Allegiance (52 page)

“West,” I say.

It is enough to set him going. He tells me that when disillusioned with the practice of law in Philadelphia he spent a year in Jackson Hole. “I lived with Struthers Burt at the Bar B-C, and we shot elk and watched the geese fly. Struthers was writing his first novel, and to pass the time I tried my hand at a tale of adolescence which pointed a moral . . .” He does not seem to notice when I leave the room.

On my desk is the folder labeled
Skinner
. It is thicker now; I have added to it as the weeks passed, added everything I could find on my own or wheedle from my sources at the SEC. There is enough to start a case, I think. There
is enough for Hoover to use, I am sure. I pick it up and walk to the elevator. I push the call button. On the fifth floor, Biddle is probably still telling his story. Hoover and his flags wait on the second. There is law, and there is vengeance, and neither of them is justice. The aluminum doors open. “Going down, sir,” the lift operator says.

I heft the folder in my hand and shake my head. “I'll take the stairs.”

“That was the summer before Cissy came to Flat Creek,” Biddle is saying as I walk in. He is looking out the window, but he turns back at the thump of the folder on his desk. “What's this?”

“It's for you,” I say. “I have to go now.”

In the Great Hall I stop for a moment. The statues look over me in silence. The spirit of justice, the majesty of law. “Philadelphia architects, you know,” I say to no one in particular. “Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary.” Then I get into my car and drive west.

Outside the city are rolling hills and narrow runs crossed with split-rail fences, the tactical checkerboard of the Civil War. They give way to a deep green valley and mountains of blue. I go on, up the slope past the coal towns, down through the foothills into the flatlands.

It is a week of solid driving. I cross the plains under a great open sky, the flat horizon holding in one dimension all our dreams. I see the big soft stars, the silent sunrise, the fields and the hills and the cities raised up out of the vast land. This is the country Fumiko sang of.
A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness.
Judge Skinner thought I would kill him, and Agent Miller too. I wonder what Hugo Black thought, as I ran him into the wall again and again. I wonder what he thought later, at the end. Mountains rise before me. At last I come to San Francisco, where the long gray ships lie at anchor.

Judge Goodman's courtroom is on Golden Gate Avenue, just a few miles from the docks. He has a new clerk and the judge himself does not recognize me at first. Then he does a double take. “Mr. Harrison.”

I hand him a sheet of paper. “I want an emergency stay. I want you to order them not to sail.”

He does not ask who I am talking about, just reads the paper. “The government will have to be heard,” he says. “I take it you are no longer in the business of presenting their arguments.”

I shake my head.

“Very well,” he says. “We will see who is available. Nine-thirty tomorrow morning.”

• • • • 

The next day dawns bright and clear, and I am in Goodman's courtroom with time to spare. As soon as I see the government attorney, it seems inevitable. Seated at the counsel's table is the familiar blocky figure of Emmett Seawell.

He looks up as I enter the room. “You again?” he asks. “They didn't say they were sending anyone.”

“Don't worry,” I say. “I'm not your expert this time.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I'm your opponent.”

It's plain from his face that he doesn't believe me, but I sit at my table and stand when the judge enters. Seawell gives him a wide-eyed, incredulous look. Goodman just smiles. “Counsel,” he says to me.

The argument is an easy one to make. It is simply Goodman's opinion dismissing the prosecution of Masaaki Kuwabara, whom I met in the Eureka courtroom. In the circumstances of Tule Lake, I say, confined behind barbed wire, the detainees could not make a free decision to give up their citizenship. I point to the Hoshidan, too; I mention the confusing information given by the Relocation Authority. Goodman nods at the right places while I speak. I have no doubt that he will rule in my favor.

“Mr. Seawell,” he says, and Seawell buttons his jacket and gets to his feet.

“I have been in contact with officials of the Justice Department,” he says, “and I have been instructed not to take a position on the merits of this case.”

They've come round, I think; at some moment while I was chasing the sun across the plains, Fahy and Biddle changed their minds. But Seawell has not said that the Department concedes, and Goodman's face is troubled. “Then what position does the Department take, Mr. Seawell?”

“The case is moot,” he says. He does not look especially happy. “The time for judicial interference has passed.”

“What do you mean by that?” Goodman's tone is sharp.

“I called my superiors in Washington for instructions,” Seawell says. “I was
told that the sailing date would be moved forward. The ships are gone by now. They are outside the jurisdiction of this court.”

Goodman does not seem to be listening anymore. He is scribbling something on a sheet of paper. I am not listening either. I am thinking of who in the Department could have ordered this. Which friend has stabbed me in the back? It could have been Ennis; he thinks that shipping the renunciants out will help the others resettle. Or Biddle, trying to spare the President political trouble in California. Herbert Wechsler—it's just his sort of move. Or Karl Bendetsen, if the idea started with War. It could be any of them.

“They've had months to file this suit,” Seawell finishes.

“Here is your order, Mr. Harrison,” says Judge Goodman. “The port of San Francisco has never been the most efficient, and these days it is chronically overburdened. I do not think vessels of that size could be gone by now. If you require a car, I believe I owe you a ride.”

“I've got one,” I say. I take the paper from his hand and run from the courtroom.

• • • • 

Driving to the docks brings back memories of my rides with Hugo Black. The streets are crowded and narrow. They bend unexpectedly; they rise and drop. I stand on the brakes and pound my horn at fruit sellers who come into view scant yards ahead. At the top of a hill the car goes airborne, soaring for a silent second above the road. But Goodman is right; the ships are still there.

I take the car down onto the dock and jump out. There are noises coming from the ships, clanking and hooting as of engines starting up. There is a crowd near the gangplanks, and as I force my way through I see Harry Nakamura and his children. I have no time to talk to them.

A military policeman on the shore blocks my way. “You can't go on board,” he says. “They're sailing in minutes.”

“I can,” I say, “and they're not.” I shove the paper in his face.

“What is that?”

“It's an order from a federal judge. Now get out of my way.”

The handwritten order does not look very impressive, but it is signed and stamped and the stationery is real. He looks at me skeptically. “I'm not asking,” I say.

Maybe the suit helps. He steps aside and I run across the planks.

If I'm on board, the sailors think, I must be legit. The captain knows his orders were changed and he is not surprised to see them countermanded. The engine sounds stop as I stand with him on the bridge; the vibration of the deck stills. From the dock I hear shouts.

Now there is time to find Harry in the crowd. “You see,” I tell him. “Sometimes the government keeps its promises.”

He shakes his head. “That was not a promise from the government.”

“You believed it anyway.”

“I believed it for that reason.”

He is right; this was won against Justice and the United States. But I hesitate. “You give us too little credit.”

“Oh, you will realize this was wrong. Someday. You are good enough for that. But realizing someday does not help the now. And I do not know what you will do the next time.”

I suppose he may be right about that, too, but for now this is something. It makes no one whole; it carries no assurances for next time, but for now it is something for those who waited and believed.

The next day I am back in Goodman's courtroom with Emmett Seawell. He shows no shame, and why should he? It was not his decision.

The Department is willing to take a position on the merits now. Some individuals, it admits, may have been unable to make a true choice. But some could; some did. Those renunciations are still valid.

Goodman tells Seawell to identify those individuals. Now he looks embarrassed. “All of them.” The saying it is hard, even if the decision is not his. Again I cannot guess who in Justice came up with the ploy. But I find I no longer care.

Goodman just blinks. “Very well,” he says. “We will hear those cases individually. All of them. In the meantime, Mr. Seawell, you will take those people off the boats and restore them to their families.”

Seawell does not object. I do not either. I have five thousand clients now, instead of one; I have five thousand files to review and five thousand hearings to prepare. It will be a lot of work, but I can do it. I can do it on my own if I have to. And perhaps I do not. When the renunciants are off the ships, I ask Goodman for a continuance. “I have to take a short trip,” I say.

“Very well, Mr. Harrison,” he says. “Where are you headed?”

“North.”

“Cash,” says Seawell as I leave the courtroom.

“What?”

“Biddle says he's opened an investigation.”

“Into what?”

“I'm supposed to tell you he's opened one. That's all he said.”

Judge Skinner. I nod. The machinery of law has started to turn. Who will be caught in the gears, I do not know. I throw two days' clothes into my car and start driving.

It is flat going to Redding. Then the road climbs into mountains of spruce and hemlock; a river falls in foamy torrents beside. I see again the lonely splendor of Mount Shasta; I pass Eureka to the west and Tule Lake to the east. I drive through lumber towns with blackened stumps like headstones and logs stacked like rifles, through roaring squalls of rain that leave the glossy myrtle glossier still. I stop when the last of the light has gone and I no longer trust myself to keep the car on the road.

The next morning I learn I have made it almost all the way through the mountains. The road turns on a ridge and the land falls away into a valley below. The plain rolls on for miles, lush green spotted with yellow blooms. I pull the car over, tires crunching on the pine needles that carpet the shoulder; I step out and take a deep breath of the wet air. Rain drums on the hood and rises in steam. For a moment I am consumed with the wild thought that no one has seen this sight before, that this land is entirely new. A part of the world saved just for me.

It isn't, of course. For centuries the Indians lived here. Smallpox came, and after it the wagons. White men from the East, then Japanese from the West, tending celery gardens and orchards of peach and cherry. Now those gardens are empty too, and there is me and my Packard, heading north. There are few things to be had in this world that are not taken from someone else.

So the Judge told me, and he had seen sin and struggle, and knew perhaps of what he spoke. But I stand and look through silver mist out onto the soft swelling bosom of earth below and think that some things are given.

A distant river sparkles; gauzy hills mount beyond. That way lie the sodium
lights of Tacoma, the shining sound, the islands cloaked in cedar. With another day's drive I will reach Seattle in the dusk of evening, coming in with the fog off the water and the sailors who step from shadows to waiting arms.

But for a moment I stay there, suspended above the green swell of the land as though thrown up onto the crest of a wave, seeing for the first time a break in the flat horizon. For this the boats crossed the ocean, the wagons climbed the mountain pass. For this the songs were sung with desert all around. This is what is given: the promise there is still a way, if we can find it, the promise we can always be renewed.

THERE NEVER WAS
a Caswell Harrison, as far as I know, though the University of Pennsylvania does have the statue of John Harrison mentioned in chapter three. Most of the characters around whom the conspiracy plot of this novel revolves—Suzanne and Judge Skinner, Colonel Bill Richards, Philip Haynes, John Hall, and Clara Watson—are my inventions. Joe and Cissy Patterson are real people, whom I have described in a generally accurate manner, but the Anti-Federalist Society, and Joe's involvement with it, are fictional. In 1919 there was a clerk, Ashton Embry, who leaked information about pending cases to confederates on Wall Street in order to allow them to profit from the knowledge. He was prosecuted for it, but modern insider trading law did not exist at the time, and the indictment was ultimately dismissed.

In the plotline dealing with legal events, I have tried to remain close to the actual facts. The description of the Nazi saboteurs' arrest, trial, and Supreme Court hearing, for instance, is drawn from primary and secondary sources, including transcripts of the Supreme Court argument and briefs written by the parties. I have changed the timing of those events in order to make them background rather than foreground action; in reality, they occurred during the summer of 1942, when Cash has already started work at the Court.

With respect to the cases surrounding the treatment of Japanese and Japanese Americans, I have likewise attempted to maintain a high degree of
historical accuracy. There was, of course, an evacuation and detention program pursuant to which roughly 120,000 people, a majority of whom were birthright American citizens, were removed from the Pacific Coast states and confined in relocation camps. I have described that program as accurately as I could, relying again on both primary and secondary sources. I have also described the well-known litigation surrounding the program—the
Hirabayashi, Korematsu,
and
Endo
cases—based on the briefs, the transcripts of oral argument, and secondary sources.