The Phoenix Tree. Jon Cleary
It won’t be an American breakfast, but it may be a long time before you have another one of those.’ Then she said in English, ‘Goodnight, Mr Joshua.’
‘Goodnight,’ he said in the same tongue. He took a risk, chipping away further at the ice: ‘My name is Okada. Tamezo Okada.’
She smiled at him from the doorway. ‘That could be a trap, speaking in English so carelessly. I think you are like me, Mr Okada. Not a very experienced spy.’
She closed the door, leaving him to sleep on that. He fell asleep wondering how long he would survive. He did not wonder about her: she looked a survivor, if ever he’d seen one.
4
Natasha lay in her own bed, wrapped in some wondering of her own. She had no doubt that Tamezo Okada was who he claimed to be; his arrival, however, had put sudden pressure on her, and, just as suddenly, she wondered if she could cope with it. Up till now she had been doing little more than playing at being a spy; keeping the transmitter oiled, as it were. From here on, if there was to be a transmission a week, it was obvious that the game was to be played seriously. She tried to think how Keith would have reacted; then knew he would have welcomed the pressure. But then he had been so much more experienced at the game than herself – or Tamezo Okada. She suddenly longed for the comfort of Keith’s arms; but it was too late. She fell asleep, making love in her memory, which, like the real thing, is often disappointing.
In the morning she decided to tell Okada about Major Nagata but not about her mother: some relationships were, well, not sacred but suspicious. ‘Major Nagata is working for himself more than for the kempei.’
‘Jesus!’ said Okada, thinking English so early in the morning. ‘Does he suspect you’re an agent for us?’
‘I don’t think so. But I have to report to him what I learned last night at General Imamaru’s.’
Okada looked up from his plate of rice and cold fish. ‘You were at a general’s place? You move in high circles.’
‘A friend of my husband’s from the university took me. Professor Kambe.’ She shook her head before he could ask the question: ‘No, we are not lovers or anything like that. He’s an old man.’ Anyone over fifty was an old man to her; Keith had just escaped the description, dotage had been only four years away when he had died. ‘He knows everyone in high circles, as you call it.’
‘Have you been using him to get information?’
‘The professor? No. Last night was the first time he’d taken me to a reception like that.’
He felt some excitement for the job now: with she and Minato both giving him information, the weekly transmission should raise some excitement back in San Diego, too. At the same time he realized that he would probably be transmitting no information of his own, that while Mrs Cairns and Minato moved in high circles, he’d be no more than the anonymous coach calling the signals. One hidden away in very low circles.
‘Is Nagata having you watched?’
‘I don’t know. If he’s working for himself, I shouldn’t think so.’
‘What makes you think he’s working for himself?’
‘Intuition.’ She had done it for herself for so long.
He hadn’t expected complications so soon. ‘Well, we’ll have to take a risk. We’ve got to meet at least once again, so that we can arrange the mail drop. The trouble is, you’re conspicuous. Your looks, I mean.’
She was so accustomed to compliments that she took his remark as another one; and was surprised. ‘Thank you.’
He looked at her blankly for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I meant you’re different. I’d pass in a crowd more easily than you would.’
She was rebuffed; but she saw his point. ‘We’d better meet at night then. It will have to be an obvious place, till you get to know Tokyo better. Come to the university. There’s a small garden next to the Art Department. There’s no one in the Department now except some elderly gentlemen, like Professor Kambe, and they won’t be there at night.’
They settled on a meeting at nine o’clock three nights hence. Then it was time for him to leave for the station. He held out his hand and she took it.
‘Don’t do that again,’ she said, ‘not in Japan. Good luck.’
He smiled, embarrassed at the small mistakes he was continuing to make. ‘I hope we can work well together.’
This morning she liked him, despite his wariness of her. Though she didn’t recognize it, she had the talent all good women spies should have: an ability to suffer men. ‘I hope so, too.’
She let him out the side door of the house and he disappeared into the morning darkness.
Three hours later Major Nagata called on her again. His visit was prompted more by the desire to see her again as a woman than as one of his operatives. But she gave him a report on last night’s reception at General Imamaru’s and he was so pleased with it he was tempted to give her a bonus. But habit held him back: charity is not part of a secret policeman’s make-up.
‘And how was your mother?’
‘Maternal,’ she said and left it at that. After all, as a Japanese, he should appreciate there were some matters that were ‘family’.
1
It took Kenji Minato only five weeks to reach home. None of the contacts along the route wanted to hold him longer than was necessary. Those outside Japan and Germany knew how badly the war was going; they were planning escape routes of their own. Minato had managed to limp out of the desert to a dirt road where he had been picked up by a Mexican farmer who had charged him fifty dollars to drive him the two hundred miles to Hermosillo. It was almost as much as the farmer would earn in six months and he was not going to ask any questions of an enemy who was willing to pay so much. Mexico was officially at war with Japan, but not so the farmer.
Minato had gone on by bus to Mexico City and from there by plane to Caracas. There he had been put aboard a Swedish freighter that was bound for Lisbon. From the Portuguese capital he had been flown to Berne with a mixed bag of diplomats, couriers, businessmen and an exiled king’s mistress going shopping in Zurich. There were two other Japanese on the flight, but they ignored him; he was not sure whether they knew who he was or whether they considered him socially inferior. He had been given a new wardrobe in Mexico City, but it was cheap and ill-fitting, as if spies on the run should not expect to be well-dressed. He longed to be back in naval uniform.
From Berne he travelled by no less than seven trains to Istanbul. On each leg of the journey he met other Japanese; these were more sociable, though none of them told him what their jobs were and he told them nothing of himself. But the number of Japanese travelling told him what he already knew, that the war was not going well. His fellow-travellers had a look of defeat about them.
He went all the way from Istanbul to Tokyo by plane, through Tashkent, Alma Ata: it was strange to see that the Russians were not yet at war with Japan. He stopped in Peking for two days when he had to wait for a seat on a plane, sleeping at the military airdrome and in his waking hours watching the military brass, none of them looking happy or victorious, trooping aboard the aircraft. He was closer to home than he had been in six years and suddenly he was more depressed than he had been in all that time. When he finally flew in over the huge bronze statue of Buddha at Kamakura and landed at Atsugi air base he felt it was more than just the end of a journey.
He was met by Lieutenants Sagawa and Nakasone. At the naval academy they had been close friends; but now they seemed like strangers. They bowed formally to him and he to them; then on an impulse he put out hands to both of them. They welcomed the intimacy, as if they had wanted proof that he had not changed. Did they know how one could be so insidiously corrupted in America?