Jon Cleary - The Phoenix Tree

‘Okada-san—’

He came back from his reverie of the past, turned away from the barbed wire to see Yosuke Mazaki standing a few yards from him. ‘I’m sorry, I was a long way away then – What is it?’

Mazaki was one of the Kibei, a young man whose fanaticism sometimes made even Chojiro uncomfortable. He was a hero who, fortunately, knew he would never be called upon to be heroic; such men are often more dangerous to their cause than to their enemies. Chojiro did not like him, but tolerated him.

‘Okada-san, I’ve had a message. Kenji Minato has been held by American Naval Intelligence for the past six months down in San Diego.’

Chojiro Okada worked his lips up and down over his teeth, the only indication he ever showed that he was perturbed. As a young man he had been like his son, profligate with his emotions and the expression of them; but the years in America had taught him the dangers and non-profit in such indulgence. He had tried to look calm, but it was always the calm of a thinly frozen lake.

‘What else did the message say?’ He had no part in the espionage network that ran through the camps and through other channels of which he had no knowledge at all. But it had been he whom Kenji Minato had come to first.

Mazaki did not look at him directly, as if turning his face away from the steel of the wind. ‘That he has now escaped.’

Chojiro Okada had been surprised when, two days after Pearl Harbor, Kenji Minato had phoned him. ‘I should like to meet with you, Okada-san. But please do not mention me to your family, not even to Tamezo.’

He had driven all the way out to Santa Monica in the two-year-old Buick which he had to sell only three months later for two hundred dollars, the best offer he could get before he and his family were carted off to Santa Anita racetrack. The irony was that on that day of the enforced sale in Gardena there had been several vultures with German names.

He and Kenji Minato had walked up and down under the palm trees on the promenade. People looked at them suspiciously or, in the case of one man, accusingly. He was an elderly man, wearing a faded American Legion cap, and he stood at the promenade railing staring out to sea, towards Japan, then looking back at Okada and Minato as if expecting them to start signalling the invasion fleet just beyond the horizon of his dimly-sighted eyes.

‘Why didn’t you come to visit us?’ Chojiro Okada had been circumspect in his greeting of the younger man, expressing no surprise. The war with Japan was only forty-eight hours old and already bricks had shattered the glasshouses in Gardena. Kenji Minato, wherever he had come from was not here just to pay his respects to his father’s old friend.

‘I had work to do. Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego. I very rarely came to Los Angeles.’

It was a moment or two before the significance of the three cities he had named besides Los Angeles sank in. ‘You were attached to the US Navy?’ Then he smiled at his own naivety; Minato mirrored his smile. Over by the railing the Legion veteran glared at them, then looked hurriedly out to sea again; he hated all Slant-Eyes, but especially ones who smiled as if the war was already won. Okada ignored the veteran of the war long gone; he nodded approvingly at the young man who was fighting the present war, albeit covertly. ‘You started early.’

‘Almost three years ago.’

‘Why are you telling me this? Are you trying to recruit me? I’m too old for such a task, Kenji. In any case, I think it’s too late.’ He glanced across at the Legionnaire by the railing. ‘They’ll be watching us like hawks from now on.’

‘Probably. But it wasn’t you I wanted to recruit. I have to go back to Seattle. We need someone here in Los Angeles as a contact. Someone who can be trusted. Someone younger than you, Okada-san.’

Okada smiled again, bitterly this time. ‘You’re not thinking of Tamezo?’

‘I was hoping … He won’t be interned. He has a good reputation—’

‘He is against us .’ It shamed him to confess it to the younger man, the true Japanese. ‘We argue … I wouldn’t put it past him to betray you, Kenji.’ They were speaking quietly, but in English; there was no point in stirring up the natives too much. For the time being there was safety in appearing to be American. He wondered if the Mexicans down around Olvera Street would give up speaking Spanish for the duration. ‘No, you could not trust Tamezo.’

Minato looked disappointed. ‘I’m sorry about that. We were friends once – it would have been good to be working together … Do you know someone else?’

It had never occurred to him that he would be called upon to engage in such work. Spying (even the word was abhorrent) was for professionals. ‘I can make enquiries—’

‘Be discreet. Careful.’ For the first time Minato showed some of the unease behind the relaxed exterior. Had bricks already been thrown at him?

‘Of course. It will take a week or two.’ He had immediately thought of two men he could approach. ‘But I cannot help you myself. If ever Tamezo found out …’

‘I understand,’ said Minato and looked as if he did.

As they walked away the old Legionnaire hurled abuse after them, only grapeshot but it was a beginning. Chojiro Okada wondered if it were the veterans of the last war who always fired the first shot in the next. He would have to study more history.

Now Yosuke Mazaki was telling him that Kenji Minato had been arrested by US Navy Intelligence, though he had since escaped. ‘Will he call on the network to help him?’

‘Not here in the States. He is already in Mexico City, or was at last report.’ Mazaki faced him, narrowing his eyes against the chilling wind. ‘There is something else, Okada-san. Your son Tamezo Okada was also held by the Americans in San Diego. But he, too, has now disappeared.’

He felt a lift of hope; the war was lost but his son had been won over. ‘You mean he has been working with Kenji Minato?’

‘We don’t think so, Okada-san. We think he is a spy, but for the Americans. The network will try to track him down. In the meantime it is informing Tokyo.’

Chapter Two

1

Natasha Cairns had arrived in Japan by the most circuitous of routes, through the passions of randy forbears, her own ambitions and the love of a man she had come to love too late, after he was dead. Her mother Lily had been born in Harbin, the result of two roubles’ worth of sex between a Chinese prostitute and a Russian soldier having a night off from the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Lily Tolstoy, a surname she gave herself when she was fourteen, left Harbin on the same day that she left school. She went south to Shanghai, where she worked her way up various ladders and traders till she had established herself as one of Shanghai’s better ladies of pleasure. Then she fell in love with one of her clients, an aberration that ladies of her profession should avoid at all costs; she married Henry Greenway, a manager for Jardine Matheson, and donned respectability, a gown that did not fit. She bore Henry a daughter, named her Natasha, gave her to the French nuns to educate and left for Saigon, still half in love with Henry but totally out of love with respectability and life on a Jardine Matheson manager’s pay.

Natasha knew nothing of her mother’s background; and those who did know it kept it from her. Henry did his meagre best to be a father to her; but expatriate Englishmen do not make good parents, especially of girls. Most of them were, at that time, afraid of females; to be responsible for one was too much. He would look at Natasha and see her mother and wonder, though he had genuinely loved Lily, what had ever possessed him to marry her. Of course, though he would not admit it to himself, he had married her because it had hurt him to share her with other men.