Читать книгу The Phoenix Tree - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 6

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.

There was a great deal of her mother in Natasha; she had a saint’s name but the devil in her blood. Or so said the nuns, who knew more about the Blood of Christ than they did about the blood of young girls. It was they who had given her the saint’s name, Therèse, one that Natasha never used. She already knew that the men she saw outside the convent walls weren’t interested in saints.

In 1938, when she was sixteen, her father was killed. He was up-country, in Sikang, trying to sell Jardine Matheson goods to a warlord, when the warlord took a sudden dislike to Henry, Jardine Matheson, all things British or the goods themselves: the reason was never determined, but Henry was suddenly dead. He left Natasha a small inheritance, his cigarette card collection of English cricketers and a sense of loss that came as a surprise to her. Her true love for certain men, first her father and later Keith Cairns, was delayed. It was as if her absent mother had left behind the unspoken advice that nothing in her heart should ever be committed to men.

She ran away from the convent and went further south, to Hong Kong. She was already beautiful, her beauty apparent in the eyes of perhaps too many beholders; there was a certain coolness to her beauty, almost a remoteness which would suddenly be denied when she smiled. Men besieged her, and she recognized the pleasures of being a prize.

She did not become a prostitute, more a floating mistress: there is a difference of more than just price. In the middle class morality of the British colony, her mixed blood put a brand on her; even a girl with the blood of St Francis of Assisi and one of the better Sung princesses in her would have been looked upon as a half-caste. Though Natasha looked more Western than Eastern, there was a slant to her eyes, a tilt to her cheekbones and an ivory sheen to her skin that set her apart from the Roses and Daisies of Bournemouth, Scunthorpe and other respectable breeding grounds. She graced tea parties at Government House and receptions at the Repulse Bay Hotel, but she was never invited to dinner parties at private homes on the Peak. Then in March 1940 she met Keith Cairns when he came to Hong Kong for what was, supposedly, a conference on Oriental art. Only later did she learn that it was a conference of Intelligence agents.

Keith Cairns was that rare man, an academic with the proper flair for courting a woman. He was forty-two years old, roughly good-looking, had had no wives but a succession of mistresses and, at his first sight of Natasha, decided then was the time to settle down with a wife, one who would also be his mistress. He was a romantic, which was one reason he had become an agent for MI6, and though he did not sweep Natasha off her feet, since she was on her back beneath him when he asked her to marry him, he overwhelmed her with his passionate persistence. She married him for a variety of reasons: she liked him; she had a sudden, if fleeting, yearning for respectability; she knew that the war in Europe would soon spread to Asia. Keith Cairns told her that Japan would probably enter the war, but that he, and she, would be safe in Tokyo.

‘Tokyo is my home,’ he told her, ‘even though I’m a Scot. I live there and I’ll probably die there because, whatever the Japanese have done outside Japan, in their own country I find them honourable and admirable and I want to go on living amongst them.’

Later she would find that frame of mind at odds with his being a spy; but then she would also find him a mixture that, because of his early death, would always remain a puzzle to her. He was kind and cruel, romantic and hard-headed, daring and cautious; he was a mass of contradictions, which perhaps was why the Japanese, a nation of contradictions, liked him and he them. But he loved Natasha as none of her patrons ever had and eventually, but too late, she loved him. She took over from him as an MI6 agent as belated payment for what he had meant to her. Having no country of her own, she was neither friend of Britain nor enemy of Japan. She was, as Keith Cairns had been, a romantic, seduced by the thought of danger, trying to prove, without any hope that the proof would be made public, that life for her was more than bed, board and baubles. She was, in the most hazardous way, still looking for respectability.

‘I got some extra fish on the black market,’ said Yuri Suzuki, coming up from the village. ‘But we are running out of money.’

She was a round little woman, a dumpling spiced with iron filings; Natasha had never discovered her age: she could have been anything between forty and sixty. She had been Keith Cairns’s housekeeper for five years when he had brought Natasha home; they had met like two wives over the still-warm body of a bigamist. But when Keith had died, Yuri had, as if there was no longer anything to fight over, abruptly changed her attitude; she had taken over as Natasha’s surrogate mother. Short-tempered, ungracious, she nevertheless had a motherly instinct she could not deny: she had a need to take care of someone.

‘I have nothing else to sell,’ said Natasha.

She had already sold the jewelry that her admirers in Hong Kong had given her. She had always kept it hidden while Keith had been alive, not wanting to remind him blatantly of what she had been before she had met him. After his death she had brought it out and, piece by piece, had found buyers for it. Now all she and Yuri had to live on was the small pension that the university, with punctilious regard for its dead professor, still paid her. Keith had died after a bungled operation for appendicitis, a mundane death for an agent, and the university authorities had suffered a loss of face in that it was one of their own medical professors who had performed the fatal operation. The pension payment arrived each month like a penance.

‘You should ask your friends to send money.’

Yuri knew of the short-wave radio hidden in the secret cellar of their house. She had never made any comment on Cairnssan’s extracurricular work as a spy, as if it were just another bachelor’s peccadillo, on a par with his drinking and his bringing home women who were no better than they should have been. When Natasha had taken over the broadcasting, Yuri had continued to make no comment, treating it as if it were the normal pan of running a household. Natasha sometimes felt uneasy about her, but she had no alternative but to trust her.

‘Yuri, how can they do that? Cable it to the General Post Office? One hundred pounds payable on the order of the British Government?’

‘They should pay you for what you are doing,’ said Yuri stubbornly. She was not thinking of the risk, but only of the actual work being done. ‘Work should be paid for.’

‘You sound like a trade unionist.’ Natasha had learned from Keith, a born Tory, of the blight one could find in Britain.

‘What’s that?’ sniffed Yuri, and on the other side of the world Keir Hardie and company went on strike in their graves.

Then Natasha saw the local sergeant of police and a stout man in civilian clothes coming up the path towards them. Nayora was a private resort village that had been developed by a group of upper-middle-class professionals just before World War One: government officials, lawyers, doctors who did not want to have to mix in their holiday time with the rapidly expanding lower middle class. All the villas stood in what had once been carefully tended gardens; now, in the present war, one elderly gardener ran an arthritic-gaited race against galloping grass and exploding shrubs. Some of the old families still lived here, though they did not mix with the alien residents who had been foisted on them. Nayora had always been a law-abiding community and even with the advent of the aliens the authorities had seen no need to enlarge the village force of Sergeant Masuda and his rather dull-witted constable.

Sergeant Masuda, who had got where he was by being obsequious, almost contorted himself in his deference to the man he brought to the gate of Natasha’s villa. ‘Major Nagata is from Tokyo, a very important man. We are honoured that he should visit us.’

Nagata, who wrote bad poetry, saw all this as snow falling on Mount Fuji: praise, if taken with proper grace, can only make a man look better. He smiled at Natasha as if to make her feel she was properly honoured by his arrival. ‘Mrs Cairns, forgive my manners. I should have warned you I was coming. But, unfortunately, in my profession warnings are often misunderstood. Or taken advantage of.’

‘What is your profession, Major Nagata?’

‘He is from the kempei,’ said Sergeant Masuda, rolling his eyes as if he were introducing one of the Kuni-Tsu-Kami, the gods of the earth.

‘It is difficult for the secret police to be secret when one is accompanied by a Greek chorus,’ said Nagata. ‘Go and arrest someone, sergeant. Leave me alone with Mrs Cairns.’

Masuda backed off with a bow that bent him double, then went lolloping down the path with his peculiar loose-kneed gait. Nagata looked after him, then turned back to Natasha and Yuri.

‘You may dismiss your servant.’

Yuri snorted, showing what she thought of the police, secret or otherwise, then, without a bow, she turned and marched up into the house. Nagata looked after her too.

‘Does she give you any trouble?’

‘If she does, I tolerate it.’ Natasha felt far less comfortable than she sounded. ‘What do you want, major?’

It suddenly struck her that, for all his fawning towards Nagata, Sergeant Masuda had taken a grave risk in identifying the secret policeman. The kempei was never spoken of openly; certainly not between an official and a woman like Natasha. The sergeant owed her nothing and she wondered why he had put himself at risk by warning her who Nagata was. Did he know about the radio set in the secret cellar?

‘Do you have a pass to leave Nayora, Mrs Cairns?’

‘Yes, a twelve-hour one, once a week. I report to Sergeant Masuda before I leave and when I return.’

‘Where do you go to?’

‘To Tokyo.’

‘What do you do there?’

‘Go shopping, mostly.’

‘On the black market?’ He smiled, to show he did not think it was a major crime. Though his teeth were not coated, they had a yellow tint, like an old man’s.

‘Of course.’ She also smiled.

‘Do you visit anyone? Friends?’

She thought of only Professor Kambe as a friend; the others had been friends of Keith’s and still tolerated her, mainly because the men amongst them admired her beauty and some of them, she knew, had dreams that some day she might be their mistress. Her vanity was very clear-sighted, enabling her to see others’ weaknesses as well as her own assets.

‘Some people at the university.’

‘Some who work for the government and the military?’

‘They may.’ She knew exactly who did; but she was certain that Nagata also knew them. She had the sudden feeling that he knew all about her, that his questions were designed not to give him information but to trip her up. ‘But you know, major, that men never discuss their work with women, especially women who are not their wives.’

‘Did Professor Cairns ever discuss his work with you?’

‘Never. He was Scottish – they are as bad as the Japanese. Do you discuss your work with your wife?’ She was uneasy, but she had always believed that attack was the best form of defence. Especially if it was accompanied by what Keith used to call her whore’s smile. In his cruel moments he could be as loving as a rugby forward, which he had once been.

‘Hardly,’ said Nagata, with a policeman’s smile. Then, still showing his yellow teeth, like a bamboo blade, he said, ‘Do you ever visit a woman called Eastern Pearl?’

Natasha frowned, wondering where this question was supposed to lead. ‘Eastern Pearl? Is she a geisha or some sort of entertainer?’

‘You might call her an entertainer. She is the mistress of one of our military leaders, General Imamaru. I thought you must have heard of her. People gossip about her.’

Natasha had indeed heard of the woman, but had paid no heed to the talk; Tokyo, she guessed, was like all capitals in wartime, full of mistresses. They were part of the fortunes, or misfortunes, of war, a compensation, for those who could afford them, for rationing and other inconveniences.

‘I’ve heard of her vaguely. But my friends in Tokyo are not the sort who gossip.’

‘Oh? I thought gossip was a major discipline amongst university people.’

‘You never went to university, major?’ Natasha had been well coached by Keith: she recognized the prejudice.

‘Just once,’ said Nagata. ‘In Mukden. To arrest one of the professors.’

‘I hope you got a good pass.’ She knew she was being impolite, keeping this policeman out in the cold waste of the garden, but she could not bring herself to invite him into the house.

‘I think so. The professor was executed.’ Nagata was enjoying the company of this young woman, though he wished she would invite him into her house. He did not like standing out in the open; he suffered from agoraphobia, the disease endemic to secret policemen. ‘I believe you have Swedish papers, Mrs Cairns.’

The change of tack was too abrupt. Natasha felt that her eyes must have squinted, as if she had been slapped. ‘Ye-es …’

‘Your father was Swedish?’

Three months after he had brought her to Tokyo, Keith had come home one day with the papers. She had had none up till then other than a badly forged British passport given her by one of her benefactors in Hong Kong. She had queried Keith where he had got the papers and why she should be Swedish.

‘Because before very long Japan is going to be in the war and if you and I are separated it will be best if you are a neutral.’

‘But why should we be separated? If they send you back to England, why won’t you take me with you?’ For the first time she had wondered if England was like Hong Kong, where driftwood, no matter how beautiful, was not displayed in the best houses.

‘I’ll take you with me, darling heart – if they send me back—’ It was another year before she had learned of his espionage work. ‘In the meantime you had a Swedish father – a ship’s captain—’

‘Swedish? But I have black hair and brown eyes—’

Physical features Major Nagata now remarked upon: ‘You don’t look Swedish, Mrs Cairns.’

‘My father came from the far north, Lapland.’ Keith had told her to say that; she had no idea whether Laplanders were blond or brunette. ‘Or so my mother said. I never knew him.’

‘No, of course not.’ Nagata was accustomed to liars; the secret police could be reduced by half if everyone told the truth. He did not resent the lying: he did not want to be put out of a job. He sighed contentedly, assured of a continuing supply of liars, including this charming one. ‘Mrs Cairns, we have made a few enquiries about Eastern Pearl. At one time she was married to an Englishman named Henry Greenway. We also have a file on you, courtesy of the Hong Kong police. They left so many things unattended to when we took over from them.’ He made it sound as if the conquest and rape of Hong Kong had been a business merger. ‘The file shows that your father was not a Swede. He was Henry Greenway and you were born in Shanghai, which was where Eastern Pearl married Mr Greenway and then left him.’

Natasha felt as if she were about to shatter into small pieces. She turned slowly, afraid that her legs would buckle under her, and went up the short wide steps to the verandah of the house. Beneath the steps she imagined she could see the small hole in the stone foundations through which she ran the aerial cable when she was broadcasting; everything was suddenly enlarged in her mind’s eye, the hole a gaping tunnel into which Major Nagata was about to push her. She led Nagata into the house and into the drawing-room. She sat down, waited for Nagata to take off his overcoat and seat himself opposite her. It struck her, oddly, as if her mind were seeking distraction, that he was the first man to sit in that particular chair since Keith died.

‘I’ve shocked you, haven’t I, Mrs Cairns? What did that? Finding out that we know all about you?’

It had been partly that; she had never really thought about how efficient the secret police might be. But the major shock had been learning who her mother was. She had often thought of her mother, but her father had brusquely silenced any questions she had asked. He had let slip that her mother had deserted them both but he had told her no more than that. As she grew up she had dreamed of some day meeting her mother, who would be a rich beauty, perhaps a Mongolian princess who had run off with a Rumanian oil tycoon; the reunion would be tearful and happy and very profitable for herself, since she also dreamed of a rich life. Now the thought that she might be about to meet the woman who could be her mother had the chill of a dream that could prove to have gone all wrong. She was a tumble of curiosity, puzzlement and fear; but so far the thought of love hadn’t entered her mind. She had always guarded against harbouring any love for a ghost.

‘I suppose I should have realized that eventually you would know all about me.’ Sitting down, she felt a little stronger: there is great strength in the bum, Keith used to say. Sometimes she had thought a lot of his philosophy had come from a rugby scrum.

‘Oh, we’ve known about you ever since Professor Cairns died.’

Natasha played for time. She called for Yuri to bring some saké, heard a grumpy response that told her the old woman would bring the drinks but in her own time. Natasha did not offer Nagata tea because that would have meant some ceremony and she was determined to keep his visit as short as possible.

She turned back to him. ‘I know nothing about this woman Eastern Pearl.’

‘Mrs Cairns, I am not suggesting you do. Madame Tolstoy knows nothing of you, I’m sure.’

‘Madame Tolstoy?’

‘It is the name she prefers to go by when she is with General Imamaru. It was down in Saigon, where he met her, that she was known as Eastern Pearl. Some people still use it about her in Tokyo. The gossipers, that is.’

‘I’ve only heard the name Eastern Pearl, never Madame Tolstoy.’

‘We must ask her if she has ever used Mrs Greenway.’

Yukio Nagata was an opportunist, a random spinner of webs. Not many babies are born to be secret policemen; he had been one of the very few. At school he had majored in intrigue; so devious was he that he was captain of the school before his fellow students realized how he had achieved it. Drafted into the army for his compulsory military training, he had spent more time studying the officers commanding him than on rudimentary military drill. When he was called back for service in Manchuria he had enough contacts to have himself placed in the secret police. If he had to fight a war, better to be out of range of the enemy. He had come to the conclusion that the present war was going so badly that Japan could not win it. So he had begun to gather evidence, most of it unrelated, that might stand him in good stead if and when the Americans came to claim victory.

‘Are you suggesting, major, that I go and meet this – this Madame Tolstoy – and ask her if she is my mother?’

Round her the house creaked, as if it had shifted on its foundations; she felt that she had no foundations herself. The house was like her, a hybrid, part-European, part-Oriental. It had two storeys and had been built by a doctor who had lived in Germany for four years before World War One; there was a heaviness about it that made it look like a tugboat amongst the yacht-like villas that surrounded it. Inside, the furniture was heavy and dark; the beds were meant to accommodate Valkyries rather than doll-like geishas. Till Keith Cairns had been sent here for internment everything about the house had dwarfed everyone who had stayed in it. Still, Natasha had been fortunate to be able to keep the house for just herself and Yuri and not have other internees forced on her.

‘I shouldn’t want you to force yourself on this woman.’ Nagata carefully arranged the creases in his trouser-legs. He usually wore uniform but today, calling on a beautiful woman, he had decided that his dark blue suit, bought at an English tailor’s in Shanghai, would make him look less threatening and more presentable. Besides, he was not here on official business. ‘I’d have thought you’d be curious to know about your mother.’

‘She may not be my mother,’ said Natasha, more stubborn against the prospect than against him.

‘True. But I have seen her, Mrs Cairns – you haven’t. I assure you there is a distinct resemblance between the two of you. She is a very beautiful woman. So are you.’

‘Thank you.’ His intimacy told her how confident he was. But then the kempei were perhaps always confident? ‘No, I need time to think about it.’

‘Of course.’

Yuri brought in the drinks, prompted more by curiosity than a desire to please. She looked at Natasha for some hint of what was going on, but Natasha was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to take any notice of her maid’s curiosity. Yuri shuffled her feet for a moment, gave a loud sniff and went back into the house.

Nagata sipped his saké. ‘It would be better, Mrs Cairns, if you didn’t think about it too long. You could be very useful to me.’

‘How?’

‘If Madame Tolstoy is your mother – and I’m sure she is – if you could be reunited with her, there could be advantages for both of us. In return for any gossip you could pick up in your mother’s circle, I can arrange that you have a pass to go into Tokyo any time you wish. That would help, wouldn’t it? I mean if you want to buy a few things?’

Food had become very scarce in the past few months and the ration available in the village had been barely enough to ease Natasha’s and Yuri’s hunger. There was a general shortage of food throughout the country, but the alien internees had been the worst hit. Without the food they had managed to buy on the black market, Natasha and Yuri would have gone hungry more than half the time.

‘I can’t buy anything if I have no money, major.’ She was stating a fact, not asking him for money.

He misunderstood her; or pretended to. He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and opened it to show a heavy gold bracelet. Natasha recognized it at once; it had been given to her by a Chinese admirer in Hong Kong. She had sold it three months ago for three hundred yen, less than a third of its value.

‘I’ll continue to hold this as – shall we say, as collateral? I could have you arrested, Mrs Cairns, for dealing on the black market. I know every piece you’ve sold and what you got for it.’

‘Everyone does it. I mean, buys on the black market.’

‘Not everyone, Mrs Cairns, only those with spare cash. A lot of people commit murder, but it’s still a crime. So is dealing on the black market, whether buying or selling. I don’t want to see you in jail – you would be no use to me there. But if you just make yourself useful …’

‘You want me to spy for you?’ She suddenly wanted to laugh at the irony of what she was saying, but managed to restrain herself. All at once she no longer felt in any danger, Major Nagata was no longer threatening her.

‘If you want to be melodramatic – yes.’ He carefully wrapped the gold bracelet back in the handkerchief and put it away in his pocket. ‘I’ll see that you should not go hungry. Food for gossip.’ He chuckled at his play on words and Natasha gave him the smile he expected. ‘We’ll meet once a week and you can tell me what you’ve heard. It should not be hard work for you. It may even be enjoyable, if your mother welcomes you. Life at General Imamaru’s level is very comfortable, I’m told.’

Natasha had begun to feel a certain excitement at the prospect of meeting her mother after all these years; but she could not feel any enjoyment. She hesitated, then took the plunge, into the past as well as into the future: ‘I’ll work for you, Major Nagata. But I’ll need money. I am penniless.’

Nagata smiled at her without smiling, then he took out his wallet and handed her a fifty-yen note. Years of corruption had taught him that his bank account had to have a debit as well as a credit side; he suffered the debit side because less went out than came in. He reached across and dropped the note into Natasha’s lap, a further gesture of intimacy that told her exactly where she stood; or sat. She was his servant.

‘We’ll agree on the terms after your first month’s work, Mrs Cairns. In the meantime that will be enough to be going on with. If your mother welcomes you to her bosom, I’m sure she will also welcome you to her table.’

He stood up, all at once became formal. He bowed, gave her a yellow smile, said goodbye. She escorted him but of the house and he went down the steps, walking with the light step of a man half his weight and one who had got what he had come for.

Yuri came out on the verandah. ‘I was listening. He is a dangerous man. You should not encourage him.’

‘It’s not a question of encouraging him. Did you also hear what he said about my mother?’

‘Yes.’ Yuri was tough-minded, as one should be who wants to be a surrogate aunt. She tightened the sash of her brown work-kimono, making the action look as if she were tightening a noose round someone’s neck. ‘I had better come with you when you go to meet her. You will need my advice.’

She was a proprietary servant. She would have made a good trade union official. She went back into the house, leaving Natasha to contemplate the darkening day and, possibly, an even more darkening future. The chrysanthemum bushes were like twisted balls of faggots. The maple tree beside the house was a many-armed crucifix. Out on the bay, on the leaden sea under the leaden sky, the fishing-boats, sails furled, looked like floating scarecrows in fields that no longer had crops. She felt utterly depressed, though not afraid.

She had never felt afraid of the future; living the life she had led, she had accepted there was only tomorrow to worry about. To think further, to next year, or the next ten, would have spoiled the present; even Keith’s unexpected death had brought no fear of what might lie ahead. She could be afraid, terribly so, but the cause and its effect had to be immediate. She wore dreams like armour.

‘Ah well,’ she sighed, and folded the fifty-yen note Nagata had given her and put it in her pocket. At least she would be well fed if and when she went to meet her mother. She practised the word, but could hardly get her tongue round it: ‘Mother … ?’

That night she made her monthly report to the US Signal Corps station in the Aleutians. She said she had nothing to report, but the station had a message for her. A man would soon be on his way to Japan and would contact her on arrival. His code name was Joshua. She took down the message, decoded it and sat wondering at how, on this otherwise ordinary day, the world was suddenly contracting.

2

‘One should never waste one’s time trying to impress those lower than oneself,’ said Professor Kambe. ‘One should only try to impress one’s peers or above. That, as the commercial men say, is where the dividends are.’

Natasha had heard this sort of mock heresy at parties at the university, but she had not expected to hear it in a house as grand as General Imamaru’s. The small group of men round the professor, however, raised their whisky glasses and laughed at his wisdom. One or two of them glanced at her to see how she had responded, but she kept her face blank and moved away to a safer distance; from the moment she had entered the general’s mansion she had felt she was under intense scrutiny. Her beauty, her different beauty, was a handicap, like an ugly birthmark; she was an outsider, the one foreigner in the room. Except for Madame Tolstoy, who had greeted her politely and without surprise.

‘We are pleased that Professor Kambe has brought you, Mrs Cairns. My friend, General Imamaru, is a great admirer of what your late husband did for Japanese art history. When Professor Kambe asked if he might bring you, the general was delighted.’

Natasha had been in a dilemma for several days before hitting on the idea of asking Professor Kambe if he would take her to a reception where she might meet Madame Tolstoy. She had shied away from the idea of going direct to Madame Tolstoy and introducing herself; the woman might just have refused to see her. Alternatively, if Madame Tolstoy had agreed to see her, there would have been no prior opportunity to study her and decide if she was a mother worth claiming. In the present circumstances there was as much decision in accepting a mother as deciding to be one, a sort of reverse pregnancy.

‘Why do you want to meet her?’ Professor Kambe was a widower, in his sixties and susceptible to pretty women. He had studied at Oxford and Heidelberg and had some Western attitudes; but he came of an aristocratic family and if anyone thought critically of him, they did not voice those thoughts. It was he who had brought Keith Cairns to Tokyo University and he had maintained an avuncular interest in Natasha since Keith’s death. ‘She is just another one of General Imamaru’s fancy women.’

‘I understand she is the one.’

‘Well yes, I suppose so. She has lasted longer than most. But you still haven’t told me why you want to meet her?’ He looked at her reproachfully. Though he knew nothing of Natasha’s background, he guessed that, since Keith Cairns had never mentioned it, it was not impeccable. ‘I hope you are not looking for a model.’

Natasha tried to blush, but she had had difficulty doing that even as a child. ‘Of course not, Kambe-san. It’s just curiosity, that’s all. I have heard so much gossip about her …’ Though she had never been disrespectful towards Kambe, she had never been able to practise the ‘respect language’: it always lay on her tongue like a mockery. So she spoke to him as she had always spoken to men, on their level but with just a hint of flattery when it was necessary. Though she knew that a woman’s flattery always put her above the man. ‘And she is like me, an outsider.’

He had smiled understandingly: like a true aristocrat he knew that most of the world was made up of outsiders. ‘Tomorrow night then. General Imamaru is having a reception for a fellow general who has just come back from a glorious retreat somewhere in the Pacific’

She was never sure whether to smile or not at Kambe’s sardonic comments on the military; he came of a family that had supplied generals to the army for several centuries, but he seemed to have an academic’s contempt of them; perhaps that was why he and Keith had always got on so well together. But she was not prepared to take the risk of sharing the joke.

Now, at the reception, she moved round the room towards where Madame Tolstoy was seated with two of the generals’ wives. This was Natasha’s first venture into Tokyo’s high society and she was surprised at the lack of respect for the Palace’s austerity policy. There was none of the depressingly drab dress one saw everywhere else; Professor Kambe had warned her that she did not need to look as if she were on her way to work in a coffin factory. Most of the women wore kimonos, but several of them, the younger ones, were in Western dress. Natasha had been careful about what she wore, choosing one of her more discreet dresses, a peach-coloured silk that threw colour up into her cheeks. She had come in by train from Nayora in the standard dress of baggy trousers and quilted jacket. She had brought the silk gown and her fur coat with her in a large cloth bag and changed at Professor Kambe’s house.

Madame Tolstoy had also been discreet, though she had not been prepared to take discretion too far for fear of being disbelieved: she wore what could only be described as a missionary version of a cheong-sam. It was not too tight, the slit in the leg was not too high: even a priest would only have been aroused to venial sin.

Madame Tolstoy introduced her to the two women, one of whom was the wife of the general who had beaten a glorious retreat in the Pacific. She had the look of a woman who knew what a retreat, glorious or otherwise, was. The other woman, plump and pale as a thick rice ball in her kimono, was the wife of yet another general. Natasha felt like a novice camp follower.

‘Mrs Cairns lives out at Nayora,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘She is so fortunate to be away from Tokyo. She is interned there.’

‘How nice,’ said the first general’s wife and looked as if she wished she might beat a retreat to Nayora.

‘I’d be just as happy here,’ said the plump wife and looked around the large room where they sat. General Imamaru’s mansion had been built for the general’s father by a Japanese apostle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s who had lost his nerve. Cohesiveness seemed to dribble away in corners; solidity and fragility confronted each other like figures in a Hall of Crazy Mirrors. The general had not improved the interior by furnishing it with what appeared to be a furniture album of his travels; some day it might be preserved as a museum of bad taste. The plump wife loved it. ‘I don’t know why you don’t move in here, Madame Tolstoy.’

‘One has to be discreet,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked as coy as only a madame could. ‘General Imamaru prefers me to live in the house across the garden.’

‘Did you furnish the other house yourself?’ said Natasha. ‘I have heard you have beautiful taste.’

‘People are so complimentary,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked at her with benign suspicion.

‘I should love to see it.’ Natasha saw the other two women look at her with sudden cool disapproval. She knew she was being forward and disrespectful, but she was speaking to another outsider, not to them. Still, she backtracked, if only for Madame Tolstoy’s sake: ‘That is, if I should not be rudely intruding.’

She had spent the last half hour studying her alleged mother and had decided that she had to know more about her, even at the risk of – what? She had not even begun to contemplate her future with a newly-found mother. But she sensed now that Madame Tolstoy was puzzled and intrigued by her. Could it be that the mother in her had already recognized the daughter?

‘Come to my house later,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘General Imamaru wants the ladies to retire early. He and the other gentlemen have matters to discuss.’

Natasha smiled her thanks, bowed to the three older women, though not as low as their position deserved, and moved away. She had never been able to bring herself to descend through the various bows of respect; a slight inclination of the head, more European than Oriental, was as far as she ever went. Though, if ever she met the Emperor, which was as unlikely as meeting God, she knew she would go right to the ground, even if only to save her neck. Having turned her back on the God the nuns had given her, she was still amazed at the reverence the Japanese gave to the Emperor.

She found a seat, a monstrous Victorian chair looted from a house in Hong Kong, and took note of the gathering; after all, she was supposed to be a spy, working for two bosses. She had never been to a reception as top-level as this, not even with Keith. Here were men who ran the country and the war. She recognized, from photos she had studied, Admiral Yonai, who was bigger than she had supposed and who seemed to be the life of the small group surrounding him; he was the Navy minister and had just been appointed assistant prime minister, but he looked as if he had no more worries than running a home for pensioned sailors. She saw others: Admiral Tajiri; the War minister General Sugiyama; Prince Mikasa, a brother of the Emperor: a bomb on this house tonight would be an exploding fuse that would blow out most of the power of Japan. She caught snatches of conversation from the various groups of men and was shocked at the frankness; defeats and retreats were being discussed here as they were never told to the public. She thrilled at the prospect of what she might hear and then pass on to the wireless operators in the Aleutians. But for this evening she had the more immediate, personal problem that had brought her here.

The groups of men began to break up and Professor Kambe came across to her. ‘You have been a success, Natasha. All the men were most complimentary.’

‘I did nothing but stand around.’

‘It was enough. Military men, unless they are using them otherwise, like their women to stand around like regimental runners.’

Natasha glanced around nervously. ‘One of these days, professor, the military men will stand you up against a wall and shoot you.’

‘Possibly. Unless they are too busy avoiding being shot themselves by the Americans.’

‘Are they all as pessimistic as that?’

But Professor Kambe wasn’t going to stand himself up against the wall; he knew when enough was enough, especially in a general’s own house. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about it. Shall we go?’

‘May I be excused, professor? Madame Tolstoy has asked me over to see her house.’

He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Is that wise? You don’t want the gossips painting you with the same brush they’ve used on her.’

‘I shall be careful, Kambe-san.’ She was grateful for his concern for her. With other men in other lands, she would have put a hand on his arm; but not here, not with so many in the room watching them. Such an intimacy would offend, though not Kambe himself. ‘Thank you for bringing me.’

‘Report to me tomorrow.’ He was not a gossip, but he enjoyed hearing it. Like sex, it is one of the pleasures of all classes. ‘And do be careful.’

How else could one be with a probable mother who was an almost total stranger? ‘I shall be.’

A servant took her across the garden to Madame Tolstoy’s house. The garden was large, one of the largest in the Koji-Machi district. Close to the Imperial Palace, which the Americans had evidently decided should not be bombed, General Imamaru’s mansion and the smaller villa of his mistress were as intact as they had been since first built. Water trickled into pools, suggesting tranquillity; the white stones of the paths were raked each day so as not to offend the general’s eye; a gardener worked here all day every day, as if flowers were an essential crop. But even as she walked through the garden, Natasha wondered if the general, from tonight’s conversation, really believed it could all last.

Madame Tolstoy was waiting for her in the villa. The gossip about her taste was true: the rooms were an ideal marriage of comfort and formalism. Madame Tolstoy had learned from her travels, had done her own looting of ideas.

There was a man with her, Colonel Hayashi. Natasha had seen him at the reception, standing in the background, never intruding on any of the groups; she had assumed that he had been an aide to one of the generals. He was tall and muscular, a man who looked as if he would enjoy the physical side of life. But it would not be an extrovert enjoyment: his face would show nothing, even his eyes had a bony look.

‘Colonel Hayashi has been admiring you all evening. He wanted to meet you.’

Dammit, surely she’s not a procuress, too?

But if Colonel Hayashi had designs on her, he did not show them. In a soft yet harsh voice he said, ‘Why haven’t we seen you before, Mrs Cairns?’

‘I am interned out at Nayora. I am allowed only one pass a week to come into Tokyo.’ That was not true: she now had Major Nagata’s promise of a pass any time she wished it. ‘I usually spend the day with friends at the University.’

‘We must see you more often at General Imamaru’s.’ He glanced at Madame Tolstoy, who tilted her head as if to say ‘maybe’. Natasha wondered if he was Madame Tolstoy’s lover; then she further wondered what General Imamaru would think of that. ‘You are a close friend of Professor Kambe’s, Mrs Cairns?’

She hedged on that one, suddenly wondering if he was one of Major Nagata’s superiors from the kempei. But if he were he would not be wearing his present uniform; he was on the General Staff. ‘The professor was a close friend of my husband.’

Hayashi nodded; not understandingly but more as if he appreciated a shrewd noncommittal answer. He gazed steadily at her for a long moment, then abruptly picked up his cap from a nearby table and bowed to both women.

‘I must be going,’ he said and left, going out so quickly and without ceremony that he might have been alone when he had decided to leave.

Thrown off-balance by his abrupt departure, Natasha blurted out, ‘Who is he?’

‘A friend,’ Madame Tolstoy had not even glanced at the door through which Colonel Hayashi had disappeared. She stood very still and composed, the straight lines of the cheong-sam seeming to accentuate her stillness. ‘The point is, Mrs Cairns, who are you?’

It was a frontal attack and it made up Natasha’s mind for her. All evening she had been wondering how she would approach Madame Tolstoy about their relationship. At every opportunity, when she had felt she herself was not being observed, she had looked closely at the other woman. She could see a resemblance to herself: they had been cut from the same fine but strong bone, their lips had the same fullness (‘inviting kisses’, Keith had said of hers), each had a trick of holding her head so that the curve of the neck was gracefully emphasized. Only the eyes were different: Madame Tolstoy’s had more slant to them, they were darker and more calculating. Natasha did not think her own were calculating, but the last thing one ever did was look deeply into one’s own eyes. Or at least she never had, and now she wondered if it had been cowardice, not wanting to see the truth.

‘Madame Tolstoy, did you ever know a Mr Henry Greenway in Shanghai?’

It was as if they had collided, though the older woman did not move. But the impact was there in her face, the eyes were no longer calculating: they had had a calculated guess confirmed. Her lips thinned, then she nodded.

‘You’ve been troubling me all evening. Yes, I knew Henry. You’re his daughter.’

Natasha had had no experience of motherhood or mother love, but she had not expected an answer like that. As if Madame Tolstoy, or Mrs Greenway, or whatever she had called herself in those days, had been no more than a vending machine, delivering a baby like those chocolate machines one found on railway stations. She laughed, though she did not feel in the least humoured.

‘Yes, I’m his daughter. And yours too.’

It only struck Natasha later that, though neither of them wanted the relationship right then, neither of them denied it. Lily Tolstoy was capable of emotion, though for most of her life she had manufactured it as the occasion demanded. But she had never experienced an occasion like this, indeed had never even contemplated that it might arise. She had occasionally thought of the child she had abandoned, but never with a true mother’s regret or grief. But now, if only for the moment, she felt what she had once felt, just as fleetingly, for Henry Greenway.

They had been speaking Japanese, though neither of them was really comfortable in the language. Now abruptly Lily said in Mandarin Chinese, ‘Do you want some tea?’

‘Not if we have to go through the ceremony,’ Natasha replied in the same language. She was amused that her mother should have reverted to her native language, as if it was the tongue she had taught Natasha at her knee. Since Lily had deserted her when she was only three months old, it was hardly likely they had exchanged any intelligible words. ‘Let’s have it English style. As a gesture to Father.’

Lily’s face had been almost masklike; but now she smiled. She liked ironic humour: she wore it as armour, to protect herself against some of the knights who had pursued her. She rang a bell for a servant. ‘English tea it shall be. I believe I have a tin of Earl Grey somewhere.’

She led Natasha into a side room furnished with the proper austerity of a tasteful looter: some French elegance from a banker’s home in Saigon. Only the walls were Japanese: Natasha, who had learned a little from Keith, recognized the two Sanraku prints. It was not a room for a warm reunion, and Natasha was glad.

‘General Imamaru treats you well,’ she said, looking about her.

‘He is charming.’ Never so much as when he was absent. Lily had early recognized the general’s drawbacks, but he was a general and he had wealth. One, not even a high-class mistress, could not ask for everything. ‘Mrs Cairns? That means you were married?’

‘My husband is dead. He worked with Professor Kambe. Father died too, you know. He was killed in 1938. A warlord up in Sikang shot him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ For a moment Lily was indeed sorry; not that she would miss Henry but that he should have died violently. He had never been a violent man. ‘I liked Henry. I just should not have married him. If your husband is dead, what do you live on?’

‘A small pension.’ And, as of this week, an informer’s pay from Major Nagata.

‘You’re very beautiful,’ said Lily, and for a moment felt slightly queasy with a mother’s pride. ‘You could do better than that.’

Natasha had never thought of herself as a whore; consequently, she did not think of herself as a reformed whore. So she did not feel sanctimonious, a consequence of reform. ‘Possibly – do you mind if I call you Mother?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Lily. ‘I’d never get used to it. Call me Lily.’

Natasha didn’t mind the rejection. She was still trying to sort out her feelings. She assumed she would have felt differently had her mother proved to be something like the romantic figure she had dreamed of; she might even have settled for one of the dull, motherly exiles from the Home Counties she had seen in Hong Kong. She could not, however, come to terms with the acceptance of Lily Tolstoy as her mother, though she knew now that it was a fact.

A servant, who must have had water boiling on call, brought in a silver tea service and exquisite bone-china cups and saucers: more loot. The tea was poured, without ceremony, and Lily offered a silver salver of Peek Frean’s biscuits. Henry Greenway would have felt right at home in the family circle.

‘I think I’d rather wait till the end of the war before I start accepting any favours,’ said Natasha. ‘My late husband taught me to take the long view.’

‘You think Japan will lose the war?’ Lily sipped her tea, little finger raised: she was a good secondrate actress.

Natasha took a risk: after all, Lily was her mother. Besides, tomorrow Major Nagata would ask her what she had learned and she would have to give him something for his money. ‘I listened to the men’s conversation this evening. None of them sounded optimistic.’

‘Natasha—’ It was the first time she had called her by name; it suggested she was prepared to be a little more intimate. ‘You probably have guessed what my life has been. Mistresses can never afford to take the long view. It is myopic for one to think one can.’

Natasha munched on a cream wafer; it was stale, but it tasted fresh and sweet to her after the years of wartime rations. ‘So what will you do when the war ends? If Japan loses?’

‘I still have my looks and my talents.’ She had those, but no modesty. ‘American generals, presumably, have mistresses.’

‘Does General Imamaru know how you feel?’ She sipped her tea, one pan of her mind thinking of Keith. He had admired the Japanese style of living, but he had had a Scotsman’s love of strong, sweet tea.

‘Of course not.’ Lily put down her cup and saucer and looked sternly at her daughter. ‘I can understand that curiosity brought you to see me. But what had you in mind to follow? Blackmail?’

‘Mother!’ said Natasha mockingly. She felt suddenly at ease, deciding that she felt no love, not even repressed, for her mother. ‘Of course not. As you say, it was curiosity …’

‘Are you disappointed in me or not?’

‘Ye-es,’ Natasha said slowly; she had had her dreams for so long, if only intermittently. ‘I used to picture you as a Mongolian princess who had run off with a Rumanian oil tycoon. Some day I was going to meet up with you on the French Riviera.’

Lily smiled. ‘How flattering. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you.’

Natasha put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’d better be going. I have a long way to go, out to Nayora.’

For the first time Lily felt the situation was slippery. ‘If we go on seeing each other …’

Natasha wasn’t sure that that was what she wanted; but she had another role to play besides that of spurned daughter. She would never get another opportunity like this to move in the higher circles in Tokyo. She thought not of Major Nagata, but of Keith, who would have jumped at this same opportunity.

‘Perhaps I could be your niece. Would General Imamaru believe that?’

‘General Imamaru makes a pretence of believing anything I tell him.’ She knew her men: she never believed anything they told her. ‘I think he finds it easier, it leaves his mind free for problems of the war. The question is, will the women believe it?’

‘The generals’ wives I met this evening won’t. They’d wonder why you didn’t introduce me as your niece at once.’

‘True. But if General Imamaru accepts you as my niece, then they will have to.’ She had never bothered herself with respectable women’s acceptance of her. ‘Who is there to contradict us?’

No one but Major Nagata and the commandeered Hong Kong police files. ‘As you say – who? Goodnight – Lily.’

‘How are you getting back to Nayora?’

‘By train. The last one goes at 10.30.’

‘I can’t have a niece of mine going all that way at night by train. A moment—’

Five minutes later Natasha was being driven back to Nayora in one of General Imamaru’s two staff cars. The car had to go up a long curving driveway past General Imamaru’s mansion to reach the gates. As it went past the wide steps leading up to the mansion she saw Colonel Hayashi coming down the steps with General Imamaru. Their heads were close together and Hayashi seemed to be doing the talking. She wondered if he was telling the general about her.

The driver, fortunately, was not talkative. He sat up front as isolated from her as he would have been had he been driving General Imamaru; she was glad that army drivers knew their place. She had him detour to Kambe’s house, where without disturbing the professor, she collected the cloth bag containing her everyday clothes. She did not, however, change into them: that would be a too immediate drop from being Madame Tolstoy’s ‘niece’.

She lay back in the car, exhausted by emotion and the evening. Now, belatedly, she felt a deep disappointment at meeting Lily Tolstoy; she had really hoped for someone more like a mother. She was not disgusted at her mother’s profession; she knew as well as anyone that in the Orient of the Twenties and Thirties any woman of mixed blood had to make her way as best she could; flexible morals only improved the opportunities. She was, however, deeply disappointed (not hurt: that would have implied some sudden love on her own part) that Lily had shown no affection for her at all. She was not a sprat, to deserve such a cold fish of a mother.

3

Tom Okada had had great difficulty in persuading the servant woman to allow him into the villa. To begin with, he was not accustomed to dealing with servants. The Okada household in Gardena, California, had had a cook and a woman who came in every day to do the chores; but he had never had to assert any authority over them and he had looked on them as part of the family. When he had graduated from his law studies at UCLA he had gone into the office of the nursery and run the business side for his father; the nursery by then had forty employees but it had always been his father who had given the orders. Faced this evening with a tiny servant, and a woman at that, as obdurate as a career army sergeant, he had felt for a while that he was fighting a losing battle. Then he had said, in a moment of inspiration, that he had been a student of Professor Cairns.

Yuri had eyed him suspiciously, but at least she had stopped shaking her head. ‘Then why do you wish to see Mrs Cairns?’

‘I have some information for her.’

Ever since the appearance of Major Nagata, Yuri had been doubly wary. Was this good-looking young man also from the kempei?

‘Where have you come from?’

‘A long way.’

The distance had been nothing compared to distances in America; but he had had to change trains twice, waiting a long time in each case. Once he had had to walk six miles; the railroad tracks had been bombed out. As he had got further down out of the mountains he had seen more and more evidence of the American bombing; the war was being brought right home to the Japanese. He was tired and hungry and it was after dark before he reached Nayora.

‘I haven’t eaten since midday,’ he said.

Yuri was torn between suspicion of the stranger and the thought of offending the ghost of Cairns-san, the one man she had come close to loving. At last she stood aside and gestured for the stranger to come into the villa. Later, she gave him supper, then went out on to the verandah to wait for Natasha’s return, wrapping herself in two blankets against the cold. Once she crept into the house and saw the young man fast asleep on a couch. She decided that, in sleep at least, he looked honest.

Okada woke when he heard the car drive up; men he heard the voices out on the verandah. He had been exhausted when he had fallen asleep; he had had no more caution left than he had energy. If the woman servant had wanted to betray him, she could easily have done so; now, as he came awake, he knew he would have to be more careful in future. From now on trust might be an extravagant luxury.

He stood up, tensing as the door opened. When only the two women came in, he almost sighed with relief. There was only one lamp in the room, a small green-shaded table lamp in a corner; it threw enough illumination for him to see that the girl standing beside the servant woman was beautiful. Nobody in Intelligence at San Diego had told him what Mrs Cairns looked like; for some reason he had expected her to be older, tougher-looking, a woman whose mixed blood would have coarsened her looks. He had his own prejudices.

‘Are you Mrs Cairns?’ he said in Japanese.

‘Yes. Who are you?’ Natasha at once had guessed who he was, though she had not expected him so soon. She saw his questioning look at Yuri and she nodded reassuringly: ‘I trust Yuri. I think you can too.’

‘I’m Joshua. You should have been expecting me.’ He still had one eye on the doorway, waiting for – soldiers? police? – to come bursting through. The day-long trip had been only prologue, from now on the real danger began.

‘I have been.’ She turned to Yuri. ‘You may go to bed now, Yuri.’

‘Will you be all right?’ With him: she didn’t say it but she nodded her head suspiciously at Okada.

‘I’ll call you if I’m not. Take a knife to bed with you.’

Yuri didn’t think that was much of a joke; she snorted and backed out of the room, not respectfully but watchfully. Okada said, ‘She doesn’t trust me.’

‘She’s never trusted any man. Except my late husband.’

‘They never mentioned her when they briefed me. They didn’t tell me much about you.’

‘What would they know about me, only that my husband had recommended me?’ They were treading warily through the bramble-bush of suspicion and ignorance of each other. Natasha knew that she had not been able to send much information of value on her monthly radio transmissions; that feeling of inadequacy and the danger she was exposing herself to had weighed heavily on her. She welcomed someone who would share the burden with her, but she was not going to accept him blindly.

Okada, for his part, had been put off by Natasha’s beauty. He was not averse to women and particularly beautiful women; but he had preferred them in the plural, taken singly only for a night or two and never with any commitment. But he would have to commit himself to this woman: it would be an affair, even if there was no romance to it. He was wary of her: a girl as beautiful and composed as this one must have received plenty of offers of commitment. She had a lot to sell besides secrets.

‘They told me nothing about you,’ she said. She had been fin looking at him objectively, something she had always done ever since she had become aware of men. He was of medium height but tall for a Japanese, and muscular. He had a strong face, good-looking but for the dark suspicion in his eyes.

They had sat down opposite each other. The room, he had observed earlier, was furnished in Western style; which, for almost trivial reasons, made him for the moment feel more comfortable; he wanted to come back to Japan, to the style of living, a step at a time. Natasha, suddenly deciding the ice needed cracking, got up, went to a big ugly cabinet and came back with two drinks.

‘Scotch whisky, the last of my husband’s stock.’ She took it for granted that he drank liquor; all the men she had known had been drinkers. ‘Now tell me about you.’

But Embury and particularly Irvine had told him that an agent in the field should never know much about his or her control. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take me at face value. All I can tell you is that I’m a Nisei, a Japanese-American. For this mission –’ he was still awkward with the jargon’ – I’m supposed to have come from Saipan, where I was an under-manager at a sawmill. You’ll report to me once a week – I may or may not have information for you to transmit. You’ll be transmitting every week from now on, instead of monthly.’

‘That increases the risk.’ She didn’t feel comfortable with the thought. Then, remembering Yuri’s comment, she said, ‘I’m not being paid for this.’

He caught the mercenary note in her voice. ‘They didn’t say anything about that. Was your husband paid?’

‘I don’t know. But with him it was different – he was a patriot.’ She had never been sure that he was; he had seemed to have more love for Japan than for Scotland. ‘It’s very difficult trying to live without money.’

‘You came home by car. Who paid for that?’ The whisky, served without ice, hadn’t broken any.

‘It was a friend’s.’ She decided she wouldn’t tell him about her mother, not yet.

‘You’re well dressed, too. A fur coat.’ He had forgotten how cold an unheated house could be.

She put her glass down and said sharply, ‘I don’t have to answer to you like some servant.’

He had been studying her carefully. The male in him appreciated her looks; but he was unaccustomed to women of mixed blood. The Japanese he had known in California had been a tightly knit community; even amongst the whites he had known at school and university he could not remember any who had had any Negro or Oriental blood in them. He had grown up in a society that believed that any relationship between races had to be promiscuous and any child, especially a girl, born of that relationship would also be promiscuous. And being promiscuous, in that way of thinking, meant having less regard for other values. He would have to adapt to her and, tired as he was, that made him angry.

‘You can raise the point with them in your next broadcast. I’ve got only enough to keep myself, till I get a job.’

‘What are you going to do? Maybe I can help,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I have contacts at the university.’

He shook his head. ‘No. If you were picked up and questioned, you would know where I could be found. It’s better for both of us if you can’t get in touch with me. I’ll contact you each week.’

‘You’re not going to trust me, are you? What if I have something important to tell you in a hurry?’

He considered that, going over all the instructions Irvine, the experienced control, had given him. ‘We’ll settle on a mail drop, somewhere where you can leave a message for me. Or I can leave one for you, if I need you in a hurry. But we can’t do that till I know my way around.’

‘Will you stay around here?’

‘No. It’ll be easier to lose myself in Tokyo.’ He could risk telling her that. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m supposed to ask you a lot of questions, but I’m too tired. What time does the first train leave Nayora in the morning?’

‘There’s one comes through from Shizuoka at 7.15, if it’s on time. They’re not always on time these days, because of the bombings.’

‘I’ll get out of your house before daylight and go up to the station. I’ll be in touch with you, where to meet me. Do you have a phone?’

‘It was disconnected when we were interned.’ She began to envy him. ‘You seem to have had an easy war in America. Expecting the trains to run on time, telephones to work …’

He smiled, a tiny crack in the ice between them; she was quick to notice that with the smile his face changed, his eyes became livelier. ‘Score one to you. Now may I get some sleep?’

She led him upstairs to one of the bedrooms, made up a bed for him and left him. ‘I’ll set an alarm to wake me at five,’ she said. ‘It’s still dark then.’

‘There’s no need for that—’

‘Yes, there is. You look worn out – if you’re not wakened, you’ll sleep right through to midday. Yuri will get up with me. She’ll see that you have something to eat before you leave. 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’.