The Phoenix Tree

‘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.’