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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.’
