"That's no wonder," said Coppersmith. He stopped pacing and stood right in front of her. She bent her neck back, looking upward at him and then gave up. She looked at the notebook in her lap. She straightened out an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt. At last the silence compelled her to look all the way up to the general's face. He was standing so close to her that he seemed to reach to the ceiling. He was staring down at her. When she stirred, he became aware of her again.
"Sorry," he said. "So he's on guard. He ought to be. I've told you about him, haven't I?"
More accusingly than she should, she told him he had not.
Coppersmith looked puzzled. "All of this is in compartments. Nobody is supposed to know what's happening in the next box. Up to now Dugan has been working on Japanese problems, and he's been Landsiedel's man. Of course, I heard gossip. It was probably correct, considering who it was that told me."
"Who?"
He glared at her and then, without giving the source, told her the story.
Dugan was known as the odd American who looked enough like a Japanese to work in the Secretariat of the Board of Fleet Admirals and Field Marshals all through the war. He had planted himself there along about the summer of 1941. When Pearl Harbor broke, he risked his life to get a message out; but the message was stopped. No identifiable American couriers showed up, so Dugan had decided that a live Japanese captain — if boneheaded enough — was worth two dead spies any day. He had settled down to work in his assumed Japanese role, successfully mixing up papers, making other people imperil codes, and spreading misunderstanding around Imperial Headquarters. He had had a hand in sending Admiral Yamamoto to his death and, always in the guise of a doggedly loyal Japanese Army captain, he had slipped out bad news from one Japanese official to another until the Imperial Army refused to send air support to the Imperial Navy in the Philippines and the Imperial Navy had retaliated by withholding munitions needed by the Army on Okinawa.
Just before the Japanese surrender, Dugan had received a Japanese decoration. Right after the surrender, when he identified himself to some startled Americans at Atsugi airfield, he had been flown back to the United States. The President had him over to lunch at the White House and somebody in the Pentagon gave him a Legion of Merit, chiefly for having stayed alive.
"And the funniest part of the story was," Coppersmith concluded, "the way Finance refused to pay him when they found he had been drawing Japanese pay all those years. He offered to pay them back his Japanese in yen if they would give him his American pay in dollars. The last I heard of the story — and mind you, it may not be true — Dugan had gotten so mad at everybody that he put in for a Purple Heart because he got gashed during a B-29 raid on Tokyo. The people in Awards and Decorations said he couldn't get a gash counted if the Americans inflicted it on him, and Dugan stumped them on that by arguing that he had been hurt by a Japanese — by mistake. He didn't get the ribbon. Funny thing — I think he wanted it."
Colonel Landsiedel arrived promptly. He was a tall, slim young man who had been one of the Assistant Military Attaches in Tokyo just before the war. It had been his privilege to run one courier message to Dugan in 1941. He had expected to find a seedy half-caste in some unsavory barroom. Instead, he was ushered into the presence of an incredibly pompous Japanese captain who lectured him on Japanese military security, insisted on inspecting all of Landsiedel's papers while a dozen other Japanese officers hung over his shoulder, and ended up by slipping the reply message into Landsiedel's wallet as he returned it. Then he had Landsiedel marched out of a Japanese division HQ under MP guard, shouting rude things after him in bad English.
Landsiedel that very day became a Dugan hobbyist and found there were several other men in the Army who shared his interest in collecting stories about Dugan. When Landsiedel came in with the Occupation and found Dugan not only alive, but decorated by the Japanese, he almost wept with the sheer artistic pleasure the sight gave him, Landsiedel, as an intelligence officer.
Landsiedel spoke fair Japanese and found himself Dugan's immediate superior. He set Dugan to tasks worthy of Dugan's talents and, before Coppersmith called Dugan in, Landsiedel had had Dugan seeking spiritual peace in the quietude of a remote Buddhist monastery. It just happened that one of the co-priests was a Japanese Field Marshal whom the Japanese government — from either ignorance or charity — had listed as dead.
Landsiedel gave a glowing account of Dugan's exploits, winding up with:
"He's the greatest actor I've ever seen or heard of, General. He doesn't use make-up or costumes or anything like that. He can just work himself into a role till he feels like it from the inside out. He can be old or young, Japanese or American, a professional man or a breezy workingman, any time he feels like it. People believe him. If he had happened to turn crook, he'd have been the greatest confidence man of all time. He's anybody, General. Mr. Anybody."
The general waved the eulogies aside.
"That's all right, Colonel. I'll take your word on it. Is the man loyal, or just clever?"
"He's pathologically loyal, General. Because of his family background."
"What is his family background?"
"I thought you knew, sir. Half-Irish and half-Aleut."
"Half-what?" snapped Coppersmith. "I thought he was one of those American Japanese what-you-may-call-ems?"
"Aleut. Aleutian Islander. Sort of like American Indians or Eskimos, sir. I don't really know. They're Christian — Russian Orthodox. The Russians converted them before we bought Alaska. Dugan once told me that his father was Catholic and his mother Russian Orthodox but that he had joined the Presbyterian Church."
Coppersmith said, "Never mind the religion. How could anybody get to be an Irish Aleut? It doesn't seem possible to me."
Landsiedel explained. "Dugan's father was an Irishman from Minneapolis. He went up in the Yukon gold rush and didn't find any gold. He went to the Andreanof group in the Aleutians when he got the idea of starting a fox farm—"
"Fox farm?"
Sarah interrupted. "People do raise foxes, for their skins. They bring terrific prices in the fur market."
"That's right, Captain," said Landsiedel. "Only Dugan's father met this native girl and married her. When the baby was still tiny, the parents died in a typhus epidemic. They were both buried two inches above the frost line. The baby was taken back to Minneapolis and brought up there."
Coppersmith looked out of the window. "Minneapolis doesn't seem to be a very good place to become an Imperial Japanese Army officer. How did he learn to pass for a Japanese?"
"He never really told me, but I met a man who knew him in high school and at the University of Minnesota. Dugan looked even more Oriental when he was a boy than he does now. Other children nicknamed him 'Jap' Dugan. That got him so thin-skinned that he took up the study of Japanese in college. You can't ever get through explaining that you're half-Irish and half-Aleut."
"I'm not, Colonel," said Coppersmith glumly. "Hudson Valley Dutch."
"That was a figure of speech, sir. What I meant was that—" Landsiedel looked puzzled and sympathetic. "If a man really is Irish and Aleut, what can he do? He can't just settle down to being the hometown preacher or lawyer. And neither Ireland nor the Aleutians meant a damned thing to Dugan, personally. He looked like a Japanese and he felt like an American. So he joined the Army, figuring we could use him. He got a direct commission long before the war, on the strength of his Japanese studies."
"You have his Army record in black and white?"
"We can account for it, General. All except the war, when he was here. And Dugan doesn't know it, but two of the locked-up Japanese lieutenant generals have given him a very good character. They didn't even know that he was an American."