“Have you thought about the consequences?” Benny asked.
“You mean bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Groves shook his head. “It ended the war. You know what kind of casualties we would have taken if we’d had to invade the Home Islands? The Japanese would have fought to the last man, woman, and child.”
The estimate, Benny had heard, was that the U.S. would have suffered a million dead.
“You know, the object was to beat Hitler to the bomb,” the general told him. “More than a few of the men who worked here were German refugee Jews. They understood it was a real danger. But after Germany surrendered, the air went out of their tires, and some of them, Oppenheimer included, didn’t think there was a practical use for the weapon.”
“Obviously, you disagreed.”
Groves gave him a level look. “I hope you’re not going all gooey on me, Sheriff,” he said.
“No, the Japanese had to be beaten, one way or another.”
“What are you doing here, Benny?” Groves asked.
Benny told him about the murder victim, Tashi Minamoto, and the Ramirez brothers.
“You think it goes back to the Jap relocation camps?”
“My guess. Bad blood.”
“They got a raw deal.”
“Why weren’t Germans and Italians interned?”
“You’re being naive,” Groves said.
“Okay, it was about the Yellow Peril,” Benny said.
“There was a war on,” Groves reminded him.
“The war’s over.”
“Maybe not for everybody,” Groves said.
“That’s my point,” Benny said.
“I understood you the first time.”
“What are you doing here, General?” Benny asked.
“Taking a victory lap,” Groves said.
“You deserve it.”
“I do,” Groves said, with a wry smile. “But the plain fact is, I’ve made a lot of enemies. I’m resigning from the Army.”
“A man can be judged on the strength of his enemies,” Benny said. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Didn’t say I did.”
Benny stubbed out his cigarette, and they shook hands.
“Good luck, Sheriff,” Groves said.
“Good luck to you, General.”
“I’ve been twice blessed,” Groves said. “I got to build the Pentagon, and I built Los Alamos. You don’t get lucky three times. It tempts the gods.”
Groves and Oppenheimer had tempted the gods, and beaten them. “What was it Oppenheimer said, after the first successful bomb test?” Benny asked, although he already knew the answer.
Oppenheimer had said, I am become death.
“You should be wary of too much philosophy,” Groves said.
“Only if it conceals a falsehood,” Benny said.
But what was the lie? Nobody had told him a deliberate untruth, or nothing he could put his finger on.
“Why don’t you believe the Ramirez brothers?” Teresa asked.
“Their story doesn’t ring true.”
“You’re suspicious by nature. Simplest is best.”
Simplest was always best. He knew that from forty years of law-enforcement experience.
“Oscar told you he picked fruit on the Minamotos’ farm when he was a teenager,” she said. “So he knew Emily’s father.”
“He knew him at the camp in Santa Fe too,” Benny said.
“Then it’s more likely he did him favors than bullied him,” Teresa said.
“Smuggled his letters past the censors? Or made sure he had warm clothing in the winter, something extra to eat?” Benny nodded. “That’s if you take Oscar at face value.”
“Why would Oscar wait two years?”
“Good point. Then again, why would anybody? There must have been any number of opportunities to stick it to an internee back during the war, when they were locked up.”
“But you do think that’s what this is about?”
“It makes the most sense.”
“You know better than to construct a theory and then make the evidence fit after the fact,” she reminded him. “You’ve got too many loose ends.”
“Not every story we wish to be true is false,” Benny said.
“Well, where to start?” Gideon Horace asked them. It was a rhetorical question. The FBI agent had agreed to meet Benny and Johnny Lee in Tierra Amarilla, the Rio Arriba county seat, halfway between Farmington and Española, far enough off the beaten path they wouldn’t attract attention. Horace, of course, was required to report any official contact with local law.
This was off the record. Background only.
“The women probably got sent to Manzanar, in the Sierra Nevada,” he said. “Not exactly a garden spot, but the camps in general were located away from population centers.” He looked at Benny. “I’m not saying right or wrong, it’s how it was. The War Department made the call.”
“How did they decide who went where?” Benny asked him.
“It was pretty arbitrary,” Horace said. “Japanese from Hawaii, say, were sent to the mainland. More of a risk of fifth column, is my guess. Pacific fleet had been decimated at Pearl Harbor. In any event, internees were categorized according to perceived risk. Were they loyal to the Empire of Japan, or were they loyal to the United States?”
“Why was there a question?”
“Japanese were thought to have a racial bias.”
“You believed that?”
“Better safe than sorry.”
Benny nodded. “What were the categories?” he asked.
“There were the die-hard imperialists, Bushido, the Rising Sun, all that eyewash. They wound up in Army custody, POWs, in effect. Then there were people who got classified as possible security risks because they wouldn’t renounce their Japanese citizenship, first-generation, for the most part. And of course there were kids who got released when they agreed to serve in the U.S. military. But there was a lot of mix and match, and a certain amount of tension. Most people went along with the program, and some of them got beaten up because they were seen as collaborators, or the rumor went around they were getting preferential treatment. It depended on who did what, or who got did to.”
“How did a fruit farmer from Embudo find himself shut up in a camp as an enemy alien?” Benny asked.
“He had the bad luck to be Japanese,” the FBI agent said.
“How much trouble got stirred up?” Johnny Lee asked him.
“Internally? We had an ugly incident in Santa Fe. A bunch of bad apples got transferred in from Tule Lake. They had shaved heads, they did regimented calisthenics, they behaved like they were in the Nip army. In fact, most of them chose to be repatriated to Japan after the war. They were hoodlums. They thought the rest of the internees had shamed themselves by giving in to relocation.”
“What happened?” Benny asked.
“They started a ruckus. Had to be broken up with tear gas and night sticks. Heads got cracked. Thankfully, nobody got dead, either side. You have to understand that the older guys, guys who’d been in the camp three or four years, they were terrified of these fanatics. Hell, they had a Suicide Squad. You crossed them, it was banzai. You wound up getting your ass handed to you, and if you were lucky, it was still in two pieces instead of six or eight.”
“What happened afterwards?” Johnny Lee asked.
“Ringleaders got shipped out to the Fort Stanton stockade.”
“Things settle down after that?”
“Pretty much.”
Johnny Lee looked at Benny. “Goes against the conventional wisdom,” he said. “That the Japanese were passive.”
“They don’t sound very passive,” Benny said.
“They’re not a passive race,” Horace said.
“We back to that?” Benny asked.
“That’s not what I meant,” Horace said. “I meant that, as a culture, they don’t like to suffer embarrassment. They have a pride in themselves.”