“Friends come and go,” Benny said. “Enemies accumulate.”
He’d meant to ask Oscar about Emily, but in the end he thought better of it. There was no purpose in rubbing salt into old wounds.
“You had a major running security at Los Alamos,” Benny said.
“Peer de Silva,” Groves said. “He made lieutenant colonel, before the war ended.”
Groves was back in Washington. Benny was both surprised and pleased he’d taken his call. “Is de Silva still in military intelligence?” he asked.
There was a pause. Benny could sense Groves smiling. “You must be cashing in that favor, Sheriff,” he said.
“In late ’forty-three or early ’forty-four, two or three dozen Japanese nationalists were released from Army custody at Tule Lake, and reassigned to the internment camp at Santa Fe, where they caused some fair amount of grief.”
“I’ve heard the story,” Groves said.
“They were returned to Army custody for the duration. What happened to them after V-J Day?”
“They were sent back to Japan.”
“All of them?”
“What’s your question, Benny?”
“I want a list of their names, and the disposition of their cases.”
“That would take months.”
“I don’t have months,” Benny said. “Colonel de Silva has access to the classified records, and you’ve got a few chips you can call in.”
He could tell the general was making careful notes of their conversation. “Anything else?” Groves asked.
“Current location,” Benny said.
“Needles in a haystack.”
“I mean whether any of them are stateside,” Benny said.
“What’s this about?”
“It’s about a murder in wartime.”
“The war’s over.”
“Not for everybody,” Benny said.
“Okay,” Groves said.
They’d had the same conversation before.
“I started out thinking it was payback,” Benny told Teresa. “A revenge killing, an American GI who was mistreated when he was a POW, say, or a family member, somebody with an axe to grind.”
“Like one of the Ramirez boys.”
“Except they don’t fit the picture. I could cast a wider net, maybe, but I just don’t get the impression there was bad blood between the Minamoto family and anybody else up in the Embudo valley. They worked hard, they got along with everybody, their neighbors took care of things when they were interned.”
“You don’t think there was prejudice?”
“There had to be some,” Benny said. “These people were unfairly singled out because they were of Japanese descent, and then they all got lumped together, so it could be that easy, the only good Jap is a dead Jap.”
Teresa knew he was thinking out loud.
“Thing is, that of course they weren’t all the same,” he said. “Yeah, some of them still had family ties to Japan, some of them were active enemy sympathizers. But look at Tommy Minamoto. Purple Heart, posthumous Silver Star, fighting in Italy. He died for his country, and that country was the United States, not Imperial Japan.”
“So which side was his father really on?”
“Our side,” Benny said. “I think that was the problem, the tensions between the interned Japanese in the camps.”
“He tried to be a peacemaker.”
“And got labeled a collaborator.”
“Where’s this leading, Benny?” she asked.
“Your question, remember, was why anybody would wait two years,” he said. “A survivor of the Bataan Death March, or some kid who was Four-F because he’s almost legally blind?”
She smiled. “And who’s still carrying a torch for Emily?”
“So maybe the guy’s been out of action the last two years,” he said. “Two years to brood about the injustice, the shame.”
“You think he’s been in prison?”
“I’m guessing he’s been in Japan,” Benny said.
“Colonel de Silva’s list,” Johnny Lee said. He was calling from Albuquerque, an hour and a half south of Santa Fe.
Of the thirty-five men, only three had been issued visas with recent U.S. entry dates. The FBI had tracked one guy down in Los Angeles, where he was visiting family. The second guy was reportedly in the Baltimore area. The third guy was dead in an Albuquerque motel room, of self-inflicted wounds.
“I’ll drive down,” Benny said.
“You’re not going to see anything I haven’t,” Montoya said. “And you won’t want to see what I saw.”
After three days, the people in the adjoining rooms had complained about the smell. Even in September, the weather in Albuquerque could be hot. When the cops broke the door down, the first of the responding officers who went into the room fell to his knees, his stomach heaving.
Nobody made fun of him later. None of them had ever seen a Japanese ritual suicide.
Kneeling on a bamboo mat, the dead man, later identified as Iyeshi Saito, had placed the katana, the sword of a samurai, to his left. He’d used the wakizashi, the short sword, to open his bowels into his lap. Just out of reach, to his right, was an 8mm pistol, a Japanese officer’s Nambu model. There had been no friend present to administer the killing blow, and the pistol was Saito’s last resort, but it had apparently slipped away from his bloody hands, and he’d thrashed to death.
“Three days,” Benny said.
“The timing’s right,” Johnny Lee said. “He shoots Minamoto and then kills himself. We’ll run ballistics on the gun.”
“This stinks,” Benny said.
Johnny Lee had been in the motel room with the dead body, and he could vividly remember the smell, but he understood Benny meant it metaphorically.
“What do I tell Minamoto’s daughter?” Benny asked. “We owe her an explanation.”
“Saito left a note,” Johnny told him.
It was in Japanese calligraphy, done with careful brush strokes.
There was arterial blood spray on the wrinkled rice paper. Benny was cautious not to tear it. “What does it say?” he asked the college professor, spreading it out on his desk.
“It’s haiku,” the Japanese scholar told him.
“Bear with me,” Benny said.
“It’s a poem, very formally structured.”
“Can you translate it?”
“It’s not an exact science.”
“Approximately, then,” Benny said.
Snow alights gently
On the shoulders of a lark
Grief burns, fire takes wing
“Meaning?” Benny asked.
“Exile, perhaps, and rebirth, or renewal.”
“The cops tell you they found this next to a suicide?”
The professor nodded.
“An educated guess, then.”
“It might mean he redeemed himself, in death.”
Benny decided he wouldn’t show anybody else the poem.
He took Aurora and Angelina up to Emily Minamoto’s farm to pick peaches. As he expected, it was hard work, but satisfying. The girls, of course, complained to him about it.
Benny had little sympathy.
Peaches, he explained patiently, are easily bruised.
Copyright © 2012 by David Edgerley Gates
In Walenstadt
by Milena Moser
Born in Zurich, Milena Moser left school for an apprenticeship as a bookseller. On completing it, she lived in Paris for a couple of years, then returned to Switzerland where she co-founded a magazine and became a freelance writer who now has sixteen novels, two volumes of short fiction, and many radio plays to her credit. She and her family lived in San Francisco from 1998–2006, where she found the inspiration for this story.