Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers' village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.
He entered a tenement and looked in an open door to a flat where a young man was trying to fix a mimeograph machine. Konno had told him to go to the fourth floor but hadn't supplied an apartment number. The hallway was dark and rank. A child was wailing on one of the upper stories.
Hidell climbs the ancient creaking stairs.
On four, two more doors were open. Students milled inside the apartments, moved from one to the other. A young man looked at Ozzie, who was standing in the hallway, smiling, in his T-shirt and dusty jeans. The man smiled back and pointed to a door at the end of the hall. Oswald knocked and was told to enter. He saw a tatami mat and low table. A woman moved across the room. She was about fifty years old, with a moon face and pixie hairdo, wearing a light cotton kimono. She said her name was Dr. Braunfels. She taught German and Russian on a private basis to students at Tokyo University. She understood he was interested in learning Russian. He said he was, and waited. She sat cross-legged on the mat at the far side of the table. She asked him to take off his shoes. These were the nice little gestures that went with the setting.
She wore eye makeup that matched the pale-blue shade of the kimono. He hadn't expected a European. It was encouraging, it was all to the good, it made his decision seem timely, fixed to favorable circumstances. She was probably important, an adviser to radical students and a recruiting officer or handler of agents. She gestured for him to sit facing her on the mat. She watched him assume the awkward position. They ate rice cakes wrapped in seaweed.
"And you are Oswald, Lee," she said finally, as if correcting an imbalance, adding the last stately note to some diplomatic exchange.
There were bamboo shades behind her, a screen to one side. The ceiling was low, a dark-toned wood. Small polished objects here and there. You were supposed to appreciate the near-bareness, the placement of things. Twigs in a vase on the lacquer table.
He told her he wanted to defect.
"I've been thinking this is the step to take, that I'll never be able to live in the U.S. I want a life like these students, political, working in the struggle. I'm not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams. I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. I do think there is something unique about the Soviet Union that I wish to find out for myself. It's the great theory come to life. Before I was fifteen I began indoctrinating myself in the New Orleans library. I studied Marxist ideology. I could lift my head from a book and see the impoverishment of the masses right there in front of me, including my own mother in her struggle to raise three children against the odds. These socialist writings showed me the key to my environment. The material was correct in its thesis. Capitalism is beginning to die. It is taking desperate measures. There is hysteria in the air, like hating Negroes and communists. In the military I'm learning the full force of the system. There is something in the system that builds up hate. How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed. Nobody knows how I feel about this.
I'm sincere in my ideal that this is what I want to do. This is not something intangible. I'm ready to go through pain and hardship to leave my country forever."
That evening he sat alone at the Queen Bee, thinking he'd approached the main business too quickly. She did not seem happy to hear the news and she countered it with news of her own. His unit was shipping out for the latest hot spot, Formosa, in a couple of weeks. What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thought of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs. She spent some time discussing this. She talked about his job, not his life. She wanted tactical call signs, authentication codes, radio frequencies. She wanted spotter photos of U-2s.
There would be money for this, although she realized money was not his motive. She talked about a second meeting in Yamato, near the base, and gave him detailed directions. She spoke in a practiced way about procedures and craft, about the need for discipline, possibly referring to his rumpled street clothes and day-old stubble. She said she admired the Japanese because a man might spend a lifetime getting one thing right.
She had a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive. He told her he was serious about learning Russian.
At the Queen Bee he waited for Tammy to finish work and he spent the night with her in the flat she shared with two of her sisters. They had sex, more or less furtively, as the sisters watched TV. Curled in a corner of the room, unable to sleep, his head in the crook of his lover's arm, he thought of a number of things Dr. Braunfels didn't know. She didn't know he'd been on mess duty since the first court-martial. Mess duty, guard duty, a series of shit details-everything but gazing into radarscopes. She didn't know he'd lost his security clearance after the second court-martial. She didn't know there was a second court-martial, or a first for that matter, and she didn't know about the incidents that brought them about. One last thing she didn't know, and that was how far out on a limb he would have to go to snatch documents from a restricted area without clearance.
Seeing her smooth round face, doing her accented voice, he said to himself in the dark, What kind of foul-up do we have here, Oswald Lee?
Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.
Ozzie thought, What if she's only interested in twisting me dry?
He met her in a flat above a bicycle shop. There was an open umbrella drying in the hall. She wore Western clothes, a raincoat over her shoulders. They shook hands like hospital roommates. She had that cropped uneven hair that was way too young and made him think she was undependable, a person who could not survive without double meanings, or saying one thing to mean the opposite.
"You are much greater value," she said, "going on with your duties, reporting to me at regular times. Go where they send you. Why not? We wish you to get ahead. You get ahead here, not in Moscow or Leningrad."
"What if I'm determined to go?"
"This is not the time for you."
"Couldn't they train me there, then send me back?"
"You are already back."
A little joke. He told her he had no documents. Documents would come, possibly, in the near future. It all depended. In the meantime he showed his good will by reporting the number and type of aircraft in his squadron and the squawk codes for aircraft entering and exiting the identification zone. He did not tell her everything he knew about the U-2. He told her a few technical things, studying her reaction to the terms. He told her there was talk around the base that the plane's cameras scanned through multiple apertures.