Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  On the desk between them lay the report that Emmett had written shortly before his departure from the Tokyo Mission, the one about the two Japanese Communist Party officials released from prison.

  “What’s up, Bill?”

  Bill grimaced. He patted the report. “Nice work.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I don’t know why — ” Bill began.

  “I was doing good work in Tokyo. How do you expect me to get anywhere if you don’t leave me alone and let me do what I have to do?”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Just tell me why I’m here, so I’ll know how to get out again.”

  “Since when did you get to be such a hothead?”

  Emmett got up and poured himself two fingers of rye, no ice, and when he turned and met Bill’s surprised gaze, he said, “I’m on Tokyo time.”

  “Look,” said Bill. “We’re just trying to make the most of our resources. Meaning you. And guys like you. We can make better use of you here.”

  “Doing what? Translating the Tokyo newspapers?”

  “That and other things.”

  “Are you serious?” Emmett thought about the man with the egg salad sandwiches coming to the office every day, probably speaks five languages but lives a life so boring his wife is glad he drinks so much, she’s hoping for cirrhosis, a widow’s pension.

  Bill didn’t look friendly right now. “Remember George Miller?”

  “The Washington ‘think tank.’ So what?”

  “So what? Who’s running the show in Japan, huh? How are we going to get anywhere if we alienate the Americans?”

  “I don’t give a shit about the Americans.”

  “Then you’re stupid.” Bill picked up the Liaison file and slapped it on his desk. “Why’d you go and stick your neck out? After I told you they were none too pleased with your talk about the Chinese. And this — ” indicating the file, he made a show of calming himself down.

  “I’m reporting facts.”

  “There’s no such thing as facts. MacArthur wanted to geld a couple of old communists? What the bejeezus are you talking about?”

  “I don’t trust MacArthur,” Emmett said. “But that was an intelligent decision. Surprises me, in fact. It seems too reasonable.”

  “Be that as it may, MacArthur is yesterday’s man.”

  “Not to the Japanese.” But Emmett didn’t want further conversation about MacArthur. He’d written that material before MacArthur had insinuated that he was leaking information about his troops’ movements in Korea.

  Bill pointed at Emmett. “Let me give you some friendly advice. Not that you deserve it.” He gazed longingly at the glass in Emmett’s hand. “Always look at the bigger picture.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Of human affairs, Jones, of the real political situation in real human terms. Not some perfect world where men are angels.”

  “You bring me here to tell me this? This is a fucking house of mirrors.” He drained his glass and was going to pour himself another when Bill told him coldly to sit down.

  “Here,” said Bill, and he poked his stubby finger into his desk, “right here in Ottawa, or in Tokyo, what the Christ, Manila, Seoul, anywhere there are Americans, we work with them. You don’t think I know my ass from a hole in the ground? What we’re doing here is selective, you know that. We’re not winning any elections, we’re here to support the men who do. And that means we smooth the way, we avoid controversy. We don’t sell our souls to the devil, but we do get along with the Americans. Anything short of that is for the pulpit. You want to think you’re changing the world, get a job in a university, become a preacher. You want to have a real effect on real events, Jones — Emmett.” Bill was winding down. “Look” — he almost said “son” but stopped himself — “I’m talking about the long run, a career in the service. You want to be another flash in the pan?”

  “It’s for my own good, is it, Bill?”

  Bill’s hazel eyes regarded him from under swollen eyelids. “You might view it that way. In time.”

  Emmett stood up to leave.

  “Did it ever occur to you —” He wanted Emmett to thank him for his support; it would have been a bleating appeal for gratitude, but Bill reined himself in and brusquely placed the last Tokyo report in his OUT pile, then plucked another file from his IN pile and picked up his pen. “Tell Agnes to bring me coffee,” he said. When Emmett opened the door to go out, Bill added, “Come for dinner sometime. Meet my wife.”

  So Emmett did say thanks and left, cursing.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  He had to get resettled in Ottawa and then report to somebody in the Far East Division. But he went to Toronto instead.

  After Japan, even in ruins, in its forceful repair, the ugliness of the Canadian cities weighed on him. Ottawa was craven and stale, eager to imitate whatever the citizens guessed might be sophistication. The squat concrete and limestone buildings had no history; it was a bland, cringing, bloodless colony. He was angry all the time. He got drunk the first night back in town and then again the second and third nights. He wanted to get into a fight with a stranger in a bar; he was bursting apart, he had to be held, he had to be reassembled in the arms of another, he needed a woman. But he was thinking, This is Canada, this is McCallum land, he wanted only Suzanne McCallum of Forest Hill, and he was sick of pretending that he didn’t.

  He bought a car, a three-year-old Plymouth coupe, and drove it down to Toronto. He thought he’d drop in on her, just drop by. She was probably seeing someone; maybe she was even married. A woman like that. He’d drop by and probably find her married to someone, and then he’d finally let her go and get on with his life.

  He drove through a suffocating hot afternoon and got into town under towering storm clouds, in air gone yellow and electric. A dog, a yellow mutt, lay in the centre of St. Clair Avenue. He thought it must have been hit and killed, but it lifted its head when his car came to a stop a few feet away, hauled itself up by its front legs, and slouched off to one side to let him pass. In his rear-view, he could see the animal amble back to the centre line to lie down again.

  The broad hot avenue with its broad hot sidewalk was nearly abandoned except for the Greek men sitting out on cane chairs drinking little glasses of wine as if they were in their own living rooms. A streetcar rumbled toward him, and he thought it was louder than it should be when he realized it was thunder he was hearing. He didn’t have time to roll up the window on the passenger side before the sky opened.

  The rain sluiced down, flooding the street, rising up to the curbs. He thought Suzanne’s place was several blocks north of St. Clair, he couldn’t remember how many, but he could barely see through his windshield and he was in the wrong lane to turn onto Avenue Road.

  He saw a woman standing at the corner. She was empty-handed, not even carrying a purse, which seemed unusual, as was her thinness, and the way she let herself get soaking wet. She wore a blue dress, or maybe it was green, and it clung to her legs. Her feet, in flat shoes, were in an inch of rainwater. What struck him hardest was that she was so calm and uncaring about the scandal of rain pouring down on her in her nice clothes. He pulled up at the curb where she stood. A delivery van had been following and it lurched to a stop and the driver leaned on his horn. The woman bent down to peer in at his open passenger window, taking in the rainwater pooling in its upholstery. Her eyes were filled with light, sky blue. She smiled at him as if they were fools to have made such an irresponsible arrangement. Emmett thought, Oh god, I want to marry you, Suzanne McCallum.

  It was the same studio that Suzanne had set up before he took his leave for Japan. But it was altered, had been made more upscale and less — “less broken,” she’d said when she saw him appraise the curtains on the windows, a fairly new settee to one side. Patrons could extinguish their cigarettes in a standing bronze ashtray with a bare-breasted Athena. There was a small fridge in one corner, where, when she opened it to fetch cream for his coffee,
he saw a bottle of gin and three lemons. He would have liked a drink of gin for his nerves, but he was holding his breath, waiting to learn that she was seeing someone, a good-looking lawyer selected for her by her father.

  She sat down on the couch and crossed her bare legs. She’d disappeared awhile to change out of her wet clothes. Now she had on a soft green dress that was like a shirt, with buttons all the way down, belted, and he was imagining unbuckling, unbuttoning. She said, “I think I was a bit — oh, I don’t know — a bit of egg shell last time we saw each other.”

  “Better now?”

  She nodded “Uh-huh,” and smiled at him peacefully.

  The rain wasn’t letting up. He hoped it wouldn’t. Her blond hair was drying into waves and the daylight grew dusky. He walked around looking at the photographs on the walls. She offered to turn on a lamp and he said no, he could see fine. “What makes them shine like that?” he wanted to know.

  She told him it was a method in the darkroom she’d been learning. “I’m becoming a bit of a cliché. But I love the way it looks, the silver.”

  “Luminous.”

  She laughed, flattered. He remembered that about her, an easy modesty; something he liked very much. But just then she stretched, as if she was bored, and looked out the window, and he thought for sure she had to be somewhere or she was expecting someone, the eldest son of a Liberal MP. She pushed her hair into place, a gesture he’d seen her mother make, caught him looking and laughed uncomfortably. “I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”

  “No. I should get going.”

  “I have a date tonight.” She said this with some anguish, blushing. “I never have dates! I think it’s the first one I’ve ever had!”

  He doubted this was true but sort of knew what she meant. He looked at her curiously, feeling his nerves ride down his arms and into his fingers. “It’s all right, it’s normal.”

  “It doesn’t feel normal. It feels stupid.”

  “Suzanne.”

  “I guess I got a bit lonely. A bit bored.”

  “Do you ever see Norfield?” He felt he could ask this now, though he’d been wondering forever.

  She indicated no with a small shake of her head. He’d pried. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wilfully regained her composure and sat up straighter.

  He said, “You look as if you’re doing okay. As a photographer.”

  “I do sell some,” she said. “I might have a book!” And then that candid modesty again, “I also get an allowance from my family.” She liked to laugh at herself, dismissing the importance of her successes and maybe diminishing the significance of her failings.

  Emmett stood to leave and she walked him to the door. She was running her hands down her sides, pressing the wrinkles from her dress with her hands on her thighs. She grumbled, “I wish I didn’t have to. I don’t like dates. I don’t know what I was thinking. I never want to do anything I’m supposed to do.” She looked up at him. Her blue, blue eyes had a rim of black around them.

  “Then don’t,” he said.

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  September 1953

  The RCMP and the Security Panel of External Affairs began questioning Emmett Jones at his home in the summer of 1953. They always came late at night or early in the morning. Emmett was sleeping very little, either from being too angry afterward or from being anxious that they’d show up before he’d had a chance to shower in the morning. All these weeks, Suzanne had stayed at Blue Sea Lake with Lennie. But summer was past, it was suddenly fall, Suzanne said she wanted to come home.

  He wanted her home. Each morning of her absence he remembered her bare shoulder where she would lie sleeping beside him, her hair spread across the pillow, and how he would put his lips to her warm skin to feel her voice when she’d lazily murmur good morning. It was better that she stay away until Gembey, Morton, and his sidekick, Partridge, all with their invisible apparatus, were left behind like dogs chasing a car.

  The investigation was a grinding, repetitive test of his memory and his endurance. They reviewed Emmett’s activities since the war again and again, forcing him to reproduce the same answers. When they came to his home, Gembey, head of Security at External, was always present. But after a couple of weeks, the RCMP requested that Emmett come to their offices downtown, where Morton would question him without Gembey present, without the feigned goodwill of the Canadian government.

  Tonight Emmett was alone downtown with Morton, and with Partridge, whose surliness, Emmett had come to realize, was intended to mask real stupidity. Morton was no fool, though, and Emmett guessed that Morton kept Partridge around mostly for show, to fudge the fact that he really didn’t work with anybody.

  Morton’s questions were jolting, doubling back to review Emmett’s earlier statements. Emmett knew that this was another of their strategies, to pretend they had him. “Who’s in charge?” Morton asked, leaning back to view him across the table.

  Emmett asked what that meant, and Partridge, standing with his back to them, answered, as if digging at Jones was the most tedious aspect of an otherwise interesting career. “He’s asking who’s your case officer.” He turned to look at him. “Who’s running you?”

  “I still don’t know what that means. I work at External. You know that. I don’t have a case officer. We don’t work that way.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  He tried to tell them about the kind of work he was doing at External, translating, mostly.

  “Chinese,” Partridge asked.

  “Japanese. I speak very little Mandarin and no Cantonese. I told you this already.”

  Partridge was distracted by something going on behind Emmett’s head. Emmett turned around and thought he saw an after-image of a red light. Morton and Partridge left the room without saying anything, leaving him alone. There was nothing but the table and two chairs. He wanted to walk to the window but felt too constrained to move. It was late. He was tired.

  This time, Robert Morton hadn’t asked him if he was a Soviet agent; he’d asked, “How long have you been working for the Soviets, Emmett?” When he told Morton that he’d never worked for the Soviets, Morton smiled that tired disgusted smile and then, as if only now remembering, “Hey, we got news of your pal, the Jewish guy who defected, Leonard Fischer. They say he isn’t doing too well.”

  Morton stretched out his legs, studying his shiny shoes and the diamond ring on his hand as he liked to do, as if reading it. Emmett knew this was one of Morton’s tricks, to make him want something from his interrogator, and he resisted for a few minutes. They sat in silence, but he finally had to ask, What news did Morton have of Leonard Fischer?

  Morton shrugged. “What do I know about that jerk? He’s not doing too well.” He removed his jacket, revealing a gun in a leather holster, snug against his chest. “Russian food is bad for his health. Says he needs medical treatment, so he wants to come home. Only, he isn’t a Canadian citizen. Who wants him?”

  “Dumb Polack,” said Partridge.

  “Hungarian,” Morton corrected Partridge with a satisfied wince, his superior intelligence confirmed yet again. Morton suddenly leaned forward toward Jones. “Say. This new hydrogen bomb the Russians set off a few weeks ago, a real big one. You pretty happy about that?” Then quickly, angrily, Morton switched focus to another close friend, John Norfield.

  This was a sore subject. John Norfield had been apprehended by MI-5 on Morton’s recommendation and then got off; the charges wouldn’t stick because of “unauthorized surveillance”; Morton’s mistake, an embarrassing error, and frustrating, to be kept on a leash when he was so close to nailing Norfield as a spy, just a courier, sure, but a traitor, a commie. “You two were close,” he observed. “John and Emmett, fellow travellers. But maybe he was closer to your wife. Or was it all three of you? Very close friends.”

  Emmett told them they were friends. He tried to say “friends” in a redemptive tone; he tried for dignity and sounded like a prude.
He heard Morton sigh tiredly. “John Norfield, Leonard Fischer, Herbert Norman,” Morton said. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  Herbert Norman had by then endured not one but two investigations by the RCMP and External — by these very men — and had been cleared yet again. But it appeared to have ruined his career: Ottawa had exiled Herbert Norman to a diplomatic posting in New Zealand.

  Morton had never discovered any hard evidence of Herbert Norman spying. But it didn’t matter; Herbert’s career was permanently damaged. Now Morton brought the interview back around to probe Emmett’s friendship with Herbert when they were working together in Tokyo. Emmett reiterated, he admired Herbert Norman’s intellect. “Hmm,” said Morton, “intellect.” He made the word sound weirdly sexual. Then Morton sat up a little, as if with a fresh connection. “Why don’t you tell us about your Japanese girlfriend?”

  He meant Aoi. This was a new subject in their interviews. Emmett didn’t successfully hide his shock that Morton knew of his private life in Tokyo. Morton saw his confusion and pressed forward. “You kind of left her in the lurch when you lost your job there.”

  Emmett recovered enough to respond calmly. “You want to know about a girl I dated? You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, Morton.”

  Morton said, “The Japanese police thought it was interesting.”

  Japan’s police were the underpaid men in their cast-off American uniforms who’d been drinking in the port district of Tokyo on the night that Emmett and Dr. Kimura had got into a brawl, December 1950. The night when Emmett had picked brass knuckles up off the floor of a bar and swung backhand across a policeman’s throat.

  “I’m not really that interesting,” Emmett said. He’d let Morton see vulnerability, and now he hoped that Morton would figure it had something to do with Aoi, a false scent.

  But Morton went on. “You got into a street fight shortly before leaving Tokyo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?” Morton could sense something.