Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  Emmett looked at his watch. “I was mugged. I was walking with a friend when we were attacked.”

  “Who was the friend?”

  Emmett didn’t hesitate. “Well, not quite a friend. A man I’d met on the train.”

  The boorish Partridge guffawed at this.

  Morton said, “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Kimura.” Emmett had reported the “mugging” to the Canadian Liaison Mission, where he worked, and he’d named Kimura, a common Japanese name. He couldn’t make a report to the police and had asked the Canadian Mission to just let the matter drop, offering the rationale that there were countless homeless people in post-war Tokyo; the men who’d assaulted him and even this man Kimura were untraceable. Emmett had added that he was partly at fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to bet on the chance that the only report on his activities in Japan came from the Liaison offices.

  “Where’s your friend Kimura now?” Morton asked.

  Emmett shrugged. “No idea. We travelled together by train and arrived in Tokyo that night. We got roughed up by some street thugs, we got away, and I never saw him again.” He pretended to be distracted, studied his nails, suppressed a yawn, and added, “I was in better shape then. Anyway. It’s late.”

  Morton was making notes and didn’t look up when he said, “Partridge. Drive him home.”

  Emmett found Kimura’s name in the phone book. Kimura had a medical practice in Ottawa. Emmett made an appointment to see him.

  He’d often imagined getting in touch with Kimura, he didn’t know why; it seemed like a better idea to let the incident in Tokyo be forgotten, but he had liked the young doctor, he felt a bond with him. And now he felt compelled to take control of the situation, to make sure that he could trust a man whom he’d only known for a few hours.

  He’d made a mistake when he’d reported the incident to the Liaison office; he’d been shaken up from the fight, perhaps even had a mild concussion, and wasn’t thinking straight — he’d given the name of his companion, the ubiquitous Japanese name Kimura, but he’d added an unnecessary detail: he’d said that his companion was leaving for Canada. At the time, in his fuddled state, it had seemed reassuring to have his accomplice out of reach. Now it was possible that Morton would see this single detail and have one of his many underlings spend a few afternoons looking for a man named Kimura who had entered Canada in December 1950, or maybe January 1951. Emmett needed to be sure that, if Kimura had learned anything of the death of the policeman, it would continue to be kept between them.

  Chapter Two

  Kimura’s round face lit up when Emmett walked in. “I saw the name and hoped. Now here you are!” He seized his hand, pumping it, then suddenly relaxed his grip. “How’s the hand? All better?”

  “It’s fine,” Emmett said. “Anyway, it was my left.”

  Kimura smiled cheerfully, as if from a happy memory, and said, “Sit down, Emmett. I’m glad to see you.” He first made a show of examining the alignment of Emmett’s nose — “Pretty good” — then leaned against his examining table, crossed his arms, and said, “What can I do for you?”

  Emmett told him that he was suffering from insomnia.

  Kimura prescribed secobarbital — in fact, he gave him two tablets then and there — though he recommended liquor as a first resort. “Unless you are alone. I don’t recommend that you drink alone.” He seemed surprised to learn that Emmett was married. Emmett remembered their conversation on that train ride from Kobe to Tokyo, remembered his complaints to Kimura about Aoi’s moodiness, and felt a pang of remorse when he realized that he’d rarely given Aoi a thought since leaving Japan three years ago.

  Emmett had his medication, it was time for him to leave. He looked into Kimura’s cheerful eyes, saw the transparency of an untroubled soul, and didn’t wish to disturb him. He thanked Kimura and stood up.

  But Kimura observed that Emmett was his last patient of the day, and he suggested they have dinner together; he knew a steak house where the martinis “are built like pleasure domes,” he said. “Since your wife is away,” he added. “We bachelors are always looking for husbands on the loose.”

  They had a couple of martinis with dinner and reviewed their working lives. Kimura said that he’d been working so intensely he’d forgotten to get married, but he seemed content to listen to Emmett speak about Suzanne, and he expressed envy for his new fatherhood.

  Emmett wanted him to meet Suzanne; it was the quickest way to make Kimura understand how he could marry so quickly. Seeing Kimura again made him more acutely aware that he’d treated Aoi unfairly, that he’d used her when he was lonely and then had almost forgotten her. It wasn’t in his character to do that; he thought of himself as a loyal man.

  Kimura was curious about small things — a quality of mind that Emmett normally associated with women. He began by asking about Suzanne’s interests, and he listened generously while Emmett told him how bright, almost uncannily bright, was his baby girl, Lenore. He brought the conversation around to Emmett’s discomfort, his inability to sleep when his family wasn’t in town. “Why are they not with you at home?” he asked.

  Kimura waited with mild, neutral curiosity while Emmett drank the dregs of his second martini.

  “I’ve had some trouble,” Emmett began — though he deflected; he began with Herbert Norman, putting Herbert’s story before his, concealing himself behind the other man. He defined Herbert as his “superior,” an intellectual, flawed by naivety in his association with a magazine that had run into trouble with the FBI. “Ever since Gouzenko,” Emmett said, “Canada’s been as paranoid as the US.”

  Kimura waved to a waiter and ordered another martini for Emmett. And while Emmett drank it, he confessed to Kimura that he, too, was being investigated. He described the gruelling sessions with Robert Morton and Harold Gembey. “They come to my house. The house where my wife and daughter live. They want me to tell them that I’m a communist. So everything I say is wrong, it’s the wrong answer.”

  “They don’t believe you?”

  “No. But they can’t find any evidence that I would have betrayed my country.”

  “Of course not,” Kimura murmured. He was staring at the glittering cutlery scattered on their table, the watery look of silver on white linen. Emmett described the interrogations while Kimura listened intensely without comment and without looking at him.

  “How senior is this Harold Gembey?” Kimura wanted to know, his eyes on the dancing candlelight reflected in silver. “What’s his background?” His questions were quirky, personal, probing the mind-set of External Affairs through the person of Harold Gembey. “You’re a hazard to Mr. Gembey,” Kimura eventually declared. “If this RCMP fellow is right, and you’re a communist,” he went on, not smiling, “then everyone in the civil service will be open to suspicion. He’s as nervous as you are.”

  “But I’m not a communist,” Emmett said.

  “No, no,” said Kimura. Then he seemed to awaken, as if from a trance, and beamed at Emmett. “You’re a nice man.”

  Emmett realized, as Kimura’s interest soaked into him with the gin, how lonely he’d been. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” he said. “I need you to promise not to speak about it with anyone else. I realize that’s unfair, to ask you to swear to secrecy.”

  “You and I, we have a bond,” Kimura said. “A friendship. Our origins are in secrecy.” The light merriment in Kimura’s eyes darkened and closed again, and Emmett remembered the steely will, unexpected in such a generous, gossipy man. Kimura shook his head almost imperceptibly. “We don’t need to talk about that night in Tokyo either,” he said. “Better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

  Chapter Three

  The investigation into Emmett Jones by the Security Panel and the RCMP had been going on for three months, and then quite suddenly, just before Thanksgiving, it was over. Emmett was told that he’d been cleared. The news came to him in a phone call from a stiffly courteous Harold G
embey, who named the investigation a “review.” “We’ve completed the review,” Harold Gembey said and paused.

  “So? What now?” Emmett had to ask.

  Gembey sounded mildly surprised by the question. “Oh. Just carry on.” He blandly added, “I imagine it’ll be easier to concentrate on your work with this monkey off your back.”

  If the interrogation had made Emmett feel rigid and apprehensive, its vague conclusion left him adrift. A space had opened around him. In telling and retelling his version of events to Gembey and Morton as they probed into his life, his friendships, his beliefs, he’d incidentally manufactured a fiction. And now his life consisted in how it might be told rather than lived.

  There were a few outward signs of support, a faint sense of rehabilitation. The minister wrote an uncommonly stern letter to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee telling them that the investigation had been thorough, and it was complete: they’d uncovered no evidence that would indicate disloyalty. What the minister didn’t say was that Emmett Jones was not and never had been a communist. Such a disclaimer should be unnecessary; it should be an implication of the acquittal. But there was no parade: the questioning had been conducted in secret and its conclusion was discreet.

  Emmett felt as if he’d participated in a sordid social experiment. When Suzanne was away, he searched the house, running his hands over every inch of the walls of every room. He pulled the mattress from their bed, overturned the couches and chairs, he took apart the telephone, dismantled the lamps, and he could find nothing, no bugs. But he had no privacy; they’d tapped him, planted a bug in his mind. He felt quarantined, hyper-aware of his own speech. For far too long he’d no contact with what he thought of as the “outside world.” He felt no persuasion, no reassuring guidance; there were no meetings, no interesting requests for his talents. He remembered himself as a man with an ideal — and he believed that an ideal is itself a talent, it’s the light he needed to live by, a sense of being inspired by motivations superior to the motivations of other men. An ideal, a talent, a private radiance in his life — all of this had abandoned him. He wondered if his existence had become that small bare room where Robert Morton had interrogated him.

  At External, no one outside Harold Gembey’s tight circle on the Security Panel and the team run by Robert Morton at the RCMP — nobody outside this small circle, other than Bill Masters and the minister — knew that Jones had been under investigation. After the fourth interview, Emmett had told Harold Gembey that he would resign if word got out. He reminded Gembey that he’d stuck with External even after being recalled from Tokyo, he’d been steady in his work on the East Asia desk. He said, “I didn’t join External to be a liability. If there’s any publicity about this, I’ll resign.”

  Gembey carefully stacked the pages of transcript, put them in a drawer, calmly sat back in his chair, and lifted his chin to view Emmett more squarely. He had clear eyes, Gembey, not possible in someone who likes a drink. Emmett was reminded of the missionaries back in his childhood home in Japan, the ones who’d quietly left the church to acquire a local business. Smarter than most men, they made certain they were irreproachable, living a balanced life. Ruthlessly suitable men.

  Emmett planned to take Dr. Kimura to the cottage and introduce him to Suzanne. He thought they’d have Thanksgiving weekend together and try to celebrate the end of his ordeal. But before this could happen, on Friday, Bill Masters asked to have lunch with him.

  It was a warm day. Bill wanted to pick up hot dogs at a food stand and sit outside on a bench to eat them, so that’s what they did. Bill had two, devoured them, then crumpled up the wax paper and wiped his mouth with it. “I’ve got something to tell you,” he said, swallowing. “And I don’t want you to get mad.”

  Emmett looked at the pink end of his hot dog, at the neatly scorched grid from the grill.

  “We’ve kept this thing quiet,” Bill said. “And that ain’t easy in Ottawa.” Bill’s face was beaded in sweat. “The FBI is so goddamn pushy when it comes to Reds.”

  Emmett shoved his uneaten hot dog into its wrapper and crushed it, then he stood up and chucked the mess three feet into a trashcan, waiting, refusing to help Bill, who was squirming, explaining wheezily, “You know what they’re like, Emmett. The Americans have been after us ever since your name surfaced at the hearings at their Foreign Relations Committee. And I want you to know — External didn’t fold, it did not fold, I swear. I want you to know that.”

  “Did somebody fold, Bill?” He came and stood over Bill.

  “Thing is,” Bill said again, “the FBI’s been going real hard on the department to forward everything we’ve got on you.”

  “You didn’t send my file, though. Right?”

  Bill looked up him beseechingly. “We delayed and delayed and delayed. Now that the investigation is over . . .”

  A car passed by slow and close, and Emmett turned and caught sight of his own reflection in its passenger window, a tall, bewildered man.

  “Thing is,” Bill went on, “Harold Gembey held them off for nearly a month.”

  “Gembey sent my file south.”

  “What else could he do? He couldn’t keep the stuff from the FBI any longer.”

  “You should’ve stopped him.”

  “No. No. That’s not the way to deal with these guys. I’m always telling you, you gotta be straight.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Think about it!” Bill went on, labouring under the hot sun. “We have to cooperate with the State Department. We’ve got no alternative. It’s the only way to clear you.”

  “By giving my file to another country?”

  “Another country? It’s the US of A, for chrissake. Don’t go off all haywire now. It went directly to the FBI. It was the only way to keep it quiet. You don’t want bad publicity from those guys. Do you? You want J. Edgar Hoover telling bad stories about you? Emmett? Listen, listen to what I’m telling you! Do you want that? Bad stories that aren’t true?”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Well, the minister, of course he knows.”

  “Why doesn’t he talk to me directly? Is he going to talk to me?”

  “Sure. Sure he’ll talk to you.”

  “When?”

  “You gotta know, the minister feels bad. He objected at first, till he had time to think about it. And it was explained to him, it’s inadvisable. It’s clearly inadvisable not to cooperate with the FBI and the State Department. At this point in time.”

  Bill became resentful that it was taking so much effort to calm Jones down; Jones was being egotistical in all this, a small incident in the broader scheme of things. “You know,” Bill said, his gurgling voice still blurred by the two hot dogs easing their way down his digestive tract, “bigger things than you are on the table right now. The DEW Line, just for instance, early radar. Now the Ruskies’ve set off another thermonuclear, we’ve gotta let American Air into the Arctic. You think we’ve got wiggle room on that? Think again. You think the Russians care about the difference between an American and a Canadian when they’re dropping an A-bomb on the city of Windsor? Eh?

  “Aw,” Bill went on, “don’t worry so much. This is good news. You’re clear. You handled it with real guts, real gumption. It’s over and done. No evidence of disloyalty, that’s what our file says. Worst thing Security said about you is, you’re naive.”

  “I’m cured of that, Bill.”

  Bill mopped the sweat from his neck. “Bejeezus warm day. Come on, let’s take a walk.”

  Emmett declined. He didn’t want to walk with Bill. It was evident now, Harold Gembey was taking his orders from the FBI. And the FBI never let go. They’d come after him again, just like they went after Herbert Norman again; the FBI would make External and the RCMP resume the interrogation any time they chose. External Affairs had no intention of protecting Emmett Jones. He was on his own.

  Chapter Four

  Thanksgiving weekend of 1953 was a glory. Calm, golden, the lake a
mirror. Suzanne was surprised at Emmett wanting to bring a friend down to spend it with them. She was getting into her car Friday morning with Lenore. “I just want a day to putter,” she said. “All the stuff that needs doing before winter.” Emmett told her he’d pick up Dr. Kimura after work and they’d drive down together. She gave him a funny look.

  All summer, while the investigation into Emmett’s loyalty grinded on, Suzanne had watched the changes work on him: the softening of his voice, a myopic hesitancy about the eyes. He was being sweet to her, so considerate her teeth hurt. They needed to have a fight to clear the air but couldn’t risk it: too much might be said, so they weren’t talking much.

  All summer long and then into September, Suzanne had waited at the cottage. She would put Lennie on the dock wearing nothing but a hat, in a porcelain basin filled with lake water, to sit beside her on the warm grey wood. She told Lennie about the investigation, the story animal-coded. The RCMP are bandit raccoons digging into garbage. She mimicked Pearson’s lisp, talking like Elmer Fudd, and Lennie rewarded her with a skeptical smile.

  Lenore was only seventeen months old. But sometimes Lennie looked at her mother with such remote consciousness. Suzanne thought it should be sort of unconscious, this mother-daughter thing. Yet it seemed that the baby was keeping her mother at a polite distance, as if she was actually uncomfortable around her.

  There were many reasons to be glad that summer was over. She cleaned the cottage, every drawer and cupboard, moving the furniture to clean behind and under. It was warm in that turned, distilled, autumn way, without the sticky pollen of summer. She held Lennie on the dock and climbed down the ladder with her into the lake, naked, their breath taken by the cold, cold water.

  Suzanne had no one to talk to so she chattered at Lenore while she cut celery and onions for a stuffing and Lennie banged away with the pots scattered over the kitchen floor. “I should be happy. It’s over. There’s no American Subcommittee, no Subsubsubcommittee going after him now, no sirree bob.” She muttered while she minced the onion into tinier pieces. “No Foreign Relations Subcommittee, no FBI, no Veterans of Shitty Foreign Wars, no National Bloody Rifle Association will ever spy on us again. ’Cause you’re our boy, aren’t ya, sonnyboy, you’re our very own sonnyboy.” The onions made her weep. It was her fault that Emmett had gone through this. She knew it, nothing would change it, even if Emmett said it wasn’t so. But it wasn’t fair, it was unjust.