by Dean Koontz
The sewing machines stuttered ceaselessly in their stitching, and the place smelled of wool. Warm air came in through wall vents near the floor, and exhaust fans pulled it toward fewer but larger vents in the exposed ductwork that snaked through the truss system overhead. In the ascending currents, I saw fabric dust rotating as it rose, like galaxies of tiny suns and planets and moons.
Some might say these were tedious jobs involving mind-numbing repetitious motions, but to a boy like me, the great room and all in it were astonishing, wondrous. The men who labored there seemed too engaged in their work to be bored, and the confidence and speed with which they performed their tasks struck me as wizardly.
Mr. Yoshioka appeared in one of the aisles, in his shirtsleeves but pulling on his suit jacket as he approached. He smiled and gave me a half bow and said, “What a pleasant surprise to see you, Jonah Kirk.”
“I’m so sorry to bother you at work, sir, but something really bad has happened, and I don’t know—”
He interrupted me. “Perhaps it would be wise to wait until we can discuss this without raising our voices.”
To the left of the door hung a time clock and next to it a file board with hundreds of slots containing envelope-size cards arranged alphabetically. Mr. Yoshioka took his from near the end of the array, inserted it in the clock, and put it away after it had been stamped with the time.
In the reception lounge, we sat in the two chairs farthest from the four women busy at their desks. We didn’t whisper, but we spoke softly.
“You know when I finally told you everything, how I’d seen Eve Adams dead in a dream, and her name was really Fiona Cassidy?”
Mr. Yoshioka nodded. “This was after you brought me a plate of your mother’s superb chocolate-chip cookies, for which I remain most grateful.”
“I thought you wouldn’t believe me about the dream, but you did. I’ll never forget how you believed me. It was like a huge relief.”
He smiled at me and waited.
With some embarrassment, I said, “Well, I didn’t really tell you everything. I mean, I told you everything about Fiona Cassidy, but she isn’t the only dream.”
“And now you will tell me everything.”
“Yes. I have to. It’s all tied together somehow.”
“Perhaps it is a good sign that you have not brought me cookies this time.”
“Sir?”
“When you bring me cookies and tell me everything, it turns out that the everything was not everything. Perhaps the cookies are your way of apologizing in advance for not telling me everything.”
I progressed from embarrassment to mortification. “I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that … I don’t know. It’s all so weird, so big and so weird, and I’m just a kid no matter what I tell myself about being the man of the house. I’m just a kid.”
Mr. Yoshioka’s eyes twinkled, like you read about the eyes of good and magical creatures twinkling in fairy tales. “Yes, you are still a child. That is why I have, as I have heard it said, ‘cut you some slack.’ Now you will tell me the rest of everything?”
“I had another dream. This was even before the one about Fiona Cassidy dead.”
I told him about Lucas Drackman, seeing him with his murdered parents in a dream, and then seeing him with my father earlier this same morning.
Mr. Yoshioka listened attentively, and when I finished, he sat with his eyes closed, which by now I knew meant that he was puzzling through the ramifications of what I’d told him. When his silence made me nervous and I started to speak, he anticipated that I had nothing more to say that wasn’t babble, and he put one forefinger to his lips to suggest the wisdom of silence.
When he opened his eyes, he said, “You dreamed of Lucas Drackman—and now Lucas Drackman knows your father. Therefore, it is logical to assume that, because you also dreamed of Fiona Cassidy, she might also know your father or will come to know him in the near future.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, but if—”
Forefinger to lips again. “It is likewise logical to suppose that if both Lucas Drackman and Fiona Cassidy know your father, they might know each other.”
I nodded, although until he put it into words, I hadn’t reached that conclusion.
“If you are correct that the police artist’s portrait of the bombing suspect in the newspaper is a badly rendered likeness of Lucas Drackman, one might conclude that he is destroying recruitment offices with explosives concocted by Eve Adams, aka Fiona Cassidy, when she was using odorous and volatile chemicals in Apartment Six-C.”
I said, “Holy mother of God,” and at once mentally accused myself of profanity and made the sign of the cross and said, “But that would mean, could mean, might mean that my father, Tilton …”
Mr. Yoshioka finished the thought that I couldn’t quite speak aloud. “Your father might know Lucas Drackman in some other context than bombing recruitment offices, but the possibility is real that the three of them are part of a conspiracy—the Bilderbergers written small.”
40
At the desks behind the counter at the farther end of the room, the four women remained busy and, as far as I could tell, were not curious about my visit with Mr. Yoshioka.
We had been talking softly, but now I whispered. “Is Tilton a mad bomber?”
“As I said, he may know Lucas Drackman in another context and have no idea that the man is a criminal. And if your father is indeed involved in a conspiracy, he is not necessarily mad—if I am correct that by mad you mean insane.”
“I guess I didn’t. Tilton’s not insane. He’s … troubled. We’ve got to tell the police.”
Judging by his expression—a compression of his lips and sudden little crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes—Mr. Yoshioka was no more enthusiastic about going to the authorities than he had been when he had installed security chains to keep Fiona Cassidy out of our apartments. “We cannot tell the police merely that your father is ‘troubled.’ Of crimes, we have no evidence, Jonah Kirk. You saw your father with someone you think might be the bombing suspect. That is even less than hearsay and of no interest to the police.”
“But for sure this Drackman guy killed his parents. Shot them in bed while they were sleeping. He’s already wanted.”
“For sure? How do you know?”
“Well, good grief, I saw it in the dream. Oh, okay. I guess … not evidence. So what can we do?”
He tugged on one cuff of his white shirt and then on the other, so that a precise half inch was displayed beyond his coat sleeves. He brushed a few all-but-invisible specks of lint off his pants. He adjusted his necktie.
“If perhaps we were to telephone an anonymous tip to the police, regarding your father, what address would we give them?”
“Since Mom threw him out, we don’t know where he lives.”
“A telephone number?”
“We don’t have one for him.”
“Where does he work?”
“As far as we know, he doesn’t. He’s not big on work. All we have is the name of some lawyer that handled the divorce for him.”
“That does not help us. The lawyer-client privilege will keep him silent.”
“So what can we do?” I asked again. “What about an anonymous tip to the cops about Drackman?”
“We do not know where he lives, either, and we do not know under what name he may be living.”
“We’re dead.”
“Never say die.” With one finger, he traced the crease in his pants along his thigh to his knee, first the left leg and then the right. “I need some time to think about this. It is quite complex.”
“Yeah, sure. My head hurts, thinking about it.”
“Now that it has come to this, do you think that you will tell your mother everything?”
If I could have gone pale, the thought of telling my mother everything would have bleached me white. “Oh, man, no. I mean, where would I start? What would she think of me? How could she trust me again?”
&n
bsp; “The truth heals all, even when it’s revealed late, Jonah Kirk, if it is revealed in its entirety and with apologies.” I reminded him that I hadn’t actually lied to my mother, that I had only withheld certain things, and he said, “Well, I would never counsel you to continue to withhold information from her.… But in all honesty, I must say, for the time being, it might be best not to tell her. If she believed you and if she went to the police, she would likely achieve nothing except to alert your father and his associates. And then I believe that both of you might be in grave danger. For the moment, at least, you are not.”
He got to his feet, and so did I, and he half bowed to me, and I returned the bow. He held out a hand, and I shook it.
I said, “I’m really sorry I had to come and dump all this on you.”
“You should not be sorry. I am not. Give me a few days to work on this. Meanwhile, as detectives say in novels, you should lie low.”
He headed toward the door that opened to the work floor, and I started toward the front entrance, but then he called to me. We met in the center of the reception area.
He said, “There must be some missing link in this story.”
“You don’t mean like half man, half monkey.”
“No, I do not. I mean some connection shared by your father, Fiona Cassidy, and Lucas Drackman. I suggest that for the time being you should avoid Mr. Reginald Smaller.”
As I was about to defend Mr. Smaller, I remembered how Tilton sometimes took a six-pack to the superintendent, supposedly to loosen his tongue and pump him for ridiculous conspiracy theories with which later to regale Mom and me.
“I find it conceivable,” said Mr. Yoshioka, “that the black-hearted company men he talks about had no idea that Miss Cassidy was living rent-free in Apartment Six-C.”
I was disappointed. “I wanted to think he was a good guy.”
“He might in fact be a good guy. But I would not stake my life on it.”
Mr. Yoshioka returned to work, and after the door fell shut behind him, I went to the counter and thanked the nice lady who had called him off the factory floor for me. “I hope he doesn’t get in trouble for taking a break.”
She had a lovely smile, and I was pleased to see it because I didn’t think she’d smile if I’d gotten the tailor in trouble. “Don’t worry, Jonah. Mr. Yoshioka is highly regarded around here.”
“He’s highly regarded by me, too,” I said. As I spoke, a funny thing happened, the words turning thick in my throat, almost as if I were going to get all choked up. And the nice lady blurred a little, too.
Outside, the wind blew cold and the sun shone bright. On that bustling street, among those many big trucks and busy people, with the city all around for miles and miles, I felt terribly small, and worse than small. Suddenly I felt alone.
41
I hiked four long blocks and two short blocks from Metropolitan Suits to our apartment building. Then I walked two more long blocks to the nearest library.
This branch wasn’t as large as the central library that stood across from the Museum of Natural History, and it featured a plain limestone floor instead of different colors of marble laid in fancy patterns. But it housed a lot of books.
Although I knew how to use the card catalog, I didn’t know under what subject to search. With the librarian’s help, in five minutes I settled at a table in the reading room with four books, three that included limited information about Manzanar and one that was devoted entirely to the subject.
Manzanar, which in Spanish meant “apple orchard,” had been a farm town 225 miles north of Los Angeles, in Owens Valley, founded in 1910 but abandoned before 1930, after Los Angeles purchased more than 6,000 acres of the valley for the water rights.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, fear of homeland sabotage swept the country, and in early 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order Number 9066, forcing nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans in western states to ten relocation centers in isolated areas. Whether he had the constitutional authority to do so is argued to this day.
Even before 9066, accounts in all American branches of Japanese banks were frozen. Most who were forced into ten internment camps by the War Relocation Authority lost their homes or sold them at a loss, and their businesses were either sold for a fraction of true value or closed without remuneration.
Even Japanese orphans residing in institutions run by nuns and by the Salvation Army were transported to Manzanar, where a camp orphanage was established for them. Caucasian foster parents caring for Japanese and half-Japanese babies were forced to surrender those children to the War Relocation Authority.
Manzanar, like the other ten camps, was self-sufficient. It had its own hospital, post office, a few churches, schools, playgrounds, football fields, baseball diamonds, tennis courts.…
The barracks apartments were small, sixteen by twenty feet, providing no privacy, which was especially stressful to the women. The government contractor used inferior materials; the workmanship was poor. Summer temperatures topped 100 degrees. Winters were cold and snowy. The internees did their best to improve accommodations, but comfort was not easily achieved. The barbed-wire fences and eight guard towers surrounding the 540 acres of the main camp made it impossible to imagine that this was ordinary life.
The internees beautified their surroundings with rose gardens and rock gardens, with ponds and streams and a waterfall. When a nursery wholesaler donated a thousand cherry and wisteria trees, internees created a park of considerable grace.
Eventually they were offered the opportunity to sign loyalty oaths, swearing allegiance to the United States and agreeing to serve in the U.S. military if called. Those who did so could leave the camp if they could find sponsors either for jobs or schools in the East or Midwest. Nearly two hundred from Manzanar eventually served in the armed forces, and one of them, Sadao Munemori, received a posthumous Medal of Honor.
No one was physically brutalized in any of the camps, and they were paid for the work they did, if not well. Two of those interned at Manzanar died of gunshots during a protest of their incarceration, but there were no other deaths by violence among the ten thousand.
In the fourth book, the one that concerned only Manzanar, I found the tailor’s surname in the index and paged to a passage about the deaths of Mr. Yoshioka’s mother and sister.
Each of the thirty-six residential blocks in the camp had its own mess hall and attached kitchen. Kiku Yoshioka and her daughter, Mariko, were members of the culinary staff for their block. A leak from a propane tank had led to an explosion and a flash fire fueled by cooking oil spilling from shrapnel-pierced containers. They were the only two unable to escape. Mariko was seventeen, two years older than her brother, and her mother thirty-eight.
Omi Yoshioka and his son, George, had been eating lunch in the adjacent mess hall when the explosion rocked the building. Kitchen staff burst through the connecting doors, chased by billows of fire. Even before Omi and George could determine that Kiku and Mariko were not among those who escaped the flames, they heard familiar voices screaming and entreating God. They tried to enter the kitchen, but the heat proved too great, and suddenly there were, as well, masses of blinding smoke. Disoriented, they themselves had to be rescued from the mess hall.
The book contained three signatures of photographs, and in the second group, I found the official black-and-white internment-camp photos of Kiku and Mariko. Kiku appeared solemn and beautiful. The daughter smiled shyly and was even lovelier than her mother.
A tragic past, as long suspected. But not distant relatives lost in the momentous, ever-echoing man-made thunder of Hiroshima, not just two souls among many thousands atomized as a terrible consequence of Japan’s war crimes and its refusal to surrender. This was a loss more intimate, random, haunting, impossible to rationalize by resort to history or to the necessary brutalities of war.
I sat in the silence of the library for a long while, staring at those faces.
A public Xerox
machine required a nickel to make a copy.
I folded the copy twice and put it in a jacket pocket.
I left the four volumes on the book-return counter.
The librarian asked me if I had found everything that I’d been looking for, and I said yes, but I didn’t say that I wished with all my heart that I’d found nothing.
Not a single cloud threatened the December sun, and all the way home, I walked in crisp, cold light.
42
Mrs. Lorenzo came to our apartment on New Year’s Eve. My mother would be very late getting home from Slinky’s, and she didn’t want to wake me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning to bring me upstairs from the widow’s place.
I was allowed to stay up to watch the New Year’s celebrations on TV, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians at the Waldorf Astoria or whatever, but music wasn’t everything to me. Although only in fourth grade, I read at a seventh-grade level, and to celebrate, I preferred a novel to watching people be silly on TV. Two days earlier, I had checked out Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars from the library, and it was extremely cool. I went to bed with the book, a glass of Coca-Cola, and a bowl of pretzels.
I finished the Coke, the pretzels, and three-quarters of the novel before falling asleep shortly after midnight. When I woke at 8:40 in the morning, I found a note from my mother on the nightstand: Sweetie, going to bed almost four ayem. Will sleep till noon. Then you and me and a fancy hotel for a late lunch!
In the kitchen, I quietly made toast and built two open-face sandwiches of thickly spread peanut butter and sliced banana. I washed them down with a glass of regular milk and then with a glass of chocolate. I figured if I ate this aggressively every day for a month, I’d still gain only an ounce. I’d given up daydreaming over those Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads in magazines. I conceded the portly end of the piano business to Fats Domino; maybe I would call myself Skinny Kirk. Better yet, Skinny Bledsoe.