The Big Dive

by Bruce Most

  I said nothing. What could I say?

  He went on. “My wife and I lived near Modesto. We owned forty-five acres of farmland. Good land. Strawberries. Sweet strawberries.” He paused as if he could still taste them. “It was land my parents bought before California made it illegal for Japanese aliens to own land in the state.”

  “Why didn’t you return to your farm after the war?”

  “There was nothing to return to. I lost it while we were imprisoned.”

  He said this without rancor, as if speaking of someone else. I didn’t understand. I could not have embraced his stoicism if I’d been unfairly imprisoned, if everything I’d owned had been stripped from me. “I would be bitter,” I said.

  Yamazaki turned his oval face from the window, and large eyes assessed me through tiny, dusty, wire-rimmed glasses. His graying, wispy mustache wrinkled as he said, “We have the concept of giri. One accepts one’s circumstances and behaves with dignity even when those circumstances are painful. Amache was a circumstance.”

  Professor Raschke’s rant about the relocation camps echoed in my mind. The camps were a disastrous mistake, their prisoners loyal Americans unfairly caught up in the hysteria following Pearl Harbor. Japanese men fought fiercely and died for the United States, like the murdered girl’s brother. Why the hell wasn’t the old man bitter, giri or not, losing his farm, now running a sad grocery store in a barren corner of Colorado, a heartbeat from where he spent years behind barbed wire and guard towers?

  “There!” Yamazaki said moments later, pointing with the stem of his pipe. In the shimmering heat, I couldn’t see what he was pointing to, but I followed his instructions and turned south off U.S. Highway 50 onto a dirt road. We stopped when we reached the twisted remains of a barbed-wire fence that had enclosed what once was home to 7,500 Japanese men, women, and children, most of them U.S. citizens. We walked through a gap in the wire. Although only six years since the camp closed down, little remained of the barracks and support buildings except for concrete foundations barely visible amid cactus and prairie grass. Rusty cans and beer bottles littered the ground, along with scattered fire pits where, according to Yamazaki, the local teenagers burned the wood they’d ripped off the tar-paper-roofed barracks after the camp was abandoned.

  It was as if man and nature had conspired to erase all evidence of our cruelty.

  Cruelty Benedict had been part of.

  I toed rubble with my shoe.

  “Careful!” he warned. “The rattlesnakes keep cool under the loose concrete.”

  I yanked my foot away.

  “We would go out every morning and beat the bushes for rattlesnakes,” he said. “So they would not bite the children.”

  We walked deeper into the camp. He pointed to a concrete foundation. The remains of the barrack where he and his wife, Aiko, once lived, in 3-F, he said in a somber voice. They had no children. Each barrack contained six rooms, one family to a room, he explained. The unfurnished barracks were uninsulated, with coal-burning stoves and brick floors set in dirt. Twelve barracks formed a block. Each block included a laundry, bathhouse, recreation hall, and a mess hall. The camp contained thirty such blocks, along with a hospital, administrative buildings, living quarters for non-internees, and military police quarters.

  Where Benedict would have lived.

  “We grew our own food, built part of the camp, and ran our schools. We built a co-op, produced our own newspaper, even formed our own police force,” he said. “Of course, the U.S. military police still ruled over us.”

  He pointed to where a Buddhist church once stood, a silkscreen shop, the butcher shop, the YMCA, the school where Boy Scouts met. Everything encircled by barbed-wire fence and six guard towers, each manned by MPs with machine guns.

  Had Benedict manned one of those towers? Had he been prepared to gun down Japs attempting to escape? Put down a riot?

  Wind whipped across the arid land, taking dust with it. I wanted to leave this haunted place. Drive Yamazaki back to Lamar and question him there about the dead girl. But I sensed he was building toward her, that all this was part of her story.

  We walked outside the perimeter fence to where the internees once tended thousands of acres of farmland—vegetables and wheat mostly. It was in these fields one day, said Yamazaki, that an old man laid down his shovel and deliberately walked into the whirling blades of a threshing machine.

  The land stood barren now, except for sagebrush and a few cows.

  We walked the section where the government administrators lived and worked. Then Yamasaki stopped at the remains of a mess hall that served one of the blocks of barracks. He pointed to prairie behind the concrete foundation.

  “That was where they found Mitsu Nakatoshi’s body,” he said. “The cooks kept an herb garden there in the summer. But it was winter when she died.”

  December, I recalled from Benedict’s newspaper clippings, her body half frozen by the time they found her.

  “Did you know the young woman?” I asked.

  “Yes. She lived in Seven-B, with her brother and her aunt. I do not know where her parents were. Dead maybe, or in a different camp.”

  “Suspicion at the time focused on young Japanese radicals,” I said. “Kibei, I believe they called them. What does that mean?”

  Yamazaki pulled the pipe from his mouth. “Kibei are Japanese born here but who go to Japan for their education and then return to America. Nisei are born here and stay. Issei are those born in Japan who settle in the United States. I am Issei. I came here with my parents as a small boy.”

  “But these young Kibei men were agitators in the camps, right?”

  He frowned. “Yes, that is true. After their return, many had difficulty—what is the word?—assimilating with the Nisei and the Issei. Not only in the camps, but before that.”

  “Why?”

  “They were angry with our people who wanted to fight for America or cooperate with authorities despite our imprisonment. They said it brought chizoku—shame—to our people. They were especially angry about the loyalty questionnaire.”

  “What was that?”

  “A questionnaire the government used to attempt to determine which of us in the camps were loyal or disloyal to the United States. Many of us resented the questionnaire. We held no loyalty to the Emperor. Our loyalty was to America. We protested the questionnaire and got some changes to the questions. But some of the young men insisted we still renounce our loyalty. We called them the no-no boys.”

  “What happened?”

  “They changed few minds. They did not understand giri. Many families in the camps had sons and even daughters who joined the American military. The young men who went into combat fought in an all-Nisei unit.”

  “The Four Hundred Forty-second Regimental Combat Team,” I said, having read of its exploits. “They fought in Europe. It was the most decorated unit in American military history.”

  “Yes,” he said proudly. “Thirty-one men from this camp died in the war.”

  “Including the dead girl’s brother,” I said.

  He nodded. “Frank Nakatoshi. A good boy. A hard worker. I remember him. He was killed during the liberation of Bruyères in France.”

  “A few weeks before his sister was murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  “The newspapers said she worked for the camp administration. I understand that these young radicals assaulted internees in some of the camps for doing that.”

  “Yes, that is true. But they never killed anyone.”

  “She was beaten to death. Maybe some went too far.”

  He shook his head. “Many of the most outspoken here were transferred to the Tule Lake camp in California before she died. The official story claiming it was Kibei was a—how do you say—a cover-up by the U.S. military.”

  “Covering up what?”

  “Most of us believed her killer was a Caucasian.”

  My chest tightened. He was dragging me closer to my fears than I wanted as to why Be
nedict kept the clippings. “You have proof of this?”

  “No. But the girl was three months pregnant at the time she died.”

  “Pregnant? How did you know that?”

  “She confided to her aunt, but it became well known in the camp. She would not say who was the father, but she swore it was not one of the Kibei.”

  “The news reports said she’d been raped but nothing about being pregnant. An autopsy would have revealed that.”

  Yamazaki smiled as if I were on the outside looking in. “The military kept it a secret. They spread the lies about it being the Kibei.”

  “Why?”

  “To protect one of their own.”

  “Who?”

  “One of the camp administrators.”

  My tension eased slightly. Administrator, not an MP. Not Benedict. Suddenly I had a hunch who. “Marcus Raschke? The deputy administrator?”

  Yamasaki’s brown eyes flicked in surprise. “Yes. You know of him?”

  “You believe he got her pregnant?”

  “Many of us did. They saw each other for months before her death. Secretly, but we knew. They would meet at a local motel in town. The authorities must have known this, too.”

  “They were lovers?”

  He shrugged. “She was young and she worked for him. Her aunt was in poor health and he did favors for them. Their relationship may not have been her choice.”

  “You believe he killed her to cover up the fact he’d gotten her pregnant?” I thought of his beaten wife, Kim. “Or in rage because he believed someone else got her pregnant?”

  He nodded. “He was an arrogant man with a violent temper. I saw the girl once with bruises. Friends warned her to stay away from him. He was a jealous man, too. He got one of the Kibei transferred to another camp when he learned she was interested in him.”

  I thought of the shriveled man in the dark of his study. “You said they would meet in a motel. She was allowed to leave the camp?”

  “We all could. But we were forced to wear assigned badges with numbers so outsiders could identify us as prisoners.” He laughed. The first time I heard him laugh. “As if they could not recognize us otherwise.”

  “If they met outside the camp, that’s where he would have most likely killed her,” I speculated. “But her body was discovered inside the camp. Why risk bringing her inside?”

  “To make people believe Kibei killed her. They found her body in Block Ten G where the more outspoken Kibei lived.”

  My unease returned. Had Raschke sneaked her body back into the compound—with the aid of a camp guard? I pulled out the photograph of Benedict. “Do you recognize this man?”

  He peered through his dusty glasses. Benedict was not in military dress and it was six years since Yamasaki would have seen him. But he nodded anyway.

  “He was a guard,” he said. “I do not remember his name. But I remember his face. I saw him and Marcus Raschke together several times.”

  I swallowed hard. “Under what circumstances?”

  “Talking. I do not know about what. But I saw them at the camp. And once when I was outside the camp. In town.”

  I struggled to keep my breathing calm. “Why would you remember these two talking? Versus any other guards?”

  “The guards kept to themselves, mostly. They did not mix much with the civilian staff.”

  “Maybe this guard was involved in the investigation of the girl’s murder,” I suggested, hoping against hope there was an innocent explanation for this. “Raschke was the camp’s liaison with the investigators.”

  The man shook his head. “This was before Mitsu was killed.”

  My heart sank.

  Yamasaki studied me. “Why do you wish to know this? The man many of us believe killed her is dead. By his own hand, I read. A bomb.”

  “Maybe.”

  He tilted his head. “You think his death was not an accident? Is he the case you believe is related to Mitsu’s murder?”

  I reiterated that I could not divulge the purpose of the investigation.

  The lidless sun crushed us. Yamazaki sat on the remains of a concrete foundation. He puffed on his pipe. A gust of dry wind snuffed it out and he relit it. Then he spoke. “There is one other man who may have killed her.”

  I squatted in front of him, my eyes scouring the ground for rattlesnakes. “Who?”

  “His name was Neil Thornton. He was one of the staff.”

  “Why him? Did he get her pregnant instead of Raschke?”

  “No. You must understand the background first. When the government forced us from our homes and businesses and farms, we were given less than two weeks to prepare before they herded us onto buses. We could take only the belongings we could carry. We were forced to sell everything else or leave it behind. Or put it in the trust of Caucasian friends. But after we were released in nineteen forty-five, we discovered that some of our friends turned out not to be friends. Our homes were vandalized, even burned to the ground. Our businesses were poorly managed or in ruins.”

  “The government didn’t protect your property?”

  Yamazaki looked at me as if I were a fool. I’d read little about the camps since my return from the war front, and little was said by those who’d remained on the home front.

  “The government stored some of our possessions, but did not protect them,” he said. “Many of our possessions were misplaced, stolen, or left to rot.”

  “What does this have to do with this Thornton and the dead girl?”

  “He ran the camp’s record section. He knew everything about all of us. He knew what each of us owned. He warned us often of the risk of losing what we had left behind due to unpaid taxes, unpaid mortgages, and poor management. He told horror stories. He scared people.”

  “Why?”

  “He said a law firm in California could help us by serving as—what is the word?—trustee for us. The firm would ensure that our mortgages and taxes were paid. Business profits would be deposited in escrow or used to hire people to harvest our crops. He said the firm was backed by a large California bank. The bank would assume all costs until we were released and could pay it back. With interest, of course. All we had to do was to sign a power of attorney.”

  “That was legal? The internees bought it?”

  A pained expression clouded the old man’s eyes. “Please understand, sir, we were prisoners. We had no rights.” He waved a hand across the landscape. “We could not check on anything from here. Mr. Thornton exploited our fears and our isolation. He warned us the government would not protect our property. He was correct. But he told us everything needed to be conducted in secret. Otherwise, the government would stop him and the law firm from helping us if it found out. He said there were many racists who wanted to ruin us.”

  “What was the name of this law firm?”

  “Bailey, Wilscom and Gable,” he snapped, as if its name was seared into his very being. “They were located in Thousand Oaks.”

  “And the bank?”

  “Something called Rancho Federal Savings Bank. We later learned no such bank existed.”

  I realized where this was going. “The law firm then, it—”

  “A firm existed by that name. But after our release, we discovered it had sold off our possessions. Supposedly to pay for taxes and maintenance. It sold off our homes and businesses and took what little there was in business profits. It let the crops rot unpicked in the fields and sold the land.”

  “Using its power of attorney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that how you lost your farm, Mr. Yamazaki?”

  Eyes squinted in the blistering sun. “Yes,” he said softly. “I calculated that I lost $32,345 as a result of my imprisonment.”

  “Did you get any of that back?”

  “The federal government paid us some money under the Evacuation Claims Act. I received $796.”

  I whistled. “Did camp authorities know of this scam?”

  “Some must have. But they did nothin
g to stop it.”

  “Was Marcus Raschke part of the scam?”

  “I do not know. He did nothing to stop it.”

  Suddenly I realized why the man was telling me this long story. “The dead girl—she learned about the scam?”

  He nodded. “She must have suspected something. Raschke loaned her to the records department now and then if Thornton needed extra help.”

  “Then Thornton might have killed her to keep her quiet. Him or Raschke. Or both.”

  The old man sat in silent acknowledgment and chewed on his pipe.

  “Do you have proof for any of this?” I said.

  He swept an arm over the rubble. “Any proof is gone like this camp.”

  “This Thornton guy, what did he look like?”

  “He was a little shorter than you. Stockier. He wore a big dark beard.”

  I pulled out the photograph of Marcus Raschke and the mystery man Ellen discovered among Benedict’s military records. I pointed to the shadowy bearded man. “That him?”

  Yamazaki squinted at the photograph. “Yes, it might be. It is difficult to tell.”

  “Eye color, tattoos, scars, anything else about him you remember?”

  “He had a tattoo, someplace on his arm. I never got a good look at it.”

  “Any idea where I might find him now?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is the law firm still around?”

  “They closed their office shortly before we were released.”

  “Did you go to the police or any government officials?”

  He managed a thin smile. “That is why I brought you here, detective. I hoped you would better understand what happened to us. To the girl. Can you find her killer? Maybe the same man who stole from us?”

  “I can’t make promises,” I said.

  I stood and accidentally kicked an empty beer bottle. It rolled noisily along a broken piece of concrete. Unease again swelled in me. How willing was I to pursue these revelations? Revelations that might involve Benedict?

  I took out Benedict’s photo again. “Did you see this man with Thornton?”

  Yamazaki shook his head. But that didn’t set Benedict in the clear. The newspaper clippings he’d hidden suggested he knew something. So did the blackmail note.