“Got the bastard!” Suzuki said triumphantly, and turned to Tayama. “You’re old Arturo’s grandson, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Tayama answered, annoyed by Suzuki’s easy familiarity with his grandfather’s name but trying not to show it. The least this policeman could have said was “Mr. Omura’s grandson.”
“Why?” Tayama asked in as neutral a tone as he could muster, the Kempei Tai always having impressed upon their agents that while it is risky to appear defiant to investigators, it can also be dangerous to roll over like a dog in submission. Confident, patriotic citizens in America, Tayama had been told, and which he’d learned in Hawaii, didn’t have anything like the respect for, or fear of, authority that citizens in Japan displayed. Your average U.S. citizen, the Kempei Tai had told him, would just as likely question the questioner with something like, “What’s the problem?”
Lieutenant Suzuki stamped on the dead wasp again as if to emphasize his unrelenting nature. “You fish a lot?”
“Fish?” Tayama shrugged — he felt American. “Yeah,” he said easily — not “yes,” but “yeah.” “So,” he added, grinning, “there a law against fishing?”
“No,” said Suzuki, turning his attention to Yoko, who was looking respectfully at this man who felt the need to kill insects twice. “No law against it. It’s just that you’ve been seen fishing a lot near Pearl.” Suzuki was still looking intently at Yoko, the trade wind that was whispering through the profusion of banyan leaves above them gently blowing a strand of hair across her slightly parted lips.
“So?” said Tayama, fighting his anger at how Suzuki was staring at Yoko, the lieutenant’s look lascivious in its intensity. “You want me to fish somewhere else?”
“Might be an idea,” said Suzuki, without taking his eyes off Yoko.
Tayama was about to say, “It’s a free country,” but that would be pushing it. At the same time, he was aware that too easy an acquiescence might confirm any suspicions Suzuki was harboring about him or Yoko. “Okay, but what’s the problem?”
“Security,” said Suzuki, his eyes shifting suddenly to Tayama. “Navy doesn’t like people getting too close to Pearl.”
“Okay,” said Tayama. “All this trouble with Tojo, right?”
“Yeah.”
Tayama nodded thoughtfully. “He’s a troublemaker, that one,” he said, and he meant it. “They ought to do something about him.” Suzuki sensed a hard conviction in the young Nisei’s voice, a tone that made it clear that this Omura really did not like the Japanese war minister.
Tayama was feeling increasingly nervous. If Suzuki mentioned his and Yoko’s nightly walks through Moanalua Gardens, it would tell Tayama that U.S. Naval Intelligence was doing much more than a simple security check on them.
“Don’t take offense,” said Suzuki. “It’s not just you. They don’t want anyone near Pearl.”
“Fine,” said Tayama.
Suzuki said nothing, and there was an awkward silence before he gave a nod and walked away. Another wasp swooped out of the banyan toward him; the investigator frenetically struck out again with the newspaper.
“He looks so funny!” said Yoko, hand to mouth as if to stem an explosion of laughter.
“Don’t!” Tayama said. “That’d really make him—” Taking Yoko’s hand, he turned about quickly to look back at the hula competitions, and they both shook with laughter, their outburst exacerbated by the sudden release of tension, the sound of their laughter fortunately subsumed by the clapping of the hula spectators. Tayama told Yoko he would have to find a better hiding place for the concealed camera in his tackle box. No doubt the Kempei Tai would press him to keep photographing Pearl, whether he kept fishing or not. Tayama and Yoko also reaffirmed their decision never to disclose the name of their shikisha—controller — to each other. That way, if they were ever caught, neither of them could identify the other’s contact. Tayama wondered just how many spies, willing or otherwise, the Kempei Tai had planted throughout these beautiful and, for him and Yoko, dangerous islands.
After they made love the next morning, he showed Yoko where the camera and lenses were, in the event something happened to him before he could move them unobserved from the apartment. It had been during one of the rare times when his snoopy landlady wasn’t at home that he’d taken the Voigtlander and lenses out of the false bottom of his fishing tackle box and placed them beneath a floorboard in his apartment. “If I’m not here,” he told her, “and you have to get the camera quickly, don’t bother fiddling about with the coins I use to lever it up. Go get the claw hammer from the cupboard under the bathroom sink. It’s in with the other plumbing tools.”
She nodded. They lay in silence together in the dreamy afterglow of their passionate release, and understood each other without talking, so that when she finally did speak it was in answer to a question he had not asked, but which she’d felt. “Don’t worry, Tay. I’m strong enough. I could pull up the whole floor with my fingers.”
He squeezed her shoulders, looking into the imperturbability of her eyes. “I hope you never have to.” He started to get up.
“No, stay,” she begged.
He turned his wristwatch toward her — it read 6:20. “Already late, sweetheart. We should have been out of here ten minutes ago. I’ll go ahead, set up the stall.” He kissed her. She dragged him back down. “Let them wait. No one wants to eat till ten. Everyone sleeps in today.”
“You’re a seductress!” he said happily, pulling away, unlocking his arms from her. She was strong.
“Your body,” she said, her eyes fixed on his nakedness, “is showing me you want to stay.”
He threw her a kiss. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been pouring rain outside, his mood after making love with Yoko was always upbeat. He felt, as Grandfather Omura would have said, like a lion. The fact that the early sun was shining in a near-cloudless sky, the blue not yet paled, and there was the myriad birdsong of barred doves, mynah birds, and sparrows, amid the fragrance of plumeria, whose white blossoms stood out amid the verdant hibiscus-splashed green of indigenous plants, only elevated his mood that much more. Instead of the downcast feeling that had always accompanied his morning walk to work before he met Yoko, he now had the feeling that with her he could endure. It was true: love did conquer all.
As if it was being performed just for him, sweet music floated across the harbor from Pearl’s Ford Island, where colors were being struck as the sailors in their Sunday whites began their day. The approaching dots of planes coming in over the Waianae Mountains to the northwest, Tayama thought, must be some kind of fly-past, the pilots’ timing impeccable. As the dots became larger, Tayama saw the bloodred suns painted on the fuselage and suddenly stopped, all his attention riveted on the planes and the black cigarlike appendages slung beneath them. Torpedoes. It was as if a giant’s hand had grasped his throat, his larynx paralyzed, unable to utter a sound though his mouth was wide-open.
It was 7:49 as Air Commander Fuchida, breaking radio silence, signaled, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”—Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! Received by Admiral Nagumo, commander of “Red Castle,” the carrier Akagi, 275 miles northeast of Oahu, the message from Fuchida was confirmation that the Japanese spearhead squadrons of forty-three Mitsubishi Zero fighters, forty-nine Nakajima bombers, fifty-one Aichi dive-bombers, and forty Torpedo bombers had attained complete surprise, catching the Americans off guard not only in Pearl Harbor but at other U.S. airfields and barracks throughout Hawaii, as well. Fuchida joked gleefully with his fellow pilots that they had caught the Americans “with their pants down.” Bombs were raining even before morning colors aboard the American ships had been completed, the Japanese pilots struck by how, save for the absence of several U.S. carriers, the layout in Pearl Harbor had been so precisely duplicated by Japanese Intelligence in the pilots’ practice mockups in Japan.