“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?”
“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.