The Phoenix Tree

He hadn’t liked the sound of that. ‘Can I protest, sir?’

‘Corporal, I understand you’ve been protesting ever since Pearl Harbor. You must be the bitchingest soldier that’s ever served in the US forces and I’d go back as far as the Revolutionary Army.’

Okada had smiled through his sweat. ‘Just proving I’m an American, sir.’

Okada had been put on a plane and two days later, via Honolulu, he was put down in California, his home state which he hadn’t seen in two long years.

‘Welcome to San Diego,’ said the Navy officer who looked as if he might have been starched inside his uniform. He was a good six inches taller than Okada, who was five feet nine, and he had a long nose that he appeared to use as a range-finder when looking down at men on a lower level of height and rank. ‘I’m Lieutenant-Commander Reilly.’

Okada saluted, a sloppy effort due more to exhaustion than disrespect. ‘I hope you can tell me why I’m here, sir. The Navy?’ He looked around the base, as spick-and-span as an admiral’s ribbons. This was the clean end of the war, the best end. ‘Is there some son of services merger going on?’

‘God forbid,’ said Reilly. ‘Follow me.’

Okada, lugging his kitbag, followed the Navy officer across to a low building set aside from the main administration offices. He was conscious of being stared at by passing Navy personnel and he could read the question in their faces: who’s the Jap bum, some prisoner they’ve brought back from the SWPA? Serves me right for looking like a bum, he thought. But then he hadn’t expected to be dumped here in this naval base where even the lawns looked as if they were shaved daily.

Reilly led him into a room that, though spartan, was still far more comfortable than anything he had seen in the past two years. FDR smiled a toothy welcome to him from a photograph on the wall, but Okada ignored it. The President was not to know that he was no longer one of Okada’s heroes.

‘Sir, is this the usual accommodation for enlisted personnel in the Navy?’

‘No, corporal, it’s not. It’s usually reserved for visiting officers – certain officers, that is. You will not leave it at any time, unless accompanied by a guard.’ Reilly nodded at the mate second class of shore police who stood outside the door, all self-importance, muscle and gaiters. Okada hated police of any sort, service or civilian. ‘You hear that, mate? If he wants to go to the head or the showers, someone goes with him every time. And he is not to communicate with anyone. Anyone, you understand?’

‘Jesus!’ said Okada.

Reilly looked at him. ‘Are you a Christian?’

‘Would it help?’ Then he saw that Reilly had little sense of humour. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Reilly gave him a look that, two years ago, Okada would have considered racist; but he no longer cared about such things. Not today, anyway; he was too exhausted. Reilly went away and Okada, letting his clothes lie where they fell, a most unnaval custom, went to bed and slept for twelve hours. If the war was over for him, he could have cared less.

Next morning, fed, shaved, showered and dressed in new tan drill, he presented himself, escorted by the SP detail, to Lieutenant-Commander Reilly. With the latter were two other officers, one American, the other British.

‘Commander Embury. Lieutenant-Commander Irvine. You may sit down, corporal. For the moment there will be no formality.’ It seemed to hurt Reilly to say it; his starch creaked as he tried to relax. ‘Commander Embury will now take over.’

Embury was USN, but a reserve officer; the starch in him had never taken, or had been watered down. He had had a successful Oldsmobile dealership in Falmouth on Cape Cod; perhaps the Navy powers-that-be had decided that an auto salesman’s shrewdness would be an asset in Intelligence. Not that he had a slick salesman’s look, as if he’d only sold solid farm machinery. He was untidy, squat and ungainly, suggesting that he was shambling even when sitting down. He smoked a pipe that looked as if it might have been taken from one of the Indians who had greeted the Pilgrims and the tobacco he used smelled as if it were dried peat from the cranberry bogs on Cape Cod. Everything about him said he was a misfit, till one looked at his eyes. Okada had never seen such a coldly intelligent gaze.

Embury wasted no time: ‘You speak Japanese fluently?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Read and write it?’

‘Yes, sir. My father insisted that my sisters and I learn it. And I lived in Japan for two years with my grandparents.’

‘We know that, corporal.’

‘I thought you might, sir.’ Okada was suddenly wary. ‘Why am I here, sir?’

‘You’ve worked with Detachment 101, of the OSS?’

‘Just the once, sir, my first action. They were short of an interpreter and I was sent to Burma. I didn’t volunteer, sir.’

Embury’s gaze suddenly softened as he smiled. ‘You didn’t like it?’

‘We were behind the enemy’s lines for the whole of that month, just me and two other guys.’

‘I thought Merrill’s Marauders often worked behind Jap lines? Sorry, Japanese lines.’

Okada ignored the slip, wondering if it was deliberate. ‘They did, sir. But usually in platoon strength, at least. It was pretty goddam lonely, just with those two OSS guys.’

‘You may yet feel even more lonely.’ But Embury didn’t elaborate. Instead, he relit his pipe and went on: ‘You have been under observation for quite some time, corporal. Not by us, but by Army Intelligence and before them the FBI. It was not your own record that caused suspicion, but your father’s. As an anti-American Issei, he hasn’t been trusted.’

Okada well knew that many of the Japan-born, the Issei, were strongly pro-American; but his father had never been, not even in the comfortable days before Pearl Harbor. He could not, however, leave his father undefended; to that extent, at least, he himself was Japanese. ‘I don’t think he’d go in for sabotage or anything like that, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Well, he is still under surveillance. Knowing the respect you Japanese, even the Nisei, the American-born ones, have for your elders—’ Embury stopped for a moment to relight his pipe. The father of three bandit brats, he sighed inwardly for what the Orientals had achieved in family life. Then he went on: ‘We couldn’t be sure what influence he might have had on you. But your record with the Military Language School in Minnesota and then in the field with the Marauders and again with the Marines in the Pacific theatre – well, it showed you were prepared to prove you were at least one hundred per cent American.’

‘At least that, sir.’ Okada did not feel at ease, but he was not going to be humbly submissive to the Navy, USN or otherwise. He glanced at Lieutenant-Commander Irvine, RN, who surprised him by giving him a quiet smile. He wondered what the Englishman was doing here so far from any theatre where the British were operating, but he did his best to hide his curiosity. While these three men were going to play the game close to their chests, he’d do the same.

Embury stood up and lumbered across to a narrow window, the only one, in the side wall of the office. Okada had noticed when he had come in that the room looked more like an interrogation cell than an office; there were no filing cabinets, just bare walls and a table and four chairs. Neither Embury nor the other two officers had offered any explanation of the room.

‘This is a one-way window. We can see out, but those on the other side can only see a mirror. Take a look, corporal. Recognize anyone out there?’

Okada got up and moved to the window, curious and puzzled. All his life, being a Nisei, there had been times when he had felt off-balance; the supposed melting-pot that was America had thrown out Orientals like himself as non-absorbable. He was off-balance now, but not for racial reasons, and he felt cautious and, yes, a little afraid. He was being set up for something and he could only guess at what it might be. He fully expected to see his father sitting in the next room.

He looked through the window into a room as bare as the one in which he stood. One man, a Caucasian in Navy tans, sat at a table. The other, a Japanese in a checked shirt and grey flannel trousers, stood with his back against a wall, saying something to the Navy officer that was obviously defiant.

‘Do you recognize the Japanese?’ said Embury.

‘He looks familiar, sort of.’ Okada stared at the man in the next room; then he felt a stiffening of shock. ‘It’s Ken Minato!’

‘Exactly. How long is it since you’ve seen him?’

‘I don’t know – six or seven years, I guess.’ Okada looked in at the man who, when they were boys, had been his closest friend. But the friend was only dimly seen, as in a photograph that had been retouched and not for the better. A friendship soured does nothing for the objective view. ‘It was in Japan, when I last went home with my father. 1937. He was in the Japanese Navy then. What’s he doing here?’

‘We’ll come to that in a moment,’ said Embury, dropping back to his game plan. But he did come out from behind the smokescreen of his pipe, leaning his head almost comically to one side. ‘Corporal, we’d like to send you back to Japan with Lieutenant Minato.’

‘When?’ Okada retreated behind his own smokescreen; Americans were always joking about Oriental inscrutability.

‘Within the next three months.’

Okada forgot all about being inscrutable; he let out a cough of laughter. ‘Commander, what sort of crap am I being fed? Did you bring me all the way from Saipan for something crazy like this?’

Embury looked at Reilly, who said, ‘I told you he had a reputation for speaking his mind. It’s all in his file.’

‘No bad thing,’ said Embury, and Reilly looked pained: Annapolis had never taught such heresy. That, of course, was a major problem of a war; one had to draw on the amateurs.

‘Yes, corporal, we did bring you all this way for exactly that. We think the idea is worth exploring. All we have to do is convince you.’

‘Fat chance.’ Okada was openly rebellious now, American all the way. ‘I’d like to be sent back to my outfit, sir. As far away from here as possible.’

‘Sit down, corporal.’ Embury resumed his own seat and after a moment Okada dropped into his chair. He eyed all three men like a trapped animal and he had the feeling that they were looking at him as animal trainers might have done. Clyde Beatty and his Japanese performing wild dog … Embury puffed on his pipe, which had now begun to look like a stage prop. ‘Let me tell you about the man in the next room. You know some of it, but not all of it. He was born in Japan and brought here when he was a year old. He went back to Japan in 1929, the year of your first visit – he was men 13 years old. Unlike you, he stayed on – he liked the Japanese way of life. You didn’t, we understand.’

‘I hated it.’

‘Well, Minato stayed on. He went to Echijima, the Naval Academy, then was posted to Naval Intelligence. He became a junior protégé of Admiral Tajiri, who was a senior member of the Navy General Staff. Minato’s parents, his only relatives, were both killed in General Doolittle’s air raid on Tokyo in March 1942.’

‘My father would be upset to hear that. He was a close friend of Old Man Minato. Where did you take Ken prisoner?’

‘Right here in the United States, at the Military Language School where you went. He’s never been in action, except as a spy.’

Okada frowned. ‘I find that hard to believe …’

The three officers waited for him to explain himself. Reilly fidgetted, but Embury and Irvine showed Oriental patience.

At last Okada said, ‘Ken was a good guy, my best friend in junior high school. We fell out later, when I saw him on my second visit to Japan, that was in 1937, but it wasn’t really serious. He just sounded like a younger version of his father. And my father too, I guess,’ he added, and regretted at once that he had done so. He was still batting for his father, though the Old Man didn’t deserve it.

‘We understand the division between you and your father is very serious.’

‘That came later,’ said Okada abruptly. ‘What about Minato?’

‘He’s been here in this country since March 1938. He came back here under the name Suzuki and enrolled as a student at Gonzaga University at Spokane in Washington State. He said he was a Catholic convert and they accepted him as such.’

‘Why up there? Why didn’t he come back to California?’

‘We assume he didn’t want to be recognized by you or any of the other Japanese he had gone to school with. Anyhow, within three months he had disappeared. He took on another identity, several in fact, and he’s been here ever since. He’s told us that he sent back to Tokyo enough information for the Japanese General Staff to know exactly the lay-out of all our West Coast shipyards, from Seattle down to here, San Diego, their capacity and our state of preparedness. Like the rest of you Japanese he was picked up at the time of the relocation order in February 1942 and he spent twelve months in a camp in Arizona. Then he volunteered for the Language School and was accepted – his idea, he’s told us, was to get sent to the Pacific theatre as an interpreter. He’d pick up more information there and then at the first opportunity he’d sneak back through the Japanese lines. He made one mistake – he tried to tell his contacts here in the States what he intended doing and we intercepted the message. Or rather, Army Intelligence did. He’s now volunteered to be turned around, as we say – to be sent back to Japan and spy for us. But we don’t trust him, not entirely. In Intelligence we tend not to trust anyone. Though, of course, at me beginning of any game, that’s all we can go on – trust. Right, gentlemen?’

The two gentlemen nodded, though Okada noticed that the Englishman smiled slightly, as if he thought trust were some sort of mild joke.

‘You said you want me to go back to Japan. With Minato? Why would you trust me?’

‘Why, indeed?’ said Embury and relit his pipe once again. Okada was becoming irritated by the routine, then he wondered if it was some sort of punctuation to keep him off-balance. Neither Reilly nor Irvine seemed impatient with Embury’s stop-go approach. ‘We’ll have to learn more about you, corporal, about your mental attitude. If you don’t come up to scratch …’

Okada saw a small red light winking at him out of the future. ‘If I don’t come up to scratch, what happens to me? Am I going to be sent back to my outfit?’

Embury shook his head. ‘No, we probably wouldn’t let you go. We may have to keep you in protective custody for the rest of the war. In better conditions than those relocation camps you were sent to, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Okada sat up straighter. His athlete’s body felt bruised, but it was really only his mind that was so. But this was still preferable to standing on the cliffs of Saipan, where his mind had almost suffered a knock-out blow. ‘Go on, sir.’

‘You’re interested?’

‘I’m interested, but that doesn’t mean I’m volunteering for anything. If I’m going to be kept in protective custody for the rest of the war, you’ve got nothing to lose by telling me more. You’ll have to tell me, if you want me to cooperate.’

Embury looked at Irvine. ‘Do you have guys like this in the British services?’

‘Occasionally. We exile them to the colonies or we send them out on commando raids and they become dead heroes.’ Irvine smiled at Okada, like an angler who always landed something from troubled waters.

‘I’ve heard of the British sense of humour, sir.’

‘It helps us muddle through,’ said Irvine, using a phrase that had become a British battle cry. Then he stopped smiling. ‘I wish you would help us in this little venture, corporal. It could mean a great deal to both our countries, America and Britain.’

For some reason he couldn’t fathom at the moment, Okada was suddenly receptive. Perhaps it was the friendliness in Irvine’s manner; the Englishman, of course, had no authority to be as demanding as Embury or Reilly. But it was obvious that, for some reason or other, Irvine had a personal interest in the matter. He did not have the bored, indifferent look of a liaison officer.

Okada looked back at Embury. ‘Tell me more, sir.’

Embury studied him for a moment through the smoke of his pipe. ‘Okay, corporal. But the more I tell you, the more you’re committed to going along with us … Admiral Tajiri was a leading member of the Strike-South faction in pre-war Japan. There were two factions – the Strike-South, the minority one, which had its eye on Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies, and the Strike-North faction, which thought it should prepare for an all-out war against communist Russia. Eventually the Strike-South lot won out. Admiral Tajiri knew the chances were high that America would come into the war if Japan struck south. So he set about preparing a spy ring. Minato was one of the first sent over here.’

‘Have you picked up any of the others?’

‘Several. They’re all held in Federal prisons. None of them volunteered to be turned around. But Minato now loves our way of life, he’s all for Mom and American apple pie and he thinks American democracy is the greatest system ever invented.’

‘Really?’ said Lieutenant-Commander Irvine, RN. Democracy was like original sin, anyone could lay claim to it.

Embury grinned at him, exposing teeth that looked as if they had been worn down by his pipe. ‘I was quoting our friend next door, David. No offence … The trouble is, corporal, we think Minato’s new-found love of America is just a bit too convenient. But we do believe that if we can smuggle him back to Tokyo, the risk is worthwhile. He may turn out to be very useful.’

‘What if he feeds you false information? How will you know the difference?’

Embury nodded approvingly. ‘You’re sharp, corporal. You’re right in step all the way, aren’t you?’

‘Let me say something, commander. I grew up in this country as a virtual outsider, no matter how much I loved Mom and apple pie and the American flag. You might almost say I was like a Jew in Nazi Germany. I had to be sharp to stay in step. You got no idea the number of times I stumbled, especially as a kid, and fell out of line. It was a question of survival – being sharp, I mean.’

Embury, Irvine and even Reilly looked suddenly sympathetic; as if, up till now, they had looked only in Caucasian mirrors. Reilly also looked disconcerted, as if he had not realized there had been another, earlier war going on.

‘It’ll be a question of survival in Japan,’ said Embury. ‘We won’t try to hide that from you. You’ll be our filter. Minato will give the information to you as his control and you’ll assess it before passing it on. We hope to teach you how to assess that information before we send you off. Our main hope is that when we get Minato back into Japan, he’ll go into Naval Intelligence on the staff of Admiral Tajiri. After six years in the field they’re not going to waste his experience.’

‘There’s an awful lot of hope going on, sir. What hope do I have that I’ll come out of this alive?’

‘Oh, about fifty-fifty – we hope.’

Okada was surrounded by smiles. He felt suddenly angry; then he made himself relax. Getting angry with these men would get him nowhere; once again he was the outsider. Then his curiosity, if not yet his patriotism, began to get the better of him. There were drawbacks to having been trained as a lawyer; one enjoyed listening to argument.

‘After I’ve assessed the information, how do I get it back to you? It seems to me that could be pretty hopeless, too.’

‘David?’ Embury looked at Irvine.

Irvine stood up, as if now that he had been invited to speak he had to stretch himself. He was about height, goodlooking but balding, with dark, and darkly amused, eyes; come Armageddon, he would treat it as the final, inevitable joke and accept it. He had what Okada, from meeting British officers in Burma, had come to know was a public school accent. British public schools, that is; Gardena High had never turned out an accent like Irvine’s. He had the assurance of someone who would never feel an outsider, anywhere at all.

‘I was in Tokyo before the war, as a junior naval attaché with the British embassy. We set up certain people as agents – we were working with our Secret Service, MI6. One of the agents was a man named Cairns. He was an authority on Oriental art, a professor at Tokyo University. He was very devoted to the Japanese in general, but not to their militarism, though he never said anything about that. He was highly regarded and he had access to a lot of top people. He was very valuable to us. He stayed on in Japan after war broke out in 1939 and even after Pearl Harbor – and the Japanese never suspected that he was an agent.’

Okada noticed that Irvine had not once used the word spy: the word was agent. Like most Americans of his time Okada knew little or nothing about spies and how they worked; he could remember seeing a couple of Alfred Hitchcock movies about British spies, but only one featuring an American. That had been Above Suspicion, which he had seen almost a year ago at the Language School: Joan Crawford had been an amateur, just as he would be if he agreed to go ahead with what was being suggested. He began to suspect that Irvine was the real professional in the room, at least in the field of espionage. He might be Royal Navy, but he was not just a sailor.

‘Professor Cairns was interned. Not sent to a prison camp, but to a resort village about forty miles south of Tokyo. Friendly aliens, if they had the right connections, were kept in several places like that. Aliens who did not want to be repatriated to their home countries or had no homelands to go to. Professor Cairns stayed on, ostensibly because he thought of Japan as his home – which he did. But he was also intent on continuing to work as an agent. He died in Nayora in May last year. Since then his wife has carried on in his place.’

‘How? I mean how does she get in touch with you?’

‘Cairns had a short-wave wireless somewhere in the village or nearby. Once a month, on a different day each month, his widow reports to a joint wireless station we run with the US Signal Corps in the Aleutians.’

‘Why can’t Mrs Cairns be Minato’s – what did you call it? Control?’

‘Yes, control. Two reasons. One, we’re not entirely sure of Mrs Cairns. I met her in Tokyo, but she had only just married Professor Cairns and, as far as we know, she didn’t know then that he was acting for us. Since his death she hasn’t fed us any false information – again as far as we know. We have to go on trust there. If she is on our side, then we can’t risk giving her away – I mean if Minato should doublecross us. You will, in effect, be the control for both of them.’

Okada gave his cough of laughter again. ‘The meat in the sandwich, you mean.’

‘Possibly,’ said Irvine. ‘I don’t think any of us are trying to fool you about your chances.’

Okada had felt out of his depth ever since he had entered the room; he had tried to float with the current, but now he was being swirled around. ‘You’re lengthening the odds too much, sir. You haven’t offered me one safe factor in this whole set-up.’

Embury took over again. ‘That’s true, corporal. Do you know of any safe factors in a war such as we’re fighting now?’

‘Yes, sir. Being posted to a base like this.’

‘That’s enough!’ Reilly couldn’t contain himself, rank or no rank.

Embury waved his pipe placatingly. ‘It’s okay, Roger. Corporal Okada is entitled to his opinion. I’m sure he feels the same way about the President being safe in the White House. The war is fought from many places.’

You son-of-a-bitch, thought Okada. He sat silent, putting on the mask he had inherited from his ancestors. At that moment, though he did not know it, he looked more Japanese than he ever had in his life before.

Okada sat staring at the one-way window in the wall. He was seated too low to be able to see into the next room. But Kenji Minato did not immediately interest him; the man next door was like himself, just a puppet in the game these men were playing. At last he said, ‘I’d like to think about it. But first, one question. How did you pick me out for this – mission?’

‘Your friend next door suggested you.’

So the course had been set and now he was on the last downward spiral of it; or at least of the first leg. He drifted through the cloud cover, which made him suddenly feel even more isolated; he was trapped in a nightmare. Panic grabbed at him, then let go; he dropped below the cloud into clear dark air. Japan rushed up at him out of the darkness; his stomach tightened and acid gushed up through his gullet and into his mouth. He caught a swift glimpse of pine trees that seemed to be jumping up at him like black sharks; the pale grey face of a precipice; and a snow-covered road that ran along the edge of the precipice. He jerked frantically on the cords of the parachute as he had been taught; but he was too inexperienced. It was luck, rather than skilful manoeuvring, that saved him. He sailed in above the cliff-face, hit a tree on the far side of the road, swung in hard against the tree-trunk and hung there twenty feet above the ground.

He was winded from hitting the tree and he felt sick from the acid in his mouth. But the overwhelming feeling was one of relief: he was alive. It was a good start: from now on he would have to learn to live by the hour.

He dropped the suitcase he carried, then awkwardly freed himself from the harness. He was wearing a flying-suit and flying-boots; he felt as cumbersome as a crippled bear. Somehow he got a foothold on the trunk of the tree and clambered up its branches to cut loose the tangled parachute. It took him another ten minutes to get the ’chute to the ground; it kept getting caught in the lower branches as he dropped it. At last he had it on the ground, folding it up so that it would serve as a sleeping-bag. Winter is no season for parachuting into enemy territory; but, he wryly told himself, war’s calendar never waits for corporals. If he survived the war he hoped he might get retrospective promotion and back pay.

He dug a hole in the snow with a broken branch, wrapped himself in the ’chute and lay down. He took stock of himself: there was no point in taking stock of his surroundings, since he couldn’t see any more than thirty yards in any direction. Behind him were the trees and in front of him, across the road, was a dark abyss. Black night, with the stars hidden by cloud, makes a joke of maps.

There was no turning back now: that was the first thing that had to be accepted. Agents dropped into Europe always had, dangerous though it might be, a landline to safety, to Switzerland or Spain or Sweden; it was Irvine who had pointed out the comparison. If he had to run he had virtually nowhere to run to but to continue circling within Japan itself. Rebellious as he had been, he had never practised philosophical resignation; but he had to practise it now. He was here to stay, probably till the end of the war. He shut out the thought that his own death might come first.

Abruptly he was exhausted; the tension of the last few days and hours caught up with him. He shivered with nerves; then the tension slipped out of him as if faucets had been opened in him. He lay back on the frozen ground and fell asleep. He stirred during the night with the cold, but better that than nightmares.

When he woke the clouds had gone and the sun was shining. He lay for a moment, wondering if his body was still alive: from the neck down he felt as if he was inhabiting an iron frame. Then, as if it had been waiting for him to wake, the sun began to warm him; he looked up into it and accepted it as another omen. At last he sat up, feeling like an old man; then got painfully to his feet, walked a few stiff paces and relieved himself. At least, he thought, I can piss like a young man.

He opened suitcase. It contained a change of clothing, a faded blue kimono, a second pair of shoes, a cheap overcoat, and a battered cap: the wardrobe of a working man. There were also a thick wallet of yen notes, a package of sandwiches, a Japanese thermos of coffee, a map and a pair of Japanese binoculars he had picked up on Saipan. While he ate the sandwiches and drank the coffee, he studied the map, comparing its contours with what he could now see of the landscape.

The black abyss of last night on the other side of the road was now a valley; pine trees covered the upper half of the slopes like a green-black shawl, but the lower slopes were terraced. The snow-covered terraces were like giant steps of ice that caught the sun and flung it back up out of the valley in a white glare. A solitary peasant climbed like an ant up through the terraces; far below him stood two oxen, still as dark rocks. The valley was utterly silent and Okada, his mind straying for the moment, wondered where the war was.

When he had finished breakfast he took the parachute and the flying suit and boots further up into the timber. The ground was too hard to break, so he buried the ’chute, the flying gear and his map in the snow; by the time the snow melted he would be long gone and a long way away. Then he went back to the road, put on the overcoat and cap, hung the suitcase over his shoulder by a strap and set off down towards the valley floor. He had a rough idea where he now was, an hour or two’s walk from the railroad that would take him to Tokyo.

By the time he reached the railroad line, following it north along the road that ran beside it, he had come down into the floor of the valley. He had passed through several hamlets and two large villages and no one had stopped him or, in most cases, even glanced at him. His apprehension, which had begun to rise as he had approached the first hamlet, had subsided; the people he had passed took him for one of themselves, he looked no different except that he was a little taller than most of them. Then he was coming into a town, larger than any of the villages he had passed through, and he began to feel apprehensive again. Here there would be police and military personnel; already he had been passed on the road by a dozen or more military vehicles, trucks and cars. He looked for a good omen, but saw none, so settled for some forced optimism, an American trait he had never shown at home.