The Honorable Traitors

by John Lutz

  He paged through more photocopies: Tillie in a one-piece suit, surfing at Waikiki. In jodhpurs and boots, riding in the mountains.

  “In the summer of 1940, she abruptly vanishes from the society pages,” Joe said. “That was when she went to work for Dole. Must have been quite a jolt. From socialite to secretary.”

  “The family blowup. What caused it, do you think?”

  “You may have noticed, she followed the fleet.”

  Laker had. There were pictures of dinners at various clubs, dances at The Royal Hawaiian hotel, showing Tillie, lovely in her long gown and above-the-elbow gloves, a corsage pinned to her bosom, and an ensign or lieutenant beside her, in white from his high, tight collar to his shoes, with a sword at his side.

  “It couldn’t have been unusual for a socialite to date Navy officers. There were plenty of them in Honolulu.”

  “True. But Tillie got serious about one of them. Too serious.”

  Laker sat back and folded his arms.

  “You look skeptical,” Joe said.

  “You said earlier, you did find one fact to support your theory. I think now’s the time for it.”

  “Tillie didn’t stay at Dole. In the spring of 1941, she took a new job. At Pearl Harbor.”

  “To be closer to some naval officer, you think.”

  “In spring 1941, they would have known they were on borrowed time. Nobody was expecting an attack on Pearl Harbor, but it was inevitable there would be war between America and Japan.”

  Laker caught their waiter’s eye and motioned for the check. “You’re building a load of supposition on your one fact.”

  “Okay. Maybe I’ve seen too many of those old black-and-white movies, with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor. Betty Grable and Tyrone Power.” Joe gazed out at the traffic on Ala Moana Boulevard without seeing it. His face was somber. “If there was an officer she loved, I think Tillie was right to stay here with him.”

  “Borrowed time, you said.”

  “In May of 1942, Tillie moved to Washington, never to return. In December of ’44, she married Mr. Moneybags Ephraim North. To me, that means her naval officer was killed, in the attack on Pearl, or in one of our lost battles of early ’42.”

  “It could also mean there was no naval officer.”

  “You think I’m nuts.”

  “I think you should write a screenplay.”

  “Nah. Tyrone Power’s dead.”

  9

  The only Honolulu hotel Ava knew the name of was The Royal Hawaiian, so that was where she was going to stay. The moment the van pulled up in front of it, she was pleased with her choice. It was a six-story pink palace topped with a cupola, right on Waikiki Beach. Long rows of windows with awnings looked out to sea. It was old-fashioned and charming. All the other beachfront hotels were new skyscrapers.

  She fully intended to be a good girl and do as Laker said. At first, anyway.

  After checking in, she returned to the front desk with Tillie’s journal. The helpful clerks offered to copy it for her, but she insisted on being taken to the copying machine in the office to do it herself. Then she had the journal placed in the hotel safe.

  Twenty minutes later, she stepped out on the pool deck, wearing a bikini, terrycloth wrap, and sun hat purchased from a boutique in the lobby. Stretching out in a lounge chair under a pink-and-white striped umbrella, she promptly fell asleep. It had been a long trip from Washington.

  An hour later, she awoke refreshed. Restless, in fact. Looking at the people on the deck and in the pool, she thought they were all the carefree vacationers they appeared to be. Laker’s notion that she would be watched or approached seemed far-fetched.

  Anyway, she was a typically pale-skinned redhead, with a tendency to burn. Even with the protection of a beach umbrella and sun hat, she didn’t feel like lying out here any longer. Especially as she was bored out of her mind.

  She returned to her room and examined the photocopies she’d made of the journal. On a careful rereading, the Japanese lines stubbornly refused to make any more sense. What had the young Tillie been trying to do? Write poetry? Some of the entries were short enough to be haiku, but didn’t meet the metrical requirements. Maybe she was trying a literary experiment of a different sort. Most entries were so filled with repeated words they suggested Tillie was trying to emulate Gertrude Stein.

  Giving up on the Japanese lines, she turned to the headings. A date and an address. Laker had recognized some of the street names. Would it be possible to pick up her grandmother’s trail? She spread out the map provided by the hotel, and quickly found two of the streets from the journal, Lemon Road and Punchbowl Street.

  The names were enticing. Ava thought she just might find out something.

  She called down to the lobby and ordered a rental car, then changed into chinos and polo shirt. With cell phone in hand, she hesitated. Laker was bound to call to check up on her. She could lie to him, say she was at the hotel as instructed, but why should she lie? He had no right to tell her what to do. But she didn’t want to get into tiresome explanations or arguments, either. She decided to leave the phone in the room.

  The first address she checked, 318 Nahua St., was only a few blocks away from The Royal Hawaiian. The even-numbered side of the 300 block consisted of a hotel, a McDonald’s, and a Walgreens. In fact nothing she saw on Nahua Street had been there in Tillie’s day, except the Ala Wai Canal at the end of it.

  That was how her search went, for a discouragingly long time. Again and again, she got out of the car at an address and looked at a new building. Some addresses proved unfindable; the numbering system must have changed. A few street names had changed, too.

  At least she was seeing a lot of Honolulu. She liked Chinatown, with its busy street markets and small, peak-roofed temples. She stopped at a restaurant for a late lunch of lomi lomi salmon.

  Going back downtown she found a pleasant area of palm tree–lined streets, parks, and old buildings. On the street Tillie had named, no building bore the number she had written. But on the other side of the street stood an old survivor, a Protestant church built of rough gray volcanic rock. Its large wooden doors were framed by white pillars, and a rectangular, battlemented clock tower rose from the slate roof. Ava guessed that it had been here since the nineteenth century.

  She went in. The plain interior was pleasantly dim and cool. Carved into the wall inside the door were the lines

  Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.—Matt. 22: 37–39

  in English and Hawaiian. It was possible that Tillie had looked upon this inscription, so Ava copied it in her notebook.

  This was beginning to seem like a waste of time, but she was too stubborn to give up. She got back in the car and headed for the next address. In the rearview mirror she saw another car turn left at an intersection and get behind her. It was a white Subaru, as nondescript as her rented Honda, except that it was missing its front left hubcap.

  She had seen that rusty, lug-nutted wheel before. Could the white Subaru be following her? But no sooner had the thought formed than the car turned off. Ava had to smile at the way her heartbeat had speeded up. Honolulu’s street pattern was a grid, and the way she kept crisscrossing and doubling back, it was no surprise that she should see the same car twice.

  Laker was making her paranoid, that was all.

  10

  After dropping off Joe Kalapalea at the Advertiser, Laker tried Ava. She didn’t answer her cell phone. He left a message. Then he pointed the Mustang’s long hood toward Pearl Harbor. It was a beautiful half-hour drive along the coast. Leaving the highway, he pulled over and tried her again. No answer on the cell or her room phone, so he called the desk. The staff of The Royal Hawaiian lived up to their reputation for courtesy and helpfulness, but were una
ble to find Ms. North at poolside.

  For a moment he seriously considered going to the hotel, turning it upside down in search of Ava, calling the police if he couldn’t do so. It was possible she was in serious trouble. Then he decided that he was overreacting.

  Ava clearly believed that her grandmother’s sacrifice had not been in vain. The murderers were fooled; they thought the journal had been destroyed in the explosion. And no one else knew of its existence. Maybe she was right. Laker hoped so.

  He also hoped Ava would call him back soon.

  He drove on until he came to the turnoff for the Admiral Clarey Bridge, where he pulled onto the shoulder and got out of the car to admire the view. A strong salty wind peeled back his jacket. Brilliant sunshine sparkling on the waves made him narrow his eyes.

  Across the water, near Ford Island, a curving white memorial stood above the wreck of the Arizona, sunk by the Japanese with the loss of more than a thousand men. But, as Laker had noticed on previous visits, if you wanted to put the catastrophic defeat of Pearl Harbor in the right perspective, Pearl Harbor was the place. On his own side of the water was the naval base, much bigger than it had been seventy years ago, with the tank farm, the administrative buildings, the cranes and docks where the sleek gray warships were moored two by two. An enormous aircraft carrier, with planes lined up on its flight deck, was being poked and prodded into the channel by three tugboats. It was far away, but he could hear the tugs’ engines laboring as their screws churned up wakes behind them. The sight made him think of the carriers Yorktown, Hornet, and Enterprise, which with the rest of the Pacific fleet had sailed from here only six months after the Pearl Harbor defeat, to inflict on the Japanese navy a blow from which it would never recover.

  His gaze drifted back to Ford Island and the long gray shape, bristling with guns, of the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the Japanese had surrendered, only four and a half years after Pearl Harbor. Only days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been devastated by nuclear bombs.

  Laker was no flag-waver or misty-eyed patriot. He had risked his life for his country too many times and come too close to losing the gamble. And had done things for his country that it troubled him to remember. But at moments like this, he thought, if you have to fight a war—any war, open or secret, declared or undeclared—you better win it.

  And America would, if he, Tom Laker, had anything to say about it.

  He drove across Halawa Creek and stopped at the gate of the naval base to present his credentials. He parked the Mustang where the guards pointed and walked toward the cluster of administration buildings, preparing to be condescended to. Laker had worked with military people closely in the Middle East, and had managed to win their respect, but it hadn’t been easy. Military people seemed to start with the assumption that a civilian was a little soft, a little sloppy, always looking for corners to cut and expecting to be pampered.

  The first man behind a desk he spoke to explained it all to him. Records of BuPers—the Bureau of Personnel, the 1940s name for the Navy’s Human Resources Department—were not kept at Pearl Harbor but in the Records Depository in St. Louis. It was no problem, because they could be accessed online.

  The clerk did so, and told him that Matilda [none] Brigham had worked as a clerk-typist in the Office of Commissary Supply from 5 May 1941 to 15 January 1942. That was all. No, there would be no more information on record here at Pearl. So why are you still standing here, wasting my time?

  He didn’t actually say that, but Laker got the message. He moved on, office to office, building to building. He learned nothing more, and encountered attitudes ranging from stiff courtesy to undisguised boredom. Nobody made the connection between Matilda Brigham and Tillie North.

  Emerging into the sunshine, Laker walked down to the docks. He looked out to sea, where the aircraft carrier was now hull down on the horizon, then toward land, where the clutter of buildings and roads climbed part way up the green flanks of the hills.

  This was looking like a wasted afternoon. What traces was he expecting to find here, of Tillie’s presence a lifetime ago? How could he even begin to answer the question of why this bright and beautiful girl had defied her parents, refusing to go to America and attend a Seven Sisters college and meet an Ivy League man, the way those of her favored class were expected to do?

  Then there was the fact that Ava hadn’t called him back. He couldn’t help worrying about her, thinking he ought to go to The Royal Hawaiian.

  He didn’t return to his car, though.

  It was a funny thing about Laker. Official reports ascribed his successes in the field to courage and persistence. He didn’t buy that. What he had was a willingness to trust his luck. When it seemed that he was getting nowhere, when it seemed that he was getting in trouble, he would push a little harder. Things were going to break his way.

  The key encounter or revelation was just around the corner.

  He turned and walked into the entrance of the nearest office building and read the directory. It said that in the basement he could find the Office of the Base Historian, Capt. (ret.) Ernestina Penderghast.

  He descended the steps. The door was open, so he walked in. It was an old-fashioned sort of government office with fluorescent strip lighting, linoleum floor, and walls painted light-green. The only window was high up on the wall and provided a view of khaki-clad legs walking past. Tall shelves were solidly lined with document boxes.

  A white-haired woman was sitting at a desk under a big map of the harbor, examining a katana, a Japanese sword.

  “Captain Penderghast?”

  She looked up. She was about seventy years old, and the lines in her face indicated that she had spent more of them frowning than smiling. Steel-gray eyes appraised him. “Can I help you?”

  “I have an idea that you can. In fact I wish I’d found this office earlier. You know, you’re kind of inconspicuously placed.”

  “Tell me about it. I used to have larger quarters. Even a staff. But when Pearl Harbor became part of Valor in the Pacific National Park, they turned historical responsibilities over to the National Park Service.”

  “That’s a shame. The Navy should have its own history office.”

  It was the right thing to say. Captain Penderghast was one of those people who warmed to you when you shared their complaints. She put down the katana and rose to approach him. She was wearing civvies—dark blue slacks and light blue shirt—but with razor-sharp creases.

  “The NPS serves tourists, and they’re only interested in December 7. The rest of our history is being lost. But the higher-ups won’t listen to my complaints. I’ve made myself unpopular around here.” She smiled with sour satisfaction, proud of making herself unpopular. “Every time a department puts its records on the Cloud, or wherever they put them, I pester them to give me their files instead of throwing them away.”

  “It would be a shame to lose those files. When people enter information on a computer, they’re just filling in blanks on a form. Back when there were files, all sorts of interesting papers got tossed into them.”

  “Are you a historian, Mister . . . ?”

  “Oh, just kind of a researcher. My name’s Laker.”

  “And what are you researching today?”

  “A civilian employee who worked here in 1941.”

  Captain Penderghast gazed at the ceiling while consulting her memory. “It’s possible I’ll be able to help you. What was his name?”

  “It was a young woman. Matilda Brigham, no middle initial.”

  The gray eyes dropped to meet his. “Tillie North? She worked here?”

  He nodded.

  “Would your—uh—research be connected with her recent death?”

  He shrugged.

  “Not too forthcoming, are you, Mr. Laker?”

  He reached into his coat pocket. “If you’d like to see my ID—”

  “Would it tell me whom you really work for?” She went on without waiting for an answer. “I’ve been stationed at
the Pentagon several times. I know the ropes. And I’m willing to bet that you’re from Washington. Or Langley. Or Fort Meade.”

  She was smiling. Laker smiled back.

  “If this is a matter of national security,” the captain continued, “let’s get to work.”

  She led him down an aisle of shelves, peering at labels on document boxes. “Do you know her job title and department?”

  “Clerk typist, Commissary supply. Which is kind of odd in itself.”

  “How so?”

  “She spoke Japanese. You’d think that in 1941 the Navy could have found something more useful for her to do than order cutlery and napkins.”

  “The Navy didn’t have much respect for the accomplishments of women in those days.” She knelt and pulled a document box from a bottom shelf. Lifting off its top, she riffled through the manila folders inside. “This is where she ought to be. But no Brigham.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t despair, Mr. Laker. They made a terrible mess of the files when they shipped them over. We’ll just have to dig.”

  For the next hour, they sat on the floor back-to-back, pulling boxes off the bottom shelf and going through them. Many boxes emitted a smell of mildew when the lids were lifted. Tiny red bugs crawled over the papers. But Laker didn’t doubt the search was worthwhile, because the files were thick. The manila folders were stuffed with faded carbon copies of reprimands and commendations, approvals and refusals. Given the military’s devotion to paperwork, he was confident that if they could find Tillie’s file it would tell him a lot.

  Captain Penderghast was just as determined as he was. Dragging another box onto the floor and lifting the lid, she said, “Any idea why she came to Pearl to work, Mr. Laker?”