Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  General MacArthur was seated at his desk when Emmett arrived. He made a slight grimace when he took in Emmett’s black eyes and told him to close the door. The din out in the hallway faded away and then the room got so quiet, Emmett could hear the ticking of the onyx clock. He must have waited ten minutes while MacArthur sat with his manicured hands spread upon a green felt desk blotter, absorbed in thought until, in due time, he took up a pen and several sheets of paper and wrote a lengthy note, unhurried, without hesitation or erasure. That done, he lit his pipe.

  Finally, MacArthur spoke. “Mr. Jones. How many communists are in North Korea?”

  Emmett began to say that he didn’t know when MacArthur interrupted: “I think you do. But I will clarify. There are nearly three hundred thousand Chinese communists soldiers in North Korea. There are one hundred and sixty-seven thousand North Koreans, soldiers, and guerrillas. Add to that six hundred and fifty thousand Chinese communist soldiers in Manchuria and another quarter of a million communists on their way to the thirty-eighth parallel. As we speak. More than a million communist soldiers, Mr. Jones, well armed with Russian matériel. And I lost fewer than thirteen thousand men.”

  “Yes. I heard,” said Emmett, wondering what MacArthur had meant by “I think you do.” He added blandly, “It’s remarkable, sir.”

  MacArthur stood. “Then why isn’t that knowledge reflected in the irresponsible statements emanating from your government?”

  “My government, sir?”

  “Your man Pearson.” MacArthur began to pace so quickly he stirred the papers on his desk. “That fool Atlee. Nehru. And your man Pearson.”

  Emmett said that he would communicate the general’s dissatisfaction to the minister.

  “Do,” MacArthur said. “Tell Mr. Pearson that he’s damaging the morale of my troops. Ask him, Mr. Jones, kindly to restrain himself from sabotaging my war. Tell him to confine his commentary to the superior manner by which I’ve executed our tactical withdrawal. That is, if he is capable of behaving in a way suitable to a foreign official, and not like some small-town gossip.”

  MacArthur returned to his chair. “When I flew over the Yalu,” he said softly, “I could see all the way to the Siberian border. All that spread before me was an endless expanse of utterly barren countryside, and the black waters of the river. It was a dismal, bleak, utterly empty landscape. And it was blanketed in snow.”

  MacArthur fell silent. Emmett wondered if the general actually had gone mad. There was snow only high in the mountains when they’d flown over the Yalu. MacArthur of course didn’t know that Emmett had been there, in the plane with the newspapermen.

  MacArthur whispered, “Snow. A massive deployment of hostiles, a phantom army moving only at night, absolutely camouflaged during the day, blending into the land. Their tracks covered by snow. They moved by stealth at night. And by day, they simply folded themselves away.”

  MacArthur’s tone changed. “But that wasn’t their sole advantage, was it? There was something else, something your man Pearson and his ilk don’t acknowledge in their easy perversions of truth. Do you want to tell me what that was?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I asked you, Do you wish to conjecture, what was the communists’ third weapon?”

  “That’s beyond my scope, general.”

  “Beyond your ‘scope,’ is it? Then let me help you. The communists’ third weapon is a traitor in our midst. The Reds won the first rout because they have a spy. Correction. They have spies. They’re being ‘tipped off.’”

  Emmett let nothing show on his face.

  MacArthur was warming up. “There is a leak in intelligence. It’s in Washington. It’s in London. Why not in Canada? You seem to want a ‘moral persuasion’ on the world stage, with your holier-than-thou pulpit diplomacy. It’s blatantly evident that my operations are known to the enemy in advance. My strategic movements are being conveyed to Lin Piao. The Chinese knew that Truman restrained me from moving against them at the Sui-Ho dam. That’s why they could infiltrate and fragment my units. There is a leak in Washington, Mr. Jones. And now, tell me, why shouldn’t I believe there’s a leak in Ottawa too? I have a hunch it doesn’t stop with your friend Mr. Norman.”

  The general put his pipe between his teeth before politely inquiring, “And why are you not laughing now, Mr. Jones?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Spring broached, and no one had connected Emmett with the death of the policeman in the port district. It looked like the SCAP official wasn’t going to make any trouble. No word came from Dr. Kimura, and Emmett figured that he had returned to Ottawa, had taken up his medical practice, and would prefer to forget an unfortunate manslaughter in a Tokyo bar.

  No word came from External Affairs either, nothing that would indicate that Bill Masters or anyone in External knew about the general’s theory, his phantom Canadian spy leaking information about his troops’ movements. Emmett had dutifully written to External to report the encounter with General MacArthur in self-mocking terms, as a humorous episode while he was temporarily handicapped by a painful hand and the loss of his spectacles, injuries he’d sustained while defending a stranger from a gang of homeless men living in the streets of Tokyo.

  Then, abruptly in early April 1951, General MacArthur was fired.

  It was the end of May, and sunny, when Emmett awoke in his suite, a few blocks away from the Liaison offices. He’d been dreaming about John Norfield; he could smell John’s scent of cigarettes and Scotch.

  John had been asleep in thick moss of the kind that grows on granite. Moss, emerald green, wet from recent rain. It must have been summer; it was warm in the untrustworthy Canadian way. Pain emanated from John, who slept inside Emmett’s sleep, one nightmare after another all night long in an exhausting rosary that must be worked and worked.

  Emmett lay in bed and watched strips of blue sky through the blinds in his apartment. He’d been telling himself that he’d soon go to see Aoi. But as the weeks passed, the silence between them grew almost tangible and he began to feel stubborn toward her. He admired her, but he didn’t understand her. She made him lonely; it was like being in love with a mountain range.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  He was wearing his pyjama bottoms and an undershirt. A Sunday. He got out of bed, pulled a cardigan over his undershirt, and opened the door to a tall Japanese man wearing a black uniform with gold braid epaulets and matching cap. It couldn’t be the Japanese police; the uniform was too new. Anyway, a uniform on a Japanese man could signify a general attitude rather than a particular rank in a particular force. As it turned out, the gentleman was a taxi driver. The taxi driver held a letter in his spotless white gloves, offered it to him, bowed deeply, and departed.

  Emmett kicked the door shut with his bare heel, tearing open the envelope. The letter was from External Affairs, requiring his presence in Ottawa. He had been recalled.

  Monday morning, hungover, Emmett stood at the teak desk of the sleek receptionist. The receptionist was on the phone and swivelled her chair to face the wall. The New York Times, dated May 30, lay on her desk. He picked it up and read the headline.

  Two top diplomats in the British Foreign Office, one stationed in London, the other in Washington, had defected to the Soviet Union.

  He took the newspaper to his office to read it.

  Their names were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Burgess was a high-ranking secretary in the British Embassy in Washington. Maclean was head of the American Department at the Foreign Office in London.

  The British Commonwealth brigade was fighting in Korea, so messages passing between the Pentagon and Dai-Ichi would have been copied to the Attlee government through the British Embassy in Washington and the American Department in Whitehall, both domains of Burgess and Maclean. The two Brits would have had access to information passing between the Pentagon and the headquarters in Japan, and they could have easily forwarded it to the Soviet Union. All of MacArthur’s plans for fighting the war in Kore
a could have been flowing into the hands of the communists through the British Foreign Office, through Burgess and Maclean.

  Thirst drove Emmett down to the staff cafeteria, where the talk was all about the two spies and the damage they must have done. No one there appeared to know about Emmett’s recall; they moved their chairs over to give him room without interrupting their flow of talk. It was unlikely that they knew about his situation and didn’t care; this kind of instability in the Liaison offices made everyone uneasy, and the staff was still shaken by the loss of Herbert Norman. Emmett sat stiffly with his former colleagues, young men who were not hungover, who were not under a cloud, who seemed stupid and uninformed but enviable nonetheless.

  The language specialists, policy analysts, secretaries, and assistant secretaries, all the men and women in the cafeteria agreed: there are communists everywhere, hiding. That’s how the Reds work. To infiltrate, to sap our strength and weaken us from within. One of the women, a pretty little redhead, confessed that she was scared, her eyes tearing up. “It’s hard,” she said, “to keep my Christian faith constantly on guard against so much evil!” The young men murmured encouragement, but she went on, “No, honestly! It’s not just the communists! It’s — it’s the fairies! The queers !” In some confusion the men moved their chairs a fraction apart. Several of the young men laughed, not unkindly, and one of them said with a hint of irony, “You’ve just gotta be vigilant, Mary,” and another said more seriously, “The fact is — it’s up to all of us to be vigilant.”

  Someone began to hold forth about President Harry Truman. Truman had suddenly relieved General MacArthur of his command in April, charging him with insubordination over the fiasco with the Chinese in North Korea. “The spy scandal spells the end of President Truman,” the fellow said. “They should impeach Truman and elect MacArthur.”

  “MacArthur for president?” The conversation moved on to MacArthur’s recall, and all the controversy surrounding the war with the Chinese. The blond young man seated beside Emmett insisted that they should’ve dropped a nuclear bomb on the Reds at the Yalu. “Would’ve saved a lot of lives,” he solemnly asserted.

  One by one they went back to their desks. Emmett sat alone at a table strewn with overflowing ashtrays and torn matches. He pulled the letter from his back pocket, smoothed it, and reread it. It was a toneless instruction to return to Ottawa “at his earliest convenience,” to report to External and receive further instructions, signed by a man he’d met only once, in the Far Eastern Division. It was marked “For Your Eyes Only.” So no one at the Liaison Mission knew.

  But when he returned to his office, the few belongings he’d kept there were in a small cardboard box. He opened his filing cabinet. It was empty, as were all the drawers in his desk. There was a paperclip on the carpet; otherwise the room was cleaned out. When he was gone, it would be without a trace.

  The phone on his empty desk began to ring and he answered. It was the receptionist, her voice for the first time indicating some interest in him. “I’ve got a call for you,” she said mockingly but impressed. “Long distance collect. She wants to know if you’ll accept the charges.” The receptionist gave one of her little Pepsi burps and added, “You got yourself a girlfriend, mystery man?”

  It was Aoi. He said that he’d pay for the call. The receptionist said, “Okay, honey, here she is,” and put Aoi through.

  He had never before spoken to Aoi on the telephone. She sounded vulnerable. He asked her if she was all right, and she said that she was. Then she said nothing. He told her, “I’m tied up at the moment. I’ll come out to see you — the day after tomorrow. Is that okay with you?” She said that it was okay, but she sounded diminished, and a sense of dread rose in him when he said goodbye.

  He picked up the cardboard box and walked. On his way out he left some money with the receptionist to pay for Aoi’s call. The receptionist gave him a knowing look and said, “Good luck, eh?”

  Emmett began to make arrangements for the long journey back to Canada. He hesitated to say goodbye to Aoi, telling himself that it would be needlessly painful, that he might jeopardize her claim to the house on the estate. He thought that the American in the blue kimono must have been watching him come and go from her house, and he considered the possibility that the blue kimono was connected to Mr. Miller, who in turn had connected him with the British spies. He felt he was the subject of conversations everywhere.

  The UN forces and the Chinese were bombing North Korea to pulp, killing each other and tens of thousands of civilians. There were more than one hundred and thirty thousand POWs — Chinese and North Korean — crammed into a UN concentration camp on an island off the coast of South Korea, in conditions that had nothing to do with the Geneva Convention. All night Emmett walked the streets of Tokyo, stopping for a drink in a bar, then walking again. Very early morning he awoke on a park bench. Young Japanese boys were playing baseball a few yards away. They were in spotless white uniforms, but, he noticed, their white socks and sneakers were blackened. The cherry trees had burned when Tokyo was bombed; saplings were growing up around the burnt skeletons of the trees, but the soil was still sooty. He didn’t want to go to his apartment, so he walked all morning. Even before noon, the delicate Japanese girls were tripping over the rubble of freshly cleared bombsites, holding hands with American soldiers and smoking Lucky Strikes. The Japanese, encouraged by the profits the banks were making off the Korean War, were practising demokurashii.

  He spoke to no one but bartenders for four days. Before he finally started the grasshopper route back to Canada, he typed up a letter to Aoi, telling her that he had to leave the country and he didn’t know if, much less when, he’d be back. He gave her the Ottawa address for External Affairs and asked her to write to him there. He told her that he would miss her very much. He thought for a minute and then, because his left hand was still in a cast, he signed it clumsily with his right hand, “Love, Emmett.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At quarter to nine on the third Monday of June 1951, Emmett was on his way to see Bill Masters. Beside him, climbing the stairs to Bill’s office in the East Block on Parliament Hill, was a balding man wearing a brown suit, anywhere between forty and fifty years old, patchily shaved, his green face leached by alcohol, carrying a paper lunch bag smelling of egg.

  Emmett had anticipated that his appointment at the Liaison Mission in Tokyo would be extended for three years, yet he’d been recalled after only ten months. He intended to remind Bill that his work had been good, better than good. In his brief time there, he’d assessed the Japanese constitution, he’d written what he knew to be lucid analyses of General Douglas MacArthur’s relationships with the Tokyo press, and he’d been able to unravel some of the horrors of the Korean War. He’d written several profiles of Tokyo gangsters. He’d even overseen insightful research into ladies’ book clubs! He’d mastered a certain congenial, authoritative tone in his reporting on American influence in East Asia. He already had analysts working under him, men who’d been there longer than he had. This is the speech he’d prepared for Bill.

  In one of the last reports that Emmett had written — before his unnerving meeting with General MacArthur — he told the story of Herbert Norman and John Emmerson, who was with the State Department, taking an army jeep to a prison camp just outside Tokyo in 1945, to pick up two Japanese prisoners, Shiga Yoshio and Tokuda Kyuichi, communist leaders who had been incarcerated since 1928. The prisoners were interrogated by American officials, returned briefly to prison, and then released.

  It was General MacArthur who had ordered the release of the two communist leaders, believing that it would let off steam, moderate the antagonisms between the old Right and old Left. Emmett had written that MacArthur intended to “geld” the two men, brand them as impotent old-timers no longer a threat to national security.

  Emmett had paused for a moment before writing about communists. The flu-like symptoms of the Red scare made it contagious even to say the word commu
nist. But he believed that he was demonstrating that he had nothing to hide.

  Then the British spies defected. And now there were going to be communist conspiracies around every corner, in every closet, under every bed. Here he was, stuck in Ottawa. His usefulness in Japan was wasted.

  At the gloomy landing to the third floor, the man with the egg-salad sandwich let out a tidy fart just as a good-looking woman briskly stepped ahead of them onto the stairs. The woman in her trim tweed skirt and high heels, a brunette with her hair swept up from the nape of her neck, surged ahead and the egg salad wearily dropped behind. When Emmett was still following her into the corridor to the left where Bill Masters had his office, she looked back, appraised him, and gave him a smile. He said, “I’m not trailing you.” And she said, “Too bad.”

  So he was feeling better when he passed by Bill’s secretary, Agnes — who’d been there for decades — and entered Bill’s office.

  Bill reached across his desk to shake Emmett’s hand. “Glad you made it,” Bill said. “You all in one piece?”

  “Yup. Same as always.” Emmett took a chair.

  Seated opposite, Bill looked like a part of his desk. He’d been in that same office or one very much like it since the end of the war, and Emmett had the impression that everything in it was not merely an expression of Bill but actually was Bill. The light was always bad in the East Block, and Bill wouldn’t get rid of the thunderously heavy velvet swag drapes that darkened the room. Beside the inevitable leather sofa, there was a credenza decorated with golf trophies and a tray with rye and glasses, and it, too, was Bill.

  Bill saw Emmett eyeing the liquor and said hopefully, “A bit early, isn’t it?”