Captain Lomax was waiting for Dugan when he emerged from General Coppersmith's inner office late the next morning. She had been watching the telltale light in her lamp base, hoping that the general would cut her in, but she had received no signal.
Ignoring the chance that Coppersmith might follow Dugan through the door, she seized Dugan's arm and said:
"Has he given you orders?"
Dugan nodded calmly. "You're an inquisitive person. Yes, he gave me orders."
Sarah cried out, "He told you to succeed or not to come back! He told you to die!"
"Sh-h-h," said Dugan, "that's just his way of talking. I'm no worse off than I was yesterday, or will be tomorrow. Anyhow, my orders are classified. We can't talk about them privately." He grinned at her expression. "You're not being official, are you, Captain?"
"Of course not!" She held his arm. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Succeed, I suppose. It seems to be the only solution which would annoy no one." Gently he plucked her hand from his sleeve and let it drop. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the general's door. "Don't get yourself in trouble, Sarah."
"But—"
He lowered his voice. "Can you meet me for lunch?"
She nodded.
He leaned over her desk, scribbled some Japanese characters on her memorandum pad. "This is Sawayama's seafood place, right beyond the Tokyo Shibaura building. Show this to any Japanese policeman, and he'll direct you. You can walk. It's four or five blocks, counting American style. Twelve-thirty or thereabouts."
When he saw that she still looked woebegone, he chuckled at her, "Don't."
"Don't?"
"Don't think Coppersmith is so tough. He's just doing this for my own good. People always do, you know."
"Do?"
"Do things for your own good. Don't worry, girl. You're more fussed about this than I am. This is just my business. I chose this kind of work years and years ago."
"Why?"
"Because I'm me. I'll tell you all about me at lunch." He waved at her and left.
Sarah stared after him, fear and affection clogging her throat. There was nothing to call after him.
Not after last night, when Dugan had paid her a call that started out conventionally and had ended up leaving both of them shaken by the naked imminence of love. He had been the awe-inspiring spy before then; suddenly he was her black Irishman, her Dugan. What would he be today? And all the tomorrows?
Sawayama's restaurant was not merely a seafood place; it was a roast-eel emporium. When Sarah arrived, Dugan was not identifiable at first. She felt bewildered. Then a strange shabby man in worn Western-style business clothes turned around. It was Dugan.
"I've just been telling the proprietor that as a Japanese-American working in your office, it was my responsibility to pick out a serious, succulent eel for your lunch. Don't tell me that you have not had unagi donburi before. Eel split and grilled over charcoal. It sounds fierce but it is the best thing to eat in all Japan."
She let him lead her to a small, immaculately clean private dining room. They both sat down on the matted floor. Dugan nodded his approval when he saw how expertly she had learned to sit on the floor.
When she stared at him, he nodded deprecatingly and said, "Working clothes."
He slid closer to her and talked just barely above a whisper, "I'm on my own now. Getting ready to do what your boss said. I need things that the American Army hasn't got."
"What?"
"All sorts of things. Tomorrow I'm going to a hospital to have my appendix scars changed over to Russian style and to have my teeth re-filled in a way that won't look too American. Then I'm going to buy gadgets."
"Can you take much with you?"
"This much." He held up an American matchbox. "But I'll have lenses, cutting edges, syrettes, all sorts of things. It's the Japanese miniature copy of the Nazi's spy kit. I don't think that the Americans ever developed anything like it. I'm putting my own combination of requirements together. And I'm taking lessons, too."
"What kind of lessons?"
"From a Japanese confidence man. He's been a prisoner in Siberia and just got back. He is a first-class swindler, with a big police reputation before the war. He's not merely sold fake plans for the American atomic bomb to the Russian officials here. He's sold the same plans to the same Russian twice. That's good. He and I are thinking up some really international swindles — American secrets for the Russians, American citizenship and passports for Japanese, all sorts of things. I'm actually getting the tune on the Russians from him. He has really gotten to know the feel of them."
Sarah sighed. "It sounds like a funny way to go about your errand." She wished he would talk about their own two personal selves.
The waiter came in with bowls of rice so white that each grain gleamed like a tiny pearl. A waitress followed, bowing prettily, with a tray on which the strips of eel gleamed in savory lengths about half the size of an American frankfurter. A miniature fitted dish, containing a jigsaw puzzle of odd-shaped saucers, contained condiments. Dugan spoke Japanese to the people of the restaurant and it was plain, even to Sarah's untrained ear, that his Japanese had a harsh hesitant run to its cadences. When they left he looked over at her and whispered:
"You like my American-accented Japanese? You ought to hear me being a graduate of the Imperial Military Academy!"
"Show me," she whispered back, alert to the game, welcoming it as against the miserable undertones of their meeting.
"Not I," said Dugan. "I change roles only for business. I would not have met you today in this capacity" — he indicated his sufu suit, his "European" cloth-and-patent-leather shoes—"except that I am in the role of a down-at-heel American Japanese, too much disgraced to have access to the glorious PX's and commissaries, but not disgraced enough to be put in a Japanese jail. In short, I am the kind of person who might be awfully useful to a Japanese of bent character and shady capacities. And right now my name," Dugan concluded, "is Kabashima."
Sarah used her chopsticks decorously and he, having made a gesture of infinite hospitality over their tray of roast fish, joined her. He ate greedily and made sucking sounds as he scooped the rice into his mouth. She realized that his words had been pure Dugan, but that even while he was talking sotto voce to her, he had play-acted the shabby Mr. Kabashima to perfection. It was an uncanny trick and reminded her of the time she, as a little girl, had been taken to the amusement park by a cousin and had been allowed to look into a half-transparent mirror which superimposed her own features on the background of a horrible grinning skeleton. From that experience she had gotten the goose-fleshy sensation that she might somehow, some day start coming apart, turning into two or three horrible and separate new people whom she could neither know nor like at all. Yet here was Dugan, playing shabby little Mr. Kabashima while talking like the friendly, even merry Major Michael Andreanof Dugan. (The funny middle name, she remembered, was the name of the islands where he was born.)
The Bible had said to her, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." Sarah got the impression of brooding power from the casual splitting of Dugan-Kabashima.
In lieu of talk she handed over to him a preliminary copy of his orders, which she had folded in her handbag. He smoothed out the sheet of paper and studied it while going on with his eating. Sarah got the odd impression that Dugan was photographing every detail of his orders on his memory, all the way down to the individual characteristics of the typewriter which had cut the stencil, the rubber stamp which had put TOP SECRET on it, and the mimeographing machine which had run it off. There was something strange about Dugan. Power.
Power without a source. Her black-Irish Dugan was not this man, this cutting edge of espionage. He was himself alone.
She began to think differently about the odds of the mission. Dugan, commanded to win or die by Coppersmith — commanded by military orders to overcome tremendous odds — Dugan, the clever and pleasant major who did not look like an American, nor like anything else either: black Irish, perhaps, if anything — such a Dugan — was a frail tool to pry open the tormented mysteries of a Soviet Los Alamos or to chisel into the industrial massif of a Russian Hanford or Oak Ridge.
But, that Dugan was not this Dugan. This Dugan was a weapon in his own right, a wolf among dogs, a mink among housecats. He was as affirmative as cold iron against warm flesh. For the first time she felt hesitation in becoming fond of him, liking him, wanting him to be within her life. Could her life resist such power stalking through it?
Dugan-Kabashima looked up at her, pleasantly enough. He seemed to think himself observed, because he did not allow himself the faintest trace of the Dugan expressions. He was pure Kabashima — pleasant but formal, hospitable but dry, calculating but ruinously self-revealing. It took a blink for Sarah to realize that Kabashima was Dugan.
"Don't take me too seriously," said Dugan in his assumed voice.
Sarah looked up, startled.
"I appreciate your being concerned for me. You have shown your friendship. But a man who moves as I do can leave no hostages to fortune. I cannot be a man and hold this job. Therefore I must be all job. The only life I ever have is the life I live in these roles." With sad drollery he mocked his own role of Mr. Kabashima and thickened his Japanese-accented English, "Rike ziss. Sank so much for having runch wiss me, nice American miss!" When he smiled at her, there was rue behind the smile.
"But I—" Sarah stopped. This was no time for elaborate man-and-woman chess-moves which might permit a man and woman to approach one another in a formal pantomime of daring advance and sweeping retreat. She was talking to a man who was about to catwalk the brim of death, preying upon vast and poisonous Atomsk. Dugan had already faded halfway out of sight into the shabby Mr. Kabashima; he might soon fade into complete strangeness, into distance, into extinction. Yet she would not, could not tell him, "I love you." That was too much.
People don't say "I love you" to grinning Japanese confidence men. What do people say?
With one of the bravest gestures of her life she reached out and took his arm, seizing it firmly. "I do take you seriously… Michael. And you must come back. For my sake."
The Kabashima face remained impassive, alert, courteous, remote as though paned behind ice; Dugan remained incredibly far away, behind the blind mask of his Japanese wraith.
Then his voice, and his voice alone, became Dugan:
"Don't say it!" he rasped in a rapid whisper. "Not another word of it! It'll hurt you, hurt you, Sarah. And I don't want you hurt. A man who's half Aleutian and half Irish can't have a personal life. I found that out when I was in high school." Old bitterness echoed in his words.
She started to protest, but he silenced her with a prohibitive Japanese gesture so odd that it seemed almost Masonic.
His thin hissed whisper went on. "In a week I'll be up in a plane. You know where I'll hit. Over yonder. Near Them. And who do you think I will be? Dugan? Kabashima? Anybody you or I ever heard of? No. Some new man, risen out of that place, proper to that land. Could I think of you while I slip from this person to that, become young or old, white or Asiatic? What's there to me if I dare stop long enough to be me? Do you think that I dare be myself?"
"But, Michael…"
He looked steadily and expressionlessly at her; for a moment she thought he might break down, become real and human and warm and talk back to her. But the tragic whisper went on:
"I found out. I had quartermaster duty once, for almost two years in Arkansas. The work was good and the place was fine. But I was not. I hated myself more than any American ever hated any Japanese. There was no place in the world for me. It might be their sunshine, but it wasn't mine, nor my air, nor my moon that shone at night. It belonged to them." All of a sudden his face lit up with an unearthly grin—
"So you see, my dear. I'm them. Mr. Kabashima today. Perhaps Mr. Smith or Comrade Ivanov tomorrow, or simple Farmer Wang. How can you think of them, my dear? They will appear, dissolve, reappear. I'm not the Michael you called me. I am Missterr Kabashima, sank you too much! Drink a toast to Michael, my dear, and to the walking nobody of two weeks hence!"
She lifted her teacup. Most of her portion of eel had become cold, though Dugan-Kabashima had devoured his share. Silently she toasted him, thinking the words but not saying them:
To your selves, my dear. To Atomsk. To my Dugan, if he lives.