Louie, after the war.
There was a scream, perhaps Louie’s, perhaps the Bird’s. Louie fought on, trying to crush the life out of the Bird. Then everything began to alter. Louie, on his knees with the Bird under him, looked down. The Bird’s shape shifted.
Louie was straddling Cynthia’s chest, his hands locked around her neck. Through her closing throat, she was screaming. Louie was strangling his pregnant wife.
He let go and leapt off Cynthia. She recoiled, gasping, crying out. He sat in the dark beside her, horrified, his nightclothes heavy with sweat. The sheets were twisted into ropes around him.
——
Little Cynthia Zamperini, nicknamed Cissy, was born two weeks after Christmas. Louie was so enraptured that he wouldn’t let anyone else hold her, and did all the diapering himself. But she couldn’t cleave him from alcoholism or his murderous obsession. In the sleepless stress of caring for a newborn, Louie and Cynthia fought constantly and furiously. When Cynthia’s mother came to help, she wept at the sight of the apartment. Louie drank without restraint.
One day Cynthia came home to find Louie gripping a squalling Cissy in his hands, shaking her. With a shriek, she pulled the baby away. Appalled at himself, Louie went on bender after bender. Cynthia had had enough. She called her father, and he sent her the money to go back to Miami Beach. She decided to file for divorce.
Cynthia packed her things, took the baby, and walked out. Louie was alone. All he had left was his alcohol and his resentment, the emotion that, Jean Amery would write, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”
——
On the other side of the world, early one evening in the fading days of 1948, Shizuka Watanabe sat on the lower floor of a two-story restaurant in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Outside, the street was lively with shoppers and diners. Shizuka faced the door, watching the blur of faces drifting past.
It was there that she saw him. Just outside the door, gazing in at her amid the passersby, was her dead son.
A Beckoning Whistle
FOR SHIZUKA WATANABE, THE MOMENT WHEN SHE SAW HER son must have answered a desperate hope. Two years earlier, she’d been driven up a mountain to see a dead man who looked just like Mutsuhiro. Everyone, even her relatives, had believed it was he, and the newspapers had announced Mutsuhiro’s suicide. But Shizuka had felt a trace of doubt. Perhaps she’d registered the same sensation that Louise Zamperini had felt when Louie was missing, a maternal murmur that told her that her son was still alive. She apparently said nothing of her doubts in public, but in secret, she clung to a promise that Mutsuhiro had made when he had last seen her, in Tokyo in the summer of ’46: On October 1, 1948, at seven P.M., he’d try to meet her at a restaurant in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo.
While she waited for that day, others began to question whether Mutsuhiro was really dead. Someone looked up the serial number on his army sidearm and found that it was different from that of the gun found beside the body. Mutsuhiro could easily have used another weapon, but an examination of the body had also found some features that seemed different from those of the fugitive. The detectives couldn’t rule out Watanabe as the dead man, but they couldn’t confirm definitively that it was he. The search for him resumed, and the police descended again on the Watanabes.
Tailed almost everywhere she went, her mail searched, her friends and family interrogated, Shizuka endured intense scrutiny for two years. When October 1, 1948, came, she went to the restaurant, apparently eluding her pursuers. There was her son, a living ghost.
The sight of him brought as much fear as joy. She knew that in appearing in public, standing in full view of crowds of people who had surely all heard of the manhunt for him, he was taking a huge risk. She spoke to him for only a few minutes, standing very close to him, trying to restrain the excitement in her voice. Mutsuhiro, his face grave, questioned her about the police’s tactics. He told her nothing about where he was living or what he was doing. Concerned that they would attract attention, mother and son decided to part. Mutsuhiro said that he’d see her again in two years, then slipped out the door.
The police didn’t know of the meeting, and continued to stalk Shizuka and her children. Everyone who visited them was tailed and investigated. Each time Shizuka ran errands, detectives trailed behind her. After she left each business, they went in to question those who had dealt with her. Shizuka was frequently interrogated, but she answered questions about her son’s whereabouts by referring to the suicides on Mount Mitsumine.
More than a year passed. Shizuka heard nothing from her son, and the detectives found nothing. Everywhere there were rumors about his fate. In one, he had fled across the China Sea and disappeared in Manchuria. One had him shot by American GIs; another had him being struck and killed by a train after an American soldier tied him to the track. But the most persistent stories ended in his suicide, by gunshot, by
Whether Shizuka believed these rumors is unknown. But in his last meeting with her, Mutsuhiro had given her one very troubling clue: I will meet you in two years, he had said,
——
In the second week of September 1949, an angular young man climbed down from a transcontinental train and stepped into Los Angeles. His remarkably tall blond hair fluttered on the summit of a remarkably tall head, which in turn topped a remarkably tall body. He had a direct gaze, a stern jawline, and a southern sway in his voice, the product of a childhood spent on a North Carolina dairy farm. His name was Billy Graham.
At thirty-one, Graham was the youngest college president in America, manning the helm at Northwestern Schools, a small Christian Bible school, liberal arts college, and seminary in Minneapolis. He was also the vice president of Youth for Christ International, an evangelical organization. He’d been crisscrossing the world for years, plugging his faith. The results had been mixed. His last campaign, in the Pennsylvania coal town of Altoona, had met with heckling, meager attendance, and a hollering, deranged choir member who had had to be thrown out of his services, only to return repeatedly, like a fly to spilled jelly. So much coal dust had billowed through the town that Graham had left it with his eyes burning and bloodshot.
That September, in a vacant parking lot on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Hill Street in Los Angeles, Graham and his small team threw up a 480-foot-long circus tent, set out sixty-five hundred folding chairs, poured
