orange ilima flowers against the green bowed obediently beneath the gentle, cooling flow of plumeria-tinged trade winds. Yoko, so frightened she felt she could barely breathe, fixed her eyes on the ilima blossoms that cast softly moving shadows along the edge of the pond in which big red-sashed carp glided by, Yoko envying the fishes’ tranquillity. They heard the carefree laughter of a group of Nisei boys passing them, shouldering a six-foot koa-wood surfboard, another boy “heading” an even more prized sixteen-foot olo board, once allowed only to Hawaiian royalty, the youths’ raucous chatter, and the fact that the boys seemed not to notice anyone else’s presence in the park, increasing Yoko’s fear.
The government agent stopped in the shade of a multitrunked banyan tree, well away from the hula spectators. “I’m Lieutenant Suzuki, U.S. Naval Intelligence. You know what that is?”
Yoko looked somewhat puzzled, but answered, “Police?”
“Sort of,” Lieutenant Suzuki said.
“Oh,” said Tayama, “we have a license for stall.”
Suzuki turned quickly, his right hand grasping his newspaper, trying to hit a wasp. “You have a
“A license,” explained Tayama, “for our stall.”
“No, no,” said Lieutenant Suzuki, suddenly twisting away from the wasp, smacking at it simultaneously. “Get outta here!”
“Wasp sting very bad,” said Yoko with a sweet seriousness.
“What? — oh yeah. Damn things. It’s the crowd. Too many people.”
Yoko and Tayama waited politely as the wasp came in at Suzuki’s head again. This time Suzuki’s rolled-up
“Got the bastard!” Suzuki said triumphantly, and turned to Tayama. “You’re old Arturo’s grandson, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Tayama answered, annoyed by Suzuki’s easy familiarity with his grandfather’s name but trying not to show it. The least this policeman could have said was “
“Why?” Tayama asked in as neutral a tone as he could muster, the Kempei Tai always having impressed upon their agents that while it is risky to appear defiant to investigators, it can also be dangerous to roll over like a dog in submission. Confident, patriotic citizens in America, Tayama had been told, and which he’d learned in Hawaii, didn’t have anything like the respect for, or fear of, authority that citizens in Japan displayed. Your average U.S. citizen, the Kempei Tai had told him, would just as likely question the questioner with something like, “What’s the problem?”
Lieutenant Suzuki stamped on the dead wasp again as if to emphasize his unrelenting nature. “You fish a lot?”
“Fish?” Tayama shrugged — he felt American. “Yeah,” he said easily — not “yes,” but “yeah.” “So,” he added, grinning, “there a law against fishing?”
“No,” said Suzuki, turning his attention to Yoko, who was looking respectfully at this man who felt the need to kill insects twice. “No law against it. It’s just that you’ve been seen fishing a lot near Pearl.” Suzuki was still looking intently at Yoko, the trade wind that was whispering through the profusion of banyan leaves above them gently blowing a strand of hair across her slightly parted lips.
“So?” said Tayama, fighting his anger at how Suzuki was staring at Yoko, the lieutenant’s look lascivious in its intensity. “You want me to fish somewhere else?”
“Might be an idea,” said Suzuki, without taking his eyes off Yoko.
Tayama was about to say, “It’s a free country,” but that would be pushing it. At the same time, he was aware that too easy an acquiescence might confirm any suspicions Suzuki was harboring about him or Yoko. “Okay, but what’s the problem?”
“Security,” said Suzuki, his eyes shifting suddenly to Tayama. “Navy doesn’t like people getting too close to Pearl.”
“Okay,” said Tayama. “All this trouble with Tojo, right?”
“Yeah.”
Tayama nodded thoughtfully. “He’s a troublemaker, that one,” he said, and he meant it. “They ought to do something about him.” Suzuki sensed a hard conviction in the young Nisei’s voice, a tone that made it clear that this Omura really did not like the Japanese war minister.
Tayama was feeling increasingly nervous. If Suzuki mentioned his and Yoko’s nightly walks through Moanalua Gardens, it would tell Tayama that U.S. Naval Intelligence was doing much more than a simple security check on them.
“Don’t take offense,” said Suzuki. “It’s not just you. They don’t want anyone near Pearl.”
“Fine,” said Tayama.
Suzuki said nothing, and there was an awkward silence before he gave a nod and walked away. Another wasp swooped out of the banyan toward him; the investigator frenetically struck out again with the newspaper.
“He looks so funny!” said Yoko, hand to mouth as if to stem an explosion of laughter.
“Don’t!” Tayama said. “That’d really make him—” Taking Yoko’s hand, he turned about quickly to look back at the hula competitions, and they both shook with laughter, their outburst exacerbated by the sudden release of tension, the sound of their laughter fortunately subsumed by the clapping of the hula spectators. Tayama told Yoko he would have to find a better hiding place for the concealed camera in his tackle box. No doubt the Kempei Tai would press him to keep photographing Pearl, whether he kept fishing or not. Tayama and Yoko also reaffirmed their decision never to disclose the name of their
After they made love the next morning, he showed Yoko where the camera and lenses were, in the event something happened to him before he could move them unobserved from the apartment. It had been during one of the rare times when his snoopy landlady wasn’t at home that he’d taken the Voigtlander and lenses out of the false bottom of his fishing tackle box and placed them beneath a floorboard in his apartment. “If I’m not here,” he told her, “and you have to get the camera quickly, don’t bother fiddling about with the coins I use to lever it up. Go get the claw hammer from the cupboard under the bathroom sink. It’s in with the other plumbing tools.”
She nodded. They lay in silence together in the dreamy afterglow of their passionate release, and understood each other without talking, so that when she finally did speak it was in answer to a question he had not asked, but which she’d felt. “Don’t worry, Tay. I’m strong enough. I could pull up the whole floor with my fingers.”
He squeezed her shoulders, looking into the imperturbability of her eyes. “I hope you never have to.” He started to get up.
“No, stay,” she begged.
He turned his wristwatch toward her — it read 6:20. “Already late, sweetheart. We should have been out of here ten minutes ago. I’ll go ahead, set up the stall.” He kissed her. She dragged him back down. “Let them wait. No one wants to eat till ten. Everyone sleeps in today.”
“You’re a seductress!” he said happily, pulling away, unlocking his arms from her. She
“Your body,” she said, her eyes fixed on his nakedness, “is showing me you want to stay.”
He threw her a kiss. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been pouring rain outside, his mood after making love with Yoko was always upbeat. He felt, as Grandfather Omura would have said, like a lion. The fact that the early sun was shining in a near-cloudless sky, the blue not yet paled, and there was the myriad birdsong of barred doves, mynah birds, and sparrows, amid the fragrance of plumeria, whose white blossoms stood out amid the verdant hibiscus-splashed green of indigenous plants, only elevated his mood that much more. Instead of the downcast feeling that had always accompanied his morning walk to work before he met Yoko, he now had the feeling that with her he could endure. It was true: love did conquer all.
As if it was being performed just for him, sweet music floated across the harbor from Pearl’s Ford Island, where colors were being struck as the sailors in their Sunday whites began their day. The approaching dots of planes coming in over the Waianae Mountains to the northwest, Tayama thought, must be some kind of fly-past,
