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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Louis Thorn and Haruto 'Harry' Yamada are the star attractions of a daredevil aerial stunt team that traverses Depression-era California: Eagle & Crane. The young men have a complicated relationship, due to the Thorn family's belief that the Yamadas - Japanese immigrants - stole land belonging to them. This tension is inflamed when Louis and Harry are both drawn to the same woman, Ava Brooks. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor there are changes and harsh realities to face. When one of the stunt planes crashes with two charred bodies inside, the authorities conclude that the victims are Harry and his father, escaped from a Japanese internment camp. However, as Agent Bonner is sent to confirm the facts, his ensuing investigation struggles when the details don't add up and no one seems willing to tell the truth.
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Seitenzahl: 625
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Eagle & Crane
SUZANNE RINDELL
In memory of my grandfather, Norbert
CONTENTS
1
NEWCASTLE, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 16, 1943
They bump along the country road, rolling through golden hills that are punctuated with granite boulders and dotted with clusters of oak trees that appear blackish green from afar. Every so often the road dips through a marshy patch here, a thicket of wild blackberry bushes there. Broken branches and nibbled leaves; the signs of beaver and deer. Verdant meadows and white flashes of cabbageworm moths. As they near the orchard, clouds of sparrows and finches make nervous, disorganized dives at the soft yellow weeds around the plum trees, little groups of them assembling like constellations and abruptly breaking up again, each and every tiny nervous body keeping one eye turned to the sky for the shadowy shape of a hawk soaring high above.
When they reach the break in the low split-rail fence, the sheriff steers the car onto the property and along the dirt drive, through the many rows of trees, and toward the leaning peak of the largest foothill. The morning air is laced with the sharp, peppery scent of dry grass burning.
‘Awful smoky out,’ Agent Bonner remarks, once the automobile comes to a stop.
‘Rice fields,’ the deputy says as the three men step out of the sheriff’s old Model A. ‘Somewhere down in the valley. It’s after harvest, see. This is when they burn ’em. Smoke gets trapped up here, against the foothills. Kind of sets around a spell.’
The sky is indeed filled with a thick haze, turning it the color of dull gunmetal; the sun is a flat white disc, small as a dime and lost in a sea of gray.
‘It’s routine farming business. The rice fields aren’t Jap-owned,’ Deputy Henderson continues. ‘Or if they were, they aren’t anymore.’
He is young, the right age for a soldier, but there is an air of being excluded about him, and of lingering teenage angst. Probably flat-footed. Or poor eyesight, Bonner thinks. Those are the most common 4-Fs, when you can’t tell by simply looking at a man. Henderson’s hair is the color of tarnished brass; his face and neck are very pink, the flesh cratered, ropey and swollen with acne. Just to look at him, a man could feel the sting of what it must feel like to shave.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ Sheriff Whitcomb says. At least it is obvious why he isn’t marching around in a uniform on the front: too old. He is thin, with haunted blue eyes. A pair of jowls and one tuft of white hair sprouting from an otherwise shiny dome. Bonner spied the tuft back at the station, before the sheriff reached for his hat and offered to drive the group out to the ranch. Every town seems to have a pair like this, Bonner thinks. Henderson and Whitcomb. One will eventually replace the other, and the cycle will begin again.
‘You said Louis Thorn is living in the old farmhouse now?’ the sheriff calls over his shoulder, speaking to Henderson. He is polite enough to Agent Bonner, but it is clear he prefers to pretend the agent is invisible.
‘Yes.’ Deputy Henderson answers the sheriff in a quick, eager voice. ‘Old Man Yamada signed it over to him, before they lost legal rights. So Louis owns it fair and square.’
‘That’s mighty interesting,’ Agent Bonner remarks. Bonner’s certainly heard of cases where Japanese families had signed over their property to their white neighbors before being evacuated to the camps. In every single case, the Japanese were hoping to eventually have their land, homes, and cars returned to them, which implied a kind of special trust in one’s neighbors.
‘It ain’t how you think. The whole town was mighty shocked the Yamadas did that,’ Henderson says. ‘The Thorns and the Yamadas had a long-standing dispute over this land.’
‘Why’d he sign it over to the Thorn family, then, if there was bad blood?’ Bonner asks. He looks to Whitcomb, but Whitcomb shrugs and looks away, his gaze dilating with disinterest. Bonner can tell the sheriff finds explaining town gossip to an outsider tedious.
‘Louis Thorn and Harry Yamada was friends – sort of,’ Whitcomb says, dispassionately. ‘Maybe Old Man Yamada put some stock in that. The old man didn’t have any friends who weren’t Japanese, himself. Maybe he figured it was worth a shot.’
‘Took a fat chance on that,’ Deputy Henderson grunts, reaching one hand up to rub at his pimply face. ‘I say Louis ain’t givin’ this land back. His father and grandfather always told him this land was Thorn property in the first place. They’d likely roll over in their graves if he was to think about giving it back.’
‘All right,’ Whitcomb says, pulling out his revolver, spinning the cylinder to ensure all six rounds are there, and putting it back in his holster. ‘Let’s just see if he knows anything. Keep it civilized. Should be pretty straightforward. We’re talking about a law-abiding citizen here; I don’t have any reason to believe Louis Thorn’d lie to us.’
They begin walking up the incline of the foothill toward the tidy white clapboard house nestled into the hillside just below the top. Louis Thorn might be living in it now, but Old Man Yamada had originally built it half a century ago – back when the latter was still a baby-faced young man, an early settler to the area. The house sits into the hill in a slightly cantilevered fashion, with a small wraparound porch from which a person can look out over the orchards below; neat rows of plum trees extend below one side of the house, a grove of satsumas in the middle, and almond trees on the other. The property consists of some fifty-odd acres, and as the three men climb the foothill now, they can see that the trees eventually peter out to reveal a wide, flat pasture some distance away. As they pause to look, three sets of eyes fall upon the far-off shape of a small, impromptu hangar down below, looking as though it had been thrown together hastily from available materials.
It is the place where the Yamadas kept their biplane, and where Louis Thorn purportedly still keeps it now. Or so Agent Bonner has been informed. The FBI took special note of the biplane after the two remaining members of the Yamada clan – Kenichi and Haruto ‘Harry’ Yamada – broke out of the Tule Lake Relocation Center, where they were being detained. The plane made the FBI more nervous than usual, but either way the Yamadas were to be tracked down and returned to the segregation center, and as soon as possible.
The three men arrive in front of the house and climb up the twenty or so stairs that lead up to the porch. No need to knock; their boots make a good deal of noise on the wooden planks. The screen door swings open on creaking hinges before the third man reaches the top stair.
‘May I help you fellas?’
The door claps shut. Louis Thorn, dressed in a long-sleeved undershirt and trousers, his suspenders hanging beside his hips, looks at the men standing on his porch, glancing searchingly from one to the next. One half of his face is dewy, clean-shaven. The other half is covered in lather. He is still clutching the straight razor in his left hand.
At the sight of the razor, Whitcomb lightly touches a hand to the butt of the gun on his own hip. ‘Mornin’, Louis. The way I hear it, you got the run of things here these days,’ the sheriff says, taking the lead.
‘That’s right,’ Louis responds. There is a note of caution in his voice. He looks over the sheriff’s shoulder, taking in the unfamiliar sight of Agent Bonner. For a brief instant Louis appears startled to see the FBI agent, but quickly recovers himself.
‘Looks like you settled into the place pretty good,’ the sheriff presses on.
Louis returns his gaze to the sheriff but doesn’t reply.
‘I take it you heard about them Yamada boys already.’
‘I heard,’ Louis says. His voice is low, steady.
‘Then you know we’re here to ask you if you seen ’em.’
Louis blinks. ‘Harry and Mr Yamada?’
‘Yes.’
‘I reckon this is the last place they’d come.’
‘So you’re telling me you ain’t seen them?’ the sheriff prods.
‘No.’
‘And you wouldn’t be inclined to help those Yamada boys if they came knocking?’
‘I told you, I haven’t seen them since.’
‘All right, all right,’ the sheriff relents. ‘You understand, we gotta ask, Louis. Agent Bonner here can’t go about his business till them boys have been found.’
‘Mr Thorn.’ Agent Bonner introduces himself, clearing his throat and extending his hand. Louis hesitates, then passes the straight razor to his other hand. The handshake is curt.
‘Look here, Louis,’ the sheriff continues, ‘I don’t know what you got goin’ on in that head of yours. Maybe you got it in your head to protect these fellers, even if they’re Japs. Or maybe,’ he says, lowering his voice, ‘you’ve gotten accustomed to being a property owner. Ain’t no crime in that. Maybe if they came back here they wouldn’t exactly be welcome. Like I said … I don’t know what you got goin’ on in that head of yours. But, to tell you the truth, I’m an old man, and I could give two shits.’
Whitcomb pauses, certain that he has everyone’s attention now.
‘What I do know,’ the sheriff adds, ‘is that it would make all of our lives a hell of a lot easier if you let us take a look around the property and see if we can’t prove you’re telling us the truth.’
Louis is silent a moment. ‘All right,’ he finally answers.
The sheriff nods. Louis moves as if to go back inside the house to finish his shave.
‘The biplane,’ Agent Bonner says, reminding everyone.
‘Oh,’ the sheriff says, turning back to Louis. ‘The agent here has to ask you some questions about that airplane being kept on the property …’
‘Yes?’
‘How’d that plane come into your possession?’ Bonner begins.
Louis hesitates. ‘Bank auction,’ he says.
Bonner has read the file: he knows that Louis is skipping details, leaving out the part where Kenichi Yamada – not Louis – bought the plane at a bank auction, and only later signed it over to Louis.
‘We used it for our flying circus act, but I don’t do that stuff anymore. I work for the US Army Air Corps as an instructor up at the Lincoln airfield. I train flyboys headed to the Pacific, mostly.’
Bonner already knows this, too, but does not interrupt. It was always better to let people do their own telling.
‘Do both Yamada men know how to fly the plane?’ Bonner asks.
Louis shakes his head. ‘Only Harry.’ He pauses, then repeats Harry’s full name as though to clarify. ‘Haruto Yamada.’
‘And before your instructor days, you and Haruto Yamada’ – Agent Bonner flips open a notebook – ‘you charged spectators to watch you perform stunts in this plane? That’s how the two of you became friendly?’
Louis shrugs. ‘Originally, we both worked for Earl Shaw and put on a barnstorming act for his flying circus. Later we had our own act … it was called Eagle & Crane.’
‘Eagle & Crane?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Sounds mighty …’ Agent Bonner pauses, looking into the air for the proper word. ‘Showy.’ Louis narrows his eyes just slightly at Bonner, but Bonner presses on. ‘What sort of tricks did you perform?’
‘Oh, wing walking and barrel rolls and such,’ Louis replies. ‘With Earl’s show, sometimes we flew two planes in formation, did loop-the-loops. Later it was more choreographed stunts. Parachute jumps, that type of thing.’
Bonner nods. He scribbles a note.
‘Say …’ Louis asks, his eyes narrowing again. ‘Why so many questions about our business with the plane?’
‘Well,’ Bonner says, clearing his throat, ‘it goes without saying that the Bureau feels an escaped evacuee who knows how to fly an airplane might be a liability.’
Louis doesn’t comment. Bonner knows he’s obligated to ask the questions the FBI expects him to ask, so he presses on.
‘Do you have any reason to believe Mr Yamada might attempt to gain access to your biplane?’
Louis pauses, considering. He shakes his head.
‘If Haruto Yamada was able to gain access to the biplane, do you have any reason to believe he might use his flying skills to commit an act of war?’
‘An act of war?’ Louis repeats. ‘You mean hurt folks with the plane somehow?’
‘Yeah,’ Deputy Henderson suddenly chimes in. ‘I’ll be damned if Pearl Harbor ain’t taught us all about how vicious those Japs can be – can’t put anything past a-one of ’em!’
Louis’s head snaps irritably in Deputy Henderson’s direction. His hand holding the straight razor twitches.
‘No,’ Louis answers, returning his attention to Agent Bonner. ‘I don’t think Harry would do anything along those lines. It’s not … it’s not Harry.’
‘You sound defensive on Harry’s behalf,’ Bonner remarks.
‘I’m not defensive.’ Louis stiffens. ‘I’m just not going to say something is one way when I know it’s another. Harry ain’t about to steal the Stearman and crash it.’
As if by the most absurd cue, their ears suddenly prick to the sound of an airplane engine droning in the distance. Louis knows from the sound of it that the plane is flying at an unusually high altitude, the steady whine of the engine humming like a dying mosquito.
All four men – Louis included – hurry to the railing at the edge of the porch and look up. Sure enough, there in the sky is the familiar silhouette of the Stearman. The group stares at the plane, powerless and immobile as they watch it inch across the sky, all of them mute as they listen to it drone along.
But then they hear an even more alarming noise. The engine sputters and coughs, and for one long, horrendous second shudders loudly, until finally it goes silent. It is a sequence of sounds Louis has never heard the airplane make before, a noise ever so slightly different from the stalling noise it makes if you pull up too hard … and yet, the second he hears it, Louis recognizes the sound with a sick feeling in his gut: it is the engine running out of gas.
What happens next is baffling. The biplane falls from the sky, a flying thing no longer, like Icarus and his melted wings. No one pulls up on the nose or raises the wing flaps. Instead it drops like a stone, or – even swifter – like a bird diving on purpose. But a bird can recover from such a dive. A small biplane cannot – that is, not without an expert pilot intent on maneuvering the contraption for all it was worth.
The men standing on the porch hold their breath as the biplane plummets. Then all four of them reactively wince, steeling themselves as it makes impact, nose-first, directly into the makeshift hangar. A small fireball leaps into the air, then transforms into a sea of black smoke.
The smoke adds to the thick haze in the air, completely blotting out the September sun.
‘Well … shoot,’ Whitcomb mutters. He spits onto the porch and turns now to Louis Thorn. ‘You care to revise your statement, son?’
2
The crash site belches black, oily smoke while the local fire engine nearly pumps the well on the Yamada ranch dry. When the color of the thick smoke finally changes from black to white, the firemen begin to breathe more easily behind their homemade masks of wetted cloth, knowing they have turned the tide on the fire. Now it is only a matter of time until the entirety of the charred mass quiets down to a steamy hiss. The air for miles around smells strange, laced with ash, the sickly scent of burning rubber, and the queer metallic odor that usually precedes a large thunderstorm.
Of the two bodies found in the wreckage, one is clearly that of the elderly Jap, Kenichi Yamada. The other is presumed to be the body of his son, Haruto Yamada. The body itself is badly charred, but a singed, tattered version of the US Army uniform that had been issued to Haruto Yamada shortly before he went AWOL still clings to the remains as they pull the body from the burning mess.
Despite the chaos at the crash site, Bonner takes care never to lose track of Louis Thorn. In particular, he studies Louis’s expression carefully when the two bodies are covered with sheets and lifted away on stretchers. Maybe you’ve gotten accustomed to being a property owner … Sheriff Whitcomb had said to Louis earlier on the porch. Maybe if the Yamadas came back here they wouldn’t exactly be welcome. Bonner had wondered if Louis was helping to hide the escaped evacuees. Now Bonner must consider the possibility that Louis is, in fact, involved in a much darker crime.
When the commotion begins to die down, Bonner sidles up to Louis.
‘I think we ought to continue our conversation, Mr Thorn,’ Bonner suggests in a firm but gentle voice.
Louis turns to stare at Bonner with a dazed expression. He is still half-dressed and half-shaven. Smudges of black grease and specks of tar from the crash complement the few smears of shaving lather still clinging to his cheek.
‘How about we go back up to the house and sit down?’ Bonner presses.
Louis’s dazed expression melts, then sharpens, as though coming back into focus. He looks down at the ground. His brow furrows.
‘All right,’ he agrees.
Several minutes later, the two men sit down to talk in the front parlor of the old Yamada house. They are perched across from each other on a pair of matching pink silk settees. In fact, the entire room is a study in symmetry. Two silk settees. Two small square glass coffee tables between them. Two bookshelves made of bamboo. Four beautiful silk scrolls hanging on the walls, all of them displaying inky watercolors of cranes and fish and far-off mountains. It is a curious blend of East and West: a series of treasured heirlooms presumably brought over from Japan, intermingled with the bulky pink settees and Western-style coffee tables.
With the other half of his shave yet to be completed, Louis managed to splash some water on his face once they got up to the house, wiping away the crust of dried lather and smudges of black grease. Despite the fact that half his face is still covered in thin, fair stubble, he’d put on fresh clothes and quickly wetted and combed his hair, too, and now, sitting across from Bonner, Louis seems cleaner, more collected. Bonner takes a closer look at Louis, assessing the details.
Louis is twenty-three, but looking at him now, Bonner notices he is distinctly boyish. With his dark blond hair, freckled nose, and blue eyes, Louis embodies the popular image of an all-American boy. Now Bonner wonders if that wholesome impression is part of a façade.
Louis can’t know it, but he is the reason Bonner requested the Yamada case. In recent months, Bonner had developed an aversion to fieldwork and specifically requested desk duty. His fellow agents said he was nuts to volunteer for such drudgery, but Bonner was relieved to work in an office, away from the Japanese segregation centers, away from the manhunts for Japanese Americans considered uncooperative with the order to evacuate. Bonner didn’t care that his peers predicted he would get bored. Boredom was a better feeling than some of the other feelings he’d had since his job began to revolve around the enforcement of Executive Order 9066.
However, when reports of two escaped evacuees from Tule Lake meant the FBI was going to send an agent to Newcastle, California, and interview the young man living on the Yamadas’ old property – a fellow by the last name of Thorn – Bonner asked to be put on the case, back in the field, because the name and location held a special significance for him.
I figured you’d come to your senses sooner or later, his boss, Reed, said in an approving tone, oblivious to Bonner’s ulterior motive. Reed approved his request and assigned Bonner to the case, which was how Bonner now found himself sitting across from Louis Thorn.
Louis is visibly nervous; it would be natural for the crash to set him on edge, but perhaps it is something more than that, Bonner thinks. Perhaps he senses Bonner’s special interest in him. Or perhaps Louis had something to do with the crash and has something to hide. Louis turns his head as though he hears a sound outside, and the unshaved stubble on one half of his face catches in the light from the window, the hair gleaming with slight traces of red and gold. It is Louis’s complexion that draws the agent’s attention now, and not because of Louis’s comical shave. Bonner is surprised he didn’t notice before: bruises bloom over both cheekbones, and Louis sports a fresh cut under one eye.
‘Looks like somebody roughed you up pretty good,’ Bonner comments.
Louis touches a self-conscious hand to one cheek – the more naked, clean-shaven one.
‘I went to get a drink at the saloon in town the other night,’ Louis says. ‘Got into a little scuffle.’
‘How many nights ago?’
‘Three.’
The bruises and the cut look more recent than that, but Bonner nods with brisk affability.
‘I hope you don’t mind if I verify that.’
‘Sure,’ Louis replies. ‘I’ll give you the name of the bartender down that way – will that help?’
Bonner thinks to himself, Louis Thorn is either telling the truth, or else is a clever, cool customer. He has an earnest air, but something doesn’t sit right. Aloud, Bonner says, ‘I’d be much obliged.’
Sensing Louis’s distracted mind-set, Bonner clears his throat. A broadcast squawks loudly from a Zenith radio perched on the mantel – one of the few objects in the room without a symmetrical twin. War updates, turned up to top volume.
‘That yours?’ Bonner asks idly.
‘Course,’ Louis replies. ‘The Yamadas turned theirs in.’
Louis means the Yamadas obeyed the order to turn the radio they owned over to the US authorities as an item of contraband that those of Japanese ancestry were not allowed to retain after Pearl Harbor.
‘They complied and never did anything fishy,’ Louis adds. He pauses. ‘Till now, I suppose.’ He shifts on the settee and changes tack. ‘Anyway, some weeks back I bought a new radio so I could follow—’ His voice breaks off. ‘Well, so I could follow all the news about the war, I guess,’ he finally finishes.
The kid must’ve been listening to it while he was shaving – maybe for the company, Bonner thinks. Bonner does that himself from time to time; it is a lonely thing to live alone, probably even more so in a strange house. But now it feels as though the radio is a disturbance, a small but terrible shrieking emanating from the corner of the room, intruding upon any real shot at conversation. Bonner rises from the settee and points.
‘May I?’
Louis nods, and Bonner switches off the radio. A dense quiet floods the room in a cool, relieving wave. Bonner lets the silence settle a little before breaking it again. He clears his throat once more.
‘Earlier you insisted the Yamadas weren’t likely to try to commandeer the biplane,’ Bonner says.
Louis raises a wary eyebrow at the agent but says nothing.
‘Doesn’t look like that turned out to be the case.’
Louis remains silent.
‘What do you think caused the crash? Do you believe it was an accident? Or do you think there was a target that the two Yamada men had in mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ Louis repeats. ‘I think I made it pretty clear I don’t think they had the inclination to hurt anyone.’
Agent Bonner pauses. The railroad lines that came up from Sacramento through the big station in Roseville were regularly used by the military to transport ammunitions manufactured in the Bay Area. Such a target would be ideal for a Japanese spy. And yet, that was not where the biplane had ultimately crashed. If they were trying to hurt someone other than themselves, they had failed spectacularly.
‘Seems lucky for us that it crashed directly down on the empty hangar,’ Bonner says now.
Louis grunts. ‘Easy for you to say. Weren’t your hangar.’ He pauses and grunts again. ‘Or your biplane.’
‘You said Harry was the one who knew how to fly the biplane?’ Bonner continues.
‘Yes.’
‘And his father did not?’
‘No.’
Agent Bonner must admit: the crash hadn’t hurt anyone except the two men in the plane. This means all possibilities must be explored and ruled out in his report. He clears his throat. ‘Do you have any idea whether Harry or his father may have been … well … despondent? Ready to give up on the world?’
Louis looks at Bonner for a moment before answering. ‘You mean ready to die by his own hand? That don’t sound like Harry to me.’ He pauses, then continues: ‘But I don’t imagine he or Mr Yamada were too cheerful about the camp they were in.’
‘So you do or you don’t think someone crashed that biplane on purpose?’
Louis shakes his head, reticent. ‘I don’t think anything. All I know is what I saw today, same as you.’
Bonner leans back and sighs. ‘Well, that’s just it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know much about planes, but I’ve always been under the impression that they don’t just drop like that from the sky – that even if the engine dies, there’s some sort of maneuvering a pilot will try to do.’
Louis appears to relent. ‘That’s generally true, I suppose,’ he says.
‘And as far as I could tell, Harry didn’t attempt any of that,’ Bonner says. ‘He didn’t try to perform any emergency maneuvers.’
‘No. It didn’t look like it.’
‘Why wouldn’t he?’
‘I can’t answer that,’ Louis says.
Suddenly, the men are interrupted. A back door slams, footsteps move swiftly through the house, and a young woman rushes into the front parlor.
‘Oh!’ she utters, stopping short when she catches sight of Agent Bonner perched on the settee opposite Louis. The young woman freezes, a deer caught in headlights. Something about her suggests a sense of urgency abruptly put on hold. It is as if she has blown in on a gust of wind; a fresh hint of the day outside – the Indian summer, the crisp leaves, the terrible burning scent of the airplane crash – swirls in the rush of air that arrives with her.
‘I didn’t know you had a guest,’ she says to Louis.
Bonner takes a closer look at the young woman. She is pretty, but in a spritely, tomboyish manner. Her red hair is smartly bobbed, its coppery color as bright as a flame. She is skinny as a whip, and attired in a crisp white shirt and a pair of men’s riding trousers.
‘Did you see the crash?’ Louis asks, a note of wary caution in his voice.
‘Yes,’ the young woman answers. ‘Isn’t it awful?’
‘Harry and Mr Yamada …’ Louis says.
‘Yes,’ the woman replies in a somber tone. ‘I know.’
The young woman lowers her eyes to stare down at the rug beneath her feet, and after a second or two Louis follows suit, leaving Agent Bonner to glance back and forth between the two of them as though trying to make up his mind about something. He stands.
‘I’m Agent Bonner,’ he introduces himself to the young woman, holding out his hand. ‘The Federal Bureau of Investigation sent me here to make some inquiries about the Yamadas.’
‘Oh!’ the young woman exclaims, accepting Bonner’s hand and shaking it firmly. ‘Of course. I’m so sorry. My name is Ava Brooks.’
Bonner racks his brain, trying to guess at the relation between Ava Brooks and Louis Thorn. Sweethearts? Neighbors? She certainly entered the room as though she were familiar with the place.
‘Ava has been helping to run the orchards while the Yamadas ain’t here,’ Louis offers, as though reading Bonner’s mind.
‘Oh.’ Bonner nods and sits back down. ‘I see. And you … live on the property?’ While he has no reason to doubt them, Ava doesn’t exactly look like a typical foreman. Bonner wonders if there still isn’t something more between them.
‘I live nearby,’ Ava replies. Her tone has shifted and is slightly stiff, brusque. Bonner considers perhaps she was offended by what his question implied. ‘It’s a lot of work, keeping the orchards running without the Yamadas,’ she adds defensively.
‘“Without the Yamadas”? It sounds as if you knew them.’
‘Of course I knew them.’
This catches Bonner’s attention. He retrieves his notebook and pencil again from his inside jacket pocket. ‘If you’re aware of the crash, then I assume you’re also aware of the fact that the two Yamada men left the camp at Tule Lake without permission. I’m investigating their case.’ He pauses. ‘Would you mind telling me how you knew them? Have you always helped out in the orchards?’
Ava bites her lip. ‘No. I suppose I first met Harry Yamada when he joined my stepfather’s barnstorming troupe.’ She glances at Louis. ‘Louis and Harry joined at the same time.’
Bonner takes this in, slightly caught off guard. ‘I see. You were all members of this …’ He struggles to recall the details Louis gave him earlier, in order to describe it properly. ‘… flying circus act?’
‘Yes,’ says Ava. ‘More or less. That’s how we met.’
‘Interesting,’ Bonner remarks. ‘Did you also perform daredevil stunts?’ Women didn’t ordinarily fly planes – much less dance on the wings – but from the looks of Ava, Bonner wouldn’t put it past her.
Louis cuts in. ‘No – Ava doesn’t fly. She’s afraid of heights. Never been up in the air, as a matter of fact.’
Agent Bonner frowns and raises an eyebrow. ‘You were employed by a flying circus troupe, but you’re afraid of heights and won’t go up in an airplane?’
‘I sold tickets for airplane rides,’ Ava answers. ‘And to use the word “employed”, Agent Bonner, is to imply that I was paid for my work. It was my stepfather’s nutty idea to start a barnstorming act. Back when Earl first started the show I was still a kid, and my mother and I were just along to sell tickets and lemonade.’
‘Traveling with a flying circus … Sounds like a rather remarkable childhood,’ Bonner says.
Ava shrugs. ‘It beat standing on the breadline,’ she replies.
She has a point: the Depression was unbearable for most families. If there is one thing good about this war, Bonner thinks, it’s the effect on the nation’s economy. Not exactly a fair trade-off, but still.
‘Your stepfather – Earl, was it?’
‘Earl Shaw,’ Ava says. She nods, but something in her face hardens at the same time.
‘Yes.’ Bonner flips a page in his notebook. ‘Louis mentioned him earlier. He was the founder of the flying circus and originally the owner of the biplane that crashed today?’
‘I reckon that’s the way of it, yes,’ Ava replies.
‘Can you arrange for me to speak to him?’ Bonner asks.
‘Why?’
Bonner blinks. ‘Well, two Japanese detainees broke out of the Tule Lake Relocation Center, stole a biplane, and crashed it. And that biplane just so happens to have belonged to your stepfather at one point – not to mention the fact you just told me Haruto Yamada once worked for your stepfather. That seems as good a reason as any to want to talk to him, doesn’t it?’
Ava frowns. ‘All right, sure,’ she says. ‘But the problem is, I haven’t the faintest idea where to find Earl, so I’m not certain I can help you.’
‘No one’s seen Earl in over three years,’ Louis supplies.
Agent Bonner is silent, thinking. During this brief pause, something shifts in Ava’s demeanor. She suddenly becomes bolder. She straightens her spine and takes a breath, all business.
‘I don’t mean to be rude, Mr Bonner,’ she says, ‘but if you’re nearly finished with your business here …?’
Again Bonner blinks at her, surprised. He realizes he is being thrown out.
‘I’d like to talk to Louis,’ Ava continues, ‘and there are things that need doing around the orchard …’
Bonner shakes himself, hiding his irritation. ‘Of course,’ he replies. He stands and straightens his suit. A tall man, Bonner dwarfs the room. ‘But I’d like to talk to you more at a later date,’ he says to Louis. He turns to Ava. ‘I’d like to talk to both of you more.’
‘Well, you’ve proven you clearly know where to find us,’ Ava says, a hard note in her singsong voice. The rote words are supplemented with a plastic smile. After ten minutes with the young lady, Bonner already knows: she is not the type to hide her disdain.
Louis stands, looking embarrassed by Ava’s behavior. ‘I’ll see you out,’ he says.
Ava retreats to the kitchen. At the front door, the two men shake hands.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Agent Bonner promises.
‘All right,’ Louis says.
‘Oh,’ Bonner says, pausing and turning back. He fishes out his notepad and pencil one last time. ‘What was the name of the man you said tends bar in town?’
Louis blinks.
‘You said you could give me the name of the bartender who was there the night you got into that scuffle we discussed,’ Bonner prompts in a helpful tone.
There is a pause as Louis stiffens.
‘Joe,’ he says finally. ‘Joe Abbott is his name.’
‘Very good,’ Bonner says, scribbling the name into his notebook.
‘And the name of the bar?’
‘Murphy’s Saloon.’
Bonner nods and scribbles that down as well.
‘All right, then. You take care, now,’ he says to Louis.
‘You, too.’
Bonner steps out onto the porch where, hours ago, he first met Louis Thorn, and hears the porch door slap shut behind him.
And with that, Agent Bonner finds himself alone again. Looking around and seeing no car, he remembers that the sheriff drove him over to the former Yamada property and that Bonner left his Bureau car parked in front of the sheriff’s office. He shades his eyes and glances up at the late-afternoon sun beating down with surprising heat despite the thick smoke now in the air.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Bonner mutters, putting his fedora on. He sighs and takes his jacket off, folding it over his arm and beginning the long, dusty walk back into town.
3
Louis and Ava peep through the curtains, watching the shape of the FBI agent moving down the drive. Bonner is ambling slowly – probably on account of the heat, Louis thinks.
‘I reckon I ought to have offered to drive him into town,’ Louis comments.
‘No. I think you ought to stay away from him,’ Ava says. ‘As much as possible.’ She drops the corner of curtain and steps away from the window, lowering her voice. ‘He’ll be back for certain. He may have located the Yamadas, but he believes you had something to do with the crash.’
Louis looks at her. She waits for him to say, I didn’t, but he says nothing. The air between them is awkward. First there is the oppressive weight of the crash, the deaths … not to mention, the last time Louis saw her, Ava was in a bed, naked. That was only twenty-four hours ago. But neither of them will talk about that now. Not directly. It feels like a lifetime has passed since then.
‘That agent,’ Ava says now. ‘He looks an awful lot like—’
‘I know,’ Louis snaps in a low voice.
Feeling sympathetic, Ava reaches out to touch his shoulder, but the second she makes contact, Louis flinches as though she has stung him.
Fine, Ava thinks. She walks to the kitchen and frowns at the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Louis has kept the rest of the place pristine but, like a typical man, has turned a blind eye to the kitchen. The bachelor life, Ava thinks. She sighs and rolls up her sleeves, then fits the shallow metal washtub into one half of the sink, filling it up with hot water.
‘You don’t have to wash those,’ Louis says, following her into the kitchen and eyeing what she is up to.
‘Somebody has to,’ Ava says. ‘Besides, Mrs Yamada would not approve of her kitchen being treated like this.’
‘It’s not all my mess,’ Louis reminds Ava, speaking to her turned back. ‘I wasn’t here by myself.’
She freezes where she stands at the sink, looks down at the filling water, and sighs. She turns the spigot off. ‘I know,’ she says. She plunges her hands into the water and sets about washing a plate. Plates and cups first, her mother always said, and pots and pans last. Ava is hardly the domestic type, but after years of traveling up and down California and making camp with a group of barnstormers, cleaning up after men has become ingrained in her, like it or not.
‘Honestly,’ Louis says, ‘you don’t have to do that.’
‘Go and shave the other half of your face,’ Ava replies. She turns to look at him and manages a weak smile, an imitation of her normally jaunty self. ‘You look ridiculous. Even more ridiculous than usual.’
Louis knows this isn’t an accurate slight against his looks. This is simply how Ava used to joke – with both of them: Louis and Harry. She is trying to put him at ease, attempting to force a small flicker of normal life in the midst of gruesome disaster.
Louis walks away without saying anything further, and Ava is left alone to ruminate over the rapidly graying dishwater.
Over the kitchen sink is a large window. It faces west, lining up almost exactly in the direction of the airplane hangar, the latter still sending a dirty column of leftover smoke into the sky. Ava finds it impossible not to stare out the window at the hazy plume as she washes, rinses, and sets each dish absentmindedly on the drain board.
Since the moment she rushed into the parlor and found him sitting with the FBI agent, Ava hasn’t been able to read Louis. Is he even sad? She knows this is Louis’s way: when emotions run high, he retreats into a stoic shell of himself. But she also knows Louis was angry with Harry … so very angry. And he had his reasons to be angry. She tried to decipher his expression when he’d said, Did you see the crash? Harry and Mr Yamada … She’d held Louis’s gaze for only a moment or two, but then something she glimpsed in his eyes made her look away, acutely uncomfortable. She can tell the FBI agent suspects Louis had something to do with the crash, and Ava understands that the agent has a reason to wonder.
Ava rinses the final frying pan and dries her hands on a dish towel as she continues to stare out the window. The firemen were able to extinguish the blaze; she knows there are no more flames, but the crash site is still so hot, smoke continues to rise, the dirty haze like a permanent smudge marking the sky. Looking at it, Ava feels utterly hollow. Not only is it terribly grim to think of the two dead bodies the firemen pulled from the wreckage down there, but Ava is also aware she is watching a part of her past turn to ash.
The fact of the crash means that the last of the two biplanes, Castor and Pollux, are gone: two twins, forever separated. The first biplane vanished into the black pit of Earl’s debt, and the second is now a strangled heap of engine parts and smoldering metal. It is strange to comprehend: so many of Ava’s formative years revolved around those two airplanes.
Sounds like a rather remarkable childhood, Agent Bonner had said. Perhaps it was. Ava can hardly remember a time when she didn’t hear the thrumming whine of airplane engines or wake up to two planes sputtering through the air as a pair of pilots practiced trick after trick: loop-the-loops, barrel rolls, falling leaves, harrowingly close fly-bys that, during shows, made the spectators down below gasp. All of these aeronautical feats were commonplace in the realm of Ava’s life – as was the constant camping, traveling from farm town to farm town. They would start at one end of California’s Central Valley and travel down to the opposite end, then start back north again. They took only the stormiest months of the winter off, and only then because Earl had yet to figure out a way to draw a crowd when it was pissing down rain.
It had been a simple outfit, at first: Earl hired Buzz and Hutch, a pair of pilots who were hard up for work, and the idea was mainly to sell airplane rides to curious farmers (and their wives and children), to fly into town with the festive air of a carnival, and then disappear before the authorities came sniffing around. Mostly, the main thing Ava recalled from her ‘rather remarkable childhood’ was a sense of loneliness.
But everything changed when Louis Thorn and Harry Yamada joined their barnstorming act.
‘Eagle’ and ‘Crane’ – those were the names that the other two pilots eventually bestowed upon Louis and Harry. Buzz and Hutch had insisted every pilot worth his salt needed a ‘call sign.’ They nicknamed Louis for his blond, freckled, all-American looks, and Harry … well, they named Harry after a bird, too, to match Louis. But being about as sensitive and diplomatic as a pair of sledgehammers, Buzz and Hutch declared it ought to be a ‘Jap’ bird – hence Crane.
With Louis and Harry on board, the show escalated, eventually growing into something bigger and more extraordinary than anything Earl had ever imagined. Ava, too. Her life had been unexpectedly changed by Eagle & Crane; she had, in her own way, fallen in love with them both.
Eagle & Crane. Louis and Harry. Ava continues to peer out the window, full of the awareness that her love for the two young men – and one in particular – is the cause of the smoke she is watching now, steadily rising into the air.
4
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
1924–1934
There had, of course, existed a time before Ava and her mother joined the traveling barnstorming spectacle. When she thought even further back, Ava could remember a time before they lived like vagabonds out of a caravan, a time before the view out her window changed weekly, a time before the sound of biplanes constantly droned overhead.
When she closed her eyes and concentrated, Ava could remember all the way back to a little Spanish-style bungalow in Los Angeles. She remembered the bright green of the small, sloped lawn, how the afternoon light burnished the house in gold and how bougainvillea crept along the champagne-colored stucco, enveloping the arched doorway in fuchsia flames. She remembered how ripe oranges materialized in winter: giant, heavy globes, they bent the limbs of a tree in the backyard, bobbing on the branches like Christmas ornaments. A suit of armor stood at attention in one of the hallways inside the house – a prop auctioned off by a movie studio and the sort of faux-medieval décor preferred in those days by plenty of respectable Angelenos, who seemed bent on creating their own mythologies and coats of arms.
For the first five or six years of Ava’s childhood in that house, the atmosphere was routine, cheerful. Her mother left the radio switched on all day while she puttered about doing chores; Helen Kane chastised folks to ‘button up your overcoat’ and Cole Porter insisted, ‘Let’s misbehave!!!’ as her mother hummed along and pinned laundry to a line outside. It was difficult to remember rain ever falling during her childhood – in that backyard, or upon that roof, or even in Los Angeles more generally; it seemed the sun shone every day, except in June, when a dull fog rolled in off the Pacific and hung persistently in the air, thick and shapeless, gray as a dull nickel.
Ava remembered her father – red-haired, like Ava herself – as he sat bent over a desk, doing calculations while wearing a green banker’s visor. Ava was still quite young, but she possessed a dim understanding that the visor fit in with her father’s profession somehow. His job had something to do with the banks; it seemed he was always on the telephone to New York. He worked in an office downtown, a tall-ceilinged, mahogany-paneled space that was perpetually hazy with cigarette smoke, the blinds partially drawn against the brash glare of the blinding Los Angeles sunshine outside. Ava’s mother took Ava to visit him there a handful of times, and her father had always looked busy, distracted. He kept very early hours, often rising before the sun to work, but he also finished early. Bankers’ hours, he called them. In the evenings he sometimes took Ava and her mother to a baseball game, or else a picture show. If they were bound for the movie house, her mother liked to dress up, to set her dark hair in pin waves. More often than not, she even reached for the garden scissors and clipped a pair of camellias from one of the shrubs that grew on their front lawn, insisting they each tuck one over an ear.
Ava’s father, usually a fairly serious man, would laugh, and grin, and wolf-whistle at the two of them, and say things like What a pair of movie stars! How’d a fella like me ever get so lucky to be surrounded by two such gorgeous dolls?
Perhaps all little girls believe their mothers are glamorous, but Ava suspected hers was more glamorous than most. Ava’s mother’s name, Cleo, was short for Cleopatra. Her mother looked the part: a full red mouth, regal cheekbones, and thick, black, silky hair – the opposite of Ava, whose pale pink lips made a small, demure bow, and whose red hair sprouted from her head like a flame. Cleo also possessed the kind of hourglass figure that was difficult to hide, no matter what she wore. It was difficult not to notice the way people reacted to her mother. Even when she was only running simple errands, men and women alike constantly threw looks at her mother.
Unfortunately, Ava’s mother was fickle when it came to the kind of attention she received: sometimes she liked it, but more often than not it proved too much for her to bear. The contradiction puzzled Ava. Her mother had a fanciful nature and loved to dress up, yet she could be painfully withdrawn. Finally, one day, it dawned on Ava: her mother wasn’t dressing to attract notice; she was ‘playing dress-up.’ Too much attention gave Cleo clammy hands and a tight feeling behind her eyes. When life made demands on her, Cleo got terrible headaches. During such times, she retreated to her bed and drew the curtains, transforming day into night.
Let’s allow your mother to rest, Ava’s father would say if he was home when Cleo got one of her headaches. He would take Ava for a walk or buy her an ice cream, and by the time they returned, her mother would be back on her feet, humming a quiet tune and cooking some supper.
The Great Crash of ’29 happened on a Tuesday, around the time of Halloween. Ava remembered the three pumpkins they had carved and set out on the terra-cotta steps that led up to their little Spanish bungalow. Ava had arranged the pumpkins in descending size to resemble her family: a daddy, a mommy, and a baby.
That afternoon, Ava’s mother walked to the kindergarten schoolyard to fetch Ava once school was out, and on the walk home they stopped at the corner store to buy a few groceries. When they approached their house, Ava noticed her father’s Ford coupe parked at the curb, indicating he’d finished the workday and come home. This wasn’t terribly unusual: Ava figured he was keeping ‘bankers’ hours,’ just as he said. Recently he’d explained to Ava, too, that clocks kept different time in New York, so that while it was one time here, it was a different time there.
She skipped happily enough up the steps, but as she passed the three pumpkins, Ava felt a curious chill.
Inside, all was quiet. Ava went to her room to play. She assumed her mother would pop her head into her father’s office to chirp out a quick greeting, then stow the market items in the kitchen icebox. Only a minute or so had passed when Ava heard the bloodcurdling scream. She dropped the hard plastic horse figurine she was holding and ran toward her mother’s cries.
A half dozen eggs were splattered on the hallway floor just outside her father’s office, yolks oozing from their broken shells. Her mother had fled to the front parlor and sat sniveling on the settee, shuddering as though the bullet had ripped through her, too. Black mascara was already beginning to run down her face. No one stopped Ava from looking into the office, and so she did, just to check. Her father’s forehead was slumped over his desk, lifeless. His hand still clutched the revolver. Ava was five at the time – much too young to understand what she was seeing. And yet, somehow, she did.
Seeing her father, his head tipped upon the desk, his skull looking as fragile as one of the eggshells lying in a shattered heap on the floor, Ava only understood one thing: something had broken her father, and as a consequence he had gone someplace she and her mother could not follow. He was no longer in the room, and he was not coming back anytime soon.
They remained in the little Spanish bungalow for a time. Policemen came and went and her father’s body was taken away, but there was little way for life to resume as it had been before. When Ava’s mother learned that her husband had died with not a penny to his name and owing debts, she contracted one of her terrible headaches and retreated to her bedroom. When Ava checked on her, Cleo was curled up in bed like a child. Ava remembered peeking through a crack in the door and staring at the curve of her mother’s back, her mother’s birdlike bones showing through her satin nightgown, the ridges of her spine like a sagging string of pearls.
Ava turned six. Unable to rouse her mother from bed in the mornings, Ava found the jar where her mother kept grocery money, purchased milk and white bread from the corner store, and walked herself to and from school. But she sensed even this arrangement – reduced as it was – could not hold up for very long. Unopened mail was piling up at their house. Notices appeared, tacked up to their front door. Collectors began knocking, while Ava’s mother only burrowed deeper under the bedsheets, hiding like a frightened animal, until finally one day the collectors returned with the police.
The officers put them out on the street with only what they could carry. Ava felt a pang to realize yet another of her mother’s mistakes: perhaps they might’ve sold their possessions. Fake Hollywood prop or not, she wondered what the suit of armor might’ve fetched in price.
All they had left now was the cash Ava’s mother had long ago squirreled away in an old hatbox. They found an apartment for rent by the week, but by the second week it was already too expensive, so they moved to a seedier apartment, in a seedier neighborhood, and then still a third apartment, in an even worse part of town. It became obvious to them both that Cleo would have to look for a job, some way to make an income. Ava knew her mother was terrified; she had never worked a day in her life, and felt qualified for nothing.
Fortunately, there was one industry that continued to boom in Los Angeles in spite of the Depression, and that was the movie industry. Cleo was able to get work on one of the studio lots as an extra, and she became a pretty face floating in the background of Sherwood Forest, scurrying along the bustling streets of New York, even – ironically – posed amid Queen Cleopatra’s court. Once or twice, she even got to speak a line. At one point, a studio executive caught a glimpse of her legs and thought she might make a good chorus girl, but Cleo’s stint there was short-lived. It turned out her legs were nice to look at but not very coordinated, and her singing voice was a weak, nervous whisper. Back to the pool of stock extras she went.
None of it paid very much, and they were still painfully poor. Ava turned seven, then eight. They managed to squeak by – but sometimes with a little help from a new habit Ava had begun to cultivate. She began to go on short outings alone, returning to whatever dingy apartment they were living in with a couple of apples or a can of soup.
‘However did you afford these?’ her mother would ask, biting into a Red Delicious.
‘I found some loose change in the lining of the hatbox,’ Ava lied. She reused that lie several times, and her mother never questioned it. Never mind that the hatbox would have had to have some distant relation to the fairy-tale goose that laid the golden egg for it to be true.
Ava had learned: there were certain advantages to being a scrawny, invisible eight-year-old girl. She knew she ought to be ashamed of herself. She also knew she was hardly the only hungry waif in those days to develop a case of sticky fingers. Times were tough.
As she grew, Ava found other ways to help them squeak by, coming up with small tasks she could do. By the time she was nine years old, she had begun taking in other people’s ironing for a few extra nickels here and there. When her tenth birthday approached, her mother began to worry that Ava was growing up without a proper childhood. It made her sad to see her daughter concentrating so hard on other people’s laundry when she should be outside, playing with other children.
And so, one day, when Ava’s mother overheard a gaggle of girls talking on the studio lot about a carnival that had popped up on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier, her ears perked up. Perhaps a visit to a carnival would lighten her daughter’s heavy mind. Children liked carnivals, didn’t they?
‘I spent less than I would have at the actual pier, and I had twice as much fun,’ one of the girls said.
‘Well, that math sounds good to me,’ a second girl agreed, snickering.
‘And you know what else? They sold the most marvelous bags of caramel corn for only a penny,’ the first girl said.
Cleo, a woman who had always possessed a highly suggestible sweet tooth, felt her mouth water. She made up her mind. A visit to a carnival! Ava would be thrilled, she thought.
When she came home that evening and announced to her daughter that they would take the Red Car over to Santa Monica and see the carnival on Sunday, Ava was not particularly tickled. But Ava saw the expression on her mother’s pretty, hopeful face and bit her tongue. Perhaps a carnival would ease her mother’s worries and lift her spirits. Cleo had recently begun to revert to the habits she’d adopted just after the death of Ava’s father: sleeping in quite late, avoiding the pile of bills that were accumulating in a corner of their shabby one-room apartment.
‘All right, we’ll go,’ Ava agreed to her mother’s invitation, sounding like an adult succumbing to the will of a child.
Ava resumed her ironing. Neither of them gave a thought to how a single visit to a makeshift carnival might in fact change their lives.
5
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 3, 1934
The carnival consisted of a ragtag group of performers that had found a measure of success by setting up shop in the echoing shadow of the Santa Monica Pier. They were a true vestige of the Depression, a company of players starved for a hearty meal and a good night’s sleep; their desperation to survive manifested itself in the way they dazzled their audiences with a riotous, nearly unhinged hilarity. During the afternoons, the sun beat down brightly, and a wet, briny breeze blew in over the festivities.
There were several jugglers, a fire-eater, and a sword-swallower. A strongman lifted various weighty objects and pumped a woman over his head like a barbell. A crone dressed as a Gypsy read fortunes. Another woman danced on stilts, swathed in a diaphanous costume that fluttered in the Pacific breeze like a moth’s wings. In the evenings, they performed by torchlight, everything around them glowing with new magic. Every so often the Santa Monica police would come around, insisting that the carnival perform its entertainments elsewhere, but the carnival had proven itself resilient, taking down their tents sewn from bedsheets and disbanding, only to reassemble not more than an hour later in the same place. They made their money by performing for nickels and dimes, but also through confidence games: there is nothing a man will spend more on than the chance to bet on his own good fortune – especially when he is down and out.
It was in this carnival that Earl Shaw came to eke out a living. He did not perform anything so obvious as card tricks or the old shell game wherein cups swirl on the table in mad figure eights and winning is an utter impossibility. In fact, Earl Shaw did not appear to ‘perform’ anything at all. He went in for a more elegant approach and gave the people what they really wanted: a chance to buy a miracle in a bottle.
