While walking one day in the dusty street of his camp Moto met the camp’s doctor, a tall white man and his son.

  “See those guns?” said the doctor. “They all point outward. They don’t expect to shoot at unarmed escapees, so maybe they expect lynch mobs. All nonsense! We’re all Americans here.”

  * * * *

  Three months after his insertion into Manzanar, Moto called out from the camp’s office. If there was a spy here, it was only himself, Shimoto/Moto. Hirata had said he would remain silent, but why should he?

  “Judge Hardy, please?” Moto said. The Navy lieutenant had left the room, almost as if he didn’t care whom Shimoto called.

  “Judge who?” a voice asked. “Who is this?”

  “Moto.”

  There was a long silence. Then, “Uh, how’s that again?”

  “I wish to speak to Judge Hardy.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “It is private.”

  “Wait one moment, please.”

  Moto waited.

  * * * *

  Throughout the war Moto expected that someone would visit him.

  In late 1945 a car finally came for him. Two men drove him to an office in Los Angeles.

  The man behind the desk did not identify himself.

  “But there are no spies at Manzanar,” Moto said. “Surely you knew that from the start?”

  The man leaned back in his chair and said, “Oh, yeah?”

  “Surely,” Moto said.

  “Well, don’t worry about it.”

  The man stared at him in silence. Moto realized that they were not quite sure what to do with their recruit, even though at the very least he had ruled out their worst fears.

  The door opened, and a big man brought in a cardboard box. He dropped it on the floor at Moto’s feet.

  Moto saw through the partially open lid that his clothes and documents were neatly piled inside.

  “I may go?” Moto asked.

  “You can do what you like, buddy.”

  “May I speak to Judge Hardy?”

  “Who?”

  “I should be debriefed.”

  The man looked at him uncaringly.

  Released, Moto found himself standing in bright sunlight, in front of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles. He had been permitted to put on his new clothes and review his possessions before being shown silently outside.

  The first newspaper he saw showed a large mushroom cloud.

  * * * *

  Mr. Moto went back to his apartment in San Bernardino. A crew cut young man met him at the door and asked, “Yes, what do you want?”

  “I am Kentaro Moto. I used to live here.”

  “So?” said the man. “I thought they deported all you people.”

  “Might you know about my possessions?” Moto asked.

  “Oh, that. The landlord sold them off. Books and things he put on the street.” After a moment the man said, “Sorry,” and closed the door.

  * * * *

  Mr. Moto resumed his American citizenship. Only a few questioned him about it. For many years he lived on Marquand Street in Boston, where he was active in the Japanese-American struggle for reparations with succeeding governments, finally paid long after his death. Peter Lorre supported the petition.

  The Moto novels had stopped at the start of World War II. Too much had come between America and Japan, despite Japan’s admirable new constitution and renunciation of offensive weapons.

  Moto finally saw the reissue of the earlier fictions about his days as an agent, and sometimes imagined that a new series might place him at the center of interesting adventures and issues involving the world war, ethnic Americans, and political ideals—all of growing interest to a new generation of diverse Americans. Mr. Marquand, the author of the prewar series, might well have suggested more for Kentaro Moto to do at Manzanar, perhaps solve a fictional mystery in a nearby town, more worthy of him than having to report, “I am so sorry there are no spies at Manzanar.”

  In 1965, a year before his death, Moto saw a minor new movie about his exploits, in which the actor was much too tall. He watched Peter Lorre’s Moto films rerun on television, butchered to accommodate advertisements for corn flakes, baby diapers, and automobiles, but later restored to their full black and white glory on DVDs long after Lorre and he were dead. He lived long enough to see all the James Bond films, but not long enough to see the nuclear terror of the Fukushima reactor, where the conqueror’s technology, first visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had returned.

  Moto sometimes doubted his own existence. The world through which he had once slipped as an agent, on behalf of conscience more than in the service of any government, had made his life into a series of entertainments, in which he had been miscast.

  __________

  George Zebrowski’s many science fiction books include the John W. Campbell Award-winning Brute Orbits. He is a prolific short-story writer and editor and has co-written several Star Trek tie-in books.

 

 

  George Zebrowski, Complete Short Fiction

 

 

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