The Diplomat’s Daughter Read online

  “You intend to arrest me because of false information. A forged letter. Now. At four o’clock in the morning in front of my wife and son,” said Franz.

  “Yes,” said Smith flatly. “Yes to the arrest. As for the grounds, you can argue what you want during your trial.”

  A trial, thought Christian. So there was a chance for his father. He, with his eloquence, would be able to explain everything.

  “But this is all hearsay,” said Franz. “Clearly someone planted these forged materials in my office. A competitor. Or a disgruntled employee. Isn’t that obvious!”

  “Are many of your employees disgruntled?” Jakobsson asked from across the room. “And the handwriting. Identical to yours. The same slant, written with a left hand,” he said, walking back over and moving the paper closer to Franz’s face. “There’s a smudge here made by the side of your hand, just as there is on the other letter.”

  “It is not impossible to forge someone’s writing. To smudge a letter with the side of a palm!” Franz said, pushing the paper away angrily.

  “And how would you know that?” asked Smith.

  “Because I know that, just as you do. Because of common sense.”

  Jakobsson laughed and looked at Helene, who was standing with her back to the wall. “Mrs. Lange,” he said, “your husband is not the only one who brought us to this house tonight. You did, too.”

  “What?” asked Helene, stunned, reaching out for Christian, who was across the room.

  “Did you make a wire transfer of eight thousand dollars to a Mrs. Jutta Köhler on the eleventh of October, 1942?” Smith asked her, having trouble looking away from her dress, which had loosened at the neckline after it had been tied in haste.

  “Did I what? Do what? Send money to Jutta?” she said, rushing to her husband’s side. “How do you know Jutta?”

  “She is your cousin. Jutta Köhler, maiden name Braun. You grew up together near Aachen, Germany,” said the agent, not explaining how he knew who Jutta was or that Helene had sent her money. “She has two daughters, a husband, and an elbow that has been broken twice. So answer the question. Did you send Mrs. Köhler eight thousand dollars?”

  “Yes, I did. Yes,” Helene replied, flustered. She looked at her husband, who was quite aware that she had sent the money. He had allowed it, in fact, since he was the one who earned and meticulously managed all the household’s money. “But I did so legally. It was when I was on a trip to New York,” she reminded Franz. “I sent it through the German consulate there. If it was meant for anything corrupt, why would I have sent it through the consulate?”

  Smith shook his head.

  “I don’t care if you sent the cash by paper airplane. Your cousin, as I’m sure you are aware, is a member of the Nazi Party,” he said. “You supporting her financially is you supporting them.”

  “A Nazi? No. Jutta is just a housewife. The wife of an elementary school teacher. She makes her own clothes and bakes bread for the church every Sunday. She has never done a thing out of turn in her life,” said Helene, starting to panic. “Her husband lost his job because he wasn’t in the party. Jutta was in need of money, and we have it to give. Why should I not send some to her? I could not refuse her. Franz?” she said, looking desperately at her husband.

  “Wasn’t in the party?” asked Smith. “He’s since joined. Probably got his job back, too, and not needing your money anymore.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Lange, you’ll be leaving with us right away,” said Jakobsson, cutting the conversation short. “We will come back for your son in the morning. Pack your things tonight,” he told Christian. “And don’t even think about running.”

  “For him?” said Helene, her eyes full of tears. “But he must come with me!” she screamed, pulling him closer.

  “He can’t,” Jakobsson barked. “He’ll be going to the Milwaukee Children’s Home.”

  “But you don’t need Christian!” Helene protested, her shock edging toward hysteria. “You can’t take him! Franz, do something!” she shouted.

  “We aren’t arresting your son. Control yourself,” said Smith. “He’s a minor, so he can’t live here alone, can he? We’ll bring him to the Children’s Home in a few hours. And he’ll stay there until . . .” His voice trailed off, and Christian knew that Smith didn’t know anything more definite. Until the war ended? Until he turned eighteen? “Until” was open-ended for him now.

  “But you can’t put him there! In that awful place with those street children!” said Helene, growing more frantic. The ribbon on her neckline had slipped totally open, exposing her ample flesh.

  “I don’t think you understand, Mrs. Lange,” Smith said, his voice more sympathetic than Jakobsson’s as he eyed her body.

  “She understands perfectly,” said Franz, putting his hand on Helene’s back. “She just doesn’t want to be separated from her only son, and neither do I. Can’t there be another way? I am contributing to the war effort for this country, my adopted country. If you arrest me, what will happen to my company and all my employees? Have you considered that?”

  “We’ve taken care of it,” said Smith. “Spoke to a second in command. Or was it a third? Whoever it was, he assured us he’d keep your company running. Maybe better than you’ve been running it.”

  “But where are my parents going?” Christian broke in, finally finding his voice while his father looked as if he might choke over what he’d just heard.

  “Prison, for now,” Smith said, with his back turned to him.

  With that, he deftly handcuffed the elder Langes, not letting them hug their son before their arms were locked behind them.

  “You can’t arrest me like this,” Franz protested, twisting his hands. “You haven’t followed any sort of protocol.”

  “There is no protocol,” said Smith. “You, as a German citizen, have no rights at all. That’s what happens during war.”

  “We will take this,” said Jakobsson, unplugging the expensive E. H. Scott radio in Franz’s study.

  Helene, despite her handcuffs, suddenly turned and began to walk up the stairs. Smith instinctively reached for her arm to stop her but she shook him off and kept going, screaming about the upstairs radios. He hurried after her, grabbing her arm firmly, but Franz shouted in a panic.

  “Leave her! She’s pregnant!”

  “Suddenly every German woman is fragile and pregnant,” said Smith, stopping on the stairs and reluctantly letting go of Helene.

  “She is pregnant!” Christian confirmed, running to his mother.

  “Yeah, I got it, she’s pregnant,” said Smith, not even glancing at Helene or her neckline after he succeeded in getting her back downstairs.

  Christian gripped her shoulders and thought of the night his parents had told him about the baby. They had called it the happiest of accidents, as doctors had always told Helene that after Christian’s difficult birth she would not be able to have more children. But here she was, in her forties, pregnant again.

  He kissed her wet cheeks, draped her coat over her shoulders, then watched as his parents were pushed toward the door.

  The sun was just starting to lift over the horizon as the agents walked Franz and Helene out of the house. The neighbors were not in their beds anymore, were no longer breathing their collective breath. They were driving their cars slowly down the road, noses to the windows, watching Franz and Helene Lange being taken away by the FBI. And in the light of day, they would watch as their son was driven away, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  EMI KATO

  JANUARY 1940–MAY 1941

  Despite her fluency in English, Emi Kato had never been drawn to America. “A country as old as a toddler?” she’d said to her father in 1938 when he disclosed that they might be posted there after Vienna. “I won’t like it—not enough history. Strange accents,” she’d added, as they sat surrounded by an icy winter day in Vienna and the warm comfort of their large eighteenth-century apartment and its three marble fireplaces. “Why not Paris?” she s
uggested. “I’ve always wanted to live in Paris.”

  “I speak English and German, like you,” he’d reminded her. “They will never send me to Paris. You’ll have to find your own way there. Maybe in the freight hold of a banana boat,” he said, eyeing her wrinkled white school shirt. After teasing his daughter playfully for a few moments, pushing her to try an American accent, his tone grew serious.

  “If I am sent to Washington, we will go,” he said. A year later, they were in the nation’s capital.

  Emi had never set foot in a place as untamed as America and though she wouldn’t admit it to her ever-curious father, she was intimidated by the vastness of such a country.

  “You? Your English is perfect. I’m afraid no one will understand me,” said Keiko on the boat over, one of the most luxurious they’d traveled on yet. “British English with a Japanese accent and grammatical errors. I won’t even be able to buy bread.”

  “I’ll buy the bread,” said Emi.

  She had grown used to being the mouthpiece for her mother over the years, a habit that started on her father’s first assignment in London, when Emi was only five years old. There she was sent to a British school for girls, where she wore a uniform so starched by the family’s amah that she had to wet the collar down or her neck would itch until it turned purple. After school, Keiko and her amah would pick her up and drag her to piano lessons, as Keiko assumed it was what Western girls did. She forced Emi to practice until she was far and away her esteemed teacher’s best student.

  After lessons—because Keiko’s English was still poor despite a year in London, while Emi had picked it up like a child catching a cold—she dragged her mother by the hand all over the city. For three years, Emi spoke and lived like a Japanese child with her parents, but like a British one in public. Then the Katos moved to Berlin and Emi was put into German school, where she continued to float to the top. She learned German, just as she had learned English. And just as she had led her mother around London, she did the same in Berlin.

  By the time she was sixteen and had reached Vienna, she was fluent in German, which was a pleasant surprise for her parents. Somewhat unintentionally, Norio and Keiko Kato had raised a fiercely independent, worldly young woman. Emi could tell that her parents, though they had started bringing up marriage and children after she’d reached twenty, were proud of the way she’d turned out. By 1939, Keiko’s English was near fluent, but Emi knew that she still liked it when her daughter spoke first when they entered a restaurant or a shop, always enjoying her daughter’s upper-crust British accent.

  As they made their way from their first-class cabin to the dining room for dinner on the boat that night, Emi took her mother’s hand, happy that they were still packing her up like a little suitcase wedged between them.

  Though Keiko had been trying for years to have Emi crop her hair like she had, chin length and waved in the front, Emi still wore hers long and straight, refusing to change it. She wasn’t sure why she was so uncompromising about the cut; perhaps she liked the rebellion more than the hairstyle. On this cool night on their ocean crossing, she had put it up for dinner at her mother’s insistence and was wearing one of her best dresses—that part she didn’t mind. After two years in Vienna, she was used to formality, and despite resisting her mother’s plans for her hair, had come to enjoy the nice affairs her father’s job allowed them.

  But Washington was not Vienna. The Kato women soon learned that in America, the diplomatic world was far less extravagant than in Europe.

  It took Emi and Keiko some time to adjust to their new landscape after their arrival in 1939. Though they both thought it would be very much like England, the language was the only similarity they felt. The people were much more outspoken, and the city did not have the cosmopolitan flair that London had. “For all the embassies being here, it doesn’t feel very international,” said Emi, who was always looking for faces that resembled hers.

  In two years, Emi grew to like the city as much as someone whose heart was somewhere else could. She made a few friends at her all-girls Catholic school in a Maryland suburb, but she did not bother to get close to anyone. On the family’s first posting abroad, to London, Emi had made many friends, too young to realize that she would have to give them all up in a few years. In Berlin, the Katos’ next posting, she was accepted at her all-girls school with the same kindness and genuine fascination she had received in London, but she became more reserved with her friendships as her heart still stung with the pain of leaving her British community behind. And when she moved to Vienna, she had reached an age where all she wanted was a small circle of friends. But when she met Leo, that circle tied itself into a knot. All Emi wanted was Leo.

  In Washington, though her classmates did not treat her with hostility or spite, they all took a few months to warm to her presence, and the reception never heated past tepid. The girls’ indifference, compared to what she had encountered in Europe, bothered Emi at first, but she soon realized that she preferred to return to her apartment near the National Zoo after school and dream about Leo anyway. So Emi went to school, was civil with her classmates who were civil to her, but after years in Washington, she still did not have any true friends.

  Leo and Emi wrote to each other every Friday, though the letters did not always make it across the ocean. Still, Emi read the ones she received until the paper was nearly translucent. She took them to school, she read them in the bath. She was never without a letter from Leo somewhere on her person. The Katos’ apartment in Washington overlooked the south part of the zoo and Emi could sometimes see giraffes milling around their small sandy enclosure while she bathed, letter from Leo in hand. It was her favorite thing about the city.

  “You shouldn’t spend all your years here locked in your room,” Keiko advised, eyeing Emi’s letter resting on her floral coverlet and her glossy pictures of Vienna’s landmarks hanging on the wall. It was January 1940 and Emi was leaving the apartment much less than she had when they’d first arrived, choosing to spend her time with the comfort of her memories.

  Emi looked at her mother skeptically. “And you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I know. I don’t go out that often, either,” Keiko admitted.

  “Almost never unless you’re with father,” said Emi.

  “But the world doesn’t need to see me. You’re young and beautiful. And unmarried. Don’t waste those fleeting things locked up in here staring at pictures of a city across an ocean.”

  “No one thinks I’m beautiful here,” Emi said plainly, flipping over onto her back and kicking off her stiff school shoes. “In Europe we were interesting. The Japanese family. People wanted to get to know me, would seek me out at school. Here, everyone speaks to me with caution. First they’re skeptical, amazed that I can speak English. Then their eyes follow me around the restaurant, or wherever I am, like I’m some exotic bird they’ve never seen before. I can tell they don’t know what to make of me and their conclusion is mostly the same. They don’t want to speak to me, but if I stay quiet and try to blend into the wallpaper, they won’t talk about me.”

  “You’re exaggerating as usual,” said Keiko, but Emi could tell by her voice that she was experiencing similar reactions from the Americans. They had previously talked about the stares they had received, the comments, though Keiko was hesitant to ever speak ill of anyone, even strangers. But she had been willing to talk about her shock at the treatment of Negroes in America. “They hate them,” she’d said to Emi one night when they’d returned from a family dinner in a hotel and seen a young Negro man berated by a white woman outside the restaurant, slapped across the face in the middle of the sidewalk. “They forced them into this country and yet despise them for still being here. They like their dogs better. Even the ugly dogs.”

  Emi had agreed, as shocked as her mother was at the racial divides in America. “A bit like us and the Koreans,” Emi pointed out.

  “Oh no, Emi, I don’t think so,” Keiko had replied, refusing to admit that the
Japanese had their own brand of bigotry. “Besides, it’s not like that in the diplomatic community. We are open-minded, curious people. Educated. Especially the wives,” she said smiling.

  “But I’m not in the diplomatic community,” Emi reminded her. “I’m at a small school in Maryland with people who have known each other since they were babies. Maybe it would be different if we lived in California, where there are many more Japanese. Erika Adachi said it was much better there. They used to live in Los Angeles—she and her American mother—while Takeo was at the consulate.”

  “You are almost done with school, Emiko, for good. And we are not going to California,” said Keiko. She folded one of Emi’s dresses and sat on her bed, too. “I admit, sometimes I do wish your amah Megumi was still with us. More for my sake than yours. Her English was poor but she was so tough. Stubborn, too. I think she’d do much better with the stares and the questions than I do.”

  Megumi had sailed back to northern Japan before the family left for Washington in 1939. In America, the diplomatic corps did not employ amahs as they did in other countries, and Emi had said goodbye to hers tearfully, knowing that at seventeen, she was too old for one anyway, but not wanting to let her companion go.

  “She must have given you your toughness,” said Keiko. “Because despite your hesitation to go out and get to know the city, your annoyance with strangers’ behavior toward you, you’re the strongest person I know. Please try to remain that way.”

  “Okay, Mama,” said Emi putting away her latest letter from Leo, making sure the exotic stamps weren’t peeling off the envelope. She folded it and placed it at the corner of the bed, running her hands over the return address. “I promise I’ll leave the house more.”

  Emi did start to venture out with more frequency after the winter of 1940 melted away, writing to Leo about the things she liked about Washington—the low marble buildings, the streets inspired by European grids, the humidity that reminded her of Tokyo weather. Sometimes they wrote to each other of war, of their fears about what was happening in Vienna, but they’d agreed to focus mostly on the good in their lives.