Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [35]
“Izumi kept looking back and forth between me and the beautiful things on my shelves and walls—in my cupboards, in my drawers,” he told me one time. “If you could have seen her expressions change when she did that,” he said, “you would have to agree with me when I say, even though it’s a very conceited thing for me to say: She fell in love with me.”
He made breakfast the next morning, all with Japanese utensils, although it was an American breakfast—bacon and eggs. She stayed curled up in bed while he cooked. She reminded him of the young deer, a doe he had raised when a boy. It was not a new thought. He had been taking care of that doe all night. He turned on his radio, which was tuned to the Armed Forces Network. He hoped for music. He got news instead. The biggest news was that a North Korean spy ring had been rounded up in Osaka in the wee hours of the morning. Their radio transmitter had been found. Only one member of the ring was still being hunted, and that was the woman who called herself “Izumi.”
Fender, by his own account, had “… entered an alternate universe by then.” He felt so much more at home in the new one than in the old one, simply because he was paired now with a woman, that he wasn’t going to return to the old one ever again. What Izumi told him about her loyalty to the communist cause did not sound like enemy talk to him. “It was just common sense on the part of a good person from an alternate universe,” he said.
So he hid her and fed her for eleven days, being careful not to neglect his duties. On the twelfth day he was so disoriented and innocent as to ask a sailor from a ship from New Zealand, which was unloading beef, if for a thousand dollars he would take a young woman on board and away from Japan. The sailor reported this to his captain, who passed it on to American authorities. Fender and Izumi were promptly arrested, separated, and would never see each other again.
Fender was never able to find out what became of her. She vanished. The most believable rumor was that she had been turned over illegally to South Korean agents, who took her to Seoul—where she was shot without trial.
Fender regretted nothing he had done.
Now he was holding up the pants of my civilian suit, a gray, pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit, for me to see. He asked me if I remembered the large cigarette hole there had been in the crotch.
“Yes,” I said.
“Find it,” he said.
I could not. Nor could I find any other holes in the suit. At his own expense he had sent the suit to an invisible mender in Atlanta. “That, dear Walter,” he said, “is my going-away present to you.”
Almost everybody, I knew, got a going-away present from Fender. He had little else to do with all the money he made from his science-fiction tales. But the mending of my suit was by far the most personal and thoughtful one I had ever heard of. I choked up. I could have cried. I told him so.
Before he could make a reply, there were shouts and the thunder of scampering feet in offices in the front of the building—offices whose windows faced the four-lane divided highway outside. It was believed that Virgil Greathouse, the former secretary of health, education, and welfare, had arrived out front. It was a false alarm.
Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender ran out into the reception area, so that they could see, too. There were no locked doors anywhere in the prison. Fender could have kept right on running outside, if he wanted to. Clyde didn’t have a gun, and neither did any of the other guards. If Fender had made a break for it, maybe somebody would have tried to tackle him; but I doubt it. It would have been the first attempted escape from the prison in its twenty-six-year history, and nobody would have had