I'm sincere in my ideal that this is what I want to do. This is not something intangible. I'm ready to go through pain and hardship to leave my country forever."

That evening he sat alone at the Queen Bee, thinking he'd approached the main business too quickly. She did not seem happy to hear the news and she countered it with news of her own. His unit was shipping out for the latest hot spot, Formosa, in a couple of weeks. What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thought of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs. She spent some time discussing this. She talked about his job, not his life. She wanted tactical call signs, authentication codes, radio frequencies. She wanted spotter photos of U-2s.

There would be money for this, although she realized money was not his motive. She talked about a second meeting in Yamato, near the base, and gave him detailed directions. She spoke in a practiced way about procedures and craft, about the need for discipline, possibly referring to his rumpled street clothes and day-old stubble. She said she admired the Japanese because a man might spend a lifetime getting one thing right.

She had a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive. He told her he was serious about learning Russian.

At the Queen Bee he waited for Tammy to finish work and he spent the night with her in the flat she shared with two of her sisters. They had sex, more or less furtively, as the sisters watched TV. Curled in a corner of the room, unable to sleep, his head in the crook of his lover's arm, he thought of a number of things Dr. Braunfels didn't know. She didn't know he'd been on mess duty since the first court-martial. Mess duty, guard duty, a series of shit details-everything but gazing into radarscopes. She didn't know he'd lost his security clearance after the second court-martial. She didn't know there was a second court-martial, or a first for that matter, and she didn't know about the incidents that brought them about. One last thing she didn't know, and that was how far out on a limb he would have to go to snatch documents from a restricted area without clearance.

Seeing her smooth round face, doing her accented voice, he said to himself in the dark, What kind of foul-up do we have here, Oswald Lee?

Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.

Ozzie thought, What if she's only interested in twisting me dry?

He met her in a flat above a bicycle shop. There was an open umbrella drying in the hall. She wore Western clothes, a raincoat over her shoulders. They shook hands like hospital roommates. She had that cropped uneven hair that was way too young and made him think she was undependable, a person who could not survive without double meanings, or saying one thing to mean the opposite.

"You are much greater value," she said, "going on with your duties, reporting to me at regular times. Go where they send you. Why not? We wish you to get ahead. You get ahead here, not in Moscow or Leningrad."

"What if I'm determined to go?"

"This is not the time for you."

"Couldn't they train me there, then send me back?"

"You are already back."

A little joke. He told her he had no documents. Documents would come, possibly, in the near future. It all depended. In the meantime he showed his good will by reporting the number and type of aircraft in his squadron and the squawk codes for aircraft entering and exiting the identification zone. He did not tell her everything he knew about the U-2. He told her a few technical things, studying her reaction to the terms. He told her there was talk around the base that the plane's cameras scanned through multiple apertures.

How wide a track?

He hated to say he didn't know. She asked the names of U-2 pilots. She wanted technical manuals, instruction sheets. He gave the impression that further information would be available in the normal course of things, depending.

He definitely wanted instruction in Russian. He'd brought along an English-Russian dictionary. The sight of it made Dr. Braunfels sink deeply into her raincoat. She told him never to do that again. She would bring whatever books were needed.

They sat at the table in dim light going over pronunciations. She seemed impressed by his efforts. If he was willing to keep studying on his own, without attracting attention, she would give him as much help as she could. She talked about the language for some time, seemingly against her better judgment, drawn by his earnest desire to learn.

Working with her, making the new sounds, watching her lips, repeating words and syllables, hearing his own flat voice take on texture and dimension, he could almost believe he was being remade on the spot, given an opening to some larger and deeper version of himself. The language had a size to it, a deep-reaching honesty. He thought she was a good teacher, firm and serious, and he felt a small true joy pass between them.

He said to her, "A thousand years from now, people will look in the history books and read where the lines were drawn and who made the right choice and who didn't. The dynamics of history favor the Soviet Union. This is totally obvious to someone coming of age in America with an open mind. Not that I ignore the values and traditions there. The fact is there's the potential of being attracted to the values. Everyone wants to love America. But how can an honest man forget what he sees in the daily give-and-take that's like a million little wars?"

Reitmeyer listened to the greetings, which were followed by a halting dialogue, with hand gestures, between his off-and-on buddy Oswald and a corporal named Yaroslavsky. He thought it was curious that a pair of U.S. Marines would turn up at muster every day chatting in Russian. It annoyed Reitmeyer. It definitely rubbed him the wrong way, the private joke they made of it all, laughing over certain phrases, calling each other comrade. They seemed to think this was hilarious. Seven, eight, nine days running. This half-ass foreign gibberish. Only in America, as the saying goes. Except this is Japan, he reminded himself, and every day is a strange day in the fabulous East.

He watched Tammy apply eyebrow pencil to her lips, a fad among teen-age girls in JP that year. She was younger than Mitsuko but not that young. Mitsuko had vanished into the floating world and it was possible Tammy would follow any time. She posed for him now in a fluffy blouse and toreador pants. It no longer made Ozzie feel self-conscious to be seen by other Marines with a woman who was put together so well. The guys in MACS-1 couldn't figure it out.

She took him to a place called the Loneliness Bar, where the hostesses wore swimsuits treated with a chemical substance. The idea was to strike a match on a girl's backside as she walked by your table. Four Negro GIs went apeshit striking matches on sleek bottoms. There were matches jutting from the knuckles of every hand. They hooted and laughed, could not contain their amazement. They were young Southern Negroes, awkward and spindly, with a likable slapstick manner, and they made him wonder what had happened to Bobby Dupard. It put a kind of doom on the evening. He sat drinking beer in the stink of all those blistered match-heads, explaining his past to Tammy in simple phrases. A night in the life of the Loneliness Bar.

Three days later he felt a stinging heat when he pissed. It burned inside. Two days after that he couldn't help noticing a thick discharge from the selfsame organ. He went to the head in the middle of the night to study the fluid, a dreadful yellowish drip. At the lab they took a series of smears and cultures, gave him nine hundred thousand units of penicillin, intramuscular, over a three-day period, and returned him to light duty. Ozzie had the clap.