"Not I," said Dugan. "I change roles only for business. I would not have met you today in this capacity" — he indicated his sufu suit, his "European" cloth-and-patent-leather shoes—"except that I am in the role of a down-at-heel American Japanese, too much disgraced to have access to the glorious PX's and commissaries, but not disgraced enough to be put in a Japanese jail. In short, I am the kind of person who might be awfully useful to a Japanese of bent character and shady capacities. And right now my name," Dugan concluded, "is Kabashima."
Sarah used her chopsticks decorously and he, having made a gesture of infinite hospitality over their tray of roast fish, joined her. He ate greedily and made sucking sounds as he scooped the rice into his mouth. She realized that his words had been pure Dugan, but that even while he was talking sotto voce to her, he had play-acted the shabby Mr. Kabashima to perfection. It was an uncanny trick and reminded her of the time she, as a little girl, had been taken to the amusement park by a cousin and had been allowed to look into a half-transparent mirror which superimposed her own features on the background of a horrible grinning skeleton. From that experience she had gotten the goose-fleshy sensation that she might somehow, some day start coming apart, turning into two or three horrible and separate new people whom she could neither know nor like at all. Yet here was Dugan, playing shabby little Mr. Kabashima while talking like the friendly, even merry Major Michael Andreanof Dugan. (The funny middle name, she remembered, was the name of the islands where he was born.)
The Bible had said to her, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." Sarah got the impression of brooding power from the casual splitting of Dugan-Kabashima.
In lieu of talk she handed over to him a preliminary copy of his orders, which she had folded in her handbag. He smoothed out the sheet of paper and studied it while going on with his eating. Sarah got the odd impression that Dugan was photographing every detail of his orders on his memory, all the way down to the individual characteristics of the typewriter which had cut the stencil, the rubber stamp which had put TOP SECRET on it, and the mimeographing machine which had run it off. There was something strange about Dugan. Power.
Power without a source. Her black-Irish Dugan was not this man, this cutting edge of espionage. He was himself alone.
She began to think differently about the odds of the mission. Dugan, commanded to win or die by Coppersmith — commanded by military orders to overcome tremendous odds — Dugan, the clever and pleasant major who did not look like an American, nor like anything else either: black Irish, perhaps, if anything — such a Dugan — was a frail tool to pry open the tormented mysteries of a Soviet Los Alamos or to chisel into the industrial massif of a Russian Hanford or Oak Ridge.
But, that Dugan was not this Dugan. This Dugan was a weapon in his own right, a wolf among dogs, a mink among housecats. He was as affirmative as cold iron against warm flesh. For the first time she felt hesitation in becoming fond of him, liking him, wanting him to be within her life. Could her life resist such power stalking through it?
Dugan-Kabashima looked up at her, pleasantly enough. He seemed to think himself observed, because he did not allow himself the faintest trace of the Dugan expressions. He was pure Kabashima — pleasant but formal, hospitable but dry, calculating but ruinously self-revealing. It took a blink for Sarah to realize that Kabashima was Dugan.
"Don't take me too seriously," said Dugan in his assumed voice.
Sarah looked up, startled.