“Horrible…horrible.”
I took hold of her by the upper arms and swung her so that she directly faced me; I locked her eyes with mine. “Look, Amy. Love of my life, I don’t know if I can spring Fred Noonan out of that concrete pillbox. But you, you’re out walking around. The security around you is laughable. You think I can’t get around those fat fuckers across the street? I can get you out of here. Tonight.”
She was moving her head, as if shooing away flies. “Not without Fred…we can’t leave Fred….”
“It’s too risky. I’m one man with one gun. A pair of native goons with nightsticks I can take out. Spring your guy out of a maximum-security cellblock…probably not.”
Her mouth tightened; her jaw was firm; her eyes stony. “Then I’ll stay. I’ll talk to them. I’ll convince them I’ll cooperate if they’ll spare Fred.”
“They won’t. They’ve decided. Sentence has been passed, baby….”
She shook her head, firmly; her mouth was a thin narrow line. “No. After all we’ve been through, I can’t leave him behind. I couldn’t live with myself, couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, knowing I’d abandoned somebody who’d been through what I’d been through, worse than I’d been through, no, you have to find a way, Nathan. You have to take us both…or leave us both behind.”
I let go of her, sighing, throwing my hands up. “Even if this were possible, Amy, think about what you’re saying, think of who you are, what you represent to so many people back home. Think of the young girls, cutting out stories about you from papers and magazines and pasting them in scrapbooks, like you did every time you saw some woman succeeding at a man’s task…are you going to take their symbol, the symbol of American womanhood, and turn it into a smiling face on a red sun on a Jap flag?”
“If I have to,” she said.
The breeze was picking up; palm fronds rustling.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “And I don’t blame you, either.”
“When you came here,” she said, “you didn’t know where you’d find me, if you’d find me. I could have been in a prison cell. What would you have done, then?”
“I’d find a way to blast you the hell out.”
She gripped my arm. Tight. “Then find a way. We can’t leave Fred behind.”
There was no moving her on the subject.
So I told her Suzuki and the governor had asked me to talk to Noonan—perhaps Noonan would reveal his secrets to an American priest; it was certainly worth a try, the Japs thought, before they killed him. I would accept their invitation, I told her, and look the jail over firsthand, and see what I could come up with.
This put some spring in her step as we walked back, that gray sky darkening, whether into evening or worse weather, I wasn’t quite sure; the temperature was dropping and that cool breeze, carrying the smell of ocean, was driving out the copra and dried fish odor, or at least diminishing it.
I left her in her room, after a long slow kiss that promised wonderful rewards to a hero who succeeded at his impossible task, and went down to the lobby, where Jesus and Ramon were back at their old stand, their greasy hands filled with greasy cards.
“Tell Chief Suzuki,” I said to Jesus, “that I need to see him.”
Lord Jesus turned his face toward me, a flower seeking sun, and showed me those brown teeth again; it wasn’t a smile. “I look like your errand boy?”
“No,” I said, “you look like the chief’s errand boy.”
He thought about that, rose, brushed by me, in a stunning wave of body odor, and—without asking the clerk’s permission—reached across the counter and used the phone. He spoke in Japanese. His eyes had told me he wasn’t stupid, Suzuki had called Jesus his “top” native detective, and Amy said not to underestimate him; I was starting to see why: this beast spoke at least three languages.
When he trundled back, I had pulled up a rattan chair myself and was shuffling the deck of cards; I’d wash my hands, later. Ramon, whose eyes weren’t smart, looked at Jesus as if his friend might have an explanation for my aberrant behavior.
“Chief be here soon,” Jesus muttered.
“Fine,” I said, shuffling. “You boys know how to play Chicago? Seven-card stud, high spade in the hole splits the pot? What are these matchsticks worth, anyway?”
I’d won a few thousand yen when the chief showed up; that was only a couple dollars but Jesus seemed pretty resentful, just the same.
“You have talked to Amira?” Suzuki asked me. He was in the company of yet another member of the Chamorro police auxiliary, a shorter but no less burly boy with a billy club in the belt of his threadbare white suit.
I nodded. We were still in the cramped lobby. Leaning toward Suzuki confidentially, I said, “Why don’t we walk over to the jail? I’d like to talk to the other pilot, now. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
“Fill in?”
“Tell you what Amira told me.”
He left the short Chamorro in Jesus’s stead, bidding his top jungkicho to tag along with us. Jesus kept a respectful distance, the billy and machete stuck in his belt, crossing in a menacing X.
On the way to the jail, I told the chief that Amelia had indicated she would be cooperative; that she was truly enamored of the Japanese and would willingly collaborate.
“She accept death of pilot?”
That was how they referred to Noonan: pilot.
“I didn’t get that far,” I pretended to admit. “She seems loyal to him. Must he die?”
“Animal man,” Suzuki said, shivering in disgust. “Throws food. Strike at jailer.” He shook his head, no. “No mercy for pilot. You talk to him now?”
“Yes,” I said.
At the jail, in a small office that but for its desk and filing cabinets was itself a concrete-walled cell, Chief Suzuki introduced me to a compact, brawny police officer, in the usual white uniform but minus gunbelt and sword; this was Sergeant Kinashi, a smiling mustached man in his thirties, the warden of Garapan Prison who, in prison guard tradition, did not wear weapons around the cells and prisoners.
Sergeant Kinashi spoke no English, but he was very gracious, in fact sickeningly solicitous, to the visiting Irish-American priest, as he led us from the boxcar main cellblock to the nearby, smaller building, the four-cell maximum-security bungalow. Though we were within the town of Garapan, the prison was set off by itself, surrounded by jungle overgrowth, which provided shade as well as an ominous backdrop, palm trees hovering like guard towers. A little parade of us—Sergeant Kinashi, Chief Suzuki, Lord Jesus, and me—went up the short flight of steps and inside.
The space between the prison wall and the four barred cells allowed guards and visitors a shallow walkway; the prison wall at our backs provided most of the light, with barred windows that let in air (and flies and mosquitoes) and cut down on, but did not nullify, the fusty fragrance of body odor, shit, piss, and general stagnation. None of that prissy, irritating disinfectant odor you run into in American jails; just pure, natural stench.
Each cell had a single high window, narrow and barred; eight feet by eight feet, the cells would have made generous closets. They had thatched sleeping mats and, in one corner, a built-in open-top concrete box three feet square, a toilet for prisoners, an airfield for flies.
Of the four cells that made up this small solid building, the one at far left was empty, the center two were occupied (a pair of Chamorro cattle rustlers, the chief said), and at far right, regarding us through his cell bars with skeptical eyes, his arms folded, stood a tall skinny white man with a bushy curly beard, dark brown mixed in with gray. He wore a filthy, occasionally ripped, crumpled-looking khaki flight suit; his feet were sandaled. Under a mop of widow’s-peaked, dark brown graying hair, he had a long, hawkish, weathered, grooved, defiant mask of a face, eyes dark and wild in deep sockets. A nasty angular white scar streaked his forehead. His teeth were large and yellow and smiling within the thicket of beard.
Fred Noonan was home, when I came calling.
“We honor you with visit,” Chief Suzuki said with low-key contempt. “American priest. Father Brian O’Leary.”
“I’m a Protestant,” Noonan said, his voice a gravelly baritone, “but what the hell.”
“In our culture,” I said to Suzuki, “it’s traditional for holy men visiting prisoners to have privacy.”
“Cannot open cell door,” the chief said, shaking his head, no.
“That’s fine,” I said, gesturing to the closed door between Noonan and me. “Just leave us alone like this.”
“I will have Jesus stay, protect you,” he said, nodding to the massive Chamorro.
“No thank you,” I said. And then I said, pointedly, “I need to be alone with the prisoner to do what I need to do.”
“Ah,” Suzuki said, remembering I was on a mission for him, and nodded. He bellowed a few Japanese phrases, and the warden, Lord Jesus, and the Chief of Saipan Police left me alone with my one-man flock.
I checked out the window and could see Sergeant Kinashi heading back into the main building, while the chief and his jungkicho were huddling for a smoke, standing well away from our cellblock bungalow.
Noonan stood near the bars with his arms unfolded; they hung funny, sort of askew.
My eyes were drawn to these poor twisted limbs. “What did they do to you?” I asked.
“I got smart with the bastards, Father,” he said, “and they broke my arms. It was that good-lookin’ fellow named after our savior. They didn’t set ’em or anything. No sissy casts. Just let ’em heal naturally. I coulda used a miracle, Father. But I didn’t get one…. You wouldn’t have a drink on you, by any chance?”
“No.”
“Picked a hell of a way to dry out, didn’t I?”
I glanced out the window one more time; the two men were smoking, talking.
“Do your neighbors speak English?” I asked, nodding toward the cells where the dark faces of the rustlers looked at me curiously.
“They can hardly speak their own native gibberish,” he said, eyes narrowing in their deep sockets. “Why?”
“Listen,” I said, moving close. The smell from the cell was as foul as a rotting corpse. “We’re only gonna have a little bit of time.”
“To do what? Who the hell are you?”
“It’s not important…. Nate Heller.”
His eyes narrowed even tighter, and glittered. “I know that name….”
“Old friend of Amelia’s.”
He began to nod, smile. “More than a friend….”
Apparently, on their long flight, he and Amy had shared a few secrets.
“Listen,” I said, “the Yellow Peril out there thinks I’m an I.R.A. priest….”
Noonan, an Irishman himself, chuckled. “Not a bad way to get onto this hellhole island. But why would you want to?”
“Our loving uncle sent me to see if you and Amelia were guests of Hirohito.”
“The answer is yes…. I hope you didn’t come alone.”
“Afraid I did—I got a way out of here tonight, though.” I glanced around the concrete bunker. “Is there any way I can bust you out of this hatbox?”
He laughed the most humorless of laughs from deep in his sunken chest. “A small army couldn’t…” Then, with sudden urgency, he said, “But you can take Amelia! They got her in this hotel over—”
“I know. I spent the afternoon with her.” I slipped a hand through the bars and onto his shoulder; and squeezed. “But she won’t go without you.”
He backed away from my touch, eyes so wide they filled the sockets. “That’s crazy! She has to….”
“When do they let you into the exercise yard?”
“Not more’n once a week, and I was just out there yesterday. No set schedule.”
“Damn.” I checked the window again; Mutt-san and Jeff-san were still smoking. “Fred. If you’ll forgive the familiarity…”
“I’ll let it slide this once.”
My hands gripped the bars as if I were the prisoner. “Chief Suzuki sent me in here to see if you’d spill your guts to a priest…a last-ditch effort to get something out of a very stubborn prisoner.”
He was studying me like he must have studied his charts. “You sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”
“You’re under a sentence of death. Today, tomorrow, a week, maybe two. But probably no more. I’m sorry.”
Another hollow laugh. “You’re sorry…”
“Amelia’s under the same death sentence. She thinks she can manipulate these clowns, but we know better, don’t we? She’s already spilled a lot, Fred, about the souped-up aspects of the Electra….”
The yellow teeth clenched in the nest of beard, and he spat, “Damn it, anyway. That’s a pacifist for you. Damn it…. Listen, Nate, you gotta get her offa this island. She doesn’t deserve this fate.” He shook his head. “Me, I knew what I was getting into. I’m military; she’s civilian. It was wrong how they used her…hell. How we used her. She didn’t even know we were flyin’ over the Mandates, till—”
“I can get her out tonight, Fred.”
“Then do it!”
“You have to do it. You have to help me convince Amelia to leave you behind. Can you think of some way to do that?”
He lowered his head; he laughed but no sound came out. Then he said, “Yeah.”
“I mean, some message….”
“I know what you mean.”
“…I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.”
I was. It was a hell of a thing I was asking.
“I better go,” I said.
I offered him my hand, and, twisted arm or not, he shook it, with a firm grip worthy of the adventurer who had helped chart the Pacific for Pan Am, not to mention his country.
I turned away.
“Heller! Nate….”
“Yeah…?”
“I got a wife.” He swallowed and his eyes were brimming with tears. “Didn’t have her very long, but she was a honey. Mary Beatrice. Some people call her Bea, but I like Mary. That’s what I call Amelia, too…. Smartest thing I ever did, marrying that girl, followed by the dumbest. Would you tell her something for me?”
“Sure.”
“…Make it something nice.”
“It’ll be a fuckin’ poem, pal.”
He grinned through his beard and held a thumb’s-up. “Do me another favor—call ’em in here. And hang around, a while, would you? Keep me company? Moral support?”
“Well, sure….”
He snorted a laugh. “Tell ol’ Chief Suki-yaki that I got something for him.”
I nodded, went to the door and called out. “Chief, the prisoner would like to speak with you. He has something for you!”
The chief smiled, pleased that his strategy had worked, obviously thinking that my priestly counsel had loosened the prisoner’s tongue. He sucked a last drag on his cigarette, sent it trailing sparks into the high grass, and marched toward me, with Lord Jesus completing the procession.
As they were entering, Noonan whispered, “You might want to stand to one side, Father…this could be messy.”
I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I moved to one side as Chief Suzuki, Lord Jesus just behind and to the left of him, positioned himself before Fred Noonan’s cell.
Chin high, regally proud, the chief asked, “You have something for me, pilot?”
“Oh yeah,” Noonan said, his grin as wild as his eyes, and he reached back into the open concrete box of shit and piss and grabbed a big handful and hurled it; the stuff sluiced through the bars and spattered the clean white uniforms of both the chief and Lord Jesus, and clots of dung clung to both their faces like lumpy awful birthmarks.
Noonan stood right up against the bars of his cell and howled in laughter at them. He was still laughing when Lord Jesus stepped snarling forward and swung the machete back and down, between the bars, and through the top of Noonan’s head, between his eyes, splitting his hawk nose, the machete handle extending like a new one.<
br />
When Lord Jesus yanked the machete loose, as if from a melon, Noonan—silent now—felt backward, blood geysering the cell wall, brightening his gloomy surroundings, depending on me to deliver his message to Amelia.
19
The Nangetsu was a shabby wood-frame pagoda-roofed two-story, just another crummy Garapan storefront, only the windows facing the street were not glass showcases, but tightly closed double-shuttered affairs, in a section of the waterfront Chief Suzuki referred to as the town’s hana machi—“flower quarters.” This was one of a cluster of similar buildings huddled like conspirators between warehouses and fishery sheds: ryoriyas, which Chief Suzuki translated as “restaurants,” though that definition would soon prove to be loose. It had been an easy walk over here from the prison, for the chief, his favorite jungkicho and me.
After a fawning greeting inside the door from a short chubby fiftyish woman in a scarlet Dragon Lady slit dress, we moved through the front half of the restaurant, where steamy food smells erased the waterfront reek. The dimly lighted room was an odd combination of shabby and elegant, unpainted, unvarnished rough-wooden walls and ungainly tile floor laid right on the dirt, but the wall decorations were elaborate Japanese murals and splayed silk fans, as Japanese men (no young men, late twenties or older) in white bathrobes sat on cushions at low-slung red-trimmed black lacquered tables while attractive women in colorful kimonos served them. When the women had finished serving their cups and bowls of this and that, they were joining the men at the tables.
The Chief of Saipan Police had taken Father O’Leary to a whorehouse.
We were ushered by the chubby Dragon Lady down a short corridor, where a sliding rice paper door gave entry to a small room that was mostly a sunken tub of steaming water. We were here, after all, to bathe, my companions having been the recipients of flung dung, which was not an Oriental delicacy but a gutsy final statement by one hell of an American.
I remained somewhat shell-shocked; I’d seen my share of savagery in the wilds of Chicago, but I’d never witnessed a murder quite like the one I’d just seen at Garapan Prison. The immediate aftermath had been a chilling display of bizarre face-saving. Chief Suzuki—who one might expect to rebuke his Chamorro protégé for showing a certain lack of restraint, in his machete-wielding response to Fred Noonan’s shit-hurling affront—had turned to Jesus and, feces still dripping from his face, bowed to his dusky associate in respect and thanks.
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