Flying Blind

Chapter 14

The mural behind the Cine-Gril bar depicted early Hollywood days, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, way back when movies couldn’t talk, a dozen years ago. The soothingly air-conditioned lounge was cozy but large enough for a bandstand and postage-stamp dance floor (Russ Columbo’s radio show was broadcast out of here) and the lighting was subdued, but not so much so that you couldn’t be seen if you wanted to. That ultramodern material, Formica, covered the front of the bar in deep red, with horizontal stripes of chrome and indirect lighting from under the lip of the mahogany countertop. The blue leather and chrome stools were shaped like champagne glasses and I was perched on one of them, sipping a rum and Coke.

I was a little early — the meeting was set for four-thirty, and I’d arrived here at the Roosevelt Hotel, by cab, having arrived by train at the impressive new Union Station on North Alameda around three. Checking in, washing up, and slipping into my Miami white suit, black-and-white-checkered tie, and black-banded straw fedora, I’d ambled through the pale chamber of the impressively decorative, Spanish Colonial-style lobby trying to inconspicuously spot movie stars among the potted palms, plush armchairs and overstuffed couches. I’d made several trips to Hollywood — including one late last year — and my pals at the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge and the Dill Pickle deli always looked forward to my blasé rundown on any Tinseltown somebodies I’d set eyes on. The joke was the few starlets, would-be matinee idols, and low-rent agents clustered here and there, chatting — not a seat taken, no one wanting to be seen “waiting” — were sneaking peeks at me, not realizing I was nobody.

The first person in Hollywood I recognized was in the movies all right, but most tourists wouldn’t have known his name any more than his Gable-mustached, nearly handsome face: Paul Mantz — in a single-breasted hunter green sport jacket with gathered waist and double-patch pockets, a yellow open-neck shirt, and light green slacks — sauntered into the Cine-Gril, put his hand on my shoulder, ordered a martini in a frosted glass from the black-jacketed bartender, and then said hello.

Other than a touch of gray at the temples and perhaps a slight further receding of his hairline, Mantz looked the same: dark alert eyes, familiar cocky set to his thin mouth, and jutting jaw.

“How’s married life?” I asked him, as he stood next to me, not taking a stool.

“Much better the second time around,” he said. “I’m a dad now, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. I’d had my own ruminations over fatherhood since I’d seen him last. “Congratulations.”

“Well, two kids were part of the package,” he said, accepting the frosted martini from the bartender, finally sliding up onto a stool. “Terry was Roy Minor’s widow, y’know, the racing pilot? His kids, good kids, Tenita and Roy Jr., are mine, now... but Terry and me have our own boy — Paul Jr. He’ll be two in August.”

“Hope business is good, with all those mouths to feed.”

Half a smile dimpled one cheek. “Real boom in war pictures. The country may not wanna get into this scrap, but they sure like to see it at the movies. Also, test flights and aerial camera jobs for Lockheed. Charter service is doin’ great, including a branch in San Francisco — set up two amphibians at the Golden Gate Expo and flew thousands of gawking Midwest bumpkins like you over the fair. Oh, and the Vega crashed — ground accident, I was fully covered.”

“No more Honeymoon Express?”

“Oh, sure, but it’s a Lockheed Orion, now. You keepin’ busy?”

I shrugged. “Retail credit, divorce work, a little industrial espionage now and then.”

“Industrial spying? You doin’ it, or stoppin’ it?”

I let him have half a smile. “I’m a priest to my clients, Paul. Don’t expect me to violate a sacred trust.”

“Unless there’s a buck in it... Don’t look so hurt.”

“That was acting,” I said. “When in Hollywood... What can you tell me about this little business conference?”

He swirled his martini in its glass. “What have they told you?”

“Not a damn thing. Margot DeCarrie called, asked if I’d come out here and listen to a business proposition; she offered train fare, two nights’ lodging and meals, plus a C-note and a half for my trouble and other expenses.”

“And that’s all she told you?”

“She said she represented the Amelia Earhart Foundation. Does that mean she’s working for Purdue University?”

“Naw. Purdue set up the Amelia Earhart Research Foundation, but that was active only when Amelia was alive.”

“You think she’s dead, Paul?”

He didn’t quite look at me. “Probably. I think she probably crashed into the sea. She bit off more than she could chew, Noonan missed the island, she was tired, and tried to land too high over clear water, or misjudged the distance and flew into a heavy roller. Either one would’ve killed them instantly.”

I didn’t tell him what I knew; the confidentiality clause in the agreement I’d signed with Uncle Sam precluded that. In fact, according to the terms of my contract, I hadn’t even been in California in 1937.

“But ‘probably’ isn’t ‘absolutely,’ is it, Paul?”

He nodded, gazed into his martini, as if an answer might be floating there. “She was a great lady,” he said. “It’s hard to let go.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“I should leave the particulars to the others,” he said. “Margot and the rest’ll be here soon enough.”

“This, uh, Amelia Earhart Foundation... Does G. P. have anything to do with it?”

“Hell no!” Mantz’s chuckle was edged with bitterness. “Not with me involved.”

“You two were never exactly bosom buddies. Do I detect a further deterioration in the relationship?”

He sipped the martini. “Amelia and I were involved in several businesses, including my charter service. But we both signed a contract that gave the surviving partner the entire business. Gippy, as executor of the Amelia Earhart Estate, is suing for half, just the same.”

I frowned. “How the hell can there be an estate? Doesn’t it take seven years to be declared legally dead, anymore?”

Mantz raised an eyebrow. “Not if you’re married to Gippy Putnam. I don’t know what kind of strings he and his lawyers pulled, but Amelia’s been legally dead since late ’38, I think, or early ’39. Gippy’s been screwing over Amelia’s mother and sister, too, makin’ sure they don’t get a share.”

“He always was a classy guy.”

“Well, he’s scramblin’ for dough. The estate was smaller than you’d think, at least that’s what I hear. They had a lot of their own money tied up in the world flight. I heard he had to sell the house in Rye; the book ‘by’ Amelia, about the last flight, got rushed out but didn’t do so hot. You do know he remarried, don’t ya?”

“No!”

My response seemed to surprise Mantz, who shrugged and said, “Got a good amount of play in the papers out here.”

“Not in Chicago. Remarried...”

Mantz was nodding. “Last year about this time, to a good-looking brunette who got a divorce from a successful lawyer in town — one of these Beverly Hills housewives who hit the garden club circuit. I hear Gippy picked her up at one of his ‘Amelia’ lectures... that’s how he’s makin’ most of his money these days.”

“Didn’t take him long to get back in circulation.”

“Hey, just a few months after Amelia disappeared, he went off on one of his ‘expeditions’ and took this other good-lookin’ gal along for company... They say he was shacked up with her for months, after they got back from the Galapagos or wherever the hell. Till she got sick of his browbeating and foul temper.”

“Jeez, Paul — you turned into a regular Hedda Hopper.”

That made him smile. “Hey, I figure you might enjoy the dirt on Gippy, since you love him about as much as I do.”

“Maybe more,” I said.

“Ah,” Mantz said, swiveling on his stool, “here’s our little party now...”

In a white frock with a cardigan collar and white buttons down to the navy and white polka-dot sash that served as her belt, pretty Margot DeCarrie had just entered the Cine-Gril, and behind and on either side of her were two well-dressed gents who each carried the unmistakable air of the business executive.

Margot — brunette hair longer now, a sea of curls nestled under a white beret — beamed upon seeing me; her cutie-pie heart-shaped face, its babyish mouth turned cherry red by lipstick, not to mention her Betty Grable frame, would have been the envy of many a starlet, white high-heel pumps doing nice things to her bare, untanned legs. She was hugging a patent leather bag under one arm, a small briefcase in her other hand.

“Nathan, it’s so wonderful to see you,” she said as she approached; some of the chirpiness had matured out of her voice. “Paul, I’m glad you could make it... Nathan, this is Elmer Dimity, the manufacturer and inventor.”

This was said as if I was supposed to recognize the name, so I said, “Oh, yes.”

Dimity was solidly built and rather tall, in a dark suit whose lapels were trimmed with scarlet suede, and his scarlet tie bore a diamond stickpin, an ensemble that sent a mixed message of austerity and flash, solemnity and goofiness. His dark hair was combed back, his face a long oval, his nose a beak dropping over a small, indecisive mouth, his chin rather weak as well; but the eyes behind the wire-frame glasses were strong and alert, and his expression was open, friendly.

“Heard a lot about you, sir,” he said, in a somewhat high-pitched, clear voice.

We shook hands and there was power in it, but no showing off.

Dimity picked up the introductions from Margot, gesturing to the other man, saying, “And this is James Forrestal, late of Wall Street.”

“Make it Jim,” Forrestal said, stepping forward to present a small hand for me to shake. His grip tried a little too hard to impress.

He was much smaller than Dimity, and in fact was shorter than Margot, yet his frame was slimly athletic within a pinstriped vested gray serge suit with four-in-hand black-and-gray-striped tie, apparel that made no allowance for the Southern California weather.

“And I’m Nate,” I said.

Forrestal’s spade-shaped face had a combative Irish look, dominated by the flattened nose of a pug; but his features otherwise reflected business-executive restraint: intense blue-gray eyes, thin lips compressed into an uncompromising line, and a ball-like cleft chin. His iron-gray hair was cut short and swept neatly back.

His small hard eyes appraising me, Forrestal asked, “Are you a Jewish fella, Nate? You don’t mind my saying so, you have an Irish cast.”

“So do you, Jim,” I said. “My looks are my mother’s fault. The name’s my father’s, but he wasn’t raised Jewish and neither was I.”

“Were you raised in your mother’s faith?” Forrestal asked. “Are you a Catholic, then?”

Margot and Dimity were clearly embarrassed by this line of questioning.

“No, Jim,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m not much of anything. The only time I pray is when I’m in a jam, and then it’s pretty nondenominational.”

“Like most people,” Mantz said with a nervous chuckle.

“I’m not a religious man myself,” Forrestal said, rendering our conversation even more oblique.

Mantz gestured toward the grill, which was sparsely populated this time of day. “Shall we find a table?”

Soon, our drink orders placed, we were gathered at a red Formica-topped table, settled on chrome-tubing chairs along a beige-drapery-flanked wall of mirrored Venetian blinds that allowed us to watch the world pass by along Hollywood Boulevard; Grauman’s Chinese was just across the way, that grandiose pagoda with movie star foot-and handprints at its gates, the mysteries of the East Americanized into a tourist mecca. I sat near the window with Mantz beside me; Forrestal was directly across from me, his gaze unnervingly steady, Dimity next to him. Margot sat at the head of the table, facing the mirrored blinds.

She tented her fingers — the nails of which, I noticed, were the same cherry red as her lipstick — and began: “As I’m sure you know, Nathan, Mr. Dimity...”

“Elmer,” he interrupted cheerfully. “I can’t be the only ‘mister’ at the table.”

“Well,” Margot said, touching his hand, “I’m going to call you Mr. Dimity because you’re my boss... And Mr. Dimity is my boss, Nate, and a wonderful one — I’m working full-time for the Amelia Earhart Foundation, as executive secretary.”

“This little whirlwind is our only full-time employee,” Dimity added. “And the only person on the payroll. I’m the chairman of the board, and strictly a volunteer. Jim here is a board member, though he’s asked not to have his name on the letterhead, so that there’s, uh... no misunderstanding.”

That was provocative; but I let it go for the moment.

“Mr. Dimity is also founder of the Foundation,” Margot said proudly.

“Swell,” I said, getting a little weary of this mutual admiration society. “What is it?”

“The Foundation?” Dimity asked. “Well, our mandate is to ‘inspire the study of aeronautical navigation and the sciences akin thereto.’”

“Ah,” I said, as if that had answered it.

A white-jacketed waiter brought us our drinks. Actually, I’d held onto my rum and Coke, but Mantz was onto a second martini. Dimity had ordered a Gilbert, Forrestal a whiskey sour, and Margot a stinger.

Then Dimity jumped back in: “But our primary objective is to conduct an expedition to clear up Amelia’s disappearance.”

“An expedition?”

“Yes. We hope to send a search and rescue team to the Pacific to discover whether our friend is still alive, and if not, find an explanation to the mystery of her disappearance.”

I couldn’t tell them what I knew, which was that to find Amy, going into Japanese-held taboo territory would be a necessity.

Instead I merely said, “That would be extremely expensive.”

“Yes, we know,” Dimity said, and sipped his Gilbert. “Tens of thousands of dollars, which we intend to raise. I’m not the only friend Amelia had in business and industry, and in the higher echelons of society and finance. We already have the blessing of Amelia’s mother, and of course Mr. Mantz here, and the President and Mrs. Roosevelt.”

The latter surprised me. Why would the government sanction an excursion into its most embarrassing, top-secret impropriety?

I played a hunch. “Uh, Mr. Forrestal... Jim. What does that mean, exactly — ‘late of Wall Street’?”

He lowered his whiskey sour and his mouth tightened into a slash of a non-smile. “I recently resigned as president of an investment banking firm, Dillon, Read, and Company.”

“And what are you doing now?”

Forrestal’s smile froze and he waited several long seconds before replying, “I’m with the administration.”

Knowing, I asked, “What administration would that be?”

“The Roosevelt administration.” He took another sip of the whiskey sour, perhaps to provide time to see if his answer would be enough to satisfy me; my gaze was still on him, so he finally added, “I’m, uh... an administrative assistant to the President.”

“Sort of a troubleshooter.”

“You might say.”

“And you flew here, from Washington, D.C., to take this meeting with me?”

“I had several other meetings here, but yes, primarily. The President, and particularly Eleanor, were close friends of Amelia’s, and they are wholly supportive of the Foundation’s efforts.”

Even if they didn’t want their man’s name on the Foundation letterhead.

“I take it, then, Jim, that you were also a personal friend of Amelia’s...”

“I knew G. P. and his wife, yes. We traveled in something of the same social circles, in New York.”

Smiling innocently at Dimity, I asked, “And you, Elmer? You have a great passion for this cause, obviously. What was your connection to Amelia?”

But it was Margot who answered, leaning forward, reaching past Mantz, to touch my hand. “That’s what I started to say, before I got off the track... I thought you knew, Nathan, that Mr. Dimity was one of Amelia’s closest friends and business associates.”

“No I didn’t,” I admitted.

Margot continued: “Mr. Dimity developed a training unit for parachute jumpers...”

“It’s a two-hundred-foot tower,” Dimity interjected, “with a safety line attached to a standard parachute harness. Designed primarily for military use. Amelia helped me out by taking the first public jump from one of my towers.”

This was ringing a bell. Amy had told me that after G. P. had left Paramount, and needed some cash flow, he’d involved her with several publicity campaigns for a parachute company; she had also fondly mentioned the well-intentioned owner of the firm, who had become a supporter and something of a hanger-on.

“Amelia helped me gain public attention for several other of my aeronautics inventions,” Dimity said, then had another taste of his Gilbert. Behind the wire frames, his eyes were distant with memory, his voice soft as he said: “I owe much of the success of my company to that kind and generous lady.”

“Well, I know you didn’t pay my way out here to ask me for a contribution,” I said, which got a chortle out of Dimity and a smile from Margot. Forrestal’s reaction was only a little less expressive than a cigar store Indian’s. “And adding my name to your membership board sure won’t gain you any prestige.”

“We have a job for you,” Dimity said. “We are probably at least a year away from mounting our expedition, hiring a ship and crew... This is no idle effort, Nate, it’s my intention to go along, and Miss DeCarrie feels the same way. Having Amelia’s personal secretary aboard will lend our expedition credibility.”

This was starting to sound about as credible to me as launching an expedition to the Island of Lost Boys to look for Peter Pan.

“Of course,” Dimity was saying, “this assumes that all goes well with fundraising.”

“An opportunity has arisen,” Forrestal said, joining in belatedly, his whiskey sour glass empty, “that may help the fundraising effort.”

“Have you heard of Captain Irving Johnson?” Dimity asked me. “No.”

“Or perhaps, Captain Irving and Electa Johnson?”

“Them either.”

Margot said, “Captain Johnson and his lovely wife, when they’re not sailing around the world, are active on the same lecture circuit as Mr. Putnam... the sort of places Amelia used to speak.”

“And they talk about sailing around the world, I gather.”

“Yes,” Margot said. “They have a schooner.”

“Isn’t that what you serve German beer in?”

“No, Nathan, it’s a big sailing vessel...”

“That was a joke, Margot. The, uh, Johnsons is it? Sail around the world, and then they go on a lecture tour; then they sail some more, and repeat the process?”

“Yes,” she said, a little embarrassed.

“They write books together,” Dimity said, “and perhaps you’ve seen their articles in the Geographic.”

“My subscription just lapsed,” I said.

Captain and Mrs. Irving Johnson were part of the adventuring and voyaging fad that had turned Amelia Earhart into a star, the same public fascination for exploring that had made G. P. Putnam and his instant books successful, and public figures out of Lindy, Admiral Byrd, Frank Buck, and the rest of that hardy bunch.

Forrestal said, “Captain Johnson and his wife are out on a world voyage right now.”

“But they are willing to divert from their cruise,” Dimity said, “to accept a two-thousand-dollar commission from the Foundation. For four weeks, Captain Johnson will sail the Gilbert and Ellice islands. It is our hope that he will discover enough new information about the Earhart disappearance to fuel our fundraising efforts for a full expedition.”

“That might be helpful,” I admitted. “Do you want me to run a full background check on the captain, and make sure he’s not just some con man?”

“Captain Johnson is quite reputable,” Forrestal said.

Mantz said, “I’ve heard of this guy, Nate. Johnson’s on the up and up.”

“What we want,” Dimity said to me, “is for you to go along.”

“Me? Do I look like a sailor?”

Forrestal said, “Yes. But that’s not the point.”

“Nate,” Dimity said, “I need a representative on that ship. Someone who can make sure the captain does his job, thoroughly earns his two thousand dollars...”

I said to Mantz, “I thought you said he was on the up and up.”

Dimity pressed on: “I can’t, in good conscience, spend the Foundation’s meager funds on a preliminary expedition without sending along a representative of our group.”

Shaking my head, I gulped down some rum and Coke and said, “You know, I don’t speak a whole lot of South Sea Island languages.”

“You’ve survived in the Chicago jungle,” Forrestal said.

“Nate,” Dimity said, “I need a man who’s physically and mentally tough. You knew Amelia...”

There was that past tense again.

“...and you know the right questions to ask. If by chance, some delicate or dangerous situation arose, you could handle yourself... or so I’ve been told by those I’ve spoken to.”

“Why don’t you go?” I asked Dimity.

His expression mingled chagrin and regret. “I can’t leave my business for a month... We’ll pay you twenty-five dollars a day and all expenses.”

“That would wind up costing you close to a thousand bucks,” I said. “The Foundation got that in its coffers?”

“No,” Dimity admitted. “I’m paying for this myself. I can afford it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I certainly can!”

“I don’t mean I don’t think you can afford it, Elmer. I mean, I don’t think this is a job for me.”

He frowned and said, “I will guarantee you one thousand dollars.”

“It isn’t the money,” I said, and for a change it wasn’t. I didn’t think the government would want me taking part in this, not after they bought me off and had me sign that agreement. But on the other hand, fucking Forrestal was sitting across from me...

“Why don’t you sleep on it?” Forrestal suggested.

“Yes, Nathan,” Margot said, “you have two nights paid for here at the hotel, and your train tickets don’t take you back till Wednesday. We can meet for lunch tomorrow.”

I considered that.

Then I said, “All right. I’ll sleep on it. But I’m warning you, Elmer, Jim... Margot. I don’t think I’m your man.”

“Fair enough,” Dimity said, smiling as though I’d already accepted the job.

“I need to be going,” Forrestal said, and he rose.

Everyone else at the table got to their feet too, and I shook Forrestal’s hand — oddly, his grip was damn near limp, this second time — and he flinched me his tight non-smile and left.

Dimity said, “I need to get going, as well. Margot will contact you about time and place for luncheon tomorrow.”

“Fine,” I said, shook his hand, and he strutted out.

Mantz, Margot and I sat back down.

“That guy thinks ‘no’ is a three-letter word,” I said.

“He’s devoted to Amelia’s memory,” Margot said admiringly, apparently not recognizing the death sentence of her words.

Mantz put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Hey, I’d invite you to the house tonight, but I’m afraid Terry and I have plans. You think you can find supper in this town, by yourself?”

“He doesn’t have to be by himself,” Margot said. “I don’t have plans.”

I looked at the cute kid with her cherry-red lips and bright blue eyes. “That’s pretty brazen. You gonna twist my arm if I spend the evening with you?”

She laughed, and it was nicely musical; brunette curls bounced under the white beret. “We’ll swear off any discussion of the subject. No Amelia Earhart Foundation. Not even any Amelia Earhart.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a date.”

Chapter 15

Margot, it seemed, lived in a Roosevelt Hotel apartment, which also served as the Foundation’s Hollywood base; the official office was in Oakland, home of Dimity’s company.

So around seven I met her in the lobby. I was still in my white linen suit but Margot had slipped into an elegant little black bengaline dress with puffy three-quarter sleeves and no cleavage but nicely form-fitting, and brother was it a nice form. Her turban and gloves were that cherry red of her lipstick, and so were the toenails peeking from the open-toed black patent leather pumps.

“Ever been to Earl Carroll’s?” she asked, looping her arm in mine.

“No. Can we get in without reservations?”

“Mr. Dimity has a membership; we’re guaranteed seats. I just hope you won’t forget about me, with all those pretty girls around.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” I said, drinking in the smell of her. Since we first met, she’d switched from soap to Chanel Number Five.

Hollywood Boulevard was bathed in dusk, that time of day movie people call “magic hour,” giving neons a special glow, muting colors, coolly air-brushing the handiwork of God and man much as gauze over a camera lens plays Fountain of Youth for an aging actress. We joined the parade sauntering along the celebrated Boulevard, a good-looking couple getting admiring looks from tourists and locals alike, Grauman’s Chinese across the street, then Grauman’s Egyptian on our side of the street, high-tone department stores and lowly five-and-dimes, exclusive shops and postcard parlors, and when we turned down Vine, we soon saw the Brown Derby, not the one shaped like a hat, but the rambling Spanish-style affair with a neon derby riding stilts on the red clay tile rooftop while below a gaggle of fans with autograph books in hand waited to waylay celebs at the canopied entrance.

Earl Carroll’s topped them all, starkly modern in its geometric grace, no pillars for this pastel green palace, rather vertical shafts of white neon. Like Grauman’s Chinese, movie star autographs in cement were on display, not at your feet, but right in front of you, on the outer wall, CARY GRANT, GINGER ROGERS, BOB HOPE, JIMMY STEWART, ROSALIND RUSSELL, dozens more, stretching to the sky, where to their right a haunting electric visage loomed, the face of a beautiful woman, a graceful Art Moderne rendition, ivory neon brushstrokes against the building’s jade, her head tilted enigmatically above the impresario’s neon name, the arc of her chapeau outlined with the blue-electric words THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD. I ushered my beautiful woman under the blush of pink and blue and yellow lighting and through the chrome entryway, into a foyer that wasn’t much — just a black patent-leather ceiling, columns of pastel light, a gilded streamlined statue of a nude goddess, and a staircase so wide and grand it might have risen to heaven, not the men’s and ladies’ rooms.

The rose plush-carpeted dining room/auditorium, its walls green satin-draped, wasn’t any larger than a couple airplane hangars, seating for a thousand on half a dozen terraced areas with pink table settings and matching chairs under a ceiling that appeared at first to undulate with gracefully curving fringed curtains but on closer look consisted of thin tubular stripes of blue and gold neon fluorescence, which seemed to lead into a similar curving curtain of fringed light above the stage, feeding into thirty-foot light columns on either side.

Margot and I sat alone at a table for four, with only a row of banquet-size tables between us and the footlights. The apparel for men ranged from my own fairly casual white linens to tuxedos, though most of the women wore fancy evening wear, wanting to compete as best they could in a theater whose stage show, Broadway to Hollywood, starred nary a Cantor nor a Jolson, but “60 of the Most Beautiful Women in the World.” The joint was packed, though our terrace nearest the stage was perhaps only two-thirds full.

“Members of the Lifetime Cover Charge Club are always guaranteed a seat in the inner circle,” Margot explained, sipping another stinger.

We’d finished dinner, which — despite a menu courtesy of Chef Felix Ganio “of the Waldorf-Astoria” — was just adequate. But how could a mere filet mignon measure up to thousands of feet of neon and the promise of sixty showgirls?

“What do they pay for that privilege?” I asked.

“A thousand dollars... Mr. Dimity’s status here has been very handy, wining and dining potential Foundation members.”

We had both already broken our promise, several times, not to discuss the Amelia Earhart Foundation. We had also established that Margot was between boyfriends and that she was having the time of her life, hobnobbing with famous people and helping Amelia’s “cause.”

Actually, quite a few famous people were seated around us: Mantz’s charter customers Gable and Lombard, Tyrone Power and Sonja Henie, Jack Benny and his wife, Mary Livingston, Edgar Bergen without Charlie McCarthy (but with a lovely blonde), all seated at various tables of larger parties otherwise consisting of people I didn’t recognize.

Okay, I was a little impressed. But famous folk occasionally wandered through the cowtown I called home, and I’d done a job for Robert Montgomery out here last year, an impressive, classy guy; but most movie actors were, like George Raft, smaller than you’d think, with off-screen dialogue that didn’t exactly sparkle.

What even a thick-headed former cop like yours truly was starting to figure out was that I, too, was being wined and dined for the Foundation’s cause; and I was starting to wonder if cute, curvy Margot was part of the package. And if you think any of that would stir indignation in my breast, you haven’t been paying attention.

A nattily attired, almost skeletally thin, delicately handsome gent who might have been Fred Astaire but wasn’t was winding through the inner-circle crowd, smiling, joking, shaking hands with the celebrities who seemed delighted, even honored, by his attention.

“Who is that?” I asked Margot.

“That’s Earl Carroll himself,” she said.

Carroll and his Vanities, of course, had been the chief rival to Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies in its Broadway heyday. The Vanities had gone nuder than the Follies, and showman Carroll was frequently in trouble with the law; he was notorious and flamboyant in a fashion that explained the admiration flowing from the Hollywood royalty at his tables.

“He’s coming this way,” Margot whispered.

“You’re Nate Heller!” he said, as if I were a celebrity too, his smile as dazzling as it was insincere.

“Mr. Carroll,” I said, and we shook hands, “nice little hole in the wall you got here.”

His strong-jawed face had a surprising sensitivity, his cheekbones high, gray-blue eyes piercing, his dark, slightly graying hair combed way back; he smelled of lilac water, smelled better than a lot of showgirls I’d dated.

He sat next to me, leaned in chummily. “We make Broadway look provincial, don’t you think? Got anything in Chicago that compares?”

“Not sober. How long you been open?”

He looked up at his glittering neon ceiling. “Year and a half. You know, I was on the verge of bankruptcy when I called every last one of my markers in, to make this place a reality. Now I’m back on top.”

“Well, congratulations. How is it you happen to know who the hell I am?”

A tiny smile drifted across his lips. “You’re sitting in my inner circle, aren’t you? Listen, I just wanted to make sure you and your lady friend have a good time this evening. I wanted you to know you’re welcome...”

And he slipped his arm around me.

“...and if this little morsel you’re with doesn’t work out,” he whispered into my dainty ear, “just let me know if you see something in the show that appeals to you... and it’s always good to have a second choice if an item is sold out.”

He rose with a sly wink, handing me his card; I slipped it in my pocket, as he continued along his glad-handing way. What was this son of a bitch, my guardian angel?

Margot, smiling like a pixie, leaned across the table and touched my hand with a gloved one. “What did that devil whisper to you?”

“He was hoping I could talk you into trying out for the chorus,” I said.

She blushed; it was legendary that Carroll’s showgirls had to audition in the nude. “No, really...”

I ducked the question with my own: “Carroll wouldn’t happen to be a member of the Foundation, would he?”

Her eyelashes fluttered. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, he’s a flier, isn’t he? A pilot.”

“How do you know that?”

“Remember when he landed a plane in the middle of New York? It was in all the papers.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, as if having to recall, “he landed in Central Park, in the middle of winter.”

“That publicity hound makes G. P. look subtle.”

“Mr. Carroll is a great admirer of Amelia’s,” she admitted, somewhat embarrassed.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I said, and patted her hand. “I used to be a Chicago cop. I thrive on bribes.”

The show was an eye-popper. The sixty showgirls, who sang well and handled patter nicely, flitted about floating platforms and revolving stages, near nudists in feathers and sequins, sometimes to classy numbers like “The Blue Danube,” courtesy of Ray Noble’s Orchestra, and other times in more traditional burlesque fashion.

One running gag had shapely brunette headliner Beryl Wallace (Carroll’s girlfriend, Margot told me; no doubt one of the “sold out” items) fleeing from a comic, first in a negligee with the funnyman flashing scissors, later in a hula skirt with him pushing a lawnmower, finally in tin pants with her pursuer wielding a blowtorch.

But spectacle and yards of near nudity were the hallmark, as when the sixty babes displayed themselves on one hundred feet of stairs. I was terribly distracted, watching this buffet of blondes and redheads and brunettes, knowing I could call their boss and select one or two or three; it ruined the damn show for me. I like to think if I pick up a showgirl for a cheap one-night fling that my boyish charm had something to do with it. Call me old-fashioned.

Maybe that was why I turned a little morose on the walk back. Margot looped her arm in mine as we strolled through the Boulevard’s valley of bright lights, a streetcar clanging its unsophisticated way down the center, occasionally.

“What’s wrong, Nathan?”

“Aw, nothin’.”

“I think I know.”

“Yeah?”

“You think I’m trying to use you.”

That made me smile. I came to a stop and she took my cue and I faced her. The night was alive with headlights of passing cars, brand names outlined in neon, searchlights announcing the premiere of a major motion picture, or maybe the opening of a drive-in barbecue stand. I gathered the small, shapely creature in my arms, the slick material of her dress slippery under my touch, and I kissed her.

It was sweet and it was real.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” I said.

“I’ve been wanting you to,” she admitted, her eyes dancing with reflected light.

“I just had to make sure.”

“About what?”

“That you were as sweet a kid as you seem to be.”

“Am I?”

“I’m not sure I care now,” I said. “Let’s go back to our hotel.”

She snuggled against me as we walked, and I was deciding whether to take her to my room or try for hers, when she said, “Do you ever wonder?”

“Wonder what?”

“If... if she had it.”

“Had what?”

“The baby. Your baby.”

I stopped again. We were in front of the Egyptian Theater with its white columns and looming color caricatures of Egyptian deities. “You sure know how to kill a mood, kid.”

“I’m sorry.” Her lower lip was quivering.

I put an arm around her shoulder and walked her along. “No, I don’t wonder about that at all,” I lied, and led her to the hotel and inside, and soon we were stepping into an elevator, which we had to ourselves. It was one of those automatic jobs, no operator. I pushed my floor button, 7, and she pushed hers, 11. Lucky numbers.

“You want to come up?” she asked, perkily hopeful. “We can order coffee, maybe some cake or something, from room service...”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No. And I’m gonna hate myself in the morning. But I’m tired. And you’re just too sweet a kid.”

She slipped her arms around me and kissed me softly, tenderly. “You’re so romantic... You still love her, don’t you?”

“The problem is,” I said, “you still do.”

A little bell announced my floor. I touched her face and said, “See you tomorrow, kid.”

“Maybe breakfast?”

“Sure,” I said, stepping into the hallway. “Breakfast.”

And the doors began to close over that cute mug, the cherry-red lipstick a little mussed, and before she was gone, she waved like a child. I sighed and dug my handkerchief out and rubbed the gunk off my mouth. Just me in the hallway. No Margot. No Earl Carroll girl. Of course, I did still have that card...

I worked the key in the door and had it open only halfway when I saw him, sitting in a wooden armchair next to an open window in the small, modernly appointed hotel room, a book in his lap. Thoughtful of him, letting in that gentle breeze whispering the sheer curtains, because otherwise my room would have reeked of the smoke from the pipe clenched in his teeth.

“Took the liberty of making myself at home,” Forrestal said, mouth flinching that non-smile around the stem of the pipe. He hefted the book; the jacket said: To Have and Have Not. “Took the opportunity to catch up on my reading — it’s this fellow Hemingway’s latest. Little raw for my tastes.”

“I’m afraid I’m a Police Gazette sort of guy myself,” I said, closing the door behind me.

“I have to ask you to forgive my rudeness,” he said, taking the pipe out of his mouth, rising, tossing the book on my nearby dresser with a clunk. He still wore the same suit and tie as this afternoon, but it looked as crisp as if he’d just put it on. “There are matters we need to discuss... privately.”

Suddenly I was glad I hadn’t brought Margot back to my room. This little man with the broken nose and stiffly dignified air represented President Roosevelt, or least that was what I’d been told. But there was something ominous about all this.

“Oh-kay,” I said, and sat on the edge of my bed near the foot, where on the luggage stand my suitcase rested. “Why don’t you sit back down, Jim, and we’ll talk.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Not here... Mind if I use your phone?”

“My room is your room.”

He flinched another non-smile and went to the nightstand and used the phone, speaking to the desk, asking for an outside line. His back was to me, perhaps so I couldn’t catch the number he dialed; I took the opportunity to slip my nine-millimeter out of the suitcase, and into my waistband, buttoning my suitcoat over it.

“Yes,” Forrestal said to somebody. “He’s here... He’ll speak with us, yes.”

He hung up and turned to me and said, “We need to take a little ride.”

I gave him a smile that didn’t have much to do with smiling. “Those aren’t friendly words in Chicago. Not in my social circles, anyway.”

He chuckled, as he relighted his pipe with a kitchen match that he flicked to flame with a thumbnail. “I assure you this is a friendly ride... and, uh, you won’t be needing that weapon.”

“Nothing much gets past you, does it, Jim?”

“Nothing much.”

“Me, either. You aren’t armed.” I stood and patted my coat over where the gun was tucked. “I’ll just keep this with me. It’s not polite to go to a party without bringing a little something.”

He shrugged, as if it mattered not a whit to him, and brushed by me, on his way out. I’ll be damned if I didn’t follow him, into the hallway, onto the elevator.

And we rode down, his eyes on the floor indicator, he asked, “Pleasant evening with Miss DeCarrie?”

“Swell. Plus, Earl Carroll gave me the pick of the litter.”

“Really.” That seemed to almost amuse him. “You pick a pup?”

“Night is young.”

Soon we were standing at the rear of the hotel, the loading area adjacent to the parking lot, which was fairly full. It was approaching midnight, and the brittle mildly drunken laughter of a pair of well-dressed couples accompanied them from a cab that deposited them, and they stumbled past us in furs and jewelry and black tie to the stairs up into the hotel, perhaps calling it a night or heading to the Cine-Gril.

A minute or so passed and a black Lincoln limousine with a leather-covered roof and white sidewalls rolled in, pulling in front of us, like something out of a Rockefeller’s funeral. The rear windows were curtained. From where I stood, I couldn’t see the driver.

A Roosevelt Hotel doorman stepped forward and opened the rear door for us; Forrestal gestured for me to step in first, and I stepped over the running board and inside. Seats faced each other in the rear of the limo, with a gray-curtained division window providing privacy from the driver; the interior was spacious and dark leather and seated way over to the left, by a gray-curtained window, was William Miller.

“Sorry for the hugger-muggery,” Miller said in his radio announcer’s baritone, bestowing me a bland smile. As always, he wore a dark suit; his tie was so dark a red it was nearly black, too. But then, what would a hearse be without an undertaker?

I sat across from Miller while Forrestal slid in beside him.

“You never quite sound like you mean it,” I said to Miller, “when you’re apologizing to me.”

Miller’s feminine lips kissed me a little smile. “That must be why I’m not attached to the diplomatic corps.”

The limo began to move. We were taking a tour of Hollywood with our curtains closed.

I sat with my hands on my knees. “Let me start off by saying what a swell job you government boys have done negotiating Amelia’s return.”

Forrestal was still smoking his pipe; its pleasantly pungent aroma was creating a minor fog. He and the lanky Miller made a Mutt and Jeff pairing, albeit a somber one. These guys were a lot of laughs. Like a barrel of monks.

Eyes hard and cold under the ridge of black eyebrow, Miller said, “The Japanese steadfastly deny any knowledge of the whereabouts of Miss Earhart or her plane.”

“You left out Fred Noonan.”

A tiny shrug. “So I did. How tactless. Or Noonan, either.”

I shook my head, grinned. “Somehow I can’t buy Uncle Sam backing Elmer Dimity’s sailboat safari. What’s really going on here?”

“We would like you to accept the Foundation’s commission,” Miller said.

“What, to keep an eye on them?”

“Not precisely. The Navy has long since conducted a thorough search of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands; Captain Johnson’s efforts there are almost certainly destined to be redundant.”

I gestured over at Forrestal. “Hey, you can ask your pal Jim, here — I didn’t tip Dimity and Margot that their skipper’d have to get into Japanese waters, to make their time and money worth spending.”

Outside, the occasional sound of a band playing in a night-spot provided sporadic background music for our conversation. With the frequent honk of a horn and general traffic sounds, my guess was we were gliding down the Sunset Strip.

“I appreciate your discretion,” Miller said. “You’ve honored your contract with us... In fact, I’m here to bring you back into the service of your government.”

I shook my head, no. “They haven’t passed the draft yet, bud...”

Miller leaned forward ever so slightly. “Nate, the information we have is limited... our intelligence in the Japanese-held sectors of the Pacific is sketchy and secondhand, to say the least. But we have reason to believe Earhart and Noonan were picked up either by a fishing boat or a launch from a battleship.” A slight bump in the road sent him leaning back into his cushioned seat. “There’s been speculation that they have been transferred to Tokyo, but our best educated guess... aided by some very indirect intelligence... convinces us she’s being held on an island called Saipan.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

The black ridge of eyebrow lifted in a facial shrug. “Few in America have. It’s a jungle island in the Western Pacific, in the Marianas chain, fifteen miles long, five miles across at its widest point. The Japs have a ‘development corporation’ there, Nan’yo Kohatsu Kaisha. They specialize in sugar production, operating three plantations growing sugar cane, and two mills producing crude sugar.”

“Isn’t that sweet.”

We seemed to be at a stoplight.

“Not really. We believe Nan’yo Kohatsu Kaisha is largely a front for military construction. We know they have a small seaplane base at Tanapag Harbor, and believe they’re building airstrips all around the island. Saipan is only 1,250 nautical miles from Tokyo, potentially the most important supply base and communications center for the Central Pacific.”

“And this is where you think Amelia and Noonan are being held?”

Forrestal got into the act. “There’s a military prison on the island. We believe that when war comes, and it will, Saipan will likely become headquarters for Jap military operations in that part of the Pacific.”

I blew out some air. “For having sketchy intelligence, you fellas know a lot.”

Things had quieted down outside the limo; perhaps we were rolling through a residential area now.

“Not really,” Miller admitted. “Except for a few details that we will in time share with you, you already know damn near as much as we do.”

“Then why are you so convinced Amelia is still alive?”

Forrestal responded to that one, the small dark eyes fixed on me like gunsights. “She would be a valuable propaganda pawn to the enemy, in the early days of the inevitable war... as evidence that we committed acts of espionage, of war, against Japan during peacetime.”

“Also,” Miller said, “she’d make a valuable prisoner for them to swap, should we have any Japanese envoy or ambassador or prominent citizens in our hands, after open hostilities begin.”

Forrestal was nodding. “And these are among the reasons that we would like to extract Miss Earhart from Japanese hands, before the war begins.”

“Why the hell didn’t the Japs tell the world they had her in the first place?” I asked. “And embarrass us then?”

Somewhere a dog was barking.

“Amelia Earhart is a beloved figure around the world,” Miller said. “That admiration, particularly among young women, crosses all borders. That means the Japs would have to release her, at some point.”

I frowned at this logic. “Even if they painted her as a spy?”

Miller gazed at the gray curtained window, as if he were taking in the scenery. “I believe so. And therein lies one of the reasons they’ve held her, and it’s a time-honored one: she knows too much. She knows the nature and the extent of the military build-up by the Japs in the Pacific, particularly on Saipan, if indeed she’s being held there. Acts of war that she could and no doubt would report.”

A nasty thought formed and I reluctantly expressed it: “Then why haven’t they quietly killed her and buried her on that hellhole?”

“Because of the factors we mentioned before,” Miller said with a small, inappropriate smile. “Her propaganda value, her worth in a prisoner exchange... but also there’s the wealth of aviation knowledge in her mind. What she and Noonan know about the Electra.”

Forrestal frowned at Miller. “I don’t believe it’s necessary to get into that.”

“Into what?” I asked. “If you want my cooperation, gentlemen, you’ll need to be as forthcoming as possible. I have one motivation here: getting Amelia back from the Pacific where you lost her.”

Forrestal shook his head, no, but Miller sighed and said, “One of the reasons we know she’s alive... or at least why we know that she was kept alive, for a time...”

Forrestal gripped Miller’s arm. “Bill, no.”

Miller lifted Forrestal’s hand off, as if it were something distasteful that had landed there, and gave him a smile that was really a frown; then his face turned sober as he looked at me and said, “The Japanese fighter plane is known as a ‘Claude’... also as a ‘Zero.’ A well-designed, successful plane, particularly up against the Chinese, who were notoriously lousy pilots, by the way. But the Claude, the Zero, has had, chronically, a drawback... it’s inclined to crash.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’d call that a drawback in an airplane.”

“This is due to its underpowered engine. That’s one of the things, I believe, that’s prevented Japan from moving against us, up till now.”

I was in over my head, but I asked, “What is?”

“Our aircraft far surpass theirs... to go up against us, they needed to improve the handling and the rate of climb, in their fighter planes. A company called Mitsubishi has been developing the new Zero...”

“I’d prefer you didn’t continue,” Forrestal said to Miller, petulantly.

“Christ... I think I’m ahead of you.” I sat forward. “By sending Amelia and her ‘Flying Laboratory’ into enemy territory, we handed those bastards a schematic for a better plane!”

Miller nodded once, almost a bow. “You are a perceptive individual, Mr. Heller. A true detective. Our intelligence reports indicate that the new Zero incorporates many of the Electra’s best features... retractable landing gear, double radial engine, automatic carburetor, and the embarrassing list goes on.”

My brain reeled. “You’re telling me we handed the Japs the specs for a plane they can use to invade us?”

Outside, silence, the limo moving through sleeping streets.

Miller shifted uncomfortably in his comfortable seat. “Worse than that — we managed to do that by way of Amelia Earhart’s plane. And, to add to the potential embarrassment and crushing indignity that implies, very possibly they’ve induced her to share her knowledge of that aircraft with them.”

“What, she’s working with the Japs?”

Miller blinked several times, a fairly rare occurrence. “She may have felt somewhat... misused by her government.”

“Oh, really? Whyever would she think that?”

He ignored the sarcasm and gave me a straight answer: “Because she wasn’t made aware of the flight over Japanese waters until the very last minute.”

That fit the Myers kid’s story of what he’d heard on his Philco, Noonan handing Amy an envelope with a change of “flight plan.”

“What did she think the cameras in the fuselage bay were for?” I asked Miller. “Home movies?”

He held up two hands, as if in surrender. “We told Miss Earhart — and it was absolutely true — that her mission was to take reconnaissance photos over Italian-held Eritrea’s military and commercial airfields... at Massawa, Assam, and Asmara.”

“Where the fuck is that?”

Forrestal reared back slightly, as if offended by my harsh language. Fuck him.

“Africa,” Miller said. “I met her personally at Darwin, Australia, and took home the film she’d shot up to that point.”

“Yeah, and handed Noonan his new secret orders behind Amelia’s back. Hell, if I was her, I’d be drawing blueprints of the White House for those Japs.”

And I let the gray curtain up next to us, to show them what I thought of their secrecy. The palm trees of Beverly Hills were gliding by, a tropical dream in the moonlight.

Miller only smiled the meaningless smile. “No you wouldn’t... Are you going to help us?”

I snorted a laugh. “If Amelia’s stuck in some military prison on... where?”

“Saipan.”

“Saipan... then what the hell good does it do me to go along with Captain Johnson on his wild-goose chase through the What’s It Islands?”

“That’s only your cover, or at least part of it. You need to understand the high opinion we have developed of you, where your special... qualities are concerned.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You’re good with your fists, you’re good with a handgun, you’re smart, resourceful, and you know the ins and outs of this delicate situation as no other civilian does.”

“If you’re looking to head up my fan club, Miller, there’s an opening.”

“In addition, you have a personal stake here, by way of your... relationship with Miss Earhart. You need also to understand that, while a private citizen, Captain Johnson is also a Naval reserve officer.”

“So you’ve recruited him, too.”

“In a word — yes. He’ll help you prepare your reports for Dimity’s Foundation, as if you’d been with the Johnson cruise all the while.”

That got my attention. “What do you mean, as if?”

Miller’s baritone was calm, soothing; he’d missed his calling — he should have been a hypnotist. “You’ll only go partway with Johnson, Nate,” he was saying. “You’ll really be working for us, for the Office of Naval Intelligence, not ‘Dilly-Dally’ Dimity, as we call him... though you can keep the money he pays you, which we intend to match with our funds. This adventure should prove as lucrative as it is interesting.”

“Why do I think I’m going to be signing another contract?”

“Because you are,” Miller said, leaning forward to pat me on the knee. “You see, we’ve arranged a separate expedition for you... to Saipan.”

Chapter 16

I sat on a netting-shaded cement verandah, sipping a rum and Coke, outside a Quonset-hut “hotel” rented by the Navy to Pan American Airlines. The naval base on this scruffy, hot, humid island — Guam, the sole U.S. territory in the midst of the Japanese-controlled Mariana Islands — was on Commar Hill, where the evening had turned out surprisingly cool. The floor show consisted of small, cat-eyed, long-tailed lizards chasing flies in the pools of light that spilled here and there from our corrugated-tin Hilton.

“Geckos,” William Miller said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what those little lizards are called.” Miller, in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, was stretched out on the deck-style chair next to mine. He was smoking a cigarette and the cool salty breeze was turning the blue smoke into a native girl’s hula.

“I’ve seen bigger lizards,” I said. I was dressed almost identically, except my trousers were a light khaki.

He allowed me a faint smile. “The rest of the Clipper passengers will be taking off at four A.M. You get to sleep in till five.”

“Are you going on with them to Manila?”

He shook his head, no. “I’ll stay here at the base and wait for your return.”

“I like your optimism.”

“You’ll make it.”

“And if I don’t, the government saves a grand or so.”

He dropped his cigarette to the cement floor, reached out his foot and ground it out. “Is there someone you’d like to see get that money?”

I had given him sarcasm; he’d given me a straight, if sobering, answer.

“No,” I said. And wasn’t that a sad goddamn thing? Didn’t that say something about the state of my affairs? The only person I could think of to bequeath my riches to was somebody who might or might not exist, a child that Amy may or may not have had on an island where she possibly was, or possibly wasn’t.

He glanced at his watch. “Johnson should be here for our little chat, shortly. He and his crew are eating over at the Navy mess.”

We had eaten, and well, on the Clipper. The famed flying boat had lived up to its storied reputation. We were served our steam-cooked meals by the steward on tables with white linen cloths, china, silver, and water goblets (no liquor was served) in a lavish, spacious lounge where the ten passengers sat in roomy, well-padded seats facing each other, five abreast. A second passenger compartment, aft, served as a sort of game room, with wicker chairs at tables for cards or checkers. Another cabin, further aft, converted to sleeping berths, but we only used them on the first leg of the flight, from San Francisco to Honolulu.

That first leg had seemed endless. The China Clipper had lifted off from the Alameda seaplane base on San Francisco Bay on a beautiful afternoon, accompanied by only the gentlest breeze. Sunshine had glistened off the hull and wings and prop blades of a white, red-trimmed four-engine ship that seemed at once sleek and ungainly, its wing riding atop the fuselage like a perfectly balanced teeter-totter. Once the lines had been cast off, we’d made several circles on the bay, warming the engine up, before surging forward, only barely flying at first, under the heavy burden of fuel, finally gaining altitude, cruising into an afternoon that stubbornly refused to let go of the day.

Many hours later, when darkness finally sheathed the ship, the Clipper settled in between layers of cloud and cruised along. My traveling companion, William Miller, wearing a dark suit and dark blue tie, to add a festive touch to our flight to the tropics, pointed out to me that we were flying a route charted by Fred Noonan.

“Isn’t that reassuring,” I said.

Dawn took its time arriving, too, and out a window, at breakfast, I spotted the familiar shape of Diamond Head; the last time had been from the deck of the ocean liner Malolo. And after only twenty and a half hours, we were landing at Pearl Harbor to a typically flower-strewn welcome. Meanwhile, the Clipper was loaded up with staples of the island Naval bases — crates of fresh fruit and vegetables, mostly — while limos with Pan Am drivers escorted the passengers to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for a leisurely evening of dining and dancing and the sight of Oahu’s starry purple sky, golden moon, ebony ocean, and white breakers. Then dawn slapped us back to reality and we were soon aboard the Clipper for the easiest leg of the trip, the mere 1,380 miles to Midway.

The entire briefing for my mission took place in hotel rooms, along the way, and of course the passenger cabin of the China Clipper, over the four days of flying. Only ten passengers were aboard — me, Miller, and four wealthy couples, two from New York, one from Los Angeles, one from Dallas — the little California to Hong Kong six-day jaunt, after all, cost $950, one way, one tickee. The cabin soundproofing was remarkable, allowing conversation in a normal, even hushed, voice.

So Miller and I sat apart from the paying customers and played endless games of checkers — which ended invariably in deadlock — while the government agent filled me in on my distressingly detailed cover story, suggested plans of action and various routes of escape. At no time was anything hand-or typewritten given to me; everything, like a pill, was administered orally.

“That saves us the annoying necessity of having to eat the papers,” Miller said, and I was never sure whether he was kidding. Probably not. A sense of humor didn’t seem to have been among his government-issue materials.

Out the window occasionally I’d spot one of the many little islands that we seemed to be following like bread crumbs to the atolls of Midway, where a beautiful lagoon waited for us to touch down. Waiting too were attentive white-uniformed Pan Am staff at the landing float with its long, pergola-style deplaning dock. A brick walkway led to a sprawling white-pillared hotel, its two wings spread like open arms, gathering us up into a sanctuary of Simmons beds, bathrooms with hot showers, classy lounges with wicker furniture, and tasty exotic meals served by white-uniformed native stewards.

On the spacious verandah that evening my bosom pal Miller sat with me as we watched an unruly surf crash upon the encircling reef, and observed bald-headed, turkey-looking birds that would run crazily along the beach, flapping their wings in takeoff, invariably nosing over in a feathery flurry of a crash landing in the sand. Most of my fellow passengers found this endlessly amusing. Takeoffs that wound up in crash landings were never my idea of a good laugh.

“Gooney birds,” Miller told me. “In fact, some people call Midway itself ‘Gooneyville.’... They’re really Laysan albatrosses.”

“Is that something I have to remember? If so, I’m really glad that one wasn’t written down; I’d hate to have to swallow the definition of a gooney bird.”

“No,” Miller said humorlessly. “You needn’t remember that.”

So of course I did.

The next day’s hotel, at Wake, was almost identical to the one at Midway, but the island itself was a barren, cruelly tropical atoll that had been home to hermit crabs and nasty rats and not humans, until flying boats like the Clipper had come along. It was a world with no fresh water, shade or harbor, a wind-blown bevy of scrubby sand dunes. For recreation we were offered air rifles and the chance to go rat hunting. I passed.

The cliff-bordered harbor at Guam had been arrayed with Navy warships and a few freighters. A small yellow bus with a small yellow driver had taken us along a scenic coastal road, dotted with big beautiful poinciana trees bursting with red blossoms. It was almost enough to make me forget about Wake; but my stomach was unsettled, and scenery, barren or bountiful, had nothing to do with it.

My Clipper cruise among millionaire tourists was coming to an end; I wouldn’t even have my warm and wonderful friend William Miller at my side, before long. I would be embarking on what might charitably be called an adventure, what more realistically might be termed a fool’s errand, and what most likely was a suicide mission. Two thousand dollars, give or take a buck, half from the Foundation, half from Uncle Sam, was all I would haul to shore; good money, in these Depression days, but only if I lived to spend it.

Why the hell was I doing this?

It was a question I had asked myself over and over again, on the various legs of this journey; and the answer was Amy. Amy and what she had told her flighty secretary, in confidence, about a possible child on the way. Whenever I had looked out a Clipper window at shimmering Pacific waters, I knew why I’d come. It was waters like these she’d disappeared over.

Now, on a verandah in Guam, outside a Navy Quonset hut, I took a last swig of my drink and looked out toward the ocean. By Clipper, Saipan was only an hour or so away. But I wasn’t going by seaplane.

Miller was on his feet and so was I. We had been joined by a singular physical specimen in a light-blue denim shirt with rolled-up sleeves, darker denim trousers, and white rubber-soled shoes. Leathery tan, his sunlightened brown hair cropped short, he regarded us through the narrow slits his eyes hid behind, the strength of a slenderly hawkish nose offset by a shyly boyish smile. His bull neck led naturally into a massive upper torso, then tapered to a wasp waist; his wrists were small but his hands were big, blunt, and powerful — he extended one to Miller and they shook.

“Skipper,” Miller said, “good to see you again. This is your passenger.”

“We don’t normally take on passengers, Mr. Heller,” he said, without having to be told my name; his voice was a New England drawl. The boyish smile was still alive as he held his hand out.

“This is Captain Irving Johnson,” Miller said, as Johnson and I shook. His grip was firm but not obnoxious. “Pull up a chair, Skipper. Can I get you something to drink?”

Easing into a wicker settee, he said, “Maybe a lemonade.” I must have reacted to that, because Johnson said, “I run a dry ship, Mr. Heller. No drinking, no smoking, either... hope that won’t be a problem.”

“Not at all, Captain. I understand your crew pays you. That’s a neat trick.”

Miller had stepped away to summon a steward to get Johnson his lemonade.

Johnson’s shy smile settled on the left side of his face, as he said, “My bride and I’ve come up with an interesting way of living... We go out for a year and a half, sail around the world having the time of our life, with a crew of young people who pay us for the privilege.”

“If I’m not out of line asking, what do you charge these amateur adventurers to play Barnacle Bill?”

“Three thousand dollars per.”

I let out a slow whistle. “You turn rich boys into slightly less rich men.”

He shrugged. “We make sailors out of them. Standing watch day and night, steering, handling sail, rigging, even sailmaking. Everybody works, which is why you’ll be an exception.”

“Hey, I’m just thumbin’ a ride — and I appreciate the favor, though it seems like an awful risk for you.”

Miller was back, joining Johnson on the settee. “The skipper here is generally regarded as the best all-around schooner master on the seas.”

“I don’t doubt that,” I said. “But sailing into Japanese waters...”

Johnson leaned back, a knee locked in his palms. “We’ll drop anchor outside Saipan, beyond the three-mile territorial zone.”

“Who’s going to take me in?”

“I will. And Hayden, my first mate... he’s no rich kid, he’s a real sailor.”

I glanced at Miller. “Who am I on this ship?”

“You’re Nate Heller,” Miller said. “The skipper has told his boys that, should anyone ask, you were along for the full four-week cruise of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.”

“Captain,” I asked, “is your crew aware this is a government mission?”

“They are,” Johnson said, nodding. “They know none of the particulars, just that we’re doing the red-white-and-blue a favor. They’re good kids, obviously from good backgrounds, and can be trusted.”

I looked at Miller again. “This sounds a little freewheeling to me.”

Miller’s shrug was barely perceptible. “We’ll have a talk with the boys at the first available moment.”

A native steward brought Johnson his lemonade. The skipper nodded his thanks to the man, and sipped at the tall cool glass. “You can have them briefed at Nauru,” Johnson said to Miller.

“Frankly, Captain,” I said, “I’m surprised you’re out in these waters with your boatload of silver spoons, considering what’s going on in this world.”

Geckos were chasing flies; catching and eating them, too, in those spilled circles of light.

“I was worried the war might dog our tracks out on the high seas,” he admitted. “And I have my wife and two young sons with me, after all... Maybe the time has passed for carefree sailing into the world’s faraway places.”

Or maybe, like Amy, he was a well-known civilian with a handy, credible cover for reconnaissance.

I tossed a nod back toward the tin-hut hotel behind us. “It certainly hasn’t stopped millionaires from taking pleasure cruises.”

“My schooner is not the China Clipper, Mr. Heller,” Johnson said, the smile turning wry. “You’re stepping into the past when you set foot on my deck. The Yankee was sailing the North Sea before any of us were born.”

And in the Guam harbor the next morning, anchored among the warships and freighters, the Yankee indeed looked as if she had sailed out of the past into a harsher, less pleasing present, this majestic white-hulled schooner, nearly a hundred feet long, like a pirate ship of good guys, as the American flag painted on her bow attested.

My travel bag in one hand, with the other I shook hands with Miller, dockside, and he asked, “Any final questions?”

“Yeah. What do you mean, ‘final’?”

And he actually laughed. “Good luck, Nate.”

“Thank you, Bill,” I said, and meant it. He had worked hard, preparing me for this mission. He was one cold son of a bitch, but then I was a smartass bastard, so who was I to talk?

Captain Johnson, at the wheel, invited me to stand beside him as we cast off and glided out. Brown-as-a-berry rich kids scurried around his deck in shorts and no shirts and no shoes, as he called out to them, “Foresail!... Mainsail!... Forestaysail!... Jib!... Maintopsail!... Fisherman staysail!” One by one they were set, then finally a massive square sail dropped from the yardarm, and a triangular one rose above it, thousands of square feet of sail, a skyscraper of canvas.

“Spend much time at sea?” the Skipper asked.

“Does Lake Michigan count?”

He laughed. “On Lake Michigan, do you run into swells two hundred yards from crest to crest?”

“Well, Chicago is the Windy City... I’ve had some ocean voyages, Skipper. I think I can survive one day of this.”

And one day was all my tour of sea duty with the Yankee would amount to: a long day, ten hours, and after sundown, we would drop anchor and spend the night, so that come morning Johnson and his first mate could row me to the next stop on my itinerary: Tanapag Harbor. Saipan. The town of Garapan.

In the meantime that long day did prove a restful journey into a simpler time. It was a sunny day with a warm breeze, the ship sailing steadily along, the ocean shimmering with sunlight. The boys — and two pretty girls in their twenties were along, too, which considering the dozen young men aboard made for interesting arithmetic — began the day ambitiously, scraping and varnishing the teak trim, splicing ropes and lines; the two girls, a blonde (Betsy from Rochester, New York) and a brunette (Dorothy from Toronto), were sewing canvas covers and mending sail. By afternoon, the barechested sailor boys and the two girls in shorts and boy’s shirts were sprawled here and there on the deck, bathed in sun, or reading in the shade of dinghies.

Belowdeck had a warmth due to more than the sun streaming through the skylights; painted ivory with varnished teak trim, the big main cabin had built-in upper and lower bunks on either side. Down the middle was an endless teakwood table where, between meals, cards were played, books were read, letters written. In the forward galley, Fritz the cook (one of the few crew members getting paid) made the most of powdered milk, canned butter, and wax-coated eggs. Lunch was particularly memorable — turtle stew with curry, baked beans, fried onions, and johnnycakes.

Watching these young people work and play was a reminder of life’s little pleasures. Johnson’s wife, Electa, Exy to one and all, was a compact curvy blue-eyed blonde in a blue-and-white-striped top and blue shorts, and who could blame Johnson for running off to sea in her company? She spent much of her time with her two young sons, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, who nimbly navigated the deck, balancing on forebooms, bouncing on sails.

“They’re fearless,” I said to her.

Exy’s smile was a dazzler. “The Yankee’s their home. They never lived anywhere else... You’re in their back yard.”

The two kids had their own cabin below, down the hall from the Captain and Mrs. Johnson’s cabin, the engine room and bathroom. There was also a double stateroom for Betsy and Dorothy, who may just have been two more of the “boys” on this trip but nonetheless did not make use of the main cabin’s dormlike bunks.

I had been assigned my own bunk, for my one night aboard the Yankee, six and a half feet long by three feet wide, thirty inches between my thin mattress and the slats of the bunk overhead. The wall next to me was bookshelves, as was the case with every bunk, and the main cabin had an entire wall devoted to books. This was a well-read, and often-reading, crew, reflecting the hours they had to kill, and their good breeding.

The ship’s first mate, Hayden, a tow-headed, long-legged, sinewy middle-class kid from New Jersey, twenty or so, passed along the skipper’s orders with an offhanded ease. Sometimes, seasoned sailor that he was, he seemed to be acting as an interpreter between Johnson and the rich kids playing sailor. Of course, some of these “kids” were in their late twenties and early thirties. The wealthy crew included a doctor, a photographer, a radio expert, and a guy who knew his way around the ship’s diesel engine. Even so, Hayden had the respect and obedience of them all.

The young man had a serious mien but an explosive smile, and was devoted to Johnson. Thinking about what was coming tomorrow morning, I decided to look for a chance to talk straight with Hayden about what he was getting into.

After a turtle-steak supper, the crew gathered on deck to see what kind of sunset God had in mind for them. The sea turned a glaring red, and the water danced with phosphorescence, as if an underwater fireworks show was going on. The childlike joy on the faces of these pampered, hardened mariners as they leaned at the rail was both touching and a little sickening. Life wasn’t this simple, anymore. These were Depression times; war times. They were hiding, out here in the open. But who the hell could blame them?

Betsy, the blonde from Rochester, kind of sidled up next to me as we studied the sunset; she had a freshly scrubbed soapy smell that reminded me of Margot, B.C. (before Chanel), and her hair was a mop of curls almost as cute as her blue-eyed, apple-cheeked, lightly lipsticked mug.

“Everyone says you’re a mysterious government agent,” she said.

“Everyone’s right,” I said. “Particularly the mysterious part.”

“It’s too bad...”

“That I’m mysterious?”

“That you’re not going to be on the Yankee except just tonight. That isn’t very long.”

“No it isn’t. Isn’t that a shame?”

She licked her lips and they glistened. “Terrible... Want to sit with me downstairs?”

Her hand locked in mine, and she led me through the deckhouse down the companionway to the main cabin, where I sat with her at the table, getting dirty looks from at least six of the rich sailor boys. We talked a little about my being from Chicago and how she hated Rochester; she also hated the all-girls schools she’d attended. Under the table, she rubbed her leg against mine.

After some guitar playing and folk-song singing, the crew headed for their bunks at eight o’clock. Betsy waved and smiled and went off to her cabin with Dorothy, giggling.

I lay in my bunk for about an hour, sorting through the memorized information Miller had fed me, an actor going over his lines, feeling the same sort of butterflies in my stomach, and it wasn’t seasickness. A little after nine, I swung out of the bunk and padded up to the deck, where the breeze had turned cool with a kiss of ocean mist in it. I knew that kid Hayden was standing watch and this would be my chance for a word alone with him.

The young man was stretched out on his back in a dinghy, ropes for his bed. His hands were locked behind his head, elbows winged out; bare-chested, in shorts, legs long and gangly, he was studying the starry sky with wide-eyed expectation.

“You always stand watch on your back?” I asked him.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, sitting up, his voice a breathy second tenor. “Is there a problem, sir?”

“Naw. Just thought I’d see if you wanted some company. Eight o’clock’s a little early to hit the rack for this Chicago boy.”

He swung out of the dinghy, bare feet landing lightly on the deck; he was aware that every movement up here was conveyed below, where the others slept.

“Would you like some coffee? I have a pot in the skipper’s deckhouse.”

Soon we were sitting on a bench on deck, sipping coffee from tin mugs, contemplating the stars scattered on a cloudless, richly pastel blue sky shared with a sicklelike slice of yellow moon. It was unreal, like an imitation sky in a Hollywood nightclub.

“The skipper says you’re a real sailor,” I said to the lad, “which I take to mean you’re not paying three grand for the fun of sailing around the world.”

“I wouldn’t mind having three grand,” he reflected. “I’d buy my own ship. No, I’m getting paid, one hundred a month. Johnson didn’t want to pay me anything, you know, said the experience of a voyage around the world would be pay enough. But I drove a harder bargain.”

Words tumbled out of this kid’s mouth without modulation, dropping off at the end of the sentence as his breath gave out. It was as if he were issuing the words to float before him for review.

“Yeah, you really held his head under the water on that deal,” I said.

He regarded me with steady eyes, his smile turned a sardonic shade rare in one his age. “The lure of this life isn’t money, Mr. Heller. It’s the utter simplicity.”

“Your skipper’s taking in a pretty penny for sharing this simple life with these spoiled brats.”

“Well-heeled vagabonds, I call them. You see, that’s why I’m probably destined to be a mate, not a master. Johnson doesn’t have to deal with just the ship, but with the land — finance, lectures, photographs for the Geographic. He’s practical. I’m romantic. He’s tolerant. Half the time I want to toss these rich babies overboard.”

“They love you, you know.”

A grin blossomed. “Well, I pride myself on treating them harshly, and they thrive on the punishment. Maybe it’ll make men of them... if the war doesn’t do it first.”

The world, by way of the ocean, stretched endlessly before us, seeming empty, nicely empty. No people.

“It is coming,” I said, “isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s here. It’s everywhere... back home they just won’t admit it.”

The gentle rolling of the ocean beneath the boat was lulling. The lapping of water splashing against the hull made a sweetly percussive music.

I asked him, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into tomorrow?”

A smile twitched; he was gazing out at the waters. “I know where we’re taking you.”

“It’s a risk that isn’t worth a hundred a month.”

“The skipper asked me to go along, and I’m going.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m tellin’ ya, take a pass. There’s a motor on that dinghy; Johnson can take me by himself.”

“No, I think I’ll go along.”

“I thought you liked the lure of the simple life.”

“I do. But I like things lively, too.” He laughed, but it came out more like another word: Ha. “You know, the skipper seems immune to the finer things... tobacco and booze and these island girls.”

“He has a pretty wife.”

“Exy’s a princess, but me, I’d leave her home.” He sipped his coffee, stared out at the moon’s yellow reflection on the ocean. “This one time... we’d been sailing west and north of Tahiti... we lay to at a quay in a lagoon near Raiatea. This broad-beamed copra schooner draws up alongside — with a cargo of beautiful girls. Twenty of them or more, lining the rail nearest our ship, clinging to the rigging. Ravishing creatures.”

“You run across boatloads of babes out here frequently, do you?”

He shook his head. “Regretfully, no. This was a charter out of Papeete, a planter named Pedro Miller, friend of Nordhoff and Hall’s.”

They were the authors of the bestsellers about the mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath.

“They invited us aboard... wine, music, laughter, dancing. I met this black-haired girl who did this grass-skirt dance... I was walking with her into the village when I glanced back and noticed the skipper standing on the Yankee deck, near the wheel, arms crossed, Exy sitting on a skylight. Wonder what he was thinking?”

“Probably that he was going to get laid, too, but not have to worry about South Sea Island crotch rot.”

He bellowed a laugh, then suppressed it, not wanting to wake anyone below. “You’re a cynical one, aren’t you?”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Hayden, you may think you’re a romantic... but right now you’re looking at the biggest romantic sap in the South Pacific.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Well, I’ll be with you tomorrow... and my pistol will be under a tarp at my feet.”

“Let’s hope you can keep it there.”

His eyebrows lifted as he cocked his head and grinned at me, and nodded in agreement. Then his eyes narrowed in good humor. “Say, uh... I see Betsy took a shine to you.”

“Yeah. Cute kid.”

“You always been this irresistible to women?”

“Just lately.” I stood; stretched. “Think I’ll go below. Wake me if a schooner of native girls stops by.”

“Okay... but I don’t think you have to worry about catching the creepin’ crud from Betsy.”

“Oh?”

“She’s a nice girl, but a tease. She’s got half the crew crazy over her and is the cause of more cases of blue balls than you can shake a stick at.”

“That’s an image I’d rather not linger over, kid. G’night.”

“G’night.”

As I was coming down the companionway, there she was, cute Betsy, waiting on the steps; she wasn’t in her nightclothes — still the shorts and a loose-fitting boy’s shirt that she bobbled under.

“Sit with me,” she whispered. “And talk.”

I was tired, but I sat, on the stairs; she snuggled next to me, wanting to be kissed. So I kissed her, all right. I put my tongue in her mouth and one hand on her soft full left breast and another on her rounded rump and she pulled away, wide-eyed, and said, “Well! I never...”

“That was my impression,” I said.

And she jumped to her feet and bolted down the stairs and disappeared into her cabin.

The next morning, after breakfast in the main cabin, I emerged from the bathroom in my dark suit with clerical collar and received bemused looks all around, particularly from Betsy. She sat before her plate of powdered eggs and fried potatoes with her eyes as wide as a pinup girl’s, and I leaned in and kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Bless you, my child.”

There was laughter ’round the table, but good-natured, though Betsy flushed and hunkered over her eggs. I thanked the crew for their hospitality and friendship, and kissed Exy on the cheek, too, and ruffled the hair on the two tykes’ heads.

From the deck of the Yankee, the island that was Saipan was a vague shape in the distance, but rising at its center, like a green peaked hat floating on the sea. Another island could be seen as well, off to the right, smaller, flatter.

“That’s Tinian,” Johnson said. He wore a navy blue, anchored skipper’s cap, white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, loose brown trousers and white deck shoes. He pointed toward Saipan. “That anthill in the center of things is Mount Tapotchau, fifteen hundred feet of her.” Then he traced the horizon with his hand. “The coastline here on the western side is almost completely fringed by reefs, except for the mouth of the bay. Few years ago the Japs dredged a deep-water channel to the shore, to improve the anchorage. You’ll see some good-size ships in that harbor.”

Hayden was on the other side of me, but his eyes searched not the horizon but the sky, which was as gray as cement. “I’ve seen prettier days,” he commented.

Tiny brown shapes were moving away from the island. Boats?

“Sampans,” Johnson said. “Okinawan fishermen. They’ll travel for days, looking for flocks of terns, meaning schools of sardine and herring are nearby. And that means bonito and tuna.”

“That’s a relief. I thought it was the Jap armada.”

“Not yet,” Johnson said with the faintest smile. “Not yet.”

Soon we had set off in the dinghy, Captain Johnson minding the motor, with Hayden on the middle seat and me up at the bow. My nine-millimeter Browning was in the travel bag, under several more changes of clerical wear; other than underwear and socks, my real clothing had been left behind. In my right hand were clutched two envelopes, and in my left a passport.

From where I sat as we putt-putted across choppy water, warm wind whipping our hair, I was watching the Yankee recede, and I felt a pang of regret out of proportion to my brief stay on Captain and Mrs. Johnson’s ship. It seemed to me I was leaving America, perhaps Western civilization itself, behind; and the faintly decadent sweetness of rich boys paying big bucks to play Popeye, and a rich girl who wanted a shipboard romance with a mysterious government agent (strictly above the waist, you understand), lent a bittersweet flavor to this lonely ride under a broodingly gray sky on rough gunmetal waters. Then the Yankee disappeared and I looked over my shoulder.

The shape of the island was no longer vague. A long undulating beast, with the central hump of Mount Tapotchau, crouched on the ocean’s surface, a study in brilliant greens and dull browns, myriad jungle shades. But we were not approaching a primitive world: the tiny boxes of buildings indicated a city, and toy boats that were massive freighters hugged a concrete pier. We were skirting a coral reef now, heading toward a much smaller island, just a glorified sandbar.

“Maniagawa Island,” Johnson said, with a nod. “That marks the entry to the harbor.”

As we drew closer, Saipan was dashing my expectations: the island seemed larger than I’d imagined, as did the surprisingly thriving town of Garapan that spread out upon the flatland beneath the hills. The little city had banished the tropics from its confines; but on either side, coconut palms swayed as per South Sea Island routine, and flame trees, with their dazzling scarlet flowers, dotted the coastline, exotic flourishes of flora.

Garapan, however, might have been a port city in the northeastern U.S.A., with its rectangular concrete wharf embracing freighters and fishing boats alike, the factory sprawl and towering black chimney of a sugar refinery, and row upon row of boxy houses in grid formation. As we neared the formidable jetty, other details filled in: a train pulling in along the pier, warehouses, telephone poles, streetlights. So much for leaving Western civilization behind.

The dinghy chugged into the harbor unnoticed; we pulled alongside the concrete pier, cut the motor, but did not tie up. Over at left, near a smaller, separate jetty, two flying boats floated near the refueling tanks and repair shed and ramps of a modest seaplane base. Down from us, at right, native workers in loose scruffy pants and usually no shirt and no shoes (like the rich boys on the Yankee) were unloading heavy sacks — sugar, Johnson said — from a freight car of the quaint-looking little steam-engine choo-choo that rested on narrow-gauge tracks; other workers were hauling sacks up a gangplank into a freighter. Supervising were pith-helmeted Japanese in white linen jackets over buttoned-to-the-neck, high-collar shirts with white trousers and white shoes; it was not quite a uniform...

Someone in a real uniform had noticed us, however.

Muscular, spade-bearded, perhaps twenty-five, he wore a light-green denim shirt, open at the neck, with matching shorts and cap, and this uniform would not have been impressive at all, might even have seemed silly or childish, had that revolver in a black holster not been on his hip.

“Naval officer,” Johnson whispered.

Our one-man welcoming committee pointed a finger at us: Uncle Samurai Wants You. Well, at least it wasn’t his gun. He seemed unhappy. He told us so, in a spew of Japanese.

Johnson responded in Japanese; it sounded clumsy and halting, but our host considered the skipper’s words carefully, then called out and another denim-dressed officer trotted over, a chubby individual who received some instructions, and trotted off again.

Then our spade-bearded welcoming committee unsnapped his holster, and withdrew and pointed his long-barreled .38 revolver at us. The tarp between Hayden and me covered a similar gun. But there was no need to go for it; our host was just keeping us covered.

Behind him and his gun, beyond the warehouses and the train tracks, sat a typical jumbled waterfront — bars, cheap restaurants, small stores, wooden-frame buildings mostly, a few brick. Very few automobiles were in sight; people walked, or rode bicycles.

“How much of their lingo do you know?” I asked Johnson in a near whisper, as we bobbed in our boat.

“That one sentence,” he said. “It was a request that he bring an English-speaking official to meet an important visitor.”

Our host barked at us in Japanese; my psychic translation was: “Shut up!” I heeded my instinct.

We weren’t kept waiting long. When the chubby officer returned, I thought at first he’d summoned one of the men supervising the unloading of the train. Positioning himself before us, feet planted, hands clasped behind him, was a small, somber, rather skeletal-looking gray-mustached fellow in that white pith helmet, linen jacket and trousers getup.

But on closer look, there were differences: the linen jacket had epaulettes, the pith helmet bore a gold badge, and a revolver in a cavalry-style holster rode his belt — arranged for a fancy right to left cross-draw.

“Mikio Suzuki,” he said in a calm, medium-pitched voice. “Chief of Saipan Police. This is closed port.”

“Captain Irving Johnson of the civilian ship, Yankee,” the skipper said. “I apologize for this unscheduled stop. We are anchored beyond your three-mile zone. I do not ask to come ashore. I’m here to drop off a passenger.”

He appraised me and my black apparel and white collar with placid skepticism. “Chamorro missions need no new missionaries. Two priests already.”

Johnson said, “Please do us the courtesy of looking at Father O’Leary’s papers.”

I blessed him with a smile as I handed my passport and the two envelopes up. He examined the passport, then withdrew and unfolded each letter; he read them with no visible reaction.

Johnson and I traded tiny shrugs; Hayden had his eyes locked onto these men with guns looming on the pier, his hand draped casually between his legs, hovering over the tarp.

Then Chief Suzuki spoke to the spade-bearded officer, a guttural command that might have been my death sentence.

But within seconds, I’d been hoisted up and out of the dinghy, Hayden handing me my travel bag and a tight smile, while the Chief of Saipan Police carefully refolded my letters, inserted them in their envelopes and returned them to me, with a bow.

“Welcome to Garapan, Father O’Leary,” Chief Suzuki said.

I half-bowed to the chief, then nodded to the skipper and his first mate, who were already putt-putting away from the pier.

Father O’Leary was on his own in Saipan.

Chapter 17

The main street of Garapan bisected the waterfront, whose typical seediness was quickly replaced by a wholesomely bustling downtown thoroughfare that, with minor changes, might have been small-town America. One-and two-story structures, sometimes wood-frame, sometimes brick, occasionally concrete, were shoulder to shoulder along the telephone-pole-flung asphalt street — office buildings, restaurants, a bakery, hairdressing salon, hardware store, fish market, the larger storefronts with awnings, smaller shops with modest wooden overhangs, even a picture show (although a samurai movie was playing). The apparel, too, seemed oddly Western — white shirts, white shorts, black shorts — though there was the occasional parasol-bearing housewife in a white cotton kimono, out grocery shopping.

A major difference — besides signs and hanging flags that bore the graceful hen scratchings of Japanese script — was how bicycles outnumbered automobiles. Another was a pervading, unpleasantly pungent odor of copra and dried fish, a near stench at odds with the neatness and cleanliness of Main Street Garapan, as were the occasional Chamorro men, dusky natives of the island, loitering at alleyways and along the wooden sidewalks, dirty and disheveled in their tattered clothes and unshod feet. It was as if the Japanese were a hurricane or tidal wave that had displaced them, and they hadn’t gotten around to tidying up yet.

The sky remained gray but little breeze accompanied this persistent threat of rain. The temperature was mild — probably seventy-five degrees — but mugginess undermined it: I was sticky in my black jacket and clerical garb, lightweight though it was.

As I walked along, travel bag in hand, at the side of the white-uniformed chief of police — who was about as talkative as the stone dogs outside the Oriental Gardens restaurant on West Randolph Street — I was getting discreet but amazed glances from almost everybody.

“They don’t see many foreigners around here,” I said.

“No.” He kept his eyes straight ahead as we marched along, didn’t even look at me when we spoke.

“But you said you have priests.”

“Two. For Chamorro, the missions. Spanish priests. Darker skin than you.”

The morning was still young, and clusters of giggling children, knapsacks on their backs, were heading for school, and an occasional straggling fisherman trudged toward the pier. Handcart peddlers wound their way among the bicycles and pedestrians, hawking in their language, making it sound as if torture were being performed on them, while postmen and policemen on their rounds pinged the bells on their bicycles to clear a path.

Of course, nobody dinged a bell at the chief of police, who was diminutive of stature but towering in bearing; in fact, everybody was clearing a path for us, as we left a trail of intimidation and astonishment in our wake, the chief and the foreigner.

“You have a nice town here,” I said.

“We have factory, hospital, post office, newspaper, radio station, electric light.”

“It’s a modern place, all right.”

On the other hand, they didn’t seem to have indoor plumbing. The side streets were unpaved and dusty, and lined with an assembly of bedraggled stores and ramshackle private homes with tin roofs; outhouses were easily glimpsed, even if they did lack our traditional half-moon.

We were four blocks from the waterfront when the street opened onto the town square, built around a rather grand, official-looking white wooden two-story building, colonial-style with pillars and double doors. The place was like an ice cream salesmen convention: everybody going in and out wore white suits or white shorts and white shoes with white Panama hats or white pith helmets or white military caps.

“Court of Justice,” Chief Suzuki said, quietly proud. “My office here.”

But we didn’t go in; the chief had paused at a black sedan parked out front. He barked at a cop in white shorts, caught on his way into the courthouse; the cop bowed, on the run, went inside and shortly thereafter another servile young copper in white shorts, white cap, and black gunbelt came trotting out and saluted the chief. The chief gave him some instructions, the young copper said, “Hai,” and opened the rear sedan door for me.

I took my cue, and the chief got in after me, with the young copper going around the front to play chauffeur.

“Would it be impolite of me to ask where we’re going?” I inquired, as we pulled out between bicycles. The backseat was roomy; it wasn’t a limo, but this Jap buggy with its cushiony black interior was comfortable, even though it rode like a lumber wagon — they’d have to go some to catch up with American automaking.

“Forgive my rudeness,” Chief Suzuki said. “I escort you to meet shichokan.”

“Oh. Local official of some kind?”

“Yes. What you call ‘governor.’” He pondered that for a moment. “Not governor of Nan’yo chokan; he is not chokunin. He is governor of shicho.”

“You mean, he’s the governor of Saipan?”

“Not Saipan only. Governor of all Mariana Islands.”

“Oh... but not of Micronesia.”

“Yes.” He seemed pleased that his intelligence and communications skills were overcoming the limitations of the slow-witted child in his care. “I instructed Lieutenant Tomura to call ahead. The shichokan...” He chose his words carefully. “...anticipation our arrival.”

Then he leaned back, happy with himself over that memorable sentence.

“Does the, uh... shichokan speak English?”

“Yes. Not as well as mine. But he does speak.”

We passed a pleasant park with a bandshell, yet another confounding familiarity in this foreign place; somehow it was oddly reassuring when we glided by a pagodalike shrine on a tastefully landscaped plot.

“Buddhist?” I asked.

The faintest frown passed over the chief’s stone visage. “Shinto.”

“I see. You mind if I roll the window down?”

“Please,” he said.

It was warm in the car, and the only breeze available was the one stirred up by our movement. The chief rolled his window down, just a little, a nice politeness on his part.

“Do you mind my asking what the population of Garapan is?”

The chief said, “Fifteen thousand people. Few thousand islanders.”

Glad he broke it down for me.

I had expected a native village with a small garrison of Japanese troops treating the place like a prison camp; instead, I was in a boom town, attested to by the contemporary residential neighborhood we were rolling through, bungalow after bungalow rising three or four feet off the ground on stone or concrete pillars with neat little yards and gardens of papaya, guavas, mangoes; despite modern construction and style, the little houses wore tin roofs whose grooves sluiced rain to gutters down to cisterns. Occasionally a stone building dating to the period of Saipan’s German domination would rear its head, or a hacienda-style abode going back to the Spanish days. Primarily, however, I was witnessing the boxlike houses — some wood-frame, mostly of newer, cement construction — in the classic gridlike layout of the modern factory town.

But what were they making in this factory town? Were these thousands of people (and natives) all employed by the sugar refinery, and the service industries of the downtown?

On the fringes of the city, finally, were clusters of the poor indigenous housing I’d expected, the thatched wooden shacks before which sat heavy-set middle-aged native women in faded sarongs fanning themselves with palm leaves. I felt strangely reassured.

“Where are the native children?” I asked. I’d seen very few, except a handful of filthy bare-assed toddlers.

“In school. We bring these simple people kansei.” The chief winced in thought, briefly, realizing I wouldn’t understand the meaning of that final word. “Rules,” he explained. “Law from society.”

“Civilization?”

He nodded, as if to say, Not quite, but close enough.

As we left the city, moving along the wide, well-paved road that seemed to be leading us into the green hills, bright red hibiscus grew along roadside hedges beyond which stood guardlike rows of palms, their broad leaves whispering with a hint of wind. Then our sedan turned down, and up, a gently sloping gravel road boarded by blooming flame trees, a riot of red and orange under the dull gray sky.

We ended up in a crushed-stone cul-de-sac, where a number of other black sedans were parked, their radio antennas bearing tiny white flags with red suns. We came to a stop, and the young copper came around and opened the door for his chief. I was reaching for the travel bag at my feet when Chief Suzuki said, “You will not be needing.”

So I left the bag behind — and the nine-millimeter tucked away inside, rolled up in my spare priest attire. The young cop chauffeur stayed behind, too, as I followed Chief Suzuki up a wide crushed-stone path through an immaculately landscaped Oriental garden, with perfectly squared-off hedges and flawlessly rounded bushes, to stone pillars bordering stone steps that rose in landings up a terrace at whose crest sprawled a latticework-decorated white wooden structure, red-roofed, cupola-surmounted, swimming in a sea of red, yellow, white, and purple chrysanthemums, emerald explosions of palm trees standing watch.

This would seem to be the governor’s mansion.

At a slant-roofed portico awaited a Naval officer in a green denim uniform — long pants, jodhpurs, a black-holstered revolver, and something else: a samurai sword. I decided I liked the more casual uniform better.

We were immediately ushered inside, into a world of sliding wooden-frame rice paper walls, hardwood floors, and Buddha-belly vases of dried flowers. We removed our shoes, trading them for slippers, and were escorted into a large sunken octagonal chamber that might have been the living room, but was more a receiving-area-cum-office. The furnishings were sparse but of an impressive dark-lacquered teakwood: three chairs arranged before a massive desk, behind which a higher-backed chair awaited an important posterior.

The possessor of that posterior was a short, heavy-set individual of perhaps fifty, wearing the same white uniform as the chief of police, but with a black string tie, and without a gunbelt, or samurai sword either. His face was pleasant and round, fat enough that his features were getting lost in it, distinguished by a mustache and goatee, his thinning black hair combed forward and plastered to his forehead like a spreading spider.

Chief Suzuki, with a half-bow, said, “Shichokan, this Father Brian O’Leary from Milwaukee, United States of America.”

“Father O’Leary,” the shichokan said, in a surprisingly bassy, rumbly voice, bowing. “You honor my house.”

I returned his bow. “You do me honor, sir. May I present my letters of introduction?”

The shichokan nodded.

I withdrew from my inside jacket the two envelopes and handed them to him.

“Please sit,” he said to me, and with a nod extended the invitation to Chief Suzuki.

We took chairs opposite the desk as he got back behind it, settling into his teakwood throne, where he put on roundlensed wire-frame glasses and read the letters. One, on embassy stationery, was from the German Ambassador to the U.S.A.; the other was from Sean Russell, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army, currently in the States on a fundraising tour, and laying low after several major London and Liverpool bombings.

They were not forgeries. Wall Street boy Forrestal’s connections with wealthy supporters of the I.R.A. had made both letters possible; and the real Father Brian O’Leary of Milwaukee, a former I.R.A. advocate appalled by the recent spate of bombings, had lent his cooperation. It was a solid cover story.

Seeming mildly confused, the shichokan removed his glasses and rested them on the table, by the two letters, which he had not returned to their envelopes. “You are Irish? Or American?”

“I’m an American citizen,” I explained. “My parents were from Dublin. There are many of us in the United States who aid and support the I.R.A. in their righteous war on England. The reason I have come is to seek your—”

The shichokan raised a pudgy hand in a “stop” gesture, smiling; his head looked like a cookie jar with a face on it. A face with Fu Manchu whiskers, that is.

“Before we go on,” he said, in that bass that rumbled up out of his squat body like an echo up a canyon, “I will need to show your letters to kaigun bukan. I hope you will forgive this formality.”

I loved the way he made it sound like I had some kind of choice in all of this. And, of course, I had no idea what the hell a kaigun bukan was.

“Not at all,” I said.

He folded the pudgy hands as if in Christian prayer. “I have taken liberty of calling him. He should be arriving soon... Tea?”

A lovely young woman in a flower-print kimono served us, and we sipped from delicate hand-painted porcelain cups as the shichokan asked me how I liked his island and I told him how swell I thought it was. Chief Suzuki said nothing, barely sipping his tea. Then the shichokan inquired if I would like to visit the Spanish mission while I was on Saipan, to meet with my fellow priests, and I declined.

“I came to your island on matters of state,” I said, “not of church.”

“In Shinto religion,” the shichokan said good-naturedly, “there is no division... Ah! Captain Tatehiko.”

The governor rose and so did we, turning to see a slim, surprisingly tall naval officer, in the more formal jodhpurs and sword uniform, embellished with campaign ribbons, striding across the hardwood floor; that he, too, wore slippers made him seem somewhat absurd though no less formidable. I placed him in his mid-forties, a warrior with Apache cheekbones and cuts in his face where his eyes should have been. He half-bowed to us. We all returned the compliment.

“Captain Tatehiko no speaks English,” the shichokan informed me. “Please to sit. I will speak to him of what we have said.”

Chief Suzuki and I returned to our teakwood chairs while Captain Tatehiko — who was apparently the liaison officer between the Navy and the colonial government — stood with crossed arms, like a sentry, listening to the shichokan, who had remained standing. Then the shichokan handed the letters to Captain Tatehiko and stood beside him, pointing at words as he read/translated.

Tatehiko listened to all this expressionlessly, then nodded curtly and took the third chair, beside Suzuki, as the relieved shichokan took his seat behind the desk, again.

“Father O’Leary,” the shichokan said, leaning forward, hands flat on his desk. “Why do you honor us with visit?”

I stood, to lend some weight to my words. “The I.R.A. has since January of last year been waging a bombing campaign against Britain. Unfortunately our resources are limited. The quality of our explosives, homemade or stolen, has not always been the best.”

“Forgive please,” the shichokan said, holding up his palm again. “I must translate as we go.”

And he translated for Tatehiko. Then he nodded to me to continue.

I did: “We have been discussing an alliance with Germany for many months. Arrangements are being made for Sean Russell to go to Berlin. He seeks aid to fight the common British enemy.”

I paused, to allow the shichokan to translate for Captain Tatehiko, which he did.

Then I went on: “I am acting as a courier in hopes that Mr. Russell, or some other I.R.A. envoy, can go to Tokyo to build a similar alliance with your imperial government. Britain bedevils you by aiding China; they hold island territories in these waters that are rightfully yours. With funding and supplies, the I.R.A. can mount a sabotage campaign aimed at key British war industries.”

Again I paused, and again the shichokan translated.

“The I.R.A. can damage the British transportation structure,” I said, ticking off a list on my fingers. “It can demoralize the British public. And it can cripple the British aircraft industry. But we need funds, arms, and supplies. That is the substance of the message I have been asked to convey.”

And the shichokan translated.

And I sat.

Captain Tatehiko mulled all of this over, briefly, then spoke in Japanese, at some length, while the shichokan listened intently.

Then the governor said to me, “Captain Tatehiko thanks you for your message, and your friendship. Your message will be conveyed.”

“That’s all I ask,” I said. I looked at the Captain, said, “Arigato,” and nodded.

He nodded back.

The shichokan said, “Some time may pass before we have a reply to your message. Captain Tatehiko will speak to Rear Admiral who will speak to Naval Ministry. I will do same with chokunin of Nan’yo chokan.”

“I understand,” I said. “However, I have arranged passage on a German trading ship due to dock at Tanapag Harbor two days from now. Back to the American territory, Guam.”

Captain Tatehiko spoke to the shichokan, apparently asking for a translation, which the shichokan seemed to provide. Tatehiko spoke again, and now it was the governor’s turn to translate for me.

“Captain Tatehiko say that if you stay longer, we will arrange safe passage to Guam at a later date.” The shichokan held his open palms out in a gesture of welcome. “Will you be our guest until that time?”

“I would be honored.”

The shichokan beamed. “You honor us, Father.”

Both Chief Suzuki and Captain Tatehiko excused themselves to pursue their official duties, but I remained behind, at the shichokan’s insistence, for luncheon, with the promise of an island tour thereafter.

My pudgy host and I sat in another room, on woven straw mats in the usual cross-legged Nipponese style, with a sliding door drawn back on a view of green hills rising into the mist. Two lovely young women in colorful kimonos attended our every whim, keeping first our teacups filled, then later serving tiny warm cups of sake, which I sipped guardedly. Lacquered trays with small dishes of food — seaweed, rice, pickles, miso paste — were set before us. The stuff was lousy.

It wasn’t like I didn’t know or appreciate Japanese cuisine. There was a place back home, on Lake Park Avenue, called Mrs. Shintani’s where they cooked sukiyaki on a little gas stove right at your table, thin slices of beef, crisp fresh vegetables, the warm aromas rising to your nostrils like undulating dancing girls. Take a young lady to Mrs. Shintani’s for an intimate evening of heavenly dining, and I dare you not to get lucky.

This tasteless goo wouldn’t get you to first base.

“I hope you enjoy meal,” the shichokan said. “We eat only finest imported food. Sent from home in can, jar, sack.”

“Aren’t there farms here?” I asked, my chopsticks finding a pinch of flavorless seaweed. “I know there’s fishing.”

The shichokan made a sour face. “Island food. We do not eat the harvest of primitive people.”

On a tropical paradise, surrounded by waters teeming with fish, where coconuts and bananas and pineapples flourished, where native farmers raised chickens, cattle, and hogs, these proud people ate canned seafood and seaweed out of jars. This was my first real indication that they were nuts.

The roly-poly shichokan’s tour of the island was fairly brief — an hour and a half or so — but illuminating. Riding in back of another black sedan, with a white-uniformed driver, our route was at first scenic, following hard dirt roads south through lush foliage, stopping to take in a small bay, a tidal pool, a blowhole, and several craters. Then, apparently to demonstrate to his new I.R.A. friend the capabilities of the Japanese, the shichokan paused to allow me to take in the panorama that was Aslito Heneda airfield.

Two vast crushed-coral runways, two service sheds with spacious crushed-coral aprons, five dark-green wood-frame hangars, and a similarly constructed terminal, Aslito Heneda was a modern airfield in the shadow of an ancient mountain. The facility had an unmistakable military look, but as we coasted by, I caught sight of no fighter planes, no bombers — the only planes on the apron were a pair of airliners — and a few parked automobiles, with some civilian activity around the terminal building, a small ground crew on the field.

“Great Japan Airways,” the shichokan explained. “People come to work Saipan. Some come for vacation from Tokyo.”

Later, the shichokan pointed out a flat stretch of land, which looked to have been recently cleared, and said, “Marpi Point. We begin clear second airfield soon.”

Saipan didn’t seem to be in dire need of another commercial airport; in fact, Aslito Heneda was barely used for that purpose. In his sly way, the shichokan was letting his I.R.A. ally know that, though military aircraft and combat units were not yet in place, the island was undergoing heavy-duty fortification.

He was less coy back in Garapan, when we rolled past the chain-link-fenced-off Chico Naval Base with its sprawl of barracks skirting the seaplane base with its ramps and repair shed, and modest population of two flying boats. Within that fenced-off area, there was no sign of any military personnel.

“Those buildings full by next year,” the governor bragged. “With konkyochitai...” Noticing my confusion, he thought about that and came up with a translation: “Battalion. Also, a bobitai, defense force. Five hundred men. And keibitai... guard force. Eight hundred navy troop.”

Our sedan headed back up the main street, and turned over onto a side street parallel to the waterfront, my spider-haired chubby tour guide proudly pointing out an imposing low-slung complex of concrete buildings on golf-green grounds — a modern hospital specializing in tropical diseases (“Dengue fever, big problem Saipan”). Across the street was a small park, where a few palm trees and stone benches attended a towering pedestal on which stood a larger-than-life-size bronze statue of an older Japanese gentleman in a business suit, a hand in his pocket, an oddly casual pose for such a formal monument.

“Baron Matsue Haruji,” the shichokan said, answering my unasked question. “Sugar King, bring prosperity to Saipan.”

On a side street nearby, however, the tour turned less cheerful, as the sedan pulled over by an undeveloped overgrown plot of land, a reminder of the jungle this town had been carved out of. Across from us were two one-and-a-half-story concrete buildings with high barred windows. The building at right was long and narrow, stretching out like an endless concrete boxcar; across a crushed-stone area, where several black sedans were parked, a similar but much smaller building squatted, a concrete bungalow with four barred windows. Probably the maximum-security section.

“Father,” the shichokan said quietly, “we give you trust. We show you...” He searched for the words and found perfect ones. “...good faith.”

“That is true, Shichokan.”

He nodded slowly. His bassy voice was somber as he said, “We ask a favor.”

I nodded in return. “You honor me, Shichokan.”

“We would like you to speak to two American prisoners... Pilots.”

My heart raced but I kept my voice calm. “Pilots?”

“Spies.”

I gestured toward the concrete buildings. “Are they held in that prison, Shichokan?”

“One is. Man.”

“There is a woman, too?”

“Yes. She is famous woman in your country... She is call ‘Amira.’”

I was trembling; I hoped he didn’t see it. “Amelia,” I said.

“Yes. Amira.” He grunted a few words in Japanese and his driver pulled out into the street, turned at the next corner.

I said nothing; my heart was a fucking sledgehammer, but I said nothing. He had brought up the subject. It was his to pursue.

We hadn’t gone far — maybe six hundred feet — when the sedan came to a stop again, opposite another concrete building, a two-story one; it loomed over its neighbors (a low-slung general merchandise store at left, a single-story frame house at right) looking at once modern and gothic, a church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Its four upper-floor windows, divided by decorative pillars, were tall and narrow, and the lower floor — which had a shallow, one-story extension to the street — had arched windows that cried out for stained glass.

But it wasn’t a church.

“Hotel,” the shichokan said. “This hotel — Kobayashi Ryokan — run by military. Keep honored guests, like honored friend, here... Also political prisoners.”

An interesting mix.

“The woman is here?” I asked, with a casual gesture to the building.

“Hai,” the shichokan said. “Second floor... Please go to hotel. You expected. Your questions answered.”

He gave me half a bow, and my door was opened by his driver; I damn near fell out of the sedan, or into the driver’s arms. But within moments I was crossing the dusty, unpaved street, watching the sedan roll away, with — framed in its rear window — the shichokan’s inanely smiling face. I approached the boxy gothic structure, and went in.

The one-story extension served as the hotel’s minuscule lobby: at right, nobody was behind the check-in counter; at left, under a churning ceiling fan, straining their rattan chairs, sat two massive Chamorro men, playing cards on a rattan table with a deck turned splotchy from sweaty, dirty fingers. Also on the table were the kitchen matchsticks they were betting, a pack of Japanese cigarettes, two long black billy clubs, and a sheathed machete.

They were the first native males I’d seen wearing shirts; in fact, they wore suits, only soiled-looking, threadbare, as if these were hand-me-downs from the Japs.

But that seemed unlikely, because these were two very big boys. One of them was hatless, with a thatch of black hair atop a cantaloupe head with watermelon-seed eyes in walnut-shell pouches of skin in a litchi-nut-toned face so unwrinkled, it was as if neither thought nor emotion had ever traveled across that arid plain. Twenty years of age or maybe fifty, he was just plain fat, bursting his seams.

Such flab made him less dangerous than the other one, a bull-necked mass of muscle and fat in a straw fedora, with a face so ugly, features so flat and blunt, so wrinkled, so pockmarked, the white knife scar down his right cheek seemed gratuitous.

The worst part was the eyes: they were not stupid; they were hard and dark and glittering and smart. He looked at me above a hand of cards clutched in knife-handle fingers and said, “Six.”

At first I thought he was making a bet, but when a frown tightened around the hard dark eyes, I asked, “Pardon me?”

He was missing a front tooth; the others were the shade of stained oak, approximately the tone of his skin. “Six.”

“That’s, what? My room number? Room six?”

He played a card. “Six.”

“Do I need a key?”

“Six!”

That seemed about as close to getting directions as I was going to get, so I entered the main building through a doorless archway, making my way down a central corridor, my shoes echoing off the hardwood floor. Doors to rooms were on either side of me; the walls were plaster, not rice paper. Stairs to the second floor were at the rear, but there seemed to be no exit down there. Fire inspectors apparently played it fast and loose in Saipan.

Okay, Room 6. I stopped at number 6, tried the knob, found the door unlocked. Slippers awaited me just inside the door, and I traded my shoes for them. The pale yellow plaster walls were bare; a tall sheer-curtained window looked out on the side of the wood-frame residence next door. Though this was a Western-style structure, the room was in the style of a Japanese inn: a “carpet” of fine woven reed, padded quilts on the floor for a bed, two floor cushions to sit at a scuffed, low-riding teakwood table. No closet, but a rack with a pole was provided. The only concession to any non-Japanese visitors was a dresser with mirror.

My travel bag was on the dresser.

I checked inside, found my nine-millimeter; both the clip I’d loaded into the weapon, and my two spare clips, seemed untampered with. Weapon cradled in my hands, I looked up and saw my face in the mirror, or anyway the face of some confused fucking priest holding a gun.

Then I looked at the ceiling, not for guidance from the Lord, but thinking about what the shichokan had said: the woman, “Amira,” was on the second floor...

So what should I do? Go upstairs and start knocking on doors? And take my nine-millimeter along, in case I needed to bestow some blessings?

A knock startled me, and I didn’t know whether to tuck the gun away in the bag, or maybe in my waistband, with the black coat over it.

“Father O’Leary?”

Chief Suzuki’s voice.

“Father O’Leary, can speak?”

I returned the nine-millimeter to my bag, and opened the door.

Chief Suzuki stood respectfully, his pith helmet with the gold badge held in his hands. “I hope you find comfort.”

“Thank you. It’s nice. Please come in.”

Suzuki gave me a nod that was almost a bow, stepped inside and out of his shoes, and I closed the door.

“Those two in the lobby,” I said, “do they work for you?”

He frowned. “Jesus and Ramon? Did they give you trouble?”

“No. I just saw their clothing, and the billy clubs, and wondered.”

“Billy...?”

“Billy clubs. Nightsticks, batons?” I pantomimed holding a billy and slapping it in my open palm.

That he understood. “They are... native police. Ten Chamorro work with us — internal security. We have Jesus...” He traced a finger down his right cheek, in imitation of the bullnecked pockmarked Chamorro’s scar.

I nodded that I understood who he meant.

He continued: “We have Jesus on guard here many time. Jesus is my top jungkicho... detective. Jesus takes care of his people.”

All of a sudden Suzuki was sounding like the priest. But what I figured he meant was, Jesus took care of investigations into crimes among the Chamorro.

“Well,” I said, “he didn’t give me any trouble... The shichokan said you wanted a favor, involving a woman in this hotel.”

“Yes,” Captain Suzuki said. “May I sit?”

“Certainly...”

Soon we were seated on floor mats facing each other.

His skeletal, gray-mustached countenance was grave, and regret clung to his words like a vine on a trellis. “Some people think the woman in this hotel... in the room above yours... should receive mercy. They say she is a fine person. A beautiful person.”

Trying not to betray the chill his words had sent through me, I said easily, “If she is who the shichokan says she is, she is a famous person, too. Important.”

“Yes. This is true. Nonetheless I disagree — she came here to carry out duties as a spy, and it cannot be helped. She should be executed.”

And then Captain Suzuki asked his favor of Father O’Leary.

Chapter 18

The room directly above mine was number 14. Chief Suzuki did not accompany me up the stairs, nor were there any signs of Jesus Sablan or Ramon Reyes, the chief’s Chamorro watchdogs; Jesus and Ramon were apparently still down in the lobby, playing rummy with smeary cards. I was alone in the hallway; according to the chief, right now only a few guests were registered at this hotel, whose rooms were reserved by the Japanese for honored guests — and prisoners.

My two knocks made a lonely echo.

From behind the door came a soft, muffled, “Yes?”

Wrapped up in the sound of that one spoken word were so many hopes and dreams carried with me across the months, across the ocean, a single word spoken in that low, rich, matter-of-fact feminine voice I never thought I’d hear again.

“Amy?” I said to the door, my face almost rubbing against its harsh, paint-blistered surface.

But the door didn’t reply. The voice on the other side of it had granted me only that one word...

I looked both ways, a kid crossing the street for the first time — stairwell at one end, window at the other, no Chief Suzuki, no members of his Chamorro goon squad, either. I kept my voice at a whisper, in case someone was eavesdropping across the way.

“Amy — it’s Nathan.”

It seemed like forever, and was probably fifteen seconds, but finally the door creaked open to reveal a sliver of the pale, lightly powdered elongated oval of her face. Under the familiar tousle of dark blonde hair, one blue-gray eye, sunken but alert, gaped at me, as half of the sensuous mouth (no lipstick) dropped open in astonishment.

“You know what I hate,” I said, “about seeing a married woman?”

The door opened wider and displayed her full face with the astonished expression frozen there, though her lips quivered and seemed almost to form a smile. “...What?”

“Always meeting in hotel rooms.”

And she backed away, shaking her head in disbelief, hand over her mouth, eyes filling with tears, as I stepped into the room, shutting the door behind me; she was thin but not emaciated, her face gaunt but not skeletal. She wore a short-sleeve mannish sportshirt and rust-color slacks and no shoes and looked neat and clean.

That’s all I had time to take in before she flew into my arms, clutching me desperately, and I held her close, held her tight, as she wept into my clerical suitcoat, saying my name over and over, and I kissed the nape of her neck, and maybe I wept a little, too.

“You’re here,” she was saying, “how can you be here? Crazy... you’re here... so crazy... here...”

Our first kiss in a very long time was salty and tender and yearning and tried not to end, but when at last she drew away from me, just a little, still in my arms, and looked at me with bewilderment, she didn’t seem able to form any more words, the surprise had knocked the wind from her.

And so she kissed me again, greedily; I savored it, then pulled gently away.

“Take it easy, baby,” I said, running a finger around my clerical collar. “I got a vow of celibacy to maintain.”

And she laughed — with only a little hysteria in it — and said, “Nathan Heller a priest? That’s good... That’s rich.”

“That’s Father Brian O’Leary,” I corrected, stepping away from her, taking a look around her room. “If anyone should ask...”

Her living quarters were identical to mine, save for a few additional allowances for an American “guest”: a well-worn faded green upholstered armchair and, near the window looking onto the neighboring house and the rooftops beyond, a small Japanese-magazine-arrayed table with a reading lamp and an ashtray bearing the residue of several incense sticks. Incense fragrance lingered, apparently Amy’s antidote to the ever-present Garapan bouquet of dried fish and copra.

But she had the same woven-reed carpet, padded quilts for a bed, low-slung teakwood table with floor cushions. On the clothesrack, among a few simple dresses and the inevitable plaid shirts, hung the oil-stained, weathered leather flight jacket she’d worn when she flew me in her Vega from St. Louis to Burbank. I checked the walls — including behind her dresser mirror — for drilled holes, found nothing to indicate we were being monitored. I didn’t figure we had much to worry about: the Japanese weren’t exactly known for their technical wizardry.

Nonetheless, we both kept our voices hushed.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, studying me with wide eyes that didn’t seem to know whether to be filled with joy, disbelief or fear. “How in God’s name did you...?”

“Does it matter?”

“No,” she said, with a sigh of a laugh, “hell no,” a rare swear word from this proper creature, and she flung herself into my arms again. I squeezed her tight, then held her face in my hands and studied it, memorized it, and kissed her as sweetly as I knew how.

“Why did do you this?” she asked, cheek pressed against my chest, arms clasped around me, grasped around me, as if she were afraid I might bolt. “Why did you...?”

“You know me,” I said. “I was hired. Works out to a grand a week.”

And she was laughing quietly into my suitcoat.

“You just can’t admit it, can you?” She looked up at me, grinning her wonderful gap-toothed grin. “You’re a romantic fool. My mercenary detective... coming halfway around the world for a woman...”

There was something I had to ask, had to know, though I knew she was brimming with so many questions she didn’t know where or how to start. With us standing there, in each other’s arms, I said, “I thought... maybe...”

She was studying me now, almost amused. “What?”

“That there might be... someone else here with you.”

“Who?” She winced. “Fred? He’s in that horrible jail... poor thing.”

“No, I... Amy, was there a baby?” It came out in a rush of ridiculous words. “Did you have your baby and they took it away from you?”

She smiled half a smile, and it settled on one side of her face; she touched the tip of my nose with a finger lightly, then asked, “Who told you I was pregnant?”

“Your secretary.”

“Margot?” The grin widened. “I bet you slept with her.”

“Almost. How about you?”

She slapped my chest. “I shouldn’t have confided in that foolish girl. I hope you’re not too disappointed... I hope you didn’t make this trip just to be a father... but most men would be relieved to hear it was a false alarm.”

I hugged her to me, whispered my response into her hair. “I am relieved... not that I wouldn’t mind being a father to a child of yours... but to think our kid would be caught up in these circumstances.”

She drew away, her eyes hooded in understanding, nodded, taking my hand, leading me to the quilted sleeping mats on the floor. We sat there, cross-legged, like kids playing Indian, holding hands.

Her smile was a half-circle of embarrassment. “Nathan, I’m afraid... it was something else...”

“What was?”

“What I thought was the baby. There never will be a baby... not in these circumstances, or any other.”

“What do you mean?”

She squeezed my hand. “What I thought was pregnancy, Nathan... was early menopause...” Shaking her head, her expression grooved with wry regret, she added, “The, uh, symptoms are similar.”

I slipped an arm around her, pulled her against me. “You picked a hell of a climate for hot flashes, lady.”

She laughed softly. “I didn’t feel a thing... I was so ill with dysentery when they brought me here... can you imagine? I arrive at the dysentery capital of the world with a case of the world-class trots... They had me in the hospital here for many, many months... I almost died.”

“Were you ever in that jail?”

She rolled her eyes, nodded vigorously. “Oh my goodness, yes... the ‘calaboose,’ they call it. Same cellblock as Fred — that dirty little building with the four nasty cells. But I only lasted three days. I passed out and woke up, I don’t know... six months later.”

I frowned. “Then you really did almost die. What, were you in a coma?”

She shrugged. “Or they kept me doped up. I don’t really know...” She studied me through narrowed eyes, as if only now she had convinced herself I wasn’t an apparition. “What are you doing here, Nathan? Who sent you on this harebrained expedition? G. P.?”

My laugh was harsher than I intended. “Not hardly. He had you declared dead, I don’t know, two years ago; he’s already remarried.”

The blood drained out of her face; so did the emotion.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry... I don’t mean to be so cold about it...”

“It’s all right. It’s just... I knew he didn’t love me, anymore. And I never loved him, not really. But we were... a kind of team, you know? A partnership. I think I... deserved a little better from him, is all.”

“You’re preaching to the choir on that one.”

She flashed me the gap-toothed grin and slipped a finger in my collar and tugged. “Preaching to the preacher, you mean. What’s this about? Who did send you, you wonderful lunatic?”

“The same star-spangled bunch who sold you out,” I said. “Uncle Sam and assorted nephews.”

And I filled her in, giving her a brief but fairly complete rundown, from my unofficial investigation in July of ’37 (she was fascinated and astounded to learn that I’d heard her capture on the Myers family Philco) to my current mission, right up to my role as I.R.A. emissary Father O’Leary — leaving out what Chief Suzuki had asked of me.

Then it was her turn, and she told how she and Noonan had been picked up by a launch from a battleship, and were held in a place called Jaluit where a doctor tended to injuries Noonan had received ditching in the water; they were bounced from one Japanese Naval station to another, islands with names like Kwajalein, Roi, Namor, and finally to Saipan, where they were interrogated by Suzuki and others — they denied being spies, having dropped their photographic equipment into the ocean — and were jailed.

“After my collapse in my cell, and that long stay in the hospital,” she said, “I was brought here to the Kobayashi Ryokan. And I’ve been treated more or less decently, ever since. I’m really under a kind of house arrest.”

“You mean, you can come and go as you please?”

She nodded, shrugged. “Within boundaries. There are always at least two of those native police lackeys watching me, here at the hotel — day and night; if I leave, they’re my shadows... even when it’s just a trip out to the privy.”

“How short a leash are you on?”

“I can venture out into the Garapan business district. Like a child, I have an allowance. I can get my hair done. Go to the movies. Stop at a teahouse — they don’t make cocoa here, unfortunately, so I’ve finally learned to drink tea and coffee, at this late date. But always my Chamorro chaperons are nearby.”

“You mean, if we wanted to leave right now,” I said, “we could go for a walk — we’d just have a couple of fat ugly tails on our behinds?”

“Yes.” She gripped my hand, tight. “But Nathan... don’t underestimate them — particularly the one named Jesus.” Her eyes took on a momentary glaze. “Lord Jesus, the islanders call him. His own people are frightened to death of him, even the ones he works with. He’s terribly cruel.”

I looked at her carefully. “You sound like you speak from experience...”

“I know he’s tortured Fred, many times.”

“It’s more than that.”

She nodded in admission, and shared the unpleasant memory: “Shortly after I got out of the hospital, Lord Jesus came to my room, this room, and tried to make me admit I was a spy...” She tilted her head to one side and pointed to her neck, where there were several nasty burn scars.

“Cigarettes?” I asked. A cold rage was rising in me.

She nodded. “But Chief Suzuki came in and saw what Jesus was doing, and put a stop to it.”

I didn’t bother to tell her that she’d just described an interrogation technique that dated back to the time of the original Jesus. Except for the cigarettes.

“This room has become a kind of... sanctuary for me,” she said. Then her tone turned bitter. “But I always remember that, whenever they want, any of them can come right through that door... torture me, rape me, whatever they please... It’s a pleasant enough prison, Nathan — but it’s a prison.”

“Let’s go for that walk,” I suggested. “A priest and his parishioner.”

She nodded, springing to her feet with girlish enthusiasm. “Just let me grab my sandals...”

We went out through the lobby — a Chamorro clerk in a high-collared white shirt and bemused expression was at the check-in desk, now — and Jesus and Ramon were indeed still playing cards at their matchstick-, billy club-and machete-littered table. Under his misshapen straw fedora, the blunt-featured, knife-scarred, pockmarked puss of Lord Jesus frowned up at us in a startling mixture of indignation and contempt. How dare we interrupt his life?

“Catching some air,” I explained. “In Six — remember?”

He sneered at me, baring mahogany teeth and the space for one.

And then we stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk where a cool yet muggy afternoon awaited under a steel-wool sky. We strolled by the general merchandise store with its shelves open onto the street, dolls and cloisonné vases, cakes and confectioneries, condiments and bean curd, its salesgirls in colorful kimonos. But the passers-by were less formal, men in shorts, women in Western-style dresses, not a parasol in sight; a few young men on bicycles. A pair of green-denim-uniformed officers on a motorcycle and sidecar rolled by, in the direction of Chico Naval Base. This time, I couldn’t catch anybody even stealing a glance — word about my presence, here, must have gotten around.

“For such a striking couple,” I said, “we’re not attracting much attention.”

Not counting Jesus and Ramon, of course, who were behind us about a half a block; they were so fat, only one could walk on the boardwalk — the other had to trod along kicking up dust in the hard-dirt street, making an obstacle for bikes. The billy clubs were stuck in their belts like pirate swords; Jesus had the sheathed machete stuck there, too — all he lacked was the parrot and eyepatch.

“Oh, I’m old hat around here,” she said with a little smile. “They call me ‘Tokyo Rosa.’”

“Why?”

“Tokyo because I attract so much official attention. Rosa because it’s a female name in English they know from somewhere.”

I gestured toward the little park where the sugar baron’s statue loomed and we headed over there.

“It’s usually prettier here,” she said, as we sauntered along. We were close enough to the waterfront that we could see gray patches of ocean between trees and buildings. “Saipan sunsets are amazing, and the waters are so many different, clear shades of blue.”

“It almost sounds like you like it here,” I said.

A tiny grimace tightened her face. “I guess I deserve that. But I’m always aware of what Fred’s going through.”

We could see the prison, on its little jungle side street, as we walked. The boardwalk had given over to a simple well-worn grassy path.

“According to Chief Suzuki,” I said, “your navigator’s been pretty uncooperative, even belligerent.”

“Fred’s never given them a shred of information, never admitted to anything... but he’s been through a living hell for it.”

That made sense. Leaning on Noonan and taking it easy on Amy wasn’t chivalry on the part of the Japanese, rather their chauvinist supposition that the male team member would be the leader, and would hold the military secrets. To some degree, they may have been right — after all, Noonan had been working for the Navy, all along.

I asked, “Do they let you see him?”

“Once a week or so we talk, when he’s allowed out into the exercise yard.” She looked in that direction and I could see the area she meant, a grassless parcel beside the larger, boxcar-like cellblocks. “He’s very strong. Resolute. I admire him terribly...”

She wiped tears from her eyes with her short sleeve and smiled bravely and I looped my arm through hers and walked her into the little park, where we settled onto a stone bench, alone in the shadow of the baron’s statue and sheltering palm trees.

“I’m going to get you out of here tonight,” I said.

Her eyes widened with hope and alarm. “You can do that?”

Jesus and Ramon were watching from across the street, sitting on the stone steps out in front of the hospital, like a couple of gargoyles who’d fallen off the roof.

“You need to understand something,” I said. “My mission to Saipan was defined by such patriots as William Miller and James Forrestal as ‘intelligence gathering.’ They didn’t send me in here to rescue you, just to find out whether you and Fred were here or not. Alive and well, or hung by your thumbs, it didn’t matter — are our missing people in Saipan or aren’t they? That was the extent of why I was sent.”

She nodded. “I follow you.”

“Trust me, you don’t. I was told, if you were here, not to ‘play hero,’ but to leave you behind, with the assurance that your pal FDR and naval and military intelligence would decide what to do about it... whether to negotiate the release of the American prisoners, or mount a full-scale rescue operation.”

Wincing in thought, she said, “I guess that makes sense...”

“No it doesn’t. I played along with them, so they’d send me in here, but baby, my sole point in taking this seagoing safari was to bring you home with me. You think I got a particle of confidence in the government’s ability to negotiate your release? How have they done so far?”

She sighed a laugh. “Not wonderfully well... and I guess they did figure there was a pretty good chance I was on Saipan, in Japanese custody, or they wouldn’t have sent you in here, looking.”

“Now you’re gettin’ your head out of the clouds.” I gently touched her arm. “Do you really think FDR would send some kind of full-scale military raiding team into Saipan, to save his wife’s canasta partner in what would clearly be an act of war?”

Her eyes seemed suddenly empty. “...No.”

“Yes — no. And I knew, coming into this masquerade party, that once Father Brian O’Leary had disappeared off their island, the Japs would figure out my real purpose. That I had come calling to ascertain the condition and whereabouts of Earhart and Noonan... in which case, what kind of future do you think would’ve been in store for you?”

“Continued detention? Imprisonment...?”

I let out a heavy sigh. “I’m going to say this, and you’re going to have to be strong. I don’t want our audience to detect any undue reaction.”

Jesus and Ramon had brought their shopworn deck of cards with them; Ramon was dealing, on the hospital steps.

“Say what you have to,” she said.

“Faced with the knowledge that the United States military has confirmed your presence in their custody, your Japanese hosts would take steps to remove any and all signs that you’d ever been here.”

She said nothing, her expression blank. I didn’t have to spell it out. She knew. She and Noonan would be executed. Buried anonymously on this island, or dumped as chum into the ocean to attract bonito.

“You’d be part of an incident that never happened,” I said. “Which, at the end of the day, would suit both governments just fine.”

Her eyes and nostrils flared. “Nathan, I can’t believe...”

“That FDR would rather have you dead, than a Japanese propaganda tool? That he’d rather have you in an unmarked grave, than living evidence that the United States committed an act of espionage and war? Didn’t they tell you what you were getting into, baby? If you’re captured, you’re on your own. That’s the cardinal rule, the unwritten law of espionage: your government never fucking heard of you.”

She looked as though I’d struck her a hard blow in the stomach; and hadn’t I?

“Maybe,” I said, “if our ambassador told their ambassador that we knew for a certainty that Amelia and Fred were in Japanese hands, maybe the Japs would quietly return the two of you. Very damn doubtful, though. It makes more sense that you would simply disappear. That’s the Japanese face-saving way, in which case America saves face, too — the U.S.A. wouldn’t have to see Amelia Earhart’s mug turning up on Jap recruiting posters.”

“Then...” she began, in halting horror. “Then... why did you come? If you knew—”

“Amy, full-scale war is around the next corner. Your death sentence has been passed already; it just hasn’t been carried out yet. No, I knew going in that I had to bring you back with me, or leave you to die. You said it yourself: that hotel room may be pretty damn nice for a prison cell, but a prison cell is exactly what it is.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes it is.”

“Now — are you ready for where this really turns nasty?”

She laughed hollowly. “You’re kidding, right?”

I nodded up toward the mustached statue of the sugar baron. “Don’t let ’em kid you, baby. Garapan isn’t a boom town ’cause of sugar; Saipan isn’t thriving ’cause of dried fish, or sheds full of copra. The chief product here is war... they haven’t harvested it yet, but they’re planting, and the yield is gonna be something fierce.”

She thought that over, and swallowed, and said, “And how does that affect me?”

“Understand, they’ve kept you here because Saipan’s been a suitably out-of-the-way pimple on Nowhere’s ass; not a bad place at all to keep a famous person like you under wraps. But with the fortification of this floating fly speck, and its advantageous position in the Pacific — perfectly located for either side, where long-range bombers are concerned — Saipan’s going to be a major target of the coming war. So, I gather from my new best friend Chief Suzuki, a decision has to be made about you and Fred Noonan.”

“A decision.”

“Yeah — about finding you a new home. One possibility is Tokyo. The imperial government, the chief tells me, is impressed by your propaganda value. They feel you might possibly be... turned. That you might come over to their side, and became a major embarrassment to your homeland.”

“But I’ve only cooperated to keep Fred and me alive,” she said, half-enraged, half-defensive. “I mean, of course I felt betrayed and abandoned, by G. P. and Franklin... but that didn’t turn me into some kind of traitor!”

It had to be asked: “How exactly have you cooperated?”

She smiled nervously, shrugging. “Well, you know, they fished the Electra out of the waters... they put her in slings and hauled her up onto the deck of that battleship that picked us up, Fred and me. I don’t exactly know how they got the plane to Saipan... Fred said on a barge, though I heard later someone actually flew it here, and badly, crash-landing through some trees onto the beach near the harbor... Anyway, Chief Suzuki, who’s been very nice to me, said that things would be better for me, and for Fred too, if I would answer a few simple questions about my ship.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, out at Aslito field. Over a period of several months, I spoke with pilots and engineers, about the plane and its various capabilities. I mean, it wasn’t a fighter plane, what was the harm? These engineers were from a Tokyo firm called, uh... Mits-something.”

“Mitsubishi?”

“Maybe... Anyway, they made all sorts of repairs, and we took the ship up a few times... that was the last time I was in a plane. Just a passenger, though. Far as I know, the Electra’s still sitting in a hangar out at Aslito airfield. It’s certainly not going anywhere without its engines.”

I blinked. “Without... its engines?”

“Yes, the last time I saw the ship, maybe six months ago, the engines’d been removed.”

Shipped off to Tokyo for further study.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her flying laboratory had become the blueprint for the revamped Japanese fighter plane, the new and improved Zero. Her own disdain for war, and her love for flying, had created in her a deadly naïvete. On the other hand, it had helped keep her alive.

“Is, uh, Fred aware of how you’ve cooperated?”

The idea of that seemed almost to frighten her. “No! Oh my goodness, no — I’ve never admitted any of this to him. I know he wouldn’t approve, and it would just agitate him. He has it so terrible, as it is...”

“I’m afraid, Amy, that Fred’s problems are going to be over very soon. That ‘nice’ Chief Suzuki informs me that the imperial government has approved Fred Noonan’s execution.”

I’d hit her with so many blows, she was almost punchy; she could barely reply. “W-what?”

“There’s no way to sugar-coat this. I heard it from Suzuki’s own lips. Fred Noonan is considered a dangerous prisoner, uncooperative, belligerent, but most important, he’s a spy, and as such will be executed... and Chief Suzuki feels that you, despite being a fine and beautiful human being, are also a spy, and should face the same fate.”

“Why did he tell you this?”

“Because he asked me... or rather, he asked Father O’Leary of the I.R.A.... to ascertain your true feelings about the Japanese.”

She was shaking her head, as if she were reeling. “True feelings...?”

“Are you sympathetic enough toward the Japanese, and bitter enough toward FDR and the United States, to come over to their side, as a valuable propaganda voice? To help them demonstrate that, as early as 1937, the United States committed an act of war upon imperial Japan?”

She was holding her head in her hands as if trying to keep it from exploding. “How this nightmare could become a greater nightmare, I never imagined... but it has... it has...”

“The chief also wanted me to ascertain whether or not your sympathies could be maintained even after the execution of your cohort. Of course, they may try telling you he died of dysentery or dengue fever—”

“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.

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.

Chapter 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.

We were now in a sunken hot steaming tub of water, to get the shit washed off (none had gotten on me, thanks to the late Fred Noonan’s warning). This was also Suzuki’s way of rewarding Jesus Sablan for defending the chief’s honor. Jesus was clearly the only Chamorro in this brothel, and I’d noticed the chief placing a fat handful of funny money in the madam’s palm, doing some quick whispered explaining to her while nodding in Jesus’s direction.

As we relaxed in the steaming water, sipping glasses of awamori, a potent mullet brandy, the chief — whose body was smoothly scrawny — said to his associate, “I send for new clothing. I ask shakufu burn dishonored clothes.”

I gathered shakufu referred to that barmaid madam who’d walked us back here.

Lord Jesus said nothing — his eyes were wide and moving side to side as he luxuriated in the steaming, scented, oil-pooled water, in what was obviously a new experience for him; hell, maybe bathing itself was a new experience for him. He was a curious combination of brawn and fat, cords of sinew alternating with flaps of flab, his heavily muscled outspread arms surrounding half the tub.

Then the chief turned his gaze upon me. “With pilot dead, is Amira lost?”

“Only if you tell her the truth about his death,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I believe you can still count on her cooperation.”

Lord Jesus, leaning back limply with his glass of awamori in hand, had an expression of bliss, his eyes half-shut, his mouth open in moronic ecstasy. I wondered if he’d worn a similar expression when he pressed the glowing red tip of a cigarette to Amy’s gentle throat.

“Pilot die dengue fever?” Suzuki suggested.

“Hai,” I said, smiling, nodding, as if this were a brilliant notion.

Water had gotten on his gray mustache and it was dripping down his smile. “You tell her for us? Make her believe?”

“You honor me with this mission,” I said. “I am sorry I failed with the pilot. I will not fail again.”

“No apology,” Suzuki said. “Barbarian pilot is better dead. Deal with woman now.”

“I can tell you, as an American, that the woman’s value to your country, alive, would far outweigh the alternative.”

Suzuki frowned, not understanding. “All-turn...?”

“Kill her,” Lord Jesus said.

I wasn’t sure whether he was explaining the meaning of what I’d said, or making his own suggestion.

Soon three slender geishas had padded in, stepped from their cheap faded rayon kimonos and slippers, and slipped down into the tub, where they began washing us.

“If you have religion problem,” the chief said, apparently noting that I was ill at ease, “please to say.”

“Actually, yes,” I said. Normally I wouldn’t have minded a Madam Butterfly soaping my privates, even if I did seem to have drawn a somewhat withered flower. I had a feeling Saipan was where Tokyo shipped their aging talent.

“If you don’t mind,” I said, putting my barely touched glass of awamori down, “I’ll walk back to the hotel. Any man’s death is troubling to a man of the cloth.”

The chief nodded solemnly; he had regained considerable dignity since the shit got cleaned off his face. Lord Jesus was lost in the nirvana of a massage from a geisha whose ability to hide her distaste was miraculous.

I smiled at my geisha, trying to send her a message that my rejection of her charms wasn’t personal, and she smiled back with a sadness in her eyes as old as her country. As I climbed out, she brought me towels and a robe.

Drying off, I said to the chief, “I’ll talk to the woman tonight, and report to you tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Chief Suzuki said with a respectful nod. “Konichiwa.”

I exited the brothel into a late afternoon that had turned ugly and cold, under a rolling, growling charcoal sky. Gunmetal waves were splashing up over the concrete jetty; a trio of immense freighters anchored in the harbor took the rough waters stoically, but fishing sampans tied to a concrete finger of a pier seemed almost to jump out of the water. This was not good. But it would not stop me. Turning up the collars of my priestly black suitcoat, I walked against the wind, the hotel only a few blocks away.

This time when I knocked, the door opened right now and there she was, standing before me, blue-gray eyes at once shiny with hope and red with despair, mouth quivering as if not quite daring to smile, hoping I’d returned with the foolproof plan that would liberate Fred Noonan and send us all happily home.

But she knew me too well; she knew the little smile I gave her did not bode well.

“Oh my goodness...”

She took a step back as I moved into the room, which had turned dark and cool with the afternoon; she still wore the short-sleeve mannish white shirt and rust slacks, her feet bare. I shut the door, as she asked, “You can’t help him?”

I took her arm, gently, and walked her to the chair by the window, which she had lowered, but not all the way, the cool wind sneaking in to riffle the covers, the pages, of the magazines on the table, colorful images of smiling Japanese.

Kneeling before her, like a suitor, I enfolded her hands in mine, gazed at her with all the tenderness I could summon and said, “No one can help him now. Amy, they executed Fred this afternoon.”

She didn’t say anything, but outside the wind howled in pain; her chin quivered, tears trickled. Slowly, she shook her head, her eyes hooded with grief.

“That’s why they wanted me to talk to him,” I said, patting her hand. “To give him Last Rites.”

A spattering of rain had begun; filmy curtains reached out in ghostly gesture.

She swallowed. “How? Was it... quick?”

“It was quick,” I said. “They shot him in his cell, right in front of me. Couldn’t do a damn thing... I’m so sorry.”

My lies softened the blow only slightly; but she mustn’t know the sacrifice he made, and had to be spared the grotesque details of his death.

Still, she knew Noonan too well not to come close, within a consonant actually, saying, “I bet he spit in their eye.”

“Oh yes.”

“Nathan... it hurts.”

Still kneeling, I held out my arms to her, like Jolson singing “Swanee,” and she tumbled into my embrace and we kind of switched around so that I was sitting in the chair, she was in my lap like a big kid, grabbing tight, face buried in my neck, the tears turning from trickle to downpour, as outside the sky imitated her.

We were like that for several minutes, and then the rain was coming in, so I eased her to her feet, and walked her to the padded quilts, where she sat, slumping. I closed the window, leaving an inch for air, switched on the reading lamp, whose translucent tan shade created a golden glow. Sick of playing priest, I removed the suitcoat, and the clerical-collared shirt, and in my T-shirt went over and sat beside her. Our legs were stretched out laxly before us, our arms hung loose, puppets whose strings had been snipped.

She was staring into nothing at all. “He suffered so. They were so terribly cruel to him... it makes me...”

And she covered her face and began to weep, sobs racking her body. I put my arm around her, patting her back as if comforting a child, but I knew there was nothing I could say or do. Could I even understand what she was going through? Could anyone, except Fred Noonan?

Finally she looked at me with wide red-rimmed eyes, her lightly powdered face streaked with tears, and said, “I feel so guilty. Nathan. So guilty... I’ve had it so easy, compared to Fred.”

“Nothing to feel guilty about,” I assured her. “It was out of your control.”

“I didn’t fight them, like he did. He was brave. I was a coward.”

“You were in prison, too.”

She shook her head, no, violently, no. “Not like him. Not like him.”

“Well, he’s free now. Be happy for him.”

She blinked some tears away. “You really look at it that way?”

“I saw how he was living. He was glad to go. Believe me. Wherever he is, it has to be a better place than that.”

Thinking that over, she lay down, resting her head in my lap, pulling her knees up, like a fetus, and I stroked that curly head of hair while she quietly cried and snuffled and even slept for a few minutes.

Finally, with her head still in my lap, she looked up and asked, “Can we really get out of here?”

“Yes. The schooner that brought me here, the Yankee, is anchored out beyond the three-mile limit. They’ve spent the day waiting to see if I’ll need a lift home tonight — the captain and his first mate’ll come in, in their motor launch, and pull up on the other side of that little island just off the waterfront — Maniagawa — and watch for me.”

“When?”

“When else? Midnight.”

Two escape routes had been arranged for me: Captain Johnson and his dinghy, tonight; or if I needed more time, in two days (as I’d told the shichokan), passage was arranged with a German trader. If I missed both my rides, I’d be on my own, though with Guam so nearby, a hijacked motorboat remained a viable third option.

“Is this rain going to be a problem?” she wondered.

The storm was rattling the window.

“It could be a help,” I said. “What fools but us will be out in it?”

She sat up. Hope was back in her eyes. “We’ll just... walk out of here?”

I cupped her face in my hands. “Baby, we’ll just slip out the window in my room. Don’t those native watchdogs usually camp out in the lobby?”

“Yes.”

I slipped my arm around her shoulder and drew her to me. “Well, they won’t even know we’re gone, till tomorrow morning sometime. They don’t watch the back door, ’cause there isn’t one, right?”

She nodded. “Originally, there was a side exit, but it was blocked off... this hotel is a sort of jail.”

“So they only watch the front door.”

She nodded again. “Where will your schooner captain pick us up?”

“Right on the dock. Right where he dropped me off.”

The sky cracked like a whip, then a low rumble followed.

I asked her, “Do they check on you? Bring you meals or anything?”

“They hardly bother me. I take my meals at that restaurant across the street.”

“Then all we have to do is sit tight for a few hours.”

“Well... after all, we do have some catching up to do.”

“We really do.”

“Nathan... Turn off that light.”

“All right...”

I got up and switched off the reading lamp and when I turned she was standing beside the padded quilts, unbuttoning the white blouse; beneath it was a wispy peach bra with (she revealed as she unzipped the rust trousers) matching silky step-ins. Her flesh took on cool tones of blue, as the reflected rain streaking down the window projected itself onto the walls, shadow ribbons of darker blue making abstract flowing patterns along the lanky curves of her body. She undid the bra and let it fall, baring the small, girlishly pert breasts, then stepped from the step-ins, standing naked, shoulders back, unashamed, legs long and lean and even muscular, clothing pooled at her bare feet, her slender shapely body painted with the textures of the storm, arms held out to me beseechingly.

It was time for Father O’Leary to take his pants off.

We made love tenderly, we made love savagely, we made up for lost time and laughed and wept, and when she rode me, her preferred posture, strong-willed woman that she was, her ivory body washed in the blue shadows of the streaky rain, she made love with an abandon and joy that she otherwise must have found only in the sky. I will never forget her lovely face hovering above me, gazing down with heartbreaking fondness, her face bright with joy, then lost in passion, drunk with sensation, and finally aglow with the bittersweet sense of loss fulfillment exacts.

Later, since we were after all in an unlocked room in the political “hotel” of our hosts, Father O’Leary and a fully clothed Amira sat on the quilts in the cool blue reflection of the rain coming down. A pitcher of water poured into her basin had allowed us to wash up and she mentioned that this current rain was welcome.

“Rainwater’s important here,” she said. “The ground water on this island has an awful, brackish taste.”

“I thought it rained every time you turn around, in the tropics.”

“We don’t get much in the summer, but winter monsoon season is pretty fierce. Lots of frequent, short showers.”

I wondered if she realized she spoke of Saipan almost as her home? And hadn’t it been, for almost three years?

“This is shaping up like a typhoon,” she said, looking toward the window. The shadows on the walls were darker, moving more quickly, and the wind sounded angry. The direction of the rain seemed to have shifted, coming down straighter, hitting the tin roof of the one-story house next door in hard pellets, unrelenting liquid machine gun fire.

She asked me questions about home, pleased that Paul Mantz had remarried (“That Terry is a terrific gal”); I gave her more details on her husband’s remarriage, which only seemed to wryly amuse her, now. She had no idea her disappearance had been the center of such worldwide attention and seemed rather flattered, even touched. Bitterly, though, she commented that the multimillion-dollar naval search must have largely been an excuse to pry in these waters.

She also spoke of her life in Saipan, which was very solitary. Other than Chief Suzuki, Jesus Sablan, and a few officials, like the shichokan, she knew of no one in Garapan who spoke fluent English, and — despite her ability to traverse the downtown — she had made few friends.

“The Chamorro family next door,” she said, pointing toward the window, and the rat-a-tat-tat tin-roof rainfall, “has been kind.” She laughed softly. “I got to know them on my trips to the privy... it’s in back of their house. They have a little girl, Matilda, maybe twelve, a sweet thing. She knows some English, and I tried to help her with her homework, now and then. I gave her a ring with a pearl as a keepsake... Her parents are nice, too, they give me fresh fruit, pineapples, mangoes, which is something I can’t find at the Japanese market. Food’s awful — everything’s out of a can or a jar.”

“I noticed,” I said with a smile.

The room turned white from lightning, and the thunderclap was like cannon fire.

“Are you sure this rain won’t be a problem?” she asked. “For us leaving tonight?”

“No, it’s helpful,” I lied. “Listen... it’s getting close to time. I’m going down and check on the chumps in the lobby... You better look around this room and see if there’s anything you want to take with you.”

Her laugh sounded like a cough. “I don’t think I’ll be looking back on this room with much nostalgia.”

“Well, look over your personal items, things you brought with you... wrap up a little bundle, if you have to, but travel light.”

She smirked. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll go down and distract the fellas... Wait maybe a minute after I leave, then go down to my room and slip inside.”

She nodded.

I was almost out the door when she clutched my arm. I leaned over and kissed her. “We’re gonna be apart for two, maybe three minutes,” I said. “Think you can bear up?”

She shook her head, no; she was smiling but her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid.”

“Good. That’s healthy. Only the dead are fearless.”

“Like Fred.”

“Like Fred,” I said, and touched her face, and stepped into the hallway.

It was empty. My hunch was the entire floor was vacant, except for Amy. The only other person I’d seen who seemed to be staying here was the desk clerk or the manager or whoever he was, who had the first room off the little lobby. I moved down the stairs, and through another empty hallway.

In the lobby, the check-in desk was unoccupied, and the ceiling fan whirred sluggishly over two Chamorro assistant coppers in their threadbare white suits. I knew them both: fatso Ramon, of the cantaloupe head and blankly stupid countenance, was seated in the rattan chair where Jesus had been previously plopped; and across from him was the short, burly officer who Suzuki had brought in to sub for Jesus. They were playing cards, of course, with what seemed to be the same greasy deck. Billy clubs and matchsticks again littered the rattan coffee table.

“Where’s Jesus?” I asked Ramon.

“Paint town red,” Ramon grinned. It wasn’t as nasty as Jesus’s grin but it was nasty enough.

“Oh, he’s still out with the chief?”

Ramon nodded, fat fingers holding the smeary cards close to his face, eyes almost crossing as he studied his hand.

Then I asked the burly character, who had a lumpy sweet-potato nose and pockmarks (though the latter weren’t nearly in Jesus Sablan’s league), if he knew how to play Chicago. His grasp of English was obviously less than that of Ramon, who having played a few hands with me this afternoon, frowned at my apparent interest in joining them.

“No!” Ramon said. “No play. Go hell.”

This rebuff was fine with me. I didn’t really want to play cards with these wild boars; I was just keeping them busy long enough for Amy to slip down the stairs and into my room.

Which, a few seconds later, was exactly where I found her, wearing her weathered wrinkled flying jacket, pacing and holding her stomach; my room seemed darker than hers, perhaps because my window onto the house next door did not overlook its rooftop.

“I feel sick,” she said. “Sick to my stomach, like before going onstage to give a stupid lecture...”

I was digging the nine-millimeter out of my travel bag. “Do you get butterflies before you take off in a plane?”

“Never.”

I checked the chamber; the bolt action made a nasty echoey click. “Well, this is more like takin’ off on a flight than giving a lecture. So tell your stomach to take it easy.”

She sucked in air, nodded.

Now, if only my belly would take that same good advice.

I slipped the extra clip into my suitcoat pocket. I wasn’t taking anything with me but the clothes on my person, the gun in my hand and Amy. That leather flight jacket was apparently the only keepsake she was taking along. Thunder rumbled and cracked, sounding fake, like a radio sound effects guy shaking a thin sheet of steel.

She swept into my arms and I held her tight, and her eyes widened as she looked at my right hand with the automatic held nose upward. “Is there going to be violence?”

“Only if that’s what it takes. Pacifists get off at this stop... Okay?”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

“If there is... violence... you have to stay calm. If you ran into trouble up in the air, you could stay calm, right?”

“Usually.”

“Well, I need that world-famous nerves-of-steel pilot at my side, right now. Okay? Is she here?”

“She’s here.”

“Now.” And I held her away from me and gave her a goofy little smile. “Sooner or later in the life of a man having an affair with a married woman, the inevitable occurs.”

She couldn’t help it; she smiled back at me. “Which is?”

“Nate Heller goes out the window.”

And I opened the window — no bars on this prison — and went out first, into the downpour, a splattering, insistent rain that was surprising in its power, my feet sinking into grassy, muddy ground several inches. The window was up off the ground a ways and I held my arms for her to slip down into, as if we were eloping, and then she was in my arms and she blinked and blinked as water drummed her face and she grinned reflexively, saying “Oh my goodness!”

And, as if she were my bride just ushered over the threshold, I eased her onto the sodden ground, where her slippered feet sank in almost to the ankle.

“This is going to be slow going!” I said, having to work to be heard over the driving rain and grumbling sky.

We were between the hotel and the house next door — there wasn’t much space, not much more than a hallway’s worth. So I got in front of her, leading her by the hand; my nine-millimeter was stuck in my waistband. We hadn’t taken more than two soggy steps when the voice behind us cried out. “Hey!”

I looked back, past Amy, and saw him: Ramon, coming out of the outdoor toilet, buckling his pants with one hand and coming at us with the raised billy club in the other. His chubby body charged through the curtain of rain as if it were nothing more than moisture, his sandaled feet making rhino craters in the muddy earth, his eyes wide and dark and brightly animal, like a frightened raccoon’s, only a raccoon would have had sense enough to flee and here Ramon was barreling right toward me, moving faster than a fat man had any right to move, and I pulled Amy back behind me, closer to the street, and thrust myself forward and just as Ramon entered the tunnel between hotel and house, my nine-millimeter slug entered the melon of his head, somewhere in his forehead, lifting the top of his skull in fragments, revealing in a spray of red that Ramon did indeed have a brain, before he tumbled backward, careening off the house next door, then splatting against the hotel, where he slid down its cement surface and sank into the mud like an animal carcass on its way to becoming a fossil.

Amy screamed and I rudely covered her mouth with my hand until her wide eyes and nodding told me she wouldn’t scream anymore and she was trembling and crying as I stood there with a fucking monsoon dripping down my head, saying, “Nobody heard that gunshot, not in this shit... but I gotta go in and deal with the other one!”

“Why?!”

“Because Ramon here can’t take a dump forever. The other one’s gonna go checking on him, and I can’t have that!”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Not if he’s smart.”

And what were the odds of that?

So I left her there, in the passageway between hotel and house, rain pummeling her as she covered her mouth, her back turned to the horror of what had become of Ramon, and I moved out onto the street and inside the hotel where the burly Chamorro looked around at me, and I swung the nine-millimeter barrel across the side of his skull in a fashion that would not only knock out most any man, but probably fucking kill him.

Only this son of a bitch shook it off, and went for the billy club on the table.

I put a bullet in his ear that wound up going through his reaching hand, as well, though I doubt he felt it. He tumbled onto the rattan table, breaking it in a crunch of shattering straw.

Now he knew how to play Chicago.

Just down the hall, out of the first hotel room door, the Chamorro desk clerk stuck out his mustached face. His eyes were huge.

“He didn’t understand that real cops have guns,” I told him. I went over and reached across the check-in counter and yanked his phone out of the wall. “Do I have to kill you or tie you up or anything?”

He shook his head, no, crossed himself, and ducked back into his room.

Then I ran out into the rain, the nine-millimeter back in my waistband, and Amy came flying out from between the house and the hotel. I slipped my arm around her waist and we ran down the boardwalk. No one was around; the unpaved street next to us was a swamp no vehicle could have navigated. From across the way, in a seedy little bar, came the sound of a gramophone playing a Dorsey Brothers record, “Lost in a Fog,” and Chamorro kids were dancing, boys and girls holding each other close, swaying to the record’s rhythm, ignoring the staccato percussion of the downpour.

When we ran out of boardwalk, the grassy ground provided a terrible soggy glue, but we moved along, stumbling, never quite falling, slowed though not quite caught in this just-poured cement. Through the sheeting rain we glimpsed the concrete cellblocks of the prison, impervious to the pounding storm, then ducked out of the way as a tin roof, flung recklessly by the wind, went pitching across our path, carving a resting place in the face of a wood-frame warehouse. Exchanging startled looks, and grabbing gulps of air, we moved on, pushing past our old friend the sugar king in his park as palm trees bowed down to him.

Then, along the waterfront, we had boardwalk under our mud-coated feet again, and the two-story buildings around us lessened the squall’s impact, though we were heading into the wind, and it took effort just to walk, our clothes so drenched they were heavy, our hair soaked flat to our scalps. A block away yawned the expanse of the Garapan harbor’s concrete dock. We were early, maybe five, maybe ten minutes; would the storm have delayed Johnson? Would it have defeated him entirely, and had I blasted my way out of one dead end and into another?

And with these questions barely posed, bad luck rendered their answers moot.

Because just as we were passing through the hana machi section of the waterfront, where men who were men drank awamori and had their manly needs tended to by faded flowers. Chief Mikio Suzuki and Jesus Sablan, drunk as skunks, came stumbling out of the Nangetsu, after an evening of revelry signifying the chief’s gratitude for his top jungkicho’s earlier display of loyalty.

Only drunks — particularly drunks who were outfitted in new, fresh clothes (even the Chamorro wore fresh white linens) — would have exited in the midst of this tempest, their finery immediately getting saturated.

But these were dangerous drunks, who looking across the liquefied goo of the unpaved waterfront street, recognized us, Amira and Father O’Leary.

And at first Chief Suzuki smiled.

So I smiled and waved and nodded.

But then Chief Suzuki frowned, even in his inebriated state smelling something fishy, not that difficult to do in this part of town, and he shrieked in Japanese at Lord Jesus, who also frowned, and they ran toward us.

We kept moving, too, toward the dock. We were on the boardwalk and the Chief and Jesus were trying to run across a sucking mucky morass. I drew my gun.

“Nathan!” she cried, and I just pulled her along.

“Amira!” the chief yelled. “Leary!”

I looked back at them and they were making progress but we were almost there, almost to where the cement apron of the waterfront led to the jetty itself.

Then a thundercrack that wasn’t a thundercrack startled me and I looked back to see that Suzuki had pulled his gun, I’d forgotten he had one, his suitcoat had been buttoned over it, and I fired back at him. It caught him in the right shoulder but the drunken little bastard barely winced, just shifted his revolver to his other hand and fired again.

Amy screamed.

“Are you hit?” I yelled, putting myself between her and the chief.

“No! I’m scared!”

I fired again and this one caught him either in the chest or the shoulder, I wasn’t sure which, but the gun fumbled from his fingers and was swallowed into the sludge. The chief just stood there, arms limp, weaving, whether from liquor or pain, who could say?

But what was worse, what was much worse, was Lord Jesus.

He was lumbering toward us, his right arm raised, hand filled with the machete, eyes showing the whites all ’round, teeth bared in a ghastly grimace of a smile. Lightning turned the street white and winked off that wide wicked blade.

I was still moving forward when I fired back at him, fired twice, hitting him once, somewhere in the midsection but it didn’t even slow him down. Behind him I could see the wounded chief waddling like a penguin, heading back toward the Nangetsu, no doubt to call in the alarm signal, goddamnit! Still running, pushing Amy out in front of me, I fired back behind me again and this time caught Jesus in the left shoulder. He felt it, he yowled, but he was still coming.

We were on the cement now, and stretching before us, beyond the concrete jetty, were choppy but not impossible waters, rough wild waters but a sailor like Captain Irving Johnson could maneuver on them...

Only there was no sight of him.

Maniagawa Island beckoned; you could almost reach out and touch it... but no motor launch in sight. Just rolling waves and angry sky.

And Jesus had made it to the cement, and his machete was poised to strike and my muddy feet slipped as I fired, the bullet taking a piece of his ear off but not important enough a piece of anything to stop him from lunging in and swinging that blade, and Amy screamed as I felt that blade carve through my clerical collar and the front of my suitcoat and cut the cloth and cut me, a gaping wide C from my right collarbone to my left hip bone and it was wet and stung but I could tell it wasn’t deep, and I fired a round into the bastard’s stomach and his yelp of agony was the sweetest fucking sound I ever heard. He tumbled face first to the cement, like a huge catch onto the deck of a fisherman’s boat, and I turned with my upper lip peeled back over my teeth in what must have been one frightening demented smile, because Amy drew back from me in alarm.

Then she moved close to me, looking at the front of me. “He cut you! He hurt you!”

“I cut myself shaving worse than this.” Gulping for air but getting mostly rain, unrelenting goddamn rain, I looked out into the restless waters and saw nothing but waves and dark sky; then lightning illuminated those waters, seemingly to the horizon, and showed me nothing new — no rescue craft. Had Johnson double-crossed me, at Miller’s behest?

“Either we’re early,” I said, “or they’re late.”

“Or they’re not coming!”

Out of breath, panting, I said, “That nice chiefy of yours is probably calling out the guard. We have to get out of here. Got any ideas?”

Breathing hard, too, she nodded. Thunder exploded as her arm thrust past me and I followed her pointing finger to the nearby, unguarded seaplane dock. The two flying boats floated there, tied at the ramp.

Right out in the open.

“Can you fly one of those things?” I asked.

She tossed her head; moisture beads flew. She was smiling, proud. “I’m Amelia Earhart,” she reminded me.

“Oh yeah,” I said.

And we ran, leaving the body of Lord Jesus behind, with no resurrection in the plans, ran across the cement, feet splashing, kids playing in the rain, and climbed a ridiculous little waist-high chain-link fence and scooted down the ramp. I untied the moorings, and she was already wading out into where the planes bobbed in the rough water. Then I was doing the same, climbing up onto the pontoon on my rider’s side, as she climbed on her pontoon to get access to the cockpit.

That was when the shots started flying.

The police station was only a few short minutes’ walk from the waterfront, even in the rain, and the chief’s reinforcements were streaking toward us, getting their white uniforms wet, bullets zinging and careening off the flying boat’s green fuselage.

The sound of a motor — and it wasn’t the flying boat’s, she wasn’t in that cockpit yet — drew my attention back out to the water, despite the bullets I was ducking. A glowing light seemed to be coming around Maniagawa Island — a lantern! A kerosene lantern in Hayden’s hand, the skipper riding the motor...

“Forget the plane!” I yelled, looking across at her — her eyes were wild. “Swim for the boat!”

She hesitated, as if hating to miss the opportunity to fly once again, then a bullet whanged into the metal near her head and she swallowed and nodded, and dove in; so did I. I swam with my nine-millimeter clenched in my fist, but I swam.

We swam toward the launch as it moved over the bumpy waters toward us, and bullets made kisses around us in the waters. And then somebody, Hayden, was hauling me into the boat, and I gulped air, air with rain in it but air, and looked toward the water, looking to reach down for Amy, and she was swimming toward us when the bullets caught her, danced across the back of her leather jacket.

And then she seemed to slump forward into the water, and soon the jacket was all we could see of her, several boat lengths away, sort of puffing up, its weathered brown leather blossoming red, hanging there as if it were a floating flower; then it, too, disappeared, sucked down under.

Gone.

I was halfway out of the boat when the kid hauled me back in, yelling, “It’s too late! Too late for her!” Bullets were flying all around us, and we were moving away from where Amy and her jacket had been, away from the little white figures on the jetty who were shooting at us, jabbering at us almost comically, tiny insignificant jumping-up-and-down figures that got lost first in the rain, then in the darkness, until they were gone, just a bizarre bad memory, a coda to an escape that almost happened.

Johnson’s voice said, “How is he?”

Hayden’s voice said, “Nasty cut.”

That was the last voice I heard, except I thought I heard Amy’s voice, one last time, saying the last thing I heard her say, so proudly, right before she ran toward that seaplane, a final plane she never flew.

“I’m Amelia Earhart,” she said.

Rain on my face.

Darkness.