Flying Blind

Chapter 20

Late in June 1940, Captain Irving Johnson reported to Elmer Dimity of the Amelia Earhart Foundation as follows: “It is my opinion that the search be considered finished and that everything humanly possible has been done to find any trace of Miss Earhart.”

Nevertheless, Elmer and Margot did not give up on their plans and a ship the Foundation had commissioned was waiting in the Honolulu harbor on December 7, 1941. The Foundation’s Pacific expedition, interrupted by World War II, was never resumed, although successful businessman Dimity — and the Foundation — continued on for many years, extolling Amelia Earhart and researching her disappearance.

Captain Johnson was working at Pearl Harbor in the War Plans Office when the Japanese attacked; the Yankee’s last cruise ended in the spring of 1941, Johnson selling the ship and entering the Navy. He spent the war on the survey ship Summer, charting the islands and waters of the South Pacific for the United States government; perhaps this was merely a continuation of what he’d already been doing on the Yankee.

After the war, Johnson — looking for a new sailing ship — was alerted by his old first mate of a German brigantine seized by the British and held in England; called the Duhnen, the ship was purchased, renamed the new Yankee, and Johnson and his wife and family resumed their round-the-world cruises and continued to record their adventures (well, some of them) in bestselling travel books into the 1960s.

Their first mate did not join them, as he had another career to pursue. I would never have guessed that Hayden’s chief interest, other than sailing, would be little theater; he did not seem the artsy type. But he had gone from the deck of the Yankee into a Hollywood career that was prematurely interrupted by the war; like me, Sterling Hayden served in the Marines, only Hayden got assigned to the OSS, through the auspices of Captain Johnson’s good friend “Wild Bill” Donovan. Hayden’s low-key macho and the weary poetry of the peculiar cadence of his speech lent themselves well to such films as The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, and Dr. Strangelove, wherein his General Jack D. Ripper saved the world from the loss of its “precious bodily fluids.”

After Pearl Harbor, Howland Island was the next United States territory attacked by the Japanese; nonetheless, its perfect crushed-coral airstrips, long since overgrown, have never been used.

William Miller, Chief of the Air Carrier Division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., in 1943. Doing a job in Hollywood, I received that news August of the same year in a booth at the Brown Derby on Wilshire, from Lt. Colonel Paul Mantz of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” I said.

“That a guy as young as Miller would die of a heart attack?” Mantz asked over his frosted martini.

“That Miller had a heart.”

Mantz’s smile twitched under his mustache; he looked spiffy in his military threads. “You always were a sentimental soul. So, Nate — what’s the story on you and Guadalcanal?”

“Got likkered up, lied about my age, and found myself in boot camp with a bunch of kids. We saw rough action, but it was malaria that got me sent home early.”

Mantz’s expression told me he knew I was holding back, but respected a fellow soldier’s right to privacy. Then, chewing a bite of Caesar salad, he grinned and said, “Hear the latest about Gippy?”

“Which story? Faking his own kidnapping to promote that Hitler book? Or pretending to sue RKO for making that movie about Amelia?”

Shortly before the war, Putnam showed up at the Los Angeles DA’s office with threatening notes to himself and a bullet-riddled copy of The Man Who Killed Hitler, which he’d just published. Later he reported firing shots at a man trying to break and enter the Putnam home. The fascist plot against him — widely covered in the papers — reached its pinnacle when G. P. was found — within hours of his staff reporting his “disappearance” — bound and gagged (but unharmed) in a house under construction in Bakersfield.

The 1943 film Flight for Freedom starred Rosalind Russell as an Amelia Earhart-like aviatrix and Fred MacMurray as her Fred Noonan-like navigator, who undertake an espionage mission for the government with heroically tragic results. Putnam loudly objected and rattled litigation sabers in the press. In fact, he had sold the rights to Amy’s story to the studio and earned extra money by promoting the picture through his public protestations.

“Neither one,” Mantz said. “Gippy’s got himself commissioned as a major in Army Intelligence.”

Putnam, who was also in the process of acquiring a new wife (his fourth — Margaret Haviland, an executive with the USO), served in China, reportedly briefing, and debriefing, squadrons flying bombing raids into Japan. He also visited American-held Saipan, supposedly to investigate the rampant rumors about two white pilots, a man and a woman, captured before the war by the Japanese, that were circulating among GIs who’d spoken to Chamorro refugees in Camp Susupe, a city of tents run by the Army for the former citizens of Garapan, which had been obliterated in June 1944.

Thirty thousand Japanese and thirty-five hundred Americans — Navy, Army, Marines — died in Operation Forager, the twenty-four-day battle for Saipan, the Pacific island hit worst by the war. I don’t know that anyone ever bothered to total up casualties among the islanders, but many had to have died in the bombings; Garapan was reduced to rubble by June 24. Garapan Harbor thereafter was home to thousands of Allied ships; while the seaplane base was destroyed, Aslito Haneda was quickly rebuilt, expanded, and renamed Isley Field, handling hundreds of takeoffs and landings each day, becoming an airbase for the B-29 Super Fortress Bombers (the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima from neighboring Tinian). The Japanese never completed the airstrip at Marpi Point; nearby was Suicide Cliff — there, and, near the north end of the island, at similarly named Banzai Cliff, thousands of Japanese men, women, and children threw themselves to a rocky death to avoid a worse fate at the hands of invading barbarians.

One odd, persistent rumor that came out of the Pacific theater was that Amelia Earhart was the voice of Tokyo Rose, the infamous female disc jockey whose Japanese propaganda broadcasts enticed American soldiers to listen to nostalgic songs from home interspersed with lies about how Japan was kicking the Allies’ ass. Major Putnam, while in the Far East, reportedly crossed enemy lines to listen to broadcasts of an American woman performing such propaganda, and rather defensively proclaimed the voice absolutely not to be Amelia’s. He said he would stake his life on it.

I have to admit, when the rumors that Amy might have been Rose first found their way to me, I had to wonder. Could she have survived that nightmarish rainy night? Had those bullets not been fatal? Did the Japs fish her out of the clear waters — we hadn’t been that far from shore — and revive her, and ship her off to Tokyo as a propaganda tool, as always intended?

And hadn’t she been known, in Saipan, as Tokyo Rosa?

Sometimes, late at night, I could almost talk myself into it. But too much was wrong. For one thing, there was no “Tokyo Rose”; it was a nickname, possibly picked up by GIs in Saipan who heard the “Tokyo Rosa” moniker, attached by the Chamorros to Amelia, and — in the way verbal storytelling evolves into legend — got applied by GIs to any English-speaking female disc jockey who turned up on Japan’s regular propaganda broadcasts.

Anyway, there was no single “Tokyo Rose,” rather dozens of female DJs who appeared on various Japanese radio shows, some with Japanese accents, others without, none of them using the Tokyo Rose appellation.

The myth grew so strong, however, that one of these women, who came forward and admitted having been coerced into doing some broadcasts — an American of Japanese descent who’d been visiting Tokyo when the war broke out — was railroaded into prison by such wonderful Americans as Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover.

Amy’s name came up in the coverage, however, because during the public witch hunt that put innocent Iva Togori away for the crime of her race, another Amy Earhart attended every day of the trial: Amelia’s mother, though elderly and in poor health, traveling from Medford, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. Amy Otis Earhart told reporters her daughter had been secretive about the world flight, not sharing as much as she usually did with her mother.

“I’m convinced,” Mrs. Earhart said, “she was on some sort of government mission, probably on verbal orders.”

Also, I could see Army Intelligence, in 1944, with the end of the war looming, panicking that Amelia Earhart might turn up embarrassingly, and sending G. P. to check out those broadcasts. After all, in my debriefing — conducted by William Miller in June 1940 — I had mentioned that Amelia was nicknamed “Tokyo Rosa” by the islanders. Maybe they put two and two together, and came up with egg on their face.

But the Japs wouldn’t have used Amelia anonymously; they would have played up her celebrity, if they’d actually had her, and had actually turned her. No. Amy died that night, when we almost made it. If Chief Suzuki and Jesus Sablan hadn’t come stumbling out of that brothel, we would have.

I didn’t learn of Suzuki’s death, incidentally, until many years later when J. T. “Buddy” Busch of Dallas, Texas, told me that a Mrs. Michiko Sugita — the daughter of Mikio Suzuki — had provided the first testimony by a Japanese national that placed Amelia Earhart on Saipan. Mrs. Sugita told Busch of hearing her father and other Garapan police officers discussing the female pilot, and whether or not she should be executed. Mrs. Sugita seemed embarrassed that her father’s vote had been for execution.

The former chief of Saipan police had not been among those Japanese who flung themselves from the suicide cliffs. After hiding in the mountains for a while, Suzuki surrendered and cooperated with the occupying forces; due to fatigue he was transferred to a hospital tent, where a witness saw an islander and an unidentified American make him drink poison. The case was investigated by one Jesus Sablan, who had been appointed (by the Army) “sheriff” of Camp Susupe, due to his “police background”; the murder was never solved.

Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran Odium, Amelia’s close friend, was the first American woman to set foot in postwar Japan; after her mission to investigate the “role of Japanese women” in the air war, Jackie reported seeing several files on Amy in Imperial Air Force headquarters. I did not meet Mrs. Odlum during those years of my relationship with Amelia, but sometime later, when she and her wealthy husband Floyd Odlum hired me on an industrial espionage case related to their cosmetics business.

“I didn’t see anything that would lead me to think Amelia was captured and kept in Japan,” Jackie told me, over dinner at the Odium ranch in Indio, California. She was a bubbly blonde who might have been the missing Andrews Sister. “Certainly nothing to make you think she was ‘Tokyo Rose.’”

She also showed me a precious memento Amy had given her before that last flight: a small silk American flag.

For whatever reason, G. P. Putnam returned from military service a different man, though staying involved with publishing and writing several more books. Plagued with illness, he lived in a Sierras mountain lodge, and later at a resort he ran in Death Valley, with his fourth wife, Peg, in what by all accounts was a happy if brief marriage. The postwar Putnam was apparently a much mellowed man, his outrageous promotional stunts behind him. He died of kidney failure in January 1950.

Paul Mantz’s military service was stellar, and not just because the movie actors serving under him included Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Ladd. His unit shot over thirty thousand feet of aerial combat footage and hundreds of training films, and while most of his duty was stateside, as he operated out of so-called Fort Roach (at Hal Roach Studios), Lt. Colonel Mantz shot stunning combat footage over the North Atlantic and in Africa.

At war’s end Paul was back at his old charter service stand, and enjoying his long and happy marriage to Terry. Radio commentator and Putnam-esque world traveler explorer Lowell Thomas hired Mantz to develop the multi-camera techniques for the famous Cinerama process; director of photography Mantz was perched in a chair in the nose of a converted B-25 bomber as he shot This Is Cinerama. Most of the famous aviation pictures of Hollywood’s Golden Age included footage shot by Paul Mantz and his team of fliers; he died in 1965, in an airplane, when a stunt went wrong on the James Stewart picture The Flight of the Phoenix.

James Forrestal moved from his administrative assistant position at the White House to Under Secretary of the Navy, and in 1944, when Secretary of the Navy Knox died of a heart attack, Forrestal took over; in 1947 he became the country’s first Secretary of Defense. He was credited with “building” the Navy, increasing the number of combat vessels from under four hundred to over fifteen hundred; he was considered “two-fisted” for taking frontline inspection tours, unusual for a ranking cabinet officer. He was also a virulent anticommunist and appeared to cheerfully despise Jews.

After President Truman forced his resignation, Forrestal — attacked in the press by Drew Pearson for war profiteering — apparently sank into a deep depression. Two months later, he fell — or perhaps was pushed — from the sixteenth floor of the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, supposedly tying his bathrobe belt to a radiator and trying to hang himself, succeeding rather in falling to his death.

I didn’t keep track of, or run into, any number of the other people from those days. Ernie Tisor was still working with Paul Mantz in the late fifties, but that’s the last I saw of him. Toni Lake, who walked away from five crash landings, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1943. Earl Carroll and his showgirl girlfriend Beryl Wallace were killed in an airliner crash in June 1948. Dizzy Dean ruined his pitching arm and got traded to the Cubs; FDR ran for a third term. I never saw Myrtle Mantz again; Margot died a few years ago — she never married; perhaps she was pining for me — or Amy.

Fred Noonan’s widow, Mary Bea, to whom I carried his message, married a widower, happily. For all her complaining about her family, Amy turned out to have a very loyal mother and sister, both of whom honored her at their every opportunity. Amy Otis Earhart, who never really gave up on the thought that her daughter might just show up one day, died at age ninety-five in October 1962.

From Boston to Honolulu, in dozens of towns across America, Amelia Earhart is honored with memorial plaques and markers, and streets and schools are named for her. Commemorative stamps have been issued; libraries and museums honor her with displays. Television movies and documentaries of her life frequently turn up on my Mitsubishi. And her luggage is still being manufactured and sold.

But also, the questions about her disappearance have developed into a cottage industry of research, expeditions, and books of a sort that G. P. Putnam might well have published. Rarely did a researcher track me down, and even more rarely did I cooperate. With one or two exceptions, I didn’t read their books, either. I didn’t need anybody to tell me what happened to Amelia Earhart. Besides which, I was under contract to Uncle Sam to keep my mouth shut; it’s like a deal with the devil — no escape clause.

And the government laughed off the Amelia-on-Saipan stories, though occasional documents surfaced due to the Freedom of Information Act that supported the “theory”; and scores of other letters and documents remain unclassified and/or destroyed. But Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, later Chief of Naval Operations, admitted that the truth about Amelia Earhart would “stagger the imagination.”

In 1969, when I heard, after so many years, from Robert Myers — now a grown man, working in a sugar factory in Salinas, California — it sent me hurtling back to his parents’ living room where we heard that exciting radio drama on the family Philco. Still peppy, he told me he was writing a book about his memories of Amelia and, on weekends and vacations, lecturing on the subject.

I was struck by odd resonances in what he’d said: the statue of sugar Baron Matsue Haruji somehow loomed over the career of Amelia Earhart’s kid pal, now working in a sugar factory, supplementing his income out on the lecture circuit. I wondered if he’d ever spoken at the Coliseum in Des Moines; I wondered if it was even still there.

“She’s alive,” he told me excitedly, and over the phone, the voice, even with the deep, older timber of an adult, still sounded like a kid’s. “She’s a woman named Irene Bolam, and she lives in New Jersey. Fred Noonan’s alive, too!”

“If he is, he’s got a splitting headache,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Look, Robert, it’s nice hearing from you—”

“Fred Noonan is this guy William Van Dusen. This former Air Force major and this author, they’ve researched both of ’em, and Van Dusen and Bolam, their backgrounds are phony. It looks like a witness protection plan kind of deal.”

“I don’t think they had a witness protection program in the forties.”

“How do you know? If Amelia got turned into Tokyo Rose, maybe the government would want to... sort of, bury her.”

“Robert, it’s nice hearing from you again.”

“You don’t want to look into this for me?”

“Are you hiring me?”

“I can’t afford that. I work in a factory.”

“I work for a living, too, Robert. Thanks for the call. Good luck.”

And that had been that. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad for Robert Myers: his friendship with Amelia had given meaning to his life; yet it had obviously been painful for him, carrying around so many unanswered questions, going through his life a “kid” few took seriously.

I’d been there. I sat in the living room with him. I knew what he’d heard. He just didn’t know where I’d been.

The book that claimed Irene Bolam was Amelia Earhart got its authors sued and itself pulled from the shelves. This made me suspicious, and one day in 1970, when I was visiting the Manhattan office of A-1, I took a side trip to Bedford Hills, New York. I found Irene Bolam in the bar with three other women in the clubhouse of Forsgate Country Club; these were ladies in their late sixties and they seemed to appreciate the attention of a good-looking kid like me, in his early to mid-sixties.

I knew at once which one was Irene. She bore a resemblance to Amy, though her nose was different, wider, larger; noses change, though, not always for the better. And the eyes were a hauntingly familiar blue-gray.

Standing next to the ladies, who looked pretty foxy in their golf sweaters and shorts, I said to Irene, “My name’s Nate Heller. We had a mutual friend.”

“Oh?” She beamed up at me. “And who would that be?”

“Amelia Earhart. I understand you were an aviatrix yourself, and flew with her?”

“That’s right, I was in the Ninety Nines... Oh, my goodness, I hope you don’t believe that baloney in that horrible book.”

The “oh my goodness” gave me a start: it was a favorite phrase of Amy’s.

But this wasn’t Amy. Amy couldn’t look at me and not betray the feelings we’d had. If by some bizarre circumstance, this was an Amelia Earhart who had survived those bullets and been carted off to Tokyo, brainwashed by Tojo, returned home, and brainwashed again by Uncle Sam... if that ridiculous scenario were even possible, I didn’t want to know.

Whether this was Irene Bolam, or Amelia Earhart, I knew one thing for sure: my Amy wasn’t in this old woman’s eyes.

I sat with the girls and they had tropical drinks with umbrellas while I had a rum and Coke. One of the girls was a widow with a nice body and a decent face lift and I think I could have got lucky. But I was an old married man now, and had changed my ways.

Irene Bolam died in July 1982. She left her body to science and her family honored her wishes that her fingerprints not be shared with those who had been hounding her about her identity.

The Continental DC-10 circled lazily on its approach, as the island of Saipan made itself known through the clouds. We had left Guam forty-five minutes before — Buddy Busch, his two-man camera crew, and me. At first glance the long narrow island appeared to be nothing more than a jungle with a mountain rising from its midst; but soon rolling hills, shell-pocked cliffs, and white sand beaches disclosed their presence, as did roads, buildings, and cultivated fields.

This was a slightly different view than I’d gotten from the Yankee or its dinghy, and I could finally understand what everyone had been raving about all these years: the ocean waters surrounding Saipan were dazzlingly blue and turquoise and green and yet transparent.

“Someday I’m gonna bring the wife along,” Buddy said. “She dudn’t believe me, ’bout how pretty them waters is. You been here before, Nate — ever see the like of it, anywheres else?”

“The folksier you get, Buddy,” I said, “the less you’re getting out of me.”

Buddy was frustrated that I had yet to open up about my own Saipan experiences.

“And the stars at night...” he began.

“Are big and bright? Deep in the heart of Saipan?”

“Back in ’45, every night, we’d be on our cots in our tents and Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ would come driftin’ across the camp, over the loudspeaker... It was like he was singin’ about Saipan.”

“I doubt he was.”

“Well,” he said defensively, “I never seen the like of it. Parade of damn stars traipsin’ across the sky... Or was I just young, and my memory’s playin’ tricks with me?”

“I ask myself that often,” I said.

Even from the air, the scars left on this island by World War II were readily apparent, violent punctuation marks in a peaceful sentence: a tank’s head poking out of the water a few hundred yards offshore; a barge marooned on the coral reef; a wrecked fuselage, half in the water, half on the beach — shimmering twisted metal in crystal-blue waters.

The DC-10 touched down at Kobler Field, near the former Aslito Haneda, aka Isley. We taxied over to a cement shed with a wooden roof emblazoned saipan in white letters; this and two Quonset-hut hangars was the Saipan airport.

“This is my fourth time here,” Buddy said coming down the deplaning steps, “and I never quite get used to how different it is from the war — no jeeps, or military trucks, no soldiers, sailors or Marines.”

The tiny airport, run by Chamorros, was a surprisingly bustling place filled with the Babel-like chatter of many languages — tourists from all over the world coming to this vacation center, Europeans, Arabs, but mostly Japanese. Buddy had told me to expect that: Saipan was a combination war shrine and honeymoon resort for the Japanese.

“Yeah, and they’re buyin’ back this island they lost,” he’d told me on the plane, “piece at a time.”

A Ford van Buddy had arranged was waiting, and we loaded our suitcases and the camera and recording gear — which was ensconced in heavy-duty flight cases — into the back. The two-man camera crew was also from Dallas; Phil was clean-cut and owned the video production company that had gone in partners with Buddy on a documentary of our visit, and Steve was a skinny, bearded, longhaired good old boy who I took for a hippie until I realized he was a Vietnam veteran — both knew their stuff. I told them I didn’t want to be on camera and they said fine, I could “grip.”

“What is a grip?” I’d seen that in the end credits of movies and always wondered.

“It means you help haul shit,” Steve said, ever-present cigarette bobbing.

Japanese machine-gun bunkers provided decorative cement touches on the road leading out of the airport. Beach Road itself, lined with flame trees, was a macadam fast track — back when the shichokan had driven me through this part of the island, the dirt road had been a glorified oxcart path. The cars outnumbered the bicycles now, but there were still plenty of the latter, often with Japanese tourists on them.

We passed through several native villages that had turned into modern little towns — Chalan Kanoa, which sported banks and a post office and a shopping district, as well as wood-frame houses and tin-roofed huts, vaguely similar to Garapan of old — and Susupe, which the army’s tent city had evolved into, where we stayed at a motel called the Sun Inn, behind a ballpark by a high school.

“Now I know you think I’m probably just bein’ a cheap bastard,” Buddy said, as we unloaded our stuff into a motel that looked like it belonged next to a strip club outside the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport. “But if we stay in one of them new fancy tourist highrises, up in Garapan, we’ll have trouble holdin’ court with the locals we need to talk to.”

The Sun Inn had a freestanding restaurant where we could sit and talk and sip coffee with our Chamorro subjects, in unintimidating surroundings.

“I’d like to bitch,” I said, “but as a veteran of a hundred thousand interviews, I agree with you. Once we get checked in, you mind if we take a spin up to Garapan?”

“Not at all,” Buddy grinned. “Kinda curious to see your old stompin’ grounds?”

“I think that’s ‘stamping grounds.’”

“Not in Texas.”

Garapan had not changed. It had gone away. This new city, called Garapan, wasn’t even on quite the same patch of earth; it was further south, its resort hotels lining white Micro Beach. Buddy took me to Sugar King Park, where the statue of Baron Matsue Haruji lorded over what was now a small botanical garden; also on display amid the palm and flame trees — and popular with Japanese children — was a little red and white locomotive, looking like the Little Engine That Could, resting on the last fragment of railroad track that once circled Saipan. It was probably the locomotive I saw at Tanapag Harbor, so very long ago.

“That statue is one of the handful of survivin’ physical remains of the original Garapan,” Buddy told me. His camera crew was catching some shots of the park, for color.

“Looks like the Baron’s got a bullet hole in his left temple,” I said, taking a closer gander.

“Yeah. Probably some jarhead, when we were occupyin’ the place, takin’ target practice... There’s only two buildings from old Garapan still standin’ — if standin’ is the word.” He nodded his head across the way, where the walls of the old hospital poked above overgrown grass. “That’s the old imperial hospital... and, not too far from here, the old Garapan Prison, which is all overgrowed. We need to get shots of that.”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

He frowned in surprise. “You don’t want to go over there to the prison with us?”

“If you don’t mind, no.”

“Well, we’ll do it another day, then. We need to get ahold of Sammy Munez, anyways.”

Munez met with us in a booth at the back of the Sun Inn coffee shop. Samuel Munez was a respected member of the community, a member of the House of Representatives of Micronesia, and had avoided previous researchers into the Earhart mystery.

But Buddy Busch was an ingratiating guy, and after three trips to Saipan, had made a lot of friends; the head of a local car dealership — who had provided our van — had arranged for us to meet with Munez, a compact, not quite stocky Chamorro in his mid-thirties with pleasant sad features on an egg-shaped head.

“You served in the Army here?” Munez asked Buddy. Munez wore sunglasses, a yellow and green tropical-style sportshirt, and navy shorts. “Wartime?”

It was just Busch and me and Munez in the booth; no camera crew yet. Buddy and Munez were drinking coffee but the climate — eighty degrees that would have been heaven if it hadn’t been so damn muggy — had me drinking Coke.

“Yes I did,” Buddy said, “only I was a Marine.”

“You, too?” Munez asked me.

“I was a Marine,” I said. “I was in the Pacific but not here. Guadalcanal.”

“I have a souvenir a Marine gave me,” Munez said, with a sly smile. His English was near perfect, though he had an accent, which had a jerky Hispanic lilt.

“Must be a lot of those on this island,” Buddy said affably.

Munez patted his thigh. “Mine is from a hand grenade. Still in me. What is that called?”

“Shrapnel,” I said.

Munez smiled, nodded. “The Marine who threw it was very upset. He apologize to us, bandage my leg himself. He thought we were Japanese... You Americans were much kinder to us than the Japanese.”

“Mr. Munez...” Buddy began.

“Sammy. All my friends call me Sammy.”

“Well, Sammy, as I think you know, we’re attempting to trace Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. Lots of people like me have come here, and lots of your people have told stories... but everything seems... secondhand. We need eyewitnesses.”

Munez sighed and thought for a long while before he answered. “Mr. Busch...”

“Buddy.”

“Buddy, I can find people to talk to you. But some will not. You stir up bad memories for Saipanese. Almost every family on the island lost family members during the Japanese occupation. We have survived centuries of occupation by doing nothing to invite punishment, nothing to invite reprisal. To come forward, even now, with public testimony, is to ask trouble.”

“From the Japanese?”

He nodded. “They begin to rule our island again — in a different way. But those who speak against them might suffer. And during the war, there was a local police force of Chamorros who worked for the Japanese. These were bad men who tortured and punished their own people. Many of them are still here.”

“Like Jesus Sablan?” I asked.

That I knew this name surprised Munez. He blinked and said, “Yes.”

“I heard he was shot and killed, a long time ago,” I said.

Buddy was gazing at me with golfball eyes.

“That is one reason why he is so feared,” Munez said. “The story that bullets could not kill him... Yes, he is alive and meaner than ten brown tree snakes.”

“What’s he doing these days?” I asked.

“He is in the junk business.”

“He peddles dope?”

“No! Junk. He has a junkyard by where the seaplane base once was. He has Saipanese employees to haul scrap to the pier. War wreckage from the jungle. He sells it to the Japanese.”

So the jungkicho was a junk king.

“He lives in a nice small house outside Chalan Kanoa,” Munez was saying. “He is a man who likes his privacy.”

“Does he like money?”

“That is his great love. What is your interest in this man, Mr. Heller?”

“It’s Nate, Sammy. I just heard he knows a lot about Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.”

Sammy nodded vigorously. “They say he knows more than anyone else on this island. He has offered to speak about this, before.”

This was obviously news to Buddy. “I never talked to him.”

“Others have. Fred Goerner. Major Gervais. But none would pay Jesus his price.”

I sipped my Coke. “Can you arrange a meeting?”

“He won’t meet with more than one man at a time. Some men attacked him once — one researcher who had Guam policemen with him who lived in Garapan during the war.”

“Ah, and held a grudge.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said cheerily, “Mr. Busch here would like to see the jail, and I have no interest. Perhaps you could arrange a meeting for me, with Mr. Sablan, while you and Buddy and his camera crew tour the old jail.”

That seemed agreeable to everybody. We would need an extra set of wheels, but Buddy felt that would be no problem, he’d just call his car dealership pal.

Over the next three days, we interviewed Chamorros that Munez lined up for us; the idea was to talk to them informally at the Sun Inn coffee shop, and the best ones would be invited to speak on camera. We spent two days doing the pre-interviews, and another shooting footage with the better subjects, at the Sugar King Park, which provided a scenic backdrop.

Two farmers traveled together from the village of San Roque with similar stories of having seen the male and female fliers at Tanapag Harbor and later in Garapan. A retired dentist had not seen the two white people but, as his practice had been restricted to Japanese military officers and police officials, he’d heard much talk of the American fliers captured as spies; the officers had joked about the U.S.A. using women as spies.

Munez’s sister, who was in her mid-sixties, had done laundry for the hotel, the Kobayashi Ryokan, and spoke of the American woman’s kindness and gave a detailed description, even identifying Amy’s photo.

A man who had been a salesclerk at the Ishi-Shoten, the general merchandise store next to Kobayashi Ryokan, spoke of often seeing Amelia in a second-floor window.

A pleasant middle-aged woman born of a Japanese father and Chamorro mother said her name was Matilda Fausto Arriola, and told of living in the house next door to the Kobayashi Ryokan. Her English limited, she chose to speak to us in the Chamorran language (which to me sounded like a combination of Spanish, French and bird calls) and Munez translated, but I knew she spoke the truth when she talked of Amy helping her with her homework, and giving her a gold ring with a pearl, which had been lost in the war. She told of the woman being followed everywhere by the Chamorran security police.

She also spoke of the burns she noticed on the white woman’s neck — from cooking oil, she thought.

I didn’t correct her.

Only one familiar face showed up: the desk clerk from the Kobayashi Ryokan, who turned out to have been the owner. He didn’t seem to recognize me, which hurt my feelings — hadn’t I spared his life? On the other hand, maybe he did recognize me, and that’s why he didn’t bring up the priest and the Chamorro who got shot in his lobby.

These and eight other witnesses told a story that provided the mosaic tiles for the following: American fliers, a man and a woman, had been brought ashore at Tanapag Harbor; the woman had short hair and dressed like a man, the man had a head injury. They were taken to the police station and then to the jail; the woman was only in the jail a few hours, and later turned up at a hotel used by the military to house political prisoners. No one seemed to know for sure what happened to these mysterious white people, but the consensus was that they’d been executed.

Buddy was generally pleased, and got some good interviews for his documentary — a few of the Chamorros spoke English, which was helpful. But he was frustrated not coming up with anything new. I suggested perhaps that the researchers had gone to the Saipan well once too often.

That made the Texan pout.

Munez said, “You might find it worthwhile to talk to Mrs. Blas — my sister says this farm woman knows something about Amelia — but she won’t come into town. She doesn’t come to town very often. You would have to go to her.”

It wasn’t much to go on, but on the fourth day, with no other interviews lined up, we followed a winding dirt back road into farm country, where the foliage was so thick, it was as though the van were moving down a green tunnel. Then suddenly the road was cutting through cultivated land, and Munez pointed out a modest tin-roofed wood-frame farmhouse.

Mrs. Blas was a tiny, slight, dignified woman, probably around sixty but with a smooth lightly tanned complexion that would be the envy of many a younger woman. She wore a black and lime and white island print dress that was similarly youthful. Against a backdrop of swaying sugarcane, with Munez translating, she told a chilling tale.

First she recounted, as so many others had, having seen the two Americans, man and woman, at Tanapag Harbor; they were taken to the police building on the town square. But several years later she saw the woman again.

“She say she was working on the farm when a motorcycle driven by Japanese soldier go by with the white woman slump in the little seat on the side,” Munez said. “The woman is blindfolded. Another motorcycle with two more Japanese follow. Mrs. Blas say she follow the Japanese soldiers without them seeing. They take the woman to this place where a hole already been dug. They make the woman kneel in front of that hole, tear the blindfold from her face and toss it in the grave. Then they shoot her in the chest. She fall backwards into the grave.”

“Did this happen near this farm here?” a stunned Buddy asked.

Munez’s translation of her answer was that it had been another farm, closer to Garapan. She had run from the place, afraid the Japanese soldiers would see her; but later she went back and saw that the grave had been filled in.

“Mrs. Blas,” Buddy asked, his voice breaking, “is it possible you could find that place again?”

She said the grave was under the biggest breadfruit tree on the island, a tree she had been to many, many times. It seemed the Japanese took all the food the farmers grew, and her family depended on the fruit of this wild tree.

Soon we were back in the van with Mrs. Blas in the rider’s seat of honor up front, Buddy Busch at the wheel, trembling with anticipation. I didn’t know what to think. Old questions were stirring. Had the Japanese hauled Amelia out of the waters that night, only to execute her later? Or had they carted her corpse in a motorcycle sidecar, and what Mrs. Bias had seen been simply a further desecration of Amy’s body before the unmarked grave took her?

But where Mrs. Blas directed Buddy was to an expansive parking lot covered with crushed coral on which bulldozers and tractors and other heavy equipment perched like stubborn dinosaurs that didn’t know they were supposed to be extinct. All of this was behind a seven-foot chain-link security fence topped with barbed wire.

And there seemed to be no breadfruit tree within the fenced-off area.

Nonetheless, Mrs. Blas insisted, through Munez, that she could identify the exact spot.

“This looks like a road maintenance storage yard,” I said. “That means government.”

Buddy nodded. “We have some fancy talking and red-tape-cutting ahead of us.”

That afternoon, in a jeep that Buddy’s car dealer had loaned me, I headed toward Chalan Kanoa for a meeting with an old friend. Buddy and his camera crew were shooting Mrs. Bias at her farmhouse and then planned to get the Garapan Prison footage they needed. I made a stop at a hardware store, to pick up a machete, and was right on time, when I pulled up in front of the Saipan Style Center.

On the outskirts north of Chalan Kanoa, the Saipan Style Center was a tin-roofed, ramshackle saloon with a restaurant and trinket shop in front, the flyspecked show window with two beach-attire-clad mannequins apparently inspiring the joint’s grandiloquent name. Moving through the small trinket shop, with its cheap made-in-Japan items — paper fans, windup toys, hula dolls — I pushed through the hanging bead curtain into the bar where a jarring cold front hit me, thanks to a chugging air conditioner.

The surprise of the chill was matched by the darkness of the bar. I took off my sunglasses and it didn’t make much difference: the only illumination was courtesy of occasional Christmas tree lights haphazardly tacked on the walls, and a garish jukebox, out of which came Wilson Pickett singing “In the Midnight Hour,” despite it being two o’clock in the afternoon. A half-dozen Chamorran males at the bar registered mild surprise at seeing a white man, then returned to their drinks. The waitresses — voluptuous Chamorran babes in unmatching bikini tops and hot pants — were much happier to see me, three of them swarming after me like sharks sniffing blood.

The first one that got to me claimed me, a heart-breakingly cute Chamorran dish with shocking absurd platinum-blonde hair.

“What’s your pleasure, daddy?”

“Well, it’s not my pleasure exactly,” I said. “But I was wondering if Jesus Sablan was here.”

Her lip curled into a sneer and she said, “You’re not a friend of his, are you?”

“I’m his twin brother. We were separated at birth.”

That made her laugh; she was no dope. “He’s in the restaurant, havin’ the special. And he’s all yours.”

Then it was through another beaded doorway and into the low-ceilinged, undecorated dining room and its dozen or so tables. It was early for supper, so nobody was back there but a bullnecked mountain of muscle and fat in an old Seabees cap and gigantic loose-fitting, well-worn army fatigues. He was hunkered over a plate of stringy, sticky seaweed, sucking it up like a kid sucks spaghetti.

I was wearing a black T-shirt with a khaki jacket over it, and khaki pants; the weather didn’t demand the jacket but I had a .38 revolver in the righthand pocket. Just in case he recognized me.

I certainly gave him every opportunity. I stood right before the table, opposite him as he sucked seaweed, and the dark, pockmarked, knife-scarred, mustached face looked at me with cold contempt, but it was the cold contempt he reserved for everybody, not just priests who shot him in the stomach.

“You the American?” he asked, chewing.

He was probably sixty, but other than some white in his short-cropped hair (his right ear had a piece out of it), the thick Zapata mustache, and some added wrinkles that gave him a bulldog quality, he hadn’t changed much.

“Yeah, I’m the American.”

He poured himself a healthy glass of red wine from an unlabeled bottle. “Siddown. I don’t look up at nobody.”

I sat, with my hand on the revolver in the jacket pocket. “How much for your Amelia Earhart story?”

“It’s a good story. What really happen.”

“How much?”

He grinned; he had a gold tooth now, and the rest of the teeth were much closer to white than I remembered. The junk king could afford a dentist. “Two thousand,” he said.

“I can get you ten.”

The dark eyes flared. “Thousand?”

“No, ten dollars. What do you think? Come in with me, we can take these rich Texas assholes for twenty grand.”

He frowned. “Fifty-fifty split?”

“Yeah, that’s how you end up with ten.” Time had made him stupid; or maybe too much of that cheap wine.

The eyes that had once scared me a little, because of the smartness in them, narrowed and perhaps something, in the back of his skull, was trying to click.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“I never been in Saipan before in my life. You want in?”

“Let me hear it.”

I leaned toward him. “They want to find Amelia Earhart’s grave. Let’s show it to them.”

“...I don’t know where it is.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I shrugged. “I got a bag of bones in my jeep — I brought ’em with me from the States.”

“What kind of bones?”

“Female. Forty years of age. Dead thirty years.”

“What’d you do, dig up some other grave?”

“That’s right. Now if a Saipanese... somebody with a history that goes back to those days... could lead these Texans to a grave in the jungle...”

He had started smiling halfway through that; he did still have some smarts. Not enough to save him, though.

“But first we got to bury those bones,” I said. “Meet me tonight at the old Garapan Prison. We’ll bury ’em near there somewhere... Bring a shovel.”

He was still grinning, nodding, liking it. “What time?”

“When else? Midnight.”

We didn’t shake hands. Just nodded at each other, and I left him to his plate of seaweed.

That evening, Buddy Busch, in the room we were sharing at the Sun Inn, was aglow.

“They’re gonna let us dig,” he said. “Problem is, they’ll only give us tomorrow... Sunday... when the facility is closed, ’cause otherwise we’d get in their way.”

So at nine the next morning, with the loan from the lot manager of a heavy front loader (and one of his men), the coral surface and an added two feet of topsoil were scraped away, and then the two Chamorran kids Munez had hired to dig got at it. Phil and Steve recorded the efforts, from various angles, and by three that afternoon, we were looking into a trench four feet by twelve, three feet deep. And very empty.

“How deep do you think those guards woulda buried her?” Buddy asked me.

“Well,” I said, stroking my stiff left arm, “probably pretty deep.”

“You know, if we’re off a little, the real grave could be three feet away and we’d never fuckin’ know it!”

But Steve called out, “Hey, what the hell’s that?”

“That” proved to be the find of the expedition, and the centerpiece of Buddy Busch’s documentary, Grave Evidence: The Execution of Amelia Earhart. The tattered piece of black cloth appeared to be a full-face blindfold, cut so that narrow strips on either side could be tied behind the wearer’s head — attesting to this, the tie straps had a stitched hem.

Mrs. Blas herself identified the scrap of cloth as the blindfold Amelia wore to her execution by Japanese soldiers.

Because of the lime-based coral content of the soil, human remains would likely be swallowed up, over these years, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and that blindfold might be all that was left of Amelia Earhart, if in fact she’d been buried beneath the missing breadfruit tree.

But even now, an aging Buddy Busch (a stroke and heart attack not enough to slow him down) is planning one last trip to Saipan (his sixth); meanwhile, a new generation of Earhart enthusiasts plans more expeditions to the Mariana Islands and other parts of the South Pacific.

Of course, if Amelia was buried in the brainwashed mind of Irene Bolam, the body they’re looking for was donated to medical science and is a long-since discarded, cremated cadaver.

I have finally decided to tell my story because I figure nobody will believe me anyway, and if the government doesn’t like it, they can sue me or go fuck themselves.

I believe Amy died in the waters of Tanapag Harbor that night, swimming with me, toward freedom; perhaps Chief Suzuki’s boys did drag her body out, and the Japanese military did take her, blindfolded, to an unmarked grave near Garapan. Perhaps by the time you read this, Buddy or some other latter-day explorer will have discovered more evidence to pinpoint exactly where Amelia Earhart was buried.

Anyway, I’m confident of one thing.

They’re more likely to find her body than that bastard Jesus Sablan’s.

The press called her “Lady Lindy,” but her family called her Mill. Schoolgirl pals preferred Meelie, certain friends Mary (Fred Noonan among them), she was Paul Mantz’s “angel,” and her husband used “A. E.” To the world she was Amelia Earhart, but to me, and only me, she was Amy.