Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (32 page)

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.