Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (33 page)

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.

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.