Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (35 page)

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.

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.