Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (26 page)

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

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

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

“My room is your room.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing much.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Night is young.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You left out Fred Noonan.”

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

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

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

“What, to keep an eye on them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never heard of it,” I said.

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

“Isn’t that sweet.”

We seemed to be at a stoplight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere a dog was barking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside, silence, the limo moving through sleeping streets.

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

“What, she’s working
with
the Japs?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where the fuck is that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Saipan.”

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

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

“Gee, thanks.”

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

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

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