Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (37 page)

“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….”