Flying Blind

“Yes. Amira.” He grunted a few words in Japanese and his driver pulled out into the street, turned at the next corner.

I said nothing; my heart was a fucking sledgehammer, but I said nothing. He had brought up the subject. It was his to pursue.

We hadn’t gone far—maybe six hundred feet—when the sedan came to a stop again, opposite another concrete building, a two-story one; it loomed over its neighbors (a low-slung general merchandise store at left, a single-story frame house at right) looking at once modern and gothic, a church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Its four upper- floor windows, divided by decorative pillars, were tall and narrow, and the lower floor—which had a shallow, one- story extension to the street—had arched windows that cried out for stained glass.

But it wasn’t a church.

“Hotel,” the shichokan said. “This hotel—Kobayashi Ryokan—run by military. Keep honored guests, like honored friend, here…. Also political prisoners.”

An interesting mix.

“The woman is here?” I asked, with a casual gesture to the building.

“Hai,” the shichokan said. “Second floor…. Please go to hotel. You expected. Your questions answered.”

He gave me half a bow, and my door was opened by his driver; I damn near fell out of the sedan, or into the driver’s arms. But within moments I was crossing the dusty, unpaved street, watching the sedan roll away, with— framed in its rear window—the shichokan’s inanely smiling face. I approached the boxy gothic structure, and went in.

The one-story extension served as the hotel’s minuscule lobby: at right, nobody was behind the check-in counter; at left, under a churning ceiling fan, straining their rattan chairs, sat two massive Chamorro men, playing cards on a rattan table with a deck turned splotchy from sweaty, dirty fingers. Also on the table were the kitchen matchsticks they were betting, a pack of Japanese cigarettes, two long black billy clubs, and a sheathed machete.

They were the first native males I’d seen wearing shirts; in fact, they wore suits, only soiled-looking, threadbare, as if these were hand-me-downs from the Japs.

But that seemed unlikely, because these were two very big boys. One of them was hatless, with a thatch of black hair atop a cantaloupe head with watermelon-seed eyes in walnut-shell pouches of skin in a litchi-nut-toned face so unwrinkled, it was as if neither thought nor emotion had ever traveled across that arid plain. Twenty years of age or maybe fifty, he was just plain fat, bursting his seams.

Such flab made him less dangerous than the other one, a bull-necked mass of muscle and fat in a straw fedora, with a face so ugly, features so flat and blunt, so wrinkled, so pockmarked, the white knife scar down his right cheek seemed gratuitous.

The worst part was the eyes: they were not stupid; they were hard and dark and glittering and smart. He looked at me above a hand of cards clutched in knife-handle fingers and said, “Six.”

At first I thought he was making a bet, but when a frown tightened around the hard dark eyes, I asked, “Pardon me?”

He was missing a front tooth; the others were the shade of stained oak, approximately the tone of his skin. “Six.”

“That’s, what? My room number? Room six?”

He played a card. “Six.”

“Do I need a key?”

“Six!”

That seemed about as close to getting directions as I was going to get, so I entered the main building through a doorless archway, making my way down a central corridor, my shoes echoing off the hardwood floor. Doors to rooms were on either side of me; the walls were plaster, not rice paper. Stairs to the second floor were at the rear, but there seemed to be no exit down there. Fire inspectors apparently played it fast and loose in Saipan.

Okay, Room 6. I stopped at number 6, tried the knob, found the door unlocked. Slippers awaited me just inside the door, and I traded my shoes for them. The pale yellow plaster walls were bare; a tall sheer-curtained window looked out on the side of the wood-frame residence next door. Though this was a Western-style structure, the room was in the style of a Japanese inn: a “carpet” of fine woven reed, padded quilts on the floor for a bed, two floor cushions to sit at a scuffed, low-riding teakwood table. No closet, but a rack with a pole was provided. The only concession to any non-Japanese visitors was a dresser with mirror.

My travel bag was on the dresser.

I checked inside, found my nine-millimeter; both the clip I’d loaded into the weapon, and my two spare clips, seemed untampered with. Weapon cradled in my hands, I looked up and saw my face in the mirror, or anyway the face of some confused fucking priest holding a gun.

Then I looked at the ceiling, not for guidance from the Lord, but thinking about what the shichokan had said: the woman, “Amira,” was on the second floor….

So what should I do? Go upstairs and start knocking on doors? And take my nine-millimeter along, in case I needed to bestow some blessings?

A knock startled me, and I didn’t know whether to tuck the gun away in the bag, or maybe in my waistband, with the black coat over it.

“Father O’Leary?”

Chief Suzuki’s voice.

“Father O’Leary, can speak?”

I returned the nine-millimeter to my bag, and opened the door.