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
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
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
