Flying Blind

“It’ll be a fuckin’ poem, pal.”

He grinned through his beard and held a thumb’s-up. “Do me another favor—call ’em in here. And hang around, a while, would you? Keep me company? Moral support?”

“Well, sure….”

He snorted a laugh. “Tell ol’ Chief Suki-yaki that I got something for him.”

I nodded, went to the door and called out. “Chief, the prisoner would like to speak with you. He has something for you!”

The chief smiled, pleased that his strategy had worked, obviously thinking that my priestly counsel had loosened the prisoner’s tongue. He sucked a last drag on his cigarette, sent it trailing sparks into the high grass, and marched toward me, with Lord Jesus completing the procession.

As they were entering, Noonan whispered, “You might want to stand to one side, Father…this could be messy.”

I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I moved to one side as Chief Suzuki, Lord Jesus just behind and to the left of him, positioned himself before Fred Noonan’s cell.

Chin high, regally proud, the chief asked, “You have something for me, pilot?”

“Oh yeah,” Noonan said, his grin as wild as his eyes, and he reached back into the open concrete box of shit and piss and grabbed a big handful and hurled it; the stuff sluiced through the bars and spattered the clean white uniforms of both the chief and Lord Jesus, and clots of dung clung to both their faces like lumpy awful birthmarks.

Noonan stood right up against the bars of his cell and howled in laughter at them. He was still laughing when Lord Jesus stepped snarling forward and swung the machete back and down, between the bars, and through the top of Noonan’s head, between his eyes, splitting his hawk nose, the machete handle extending like a new one.

When Lord Jesus yanked the machete loose, as if from a melon, Noonan—silent now—felt backward, blood geysering the cell wall, brightening his gloomy surroundings, depending on me to deliver his message to Amelia.

19

The Nangetsu was a shabby wood-frame pagoda-roofed two-story, just another crummy Garapan storefront, only the windows facing the street were not glass showcases, but tightly closed double-shuttered affairs, in a section of the waterfront Chief Suzuki referred to as the town’s hana machi—“flower quarters.” This was one of a cluster of similar buildings huddled like conspirators between warehouses and fishery sheds: ryoriyas, which Chief Suzuki translated as “restaurants,” though that definition would soon prove to be loose. It had been an easy walk over here from the prison, for the chief, his favorite jungkicho and me.

After a fawning greeting inside the door from a short chubby fiftyish woman in a scarlet Dragon Lady slit dress, we moved through the front half of the restaurant, where steamy food smells erased the waterfront reek. The dimly lighted room was an odd combination of shabby and elegant, unpainted, unvarnished rough-wooden walls and ungainly tile floor laid right on the dirt, but the wall decorations were elaborate Japanese murals and splayed silk fans, as Japanese men (no young men, late twenties or older) in white bathrobes sat on cushions at low-slung red- trimmed black lacquered tables while attractive women in colorful kimonos served them. When the women had finished serving their cups and bowls of this and that, they were joining the men at the tables.

The Chief of Saipan Police had taken Father O’Leary to a whorehouse.

We were ushered by the chubby Dragon Lady down a short corridor, where a sliding rice paper door gave entry to a small room that was mostly a sunken tub of steaming water. We were here, after all, to bathe, my companions having been the recipients of flung dung, which was not an Oriental delicacy but a gutsy final statement by one hell of an American.

I remained somewhat shell-shocked; I’d seen my share of savagery in the wilds of Chicago, but I’d never witnessed a murder quite like the one I’d just seen at Garapan Prison. The immediate aftermath had been a chilling display of bizarre face-saving. Chief Suzuki—who one might expect to rebuke his Chamorro protege for showing a certain lack of restraint, in his machete-wielding response to Fred Noonan’s shit-hurling affront—had turned to Jesus and, feces still dripping from his face, bowed to his dusky associate in respect and thanks.

We were now in a sunken hot steaming tub of water, to get the shit washed off (none had gotten on me, thanks to the late Fred Noonan’s warning). This was also Suzuki’s way of rewarding Jesus Sablan for defending the chief’s honor. Jesus was clearly the only Chamorro in this brothel, and I’d noticed the chief placing a fat handful of funny money in the madam’s palm, doing some quick whispered explaining to her while nodding in Jesus’s direction.

As we relaxed in the steaming water, sipping glasses of awamori, a potent mullet brandy, the chief—whose body was smoothly scrawny—said to his associate, “I send for new clothing. I ask shakufu burn dishonored clothes.”

I gathered shakufu referred to that barmaid madam who’d walked us back here.

Lord Jesus said nothing—his eyes were wide and moving side to side as he luxuriated in the steaming, scented, oil-pooled water, in what was obviously a new experience for him; hell, maybe bathing itself was a new experience for him. He was a curious combination of brawn and fat, cords of sinew alternating with flaps of flab, his heavily muscled outspread arms surrounding half the tub.

Then the chief turned his gaze upon me. “With pilot dead, is Amira lost?”

“Only if you tell her the truth about his death,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I believe you can still count on her cooperation.”

Lord Jesus, leaning back limply with his glass of awamori in hand, had an expression of bliss, his eyes half-shut, his mouth open in moronic ecstasy. I wondered if he’d worn a similar expression when he pressed the glowing red tip of a cigarette to Amy’s gentle throat.

“Pilot die dengue fever?” Suzuki suggested.

“Hai,” I said, smiling, nodding, as if this were a brilliant notion.

Water had gotten on his gray mustache and it was dripping down his smile. “You tell her for us? Make her