believe?”
“You honor me with this mission,” I said. “I am sorry I failed with the pilot. I will not fail again.”
“No apology,” Suzuki said. “Barbarian pilot is better dead. Deal with woman now.”
“I can tell you, as an American, that the woman’s value to your country, alive, would far outweigh the alternative.”
Suzuki frowned, not understanding. “All-turn…?”
“Kill her,” Lord Jesus said.
I wasn’t sure whether he was explaining the meaning of what I’d said, or making his own suggestion.
Soon three slender geishas had padded in, stepped from their cheap faded rayon kimonos and slippers, and slipped down into the tub, where they began washing us.
“If you have religion problem,” the chief said, apparently noting that I was ill at ease, “please to say.”
“Actually, yes,” I said. Normally I wouldn’t have minded a Madam Butterfly soaping my privates, even if I did seem to have drawn a somewhat withered flower. I had a feeling Saipan was where Tokyo shipped their aging talent.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, putting my barely touched glass of
The chief nodded solemnly; he had regained considerable dignity since the shit got cleaned off his face. Lord Jesus was lost in the nirvana of a massage from a geisha whose ability to hide her distaste was miraculous.
I smiled at my geisha, trying to send her a message that my rejection of her charms wasn’t personal, and she smiled back with a sadness in her eyes as old as her country. As I climbed out, she brought me towels and a robe.
Drying off, I said to the chief, “I’ll talk to the woman tonight, and report to you tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Chief Suzuki said with a respectful nod.
I exited the brothel into a late afternoon that had turned ugly and cold, under a rolling, growling charcoal sky. Gunmetal waves were splashing up over the concrete jetty; a trio of immense freighters anchored in the harbor took the rough waters stoically, but fishing sampans tied to a concrete finger of a pier seemed almost to jump out of the water. This was not good. But it would not stop me. Turning up the collars of my priestly black suitcoat, I walked against the wind, the hotel only a few blocks away.
This time when I knocked, the door opened right now and there she was, standing before me, blue-gray eyes at once shiny with hope and red with despair, mouth quivering as if not quite daring to smile, hoping I’d returned with the foolproof plan that would liberate Fred Noonan and send us all happily home.
But she knew me too well; she knew the little smile I gave her did not bode well.
“Oh my goodness…”
She took a step back as I moved into the room, which had turned dark and cool with the afternoon; she still wore the short-sleeve mannish white shirt and rust slacks, her feet bare. I shut the door, as she asked, “You can’t help him?”
I took her arm, gently, and walked her to the chair by the window, which she had lowered, but not all the way, the cool wind sneaking in to riffle the covers, the pages, of the magazines on the table, colorful images of smiling Japanese.
Kneeling before her, like a suitor, I enfolded her hands in mine, gazed at her with all the tenderness I could summon and said, “No one can help him now. Amy, they executed Fred this afternoon.”
She didn’t say anything, but outside the wind howled in pain; her chin quivered, tears trickled. Slowly, she shook her head, her eyes hooded with grief.
“That’s why they wanted me to talk to him,” I said, patting her hand. “To give him Last Rites.”
A spattering of rain had begun; filmy curtains reached out in ghostly gesture.
She swallowed. “How? Was it…quick?”
“It was quick,” I said. “They shot him in his cell, right in front of me. Couldn’t do a damn thing…I’m so sorry.”
My lies softened the blow only slightly; but she mustn’t know the sacrifice he made, and had to be spared the grotesque details of his death.
Still, she knew Noonan too well not to come close, within a consonant actually, saying, “I bet he spit in their eye.”
“Oh yes.”
“Nathan…it hurts.”
Still kneeling, I held out my arms to her, like Jolson singing “Swanee,” and she tumbled into my embrace and we kind of switched around so that I was sitting in the chair, she was in my lap like a big kid, grabbing tight, face buried in my neck, the tears turning from trickle to downpour, as outside the sky imitated her.
We were like that for several minutes, and then the rain was coming in, so I eased her to her feet, and walked her to the padded quilts, where she sat, slumping. I closed the window, leaving an inch for air, switched on the reading lamp, whose translucent tan shade created a golden glow. Sick of playing priest, I removed the suitcoat, and the clerical-collared shirt, and in my T-shirt went over and sat beside her. Our legs were stretched out laxly before us, our arms hung loose, puppets whose strings had been snipped.
She was staring into nothing at all. “He suffered so. They were so terribly cruel to him…it makes me…”
And she covered her face and began to weep, sobs racking her body. I put my arm around her, patting her back as if comforting a child, but I knew there was nothing I could say or do. Could I even understand what she was
