into the Earhart mystery.
But Buddy Busch was an ingratiating guy, and after three trips to Saipan, had made a lot of friends; the head of a local car dealership—who had provided our van—had arranged for us to meet with Munez, a compact, not quite stocky Chamorro in his mid-thirties with pleasant sad features on an egg-shaped head.
“You served in the Army here?” Munez asked Buddy. Munez wore sunglasses, a yellow and green tropical-style sportshirt, and navy shorts. “Wartime?”
It was just Busch and me and Munez in the booth; no camera crew yet. Buddy and Munez were drinking coffee but the climate—eighty degrees that would have been heaven if it hadn’t been so damn muggy—had me drinking Coke.
“Yes I did,” Buddy said, “only I was a Marine.”
“You, too?” Munez asked me.
“I was a Marine,” I said. “I was in the Pacific but not here. Guadalcanal.”
“I have a souvenir a Marine gave me,” Munez said, with a sly smile. His English was near perfect, though he had an accent, which had a jerky Hispanic lilt.
“Must be a lot of those on this island,” Buddy said affably.
Munez patted his thigh. “Mine is from a hand grenade. Still in me. What is that called?”
“Shrapnel,” I said.
Munez smiled, nodded. “The Marine who threw it was very upset. He apologize to us, bandage my leg himself. He thought we were Japanese…. You Americans were much kinder to us than the Japanese.”
“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
“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.”
