Nonetheless, Mrs. Blas insisted, through Munez, that she could identify the exact spot.
“This looks like a road maintenance storage yard,” I said. “That means government.”
Buddy nodded. “We have some fancy talking and red-tape-cutting ahead of us.”
That afternoon, in a jeep that Buddy’s car dealer had loaned me, I headed toward Chalan Kanoa for a meeting with an old friend. Buddy and his camera crew were shooting Mrs. Bias at her farmhouse and then planned to get the Garapan Prison footage they needed. I made a stop at a hardware store, to pick up a machete, and was right on time, when I pulled up in front of the Saipan Style Center.
On the outskirts north of Chalan Kanoa, the Saipan Style Center was a tin-roofed, ramshackle saloon with a restaurant and trinket shop in front, the flyspecked show window with two beach-attire-clad mannequins apparently inspiring the joint’s grandiloquent name. Moving through the small trinket shop, with its cheap made-in-Japan items—paper fans, windup toys, hula dolls—I pushed through the hanging bead curtain into the bar where a jarring cold front hit me, thanks to a chugging air conditioner.
The surprise of the chill was matched by the darkness of the bar. I took off my sunglasses and it didn’t make much difference: the only illumination was courtesy of occasional Christmas tree lights haphazardly tacked on the walls, and a garish jukebox, out of which came Wilson Pickett singing “In the Midnight Hour,” despite it being two o’clock in the afternoon. A half-dozen Chamorran males at the bar registered mild surprise at seeing a white man, then returned to their drinks. The waitresses—voluptuous Chamorran babes in unmatching bikini tops and hot pants—were much happier to see me, three of them swarming after me like sharks sniffing blood.
The first one that got to me claimed me, a heart-breakingly cute Chamorran dish with shocking absurd platinum-blonde hair.
“What’s your pleasure, daddy?”
“Well, it’s not my pleasure exactly,” I said. “But I was wondering if Jesus Sablan was here.”
Her lip curled into a sneer and she said, “You’re not a friend of his, are you?”
“I’m his twin brother. We were separated at birth.”
That made her laugh; she was no dope. “He’s in the restaurant, havin’ the special. And he’s all yours.”
Then it was through another beaded doorway and into the low-ceilinged, undecorated dining room and its dozen or so tables. It was early for supper, so nobody was back there but a bullnecked mountain of muscle and fat in an old Seabees cap and gigantic loose-fitting, well-worn army fatigues. He was hunkered over a plate of stringy, sticky seaweed, sucking it up like a kid sucks spaghetti.
I was wearing a black T-shirt with a khaki jacket over it, and khaki pants; the weather didn’t demand the jacket but I had a .38 revolver in the righthand pocket. Just in case he recognized me.
I certainly gave him every opportunity. I stood right before the table, opposite him as he sucked seaweed, and the dark, pockmarked, knife-scarred, mustached face looked at me with cold contempt, but it was the cold contempt he reserved for everybody, not just priests who shot him in the stomach.
“You the American?” he asked, chewing.
He was probably sixty, but other than some white in his short-cropped hair (his right ear had a piece out of it), the thick Zapata mustache, and some added wrinkles that gave him a bulldog quality, he hadn’t changed much.
“Yeah, I’m the American.”
He poured himself a healthy glass of red wine from an unlabeled bottle. “Siddown. I don’t look up at nobody.”
I sat, with my hand on the revolver in the jacket pocket. “How much for your Amelia Earhart story?”
“It’s a good story. What really happen.”
“How much?”
He grinned; he had a gold tooth now, and the rest of the teeth were much closer to white than I remembered. The junk king could afford a dentist. “Two thousand,” he said.
“I can get you ten.”
The dark eyes flared. “Thousand?”
“No, ten dollars. What do you think? Come in with me, we can take these rich Texas assholes for twenty grand.”
He frowned. “Fifty-fifty split?”
“Yeah, that’s how you end up with ten.” Time had made him stupid; or maybe too much of that cheap wine.
The eyes that had once scared me a little, because of the smartness in them, narrowed and perhaps something, in the back of his skull, was trying to click.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I never been in Saipan before in my life. You want in?”
“Let me hear it.”
I leaned toward him. “They want to find Amelia Earhart’s grave. Let’s show it to them.”
“…I don’t know where it is.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I shrugged. “I got a bag of bones in my jeep—I brought ’em with me from the States.”
“What kind of bones?”
