Flying Blind

I had expected a native village with a small garrison of Japanese troops treating the place like a prison camp; instead, I was in a boom town, attested to by the contemporary residential neighborhood we were rolling through, bungalow after bungalow rising three or four feet off the ground on stone or concrete pillars with neat little yards and gardens of papaya, guavas, mangoes; despite modern construction and style, the little houses wore tin roofs whose grooves sluiced rain to gutters down to cisterns. Occasionally a stone building dating to the period of Saipan’s German domination would rear its head, or a hacienda-style abode going back to the Spanish days. Primarily, however, I was witnessing the boxlike houses—some wood-frame, mostly of newer, cement construction—in the classic gridlike layout of the modern factory town.

But what were they making in this factory town? Were these thousands of people (and natives) all employed by the sugar refinery, and the service industries of the downtown?

On the fringes of the city, finally, were clusters of the poor indigenous housing I’d expected, the thatched wooden shacks before which sat heavy-set middle-aged native women in faded sarongs fanning themselves with palm leaves. I felt strangely reassured.

“Where are the native children?” I asked. I’d seen very few, except a handful of filthy bare-assed toddlers.

“In school. We bring these simple people kansei.” The chief winced in thought, briefly, realizing I wouldn’t understand the meaning of that final word. “Rules,” he explained. “Law from society.”

“Civilization?”

He nodded, as if to say, Not quite, but close enough.

As we left the city, moving along the wide, well-paved road that seemed to be leading us into the green hills, bright red hibiscus grew along roadside hedges beyond which stood guardlike rows of palms, their broad leaves whispering with a hint of wind. Then our sedan turned down, and up, a gently sloping gravel road boarded by blooming flame trees, a riot of red and orange under the dull gray sky.

We ended up in a crushed-stone cul-de-sac, where a number of other black sedans were parked, their radio antennas bearing tiny white flags with red suns. We came to a stop, and the young copper came around and opened the door for his chief. I was reaching for the travel bag at my feet when Chief Suzuki said, “You will not be needing.”

So I left the bag behind—and the nine-millimeter tucked away inside, rolled up in my spare priest attire. The young cop chauffeur stayed behind, too, as I followed Chief Suzuki up a wide crushed-stone path through an immaculately landscaped Oriental garden, with perfectly squared-off hedges and flawlessly rounded bushes, to stone pillars bordering stone steps that rose in landings up a terrace at whose crest sprawled a latticework- decorated white wooden structure, red-roofed, cupola-surmounted, swimming in a sea of red, yellow, white, and purple chrysanthemums, emerald explosions of palm trees standing watch.

This would seem to be the governor’s mansion.

At a slant-roofed portico awaited a Naval officer in a green denim uniform—long pants, jodhpurs, a black- holstered revolver, and something else: a samurai sword. I decided I liked the more casual uniform better.

We were immediately ushered inside, into a world of sliding wooden-frame rice paper walls, hardwood floors, and Buddha-belly vases of dried flowers. We removed our shoes, trading them for slippers, and were escorted into a large sunken octagonal chamber that might have been the living room, but was more a receiving-area-cum-office. The furnishings were sparse but of an impressive dark-lacquered teakwood: three chairs arranged before a massive desk, behind which a higher-backed chair awaited an important posterior.

The possessor of that posterior was a short, heavy-set individual of perhaps fifty, wearing the same white uniform as the chief of police, but with a black string tie, and without a gunbelt, or samurai sword either. His face was pleasant and round, fat enough that his features were getting lost in it, distinguished by a mustache and goatee, his thinning black hair combed forward and plastered to his forehead like a spreading spider.

Chief Suzuki, with a half-bow, said, “Shichokan, this Father Brian O’Leary from Milwaukee, United States of America.”

“Father O’Leary,” the shichokan said, in a surprisingly bassy, rumbly voice, bowing. “You honor my house.”

I returned his bow. “You do me honor, sir. May I present my letters of introduction?”

The shichokan nodded.

I withdrew from my inside jacket the two envelopes and handed them to him.

“Please sit,” he said to me, and with a nod extended the invitation to Chief Suzuki.

We took chairs opposite the desk as he got back behind it, settling into his teakwood throne, where he put on roundlensed wire-frame glasses and read the letters. One, on embassy stationery, was from the German Ambassador to the U.S.A.; the other was from Sean Russell, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army, currently in the States on a fundraising tour, and laying low after several major London and Liverpool bombings.

They were not forgeries. Wall Street boy Forrestal’s connections with wealthy supporters of the I.R.A. had made both letters possible; and the real Father Brian O’Leary of Milwaukee, a former I.R.A. advocate appalled by the recent spate of bombings, had lent his cooperation. It was a solid cover story.

Seeming mildly confused, the shichokan removed his glasses and rested them on the table, by the two letters, which he had not returned to their envelopes. “You are Irish? Or American?”

“I’m an American citizen,” I explained. “My parents were from Dublin. There are many of us in the United States who aid and support the I.R.A. in their righteous war on England. The reason I have come is to seek your —”

The shichokan raised a pudgy hand in a “stop” gesture, smiling; his head looked like a cookie jar with a face on it. A face with Fu Manchu whiskers, that is.

“Before we go on,” he said, in that bass that rumbled up out of his squat body like an echo up a canyon, “I will need to show your letters to kaigun bukan. I hope you will forgive this formality.”

I loved the way he made it sound like I had some kind of choice in all of this. And, of course, I had no idea what the hell a kaigun bukan was.