“What is a grip?” I’d seen that in the end credits of movies and always wondered.
“It means you help haul shit,” Steve said, ever-present cigarette bobbing.
Japanese machine-gun bunkers provided decorative cement touches on the road leading out of the airport. Beach Road itself, lined with flame trees, was a macadam fast track—back when the shichokan had driven me through this part of the island, the dirt road had been a glorified oxcart path. The cars outnumbered the bicycles now, but there were still plenty of the latter, often with Japanese tourists on them.
We passed through several native villages that had turned into modern little towns—Chalan Kanoa, which sported banks and a post office and a shopping district, as well as wood-frame houses and tin-roofed huts, vaguely similar to Garapan of old—and Susupe, which the army’s tent city had evolved into, where we stayed at a motel called the Sun Inn, behind a ballpark by a high school.
“Now I know you think I’m probably just bein’ a cheap bastard,” Buddy said, as we unloaded our stuff into a motel that looked like it belonged next to a strip club outside the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport. “But if we stay in one of them new fancy tourist highrises, up in Garapan, we’ll have trouble holdin’ court with the locals we need to talk to.”
The Sun Inn had a freestanding restaurant where we could sit and talk and sip coffee with our Chamorro subjects, in unintimidating surroundings.
“I’d like to bitch,” I said, “but as a veteran of a hundred thousand interviews, I agree with you. Once we get checked in, you mind if we take a spin up to Garapan?”
“Not at all,” Buddy grinned. “Kinda curious to see your old stompin’ grounds?”
“I think that’s ‘stamping grounds.’”
“Not in Texas.”
Garapan had not changed. It had gone away. This new city, called Garapan, wasn’t even on quite the same patch of earth; it was further south, its resort hotels lining white Micro Beach. Buddy took me to Sugar King Park, where the statue of Baron Matsue Haruji lorded over what was now a small botanical garden; also on display amid the palm and flame trees—and popular with Japanese children—was a little red and white locomotive, looking like the Little Engine That Could, resting on the last fragment of railroad track that once circled Saipan. It was probably the locomotive I saw at Tanapag Harbor, so very long ago.
“That statue is one of the handful of survivin’ physical remains of the original Garapan,” Buddy told me. His camera crew was catching some shots of the park, for color.
“Looks like the Baron’s got a bullet hole in his left temple,” I said, taking a closer gander.
“Yeah. Probably some jarhead, when we were occupyin’ the place, takin’ target practice…. There’s only two buildings from old Garapan still standin’—if standin’ is the word.” He nodded his head across the way, where the walls of the old hospital poked above overgrown grass. “That’s the old imperial hospital…and, not too far from here, the old Garapan Prison, which is all overgrowed. We need to get shots of that.”
“I’ll pass,” I said.
He frowned in surprise. “You don’t want to go over there to the prison with us?”
“If you don’t mind, no.”
“Well, we’ll do it another day, then. We need to get ahold of Sammy Munez, anyways.”
Munez met with us in a booth at the back of the Sun Inn coffee shop. Samuel Munez was a respected member of the community, a member of the House of Representatives of Micronesia, and had avoided previous researchers 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 jungkicho was a junk king.
“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.”