But right now we were in the three-bedroom Heller palace, in the kitchen-dining area, where my wife was serving us coffee and macaroons after bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. She disappeared off to watch television while Busch and I talked into the evening.
“You know, I realize all of a sudden this is Valentine’s Day,” he said chagrined, “and here I drop in and you and your wife probably had plans. Didn’t mean to spoil ’em...”
“We had a romantic little luncheon together,” I said. “We did what all Chicagoans do to honor the day.”
“What’s that?”
“Shot up a garage.” I munched a macaroon. “So Saipan trip number four is coming up? Aren’t you taking a childhood interest a little far?”
“I didn’t set out to try to find Amelia,” he said. “A pal of mine and me, we went to the Marshall Islands, what was it, now? Four years ago, five? Anyway, I had it on good authority that a whole slew of Jap warbirds were just waitin’ for the pickin’, on Mili Atoll.”
“I suppose they did abandon a lot of planes,” I allowed, sipping my black coffee, “when our boys started advancing. So you figured you could reclaim a bird or two?”
He nodded. With his sunglasses off, he had sky-blue eyes with long, almost feminine lashes, curiously beautiful in a craggy male face. “I had a couple museums on the hook, eager to buy planes to restore and display. But it never panned out.”
“Never found any?”
“Oh, hell, there was a passel of ’em, all right. Zeros, mostly. Only in shit-poor condition. Planes either past restoration or too difficult to pry loose from the underbrush and overgrowth. Did some diving, too, ’cause we knew some planes went down; but what with rust and corrosion... It was a fool’s errand, and you’re lookin’ at the head fool.”
I studied him. “Did you think you were going to find Amelia’s Lockheed?”
“Not hardly.” Now the blue eyes had a twinkle. “You see, I know what happened to that ‘flyin’ laboratory’ of hers. I saw it.”
That perked me up. “When in hell?”
“The first time I was in Saipan... July 1944.”
“You saw the plane.”
“We’d just captured Aslito Field. You or your wife mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
He dug out a pack of Lucky Strikes and fired one up, waving out the match as he said, “I was one of several Marine guards posted outside this padlocked hangar. Some of the brass were arguing with this fella in a white shirt, no sidearm, and you know sidearms were mandatory for officers in combat zones. Some kinda intelligence spook, I gathered... Seems Major Greene discovered this American plane in Jap storage, and wanted to make sure the Marines got credit for it. But this guy in the white shirt was backing ’em off — and they were taking it.”
“Did you see this plane?”
“Yes and no. A buddy of mine said they rolled her out and actually flew her. I didn’t see that. That night, off duty — we were bivouacked a half-mile away — we heard an explosion, over at the airfield. Bunch of us went over there and this plane, a Lockheed Electra, civilian plane, was the hell on fire. Like somebody’d poured gas on and lit her up like a bonfire. Still, I could make out an ID number — NR16020 — which meant nothin’ to me at the time.”
That was the registration number of Amelia’s Lockheed Electra, the one she’d taken on her final, ill-fated flight around the world. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had taken off on the last leg of the landmark flight, from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937. Their destination was tiny Howland Island, 2,556 miles away. It was the most famous unfinished trip in history.
“Jap sabotage?” I asked, referring to the burning plane. “There would’ve been plenty of our little yellow friends left on the island, in the hills and trees and caves.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head, no. “I think somebody was destroyin’ evidence. That fella I saw? In the white shirt? He had a real familiar face. I recognized him from the papers, or anyway I knew I should have recognized him from the papers. He was somebody.”
“Did it ever come to you, who he was?”
He snorted a laugh. “Only the goddamn Secretary of the Navy. Remember that guy? James Vincent Forrestal!”
Names from the past can have a funny effect on you. Sometimes a warm feeling flows through you; my stomach had just gone cold. Colder than my wife’s coffee could ever cure.
The blue eyes tightened. “You all right, Nate?”
We’d gone to first names, a long time ago. Sometimes I’m not all that easy to read; but I guess the blood had drained out of my poker face.
“Yeah. Sure. Get back to your story, Buddy. Trying to reclaim those old warbirds.”
He grinned again; dentures, I’d decided. “I guess I am gettin’ ahead of myself, jumpin’ around... Anyway, while we were on Majuro, misguidedly mountin’ a machete expedition into the jungle to try and liberate one of the better-preserved Zeros, this fella... he was in charge of this heavy equipment yard where we were rentin’ some stuff? This fella asked me the same question you did.”
“What question is that?”
“He asked if we were looking for Amelia Earhart’s plane. Then he told us how in 1937 he’d worked for a company supplying coal to the Japanese Navy. How one night he was refueling a ship called the Koshu when a crew member friend of his told him the ship was about to leave to search for an American airplane that crashed.”
“That was his whole story?”
He gestured with a Lucky Strike in hand, making smoke streaks. “That was it, but it was enough, coming when it did. I mean, we were stuck in the Marshall Islands, about to throw in the towel on my warbird expedition. My friend who gave me the lead on the abandoned planes? Well, he’d also told me about these islanders, hundreds of miles apart, all with the same story to tell... a story of two American fliers, a man and a woman, captured by the Japs and held as spies, before the war.”
“You were an Earhart buff already, Buddy. You’d read the books.”
“Sure, casually. I knew the stories of her and Noonan windin’ up on Saipan, the theory that Amelia was on some sort of secret spy mission, and got shot down and captured. Never took it too seriously, though. ’Course I kinda liked the romance of it. Right out of the movies, you know?”
“And you were in the neighborhood, so you decided to see for yourself.”
“Yes, I did. Got an ashtray?”
“Use your saucer.”
He put his Lucky out, then sat forward, the coolness of his blue eyes at odds with an expression that had grown intense. “And I talked to all sorts of people... on Majuro, Mili, and Jaluit, three little atolls in the middle of the South Pacific.”
He told me of some of the islanders he’d spoken with.
Bilimon Amaron, a respected storeowner on Majuro, related that as a sixteen-year-old medic, at Jaluit, he was called to a military cargo ship, where he tended to two Americans, “one lady, one man.” The man had some minor injuries from a plane crash, and the woman was called, by the Japanese, “Amira.”
Oscar De Brum, a high-ranking Marshallese official, told of hearing from his father (in 1937, when De Brum was in the first grade) of the capture of a lady pilot who was being taken to the Japanese high command office in Jaluit.
John Heinie, a prominent Majuro attorney, recalled attending a Japanese school as a child in 1937 and witnessing, one morning, just before school, a ship towing a barge with a silver airplane on it, into the Jaluit harbor.