Then it was her turn, and she told how she and Noonan had been picked up by a launch from a battleship, and were held in a place called Jaluit where a doctor tended to injuries Noonan had received ditching in the water; they were bounced from one Japanese Naval station to another, islands with names like Kwajalein, Roi, Namor, and finally to Saipan, where they were interrogated by Suzuki and others — they denied being spies, having dropped their photographic equipment into the ocean — and were jailed.
“After my collapse in my cell, and that long stay in the hospital,” she said, “I was brought here to the Kobayashi Ryokan. And I’ve been treated more or less decently, ever since. I’m really under a kind of house arrest.”
“You mean, you can come and go as you please?”
She nodded, shrugged. “Within boundaries. There are always at least two of those native police lackeys watching me, here at the hotel — day and night; if I leave, they’re my shadows... even when it’s just a trip out to the privy.”
“How short a leash are you on?”
“I can venture out into the Garapan business district. Like a child, I have an allowance. I can get my hair done. Go to the movies. Stop at a teahouse — they don’t make cocoa here, unfortunately, so I’ve finally learned to drink tea and coffee, at this late date. But always my Chamorro chaperons are nearby.”
“You mean, if we wanted to leave right now,” I said, “we could go for a walk — we’d just have a couple of fat ugly tails on our behinds?”
“Yes.” She gripped my hand, tight. “But Nathan... don’t underestimate them — particularly the one named Jesus.” Her eyes took on a momentary glaze. “Lord Jesus, the islanders call him. His own people are frightened to death of him, even the ones he works with. He’s terribly cruel.”
I looked at her carefully. “You sound like you speak from experience...”
“I know he’s tortured Fred, many times.”
“It’s more than that.”
She nodded in admission, and shared the unpleasant memory: “Shortly after I got out of the hospital, Lord Jesus came to my room, this room, and tried to make me admit I was a spy...” She tilted her head to one side and pointed to her neck, where there were several nasty burn scars.
“Cigarettes?” I asked. A cold rage was rising in me.
She nodded. “But Chief Suzuki came in and saw what Jesus was doing, and put a stop to it.”
I didn’t bother to tell her that she’d just described an interrogation technique that dated back to the time of the original Jesus. Except for the cigarettes.
“This room has become a kind of... sanctuary for me,” she said. Then her tone turned bitter. “But I always remember that, whenever they want, any of them can come right through that door... torture me, rape me, whatever they please... It’s a pleasant enough prison, Nathan — but it’s a prison.”
“Let’s go for that walk,” I suggested. “A priest and his parishioner.”
She nodded, springing to her feet with girlish enthusiasm. “Just let me grab my sandals...”
We went out through the lobby — a Chamorro clerk in a high-collared white shirt and bemused expression was at the check-in desk, now — and Jesus and Ramon were indeed still playing cards at their matchstick-, billy club-and machete-littered table. Under his misshapen straw fedora, the blunt-featured, knife-scarred, pockmarked puss of Lord Jesus frowned up at us in a startling mixture of indignation and contempt. How dare we interrupt his life?
“Catching some air,” I explained. “In Six — remember?”
He sneered at me, baring mahogany teeth and the space for one.
And then we stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk where a cool yet muggy afternoon awaited under a steel-wool sky. We strolled by the general merchandise store with its shelves open onto the street, dolls and cloisonné vases, cakes and confectioneries, condiments and bean curd, its salesgirls in colorful kimonos. But the passers-by were less formal, men in shorts, women in Western-style dresses, not a parasol in sight; a few young men on bicycles. A pair of green-denim-uniformed officers on a motorcycle and sidecar rolled by, in the direction of Chico Naval Base. This time, I couldn’t catch anybody even stealing a glance — word about my presence, here, must have gotten around.
“For such a striking couple,” I said, “we’re not attracting much attention.”
Not counting Jesus and Ramon, of course, who were behind us about a half a block; they were so fat, only one could walk on the boardwalk — the other had to trod along kicking up dust in the hard-dirt street, making an obstacle for bikes. The billy clubs were stuck in their belts like pirate swords; Jesus had the sheathed machete stuck there, too — all he lacked was the parrot and eyepatch.
“Oh, I’m old hat around here,” she said with a little smile. “They call me ‘Tokyo Rosa.’”
“Why?”
“Tokyo because I attract so much official attention. Rosa because it’s a female name in English they know from somewhere.”
I gestured toward the little park where the sugar baron’s statue loomed and we headed over there.
“It’s usually prettier here,” she said, as we sauntered along. We were close enough to the waterfront that we could see gray patches of ocean between trees and buildings. “Saipan sunsets are amazing, and the waters are so many different, clear shades of blue.”
“It almost sounds like you like it here,” I said.
A tiny grimace tightened her face. “I guess I deserve that. But I’m always aware of what Fred’s going through.”
We could see the prison, on its little jungle side street, as we walked. The boardwalk had given over to a simple well-worn grassy path.
“According to Chief Suzuki,” I said, “your navigator’s been pretty uncooperative, even belligerent.”
“Fred’s never given them a shred of information, never admitted to anything... but he’s been through a living hell for it.”
That made sense. Leaning on Noonan and taking it easy on Amy wasn’t chivalry on the part of the Japanese, rather their chauvinist supposition that the male team member would be the leader, and would hold the military secrets. To some degree, they may have been right — after all, Noonan had been working for the Navy, all along.
I asked, “Do they let you see him?”
“Once a week or so we talk, when he’s allowed out into the exercise yard.” She looked in that direction and I could see the area she meant, a grassless parcel beside the larger, boxcar-like cellblocks. “He’s very strong. Resolute. I admire him terribly...”
She wiped tears from her eyes with her short sleeve and smiled bravely and I looped my arm through hers and walked her into the little park, where we settled onto a stone bench, alone in the shadow of the baron’s statue and sheltering palm trees.
“I’m going to get you out of here tonight,” I said.
Her eyes widened with hope and alarm. “You can do that?”
Jesus and Ramon were watching from across the street, sitting on the stone steps out in front of the hospital, like a couple of gargoyles who’d fallen off the roof.
“You need to understand something,” I said. “My mission to Saipan was defined by such patriots as William Miller and James Forrestal as ‘intelligence gathering.’ They didn’t send me in here to rescue you, just to find out whether you and Fred were here or not. Alive and well, or hung by your thumbs, it didn’t matter — are our missing people in Saipan or aren’t they? That was the extent of why I was sent.”
She nodded. “I follow you.”
“Trust me, you don’t. I was told, if you were here, not to ‘play hero,’ but to leave you behind, with the assurance that your pal FDR and naval and military intelligence would decide what to do about it... whether to negotiate the release of the American prisoners, or mount a full-scale rescue operation.”