I smiled at my geisha, trying to send her a message that my rejection of her charms wasn’t personal, and she smiled back with a sadness in her eyes as old as her country. As I climbed out, she brought me towels and a robe.
Drying off, I said to the chief, “I’ll talk to the woman tonight, and report to you tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Chief Suzuki said with a respectful nod. “Konichiwa.”
I exited the brothel into a late afternoon that had turned ugly and cold, under a rolling, growling charcoal sky. Gunmetal waves were splashing up over the concrete jetty; a trio of immense freighters anchored in the harbor took the rough waters stoically, but fishing sampans tied to a concrete finger of a pier seemed almost to jump out of the water. This was not good. But it would not stop me. Turning up the collars of my priestly black suitcoat, I walked against the wind, the hotel only a few blocks away.
This time when I knocked, the door opened right now and there she was, standing before me, blue-gray eyes at once shiny with hope and red with despair, mouth quivering as if not quite daring to smile, hoping I’d returned with the foolproof plan that would liberate Fred Noonan and send us all happily home.
But she knew me too well; she knew the little smile I gave her did not bode well.
“Oh my goodness...”
She took a step back as I moved into the room, which had turned dark and cool with the afternoon; she still wore the short-sleeve mannish white shirt and rust slacks, her feet bare. I shut the door, as she asked, “You can’t help him?”
I took her arm, gently, and walked her to the chair by the window, which she had lowered, but not all the way, the cool wind sneaking in to riffle the covers, the pages, of the magazines on the table, colorful images of smiling Japanese.
Kneeling before her, like a suitor, I enfolded her hands in mine, gazed at her with all the tenderness I could summon and said, “No one can help him now. Amy, they executed Fred this afternoon.”
She didn’t say anything, but outside the wind howled in pain; her chin quivered, tears trickled. Slowly, she shook her head, her eyes hooded with grief.
“That’s why they wanted me to talk to him,” I said, patting her hand. “To give him Last Rites.”
A spattering of rain had begun; filmy curtains reached out in ghostly gesture.
She swallowed. “How? Was it... quick?”
“It was quick,” I said. “They shot him in his cell, right in front of me. Couldn’t do a damn thing... I’m so sorry.”
My lies softened the blow only slightly; but she mustn’t know the sacrifice he made, and had to be spared the grotesque details of his death.
Still, she knew Noonan too well not to come close, within a consonant actually, saying, “I bet he spit in their eye.”
“Oh yes.”
“Nathan... it hurts.”
Still kneeling, I held out my arms to her, like Jolson singing “Swanee,” and she tumbled into my embrace and we kind of switched around so that I was sitting in the chair, she was in my lap like a big kid, grabbing tight, face buried in my neck, the tears turning from trickle to downpour, as outside the sky imitated her.
We were like that for several minutes, and then the rain was coming in, so I eased her to her feet, and walked her to the padded quilts, where she sat, slumping. I closed the window, leaving an inch for air, switched on the reading lamp, whose translucent tan shade created a golden glow. Sick of playing priest, I removed the suitcoat, and the clerical-collared shirt, and in my T-shirt went over and sat beside her. Our legs were stretched out laxly before us, our arms hung loose, puppets whose strings had been snipped.
She was staring into nothing at all. “He suffered so. They were so terribly cruel to him... it makes me...”
And she covered her face and began to weep, sobs racking her body. I put my arm around her, patting her back as if comforting a child, but I knew there was nothing I could say or do. Could I even understand what she was going through? Could anyone, except Fred Noonan?
Finally she looked at me with wide red-rimmed eyes, her lightly powdered face streaked with tears, and said, “I feel so guilty. Nathan. So guilty... I’ve had it so easy, compared to Fred.”
“Nothing to feel guilty about,” I assured her. “It was out of your control.”
“I didn’t fight them, like he did. He was brave. I was a coward.”
“You were in prison, too.”
She shook her head, no, violently, no. “Not like him. Not like him.”
“Well, he’s free now. Be happy for him.”
She blinked some tears away. “You really look at it that way?”
“I saw how he was living. He was glad to go. Believe me. Wherever he is, it has to be a better place than that.”
Thinking that over, she lay down, resting her head in my lap, pulling her knees up, like a fetus, and I stroked that curly head of hair while she quietly cried and snuffled and even slept for a few minutes.
Finally, with her head still in my lap, she looked up and asked, “Can we really get out of here?”
“Yes. The schooner that brought me here, the Yankee, is anchored out beyond the three-mile limit. They’ve spent the day waiting to see if I’ll need a lift home tonight — the captain and his first mate’ll come in, in their motor launch, and pull up on the other side of that little island just off the waterfront — Maniagawa — and watch for me.”
“When?”
“When else? Midnight.”
Two escape routes had been arranged for me: Captain Johnson and his dinghy, tonight; or if I needed more time, in two days (as I’d told the shichokan), passage was arranged with a German trader. If I missed both my rides, I’d be on my own, though with Guam so nearby, a hijacked motorboat remained a viable third option.
“Is this rain going to be a problem?” she wondered.
The storm was rattling the window.
“It could be a help,” I said. “What fools but us will be out in it?”
She sat up. Hope was back in her eyes. “We’ll just... walk out of here?”
I cupped her face in my hands. “Baby, we’ll just slip out the window in my room. Don’t those native watchdogs usually camp out in the lobby?”
“Yes.”
I slipped my arm around her shoulder and drew her to me. “Well, they won’t even know we’re gone, till tomorrow morning sometime. They don’t watch the back door, ’cause there isn’t one, right?”
She nodded. “Originally, there was a side exit, but it was blocked off... this hotel is a sort of jail.”
“So they only watch the front door.”
She nodded again. “Where will your schooner captain pick us up?”
“Right on the dock. Right where he dropped me off.”
The sky cracked like a whip, then a low rumble followed.
I asked her, “Do they check on you? Bring you meals or anything?”
“They hardly bother me. I take my meals at that restaurant across the street.”
“Then all we have to do is sit tight for a few hours.”
“Well... after all, we do have some catching up to do.”
“We really do.”
“Nathan... Turn off that light.”
“All right...”
I got up and switched off the reading lamp and when I turned she was standing beside the padded quilts, unbuttoning the white blouse; beneath it was a wispy peach bra with (she revealed as she unzipped the rust trousers) matching silky step-ins. Her flesh took on cool tones of blue, as the reflected rain streaking down the window projected itself onto the walls, shadow ribbons of darker blue making abstract flowing patterns along the lanky curves of her body. She undid the bra and let it fall, baring the small, girlishly pert breasts, then stepped from the step-ins, standing naked, shoulders back, unashamed, legs long and lean and even muscular, clothing pooled at her bare feet, her slender shapely body painted with the textures of the storm, arms held out to me beseechingly.