“If he is, he’s got a splitting headache,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, Robert, it’s nice hearing from you—”
“Fred Noonan is this guy William Van Dusen. This former Air Force major and this author, they’ve researched both of ’em, and Van Dusen and Bolam, their backgrounds are phony. It looks like a witness protection plan kind of deal.”
“I don’t think they had a witness protection program in the forties.”
“How do you know? If Amelia got turned into Tokyo Rose, maybe the government would want to... sort of, bury her.”
“Robert, it’s nice hearing from you again.”
“You don’t want to look into this for me?”
“Are you hiring me?”
“I can’t afford that. I work in a factory.”
“I work for a living, too, Robert. Thanks for the call. Good luck.”
And that had been that. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad for Robert Myers: his friendship with Amelia had given meaning to his life; yet it had obviously been painful for him, carrying around so many unanswered questions, going through his life a “kid” few took seriously.
I’d been there. I sat in the living room with him. I knew what he’d heard. He just didn’t know where I’d been.
The book that claimed Irene Bolam was Amelia Earhart got its authors sued and itself pulled from the shelves. This made me suspicious, and one day in 1970, when I was visiting the Manhattan office of A-1, I took a side trip to Bedford Hills, New York. I found Irene Bolam in the bar with three other women in the clubhouse of Forsgate Country Club; these were ladies in their late sixties and they seemed to appreciate the attention of a good-looking kid like me, in his early to mid-sixties.
I knew at once which one was Irene. She bore a resemblance to Amy, though her nose was different, wider, larger; noses change, though, not always for the better. And the eyes were a hauntingly familiar blue-gray.
Standing next to the ladies, who looked pretty foxy in their golf sweaters and shorts, I said to Irene, “My name’s Nate Heller. We had a mutual friend.”
“Oh?” She beamed up at me. “And who would that be?”
“Amelia Earhart. I understand you were an aviatrix yourself, and flew with her?”
“That’s right, I was in the Ninety Nines... Oh, my goodness, I hope you don’t believe that baloney in that horrible book.”
The “oh my goodness” gave me a start: it was a favorite phrase of Amy’s.
But this wasn’t Amy. Amy couldn’t look at me and not betray the feelings we’d had. If by some bizarre circumstance, this was an Amelia Earhart who had survived those bullets and been carted off to Tokyo, brainwashed by Tojo, returned home, and brainwashed again by Uncle Sam... if that ridiculous scenario were even possible, I didn’t want to know.
Whether this was Irene Bolam, or Amelia Earhart, I knew one thing for sure: my Amy wasn’t in this old woman’s eyes.
I sat with the girls and they had tropical drinks with umbrellas while I had a rum and Coke. One of the girls was a widow with a nice body and a decent face lift and I think I could have got lucky. But I was an old married man now, and had changed my ways.
Irene Bolam died in July 1982. She left her body to science and her family honored her wishes that her fingerprints not be shared with those who had been hounding her about her identity.
The Continental DC-10 circled lazily on its approach, as the island of Saipan made itself known through the clouds. We had left Guam forty-five minutes before — Buddy Busch, his two-man camera crew, and me. At first glance the long narrow island appeared to be nothing more than a jungle with a mountain rising from its midst; but soon rolling hills, shell-pocked cliffs, and white sand beaches disclosed their presence, as did roads, buildings, and cultivated fields.
This was a slightly different view than I’d gotten from the Yankee or its dinghy, and I could finally understand what everyone had been raving about all these years: the ocean waters surrounding Saipan were dazzlingly blue and turquoise and green and yet transparent.
“Someday I’m gonna bring the wife along,” Buddy said. “She dudn’t believe me, ’bout how pretty them waters is. You been here before, Nate — ever see the like of it, anywheres else?”
“The folksier you get, Buddy,” I said, “the less you’re getting out of me.”
Buddy was frustrated that I had yet to open up about my own Saipan experiences.
“And the stars at night...” he began.
“Are big and bright? Deep in the heart of Saipan?”
“Back in ’45, every night, we’d be on our cots in our tents and Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ would come driftin’ across the camp, over the loudspeaker... It was like he was singin’ about Saipan.”
“I doubt he was.”
“Well,” he said defensively, “I never seen the like of it. Parade of damn stars traipsin’ across the sky... Or was I just young, and my memory’s playin’ tricks with me?”
“I ask myself that often,” I said.
Even from the air, the scars left on this island by World War II were readily apparent, violent punctuation marks in a peaceful sentence: a tank’s head poking out of the water a few hundred yards offshore; a barge marooned on the coral reef; a wrecked fuselage, half in the water, half on the beach — shimmering twisted metal in crystal-blue waters.
The DC-10 touched down at Kobler Field, near the former Aslito Haneda, aka Isley. We taxied over to a cement shed with a wooden roof emblazoned saipan in white letters; this and two Quonset-hut hangars was the Saipan airport.
“This is my fourth time here,” Buddy said coming down the deplaning steps, “and I never quite get used to how different it is from the war — no jeeps, or military trucks, no soldiers, sailors or Marines.”
The tiny airport, run by Chamorros, was a surprisingly bustling place filled with the Babel-like chatter of many languages — tourists from all over the world coming to this vacation center, Europeans, Arabs, but mostly Japanese. Buddy had told me to expect that: Saipan was a combination war shrine and honeymoon resort for the Japanese.
“Yeah, and they’re buyin’ back this island they lost,” he’d told me on the plane, “piece at a time.”
A Ford van Buddy had arranged was waiting, and we loaded our suitcases and the camera and recording gear — which was ensconced in heavy-duty flight cases — into the back. The two-man camera crew was also from Dallas; Phil was clean-cut and owned the video production company that had gone in partners with Buddy on a documentary of our visit, and Steve was a skinny, bearded, longhaired good old boy who I took for a hippie until I realized he was a Vietnam veteran — both knew their stuff. I told them I didn’t want to be on camera and they said fine, I could “grip.”
“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.