Her lip curled into a sneer and she said, “You’re not a friend of his, are you?”
“I’m his twin brother. We were separated at birth.”
That made her laugh; she was no dope. “He’s in the restaurant, havin’ the special. And he’s all yours.”
Then it was through another beaded doorway and into the low-ceilinged, undecorated dining room and its dozen or so tables. It was early for supper, so nobody was back there but a bullnecked mountain of muscle and fat in an old Seabees cap and gigantic loose-fitting, well-worn army fatigues. He was hunkered over a plate of stringy, sticky seaweed, sucking it up like a kid sucks spaghetti.
I was wearing a black T-shirt with a khaki jacket over it, and khaki pants; the weather didn’t demand the jacket but I had a .38 revolver in the righthand pocket. Just in case he recognized me.
I certainly gave him every opportunity. I stood right before the table, opposite him as he sucked seaweed, and the dark, pockmarked, knife-scarred, mustached face looked at me with cold contempt, but it was the cold contempt he reserved for everybody, not just priests who shot him in the stomach.
“You the American?” he asked, chewing.
He was probably sixty, but other than some white in his short-cropped hair (his right ear had a piece out of it), the thick Zapata mustache, and some added wrinkles that gave him a bulldog quality, he hadn’t changed much.
“Yeah, I’m the American.”
He poured himself a healthy glass of red wine from an unlabeled bottle. “Siddown. I don’t look up at nobody.”
I sat, with my hand on the revolver in the jacket pocket. “How much for your Amelia Earhart story?”
“It’s a good story. What really happen.”
“How much?”
He grinned; he had a gold tooth now, and the rest of the teeth were much closer to white than I remembered. The junk king could afford a dentist. “Two thousand,” he said.
“I can get you ten.”
The dark eyes flared. “Thousand?”
“No, ten dollars. What do you think? Come in with me, we can take these rich Texas assholes for twenty grand.”
He frowned. “Fifty-fifty split?”
“Yeah, that’s how you end up with ten.” Time had made him stupid; or maybe too much of that cheap wine.
The eyes that had once scared me a little, because of the smartness in them, narrowed and perhaps something, in the back of his skull, was trying to click.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I never been in Saipan before in my life. You want in?”
“Let me hear it.”
I leaned toward him. “They want to find Amelia Earhart’s grave. Let’s show it to them.”
“...I don’t know where it is.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I shrugged. “I got a bag of bones in my jeep — I brought ’em with me from the States.”
“What kind of bones?”
“Female. Forty years of age. Dead thirty years.”
“What’d you do, dig up some other grave?”
“That’s right. Now if a Saipanese... somebody with a history that goes back to those days... could lead these Texans to a grave in the jungle...”
He had started smiling halfway through that; he did still have some smarts. Not enough to save him, though.
“But first we got to bury those bones,” I said. “Meet me tonight at the old Garapan Prison. We’ll bury ’em near there somewhere... Bring a shovel.”
He was still grinning, nodding, liking it. “What time?”
“When else? Midnight.”
We didn’t shake hands. Just nodded at each other, and I left him to his plate of seaweed.
That evening, Buddy Busch, in the room we were sharing at the Sun Inn, was aglow.
“They’re gonna let us dig,” he said. “Problem is, they’ll only give us tomorrow... Sunday... when the facility is closed, ’cause otherwise we’d get in their way.”
So at nine the next morning, with the loan from the lot manager of a heavy front loader (and one of his men), the coral surface and an added two feet of topsoil were scraped away, and then the two Chamorran kids Munez had hired to dig got at it. Phil and Steve recorded the efforts, from various angles, and by three that afternoon, we were looking into a trench four feet by twelve, three feet deep. And very empty.
“How deep do you think those guards woulda buried her?” Buddy asked me.
“Well,” I said, stroking my stiff left arm, “probably pretty deep.”
“You know, if we’re off a little, the real grave could be three feet away and we’d never fuckin’ know it!”
But Steve called out, “Hey, what the hell’s that?”
“That” proved to be the find of the expedition, and the centerpiece of Buddy Busch’s documentary, Grave Evidence: The Execution of Amelia Earhart. The tattered piece of black cloth appeared to be a full-face blindfold, cut so that narrow strips on either side could be tied behind the wearer’s head — attesting to this, the tie straps had a stitched hem.
Mrs. Blas herself identified the scrap of cloth as the blindfold Amelia wore to her execution by Japanese soldiers.
Because of the lime-based coral content of the soil, human remains would likely be swallowed up, over these years, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and that blindfold might be all that was left of Amelia Earhart, if in fact she’d been buried beneath the missing breadfruit tree.
But even now, an aging Buddy Busch (a stroke and heart attack not enough to slow him down) is planning one last trip to Saipan (his sixth); meanwhile, a new generation of Earhart enthusiasts plans more expeditions to the Mariana Islands and other parts of the South Pacific.
Of course, if Amelia was buried in the brainwashed mind of Irene Bolam, the body they’re looking for was donated to medical science and is a long-since discarded, cremated cadaver.
I have finally decided to tell my story because I figure nobody will believe me anyway, and if the government doesn’t like it, they can sue me or go fuck themselves.
I believe Amy died in the waters of Tanapag Harbor that night, swimming with me, toward freedom; perhaps Chief Suzuki’s boys did drag her body out, and the Japanese military did take her, blindfolded, to an unmarked grave near Garapan. Perhaps by the time you read this, Buddy or some other latter-day explorer will have discovered more evidence to pinpoint exactly where Amelia Earhart was buried.
Anyway, I’m confident of one thing.
They’re more likely to find her body than that bastard Jesus Sablan’s.
The press called her “Lady Lindy,” but her family called her Mill. Schoolgirl pals preferred Meelie, certain friends Mary (Fred Noonan among them), she was Paul Mantz’s “angel,” and her husband used “A. E.” To the world she was Amelia Earhart, but to me, and only me, she was Amy.
I Owe Them One
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible — and any blame for historical (and/or geographical) inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.
Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names. The characterizations of Margot DeCarrie and Myrtle Mantz are fictionalized, based upon limited reference material. Ernie Tisor, Jesus Sablan, Sammy Munez, Toni Lake, and J. T. “Buddy” Busch are fictional characters with one or more real-life counterparts.
To my knowledge, the notion that Amelia Earhart may have been bisexual is new to this work. The possibility that she was a lesbian is a subject often broached but little explored, and the issue of her sexuality is clouded (as are her accomplishments and disappearance) by the tendency of those writing her biographies to view her through rose-colored glasses, sacrificing the person for a role model. She is depicted as a Victorian prude, and yet reports of her promiscuity persist; her mannish attire, and traveling with women companions, is offset by talk of youthful flings with older men and long affairs with Samuel Chapman and Eugene Vidal. Despite the claims of some biographers, her marriage to G. P. Putnam was obviously an arrangement, perhaps a sham. From these contradictions, my portrayal of her arose, organically, during the writing of this book.