But on closer look, there were differences: the linen jacket had epaulettes, the pith helmet bore a gold badge, and a revolver in a cavalry-style holster rode his belt—arranged for a fancy right to left cross-draw.
“Mikio Suzuki,” he said in a calm, medium-pitched voice. “Chief of Saipan Police. This is closed port.”
“Captain Irving Johnson of the civilian ship, Yankee,” the skipper said. “I apologize for this unscheduled stop. We are anchored beyond your three-mile zone. I do not ask to come ashore. I’m here to drop off a passenger.”
He appraised me and my black apparel and white collar with placid skepticism. “Chamorro missions need no new missionaries. Two priests already.”
Johnson said, “Please do us the courtesy of looking at Father O’Leary’s papers.”
I blessed him with a smile as I handed my passport and the two envelopes up. He examined the passport, then withdrew and unfolded each letter; he read them with no visible reaction.
Johnson and I traded tiny shrugs; Hayden had his eyes locked onto these men with guns looming on the pier, his hand draped casually between his legs, hovering over the tarp.
Then Chief Suzuki spoke to the spade-bearded officer, a guttural command that might have been my death sentence.
But within seconds, I’d been hoisted up and out of the dinghy, Hayden handing me my travel bag and a tight smile, while the Chief of Saipan Police carefully refolded my letters, inserted them in their envelopes and returned them to me, with a bow.
“Welcome to Garapan, Father O’Leary,” Chief Suzuki said.
I half-bowed to the chief, then nodded to the skipper and his first mate, who were already putt-putting away from the pier.
Father O’Leary was on his own in Saipan.
17
The main street of Garapan bisected the waterfront, whose typical seediness was quickly replaced by a wholesomely bustling downtown thoroughfare that, with minor changes, might have been small-town America. One-and two-story structures, sometimes wood-frame, sometimes brick, occasionally concrete, were shoulder to shoulder along the telephone-pole-flung asphalt street—office buildings, restaurants, a bakery, hairdressing salon, hardware store, fish market, the larger storefronts with awnings, smaller shops with modest wooden overhangs, even a picture show (although a samurai movie was playing). The apparel, too, seemed oddly Western—white shirts, white shorts, black shorts—though there was the occasional parasol-bearing housewife in a white cotton kimono, out grocery shopping.
A major difference—besides signs and hanging flags that bore the graceful hen scratchings of Japanese script—was how bicycles outnumbered automobiles. Another was a pervading, unpleasantly pungent odor of copra and dried fish, a near stench at odds with the neatness and cleanliness of Main Street Garapan, as were the occasional Chamorro men, dusky natives of the island, loitering at alleyways and along the wooden sidewalks, dirty and disheveled in their tattered clothes and unshod feet. It was as if the Japanese were a hurricane or tidal wave that had displaced them, and they hadn’t gotten around to tidying up yet.
The sky remained gray but little breeze accompanied this persistent threat of rain. The temperature was mild—probably seventy-five degrees—but mugginess undermined it: I was sticky in my black jacket and clerical garb, lightweight though it was.
As I walked along, travel bag in hand, at the side of the white-uniformed chief of police—who was about as talkative as the stone dogs outside the Oriental Gardens restaurant on West Randolph Street—I was getting discreet but amazed glances from almost everybody.
“They don’t see many foreigners around here,” I said.
“No.” He kept his eyes straight ahead as we marched along, didn’t even look at me when we spoke.
“But you said you have priests.”
“Two. For Chamorro, the missions. Spanish priests. Darker skin than you.”
The morning was still young, and clusters of giggling children, knapsacks on their backs, were heading for school, and an occasional straggling fisherman trudged toward the pier. Handcart peddlers wound their way among the bicycles and pedestrians, hawking in their language, making it sound as if torture were being performed on them, while postmen and policemen on their rounds pinged the bells on their bicycles to clear a path.
Of course, nobody dinged a bell at the chief of police, who was diminutive of stature but towering in bearing; in fact, everybody was clearing a path for us, as we left a trail of intimidation and astonishment in our wake, the chief and the foreigner.
“You have a nice town here,” I said.
“We have factory, hospital, post office, newspaper, radio station, electric light.”
“It’s a modern place, all right.”
On the other hand, they didn’t seem to have indoor plumbing. The side streets were unpaved and dusty, and lined with an assembly of bedraggled stores and ramshackle private homes with tin roofs; outhouses were easily glimpsed, even if they did lack our traditional half-moon.
We were four blocks from the waterfront when the street opened onto the town square, built around a rather grand, official-looking white wooden two-story building, colonial-style with pillars and double doors. The place was like an ice cream salesmen convention: everybody going in and out wore white suits or white shorts and white shoes with white Panama hats or white pith helmets or white military caps.
“Court of Justice,” Chief Suzuki said, quietly proud. “My office here.”
But we didn’t go in; the chief had paused at a black sedan parked out front. He barked at a cop in white shorts, caught on his way into the courthouse; the cop bowed, on the run, went inside and shortly thereafter another servile young copper in white shorts, white cap, and black gunbelt came trotting out and saluted the chief. The chief gave him some instructions, the young copper said, “Hai,” and opened the rear sedan door for me.
I took my cue, and the chief got in after me, with the young copper going around the front to play chauffeur.
“Would it be impolite of me to ask where we’re going?” I inquired, as we pulled out between bicycles. The backseat was roomy; it wasn’t a limo, but this Jap buggy with its cushiony black interior was comfortable, even though it rode like a lumber wagon—they’d have to go some to catch up with American automaking.
“Forgive my rudeness,” Chief Suzuki said. “I escort you to meet shichokan.”
“Oh. Local official of some kind?”
“Yes. What you call ‘governor.’” He pondered that for a moment. “Not governor of Nan’yo chokan; he is not chokunin. He is governor of shicho.”
“You mean, he’s the governor of Saipan?”
“Not Saipan only. Governor of all Mariana Islands.”
“Oh…but not of Micronesia.”
“Yes.” He seemed pleased that his intelligence and communications skills were overcoming the limitations of the slow-witted child in his care. “I instructed Lieutenant Tomura to call ahead. The shichokan…” He chose his words carefully. “…anticipation our arrival.”
Then he leaned back, happy with himself over that memorable sentence.
“Does the, uh…shichokan speak English?”
“Yes. Not as well as mine. But he does speak.”
We passed a pleasant park with a bandshell, yet another confounding familiarity in this foreign place; somehow it was oddly reassuring when we glided by a pagodalike shrine on a tastefully landscaped plot.
“Buddhist?” I asked.
The faintest frown passed over the chief’s stone visage. “Shinto.”
“I see. You mind if I roll the window down?”