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.
It was time for Father O’Leary to take his pants off.
We made love tenderly, we made love savagely, we made up for lost time and laughed and wept, and when she rode me, her preferred posture, strong-willed woman that she was, her ivory body washed in the blue shadows of the streaky rain, she made love with an abandon and joy that she otherwise must have found only in the sky. I will never forget her lovely face hovering above me, gazing down with heartbreaking fondness, her face bright with joy, then lost in passion, drunk with sensation, and finally aglow with the bittersweet sense of loss fulfillment exacts.
Later, since we were after all in an unlocked room in the political “hotel” of our hosts, Father O’Leary and a fully clothed Amira sat on the quilts in the cool blue reflection of the rain coming down. A pitcher of water poured into her basin had allowed us to wash up and she mentioned that this current rain was welcome.
“Rainwater’s important here,” she said. “The ground water on this island has an awful, brackish taste.”
“I thought it rained every time you turn around, in the tropics.”
“We don’t get much in the summer, but winter monsoon season is pretty fierce. Lots of frequent, short showers.”
I wondered if she realized she spoke of Saipan almost as her home? And hadn’t it been, for almost three years?
“This is shaping up like a typhoon,” she said, looking toward the window. The shadows on the walls were darker, moving more quickly, and the wind sounded angry. The direction of the rain seemed to have shifted, coming down straighter, hitting the tin roof of the one-story house next door in hard pellets, unrelenting liquid machine gun fire.
She asked me questions about home, pleased that Paul Mantz had remarried (“That Terry is a terrific gal”); I gave her more details on her husband’s remarriage, which only seemed to wryly amuse her, now. She had no idea her disappearance had been the center of such worldwide attention and seemed rather flattered, even touched. Bitterly, though, she commented that the multimillion-dollar naval search must have largely been an excuse to pry in these waters.
She also spoke of her life in Saipan, which was very solitary. Other than Chief Suzuki, Jesus Sablan, and a few officials, like the shichokan, she knew of no one in Garapan who spoke fluent English, and—despite her ability to traverse the downtown—she had made few friends.
“The Chamorro family next door,” she said, pointing toward the window, and the rat-a-tat-tat tin-roof rainfall, “has been kind.” She laughed softly. “I got to know them on my trips to the privy…it’s in back of their house. They have a little girl, Matilda, maybe twelve, a sweet thing. She knows some English, and I tried to help her with her homework, now and then. I gave her a ring with a pearl as a keepsake…. Her parents are nice, too, they give me fresh fruit, pineapples, mangoes, which is something I can’t find at the Japanese market. Food’s awful—everything’s out of a can or a jar.”
“I noticed,” I said with a smile.
The room turned white from lightning, and the thunderclap was like cannon fire.
“Are you sure this rain won’t be a problem?” she asked. “For us leaving tonight?”
“No, it’s helpful,” I lied. “Listen…it’s getting close to time. I’m going down and check on the chumps in the lobby…. You better look around this room and see if there’s anything you want to take with you.”
Her laugh sounded like a cough. “I don’t think I’ll be looking back on this room with much nostalgia.”
“Well, look over your personal items, things you brought with you…wrap up a little bundle, if you have to, but travel light.”
She smirked. “Don’t worry.”
“I’ll go down and distract the fellas…. Wait maybe a minute after I leave, then go down to my room and slip inside.”
She nodded.
I was almost out the door when she clutched my arm. I leaned over and kissed her. “We’re gonna be apart for two, maybe three minutes,” I said. “Think you can bear up?”
She shook her head, no; she was smiling but her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid.”
“Good. That’s healthy. Only the dead are fearless.”
“Like Fred.”
“Like Fred,” I said, and touched her face, and stepped into the hallway.
It was empty. My hunch was the entire floor was vacant, except for Amy. The only other person I’d seen who seemed to be staying here was the desk clerk or the manager or whoever he was, who had the first room off the little lobby. I moved down the stairs, and through another empty hallway.
In the lobby, the check-in desk was unoccupied, and the ceiling fan whirred sluggishly over two Chamorro assistant coppers in their threadbare white suits. I knew them both: fatso Ramon, of the cantaloupe head and blankly stupid countenance, was seated in the rattan chair where Jesus had been previously plopped; and across from him was the short, burly officer who Suzuki had brought in to sub for Jesus. They were playing cards, of course, with what seemed to be the same greasy deck. Billy clubs and matchsticks again littered the rattan coffee table.
“Where’s Jesus?” I asked Ramon.
“Paint town red,” Ramon grinned. It wasn’t as nasty as Jesus’s grin but it was nasty enough.
“Oh, he’s still out with the chief?”
Ramon nodded, fat fingers holding the smeary cards close to his face, eyes almost crossing as he studied his hand.
Then I asked the burly character, who had a lumpy sweet-potato nose and pockmarks (though the latter weren’t nearly in Jesus Sablan’s league), if he knew how to play Chicago. His grasp of English was obviously less than that of Ramon, who having played a few hands with me this afternoon, frowned at my apparent interest in joining them.