Flying Blind

by Max Allan Collins

  “Robert,” Mantz said, gently, “you know there have been some radio recreations, some dramatic—”

  “Not happening at the exact same time as when she took off! I’m sorry, Mr. Mantz—I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just—I know what I heard.” His speech picked up speed, as if his conversation were lifting off a runway after a long taxi. “And then she was talking to a radioman back on Lae, named Balfour, saying Mr. Noonan had passed her a sealed envelope with a note about a change of flight plans. She seemed really peeved…. The radioman said he didn’t know about the change, that his orders were to give her weather reports. She said something about flying north to Truk Island.”

  It was like listening to an idiot savant rattle off trigonometry equations. “You remember all this?”

  He nodded, blond shock bouncing. “I wrote it down. I got my school notebook and I’ve been writing everything down.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Dozens of transmissions over the last few days!”

  I sat forward, not really buying any of this, but impressed with his imagination. Mantz looked amused.

  “She came on later, more relaxed, not so mad, even giggling a little, as she called out the names of islands she was flying over, trying to pronounce them—I heard her mention the tip of Rabaul, for instance. She lost contact with Lae about three hundred miles out, but I heard her say Noonan was getting good pictures of the Caroline Islands.”

  “And you’re hearing all this over your Philco?” I asked.

  “Sure! I heard her talkin’ to that ship, the Itasca, too! I heard her make her first contact with ’em, when they asked her to identify herself and she said, ‘The name is Putnam, but I don’t use that.’”

  I had to chuckle; that did sound like her. Even Mantz was smiling a little, though I could tell he figured this kid was spinning a yarn.

  “I listened all night,” Robert said. “She came on naming islands as she passed over them, sayin’ they were off her left or right wing…Bikar, Majuro, Jaluit, I’m leavin’ a few out but I got ’em written down…. She said there was plenty of good light and they could see the islands fine. Then she had trouble getting the Itasca to hear her—here I am, in my living room in California, and I can hear her fine! I mean, there’s static and everything, and she kinda comes in and out, but I heard her asking Itasca to turn on their lights, sayin’ she must be circling the ship, but she couldn’t come down because it was too dark, she got there too early. Then it just got worse and worse…. They weren’t answering her…. She kept saying her fuel was low. She told the Itasca she was gonna try for Hull Island, but they didn’t hear her, and that’s when she spotted the Japanese fighter planes.”

  “Fighter planes.”

  He nodded, wild-eyed. “One was above her, the other two were near her wingtips; they fired on her! Machinegun bursts!”

  “Look, kid—” Mantz began.

  The boy just kept going, gesturing with both hands. “They were trying to force her to land at Hull, but when she looked down, she saw these ships offshore—a fishing boat, and two battleships—but they were able to outrun the Japs in the Electra, it was much faster. Mr. Noonan had her fly toward an island called Sydney, just a hundred miles away, and all the time she was still callin’ the Itasca, no response. And then one engine sputtered out—they could see the island! But then the other one went out, too, and I heard her say, ‘Oh, my goodness! We’re out of fuel!’”

  As silly as this story was, hearing Amy’s familiar “Oh, my goodness!” from this kid’s mouth sent a chill up me.

  “I heard the plane make this awful loud thud—you’d think it would have sounded more like a splash, but it didn’t—and I waited for seconds that seemed like hours before she came back on, saying, ‘We missed the trees and the coral reef…. We’re on the water.’ She said Mr. Noonan injured his head, shoulder, and arm and she stopped transmitting to go check on him…. Then it was morning, and I lost them…. I’d been listening twelve hours or more.”

  “Is this the story you told the police?” I asked.

  Mantz was leaned back with a hand over his eyes.

  “Oh, you listened to a lot more of it than the desk sergeant on the phone did…. They’re still out there, Nate…Mr. Mantz…Amelia and Mr. Noonan. I’ve been listening to them every night. She comes on every hour and doesn’t stay on long—conserving the battery. They’re floating on the water…. They’re hot and they’re hungry and Amelia’s really mad, she keeps saying, ‘Why are you doing this to us? Why don’t you come get us? You know where we are.’ Things like that. It’s real sad. But they are still alive…. Isn’t that a relief?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned forward, puppy-dog eager, looking from me to Mantz and back again. “Would you like to come to my house and listen, tonight? I’m sure my mom and dad wouldn’t mind.”

  “Thanks, kid,” Mantz said, with a sick smile. “I think I’ll take a rain check.”

  I put a hand on Mantz’s shoulder. “Paul, can I have a word with you, for a minute? Outside?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Sure.”

  “Robert, you think you can handle another snail?”

  The boy beamed. “Boy, could I! Warmed up and everything?”

  “Live a little,” I said, and nodded over to Mom behind the counter, who smiled and took care of the order, as Mantz and I headed outside.

  He dug a pack of Camels out of his sportcoat and lighted one up, saying, “You can’t believe any of that baloney. Tell me you don’t.”

  There was runway noise and I had to work my voice up. “How do you explain some of what he knows? The names of those islands, for example?”

  Mantz smirked, shrugged, blew smoke out his nose like a dragon. “I never heard of those islands. Maybe he made ’em up.”

  “Maybe he didn’t.”

  “Maybe he’s got a Rand McNally atlas in his house. Look, he and Amelia were friends, all of that stuff he told you was legit…. But now he’s stayin’ up at night, with his head filled with what he’s readin’ in the papers about his famous friend, and he’s listening to staticky garbage and his imagination is running wild.”

  “Is it possible for that Philco to be picking her up?”

  “Sure.” The cigarette bobbled in his mouth as he spoke. “McMenamy thinks he’s heard her, too—of course, he hasn’t heard twenty or thirty exciting episodes like Robert has!”

  Through the window we could see the kid chowing down on another snail.

  I said, “I don’t understand how either of them could be hearing what the Itasca and the rest of the Navy and Coast Guard can’t.”

  Mantz raised an eyebrow. “Well, the Electra’s radios sure can’t transmit over any considerable distance, but there’s always ‘skip.’”

  “What’s skip?”

  “A freak but common phenomenon. Sometimes radio reception turns up hundreds, even thousands of miles away.”

  “And that’s what Robert could be hearing?”

  “I think Robert’s hearing pixies.”

  “I’m going to take him up on his invitation.”

  “You gotta be pullin’ my leg! You can’t—”

  “Go home. I’ll catch the train back to L.A. tomorrow.”

  “Heller—”

  “I’m going over to Robert’s to listen to the radio. Who knows? Maybe Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, will win the big game.”

  “I’m an Amos ‘n’ Andy man myself,” Mantz said, pitching his cigarette, sending it sparking to the ground. “And I’m takin’ my plane back to Burbank, before I miss tonight’s installment.”

  The Myers house, though in a heavily residential section on the north edge of Oakland, sat alone on a small hill, a shingled bungalow absurdly dominated by that sixty-foot copper antenna Robert had told us about. That, at least, had been no exaggeration.

  The boy had hitchhiked home, on the understanding that I would drop by after supper, his parents suitably warned. Robert knew I planned to check in at the Ba
y Farm Airport Hotel, which I did, and it was there that he tracked me down.

  “I thought you didn’t have a phone,” I said into the receiver, as I sat on the edge of my bed in the hotel room.

  “We don’t,” the kid’s voice said, “but our neighbor does. My folks want you to come over for supper. My mom’s a really good cook.”

  I accepted, and drove over there in a buggy that Mantz’s friend, airport manager Guy Turner, loaned me, a ’32 Ford station wagon with bay farm airport stenciled on either side. When I parked out front, the hangars of the airport four miles away were visible from the hill the house perched upon.

  Dinner was pleasant enough, in the small dining room of the cramped, modestly furnished home—meat loaf and mashed potatoes and creamed corn, served up by Robert’s mother Anna, an attractive woman in her thirties. His father Bob, Sr., a solid-looking quiet man, a little older than his wife, worked night shift in a canning factory. Robert’s sister, a cute blonde, probably seventeen, and a younger brother, maybe twelve, were fairly talkative, not at all put off by the presence of a stranger.

  I had been introduced as a friend of both Paul Mantz and Amelia Earhart, and as a detective who was interested in checking out the short-wave transmissions Robert had reported. They understood I was not from the police, and I implied I was working for Mantz, whom both parents had met at the airport on an occasion or two.

  Questions about what Chicago was like predominated, and the father—who had said little throughout the meal—finally said, over apple pie, “You think there’s somethin’ to this? What Robert’s been hearing on the radio?”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  “Paper says there’s lots of hoaxers.”

  “I know.”

  “Any fool with a short wave can get on and pretend to be the King of England.”

  “Sure.”

  “Lot of sick-in-the-head people in this world, you ask me.”

  “No argument,” I said.

  “Robert’s always been creative,” his mother said. She had lovely eyes and a nice smile, and Robert and his sister had gotten their blond hair from her, though Anna’s was now a dishwater variety. She had the haggard look of an overworked, underappreciated working-class mother.

  “You mean Bobby’s always been a nut,” his sister said.

  The younger brother laughed, too loud.

  “Shut it,” the father said, and they did.

  The mother smiled and laughed, nervously. “Brothers and sisters,” she said. “You know how it is.”

  After supper, the father took off for work with his lunch pail in hand, and Mrs. Myers did the dishes, declining my offer of help. Her daughter pitched in, while the younger brother hung around the living room with us, as Robert sat me down on the couch across from the fireplace and the square-shouldered Philco console, which was not yet turned on.

  For several mind-numbing hours, Robert showed me the charts and notes and maps he’d created, the supposed physical evidence of the transmissions he’d been hearing. He spread these out on the coffee table before me, and walked me through them, explaining his methods, reading aloud, and I could follow very little of it.

  I had begun to suspect that Robert was, indeed, a “creative” young man, and possibly a seriously disturbed one.

  Around nine o’clock, Mrs. Myers excused herself, having shooed the younger brother off to bed already (after the boy showed me the flying wings badge he’d sent for from a radio show called The Air Adventures of Jimmy Allen). The daughter had gone over to a girlfriend’s house to spend the night, or anyway that’s what she told her mother. Soon the house was dark, and I was on the couch and Robert—ring notebook and pencil at the ready—was kneeling in front of the Philco, as if it were an altar, bathed in its green glow, twisting the knobs, the dials, searching for Amelia.

  And finding static.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  This went on for some time. I sat with a hand covering my face, feeling like a moron, pitying this kid, exhausted, having slept very little over the past thirty-six hours, wondering why the hell I didn’t go back to Chicago where I had paying clients.

  “Oh my goodness, did you hear that?”

  The voice came from the Philco.

  “Fred just said he saw something!”

  “I told you!” Robert said, gleeful. He began writing, recording what he heard.

  I sat forward.

  “Did you hear that, Itasca? Please hurry, please, please hurry!”

  Amy’s voice. It sure as hell sounded like Amy’s voice.

  Another voice, fainter, male, but picked up over her microphone: “It’s them! The Japanese!”

  “They’re going to be saved!” Robert said, turning to me, eyes glittering in the near darkness. He kept writing. My heart was racing.

  The male voice again, faint but shouting: “So big! The guns are so big!”

  I stumbled off the couch, and found myself crouching next to Robert, a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  The voice that seemed to be Amy’s said: “They’re lowering small boats…”

  “Thank you, God,” Robert was saying, as he scribbled cursive notes. “Thank you, God, for letting someone find them.”

  Amy said, rapid-fire words: “I’ll keep talking, Itasca, as long as I can….”

  But static flared up.

  They were gone.

  “Is there anything you can do?” I asked the kid.

  His terrified expression belied his calming words: “They’ll be back…they’ll be back….”

  Finally, I heard the man’s voice again: “They’re here! They’re opening the door!”

  And Amy said, “Did you hear that, Itasca? They’re coming in!”

  Robert covered his mouth with a hand. He had dropped his notebook.

  Sounds of grunting, metallic banging around in the plane, accompanied Amy’s near screams: “Oh my goodness, he’s resisting them! No, Fred—no! Oh, they’re beating him terribly…. Stop! Stop!”

  And that was followed by a sound that could only have been a slap.

  Then dead silence.

  We listened for a long time, but all we heard was that awful deathly stillness, and static. He picked the notebook up and recorded those last terrible sentences. Finally I helped the boy to his feet and we stumbled together over to the couch, flopping there, exhausted.

  What had we heard? Cruel hoax? Or cruel reality?

  “They’re saved, though, right?” he asked. “It’s better than nothing, the Japs saving them. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  Sitting there in the near dark, I nodded and smiled and put my arm around the boy, and pretended not to notice he was weeping.

  He did me the same favor.

  13

  The sky was a glowing pastel blue with bright stars that created shimmering crosses if you looked right at them; the stars were electric, arranged in caricatures of constellations, and the sky merely the sculpted ceiling that rose in a gentle slope from behind the stage to shelter the posh crowd out on the mirror-varnished dance floor. They were gliding around to “A Foggy Day in London Town” as performed by Harl Smith and His Continental Orchestra, at the Club Continental, a shout away from Burbank’s United Airport, formal in its linen-covered tablecloths, fine china, and sterling silverware, intimate in its cozy booths, tables for two, and pastel-tinted wooden paneling.

  In my herringbone blue garbardine, the nicest suit I owned, I was underdressed. A good-looking brunette in furs and gown who might have been Paulette Goddard was dancing with a guy I didn’t recognize but who, like most of the men on the dance floor, wore a tuxedo.

  I found Mantz at one of those cozy booths, seated across from a cute blonde; he was in a white dinner jacket with a black bow tie, and she wore a yellow chiffon evening dress with an admirable décolletage.

  “Sorry to track you down like this,” I said. “But I’m leaving tomorrow morning, on the train.”

  “Glad you did,” h
e said, and nodded toward his companion. “My fiancée, Terry Minor…. This is the guy I was tellin’ you about, Terry—Nate Heller from Chicago.”

  “A real pleasure, Nate,” she said, and beamed, offering her hand for me to shake; she had a firm, friendly grip.

  “Pleasure’s all mine, Terry,” I said.

  She was in her early thirties, not movie star pretty, but it was easy to see what Mantz saw in her, and I’m not just referring to her neckline. Her hair in hundreds of tiny blonde curls, eyes bright and blue, she radiated the same tomboyish appeal as Amy.

  “Sit down,” Mantz said, sliding over in the booth.

  “I hate to think what he’s told you about me,” I said to Terry with a grin.

  “I told her how you saved my behind,” Mantz said, frosted martini in hand, “when Myrtle came gunnin’ for me…. Considering why you were hired that night, that was pretty white of ya.”

  He was fairly well oiled, good-naturedly so.

  Softly, I asked him, “Have you, uh, informed Terry about why I’m in town?”

  “I’ve filled her in,” he said. “We don’t have any secrets.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she said with a little smile, sipping her own frosted drink.

  That made him smile; in addition to being well lubricated, he was lovesick over this cutie.

  “So…you’ve come to your senses, then,” he said. “You’re finally givin’ up on this foolheaded fishing expedition.”

  I gave him half a smile. “Are you forgetting what fool headed me there, in the first place?”

  That made Terry giggle, but her steady gaze let me know she didn’t take this subject lightly.

  I waved a waiter over and ordered a rum and Coke. “Hell no I’m not giving up. I’m heading home and sell my story to the Trib.”