Thirty-four
The Shimmering Girl
ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON, LOUIE STEPPED OUT OF AN army car and stood on the lawn at 2028 Gramercy Avenue, looking at his parents’ house for the first time in more than three years.
“This, this little home,” he said, “was worth all of it.”
As his parents and siblings filed into the house, Louie paused, overcome by a strange uneasiness. He had to push himself to walk up the steps.
The house was done up top to bottom for his homecoming. The surface of the dining room table was a traffic jam of heaping dishes. Three years’ worth of Christmas and birthday presents sat ready for opening. There was a cake with Welcome Home Louie inscribed in the icing. In the garage sat Louie’s beige Plymouth convertible, just as he had left it.
The family ringed around Louie, babbling, eager to look at him and touch him. Anthony and Louise smiled, but there was a cast to their eyes, a tension that had never been there before. What Louie didn’t see was the rash on his mother’s hands. As soon as Louise had learned that her son was coming home, the rash had vanished. Nothing, not even a scar, remained. She would never tell Louie about it.
After dessert, the family sat and talked. They spoke easily, as they always had. No one asked about prison camp. Louie volunteered a little about it, and to everyone’s relief, it seemed to carry little emotion for him. It seemed that he was going to be just fine.
Sylvia had a surprise for Louie. Lynn Moody, the woman who had transcribed Louie’s broadcast, had arranged for a recording of it to be sent to the Zamperinis. The family treasured the record, which had given them proof that he was alive. Knowing nothing of the circumstances in which the broadcast had been made, Sylvia was eager to share it with Louie. As he sat nearby, relaxed and cheerful, she dropped the record on the turntable. The broadcast began to play.
Louie was suddenly screaming. Sylvia turned and found him shaking violently, shouting, “Take it off! Take it off! I can’t stand it!” As Sylvia jumped up, Louie swore at the voice, yelling something about propaganda prisoners. Sylvia snatched up the record, and Louie yelled at her to break it. She smashed it and threw it away.
Louie fell silent, shivering. His family stared at him in horror.
Louie walked upstairs and lay down on his old bed. When he finally drifted off, the Bird followed him into his dreams.
——
The same man was on many other minds that fall. On ships docked at Yokohama, in tents in Manila, and in stateside hospitals, former POWs were telling their stories. Investigators, gathering affidavits on war criminals, sat by as men told of abuses and atrocities that pushed the bounds of believability. As the stories were corroborated again and again, it became clear that these events had been commonplace in camps throughout Japan’s empire. In interview after interview, former POWs mentioned the same name: Mutsuhiro Watanabe. When Wade wrote that name on his statement, his interviewer exclaimed, “Not the same Watanabe! We’ve got enough to hang him six times already.”
“Sit back and take it easy,” Wade replied. “There’s lots more to come.”
On September 11, General MacArthur, now the supreme commander of Allied powers in occupied Japan, ordered the arrest of forty war-crimes suspects. While thousands of men would be sought later, this preliminary list was composed of those accused of the worst crimes, including list-topper Hideki Tojo, mastermind of Pearl Harbor and the man on whose orders POWs had been enslaved and starved, and Masahuru Homma, who was responsible for the Bataan Death March.* On the list with them was Mutsuhiro Watanabe.
——
The Bird had left Naoetsu in a panic, and without a plan. According to Watanabe family accounts, he fled to the village of Kusakabe, where his mother and other relatives were living. About a week and a half after Mutsuhiro’s arrival, his aunt found him out drinking and told him that she’d just heard a radio broadcast naming him as a war-crimes suspect. Mutsuhiro decided to make a run for it. He apparently told his mother that he was leaving to visit a friend’s tomb, then took his little sister aside and told her that he had to escape, but asked her not to tell his mother. As Mutsuhiro was preparing to go, his little sister gave him a deck of playing cards, to be used for fortune-telling.
Wearing his uniform with the insignia torn off, Mutsuhiro packed a trunk with food and clothing and lugged it to a car. He drove to the rail station and walked onto the first train he saw, without checking its destination. He hoped it would take him to someplace distant and obscure, but the train reached its terminus only two towns down the line, at the metropolis of Kofu. He got off, wandered the station, then lay down and slept.
In the morning, he meandered around Kofu. Somewhere in the city, he passed a radio and heard his name listed among those wanted for war crimes. To learn that he was being sought was no surprise, but he was shocked to hear his name listed alongside that of Tojo. If his case was considered comparable to that of Tojo, he thought, arrest would mean execution.
At all costs, he vowed, he wouldn’t let himself fall into the hands of the Americans. He resolved to disappear forever.
——
As Mutsuhiro fled, the hunt for him began. Though they were now operating under the orders of their former enemies, the Japanese police worked swiftly and energetically to round up war-crimes suspects. The Watanabe case was no exception. After finding nothing at Mutsuhiro’s last known address, police appeared at his mother’s door in Kusakabe. Shizuka Watanabe told them that her son had been there, but had left. They had missed him by three days. Shizuka suggested that he might seek refuge with his sister Michiko, who lived in Tokyo. She’d soon be visiting Michiko, she said, and if she found Mutsuhiro there, she’d urge him to turn himself in.
The police seized on the lead. Shizuka gave them an address for Michiko, and they converged on it. Not only was there no Michiko there, there was no house. Every home in the neighborhood had burned long ago, in the firebombing.
Shizuka was now the focus of suspicion. On her regular visits to Tokyo, she always stayed with Michiko, and given that she was scheduled to do so that very week, she surely knew that her daughter’s home had burned down. Shizuka’s misdirection of the detectives may have been an honest mistake—Michiko had moved to a home down the same road, so the only change in the address was the door number—but the police began to suspect that she knew where her son was. On September 24, the police arrested her. If she knew anything, she let nothing slip. She was released.
The police were a long way from giving up. Two detectives began tailing Shizuka and often came into her home to question her. Her monetary transactions were tracked, and her landlord was regularly questioned. Mutsuhiro’s other relatives were investigated, questioned, and sometimes searched. Police intercepted all of the family’s incoming and outgoing mail. They even had a stranger deliver a fake letter, apparently making it appear to be from Mutsuhiro, in hopes of getting the family to betray his whereabouts.
Widening the hunt, the police investigated Mutsuhiro’s former army roommates. The home of his Omori commander was searched and put under surveillance. Mutsuhiro’s photograph was distributed throughout police ranks in the Tokyo metropolitan area and four prefectures. Every police station in Nagano Prefecture, where a Watanabe family mine was located, conducted special searches. Detectives went through Mutsuhiro’s academic records and searched for his teachers and classmates, going back to his childhood. They even got hold of a love letter from a girl who had asked Mutsuhiro if he’d marry her.
They found only two leads. A former soldier told them that Mutsuhiro had spoken of his intention to flee to Fukuoka Prefecture to be a farmer. The soldier thought that Mutsuhiro would hide with a friend named Yo. Police found Yo, questioned and investigated him, and questioned people in his neighborhood. It was a dead lead. Meanwhile, a detective at Mitsushima found a man who’d seen Mutsuhiro in August. The man said that Mutsuhiro had left, claiming to be headed for Tokyo, at the war’s end. But Mutsuhiro had gone to Kusakabe; there was no evidence that he’d gone to Tokyo. He may have seeded his acquaintances with false information to misdirect his pursuers.
There was one other possible clue. The man at Mitsushima mentioned something he had overheard Mutsuhiro say: He would rather kill himself than be captured. It seemed no idle threat; that fall, during a roundup of suspected war criminals, there was a wave of suicides among those sought. Perhaps the Bird was already dead.
While investigators combed Japan for Mutsuhiro, prosecutors were inundated with some 250 POW affidavits concerning his actions in camps. These would be distilled into an 84-count indictment. Even with each count stated with maximum brevity, in single spacing, the indictment stretched over eight feet of paper. It would reflect only a tiny fraction of the crimes that POWs said Watanabe had committed; Louie’s accusations of myriad attacks would make up only one count. Investigators believed that they had far more evidence than they needed to have Watanabe convicted and put to death. But nothing could go forward. The Bird was still at large.
——
As his tormenter disappeared into darkness, Louie was pulled into blinding light. With his Odyssean saga featured in newspapers, magazines, and radio shows, he was a national sensation. Two thousand people wrote him letters. Press photographers tailed him. His attempts to sleep were invariably interrupted by a ringing phone. Strangers teemed around him, pushing for news on what he’d do next. Everyone wanted him to tell his story. The War Department booked him on a speaking tour, and he was inundated with speaking invitations that usually came with an award, making them impossible to decline. In his first weeks home, staying with his parents, he gave ninety-five speeches and made countless radio appearances. When he went to dinner clubs, the managers begged him to regale the guests. For Louie, all of the attention was drenching, a great noise, overpowering.
When Payton Jordan first saw Louie again, he was reassured by his old friend’s familiar impish grin and the springy cadence of his speech. But when Louie spoke of the war, Jordan sensed something rustling just behind his eyes, a clamoring emotion pent up in a small space. He spoke not with anger or anguish but with bewilderment. Sometimes he’d pause and drift off, a troubled expression on his face. “It was like he got hit real hard,” Jordan recalled, “and he was trying to shake it off.”
Louie was struggling more than Jordan or anyone else knew. He was beginning to suffer bouts of suffocating anxiety. Each time he was asked to stand before a crowd and shape words around his private horror, his gut would wring. Every night, in his dreams, an apparition would form in his head and burn there. It was the face of the Bird, screaming, “Next! Next! Next!”
Very early one morning, Louie tiptoed from his room without telling anyone where he was going, slid into his Plymouth, put his foot on the gas, and didn’t stop until he was high in the mountains. He spent the day walking among the trees, thinking of his dead friends and his own survival, drawing from the wilderness the peace that it had given him since his boyhood summer on the Cahuilla reservation. The moment he nosed the car back in the driveway, the whirling began again.
Shortly after returning home, Louie found himself sitting in the audience at a gala held by the Los Angeles Times, which was giving him an award. Louie forked through his dinner, waiting for his name to be announced, apprehensive over having to relive his ordeal before all these people. Drinks were set before him, and he sipped them and felt his nerves unwinding. By the time he rose to speak, he was in a haze, and he rambled on for much too long. When he got back to his seat, he felt relieved. The alcohol had brought him a pleasant numbness.
One day not long after, as he sat at breakfast and fretted over the prospect of another speech, he broke out a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey and poured a shot into his coffee. That gave him a warm feeling, so he had another shot. It couldn’t hurt to have a third. The whiskey floated him through that speech, too, and so began a routine. A flask became his constant companion, making furtive appearances in parking lots and corridors outside speaking halls. When the harsh push of memory ran through Louie, reaching for his flask became as easy as slapping a swatter on a fly.
——
One afternoon in the middle of March 1946, Louie was at a bar at the Deauville Club in Miami Beach, chatting up a stewardess. He had just completed the latest of many surreal liberation experiences, traveling to New York to fire the starting gun for Madison Square Garden’s Zamperini Invitational Mile, the race conceived to honor him when almost everyone thought he was dead. After the race, he’d come to Miami Beach for the two weeks of R&R awarded to returning servicemen. A USC classmate, Harry Read, had accompanied him.
Across the room, a door opened. Louie glanced up. Flitting into the club was an arrestingly beautiful young woman, her hair a tumble of blondness, her body as quick and gracile as a deer’s. Those who knew her spoke of a shimmer about her, an incandescence. Louie drank in one long look and, he later told Sylvia, had the astounding thought that he had to marry this girl.
The next day, Louie and Harry returned to the club, vaulted the fence surrounding its private beach, and spread their towels near a pair of sunbathing women. When one of the women turned, Louie saw that it was the beauty from the bar. He was hesitant to speak to her, afraid that he’d come off as a wolf, but Harry charged right in, regaling the women with Louie’s history. When Harry mentioned the 1938 NCAA Championships, when rival runners had spiked Louie’s legs, the pretty woman stopped him. She said that when she was twelve, her mother had taken her to a theater to see Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, and there she’d watched a newsreel showing the NCAA mile winner and his bandaged legs. The sight had stuck in her mind.
Her name was Cynthia Applewhite, and she was a few weeks past her twentieth birthday. Louie spoke with her for a while, and the two discovered that they had geography in common; as a child, she had lived near Torrance. She seemed to like him, and he thought her bright and lively and so beautiful. When they parted, Louie grumbled something about how she probably wouldn’t want to see him again. “Maybe,” she said playfully, “I want to see you again.”
Louie wasn’t the first guy to be felled by Cynthia. Dense forests of men had gone down at the sight of her. She was dating two guys at once, both named Mac, and each Mac was trying to outlast the other. Since the Macs had Cynthia booked for every evening, Louie asked her for a daytime date, to go fishing. Showing up in blue jeans rolled up to the knee, she took up a fishing pole, smiled gaily for photographs, and braved seasickness with cheer. When Louie asked if he could take her out again, she said yes.
Cynthia Applewhite, on the day after Louie met her. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
They seemed an unlikely pair. Cynthia was wealthy and pedigreed; she’d been educated in private schools, then an elite finishing academy. But for all of her polishing, she was not a buttoned-up girl. A friend would remember her as “different”—passionate and impulsive. At thirteen, when her family lived in New York State, she developed such a fever for Laurence Olivier that, unbeknownst to her parents, she hopped a train to Manhattan to see him in Wuthering Heights. At sixteen, she was drinking gin. She dressed in bohemian clothes, penned novels, painted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world. She was habitually defiant and fearless, and when she felt controlled, as she often did, she could be irresistibly willful. Mostly, she was bored silly by the vanilla sort of boys who trailed her around, and by the stodgy set in Miami Beach.
Along came Louie. Here was someone exotic, someone who answered her yearning for adventure, understood her fiercely independent personality, and was from nowhere near Miami Beach. She was impressed with this older man, introducing him with his full name, as if he were a dignitary. On one of their first dates, he raced her through his hotel, snatching up toilet paper rolls and streaming them down the side of the building, earning the hotel manager’s wrath and Cynthia’s exhilaration. She gave up the Macs, and she and Louie swept around Miami.
At the end of March, just before he was to leave for his speaking tour, Louie led Cynthia onto a beach and confessed that he was in love with her. Cynthia replied that she thought she loved him but wasn’t sure. Louie was undiscouraged. Before their walk was done, he had talked her into marrying him. They had known each other for less than two weeks.
After Louie left, Cynthia broke the news to her parents. The Applewhites were alarmed that their daughter was flinging herself into marriage with a twenty-nine-year-old soldier whom she’d known for just days. Cynthia couldn’t be swayed, so Mrs. Applewhite refused to give her money to fly to California to get married. Cynthia vowed to get the money somehow, either by borrowing it or, in defiance of her mother, getting a job.
Louie wrote to Cynthia almost every day, and every morning at ten-thirty, he sat waiting for the mailman to bring him a pink envelope from Cynthia. Though the letters were adoring on both sides, they reveal how little the two knew about each other. Cynthia had no idea that Louie was losing his emotional equilibrium. From Harry, she knew a little about his time as a POW, but Louie had said almost nothing. In his letters, the closest he came to addressing it was to joke that he hoped that she’d go easy on rice and barley in her cooking. On one of their dates, Louie had gotten very drunk, but he had apologized and curbed himself from then on. Louie’s drinking may have struck Cynthia as harmless, but it was in fact a growing problem. In critical ways, she was engaged to a stranger.
Louie seemed to be aware that in marrying her, he was asking more of her than she knew, and he frequently warned her of how much she was taking on. Still, he wanted a wedding as soon as possible. “We have got to set a date early in June,” he wrote in mid-April, “or I’ll just go plain crazy.” Soon after, he wrote that they had to marry in May. She told him that she’d help him forget his past, and he grasped her promise as a lifeline. “If you love me enough,” he wrote back, “I’ll have to forget it. How much can you love?”
——
As Cynthia worked on her parents, Louie went into wedding overdrive. He tracked down reception sites, invitations, a caterer, and a jeweler. He found the Church of Our Savior, which Cynthia had attended as a child. He bought a used Chevy convertible and overhauled it to impress Cynthia. Trying to make a new man of himself, he quit drinking and smoking. He took terminal leave from the air force, meaning that he formally ended active duty but would still wear his uniform and draw pay until his accumulated leave ran out in August, at which point he’d become a captain in the Air Force Reserve. He began a low-paying job at the Warner Brothers studios, teaching actors how to ride horses.
What he didn’t have was a proper place to live. Because Los Angeles was teeming with repatriated soldiers, inexpensive housing was all but impossible to find, so Louie was still living with his parents. Cynthia wrote of how badly she wanted a home of her own, but Louie, in some distress, wrote back to explain that he didn’t have the money. The best he could do was to move into the house that Harry Read shared with his mother and promise Cynthia that he’d do whatever he could to earn enough money for a home. He bought an air mattress for Cynthia; he’d sleep on the floor. After POW camp, he said, he didn’t mind sleeping on floors.
The Applewhites’ opposition to the marriage, the pressure to make a good life for Cynthia, and his black memories left Louie taut with stress. He had little appetite. He was emerging from years in which the only constants were violence and loss, and his letters show how much he feared something terrible befalling Cynthia. He clung to the thought of her as if, at any moment, she might be torn from his hands.
He was especially worried about her parents’ views of him. He felt certain that they objected to him personally, finding his Italian ethnicity and middle-class origins repellent. He wrote earnest letters to her father, trying to win him over. When he kept seeing the same car parked by the Reads’ house, he became convinced that it was a detective hired by Cynthia’s father. According to Cynthia’s brother, Ric, his parents had no objection to Louie, only to a hasty marriage. As for the spying, Ric said, such an act would be unlike his easygoing father, and would have made no sense, as Mr. Applewhite liked Louie. Right or wrong, Louie’s suspicions illustrated how sensitive he was to the idea that he was unworthy of Cynthia. Perhaps it wasn’t the Applewhites he was trying to convince.
Six months after returning from Japan, Louie began to feel a familiar pull. It had just been announced that the summer Olympic Games, which hadn’t been held since 1936, were set to return. They’d be held in London in July 1948. Louie’s bad leg felt passably sound, and he finally felt healthy. He began testing himself with long hikes, borrowing a dog for company. The leg felt sturdy, the body strong. July of ’48 was more than two years away. Louie began training.
——
In May, Cynthia and her parents made a deal. Cynthia could visit Louie, on the condition that they not marry until the fall, in a ceremony at the Applewhite mansion. Cynthia threw her clothes into a suitcase and went to the airport. As she left, her brother Ric felt a pang of worry. He was afraid that his young sister, dashing off to be with a man she hardly knew, might be making an enormous mistake.
At Burbank Airport on May 17, a plane stopped on the tarmac, the stairway unfolded, and Louie bounded up the steps to embrace Cynthia, then squired her home to meet his family. The Zamperinis fell for her, just as Louie had.
Driving away after the visit, Louie sensed that Cynthia was drawing backward. Maybe during the visit there had been a word or a look that hinted at all she didn’t know, or maybe impulsive decisions made in the fog of lovesickness were becoming real. Whatever it was, Louie thought he was losing her. He lost his temper and abruptly said that maybe they should call off the engagement. Cynthia panicked, and they argued, overwrought. When they calmed down, they made a decision.
On Saturday, May 25, the same day that the papers quoted Louie as saying he’d marry Cynthia at the summer’s end, Louie and Cynthia drove to the Church of Our Savior, where the Zamperinis were waiting. He wore his dress uniform; she wore a simple off-white suit. One of Louie’s college buddies walked Cynthia down the aisle, and Louie and Cynthia said their vows. There had been no time to bake a wedding cake, so Pete’s birthday cake, made by Sylvia the day before, did double duty.
Suspecting that Louie’s friends would pull wedding night pranks, the newlyweds stole off to an obscure hotel, and Cynthia called home. Her announcement prompted an explosion. Cynthia hung on the phone all evening, crying, while her mother, who’d gone to great effort to plan a fall wedding, bawled her out. Louie sat by, listening as his bride was excoriated for marrying him, trying in vain to get her to hang up. Eventually he picked up a bottle of champagne, popped it open, drank it dry, and went to sleep by himself.
* Tojo was found in his home that day, sitting in a chair, blood gushing from a self-inflicted bullet wound in his chest. Whispering “Banzai!” and saying he’d rather die than face trial, Tojo was given a pint of American blood plasma, then taken to a hospital. When he recovered, he was housed at Omori, sleeping in Bob Martindale’s bunk. He complained about lice and bedbugs. He was tried, sentenced to death, and, in 1948, hanged. He and 1,068 other convicted war criminals were later honored in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, memorializing Japanese who died in the service of the emperor.