Assignment Burma Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  Afterward, you saw the squad of Kachin guerilla fighters led by OSS Lieutenant Emmett Claye, the thin bitter kid from the collieries, with murder in his heart and a lust for fighting nobody could match. Claye’s Kids, they called the amiable Kachins who cleaned up the Japanese ambush and turned the tide for your own platoon.

  You shook hands with the man who had handed you back your life and you couldn’t find words to thank him. For two weeks afterward, Claye’s Kids scouted the trail ahead from Shaduzap to Nambum Ga, and the exhausted platoon owed their lives to the strange and taciturn young man with this unnatural lust for blood.

  For two weeks you talked to the kid. He was blond and skinny, all rope-like muscle and yellow from Atabrine, with yellow eyes like his skin, eyes that watched everything and everyone like a wary cat.

  “How long have you been in Burma?” you asked him.

  “Four months.”

  “They dropped you by parachute, just like that?”

  A shrug. “I volunteered for it, Captain.”

  “You get along well with these people,” you said, indicating the pleasant, soft-spoken Kachins who were such deadly guerilla fighters.

  Another shrug. “We’re a lot alike. They’re my friends.”

  And you said, reacting with irritation, “Maybe you’d like to settle down here, after the war is over.”

  There came a slow turn of the head, and the yellow, burning cat eyes looked at you and into you and through you.

  “There are worse places,” Emmett said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Like home,” Emmett said.

  “Really?”

  “I’m never going back there,” Emmett said. “Never.

  “My old man was a miner who was killed in the Pittsville No. 2 shaft explosion. He was no good, anyway. My old lady was a drunk, who lived only for moonshine. I’ve got an uncle out west somewhere who quarreled with my old man and never writes. I got a kid sister, age six, in a convent. That’s all.”

  “And no girl?”

  “Only those in a cathouse behind the Shady Grove Cafe.” Emmett watched the jungle beyond the bashas of Nambum Ga, while he spoke. He never stopped watching. He was in his element. “These people here gave me the first kind word I ever heard. Do you believe that?”

  “It’s hard to believe.”

  “Where are you from, Paul? You talk like a Southerner.”

  “I’m from Dallas. I studied law,” you said.

  “A lawyer?”

  “Maybe I’ll finish and get my degree, if I live.”

  “You’ll live,” Emmett said.

  “I wish I was as sure of that as you sound,” you said.

  “I’ll see to it,” Emmett said.

  He kept his word that night.

  Nobody knew how it happened. Maybe they were betrayed, after all. The Japanese came out of the dark jungle by a path nobody knew about, except perhaps someone in the village. They were inside the perimeter before they started shooting.

  It was a massacre.

  You awoke to the sounds of the shots and screams and the panic thud of running men—and you ran, too, seeing the hopelessness of trying to stem the tide. Your only chance was to get out with as many men as you could save and reorganize when exhaustion made all of you stop running. And you would have run right into the Nambu’s line of fire if the skinny kid who led the Kachin guerillas hadn’t hurled himself at you out of the night like a furious cougar.

  “Go back!” he screamed. “The other way, you fool!”

  “But what—?”

  “Get going!”

  The Nambu ripped through the night and you fell flat and then picked yourself up and ran and ran, and the image of your panicky cowardice haunts you still—

  Somehow, you lived through that night.

  You got the ragged, exhausted, frightened men to rally two miles below the village, and some other platoons came back from the main column and pulled you out of it.

  And you kept asking about the skinny kid.

  “Emmett? Has anybody seen Emmett?”

  And you remembered the bitter fury in his eyes, and you knew he hadn’t run with you, but had stayed there in the trap, firing away at the victorious Japs, buying time for the rest of you to run away and live.

  “Emmett?” you asked. “What happened to the kid?”

  But nobody had an answer.

  And you knew he’d bought your life for the price of his own.

  Paul came swimming up out of his fevered memories like an exhausted swimmer surfacing for the third time. He was still in the cage. The years dropped away and he sat still, hungry, wet and feverish.

  The luxury of Rangoon and the softness of Eva’s body was a lunatic memory that had never existed. The comfort of money in incalculable sums, after a scratch existence as a second-rate attorney in Dallas (he admitted he was not good at law, and only a wild streak of luck had brought him to Eva) were all figments of a fevered imagination about a world that had never existed.

  The only reality was the cage.

  It had gone on forever. It would go on until he died. And yet he thought of Eva—

  He saw her lying naked on the bed in the Rangoon bungalow, and the moonlight put hands on the soft curve of her hip, shadowing the hollows of her body and outlining in pale radiance the full thrust of her arrogant breasts. “Darling, you must do it,” she had said. “Do it for me.”

  “It’s a silly thing,” he had told her. “Eva, it’s dangerous.” He saw the slow smile of scorn on her lips. “Oh, Paul, I’m serious. I want you to go. You were always a coward.” “No. Not always.”

  “When did you change?”

  He spoke in anger. “When I married you, Eva. You made me a coward.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. And don’t touch me again.” “Then cover up, and don’t torment me,” he said.

  “But I want you to look at me. I like it when you look at me when I’m naked.” She laughed. “Are you sorry you married me?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No.”

  “But you’re not sorry about my money, are you, Paul?” He had wanted to hit her. And yet he loved her. He loved her more than he could ever tell her. He thought that even if she didn’t have the money, even if she was the same tramp from the coal mining town when he had found her, he would still love her.

  But she’d never have believed him.

  She would only laugh if he tried to tell her the truth about how he felt toward her.

  He could no longer bear to sit on the edge of the bed while she lay naked beside him. He got up and walked to the rattan chair by the window. She could see him when she turned her blonde head. He lit a cigarette and she told him to light one for her, and he did so, knowing she was forcing him in this way to return to the bed.

  “Emmett was your friend, wasn’t he?” she asked softly. “Don’t you want to find the place he was buried?”

  “I hardly knew your brother. He was crazy, gone jungle mad.”

  “You said he saved your life.”

  “Twice. Yes.”

  “And you don’t want to find out where he’s buried?” He spoke brutally. “Maybe he was never buried. Maybe he was just left to rot under the bamboo. It happened to plenty of others.”

  “But I want to know,” she insisted.

  “Why now? Why at this time, after all these years?” “Because I’m here now,” she said. “And I keep thinking of him. I hardly remember him. I was only a kid when the war came. He was twenty years older than I. Like you, Paul.”

  “I’m not too old for you,” he said sullenly.

  She only smiled and moved her body a little.

  “I’m not,” he said. He touched her. “Am I?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Well, then.”

  “This is where Emmett died, somewhere in this country. He’s the only person I can remember with love from my childhood. I want to know the truth about what happened to him.”

  “
But I’ve told you the truth.”

  “And the more you tell, the more I wonder. The way you described him, he wasn’t the kind to get killed like that. It had to happen differently, and I want to know about it.”

  He returned to the chair by the window. Outside, on the neat, civilized lawns, he could see the kampong bungalows where Eva’s servants lived, making their stay in Rangoon so palatable. She had quickly learned the tastes and habits of the wealthy, he thought bitterly. She had come a long way in a short time, this Cinderella girl. She had learned arrogance and the habit of command as if she had been bom to it—

  It was something out of the book, he’d thought, the way he found her. Even the way old Arthur Claye came into his shabby little office in downtown Dallas, where a man of Claye’s wealth and position had no right to be, ever. But money can do anything, he thought. It wasn’t an accident that old Arthur Claye, with his oil, cattle and real estate, chose him. These things don’t happen by accident to men like Claye.

  Claye had conducted his investigation thoroughly. He was the missing uncle, who had quarreled with his coalminer brother two generations ago. He was the fairytale genie who shows up at the end of the Arabian Nights’ tale and showers gold and goodies on the suffering hero —or heroine, as this case happened to be.

  Claye knew all about the nephew and niece his alienated, coal-mining brother had begotten back in the Pennsylvania slag heaps. He had a dossier on Paul, too. He knew about Paul’s brief friendship with Emmett Claye from survivors of the Marauder expedition whom he had questioned.

  “Perhaps,” the old man had said, “you wonder why I waited so long before thinking of kith and kin, eh?” He sat with massive shoulders hunched over the head of his black and gold cane. He wore a Texas hat and a string tie and could have posed as the usual caricature of the Texas oil and cattle land baron of popular imagery. He had Parkinson’s disease, too, and the deadly, betraying palsy that shook his gnarled hands ever so gently told Paul a thorough story. “It’s a question of growing old, young man. And with every step one takes through life, after a certain time, one also yearns to take a step backward. It pleases me to think that, however late it may be to help Emmett, I may perhaps find Eva and enjoy playing Pygmalion to her Galatea.”

  “May I ask why you chose me?”

  “Because your practice is small, because you are not successful, and because my money can shut your mouth,” the old man said.

  Paul had flushed. “That’s frank enough.”

  “I can afford to be blunt. Am I right?”

  Paul had swallowed pride and manhood in the next moment.

  “Yes. You are right.”

  “Then I can trust to your discretion.”

  “Yes.”

  “Eva works in a roadhouse cafe called the Shady Grove near the town where she was born.”

  Paul said, “I remember it.”

  “You do? How?”

  “Emmett told me about it. He had a girl there.”

  “It’s a house of prostitution. Did Emmett tell you that, too?”

  “Yes,” Paul said.

  “She may be working there.”

  “I see,” Paul said.

  “In an uncouth, poverty-stricken, barren coal town.” Paul was silent.

  “You can imagine the clientele,” the old man said gently. Paul drew a deep breath. “Why do you want to contact this girl, then?”

  “I’m an old man, and I won’t live too long. No amount of money can keep me alive for more than six months. My friends are either purchased or sycophants, or they hate me behind their smiles. Why not leave my money to my niece, even if she is a whore?”

  Paul said, “You’re not serious?”

  “I am. If you don’t believe me, I can leave.”

  The old man had stood up. His palsy shook him and he had to sit down again. He fixed Paul with an angry, bitter stare from pale, tawny eyes that evoked a sudden, stabbing memory of other bitter, yellow eyes, seen in a Burmese jungle almost twenty years ago. There was no doubt about the relationship.

  “All right,” Paul said. “I believe you.”

  “Then you can imagine what I want you to do. Go to her, give her money, dress her up, spend two months making her fit to see me. Then bring her to me. And if I like what I see, she’ll have over three hundred million after taxes to play with for the rest of her life.”

  Paul had hesitated. It was too big to handle, too much for him to grasp all at once. It was enormous. It was something you dream might happen to you, but which never really can be expected. But here it was.

  The old man got up to go.

  “Are you wondering about your fee, Mr. Hartford?” “No, I’m sure we can agree on some arrangement.” “I can suggest something for you, sir.”

  Paul waited.

  The old man began to laugh, looking at him, a kind of senile, cruel, wheezing chuckle that made Paul hate him forever.

  “You might try to marry her,” the old man gasped. “Would you have any scruples, knowing what she is?”

  “No,” Paul said at once.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  And the old man went out.

  "Paul!"

  He had turned away from the window, in the bungalow in Rangoon, and looked back at Eva as she lay on the bed. She had turned on her side, and now the moonlight traced a liquid line of silver along the upthrust curve of her hip and etched playful, tormenting hollows on her smooth stomach and loins.

  “Eva, let me be,” he whispered.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He obediently got up and went to the bed and stood there looking down at her. He knew she liked him to look at her like this. There was a bitter taste in his throat and a trembling, shaking ache in his vitals.

  “Will you go? I have it all arranged. Train tickets and a steamer on the Irrawaddy, and then a plane from BAT to take you into the hills,” she said. “I spoke to a very nice man from the Burmese government, a Colonel Savarati. He says there is no objection to your going up there. In fact, he wants to talk to you about it.”

  Paul said, “Eva, honey, those hills axe out of touch with the government here in Rangoon. You’ve heard the radio news. There’s a lot of trouble brewing in that border country.”

  “Really,” she said, and her voice was petulant. “I was teasing before, about your being afraid, but I’m beginning to think—”

  “I’m not afraid. I just think it’s foolish.”

  “Do it for me,” she said coaxingly.

  “I don’t like to leave you here.”

  “Will you at least speak to Colonel Savarati, darling? He’s coming for breakfast at ten tomorrow morning.”

  She held up her arms to him and moved invitingly on the bed. Her body was dark gold against the immaculately white sheets. He sat down and her arms came around him and then her hands slid down his chest and sought him and she made a soft giggling sound in her throat.

  “Oh, Paul—”

  “I can’t help it. That’s what you always do to me.”

  “You’ve really been very kind to me, Paul.”

  “I try to be.”

  “And you never resent what I used to be.”

  “I don’t think about it. You’re not the same person any more.”

  “Oh yes I am. You just don’t want to believe it.”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” he said.

  “Will you see Colonel Savarati in the morning? And go find out where Emmett is buried?”

  “All right.” And he said, “Yes,” surrendering.

  Her hands became knowing and wise, searching and rousing him to a fever that brought him to her in the bed in an impassioned embrace. Her body was like the moonlight that poured down from the Rangoon skies, all gold and silver and liquid magic—

  “Paul?”

  The voice was tentative. He thought it was Eva again, and a wild panic came to him, a complete disorientation in space and time, because when he opened his eyes and looked around, he saw he wa
s still in the cage and everything in his mind had been a dream and a memory of something that might never have been.

  “Paul?”

  He looked around wildly. Through the bars of the cage he saw the shining green of the banyan leaves and the tall shoots of the bamboo interlacing overhead. Small wonder the eagles had died here, he thought, one fragment of his mind suddenly yearning for a glimpse of the open blue sky.

  “Look at me, Mr. Hartford.”

  He turned his head so suddenly it made him dizzy. The girl sat in the banyan tree near the gate of the cage. He stared at her without comprehension. Tagashi had sat there, and occasionally a sullen-eyed man from the village who brought him his regular ration of food and water.

  This time it was a Kachin girl.

  She wore a batik cloth folded and draped around her, but her legs were bare. She might be a wood nymph suddenly added to all the other hallucinations he had suffered.

  “Hello,” he said, and his voice sounded insane.

  “Can you understand me?” she asked in careful English.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I am so sorry for you. I’ve come to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Can’t you understand? I speak English very well.”

  “Oh, sure. Sure. How can you help?”

  She did not reply, but studied him while she apparently considered her decision. She kept one foot on the rung of the bamboo ladder by which she had climbed to her perch equal in height to the cage above the jungle floor. There was something about the way she sat there that made him speak with controlled calm.

  “Please. Please don’t be afraid of me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You look as if you are.”

  “No. But something terrible has happened.”

  “Did I hear gun fire last night?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “In your town?”

  “Yes. I am going to let you go,” she said abruptly.

  But she did not move, only stared at him.

  “Where is Tagashi?” he asked.

  “Has he been coming to see you?”

  “He’s helped to feed me.”

  “I do not know where Tagashi is,” she said.