“I’m not sure,” Delaney said. “The two words are quite similar in some ways, in English.”
“I thought martyr meant a dead person,” Mai said.
“I thought so too,” Delaney said. “The word saint also.”
“Nathan always said Suu Kyi was a caged bird. He said she shouldn’t be in a cage like that, in Rangoon. He seemed angry about that sometimes.”
“Angry.”
“Yes. At the generals, for keeping her in her house like that, for years.”
Mai went back into the other room and sat down on a rattan chair. Her hands shook and she tried very hard not to cry again. She fought back her grief and her fear, and also her shame at what Delaney had had to learn. She tried hard to believe that this nice Canadian man, this friend of Nathan’s, would help end this nightmare and allow her to resume her little life again. She tried hard to believe that because she believed, with all her heart, in men.
She had believed in Nathan when he picked her out, for reasons she still could not quite understand, to be his woman. She was not a bar girl, not as pretty as some Thai girls, not as experienced in the ways of pleasure that brought so many Western men to Bangkok, to Thailand, to Southeast Asia. But he had picked her and, to her own very great surprise and delight, he had been kind and loyal and caring to her now for years. She allowed herself to believe he loved her.
He was not like most of the other Western men in Bangkok, who took young girls when they felt the urge and kept them like exotic sexual pets for a time and then threw them aside. She had been with some of those men, had known their aggressive desires, had seen them use their bodies against Thai women like weapons.
Nathan was not like that. He was a different man. He liked women—he told her that often—he liked their presence around him. He liked her presence around him, he liked her. He did not say he loved her, but Mai did not need that very much, she did not need to hear that. She just wanted to be with him, to feel his presence in their space, to yield to his intense, but never aggressive, desires.
And now he was gone. Now she knew she was not his only lady—that in his mind there was another object of his intense desire. Mai did not understand that desire, where such obessional desire came from and where it was meant to lead. It was beyond her comprehension, beyond all comprehension.
Mai sat in her rattan chair in the ordered dimness of her man’s space, the space they had shared for years, and she fought back her grief and fear and shame. The air was hot and still. She felt a sudden intense desire herself, her skin tingled with desire. She felt a sudden need for sex with her man, for the sort of sex that could leave no doubt, no possibility of doubt, about anything whatsoever.
Delaney had put away the pornography and resumed his searches. He wanted to know more about Kellner’s apparent obsession with Aung San Suu Kyi. He wanted to know much more about this Australian business deal in Burma. He wanted to know if somehow, according to some convoluted logic, the two issues could somehow be connected, if only in the mind of a man like Kellner, a mind clearly not always functioning on a rational level. Delaney himself, however, knew what it was like to be guilty of obsession with a woman. He considered that for a while as he sat quietly looking at the pictures of Suu Kyi.
Delaney found Kellner’s 2001 agenda book, such as it was. There were various entries for interviews, meetings, badminton games. One page per day. But surely too few entries on any given day for a busy reporter like Kellner. He probably failed to enter much of what he was doing on any particular day or week. Or perhaps preferred not to record certain things. But certain recurring entries caught Delaney’s eye. Periodically, a short stretch of two days, three days, would be blocked out with a line running from top to bottom of the pages. These entries said simply: “House.” Earlier in the year, some entries said “House preps.”
Delaney rummaged around on shelves and found other agenda books going back a few years. In late 2000, there were more “House” and “House preps” entries. In the 2001 book, one recent entry, from March said: “Stefan et al at the house. With gear.”
It was possible Kellner referred to his apartment as the house, but Delaney thought this unlikely. He wondered what “gear” could mean. Drug slang, in some countries, but usually referring to hard drugs and the related paraphernalia. He went outside with the books and showed them to Mai.
“What do you make of these?” Delaney said, showing her the house references.
“What does it mean?” she said.
“I don’t know. Does he mean this house? This apartment?”
Mai looked at some recent dates.
“Why would Nathan write down that he was at this house? He was here a lot. He doesn’t need to write that down. It is not a house anyway.”
“Did you have another house somewhere? A house at the beach?”
“No, Frank,” Mai said, looking up at him. “No other house.”
That you know of, Delaney thought. He sensed Mai was now thinking the same thing.
“Do you think Nathan had another house, Frank?” she asked quietly.
“I can’t say, not from this. Maybe it was another guy’s house. Where he went for visits. Did he ever mention something like that?”
“We never went to visit people’s places, hardly ever,” Mai said. “In Bangkok maybe, but not very much. And they were apartments. Not houses.”
“Maybe he went alone somewhere,” Delaney said.
“Yes. Maybe alone,” she said.
“Do you know someone named Stefan?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Yes. I never heard a name like that.” Delaney realized he was straying into territory where Mai had never been, and where he should probably not attempt to bring her. He went back into the study and began making notes of his own, on one of Kellner’s big pads. Mai said she would make them a late lunch.
He heard her moving around quietly in the kitchen, heard the classic Asian hiss and sizzle and scrape of food and oil and metal spatula in a wok. Suddenly he felt the urge to just spend the rest of the day at ease. To rest on Kellner’s bed, to enjoy the safe domesticity of a quiet tidy home where he could share hot lunches with a beautiful young woman, or share quiet nights on a balcony where breezes always blew. Somewhere he belonged, where he truly wanted to be.
They ate together at a little table on the balcony. Delaney drank some beer. Mai mostly sat watching him eat and drink, saying almost nothing, taking little food for herself.
“Nathan would speak about you sometimes. And about Montreal,” she said finally. “What would he say?”
“He said you were good at being a reporter.”
“That was nice of him,” Delaney said. They both smiled.
“He read your newspaper on the Internet. He liked to know about Montreal, even though he lived here.”
“We Montrealers can never really leave our city,” Delaney said. “Not in our minds, in any case.” “Nathan was like that too,” she said.
She sat looking dreamily at him for a while, probably thinking of her lost man. Then she stood up.
“Let me get something,” she said.
She moved off into the house and into Kellner’s room. She was gone for a few minutes. Then she came back carrying a large brown envelope, apparently bulging with papers.
“Letters,” she said, putting the envelope down on the table.
“Whose letters.”
“Nathan’s,” she said. “Love letters. In a way.”
“You want me to look at these?” Delaney said.
“They weren’t for me,” she said. She sat down and waited. Delaney looked at her for a long time and then picked up the package, pulling out a few letters in slim white envelopes. On each was written the words: “Suu Kyi.” No address, no stamps. “You can read them,” Mai said.
Delaney
opened one. A single page, apparently like all the others. It began: My beautiful, beautiful lady . . .
He looked at Mai.
“My beautiful, beautiful lady. Most of them start like that. When I first found them, I thought they were for me.”
Delaney read on: How can I tell you what I feel when I see your face? How can I tell you? One day I will tell you. And one day the world will not only have to see your face through the bars of a cage. This I promise you, my lady . . .
Delaney would have dismissed the words as the ramblings of a lovesick adolescent or a very bad poet. Except that he knew they had been written by Nathan Kellner, a man nearing 50 and one with years of experience of the real, hard world.
Delaney skimmed a few other letters, satisfied himself that they were all approximately the same. None carried addresses or stamps. He put them back in the bigger envelope, closed it, pushed it toward Mai.
“Nonsense,” he said.
“For the Burmese lady,” Mai said.
“Yes. I would say so,” Delaney said. “Bizarre. But never mailed anywhere. Not intended for mailing.”
He could imagine Kellner writing any number of things at his desk in the tropical night, hatching wild plots or recording secret activities, illicit or otherwise. But love letters to Aung San Suu Kyi? This did not seem possible. Only drugs, or a truly profound obsession, could explain it. Mai looked very sad indeed.
Later, they smoked some mild marijuana in the dying light of the day. Delaney had not smoked for years. The drug put him instantly in a quiet, gentle other space. Mai and he sat in the cool breeze on the apartment balcony, saying nothing, thinking nothing.
Much later, she undressed him in the guest bedroom. Gentle assistance with his clothes. He floated on a warm sea of tropical air and the marijuana trance. Mai dropped her sarong to the floor. They climbed into the cool sheets of the guest bed, together. She held him from behind, knees bent up behind his knees, breasts against his back. Her skin was fantastically cool and smooth. Every pore of his own skin was burning, alive to her touch. The merest touch of her hair was electric. He did not remember if they made love, he would probably never know.
He dreamed and dreamed:
Kate rides toward him on a perfect chestnut horse. She is naked. Her right hand is raised in a small sign of greeting, of expectation. Natalia walks elegantly behind Kate in the robes of the dead, a little to the left of the horse. Natalia’s right hand is raised in a small sign of benediction. There is an emblem of a caged bird on the breast of her garment. Delaney watches in the dream as the two women approach, approach, approach; but they never get any nearer. Somewhere behind them or above them or off to the side is danger or a darkness, but still very far away. A danger that is as yet impossible to discern clearly or to combat.
PART 4
Bangkok and Mae Sot
Chapter 7
Just before the attack came, Delaney sensed something was wrong. He was not able to articulate quite what afterward, but he knew in his gut that if he had just been a little more watchful, a little more attentive, he might have been able to avoid it.
Ben was waiting for him outside Kellner’s apartment building. Delaney had gone to see Mai another time, after his meeting—a daylight, sober one this time—with Cohen at a place called Chivas Bar. Ben pulled his car out from a shady spot into the late-afternoon Bangkok sun. Delaney was in the back as usual. Immediately, a black Lexus with heavily tinted windows pulled out of an entrance a short way up the soi and blocked their path.
Ben had been in the business a long time and had been in bad spots before. He had no formal training that Delaney knew of in defensive-driving techniques, but he knew exactly what to do and he did it fast. When a stocky Asian man in a dark blue tracksuit got out of the back of the Lexus and took aim with a pistol, Ben threw his Toyota into reverse and stomped on the accelerator. The aging station wagon rocketed backward amidst a screech of tires and an acrid haze of rubber smoke.
“Down, Khun Frank, down, down, down,” Ben screamed as he threw his arm over the passenger seat and peered wild-eyed backward to guide the slipsliding car out of danger. Delaney plunged sideways onto the rear seat.
The first shot punctured the windshield just below the rearview mirror. Delaney didn’t see the hole in the glass, but he saw Ben hunch even lower, as low as he could into the back of the driver’s seat, his eyes squinting tight as he anticipated the next shot. Two more rounds came in quick succession, this time taking the windshield glass out completely. Shards exploded over Ben’s shoulders and cascaded into the rear over Delaney.
Ben yanked the steering wheel left, a true expert, and the car rocked and heaved backward into the short driveway and then the walled dirt courtyard of Kellner’s building, all the while screeching and heaving up smoke and dust and stones. It came up against something hard and stalled dead.
“Out, out, out, out,” Ben shouted. They both flung open the doors on the driver’s side and rolled into the dirt. The watchman’s wooden bed was now a pile of timber under the Toyota’s rear wheels. The watchman himself was nowhere to be seen. Delaney and Ben picked themselves up and raced into the open air corridor on the ground floor.
“Have you got a gun, Ben?” Delaney shouted.
“No, no. Never,” Ben shouted back.
“Run,” Delaney said.
Some instinct made Delaney turn right instead of left, away from Kellner’s corridor and the apartment where Mai would be watching TV as she was when he left her a few moments earlier. He prayed she would not have heard the gunfire and come out to see what was happening. He ran with Ben to the end of the right-hand corridor and began climbing stairs to upper floors. Each dim corridor ended with a windowless archway that kept the building breezy. On the third floor they could see over the wall and trees out onto the long soi where the Lexus had been waiting. It was gone.
They stopped, panting heavily, and looked at each other for a moment. “Up?” Ben said.
“They may be in the courtyard. He may have parked it there,” Delaney said. They listened intently, trying to control their breathing so they could hear.
They could hear no steps, no voices, no car. “Gone,” Ben said, slipping down against the end wall of the corridor, knees against his chest.
“Maybe,” Delaney said, still listening, still ready for flight. “Don’t sit, Ben. Be ready.”
“Ready. Ready,” Ben said. He looked all in. His flowered shirt was wet with sweat. Delaney remembered that he must be almost sixty.
Delaney put his head cautiously out of the archway and looked far up the soi to where it met Sathon Road. He thought he saw a black car turning right, joining the river of traffic on the huge main boulevard, but he couldn’t be sure. There were no other cars in the soi. Far up, a lone food vendor pushed a wooden cart in the direction away from Kellner’s building. Delaney wanted to ask him what he had seen. But not yet.
He slumped down beside Ben below the archway and rested his back against the wall, knees up.
“I think they’re gone,” he said.
“Me too,” Ben said.
“You all right?” Delaney said.
“Tired, Frank. Scared.”
“Me too.”
“Tough guys,” Ben said.
“Yeah.”
“My car. Wrecked now.”
“We’ll get it fixed,” Delaney said.
Ben pulled a small piece of windshield glass out of the front pocket of his shirt and sat staring at it. He looked up at Delaney, as if waiting for some kind of cue.
“Tough guys,” Delaney said.
“Yes,” Ben said.
They waited for a long time, sitting in the dim coolness of the corridor. A light breeze wafted in through the archway. Delaney thought for a moment that Ben was going to fall asleep. Neither of them spoke for some time.
“I think we can go down now,�
�� Delaney said eventually.
“OK, Frank,” Ben said.
They headed very cautiously down the stairs, stopping and listening often. They heard two low voices, speaking Thai. When they peered around a wall into the brightness of the courtyard, they say the watchman and a gardener standing together near the car, both looking extremely grave.They turned when Delaney and Ben emerged from the shadows.
The watchman immediately launched a torrent of Thai, talking loudly to Ben and waving his arms and pointing at the car, the apartment, Delaney, everywhere. Ben poured back his own torrent of Thai. Delaney could only stand and let it flow. “What did he see?” Delaney said eventually.
“Nothing, he says.”
“Where was he when we rolled in here?”
“At the other side. Helping the gardener, he says.”
“He didn’t see anything? He didn’t hear anything?” Delaney knew the watchman spoke English, but today he seemed to be able to speak only Thai. “Did you hear anything?” he asked.
The watchman looked at him angrily and turned to Ben to reply in Thai.
“Nothing, he says,” Ben told Delaney. “Nothing.”
“Why won’t he speak to me?”
“He’s angry. Scared.”
“We’ll pay for his damn bed,” Delaney said. He knew he was being understood. Even the gardener seemed to understand.
“He isn’t angry about the bed, Frank. He says he doesn’t want you around here anymore. He says things are better without farangs around. Better even that Khun Nathan is gone now.”
“What does he mean by that? What does he mean about Kellner?” Delaney said. He turned to the watchman, addressed him directly. “What do you mean by that?”
“I call police,” the watchman said.
“And what will they do?” Delaney said.
“Take you away,” the watchman said. “Back to Canada.”
“And who will find Khun Nathan?”
“No one. He is gone,” the watchman said.
The Burma Effect Page 11
