Saxon liked that about the Thais. They always knew the right question to ask.
“Yadanar Khin is U Htun’s son. U Htun has the rank of general and runs the health ministry. The son sits on a couple of boards of directors. Twenty-seven years old, educated in England, likes imported sports cars and French wine, plays keyboard in a local band, beds beautiful women by the water buffalo wagonload.”
“He goes for the low-end market?” asked Calvino.
“Low-end, high-end… An equal opportunity playboy in a buyer’s market,” said Saxon, smiling.
He flipped through his notebook and ran a finger down the page.
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up at the hotel, Calvino.”
“Where are we going?”
“On the trail of the Black Cat and your missing man. The Rangoon Running Club has a weekly run, 10K. I’ll introduce you to some people who might have some information. You can run and talk, right?”
Calvino and Colonel Pratt exchanged a look.
“Ten kilometers?” asked Calvino.
“Don’t think you can do it?”
“Depends who I’m chasing or who’s chasing me.”
Saxon smiled. “We can deal with that tomorrow. Swamp Bitch has it all set up.”
The Colonel raised an eyebrow.
“It’s her running club handle,” Saxon explained. “Mine is Pistol Penis. It’s a tradition.”
A wiry grin crossed Saxon’s face.
“Swamp Bitch is a translator. Be nice to her, Vinny. She might be able to find a way for you to attend the trial of Mya Kyaw Thein’s brother, Wai Wan.”
Saxon registered the slight wince on Calvino’s face. He wrote the name down on one of the back pages of his notebook, tore the page out and gave it to Calvino.
Calvino studied the name. He showed it to Colonel Pratt. Under Wai Wan’s name Saxon had written, “Yadanar Khin, son of U Htun,” an address and a phone number.
“And does Swamp Bitch have another name?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“Ohn Myint.”
“You’ll get used to the names,” said Saxon. “The weird thing about Burmese names is how confusing they are for outsiders. The Burmese don’t have family names like in the West. It makes it almost impossible to tell who’s related to who. It’s like a secret naming society. If you’re not a member, you can’t follow the membership roster. It confused the hell out of the British when they ran the place. They were always hanging the wrong person. But it’s not that difficult to get a feel for. After a few years here, if you pay attention, the names start to sound normal.”
“Anything I should know about Yadanar Khin? ”
“His mother is Daw Kyaw. If she had a running club name, it would be Fire Dragon Bitch. She is said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of poisons. The rumor is that she used it to clear away her husband’s enemies. I let the word drift Yadanar’s way that Colonel Pratt is a famous saxophone player and if invited might jam with his band.”
The Colonel nodded. “That explains the email I received this morning.”
It was the first time Calvino had heard of the email.
“Did he invite you to play with his band?”
“He asked if I’d brought my saxophone. I told him that I had.”
Pratt always traveled with his saxophone.
It seemed that even before lunch had arrived, Saxon had squared everything, including getting him a pass to the Black Cat’s brother’s trial.
“I can’t promise a Get out of Jail Free card,” said Saxon. “I’m afraid that’s a tough one to deliver.”
The table fell into silence. Saxon was thinking of his brother in Toronto. Colonel Pratt was wondering whether the invitation to play had really come from Saxon’s efforts or another source. Calvino, on the other hand, sat staring at his hands as he thought about running beside Swamp Bitch and tried to guess which part of his body would start screaming first on the 10K run.
A few minutes later Saxon had finished his pile of boiled shrimp and pushed back his plate.
“When I first arrived in Rangoon, an editor at the newspaper gave me a small book of proverbs. He marked one that he said I should pay particular attention to. Calvino, before you go to the courthouse, you might have a look at some old Burmese proverbs. Truth is often found in simple stories.”
Reaching into his backpack, he pulled out the book and slid it across the table to Calvino.
“The book has sentimental value. Before you return to Bangkok, I’d like you to return it. I marked the one I like the best. Good luck finding Rob. Find Mya Kyaw Thein, and that’ll be where you’ll find him.”
As Calvino examined the book, Saxon turned to the Colonel.
“Colonel Pratt, I never did get a chance to thank you properly for what you did for my brother. You need anything while you’re in Rangoon, let me know.”
“Do you know the 50th Street Bar?” asked Colonel Pratt. “I’ll be sitting in with Yadanar Khin’s band. I hope you’ll come along.”
A smile started on the right side of Saxon’s face and rippled like a racing river until his whole face lit up.
“I play pool at the 50th Street Bar. I’ve heard Yadanar Khin’s band a couple of times. They’re not too bad. But Yadanar Khin takes after his dragon lady mother, and that’s not a particularly good genetic history to follow.”
“What’s the name of the band?” asked Calvino.
For some reason the Colonel hadn’t asked, or if he knew, he hadn’t mentioned it.
“Night Raiders.”
Sitting on the balcony of his hotel room, Calvino opened the book Jack Saxon had given him at lunch and took out the bookmark. The secondhand book, old and discolored with a fragile spine, opened to the story that Saxon apparently wanted him to read. Calvino began reading as he eased himself into the chair. The plan had been to meet Pratt in the lobby in half an hour.
It was a Burmese proverb about a weary traveler who stops along the road to eat his lunch. The traveler is a poor man, and his meal is a meager helping of rice and vegetables. Nearby a food vendor is selling fried fish and fish cakes.
Calvino noticed that the food in the proverb was the same that Saxon had ordered.
The stall owner watches the traveler eating as she fries fish over a small grill. The smell of the fish drifts toward the traveler, who squats alone on the side of the road, lost in his own thoughts.
As the traveler finishes his meal and is about to leave, the woman from the food stall looks up from her fish frying and shouts at him, stopping him in his tracks.
“You owe me a silver quarter for the price of one fried fish.”
“But madam, I did not eat one of your fried fish.”
“You are a cheater,” she replies. “A person who takes without paying for what he takes.”
“But, madam, I’ve taken nothing from you. I have not come within five feet of your stall.”
“Ha! And you’re a liar to boot. I have many witnesses who will testify that they saw you enjoying the smell of my fried fish as you ate your meal. You would not have been able to eat that disgusting mush of rice and vegetables without taking in the sweet aroma of my fish frying. So pay me the silver quarter and don’t make any more trouble for yourself.”
The confrontation soon draws a crowd. The fish seller plays to the onlookers, who have to agree that indeed the traveler availed himself of the smell of the fish frying. Even the traveler can’t deny that he smelled it as he ate. But he insists that he has no duty to pay for that privilege.
The matter is taken to a royal judge, who hears the evidence. The judge deliberates on the matter in a court-house nestled under the shade of a coconut tree, with chickens pecking for grain along the road nearby. Several minutes pass before he announces his verdict to the parties and the crowd who have accompanied them to the court.
The judge finds that the basic facts aren’t in dispute. The traveler’s enjoyment of his meal was indeed enhanced by the pleasant smell of the fish frying. He receiv
ed a benefit. But what is the value of that benefit? The fish seller says the price for a plate of fish is a silver quarter. The judge orders the parties to leave the courthouse and to walk out into the sun. He tells the traveler to hold out a silver quarter in the sunlight so that the fish vendor can grasp its shadow. The judge reasons that if a plate of fish costs one silver quarter, then the exchange value for the smell of the fish must be the shadow of a quarter.
Calvino set the book down and stretched back in his chair. Saxon was sending him a message. First through the food he ordered, then through the story of the peasant who gets into trouble over fried fish he hasn’t ordered or eaten. Like open secrets in a secretive society, the message was another paradox.
He looked out at the unbroken forest of trees between his hotel and the Shwedagon Pagoda, the gold-domed top catching the late afternoon sun, casting shadows over the treetops in the distance. Burma was a place of shadows, where hungry men squatted along the road, smelling the fish, while the cooks patiently waited to make their play.
The Black Cat’s brother might have been that man on the roadside, caught smelling the cooking fish. His sister was politically active. He figured the Black Cat thought her brother’s case had the smell of fish.
She had impressed Gung, the owner of Le Chat Noir, with her views about the Lesson. Maybe she’d been talking about Burmese proverbs, like the one about the poor man and the fish vendor, all along.
SIX
The Rangoon Running Club
A TAXI BEARING Calvino, Colonel Pratt and Jack Saxon pulled to a stop in front of the Traveler’s Hotel. They got out and walked toward a couple of dozen people—foreigners and Burmese—dressed in running shorts and shoes, some doing stretching exercises, others clumped in small groups, leaning against SUVs, gossiping and laughing.
Half of the runners looked like old hands in their heavily washed official Rangoon Running Club T-shirts. More than half of them were women. Most of the crowd looked like fit thirties or early forties fighting a rearguard battle against their fifties, clawing back their youth. Saxon didn’t exactly fit in. He was older than the others, and he dressed for the occasion with a hill tribe band around his forehead, an earring in his right ear and a silver band around his left wrist, each little pinky nail painted red and big toenails painted green. Some would say he’d gone native. Others thought Saxon was playing out his rebellion against the conformity of a London, Ontario upbringing. Everyone agreed that no one had ever seen hill tribe members who dressed like Jack Saxon. He had his own style, his Pistol Penis identity gear.
Calvino wondered which one was Ohn Myint.
“You never told me how the Colonel and you got Paul out of that mess,” Saxon said to Calvino. “He must have some pull inside the department with the big guys. Or the cops are more honest than their reputation.”
“Multiple interpretations are what reporters do,” said Calvino.
“Funny about that. Paul told me the Colonel paid forty thousand baht, saying it came from me,” said Saxon, looking at both Pratt and Calvino.
“Why would Pratt do that?” asked Calvino with his best poker face, covering a losing hand.
Saxon rolled his eyes. “It’s a question mark. A puzzle, a mystery.”
“One of those unsolved mysteries from the days when most mysteries were never solved,” said Colonel Pratt.
“I remember those days,” said Saxon. “I miss those days. Anyway, I’d like to pay back the forty thousand.”
“Tell your brother not to believe everything he hears,” said Colonel Pratt.
Saxon slowly rolled his jaw back and forth, front teeth biting his bottom lip.
“I’d offer the same advice here.”
Calvino wore a pair of baggy blue shorts and a T-shirt that said “New York Mets.” Saxon led the way through the crowd of runners. A couple of buzz-shaved black youths, no more than twenty years old, were doing warm-up. They were the only ones warming up, and the only ones who looked like they didn’t need to. If they’d had “US Embassy Marines” tattooed on those shaved heads, they couldn’t have been any easier to spot. The two men shared that combat-trained stare—wary, catlike watchfulness that was really a studied, fully situational evaluation of the opponent’s capability—all of it concentrated into a sniper’s squinted eye as they surveyed the other runners.
“Those are the winners,” said Saxon. “They win today, they’re barred from winning for a month. It’s hard enough to run 10K with the slight hope you might win, but with these two Americans running, no one else has a chance.”
Saxon walked up to one them.
“That’s right, isn’t it, Randy? You guys never let us win.”
“Hey, man, stop bitching. You got it in you. Don’t give up on yourself,” said the young marine he’d called Randy.
“Yeah, right. This is my friend Vincent. Another Yank. And Pratt, who’s Thai.”
“Where in the States are you from, man?” the other man asked Calvino, smiling and then sticking out his hand. “Roosevelt’s my name.”
“Roosevelt, I’m from Brooklyn. Like Henry Miller.”
“Henry who?” asked Randy.
“Fool,” said Roosevelt, nudging Randy in the ribcage, “the guy who played ball for the Louisville Cardinals. You know, the guy that scored the big overtime touchdown against Florida State in 2002. I was just a kid, but I remember that game.”
“Henry Miller… Yeah, the guy who made the big upset. Whatever happened to him?”
“Big upset win and then forgotten. Time does that. Doesn’t seem fair,” said Calvino. “My friend is a saxophone player.”
Pratt smiled and nodded. “I do my best.”
The two young men looked Pratt up and down.
“Man, you don’t look nothing like a saxophone player,” said Randy.
“He plays just like Miles Davis,” said Calvino, winking.
“Man, you gotta be joking. Come on, Roosevelt, we ain’t finished warming up.”
Saxon blocked Roosevelt’s path.
“Either of you superstar athletes seen Ohn Myint?”
“Swamp Bitch?” said Roosevelt.
They both smiled at her running club name.
“She’s the heart and soul of the club, why we keep on coming back. Ain’t that right, Randy?”
“For Swamp Bitch. No one gonna forget her like they forgot Henry Miller,” said Randy. “She looks the part.”
“Man, she’ll take you apart is what you mean,” said Roosevelt.
Randy stepped out into the road and pointed fifty meters ahead. A Burmese woman with glasses and flat shoulder-length black hair tied with a blue band into a ponytail, dressed in shorts and white running shoes, stood with her hands on her hips, talking to three men also dressed in running gear. Ohn Myint held court, arms folded, a bottle of water tucked against her chest. Saxon waved at her, and when she didn’t respond, he called her name.
“Ohn Myint,” he said as they approached, “this is my friend Vincent I told you about.”
“What did you tell her?” asked Calvino out of the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t worry. Not the truth. I wouldn’t want Swamp Pussy to get scared and take off before the race started.”
“And this is Vincent’s friend, Pratt, a jazz musician from Bangkok.”
She offered her hand to Pratt, who shook it.
“I love jazz,” she said.
The runners standing in a circle around her turned out to be an oil and gas industry expat, an official from the British embassy and a Burmese businessman whom everyone respected and loved—he’d arranged for the beer truck that would be waiting to sell beer at the end of the 10K run. They looked like men who wore suits and ties all week long but on the weekend changed into schoolboy gym clothes that revealed that they no longer had schoolboy bodies.
One person in the group would take a drink from a plastic bottle of water and hand it to the runner next to him. Hands on hips, squinting at the sun, they shared not just a collective
bottle but a shared belief that running once a week would forestall old age. Giving themselves rude schoolboy names, they weren’t running to stay fit; they were running against time itself, in a run no one ever won.
Sometimes on a warm, sunny morning like this, a man in such a running group would just keep on running, never looking behind him, and sail toward the horizon, not really knowing why but knowing he wasn’t ever going back. Calvino had found one or two missing persons who fit that profile.
He looked at the sky and the bamboo along the road. Birds were singing in the trees, fish swimming in the ponds. The shadow of the thick bamboo sheltered them with a half coin’s worth of intoxicatingly fresh air. A couple of the runners stretched their legs. Several young women—schoolteachers, NGOs and an embassy official—wore fresh-pressed shorts and tops and new running shoes. They huddled beside a Land Rover, arms crossed, and talked among themselves.
“Perfect weather,” said Saxon.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Calvino.
“You need a name. It’s a tradition.”
Saxon eyed him for a moment.
“‘Kiss My Trash’ comes to mind.”
Colonel Pratt laughed as Calvino flinched.
“Do I have a choice?”
Saxon shook his head. “‘Crack Shot’ for your colonel.”
“Why does Pratt get a normal-sounding name?”
“You get the running name God intended for you. I am his agent, just passing along your karma. That’s why.”
With Calvino and Colonel Pratt initiated into the club, Saxon had burnished his reputation as a man who delivered unexpected visitors. Ohn Myint, as the unofficial head of the club, accepted them as an offering to her authority. Calvino guessed the two went some time back. They had the comfort level, the easy banter and the intimacy even around others that made it likely they got more out of the club than running. Saxon was on the receiving end of Ohn Myint’s gossip feed, which monitored who was in and who was out in Burmese society, whose wife had been seen with another general’s wife, who had a new deal and where money had gone missing—eddies and flows in the never-ending stream of power.
Missing In Rangoon Page 6
