She asked better questions that the MI agent, thought Calvino.
“Finding Osborne will take time and legwork. I can find him. The problem is convincing him to return to Bangkok.”
Ohn Myint sucked her teeth.
“Getting the brother out of prison will persuade Osborne to return?”
“The deal is, I spring the brother, and Mya Kyaw Thein tells Osborne he has to go back and make his peace with his old man.”
“Four thousand, five hundred dollars,” she said.
“You’ll have it tomorrow morning,” said Calvino. “Let Mya know what the deal is—Rob goes back to Bangkok to see his father. After he sees him, it’s up to Rob whether he wants to stay there or come back.”
She surveyed the sky as if looking for an answer.
“I’ll let her know.”
It was the cost of one man’s freedom from prison, the number that would assure that another man, once found, would voluntarily return to Bangkok. Rob Osborne had unsuccessfully tried to borrow the money from his old man. Now the old man would have to pay the amount anyway, with Calvino’s fee added as interest.
Some numbers always return, like a swallow to the home roost. But an old saying has it that the presence of one swallow doesn’t make for a summer. There was a chance that Rob Osborne wouldn’t leave Rangoon without the Black Cat. The price to get her brother out of prison hadn’t included her promise to return.
“See you at the finish line,” said Ohn Myint.
Calvino watched her pick up speed on the path leading through the field, until her clean smooth stride kicked in. She disappeared around a bend as she entered a road. He sucked in a long breath and put one foot in front of the other, a kind of running that retreating soldiers would have recognized. By now Jack Saxon would be at the finish line drinking his second or third beer. Ohn Myint had taken the baton from Saxon and run with it. The handoff had been made. She would see that the money was delivered.
The way he figured it, Mya Kyaw Thein, or the Black Cat—whatever she wanted to call herself—would find a way to slip into her brother’s trial. After all, the Monkey Nose lead singer had left Bangkok to help her brother beat the illegal teak transport rap. It wasn’t as if he’d killed someone. Though Alf, the Texan sax player in the Monkey Nose band, had reminded Calvino that stealing a man’s horse in Texas was worse than killing a man. What a horse was to a Texan, teak was to the Burmese.
The natural course of events followed a pattern—find the woman, and you’ll find her man within fifty meters, lurking in the shadows. Men tend to stay within sniffing distance, Calvino had found, watching and guarding their women. DNA wired them to use their eyes, nose and ears, their senses fine-tuned to the task. When the woman had the agility of a black cat, trapping and caging her wasn’t going to end well. The deal Calvino had made with Ohn Myint was his best play. A four thousand and five hundred dollar chip was on the table. Tomorrow the roulette wheel would spin and he’d either win or lose. He was betting that Mya Kyaw Thein’s brother would get a tap on the shoulder and then find himself shown to a side door leading to freedom. It’s just the way people run after money, he thought. Freedom has a drop-down menu, and price is a central feature.
As he began to run again, he thought how lucky Pratt had been to have an embassy car whisk him away just in time. Had it been luck? Or had Pratt planned it that way? Questions were all he had to sustain him on the last kilometer. The marines would have crossed the finish line long ago. The fat NGOs would be on their second beer, and he’d appear just ahead of the walkers, his head filled with questions and a thirst in his belly.
SEVEN
Calvino’s Short Trigger Pull
LATE AFTERNOON, BACK at his hotel, Calvino stood under the shower, trying to wash away the afterburn from the 10K run. Slowly he opened his eyes. Someone was ringing the doorbell for his room. Or was his mind playing tricks? He turned off water. The bell rang again. He hardly felt his legs as he stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist to open the door.
Bianca Conti extended her hand. They stared at each other.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Water dripped from his body, pooling on the floor.
“Come in,” he said.
She walked into his room, her sleeveless blue dress hugging her waist and hips like a second skin.
“If it isn’t a good time, I can come back.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do Americans shower in the afternoon, too?”
“Only after a 10K run.”
“You are one of those fitness types?”
He didn’t tell her about how Kiss My Trash hadn’t exactly won any medals.
Her edge of near-hysterical jetlag madness had passed like storm clouds revealing a bright, promising day. A three-hour power nap had restored her color to a warm honey glow, and her mood had rebooted to a mellow, controlled calmness. She walked straight to the balcony like a catwalk model, slid back the door and walked out. She filled her lungs with air. Slowly she looked back at Calvino, who had begun to pour her a glass of wine.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, handing her the wine.
She sipped from the glass.
“The manager told me what happened.”
“Did you have to torture him before he talked?”
She leaned with her back against the railing, the sunlit park and lake below behind her right shoulder. Bracelets on both wrists looked to be made of fine silver with precious stones. No wedding ring, but she did wear a gold ring with a large pearl on her right hand. She hooked one calf over the top of the other, relaxed and easy. She tilted her head as she studied him, taking a long look before replying.
“Men always talk when they have a bad conscience.”
“That’s what a torturer usually says.”
“He said this was my room. But your friend Jack Saxon asked him for a favor to give it to you. That is how you got this room.”
“The manager blamed Jack?”
“‘Blame’ is an ugly word.”
She held out her glass and he topped it up.
She watched him put the wine bottle back inside, and when Calvino returned, she continued.
“‘Wine’ is a much better word.”
“He must have made a mistake. I know this room was booked for me a few days ago,” said Calvino, taking a drink from his own glass of wine.
She extended her glass and touched the rim of his. A nice, clean clink registered, and she smiled.
“Italian?”
“French.”
“I mean you. You have an Italian name.”
She took another sip and put the glass down.
“My mother was Jewish, my father Italian. I’m a New Yorker.”
“I thought you lived in Bangkok, no?”
“When you’re born in New York you are a New Yorker for life. That’s how it works.”
She caught his eye, turning what might have started as a glance into something else. She lowered the glass.
“Back to business. Your friend Jack thought he reserved this room. Or his secretary told him she reserved it. They had you reserved in a room with no view. Jack asked his friend, the manager, to switch our rooms.”
“And you’ve come to take your room.”
Bianca giggled like a little girl, something she’d never outgrown.
“It’s not necessary. We have another view room. But a Chinese couple will be disappointed. Isn’t that how musical chairs works?”
“What are you doing in Rangoon?” asked Calvino.
“Buying emeralds, rubies, opals. I am a jewelry designer. And you?”
He refilled her wine glass.
“A tourist on holiday. All the news of Burma opening up made me curious. I came to have a look around.”
“What kind of work do you do, I mean?”
“Private investigations.”
“A private eye in a toga? That must be your Italian half.”
H
e grinned, half-embarrassed by his state of undress.
“I wasn’t expecting a guest.”
“Don’t let me stop you from whatever you’re doing. I had this desire to stand on the balcony and see…”
She turned away, looking at the view.
“If you missed something by taking the other room.”
“I won’t turn around if you want to dress.”
“I do private investigations,” he said as he slipped into his clothes that he’d laid out on the bed.
“Are you on a working holiday?”
He zipped his pants and fastened his belt, leaving his polo shirt out. He sat on the bed and pulled on his socks. After he finished, he watched her long, firm legs, which the sunlight exposed through her thin dress. Why had she come to his room? Was she just passing the time? Why the interrogation about his reasons for being in Rangoon? He buttoned the bottom button of his polo shirt, thinking a woman like this who was in the jewelry business might be someone who could help find the Black Cat’s mother, who was in the same business.
“You can turn around,” he said.
She waited a few moments before turning away from the view.
“How was does the view compare with your room?”
“I like yours better,” she said.
“Do you have plans for the rest of the day,” she continued, “work or play?”
“I’m looking for a young musician. His father’s worried about him. He’s been missing for more than a week, but I think he’s somewhere in Rangoon.”
“It could take some time to find him,” she said.
He shrugged. “It could.”
“Meanwhile, if you want to see some sites, I could come along.”
The Italian woman who had invited herself to his room was now, after a glass of wine, making a play to become part of his holiday.
“You got off a twelve o’clock flight. You must be jetlagged.”
She walked in from the balcony.
“I am meeting my friend for dinner. Join us. Bring along your friend, the Colonel.”
She had a good memory for detail. Calvino figured it must be a required skill someone who appraised stones—examining each facet, looking for tiny flaws, remembering the color range.
“The Colonel?”
“The one you were with in the lobby?”
He’d forgotten that Saxon had introduced Calvino by his job description and Pratt by his rank.
“Yeah, the Thai guy. He’s playing the saxophone at a club tonight. Join us if you want. Bring your friend…”
“Anne.”
“Her name was on the tip of my tongue.”
He put on his shoes and combed his hair. He lay down the brush and walked past her onto the balcony.
“It is a great view,” he said.
She had slipped out on the balcony and stood close to him.
“What’s his name, your Thai friend, the Colonel?”
“Pratt. Everyone likes him, especially women—they seem to love saxophone players. There aren’t many Bangkok cops who can play the sax. He’s jamming with a local band.”
“He’s a cop? Is he helping you find the missing musician?”
Calvino shook his head and drank from his wine glass.
“He’s doing his own thing.”
“Your other friend, Jack, will be there too?”
She cupped her hand over Calvino’s hand, resting on the railing. He stared ahead, calculating the situation. He tried to concentrate on the thin traffic on the road in the distance, counting the cars. She stood close, her hip touching his. When he glanced back at her, what caught his attention was a perfectly formed white patch on her skin just below her throat. It was in the shape of a cross. It was the kind of evidence most people overlooked. He wanted to ask her what had happened to the crucifix she’d worn around the throat, about the beach where she’d tanned and whether she’d touched hips lying on the sand next to her last man. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to know any of those things. Not yet, anyway. It was better to register the clues and slowly build a profile of this woman who had mysteriously come to his room.
“Jack’ll be there, too. Wherever there’s a pool table, cold beer and a sports channel, sooner or later you’ll run into Jack.”
“Jack is a man’s man,” she said.
Jack Saxon hadn’t been in her life more than five minutes, and she already had him figured out.
The sky was washed with streaks of languid orange cloud that brushed the vast tree canopy. Calvino stood next to Bianca on the balcony, looking out at the ancient forest enveloping the heart of Rangoon—a deep green in the fading light. He slipped his arm around Bianca’s waist. She leaned in closer, brushing his body with hers. Off to the right was a colonial mansion with a red roof—a portico as erect as a headwaiter at the Savoy—a testament to the past, when British rulers built structures that announced, “We are here,” and now added, “Remember that all foreign rulers disappear into the sunset.”
“It’s all going to change,” she said.
“But not tonight,” he said.
Rangoon was a vast forest with buildings scattered through it. Calvino tried to imagine a Bangkok-like city sprawling out in place of the trees. The way things worked, he knew she was right. The forest would fall soon enough, and the tall, shiny buildings would take its place.
Not tonight, though. Tonight still belonged to the cartwheeling birds appearing in ones and twos and finally in waves. First the pigeons going to roost, then the swallows, feeding, and finally the bats. They looked out over a city virtually untouched by the world of developers, bankers, lawyers and consultants, with their plans and blueprints for high-rises, shopping malls, condos and supermarkets. Rangoon would soon leave one world and join another.
Bianca slipped her arm around Calvino. They stood holding each other, looking at the sky.
“What happens when the Chinese arrive and want their room with this view?” asked Calvino.
She glanced up at him and shrugged. “They can start a new cultural revolution in the lobby.”
He laughed, brushing back her hair with the back of his hand.
“You could give them your room and stay here.”
“I don’t think Anne wants to share a room with the Chinese.”
He’d forgotten about her friend. The phone in the room rang. After three rings, Calvino sat on the edge of the bed and answered it.
“Jack sent me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He included a note: ‘I’m working on what I owe you. See you later at 50th Street.’ Come up to my room for a drink. I want to hear about the Rangoon Running Club.”
Calvino would tell Pratt the truth about the run, and his friend would laugh at the agony of his miserable finish. But that could wait, couldn’t it? Calvino wanted to freeze that moment on the balcony, with Rangoon framed against the setting sun as he responded to her touch. He wanted to remember it, file it away like a postcard stored in a box for his old age. But there was no such thing as a working holiday.
“Give me twenty minutes,” he said, hanging up the phone.
She reentered the room and headed for the door.
“I should be going.”
“Bring Anne along tonight. The 50th Street Bar, about nine o’clock.”
“I know the place.”
She was out the door before he could ask her about the perfume she was wearing. He’d been around that scent before—fresh lime with a hint of lavender.
After Bianca had gone, Calvino pulled a chair onto the balcony, sat down and placed the bottle of wine on a small table. Stretching forward, he perched his arm on the railing. The hotel was in a part of Rangoon where the elites lived in secluded mansions, hidden in the city forest. Somewhere under the trees, Rob Osborne sat in a room, waiting for a woman to come through the door, thought Calvino. Some were worth waiting for, and every man thought he’d made the right call on the value of his woman. He’d never met Mya Kyaw Thein, the Black Cat, but he had an idea that anyone who�
��d followed a blogger with a political agenda, a Henry Miller-quoting jazz singer with a brother going to trial in the morning, had to be in love. When that happened, all bets were off. People went missing by the planeload in the name of love.
Romantic madness wasn’t Calvino’s business. He’d deliver four and half grand to Ohn Myint to spring the brother. That was his business in Rangoon—finding a way to pump money into a system for the result his client wanted.
A day or so should be enough for him to find Rob and watch him get on a plane to Bangkok, he thought. That would be it. Case closed. But something didn’t feel right. He couldn’t decide why, but he had a nagging feeling that things worked in Rangoon in ways he didn’t understand.
Rangoon made a man’s mind drift and doubt itself. Was that the reason Rob hadn’t contacted his father? Captured by the magic of the place, he’d just forgotten about time, Bangkok, his father and the Monkey Nose band? Such things happen to people lost in Southeast Asia. People like Rob didn’t so much disappear as dissolve into some back alley of a lost place, usually with a woman—strike that; always with a woman—waiting for something or someone: rescue, redemption, drugs, death or enlightenment.
He poured himself another glass of wine. A Bangkok-raised boy like Rob holed up in Rangoon, one of the last places where the sacred dominated the landscape, was running away from home. The light was now fading quickly. It no longer burnt orange under the graying clouds. On the street below cars became visible as their headlights turned on, but there was no real traffic, just one, then two or three cars, then an empty space, and after a moment another car. It was like counting coins in a beggar’s bowl.
He’d come to Rangoon because Pratt needed backup. But having arrived, he would do his best to launch a Rob Osborne rescue mission. Calvino remembered what it had been like to strike out in a strange city, to be lost among the losers, dreamers, prostitutes, grifters, godfathers, wanderers and scam artists—the usual crowd who were the first to secure a beachhead in a place with a deep, troubled history and an uncertain future. Places like that never lasted. Sooner or later the modern global generals smelled the money and sent in their officers dressed in suits, who’d been trained to use balance sheets to occupy a territory. That had happened in Bangkok, Saigon and Phnom Penh, and it would eventually happen in Rangoon. There’s nothing wrong with the domino theory, Calvino thought; it was tailor-made for capitalism.
Missing In Rangoon Page 8
