Every hotel room in the city was booked. Hundreds of business people, government officials and NGOs from around the world had come to the party. Changing hotels meant going to some place outside Rangoon. But the whole point of coming to Burma was to be in the city so they could get their jobs done. Calvino’s missing person was in Rangoon. The son of the general who headed the Ministry of Health played in a band in Rangoon. They had no choice but to hold tight, contain the damage.
“I’ll ask Jack to find me a room.”
“He might have a small guest room you can use. Also, talk to Bianca,” said the Colonel. “Let her know her messages are causing you complications.”
“She’s liable to tell her friends I’m threatening her.”
Pratt raised an eyebrow.
“Tell her you found Mya Kyaw Thein’s mother, thank her for her offer to help, and tell her you’re flying back to Bangkok this evening after your court case.”
“In other words, I go missing.”
Calvino fell into silence just as Bianca and Anne came out on the terrace and made straight for their table. She was all smiles, makeup on, extra lip gloss, hair on her shoulders, sparkling eyes.
“Hey, join us,” said Calvino. “I was just saying goodbye to my friend. I found my missing person. It was a stroke of luck. I’m taking him back to Bangkok on an evening flight. I wish I hadn’t found him, in a way. I was looking forward to spending time in Rangoon. But I have another case in Bangkok, and I need to get back there to put out a fire.”
Bianca’s face clouded. It looked like she was going to cry. Composing herself, she looked at Anne and then Calvino.
“I guess I’m happy it worked out.”
“Thanks.”
“If you’ll excuse me, I need to go to my room and pack.”
He left Colonel Pratt with the two women.
“In Bangkok,” the Colonel confided, “Vincent’s nickname is Heartbreaker. But he probably didn’t tell you that. He never does.”
“Bastard,” she said.
The Colonel had seen that face before. It was the one that had glowed with the white heat of anger in the hotel lobby as the staff kept her cooling her heels while trying to figure out who was going to tell her that her view room was occupied by a private eye named Vincent Calvino.
In the elevator ride up to his floor, Calvino thought about the old days, when a man and a woman simply exchanged first glances, their electrical circuits sparking, picked each other up, made passionate, unrestrained love, fell asleep and then parted to disappear back into their private lives.
His parting with Bianca had been abrupt, like the period suddenly appearing at the end of a sentence that should have kept on going. Bianca had got him thinking about formulating a new Calvino’s Law. What he had so far wasn’t so much a law as the raw material from which laws are formed: “Before you move on the woman you’ve locked eyes with, think where that first step might take you. She may not look the type to give you grief, but there isn’t a profile you can trust, one that tells you if she’ll post your picture and your personal details on her Facebook account. You still want her? Okay, now she closes the Facebook window and opens her Twitter account to spill your details 140 characters at a time. That little step across the room finds a mass audience of strangers. Do you really want the eyes of all those strangers watching your big move?”
Calvino had the answer, but it was too late with Bianca. Some laws can’t be applied retroactively. What remained could be scrawled on a restroom wall: “The privacy of the casual affair has been permanently disabled.”
He’d been busted. It was something he could live with. But compromising Pratt working in the field was another matter. He used the room phone to call Jack Saxon, who was already at his newspaper office and picked up after the second ring.
“Jack, I need to bunk with you for a couple of nights.”
“My place is a dump. I don’t have air-con. You’d die of heat prostration.”
“I’ll buy a fan.”
“I have a fan you can use.”
Can I leave my suitcase at your office? I don’t want to drag it into the courtroom.”
“That probably wouldn’t be too cool. Leave your bags at the hotel, and I’ll pick them up later.”
“It’s better if I take it to your office.”
“Bring them over to my place later, then.”
The if-you-must tone of voice gave Calvino pause. How to handle Saxon?
“Jack, it’s one case. I travel light.”
“Since you’re usually on the run, that’s smart.”
Calvino hung up the phone, took his empty case to the bed and opened it. He crouched down in front of the small safe, feeling the last of the strain in his legs. He worked the combination lock, removed his cash, passport, gun and ammo. After ten minutes had passed he’d closed his case and locked it. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the Shwedagon Pagoda, gun in his hand. The gun had a good natural grip. He holstered it and strapped the harness over his back so that the weapon fit snugly under his left armpit.
At the front desk Calvino was greeted by the manager whom Jack Saxon had enlisted to take special care of him and get him a view room.
“I’m checking out. Something’s come up in Bangkok, and I need to get back immediately.”
“I am sorry to hear that. You’ve been with us only two nights.”
“Great room, too. You might want to put those two Italian women in it.”
The manager nodded. “We have three or four bookings a day for that room.”
“It’s your lucky room,” said Calvino.
“I am glad you feel that way. I trust it brought you luck, taking you home early, sir.”
Calvino was about to say something more but stopped himself. Leaving a manager with a memorable parting remark was never a good idea in the private investiga-tion business. Slipping quietly away under the cover of a white lie wasn’t something a hero did, but heroes didn’t snoop around Burma looking for missing persons. Heroes stayed home defending friends, castle and wife, and died by making themselves a memorable target.
Calvino climbed inside the taxi, a wreck of a vehicle with peeling upholstery, broken window handles and a rattling transmission. He gave the driver the address of the Rangoon Times. On the drive to Jack Saxon’s newspaper, Calvino weighed the odds of Bianca’s message causing Colonel Pratt a problem. As far as he was concerned, the Facebook write-up was a major personal embarrassment. Ratana must be disappointed that he’d acted so carelessly. As for the Colonel, the stakes were higher. Burma was a place where MIs watched the movements of foreigners. Bianca hadn’t said much about the Colonel. She’d heard him playing the sax. What harm could that information cause? But she’d also said he was a Thai cop, and that wasn’t so good.
Colonel Pratt could smooth that over with Yadanar, who would have known that detail anyway. The jazz community knew the Colonel worked for the police. After hearing him play, they forgot he was a cop. But there were other players outside the musical community, and they were the real worry.
He knew that any information about a cop’s movements had the potential to cause a problem. The Facebook message linked Colonel Pratt to a certain place with certain people. It allowed anyone with minimal intelligence training to connect the dots. And once enough dots were connected, a picture would emerge of a cop working undercover. Once that happened, the inner network of power players would begin to buzz with paranoia, and sooner or later, they would find a target in their midst and move to zero in and destroy it.
Those players had the resources to stop Colonel Pratt from shutting down the flow of millions of cold pills from Burma to Thailand. Before that could happen, though, someone would need to get lucky. Bianca’s Facebook feed had to be accessed by someone inside the network in Burma, a place still mostly closed off from outsiders, where the digital world had only just started to seep in. The risk was small. But even a small increase in risk was not something Calvino could shrug off wh
en it came to his best friend.
His hope was that the intelligence sources of the pill smugglers were as limited as the MI agent who’d cornered him on his run. He tried to imagine that guy reading a feed of millions of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, and by the time the taxi arrived outside the Rangoon Times, Calvino was feeling better. He understood why on the terrace the Colonel had been less upset than he’d expected. Things were getting interesting. Not that that was something either of them really wanted.
There had always been an excess of foreigner-watchers in Burma. But recently the pace of change had not so much quickened as exploded overnight, along with the number of foreigners. Calvino and Colonel Pratt’s decision to split up and stay in different places would make the MIs’ jobs more difficult. Calvino told himself the damage had been contained. He hadn’t come to Rangoon for a holiday. It had been a mistake for the two of them to stay at the same upscale hotel. Besides, the secluded luxury distracted a man from his work.
He breathed more freely as he stood on the curb and watched the taxi pull away.
TEN
Ownerless Dogs Sleeping in The Courtyard
THE RANGOON TIME occupied an ugly square box of a building. Its paint peeling and smeared with grime, it faced a church across the road that had the aging, grand style of an old dowager. In contrast, the press, if it ever had a pretty face in Burma, had masked it under a burka of mystery and secrecy for the last half century. Jack Saxon had said the good news about the political changes was that the local press had been upgraded to a hijab.
“One step at a time, and before you know it, we’re going to have tabloids with nude women bathing on the Irrawaddy,” Saxon had said.
The next thing you know, the press might, like a Saudi woman, demand to drive a car without an escort. As for the church across the street, with its donation boxes, prayers and rosary beads, perhaps it would also wake up, stretch, look around and decide to dust off its teachings. Calvino studied the large bank of stained glass windows facing the road. Messages about an afterlife were old news to him.
The newspaper office was at the end of a wide staircase on the second floor. A slightly overweight Burmese woman, reading a newspaper and picking her teeth like a precinct sergeant, sat behind a large teak reception desk. She saw him come up the stairs carrying a suitcase as if he thought he was arriving at a hotel.
“I’m here to see Jack Saxon,” he said.
“Have a seat.”
She picked up the phone, keeping an eye on Calvino as she removed the toothpick from her mouth and dialed Saxon’s number. Calvino sat in a hard chair, waiting for Saxon to finish doing whatever he was doing before coming out to meet him.
When Saxon finally walked into reception, he looked distracted as he talked into his cell phone. He gestured to Calvino to follow him.
“Anyone ever tell you your receptionist looks like she’s straight out of an NYPD borough precinct?”
“Only visiting criminals from New York,” said Saxon, without looking back at Calvino.
He closed his cell phone and left it in his right hand as he led the way. They passed a dozen reporters and staff working at desks in a long, narrow room, eyes glued to their computer screens. That guy is posting on Facebook, thought Calvino, as his eyes passed over the screen. He was rolling his bag behind him, and the racket it made had heads popping up.
“Don’t mind my American friend. He’s mistaken us for the Holiday Inn. It happens all the time.”
Calvino smiled and gave one of those borough politician’s waves of the hand as if to acknowledge their existence on his way to the big office at the end of room. It was the same wave he’d used so effectively in the villages he’d passed through on the run.
The floors of the newspaper office, an unfinished concrete, could have come from a slaughterhouse. The interior design had the look of a warehouse with long rows of desk banged in. At the end of the room Saxon had a separate cubicle, as befitted a senior editor. On his desk was a red phone. Every call to that number was an emergency from the publisher, a police official, a general or a civil servant. The handset lay on the desk beside the phone. The line was permanently busy.
Saxon laid his cell phone on the desk next to the red phone and sat in his chair.
“You can put your bag here. And you can tell me why you checked out of a hotel that hundreds of foreigners are crying and bribing to get into?”
Calvino rolled his case underneath a long built-in desk trimmed with blue strips to make it look modern. Piles of papers were scattered at both ends. His working space was confined to a small center area.
“The toilet wasn’t up to standard,” said Calvino.
Saxon’s jaw dropped.
“Kiss My Trash—you’re kidding! Wait until you see the toilet in my place.”
“Can’t wait, Jack. And thanks for putting me up.”
“You still haven’t told me why you checked out.”
“It’s better Pratt and I stay at separate places.”
“You’re here two days, and already in trouble?”
“Am I going to complicate your life, is that what you’re worried about?”
“You’ve already complicated it. The question is how much grief can I expect while you’re in Rangoon and how much grief you plan to leave behind once you get on the plane. Remember, you go home; I live here.”
Calvino nodded. He understood Saxon’s position. A man’s own troubles in a place like Rangoon or Bangkok were difficult enough, but the shadows left by others putting their noses into the locals’ business scaled the risk in ways that were impossible to calculate. How many times had Calvino told someone what Saxon had just said to him? He’d lost track.
“What I have in mind is a guesthouse where I can check in without anyone asking for a lot of personal information, like a passport,” said Calvino.
Saxon’s face collapsed as he flipped through a notebook, running a finger down the page, turning it before looking up with a big smile.
“There is a place not far from the Savoy Hotel. But you’ll hate the toilet.”
“I’ll use the one at the Savoy.”
“I don’t think they’d like that.”
Ohn Myint’s face suddenly appeared inside Saxon’s cubicle.
“Ohn, you’re exactly on time,” said Saxon.
“I’ve got a taxi waiting downstairs,” she said. “We should be on our way.”
It was the first time that Calvino had seen her in regular clothes. She wore a freshly pressed longyi and white blouse and had makeup and a light brush of lipstick. Her hair had been combed, parted and tied back in a ponytail. She smelled of perfume and sliced oranges. Her glasses gave her a professional look, like a lawyer or a librarian.
“I phoned her. I hope you don’t mind, Vinny. But I’ve got a ton of work here.”
Calvino was on his feet.
“Let’s have dinner tonight,” Calvino said. “I’m buying.”
It was just like Jack Saxon to phone Ohn Myint and reorganize the money pickup. He hadn’t mentioned Calvino’s name to her directly but said the lawyer going to court was waiting for her in his office. Saxon had assumed the call was being recorded. The link had been made. The MI diehards read the Rangoon Times and were aware of the big changes in Burma. They’d been told to expect lawyers, accountants and bankers to arrive by the planeload. But no one in the chain of command had told the MI agents in the field anything about how that would affect their job. They kept doing it as they’d always done. That was the idea, one that would make Calvino a person of interest independent of Colonel Pratt.
Someone would have asked: Who is this foreigner who has wormed his way into a criminal trial of no particular interest? Why is he interested in four ordinary defendants who are on their way to receiving long prison terms?
“I’ll look after your suitcase, and I’ll see you at the Savoy Hotel at seven.”
“You’re not coming along?” asked Calvino.
“Two white faces at t
he court hearing would be a little too memorable.”
Calvino picked up his briefcase. Inside he had the cash. The plan was to give the briefcase to the Black Cat at the courthouse. He took a long last look at his suitcase under Saxon’s desk.
“I’ll handle it,” Saxon said. He clenched his jaw and looked at the ceiling. “Remind me to thank my brother Paul for making my life so interesting.”
During the taxi ride to the courthouse, Calvino told Ohn Myint the story of what had happened to Jack Saxon’s brother Paul in Bangkok.
“I’m old enough to remember a time when a man’s character was measured by his willingness to lead a mission to rescue a friend. It was something you did. But that was a long time ago, and not a lot of people think like that any more.”
“Does that explain why you came to Rangoon with the Colonel?”
“It explains why you’re here in the taxi with me. Jack’s your friend.”
Calvino looked at the people in the street. He’d been thinking that Saxon had picked good friends, and that that was a good way to judge a person’s character.
“People don’t have true friends in a lot of places. When friends are considered a kind of subprime emotional mortgage, you’re alone. I can’t think of a place where I’d want to be that alone.”
He waited for her to say something.
“What matters is, you’re making this happen,” said Calvino. “That’s not easy. You feel the rope around your neck.”
Ohn Myint had listened carefully but hadn’t said much as the taxi entered the northern outskirts of Rangoon. People walked along the dusty road in longyis and sandals before cramped, rundown buildings and one-story shacks baking in the morning sun. The forest had ended as the need for firewood doomed its further expansion.
“Friends help friends,” she said, taking the high ground.
“Jack trusts you. That’s all I need to know.”
She offered a pragmatic, common-sense smile as if to say, “Isn’t that obvious? Why otherwise would I be here with you?”
Missing In Rangoon Page 12
