The Burma Legacy

by Geoffrey Archer

  Tin Su had touched her hands in gratitude for the man’s efforts and walked quickly from the door. As they returned to the car she’d told Harrison he shouldn’t have come back to Burma. Should’ve left them all in peace.

  Then Saw Lwin had taken them back to his hotel. Harrison had got out, with Tin Su remaining in the car, waiting to be taken home. He’d lifted a hand, half salute, half wave, but she hadn’t been watching. As the car disappeared at the end of the drive he’d felt a terrible loss. For several years she’d been his life, and he’d thrown it away.

  Back in his hotel room he’d sunk into a deep depression. If he’d had the courage he might have ended it there and then. The medicine bottles he’d brought from England contained quite enough to kill him. It was fear that stopped him. Fear of what death would be followed by.

  He’d believed in reincarnation since he was a teenager, because it made better sense to him than concepts such as heaven and hell. In general he reckoned he’d done more good than harm during his present existence, so hoped for a reasonable placing in his next life. Even his plans for the Japanese Lieutenant amounted, in his view, to a long-delayed triumph of good over evil. But his confidence in his standing had been eroded now by the knowledge of the suffering he’d caused Tin Su. His prospects beyond the grave would have dimmed.

  He spent the rest of the day in his hotel room, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the call from Saw Lwin’s aunt that might or might not bring news. By the time it came, the shadows were lengthening outside the windows of his ground-floor room and the fierce daylight was beginning to mellow.

  ‘It has been very hard, Mr Harrison,’ she stressed. ‘So many phone calls. I have to make them from my sister’s house because my phone still not working. In the end I have some luck. Mr Tetsuo Kamata has reserved two rooms at the Jade Palace Hotel in Mong Lai tomorrow night and Friday night.’

  Harrison’s heart somersaulted. He scrabbled for the pad and pen which he kept on the bedside table.

  ‘You would like me to arrange things for you? Book you into the same place? They have beautiful suites for thirty dollars. And the flights I can do at a very good price. When you want to go?’

  ‘I need to think about this.’ His heart was thudding uncontrollably.

  ‘Yes. But you must think quick. There is a flight to Heho every morning about seven-thirty but it always full. Another flight at eleven. You want me to try book you on it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Book it please.’

  ‘I will do it in the morning. Airline office closed now. And the hotel?’

  He hesitated. ‘Is there another place?’

  ‘Golden Lion. Not so nice, but clean.’

  ‘Then please book that.’

  ‘I will come round to your hotel tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. All right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’ll be fine. And thank you. Thank you very much.’

  He replaced the receiver and smiled for the first time that day. Fate was beckoning. Challenging him. Somehow he would have to do the deed alone, but if he could achieve that it might earn him extra merit. The trouble was he had no idea how he would manage it.

  Time to resort to prayer, he decided. Not to the Christian God who’d ignored his pleas for release from suffering in 1943 and 1944, but to whatever amorphous force it was up there that controlled the destiny of humans.

  He looked out of the window at the reddening sky. There was only one place to be when the sun set over Rangoon and a man wanted to commune with the heavens.

  He made his painful way to the lobby.

  ‘How quickly can you get me a taxi?’

  ‘One waiting outside Mister Wetherby. Where you want to go?’

  ‘The Shwe Dagon Pagoda.’

  ‘You pay taxi 300 kyat. I tell him.’

  The clerk ushered him through the door and into the car, speaking briefly to the driver.

  Harrison slumped in the back as they accelerated down the drive. Within minutes they were entering the car park at the base of the temple, drawing up outside the entrance for tourists.

  There was a freshly painted notice beside it:

  Entrance fee for foreigners $5. Includes camera.

  Last time he’d come here he’d walked up one of the long, covered ramps that took Burmans to their place of worship without charge.

  In the entrance hall he took off his shoes and placed them in a rack, then paid his fee and began moving to the lift that would take him to the platform. A studious but attractive young woman waylaid him, asking if he wanted a guide.

  ‘Five dollars,’ she said.

  A few years ago he’d have taken her on, in the hope that in the hour or so of the tour he could work his spell on her and get her to share his bed for the night. He smiled at the memory of what he used to do. Memories were all he had left.

  ‘No thank you.’

  He stepped into the lift and half a minute later the doors opened onto the main platform of the temple. The bell-shaped zedi towered nearly a hundred metres over the mound, its gold-plated bulk picked out by floodlights against a purple-red sky. To his right, in a corner of the courtyard, a banyan tree towered, its aerial roots encircling the trunk like creepers.

  Harrison stopped beneath the zedi and looked up. Somewhere nearby a guide was reciting numbers. Thirteen thousand plates of gold on the banana bud at the top. Thousands of diamonds and other precious stones on the decorations above that. Fifty tons of gold leaf on the bell itself.

  Such statistics were repulsive to him. The unacceptable face of Buddhism – of any religion adhered to by the poor. He began to walk around the platform, clockwise as custom demanded. Despite the glitz, for him the place radiated spirituality. Dozens of smaller shrines surrounded the main one. Everywhere he looked people kneeled in prayer or sat in quiet meditation.

  Prayer was what he’d come here for and he turned towards a side pavilion that looked empty. The significance of the shrine was unimportant to him. All he sought was an atmosphere in which to focus his thoughts. He climbed the steps.

  Inside, an elderly woman and a young girl knelt before an unsmiling Buddha, a photograph of a young man placed on the ground between them. Their eyes were closed, their hands pressed together. Perry dropped stiffly to his knees behind them.

  He looked up to the face of the Buddha. Then he cast his eyes down and closed the lids. To concentrate. He tried to ask for a boost from above in these last, frail days of his life, but the words wouldn’t come. His thoughts simply wouldn’t mould themselves into prayers. For several minutes he remained where he was, yearning to connect with the superior force. Soon his knees began to hurt so much that he had to get back to his feet. He stood in solemn silence for several more minutes, then finally admitted defeat.

  As he stepped back onto the paved courtyard beneath the zedi, the pain in his back was like a bayonet slicing through his vertebrae. He sat on a low wall, despair and weariness engulfing him.

  How, how could he do this thing on his own? This act he’d waited over fifty years to carry out. It wasn’t the issue of applying sharp or blunt instruments to living flesh that worried him – he’d proved himself still capable of that by disembowelling a goat kid at Bordhill a few days before leaving the place. It was the lack of strength. He simply didn’t have enough any more. Not in his spirit nor in his body.

  Yes, he could make it to Heho. Yes to the hotel at Mong Lai. Yes even to confronting Kamata at the memorial. But then what? Without the support of a man of Rip’s local knowledge, contacts and sheer bloody bravado, he would fail. And worse than that, would risk humiliation again. He felt close to tears after coming so far.

  He looked at the placid Burmese faces gathered to witness the sunset. Old and young. Men and women. Accepting what the religion taught them, that they should put up with their lot without protest. Something he had never been able to do.

  He watched a quartet of young monks squatting by a small Buddha, chatting like schoolgirls. Shaved heads, maroon robes. They’d reje
cted worldly goods. Rejected sexual pleasures. And looked happy with their choice, a choice he could never have made.

  A sense of peace began to descend on him. Shwe Dagon was working its magic. It was dawning on him that he was finished. That he’d reached the end of the road and this was as good a place as any to die. Here. Tomorrow evening, he could do it. With the rest of the morphine patches plastered to his skin, a box of pills and a bottle of water to swallow them with.

  His life would end, fittingly, as the sun went down.

  He felt extraordinarily calm, having decided that, and let his eyes wander. Above him bats flitted blackly against the gold of the zedi and the purple of the sky.

  He studied the others who’d come here. The flat-faced Burmans from the central plains. Those with Chinese features from the north of the country. And a few Europeans. A handful only. Elderly mostly. Independent-minded travellers impervious to international calls for a boycott of this place.

  Then he saw a face that looked startlingly familiar.

  The man it belonged to was a European in his early forties, but wearing a longyi. Talking with an unusually tall and burly Burman. Curly hair. A small v-shaped scar on his left cheek, which Perry Harrison happened to know was from a knife wound inflicted during a skirmish in the Omani desert.

  He rose to his feet as if propelled by springs. The miracle had happened. His prayers, such as they were, had been heard after all.

  As he walked, his hands reached out in greeting.

  ‘Rip …’

  The European turned to him and gaped.

  Then, very slowly, a smile spread across his face.

  Twenty-three

  Yangon

  The following evening, Thursday, 13 January

  Sam checked into a city centre hotel just before 8 p.m. His rendezvous with the SIS rep was in thirty minutes.

  The guidebook had described the place as recently built, Chinese-owned and good value at twenty dollars a night. It was on nine levels and when he left the lift he found the floor sloping alarmingly.

  He had a quick wash, then studied a street map. The 49th Street Bar and Grill was five blocks away. The SIS woman he was to meet there gloried in the name of Philomena and had been described by Waddell as frighteningly bright.

  It was a sultry night. The tea shops and food stalls were busy. Walking amongst these slight, brown-skinned people, he was the only European, yet there were few of the hostile stares that would be normal in many parts of the Orient. The avenues he passed along had been given Burmese names after independence, but some of the old street signs persisted – Fraser Street, Godwin Road, echoes of Empire and the Raj.

  He turned into 49th Street, an alley whose darkness was punctuated by a scattering of feeble lights. On one side of the road were businesses repairing motor bikes or selling household goods. On the other, tenement blocks reminded him of the Peabody Buildings which dotted the east end of London. Windows were wide open in the hope of catching some movement of air. TV screens glowed inside and clothes hung on lines suspended over the street. Here and there children played, delaying the moment of bedtime.

  A familiar tune caused him to slow his pace for a moment. Lillibullero. At the side of the street, squatting on the ground by a parked car, was an elderly man listening to the BBC World Service on a small short-wave radio. The wizened face turned to look up and smiled graciously. Sam smiled back and went on his way.

  The 49th Street Bar and Grill was a brown brick warehouse conversion. Inside, its rough walls were hung with posters and photographs of colonial Rangoon. A horseshoe bar filled the centre of the space and a broad, iron staircase led to an upper floor. The staff were both European and local, but the few customers were ex-pats and male. Three sat on their own at the bar and a few more hugged a billiard table. They glanced briefly at Sam, then returned to their preoccupations.

  He perched at the counter and ordered a beer, placing a copy of Time magazine beside him.

  ‘Here working?’ The woman’s accent gave her away as Australian.

  ‘No. Just visiting for a few days. I was in Bangkok on business and thought I’d take a look.’

  ‘Hope you enjoy it. Are you planning to eat here tonight? Lake to see a menu?’

  ‘Er, no. I’m meeting someone. Daughter of a neighbour of mine back in England. Works at the British mission. Said I’d get in touch when I was here.’

  ‘That’ll be Phil. Been here about a year. The only female at the embassy – amongst the ex-pats anyway. Popular girl.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’ In truth he knew nothing about her. He glanced at his watch. Three minutes to go.

  The manageress turned to deal with another customer and Sam began flicking through the pages of Time. But his mind had flipped back to Bangkok, the woman’s accent making him think of Midge.

  She’d turned up at his hotel that morning. He’d been on the point of leaving to take his passport to the Myanmar Embassy and had told her jokingly that if it was sex she’d come for, her timing was lousy. But she’d been deadly serious. Pressed a small black box into his hand, the size of a cigarette lighter. Told him it was a satellite tracker.

  ‘In case you bump into Jimmy Squires. Plant it in his luggage or whatever. It has a strong magnet too, so you can stick it to a car.’

  He’d told her she was out of her sweet little mind, but took it anyway.

  ‘The conference I’m going to is at the Empress Hotel in Chiang Mai,’ she’d said. ‘The tracking of that thing’s done back in Oz, but I can dial into it through the net from my PC.’

  ‘So you can check what I’m getting up to.’

  ‘Well I did say I don’t know you well enough …’

  He’d packed the device in a pocket of the small rucksack which he carried as hand baggage.

  ‘Hello.’ A woman’s voice right beside him.

  He looked up from the magazine.

  ‘Philomena?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was a big girl, dressed in a linen skirt and jacket. In her twenties with a jolly face. ‘Recognised you immediately from my dad’s description. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Get you a drink?’

  ‘A coke thanks. Then we can go over there and natter.’ She pointed to a small round table next to a hearth which Sam suspected had never been lit.

  ‘Was that a coke, Phil?’ the manageress checked.

  ‘Please.’

  As they ambled to the table Sam remarked on the cosiness of the place.

  ‘A haven for lonely Europeans,’ she murmured, nodding a greeting to the group round the billiard table.

  ‘Many Brits amongst them?’

  They sat down.

  ‘Not a lot. Most UK companies respect the trade embargo and don’t do anything in Myanmar. A few blokes are here with Premier Oil – there’s a new gas pipeline operating. And a handful of others who don’t reveal what they’re up to.’

  Sam leaned forward. ‘Any luck with finding Perry Harrison?’

  Philomena leaned in too. ‘’Fraid not. We know where he was staying but he checked out on Tuesday. The hotel said he’d gone to Bagan, but I’ve rung all the main hotels there and there’s no trace.’

  ‘Bagan’s where all the temples are.’

  ‘That’s right. Thousands of them. It’s the jewel in the crown for tourists.’ She had big round, guiltless eyes. A good card player, Sam guessed.

  ‘No Burmese officials who could help? They must keep track of tourists.’

  ‘They do, but it’s not exactly done in real time. Anyway our policy is not to collaborate with the regime in any way. The Tatmadaw are illegally in charge of this country as far as UK government is concerned. The State Protection and Development Council tolerates our presence here, but we’re highly suspect because we’re always rattling on about freedom of speech and democracy. Our phones are bugged, our domestic staff are paid to inform on us. It’s not the easiest country to work in.’

  ‘So where was Harrison staying in Yangon? Sounds like my only start
ing point.’

  ‘And not much of one, I’m afraid.’ She handed him a scrap of paper with the address on it. ‘I doubt you’ll get any more joy than I did.’

  ‘Is this your first posting?’

  Her self-confidence cracked, but only momentarily. ‘Does it show?’

  ‘No, but “father” said you were only twenty-five. So I assumed …’

  ‘Rightly, as it happens. It’s an interesting brief, if of limited significance.’ She spoke with the dismissiveness of someone who was highly ambitious. ‘I’d have preferred Beijing, I must admit.’

  ‘This place where Harrison was staying …’ He glanced down at the piece of paper. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Small. Off the beaten track. Not doing much business. God knows how they survive, these places.’

  ‘How long to get there in a taxi?’

  ‘At this time of night? Ten or fifteen minutes. You’re thinking of going now?’

  ‘Unless there’s somewhere else. You’ve no other information for me? On Harrison’s ex-wife for example?’

  ‘Nothing. Sorry.’

  ‘And London hasn’t messaged you with Tetsuo Kamata’s vacation plans?’

  ‘Negative again.’

  He leaned back in the wooden chair and drank from his glass. There was a desultory sociability about the bar. People came here because they had nothing else to do. He was keen to leave it.

  ‘You get much of a social life here?’ he asked.

  ‘Pretty limited. Mostly with the other ex-pats. The Americans keep to themselves, but the Australians are fun. Fortunately our ambassador here and his wife are both great characters.’ There was a girlish enthusiasm about the way she said it.

  ‘Any Burmese friends?’

  ‘A few. But you don’t get very close. They’re too scared of being arrested for consorting with foreigners.’

  Sam finished his beer.

  ‘You’ll want to be on your way,’ she ventured.