The Burma Effect

by Michael E. Rose

  BEN YONG, Media Driver.

  Experience in all areas of Thailand and environs.

  References available—CNN, ITN, VisNews, Reuters,

  AP, New York Times, etc.

  War zones OK.

  Day rates, fuel extra however.

  Tel/Fax 0 2467 0811.

  The Tribune was not on his list of references. But Delaney had used Ben Yong many times, on many assignments, not all of them safe, not all of them for the newspaper and not all of them successful. And Delaney was always thankful when Ben’s wife, who handled most of the telephone requests for his services, answered in her singsong affirmative that Mr. Ben would, easy, no problem, be available once again for Khun Frank when he arrived at Bangkok airport.

  Ben spent any waiting time polishing his immaculate Toyota Crown station wagon with a selection of soft cloths he kept in a special metal box in the back. Sometimes wax was applied, but Ben usually caressed the aging vehicle’s turquoise and white twotone paint job for the sake of it, for the love of it. Delaney had known many media drivers, in many countries—Sierra Leone, Nigeria, East Timor, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, just about everywhere there was a story and where he had been on assignment. And the good ones always, without fail, took loving care of their vehicles, no matter how old. These cars represented their livelihood, their badge of honour and, very often, their last refuge when the going got tough.

  The good drivers, the ones who knew how the media operated and how journalists needed to work, elicited affection, admiration and respect from the reporters who often entrusted them with their lives. When a well-known, experienced and reliable driver died or left the game, word would shoot around the world’s press clubs and news desks at a speed approaching that achieved when a veteran foreign correspondent died on assignment.

  Ben had gained weight, and lost hair. He was one of the few Thai men with a balding problem. He gave Delaney a slow, elegant wai, and then rushed over to shake his hand at the entrance to the airport terminal building. There was the usual chaos at the doorways and Ben extracted them from it expertly— negotiating the crowded sidewalk, fending off other drivers and tourist touts and sliding Delaney’s small suitcase and equipment bag into the back of the car. Ben had long ago made a deal with the parking police and he was always able to wait just at curbside, sparing himself and his clients a long hot trek to the jammed airport parking lots.

  “Too long now since you are in Bangkok, Frank,” Ben shouted over the headrests, grinning happily as he manoeuvred the Toyota through impossible tangles of cars, buses and motorbikes heading for the airport approach road. “What’s up, you need to buy some shirts?”

  Delaney always sat in the back of the car, no matter how many times he used Ben’s services and how well he got to know him. Ben preferred it that way. It left the front passenger seat empty and available to store anything that might be required immediately to hand and, Ben had always said, it could elicit respect for the passenger in back, sometimes, when police or soldiers stopped the car for paper checks or to demand bribes. Only greenhorns and aid workers rode in the front seat with their driver; this was Ben’s theory.

  The car’s aging air conditioner was beginning to kick in, but it was a noisy system and conversation had to be at high volume. As always in Thailand, conversation also had to battle with local music scratching its way out of bad loudspeakers and aging tape players.

  “I’m still working through my shirts from the last trip over, Ben,” Delaney said. “And the paper’s not sending me to Asia like it used to.”

  “Everywhere is the same,” Ben said. “All the guys, the same now. No travel like before, bad budgets, even for TV. Bad for me, guys like me.”

  “I’ll need you for a few days at least, Ben,” Delaney said. “At least.”

  “Good, good, very good,” Ben said. “Where we going?”

  Ben didn’t mean which hotel. He knew that Delaney always stayed at the venerable Royal Hotel, in a teeming neighbourhood near the Democracy Monument. It was aging badly but had a long history with media people and locals alike. Delaney and Ben had been sitting together in the hotel’s famous lobby bar in 1992 when Thai soldiers chased in a crowd of pro-democracy demonstrators and shot a few of them behind the check-in counter.

  “Not sure where we’re going this time, exactly,” Delaney said. “Stick around Bangkok for a while, maybe have to go outside later on.”

  He wanted to wait until they were sitting down to a couple of cold Singha beers before telling Ben about Kellner and asking for a rundown on what he had heard around town.

  The lobby of the Royal was quiet. A few Thai businessmen in dark blue suits sat in the lobby bar, as did a few taxi drivers in brightly patterned shortsleeved shirts. The prostitutes had not yet shown up for the afternoon shift. The ceiling fans turned lazily as they had for the past 60 years, still in service if only because of the hotel’s ramshackle and notoriously unreliable air-conditioning system.

  Delaney got the room he had requested, in the hotel’s original building and not in the so-called new wing, which had actually been around since the bad old days of 1970s hotel décor. He asked Ben to give him an hour. He wanted to perform his postflight ritual of 20 minutes sleep and a long hot shower. Ben said he would sleep too, in the car where he had parked it behind the hotel out back, in perhaps the only reliable patch of shade for kilometres around.

  Ben was waiting for him in the bar exactly an hour later, with two cold Singhas already poured and a small wooden bowl of mixed nuts at the ready. Ben had never once in Delaney’s experience been late for anything, except when detained by police or soldiers. Even then he always managed to extricate himself in record time from whatever the problem might be.

  “What we working on, Frank?” Ben said, always eager to get started.

  “Nathan Kellner,” Delaney said.

  “He coming too?” Ben said. “Haven’t seen him for a long while. I don’t think Khun Nathan is around.”

  “That’s what we’re working on, Ben. Kellner’s gone to ground. I’m looking for him.” “You not doing a story?”

  “Might be. Depends what Kellner’s up to. I’ve been asked to find out where he’s gone.”

  “He’s in trouble maybe. Like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ben was eating nuts one by one, as he always did. He drank beer very slowly and ate peanuts as if time had stood still.

  “I never see him now. Never drove for him much anyway. He used another guy. I could ask a few people maybe.”

  “OK. I’m going to go see his girlfriend. She’s Thai,” Delaney said.

  “All your guys have Thai girls here, Frank. You would too, in Bangkok,” Ben said with a smile.

  “They’ve been together a long time,” Delaney said. “Not like with the other guys, I would say.”

  “Maybe not,” Ben said. Not convinced. “Bar girl? Used to be?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Ben was clearly not convinced.

  “Let’s take a run over there so I can talk to her.”

  “Sure, OK.”

  “His place is on a little soi off Thanon Sathon.”

  “Near U.S. Information Service?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I know where,” Ben said.

  The traffic was dense, but not as dense as Delaney remembered from the last time he had been in Bangkok. It seemed to be getting ever so slightly easier to move around the city each time he came. Perhaps because of the Skytrain that had at long last been built. Perhaps because Bangkok, like so many Asian cities, was becoming more and more Westernized, adopting Western trappings such as traffic lights that worked and driving schools for young people and policemen who, occasionally, refused to look the other way when confronted with egregious infractions of the traffic rules. Perhaps.

  The watchman in the dirt courtyard of Kellner’s
apartment block stood up when Delaney arrived. He had watched from a reclining position on his wooden bed when Delaney got out of Ben’s car and had sat up when Delaney turned to come onto the property. He stood up only when it was clear Delaney wanted to go inside the building. He offered the Western visitor no wai, a rare failure in Thailand and one that Delaney noted with interest.

  Delaney offered the wai and said: “Nathan Kellner’s house.”

  No smile from the watchman. Another rare failure in Thailand.

  “He is not here,” the watchman said, looking past Delaney’s shoulder to the car where Ben was already reading his newspaper.

  “I know. I am here to see his girl,” Delaney said.

  “You are a friend?” the watchman said; dubious.

  “Yes.”

  “Whose friend? Mai or Khun Nathan?”

  “Both.”

  The watchman looked at him closely.

  “Canadian?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go see,” the watchman said.

  He slid into his sandals, classics with soles made from old automobile tires, and headed through an arch into a ground floor corridor that led to a line of doors painted maroon. Delaney remembered that Kellner’s apartment was on the ground floor. He turned around to look at Ben Yong, who gave him the thumbs up and an interrogative shrug. Delaney shrugged back.

  From far down the corridor, Delaney heard quiet words in Thai, then the slap of the watchman’s sandals as he came back. Now the wai was offered.

  “So sorry, my friend. Mai is waiting for you now. So sorry.”

  “Any troubles here?” Delaney asked.

  “You know,” the watchman said, looking intently at Delaney. “Mai will tell you if you don’t know.”

  “Lots of visitors for Mai now?

  “Yes.”

  “People you know?”

  “Some of them.”

  “People Mai knows?”

  “Some.”

  Delaney could see Mai through the screen door of the apartment as he removed his shoes and placed them on a low stand in the corridor outside the entrance. She was sitting on a large Thai reclining platform, resting against triangular upright cushions and stroking two tiny kittens. A big-screen TV flickered CNN images silently in a corner. The place was very dim. Even in the dim light Delaney could see she was as heartstoppingly beautiful as ever. She did not get up.

  “Kuhn Frank,” she said.

  “Mai, my friend.” Delaney pushed open the screen door and moved across the coolness of the shining waxed floor to shake her hand. She offered up a cheek and he kissed it, feeling a breath of fine silky hair on his own cheek as he did so. The cats scattered.

  “Where is Nathan, Frank? Where has he gone?” Mai immediately started to cry softly. “He has never been away so long without calling me.”

  “I know that, Mai.”

  “Have you come to give me some news?” she asked.

  “No. I’ve come to find out where he has gone,” Delaney said.

  “Oh good. Good,” she said. “I miss him, Frank. I am worried this time.”

  “We’ll find out what he’s doing,” Delaney said.

  “Please.”

  Mai made him tea.The cats chased her bare feet and legs as she padded around the apartment getting things ready. Delaney could not keep his eyes off her. She moved with fantastic grace. That alone would capture any Westerner’s eye. She was older than most of the girls living with Western correspondents in Bangkok, at least the ones Delaney knew. Late twenties, thirty maximum, or so Delaney had been told. But looking far, far younger.

  There was a lot to discuss. Mai told him that Kellner had not appeared worried or distracted in the days before he left. He was always working on something or other, she said, and often he did not tell her much about what that might have been. Kellner and Mai had a quiet lifestyle in their dim, immaculate apartment, she said. Visitors often came from embassies, particularly Asian embassies, often people who went into Kellner’s study with him and closed the door. Usually men who carried with them cartons of cigarettes and bottles of Johnnie Walker as offerings when they arrived.

  But these visitors did not stay to eat or drink after such meetings. Occasionally another Western correspondent would come, usually with a Thai girl like Mai. There would be food on those occasions, prepared by Kellner’s housekeeper before she left for the day, and then lots of marijuana. And vodka and beer for the men. There would be much talk of journalism and Asia and travel and there would often be video movies on the giant TV screen and more marijuana and vodka and beer. Sometimes the guests would sleep in the guest bedroom, sometimes not.

  Kellner worked from home. Delaney wanted very much to look closely at what was on his desk and in his desk and in his appointment book if that had been left behind. He had not decided whether to ask to do this later that day, on the first meeting with Mai. He wanted first to hear everything she had to say about how Kellner had disappeared.

  “He went out to play badminton that day,” she said. “He came home and we smoked some Thai stick and he drank his vodka. We went onto the bed.”

  Delaney always marvelled at the sexual frankness of young Thai women.

  “After we had our bath he got ready to go out. He said he had to say something at the press club.” “Say something?” Delaney said.

  “Like a speech maybe,” she said. “He got ready to go out, like anytime, and then he went out. And he has not come back.”

  Mai hugged her knees on the reclining platform. Her sarong fell away slightly. Delaney cursed himself for the frisson her slender thighs elicited. He thought suddenly of Kate, remembered the last time they had had sex. A languorous Thailand evening was working its magic with his senses. He wondered how intense that might be for someone like Kellner, in a deeper, drug-induced trance that he never, apparently, quite allowed to end.

  “Do you think he might be dead, Frank?” Mai asked.

  Delaney thought about it for a while before answering, before deciding how much of an answer he wanted to give to this sad young woman sitting before him.

  “It’s too early for us to talk like that,” Delaney said finally.

  “You are a good man,” Mai said. “Nathan liked you.”

  “We didn’t see each other much,” Delaney said.

  “He liked you. He liked Montreal and he liked you.”

  Delaney didn’t push her too hard on the first meeting. He knew, from all his years as an interviewer, to circle the subject slowly in a case like this, to allow Mai to remember things at random and then to slowly ask for clarification, amplification, explanation. He knew that too many questions, too early in a case like this, would be counterproductive.

  He had already decided that there was no way Mai was hiding anything from him. He knew there was no reason for her to do that and he knew, he sensed, that she was telling him as much as she possibly could. They talked for a long while.

  “Who would be angry with Nathan, do you think?” Delaney asked eventually. “Were people complaining about his stories lately?” Mai looked up at Delaney.

  “You know there are stories he wrote that made people angry,” she said.

  “No, I really don’t anymore,” Delaney said. “What was he working on?”

  “He would only tell me after, most times,” she said. “He liked to show me his stories when they came back from London by fax. Mostly gun stories, big weapon stories. Tanks. In lots of countries.”

  “What lately? Before he went away.” Delaney was avoiding the word disappeared.

  “Not so much lately. Less than before. He was working from here more lately. Less travel. Lots of phoning. Lots of time in there.” Mai pointed at Nathan’s study.

  “Who was angry at him, Mai?” Delaney asked again.

  She sat quietly, stroking one of her cats. Delan
ey began to wonder if she was indeed hiding something now or whether she was just trying to remember.

  “There were some Australians who were mad once,” she said. “Two or three Australians. But a long while ago now. Months ago.”

  “Australians.”

  “Yes.”

  “What were they angry about?”

  “One of Nathan’s articles. He wrote about Australian rich men, you know, businessmen. What they were doing in Burma. He had other people in the story saying they should not be in there, that it is a bad place and that they shouldn’t work with the generals. Something like that.”

  “What sort of work were they doing over there?” Delaney asked.

  He knew that the answer, for Burma and for northern Thailand near the Burma border, could be any number of lucrative things. Timber, tobacco, construction of roads, casinos, the gem trade, the people trade, the drug trade—it was wide open if you knew the right general. But a very tricky part of the world to do business.

  “Building, I think,” Mai said. “Maybe a road. Hard to remember now.”

  “Have you got the article?” Delaney asked.

  “Probably in there,” she said, pointing again at Nathan’s study.

  “I’ll look in there soon,” Delaney said. “Will that be OK?”

  “Nathan would say OK, I think,” she said.

  “Good. What did the Australians do?” he asked.

  “Many telephone calls. Nathan said they were yelling on the phone. Not happy.” “Did they come here?”

  “No. I think Nathan met them, maybe. But this was a long time ago now. Months now.”

  Delaney wasn’t sure it would be so unusual, or even potentially dangerous, for a journalist to have upset a few foreign businessmen trying to make a fast buck in Thailand and Burma. Despite the world condemnation of the Burmese military regime, businessmen from Australia, Europe, all over, were quietly going in to make deals and to make big money. It was not so unusual.The regime was utterly corrupt and utterly ruthless and needed a lot of money just to keep the lid on things, especially with the democracy movement simmering away and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest in Rangoon again. Making a couple of businessmen angry was one thing; making the generals angry would be quite another.