The Burma Effect

by Michael E. Rose

  “People have been coming to see you since Nathan went away,” Delaney said.

  “How can you know that?” Mai said.

  “I’m a reporter,” Delaney said, smiling.

  Mai smiled too. “That’s what Nathan always said when I asked him how he knew things.” “Who has been coming?”

  “Mordecai. Other farangs from the press club. Their wives and girls. My family.”

  “Mordecai Cohen? From Montreal?” Delaney said.

  “Yes. Nathan’s good friend. He has been trying to help me. He comes, with his girl. He brings me smoke. Other guys visit from the press club sometimes. It’s like that.”

  “Who else?” Delaney remembered the email in London from Rawson saying two Asian men had been at the apartment.

  “A Canadian embassy man. Thai police.”

  “Who else?

  “Two men. Last week. Thai. In suits. They said they were police too but they had no uniforms. They were wearing suits. Nice Western suits.”

  “Thai? You sure?”

  “Yes. But northern-sounding, I think.”

  “Did you ask them for ID?” Mai looked at Delaney as if at a child.

  “That is not how it works here, Frank.”

  “What did they ask?”

  “They asked what Nathan was working on, just like you. Just like everyone asks now when they come. I told them I couldn’t remember. That is what Nathan would have told me to say.”

  “Did they ask about Burma? Or about the Australian story Nathan wrote?”

  “Not about Australia. About Burma, yes.”

  “What did they ask?”

  “They asked if Nathan had been in Burma, if he was going to go to Burma.”

  “You sure these guys were not Burmese?”

  “I would know this, Frank,” Mai said quietly. “But they asked about Burma. They asked if Nathan was going to be writing about the democracy people there. Aung San Suu Kyi’s people. The lady.”

  Everyone in the region simply referred to Suu Kyi as “the lady.” The daughter of General Aung San, the independence hero, now herself a hero whose party won elections in 1990. In and out of house arrest for years and even while detained, staging famous rallies every Sunday afternoon from over the fence at her rambling rundown house in Rangoon.

  “Was he writing about Suu Kyi?” Delaney asked.

  “I don’t think so. He wrote about guns and business. Not people so much,” she said.

  “People who buy and sell guns need to find people to carry them and shoot them, Mai,” Delaney said.

  “I don’t think Nathan wrote about that part so much,” she said.

  Delaney could see it was time to have a good look through Kellner’s papers.

  “Nathan liked the lady,” Mai said. “He has pictures of her in his working room.”

  “Pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi?”

  “Yes. On his board.”

  “But he wasn’t writing about her.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mai said. “But he liked her. He said she was very special, very beautiful. Important. Sometimes I felt a little jealous.” Mai looked embarrassed, and then smiled. “Like a foolish girl, maybe.”

  “Can I look in Nathan’s study now?” Delaney asked.

  “OK. But I have to go out soon. To my classes. I am going to be a teacher. Did you know that, Frank?” she said.

  “No. That’s terrific,” he said.

  “I study only part-time. Nathan helps me. It is very slow.” “That’s terrific.”

  “My brother has been taking me to my classes since Nathan went away. He is probably waiting outside now.”

  “Why wouldn’t he come in?” Delaney asked.

  Mai again gave him a patient look.

  “Because that is not how it works here, Frank,” she said.

  “How would he know I was here?”

  “The watchman watches,” she said. “And you have a driver, like always, probably.”

  “Yes.”

  “So my brother waits outside.” She stood up, scattering cats.

  “I will go out to tell him I’m coming. Then you can look in Nathan’s room.” “Let me meet your brother,” Delaney said. Mai looked uncomfortable.

  “Frank, my brother doesn’t like Western guys.”

  “I see.”

  “He doesn’t think Thai girls should should go to bed with farangs and live in their houses.” “I see. So he didn’t like Nathan either?” She hesitated, but only for a moment. “No,” she said.

  “What about the rest of your family?”

  “For my mother, it’s OK. She is happy Nathan is nice to me and helps me to be a teacher. My father is dead. My other brothers, not so happy.”

  “This brother outside, what does he do?”

  “He works in a hotel.”

  “Let me meet him.”

  “OK, Frank.”

  Mai got a bag and some books and got ready to go. She found Delaney a spare key.

  “You stay here, OK? Don’t stay in a hotel. Nathan would have invited you too,” she said.

  “I’m OK. I’m at the Royal. I’m OK, really,” Delaney said.

  “Stay here. It’s lonely here without Nathan. Sleep with me in my bed. Nathan wouldn’t mind. You can hold me. Nathan wouldn’t mind. Just holding.”

  Delaney, despite all his travels in Asia, was still always taken aback by such frank suggestions.

  “I don’t think so, Mai,” Delaney said. He felt, however, an intense jolt of sexual energy.

  “You have a girl?” Mai asked.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “Would she mind? Just holding?”

  “I’m not sure.” He really was not sure.

  “OK, Frank. But you stay anyway. In the other bedroom. Very nice in there too. Maybe I come in to hold you in the morning.”

  They went outside into the early Thai evening. It was still very hot. The watchman and Mai’s brother were sitting together on the watchman’s wooden bed frame, smoking cigarettes. They both stood up when Mai and Delaney approached. The brother offered no wai. Ben was reading a newspaper in his car across the street. He folded the paper and got out when he saw Delaney, but waited where he was.

  Mai said something in Thai to her brother and the watchman. Her brother looked sullen. He turned as if to go. Mai touched his arm and he stopped.

  “Frank, this is my brother, Thaksin. He speaks only a very little bit of English.” She said something else to her brother in Thai.

  Thaksin stood for a moment and then took Frank’s hand. Thaksin’s small hand was rough and hard in Frank’s. A hand that had done much manual work.

  “I’m a friend of Nathan’s,” Frank said. “I’m helping your sister find out where he is.” Mai translated this.

  “OK,” Thaksin said finally, not smiling. Mai said something else in Thai. The watchman spoke in Thai as well. Ben started to walk over, apparently thinking something was wrong.

  “Everything OK, Frank?” Ben said.

  “Yeah,” Delaney said.

  Mai spoke to Ben in Thai. Ben looked at Frank, and then spoke to Thaksin in Thai. There was a burst of Thai among the group of four locals, and a series of looks over at Frank. Finally, Thaksin said, looking at Frank: “OK. OK.”

  Thaksin touched Mai’s arm and gestured toward a very beat-up Mazda parked near Ben’s car.

  “I go now, Frank,” Mai said. “You stay in the apartment.” She came away from the group and said to him much more quietly. “You stay tonight too.”

  “I think I will go to the hotel now instead,” Delaney said, loud enough for all to hear, not at all sure he would be understood. Staying in the apartment now, and especially overnight, would clearly not be a good idea. “We will look at papers tomorrow. Ben, let’s get going.” “Sure
Frank,” Ben said.

  Mai spoke again in Thai to her brother and to the watchman, and then came over to give Delaney a light kiss on the cheek. Her brother’s face darkened.

  “Thank you for coming to help me, Frank,” Mai said. “We will find Nathan, right?” “Yes, Mai,” Delaney said.

  “Thank you, Frank.” She walked over to the Mazda with her brother. Delaney shook the watchman’s hand.

  “I’m coming back tomorrow,” Delaney said. “To see Mai again.”

  “OK,” the watchman said. “Daytime is better.”

  Ben said something in Thai to the watchman, who said nothing in response.

  “Let’s go,” Delaney said.

  He walked to Ben’s car and got in the back. “The girl’s brother is not a happy guy, Frank,” Ben said. “He doesn’t like farangs.”

  “So I’m told. Didn’t like Nathan very much at all, I’m told.”

  “So? He doesn’t like any Western guys.”

  “So Nathan’s disappeared.”

  “No way, Frank,” Ben said. “No way. That’s not how it works. These guys are not stupid people. Guys like him. They don’t like the farangs who sleep with their sisters but the whole family gets something. Directly or indirectly. Always.They would not break that.”

  “You sure about that, Ben?”

  “Sure,” Ben said.

  Delaney was not convinced.

  They headed back to the Royal. Delaney filled Ben in, trusting him totally and relying on his insights into regional politics, business, social relations. Then Ben waited in the lobby with his newspaper while Delaney went upstairs. Despite his post-flight nap, Delaney was feeling the effects of the long trip from London.

  He checked emails on his laptop computer. Another one from Rawson that simply said: What you got? JR. Frank emailed back, saying: On the ground in BKK and on the case. Rawson was not usually so inquisitive so early. Something important was going on, something potentially important. Another message from the Jung Society, express ing disappointment that, again, Delaney had failed to deliver his promised paper. No message from Kate. But one from Harden.

  Dear FD. Would have appreciated a bit more of a discussion with you before you headed out this time. Call me ASAP. Need to talk column, assignments, logistics, chains of command. Thanks and regards, Harden. (Editor-in-Chief).

  That Harden had bothered to remind Delaney of his position and title was a worrying sign. Delaney looked at his watch, calculated that Harden would still be at his desk and decided to wait before calling. Best to hit voicemail for something like this. He would make the call later. The opinion page editor had been at work and Harden would need soothing.

  Delaney called Mordecai Cohen’s mobile phone. The photographer answered immediately. It sounded like he was on a construction site. “Cohen,” he shouted over the din.

  “Mordecai, it’s Frank Delaney. Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m in a tuk-tuk on Khao San Road. It’s fucking hot and noisy. You in town?”

  “Yeah,” Delaney said. “Not far from Khao San. At the Royal.”

  “I figured you’d be through eventually. Kellner’s still AWOL.”

  “I know. I saw Mai today.”

  “Drinks? Too noisy for me to talk anyway,” Cohen said. “When?”

  “Half hour, more or less. Depends on traffic and this tuk-tuk. It’s an antique. Say an hour. At the press club.”

  “Not here?”

  “Nah. I hate the fucking Royal.”

  “OK,” Delaney said.

  Delaney realized that he was very hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast on the plane. He went downstairs and ordered some pad thai in the bar and more beers for himself and Ben and they talked over what Delaney had gathered so far.

  Ben thought, after hearing what Delaney told him, that Kellner had gone into Burma on some secret assignment. A lot of Western reporters tried periodically to go in, usually on tourist visas, but the regime was tough on the foreign media and turned most reporters back. Those who got in without official approval risked arrest and, if discovered, at best a short stay in Rangoon’s Insein Prison and a fast deportation back to Bangkok. Such reporters would usually be barred for life from entering Burma again.

  Kellner, however, was an old hand. If he had gone into Burma without a journalist’s visa he would probably have gone in by road, with plenty of U.S. dollars for bribes.Through Mae Sot on the Thai side into Myawadi on the Burmese side. Then by very bad road anywhere else in the country until he got caught. Or so Ben thought.

  “Why would he not tell Mai where he was going?” Delaney asked.

  “He didn’t want to worry his woman,” Ben said.

  “He always worried any woman he has ever been with. That was no big deal for him.” “Maybe he’s softening up,” Ben said.

  Delaney was not convinced. He saw the Burma connections firming up but saw also that with a man like Kellner, those connections could go wrong outside Burma as easily as inside. It could also be any number of other connections gone bad, other stories and other deals gone bad. Delaney wanted to pump Mordecai for information and knew that the press club would be the place to do it. It risked, however, being a very long night.

  Ben dropped Delaney off in the crowded parking lot of the Dusit Thani hotel.The press club, improbably, was located at the very top of the high-rise, a deal made years before with the hotel management. The club drew in many reporters, of course, but also hangers-on, VIP speakers, diplomats, girlfriends, wives, spies. A mutually advantageous arrangement for the hotel and the press club executive board.

  Delaney insisted that Ben go home. He would be drinking with Mordecai and his crowd for hours and Ben had young children. Delaney remembered once having had the rare privilege of going to Ben’s modest little home on the outskirts of Bangkok. He had watched as Ben’s boy, about 10, and his daughter, maybe 12, had raced across a dusty field to leap at their father and hug and kiss him as if he were the best and most important man in the world.The children, and his wife, were intensely proud of Ben, of his profession, his friends from around the world, and of his lovingly maintained little car.

  Delaney always tried to prevent Ben from staying out too late, especially if it was just to wait outside some drinking establishment of dubious reputation. They always had the same argument, but in the end Delaney always prevailed.

  “Family, Ben. It’s important,” Delaney said.

  “Yes, grandfather,” Ben would say, smiling. “Yes, grandfather.” But Ben would always go home in the end, in such circumstances, except if there was real work left to do or if Delaney really needed help. Delaney, no family man, had other priorities. He wondered, as he watched Ben’s car disappear into the humid Thai night, just what these had come to be. He needed someone to remind him.

  Chapter 7

  When Delaney emerged from the Royal Hotel the next day, he was in extremely ragged shape. Ben Yong just shook his head sadly and took Delaney’s equipment bag from him.

  “Was I not wise in advising you to avoid the press club last night, my friend?” Delaney said. He ordered a litre-and-a-half bottle of mineral water from the barman and a foil packet of aspirin that the bar staff always also kept in stock. Ben was drinking tea.

  “Not so very wise, it looks like,” Ben said. “What time you finish?”

  “It seems like a very few minutes ago, Ben,” Delaney said.

  The night, as expected, had been a classic Asian press club night. Delaney had run into Cohen in the crowded lobby of the Dusit Thani. Cohen, as always, looked like he had just stepped off a helicopter in from a dirty, dangerous war zone. He wore the regulation combat green photographer’s vest with many pockets, battered khaki pants and sturdy hiker’s sandals. He did not, however, have a giant Nikon or Canon camera dangling from his neck, not so much because he was off duty but because he was rarely on duty and not
a very good photographer at all.

  Cohen, like some expats of a certain type in Asia and elsewhere, had energetically adopted the freelance news photographer lifestyle, dress and attitude without actually having paid his dues on the job. He got the occasional assignment from minor magazines, and sometimes played second or even third string to other more respected shooters, but it was common knowledge that he had neither the technical skill nor the experience to make it big.

  In fact, word was that he very much preferred things that way. He used the photography to finance his rundown apartment, his dope smoking, his girlfriends and his painting. No one among the Bangkok expat crowd quite knew if Cohen was a better painter than he was a photographer. No one had seen his paintings and no one really seemed to care. Cohen was amusing to have around in a drinking session and he was a solid, reliable contact for soft drugs. Occasionally he produced a news picture that appeared somewhere in the world’s media.

  Cohen was arguing with the hotel’s impeccably dressed night manager about where he had left his car. He had parked the filthy old Ford directly outside the glass entrance doors, under the hotel’s sweeping awning. It was unmistakably his because it still had the letters TV applied in various places to the pocked window glass and the roof with heavy tape—de rigueur in battle zones, less so outside downtown five-star hotels. Cohen had not been anywhere vaguely resembling a battle zone for a very long time, but left the TV markings on his car as a badge of honour.

  “Fuck it, man, that’s where I always leave my car. I could be called out again at any moment,” Cohen was saying to the manager, pushing his long unruly hair back from his eyes. “I’m a press club member. I may need to get to my car in a hurry.” The hotel man was patient, polite, very Thai. “Please, you must remove this car. We have many guests arriving tonight. Tour buses also,” he said quietly.