“No way. I may need it at any time.” Cohen spotted Delaney and said to the manager: “Here is my colleague now, from the Tribune. Frank, could you please explain to our friend here that you and I may at any moment be called to the frontline?” He grabbed Delaney’s hand and shook it furiously. Obviously stoned, well on his way to being drunk as well.
The manager gave Delaney a slow wai. “Gentlemen, please, that car cannot remain there tonight.”
“Mordecai, just move the car, OK?” Delaney said. “It’s bad for property values.”
Cohen hesitated, then fished his keys out of a vest pocket and handed them to the hotel man.
“OK, fine, OK,” he said. “But tell your valet we may need this vehicle at any time. Urgent business.”
The manager took the keys and handed them to a uniformed doorman, who looked decidedly unhappy about having to get into such a disreputable vehicle with fresh clothes on. Cohen pulled Delaney toward the elevators.
“Cocktails,” Cohen said. “On the Tribune,I would imagine.”
Delaney had spent a lot of time that night greeting reporters and cameramen he had known from previous assignments or other newsrooms. The press club, and its crowd of regulars, never changed. The focus was, of course, the bar. People tended to crowd around it rather than sit at any one of the 20 or so small tables they could have used at any given moment. The tables in the press club were almost always empty while the bar stools and bar area teemed with people. An adjacent small dining room was where people usually sat if they felt they had to or if they wanted to eat instead of simply drink.
“No idea where Kellner’s gone, no idea,” Cohen said much later, after he and Delaney had gone through the social niceties, if they can be called that in a bar where journalists congregate. “He just, like, disappeared.”
Cohen had been useless all evening, in his customary haze and never clear at the best of times about what Kellner might have been working on at any given moment.
“What were you guys up to lately?” Delaney asked again.
“Us guys? Kellner, you mean,” Cohen said through a mouthful of beer nuts.
“You were often working on stuff together, no?”
“Nah, not much anymore,” Cohen said. “When I first came over maybe, the odd picture for his mag, the odd thing together upcountry around Chiang Mai when I first came over. Not now.”
“Surely you’ve got some idea what he’s doing, where he’s gone.”
“Honest to God, Frank, I’ve got no clue. The guy was supposed to come over here a few weeks back, to do another version of his wonderfully boring do-gooder speech about safety training for corros in war zones. He never showed up. That’s it.”
“Have you pissed anyone off lately?” Delaney asked.
“What, me personally?”
“You guys. You two. You ran together.”
“Not so much anymore.”
“Dope?”
“Ah, minor stuff, man. We did the odd minor deal together, nothing heavy. He fronted me a bit of cash for deals sometimes, but it was small stuff, very small stuff. Recreational use, a little on the side for friends. Thirdand fourth-hand deals. Westernerto-Westerner stuff. Nothing.” “You burn anyone lately?”
“Frank, come on, we’re talking small stuff here. Friends and family. No rip-offs.The generals are the big players in Thailand. We’re nobodies.”
“What about Burma?”
“What do you mean? Dope?”
“No. Was Kellner going in on a job?”
“I don’t know, Frank. Maybe. He liked that Suu Kyi broad, I know that. The lady. He liked what she was doing over there.”
“Did he have an interview set up?”
“She’s under house arrest, Frank. She’s not talking to the press. You know that.”
“Mai says some guys were at their place, asking whether Kellner was going to Burma, whether he had been in.”
“Aha,” Cohen said. “The plot thickens.”
“Mordecai, you really don’t seem to be taking this seriously,” Delaney said. “Kellner’s been out of the game for more than a month. You don’t seem to give a shit.”
“He’ll turn up. I’m sure he’ll turn up here any day now. He’s off on some adventure somewhere. What’s your angle anyway? You guys weren’t such close pals. What you doing over here looking for him anyway?”
Delaney found himself getting more and more exasperated. He knew he was battling through Cohen’s deepening late-night trance, but had expected more information, more concern. Delaney didn’t answer. He ordered more beer. Cohen was going to be dead end. That night, in any case.
More journalists had rolled in to the club. Delaney’s information gathering ceased.
Ross Laverton was there, holding court. In Delaney’s view, one of the most insufferable specimens that Canadian journalism had ever produced.
A weekly newsmagazine man, under no particular pressure to produce, and under no particular pressure to produce anything other than matchers for breaks in the newspapers. Laverton had been in Bangkok for too long. It showed in his sallow complexion, his rumpled tropical weight suit and expanding beer gut.
“My round,” he shouted to no one in particular. This news did not stop the intense buzz of conversation.
“Delaney,” Laverton shouted. “Surely you must allow me to buy you a glass of beer. And Cohen, come on. Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Delaney and Laverton had been at odds, if not enemies, ever since they had started out together on the Tribune a lifetime ago. Laverton had seen Delaney as a competitor. Delaney had never seen Laverton as anything more than a modestly talented middle-class boy from Montreal’s western suburbs.
Beers were purchased; pleasantries, near-pleasantries exchanged.
“I read your column regularly, Frank, of course,” Laverton said eventually. “A new beat for you, really, isn’t it. Political trends.” “Not really, Ross,” Delaney said.
“Well, I mean, the analytical side of things,” Laverton said.
“Don’t use words of more than two or three syllables maximum with this dickhead,” Cohen said drunkenly. “Delaney gets confused easily. But he thanks you for the beer. Right, Frankie?”
“No really, I mean, it is quite a departure for you, isn’t it Frank? A weekly column? No?”
“I was actually quite used to filing every day, Ross,” Delaney said, not yet drunk enough to be offended, not sober enough to completely let things go.“I find the weekly rhythm very easy to take, actually. Quite relaxing.”
“Touché,” shouted Cohen. “Touché, you weekly fucking magazine scumbag. Still your round, Ross.”
More rounds of drinks were bought, many more rounds, by a series of other reporters, hangers-on and knaves. More stories were exchanged; more complaints about the media game were aired. Ferocious little arguments started and stopped. Colleagues and competitors were slandered or praised. Plates of Thai food were consumed very late. Then, for Delaney, a jumbled impression of the gently spinning hotel lobby; handshakes, embraces, exchanges of business cards, exchanges of notes. Backslapping, handshakes, cars.
Then a freezing air-conditioned taxi ride back to the Royal, a long slow fumbling for keys, and a cool pillow rushing up to meet Delaney’s face. He woke, in his clothes, to the warble of the room telephone. Ben Yong was waiting for him downstairs.
Ben dropped him off at the end of Kellner’s soi. Delaney told him he would call if he needed a ride toward the end of the day. The watchman was neither friendly nor unfriendly. He offered Delaney a brief wai and then went back to reading a newspaper on his wooden bed. He didn’t go down the corridor first to announce Delaney’s arrival as he had done the day before.
Mai didn’t look good when Delaney pushed open the screen door. She had been crying again, it appeared. She was feeding go
ldfish in a small tank. She looked very tired.
“Mordecai Cohen was no help last night, Mai,” Delaney said.
“He would know where Nathan is, Frank. If anybody would know,” Mai said sadly. Neither of them had much more to say for the moment.
The key thing now was Kellner’s study. Delaney went in right away. Mai watched TV in the living room, kept company by cats.
The first thing that struck Delaney was the pictures. Ten or more, pinned up on the big bulletin board over Kellner’s old wooden desk. Aung San Suu Kyi in a variety of poses, at various stages of her career. The biggest one, a reprint of an Associated Press news picture, showed Suu Kyi standing on a platform behind the fence of her house in Rangoon, addressing party supporters and democracy campaigners. Hard-looking Burmese soldiers looking on uneasily. The fence was decorated with images of dancing peacocks, symbols of the student democracy movement and of Suu Kyi’s party, the New League for Democracy, the NLD.
The picture was dated November 2000, about six months ago—and a few months after Suu Kyi had been placed under house arrest for the second time by the military regime. She had been free, or relatively free, for about five years before that. She’d been under house arrest for the first time in the late eighties, Delaney recalled, until about 1995.
Other pictures showed Suu Kyi looking very attractive in other settings, in wide Burmese woven hats with flowers in her hair or at the nape of her neck. A charismatic, Oxford-educated beauty, whose fate it was to return to Burma to visit in 1988, just as the democracy movement was taking flight and as the generals panicked and cracked down. Now the leader of the strongest pro-democracy political grouping in the country and a thorn in the side of the regime. She had an open invitation from the generals to leave Burma, but she did not leave, even when her husband was dying back in England, saying she feared she would never be allowed back in to her home country again.
Under the pictures, Kellner—Delaney had to assume it was Kellner—had pinned slogans and quotations, written by hand on pages from a reporter’s notebook.
“The work of our national movement remains unfinished. We still have to achieve the prosperity promised by the dragon. It is not yet time for the triumphant dance of the peacock.” Suu Kyi.
“Some people in Burma spend the period of the Thingyan spring water festival in April in meditating, worshipping at pagodas, observing Buddhism’s eight precepts, releasing caged birds and fishes, and performing other meritorious deeds. Children are told that Sakya comes down from his heavenly abode to wander in the human world in the days of Thingyan, carrying with him two large books, one bound in gold and the other bound in dog leather. The names of those who perform meritorious acts are entered in the golden book . . .” Suu Kyi
Kellner had underlined, in red, the word Sakya.
The final quote was not attributed. It said:
“To turn Aung San Suu Kyi from a martyr into a saint could only further harm an already-tarnished image of the military regime.”
Delaney found it hard to imagine Kellner, a veteran foreign correspondent of the most cynical and hardened kind, pinning up inspirational quotations about any democracy movement, anywhere in the world. Kellner was not the type to idolize movements, or ideas. Women, perhaps. Not movements or ideas.
The bulletin board also contained a mishmash of business cards, receipts, postcards, memorabilia— none of them immediately noteworthy. Cohen’s business card was there. Another for the military attaché at the Taiwanese embassy. One for the Canadian consulate’s press officer. A schedule of court times for Kellner’s badminton club.
Delaney started looking methodically through Kellner’s drawers. The usual pens and paperclips in the top right. Cassette tapes, with names of interview subjects and dates. He would have to listen to those, perhaps, but later. That would be a long job.
The second drawer down was full of reporter’s notebooks, tossed in a jumble but quite well labelled on the back with story subjects, interviewees’ names, dates. It looked like Kellner had been at an arms fair in Singapore about two months previously. Lots of notes from interviews conducted there. Nothing that stood out.
In notebooks from the period prior to that, a series of interviews and story subjects one would expect for the correspondent for Defence Monthly. Possible heavy equipment purchases by the Thai military. Maritime signalling equipment possibly being bought by the Taiwanese. What looked like notes for various political features. Nothing at first glance at all about Burma, or Suu Kyi, however. Delaney found this odd.
Then he spotted a slightly larger notebook, the kind university students use in class. It was in Kellner’s jammed in-tray on top of the desk. This one had the word Oz written in the top-right corner in felt marker pen. It was full of densely written notes about what appeared to be a construction contract in Burma, for an access road to a casino complex being built in Mongla, in northeast Burma near the Chinese border. Australians were involved, the notes indicated, providing engineering support and subcontracting services for equipment and materials. And, Kellner had indicated, for project security.
Kellner had written in the margin in that section, apparently later, with a different pen, the word mercs. Delaney wondered if this meant Mercedes or mercenaries. In that part of the world, it could well be either.
Mongla used to be just another backwater Burmese village, in the Shan State. Now it was a notorious drug-running and people-smuggling centre, and also a place where thousands of Chinese tourists poured in on tour buses from across the border in Yunan Province to gamble and watch seedy transvestite sex shows and get drunk. Mongla was the turf of one of Burma’s most powerful ethnic Chinese drug warlords, Min Lingxian, who had long ago cut a deal with the Burmese military regime to share profits from the opium trade in the wilderness bordering China, Laos and Thailand.
There was huge money to be made in Shan State, most of it of dubious origin, but some, as it appeared for the Australian consortium working the road deal Kellner had become interested in, more or less legal. Legal, but dangerous, financially risky and impossible to conduct without a nod from the military regime, the local warlord, and probably both. Impossible to conduct without protection of various sorts, military and political.
The area was awash with weapons—another reason Kellner and his magazine would have been keenly interested. Min Lingxian was reported to have more than three thousand heavily armed militiamen looking after his interests there. No foreign company could ever hope to operate in Mongla without dealing, directly or indirectly, with Lingxian’s people. Construction companies from Thailand had built many of the roads in the parts of Burma run by drug traffickers. Now, it appeared, an Australian company was getting a slice of that business too. And Kellner was onto the story.
Kellner put the big notebook into his equipment bag to study further at the hotel. He didn’t bother to tell Mai. She would surely be unaware of the details of Kellner’s journalistic activities, and probably of much of his other activities as well. She would never miss the odd notebook or sheaf of papers.
Kellner’s deep bottom drawer was even more interesting than the rest, in a much different way. This was where he kept some of his stash of marijuana and smoker’s paraphernalia. Small plastic bags of dope. Other smaller quantities in grey-plastic 35millimetre film canisters. Also small chunks of black resin wrapped in bits of aluminum foil, almost certainly opium or possibly Afghani hashish. No hard drugs apparently, no tablets or cocaine or heroin. Just smoker’s supplies and various pipes, rolling papers, matches, lighters. There were also DVDs, with Chinese-language labels showing pictures of naked women.
Delaney fired up Kellner’s laptop, hoping it would not need a password. He would want to read files on that computer later on. No password was requested. Delaney put one of the DVDs into the proper slot and clicked on the play function. Hardcore pornography poured across the laptop screen; young Chinese girls, obviously heavily drugg
ed, having gynecologically explicit sex with rough-looking Chinese young men. No plot, no dialogue except moans and grunts; just plain old hard-core porn.
“Nathan and I used to watch those together,” Mai said quietly from the doorway. She had apparently heard sound from the film and come in to see what Delaney was doing.
Delaney found himself blushing; a small boy caught looking at naughty pictures. He turned off the show.
“Nathan liked to watch that before we went to bed together,” Mai said. “You like that?” “Not my thing, Mai,” Delaney said.
“You are finding all there is to know about my man. His little secrets,” she said. “Now you have to find out where he has gone.” “I’m trying, Mai,” Delaney said.
She looked past him at the pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi.
“And you see the pictures of his other lady,” she said. “No picture of me there. Just Suu Kyi. With clothes on.”
“I see that,” he said.
She gazed at the pictures on the bulletin board for a while.
“Did you see Nathan’s scrapbook?” she asked. “Is that the word? Scrapbook, where you collect things on paper?”
“Scrapbook?”
“Yes.”
Mai reached up onto a shelf near the bulletin board and pulled down a ragged scrapbook with a floral-patterned cover—the type any school kid would use for special projects or to collect pictures. Kellner’s was full of clippings about Aung San Suu Kyi. They went far back. Some as far as her release from a first period of house arrest in 1995, then through her increasingly important pro-democracy activities and her struggle to force the military regime to recognize the results of the 1990 election that her party clearly won. Then house arrest again in 2000.
On one recent clipping about Suu Kyi’s daily, almost monastic, routine in her secluded house on Rangoon’s University Avenue, Kellner had written in felt pen: “From martyr to saint.”
“What does he mean by that?” Mai asked when she saw Delaney looking at the inscription.
The Burma Effect Page 10