Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

  “McPhail, wait up. You really should come to Rangoon.”

  McPhail swung around on his heels.

  “Next life, Vinny.”

  TWO

  Pseudoephedrine Is Not an Illicit Drug

  RATANA SMILED AS Calvino came back into the office. He returned the smile.

  “How did it go with McPhail?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t want to go to Burma.”

  “I meant with paying respect to George and the others at the Lonesome Hawk Bar.”

  “They haven’t got back to me.”

  Her eyes smiling, she said, “They will let you know.”

  “Any calls while I was out?”

  She shrugged.

  He walked into his office, removed his jacket and sat at his desk. Ratana had placed his passport, two photos and the Burmese visa form beside the keyboard. The documents were surrounded by the mouse on the left and on the right, his favorite pen for signing documents.

  It was up to him. Of course it was. He sat at his desk and woke up his screen from sleep mode. There was a note in Ratana’s handwriting on top of the passport: “Brad Morrisey, RIP.”

  She’d smiled when he’d come in, and there are layers to a Thai smile. Stacked one upon another, with no instructions on how to unpack. The note, the papers, like a jazz solo, had been in Ratana’s smile. Calvino understood. She knew that he would.

  Brad Morrisey had disappeared upcountry to a small village, retreating to a small room in a house on stilts, pigs and chickens and dogs running in the dirt pathways. But Brad had holed up there with a bar girl who bought him “ice,” lit his pipe, watched him smoke and then asked for more money. After three days without food or sleep in his self-imposed exile from reality, he found an ATM and withdrew more money. Brad, an ex-firefighter from London, Ontario, had once put out other people’s fires for a living, until he came to Thailand and used ice to torch his own life. Set the whole thing ablaze. His family had hired Calvino to bring him to Bangkok and send him back to Canada. Brad hadn’t wanted to leave the village, but Calvino persuaded him to return to Bangkok for a medical checkup.

  The tragedy was, Brad didn’t want help. He told Calvino he wouldn’t be going home to Canada. The day of his flight, Brad jumped from a sixth floor hotel on Soi 22, Sukhumvit Road. It was his third morning in Bangkok. Calvino went to the scene of the suicide that morning and saw the man he’d coaxed back from the village in Surin Province lying dead on the sidewalk in that strangely awkward sprawl of broken limbs, blood pooling.

  The death of his client had happened six months ago. The family hadn’t blamed Calvino. They didn’t have to; he blamed himself. There hadn’t been a day when he hadn’t asked himself what he could have done differently. He vetted the death like a pathologist trying to unravel the mystery of cause and effect in a corpse, only to find that for a private investigator, studying the death of a client was like watching life advance by staring into the rearview mirror. The scene behind never changed. It belonged to the past, and the road ahead never allowed for a U-turn.

  “Ice,” Calvino learned, is a designer drug that alters the alpha waves of the mind, bringing supercharged delusions of power, confidence and strength of purpose. Brad hadn’t wanted to kill himself. He’d thought he could fly. The police found one last blue pill in his jeans.

  Warp-speed mind travel, tearing through the fabric of time and space before the free fall—for Brad ice created an ache of hunger to stay forever inside that headspace. The visions there changed faster than sheets in a short-time hotel. Sooner or later someone had to pay the laundry bill.

  Colonel Pratt beat him to the suicide scene by twenty minutes. Ratana had phoned the Colonel to tell him what had happened. When Calvino showed up, he found Pratt near the body, talking to a uniformed police officer.

  “There were half a dozen witnesses,” said Colonel Pratt.

  They all told the same story. Brad standing on the balcony, arms spread out, head to one side, saying he was flying home.

  Six months later, there was Brad’s name again on Calvino’s desk, attached to his travel documents, the neatly prepared papers for a trip to Burma, in recent years officially known as Myanmar. All he had to do was sign the visa application form. When the Thais want something, Calvino thought, they are all efficiency. The Colonel clearly wanted something.

  Calvino also understood that Colonel Pratt’s visit wasn’t an invitation to explore the psychological state of drug users. That was someone else’s business. Breaking a nationwide distribution network that stretched into Burma was the goal. And getting in the way of important people’s money had a high probability of blowback.

  The Colonel hadn’t said so, but Calvino understood why the Colonel had come to his office with the travel forms already filled out. Colonel Pratt needed someone he trusted to watch his back, but being Thai, he couldn’t come out and ask directly. It was, as the Thais always say, up to him.

  They had left the decision hanging in the air. The Colonel had left Calvino’s office, and neither man had mentioned the downside, or whether there even was a bridge from there to a possible upside. Cases like Brad’s come in pairs, Calvino thought. Rob Osborne, who had gone missing in Rangoon, was about the same age as Brad, and like Rob he was confused and fully mortgaged to ideas that owned him. People like Brad craved the experience of a rewired, hyper-stimulated brain. Brad’s girlfriend saw the benefit. Enablers always did.

  When Calvino had returned to the shell of the Lonesome Hawk Bar, not far from where Brad had died, he’d realized with new certainty that life is about the living. The dead are to be remembered, but the living have a larger claim on our minds and hearts. He wouldn’t go to Burma because Brad had died on his watch; he’d go because the thing that had killed Brad was still circulating among the living.

  It become public knowledge that, just as pseudoephedrine is embedded in ice, ice was embedded deep in underground rivers of commerce. The source of that river had become a big, ever-widening story in the Bangkok Post and the New York Times, and surfaced as dozens of blogs joined the discussion about how pillars of the establishment had networked to supply the essential ingredient found in remedies for the common cold to the hard men who ran the illegal cross-border drug cartel. Cold pills had a fleeting fifteen minutes of fame. Though the problem festered like an untreated wound, it had been one of those stories that quickly vanished from the collective mind. As quickly as the pavements dried after an afternoon monsoon rain, the news cycle returned to reporting political infighting and celebrity gossip.

  This wasn’t the usual drug network case. Colonel Pratt had a roster of unusual suspects—doctors, hospital administrators, pharmacists and government officials. Pretty much everyone in the chain of the health profession had been implicated. Cold pills that had been delivered to the front door of a hospital or clinic went out the back door, loaded into pickups by the people who delivered the pills to those who had set up shop across the Thai-Burmese border.

  With that number of players involved, it was only a matter of time before someone noticed a game was in progress. A secret game, with the players moving huge quantities of cold pills to an end zone that had nothing to do with treating a cold. They had a nice little business, turning over a large profit.

  “On February 16th,” Calvino read on the screen, “a contingent of Burmese police discovered an estimated 8.7 million amphetamine tablets and guns when they raided some houses in Tachilek Township.” The writer even characterized the Burmese village as being “pointed like an arrow at Thailand.” Someone had missed a payment to the Burmese cops, he thought. The problem with greed, whatever the enterprise, was that it tended to show up once the accounting was done, the audit conducted, the traffic checked to see no one was cheating. Cheaters ruined things for illegal businesses as much as the legal ones. It was only a matter of time until someone noticed they’d been cheated, and if they wore a uniform and carried a gun, they had a way to do something about the cheater—as the events o
f February 16th had proved.

  As the fallout over the cold pill scandal spread, a number of important people scrambled for shelter. The time had come to seek out a warlord for protection. The distribution network as reported had been confusing, opaque, complex, blurring the line between legal and illegal. Pseudoephedrine had left a trail through Thai hospitals, health agencies and clinics, like breadcrumbs leading to the nest of hawks. It was time to find out who had powerful friends and who didn’t. Calvino’s Law for operations like this: Get inside the pipeline to witness the flow of money; find out who runs the pumps and where the pipeline leads.

  For years in Thailand, whenever he’d had a cold or sinus problem, Calvino had run down to the local drugstore and bought a packet of Actifed, popped out a couple of the pills, swallowed them with a glass of water, beer or whiskey, and soon he could breathe again. Then the authorities banned them from over-the-counter sales and the black market found a new money-maker.

  Calvino picked up his passport and flipped through the pages filled with visa stamps. He thought of the Colonel sitting in front of him earlier that morning.

  “You volunteered for the Burma assignment?” Calvino had asked.

  Colonel Pratt had half-smiled. “The police department isn’t a volunteer organization, Vincent.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “With what happened to Morrisey a few months ago, I thought you might be interested.”

  Calvino had stood up from his desk, paced behind it, looked out the window, paced again.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Every time we’ve traveled together, I recall being shot at. Phnom Penh, Saigon, New York. Sooner or later, you get unlucky.”

  “We had that trip to Singapore a couple of years ago. No one fired a shot.”

  “Singapore isn’t Burma.”

  Colonel Pratt had smiled and nodded. “So I’ve heard. All I am saying is I want you to know that I’m going to Rangoon. You mentioned a case that might take you there. I thought we might do some sightseeing.”

  A new case had been the second arrow to the Colonel’s bow. First Brad, the dead ice junkie, and then it was only a matter of time before Pratt would mention Alan Osborne and his missing son, Rob. Calvino wasn’t so much a private investigator as a triage expert brought in by families of expats to save broken hearts.

  Calvino had leaned forward on his desk. “Sightseeing in a cold pill factory isn’t my idea of a holiday.” He’d paused and sat back in his chair. “Did the department say why they’re sending you to Burma alone?”

  “A delegation would be noticed. It would require official approval.”

  “You’re going to Burma off the record.”

  Colonel Pratt had smiled. “The country is opening up. Everyone is going in off the record these days. It’s called fact finding.”

  “Facts? Like beachcombing for seashells on Koh Samui?” Calvino had said. “They’re kinda hard to find in this part of the world. All the facts and shells have been picked over till there are none left.”

  “One day when I become a famous saxophone player, you’ll be glad to have gone to Rangoon with me.”

  “I’ll be glad to be alive on that day.”

  Pratt had left the Burma visa application along with a UN report from its anti-narc agency. Calvino read through it. In 2009, it said, Thai authorities pulled 15.8 tons of methamphetamine pills out of circulation. It was only the tip of the iceberg. The report fingered Burma as the main source of the pills crossing borders in Southeast Asia. What it didn’t say was how much was still finding its way over the border and who on the Thai side of the border was making the operation profitable for all concerned.

  Calvino put the UN report down and picked up the visa application.

  Ratana came into his office as he was signing the visa form. She waited until he looked up, shaking his head.

  “I’m crazy to do this,” he said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let Colonel Pratt go to Rangoon alone,” she said.

  “I get to play one-man entourage to a sax player.”

  “Manee was worried about her husband going to Burma alone,” she said.

  The truth was coming out. Colonel Pratt’s wife had already co-opted his secretary in the campaign to get him on the plane to Rangoon.

  “And you’re not worried about me?”

  She shook her head, taking his passport and papers from his desk.

  “Not really. You have luck. Manee said the same thing.”

  “What does that mean? Am I some kind of human amulet? Maybe I should buy a gold chain and hang myself around Pratt’s neck.”

  Calvino lost any chance of resisting. He doodled on his notepad. Brad Morrisey. Rob Osborne. And the high probability of getting shot. There was that old ghost pain, the memory of a bullet hitting hard. Saigon and Phnom Penh. Colonel Pratt had been there. And Manee—she knew this history—still thought that Calvino came down on the side of having luck. He couldn’t figure it out. After being shot a couple of times, he found it impossible to think clearly about his odds the next time around. Up to now he’d either underestimated or overweighed the chances of something bad happening, and he had no reason to think he was getting any better at assessing the odds with experience.

  It was too late in life to take up playing a musical instrument. He’d have to go into Burma as a businessman. Enough of them were streaming across the border to make it easy to join the parade and disappear into the crowd of faces.

  “Bring me the Osborne file,” he said.

  He watched her leave his office. Turning back to his computer, he clicked on iTunes and then on Colonel Pratt’s debut album, the one he’d made after the Java Jazz Festival a few years earlier. He’d reinvented himself.

  Ratana returned with the file. Rob, the son, was still missing in Rangoon.

  “I love Colonel Pratt’s saxophone,” she said. “He’s so talented.”

  As with many reinventions, the original platform remained functional underneath. The Colonel was still a cop who played the saxophone and not a saxophonist who played at being a cop.

  “He’s had some good audiences,” said Calvino. “Burma’s a tough one. Like New York, they’re edgy, streetwise, hard to impress, harder to fool.”

  Colonel Pratt had his saxophone as shield and sword. It made going into Burma unofficially easier to pull off. And jazz and ice, like rum and coke, go together, Calvino thought. Siamese twins. Heading to Rangoon as a cop would look like an official investigation, and that would mean going through channels. There was no straight-ahead way to cold call into the hospital cold pills smuggling operation without some powerful sleeping giants sitting up, rubbing their eyes and gazing around to see who was causing all the commotion.

  Pratt would play the saxophone and, between sets, sit back at a table as the flow of information—facts, names, ranks, connections and a timeline—washed through the late-night conversations. He had a back channel. That’s what Calvino heard him saying between the words. All the Colonel had to do was tune in. Locating a secure back channel sometimes came from a spit. Once it was found, law enforcement would drop a saxophone player, or the equivalent, into the action to report back whether the Spit had lied to them.

  Burma had a history of men who stood immune to laws. The way to bypass such an immune system was to find where these men played and relaxed. Colonel Pratt knew their game—its rules, rituals, referees, players and audience. What the Thai history books failed to teach was that there were men on the Thai side of the border playing on the same operating system. Together, they were an audience of immunity brothers, and the Colonel had a mission to hack the system. He’d have to conquer them one jazz improvisation at a time.

  When a saxophone player dies and an autopsy is performed, the pathologist won’t find any musical notes inside, just blood and bones and gore. But somehow these are all the things that once made the music, causing people to move their bodies and dance.

  The time had come to go dancing
.

  THREE

  Sticking Chicken Shit on a Monkey’s Nose

  OSBOME’S NUMBER FLASHED on Calvino’s cell phone. He stared at the screen. He’d made it a practice not to give his private number to potential clients.

  He had a reason or two. Actually he had a long list of reasons to keep his number private in a place like Bangkok, where clients lost track of the hour and were often hit by a sudden surge of paranoia. Calvino had felt that surge himself.

  “Somebody’s gonna die.” Vincent Calvino, private investigator, tried to remember ever hearing this declaration pour from the sweet lying lips of a prospective client as he explained how he was asking Calvino to handle a routine assignment. The pitch was always the same—a simple missing person case that any moron could solve.

  Clients seemed never to understand that when a person goes missing, there are reasons for it, and that finding those reasons is as difficult as finding a silence in a drunk’s telling of his life story. Alan Osborne was no different.

  When Osborne had walked through the door, pulled up a chair and asked him to take a case, Calvino remembered him looking him in the eyes and saying not, “The person I want you to get information on would as soon shoot you as look at you,” but something more like, “You’ll turn up my son in the first Rangoon bar you walk into.” Staring back as Osborne continued, Calvino heard less comforting words inside his head: “Your presence in Rangoon will unleash a psychological firestorm like a nuke blast, and you’ll feel the heat and radiation peel the skin from every square inch of your body.”

  Paranoia could make a listener substitute one set of words for another. Osborne’s words had that effect on Calvino. Maybe Osborne’s visit had come too soon after Brad Morrisey’s leap from the hotel balcony. He’d been a missing person case, too.