Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

Calvino moved through the long room. The remaining members of Monkey Nose, between sets, were in relaxation mode except for an intense, wired-up farang named Alf, a blues alto sax player. Alf came from Texas and hated America with the passion that only an ex-lover could nurse and sustain in its full fury year after year after the relationship had died.

  “Rob had enough shit from his old man. He split. And Mya, she had the brother problem. What Asian chick doesn’t have a brain-dead brother who drains the family resources?”

  “What’s the problem with the brother?” asked Calvino.

  “Got his ass arrested in Burma for smuggling teak.”

  “Teak?”

  “Stupid, yeah. Not opium or pills. He got caught with a truck of fucking wood. What kind of country throws people in jail for transporting wood? Burma. The whole world is clapping that the generals have seen the light. Not according to Mya and her brother. It’s a jungle. One with a few less teak trees. Go figure.”

  “Is that why she went back to Rangoon?”

  Alf nodded his head, took a long drag on his cigarette. Smoke poured out of his mouth as he answered.

  “Family pressure. Rob said he tried to hit his old man up for money to pay whoever you have to pay to get out of a wood smuggling charge in Burma. But he got turned down. Rob and his old man don’t get along.”

  “His father told me Rob wanted money to shoot a video of the band.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You’re saying that really it was Mya’s family problem?”

  “When you play in a band with a guy and his woman all night, week after week, you pick up on things. Like who wears the pants.”

  “Mya calls the shots.”

  “Did I say that? I was talking about pants. And you know what, she has a voice that can drive a man to do and say things, promise things he couldn’t imagine himself doing.”

  The owner of the bar walked over as the band was about to go back on stage. Alf called him over and introduced the big man to Calvino. Gung, whose name was the Thai word for shrimp, shook hands with Calvino. In his time Calvino had bought a boatload of shrimp on his tab, not to mention a trawler’s worth of fish and one or two drinks. It was private eye fishing bait. This Gung drank rum and coke. A few rum and cokes would crack open the shell of most people named Shrimp. Patience was all that was needed.

  “Gung,” said Alf, “I was just explaining about Rob and Mya. This fella is working for Rob’s old man, who wants him to drag our boy’s ass back to Bangkok.”

  “I’m all for that. You guys sound like shit without him.”

  “Go blow yourself, slumdog breath.”

  Gung smiled.

  “What is it you want to know?” he asked Calvino.

  “Rob’s address in Rangoon. Assuming you don’t have it, then can you help me narrow down where I might find him? My first question is what made Rob and Mya take off for Rangoon? They have work here. Rob wanted to make a video of the band. Doesn’t sound like a situation he’d want to leave. Second question, why haven’t they contacted anyone in the band in over a week? That doesn’t seem normal. They’re friends. Why haven’t these friends got his address and phone number in Rangoon? That’s about it,” said Calvino.

  “You talk like someone from New York.”

  “I am from New York.”

  “Intense, man. Like a machine gun on rapid fire.”

  “Tell you what, after you answer my questions, you can tell me why you named the bar Le Chat Noir.”

  Gung scratched the reddish stubble on his chin. His rum and coke arrived in an oversized glass. He took a sip.

  “I’ll start with your last question since that’s one I can answer without any bullshit. When you die, that’s it. There is no afterlife. Zip, zero, a blank screen without snow. ‘Le Chat Noir’ really means to me the big blackout. Gone baby, gone,” said Gung, the luk kreung—mixed race—owner/manager. He was a big man with a large head who looked half-Viking, half-mongoose, born into a coiled cobra of a world. The mongoose DNA came from his Thai mother.

  “Le Chat Noir was actually my second choice to name the bar.”

  Calvino watched Gung size him up, as if he had shrimp antenna whipping through the air around his face.

  “And your first choice?” asked Calvino, who was doing his own assessment.

  “Fuck Everybody,” said Gung.

  His eyes narrowed as he sucked on a cigarette.

  “But the assholes who run ‘The Big Show’ wouldn’t let me register it. They said you can’t use ‘fuck’ in the name of a company. And I said, ‘Truth. Isn’t that a good enough reason?’ But the Big Show runners, man, they just don’t get it. Rob did. So did Mya Kyaw Thein.”

  Alf butted in: “‘The Big Show’ was Rob’s expression. He wrote a song called ‘The Big Show.’”

  “Mya Kyaw Thein came up with the name,” Gung added.

  Alf rolled his eyes and said, “Man, in Texas, you’d be thrown on the barbecue, Gung, for telling such lies.”

  “Ain’t a lie. She’s the one who taught him what she called the Lesson. The Burmese know a thing or two about the Big Show. They get it. Only they got a different cast in Burma. But nothing’s changed. It’s still the uniforms who run the country on one big policy—Fuck Everybody. Now the rest of the world thinks that Burma’s opening up and everything’s gonna change. Bullshit. Same Big Show, different actors.”

  “That’s what Mya said?”

  Alf’s Texas drawl had a little contempt in the tone.

  “But she’s not here, is she? This man wants information about her. I am answering his questions.”

  The price was a giant rum and coke.

  “Yeah, you’re just talking, Gung. A noise just a couple of decibels above your farting frequency. And I can’t ever tell one from the other.”

  “Back to work, Monkey Nose.”

  Alf pushed off. Gung suggested that, while he took care of some owner’s business, Calvino wait for him at one of the tables and chairs on the street in front of the bar, where they could hear each other better. Soon, in his new, more ear-friendly location, Calvino could hear the sound of guitars and drums blasting from the stage and through the sliding door. Then Alf’s voice, singing the lyrics to “The Big Show,” drifted through the Bangkok night. After a few songs, Gung joined him again.

  “So… I’m looking for Alan Osborne’s son.”

  “Rob the missing person,” said Gung. “I knew he was crazy over that girl, so I’m not all that surprised he’s gone MIA. She’s the one who kept at him, telling him to stand up to his dad. When you work a bar for years, you know what you find out about women? They hate weakness in a man. It terrifies them, and finally it disgusts them. Burma is place of strong-willed women. Aung San Suu Kyi under lock and key for fifteen fucking years. Not a lot of men have the balls to do what she did. Mya’s cut from the same sarong. She kept at Rob until he went to his old man for money. I heard he hit the old fucker after he turned him down. But he might have said that just to get Mya off his back.”

  “Rob did punch him.”

  Gung smiled. He held up his glass, signaling the waitress for a refill.

  “I’m a practical guy,” said Calvino. “I’m looking for leads. Save the political analysis for someone who has the interest. ‘The Big Show,’ ‘the Lesson’… I have no idea what those things mean or the time to find out. I want information that will help me find him. Nothing more complicated. Am I making myself clear?”

  Gung smiled and shook his head.

  “Most people don’t understand,” Gung said. “To find Rob, you’ve got to get inside his head, and that means inside Mya’s head, and understand how they think. What motivated them to run off to Burma. That’s the point. The Lesson for Mya meant one day she opened her eyes and realized that all her life she’d been programmed to obey and not question. Those who ran the show wrote the script, and that was what the Lesson was: stick to the script. Don’t change a fucking thing.”

  “And she changed somethi
ng?”

  Gung nodded, his lower lip sticking out for a moment.

  “She started posting articles on websites that were critical of the regime. She’d write shit in between sets and post it. Next thing, her brother’s arrested.”

  “Any idea where in Rangoon I can find her?” asked Calvino. “Maybe she said something about family or friends?”

  Gung had the expression of a longshoreman who’d found out that his request for overtime had been turned down.

  “Mya said you gotta find the escape hatch, climb out and make a run for it,” Gung said. “Otherwise you stay locked inside the incubator. You get it? Inside a cramped machine that processes the raw material of your life into money for the show runners.”

  Alf, palming a joint while the band was on a break, sat down at the table.

  “Her brother’s in jail,” said Alf, “because she couldn’t shut up about corruption, and that offended some people in the government. Don’t know how that could ever happen. It’s a huge mystery.”

  He took a long hit off his spliff.

  “You got that right, Alf. I told her that she was too public and political,” said Gung. “The generals don’t like big mouths making trouble about loot and treasure.”

  By the end of the second liter of rum and coke, Gung had laid out Mya’s creed about how the Big Show ran its global operation by selling ideas about progress, commerce and capitalism. She’d blogged using the name La Chatte Noire and given interviews naming names. A blogger whose handle referred to the name of the club where she worked was asking to be exposed. Mya was fearless, dedicated and determined. She fit the profile of a person who doomed their relatives to persecution and suffering, the Black Cat who watched from the riverbank as her kittens were drowned. Calvino had a feeling the brother never knew what had hit him or why when he’d been thrown into prison. An activist sister ran up the odds of a brother finding himself in all kinds of trouble. Boyfriend, brother, friends, family—the list of vulnerabilities that a government might use to target the pain most effectively, until the true believer questioned her faith.

  A man doing ordinary things in an ordinary life made do. It rarely occurred to such people that they should revolt and refuse to live like domesticated animals, bred generation after generation, docile suckers competing for meaningless jobs, believing they could somehow slip inside the Big Show. They just wanted money to buy smokes and beer.

  Gung had been right about one thing. Getting inside Mya’s head was giving Calvino a better idea of Rob’s behavior.

  “Was the band planning a video production?”

  Alf laughed. “We have half a dozen videos on YouTube.”

  Rob had lied to his old man about the money. It was for Mya and her brother’s problem. The kind of problem that an old hand like Osborne would have dismissed out of hand as the usual scam by a family to milk money.

  “Mya asked Rob to help her raise money for her brother,” said Calvino.

  It wasn’t a question. Alf and Gung looked at each other and nodded.

  “That pretty much nails it,” said Alf.

  Calvino smiled and took a long drink.

  “She sounds like the kind of woman who gets under a man’s skin.”

  He was getting an image of Mya Kyaw Thein as someone who’d volunteered to set fire to the big tent, and Rob had been detailed to buy the matches.

  Alf sucked hard on the spliff, the tip burning hot, ashes spilling.

  “You can say that again. She’s a woman a man would do anything for. Take my word for it.”

  Gung took the spliff from Alf, inhaled, eyes hooded, and said as the smoke rolled from his lips: “She wanted Rob to be Henry Miller walking the earth—fucking whores, hungry at midnight with no money but with a fire in his belly, and figuring out how to stop the world from stepping on his shadow and capturing his soul, selling it to the devil for a weekly paycheck.”

  “Fuck that,” Mya Kyaw Thein had said, according to Gung.

  Alf had returned to the stage along with the other band members.

  Over the roar of the electric guitar, Calvino leaned forward and shouted, “Does her mother live in Rangoon?”

  “Man, I’d love to meet her mother. If you find her, tell her she can drink at this bar any time on my tab,” said Gung.

  Smoke curled out of his nostrils, which were rimmed with tiny gold rings. The world of Monkey Nose might be in fragments, but the gravity of the music gathered the pieces slowly through the night, bringing an underlying harmony.

  A waitress brought Calvino a slip of paper. He opened it and read the scrawl in the dim light.

  “Mya’s mother sells jewelry in the market. Unsubscribe.”

  Calvino read the note a couple of times.

  “Unsubscribe?” he muttered to himself.

  He called the waitress over and asked who’d given her the note.

  “Jazz,” she said, pointing out the drummer on stage.

  Gung had drifted off to another table with his rum and coke. Calvino stood in the doorway and watched the drummer run through one of those two-minute high-speed drum solos where sweat flies off the performer’s face and into the crowd. As he finished, the drummer banged his cymbals, making a sound that, though muted, had a head-cracking quality. Calvino and the drummer nodded at each other.

  In Calvino’s mind there was only one question: unsubscribe from what?

  Interviewing people in a bar with a band blaring always turned up a surprise or two—someone with information, biding their time before sending it down the river of tears, believing that it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Earlier that night the drummer, who’d sat with a woman straddling him—a woman with silver and gold looped through her ears and around her wrists and ankles, squeezing her breasts against his chest—had brushed off Calvino’s questions. But Calvino’s timing had been right after all. For a drummer in a band, timing is what it’s all about, and apparently for this drummer “fuck everybody” didn’t mean “fuck everything.”

  The drummer tipped his hand as another man who had succumbed to Mya’s charm and found that nothing quite like it had happened to him before or since. She’d only been gone a week. Maybe she’d be back and he’d close in for another chance.

  The band wanted her back. Gung wanted her back too. She was a big draw. Those left behind were as much in love with the Black Cat as Rob was.

  As Calvino paid the bill, Gung came back to the table.

  “Monkey Nose plays every Tuesday and Thursday night. Come back. And if you find Mya, ask her about the Big Show, the Lesson and Henry Miller. She’s something else, that woman.”

  He didn’t seem that interested in whether Calvino found Rob. Electric bass players weren’t that hard to find. But a singer like Mya was. Even though a performer like that always came with baggage, packed with beliefs, emotions and the past, it didn’t matter. Everyone at Le Chat Noir wanted La Chatte Noire back on stage.

  There was nothing more for Calvino to ask, and he paid his bar bill. Listening to one more Monkey Nose song as he waited for his change, he thought he remembered it from somewhere. The waitress refreshed his memory.

  “It’s called ‘When Can I Kiss You Again?’”

  “Romantic,” said Calvino, leaving a large tip.

  “Not really. It’s from Michael Brecker’s Pilgrimage, the last album he made before he died. He wrote it for his kid, who said those words to him as he was dying of cancer.”

  She disappeared to another table with the tray bearing his tip. You get what you pay for, he thought—isn’t that a Calvino’s Law? He was no longer sure he remembered the thinking behind that law or whether it much mattered.

  Back on the street he waited for a taxi, thinking about inviting Ratana to the bar one night. She rarely got out, and a little live music might be good for her. Then he realized that the last thing he wanted was for someone to fill Ratana’s head with riffs about the Lesson in between sets. Or songs that young children inspired in dying fathers. The regula
rs at Le Chat Noir were the groupies, camp followers, junkies, drunks and men on the make—small-time thugs—that he’d seen around jazz clubs before. They bounced around Bangkok through the night like a bats on sonar, soaring and diving and then sheltering in the last hole in the wall before dawn broke. That was the dark crawl space where the Big Show left them to their own devices.

  In the back of the cab Calvino’s thoughts drifted to Henry Miller. It’d been a long time since he’d heard that name. The writer was from Brooklyn. He’d written Tropic of Cancer, a diary of sexual adventures, as he lived down and out in Paris in the 1930s. Miller’s wife had sold her body to support him. Vinny Calvino was also from Brooklyn. He knew of the legend of the writer who had defied morality and the ties of family, marriage and home to break free—to roam the world as a free man. Some men did escape; most didn’t. Who were the saddest of them all, Calvino wondered—those without a home, living free under Paris bridges? Or those who stayed behind in their old neighborhoods, trying to imagine what freedom might feel like?

  The Dodgers were from Brooklyn, too. They’d all left but hadn’t ever found a way to flush the Brooklyn out of their system. It sat in the back of the eyes, the back of the throat, like a tumor waiting to grow, metastasize and spread. Waiting for the answer to the question, “When can I kiss you again?”

  Who could answer such a question? At any turn of the road, Brooklyn could reappear, grab their ass and throw them back where they started, and they’d wake up like the getaway had all been a dream. That’s the hold Brooklyn had on people like Henry Miller. Like everyone from Brooklyn, Calvino knew his Henry Miller, the role model who had come to the conclusion that it was better to starve in the company of neighborhood street whores in Paris than to sit around eating bagels in a deli on Decatur Street. Take your life in your hands and run out the nearest exit door—that was the message. Don’t look back. Put plenty of distance between yourself and the un-free.

  Calvino leaned back, watching Bangkok pass by as the taxi gathered speed—and thinking about Brooklyn. Waste of time, he thought. It was gone. He focused on Rangoon and Alan Osborne’s missing son. Maybe the kid was like Henry Miller, and he just wanted to leave his equivalent of Brooklyn and forget that it ever existed. He had the woman of every man’s dreams. He could play hero. It made sense. The kid might not want to be found. Why not leave him alone? So he’d lied to his old man about why he wanted the money. Who hadn’t done that?