Colonel Pratt would understand his reasoning if he decided to give Rangoon a miss, thought Calvino. But he knew at the same time that Pratt wouldn’t buy the premise. Sons and fathers kept in touch. It pained a father to lose a son. There was no greater loss. Well, maybe in Asia they stayed in touch. But in Brooklyn the sooner the son could escape from the old man’s shadow, the better. They didn’t go missing. They fled for their lives. Explaining that to someone like the Colonel was like talking to a good sleeper about what it’s like to have a bad case of insomnia and have your whole life haunted by the futility of sleep.
His cell phone came to life, playing one of Colonel Pratt’s saxophone riffs. The music announced the caller.
“I booked us on the afternoon flight tomorrow.”
“See you at the airport.”
“I’ll pick you up. We’ll go together.”
“So I don’t get lost?”
“I know where to find you.”
The call ended. Calvino hadn’t exactly made up his mind. Unlike Rob Osborne, he could never truly go missing. Not with the Colonel around. No one cares about explanations when they really need you. Good reasons for not going to Rangoon had never been in the cards. Le Chat Noir had given him a reason to believe he could find the two young musicians. They’d got it into their heads that the time was right to escape from the Big Show and at the same time rescue the wood-stealing brother. Rob might be caught up in some political drama that he couldn’t get out of. Maybe, like Mya’s brother, he was being held against his will. That tiny space of doubt was enough for Calvino as the taxi pulled into the entrance of his condo. Why not help Alan Osborne find his son?
He was on his way to Rangoon in any event.
After all, that’s what Calvino did for a living. A Brooklyn boy grown old in Bangkok, living for years off the money people paid him to find someone who had no desire to be found. He had a long career of finding people on the run from the Big Show. Men and women who had no idea how to vanish and leave no trace behind. Unless the disappearing act had been years earlier, he just about always found that they’d left a trail of breadcrumbs. Follow the crumbs and you’d find the bird perched in a tree, thinking he was invisible but standing out like a hooker in a miniskirt skating for the New York Rangers.
But he’d never found a Henry Miller. There was a reason for that; no one but Miller’s wife had ever gone looking for him, and she knew exactly where to look. Rangoon wasn’t Paris. And this wasn’t the 1930s. But he told himself that a Burmese who’d left such a big mark on Le Chat Noir and who channeled Miller was worth the price of a ticket to Rangoon.
He liked the idea that a search for Rob Osborne would lead him to the woman he had watched in a YouTube video on his iPhone. She had the look of a black cat, back arched, eyes intensely focused and nails extended. He paid the taxi fare, got out and walked to the entrance of his building.
Tomorrow afternoon he’d be on a plane. It all boiled down to the simplest of mixed obligations and desires—watch the Colonel’s back and somehow, at the same time, look for the Black Cat and Osborne’s missing son, who Calvino hoped would be found within walking distance of her litter box.
FIVE
The Traveler’s Fish Lunch
RANGOON, HOTEL LOBBY. Calvino checked his watch. Jack Saxon was running late for their appointment.
Calvino sat on a designer rattan couch with soft white cushions. One cushion closer to the door, Colonel Pratt watched as the doorman scanned the people entering and exiting the lobby. Like airport departure lounges, hotel lobbies are usually filled with bags on carts, porters and security personnel. But no one at an airport gate had ever brought Calvino a tall, smooth green drink with a tiny bamboo umbrella on a tray. He took the glass by the stem and raised it in a toast to the Colonel.
“Welcome to Rangoon,” said the young pretty woman from the front desk.
“I thought we already had our welcoming drink,” said Pratt.
“I’m not complaining,” said Calvino.
“Mr. Jack says he’s on his way,” she said. “He asked me to bring you a real drink.”
Calvino sniffed the drink. Whiskey fired through his nostrils like a slug from a .50 caliber round. Saxon knew his alcohol. He smiled, thinking how Saxon had had the hotel fill the glass half-full of whiskey as a kind of atonement for running late.
Running thirty minutes late, to be precise, for their lunch appointment. He’d sent a text message to Calvino saying that a breaking news story about the British government dropping sanctions had delayed him. Jack Saxon had made a reputation for walking the constantly shifting line of what could be reported in the Rangoon Times, one of those frontier English-language dailies that struggled to keep from being shut down.
Saxon had lived and worked in Phnom Penh for half a dozen years. Before that he’d been a reporter in Bangkok, and before that he’d worked as a copy editor in Toronto for an arts and living magazine. An old hand with local knowledge and the kinds of contacts that only journalists and politicians accumulated, to Calvino he was worth his weight in gold. Calvino knew Saxon from his Bangkok days. They’d gone out drinking together and shared a few meals, laughs, stories and women. Two years ago, Calvino had got one of those early-morning distress calls for help. It was from Jack Saxon. His younger brother, Paul, had left Soi Cowboy, got turned around and found himself lost on a dark soi. A disoriented farang at one in the morning who looks like he doesn’t belong or know where he’s going is a target.
“Jack has never forgotten what you did for his brother,” Calvino said to Pratt.
“He was your friend. I helped him. It wasn’t much.”
That wasn’t strictly true. What Colonel Pratt had done was rescue Paul’s ass from a five-year stretch eating red rice and sleeping in shifts along with forty other prisoners in a Thai prison cell. Five years would have been on the light side, but to keep the story simple, five years was the number that Calvino had used on the phone to remind Saxon how helpful the Colonel had been.
Events had happened faster that night than shifts at a Patpong short-time. Paul Saxon had gone through a few beers, left the last bar and walked down a small side street, alone, lost and not used to the heat, when two cops pulled up on a motorcycle. They got off and called Paul over. They searched him. One cop stuck his hand inside Paul’s front pocket, staring him in the eye, a little smile crossing his face as he withdrew the clenched hand. As his fist opened, he revealed a couple of pills. He showed the pills to the other cop. He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time—the definition of a setup. Paul refused to pay the cops twenty thousand baht, about six hundred dollars, to cut him lose. It was Paul’s first trip to Bangkok. He was meeting his brother, who was flying in from Rangoon. He didn’t understand how to read the situation. Nor had anyone briefed him on the business aspect that came from being ambushed on a dark soi with no one around. He called his brother’s hotel from the police station. Jack Saxon got Calvino out of bed at three in the morning. At eight o’clock that morning, Colonel Pratt came to the lockup where Paul was being held and talked to a couple of people behind a closed door.
The Colonel paid forty thousand baht out of his own pocket. He said it was from the farang. Calvino found out about Colonel Pratt’s payment only later, and indirectly. Manee, the Colonel’s wife, told Ratana, and later as the conga line reached his office, he found out. By then there wasn’t much Calvino could do about getting the forty thousand baht returned. Paul had gone back to the hotel, packed his case and booked a flight to Toronto the same day. Jack Saxon had flown back to Rangoon before Calvino could explain the situation. Calvino gave the money to Pratt in an envelope. Pratt left the envelope on Calvino’s desk. For a week the envelope passed back and forth between the two of them, until finally Calvino sent it to Father Andrew in the Klong Toey slums as money to help street kids get out of jail.
Paul had had a short first visit to the Land of Smiles, as the lady in the tourist brochure had characterized it with her “I no
bullshit you” smile. Can’t imagine why he’s never come back, thought Calvino. Two feet of snow in the streets of Toronto would seem like nothing in the life-is-a-bitch department after a few hours in a Bangkok police lockup.
Forty-eight hours after his run-in with the law, with Pratt’s help, the brother had boarded a plane to Toronto. All happy tourists in Asia have the same experience; they are invisible in the way that anonymous people are everywhere. The unhappy ones—young men like Paul Saxon, who’ve found themselves boxed into a corner—those are the ones whose stories crossed Calvino’s desk.
“Jack’s on the way,” said Calvino. “He said to tell the Colonel that he’s sorry to keep him waiting.”
Two women in the lobby had been distracting Colonel Pratt. As the minutes passed, Saxon’s delay had hardly registered as he watched them. He glanced at Calvino and smiled.
“Relax, Vincent. We have all the time we need.”
Colonel Pratt had slipped into Thai time, the flow metered by mood rather than established increments. A place where no one counted off the seconds and minutes, and the presence of the two women gesturing and carrying on nearby made for a small, enveloping drama.
Shakespeare quotations ran through Colonel Pratt’s head like cherries, apples and oranges on a slot machine.
“‘Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly.’ King Lear.”
It was as if two of King Lear’s daughters had inherited their father’s rage gene. The two Italian women sat on large rattan chairs with scallop-shell-shaped backs. One appeared to be in her mid-thirties, the other possibility a decade older. Maybe sisters. They wore silk scarves around their necks, necklaces of gold, fine jewelry on their fingers and expensive Italian shoes. Designer handbags sat atop travel bags with airline handling tickets still attached to the handles. Calvino spotted the word “Roma” on one tag. Already in the lobby when he and Pratt had sat on the couch, they’d been in the middle of a deep, highly emotional conversation with an assistant manager of the hotel, with two guests speaking Italian and gesturing like maestros warming up an orchestra. Just as the two women approached the high-pitched climax of Cio-Cio San! from Madama Butterfly, the tension in their voices hit the ramp, flying up to the next level of anxiety and hostility.
“We travel more than twenty hours. You say our room is ready. It’s not ready. We book a room with a view of the Shwedagon Pagoda. You say you not have. We can’t wait. We need to sleep. Now! Do you hear me?”
She looked pale beneath her econ seat hair—matted, and stringy at the split ends.
Everyone in the lobby heard her hysterical outburst—half-wail, half-blowtorch. As she rose to her feet, holding up her hands like a boxer, Calvino tried not to laugh. The assistant manager remained cool, smiling—understandably, as he’d probably been through a lot worse when dealing with the police, military, officials… Anyone powerful enough to kick him in the balls.
They eyed each other, the assistant manager calmly keeping his hands at his sides. His only chance with a woman ablaze on a high-octane slurry of jetlag, frustration, language problems, broken promises and culture shock was to play defense. Would the confrontation turn physical? Or would a miracle suddenly calm her nerves? Calvino saw how close she was to taking a swing. She was so tired it would have been easy for the assistant manager to duck out of the way, but it seemed to Calvino that her awareness of this was making her even more frustrated and angry.
“Think I ought to help?” he asked Colonel Pratt.
“They will find a compromise,” the Colonel replied.
Calvino figured Pratt was right. He only had to recall Calvino’s Law on gentlemanly intervention in Southeast Asia—never get between people who are spoiling for a fight unless you want your blood on the floor. He watched the women as Colonel Pratt watched the door.
Jack Saxon bounced in with his hand outstretched as he approached Colonel Pratt on the couch.
“Welcome to Rangoon, Colonel Pratt! You got my message?”
“Vincent said you had a slight problem.”
“I don’t know what causes a newspaper more problems: shootings in the streets or streets filled with people looking to find gold and get rich.”
“Jack, you look like you’ve been sleeping in a pothole,” said Calvino.
“Nah, that’s no good for my back.”
Saxon moved his shoulders forward and then stretched them back, making a bone-cracking sound with his spine. He did a couple of side turns, shifting his body in one direction and then back in the other.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said.
Saxon walked past Calvino and the Colonel and stood between the assistant manager and the two Italian women. He kissed the younger of the two on both cheeks and saw the kiss hadn’t changed her attitude.
“Bianca, you don’t look so happy.”
Bianca explained their problem with the room booking. Saxon whispered something in the assistant manager’s ear. He turned and left. A moment later, the assistant manager emerged from his office and the women were upgraded to a suite with a view of the Shwedagon.
Saxon’s little performance impressed Calvino and the Colonel. In a few moments he’d cut through the runaround and fixed the problem. Saxon then introduced the private eye and the Colonel—as he referred to them—to the women.
“This is Bianca Conti and her friend Anne Russo.”
Calvino locked eyes with Bianca just that fraction of a moment to establish a connection.
“Bella donna,” said Calvino.
She smiled for the first time in the lobby.
“A private eye with a Brooklyn accent, yes?”
Then the women vanished behind a bellhop. Bianca looked back as they turned the corner. She nodded at Calvino.
“Nice demonstration of home turf fixer. Nothing like it when you need a hotel room,” said Calvino. “It’s the other stuff that gets difficult.”
Saxon playfully cuffed Calvino on the shoulder. He’d expected a couple more points from Calvino but settled for the half-star for getting the Italians a room and a full star for the introduction to the good-looking one.
“My brother still tells everyone how the Colonel and you saved him from starring in the Thai version of Midnight Express.”
“Who’s Bianca?” Calvino asked.
“You came to Rangoon to ask about Bianca?” asked Saxon with a crooked smile, shaking his head. “What? You don’t get enough action in Bangkok?”
He gave Calvino a playful punch on the shoulder and they embraced for a moment.
“Good to have you in Rangoon. Sorry I was running late.” He shook his head and added, “Women, who can understand them?”
Colonel Pratt, standing beside Calvino, chipped in: “Shakespeare once wrote that ‘Women speak two languages—one of which is verbal.’ Men speak three languages—one of which is silence.”
“Shakespeare said men have three languages?” asked Saxon. “Learn something every day.”
“Actually, I said that,” said the Colonel.
“You might pass that along to your brother, Jack.”
Silence was that third language that the spit had to be taught to forget. It didn’t take a Shakespearian scholar to tutor a man in detention in the fine art of snitching.
“Paul has never talked about what happened,” Saxon said.
Paul had escaped into silence. He’d beat the system. He’d got away, never having been truly tested in a cell where silence no longer a remained virtue. Paul got away without understanding how lucky he was—that most men trapped in the Thai legal system lacked the right connections to get out. Abandoned inside a prison cell, these men waited thinking about their choice of either ‘justice’ or a deal. The call of freedom drove a man to spit for the deal.
The three men walked from the hotel across the road to a Thai restaurant in a gravel parking lot next to a small lake. The waiter showed them to a big table overlooking the gardens and tropical trees. Colonel Pratt took a menu, put on his reading glasses and looked down the
column of photographs next to each item on the menu. He ordered noodles and pork. Calvino pointed at the picture of pad Thai, and Saxon ordered a big plate of boiled shrimp, fish cakes and fried fish cooked in lemongrass, rice and Chinese mushrooms. Saxon had the old journalist’s habit of ordering half the menu.
“Hungry?” asked Calvino.
“Starving,” said Saxon.
After the waiter took their order, Saxon pulled a notebook from his backpack and thumbed through the pages. He stopped and looked up.
“Jack, next time introduce us by our names. Not ‘This is a private eye and that’s a colonel,’” said Calvino.
Saxon smiled, raising one eyebrow.
“The first thing you learn in a secretive society is there are no secrets. It’s a paradox. The people you don’t want to know here will already know who you are. The people who couldn’t care less will remember they met a private eye and a colonel in Rangoon. Something exotic to talk about over dinner when they go home.”
“They were foreigners. What they say over dinner in Italy doesn’t worry me. But there were other people in the hotel lobby,” said Calvino, “and that worries me.”
Colonel Pratt nodded. “It’s a delicate situation,” he said.
Saxon pretended to zip shut his mouth and throw away the key.
“Okay, from now on it’s Vinny and Pratt. My two buddies from Bangkok.”
Calvino suspected it was already too late, but he appreciated Saxon’s pledge to rein in his song and dance for future introductions.
“Better,” said Calvino.
“Now that that’s out of way… the first person Colonel Pratt will meet is Yadanar Khin.”
“Who is his father?” asked Colonel Pratt.
Missing In Rangoon Page 5