Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

  Saxon, for his part, had a knack for cultivating contacts, and these sources with their inside information were what made him an extraordinary journalist. Together, the two more than doubled the value of their own information. It was a good investment. Sometimes in a hostile environment nothing is more valuable than a solid working connection between a local and foreigner.

  Ohn Myint introduced Calvino and Colonel Pratt to the others by their new running club handles. All of them smiled and nodded. If Saxon could vouch for these two outsiders, that was good enough for everybody. Colonel Pratt and Calvino found themselves welcomed into the group.

  “Anyone Jack drags in and drops at Swamp Bitch’s feet is usually pretty dubious,” teased one member of the group. “The last person you brought got lost. We spent hours trying to find him.”

  “Never did,” said another runner.

  “They won’t get lost,” said Saxon.

  “Don’t worry,” said Calvino. “If that happens, we’ll buy the beer.”

  That brought a show of knowing smiles that folded into half sneer. The mood then shifted as Calvino and Pratt were again ignored.

  The regulars returned to a conversation they’d been having a few minutes earlier, one of those jags of fear and loathing among expats that are incited by an act of violence against a member in good standing of their community, in this case a Scotsman who was a running club member.

  “Derek was attacked inside his house,” said one of the runners.

  All the emphasis was on the word “inside,” as if the violence had been worse for him there than it would have been on the street.

  “Surprised him, I heard,” said another runner.

  Ohn Myint had heard from her sources—and the men were all ears—that the assailant had crept up with a ceremonial Japanese sword behind Derek as he sat working at his desk. The sword had been rusted and dull, but sharp enough to inflict five wounds to Derek’s head.

  “He was working,” said the runner who had placed a boldfaced emphasis on “inside,” pronouncing the word in a shrill, angry tone.

  Nothing worse than to be assaulted when working inside, where you also slept, ate, entertained friends, screwed and bathed. The most private of places.

  “It could have happened to any of us,” said one the men.

  He spoke for the group. In their minds it wasn’t just Derek who was a victim of violence because it could just as well have been one of them. They couldn’t help but think that attack was a message that they could be next.

  “A home invasion,” said Saxon, as he turned to Calvino, his lower jaw dropped, “with a sword?”

  “They catch the guy?” asked Calvino.

  “Still investigating,” said Saxon.

  “After two weeks,” said Ohn Myint.

  “I saw the photographs after the attack,” said Saxon. “He had two puffy black eyes. Blood had filled the white bits. The British embassy has put a lot of pressure on the cops to find the attacker.”

  “They know who did it,” said Calvino.

  “The police are investigating,” said Saxon, muffling a quiet laugh.

  One of the expats moaned that Derek, an experienced oil and gas engineer, had offended a local, causing a loss of face. The attacker was angry, wild-eyed, on drugs.

  “You’re here to help Derek?” one of the expat runners asked Calvino.

  “Don’t know him,” said Calvino.

  “We thought Jack said something about how an investigator was coming along on the run, and he might have an idea of how to get things moving for Derek,” said another runner, who periodically raised one knee, grabbed it with both hands, grimaced and then repeated the exercise with the other knee.

  “Hey, guys, Vincent’s here to see me,” said Ohn Myint. “Nothing to do with Derek.”

  They looked disappointed.

  “If you have time, though,” one of them said, “you might do what you can for Derek. He’s one of us.”

  Suddenly the runners shot into motion as if someone had fired a starting pistol. They raced to climb inside cars and SUVs that would take them to the starting line. A new white BMW pulled to the side of the road. The window on the driver’s side slid down, and an Asian man in a suit and tie waved Colonel Pratt over.

  “My contact at the Thai embassy,” said Colonel Pratt to Calvino.

  “Good, he can take us back to the hotel after the run.”

  Colonel Pratt pulled Calvino to the side.

  “He didn’t come to wait. I’ve got to go.”

  That was the Thai way. When an official wanted something from you, waiting was impossible. But when you wanted something from an official, the laws of the universe governing time and movement reorganized themselves into a dark force of molasses that no one could influence or fully explain.

  “See you later,” said Calvino as the Colonel ran across the road and climbed into the BMW.

  “Come with me,” said Ohn Myint, a.k.a. Swamp Bitch.

  She led Calvino over to the British embassy official’s SUV, opened the door and pushed Calvino into the back.

  “Looks like your friend’s gone with number three at the Thai embassy,” said the British official.

  Burma had only a small network of embassy staff. He used the rearview mirror to catch Calvino’s eye. It was a kind of challenge for him to explain why his friend had abandoned the run. An Englishmen would never think of pulling one of their own out before he’d finished the run.

  “The embassy is organizing a performance. Pratt plays the saxophone, and he’s giving some kind of a concert. They must be going over the program.”

  The British embassy official smiled in the mirror, one of those English smiles that signals, “You’re full of shit, but it’s okay because I can find out with a phone call.”

  “Or he’s part of the master plan for a Thai takeover of Rangoon,” said Calvino. “It’s either the sax or revolution. I sometimes get the two confused.”

  “A lot of people have that confusion,” the embassy official said.

  On the long drive from the city to the starting line for the race, the conversation turned back to Derek, the battered engineer. The British embassy official explained his theory about how Derek had caused a Burmese, a fellow runner, to lose face. Derek had been a little drunk and angry, and he launched into a smart-ass riff, ridiculing the man’s intelligence, the size of his balls, the legitimacy of his birth and his jungle school education. All of it was good running club banter. But what might play as sport in Scotland or England played on a different frequency in Burma.

  The Burmese runner had straggled over the finish line hours after everyone else on the 10K run. A search party had been sent out to find him. They found him drinking tea in a hut with two old men and an old woman with missing teeth and a red betel nut smile. Derek tore into him, calling him an idiot, a jackass and an imbecile. Derek had drunk a lot of beer and the Burmese, head down, just took it all in. Derek’s verbal attack and the Burmese man’s later physical attack on Derek had left the Rangoon Running club with two black eyes.

  “This is the guy Jack introduced to the club?”

  Ohn Myint said, “It wasn’t Jack’s fault.”

  Calvino thought Saxon would have liked that display of loyalty. He made a mental note—the woman wasn’t a bitch. She was straight up, not letting anyone say anything bad about a friend.

  On the way to the starting line, they turned down the wrong road, not once, but twice. Twenty kilometers outside Rangoon was a different landscape. They stopped, and the British official asked for directions. The reply was a shrug of the shoulders. In Burmese Ohn Myint asked a young woman in a dress holding a small child on her hip. She translated the instructions into English, and they made a U-turn and headed back in the direction they’d come from. They were the last to arrive at the end of the dirt road. The British embassy official pulled to the side and cut the engine. They got out and walked along the road, which ran between green fields. Toward the horizon was the outline of
a village. Other cars had parked, and the runners were on the road, warming up. The men and women who had stood apart before had come together to form a group of nearly thirty runners.

  Ohn Myint had been out days before laying the run, marking it with shredded paper and throwing in some false trails to make it interesting.

  Jack Saxon had arrived in another car. He waved at Calvino.

  “Don’t get lost,” he said.

  “I’ll do my best not to embarrass you, Pistol Penis.”

  Saxon tilted his head.

  “Kiss My Trash. Go well. Too bad about Crack Shot.”

  “Things happen for a reason.”

  “Yes, they do. I believe that, Vinny.”

  The countryside stretched out, clean, smooth and green, a place to run off steam, thought Calvino. The thought of running ten kilometers made him sigh. The two US marines pulled up beside him, running in place.

  “You can run with us if you want,” said Randy.

  “We’ll see you don’t get lost,” said Roosevelt.

  Calvino smiled. “You go ahead.”

  Five minutes after the race started, the two of them were tiny dots framed against the sky.

  “Big upset, that Henry Miller,” he imagined Randy saying to Roosevelt. “Hey, whatever happened to that guy from Brooklyn? I bet he got his ass lost.”

  Moments after the run started, Calvino had fallen back to the blurry line that divided the slowest of the runners from the fastest of the walkers. Ahead of him he saw Ohn Myint a hundred meters off. Two young female NGOs with pale white skin were ten meters ahead. They looked to be carrying an extra twenty or thirty pounds in bulges around their hips and legs. They performed like the starter car at a Nascar track. Each time he pulled up close, they increased their pace. They might have been overweight, but they could outrun him. His unsuccessful efforts to catch and pass the two women were, he told himself, a greater humiliation than getting lost. He was grateful that the two young marines from the US embassy hadn’t been around to witness it.

  Five kilometers into the run, Calvino found himself running alone down a narrow dirt road that snaked through a hamlet. The inhabitants were lined in front of their huts, laughing and clapping as he crossed a small bridge. They cheered him as he sweated, face red, legs numb, lifting his arms and flashing the victory sign. He passed a stream running underneath the road that smelled of pig shit. The women wore their best dresses, flowers in their hair, with their children playing in the dirt at their feet. Chickens and pigs caged in pens rested alongside the houses. Older children ran behind him, laughing and cheering, passing him, falling back, passing him again. It made them happy to have a runner they could run circles around.

  He had captured an audience simply by running so slowly. The villagers felt he lingered long enough that they almost got to know this white man.

  Focus, he told himself. Take it one step at a time. Look happy. Don’t think five kilometers left. Just run.

  Legs rubbery, Calvino ran, stopped, ran, stopped and then leaned over, hands on his legs, staring at the ground as he struggled to catch his breath.

  Sixteenth century, he thought as he looked around him. I’ve gone back in time.

  There was nothing like the countryside outside Rangoon to remind the newcomer that when a country has gone to sleep for fifty years, when it finally awakes, rubbing its eyes, whatever comes down the road—in this case Vincent Calvino—must be a figure from the future. All along the road Calvino stopped to shake hands with the old men, often flashing a gold or silver tooth or reddish lips from betel nut, and the women and children. By the second village, if there had been a by-election, Calvino would have won. The underdog with grit had universal appeal that extended to the outer reaches of the Burmese countryside.

  The main threat was the village dogs that didn’t like strangers. Ohn Myint had told the villagers to keep their dogs on chains. Calvino saw them—gnarling dogs collared to trees and posts, showing their teeth as he passed. He couldn’t have outrun the most ancient and lamest among them. Their tethers held, but he still shuddered as he ran past the last one that lunged at him.

  Shaking all of those hands wasn’t enough to wipe away the embarrassment of falling behind a pair of big women. The two marines… Okay, he could live with the fact that a couple of combat-fit twenty-year-olds could leave him in the dust. But it rankled that even the two guava-shaped NGOs had more acceleration, endurance and style than he did. He ran alone. The fat, the old—and, he imagined, cripples too—were all somewhere well ahead of him, crossing the finish line, drinking a cool beer, perhaps wondering if a search party should be organized to find him.

  After reaching the seven kilometer mark, Ohn Myint ran back to find Calvino standing in a vast rice field.

  “You okay?” she asked. “If you want, I can have a truck come and pick you up.”

  “No need,” said Calvino. “Just stopping to admire the view.”

  In the distance behind him he saw the walkers—never a good sign if you’re a runner. Only it soon became clear that one of them wasn’t a member of the club. The man, who approached on a motorcycle, was a military intelligence agent—what the Burmese shortened to “MI.” As common as village dogs, only they were never tethered.

  “We have a visitor,” said Ohn Myint.

  The MI agent, in his crisp white shirt and longyi, who’d been sent to spy on the Rangoon Running Club—no doubt investigating Derek’s case—rode up the narrow path toward Calvino and Ohn Myint. Stopping near them, he got off and strolled over.

  “Have you been up north?” the MI agent asked.

  “North, south, I can’t say which direction I’ve been,” said Calvino.

  “The northern part of the country.”

  “You think I should go?”

  “What do you think of the situation in the country?”

  Calvino smiled. “Friendly villages. One of the village women gave me a peeled orange. And I can’t figure that out. Why did she give me an orange?”

  The MI agent grinned, his sunglasses covering his eyes.

  “Why are you in our country?”

  “I’m a tourist. I spend money. I’m hoping to meet a couple of friends. Isn’t that a good enough reason? The situation in your country is none of my business. I couldn’t care less if you murder each other in your beds.”

  “Passport,” demanded the MI agent.

  Calvino nodded. “Runners don’t carry passports.”

  “It’s the law. You must have your passport at all times.”

  “In the shower?”

  The MI agent took out his cell phone and talked for a couple of minutes, watching Calvino. When he finished, he lowered his sunglasses. There was a look of absolute hate in his eyes. His boss had told him to let Calvino go. His motorcycle was parked a few feet away in the field where he’d left it. It was orange. All MIs drove orange or gray motorcycles that had the number 4 or 5 on the special license plate.

  “Isn’t riding a motorcycle on the 10K run against the rules?” he asked Ohn Myint.”

  “MIs have their own set of rules.”

  He’d been trailing Calvino through a hamlet and likely had been on his tail from the start of the run.

  “He’s done nothing wrong,” said Ohn Myat.

  “What’s your name?” he asked Calvino.

  “Kiss My Trash. And this my friend Swamp Bitch.”

  He wrote down the names in his notebook.

  “Where are you going?” the MI agent asked her.

  “To the beer truck at the finish line.”

  The MI agent stared at him. “Why are you running?”

  “Exercise,” said Calvino. “It’s good for your health.”

  The MI agent spit on the ground. Health appeared to be an alien concept to him as he scribbled in his notebook.

  “He’s an American,” said Ohn Myint.

  “And who are you?”

  “His translator.”

  “Why do you run?”

 
The MI agent seemed to be caught in first gear, repeating the same question.

  “Good for the heart and lungs,” she said in English, and repeated it again in Burmese when it appeared the MI agent hadn’t understood.

  A small crowd of villagers watched in the distance from the safety of their houses along the narrow, winding road, smiling and whispering to one another.

  “How many Americans are running with you?”

  Calvino thought of the two ultra-fit marines from the American embassy who had the bodies of whippets and ran like cheetahs.

  “A platoon of battle hardened snipers,” he said.

  It wasn’t a word the MI agent understood. Calvino spelled out word “platoon” for him.

  “P-l-a-t-o-o-n.” He looked at the notebook. “Two O’s,” he said. “Toon as in cartoon.”

  The MI agent scribbled “Plato”underneath.

  Calvino nodded. “That’s it, Plato. The quarterback who played football for Florida State against Henry Miller.”

  “What is the purpose of running?”

  Calvino had already answered the question, and so had Ohn Myint. But the technique was to keep asking the questions until the MI agent received an answer that would fit into his report. That was all that mattered. His job was to produce an answer that he could show his superiors without getting in trouble or being laughed at.

  “What do you want to hear?” he asked the MI agent.

  “Purpose.”

  “To lose weight.”

  The MI agent, slightly overweight, looked at the lines of sweat rolling down Calvino’s face.

  “But you’re not fat.”

  “My heart is fat.”

  The MI agent wrote that down.

  “I’ll talk with you again.”

  He turned away and walked to his motorcycle.

  Ohn Myint nodded. “He’ll be back, for sure.”

  “Jack said you made arrangements for the trial tomorrow.”

  “It’s been arranged,” she said.

  Hands on her hips, she looked at a runner in the distance ahead.

  “And he said you were looking for a missing person, Rob Osborne. Getting the girlfriend’s brother out of prison is going to help you find him?”