“What kind of license do you have? Does it permit you to drive a heavy vehicle?”
“Yes, I have a license to drive a heavy truck.”
The clerk called time out, pulled out the pages separated with a sheet of carbon paper, peeled them apart, took out the carbon paper and slipped it between two fresh sheets of paper and back into the carriage. The maneuver was done in one sweeping motion. He adjusted the paper and nodded that he was ready, and the cross-examination resumed.
“Your truck was filled with teak.”
“The owner told me she’d done the paperwork. I believed her.”
“Do you have any proof of what she said?”
“Proof?”
“Evidence?”
A soft hiss of a no issued from his pressed lips.
“When you were arrested, did you communicate with the owner?”
He nodded. “Yes, over the phone.”
“What did she say?”
“That she would come and get me released.”
“And did she come?”
“No. The forestry official held me in a cell. He interrogated me, and I told them what the owner told me to say.”
“Do you have any evidence of what the owner told you to say?”
Wai Wan slowly bowed his head, defeated, boiling with anger, trying not to catch the eye of his sister in the doorway. He wouldn’t want her to see him in utter submission, helpless as a whipped slave.
One of the cops leaned forward on a wooden railing. One hand rested on his chin, and with the other hand he worked a key to the handcuffs to pick at the edge of the Crown counsel’s table, slowly peeling it back as if he were unwrapping a gift.
“Before, you told the court you said that you acted alone. Now you say someone instructed you by phone what to say to the forestry officials. How can the court believe this testimony?”
When a man has been betrayed, his face shows a peculiar pain of shock, disbelief and hatred. Wai Wan had been sucker-punched. The Crown counsel continued to punch, but there was never any contest, as in a prize fight when the fight has gone out of the opponent and it’s only a matter of time before he collapses.
The trial was going in the wrong direction. Calvino had had enough. He stood up and nodded at Ohn Myint.
“I want you to translate what I am going to say.”
“I would like to request that your honor subpoena the owner of the teak and the owner of the truck, if it is a different person.”
He stopped and let Ohn Myint translate.
The judge looked over his glasses at Calvino as if the British invaders had returned on the wings of the courtroom sparrows.
“Request denied.”
Calvino locked eyes with the judge and broke out into a smile.
“Second motion. That I be allowed to approach the bench for a conference.”
The Burmese lawyers exchanged glances. No one had ever requested a private conference with a sitting judge. What could the foreigner’s intent be? The judge sat through what seemed a long period of silence. Finally he waved Calvino to step forward.
“In New York we keep it simple. I was going to ask you to dismiss the case against this man on the grounds of lack of intent.”
Calvino pulled out the note the ex-judge had written and read it word for word:
“‘Your Honor, your dismissal of charges against Wai Wan will show the American government your fairness and courage and demonstrate for the world to see that Myanmar’s courts can be trusted to deliver justice.’”
After he finished reading the note, Calvino handed it to the judge, returned to his chair and sat down.
All eyes turned to the judge. He seemed to recognize the handwriting. On the note, and on the entire wall.
TWELVE
View from the Balcony
JACK SAXON HAD booked Calvino a room at the guesthouse under the name Richard Smith. The room, cramped, hot and dark, smelled like a livestock holding pen and was only slight smaller. Calvino stood in the doorway surveying the bed, the chair, the closet and the bathroom door, painted pink. He walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains. The view was of a brick wall two meters away. Closing them again, Calvino walked to the front of the bed, leaned over and tried the mattress. Soft as overcooked pork bellies. He sat down on the edge. As soon as Rob Osborne was on a plane to Bangkok, he’d find another place. For now it would do.
It was time to go to work. He studied the room from every angle—entry, exit, electrical, lights, water, floors and closet. It was the kind of hotel room where the police found a body stuffed in a bag, hands cut off, with a shaved, bearded head stuffed in a separate burlap bag. And they’d joke about the pink bathroom door.
And they would know they’d never catch the mad butcher who had carved up the body. Because tracking a murderer who’d left his victim in a place like this was a waste of time. The victim would have likely used a phony name like Richard Smith. No one could ID him. John Doe murder files everywhere were stuffed in the back of a file cabinet in the drawer marked “Nobodies Killing Nobodies When They Were Drunk and in Arm’s Reach of a Knife.” A bit long for a file name, but once they’d found a body in a room like this, the cops only had to go through the motions of opening a file, one that would gather dust.
Saxon had left Calvino a note on the chair. Calvino picked it up and read it.
“Welcome to the real Burma. See you later. Your case is in the closet.”
Like the note Calvino had handed to the judge, Saxon’s note didn’t open with a name or end with one. Anonymous notes were short on such details. Who else but Saxon would have rented him a hellhole and then put his case in the closet so other guests wouldn’t steal it and sell his clothes to buy booze or drugs?
Calvino went to the closet and pulled his suitcase off the top shelf. The closet had that old man’s stale smell of cat piss and day-old dried sweat. He put his case on the chair and sat on the bed, opened it and took out his clothes and his handgun. Strapping on the holster, he checked the chamber of the Walther and slipped it into place. He went to the closet, took out his jacket, put it on, checked himself in the mirror and locked the door behind him.
Back on the street, Calvino checked out the narrow driveway leading to the guesthouse, turned left at the street and began walking to the Savoy Hotel. Across the road he saw a cloud of swallows swarming out of the Shwedagon, visible at the horizon. The birds blackened the sky. He stopped to watch, shading his eyes with his hand. The thick soup of birds darted, flitted and danced across the sky as a single interconnected, flexible unit. The setting sun cast shadows, but where the swallows flew, the sky remained a bright aqua. As he watched, he thought about his hotel room with the balcony overlooking the pagoda—the one he’d checked into as Vincent Calvino—and the distance he’d flown solo from the pagoda to a backwater nest registered under the name Richard Smith.
A couple of minutes later, Calvino walked into the Savoy Hotel driveway, pushed through the entrance door and entered the bar. He looked around but didn’t see Colonel Pratt. Instead he saw what wasn’t in the bar. There was no table with beaten-up alcoholics, their livers screaming like a retired traffic cop with nightmares of escorting kids caught in heavy traffic. There were no characters who’d fallen under the wheels of life. Everyone looked as if they’d checked in under their real name and had real lives that didn’t require carrying a handgun.
The tables were occupied with respectable types: expat diplomats, businessmen, NGOs, translators and teachers. A few more people sat at the bar engaging in polite conversation. These were the kind of drinkers who got all of their vaccine boosters every year, exercised, avoided meat and cigarettes, paid their taxes and read to their kids at bedtime. Saigon, Bangkok and Phnom Penh all had similar bars for the same crowd of swallows. It was a place for drinkers to step out of the harsh reality of the culture and language and pretend among themselves that they were together in their own country, a city they liked, where they were safe and everyone was pret
ty much like them.
Calvino figured the bar catered to customers who came early and left late, long enough to drink and sober up again before stepping into the Rangoon night.
He passed a wall of brass fittings that suggested an old English country pub. Behind the bar hung photographs of fishing boats. The bronze bell above the bar had an open invitation to ring it and buy a round for customers. Only true drunks rang the bell, and by the look of it, the bell hadn’t been rung in some time.
One drink reorder later, Colonel Pratt walked in dressed like a businessman in a suit and tie. He was heeled, too. He went straight to the bar and sat on the stool beside Calvino. He didn’t look like a saxophonist. And he didn’t look like a cop. Colonel Pratt had transformed himself into the role he saw scripted for him by circumstances. It wasn’t just the clothes; it was the style, the attitude and the way he walked that created the illusion.
“Sorry, I’m late. Jack phoned me,” he said, ordering a beer. “I went around to have a talk with him.”
“Jack’s been a busy boy. He got me a room.”
“How is it?”
“It’s a different view from the balcony,” said Calvino.
“Everything go okay today? At Jack’s office and at the trial?”
Calvino nodded, lit a cigarette and ordered a third round, telling himself that he had to slow down. He snuffed out the cigarette. It promised to be a long night, and he’d be going to neighborhoods he didn’t know, surrounded by people he didn’t want to know.
“What’d Jack want?” asked Calvino.
“He had some advice.”
“He’s a journalist, not a doctor or a lawyer.”
Colonel Pratt raised his glass of Tiger beer, and Calvino touched the rim of his whiskey glass.
“He said it would be a good idea if I hired a local to do surveillance work.”
“Good idea. Put a tail on Yadanar.”
“Only there’s a little problem,” said Colonel Pratt.
Calvino didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Being alive and on assignment in Rangoon was a guarantee of problems, and like the swallows from the Shwedagon they came in swarms. The Colonel saw Calvino wasn’t going to ask him what he meant.
“You want to know the problem?”
“I’m waiting to hear.”
“Rangoon doesn’t have private investigators.”
It was like going into McDonald’s and being told they didn’t sell French fries.
“And you thought I might be able to find one for you?”
Colonel Pratt drank from his glass.
“You are good at finding missing persons. There has to be one private eye in Rangoon. Think of him as missing. Find him. It’s a simple surveillance job. I need a local who knows the city. You don’t. I don’t. And there isn’t anyone else.”
He was right; they needed local resources. It was the difference between success and failure.
“I’ll find someone.”
Just as Calvino was on the cusp of solving one missing person case, the Colonel handed him another one. The hard-to-find were popping up like mushrooms at dawn hiding in a fine mist.
“You’re still busy with the Osborne case.”
Calvino smiled. “Looks like I’m finished with it tonight. I’ve booked his flight to Bangkok. I have the ticket. What I don’t have is him.”
“Is that a detail or a problem?”
“I’ll let you know. It looks straightforward. But the kid has been hiding out in Rangoon for a reason. Why would he do that? Because he’s worried that I’m looking for him? I don’t think so.”
“It’s not over,” said Colonel Pratt.
“Not until he’s on the plane to Bangkok.”
“Any plans to meet him?”
“Tonight in Chinatown. That’s the plan.”
“Why don’t I come along?” said Colonel Pratt.
Calvino toasted his friend.
“Tomorrow I’ll have a look around for a local investigator.”
Saxon had given the Colonel some good advice. A local private eye in a foreign jurisdiction was a guy who made his living because he had access to inside information about important people. If it had been easy to find a private investigator, Saxon would have had his number or known someone who did. The fact that he hadn’t passed a number along to the Colonel gave Calvino a doomed feeling. The starting Yankees pitcher walks three consecutive runners, and the coach pulls him, gives the nod to the pitcher’s brother, who walks out to the mound on crutches. That’s how Calvino thought of himself, a guy put in the game because there was no one else to pitch.
“Improvise,” said Colonel Pratt.
“That works with jazz. I’ll see what I can turn up.”
Calvino began to explain how the judge had dismissed the criminal charges against Wai Wan. He’d used the old Asian standby—throw the case out for lack of evidence. The police officer on the motorcycle who’d arrested Wai Wan, or someone who professed to be that officer, said he couldn’t be sure Wai Wan was the driver of the truck. The cop also testified he was absolutely certain about the identity of the remaining three prisoners. They had sat quietly against the wall—a relief driver and two passengers. The owner was out of the case. The driver had got a pass out of jail. That left three poster boys sitting on the low bench, backs to the wall, reminders so no one forgot that, at the end of the day, someone is always needed to hold the bag.
Calvino paused, held up his glass and tried, and failed, to catch the bartender’s eye, even though he was standing close enough for Calvino to smell the garlic on his breath. The man stood behind the bar staring into the distance like he’d been hit by an alien ray gun in an old science fiction movie. Calvino turned to see what had captured the man’s attention and saw that the bartender wasn’t the only one who’d stopped breathing and talking.
A knock-down beautiful Thai woman had entered the room. Standing near the door, she looked around as if looking for someone. A sea of hopeful faces with sloppy choose-me smiles stared back. She’d stopped every conversation in the bar.
Calvino’s jaw dropped as he saw her cross the room to stand just behind Pratt. This woman had a knee-liquefying beauty that made a man’s legs turn to rubber stumps as his jaw involuntarily opened like that of a moron who’d stumbled onto a porn site for the first time. There was a small class of women who made knees quiver, but only once or twice in a decade did the cartilage in a man’s knees appear to uncoil, boil and dissolve.
“Is something wrong, Vincent?”
Calvino signaled with his eyes that Pratt should turn around and take a look at the woman hovering a couple of inches away from his left shoulder. He’d been thinking about Calvino’s courtroom experience. When he turned on the stool, he saw what had caused the room to go silent.
The woman was young. Pratt guessed she stood at about 165 centimeters, and with heels, over 170. Her thick black hair extended to her waist, which was as narrow as that of a political prisoner attached to a feeding tube. She had intense and expressive large brown eyes, full, glossy red lips and the kind of long, shapely legs that come from hours of daily exercise. Calvino guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She wore no wedding ring. She tapped Pratt on the shoulder with one of her fingernails, a long, slender stiletto tap that a man paid attention to. She had the Northern Thai white skin, the kind that Thai men slit throats for, and a smile that caused other men to stare with utter amazement and envy that the woman had chosen Colonel Pratt. What did that man at the bar have that they didn’t?
As soon as it was clear she was with someone, the conversations resumed.
“Hello,” said Pratt in English.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
Pratt looked at her, smiled.
“Have a seat.” He turned away, talking to Calvino. “The brother walked out of the courthouse a free man?” asked Pratt.
He’d put her on ice. It was an old habit. Like a good cop, he had learnt long ago to control distractions, making it clear
he’d decide the timing.
“There was some paperwork, but that didn’t take long. They’re flexible about that. Pratt, there’s someone who wants to say something.”
Calvino glanced over Pratt’s shoulder. He was talking but no longer concentrating on anything other than the woman hovering near Pratt, waiting for him to give her a moment. Finally, she spoke to him in Thai.
“I wonder if I could have your autograph?”
If one question could give a man face, this question gave Pratt the equivalent of a Jupiter-sized one.
“You must be mistaken,” he said.
She tilted her head to the side, brushing stray hair from her face.
“I heard you playing last night at the 50th Street Bar. I went back to my hotel and searched your name on Google. What a surprise! You are a famous jazz saxophone player from my country. You make me very proud to be a Thai. I saw you at the bar. I hope that you don’t mind.”
“Are you joking?” said Calvino. “Of course he doesn’t mind. What do you want to drink?”
There was no trouble getting the bartender’s attention.
“This is my friend Vincent Calvino.”
She stretched her hand out to Calvino.
“Pleased to meet you. How lucky you are to have such a talented friend.”
“He reminds me every few hours,” said Calvino. “Just in case I forget.”
“I don’t think you’ve told me your name,” said Colonel Pratt.
With a woman who looked like this one, a name seemed unnecessary.
“My friends call me Kati.”
“What’s your Thai name?” asked Calvino. It bothered him when a Thai woman called herself Kati or Joy or June.
Leaning forward, she whispered, “Titiporn.”
If there was ever a reason for a Thai woman to use a farang name, she had it nailed. Calvino roughly estimated her breasts to fall in the region of 38C, raising a man’s temperature to about the same figure in Celsius. With a name like Kati she was sure to have stories of intensive questioning by immigration officers at international airports. But that would have paled against the attention her real name would have attracted in an upscale expat bar in Rangoon.
Missing In Rangoon Page 15