Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

  “That’s a beautiful name,” said Pratt.

  “Memorable,” said Calvino.

  “What would you like to drink?” asked the Colonel.

  Kati, who preferred that name to Titiporn, sat at the bar next to Pratt.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said.

  “Vincent was telling me about visiting the historical sights in Rangoon.”

  “The Shwedagon is so beautiful,” she said. “But I prefer Wat Po in Bangkok.”

  “I agree,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Are you playing at 50th Street again tonight?” Kati asked. “If so, I’ll go to hear you again. You play like a dream from heaven.”

  A mouthful of whiskey shot out of Calvino’s nose.

  “Did I say something funny?” she asked uncertainly.

  Calvino grabbed a bar napkin and wiped his nose.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be on Facebook?” asked Calvino, raising an eyebrow.

  He glanced from her over to Pratt, whose nose was next to Kati’s hair. She flashed a smile as she shook her head.

  “I don’t really like social media. Do you?”

  “It has its moments,” said Calvino.

  “I know someone who could make a fan page for you,” she said, looking up at the Colonel.

  “I’d click ‘Like,’” said Calvino.

  Kati reached into her Gucci bag and took out a pen and a notebook.

  “If you could give me your autograph, I’d treasure that. If you have a photo of yourself playing the sax, that would be something I’d keep forever.”

  “Heaven” and “forever,” thought Calvino. Kati had a long-term vision of things connected with Colonel Pratt.

  “Gin kow ru yung?” asked the Colonel.

  “Have you eaten yet?” as Calvino knew well, is one of the most caring and friendly questions any Thai can ask another, framing a genuine concern.

  She flashed a smile and touched his arm. “Yang kha. Hiew.” she said. “Not yet. I’m hungry.”

  This from a woman who, like the man in the proverb Saxon had shared with Calvino, probably lived off the smell of food. Kati looked like someone with the money to buy a boatload of fish.

  “And you?”

  “Vincent and I are going out for dinner. Join us if you like,” said Pratt.

  “That’s so kind. But I would be interfering with your business.”

  “It’s okay. Isn’t it, Vincent?”

  “Not a problem. We’re going to Chinatown.”

  Her face brightened. “I love Chinese food.”

  “To an Indian restaurant,” said Calvino, watching her smile dim.

  In all the many years Calvino had known Colonel Pratt, this was the first time he’d ever witnessed him inviting a total stranger to join them for dinner. If there was going to be a first time, Kati was a good choice. Pratt already had that faraway look of an expat who’d taken an airport taxi to Soi Cowboy and bar-fined the first dancer who’d sat on his lap and provoked thoughts of marriage and children before the ink on his visa stamp had dried. Pratt had that struck-by-lightning look. Calvino saw the signs. When a woman like Kati walked into a man’s life, he discovered he’d been living no more than a zipper’s length away from the kingdom of mind-controlled morons ruled by women with improbable names. It was hard to watch Pratt dropping IQ points faster than a plane with stalled engines losing altitude.

  “Pratt, there’s something here that doesn’t seem right,” Calvino, leaning in, said softly to Colonel Pratt, who suddenly no longer understood English.

  “Right, wrong. We are talking dinner in Chinatown. Give Rob his plane ticket, and we go to 50th Street afterwards.”

  “Okay,” Calvino said to both of them, “why not make a night of it?”

  “Thank you. I’m so excited,” she said, giggling as she touched Colonel Pratt’s shoulder.

  Kati looked like a woman who could keep a high level of excitement rolling right through the night, thought Calvino.

  He watched as Kati’s hand lingered a moment too long on the Colonel. Pratt accepted the gesture like a celebrity accustomed to hands reaching out and pressing to confirm the idol was flesh and blood. Musicians on the road have a basic code of conduct: bring the sexy members of the audience to an emotional frenzy and then, after the show, reap the rewards by playing the game of not letting them go and pushing them away at the same time. Pratt had never fallen into that way of life. He was too much of a cop and a family man. At least that’s what Calvino had believed all of these years. The saxophone allowed him to vent, to release and let go. It had never been about the women. But men changed, lives changed, and women like Kati didn’t fly out of a famous temple at dusk every night of the week. She was a bird in the hand.

  Calvino asked the bartender for the bill. He paid for the drinks, thinking of a laundry list of issues he had intended to discuss with Pratt about the Chinatown meeting. Sometimes it was better not to plan and to just let things work out on the fly. She’d also be at the 50th Street Bar later. That didn’t leave much opportunity for talking about the local private investigator. The chances were that everything would fall into place. Besides, Kati was a goddess, and all other business suddenly seemed much less pressing.

  Cold pill smuggling and missing people had filtered out of Colonel Pratt’s consciousness as he sat at the Savoy Hotel bar beside the attentive Kati, her legs crossed on the stool, talking in Thai about jazz. Kati had mastered that fine art of watching a man with doe-like eyes, hanging on his every word as if everything he said was a riff on the secrets of the universe. She sighed like a schoolgirl when he signed his name in her notebook. Colonel Pratt had stumbled across a Thai name in her notebook that had disturbed him, but there was nothing like a beautiful woman to make a man to file away his suspicions for another day.

  “We can go, Pratt,” said Calvino, standing up.

  “I did mention it was Indian food, didn’t I? Do you like Indian food?” Colonel Pratt asked Kati.

  “I love it.”

  She lied with a grace that impressed even Calvino. He was pretty sure that Pratt could have said, “We’re going to eat fried rats and house lizards,” and she would have loved that too.

  “Right,” said Calvino, “and we’ll be meeting another friend.”

  Rob Osborne was hardly a friend. But this remark sounded better than, “We’ll be meeting a missing person whose father fronted $4,500 to spring his son’s girlfriend’s brother from prison.”

  In the private investigations business there was always a chance that a meeting over a missing person could go pear-shaped. But he had no reason to expect it in this case. The Black Cat, in his mind, had been using Rob all along to get her brother out of prison. Mission accomplished, why wouldn’t she deliver him? It had been Colonel Pratt’s idea to go along as backup. They both carried concealed weapons. The Colonel had been shot a while back, and whenever that old scar started to itch, he said it was a warning. Meeting Rob Osborne in Chinatown had him scratching that old wound. Turning a missing-person meeting into a social occasion didn’t seem like the right way to scratch it. But sometimes one itch replaces another, and Kati had a barroom of men itching.

  Mya Kyaw Thein had said Rob Osborne would meet him in Chinatown. She’d given Calvino the name of the Indian restaurant and told him which table to sit at. She kept her promises, she’d told him. Getting Rob to meet Calvino, she assured him, was nearly as difficult as springing her brother from Insein Prison. She refused to say how long the meeting would last or if Rob would return to Bangkok. He could deal with that. However the meeting ended, Calvino could report to his father that he’d met with Rob, and he was no longer being held against his will or in any serious trouble.

  The Black Cat hadn’t committed to showing up with Rob. That was something she hadn’t worked out with him. But it didn’t matter, thought Calvino. It might be better if she didn’t turn up. His old man wanted Rob. The woman, in Alan Osborne’s world, was a distraction, a person of
no interest outside the fact that she’d lured his son into hiding. Mya Kyaw Thein had been bitter about Alan Osborne’s ill treatment of his son and her. She hadn’t mentioned that her boyfriend had punched his father in the face. Besides, it had worked out well for her in the end. Without Rob running away to Rangoon, the old man would have never paid the money for her brother’s release.

  Calvino walked behind Colonel Pratt, who had Kati in tow. He felt like the manager of a rock star. The Colonel had won a prize at the Java Jazz Festival a few years back, which had led to more engagements and prizes in Macau, Singapore and Hong Kong.

  Colonel Pratt was a cop who played the saxophone as a hobby to release pressure from the job. Things and people change. The Colonel had started to think of himself more as a saxophone player whose hobby was policing. Calvino had witnessed the shift over the last year. After Pratt had been shot, he had thought about things in a different way. He’d never seemed happier. There was no boss in jazz. He turned a blind eye to the politics inside his department, where corruption money kicked upstairs, letting connected people walk free. He told himself that people inside the jazz culture were made of better stuff. His music made other people happy. He could riff and improvise and no one lost face, no one got hurt. When was the last time he’d done that as a cop? Pratt had asked Calvino that question not more than six months ago.

  “Midlife crisis, Pratt,” he’d said. “You’ll out grow it.”

  “Music is the best life. I have no desire to outgrow it.”

  Kati—the Thai woman also known as Titiporn—was another good reason for Colonel Pratt to think of himself as a musician. No cop with his head screwed on right would have invited a strange woman to a meeting in Chinatown while packing a weapon because a scar itched. Women like Kati made a man forget about planning, forget about concentrating on who was on the scene, who was waiting in the shadows, and what firing position to assume in case of an ambush. Kati made him like a bomb unit commander who felt safe with a phony detector because he had faith things would all work out somehow. A beautiful woman could make even a cautious man like the Colonel feel safe when he should have been on high alert for danger.

  Kati had threaded her hand through Pratt’s arm as they walked away from the Savoy Hotel to flag a taxi on the street. Calvino made a point of staying a couple of steps behind them. The sky was pitch dark. Heavy traffic passed as they looked for a cab. The Shwedagon Pagoda swallows had flown elsewhere, looking for food while avoiding predators, or folding their wings in a flutter of sex.

  As they got into a taxi, Calvino sat up front with the driver. A small, dark man with glasses and a silver front tooth, he reminded Calvino of the judge who had presided over the trial earlier that morning. In physical features, they were largely indistinguishable. That was a dangerous way of thinking. Calvino thought about the line written by Orwell: “You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives,’ and then you establish ‘the Law.’” Whether Burma was opening up or not, the local history had shown that the natives were perfectly capable of turning the Gatling gun on their own.

  THIRTEEN

  Chinatown and Dragon Dancing

  EITHER A MAN finds a way to own the street where he lives or it will end up owning him. Wai Wan’s trial proved that the wisdom applied in Burma. It was his absence of Rangoon street smarts that made Calvino uneasy. Colonel Pratt had the same instinct about their own presence in Rangoon—we don’t know these streets, and we’re in over our heads, so hire a local.

  Kati and the Colonel spoke in soft tones, having switched to Thai in the back of the taxi. Calvino sat in the front with the driver, who looked straight ahead at the road. One street after another, and none of them had any recognizable feature. He had no idea whether the taxi was headed to Chinatown. He sat back and thought about Rob Osborne and how things had gone his way so far.

  New York taught its children a couple of early lessons. One of them was never allow yourself to become compla-cent. The other was stay clear of strange neighborhoods unless you’ve got a rabbi on board to vouch for you. Calvino had never forgotten these lessons, but his gut told him he was about to violate both.

  “You all right up there, Vincent?” Colonel Pratt asked from the back. “You’re being very quiet.”

  “I have no idea where we are,” said Calvino.

  “We’re on Lanmadaw Street, and he’ll turn right onto Maha Bandoola Road. When we reach Latha Street, that’s Cherry Mann,” said Kati in English.

  For someone who didn’t like Indian food, she had a GPS fix on the location of the Cherry Mann restaurant.

  “How did you know that?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “I go shopping in Chinatown,” she said.

  “We won’t get lost, Vincent,” said the Colonel.

  They settled back into their Thai conversation in the back.

  Getting lost wasn’t what worried Calvino. He still hadn’t got over the way the Black Cat had manipulated the location. Letting her choose the meeting place gave Rob a tactical advantage. She’d insisted. Her choice of place—though she’d said it was Rob’s decision, not hers—or forget about a meeting. A small voice in the back of his head repeated another wisdom: Never let a woman choose where to meet a lover who has gone missing.

  When the taxi turned right at Maha Bandoola Road, they found that a power shortage had left the street in darkness. It was like driving through a tunnel. The dim light from the cab’s interior gave the driver a ghoulish look. Calvino tried staring out the window, but he was looking into a black void. Out there in the darkness were the men who “owned” the street. Calvino knew that who owned the streets and the neighborhood wasn’t something that could be figured out by reading the title deeds. That kind of ownership required force and brutality, and there was a chain of owners, one stacked upon the other, the boss above more powerful than the one below. To get those relationships straight required insider knowledge of the flow and movement of people, who was on the take, who was muscle and how the money circulated. Stuff that happened in corners and alleyways served a purpose. But an outsider had no access to the chain of command.

  The streetlights came on, and a group of Chinese New Year dragon dancers appeared in the headlights. The taxi slowed down. Dancers passed on both sides of the car. There’d been no sign welcoming them to Chinatown, but they were there. The sidewalks were crowded with restaurant tables of celebrating Chinese. Candles and gas lanterns flickered, throwing star-rays of light on glasses and bottles of whiskey.

  The taxi pulled to the curb as Maha Bandoola Road intersected with Latha Street. The three of them got out of the taxi and walked in the street. Calvino strode next to Colonel Pratt and Kati was on the Colonel’s other side, holding his arm. They navigated around cars double-parked in front of restaurants. Calvino looked for a sign or a building number. The lighting was strictly Third World; the streetlight had a faint amber glow, but its illumination never managed to touch the ground. They stepped from pools of dim light into large shadows that swallowed up the buildings.

  “Cherry Mann. Mann, like man and woman. The number is 88,” said Calvino.

  “That’s a lucky number,” said Kati.

  “Can you read the number on the building?” asked Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt squinted at a building.

  “We’re gaining on 88.”

  They walked through a large sinkhole of darkness and found a series of restaurants on the pavement, no-nonsense outdoor eateries with dozens of tables. The smell of whiskey and beer mingling with duck and steamed rice filled the air—but not for long, as they passed a rancid open sewer smell that made the bile back up in Calvino’s throat. He looked at the surroundings. A series of dark alleys ran off both sides of the main street. Further down the road, the traffic jammed bumper to bumper behind a small convoy of rickshaws. It was the kind of spot where anyone could watch people coming and going without being seen. The kind of place the Black Cat had chosen told Calvino that somewhere among the Chinese signs, businesses
and shophouses, Rob Osborne watched and waited. He’d be spitting distance away.

  Calvino stopped a rickshaw driver and asked which restaurant was Cherry Mann. The rickshaw driver shook his head. He pointed in the opposite direction. They had walked the wrong way from the Latha Street intersection.

  “Are you meeting someone?” asked Kati.

  “Vincent’s friend,” said Colonel Pratt.

  The last thing Calvino took the Black Cat for was his friend.

  “We’ve gone the wrong way,” said Calvino, gesturing impatiently with his hands to the sky.

  Neither Kati nor the Colonel seemed to mind. With a beautiful woman on his arm, a man is never lost. They stood in the road deciding what to do next.

  “It’s this way,” said Calvino, leading the way down the road.

  At night the area had the closed-down, shuttered look of a place under siege. People were holed up inside their rooms, hunkered down as if in bunkers, knowing in their gut that night was the most dangerous time for people squeezed into a ghetto. After dark, over the sound of the TV, that aching voice gnawed at them, wondering just when trouble was going to explode. Roundups start at night. Expulsions and beatings love the cover of darkness too. Living in a ghetto like this, people could hear the tick-tock of someone else’s clock beating in their heads.

  They found it a few minutes later. The Cherry Mann restaurant extended over the pavement with rows of tables, all packed with locals, drinking and eating. Waiters ran back and forth with orders, wiped down tables to seat the next customers and disappeared into the kitchen facing the street. The clientele relaxed, smoked, joked and talked in that liquor-loosened way—loud, boozy, with a machine-gun kind of laughter rattling across the tables. Calvino walked ahead of Colonel Pratt and Titiporn—he liked to use her Thai name. It rolled off the tongue. He figured the Chinese at the tables would like it too.

  He pushed through a knot of Chinese who had taken their party to the next step. They spilled into the street, joining others on foot, in cars and on motorbikes, and drinking whiskey in sidewalk restaurants celebrating the New Year. The smell of firecrackers and money drifted above this group of slavering drunks who laughed and spit chicken bones beside their tables, where rats timed their bone runs with precision. Colonel Pratt and Kati fell back, cut off by the crowd. Calvino ploughed ahead with shoulders and elbows.