Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

“He had Watson.”

  “I have you.”

  “There are a couple of reasons why that won’t work.”

  The Burmese PI found himself glancing out his window as he calmed his eyebrow tick. The covered market was visible below. It would be difficult to get much in the way of travel expenses on this job, and he was thinking how best to increase his rate as compensation.

  Calvino waited for a reply, thinking Naing Aung was running manpower estimates through his head.

  “I have a friend who can watch the back,” Naing Aung finally said.

  “I want to meet him.”

  Calvino wondered if Naing Aung had picked up from Perry Mason or Sherlock Holmes the idea that watching the back of a market was not nearly as important as having someone watching your back.

  As he looked out the window, Naing Aung found a solution to his problem sitting at a roadside table drinking tea.

  “I will introduce you to my colleague.”

  Calvino smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Naing Aung, a head shorter than Calvino, walked beside his new client, greeting shopkeepers and vendors as they edged their way down 27th Street. Skynet TV dishes angled out from third and fourth-floor balconies. A Muslim with a white skullcap and white cotton shirt and trousers, his beard flecked with gray, shook Naing Aung’s hand as they passed.

  “My colleague is from America,” he said. “Mr. Calvino.

  “Will the American buy my sweets? It is my dream.”

  The Muslim made a sweeping gesture with his hand at a large glass case filled with candies. His gold-framed glasses rested heavily on his nose. Calvino thought the vendor was going to start talking about his dreams too when a taxi honked, edging forward slowly to clear a path among schoolchildren walking two and three abreast toward the main road.

  Moving on, the two men passed several lottery vendors. “Moe Yan Lottery Enterprises” was painted on a sign hanging in front of one of the shops, the white frame chipped along the edges. The pitch was the same as at every shop: “Make yourself a billionaire.” Not a dollar billionaire, but a kyat billionaire, and that was a wholly different scale of wealth. Every other shop was a lottery shop. The signs promised a way out of poverty.

  “My clients ask for lucky lottery numbers. They dream of a number and phone me to ask if it is lucky.”

  “Do they ever win?”

  “You don’t need to win to believe. All believers are winners. This is the wisdom of our fathers.”

  Naing Aung had managed to sum up the whole machinery of astrology and religion without the hint of an eyebrow tic. To give him credit, thought Calvino, he did seem to believe that what he said was true.

  Opposite the Hindu temple on 27th Street, four lottery shops competed for customers. In the lottery trade, a shop positioned opposite a temple presented the faithful with a gateway to test their good fortune. Naing Aung is right, Calvino thought. Belief in luck is powerful—and good business.

  The Burmese PI walked slowly as he explained about Khin Myat, the man Calvino had seen him staring at through the window. Eight years of working as a freelance journalist in New York, taking translating jobs here and there, had given Khin Myat time to witness how the truly rich in America lived—though it was mainly from TV that he knew them. He’d taken an American wife, who worked as a refugee counselor for an NGO—that’s how they’d met—and they had settled in Queens. Her much larger income had supported him after they married.

  Sarah—that was his wife’s name—had ended up dumping him for a union official she’d met at an Occupy Wall Street protest. Sarah had told Khin Myat that she was washing her hands of refugees—too much baggage. Khin Myat had found a job at Walmart spying on shoplifters and worked double shifts, building up lots of overtime.

  Poor Khin Myat hadn’t seen it coming, that this wife would leave him. Sooner or later she’d get bored with her union official—Naing Aung had consoled his friend with this thought many times. Wives changed… governments, too. Khin Myat read about the political changes in Burma and went to a travel agent and charged a one-way ticket to Rangoon to his wife’s Visa card. He’d confided in Naing Aung—or so the latter told Calvino—that he’d rather slam against a brick wall as his own master than scan security-camera feeds in Walmart for the rest of his life.

  Naing Aung guided Calvino past several storefronts. Squeezed between the lottery shops was a roadside café with wooden tables, red plastic chairs and locals drinking tea and eating sweets and fruit. Naing Aung greeted another young Burmese man dressed in blue jeans and a New York Mets T-shirt. He turned to introduce Calvino, but before he could open his mouth, Khin Myat turned to Calvino with a handful of lottery tickets.

  “How many do you want?”

  Shock crossed Naing Aung’s face like someone watching a car about to smash into a crazy monk on a pedestrian crossing. He gestured with both hands, waving them at Khin Myat.

  “What?” asked Khin Myat, trying to read his friend’s lips. “No lottery ticket? Okay.”

  Khin Myat shook his head as he laid the tickets on a table. He registered his defeat by drinking from his teacup. Naing Aung glanced sheepishly at Calvino to resume his introduction.

  “Mr. Calvino, meet my good friend and colleague Khin Myat. He lived in New York. He was born on a Monday.”

  “I was born in New York on a Tuesday,” said Calvino, smiling as he extended his hand.

  Burmese names, Calvino understood, are chosen according to the day of the week a person is born on.

  “New York was confusing. The names never corresponded with anything important like the day of the week,” said Khin Myat. “But after a few years I said, hey, why should a name go with the day of the week? It got me questioning myself.”

  “About the meaning of dreams?” said Calvino.

  “Man, how did you know that?”

  “So now you sell lottery tickets,” said Calvino.

  It was the kind of disparaging remark that Khin Myat remembered Sarah, his wife, saying.

  “I’m helping out my uncle.”

  He gestured to a lottery ticket shop across the street.

  “You know the street?” Calvino asked.

  “Better than you know New York.”

  “I haven’t lived in New York for a long time. I couldn’t say I know it. You’ve been away a long time. Things change. People come and go.”

  “Not in Burma. Nothing changes that fast. Same people, same faces, mostly the same family businesses.”

  Calvino thought he had a point. Rangoon had an air not so much of timelessness as of an old streetcar crawling slowly up a hill, one that you could get off for a while and catch up with a bit later, without missing a beat.

  “I need a second pair of eyes for a few days.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Watching the covered market.”

  “I can’t do it myself,” said Naing Aung.

  Khin Myat fingered his book of lottery tickets, sucking his teeth.

  “Are you some kind of cop?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” said Calvino. “I find missing persons.”

  “Like on TV.”

  “Nothing as romantic as TV. Watching is boring, and people lose interest.”

  “I could watch security tapes for hours and never take a break.”

  “I mentioned to Mr. Calvino that you are observant,” said Naing Aung. “Sherlock had Watson—a point made by Mr. Calvino. I can’t deny that Watson was essential to his success.”

  Khin Myat had two natural, non-twitching eyebrows, and that was a good start, thought Calvino.

  “Man, Sherlock Holmes lived a hundred years ago. If you watched CSI, The Wire, The Sopranos, you’d know no one solves cases like that anymore. You need technology to rock ’n’ roll. Isn’t that right, Mr. Calvino?”

  Khin Myat swirled the dregs of his tea in the small cup, tipped the cup over on the table and fingered the leaves.

  “You can read tea leaves, or you look at the e
vidence of who put the poison in the cup. It’s not the same thing.”

  Calvino wanted to give him a bear hug.

  “Can you two work together?” Calvino asked.

  They exchanged a knowing smile. One man sold lottery tickets on the street, and the other sold winning numbers, stitched together by the invisible thread of greed and opportunity.

  “Good, then we can all work together.”

  “I work well with Americans,” said Khin Myat.

  Naing Aung’s eyebrow did its familiar tell, suggesting he wasn’t happy with the way his friend was positioning himself as the superior investigator.

  “If you’d worked that well with them, you’d still be at Walmart.”

  The moment of tension between them passed as a young woman turned up at the table, chose one of Khin Myat’s lottery tickets and paid him the money. She had the confidence of a regular customer.

  Upon his return to Burma, Khin Myat had found that his time in America both helped and hurt him. As a young Burmese, he fell into the class of what the locals called returnees, the men and women who had filtered back to Burma after the first hint the place was opening up. Ohn Myint was another example. Her nickname, Swamp Bitch, Jack Saxon had said, voiced an attitude the other Burmese mainly kept to themselves about the returnees. Their time spent abroad made for feelings of jealousy and envy, combined with a lot of misinformation about the “good life” elsewhere.

  “Khin Myat left America very rich,” said Naing Aung.

  “I wish it were true. Unfortunately it’s bullshit. You ever hear of anyone reviewing security tapes in a Walmart office getting rich?” asked Khin Myat. “Since I came back a couple of months ago, I’ve been selling lottery tickets for my uncle. If I were rich, why would I bother?”

  Naing Aung held out a cup and poured himself tea.

  “Because even the rich need to feel productive. They need to do something for their family.”

  Khin Myat stabbed a finger into the tea leaves on the table and held up his finger for Calvino and Naing Aung to see the leaves stuck to it.

  “The rich don’t have to raise a finger, and if they do, it’s to order a servant to run to the table to clean it.”

  He popped his finger in his mouth.

  “I clean my own hands.”

  “When I was transferred to the security department,” he said. “I made minimum wage. You know what living on minimum wage in America means? Food stamps. You live in a small room in a bad neighborhood. So I came home, thinking it had to be better.”

  He’d followed up leads in Rangoon but they’d led nowhere. He’d then drifted back to 27th Street, where his uncle had an office and a lottery ticket business. Khin Myat found himself ahead of his time. He had no idea when the rising tide in Burma would lift small boats like his.

  Meanwhile, Khin Myat was not a rich man. It also turned out that he and Naing Aung had a family history from 27th Street. Naing Aung had wanted him to invest in his new private investigation business, only Khin Myat had said he had no money. The astrologer had taken that statement as a negotiating posture. He’d assumed Khin Myat wanted to drive down the price. Calvino had given them their first chance to actually work together.

  “Tell Naing Aung that not everyone in New York is rich. He won’t believe me.”

  “New York has poor people,” said Calvino.

  Naing Aung wrinkled his nose. It was a conspiracy.

  “Maybe that’s true. But any Burmese who lived eight years in America is rich.”

  “That’s wrong on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin. Just because I lived in the States doesn’t mean that I’ve got money. I had to pay taxes, insurance, social security, a mortgage and gasoline. By the end of the month, I hadn’t saved anything, and even worse, I had credit card debts piling up.”

  Khin Myat turned to Naing Aung. They’d had this conversation before and likely right in front of the same Hindu temple.

  “Naing Aung, do you pay taxes in Rangoon? Do you know anyone who pays taxes? Who do you know who pays for insurance or social security? You don’t. No one you know does. You are the one who should be rich. In the US you make all that money, but you blow it on shit no one thinks about here. Man, being rich isn’t something they know anything about.”

  “You want the job?” asked Calvino. “Fifty bucks a day.”

  “Plus expenses,” said Naing Aung.

  “I’m in. Just tell me what I’ve got to do, Sherlock,” he said, looking at his friend, who had used his long pinky fingernail to peel the skin from an orange and now popped a slice into his mouth.

  “Your fee can be a down payment on your junior position in my private investigation business,” said Naing Aung.

  He’d already done the calculations.

  Khin Myat scratched a two-day stubble on his cheek as his eyes narrowed. He watched Naing Aung lick the juice from his finger after devouring another slice of orange. Naing Aung ignored the disdain in that look as he wiped his hand on his trouser leg. Calvino wondered if Khin Myat had shot such a glance at his Walmart supervisor the day he told him that he was quitting and returning to Burma, and the supervisor had replied, “You’ll be sorry.”

  “Just tell me what you want me to do,” he said to Calvino.

  “It’s a stakeout.”

  Khin Myat laughed.

  “I was born to watch.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The Cold Pill Stakeout

  AT ABOUT 10:00 A.M. business at the 27th Street covered market picked up. Customers wandered in from the street, and the big customers parked their pickups and vans in the back and used the rear entrance. Khin Myat ran a thumb through the thick wad of lottery tickets he’d taken along on the job. He remembered from TV that people watching other people needed a cover so they wouldn’t be noticed. Khin Myat didn’t need to invent a cover. People on the street knew that he sold lottery tickets on the street for his uncle.

  He wandered through the parking lot in the back, showing the lottery tickets as he walked. He watched as medical supplies were unloaded, stacked on carts and then pulled into the market, the wheels clanging as they bumped over the uneven concrete floor. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. He followed one of the carts inside. It was just another business day, with local customers and merchants exchanging cash for merchandise. It reminded him of watching endless hours of security tapes when nothing happened except someone pulled a box of corn flakes off a shelf and put it in their basket.

  Sometimes a tourist might walk down one of the dark corridors and take a couple of photographs before turning around and walking back to the street. Local housewives wandered inside to shop for bargains at the stalls selling women’s and children’s clothes. Calvino had been smart to hire him and send him inside, Khin Myat thought. He moved down the corridor and no one paid any notice. Seeing he had lottery tickets, most turned their backs as a sign they weren’t interested.

  The real business took place in the rows of stalls with medical supplies and drugs stacked in shelves. Clerks squatted on stools in front of their shelves and waited on customers who pointed at boxes.

  Khin Myat milled among the shoppers in the market that first morning, looking for the stall whose number Calvino had given him. Hands hanging at either side of his longyi, he occasionally raised a fistful of tickets toward someone at a stall, and they would gesture for him to keep on moving. Calvino hadn’t used the term “surveillance detail.” He’d kept it simple, saying he needed both an inside and an outside pair of eyes. Calvino had picked Khin Myat as the inside man, and Naing Aung was to work out of his office as he listened to the dreams of his clients.

  Khin Myat had been one of the first people to enter the market when it opened. He continued wandering past the stalls, skirting the phantom shapes of old Chinese bicycles leaning against a wooden platform. The concrete floor was cluttered and dirty. Shoes and sandals were shoved under stools in front of the stalls. Workers helped themselves to water from large plastic jugs as he passed.


  The interior of the covered market was medieval. Nothing like it existed in places like New York. Birds nested in the ceiling, and cats stalked the dark lanes between the stalls. He wished he had a pair of night vision goggles as he finished one lane and turned to enter another one.

  If Rangoon had a heart—though no one doubted that it had a head—the covered market was likely it. It was a land of spirits, superstitions, family and neighbors sharing their dreams with each other and with astrologers, monks and gurus, all looking for a winning lottery ticket number and all within the shadow of a sacred Hindu temple. You could also buy any modern drug you wanted there.

  The vendors at the quieter stalls slumped over their newspapers, eating curry and rice as they waited for customers to shuffle up and point to a box of drugs or a modern medical device. Khin Myat continued, largely ignored as he wound his way along the market stalls. All around him was merchandise intended for those whose health had failed—the injured or maimed, the frail or disabled. He passed through a fleet of wheelchairs ready to roll through a world of demons, portable toilets for pit stops in the unrelenting search for ghosts, crutches to keep up with a fast-talking fortune teller, blood glucose monitoring systems as a hedge in the world of faith healing, scales for weighing medicine when brewing up herbal recipes and slimming belts to strap on before entering a ritual of black magic.

  Every disease, condition, genetic malfunction or accidental injury had an infinite choice of remedies. Wholesalers, retailers, doctors, healers, nurses and hospital workers all shopped at the market; so did junkies, quacks and hypochondriacs. It should have been a fertile ground for lottery ticket sales.

  “Things are upside down everywhere,” Khin Myat muttered to himself, holding up his sheaf of lottery tickets. “But in Burma they’re so confused that no one can tell the arms from the legs.”

  He stopped beside a row of products near the stall Calvino had told him to target. He picked up a green box labeled “essence of chili,” looked it over, put it back, picked up a bottle of cod liver oil and finally one with garlic oil. Sitting at the stall, a small man removed his glasses, put his newspaper aside and arranged his longyi like a barnyard bat looking to drop from the ceiling and sonar out for a snack.