Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

  Colonel Pratt looked at his watch.

  “What time does that train arrive?”

  “In thirty minutes,” said Khin Myat. “Unless it’s late. Then maybe one, two hours.”

  It was the kind of open-ended answer that, like a dream, had many interpretations, and a Thai fully understood that each one was as probable as the next.

  EIGHTEEN

  Pha Yar Lan Train Station at Scott’s Market

  FROM THE NARROW lane leading to the train station entrance, Calvino turned and shielded his eyes as he stared up at the second floor balcony that ran along the side of the colonial-style market building. Khin Myat leaned over the balcony railing, with his own binoculars, watching Calvino standing to the right of a column. Calvino swept the balcony, freezing on Khin Myat, catching a glint of sunrays from the glasses.

  Calvino continued his sweep of the area. From where Khin Myat was positioned on the balcony, he had an unobstructed view of the train station entrance, a narrow gate carved into the high stone wall. If Khin Myat saw something that looked out of the ordinary, a face that looked out of place or anything his guts told him something wasn’t right, Calvino had told him to call him and report.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘out of the ordinary’?” Khin Myat now asked, speaking into the phone while looking at Calvino below.

  Good question, Calvino thought. In Burma he had no benchmark to judge what was extraordinary.

  “There’s no rule. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  He ended the call, and glancing up, saw Khin Myat waving. As a rule members of a surveillance team didn’t wave at each other. But only so many contingencies could be planned for, and the street inevitably delivered surprises that hadn’t been expected.

  When in doubt, Calvino fell back on Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography—“I know it when I see it”—because sometimes only ad hoc rules deliver the right outcome.

  Colonel Pratt stood beside a small clothing shop, looking at the merchandise displayed in the window. Calvino walked up and stopped beside him.

  “Thinking of buying Kati a dress?”

  “It’s not her style,” said Colonel Pratt.

  They stared at a traditional dress with gold sequins, worn by a dummy with a cheap black wig that had slipped to one side, covering one eye.

  “Time to meet a train,” Calvino said.

  Calvino glanced at his watch. They had plenty of time to kill, so why wasn’t he feeling more relaxed? It had to do with the setup. Relying on lottery ticket vendors and astrologers like Khin Myat and Naing Aung for information was loaded with enough downside to make a descent from Everest look like a walk through Kansas in comparison. He and Colonel Pratt were strangers to their newfound Burmese colleagues. Men like Thiri Pyan Chi were neighbors to these men, members of the same 27th Street tribe of merchants and vendors. Double-crossing a tribe member, even when he’s a criminal, might come with some heavy costs.

  “I keep asking myself if the astrologer would tip off Thiri Pyan Chi,” said Calvino.

  Pratt nodded and turned away from the window display, saying, “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Pratt and Calvino walked side by side down the lane, which was narrowed by rows of cars parked on both sides. They came to the entrance, which could have passed as a gateway into a medieval dungeon, with its heavy iron gate hanging on thick hinges in the stone wall. The sound of trains arriving drifted from the other side.

  Wai Wan’s trial had taught Calvino a lesson about the perils of toll-gates when moving cargo along Burmese highways. Contraband shipments ran a gauntlet of officials, and that was expensive and dangerous. But one lone cop was all it took to scuttle a shipment. A jealous competitor, a business rival or an old enemy seeking revenge only had to find that one cop and slip him some money, and a semitrailer-sized hole appeared overnight in the balance sheet. Then it was stop and seize, cat and mouse, payoffs and jerkoffs, as grudges and double-crosses piled high like old inventory no one could put a value on anymore.

  The Burmese system had been built on violence. It proved the old adage that it was far cheaper to pay one man to blow up a bridge than three hundred men to build one. Violence and the threat of violence, knitted into the distribution system, made for an elite clan of rich psychopaths. It was also why Burma had few modern bridges.

  Thiri Pyan Chi had found an alternative highway for smuggling his cold pill shipments into Rangoon right under the noses of the authorities: the train. Pha Yar Lan train station was his lucky ninth tollgate.

  “We don’t engage them,” said Colonel Pratt, “or interfere.”

  “Not much point,” said Calvino.

  “No point at all.”

  “I’ll play like a tourist taking some photos on the platform.”

  Pratt thought Calvino didn’t look like a tourist.

  “Tourists don’t take photographs of boxes being unloaded from a train.”

  “I’ll be discreet,” said Calvino, smiling.

  “Some foreigners never pass as tourists.”

  “You’re saying I stand out?”

  “If you take pictures, you’ll be noticed.”

  “It wouldn’t be healthy to be noticed by Udom Thongsirilert,” said Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt nodded. Udom Thongsirilert, an influential Thai from Buriram, ran a number of legit Thai companies—specializing in transport, event planning, luxury imported cars and electronics—along with a couple of illegit ones. The legit companies provided a way to launder his large profits from the smuggling of cold pills. One of his legit companies sold the cold pills to clinics and hospitals. The pills went in one door and out another to Udom’s transport company, which hauled them back over the border to Burma to the string of yaba factories. The route was intentionally serpentine as with most clandestine businesses, a direct line of supply led to a prison cell. More circuits also meant more profit for the transport company. Colonel Pratt had been sent to Burma to gather intelligence to close down Udom Thongsirilert’s Burmese smuggling operation.

  “I’d like a look at the shipping manifest,” said Calvino.

  “I’d like to look inside the boxes, but that’s unlikely to happen. We’ll watch them, follow them out and find out how they ship them into Thailand.”

  “Did I mention that the Burmese guy who sells the cold pills out of the market happens to drive a Lexus that matches the one in Chinatown?” asked Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt stopped to look around at the cars and pickups before his eyes rested on the wall they were about to disappear behind. He turned to Calvino.

  “I’m sorry about what happened at Cherry Mann.”

  “You pulled the tail off. You made the right decision. You didn’t know it was Naing Aung, an astrologer. We could have had one of Udom’s people following us.”

  “I thought there was something strange about that guy.”

  “The eyebrows,” said Calvino.

  “What about them?”

  “He shaved them off and painted them on again with black eyeliner.”

  Colonel Pratt smiled and entered first through the station gate topped with iron spikes. He followed close to a couple of Burmese to avoid drawing attention. Calvino waited to the count of ten and walked through. As he emerged on the other side, the Colonel stood on the concrete platform holding a Burmese newspaper about twenty meters away. He blended in like a local commuter. Calvino turned and walked ten meters in the opposite direction. A crowd of about a hundred people was stretched out along the platform.

  The Pha Yar Lan train station was usually invisible to outsiders. In Rangoon only locals took trains. One day that would all change, but that day was still long off. Calvino examined the faces among the crowd. Not a single foreigner on the platform. He felt a gear grinding in his gut—the place where porn and fear both registered a vote. Once they’d entered the station, Khin Myat lost the ability to watch their back. While on the train station platform, they were on their own. Colonel Pratt pretended
to read the newspaper with his back to the platform wall. His eyes moved across the platform, the dual tracks and the surrounding wall to the terrain on the opposite side of the tracks, where a line of trees ran down a steep embankment. Calvino hovered near a column as a dog came up and sniffed his leg. Even the dogs smelled the scent of a foreigner, he thought.

  Colonel Pratt mentally flipped through his checklist of contingencies. For one thing, the people bringing in the shipment might slip out without using the main gate. But spotting these alternative exits was even more important because he and Calvino might have to use one fast if things turned ugly. The first priority of going into a dangerous unknown place, he knew well, was planning an avenue of escape. Once they were on the run, it would be too late.

  Calvino waited until the dog moved away before walking to the end of platform. His white face stuck out among the Burmese sitting, standing, squatting or milling around. Like a tourist from Iowa on New York’s E train, even under a low-hanging hoodie it required only a glance to peg someone who was from out of town. He tried to act relaxed, stretching his arms, glancing at his watch, pacing as if waiting for the train. Not belonging to the commuter set on the platform wasn’t something he could disguise. After a few minutes, though, people stopped staring. They adjusted to the presence of a foreigner pacing to the edge of the platform and looking down the tracks, playing the role of an impatient visitor waiting for a train.

  The pedestrian bridge across the tracks looked like an empty painting against the sky. No one used it. Climbing up a long flight of stairs only to climb down another one made no sense when you could just step down from the platform and walk across. A couple of schoolgirls loitered on the tracks between the platform and the embankment on the opposite side, leaning in close to whisper with each other and giggling as they stole looks at Calvino. Other commuters, apparently worn down from a long day’s work, loitered in the no man’s land between the train tracks. On the far side several young girls squatted on the tracks with their tiffin boxes at their sides, reflecting the sunrays.

  Calvino could see Colonel Pratt holding his cell phone between his ear and shoulder, head buried in the newspaper. He didn’t look in Calvino’s direction as he spoke. Calvino wondered who he was talking to—his wife, Manee, or Kati, the super-fan who’d been super-glued to him before like a bandage on a hairy leg. Neither man acknowledged the other. Khin Myat had warned Calvino and the Colonel, in his way, that the train wouldn’t be on time. None of the trio had had to state another possible setback: that the shipment wouldn’t be on it when it did arrive.

  The worst part of the wait was killing time and trying not to be noticed as the minutes were murdered one by one.

  A steady stream of tired vendors and shoppers filtered through the entrance from the market, lugging bags and boxes. Like the courthouse, Pha Yar Lan station hadn’t changed from Orwell’s time. Colonial architecture and infrastructure handcuffed the struggling nation to a dead empire. The Burmese wandered like survivors of some terrible conflict among the buildings built by their former masters. The concrete and brick walls of the train station’s interior, decaying, unpainted, covered with moss and gnarled vines, had witnessed more than one crime in their time. The cold pill smugglers joined a long column of criminals who understood that the Burmese railways had been built by the British to carry booty and contraband. Why wouldn’t Yadanar, Udom and Thiri use the same railway tracks to carry on the tradition?

  Calvino struggled to think of a distinction between the colonial masters and the businessmen who’d followed them. He looked across the embankment to the opposite side, where among the trees and weeds a man relieved himself, his back turned to the platform.

  A couple of brown dogs, led by the one that had sniffed his pant leg before, sauntered along the platform, tails wagging, snouts down, sniffing for scraps. Train platforms, like airport departure lounges, Calvino thought, are life suspension spaces, places where people wait for transportation to arrive so their life can start up again. The difference between powerful and rich and powerless and poor showed on the faces around him. Those who wait for public transportation have a sad, weary resignation; those whose transportation waits for them belong to a different species.

  Life comes equipped with two standard options, thought Calvino, as he looked down the track at Colonel Pratt and saw that he was no longer on the phone. A man is born to wait for the train, or he finds a way to make the train wait for him. Calvino knew where he belonged in the scheme of things. His life was not that different from those of the people waiting beside him. Most people accept that in the grand scheme of things they were born to wait. But sometimes when the young catch a glimpse of the long wait ahead of them, they find that hitching a ride on yaba makes waiting disappear. That’s the attraction in it, he thought, the escape hatch from the boredom of the long wait.

  Crows circled in the cloudless sky overhead, cawing as they roosted in the treetops above the embankment. The crowd stirred as an ancient locomotive slowly came into view. The train stopped on the opposite side of the platform. The conductor’s left hand eased the brake lever. The wheels screeched, metal against metal, as the train finally stopped. People with bundles and bags climbed on, stepping up gracefully in their longyis as they moved over the tracks and up the stairs to the carriages.

  A few minutes later a second train—Number DD 933—pulling six orange and brown striped carriages, stopped at the station. Passengers leaned their heads out the windows, smiling and waving to people in the crowd. A couple of schoolgirls in uniform ran to climb into a carriage, giggling and shoving. They had no need to rush. The conductor sat in the front cabin lost in thought as he smoked a cigarette. His blue-uniformed assistant squatted in front of the engine, whipping out a lighter and leaning the cigarette pressed between his lips into the flame.

  At the far end of the platform three men approached the end car with a trolley. With the help of a man inside, they formed a line, passing boxes from one to another and finally to a man who stacked them on the trolley. Colonel Pratt walked down the platform past the men.

  The boxes had printed labels with Thiri Pyan Chi’s name and market stall address. The Chinese brand name and logo for Coldco was stenciled on the side of each box. The Colonel counted forty boxes stacked in rows on the trolley. He’d researched the packaging and number of pills inside a standard shipment box. One thousand cold pills were inside each of them. Forty boxes translated into forty thousand pills. A degree in chemistry wasn’t necessary to calculate that the amount of pseudoephedrine inside the shipment would make a batch of yaba to supply a small stadium of teenagers. Still, the shipment was only a bucket in the sea of cold pills flowing through Thailand.

  Colonel Pratt had confided to Calvino a couple of facts about Udom’s operation that he’d learnt at his intel briefing, including how his department had traced orders for ten billion cold pills from one of Udom’s electronic companies directly to the Chinese manufacturer. The Colonel’s boss wanted the answers to two questions: who had helped Udom arrange the supply route from China into Rangoon, and who were his Burmese friends who were working out the shipments from Rangoon to Thailand? The Colonel had initially thought that finding out about the train shipment would allow him to crack the case, but even if the train were a hundred carriages long and they were all filled with cold pills, it still couldn’t be what they were using. Pratt ran the figures through his head. Using trains shipping one trolley’s worth a day, it would take seven hundred years to complete that order.

  When he saw the trolley with the forty boxes, he was disappointed. The shipment was more likely than not a local resupply to Thiri Pyan Chi’s market stall. He also sold cold pills in quantity to hospitals and clinics in Rangoon and possibly some upcountry as well. Colonel Pratt felt frustrated as the trolley rolled past. It had been a huge waste of time.

  As Colonel Pratt turned and walked back to Calvino, one of the workmen, carrying the last box from the train carriage, stopped in his tracks. H
e dropped the box and started shouting in Burmese. It wasn’t like there were any other Westerners he might have confused Calvino with. He was the only one on the platform, and the man had got a clear look at him. Calvino had walked close enough to also recognize the man behind the wheel of the Lexus with two soon-to-be-dead Thais in the back.

  A Chinatown reunion with the Lexus driver wasn’t what Calvino had expected. He’d clipped the driver on the head and dragged him out and dropped him in the road. But something in the back of Calvino’s mind had told him the driver must have seen him approaching in the rearview mirror. Getting hammered on the head with the Walther hadn’t blurred his memory, apparently. Three of the men started after Calvino, who had already pushed through the passengers and headed for the entrance.

  The men left the cold pill boxes behind along with some paperwork. Colonel Pratt backtracked and grabbed the papers. A young man with his arm around the waist of his girlfriend stared at him, shaking his head. An awkward moment passed as the two men locked eyes. The young man broke the solemn spell with a wide smile and wink. His girlfriend nudged him and nodded. One of the workers turned just before the entrance, looked back at the train and huddled for a split second with another worker. Someone must have remembered there was no one to prevent people from stealing the whole lot. One worker ran toward the trolley, shouting at people to back away or there would be trouble. Colonel Pratt noticed a detail in the warning. The man wasn’t threatening to call the police. No need for that. Everyone knew that “trouble” was a word expandable to cover most kinds of suffering. They backed away.

  Colonel Pratt joined several people who passed through the entrance and back into the street alongside the market. When he looked up at the balcony, the Colonel didn’t see Khin Myat, who was supposed to be keeping a lookout. He scanned the street and a laneway that disappeared inside the central market but saw no sign of Calvino.