“Let’s go meet the curator,” said Saxon.
On the way upstairs they passed Khin Myat. Calvino stopped on the stairs at eye level with him.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” Calvino said. “You remember Colonel Pratt.”
The last time they’d seen Khin Myat, he’d been on the balcony watching them go through the gate of Pha Yar Lan train station.
“I didn’t expect to be here. Yadanar’s birthday party is also his going-away party. He invited old school friends, people he’d lost touch with.”
Su Su, the woman from the covered market, came down the stairs and stood behind Khin Myat.
“There you are,” she said.
“Catch you later,” Khin Myat said in perfect idiomatic American English.
Saxon raised an eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”
“How so?” asked Calvino, assuming he was referring to Khin Myat’s linguistic skill.
That wasn’t the case. Saxon was accustomed to hearing returnees speak in perfect English.
“Vinny, you know more people here than I do. And I live in Rangoon.”
“You need to get out of the office more often, Jack,” said Calvino.
Before Saxon replied, the Colonel, who’d been watching the faces come and go, gestured to Saxon, who leaned in closer.
“Have you seen Yadanar?” he asked.
Saxon held up a finger, signaling to wait one minute. He disappeared up the staircase, and when he came back he had Yadanar at his side.
“Pratt,” said Yadanar, “I hope you had a drink and some food. A little later, I thought we might play a set. If you have time.”
“I didn’t bring my saxophone.”
“I have one you can use.”
Yadanar grabbed the arm of a passerby, saying, “Take my friend to find a saxophone.”
“And I’ll catch up with you in a couple of minutes,” Yadanar said to the Colonel.
Calvino and Colonel Pratt exchanged a look of two men trying to read the mind of the other.
“I’ll wait for you here,” said Calvino.
The Colonel broke into a smile. He was amused by the thought that Yadanar might have as many musical instruments scattered through his house as he had paintings. Calvino saw the smile and thought that Colonel Pratt was handling the party better than expected. His cop’s haircut and conservative shirt and trousers, along with being more than a generation older than most of the people in the house, made him stand out like a father at a high school prom. He’d done his best to blend into the crowd. He’d warned Calvino that a cop wandering through rooms of guests smoking dope and doing drugs had the potential of going pear-shaped. In Burma that was the one shape of fruit that was best avoided. But he’d relented. After all, Saxon owed him for helping spring his brother. That was the only piece of evidence the Colonel clutched to himself against the possibility that he was walking into a setup.
Colonel Pratt worked his way through the groups of smart young people at Yadanar’s birthday party, and the escort assigned by Yadanar led him into a room with three saxophones on a table. The Colonel picked up one of the instruments and played a couple of runs. He continued with the other two saxophones, taking his time to choose among them.
As Colonel Pratt was picking a saxophone, Calvino followed Yadanar down the upstairs corridor, passing several closed doors.
“Where’s Mya?” Calvino asked.
“She’s here. Waiting for you.
“Jack says this is your going-away party. Mya says it’s your birthday party.”
Yadanar approached a door at the end of the corridor and stopped in front of it.
“They’re both right,” he said.
A Burmese man stumbled out of the room, wiping sweat from his face. The blood had drained from it. He looked ghost white.
“This is Thiri Pyan Chi,” Yadanar said.
But Thiri Pyan Chi didn’t stick around to exchange business cards. He rushed past them and down the corridor and disappeared down the stairs.
“He’s in a hurry,” said Calvino.
“Like everyone in Rangoon. And that is a problem. I’m afraid your friend Rob got mixed up with a Thai named Somchai. He’s been in town to see Thiri Pyan Chi. I asked Thiri Pyan Chi to invite Somchai and his two bodyguards over to his house for a business discussion. I sent over a few men to bring the four of them to my party.”
“Thiri Pyan Chi was running a business with Somchai behind your back,” said Calvino.
“That’s just one of his big mistakes,” said Yadanar. “I told Thiri Pyan Chi how disappointed I was to find out about his side deal with Somchai. You know what he said?”
“He was going to tell you when the time was right.”
Yadanar’s face lit up.
“I like you, Vincent. You understand how Burmese people think. Mya told me that about you. She was right to invite you tonight.”
Calvino caught a glimpse of Thiri Pyan Chi wandering around downstairs, ready to vomit. He looked like he was going from one wall of dreams to another, looking at angels, demons, fairies, gods, warriors and peacocks.
Calvino and Yadanar still stood in the corridor outside the door Thiri Pyan Chi had emerged from.
“He doesn’t look so good,” Calvino said.
“People who fuck up never do.”
Calvino thought about Thiri Pyan Chi downstairs, eating snacks, drinking his way to some courage and trying to engage in conversation among the guests whose faces looked ten, twenty years younger than his own. No doubt he felt like a senior citizen.
It was nearly midnight.
“Time for the party to start,” Yadanar said.
Yadanar opened the door and nodded as Mya rose from a sofa and walked toward Calvino. She wore blue jeans with tears in the knees and a fresh black T-shirt that had Burmese script on it, and underneath—“STOP Killing Press.” Red was used for the word “STOP” and white for “Killing Press.” Her political activist self had surfaced and found its way to Yadanar’s party.
Calvino understood why Yadanar had sent Colonel Pratt off to find a saxophone. He hadn’t wanted a Thai police colonel inside this room. Two men, apparently Yananar’s good friends, stood aside to reveal they weren’t alone. Seated on the floor, tied up with black duct tape, were three men, their heads covered with white cloth bags. Above them was a large mural that covered most of the wall.
“You like the painting?” asked Yadanar.
The artist must have devoted weeks with his paints laid out on a table in the room, painting nats—the whole pantheon of Burmese spirits—as they hovered over the floating lotus on a languid, crystal-clear lake, diving and flying through an enveloping, brilliant blue sky. Canary-eyed dragons flew above an open sea. House lizards as large as dragons crawled over a table with books, incense sticks and candles. Bats, owls and eagles darted in and out of bonfires. Rows of monks disappeared along the shore into an infinity of mirrors. Dismembered bodies littered the sandy beaches with large tree roots extending into the earth. Elephants on stilts walked over a wooden bridge that led to an ancient temple.
“My mother had this dream many years ago.”
The hooded men whined like beaten dogs, their muffled voices sealed by duct tape.
“Is this the Burmese way of dealing with party crashers?” asked Calvino, watching as Yadanar moved closer to the prisoners on the floor.
Yadanar glanced back.
“I like that. Yeah, that describes them exactly. Party crashers. They weren’t invited and decided to sneak in and help themselves. Isn’t that right, asshole?” he said, kicking one of the men in the ribs.
The kicked man let out a loud, throaty groan of pain. Calvino had begun to wonder if the men, the setup and Mya in the T-shirt were all part of the artwork. The look he’d seen on Thiri Pyan Chi’s face, the fear in the eyes, his shaking hands, hadn’t been those of an actor performing a role. He’d been terrified.
Sitting apart from the three men on the floor, an Asian woman was also tie
d up with a pillowcase over her head, her skirt hiked up to her thighs. Yadanar lifted his shoe and jabbed the shoulder of one of the bound men on the floor.
“This one is named Somchai. He’s a Thai who came to visit my country. He read somewhere that Myanmar was open for business, and everyone was invited to come and look around. We are the new land of opportunity. But Somchai made a big mistake. He didn’t do his homework. He thought, I don’t know any of those people in Rangoon, and you know what? If I don’t know them, then they probably don’t know each other. Would he think that in Thailand? I don’t think so. Somchai lacked a basic understanding of the situation. He had no idea—nor did he care to find out—who holds the real power, the man you must see before you make your deal. Just to be on the safe side that you’re not stepping on toes. You want to know how stupid Somchai is? He recruits a man whose girlfriend is connected through her family to the top. But he doesn’t have a clue.
“People in her extended family control the export side of the retail pharmaceutical business. Why wouldn’t he think, Myanmar, another country, yes, so shouldn’t I find out who are the people in my country, Thailand, doing business with that family in Myanmar? Could someone important like Khun Udom already have the business covered? If he didn’t know Khun Udom was in the business, then he had no brains and should have stayed home. No, he left home and came here to export cold pills. What does he do with the pills? He puts them in circulation in Bangkok, and Udom phones me and asks me why I’m setting up a second channel into Thailand. Why am I sneaking around his back, cheating him? And I tell Udom that is news to me. I am a person of honor. My family are people of honor. We keep our word. Before you came into the room, I asked Somchai if he ever bothered to read the newspapers in Thailand. The Thai government apparently doesn’t like the amount of cold pills entering the country. Udom was asked to lay off the business. He did. But pills still showed up. He took the heat. And then he blamed me for causing him a problem. But it wasn’t Udom. It wasn’t me. It was this little shit named Somchai.”
Yadanar slapped one of the hooded men in the head. Calvino assumed that one was Somchai. The blow knocked the man to his side.
“Thiri Pyan Chi has told me everything about you, Somchai. You didn’t figure that one either. What a dickhead. Always ask around about the guy you are thinking of going into business with, and ask yourself who is he, and why doesn’t he have a business going with someone bigger than you? You don’t marry someone on your first date. Your timing is terrible. You could never play the piano with such poor timing. I asked you before, ‘Don’t you read the papers?’ The Thai government is investigating the import cold pills business. They are digging for information. They are looking for someone to hang the blame on. And then you arrive at the party.
“A good businessman knows not only when to enter a market but when to leave it. Udom is a very good businessman. He’s been our partner in China. He loves us. We told him not to worry. We’d shut off the cold pills going into Thailand. And we’d put him in some new projects. Seaside resort developments are a good investment. You build places for the rich to lie on the beach and relax. Instead, what does Somchai do? He kills Rob Osborne. Because he thought he was a threat. Rob a threat? Somchai’s lack of judgment knows no end. He got it in his head Rob would talk about his business to other people. Rob made him nervous. Maybe Rob would tell his girlfriend he’d threatened him. But did Somchai care? He didn’t. Until someone told him that Mya and I are family. But then it was too late. He’d already killed him. Or maybe he knew and just didn’t really care that I’d be very unhappy. I’d promised Mya that her boyfriend would be safe. But Somchai made me a liar. We keep our family promises.
“Now I have Udom screaming at me. I have my cousin saying I’m a lying shit. And all of this comes around my birthday. I thought to myself, what would make me happy on my birthday? And I said to myself, ‘Let’s have a conversation with Somchai and his Thai colleagues. Sort this out. Start the new birth year on happier ground.’”
Talking to a room where three men and a woman sat gagged and bound, Yadanar had created a perfectly attentive audience. No matter how long Yadanar paused, no one cut into the silence with a question or comment. One of Yadanar’s friends handed him a flute of ice-cold champagne, and he took a sip. He pointed the glass at the woman on the floor.
“She pulled the trigger. Blew out Khun Rob’s brains, didn’t you?”
Mya stepped forward and pulled the pillowcase off the woman’s head. A gag, stained with blood, muted her shouts.
“Kati?” said Mya.
She looked at Yadanar.
“She killed Rob?”
“I’m afraid she did,” said Yadanar.
Kati’s face was bruised, swollen. A large red welt had risen on one cheek. Her eyes were puffy and black. Her front teeth, visible above the gag, were jagged stumps. They’d done a thorough job of beating her. The beauty had been erased from her face, leaving a mask of horror.
“She decided to help Somchai out by pulling the trigger. None of the men in this room said she was lying, that one of them pulled the trigger. She shot him because that’s what Somchai asked her to do.”
Yadanar walked to a cupboard, unlocked a drawer and removed a nickel-plated handgun, a Colt .22 with a long silencer fitted to the barrel, and showed it to Calvino.
“She killed the man you were looking for,” said Yadanar. “Do you want to do the honors on behalf of his father?”
“I don’t shoot women who are tied and beaten up,” said Calvino.
“Right,” Yadanar said.
Turning to Mya, he flipped the gun around. Grabbing Mya’s right hand, he slapped the gun into her palm. Her fingers wrapped around the grip. She pointed the long-barreled Colt .22 at the floor.
“It’s my birthday,” said Yadanar. “Calvino doesn’t have the stomach for it. Will you avenge Rob’s death? You should be the one. You know why? She told us she found out Rob was hiding in your room from you. She heard you talking to the Colonel at the 50th Street Bar. You looked surprised. Shocked. That’s what happens when you treated a strange woman like she’s wallpaper. Foreigners regularly do that with Thai girls, am I right? Think about it. Is this your karma? The moment must be in one of our family dreams. One recorded in some painting stacked in some room of this house.”
Calvino looked away. Staring at Kati, broken and terrified, full of pain and suffering, only made him feel sorry for her, and he didn’t want to feel any pity for a murderer. He understood now that Yadanar had an even better reason to separate Colonel Pratt from him. No one wanted a police colonel to witness what would be done to a woman who had gambled her life and lost with her bet on a stupid man. Bad things turned up in the real world and landed at the door of a woman who’d never given a thought to the real odds of things going completely wrong. It wasn’t something she’d remotely thought could happen. Luck had always been with her.
“Don’t, Mya.”
Mya avoided looking at Calvino. Instead she stared at Kati, crying and begging, in between her wails and sobs.
“A beautiful woman like Kati always gets what she wants from men, and when she wants it,” said Yadanar. “Somchai was young, handsome as a leading man, and he dressed with an elegant hi-so club style. He talked her into shooting the guy. Just do it. Boom. You got close to him because you’re a woman, a pretty woman, and maybe he thought you were a part of his dream, a hallucination. And you blew out his brains, making it look like suicide. Isn’t that what you told us earlier?” Yadanar sighed. “Not that she wanted to tell the story. But she finally got around to telling us everything.”
Mya walked over to the corner where Kati sat. She saw Kati’s eyes balloon in size as she aimed the Colt .22 and pulled the trigger. The silencer masked the shot. The bullet entered Kati’s skull above her right eye and rattled around and around inside her skull, scrambling her brain tissue into a soft yogurt. She fell back against the wall with the mural, splattering blood on angels and fairies hovering on
a grassy knoll. Mya lowered the Colt .22 and crossed the room while everyone watched. Stopping at the cupboard, she dropped the gun in the drawer.
She turned to Calvino.
“Back in Bangkok, you tell Rob’s father that no one got away with killing Rob. His killer was taken care of. You tell him that Mya made certain herself.”
The three men on the floor squirmed, blubbering, crying and pleading.
“We’ll take care of them later,” said Yadanar.
He opened the door for Mya, who strolled out in her activist T-shirt. Calvino caught up with her and grabbed her arm, spinning her around.
“That was your ‘fuck everyone’ statement?” he asked.
“I can’t think of a better one, can you?”
She broke free and rushed down the stairs.
Yadanar stepped to Calvino’s side, holding a glass of his birthday champagne.
“My cousin was headstrong even as a kid,” said Yadanar. “I liked her T-shirt this evening. STOP Killing Press. How appropriate for a revenge killing.”
“I didn’t think she’d pull the trigger,” said Calvino.
“To be frank, neither did I. She exceeded my expectations.”
Yadanar had seen her impact at the 50th Street Bar on the first night she’d walked on stage and left the audience screaming for more. She was an entertainer, a performer, who was only alive when she stood before an audience. Calvino started down the stairs, squeezing between couples. He looked for Colonel Pratt in one room, then another, until he heard the sound of a saxophone, drums and a violin coming from down the hall. The Colonel was inside, playing the borrowed instrument. After the music finished, the Colonel walked over to Calvino, smiling. Playing the saxophone had him in the groove, the zone, the eye of the storm—a place that had many names, and a place where a man could exit and no one could touch him. Calvino gestured for his friend to step outside. Colonel Pratt removed the strap of the saxophone, swung it over his head and walked out of the room. The other players looked after him, shrugged and kept playing.
Missing In Rangoon Page 29