Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

  They walked down the corner and into the kitchen, past the fridge and into a pantry. Calvino shut the door.

  “You were right about the birthday party having risks,” said Calvino.

  “You were right about the girl,” said Pratt.

  “Which one?”

  Colonel Pratt looked surprised.

  “Which one? Is there more than one?”

  Calvino recovered himself.

  “Not really. There’s the Black Cat, of course. Who did you think I meant?”

  “I thought Kati would be here tonight,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “You thought that she worked for Yadanar,” said Calvino.

  “A reasonable assumption,” Colonel Pratt said. “Unless you’ve got some information you want to tell me.”

  “Only she didn’t work for Yadanar. She worked for Somchai.”

  “Worked? She quit?”

  “She’s out of the picture.”

  Calvino picked up a thick loaf of bread. Without thinking, he took a knife and hacked off a hunk. Then another piece, until the entire loaf was in pieces.

  “You never know where a woman like that will land.”

  “She didn’t say goodbye.”

  “She might have. But you just didn’t hear it.”

  “Why’d you cut the bread?”

  “I must have seen it in a dream.”

  “Maybe we should get out of here.”

  “I’ll go back to the bookstore for my things.”

  “But Mya promised to sing tonight. I promised her I’d stay for that,” said the Colonel.

  Calvino wanted to tell the Colonel what the Black Cat had done to Kati. But he left him with the impression that Kati had checked out of the party early. He just told the Colonel that he’d overheard her admit she’d been Somchai’s squeeze.

  “Are you sure?”

  Calvino nodded. “Afraid so.”

  The Colonel hadn’t known. And he didn’t want to know. It was enough for the Colonel to file her away as the kind of woman who was the small change that moved from one high roller’s pocket to the next. She’d been like most of the pretties who worked the auto shows. Her life’s ambition had been to find a man who’d buy her all the stuff of her dreams. Somchai had been tied up on the floor a few feet away, and the only dreams left were those in the large mural above their heads. Some dreams weren’t for sale.

  The house was filled with the new generation. The sons and daughters of politicians, businessmen, godfathers and generals, people who had gone to school together and were now linked by power, marriage and wealth. Yadanar’s little speech inside the room had been an indictment of Somchai’s ignorance, and the consequence of ignorance when doing business in Myanmar was a death sentence. Figuring out where one belongs is always the first order of business. The room was filled with people who were one, large extended family. What family didn’t have morons, renegades, traitors or cheaters? There was always a struggle under the surface, until someone felt lucky and tried to ambush the pack from behind.

  Colonel Pratt returned to the music room to play for the guests. People laughed and hugged and danced. When the song ended, Calvino moved through the crowd to stand next to the Colonel as Yadanar stood on a stool, his hands raised, asking for everyone’s attention.

  “I have a birthday announcement. Good news,” he said. “Where’s Mya?”

  She was found in the back of the room on a sofa.

  “Come up here with me.”

  He waited until Mya was next to him.

  “We have been invited to perform in Bangkok. Pratt, Mya and the rest of our band are going there.”

  “Did you know about this?” Calvino asked the Colonel.

  Pratt slowly turned his attention from Yadanar.

  “I’m afraid I did.”

  The room of people applauded.

  “Our country is opening. We will take the message of a new beginning for the Burmese people to the larger world. We are changing. We are part of the new Myanmar.”

  There was more applause. One of the band members handed Mya a mike, and soon her voice echoed through the room, out the hall and throughout the house as she sang “Every Step of the Way.” Yadanar accompanied her on the piano. It was just the two of them playing in the music room, before an admiring crowd of people invited to a birthday party. A going-away party.

  On the way out of the grounds, before they had reached the gate and the security guards with the AK-47s, Colonel Pratt told Calvino that he had found Yadanar’s price, the amount that would guarantee no more smuggling of cold pills into Thailand. The promise of a chance at the musical big time had been it. No guarantees, but a chance. Then the matter would be in the laps of the gods. The deal was good enough for Colonel Pratt to return to Bangkok and let his boss know the cold pill smuggling operation had been closed down. The “closed” sign was hanging in the window. The owner had turned his back on pills to earn an audience with his piano and his cousin’s voice. Udom no longer had his Burmese source. It was as if the electrical generating plant had been shut down. Blackout.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Bangkok: The Living Room

  IT WAS CLOSING night at the upscale nightclub, located in a five-star Sukhumvit Road hotel. Yadanar wore a newly tailored tan suit, a purple silk shirt and alligator shoes with shiny soles. He sat behind a grand piano, smiling at the audience, hands dancing across the keyboard as Colonel Pratt finished John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”—which he dedicated to Manee, his wife, who was sitting at a front row table. Two members of the 50th Street band, one on drums and the other on guitar, accompanied the Colonel. Mya perched on a stool to one side, holding a mike and tapping her booted foot to the beat.

  As the Colonel finished, Calvino, Ratana and Manee all rose in unison, clapping. The rest of the audience followed. Alan Osborne, wearing sunglasses, sat in his chair, gimlet-eyed. He reached over and pulled Calvino’s sleeve.

  “Sit down, Calvino. Being an unpaid shill is terribly demeaning. At least peasant farmers demand to be paid before they applaud some third-rate politician.”

  Calvino couldn’t make up his mind whether Obsorne’s nasty, bitter streak, his lashing out, was connected to the grief from losing his son, or if it had always been there, part of his natural instinct, the way he lived in the world.

  “He deserves it,” said Calvino, leaning down.

  Osborne wrinkled his nose and waved Calvino away.

  “Says the slave to the master.”

  At the next table, Udom sat in the company of a politician, a general and an official from the health ministry. Udom rose and walked to the stage. He presented Pratt with a large bouquet of orchids. They exchanged wais. Two of the Chinese businessmen at Udom’s table stood and applauded as Udom took the mike from Mya.

  “Khun Yadanar is like my son. His father, like my brother. We love and understand each other.”

  He hugged Yadanar and then walked back to his table.

  Calvino had watched over the past couple of weeks after returning to Bangkok as old alliances had fallen apart and new ones had emerged. Information drifted in from Jack Saxon, and the Colonel had his own pipeline—one that was made of glass, so he could see the faces as they passed through.

  The Thai and Burmese cartel bosses had rushed to plan resorts in the newly developing country, and casino gambling interests had acquired a rim of land that swung along the Burmese coastline, a pristine jewel of a beach. Chinese money circled Udom and Yadanar’s families. Competitors tested weak points in their relationship and their networks. The new group had formed as the old business was abandoned. After all, it was only business. Nothing in business—not the concessions, the personalities or the families—was forever. There was no forever equation in illicit business any more than in the so-called licit ones. A man made as much profit as possible and moved on as political pressure to share the spoils became irresistible. Friends who helped the venture, the ones in power, always asked for larger and larger slices of the bu
siness.

  Businessmen helping politicians was the right order of things. Udom and his partners easily made the transition from cold pills to saunas and slot machines. They knew that money, like a raging river, found its own pathways and was unstoppable, cutting through anything in its path.

  The audience chanted for an encore. Mya came back on stage and sang, “When You’re by My Side,” with Yadanar accompanying her on the piano. She sang the words with soft, intense feeling that lit up the audience, leaving the women in tears and even the men with moist eyes. It was the rendition that would turn up for a lifetime within their dreams.

  Since he’d returned, Calvino had had a recurring dream. He was next to Colonel Pratt when they were caught in a crossfire, ambushed by a group concealed in the vendor stalls of the covered market in Rangoon. They should have been dead. In the weird reality of the dream, a shootout had erupted. Pratt had taken cover behind a wheelchair, and Calvino had crawled behind a desk stacked with boxes of cold pills. All hell had broken loose as two of the gunman ran down a corridor firing. More had joined in the running gun battle, shooting anything that moved. Colonel Pratt and Calvino killed three, possibly four heavily armed men. They’d stumbled into the group, who’d arrived pushing trolley carts down one corridor. The carts were stacked high with boxes of Chinese cold pills. The gunmen wore strange rubber masks with large holes cut out for the nose and eyes. The rubbery faces were recognizable—famous gangsters like Al Capone, Marlon Brando as the Godfather, death masks of ancient kings, generals and warlords.

  After the shooting ended, Calvino stripped the masks off each body as Pratt looked on. Underneath were more rubber masks—of Somchai, Rob and the men he’d shot in the Lexus. Then he saw another body. Kati’s limp, long fingers pressed into a wai, her bikini top pulled down exposing one breast, her unblinking eyes open, staring at a box of cold pills. The damp, sickly smell of decomposition filled the space.

  When he’d woken up, he’d opened the blinds and stared out at Bangkok at dawn. He wouldn’t want a painting of that dream, he thought. When he thought of the hundreds of paintings in every room of Yadanar’s house, he doubted the wisdom of preserving such dreams. Forgetting dreams is what keeps us anchored to reality, keeps us human, he thought, watching the sunrise over Sukhumvit Road.

  When he’d told Pratt about the dream, the Colonel had said that the point of the artwork in the mansion was the opposite of Calvino’s view. If the stories unfolding in dreams were inescapable in the waking world, the best defense was to surround yourself with a full index and plan for what fate had in store.

  “Forgetting your dreams can’t change the fact that they were real in your mind or the future possibility that they will be real again,” said the Colonel.

  “Not so,” Calvino had said. “Dreams are the brain’s one-stop Laundromat. They wash the dirt and grime out so our brains are clear and fresh the next day.”

  “I don’t think so, Vincent,” Pratt had said.

  They’d left it at the impasse, as Calvino saw no point in arguing the point. He was more interested in the deal Pratt had brokered with Yadanar Khin. The Colonel had straight-out told Yadanar that he couldn’t make anyone famous. No one had that power. No one but Lady Luck could touch someone with her magic wand. Over time the local papers had run fewer stories about the cold pill scandal until not even a slight vapor trail had been left. That jet airliner had long passed overhead and disappeared out of sight and out of mind. People had moved on to the latest object flying overhead, threatening to turn their lives upside down, and never stopped to look back and ask, “Whatever happened to those cold pill smugglers?” That question wasn’t asked.

  Someone could have asked Yadanar, behind a piano, about the cold pills. No one did. No one would. He’d been on that plane. But no one can see who is inside a plane leaving the vapor trail overhead. As Mya finished, another round of applause followed. Yadanar rose from the piano and took a bow. Mya went to his side, and they took a bow together.

  “With all this bowing,” said Alan Osborne, “You’d think they were bloody Japanese.”

  Calvino had seen Osborne wiping away a tear. The old man, filled with bluff and bile, tried to hide a simple act that made him human because he never identified with the essence of humanity. It was found inside its tears.

  “They’re on their way to Jakarta and then New York,” said Calvino.

  “Hellholes, both places,” said Osborne.

  On stage Yadanar looked the part of a professional entertainer. The Black Cat, with her killing smile and angelic voice, created an audience of captives who would have done anything she asked. His good looks and hers helped seal the deal. Pratt arranged for them to receive an invitation to the Java Jazz Festival. Calvino had a relative named Nero who had real estate on the Lower East Side of New York. Nero was connected. He was able to arrange a night at the Blue Note. Negotiations had been completed for a TEDx performance in Singapore. A week after leaving Myanmar, Yadanar had put a couple of light years’ distance between himself and the cold pill smuggling operation. The Americans had given him and Mya a visa. Everyone wanted to do business and play friendly.

  The bodies of Somchai and his crew had been dumped into a deep channel of the Irrawaddy River. Kati’s body had been stuffed in a barrel, filled with cement and shoved over the side of a boat in the same spot. Nobody inside Myanmar had looked very hard for them. They were foreigners who had come and gone. No one in the country cared what might have happened to them. The Thais remained silent. Not a bubble rose to the surface to burst with Somchai or Kati’s name. It seemed that everyone who remained alive was happy. But it is always a mistake to find happiness in silence. There are always unhappy people waiting in the margins.

  Thiri Pyan Chi had got himself ordained as a monk, a tried and true way to escape the law enforcement system that involved voluntary impoverishment, celibacy and chanting morning and night. As he sat under a blue umbrella with a blonde and a tall tropical drink, his bald head glistened in the sunlight. The statues at the pagoda gave him a case of “uncanny valley” revulsion. They seemed like dolls whose too lifelike human appearance caused him to vomit his ham sandwich into the dirt.

  After the applause died, Yadanar joined Udom’s table and Mya pulled back a chair and sat beside Alan Osborne.

  “You sing beautifully,” Osborne said.

  Mya had no idea that this was from a bitter old man who never gave a compliment.

  “Rob wanted to come home,” she said. “He just didn’t know how.”

  “My father was born in Burma. In a way it was home for him. I think of Rob as having gone home. But thank you,” he said.

  Those were two of the most difficult words for someone who identified with the official class and looked with disdain on “Kipling’s natives.” He looked at her a long time, reached forward, pulled her head to his lips and kissed her forehead. Calvino had told him that she’d settled things in Rangoon. But he’d left out exactly how. It was best that way. Alan was as careless as he was bitter, and a bitter, careless man never keeps secrets, at least not for long.

  Colonel Pratt put his arm around Calvino’s shoulder. It wasn’t a Thai thing to embrace a friend. Thailand wasn’t Spain or Argentina.

  “When you see too much, it takes time for the image to pass away. But it will pass. You have to believe that when the train enters a tunnel, it will come out the other end.”

  “You sounded great tonight,” said Calvino.

  The Colonel removed his arm.

  “If my playing were that great, you’d have come out of the tunnel. The words are nice, but they don’t ring true.”

  “None of what happened there rings true, Pratt. Mirrors clouded with smoke and dreams.”

  “That is a good description of Myanmar.”

  Calvino suppressed a yawn behind his fist.

  “It’s past my bedtime.”

  “Before you go, see that it’s right between Rob’s father and Mya. You’ll sleep better after tha
t.”

  Calvino liked his friend’s loyalty. The Colonel had emerged from the tunnel and only wanted the same for him. Each night Calvino struggled to stay awake until utter fatigue wore him down and dragged him under the radar of what he could control. As he drifted, the surface was no longer solid. Rangoon carried him back through the land of dreams and deposited him at the foot of its dreamers.

  Calvino eased into a chair beside Mya, nodding hello to Alan Osborne.

  “Stay away from Calvino. He’ll only get you in trouble,” said Osborne.

  It was his English way of showing affection.

  Her lips slowly stretched into a smile as if he somehow amused her, or she’d been amused by her own image of him bearing no relationship to the actual man.

  “Mr. Osborne, thank you for coming tonight. I know you’re not well.”

  Calvino watched as a tear slipped down Alan Osborne’s cheek. He made no attempt to wipe this one away.

  “You can sing. I can grant you that.”

  There wasn’t any response that would take away the old man’s guilt. Mya leaned forward and hugged him.

  “Rob loved you,” she whispered.

  “That’s a lie. A noble one, but that doesn’t make it any less false. He tried to love me and found what most people have found, nothing to love.”

  “He never gave up trying, and to me, that’s the meaning of love,” she said.

  Alan Osborne’s face collapsed, and he wept. The conversation around the table stopped. Calvino helped Osborne from the table. He walked him out to his silver Benz, watched him unlock the door. Osborne opened it, leaned inside and pulled out a box.

  “Go ahead, open it.”

  Calvino lifted the lid and removed a book.

  “It was Rob’s. I think he’d like to know that you have it.”

  It was a first edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, signed to Lionel Osborne.

  “Orwell gave that to Rob’s grandfather.”

  The conversation at the table was in full swing when Calvino returned and sat at the table.