Missing In Rangoon

by Christopher G. Moore

Colonel Pratt turned to him and said, “Vincent intro-duced me to an astrologer in Rangoon. He was a meditation expert. And his knowledge on nats, what the Burmese call spirits, was solid. He’d made a study of organic foods and diets. And he promised that if I followed his advice, I would immediately improve my saxophone playing.”

  Naing Aung was an expert at many things, thought Calvino.

  “Naing Aung used his multiple talents to open a private investigation business.”

  “Does that mean you might start astrology as a sideline?” asked Ratana. “I’m joking. A foreigner can’t get a work permit to become an astrologer. I remember checking that point for one of our clients some years ago.

  “Vincent as an astrologer would be an exciting idea,” said Manee.

  Drinking from his whiskey glass, Calvino glanced at the Orwell novel, which he’d laid on the table. When he looked up, he was surprised to find all eyes around the table staring at him, waiting for a reaction. He was from New York and by default was expected to finish Ratana’s setup. Over the years she’d fed him the lines, and he’d never missed an opportunity to unearth the deeper joke inside. But the transmission lines had been knocked down in his dreams, and in the uneasy twilight awareness of the moment, he told them what he hadn’t told Colonel Pratt.

  “Naing Aung’s crystal ball had some help. He had a friend who staked out a table in front of a Hindu temple. The friend sold lottery tickets. The friend would whisper the numbers of several tickets, and then Naing Aung would give those numbers to his clients asking for magical lottery numbers. They would leave Naing Aung’s office and then ‘find’ the numbers on the table across the street in front of the Hindu temple. A good racket. They could have been Wall Street bankers.

  “An investigator deals with sleaze. It’s unavoidable. But a sleazy investigator sells out his clients. So I’ll be sticking to the investigations. I’ll leave reading the future to others.”

  No one laughed. No one got the joke because the illusion had been broken.

  The Colonel acted quickly to change the mood of the table by telling Ratana and Manee about Naing Aung’s version of his destiny to become Rangoon’s first private eye. From the Colonel’s tone of voice, it was clear this story was being told to cleanse the air—the dead, stale air that Alan Osborne had left behind, the same air that Calvino had breathed into the story of Naing Aung’s fraud.

  Calvino listened as Colonel Pratt told the story he’d heard Naing Aung tell in Rangoon. It was a story of a monk who had sent a message to all of his disciples that he’d left the temple with his entourage. Everyone who did meditation received his message through his special powers to communicate thoughts. Meditation started on a Monday and lasted nine, eighteen, forty-five or eighty-one days. Every day they lit candles in front of an alter that held a Buddha image and the monk’s photograph. Meditations were transmitted messages to the nats, who acted as guardian angels. For six months they read the twenty-four verses of the Buddha teachings, nine times a day, each reading requiring ten minutes. Some people used only one one-hour reading per day. The main point was the repetition. After nine days what the vision owner desired was realized. Naing Aung had performed the rituals to ensure that his private eye business would be a success. At the end of the ninth day, Vincent Calvino had showed up at his office with his first real case. Naing Aung believed that his guru had the special capacity to read each person’s destiny. He also believed that people’s destinies were intertwined.

  Naing Aung’s dietary advice to the Colonel had been straightforward—rice curry, vegetables, no meat, no cakes or cheese. Small snacks all add up. Before a performance, he shouldn’t eat anything that needed to be chewed. He should mix the food and eat it as a slurry. A monk who had mastered his body ate only five spoonfuls of the slurry. Of course, that was an extreme meditation practice, which only the brave could hope to continue for more than a couple of days. To stay on the right diet and meditate was the way to send merit to the whole world.

  Once again the laughter returned to the table. It caught Udom’s attention. He rose from his VIP table and walked over to where Colonel Pratt, Calvino and the others sat at the second VIP table. The room of people watched the VIPs huddling together. They watched them during the performance, too, taking their cues from their “betters.” They applauded when the VIPs applauded, laughed when they laughed, ordered wine as they ordered.

  Udom sized up Calvino, taking measure of the farang seated before him at the table. The shape of the head, the lips, eyes, height of the forehead, his watch and clothes. Patterns emerged that meant a man could be trusted. Calvino also sought to read the mind working inside Udom’s skull. The jao pah smiled, thinking the farang saw only what the Thais chose to let them see. They never worried about a man like Udom, who looked like a happy businessman. There was nothing of the gangster about him.

  Yadanar didn’t like being left stranded with Udom’s flunkies, so he walked over to join the conversation at Colonel Pratt’s table.

  “Mya is my cousin,” he said to Ratana. “Her mother and my mother are sisters. She is like my sister.”

  Udom heard the remark and turned to Yadanar.

  “And Khun Yadanar, you are like my son, your father, like my brother. We love and understand each other.”

  He’d had a lot to drink and his words slurred a little.

  “My home is also your home,” said Yadanar.

  “And my home is your home,” said Udom.

  House exchange, thought Calvino. He smiled, watching them express the depth of their relationship. They lived in houses built with underground bunkers stacked with cash, the walls covered with art, yet in a sense they were one large house. Yadanar’s mansion was buried deep in forested enclaves, surrounded by high walls and men with automatic weapons watching the gate. The men who ran the world lived in such houses. When Somchai had gone up against them, he’d hit the full force of power and influence, the weight of money that condemned him to the bottom of the Irrawaddy River, where he and Kati and his luk nong slept—though still appearing in the dreams of the rich, who paid artists to paint their afterlives in murals and on canvases.

  Calvino picked up the Orwell book and left the table. Half an hour later, back at his condo, he sat with a drink and read about Orwell in the Spanish Civil War until he fell asleep in his chair. After the Bangkok night had long disappeared and the sun had cleared Queen Sirikit Centre, he woke up. He had several missed calls on his cell phone. Ratana, Pratt, McPhail had all phoned. The phone had been in silent mode. He opened his iPad and checked his email. A dozen messages, but the one that caught his eye was from Jack Saxon.

  He read Saxon’s message. Then he opened the Bangkok Post website and read the breaking news story on the scroll. Yadanar and Mya, the Black Cat, were dead. It had happened while he’d been asleep, dreaming. He reread the story.

  New York-Bound Burmese Entertainers Killed

  Dateline: Bangkok

  Two Burmese nationals named Mya Kyaw Thein, aged 26 years old, and Yadanar Khin, aged 32 years old and the son of General Tayza, Minister of Public Welfare, were killed in an apparent car bomb attack. They were traveling to a club on Ratchadapisek Road when the explosive device was set off by remote control. The police suspect a cell phone was used. The explosion was reported at 2:30 a.m. Wreckage was scattered over a hundred meter radius. Police believed as much as 50 kilos of explosives had been used. The military said they had intelligence that similar explosive devices were used in recent violence in the three most southern provinces.

  Asked whether the bombing was connected to the insurgency in the South, the police spokesman said they suspected a personal or business conflict lay behind the killings. They were investigating both possibilities. But they weren’t discounting an escalation of Muslim terrorists to strike targets in Bangkok.

  There was a photograph of half a dozen police smiling as they stood around the crater left by the bomb. One of them was holding a GT200—a device used by those with more fai
th than sense to detect bombs. Calvino examined the photo. Nothing about the car appeared car-like. It was hard to know what kind of car it had been. If the bomb had done that to steel, clearly nothing of Yadanar or Mya’s remains matched a human being. Atomized—machine and bodies.

  Rescue teams had arrived in their pickup trucks and vans. The fire brigade had turned hoses on the smoking ruins in the street. Charred bodies were cradled in the mesh of metal and glass and upholstery.

  Expectations of Burma’s new opening were running too far ahead, as if the flowers had bloomed before the seeds had been planted. The old garden still held the ground, gnarled with old growth, weeds and thorns, and untamed lanes. And the way through the forest was through dreams tethered to a chain of other dreams.

  Revenge floated above that old garden like a mist.

  Calvino opened two more emails from Jack Saxon. The last of them was a forward Saxon had sent, originally sent by “Anonymous.” Someone had gone to the trouble of reworking lines from a famous W.H. Auden poem and posting them on the activist website where the Black Cat had uploaded her political tracts. The revised poem read:

  In the nightmare of the dark,

  All the dogs of Burma bark,

  And the big families wait,

  Each sequestered in its hate;

  Intellectual disgrace

  Stares from every human face,

  And the seas of pity lie

  Locked and frozen in each eye.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My friend Geoffrey Goddard showed me sides of Rangoon that I would never have found on my own. Geoffrey introduced me to many people, including Khaing Tun—Khine—who answered many of my questions about current political and social developments and gave me a deeper understanding of the changing expectations of the Burmese people as their country opens.

  A number of people read earlier drafts of Missing in Rangoon and offered comments, suggestions and advice, and the book is stronger because of their efforts. I’d like to acknowledge with gratitude the efforts of (in alphabetical order) Denny Baun, Kevin Cummings, Peter Friedrich, Michaela Striewski and Frank Vatai. They undertook their task with genuine dedication to helping me realize the potential of the book. The defects and flaws that remain are mine alone. As hard as I strive for perfection, I inevitably fall short. I accept that fate as it reminds me that I am chained to the frailty of the human condition like everyone else.

  With special thanks to Martin Townsend, copy editor extraordinaire, and Busakorn Suriyasarn, proofreader and editor, for her advice and cultural expertise.

  The book draws upon real events at a time of change inside Burma, but the characters and story are fiction. A novelist makes things up, and sometimes the result is more real than real life. If I’ve come close to convincing you the story is real, then I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.

  SPIRIT HOUSE

  First in the series

  Heaven Lake Press (2004) ISBN 974-92389-3-1

  The Bangkok police already have a confession by a nineteen-year-old drug addict who has admitted to the murder of a British computer wizard, Ben Hoadly. From the bruises on his face shown at the press conference, it is clear that the young suspect had some help from the police in the making of his confession. The case is wrapped up. Only there are some loose ends that the police and just about everyone else are happy to overlook.

  The search for the killer of Ben Hoadley plunges Calvino into the dark side of Bangkok, where professional hit men have orders to stop him. From the world of thinner addicts, dope dealers, fortunetellers, and high-class call girls, Calvino peels away the mystery surrounding the death of the English ex-public schoolboy who had a lot of dubious friends.

  “Well-written, tough and bloody.”

  —Bernard Knight, Tangled Web (UK)

  “A thinking man’s Philip Marlowe, Calvino is a cynic on the surface but a romantic at heart. Calvino ... found himself in Bangkok—the end of the world—for a whole host of bizarre foreigners unwilling, unable, or uninterested in going home.”—The Daily Yomiuri

  “Good, that there are still real crime writers. Christopher G. Moore’s [Spirit House] is colorful and crafty.”

  —Hessischer Rundfunk (Germany)

  ASIA HAND

  Second in the series

  Heaven Lake Press (2000) ISBN 974-87171-2-7

  Winner of 2011 Shamus Award for Best Original Paperback

  Bangkok—the Year of the Monkey. Calvino’s Chinese New Year celebration is interrupted by a call to Lumpini Park Lake, where Thai cops have just fished the body of a farang cameraman. CNN is running dramatic footage of several Burmese soldiers on the Thai border executing students.

  Calvino follows the trail of the dead man to a feature film crew where he hits the wall of silence. On the other side of that wall, Calvino and Colonel Pratt discover and elite film unit of old Asia Hands with connections to influential people in Southeast Asia. They find themselves matched against a set of farangs conditioned for urban survival and willing to go for a knock-out punch.

  “Highly recommended to readers of hard-boiled detective fiction”—Booklist

  “Asia Hand is the kind of novel that grabs you and never lets go.”—The Times of India

  “Moore’s stylish second Bangkok thriller … explores the dark side of both Bangkok and the human heart. Felicitous prose speeds the action along.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Fast moving and hypnotic, this was a great read.”

  —Crime Spree Magazine

  ZERO HOUR IN PHNOM PENH

  Third in the series

  Heaven Lake Press (2005) ISBN 974-93035-9-8

  Winner of 2004 German Critics Award for Crime Fiction (Deutscher Krimi Preis) for best international crime fiction and 2007 Premier Special Director’s Award Semana Negra (Spain)

  In the early 1990s, at the end of the devastating civil war UN peacekeeping forces try to keep the lid on the violence. Gunfire can still be heard nightly in Phnom Penh, where Vietnamese prostitutes try to hook UN peacekeepers from the balcony of the Lido Bar.

  Calvino traces leads on a missing farang from Bangkok to war-torn Cambodia, through the Russian market, hospitals, nightclubs, news briefings, and UNTAC headquarters. Calvino’s buddy, Colonel Pratt, knows something that Calvino does not: the missing man is connected with the jewels stolen from the Saudi royal family. Calvino quickly finds out that he is not the only one looking for the missing farang.

  “Political, courageous and perhaps Moore’s most important work.”—CrimiCouch.de

  “An excellent whodunnit hardboiled, a black novel with a solitary, disillusioned but tempting detective, an interesting historical and social context (Kampuchea of after Pol Pot), and a very thorough psychology of the characters.”

  —La culture se partage

  “A bursting, high adventure ... Extremely gripping ... A morality portrait with no illusion.”

  —Ulrich Noller, Westdeutscher Rundfunk

  COMFORT ZONE

  Fourth in the series

  Heaven Lake Press (2001) ISBN 974-87754-9-6

  Twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam is opening to the outside world. There is a smell of fast money in the air and poverty in the streets. Business is booming and in austere Ho Chi Minh City a new generation of foreigners have arrived to make money and not war. Against the backdrop of Vietnam’s economic miracle, Comfort Zone reveals a taut, compelling story of a divided people still not reconciled with their past and unsure of their future.

  Calvino is hired by an ex-special forces veteran, whose younger brother uncovers corruption and fraud in the emerging business world in which his clients are dealing. But before Calvino even leaves Bangkok, there have already been two murders, one in Saigon and one in Bangkok.

  “Calvino digs, discovering layers of intrigue. He’s stalked by hired killers and falls in love with a Hanoi girl. Can he trust her? The reader is hooked.”

  —NTUC Lifestyle (Singapore)

  “Moore hits
home with more of everything in Comfort Zone. There is a balanced mix of story-line, narrative, wisdom, knowledge as well as love, sex, and murder.”

  —Thailand Times

  “Like a Japanese gardener who captures the land and the sky and recreates it in the backyard, Moore’s genius is in portraying the Southeast Asian heartscape behind the tourist industry hotel gloss.”—The Daily Yomiuri

  THE BIG WEIRD

  Fifth in the series

  Heaven Lake Press (2008) ISBN 978-974-8418-42-1

  A beautiful American blond is found dead with a large bullet hole in her head in the house of her ex-boyfriend. A famous Hollywood screenwriter hires Calvino to investigate her death. Everyone except Calvino’s client believes Samantha McNeal has committed suicide.

  In the early days of the Internet, Sam ran with a young and wild expat crowd in Bangkok: a Net-savvy pornographer, a Thai hooker plotting to hit it big in cyberspace, an angry feminist with an agenda, a starving writer-cum-scam artist, a Hollywoord legend with a severe case of The Sickness. As Calvino slides into a world where people are dead serious about sex, money and fame, he unearths a hedonistic community where the ritual of death is the ultimate high.