Missing In Rangoon

Ratana brought him a glass of water.

“You have a little something in your desk drawer to put in this?”

Calvino leaned over, opened his bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He opened the bottle and poured. Osborne stretched his arm forward and pressed a finger on the neck of the bottle.

“Don’t be a Cheap Charlie, Calvino.”

No one ever stopped mentioning to Osborne the health consequences of years of trading food and sleep for cigarettes and single-malt whiskey. It wasn’t that he didn’t know or hadn’t been warned. He didn’t care about life itself as much as he cared about good whiskey, women and cigarettes. Osborne knew that he was dying. If he found a bartender had cheated on the nightly take, he’d shrug and fire her, but with death, what was available except a shrug? She—of course death was a she—could steal his life, rob him blind as he watched her stealing, and there was nothing he could do but rail against the death goddess and finally submit to the thief no man could defeat. Osborne took a long drink from the glass of Johnnie Walker and water.

“My father was born in Burma. His family owned property in Rangoon. He knew George Orwell. The country was under British rule then. Have you read Kipling? Of course, you’re an American. Americans don’t read Kipling. If they did, they’d know that this ‘opening up’ business is all rubbish.”

Sitting his glass down, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Calvino hadn’t known about Osborne’s father having a birth connection to Burma.

“My grandfather was a senior official in the colonial administration. I may be a pimp, but I come from a long line of colonial plunderers.”

“He hasn’t phoned? Emailed?”

Osborne shook his head and took another drink.

“The little bastard’s hiding out in the old family lair. Rob has always caused me fucking problems. While you’re in Rangoon, I want you to check if I still have any claim on the old family property. You were a lawyer. You can find that out, certainly.”

Osborne sat across from Calvino’s desk, smoking. His face was sallow, lined, the skin loose and in puddles like melted wax. Calvino had been waiting for him to raise the real reason he was interested in Burma.

“Hire a Burmese lawyer, Alan.”

His eyes rolled so far as to leave, for a brief moment, two full yellowish moons in his eye sockets.

“Come on, Calvino. They’re useless. No, I need you to investigate. Find him and bring him home. And find out how my father’s house can be returned.”

The only thing more difficult than a missing person case, Calvino thought, was an ex-colonial claim against property confiscated half a century ago. Calvino figured that Osborne knew the score, but knowing the score and accepting it were different things.

“Forget about the property.”

“My son hit me. Did I tell you?”

“You told me.”

“I am an old man. I never hit my father. And he could be a bastard.”

“There’s usually a reason,” said Calvino.

“Money,” said Osborne. “For his band, Monkey Nose. What kind of fucking name is that, I asked him. He hit me.”

The Thais have a saying about the moment when they can no longer avoid butting heads in the same physical space. It is khii-kai ji dang wok, which means sticking chicken shit on a monkey’s nose. The monkey is bound to take offense. It?

?s a primate thing.

Calvino visualized father and son circling each other, each man’s eyes narrowed to slits, jaws clenched, fists clutched into lobster claws as they sized each other up, waiting for the one other to utter a single word—the shit on the nose—that would ignite violence.

Rob wanted his father to front the money so that he could make a video of his band. The problem with naming a band after only half of a proverb is the message may get lost along the way. And Monkey Nose had wandered for years in obscurity, playing in dives before fifty people, most of them talking and drinking, checking their email on cell phones. Obscurity was the shit on the end of an artist’s nose. Alan Osborne had no problem pointing it out to his son.

Rob never got the money. He took a swing at his old man, caught him with a right hook that knocked him back in his chair. A trickle of blood ran down Osborne’s mouth onto his shirt. Rob had hit a man who was dying. Osborne smiled. The punch in the face hadn’t surprised him.

Calvino thought the father might have baited his son, daring him to hit him.

Osborne touched his mouth with the back of his hand, examined the smear of blood, looked up at his son and said, “Piss off. And don’t bother to come around again. My funeral will be invitation only. You’re not on the list. And you’re cut out of my will.”

Osborne had changed his will so many times as to establish prima evidence of mental incapacity to make a will.