Missing In Rangoon

Back on the street he waited for a taxi, thinking about inviting Ratana to the bar one night. She rarely got out, and a little live music might be good for her. Then he realized that the last thing he wanted was for someone to fill Ratana’s head with riffs about the Lesson in between sets. Or songs that young children inspired in dying fathers. The regula

rs at Le Chat Noir were the groupies, camp followers, junkies, drunks and men on the make—small-time thugs—that he’d seen around jazz clubs before. They bounced around Bangkok through the night like a bats on sonar, soaring and diving and then sheltering in the last hole in the wall before dawn broke. That was the dark crawl space where the Big Show left them to their own devices.

In the back of the cab Calvino’s thoughts drifted to Henry Miller. It’d been a long time since he’d heard that name. The writer was from Brooklyn. He’d written Tropic of Cancer, a diary of sexual adventures, as he lived down and out in Paris in the 1930s. Miller’s wife had sold her body to support him. Vinny Calvino was also from Brooklyn. He knew of the legend of the writer who had defied morality and the ties of family, marriage and home to break free—to roam the world as a free man. Some men did escape; most didn’t. Who were the saddest of them all, Calvino wondered—those without a home, living free under Paris bridges? Or those who stayed behind in their old neighborhoods, trying to imagine what freedom might feel like?

The Dodgers were from Brooklyn, too. They’d all left but hadn’t ever found a way to flush the Brooklyn out of their system. It sat in the back of the eyes, the back of the throat, like a tumor waiting to grow, metastasize and spread. Waiting for the answer to the question, “When can I kiss you again?”

Who could answer such a question? At any turn of the road, Brooklyn could reappear, grab their ass and throw them back where they started, and they’d wake up like the getaway had all been a dream. That’s the hold Brooklyn had on people like Henry Miller. Like everyone from Brooklyn, Calvino knew his Henry Miller, the role model who had come to the conclusion that it was better to starve in the company of neighborhood street whores in Paris than to sit around eating bagels in a deli on Decatur Street. Take your life in your hands and run out the nearest exit door—that was the message. Don’t look back. Put plenty of distance between yourself and the un-free.

Calvino leaned back, watching Bangkok pass by as the taxi gathered speed—and thinking about Brooklyn. Waste of time, he thought. It was gone. He focused on Rangoon and Alan Osborne’s missing son. Maybe the kid was like Henry Miller, and he just wanted to leave his equivalent of Brooklyn and forget that it ever existed. He had the woman of every man’s dreams. He could play hero. It made sense. The kid might not want to be found. Why not leave him alone? So he’d lied to his old man about why he wanted the money. Who hadn’t done that?

Colonel Pratt would understand his reasoning if he decided to give Rangoon a miss, thought Calvino. But he knew at the same time that Pratt wouldn’t buy the premise. Sons and fathers kept in touch. It pained a father to lose a son. There was no greater loss. Well, maybe in Asia they stayed in touch. But in Brooklyn the sooner the son could escape from the old man’s shadow, the better. They didn’t go missing. They fled for their lives. Explaining that to someone like the Colonel was like talking to a good sleeper about what it’s like to have a bad case of insomnia and have your whole life haunted by the futility of sleep.

His cell phone came to life, playing one of Colonel Pratt’s saxophone riffs. The music announced the caller.

“I booked us on the afternoon flight tomorrow.”

“See you at the airport.”

“I’ll pick you up. We’ll go together.”

“So I don’t get lost?”

“I know where to find you.”

The call ended. Calvino hadn’t exactly made up his mind. Unlike Rob Osborne, he could never truly go missing. Not with the Colonel around. No one cares about explanations when they really need you. Good reasons for not going to Rangoon had never been in the cards. Le Chat Noir had given him a reason to believe he could find the two young musicians. They’d got it into their heads that the time was right to escape from the Big Show and at the same time rescue the wood-stealing brother. Rob might be caught up in some political drama that he couldn’t get out of. Maybe, like Mya’s brother, he was being held against his will. That tiny space of doubt was enough for Calvino as the taxi pulled into the entrance of his condo. Why not help Alan Osborne find his son?

He was on his way to Rangoon in any event.

After all, that’s what Calvino did for a living. A Brooklyn boy grown old in Bangkok, living for years off the money people paid him to find someone who had no desire to be found. He had a long career of finding people on the run from the Big Show. Men and women who had no idea how to vanish and leave no trace behind. Unless the disappearing act had been years earlier, he just about always found that they’d left a trail of breadcrumbs. Follow the crumbs and you’d find the bird perched in a tree, thinking he was invisible but standing out like a hooker in a miniskirt skating for the New York Rangers.

But he’d never found a Henry Miller. There was a reason for that; no one but Miller’s wife had ever gone looking for him, and she knew exactly where to look. Rangoon wasn’t Paris. And this wasn’t the 1930s. But he told himself that a Burmese who’d left such a big mark on Le Chat Noir and who channeled Miller was worth the price of a ticket to Rangoon.

He liked the idea that a search for Rob Osborne would lead him to the woman he had watched in a YouTube video on his iPhone. She had the look of a black cat, back arched, eyes intensely focused and nails extended. He paid the taxi fare, got out and walked to the entrance of his building.

Tomorrow afternoon he’d be on a plane. It all boiled down to the simplest of mixed obligations and desires—watch the Colonel’s back and somehow, at the same time, look for the Black Cat and Osborne’s missing son, who Calvino hoped would be found within walking distance of her litter box.

FIVE

The Traveler’s Fish Lunch

RANGOON, HOTEL LOBBY. Calvino checked his watch. Jack Saxon was running late for their appointment.

Calvino sat on a designer rattan couch with soft white cushions. One cushion closer to the door, Colonel Pratt watched as the doorman scanned the people entering and exiting the lobby. Like airport departure lounges, hotel lobbies are usually filled with bags on carts, porters and security personnel. But no one at an airport gate had ever brought Calvino a tall, smooth green drink with a tiny bamboo umbrella on a tray. He took the glass by the stem and raised it in a toast to the Colonel.

“Welcome to Rangoon,” said the young pretty woman from the front desk.

“I thought we already had our welcoming drink,” said Pratt.

“I’m not complaining,” said Calvino.

“Mr. Jack says he’s on his way,” she said. “He asked me to bring you a real drink.”

Calvino sniffed the drink. Whiskey fired through his nostrils like a slug from a .50 caliber round. Saxon knew his alcohol. He smiled, thinking how Saxon had had the hotel fill the glass half-full of whiskey as a kind of atonement for running late.

Running thirty minutes late, to be precise, for their lunch appointment. He’d sent a text message to Calvino saying that a breaking news story about the British government dropping sanctions had delayed him. Jack Saxon had made a reputation for walking the constantly shifting line of what could be reported in the Rangoon Times, one of those frontier English-language dailies that struggled to keep from being shut down.

Saxon had lived and worked in Phnom Penh for half a dozen years. Before that he’d been a reporter in Bangkok, and before that he’d worked as a copy editor in Toronto for an arts and living magazine. An old hand with local knowledge and the kinds of contacts that only journalists and politicians accumulated, to Calvino he was worth his weight in gold. Calvino knew Saxon from his Bangkok days. They’d gone out drinking together and shared a few meals, laughs, stories and women. Two years ago, Calvino had got one of those early-morning distress calls for help. It was from Jack Saxon. His younger brother, Paul, had left Soi Cowboy, got turned around and found himself lost on a dark soi. A disoriented farang at one in the morning who looks like he doesn’t belong or know where he’s going is a target.