“Business.”
Bianca led Calvino up the stairs, making a display of taking his hand and lingering a moment so the Black Cat couldn’t help but see the man she’d been singing a ballad to was holding hands with another woman. Nothing like the attentions of a sexy woman to bring the other women into play, Calvino thought. Their competitive spirit propelled them forward. It was pure instinct.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said.
They passed booths and tables filled with customers admiring themselves in mirrors mounted on the brick walls. Bianca stopped at a booth near the bar end, a secluded alcove where lovers could sit without being disturbed. A well-dressed foreigner in his early fifties, eating a hamburger, sat in the middle of the booth, elbows on the table, chewing and smiling as Bianca appeared. Anne sat next to him, smoking a cigarette, looking bored.
Bianca slid into the booth and introduced him as Arnold or Harold, or it might have been Reynolds. Calvino didn’t catch the name. The noise from downstairs made it difficult to hear. But his name didn’t matter. Nor did his nationality. He was just another guy who was rich or pretending to be rich, who had charmed Bianca.
“The burgers are great,” he said. “You want one?”
Calvino waved off the offer. The man shrugged as if to say Calvino didn’t know what he was missing. But Calvino did know what he was missing, and it wasn’t a hamburger.
Arnold/Harold/Reynolds told Calvino how he’d worked his ass off to locate a Flying Tiger P-40 because he had a collector in the States willing to pay a million dollars for one. He’d now located one of the airplanes and was looking for a partner to retrieve it. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. He confided his insider’s information about how the P-40 had been stored in Russia during the war. His previous partner had figured out they could forge the registration plate and pass it off as one of the American Volunteer GroupV planes.
During World War II, there had been only a hundred Flying Tiger P-40s in Burma. All but a couple had been accounted for. It was a dangerous business running a scam on people who had spent a lifetime studying the Flying Tigers and knew each and every P-40 as if they were their children. The guy had convinced himself it wasn’t a grift. He believed that he’d found the real thing and that it was going to make him rich.
“I specialize in finding missing people,” said Calvino. “Unless the guy I’m looking for is harnessed inside the cockpit of a P-40, I’m not interested.”
Mr. P-40 fell into an uneasy silence. Grease dripped between his fingers as he finished the hamburger and wiped his hands on paper napkins. Calvino had the impression this setup was Bianca’s doing; she must have built him up as the guy to talk to about international business ventures. It could have been a covert sting operation, or she might have been using Calvino to assess the deal. Or they could have been looking for a mark, and Calvino, like a lot of others who turned up in Rangoon, seemed to have money. Whatever the plan had been, Arnold/Harold/Reynolds now looked away, embarrassed. Busted expectation made a man go quiet just as it made a woman turn the emotions into song. At least that’s the way it seemed to Calvino as, in the silent interlude, the singer’s voice penetrated from downstairs.
The Black Cat—it was difficult to think of her under the name Mya Kyaw Thein—had finished her version of “My Man,” and after a couple of beats the audience erupted in wild applause and catcalls.
“That girl can belt it out,” said the P-40 con man.
Arnold/Harold/Reynolds was a crook, but even a crook couldn’t help but speak the truth about a talented performer. Black Cat made it easy for him and everyone else in the room. She had that rare ability only a few singers had. Something beyond a good voice and good looks. She personalized the lyrics, made the audience feel them, convinced each of them that the Black Cat alone owned the feelings and the words and shared them from her heart.
He’s not true. He beats me, too. What can I do? Oh, my man, I love him so. He’ll never know. And my life is just despair, but I don’t care. When he takes me in his arms the world is bright.
Bianca massaged his leg under the table. The muscles, tender from the run, had knotted.
“Are you all right?” she asked him as he winced.
He put his hand over her hand, stilling it.
“That’s better.”
Anne and Bianca started a conversation in Italian. Soon both hands were above the table and she carried on the discussion as if she were conducting a band.
Calvino sat back and thought about the performance he’d heard downstairs. Like every person—man and woman—in the room, Calvino wanted to cradle the Black Cat in his arms and whisper, “Baby, you’ll be okay.”
He thought about going downstairs and telling her that, but he had a gut feeling that, actually, it wasn’t going to work out for her. How would it end? The way that kind of thing always ended, in disappointment and frustration. Calvino would go downstairs and she’d be gone. Tomorrow morning, she’d show up at the courthouse and be there waiting for him when he arrived with Ohn Myint, his translator, the marker of trails for the Rangoon Running Club, the fixer who gave the MI agent the language he needed to file his report.
They had business to transact, and that was always a problem. Business poisoned the well where all those feelings waited to be lifted up. He had money to offer—it wasn’t even his own; it came from Alan Osborne—and she had a boyfriend she was selling. He thought that a woman could still love a man who was unfaithful and beat her but never a man who had rightly calculated what it would cost for her to betray her man.
Colonel Pratt put his saxophone back in the case and closed it. He was ready to return to the hotel. Calvino flew past him and out the door as the Colonel shook hands with Yadanar Khin and the other members of the band. Mya Kyaw Thein had vanished before the applause ended. No one had followed her out. By the time Calvino had gone downstairs and into the street, she’d gone. No one had seen her get into a taxi or a car or onto a motorbike. Wherever she’d vanished to, she hadn’t left a clue—it was the way a black cat disappeared into a dark alley.
Bianca lifted her head slightly from Calvino’s chest and looked at her watch in the early morning sunlight reflected from the Shwedagon Pagoda. The curtains were open. The golden temple was a beacon in the distance, and the flame of its color washed over her body. Calvino had kicked off the sheets. Sweat beaded on her breasts and spilled onto his belly as she pulled herself up on one elbow. She tried to make out the expression on his face. His head was turned to the side on the pillow as if waiting for her to say something. Anything.
“Do you ask every wom
an you sleep with to work for you?”
He cupped his hand around the back of her head and pulled her back onto his chest.
“Only if I think she has...”
“Talent?”