Missing In Rangoon

He pushed the hair away from her face.

“Talent for digging behind the lies people tell.”

She let out a long sigh and shifted her weight to swing one leg over his. He cried out, reaching down to stop the spasm in his calf from working its way up his leg.

“I forgot. You’re a sore runner. Not a sore loser.”

She sat up to light a cigarette and walked to stand in front of the window, staring at the dark forest and at the temple, enveloped in a cone of golden light.

“I could help you find this person. If you want me to, that is.”

Calvino racked his memory to see if this was the first time, moments after making love to a strange woman, she’d volunteered her services to help him find a missing person. Though it wasn’t exactly volunteering. He’d practically asked her to do it. He’d just finished telling her that he planned to follow up a lead on the Black Cat’s mother, who had a stall in Scott’s Market. He told her he’d learnt from a member of the Black Cat’s band in Bangkok that her mother had a shop there and was in Bianca’s line of business, jewelry. Scott’s Market, or Bogyoke Zay, was a big place with lots of stalls, he’d heard. It could take a couple of days to find the mother, and if he went around asking for her, suspicions might arise and she’d shutter her shop and take a holiday.

He’d also told Bianca that finding the mother was less important now that he’d met the Black Cat. But Bianca had thought he should still talk to the mother.

“If you want to know the daughter, always talk to the mother,” she’d said.

She’d sounded very Thai at that moment.

Calvino told himself she was right. It was just that this wasn’t something you normally asked of a woman ten minutes after one of those Henry Miller scenes of tearing off clothes, deep-mouth kissing, grabbing and sucking, falling into bed, kicking off shoes and peeling off underwear while choreographing body parts as if the participants were alternating between trampoline jumping and mud-wrestling. The entire performance had taken place within the glow of Burma’s most holy and sacred symbol.

“If you want to work for me to find the Black Cat’s mother, that can be arranged,” he said as she turned around.

She had the confused look of someone who wasn’t sure what she’d heard.

“Work for you?”

“Were you working for Reynolds… the guy with the P-40?”

“You thought that?”

“He might have assumed that from you bringing me to the table.”

“Missing persons, missing planes. I thought he might interest you.”

“Wet laundry isn’t that interesting,” he said.

She had a careless way of being in the world. It troubled him that she failed to understand what is truly worth looking for when it goes missing. Calvino called the confusion the wet laundry fallacy. A person dumped a lump of wet laundry at the door and asked him to believe freshly pressed shirts and pants on hangers had been delivered. He could never trust the judgment of such a person.

“What if I did it as a favor? Like helping out a friend,” she said.

Calvino watched her eyes as they stared back at him.

In the mutual mauling, the sex had buried all restraint, shyness, caution and civility. The post-sex intimacy had now flooded over both of them. But the thing about intimacy was that a man’s idea of what was in the realm of the possible mostly missed the woman’s target by a mile. For instance, about the worst thing Calvino could have said was, “Close the curtains on your way out.” Practical though the request would have been, it would have said far too much—that flooding of sunshine on a strange woman’s face while his mind tried to remember her more alluring countenance in the boozy darkness of the night before.

For a woman, Calvino thought, what she said and what he said before making love no longer exist after the deed is done. Those words are dead and gone to the past, where they should stay buried. What matter to her are the words that come afterward, the kind of words a woman can set to music and sing. And a job offer to find the mother of a talented and sexy woman who held men in thrall wasn’t the kind of overture Bianca was interested in.

“You volunteer to help a lot of people you don’t know,” he said.

She stared at him, making him feel the sting.

“I only wanted to help Reynolds,” she said. “Is that a sin?”

“Where’s your cross, by the way? The one you usually wear around your neck.”

The deflection caused her to touch her throat. She’d rattled him and he’d bucked back as if he’d taken a hard right hook.

“Are you always on the job?” she asked.