His parting with Bianca had been abrupt, like the period suddenly appearing at the end of a sentence that should have kept on going. Bianca had got him thinking about formulating a new Calvino’s Law. What he had so far wasn’t so much a law as the raw material from which laws are formed: “Before you move on the woman you’ve locked eyes with, think where that first step might take you. She may not look the type to give you grief, but there isn’t a profile you can trust, one that tells you if she’ll post your picture and your personal details on her Facebook account. You still want her? Okay, now she closes the Facebook window and opens her Twitter account to spill your details 140 characters at a time. That little step across the room finds a mass audience of strangers. Do you really want the eyes of all those strangers watching your big move?”
Calvino had the answer, but it was too late with Bianca. Some laws can’t be applied retroactively. What remained could be scrawled on a restroom wall: “The privacy of the casual affair has been permanently disabled.”
He’d been busted. It was something he could live with. But compromising Pratt working in the field was another matter. He used the room phone to call Jack Saxon, who was already at his newspaper office and picked up after the second ring.
“Jack, I need to bunk with you for a couple of nights.”
“My place is a dump. I don’t have air-con. You’d die of heat prostration.”
“I’ll buy a fan.”
“I have a fan you can use.”
Can I leave my suitcase at your office? I don’t want to drag it into the courtroom.”
“That probably wouldn’t be too cool. Leave your bags at the hotel, and I’ll pick them up later.”
“It’s better if I take it to your office.”
“Bring them over to my place later, then.”
The if-you-must tone of voice gave Calvino pause. How to handle Saxon?
“Jack, it’s one case. I travel light.”
“Since you’re usually on the run, that’s smart.”
Calvino hung up the phone, took his empty case to the bed and opened it. He crouched down in front of the small safe, feeling the last of the strain in his legs. He worked the combination lock, removed his cash, passport, gun and ammo. After ten minutes had passed he’d closed his case and locked it. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the Shwedagon Pagoda, gun in his hand. The gun had a good natural grip. He holstered it and strapped the harness over his back so that the weapon fit snugly under his left armpit.
At the front desk Calvino was greeted by the manager whom Jack Saxon had enlisted to take special care of him and get him a view room.
“I’m checking out. Something’s come up in Bangkok, and I need to get back immediately.”
“I am sorry to hear that. You’ve been with us only two nights.”
“Great room, too. You might want to put those two Italian women in it.”
The manager nodded. “We have three or four bookings a day for that room.”
“It’s your lucky room,” said Calvino.
“I am glad you feel that way. I trust it brought you luck, taking you home early, sir.”
Calvino was about to say something more but stopped himself. Leaving a manager with a memorable parting remark was never a good idea in the private investiga-tion business. Slipping quietly away under the cover of a white lie wasn’t something a hero did, but heroes didn’t snoop around Burma looking for missing persons. Heroes stayed home defending friends, castle and wife, and died by making themselves a memorable target.
Calvino climbed inside the taxi, a wreck of a vehicle with peeling upholstery, broken window handles and a rattling transmission. He gave the driver the address of the Rangoon Times. On the drive to Jack Saxon’s newspaper, Calvino weighed the odds of Bianca’s message causing Colonel Pratt a problem. As far as he was concerned, the Facebook write-up was a major personal embarrassment. Ratana must be disappointed that he’d acted so carelessly. As for the Colonel, the stakes were higher. Burma was a place where MIs watched the movements of foreigners. Bianca hadn’t said much about the Colonel. She’d heard him playing the sax. What harm could that information cause? But she’d also said he was a Thai cop, and that wasn’t so good.
Colonel Pratt could smooth that over with Yadanar, who would have known that detail anyway. The jazz community knew the Colonel worked for the police. After hearing him play, they forgot he was a cop. But there were other players outside the musical community, and they were the real worry.
He knew that any information about a cop’s movements had the potential to cause a problem. The Facebook message linked Colonel Pratt to a certain place with certain people. It allowed anyone with minimal intelligence training to connect the dots. And once enough dots were connected, a picture would emerge of a cop working undercover. Once that happened, the inner network of power players would begin to buzz with paranoia, and sooner or later, they would find a target in their midst and move to zero in and destroy it.
Those players had the resources to stop Colonel Pratt from shutting down the flow of millions of cold pills from Burma to Thailand. Before that could happen, though, someone would need to get lucky. Bianca’s Facebook feed had to be accessed by someone inside the network in Burma, a place still mostly closed off from outsiders, where the digital world had only just started to seep in. The risk was small. But even a small increase in risk was not something Calvino could shrug off wh
en it came to his best friend.
His hope was that the intelligence sources of the pill smugglers were as limited as the MI agent who’d cornered him on his run. He tried to imagine that guy reading a feed of millions of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, and by the time the taxi arrived outside the Rangoon Times, Calvino was feeling better. He understood why on the terrace the Colonel had been less upset than he’d expected. Things were getting interesting. Not that that was something either of them really wanted.
There had always been an excess of foreigner-watchers in Burma. But recently the pace of change had not so much quickened as exploded overnight, along with the number of foreigners. Calvino and Colonel Pratt’s decision to split up and stay in different places would make the MIs’ jobs more difficult. Calvino told himself the damage had been contained. He hadn’t come to Rangoon for a holiday. It had been a mistake for the two of them to stay at the same upscale hotel. Besides, the secluded luxury distracted a man from his work.