Missing In Rangoon

“Jack trusts you. That’s all I need to know.”

She offered a pragmatic, common-sense smile as if to say, “Isn’t that obvious? Why otherwise would I be here with you?”

Instead she said, “Vincent, I want to be clear. You deliver the briefcase to Mya Kyaw Thein, and she will deal with it from there. It’s been arranged for you to sit in the courtroom. Then we return to your hotel. Tomorrow Mya Kyaw Thein should have her good news.”

Her plan suggested that she had no problem drawing a line where one needed to be drawn. Friends didn’t push friends over that line. Calvino couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t entirely certain that if the situation were reversed, he would stick his neck out as far as she was doing. She was right to be careful about accepting new members within a friendship circle. Calvino was just a friend of a friend, though a friend of Jack Saxon’s was close enough for her to help. Saxon had told her Calvino was in Rangoon to find a missing son of an old friend and to assist a friend of his who was a Thai police colonel, and she’d decided he was worth helping.

Calvino went quiet as Ohn Myint withdrew into her own world. She had a lot to think about, and he wondered how much Saxon had told her about what had happened with his brother in Bangkok. Calvino stared out the window. People walking along the road or riding cheap Chinese bicycles. Trucks and old buses passed. Lives hammered by sun, dust, poverty and oppression. Blank, empty faces. He thought of Saxon’s proverb about the man eating rice and breathing in the smell of fish cooking.

“Mya Kyaw Thein says they grabbed her brother because they didn’t like her political views.”

“Wai Wan was caught red-handed with a truckload of teak.”

“But they catch only a few smugglers. Is teak smuggling suddenly a high priority?”

Ohn Myint sniffed from the dust kicked up by the boys playing soccer.

“If the political situation weren’t changing for the better, would she have come back? I don’t think so. She’d have been arrested, and they wouldn’t have needed to find her riding on a truckload of teak to charge her.”

“You don’t like her.”

Ohn Myint shrugged.

“Like, don’t like. I don’t know. Some people choose to stay outside a country and throw rocks at the windows. They want people to believe they have all the answers. When the country opens, they want to take all of the credit. It was their rock throwing, they tell us, that did the trick. As for those who stayed behind and quietly worked for change, they don’t talk about us. We didn’t throw any of their rocks. They come back to tell us that they made all of the sacrifices. But not everyone sees it that way.”

“You and the Black Cat should have a talk.”

“The whole country is talking. For the first time people aren’t scared to say what’s on their mind. That is good.”

Calvino thought about her answer—noncommittal, impersonal, open and vague. Ohn Myint wasn’t afraid to talk to Black Cat or anyone else. Throughout the country others were finding their voice, and no one was stopping them. All those years of the great silence were slowly fading as the volume of voices expanded. The howls from vanguard of globalized riders, the cracked of their whips echoed through the airport halls, the hotel lobbies, bars and restaurants. These foreign voices were everywhere and Rangoon was listening.

The two fell into silence again until Ohn Myint said, “She’ll meet us in the courtyard. You can talk to her alone. Ask her yourself.”

There was no need to explain why Mya Kyaw Thein would go separately. It was the Burmese way—find your own way to lay down smoke, a small cloud to blur the vision of the MIs. As they rubbed their eyes, a small gap would open and the MIs’ targets would dissolve, vanish just as they had appeared, alone, as if carried by a sudden gust of wind.

The taxi driver had no trouble finding the Insein Northern Divisional Courthouse. Like an airport shuttle driver, his internal GPS took him by the best possible route. The location of the criminal court was common knowledge. No one needed a map. It was more than a court; inside this building the regime processed ordinary people into the criminal class and assigned them floor space in the vast prison system.

Many Burmese had relatives, friends or neighbors, sometimes one or two degrees removed, who’d dragged their shackles across the threshold of the court. As the taxi turned into a parking area at the courthouse, a white prison van parked on the side unloaded a batch of prisoners, arms chained, legs manacled, under the watchful eyes of guards. The prisoners struggled to walk in their chains and their longyis. It required a supreme effort of coordination not to stumble into the prisoner in front or be toppled by the one behind, with everyone falling like bowling pins. Some prisoners had the hang of it more than others.

Ohn Myint paid the driver and they got out in front of the courthouse.

“Where are they taking those prisoners?” asked Calvino.

“They lock them in cages inside. There’s a special holding pen on the courthouse grounds,” said Ohn Myint.

“Do you see Mya Kyaw Thein’s brother?”

She looked at the faces as their taxi pulled away.

“No. I don’t see him with that lot. Wai Wan’s probably already inside. Vans come in and out all day. If a prisoner has money, they move him from the pen to an office.”

Calvino reached for his wallet.

“How much do you need?”

“You can rent the warden’s office and he can sit in air conditioning. Fifty dollars. Without the leg irons it’s another twenty dollars.”

“The à la carte justice system.”