Missing In Rangoon

He pulled out seventy dollars and pressed the notes into her hand. She shrugged and stared at the money before slipping it in her bag.

“If you have big money, and it’s not a political crime, you will get off. Eventually. It takes time in Burma to get charges dropped. Just as it takes time before minds accept change. If you’ve pissed off someone important, it can get expensive.”

Calvino had an idea the Black Cat fell in the category of rock throwers who paid a premium for the windows they broke. As he and Ohn Myint walked up to the courthouse, they watched as the prisoners and their guards disappeared inside. The courthouse was a long, two-story remnant of nineteenth-century colonialism, located off the main road, with railroad tracks running along one side. The British had been masters at building symbols of imperial authority like this one. Now the red-brick vestige of empire served the new oligarchy with the same brutal efficiency as the one it displaced.

The prisoners being delivered to the court were skin and bones. In this building that looked like a ruin, judges tried human skeletons. Calvino and Ohn Myint walked through the archway. Twenty feet ahead, half a dozen numb-looking prisoners were herded down a corridor to disappear around a corner. Ohn Myint hardly noticed them as she led Calvino through a long walkway to a courtyard, following the smell of fried banana, coconut and the hangman’s rope.

They arrived at the courtyard to find a hot sun blazing overhead. People took shelter at small wooden tables under large umbrellas. Dogs with festering sores and faces scarred from fighting over scraps sunbathed in the dirt, turning in their sleep like boxers in a coma and ignoring the young boys kicking a soccer ball a few feet away. Near Calvino, a middle-aged lawyer in a white shirt and a black Burmese coat stuffed betel nut between his teeth and gums as he listened to a relative of a defendant moan, weep and collapse into sorrow. Calvino scanned the scene for the Black Cat.

“I’ll be back,” said Ohn Myint. “Make yourself comfort-able. They have tea.”

She left to find the warden to arrange for the brother’s transfer to more comfortable conditions.

Tea? he thought.

“I’ll wait for you here,” he said, sitting down at one of the tables.

The Burmese in the courtyard stared at him. No one had seen a white man there for years. They murmured among themselves that Calvino was an omen. Like the villagers on the 10K run, they smiled and nodded, and one of the women got up from her table and brought him a plate of sliced pineapple.

As he sat waiting for Ohn Myint, he ate the pineapple and watched the food vendors, brokers, family members, lawyers, touts and dogs sharing tabl

es around him, under umbrellas, or taking shade under the roof overhanging the corridor. Gradually people stopped staring at him.

The courtyard was part market, part festival—a place of medieval contradictions where harsh justice mixed with food, betel nut and games, fixers and astrologers, amid gossip, secrets, regrets and intrigue. It was also part funeral. A reunion of friends and family and neighbors with a shared bond—one of their own was being thrown into the large meat grinder of the system. At the tables men and women, sad and happy, listless and active, conspiratorial and confessional, drank, whispered and watched for their son, brother, father, uncle or cousin to appear from a holding cell. For people who’d long survived in desperation, anyone like Calvino was a possible source of hope. More plates of fruit were delivered to his table.

Soon he was surrounded with food offerings. Flies buzzed around slices of watermelon, coconut and mango. When Ohn Myint returned, she found Calvino sitting under an umbrella, elbows on the table, his briefcase on his lap, looking over a feast of food at some children kicking a soccer ball in the dirt nearby. She laughed.

“You ordered all of this?”

“I was hungry,” he said.

She shooed away the flies with her hand and popped a slice of pineapple in her mouth.

“It’s done,” she said. “Wai Wan is in the warden’s office.”

“How’s he look?”

“Jack told me you were the sensitive type.”

She knew that anyone who, like the Black Cat’s brother, had been locked inside the Insein Prison for a couple of months would have joined the brotherhood of the beaten down and haunted, the less than human. That was the whole idea of prison.

“Mya Kyaw Thein should be here any time,” she added.

A narrow walkway separated the courtyard from the bank of doors leading to half a dozen courtrooms. When one of the doors opened, the lawyers and relatives of the accused rushed from their tables to crowd in front of the entrance and watch.

Above where Calvino sat, men in uniforms paced across the balcony that wrapped the building’s interior, watching the people below. Ever since he’d sat down, they’d seen people giving him offerings as if he were a monk. A white face looked out of place here, where the abundant sunlight belied the darkness of what went on inside the adjacent rooms. Calvino’s presence reminded them of the days when it was men who looked like him who’d sat on the bench and judged them. That was another time. In this time and in this place, the power had shifted. The faces on the balcony were those of hard men. The majesty of the courts—judges, lawyers, all the Burmese in uniforms—was built on a bedrock of hard men who carried out their judgments. Men who didn’t flinch, who weren’t squeamish. The kind of man every regime used to project authority.

Calvino would have stood out as the most likely person to have paid to have Wai Wan transferred to the air-conditioned warden’s office. Here was a man who understood how justice worked. There was one good reason not to be poor, one that had nothing to do with buying shiny objects with touch screens; it was about shedding chains for half an hour before facing a judge. Wai Wan could count himself lucky, they must have thought, to have a white man come to the courthouse and pay money for a common prisoner to sit in an important office. Such a man was someone who needed watching.

“When can I see Wai Wan?”

Ohn Myint looked away, thinking for a moment.

“Inside the courtroom.”

“How can I do anything for my client if I can’t talk to him?”

She shrugged.