The trial was going in the wrong direction. Calvino had had enough. He stood up and nodded at Ohn Myint.
“I want you to translate what I am going to say.”
“I would like to request that your honor subpoena the owner of the teak and the owner of the truck, if it is a different person.”
He stopped and let Ohn Myint translate.
The judge looked over his glasses at Calvino as if the British invaders had returned on the wings of the courtroom sparrows.
“Request denied.”
Calvino locked eyes with the judge and broke out into a smile.
“Second motion. That I be allowed to approach the bench for a conference.”
The Burmese lawyers exchanged glances. No one had ever requested a private conference with a sitting judge. What could the foreigner’s intent be? The judge sat through what seemed a long period of silence. Finally he waved Calvino to step forward.
“In New York we keep it simple. I was going to ask you to dismiss the case against this man on the grounds of lack of intent.”
Calvino pulled out the note the ex-judge had written and read it word for word:
“‘Your Honor, your dismissal of charges against Wai Wan will show the American government your fairness and courage and demonstrate for the world to see that Myanmar’s courts can be trusted to deliver justice.’”
After he finished reading the note, Calvino handed it to the judge, returned to his chair and sat down.
All eyes turned to the judge. He seemed to recognize the handwriting. On the note, and on the entire wall.
TWELVE
View from the Balcony
JACK SAXON HAD booked Calvino a room at the guesthouse under the name Richard Smith. The room, cramped, hot and dark, smelled like a livestock holding pen and was only slight smaller. Calvino stood in the doorway surveying the bed, the chair, the closet and the bathroom door, painted pink. He walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains. The view was of a brick wall two meters away. Closing them again, Calvino walked to the front of the bed, leaned over and tried the mattress. Soft as overcooked pork bellies. He sat down on the edge. As soon as Rob Osborne was on a plane to Bangkok, he’d find another place. For now it would do.
It was time to go to work. He studied the room from every angle—entry, exit, electrical, lights, water, floors and closet. It was the kind of hotel room where the police found a body stuffed in a bag, hands cut off, with a shaved, bearded head stuffed in a separate burlap bag. And they’d joke about the pink bathroom door.
And they would know they’d never catch the mad butcher who had carved up the body. Because tracking a murderer who’d left his victim in a place like this was a waste of time. The victim would have likely used a phony name like Richard Smith. No one could ID him. John Doe murder files everywhere were stuffed in the back of a file cabinet in the drawer marked “Nobodies Killing Nobodies When They Were Drunk and in Arm’s Reach of a Knife.” A bit long for a file name, but once they’d found a body in a room like this, the cops only had to go through the motions of opening a file, one that would gather dust.
Saxon had left Calvino a note on the chair. Calvino picked it up and read it.
“Welcome to the real Burma. See you later. Your case is in the closet.”
Like the note Calvino had handed to the judge, Saxon’s note didn’t open with a name or end with one. Anonymous notes were short on such details. Who else but Saxon would have rented him a hellhole and then put his case in the closet so other guests wouldn’t steal it and sell his clothes to buy booze or drugs?
Calvino went to the closet and pulled his suitcase off the top shelf. The closet had that old man’s stale smell of cat piss and day-old dried sweat. He put his case on the chair and sat on the bed, opened it and took out his clothes and his handgun. Strapping on the holster, he checked the chamber of the Walther and slipped it into place. He went to the closet, took out his jacket, put it on, checked himself in the mirror and locked the door behind him.
Back on the street, Calvino checked out the narrow driveway leading to the guesthouse, turned left at the street and began walking to the Savoy Hotel. Across the road he saw a cloud of swallows swarming out of the Shwedagon, visible at the horizon. The birds blackened the sky. He stopped to watch, shading his eyes with his hand. The thick soup of birds darted, flitted and danced across the sky as a single interconnected, flexible unit. The setting sun cast shadows, but where the swallows flew, the sky remained a bright aqua. As he watched, he thought about his hotel room with the balcony overlooking the pagoda—the one he’d checked into as Vincent Calvino—and the distance he’d flown solo from the pagoda to a backwater nest registered under the name Richard Smith.
A couple of minutes later, Calvino walked into the Savoy Hotel driveway, pushed through the entrance door and entered the bar. He looked around but didn’t see Colonel Pratt. Instead he saw what wasn’t in the bar. There was no table with beaten-up alcoholics, their livers screaming like a retired traffic cop with nightmares of escorting kids caught in heavy traffic. There were no characters who’d fallen under the wheels of life. Everyone looked as if they’d checked in under their real name and had real lives that didn’t require carrying a handgun.
The tables were occupied with respectable types: expat diplomats, businessmen, NGOs, translators and teachers. A few more people sat at the bar engaging in polite conversation. These were the kind of drinkers who got all of their vaccine boosters every year, exercised, avoided meat and cigarettes, paid their taxes and read to their kids at bedtime. Saigon, Bangkok and Phnom Penh all had similar bars for the same crowd of swallows. It was a place for drinkers to step out of the harsh reality of the culture and language and pretend among themselves that they were together in their own country, a city they liked, where they were safe and everyone was pret
ty much like them.
Calvino figured the bar catered to customers who came early and left late, long enough to drink and sober up again before stepping into the Rangoon night.
He passed a wall of brass fittings that suggested an old English country pub. Behind the bar hung photographs of fishing boats. The bronze bell above the bar had an open invitation to ring it and buy a round for customers. Only true drunks rang the bell, and by the look of it, the bell hadn’t been rung in some time.
One drink reorder later, Colonel Pratt walked in dressed like a businessman in a suit and tie. He was heeled, too. He went straight to the bar and sat on the stool beside Calvino. He didn’t look like a saxophonist. And he didn’t look like a cop. Colonel Pratt had transformed himself into the role he saw scripted for him by circumstances. It wasn’t just the clothes; it was the style, the attitude and the way he walked that created the illusion.