Missing In Rangoon

Calvino shook his head.

“No, I was lost, Pratt. I didn’t pick up the tail.”

“He was a little Burmese guy with a strange haircut. Thirty, thirty-five years old, wearing a cheap polo shirt with an alligator logo and a checkered green and yellow longyi. From the way he moved, he either wanted us to know we were being followed or he was stupid.”

“Or he was new to the business. Shit, how I did I manage not to spot him?”

The jazz piano drifted into the night. The band had started the set without their saxophone player. It didn’t worry the Colonel. He kept cool as he glanced at the door.

“Kati’s difficult to ignore. The guy tailing us spent a lot of time looking her up and down. I figured if we left you, he’d follow me. And he did. Or I should say he followed Kati. Don’t forget that Mya was clear that her boyfriend wouldn’t show up if we stayed.”

“You did the right thing, Pratt. I handled it.”

“I’m sure you did,” he said.

“The Walther did the job.”

“If you don’t mind, I won’t pass along your thanks to my friend at the embassy.”

Calvino put an arm around Colonel Pratt’s shoulder.

“You really had me thinking…”

“You thought I was head over heels for Kati.”

“Kati. I hate that nickname. Ninety percent of the time, with a woman named Kati, what you see isn’t what you get. You never see it coming. And, yeah, I did think that. But I also missed the tail in Chinatown. You ought to think of telling me to go back to Bangkok.”

Pratt hugged him.

“Stick around. Things are starting to get interesting.”

For the first time since Kati showed up out of the blue, Calvino was confident that the Colonel was firmly anchored in reality. Some people had underestimated the Colonel in the past, and Calvino now had to admit he’d been one of them.

“See you around,” Calvino said.

Calvino watched the Colonel walk back into the bar. He hailed a taxi headed his way. It stopped, and Mya opened the back door and got out.

“How about I buy you a drink, and you tell me how you got Rob into the cold pill business?”

“Some other time,” she said.

They stood in the street staring at each other.

“You’ve had a long day. Your brother in leg irons. Your boyfriend nearly killed by thugs. As a friend of mine said, things are starting to get interesting. So what’s next, Mya? Back in Bangkok at Le Chat Noir, your boss told me you’d adopted Henry Miller as your patron saint. He said Miller’s philosophy of fuck everything appealed to you. As a freethinker, a political activist and a blogger. But it turns out you’re going for the brass ring. Not fuck the system, but how do I get inside it? And who do I take with me, and who do I leave behind?”

“I’ll make it right for Rob,” she said. “I owe him that much.”

“You owe him, you owe me, and your brother owes you. It must get confusing. You ever sit down and write down all the debts and credits?”

“I can finish up on my own,” she said in what sounded like a sincere voice. “What you did tonight isn’t something I’ll forget.”

He thought about it. How everyone had this sudden need to be square. Jack Saxon wanted to know if he was square for his brother’s rescue. Rob wanted to square with him after what happened in the Lexus. Even Pratt talked about squaring things. The problem was Rangoon. It was a place where the toll-gates had just opened, the gatekeepers were missing or on the take, and everyone who passed through found themselves inside a world where the squares, circles and straight lines operated according to different principles of social and political geometry. No one was square, but everyone was trying to square the circle and thinking they’d succeed.

Looking at the Black Cat’s face, backlit from the bar, it was hard to read her emotions. Her tone hinted that she measured things, men, performers and opportunities with the same ruler she’d been trying to break and throw away. But she’d run into a hard lesson of adult life: some rulers were harder to break than others—and the money ruler was the last one anyone broke. They kept that one safe. It was instinct, automatic behavior, hardwired from birth. And that was the ruler that made most men easy marks, and most women slaves. She’d wanted to walk away from it as Henry Miller had done. Times had changed. Even Henry Miller had a price, and in Rangoon, whatever that price was, someone would have found it.

As they stood talking, Calvino had a vision of the old woman behind the reception desk at the guesthouse, who apparently had made some wrong plays along the way. In the street was a young woman who had reached a toll-gate, and if she looked behind, she would find that she had someone tailing her.

When that happened, which way was she going to turn? And who was she going to turn to?