Missing In Rangoon

Naing Aung read it as a yes and added, gesturing toward the door, “Please, take that chair.”

Calvino sat back in a wooden chair, arms folded, waiting for Naing Aung and his client to finish the consultation or her dream analysis or whatever business they had been conducting before he walked in. They both stared at him, not in a curious or suspicious way, but more with the stalled look of two people trying to reestablish a psychic space that had evaporated. Naing Aung closed his eyes and held his arms out like a shaman performing a religious rite, one designed to open the woman’s dream like an oyster and look for the pearl inside.

Calvino had always wondered what went on inside an astrologer’s office, and now he had a ringside seat to find out. So this was the man who’d followed them to Chinatown, the person Jack said was the only private eye in Rangoon. As unlikely a candidate as Naing Aung seemed, Pratt needed local knowledge and talent, and all roads led to this office.

The Indian client twisted ample hips and stomach around to better study Calvino. Middle-aged, her large, round face was set off with a pair of armor-piercing brown eyes with heavy eye shadow that gave her a raccoon-like appearance. On the desk, sticks of incense had burnt halfway down inside small bronze bowls festooned with fresh flowers. A plate of cut banana and coconut sat nearby. Behind Naing Aung, a foot-high porcelain statue of Buddha in one corner and a statue of the Hindu goddess Indira in the other flanked his desk like guardian angels.

Daw Aye Htay said nothing as she worked prayer beads between her fingers, the low sound of a chant coming from deep inside her throat. Odd, thought Calvino. The two spoke Burmese in muffled tones, but from the sound of it their conversation was a negotiation having to do with the stranger seated on the chair behind them. Naing Aung had birth charts, diagrams and books opened on his desk. He said something in Burmese, and Daw Aye Htay extended her hand. Drawing his forefinger over lines in her palm, he smacked his lips and nodded and then shook his head. Letting go of her hand, he consulted one of the charts.

Colonel Pratt had said Naing Aung had strange hair. What the Colonel had omitted was that the private investigator’s haircut looked like the flight deck of a damaged aircraft carrier. Calvino had been in other PIs’ places of business. None had prepared him for Naing Aung’s “Urgent Astrologer and Private Eye Office.” He tried to imagine how the Colonel would have taken it all in—the investigator chanting over incense sticks, hunched over his charts, incense smoke drifting across the desk, as the woman with the worry beads, mouth firm, waited for the chants to deliver a message from another world.

She had a long wait.

Naing Aung finally looked up, switching to English as he spoke. He explained to Calvino that they’d been discussing events in her life and the meaning of her dreams. She’d already spoken to her children, her sister and a monk about her dreams the previous night. Naing Aung, apparently, was the last person on her dream list. But as Calvino would soon find out, sharing dreams is an utterly natural part of a Burmese day.

“Tell Mr. Calvino your dream,” Naing Aung said. “He’s a private eye from Bangkok. If you agree, Mr. Calvino.”

Calvino didn’t see much of an option. He could walk out of the office and report to the Colonel that Jack Saxon had recommended someone who was in the snake-charming business, or he could play along and learn if Naing Aung had any actual investigative skills. Having already climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, Calvino flipped a coin in his mind.

“Let’s hear the dream.”

“What day of the week were you born on?” asked Daw Aye Htay.

“Tuesday,” said Calvino.

“The same day as me,” Daw Aye Htay said, showing some expensive gold and silver fillings as she smiled. “Tuesday is good.”

She pulled her chair around so that she could see both Calvino and Naing Aung by shifting her head. Then, showing a measure of pride as she looked at Calvino, she began her story.

Daw Aye Htay had bought a goat from the slaughter-house. It had been a rescue mission. She’d planned to take it to a temple and free it in the temple grounds. Her family accompanied her on the day the goat was to be released. At the temple they watched a family of monkeys scramble around the grounds begging for food. People gave them guavas, bananas and candy. Mother monkeys clutched their young to their breast with one hand while reaching out with the other for a sweet.

There was a reason behind the temple visit. The family driver had taken the Toyota Camry out and been in an accident, hitting a pedestrian on the road. The police had arrested the driver and hauled him off to jail. The accident had happened in front of a hotel on the way back from picking up the family’s son from school. The news filtered in from an MI who lived in her neighbor’s house. She told her brother to go and wait at the ICU. At the time she was more worried about her son.

The pedestrian injured in the accident turned out to be a mentally ill monk. The family driver, an ethnic Indian, sat in jail waiting for help from his boss. The Burmese in prison hated the Indians. Sectarian grudges and suspicions ran deep in Burma. Ethnic cleansing flared up with disturbing regularity. Daw Aye Htay’s face turned fearful as she whispered to Calvino that her name was surely on some extermination list, and come the awful day the Burmese rose up and slit the Indians’ throats, she would fare no better than a Rohingya trying to escape slaughter in some muddy village deep in the heart of the Arakan region.

Her fear of ethnic persecution extended to her driver, who, she was convinced, would die a terrible death inside a Burmese prison. He would be killed by knife-wielding Burmese convicts, the murder covered up as some natural cause such as a heart attack. Daw Aye Htay was sure this would be her driver’s fate—unless, of course, he had money and connections and paid the medical bill and gave compensation. Then jail might be avoided. But the driver was a poor man who depended on his income to feed his family. If he went to jail, his family would have nothing. They’d be in the street, going around hung

ry like wandering ghosts. The mentally ill monk’s family had started a crusade to squeeze money from them because they were poor and saw a chance to get rich.

She had bought the goat because the driver had been born on a Tuesday, and the goat was also Tuesday-born. Naing Aung had confirmed this was the right animal for the dates concerned. If it had been a Thursday, like Naing Aung’s birthday, then it would have to have been a monkey. On the other hand, the crazy monk was a monkey-born person. That was a consideration, too.

Daw Aye Htay also had a monk advising her. He had actually phoned her four days before the accident happened to recommend she free the goat. Naing Aung had thought that three goats would be better than one. She’d had conflicting advice. The injured man’s family was now trying to blackmail her, to extort a large cash settlement. Daw Aye Htay’s family all thought that such a demand amounted to theft. But they also agreed that a debt was owed to the monk. And even though the man was crazy, evil and cunning and came from a bad family, he was still a monk. As for why this accident had come about, everyone told her the same thing—she owed the injured monk because in a previous life she had committed some misdeed. In this life, it was her karma to pay off that debt. She had already paid the monk’s family three thousand dollars. The family wanted more, seeing the accident as a cosmic lottery win. There was no limit to their greed.

Day and night, hospital nurses and staff waited hand and foot on the monk. They came to his bed and waied him. His family had already started a lawsuit. They even tried to drag him out of the hospital in the hope that he might die and they’d get more money. The doctors, worried about tarnishing their own karma, refused to sign the papers to let him be discharged.

It was her son’s dream that had convinced Daw Aye Htay not to pay any more money or release any more goats in atonement. From the time her son was an infant, she’d known he was special. She’d had a vision then of a small boy wearing white clothes who came from a green bamboo forest holding a gong, which he struck with a small golden mallet. Her son had said in his childlike voice, “All people beware that I’m coming.” Behind him a monk followed.

Even when he’d been a three-month-old baby and she was breastfeeding him, her son had come into her dreams. Every time the mother ate something that wasn’t good—raw fish in particular—he gave her a dream not to eat raw fish. The son found his way into the visions of friends, who phoned her to ask whether she’d eaten raw fish. “How did you know?” she asked. “Your son came in my dream and told me.”

After she had finished her tale, Naing Aung sat back in his chair.

“Daw Aye Htay wants me to investigate the wife and brother-in-law of the monk,” explained Naing Aung. “They are up to monkey business. If I can find evidence of dirty books in their house, then the family will go away. Otherwise, it will drag on, and that is bad karma.”

An astrology and private investigation mind-meld, thought Calvino.

“How do you know he has dirty books?”

“I felt a vibration,” said Naing Aung.