“I’d like a look at the shipping manifest,” said Calvino.
“I’d like to look inside the boxes, but that’s unlikely to happen. We’ll watch them, follow them out and find out how they ship them into Thailand.”
“Did I mention that the Burmese guy who sells the cold pills out of the market happens to drive a Lexus that matches the one in Chinatown?” asked Calvino.
Colonel Pratt stopped to look around at the cars and pickups before his eyes rested on the wall they were about to disappear behind. He turned to Calvino.
“I’m sorry about what happened at Cherry Mann.”
“You pulled the tail off. You made the right decision. You didn’t know it was Naing Aung, an astrologer. We could have had one of Udom’s people following us.”
“I thought there was something strange about that guy.”
“The eyebrows,” said Calvino.
“What about them?”
“He shaved them off and painted them on again with black eyeliner.”
Colonel Pratt smiled and entered first through the station gate topped with iron spikes. He followed close to a couple of Burmese to avoid drawing attention. Calvino waited to the count of ten and walked through. As he emerged on the other side, the Colonel stood on the concrete platform holding a Burmese newspaper about twenty meters away. He blended in like a local commuter. Calvino turned and walked ten meters in the opposite direction. A crowd of about a hundred people was stretched out along the platform.
The Pha Yar Lan train station was usually invisible to outsiders. In Rangoon only locals took trains. One day that would all change, but that day was still long off. Calvino examined the faces among the crowd. Not a single foreigner on the platform. He felt a gear grinding in his gut—the place where porn and fear both registered a vote. Once they’d entered the station, Khin Myat lost the ability to watch their back. While on the train station platform, they were on their own. Colonel Pratt pretended
to read the newspaper with his back to the platform wall. His eyes moved across the platform, the dual tracks and the surrounding wall to the terrain on the opposite side of the tracks, where a line of trees ran down a steep embankment. Calvino hovered near a column as a dog came up and sniffed his leg. Even the dogs smelled the scent of a foreigner, he thought.
Colonel Pratt mentally flipped through his checklist of contingencies. For one thing, the people bringing in the shipment might slip out without using the main gate. But spotting these alternative exits was even more important because he and Calvino might have to use one fast if things turned ugly. The first priority of going into a dangerous unknown place, he knew well, was planning an avenue of escape. Once they were on the run, it would be too late.
Calvino waited until the dog moved away before walking to the end of platform. His white face stuck out among the Burmese sitting, standing, squatting or milling around. Like a tourist from Iowa on New York’s E train, even under a low-hanging hoodie it required only a glance to peg someone who was from out of town. He tried to act relaxed, stretching his arms, glancing at his watch, pacing as if waiting for the train. Not belonging to the commuter set on the platform wasn’t something he could disguise. After a few minutes, though, people stopped staring. They adjusted to the presence of a foreigner pacing to the edge of the platform and looking down the tracks, playing the role of an impatient visitor waiting for a train.
The pedestrian bridge across the tracks looked like an empty painting against the sky. No one used it. Climbing up a long flight of stairs only to climb down another one made no sense when you could just step down from the platform and walk across. A couple of schoolgirls loitered on the tracks between the platform and the embankment on the opposite side, leaning in close to whisper with each other and giggling as they stole looks at Calvino. Other commuters, apparently worn down from a long day’s work, loitered in the no man’s land between the train tracks. On the far side several young girls squatted on the tracks with their tiffin boxes at their sides, reflecting the sunrays.
Calvino could see Colonel Pratt holding his cell phone between his ear and shoulder, head buried in the newspaper. He didn’t look in Calvino’s direction as he spoke. Calvino wondered who he was talking to—his wife, Manee, or Kati, the super-fan who’d been super-glued to him before like a bandage on a hairy leg. Neither man acknowledged the other. Khin Myat had warned Calvino and the Colonel, in his way, that the train wouldn’t be on time. None of the trio had had to state another possible setback: that the shipment wouldn’t be on it when it did arrive.
The worst part of the wait was killing time and trying not to be noticed as the minutes were murdered one by one.
A steady stream of tired vendors and shoppers filtered through the entrance from the market, lugging bags and boxes. Like the courthouse, Pha Yar Lan station hadn’t changed from Orwell’s time. Colonial architecture and infrastructure handcuffed the struggling nation to a dead empire. The Burmese wandered like survivors of some terrible conflict among the buildings built by their former masters. The concrete and brick walls of the train station’s interior, decaying, unpainted, covered with moss and gnarled vines, had witnessed more than one crime in their time. The cold pill smugglers joined a long column of criminals who understood that the Burmese railways had been built by the British to carry booty and contraband. Why wouldn’t Yadanar, Udom and Thiri use the same railway tracks to carry on the tradition?
Calvino struggled to think of a distinction between the colonial masters and the businessmen who’d followed them. He looked across the embankment to the opposite side, where among the trees and weeds a man relieved himself, his back turned to the platform.
A couple of brown dogs, led by the one that had sniffed his pant leg before, sauntered along the platform, tails wagging, snouts down, sniffing for scraps. Train platforms, like airport departure lounges, Calvino thought, are life suspension spaces, places where people wait for transportation to arrive so their life can start up again. The difference between powerful and rich and powerless and poor showed on the faces around him. Those who wait for public transportation have a sad, weary resignation; those whose transportation waits for them belong to a different species.
Life comes equipped with two standard options, thought Calvino, as he looked down the track at Colonel Pratt and saw that he was no longer on the phone. A man is born to wait for the train, or he finds a way to make the train wait for him. Calvino knew where he belonged in the scheme of things. His life was not that different from those of the people waiting beside him. Most people accept that in the grand scheme of things they were born to wait. But sometimes when the young catch a glimpse of the long wait ahead of them, they find that hitching a ride on yaba makes waiting disappear. That’s the attraction in it, he thought, the escape hatch from the boredom of the long wait.
Crows circled in the cloudless sky overhead, cawing as they roosted in the treetops above the embankment. The crowd stirred as an ancient locomotive slowly came into view. The train stopped on the opposite side of the platform. The conductor’s left hand eased the brake lever. The wheels screeched, metal against metal, as the train finally stopped. People with bundles and bags climbed on, stepping up gracefully in their longyis as they moved over the tracks and up the stairs to the carriages.
A few minutes later a second train—Number DD 933—pulling six orange and brown striped carriages, stopped at the station. Passengers leaned their heads out the windows, smiling and waving to people in the crowd. A couple of schoolgirls in uniform ran to climb into a carriage, giggling and shoving. They had no need to rush. The conductor sat in the front cabin lost in thought as he smoked a cigarette. His blue-uniformed assistant squatted in front of the engine, whipping out a lighter and leaning the cigarette pressed between his lips into the flame.
At the far end of the platform three men approached the end car with a trolley. With the help of a man inside, they formed a line, passing boxes from one to another and finally to a man who stacked them on the trolley. Colonel Pratt walked down the platform past the men.
The boxes had printed labels with Thiri Pyan Chi’s name and market stall address. The Chinese brand name and logo for Coldco was stenciled on the side of each box. The Colonel counted forty boxes stacked in rows on the trolley. He’d researched the packaging and number of pills inside a standard shipment box. One thousand cold pills were inside each of them. Forty boxes translated into forty thousand pills. A degree in chemistry wasn’t necessary to calculate that the amount of pseudoephedrine inside the shipment would make a batch of yaba to supply a small stadium of teenagers. Still, the shipment was only a bucket in the sea of cold pills flowing through Thailand.
Colonel Pratt had confided to Calvino a couple of facts about Udom’s operation that he’d learnt at his intel briefing, including how his department had traced orders for ten billion cold pills from one of Udom’s electronic companies directly to the Chinese manufacturer. The Colonel’s boss wanted the answers to two questions: who had helped Udom arrange the supply route from China into Rangoon, and who were his Burmese friends who were working out the shipments from Rangoon to Thailand? The Colonel had initially thought that finding out about the train shipment would allow him to crack the case, but even if the train were a hundred carriages long and they were all filled with cold pills, it still couldn’t be what they were using. Pratt ran the figures through his head. Using trains shipping one trolley’s worth a day, it would take seven hundred years to complete that order.
When he saw the trolley with the forty boxes, he was disappointed. The shipment was more likely than not a local resupply to Thiri Pyan Chi’s market stall. He also sold cold pills in quantity to hospitals and clinics in Rangoon and possibly some upcountry as well. Colonel Pratt felt frustrated as the trolley rolled past. It had been a huge waste of time.
As Colonel Pratt turned and walked back to Calvino, one of the workmen, carrying the last box from the train carriage, stopped in his tracks. H
e dropped the box and started shouting in Burmese. It wasn’t like there were any other Westerners he might have confused Calvino with. He was the only one on the platform, and the man had got a clear look at him. Calvino had walked close enough to also recognize the man behind the wheel of the Lexus with two soon-to-be-dead Thais in the back.