Missing In Rangoon

Slowly she raised her eyes from the book and looked at him over the top of her reading glasses. There were bruises on the right side of her face. Georgette Heyer’s novels hadn’t prepared her for life in the twenty-first century.

He stood waiting for her to collect her thoughts.

Finally, she blinked away tears and whispered, “Go.”

No bill, no request for money. No nothing except that one small word that spoke a library of twisted suffering.

“They threatened you. Beat you up,” said Calvino. “I can help.”

“Like you helped the boy in your room?”

It was true that what had happened to Rob wasn’t exactly a recommendation of Calvino’s ability to protect anyone. There was nothing he could do or say to change things now. Whoever had killed Rob had covered the bases. That’s the way they wanted things to play out, he thought. They had closed the business with Rob. Finished, over and done with. Calvino was nothing to them. If he were smart, he’d walk away—and they expected he’d have no other choice, and that would be the end of it. They would have told the old woman at reception to play along, and the moment she’d put up the slightest resistance or asked the wrong kind of question, they’d taught her the lesson of simple obedience.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out their script. The Richard Smith whose phony name was on the registry was a young luk krueng, a half-breed, with braided hair and a beard. He had the look and the lifestyle of a terrorist. She’d found him dead inside the room. She would say he had appeared depressed. How was she to know he’d used a phony name? He’d looked like a drug addict and kept to himself. She had no idea why he would have killed himself. No, she hadn’t heard any shot. And no, she hadn’t seen anyone go into or out of his room.

Walking out of the lobby, it hit Calvino. Whatever deal had been done was in place. All he had to do was walk out the door and not look back. Not ask questions, get on a plane to Bangkok, return to his life and dream of new cases. His options were limited. He wasn’t Richard Smith, and he had a dead man in his room. If it wasn’t suicide, they’d be happy to let him take the fall, and for a moment he saw himself back at the courthouse. Only this time, he wouldn’t be a privileged guest but another shackled prisoner in the dock. No one would be in the room seeing that he walked out a free man.

The killers were covered, unless Calvino was stupid enough to think the ball was still in play when the game was already over. They figured him for a survivor, a private investigator who found missing people and so understood the nature of violence. Stick with the suicide theory and it would be a smooth, easy resolution. It wasn’t all that hard to make a murder look like a suicide, especially if the dead man was no more than a kid, someone who tested positive for drugs and had a history of running in circles where people die young. The police report would have enough evidence to support suicide. Unless Calvino wanted to make trouble, hang around and contradict the cops. Then they’d find his gun. Find out his real name. Maybe link him to the two men killed in Chinatown. No one wanted Rob to be a murder victim. That would look bad for the country’s opening party. Calvino felt he’d been lowered into a tight-fitting box, and the lid had been screwed shut.

It was 4:00 a.m. when Calvino pushed his suitcase into the back of a taxi, climbed in and asked the driver to drop him at the Shwedagon.

“I want to feed the monks,” he said.

It was too early in the morning for the driver to offer him a free ride to shop for discounted jewelry. As Calvino sat in the back of the car, he thought about Mya and Yadanar. Whether they had already been told what had happened to Rob.

After the taxi stopped beside the pagoda, he pulled out his case, waited a couple of minutes and then hailed another taxi. He leaned into the window and asked the second taxi driver how much to drive to Kandawgyi Road and drop him off at the entrance of Bogyoke Aung San Park. The driver sucked his teeth, looking Calvino up and down and noting his suitcase, and quoted three dollars. Taking a foreigner from Shwedagon to Kandawgyi Lake—one of the features of Bogyoke Aung San Park—made him scratch his head.

“I had a dream about making merit if I fed the ducks at dawn,” Calvino said.

The foreigner made sense.

“Get in. Two dollars, okay?” the driver said.

Colonel Pratt had walked out of the hotel, crossed the street and was waiting when Calvino’s taxi stopped at the entrance to the park. He waited until Calvino had paid the taxi and it had driven away before approaching him. Seeing the Colonel, Calvino shifted the suitcase to his left hand and extended his right hand to his friend.

“Sorry to pull you out of bed,” he said.

They walked along the pavement leading inside the vast garden. They had the park to themselves. Walking over to a bench, they sat down and Calvino looked at the lake in the darkness. A few lamps at the far end illuminated the water. It was a dead-quiet time in Rangoon, an hour of the morning without people or car sounds, just birds roosting in the treetops and the sweet scent of flowers on the cool breeze.

“I told Mya after you called me. We were about to do a final set,” said Colonel Pratt.

“How did she react?”

“She sang that song of hers. There wasn’t much of an audience left by then. The bar wanted to close down. Yadanar wouldn’t let them. He wanted to play all night. Cocaine makes four in the morning feel like noon. She got on the stage and sang ‘My Man.’ There weren’t more than five people in audience, but she had them on their knees. She put down the microphone, walked off the stage and out the door.”

Calvino’s cell phone vibrated inside his jacket and he fished it out. Mya’s voice came through from the other end.

“You heard,” he said.

He looked at Colonel Pratt as they sat on the park bench.

“Okay, we’re at Bogyoke Park, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake. You’ll find us.”

Half an hour later she walked up behind them silently, circled around the bench and stood looking at the lake, hands in her jean pockets. She’d been crying and didn’t want them to see.

“Tell me what happened.”

She turned and walked over to Calvino and sat beside him.