“Tell me. Tell me everything.”
TWENTY-ONE
The House Filled with a Thousand Paintings of Dreams
COLONEL PRATT SHARED a taxi. The Colonel picked Calvino up a block away from the bookshop on 42nd Street. The driver, a Rangoon native, looked at the address for Yadanar’s house and said he knew it. Mya had written the address down in Burmese, having left for the party earlier. She hadn’t wanted to arrive with them.
Yadanar’s house was in an area most people knew about but had never seen with their own eyes. The dreams people had inside those mansions were filled with monkey kings, peacocks, crocodiles, gold lions and pigs and dogs squealing through halls of power, pagodas, cemeteries, battlefields and bedrooms. The very rich and powerful dreamt their dreams inside these vast old houses left behind by the British and inside modern futuristic domes inspired by visions of the colonial rulers’ grandchildren. Yadanar’s mansion was traditional, a relic of colonization, built on the edge of a densely forested area and situated halfway up a hill that overlooked the Shwedagon Pagoda. His father had acquired it ten years earlier. Yadanar’s family lived in another mansion nearby.
As the taxi turned up the hill, the night closed in. There were few streetlights to break the uniformity of the dark tunnel of trees. The road seemed to close in on Calvino like a nightmare. The houses were hidden behind high stone walls. The interior roads had few signs posted, perhaps to deter the intrusion of strangers. The driver, though, turned from one small lane to the next without difficulty. He knew where he was going.
“Some neighborhood,” said Calvino.
The Colonel sat quietly in the back.
“Pratt, you’re too quiet. You’re thinking about going home tomorrow?”
“The birthday par
ty might not be a good idea.”
Calvino had heard the same reservation early that morning beside Kandawgyi Lake. The time lapse hadn’t changed Pratt’s opinion.
“You’ve bonded with Yadanar, right? You’re going to see that he breaks into the jazz scene. You’re’ going to help him realize his dream. Tonight he’ll announce in front of all his friends that he’s going on the road to be a superstar. You’ll tell him his name will be on the lips of people in Hollywood and New York. Give him a big face. Then we can go home. When Yadanar owes you, he pulls the plug on cold pill smuggling into Thailand. He wins, you win. Case over.”
“And if it doesn’t work out that way?”
“We can worry about that bridge when we come to it.”
“When I came here, no one had any idea how involved he was, or about his connection with Udom. It would be foolish to think that Yadanar will easily let all of that money go somewhere else.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“Would you?”
Two security guards posted at the front gate sat on plastic stools, smoking cigarettes. Each was heavily armed. The distinctive shapes of two AK-47s revealed themselves in the light pooling from the pillar-top lamps on either side of the gate. Both guards snapped to attention as Colonel Pratt and Calvino approached. The guards used a walkie-talkie to confirm that Colonel Pratt and Calvino were on the guest list. One of them opened the gate, and Calvino and the Colonel walked down a long dark driveway. The interior of the compound was as densely forested as the neighborhood outside. The property felt lonely and isolated as they passed through it together.
“When I lived in Queens, we were always careful about walking into someone else’s neighborhood.”
“Most places, it’s the same,” said Colonel Pratt. “You go into another man’s territory without his permission, and next thing there’s a battle.”
“Luckily, we’re invited guests.”
Colonel Pratt hardly listened as he scanned the wall for exit points.
“Not all invitations are to be trusted, Vincent.”
They walked along a private drive that rose over a small incline and curved slightly to the right. Then for the first time they saw the mansion, which showed lights behind the curtained ground-floor and second-floor windows. The sounds of piano, drums and guitar grew louder. Pratt stopped to consider the lay of the land. It was an enormous mansion, with two stories, verandahs, large arched windows and a driveway filled with the same cars that had been parked in front of the 50th Street Bar.
The front door of the mansion could have passed for the gate separating Pha Yar Lan train station from Scott’s Market. The door stood open to the night. Calvino pushed it open wider and walked in first. Clusters of young people stood in corners, sat on sofas, walked between rooms or stood with drinks and food that were delivered on trays by three or four circulating servants. They didn’t recognize anyone among the faces until Jack Saxon’s head popped out of a doorway.
“Vincent, did you have any trouble finding the house?”
“As easy as finding Insein Prison,” he said.
Ohn Myint poked her head out beside Saxon.
“Swamp Bitch!” said Calvino.