Missing In Rangoon

Calvino picked up the Orwell book and left the table. Half an hour later, back at his condo, he sat with a drink and read about Orwell in the Spanish Civil War until he fell asleep in his chair. After the Bangkok night had long disappeared and the sun had cleared Queen Sirikit Centre, he woke up. He had several missed calls on his cell phone. Ratana, Pratt, McPhail had all phoned. The phone had been in silent mode. He opened his iPad and checked his email. A dozen messages, but the one that caught his eye was from Jack Saxon.

He read Saxon’s message. Then he opened the Bangkok Post website and read the breaking news story on the scroll. Yadanar and Mya, the Black Cat, were dead. It had happened while he’d been asleep, dreaming. He reread the story.

New York-Bound Burmese Entertainers Killed

Dateline: Bangkok

Two Burmese nationals named Mya Kyaw Thein, aged 26 years old, and Yadanar Khin, aged 32 years old and the son of General Tayza, Minister of Public Welfare, were killed in an apparent car bomb attack. They were traveling to a club on Ratchadapisek Road when the explosive device was set off by remote control. The police suspect a cell phone was used. The explosion was reported at 2:30 a.m. Wreckage was scattered over a hundred meter radius. Police believed as much as 50 kilos of explosives had been used. The military said they had intelligence that similar explosive devices were used in recent violence in the three most southern provinces.

Asked whether the bombing was connected to the insurgency in the South, the police spokesman said they suspected a personal or business conflict lay behind the killings. They were investigating both possibilities. But they weren’t discounting an escalation of Muslim terrorists to strike targets in Bangkok.

There was a photograph of half a dozen police smiling as they stood around the crater left by the bomb. One of them was holding a GT200—a device used by those with more fai

th than sense to detect bombs. Calvino examined the photo. Nothing about the car appeared car-like. It was hard to know what kind of car it had been. If the bomb had done that to steel, clearly nothing of Yadanar or Mya’s remains matched a human being. Atomized—machine and bodies.

Rescue teams had arrived in their pickup trucks and vans. The fire brigade had turned hoses on the smoking ruins in the street. Charred bodies were cradled in the mesh of metal and glass and upholstery.

Expectations of Burma’s new opening were running too far ahead, as if the flowers had bloomed before the seeds had been planted. The old garden still held the ground, gnarled with old growth, weeds and thorns, and untamed lanes. And the way through the forest was through dreams tethered to a chain of other dreams.

Revenge floated above that old garden like a mist.

Calvino opened two more emails from Jack Saxon. The last of them was a forward Saxon had sent, originally sent by “Anonymous.” Someone had gone to the trouble of reworking lines from a famous W.H. Auden poem and posting them on the activist website where the Black Cat had uploaded her political tracts. The revised poem read:

In the nightmare of the dark,

All the dogs of Burma bark,

And the big families wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.