Missing In Rangoon

“He never gave up trying, and to me, that’s the meaning of love,” she said.

Alan Osborne’s face collapsed, and he wept. The conversation around the table stopped. Calvino helped Osborne from the table. He walked him out to his silver Benz, watched him unlock the door. Osborne opened it, leaned inside and pulled out a box.

“Go ahead, open it.”

Calvino lifted the lid and removed a book.

“It was Rob’s. I think he’d like to know that you have it.”

It was a first edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, signed to Lionel Osborne.

“Orwell gave that to Rob’s grandfather.”

The conversation at the table was in full swing when Calvino returned and sat at the table.

Colonel Pratt turned to him and said, “Vincent intro-duced me to an astrologer in Rangoon. He was a meditation expert. And his knowledge on nats, what the Burmese call spirits, was solid. He’d made a study of organic foods and diets. And he promised that if I followed his advice, I would immediately improve my saxophone playing.”

Naing Aung was an expert at many things, thought Calvino.

“Naing Aung used his multiple talents to open a private investigation business.”

“Does that mean you might start astrology as a sideline?” asked Ratana. “I’m joking. A foreigner can’t get a work permit to become an astrologer. I remember checking that point for one of our clients some years ago.

“Vincent as an astrologer would be an exciting idea,” said Manee.

Drinking from his whiskey glass, Calvino glanced at the Orwell novel, which he’d laid on the table. When he looked up, he was surprised to find all eyes around the table staring at him, waiting for a reaction. He was from New York and by default was expected to finish Ratana’s setup. Over the years she’d fed him the lines, and he’d never missed an opportunity to unearth the deeper joke inside. But the transmission lines had been knocked down in his dreams, and in the uneasy twilight awareness of the moment, he told them what he hadn’t told Colonel Pratt.

“Naing Aung’s crystal ball had some help. He had a friend who staked out a table in front of a Hindu temple. The friend sold lottery tickets. The friend would whisper the numbers of several tickets, and then Naing Aung would give those numbers to his clients asking for magical lottery numbers. They would leave Naing Aung’s office and then ‘find’ the numbers on the table across the street in front of the Hindu temple. A good racket. They could have been Wall Street bankers.

“An investigator deals with sleaze. It’s unavoidable. But a sleazy investigator sells out his clients. So I’ll be sticking to the investigations. I’ll leave reading the future to others.”

No one laughed. No one got the joke because the illusion had been broken.

The Colonel acted quickly to change the mood of the table by telling Ratana and Manee about Naing Aung’s version of his destiny to become Rangoon’s first private eye. From the Colonel’s tone of voice, it was clear this story was being told to cleanse the air—the dead, stale air that Alan Osborne had left behind, the same air that Calvino had breathed into the story of Naing Aung’s fraud.

Calvino listened as Colonel Pratt told the story he’d heard Naing Aung tell in Rangoon. It was a story of a monk who had sent a message to all of his disciples that he’d left the temple with his entourage. Everyone who did meditation received his message through his special powers to communicate thoughts. Meditation started on a Monday and lasted nine, eighteen, forty-five or eighty-one days. Every day they lit candles in front of an alter that held a Buddha image and the monk’s photograph. Meditations were transmitted messages to the nats, who acted as guardian angels. For six months they read the twenty-four verses of the Buddha teachings, nine times a day, each reading requiring ten minutes. Some people used only one one-hour reading per day. The main point was the repetition. After nine days what the vision owner desired was realized. Naing Aung had performed the rituals to ensure that his private eye business would be a success. At the end of the ninth day, Vincent Calvino had showed up at his office with his first real case. Naing Aung believed that his guru had the special capacity to read each person’s destiny. He also believed that people’s destinies were intertwined.

Naing Aung’s dietary advice to the Colonel had been straightforward—rice curry, vegetables, no meat, no cakes or cheese. Small snacks all add up. Before a performance, he shouldn’t eat anything that needed to be chewed. He should mix the food and eat it as a slurry. A monk who had mastered his body ate only five spoonfuls of the slurry. Of course, that was an extreme meditation practice, which only the brave could hope to continue for more than a couple of days. To stay on the right diet and meditate was the way to send merit to the whole world.

Once again the laughter returned to the table. It caught Udom’s attention. He rose from his VIP table and walked over to where Colonel Pratt, Calvino and the others sat at the second VIP table. The room of people watched the VIPs huddling together. They watched them during the performance, too, taking their cues from their “betters.” They applauded when the VIPs applauded, laughed when they laughed, ordered wine as they ordered.

Udom sized up Calvino, taking measure of the farang seated before him at the table. The shape of the head, the lips, eyes, height of the forehead, his watch and clothes. Patterns emerged that meant a man could be trusted. Calvino also sought to read the mind working inside Udom’s skull. The jao pah smiled, thinking the farang saw only what the Thais chose to let them see. They never worried about a man like Udom, who looked like a happy businessman. There was nothing of the gangster about him.

Yadanar didn’t like being left stranded with Udom’s flunkies, so he walked over to join the conversation at Colonel Pratt’s table.

“Mya is my cousin,” he said to Ratana. “Her mother and my mother are sisters. She is like my sister.”

Udom heard the remark and turned to Yadanar.

“And Khun Yadanar, you are like my son, your father, like my brother. We love and understand each other.”

He’d had a lot to drink and his words slurred a little.

“My home is also your home,” said Yadanar.

“And my home is your home,” said Udom.

House exchange, thought Calvino. He smiled, watching them express the depth of their relationship. They lived in houses built with underground bunkers stacked with cash, the walls covered with art, yet in a sense they were one large house. Yadanar’s mansion was buried deep in forested enclaves, surrounded by high walls and men with automatic weapons watching the gate. The men who ran the world lived in such houses. When Somchai had gone up against them, he’d hit the full force of power and influence, the weight of money that condemned him to the bottom of the Irrawaddy River, where he and Kati and his luk nong slept—though still appearing in the dreams of the rich, who paid artists to paint their afterlives in murals and on canvases.