Missing In Rangoon

Calvino continued his sweep of the area. From where Khin Myat was positioned on the balcony, he had an unobstructed view of the train station entrance, a narrow gate carved into the high stone wall. If Khin Myat saw something that looked out of the ordinary, a face that looked out of place or anything his guts told him something wasn’t right, Calvino had told him to call him and report.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘out of the ordinary’?” Khin Myat now asked, speaking into the phone while looking at Calvino below.

Good question, Calvino thought. In Burma he had no benchmark to judge what was extraordinary.

“There’s no rule. You’ll know it when you see it.”

He ended the call, and glancing up, saw Khin Myat waving. As a rule members of a surveillance team didn’t wave at each other. But only so many contingencies could be planned for, and the street inevitably delivered surprises that hadn’t been expected.

When in doubt, Calvino fell back on Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography—“I know it when I see it”—because sometimes only ad hoc rules deliver the right outcome.

Colonel Pratt stood beside a small clothing shop, looking at the merchandise displayed in the window. Calvino walked up and stopped beside him.

“Thinking of buying Kati a dress?”

“It’s not her style,” said Colonel Pratt.

They stared at a traditional dress with gold sequins, worn by a dummy with a cheap black wig that had slipped to one side, covering one eye.

“Time to meet a train,” Calvino said.

Calvino glanced at his watch. They had plenty of time to kill, so why wasn’t he feeling more relaxed? It had to do with the setup. Relying on lottery ticket vendors and astrologers like Khin Myat and Naing Aung for information was loaded with enough downside to make a descent from Everest look like a walk through Kansas in comparison. He and Colonel Pratt were strangers to their newfound Burmese colleagues. Men like Thiri Pyan Chi were neighbors to these men, members of the same 27th Street tribe of merchants and vendors. Double-crossing a tribe member, even when he’s a criminal, might come with some heavy costs.

“I keep asking myself if the astrologer would tip off Thiri Pyan Chi,” said Calvino.

Pratt nodded and turned away from the window display, saying, “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Pratt and Calvino walked side by side down the lane, which was narrowed by rows of cars parked on both sides. They came to the entrance, which could have passed as a gateway into a medieval dungeon, with its heavy iron gate hanging on thick hinges in the stone wall. The sound of trains arriving drifted from the other side.

Wai Wan’s trial had taught Calvino a lesson about the perils of toll-gates when moving cargo along Burmese highways. Contraband shipments ran a gauntlet of officials, and that was expensive and dangerous. But one lone cop was all it took to scuttle a shipment. A jealous competitor, a business rival or an old enemy seeking revenge only had to find that one cop and slip him some money, and a semitrailer-sized hole appeared overnight in the balance sheet. Then it was stop and seize, cat and mouse, payoffs and jerkoffs, as grudges and double-crosses piled high like old inventory no one could put a value on anymore.

The Burmese system had been built on violence. It proved the old adage that it was far cheaper to pay one man to blow up a bridge than three hundred men to build one. Violence and the threat of violence, knitted into the distribution system, made for an elite clan of rich psychopaths. It was also why Burma had few modern bridges.

Thiri Pyan Chi had found an alternative highway for smuggling his cold pill shipments into Rangoon right under the noses of the authorities: the train. Pha Yar Lan train station was his lucky ninth tollgate.

“We don’t engage them,” said Colonel Pratt, “or interfere.”

“Not much point,” said Calvino.

“No point at all.”

“I’ll play like a tourist taking some photos on the platform.”

Pratt thought Calvino didn’t look like a tourist.

“Tourists don’t take photographs of boxes being unloaded from a train.”

“I’ll be discreet,” said Calvino, smiling.

“Some foreigners never pass as tourists.”

“You’re saying I stand out?”

“If you take pictures, you’ll be noticed.”

“It wouldn’t be healthy to be noticed by Udom Thongsirilert,” said Calvino.

Colonel Pratt nodded. Udom Thongsirilert, an influential Thai from Buriram, ran a number of legit Thai companies—specializing in transport, event planning, luxury imported cars and electronics—along with a couple of illegit ones. The legit companies provided a way to launder his large profits from the smuggling of cold pills. One of his legit companies sold the cold pills to clinics and hospitals. The pills went in one door and out another to Udom’s transport company, which hauled them back over the border to Burma to the string of yaba factories. The route was intentionally serpentine as with most clandestine businesses, a direct line of supply led to a prison cell. More circuits also meant more profit for the transport company. Colonel Pratt had been sent to Burma to gather intelligence to close down Udom Thongsirilert’s Burmese smuggling operation.