Missing In Rangoon Read online

  Missing in Rangoon

  Missing in Rangoon

  A Novel by

  CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

  Heaven Lake Press

  Missing in Rangoon

  Christopher G. Moore

  Smashword Edition 2012

  Missing in Rangoon is published by Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords.

  Copyright © 2012 Christopher G. Moore

  Author’s web site: http://www.cgmoore.com/

  Author’s e-mail: [email protected]

  Jacket design: K. Jiamsomboon

  License Notes

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  For Busakorn Suriyasarn

  In the nightmare of the dark

  All the dogs of Europe bark,

  And the living nations 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.

  In Memory of W.B. Yeats 1939

  W.H. Auden

  ONE

  The Definition of “Spit”

  EVERY TIME ALAN Osborne telephoned Calvino’s office, Ratana imagined a dark, dense mass of bats, excited, purposeful in their hunger, flying like a solid black cloud from the mouth of an ancient cave. She lifted the handset, preparing herself to hear his voice as she placed a plastic lotus to mark her place in the detective novel on her desk. She hadn’t decided whether to get up and go around the partition to Vincent Calvino’s desk with the news. Or she could tell Osborne what he didn’t want to hear.

  “I will tell Vincent that you phoned, Mr. Osborne.”

  She waited half a beat.

  “Did I ask you to tell Vincent that I phoned? I asked you to put him on the fucking phone.”

  “I will take your message, Mr. Osborne.”

  “Is he going to look for my son in Rangoon? Yes or no?”

  “I will ask him to phone you.”

  “Tell Calvino that I want a fucking answer.”

  That was Osborne. Fucking phone. Fucking answer. Fucking this, fucking that—an auto-add adjective to every noun he wanted to emphasize. It was an error that Georgette Heyer would not allow in one of her detective novels, and certainly never in one of her regency romances.

  Ratana hung up the phone and read a couple of pages from Death in the Stocks. There was something in the personality of Osborne that resembled the murder victim named Andrew Vereker. Solving the murder of a nasty, unsympathetic character required truly extraordinary writing ability.

  Osborne hadn’t been murdered—yet—but she did wonder how he had escaped such a fate in Thailand with his temper, cursing, disrespect and disagreeable aggressiveness. In Thai culture, Ratana knew, any transgression is ranked as a possible capital offense, depending on who is offended.

  Ratana hadn’t waited long before her boss summoned her.

  “I need help with a Thai word!” Calvino shouted from his side of the office.

  She sighed and walked around the partition.

  “Osborne phoned again.”

  “I don’t want to go to Burma,” he said. “Everyone’s piling in. It’ll be a zoo.”

  “Phone him and tell him.”

  Calvino shrugged and repeated, “I need help with a Thai word.”

  “The same one?”

  He nodded. She’d helped him earlier. He’d forgotten what he’d learnt.

  Calvino focused on Ratana’s face as she slowly rounded her lips and tongue to pronounce the correct sound for the Thai word “thouy.” A foreign sound, he’d read, has to have lodged in a person’s brain by the age of five. Otherwise, even when hearing it in slow motion, the adult brain resists. As far as Calvino could tell, Thai tones happen inside a musical registry where every note sounds the same. He marveled at the capacity of a toddler to get the tones right while sucking on an ice cube. Thouy. Life isn’t fair, he thought. Brains age, tongues stiffen. Tonal ignorance, like all ignorance, expands over time, leaving adults in a shrinking world.

  Vinny Calvino was not one to give up. He told himself he wouldn’t leave the office until he’d learnt how to say “thouy.”

  Calvino’s mouth and jaws froze into the mask of a snakebite victim as he looked to his secretary for confirmation that he’d mastered the right combination of tongue, lips and jaw.

  She shook her head and emitted a long sigh.

  “Your lips…”

  “What about my lips?”

  Ratana stared at Calvino’s lips before moving to his eyes.

  “Your lips end a little… I don’t know. Like a shuttle landing platform upside down on a space station.”

  John John, her boy, had a particular affection for video games. Mothers borrow their metaphors from their children’s toys—or at least, this was Calvino’s theory, as he tried the Thai word once again. He had picked up the Thai habit of producing a proverb or some sort of saying for just about everything that happened in life. To him it seemed that the Thais fell back on old proverbs the way that Cockney gangsters used their own slang to talk to each other around the police.

  On Calvino’s desk were a couple of photographs. One showed a Thai man in his mid-twenties with a puffy right eye and a swollen upper lip. Another showed a distinguished looking Thai in an official white ceremonial uniform with gold braiding and epaulets. Putting the photographs side by side, as Colonel Pratt had done, created a geometry that went by a number of non-mathematical names: yin and yang, chalk and cheese, insider and outsider.

  The language difficulty that had stalled Calvino and kept him at his desk—and given Ratana, arms folded, her stern schoolteacher’s face—had come in the wake of Colonel Pratt’s unannounced visit. He’d burst into the office a couple of hours earlier, sat down across from Calvino and asked if he knew the Thai expression “thouy,” and Calvino had said with a smile, “It means to spit.”

  Pratt rolled his eyes. “‘Thouy’ is also slang.”

  Calvino shot him a hard glance. “Police lingo, you mean? Spit and polish to keep the boots mirror-like?”

  “As in snitch.”

  Colonel Pratt removed several photographs from an envelope and laid them on Calvino’s desk.

  “They look happy,” Calvino said.

  Masterminds like these embodied well that joyful you-can’t-touch-or-mess-with-me look.

  “Not for long,” Pratt said. “The thouy told us their story.”

  The “spit” in this case referred to the collar left alone in the interrogation room with several cops. At some point, the Spit had decided that the time had come to drop the dime on another crook. The best Thai slang, it occurred to Calvino, often hinted at a deeper story about how powerful people got the job done.

  No native English speaker would ever think of the full range of metaphorical possibilities of good old spit—like using it to suggest fear, the kind of fear that overcomes a man after he spits out his own teeth and clots of blood on an interrogation room floor. This spit had mass. It made a mess on the table and the floor, but there were always cleaners for that, whereas cleaning up a mystery often proved more difficult for everyone. It usually happened only when the Spit finally coughed up the name, the identity of the mastermind, and spat it out like a bluebottle fly that had flown into his mouth.

  Although that would be very
important information anywhere in the world, in places like Thailand extracting the mastermind’s name is always the endgame. He is the pot of gold at the end of the investigator’s rainbow. Get that motherfucker, and the world will be a better place, lions will sleep with lambs, people will hug each other in the streets and sing “Kumbaya” around the campfire because the khaya sangkom—garbage of society—has been dumped in the gutter and flushed into the deep, dark sea.

  However, before taking out the broom and shovel and getting their singing voices ready, the Thai cops always found it a good idea to run a background check on the piece of garbage. His family, where he came from, the name of his patron—the layers of insulation that might protect him from the heat when the gamma rays of the police investigation rained down. These specks of information were examined in the spit, and, like tea leaves or chicken gizzards, they told a story. The Thai variety of spit had brought Colonel Pratt to Calvino’s office to tell him and his secretary, Ratana, that the following week he’d be flying to Rangoon.

  Pratt pulled out the photographs of the two yin-and-yang Thai men and a third man, dressed in white shirt and longyi—one of those wraparound half-kilt, half-skirts the Burmese wore. Whatever the three were up to, it was unlikely they’d been singing “Kumbaya” around a campfire. Pratt had a drawn a bead on the criminal enterprise they ran, but he hadn’t yet pulled the trigger.

  The pictures the Colonel showed to Calvino told a story, one that had emerged during an interrogation. The showdown between the Spit and the cops had happened in a small room—a table and a couple of chairs and nothing else except the actual pain and fear of the interrogation, which gnawed away the Spit’s fear of what his boss would do to him and his family. Pain crosses a threshold in every man. Beyond that point is pure terror, a space that closes in on him as he’s caught between two tigers, one near and one far, and nowhere to jump free. The tiger in the room is always more frightening than the one outside.

  The Spit fingered the three tigers in the photographs. These men carried on a business across an international border. When a man cracks, everything spills out at once—names, dates, places. The smallest details. He actually wants to talk, to cleanse himself by spitting out the bad taste along with the blood. Break the bonds that hold him together, and the man is reborn, and no one can shut him up.

  “You’re going to Rangoon to look for these men?” Calvino asked.

  Pratt smiled. “I am going to play the saxophone. See some people. Look around. If I run into these men, well, I might have a question or two.”

  “Ratana said you have some kind of jazz festival.”

  The Colonel shook his head. “Not a festival. There’s a band, and they asked if I might like to sit in with them.”

  “Given that you’re a famous jazz saxophone player.”

  The Colonel ignored the jab and changed the subject.

  “You told me you had a client who wanted to send you to Rangoon.”

  “And you thought we might go together,” Calvino said.

  “It crossed my mind. It’s up to you.”

  “I haven’t decided to take the case.”

  Calvino studied the photograph of the Burmese man.

  “You’ll need a few days to arrange a visa.”

  Pratt had it all worked out. He pulled out the Burmese visa application form, which was completed except for Calvino’s signature, and put it on top of the photographs.

  “Just in case you decide to go. The paperwork’s under control.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Calvino locked eyes with the Colonel, who smiled. One of those knowing silences expanded. They both knew that each time they’d traveled outside Thailand together, things had turned out in ways no one described in tourist brochures.

  Ratana came into the room carrying incense sticks, yellow candles and orchids.

  “You’re late to meet Khun Ed,” she had said to Calvino. “You’ll need these.”

  Colonel Pratt nodded as he examined the items for a ritual to appease the spirits.

  “You should help your boss with this Thai word, ‘thouy.’ It’s a difficult one for foreigners.”

  The Colonel omitted that it was even more difficult for the Thais—not to pronounce, but to think about the story behind the word. It caused a shiver and a prayer that the Lord Buddha would protect them from ever finding themselves in that situation.

  The Square had never been a pretty place. Originally designed in the shape of a large horseshoe, it consisted of rows of Chinese four-story shop buildings—squat rec-tangular structures built for function and not designed to win awards. At last the redevelopers had found their sweet-spot price and slowly bought the horseshoe, piece by piece. The Lomesome Hawk Bar had been part of the shoe. It had been Calvino’s home away from home, his makeshift office, the crossroads café where men drifted in from the oil fields, foreign wars and domestic firefights to shelter, heal up and decide on Plan B.

  Calvino stepped around a pile of concrete debris and garbage as he turned toward the Lonesome Hawk—or the shell that once had been the bar. Inside he found Ed McPhail sitting at his favorite booth. The cushions were gone, the walls were bare, and the floor was cluttered with scraps of wood.

  “Hey, buddy. I thought you weren’t coming.”

  Calvino eased into the booth.

  “Colonel Pratt showed up at the office.”

  McPhail smoked a cigarette, his eyes looking around the bar. He wasn’t listening to Calvino.

  “The place is a wreck,” McPhail said.

  “I’m thinking of going to Rangoon.”

  “Most of the regulars are dead. They never lived long enough to see this.”

  “Why don’t you come along?”

  “Rangoon?”

  Calvino nodded. “It’s opening up.”

  “This place is closing down.”

  He flicked a long ash on the floor.

  “George used to sit over there and shout at the girls, ‘Turn down that goddamn music!’ If he’d seen the place looking like this, it would have killed him.”

  Calvino pulled out the candles and incense sticks.

  “Give me your lighter.”

  “That’s a good idea. A remembrance. That’s what I said we should do.”

  Calvino walked over to the bar counter. The stools had been stripped, and the bar broken in places. Lighting the bottom of each of three candles, he stuck them on the top and then lit the wicks. He found a glass behind the bar and put the incense sticks in and lit them. He placed the orchids in front of the glass.

  A moment passed.

  “That’s it?” asked McPhail.

  The bar had been fading away for a long time. Like a terminal patient, it had grown weaker, smaller and less friendly, more foreign. George had died. Most of the regulars had died too, or drifted away. Its time had passed. No one was surprised at the end that it had rolled over and died with the rest of the Square.

  “You die and then what?” asked McPhail.

  Death, Calvino thought, looked a lot like one more missing person case where there’s no evidence.

  “I figure it’s like one of those dashes,” Calvino said finally, “that mark you find in a sentence linking one part with an explanation. Life on one side, and it stretches through the dash into an empty void. Remember when everyone came back after George’s funeral and sat around the bar, arguing and bullshitting about death?”

  “What if death isn’t a dash but a period?”

  “You know what I think, Ed?”

  A silence fell between them as McPhail stared at the makeshift altar.

  “The whole universe is connected to the end of that dash.”

  Rituals with candles, incense and flowers, Calvino thought, are supposed to allow people to make their peace with the destruction and the absence. But the ache of the loss is never easily appeased.

  “It’s time, Ed. I’ve got to get back to my office.”

  McPhail nodded, exhaling a cloud of smoke. He
opened a bottle of rum and took a long drink before screwing the cap back on.

  “Rangoon,” he said.

  “Think about it.”

  “You think the Lonesome Hawk might have been reincarnated in Rangoon?” said McPhail, taking another hit from the rum bottle.

  Calvino laughed. “A new bar,” he said, “filled with all of the old regulars, reborn in Rangoon, asking George, ‘What’s the special?’ And Baby Cook coming out of the kitchen with her blouse hiked up over her belly, sweating and smoking a cigarette.”

  McPhail slid out from the booth. He walked to the bar and placed the palm of his hand over each candle, extinguishing the flames one at a time.

  “I don’t want to say goodbye more than once. You go to Rangoon. You find that bar. And you tell George and Gator and Bill and the rest of them that McPhail loved them. I did. You know that, Vinny.”

  Calvino watched him walk to the door and look back one last time.

  “You’ve got to get back to your office,” said McPhail.

  They’d done what they’d come to do—perform one last small gesture. Rituals last an instant, memories a lifetime. The two things may be out of proportion, but however a man measures the difference, Calvino figured, in the grand scheme of things they aren’t all that far apart. Rituals and memories have never been meant to last forever.

  It was time to go. They pushed through the door with the crumbling poster for free food. They walked around the piles of rubble and into the old parking area. Calvino stopped and took a final look. McPhail kept walking.

  The flow of time carries all men and all things. It had swept away the Lonesome Hawk, and the river of time would always move through the minds of men, drowning them in the past or sweeping them downstream into the future. There was a choice.