Missing In Rangoon Page 13

  Instead she said, “Vincent, I want to be clear. You deliver the briefcase to Mya Kyaw Thein, and she will deal with it from there. It’s been arranged for you to sit in the courtroom. Then we return to your hotel. Tomorrow Mya Kyaw Thein should have her good news.”

  Her plan suggested that she had no problem drawing a line where one needed to be drawn. Friends didn’t push friends over that line. Calvino couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t entirely certain that if the situation were reversed, he would stick his neck out as far as she was doing. She was right to be careful about accepting new members within a friendship circle. Calvino was just a friend of a friend, though a friend of Jack Saxon’s was close enough for her to help. Saxon had told her Calvino was in Rangoon to find a missing son of an old friend and to assist a friend of his who was a Thai police colonel, and she’d decided he was worth helping.

  Calvino went quiet as Ohn Myint withdrew into her own world. She had a lot to think about, and he wondered how much Saxon had told her about what had happened with his brother in Bangkok. Calvino stared out the window. People walking along the road or riding cheap Chinese bicycles. Trucks and old buses passed. Lives hammered by sun, dust, poverty and oppression. Blank, empty faces. He thought of Saxon’s proverb about the man eating rice and breathing in the smell of fish cooking.

  “Mya Kyaw Thein says they grabbed her brother because they didn’t like her political views.”

  “Wai Wan was caught red-handed with a truckload of teak.”

  “But they catch only a few smugglers. Is teak smuggling suddenly a high priority?”

  Ohn Myint sniffed from the dust kicked up by the boys playing soccer.

  “If the political situation weren’t changing for the better, would she have come back? I don’t think so. She’d have been arrested, and they wouldn’t have needed to find her riding on a truckload of teak to charge her.”

  “You don’t like her.”

  Ohn Myint shrugged.

  “Like, don’t like. I don’t know. Some people choose to stay outside a country and throw rocks at the windows. They want people to believe they have all the answers. When the country opens, they want to take all of the credit. It was their rock throwing, they tell us, that did the trick. As for those who stayed behind and quietly worked for change, they don’t talk about us. We didn’t throw any of their rocks. They come back to tell us that they made all of the sacrifices. But not everyone sees it that way.”

  “You and the Black Cat should have a talk.”

  “The whole country is talking. For the first time people aren’t scared to say what’s on their mind. That is good.”

  Calvino thought about her answer—noncommittal, impersonal, open and vague. Ohn Myint wasn’t afraid to talk to Black Cat or anyone else. Throughout the country others were finding their voice, and no one was stopping them. All those years of the great silence were slowly fading as the volume of voices expanded. The howls from vanguard of globalized riders, the cracked of their whips echoed through the airport halls, the hotel lobbies, bars and restaurants. These foreign voices were everywhere and Rangoon was listening.

  The two fell into silence again until Ohn Myint said, “She’ll meet us in the courtyard. You can talk to her alone. Ask her yourself.”

  There was no need to explain why Mya Kyaw Thein would go separately. It was the Burmese way—find your own way to lay down smoke, a small cloud to blur the vision of the MIs. As they rubbed their eyes, a small gap would open and the MIs’ targets would dissolve, vanish just as they had appeared, alone, as if carried by a sudden gust of wind.

  The taxi driver had no trouble finding the Insein Northern Divisional Courthouse. Like an airport shuttle driver, his internal GPS took him by the best possible route. The location of the criminal court was common knowledge. No one needed a map. It was more than a court; inside this building the regime processed ordinary people into the criminal class and assigned them floor space in the vast prison system.

  Many Burmese had relatives, friends or neighbors, sometimes one or two degrees removed, who’d dragged their shackles across the threshold of the court. As the taxi turned into a parking area at the courthouse, a white prison van parked on the side unloaded a batch of prisoners, arms chained, legs manacled, under the watchful eyes of guards. The prisoners struggled to walk in their chains and their longyis. It required a supreme effort of coordination not to stumble into the prisoner in front or be toppled by the one behind, with everyone falling like bowling pins. Some prisoners had the hang of it more than others.

  Ohn Myint paid the driver and they got out in front of the courthouse.

  “Where are they taking those prisoners?” asked Calvino.

  “They lock them in cages inside. There’s a special holding pen on the courthouse grounds,” said Ohn Myint.

  “Do you see Mya Kyaw Thein’s brother?”

  She looked at the faces as their taxi pulled away.

  “No. I don’t see him with that lot. Wai Wan’s probably already inside. Vans come in and out all day. If a prisoner has money, they move him from the pen to an office.”

  Calvino reached for his wallet.

  “How much do you need?”

  “You can rent the warden’s office and he can sit in air conditioning. Fifty dollars. Without the leg irons it’s another twenty dollars.”

  “The à la carte justice system.”

  He pulled out seventy dollars and pressed the notes into her hand. She shrugged and stared at the money before slipping it in her bag.

  “If you have big money, and it’s not a political crime, you will get off. Eventually. It takes time in Burma to get charges dropped. Just as it takes time before minds accept change. If you’ve pissed off someone important, it can get expensive.”

  Calvino had an idea the Black Cat fell in the category of rock throwers who paid a premium for the windows they broke. As he and Ohn Myint walked up to the courthouse, they watched as the prisoners and their guards disappeared inside. The courthouse was a long, two-story remnant of nineteenth-century colonialism, located off the main road, with railroad tracks running along one side. The British had been masters at building symbols of imperial authority like this one. Now the red-brick vestige of empire served the new oligarchy with the same brutal efficiency as the one it displaced.

  The prisoners being delivered to the court were skin and bones. In this building that looked like a ruin, judges tried human skeletons. Calvino and Ohn Myint walked through the archway. Twenty feet ahead, half a dozen numb-looking prisoners were herded down a corridor to disappear around a corner. Ohn Myint hardly noticed them as she led Calvino through a long walkway to a courtyard, following the smell of fried banana, coconut and the hangman’s rope.

  They arrived at the courtyard to find a hot sun blazing overhead. People took shelter at small wooden tables under large umbrellas. Dogs with festering sores and faces scarred from fighting over scraps sunbathed in the dirt, turning in their sleep like boxers in a coma and ignoring the young boys kicking a soccer ball a few feet away. Near Calvino, a middle-aged lawyer in a white shirt and a black Burmese coat stuffed betel nut between his teeth and gums as he listened to a relative of a defendant moan, weep and collapse into sorrow. Calvino scanned the scene for the Black Cat.

  “I’ll be back,” said Ohn Myint. “Make yourself comfort-able. They have tea.”

  She left to find the warden to arrange for the brother’s transfer to more comfortable conditions.

  Tea? he thought.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” he said, sitting down at one of the tables.

  The Burmese in the courtyard stared at him. No one had seen a white man there for years. They murmured among themselves that Calvino was an omen. Like the villagers on the 10K run, they smiled and nodded, and one of the women got up from her table and brought him a plate of sliced pineapple.

  As he sat waiting for Ohn Myint, he ate the pineapple and watched the food vendors, brokers, family members, lawyers, touts and dogs sharing tabl
es around him, under umbrellas, or taking shade under the roof overhanging the corridor. Gradually people stopped staring at him.

  The courtyard was part market, part festival—a place of medieval contradictions where harsh justice mixed with food, betel nut and games, fixers and astrologers, amid gossip, secrets, regrets and intrigue. It was also part funeral. A reunion of friends and family and neighbors with a shared bond—one of their own was being thrown into the large meat grinder of the system. At the tables men and women, sad and happy, listless and active, conspiratorial and confessional, drank, whispered and watched for their son, brother, father, uncle or cousin to appear from a holding cell. For people who’d long survived in desperation, anyone like Calvino was a possible source of hope. More plates of fruit were delivered to his table.

  Soon he was surrounded with food offerings. Flies buzzed around slices of watermelon, coconut and mango. When Ohn Myint returned, she found Calvino sitting under an umbrella, elbows on the table, his briefcase on his lap, looking over a feast of food at some children kicking a soccer ball in the dirt nearby. She laughed.

  “You ordered all of this?”

  “I was hungry,” he said.

  She shooed away the flies with her hand and popped a slice of pineapple in her mouth.

  “It’s done,” she said. “Wai Wan is in the warden’s office.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “Jack told me you were the sensitive type.”

  She knew that anyone who, like the Black Cat’s brother, had been locked inside the Insein Prison for a couple of months would have joined the brotherhood of the beaten down and haunted, the less than human. That was the whole idea of prison.

  “Mya Kyaw Thein should be here any time,” she added.

  A narrow walkway separated the courtyard from the bank of doors leading to half a dozen courtrooms. When one of the doors opened, the lawyers and relatives of the accused rushed from their tables to crowd in front of the entrance and watch.

  Above where Calvino sat, men in uniforms paced across the balcony that wrapped the building’s interior, watching the people below. Ever since he’d sat down, they’d seen people giving him offerings as if he were a monk. A white face looked out of place here, where the abundant sunlight belied the darkness of what went on inside the adjacent rooms. Calvino’s presence reminded them of the days when it was men who looked like him who’d sat on the bench and judged them. That was another time. In this time and in this place, the power had shifted. The faces on the balcony were those of hard men. The majesty of the courts—judges, lawyers, all the Burmese in uniforms—was built on a bedrock of hard men who carried out their judgments. Men who didn’t flinch, who weren’t squeamish. The kind of man every regime used to project authority.

  Calvino would have stood out as the most likely person to have paid to have Wai Wan transferred to the air-conditioned warden’s office. Here was a man who understood how justice worked. There was one good reason not to be poor, one that had nothing to do with buying shiny objects with touch screens; it was about shedding chains for half an hour before facing a judge. Wai Wan could count himself lucky, they must have thought, to have a white man come to the courthouse and pay money for a common prisoner to sit in an important office. Such a man was someone who needed watching.

  “When can I see Wai Wan?”

  Ohn Myint looked away, thinking for a moment.

  “Inside the courtroom.”

  “How can I do anything for my client if I can’t talk to him?”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s the rule. He’s not officially your client. It would be good if you didn’t refer to him as your client inside the courtroom.”

  The system seemed to be not that different from a Thai court, Calvino thought. Forget about burden of proof, rules of evidence, questioning the Crown’s case, as those approaches were beside the point. Only guilty people were brought to a courtroom. They were there to have their guilt confirmed. Wai Wan waited in the warden’s room, having no idea how his fortune had suddenly turned for the better. Soon he’d be delivered to the courtroom and would discover whether his good fortune would continue, bringing him freedom, or his guilt would be rubber-stamped.

  “It’s better you talk to Wai Wan’s lawyer. He can fill you in on the details.”

  Ohn Myint’s job wasn’t to defend or explain the system but to translate for Calvino at the hearing. He would say what he wanted to say, and she’d convey the part of it that she thought was appropriate. The prosecutor would say what he would say, and she’d translate that for Calvino in full. And Wai Wan would testify and she’d translate that too. The judge would say little. He would take notes as she translated what Calvino said. The fact that Calvino was to be allowed in the courtroom was already a victory. It was highly unusual and had been difficult to arrange, though she didn’t feel it was necessary to explain this background to Calvino.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Calvino said.

  “It’s up to you. We are here. Arrangements have been made. What is there to lose?”

  “I don’t think Mya Kyaw Thein’s going to show.”

  “Mr. Calvino, she would do anything for her brother. You shouldn’t worry. Let her find you.”

  “She’s pretty good at finding me when she wants,” said Calvino.

  Relax, he told himself. She’d materialize out of thin air just as she’d done at the 50th Street Bar. Only this appearance would be different. She’d be in the audience this time, for her brother’s performance.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder, turned around and saw a strange woman looking down at him.

  “You don’t recognize me? That is the way it should be.”

  She took his briefcase from the table and walked away. He turned and started to get up. Ohn Myint pulled on his arm, and he sat back down. He watched as she walked several tables away and sat the briefcase down in front of the middle-aged lawyer chewing betel nut.

  ELEVEN

  The Trial of Pigeons

  MYA KYAW THEIN had entered in lockstep with the betel nut vendors who went from table to table—three old ladies under an umbrella. She looked and dressed like she was part of their group. An older woman in the middle of the group carried a large tray of yellow tofu cut into slices. The other two carried plastic stools to set up shop under an old gnarled tree that looked as if it might have been a seedling when the courthouse first opened. The tree and the courtyard had seen generations of defendant witnesses, families and friends of the defendants, touts and brokers, senior lawyers, junior lawyers and Crown prosecutors, all out under the morning sun, sitting around tables waiting for their case to be called.

  The Black Cat had slipped into the courtyard dressed like a family member of someone with a court appearance. One of those sad people, dressed in worn clothes and feet caked with dust, who only saw her loved one on court appearance days. She was unrecognizable from the star who had won over the audience at the 50th Street Bar. She had transformed herself into just another faceless peasant. To MI agents milling around the grounds, she would have been invisible.

  Wasting no time, she took a stool beside her brother’s lawyer, setting Calvino’s briefcase down beside his stool. She found Calvino’s eye and gestured for him to join her and the lawyer.

  Ohn Myint said, “You’re being summoned.”

  “You’re coming too?”

  “Yes, I need to talk to the lawyer.”

  As soon as Calvino sat at the table, Mya Kyaw Thein wasted no time introducing him as her brother’s American lawyer. A plump Burmese man with large, round jowls that collapsed like airbags as he leaned over his tea, he listened to Calvino, eyeing him closely. She spoke in English so that Calvino could hear himself described as a New York lawyer who’d flown in to assist in the case. Then she switched into Burmese to talk about the briefcase. Calvino was lost as soon as she spoke in Burmese.

  “What’s she saying to him?” he asked Ohn Myint.

  “She’s saying you’re from
New York.”

  “She said that in English.”

  “She’s saying how famous you are in New York.”

  “I’m from Bangkok,” he said, “and I’m not famous in New York.”

  “Too much detail confuses people,” she said as Mya Kyaw Thein continued in Burmese to tell the lawyer how Calvino was a celebrity New York lawyer who took only high-profile cases, and that he should understand how lucky he was to have Calvino with him in the courtroom. Once the judge understood that a senior New York lawyer had come to defend a simple Burmese man, he would see that the country really had changed, and the American embassy would send an ambassador from Washington soon afterwards. And there was the matter of cash. It was in the briefcase.

  “She’s telling him that the American government is watching the outcome of the trial with interest.”

  “‘All that is solid melts into air. All that is holy is profaned,’” said Calvino. “I’d always wondered what inspired someone to write those words.”

  The lawyer’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Calvino. His client had been accused of teak smuggling, and as far as he could see, it was an open and shut case. Why would the Americans bother themselves with the case of a common criminal? He scratched his head and drank his tea, his foot nudging the briefcase.

  “It only looks like an ordinary case,” the Black Cat said. “The fact that the Americans have sent a top lawyer has to tell you that something important is involved, something not in the file.”

  Mya Kyaw Thein assured the man that he was still lead counsel and Calvino had come only to offer technical support. He stared at Calvino, wondering how a New Yorker had become an expert in Burmese teak smuggling. The Burmese lawyer, by contrast, looked like he could’ve been the boy who planted the old tree in the courtyard. After the Black Cat finished her speech, he turned to Calvino.

  In English he told Calvino how he’d previously worked as a judge and resigned to take counsel work. He knew a thing or two about how the system worked from the inside. His jowls matched his large, rounded stomach perfectly. He wore a gold stud in the top button of his white shirt.