He’d forgotten about her friend. The phone in the room rang. After three rings, Calvino sat on the edge of the bed and answered it.
“Jack sent me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He included a note: ‘I’m working on what I owe you. See you later at 50th Street.’ Come up to my room for a drink. I want to hear about the Rangoon Running Club.”
Calvino would tell Pratt the truth about the run, and his friend would laugh at the agony of his miserable finish. But that could wait, couldn’t it? Calvino wanted to freeze that moment on the balcony, with Rangoon framed against the setting sun as he responded to her touch. He wanted to remember it, file it away like a postcard stored in a box for his old age. But there was no such thing as a working holiday.
“Give me twenty minutes,” he said, hanging up the phone.
She reentered the room and headed for the door.
“I should be going.”
“Bring Anne along tonight. The 50th Street Bar, about nine o’clock.”
“I know the place.”
She was out the door before he could ask her about the perfume she was wearing. He’d been around that scent before—fresh lime with a hint of lavender.
After Bianca had gone, Calvino pulled a chair onto the balcony, sat down and placed the bottle of wine on a small table. Stretching forward, he perched his arm on the railing. The hotel was in a part of Rangoon where the elites lived in secluded mansions, hidden in the city forest. Somewhere under the trees, Rob Osborne sat in a room, waiting for a woman to come through the door, thought Calvino. Some were worth waiting for, and every man thought he’d made the right call on the value of his woman. He’d never met Mya Kyaw Thein, the Black Cat, but he had an idea that anyone who?
??d followed a blogger with a political agenda, a Henry Miller-quoting jazz singer with a brother going to trial in the morning, had to be in love. When that happened, all bets were off. People went missing by the planeload in the name of love.
Romantic madness wasn’t Calvino’s business. He’d deliver four and half grand to Ohn Myint to spring the brother. That was his business in Rangoon—finding a way to pump money into a system for the result his client wanted.
A day or so should be enough for him to find Rob and watch him get on a plane to Bangkok, he thought. That would be it. Case closed. But something didn’t feel right. He couldn’t decide why, but he had a nagging feeling that things worked in Rangoon in ways he didn’t understand.
Rangoon made a man’s mind drift and doubt itself. Was that the reason Rob hadn’t contacted his father? Captured by the magic of the place, he’d just forgotten about time, Bangkok, his father and the Monkey Nose band? Such things happen to people lost in Southeast Asia. People like Rob didn’t so much disappear as dissolve into some back alley of a lost place, usually with a woman—strike that; always with a woman—waiting for something or someone: rescue, redemption, drugs, death or enlightenment.
He poured himself another glass of wine. A Bangkok-raised boy like Rob holed up in Rangoon, one of the last places where the sacred dominated the landscape, was running away from home. The light was now fading quickly. It no longer burnt orange under the graying clouds. On the street below cars became visible as their headlights turned on, but there was no real traffic, just one, then two or three cars, then an empty space, and after a moment another car. It was like counting coins in a beggar’s bowl.
He’d come to Rangoon because Pratt needed backup. But having arrived, he would do his best to launch a Rob Osborne rescue mission. Calvino remembered what it had been like to strike out in a strange city, to be lost among the losers, dreamers, prostitutes, grifters, godfathers, wanderers and scam artists—the usual crowd who were the first to secure a beachhead in a place with a deep, troubled history and an uncertain future. Places like that never lasted. Sooner or later the modern global generals smelled the money and sent in their officers dressed in suits, who’d been trained to use balance sheets to occupy a territory. That had happened in Bangkok, Saigon and Phnom Penh, and it would eventually happen in Rangoon. There’s nothing wrong with the domino theory, Calvino thought; it was tailor-made for capitalism.
If Henry Miller were leaving Brooklyn in our time, Calvino figured, he’d rip up his ticket to Paris and find his way to Rangoon, one of the last romantic oases on earth. On the other hand, the city was already filling up with foreign caravans. Come to think of it, Calvino thought, Miller would be not only too late, but irrelevant. Tropic of Cancer—download it for free from the Internet and then forget where you saved it on your computer. That’s how Henry would stop mattering. Saved but unread, except by one exotic Black Cat.
Colonel Pratt asked who was at the door before opening it.
“It’s me, Pratt.”
Calvino heard the security chain slide and fall. The door opened and Calvino walked in. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, two glasses and bucket of ice waited on the table near the balcony. The curtains were drawn. Pratt’s carry-on case was open on the bed. Calvino watched Pratt slide the chain back into the slot.
“Still not unpacked?” asked Calvino, staring at the suitcase.
“Got back only ten minutes before I phoned you.”
“The Thai embassy is running overtime.”
“We drove out to a shooting range. It was my good friend from the embassy who had the idea.”
“Did you tell him your running name was Crack Shot?”
The Colonel smiled. “I forgot. He would have liked that.”
Pratt hadn’t offered the Thai embassy official’s name, and Calvino didn’t ask. He understood the power and risk of naming people and things.
Calvino sat in a chair, poured whiskey into the two glasses and took a drink from one of them.
“While I was running through rice fields, I was being followed by an MI asshole. As slow as I ran, he didn’t even pretend to run. He was riding one of those cheap-ass motorcycles.”
“What did he want?”