Tanner On Ice

Chapter 10

I had a mini-flashlight in the Kangaroo strapped around my waist, keeping my Swiss Army knife company. It would have been handy for getting out of the alley, and I opened the zipper of the Kangaroo, groped around until I found the light, and then, reassured by its presence, decided to leave it there. Spurgeon’s cab might well circle the block and make another pass at the alley before I cleared it, and I wanted to be able to disappear into the shadows if I had to.

Meanwhile, I did what I could to avoid falling on my face. The alley was evidently where the citizens of that part of Rangoon stored their spare stumbling blocks, and it’s hard to keep from getting tripped up by objects in your path when you don’t know they’re there. I stubbed my toe a couple of times, and almost fell more than once, but I stayed on my feet. It struck me as a good thing I wasn’t traversing holy ground. The trek would have been murder without shoes.

At the mouth of the alley I looked both ways without knowing exactly what I was looking for. I saw cars passing in both directions, and any of them could have been Harry Spurgeon’s cab. If it had had any distinguishing marks or characteristics, I hadn’t noticed them.

Unlike the man himself, who sported a distinguishing mark on either side of his head. That patch of white hair was as vivid and unmistakable a field mark as the white feathers on a magpie’s wing or the eponymous scarlet of the red-winged blackbird. I hadn’t really given Harry a thought since we’d shared that cab from the airport. Now, suddenly, I could think of nothing else.

And now, of course, it all seemed obvious. The way he’d so neatly picked me up when I cleared Customs, the way he’d suggested our sharing a cab. He was a type, the old Burma hand, knocking around Asia at his employer’s behest, grumbling a little about each country’s less palatable idiosyncracies, and making the best of it all the while. Bluff, open, friendly, especially to another English speaker-

And determined to dog my footsteps all around Rangoon.

But who the hell was he? A player on the other side, I had to assume, but what other side? What were the sides in this particular game without rules? And how many sides were there?

I had a million questions and I couldn’t come up with answers to any of them. When I tried, all I got were more questions.

All I knew was that I didn’t see Harry anywhere right now, and I wasn’t inclined to wait for him to show up. Before I’d spotted him, and long before I knew who he was, I’d been planning to go to ground.

It seemed like a better plan than ever now.

The Char Win Guest House was a four-story frame building on Mahabandoola Street. I liked the name of the street – it had such a nice musical cadence to it I was surprised SLORC hadn’t changed it. And, sipping a beer in the café across the road, I decided I liked the looks of the Char Win as well. What I especially liked was that, while I drank my bottle of Mandalay (and it was watery and tasteless, as Ku Min had said it would be) I saw four couples make their way up the half flight of wooden steps and into the guest house. In two instances the couples were mixed, with the woman Asian and the man a Westerner. All four couples were traveling light, unencumbered by luggage.

My kind of place.

I climbed the stairs myself. The lobby held two wicker chairs and a sad little palm tree. The fellow behind the counter looked as though he’d spent all his life staying away from sunlight and fresh air. He had sunken cheeks and a very tentative mustache, which he worried with a forefinger as he studied me.

“I want room,” I said in what I hoped was basic Burmese.

It was hard to tell if he understood me or not. He peered at me, picked up a cigarette from a glass ashtray, drew deeply on it. In English he said, “You bring girl?”

I shook my head.

“You got girl coming?”

“No.”

“You want girl?”

“I want a room,” I said. “To sleep.”

He nodded, looking neither pleased nor disappointed. He consulted what I suppose was the register, then reached to take a key from a hook. “Twenny dollar,” he said.

“Ten,” I suggested.

“Twenny.”

“Fifteen?”

He shook his head sadly. I found a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to him, and he looked it over carefully. He said, “Passport?”

I just looked at him. He held my glance for a long moment, then shrugged elaborately. The bill went into the breast pocket of his pale green shirt. He handed over the key, pointed at the stairs. “Room Six,” he said. “First floor.”

First floor meant one flight up, as it does just about everywhere but the United States. I climbed the stairs and found my room. The key was an old-fashioned skeleton type, with a brass oval attached to it, stamped with what was either a 6 or a 9, depending on which way you held it. I had trouble fitting the key in the lock, and had just about convinced myself he’d given me the wrong key when it slipped in the final quarter-inch. I turned it and opened the door.

I wasn’t expecting much, and that was exactly what I got. The room was very small, just a cubicle, really. There was a single bed, an old iron bedstead, the paint flaking from the metal panels of the headboard. There was a small mahogany table and a desk chair with a cane back and seat. The seat needed some repair, but probably wasn’t worth fixing. The floor was uncarpeted wood, ill used by time.

There was a window that looked out onto the litter-strewn backyard. I’d have closed the curtains if there had been any. I switched off the light instead, set my backpack on the rickety little chair, and sat down on the bed. The mattress was thin and the springs groaned. I stretched out on the bed – I kept my shoes on, what the hell, I wasn’t in a pagoda – and wished I had something to read. Except there wasn’t enough light to read by. Not now, with the light off, of course, but not with the light on, either. There was no lamp, just the one-bulb ceiling fixture, and the bulb couldn’t have been more than twenty-five watts. And it was a long ways off, too; the one nice thing about the room was its twelve-foot ceiling.

We’ll, I’d gone to ground. Now what was I supposed to do?

I settled my head on the pillow and tried not to think about lice. The room wasn’t exactly filthy, although it would have been going some to call it clean. But over the years I’d found myself in a lot worse places.

Maybe I should have asked him to get me a girl. This was no room to take a decent woman to, or even an indecent one, but maybe you got a more spacious room if you were going to be sharing it.

I closed my eyes and thought about Harry Spurgeon. But I didn’t want to think about him, not now. I tried instead to slip into the state of relaxation and meditation that I use as an alternative to sleep. By tensing and relaxing different muscle groups in turn, I get into a state that helps knit up the raveled sleeve of care. It’s not quite the restorative that eight hours of unconsciousness provides, but it’s an acceptable substitute when you haven’t got a working sleep center in your brain.

I started to ease into it, then lost it when tensing the muscles in my shoulder sent a stab of pain through me. The shoulder I’d landed on was going to hurt, all right. I rubbed it a little, to no apparent purpose, then started over from the beginning. Feet, ankles, calves, thighs, fingers, hands, arms-

There was a knock on the door.

I stayed where I was, breathing slowly and deeply, trying to concentrate on the light tingling sensation in my hands and feet.

Another knock.

Go away, I thought. And then I heard the knob turn and realized the lock was the sort that you had to lock with the key, and I hadn’t.

The door opened. In an instant the woman who’d opened it slipped inside and pushed it shut, pressing her back against it. I couldn’t see much in the dim light, only her silhouette against the door. She was about five-six and slender, and her hair was long. That was all I could tell.

“Please,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move, either, just lay there on my back.

“You are European?”

“American,” I said.

“That is even better.”

I guess the U.S. Information Agency would have been glad to hear that. It’s always nice to know our image in the Third World is improving. Still, I had the feeling I ought to nip this conversation in the bud.

“The clerk has made a mistake,” I told her.

“He has made many mistakes,” she agreed. “He would not be here otherwise.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I said, “I told him I didn’t want a girl tonight.”

“Oh,” she said. There was a silence, which I thought I probably ought to fill with an apology. But I didn’t, and at length she said, “But I am not a girl, not in the sense you mean. Of course you would think that. What else would you think when a woman comes to your door?”

If the clerk had sent her, I thought, she wouldn’t have entered so furtively.

“I am not a prostitute,” she said. “Perhaps I would be better off if I were, but I am not. If you want me to go, tell me.”

“First tell me what you want.”

“May I turn the light on?” She worked the wall switch without waiting for permission, and now I got a good look at her. She turned out to be Eurasian, and I wasn’t greatly surprised. Her English was fluent, even educated, but it was strongly accented and I couldn’t place the accent.

Whatever it was, it seemed a match for her appearance. She had straight blond hair that hung to her shoulders and a heart-shaped face with a broad, high forehead and cheekbones that were almost severe in their prominence. A lot of Slavic blood showed in her face, but the Asian was evident around the eyes and mouth, and in her complexion. I was so busy cataloging the various elements that it took me a minute to notice that, when all was said and done, she was not merely exotic. She was beautiful.

Her looks were the sort that made you sit up and take notice. I’d already taken notice, and now I sat up. I must have winced, because she asked me what was the matter.

“My shoulder,” I said. “I hurt it in a fall.”

“A long time ago?”

“About an hour.”

She came closer, set my backpack on the floor, and sat on the cane chair. She said, “Do you have anything to drink?”

“No.”

“It would probably do you good.”

“It generally does,” I said.

She took a breath. “That is one reason I came here,” she said. “I was at my window when you came into the hotel. I thought you might have some whiskey.”

“I wish I did.”

“Yes, I wish it, too.”

“I might have bought a bottle,” I said, “but I didn’t see it for sale anywhere.”

“Buddhists,” she said.

“They don’t prohibit alcohol, do they?”

“They discourage drunkenness,” she said. “The Fifth Precept is opposed to intoxication.”

“Well, so am I,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t like a drink now and then.”

“They sell whiskey in the big hotels,” she said. “But not in a place like this. And it is very expensive.”

“I see.”

“What is your name?”

“Evan.”

“Evan. It’s American?”

“Well, the name is Welsh originally, the Welsh equivalent of John. Like Ian in Scottish, or Ivan in Russian.”

“Evan. My name is Katya.”

“Russian?”

“The name is Russian. I am – I don’t know what I am. So many different things. Katya is a diminutive.”

“For Katerina.”

“Yes. In English it would be Katherine. What would you say for short, Kathy?”

“Or Kitty,” I said. “Or Kate.”

“Kate,” she said, trying it out. “That is so quick, is it not? So sudden, like fingers snapping. Kate. It is almost harsh.”

“Katya is a pretty name.”

“Maybe you’ll call me Kate. Maybe I like it. I don’t know.” Her forehead darkened. “Or maybe you will not call me anything at all because you want me to go.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to go.”

“If we had some whiskey,” she said, “we could go to my room and drink it. My room is larger than yours.”

“Almost anything would be.”

“And not so barren. There are some pictures on the walls, a bit of rug on the floor.”

“It sounds cheerful.”

“No,” she said, “it is not cheerful. It is sad, like everything in this place. But it is a little better than this. Evan, could you give me some money? I will go buy whiskey.”

“Where will you go?”

“There is a night market a few hundred meters from here. They sell whiskey at one of the stalls, but you have to know to ask for it. It is not very good whiskey. It is made in Burma, so how good could it be? But it is whiskey.”

“How much is it?”

“Six hundred kyat. Five dollars if you pay in hard currency. I am not trying to cheat you, Evan.”

“I didn’t think-”

“Of course you did. A woman comes into your room and asks you for money, what else are you to think? But I am not after your money. You are welcome to come with me to the market. But I do not think you wish to leave the hotel. I saw your face when you crossed the street, and I sensed that tonight you do not care to be where people can see you.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re right about that.”

“Come to my room, Evan. I will look at your shoulder. And you can rest while I go for the whiskey. You will be more comfortable there than here.”

I sat on her bed and looked out the window, and I watched as she left the hotel and walked purposefully down the street. She turned at the corner and disappeared from view.

Her room was nicer than mine, just as she’d said. It was larger, and the bed was wider and the mattress thicker. She’d taped some pictures cut from magazines on the green-gray walls, and there was indeed a scrap of worn carpet on the floor. There were two chairs instead of one, and a small chest of drawers that held her neatly folded blouses and longyis. There was no closet, but a row of pegs on the far wall held other garments, and several pairs of shoes and sandals were lined up beneath them.

I was turning the pages of a year-old copy of Paris Match when the door opened and she burst in, carrying a bottle wrapped in a sheet of newsprint. She unwrapped it, a flattened one-liter bottle, and filled the two glasses from on top of the dresser.

“Ayet piu,” she said, handing me one. I thought that was the local equivalent of s Cheers! or Prosit! or Here’s mud in your eye!, but it turned out to be the name of what we were drinking. The name meant white liquor, and when I’d had much the same thing ages ago at a Macedonian get-together in Tennessee, they’d called it White Mule. In the west of Ireland it’s poteen, and other cultures call it other things, but whatever you call it, it tastes like fusel oil and kicks like, well, like a white mule.

“Ayet piu,” I said, even if it wasn’t a toast, and we both drank. “Piu,” I said, and shuddered. I wasn’t repeating the last name of the stuff, either. I was giving my considered opinion of its bouquet and flavor.

“It is terrible,” she agreed. “But it performs the task.”

“Performs the… oh, right. It gets the job done.”

And I have to say it did. As warm as it was in Rangoon – and it hadn’t cooled off much in the evening, either – I’d been starting to feel the chill that never entirely left my bones. But the ayet piu got right in there and fought the good fight. It smelled foul and tasted worse, but it got the job done.

I was working on my second glass of the stuff when Katya sat next to me and told me to take my shirt off. She clucked with concern when she saw my shoulder, and I could see why. It was already turning an interesting color. Her fingers probed the sore spots, and she didn’t have to press hard to make me cry out.

“How did you do this, Evan?”

“I was getting out of a car.”

“You said you fell.”

“It was more of a dive,” I said. “I went through the window.”

“Were you cut? Was it a bad accident?”

“It was the side window,” I said, “and it was open.” And I added a few words of explanation, without getting around to the question of why I’d thought it a good thing to leave a car in such an unorthodox fashion.

“But it’s just a bruise,” I said. “It’ll look bad tomorrow and worse the next day, but then it’ll start getting better.”

“I envy you,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because in two days you will start getting better. Days and weeks and months pass, and it never gets better for me.”

“What’s the matter, Katya?”

“What is the matter? I am in Rangoon.”

“I guess you’re not thrilled to be here.”

“I hate it,” she said.

“Why do you stay?”

“I stay because I can’t leave. To leave one needs papers. A passport, a visa to enter another country. One needs money for a ticket. I have none of these things. Christ, I had to beg you for five dollars for a bottle of bad whiskey.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’m starting to like it.”

“Well, I am not starting to like Rangoon. Or this – this castle I live in.” She extended a hand. “Look at it. I brought you upstairs because it is nicer than your room. But your room was just to sleep in. I live here, day after day after day. Look!”

“How long have you been here, Katya?”

“Forever.”

“That long,” I said.

“I do not even know how long,” she said. “I would have to count the months. What does it matter, Evan? You don’t want to hear my story, do you?”

“Why not?”

“It is not so interesting,” she said. “And my English is not so good, I am thinking.”

“Your English is just fine,” I said. “But what’s the easiest language for you to tell it in?”

“I suppose Russian. But it is not so good Russian, I am thinking. I have never been to Russia, so how do I know if it is good?”

In Russian I said, “Why don’t you tell me your story, Katya?”

Her eyes widened. “You speak Russian?”

“A little bit.”

“It would be good to talk a little in Russian,” she said. I suppose her Russian was accented, but I could follow her well enough. “If you are bored,” she said, “just close your eyes and go to sleep. I will tell myself you are deeply concentrating.”

“I won’t be bored,” I said. “And I won’t drift off. I won’t even close my eyes.”

She could have been reading the Rangoon phone book, if they had one, and it wouldn’t have put me to sleep. Because nothing does. But I can’t imagine how anyone could have dozed off listening to her story.

Her paternal grandfather was a Russian nobleman who led a brigade of Cossacks against the Bolsheviks in the fighting that followed the 1917 revolution. When the Red victory was inevitable, he escaped through Siberia into China, eventually reaching Nanking, where he met and married a Chinese girl, the daughter of a minor war lord.

A son born of that marriage fought with Chiang Kaishek, first against the Japanese, then less successfully against Mao’s forces. When the Nationalist army withdrew to Taiwan, he went in the other direction and wound up in French Indochina. He joined up with the French, and he was with them when Ho Chi Minh’s men defeated them at Dien Bien Phu.

“My family,” she said, “is never on the winning side. It is a great failing of ours.”

When the French surrendered, her Russian-Chinese father slipped out of the country in the company of a much younger woman, herself the illegitimate offspring of a liaison between a French merchant and a Vietnamese actress. The two wound up in Vientiane, in Laos, where they opened a restaurant and nightclub. It flourished, but then the political climate changed and they had to leave the country. They were in Thailand, among other places, and had wound up in Sri Lanka sometime in the early 1960s. They were there in 1964, when Katya was born.

“So now you know how old I am,” she said.

Katya’s childhood in Sri Lanka was a pleasant one. They lived in a large house in the hills overlooking Columbo, with a whole retinue of Tamil servants. Katya had a Russian nanny, herself the granddaughter of an exiled countess, and grew up speaking the language. She went to a school run by French-speaking nuns, and was fluent in that language as well, along with Sinhalese.

Then there was a change of political fortune. Her father, who had thus far led a charmed if ill-starred life, had run out of luck. He was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, tried, convicted, and executed. All of the family holdings were confiscated, and Katya and her mother, accompanied by the servants, fled to the Indian mainland. There her mother formed an alliance with a Portuguese expatriate who had been the deputy governor-general of Goa until India took over the Portuguese colony.

The story got hazy at that point – or I did, or Katya did. The ayet piu may have had something to do with the haze. I was beginning to like it, but she had a true thirst for the stuff, and was doing a good job of killing the bottle.

“Evan,” she said. “In Russian that is Ivan. I could call you Vanya.”

“You could,” I agreed.

“Kiss me, Vanya.”

I suppose she must have tasted of ayet piu, which is a hell of a thing to say about a person. But you couldn’t prove it by me. I had enough of the stuff on my own breath to keep me from detecting it on hers. I took her in my arms and kissed her, and felt the soft womanly warmth of her against me. I felt a stirring, and wondered if it might not be a good time to end the Noble Experiment of celibacy. She was drunk, and to have it off with a woman in such a condition was ethically questionable. In Victorian times they called it gallantry, in my own youth it was considered caddish if expedient, and nowadays a lot of people labeled it rape. I didn’t think Katya would call it that, I think it was what she had in mind when she brought me to her room, but I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

“My little Vanya,” she said, and smiled lazily. And then she solved my ethical dilemma by passing out.

That did make it easier. I might have been able to rationalize the seduction of a drunken Katya, but an unconscious Katya was something else entirely.

There was a little of the clear liquid left in the bottle, and I left it in case she needed it first thing in the morning. I unbuttoned her blouse and took it off, untied her longyi and eased it down over her hips. I’d read somewhere that men were as naked under their longyis as Scotsmen are under their kilts, but that source had had nothing to say about female undergarments or the absence thereof. I could now state authoritatively that Russian-Chinese-French-Vietnamese women residing in Rangoon didn’t let anything come between them and their long skirts.

She lay on her back, her blond hair spread on the pillow, and I drank in the sight of her. I kissed her gently on the mouth, and what worked with Sleeping Beauty had no discernible effect upon Katya. She didn’t move a muscle.

I drew the sheet over her and covered her to the throat. I switched off the little lamp – the overhead light was already off – and, not without reluctance, let myself out of her room.

I left her door unlocked. Halfway down the stairs it occurred to me that I could have tried locking it with my key. There was a good chance that most of the keys at the Char Win fit most of the locks. But if that was so, why bother locking the door in the first place?

I’d left my own door unlocked again, I saw, although I could have sworn I’d taken a moment to lock up before I went up to Katya’s room. But when I gave the knob a turn and the door a push it opened inward. Maybe the key had turned without engaging the tumbler. Something wasn’t working right, either the lock or my memory, but I couldn’t see that it mattered.

I slipped inside and reached for the light switch. And stopped when I saw that there was somebody sleeping in my bed.

Classy hotel, I thought. It was a variation on an old Henny Youngman joke – you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when you get back there’s another guest in your room.

How had it happened? Well, maybe they put him in Room 9 and he held the key upside down. Maybe the clerk, on his rounds, checked my room and found it empty and thought he could fit in an extra off-the-books rental. Maybe Katya, with a nod and a wink, had told him during her ayet piu run that I’d be upstairs in her room.

Didn’t matter. He was there, and the bed was far too narrow for two people, even if they loved each other. The night was almost over – there had been a lot of rich detail in Katya’s story, and the hours had flown during the telling of it. It was almost dawn, and time for me to get busy doing… well, whatever I was going to be doing. I could leave now, or, if I wanted to wait another hour or two, I could go back upstairs and perch on a chair in Katya’s room.

I opened the door to let myself out. Then I remembered the backpack. I’d put it on the chair, but Katya had moved it so that she could sit down. And there it was, on the floor where she’d placed it.

So I slipped inside again and went over to get the pack. And that brought me close enough to the bed so that, with only what little light filtered in through the window, I could have a look at the someone who’d been sleeping in my bed.

It wasn’t Goldilocks. This sleeper’s hair was dark. All except the patch of white at the temple.

Spurgeon! Harry Spurgeon, asleep in my bed!

Well, not exactly. Staring hard at him, I realized he didn’t seem to be breathing. I leaned in, listening, and still couldn’t hear anything. I reached out a hand and touched him. His forehead was still warm – it takes a while for a body to lose heat, especially in the tropics – but I could tell I was touching a dead man.

He was lying on his stomach, the side of his face pressed to the pillow. I rolled him over to get a look at his face and found I was wrong on a second count as well. Not only wasn’t he sleeping, but he also wasn’t Harry Spurgeon.

I got my little flashlight from my Kangaroo and made sure. He wasn’t Spurgeon, and he didn’t even come close. This man was Asian, for openers, and he was shorter and slimmer and darker than the hearty fellow who’d picked me up at the airport. In fact, the only similarity between the two men was the white hair at the temple.

And that was a fake. A close look with the help of the flashlight showed the hair had been bleached, with the effect heightened by the application of what looked like white shoe polish.

Who was this faux Spurgeon? And what was he doing here? And how had he died?

The last question was the easiest to answer. Whoever had stuck the knife in him had left it there, wedged between his ribs. The wound must have been instantly fatal, as there was hardly any blood.

I patted him down, looking for ID. His pockets were empty except for a single well-worn forty-five-kyat note. Something made me roll him over again, onto his face, and when I ran my hands over him I felt a bulge in the small of his back. I tugged his shirt free from his pants – he was wearing dark Western trousers, this Spurgeon imitator – and found an oilskin packet fastened to his skin with plastic-coated tape.

I ripped it free, stuffed it into my own pocket. And heard a car draw up somewhere outside, brakes squealing. And more noise in the pre-dawn stillness – men shouting, their boots slapping on wooden stairs, their voices loud and angry in the lobby.

Time to get the hell out.

I heard them on the stairs and beat them to the door, turning the key and sliding the brass bolt across as well. While they hammered at the door I rushed to the window, flung it all the way open, and tossed my backpack out. More hammering at the door, and they were fiddling with the lock, trying to get a key in while the key I’d left there blocked the way. In a minute or two they’d lose patience, I knew, and they’d kick the door in, and that would be about as difficult as shoving in the side of a cardboard box.

I sat on the windowsill, my legs outside. I got turned around so that I could get a grip on the sill and lower myself partway before letting go. My shoulder ached, and when my hands were supporting my body weight, the ache in my shoulder became something more than an ache. It felt as though my arm was being yanked out of its socket.

Could I just stay there? Maybe they’d confine their search to the room, maybe it wouldn’t occur to them to look out the window-

Yeah, right. I heard them hammering at the door – more forcefully, it seemed to me – and I took a deep breath and let go.