Tanner On Ice

Chapter 11

One of the things that had struck me during my months of catching up with the news of the world was an experiment the city of Chicago had tried a few years ago. Someone had determined that street-level drug dealers made a lot of their arrangements via public telephones. So the city ordered the removal of all pay phones in drug-infested areas.

That struck me as something like draining Lake Michigan because mosquitoes breed in it. And of course it didn’t inconvenience the dealers for longer than it took them to run out and get cellular phones. But it certainly made it a lot more difficult for the rest of the public to place a call.

I wondered if the same keen civic intelligence was at work in Rangoon. If there was a phone booth anywhere in town, I couldn’t find it. New York has pay phones at almost every corner. Three-quarters of them don’t work and the rest have people lined up waiting to use them, but at least they’re there.

And I wanted to make a phone call. I knew one man in Rangoon, and I even knew where he was staying. He was all mixed up in whatever it was that I was mixed up in, and I’d been followed earlier by someone who was either him or his double, and I knew he had a double because that’s who I’d just found in my bed, deader than your average New York pay phone. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to Harry Spurgeon, but I couldn’t think of a better place to start.

The one-story drop hadn’t done any further damage to my shoulder, though it certainly didn’t do my ankle any good. I landed on both feet and managed to stay upright, and I grabbed my backpack and got my arms through the straps. The pack felt a little heavier than I remembered it, but I figured that was me. I was probably a little weaker than I’d been at the beginning of the evening.

I limped a little leaving the alley behind the guest house. I figured there might be some cops out front – I could only assume those were cops hammering on my door, and didn’t want to hang around to test the hypothesis. Nor did I want to meet any of their fellows, so I worked my way through backyards instead and wound up on a different street. And decided I ought to call Spurgeon, and went looking for a phone.

I don’t know what I could have done if I’d found one. The small change in Burma, all the way down to a single kyat, was in the form of paper money, and you couldn’t stuff it in a telephone. Maybe they had tokens, or plastic phone cards. Then again, what did they need them for if they didn’t have phones?

Of course I could just turn up at the Strand and ask for him at the desk. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. I didn’t know what his agenda was or how I fit into it, but he damn well had one. I wanted to talk to him, but from a distance.

I bought some sticky rice and a couple of steamed buns from a vendor. He didn’t have any English and my Burmese didn’t include the word for telephone, so I asked my question by pantomime, holding an invisible receiver to my ear and making dialing motions.

“Hotay,” he said.

That meant hotel, and I tried the first one I came to. The clerk was Chinese – from Singapore, I guessed – and his English was fine. Yes, he said, they had a telephone available to the public. There was only one problem. It wasn’t working.

“Phone system very bad in Myanmar,” he explained. “Almost never possible to call through to Mandalay. Other towns, forget it.”

“I wanted to call someone in Rangoon.”

He picked up the phone behind the desk, checked it a couple of times, shook his head. “Not possible now,” he said. “Maybe they fix it in an hour, maybe a few days.”

“If I tried another hotel-”

“Be same story. Is the whole system, not just hotel.” Whereupon the phone rang, and he picked it up, rattled off a conversation in Chinese too rapidly for me to follow, and hung up. “A guest,” he said. “Hotel system works fine. You want to talk to someone staying here, no problem. Anybody else, forget it.”

“I tried to call,” I told the young woman at Strand ’s registration desk. “From Delhi yesterday, and then from the airport just now. But I couldn’t get through.”

“It is a problem,” she said.

“So I don’t have a reservation. I hope you have room for me. I’ll be staying three nights, possibly longer.”

She had a nice room on the fifth floor, she told me, and gave me a card to fill out. I signed in as Gordon Edmonds and made up a street address in Toronto and a Canadian passport number. My luggage would be along later, I explained. It had missed one of the connecting flights, but I’d been assured the bags would catch up with me here in Yangon, and that the airlines would deliver it to the hotel.

She asked to see my passport, and a credit card. I patted the money belt beneath my clothes and explained I couldn’t get at either very easily but that I’d bring them to the desk as soon as I’d had a chance to wash up. She decided that would be fine.

I rode up alone in the elevator. It was a beautiful hotel, and I could see why Spurgeon was partial to it. I’d have been happy to stay there myself, but for the fact that a hotel room is largely wasted on a man who doesn’t sleep.

I’d only come here now because I wanted to use the phone.

And that was the first thing I did.

“Mr. Spurgeon,” I said, and spelled the name. After a long moment the phone rang, and after two and a half rings he picked it up.

“Mr. Spurgeon,” I said again.

“This is Harry Spurgeon.”

“And this is Evan Tanner,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but we shared a taxi from the airport.”

“Of course I remember you, Tanner. I hope you’re enjoying Rangoon.”

“As much as possible,” I said.

“And you got to Shwe Dagon Pagoda all right?”

“I did.”

“And took your shoes off, I trust.”

“Yes, and put them back on again once I got out of there.”

“Wound up with the same ones you started with, did you?”

“I think so, yes.”

“That’s good,” he said. “One wouldn’t care to be walking around in another man’s shoes.”

“One wouldn’t,” I agreed.

“And you found a place to stay? Something modest but not too modest, I hope.”

“The first place I tried was a little too bare-bones for me,”

I said. “It turned out to be less private than I would have liked.”

“I daresay that was unpleasant.”

“It was,” I said, “so I moved to someplace a little more upscale.”

“A good idea, I’d say. What’s the name of it? I always want hotels to recommend to associates.”

“I’m in it right now,” I said, “and I’m damned if I can remember the name of it. It’s three or four one-syllable words strung together, and it sounds like a dish you’d order in a Chinese restaurant. Wan hung lo? Hu flung dung? I don’t know, something like that.”

He chuckled. “But you’re comfortable there,” he said. “That’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed.

“And I’m glad you thought to call me.”

“I’ve been trying for hours,” I said. “I gather there’s been a problem with the phones.”

“Ah, well,” he said. “ Burma, you know.”

“I thought perhaps we could meet.”

“Talk things over.”

“Yes.”

“See where we stand.”

“Exactly.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Should we meet at your hotel, do you think?”

“I don’t even know the name of it.”

“I suppose you could always find out and ring back.”

“Of course I might not get through if I ring back,” I said. “ Burma, you know.”

“Quite. Would you want to come here?”

“The Strand, do you mean?”

“It’s better than trying to meet at a pagoda,” he said.

“At least we can wear shoes.”

“We can. I’d tell you to pop by right away, but I’m afraid I have an appointment. Do you want to come for lunch?”

“That would be fine.”

“Hang on,” he said. “I’ve a better idea. They do an English tea here better than you could get at home. Better than I could get at home, I should say. I’ve no idea what you could get at home.”

“Any number of things,” I said, “but not much in the way of a proper English tea.”

“Four o’clock, then,” he said. “Just say you’ve come for tea. They’ll show you where to go. Until then, Tanner.”

I can’t say my mouth started watering at the thought of a proper English tea, with watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off and similar dubious delicacies. But the Strand also boasted a proper American bathroom, and as soon as I got off the phone with Spurgeon I went and drew myself a proper American bath.

I wasn’t sure whether I was going to stay put until tea time. That was the safest and simplest way. I could hang out in air-conditioned comfort, letting room service keep hunger at bay, and slipping downstairs when four o’clock rolled around.

But would the sweet young thing at the desk let me stay that long without showing her a passport and a credit card? I had both, but they were in my name, and not the one I’d signed at registration. I could come up with cash in lieu of a credit card, but how could I get around showing her Gordon Edmonds’s Canadian passport?

I lowered myself into the deep claw-footed tub and decided I could jump off that bridge when I came to it. The hot water was just what my shoulder needed, and wouldn’t do my sore ankle any harm, either. And, in combination with soap, it was just the ticket for the rest of me, or at least for the outside surface thereof.

I’d have gladly stayed in that tub until it was time to dry off and meet Spurgeon for tea, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I soaked for as long as I dared, hopped out, toweled dry, and had a quick shave. I looked a lot less grubby, and God knows I felt a lot less grubby. Insomnia, all things considered, doesn’t save the traveler as much money as it might. Even though you don’t need a bed to sleep in, you still have to have a place to wash up.

I got my backpack from the chair where I’d left it and dumped it out on the bed, picking out clean clothes to wear. Clean undershorts, clean socks, a clean shirt, clean khakis – I was going to be clean from head to toe, and God knew when I’d be able to make that claim again, since the chance I’d be able to wash anything out between now and my return home struck me as remote.

Well, what better venue for cleanliness than tea at the Strand?

I laid out what I was going to wear and put everything else back in my pack. Then I’d get dressed, and then-

Hello!

What had we here? It was a parcel about the size and shape of a brick, although it didn’t seem as heavy as a brick. It weighed, at a guess, a pound or two. I hefted it in my hand and decided it was closer to two pounds than one.

Maybe just a little more than that, I decided.

Maybe 2.2 pounds, say. One kilogram, if you’re feeling metric.

All wrapped in foil and neatly sealed with tape.

Now where had this come from? I certainly hadn’t brought it with me from New York. It was the sort of thing I’d remember packing.

And it certainly hadn’t been in my pack when I cleared Customs the previous morning at Yangon Airport. It was the sort of thing the inspector would have noticed, and I had a feeling he’d have made a fuss about it.

From then on the pack had stayed on my back, the zipper zipped shut. Until I set it down on a chair at the Char Win, where it stayed until Katya shifted it to the floor. And that’s where I found it when I returned to my room. It had company – the dead man with the Spurgeonesque whitened temples – but it appeared undisturbed.

Yet, when I picked it up, it had seemed heavier. And well it might, I thought, having grown in weight to the tune of a kilo.

A kilo of what? Well, I didn’t know. But I could all too easily guess.

I stood there, stark naked, and decided I would have to do something about the foil-wrapped brick-shaped kilo of something or other. But I wasn’t sure what to do, and whatever it was could probably wait until I had clothes on.

I put down the package and picked up a pair of undershorts. And someone picked that moment to commence shouting my name and pounding on the door.

Not my name, actually.

Gordon Edmonds’s name.

Well, that was something.

“Just a minute!” I shouted, and ran to the door and made sure the chain bolt was on. “Give me a second! Be right with you!”

“Mr. Edmonds, open the door!”

“Right-o,” I cried, wondering if that was something Canadians said, wondering why I thought it mattered. “Just out of the tub!” I added. “Be with you in a jiffy!”

I’d dived out a car window and dropped from a first-floor guest-house window, but this time, damn it to hell, I’d taken a room on the fifth floor. Was there, by some lucky fluke, a fire escape? Or a ledge wide enough to cling to?

No and no.

“Please open door right now!”

“Yes!” I sang out. “Right now! Wish you’d let me get decent, but I daresay you’re in a bit of a rush, and I wouldn’t want to throw your timetable out of kilter. Know how annoying that sort of thing can be.”

They had the door unlocked and were just about to hit it hard enough to smash the chain bolt when I reached it, unhooked the chain, and drew the door open. I had my clean khakis on, although I hadn’t managed to run the belt through the belt loops. Nor had I put a shirt on.

And I was barefoot. If we were going to visit a pagoda, I was dressed for it.

“Come in,” I said. “Come right in, make yourself comfortable. Sorry I’m not properly dressed, but I sensed that you were in a bit of a hurry. Now then, what seems to be the trouble?”