Tanner On Ice

Chapter 12

There were four of them, all men, all dressed in smart khaki uniforms, the trousers sharply creased, the shoes polished. Two held automatic weapons and looked as though it was all they could do to keep from pointing them at me and letting off a burst. The other two were officers, with no weapons in their hands but holstered pistols on their hips. One was the little master of an-ah-deh who’d steered me away from Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. The other, with an extra chevron on his sleeve, looked to be in command.

“Your papers,” he said.

“My papers.”

“Your passport.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Didn’t I leave it with the girl at the desk downstairs?”

“She say not.”

“Well, I suppose she’s always been truthful in the past. Oh, right,” I said, digging it out of my Kangaroo. “Here we are.”

The man in charge let his segundo take the passport from me and inspect it before passing it on. Then he had a look at it himself, and then he had a look at me.

“Evan Tanner,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You gave other name downstairs.”

“Well, yes,” I admitted.

“ Edmonds.”

“Yes, Gordon Edmonds.”

“Canadian.”

“Yes, that’s what I wrote.”

“Put passport number. Different number from this.”

“Yes,” I said. “I can explain.”

They looked at me.

“You see,” I said, “I didn’t want my competitor to know what I was up to. I’m a businessman, and one of my rivals has a representative in Rangoon, and I didn’t want him to know where I was staying.”

“So you use false name.”

“That’s right.”

“Who is Edmonds?”

“No one, really.”

“You just make him up.”

“Yes. Silly of me, I suppose. I thought I’d be a Canadian, you see, and I tried to think of a Canadian name, and all I could think of was Gordon Lightfoot. The singer?”

They didn’t seem to have heard of him.

“Well, he had a big hit with a song called ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ About a ship that sank in Lake Superior some years ago. Gordon and Edmund, you see. Gordon Edmonds. I don’t suppose it sounds particularly Canadian, but-”

“You are here on business.”

“Yes.”

“It says tourism on your visa.”

“Yes, well-”

“What business you in?”

“I’m an importer.”

“What you import?”

“Coffee, mostly. You see-”

“No coffee in Myanmar.”

“But that’s just it,” I said. “You don’t grow any coffee here, and I’m sure there are hillsides in this country that would be perfect for coffee plantations.”

I nattered on in this vein, making it up as I went along, and it began to sound pretty good to me. Why not grow coffee in the mountainous regions? There were areas of the Shan state, for example, that ought to provide an ideal climate for its cultivation. It might not have the dollar-per-acre return of opium, but it could still prove profitable, and caffeine was a more socially acceptable drug than heroin, and-

“I think you have something beside coffee,” said the man in charge. He pointed at my backpack, still reposing on the bed, and let off a burst of Burmese too rapid for me to make out. One of the men opened my pack, and the Number Two officer began to go through my things.

“You are drug trafficker,” said my interrogator. “Yes?”

“No.”

“You come to Myanmar, buy drugs, sell drugs. Destroy moral fiber.”

“Never,” I said. “I’m all for fiber. I know how important it is.”

“You got drugs in pack.”

“They searched my belongings at the airport when I got here,” I said. “They didn’t find anything.”

“This time,” he said confidently. “This time we find.”

But they didn’t, and it didn’t make him happy. There were some more rapid-fire exchanges with his subordinates, and you didn’t need to know the language to realize he was pissed off – at them, at me, and at the stars in their courses.

He barked a command, and they pulled drawers out of dressers, ran their hands over the bare closet shelves, crawled around looking under the furniture. And they came up empty.

Well, Burma, I thought. What could you expect from the Third World? His American counterpart would have come well prepared, with some contraband of his own to discover if he couldn’t find any of mine. But this crew was so sure they’d find that foil-wrapped brick in my knapsack that they didn’t have a Plan B.

“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” I said reasonably, “but it doesn’t look as though you’re going to find it. Why don’t you tell me what it is and perhaps we can look for it together?”

“Shut up,” he said.

I opened my mouth, considered, and closed it.

“That. What is that?”

He was pointing at my waist. “It’s a Kangaroo,” I said. “A fanny pack, they call it, because if you turn it around” – I demonstrated – “it rides on your fanny. Of course, they don’t call it that in England because a fanny is something different over there. I don’t know what they call it in Canada.”

He held out a hand. Obediently I unclasped the Kangaroo and gave it to him. He opened it and shook out its contents onto the bed. No foil-wrapped brick, but how could there be? The brick was substantially larger than the exterior dimensions of the Kangaroo pouch.

“Now take off clothes.”

“Couldn’t you just pat me down?” I patted myself down to give him the idea. “Nothing here,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

“Take off clothes,” he said again, and one of his men aimed a gun at me.

I took off my clothes. My pants, really, because that was all I was wearing. And my undershorts. And, at his insistence, my money belt.

“American currency,” he noted.

“Well, yes. I suppose I’ll be sorry I didn’t take traveler’s checks, but-”

“Now you bend over.”

I braced myself, as one does for a routine prostate examination, and I wrestled with every man’s two great fears at such a time – that it will hurt, or, worse, that it will feel good. Neither came to pass. The procedure, let us say, was not overly invasive.

“Put on clothes.”

“With pleasure,” I said. I got into my shorts, then reached out a hand for my money belt. He just looked at me. “I guess that’s a no,” I said, and put on a shirt and trousers. I picked up my belt, and he took it away from me.

“It’s just a belt,” I said. “To keep my pants up.”

He put the end through the buckle, draped the noose he’d thus formed around his neck, and mimed hanging himself. “Not safe,” he said.

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “You can’t expect me to walk around without a belt.”

He looked at me.

“Oh,” I said.

He bent over the bed, sifted through the articles he’d shaken out of my Kangaroo. He opened the little flashlight, examined the batteries. He checked out my Swiss Army knife, as if contemplating a concealed-weapons charge. Then he picked up a foil-wrapped condom and thrust it at me.

“You are on sex tour,” he said. “Come to corrupt women of Myanmar.”

I didn’t even try to answer that one, and he threw the offending article back on the bed.

“You drug trafficker,” he said. “Yes?”

“No.”

“I think yes.”

An-ah-deh seemed to have gone by the boards, so I figured to hell with it. “I think you’re full of crap,” I said. “I don’t approve of drugs, let alone traffic in them. I hardly ever take aspirin for a headache, and I certainly don’t-”

“What’s this?”

“Lariam,” I said.

“Say again?”

“Lariam, just like it says on the wrapper. They’re malaria pills.”

“Malaria pills?”

“Well, anti-malaria pills, actually. You don’t get malaria from a pill. You get it from a mosquito.”

The Lariam tablets, like the condoms, were individually wrapped in foil packets. There were more of the Lariam, though. I had to take one a week while I was in Burma, and was to continue the regimen for four weeks after I got back home. They contained mefloquine, the prophylaxis of choice now that most strains of the disease were resistant to chloroquine. (If you build a better mousetrap, someone once told me, God will build a better mouse.) Lariam wouldn’t prevent infection, but it would kill the parasites once they got in your bloodstream, before they could be fruitful and multiply. And it would remain effective, I suppose, until evolution unfailingly produced a new strain of Lariam-resistant little buggers.

The man in charge tore open a packet, took out the pill it had contained. He touched the tip of his tongue to it.

“Bitter,” he announced.

“Well, of course it’s bitter,” I said. “They’re not after-dinner mints.”

“Very bitter,” he said accusingly.

“Very bitter indeed,” I agreed. “After all, they’re quinine.”

“Quinine?”

“A form of it.”

“I think heroin,” he said.

“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s very amusing. Heroin for malaria protection.”

“No need for quinine,” he said. “There is no malaria in Myanmar.”

“I know,” I said, “and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” He stared at me. “It’s a song,” I explained. “Little green apples? Roger Miller? Never mind.”

“Heroin,” he said authoritatively. “But we see. Send pills to laboratory, test them. See if they quinine or heroin.”

“Fine,” I said. “You take them, and let me know what you find. Meanwhile I’ll just continue to enjoy your beautiful city and-”

“You come,” he said. “You go to jail now.”

“Jail?”

“For little while,” he said, “until we get report from laboratory. If pills are what you say, then you will be deported from Myanmar and returned to your own country.”

“But why? For telling the truth?”

“For giving false information when registering at hotel. For claiming to be tourist on visa application and pursuing commercial interests.”

“Oh,” I said.

I waited until we were crossing the lobby to ask what would happen if the pills were heroin.

“Then you a drug trafficker,” he said. “And we hang you. Not with belt, though. We use rope.” And he said something in Burmese – a translation, I suppose. And everybody had a good laugh.