Tanner On Ice

Chapter 24

“I thought you were dead,” the Chief said. “There were these stories out of Burma. Great work, setting off a bomb at one of their sacred sites. Nothing quite gets a headline like blowing up the Holiest of Holies, eh?”

I’d been back for less than a week when the call came, and we were meeting in a bare-to-the-crumbling-walls apartment on the top floor of a tenement in Alphabet City. The building was abandoned, and I could see why. Squatters had nested in some of the other apartments, but only the Chief had wanted to climb five flights of stairs to this one.

How he finds these meeting places, or why he thinks they’re suitable, is just one of the mysteries that hover about him.

“But then they arrested you and hanged you,” he went on, “and I found that disturbing in the extreme. That’s not like Tanner, I told myself. It’s never happened before.”

“Once is generally plenty,” I said.

“And the irony of it,” he said. “Here I’d just got you back after having lost you for what, twenty-five years?”

“Something like that.”

He put his fingertips together, looking almost as though he were praying, which I somehow knew he was not. “One sends men out,” he said, “knowing that there’s a chance one will not see them again. Of all the burdens of command, that is by far the heaviest. Yet in this instance I had no real concern that you might be lost. I felt confident that you’d execute your assignment and return in good time, and in all likelihood net yourself a tidy profit in the bargain.”

Some tidy profit, I thought. I’d lost everything I brought with me, including my flashlight and my Swiss Army knife, and I’d still be stuck in Bangkok but for Katya’s ruby ring.

“The shock,” he said, “when I learned you were dead. But of course, that was your doing, wasn’t it? Covering your tracks by having someone else carry your name to the scaffold.”

“This Rufus Crombie,” I said. “Your… what? Employer?”

“Patron, you might say.”

“How sure are you of him?”

He gave me a long look. “Why?” he said at length.

“I didn’t arrange the bombing at Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It’s about the last thing I would have done. Well, the second last, actually. The last thing would be harming Aung San Suu Kyi.”

“That woman.”

“Yes.”

“But your assignment-”

“Was to destabilize the SLORC regime,” I said, “and that would have been the worst way to do it. And bombing Shwe Dagon runs a close second. They framed me for it, and if they’d had the chance, they’d have hanged me for it. As it was, they did the next best thing. They hanged an Australian kid and said he was me.” I drew a breath. “It was a setup from the jump. That’s what I was there for. To be framed. And caught. And hanged.”

He was sitting up straight now, a frown creasing his brow. All the years seemed to drop away, and he was his old self again, the man I’d known back when the Cold War was red hot. Of course he hadn’t been all that sharp back then, but it was still comforting to see him as I remembered him.

“Report,” he said.

When I’d finished he went to the window and spent a few minutes staring out. Then he said, “It’s all very confusing.”

“Yes.”

“And unsettling as well. Disturbing, even.”

“That too.”

“You were set up, as you said. You also seem to have been protected. Someone arranged your escape from jail, for example.”

“Unless I was supposed to be recaptured. But you’re right, I had a guardian angel hovering around somewhere. The warning I got at Shwe Dagon was well sent.”

“And someone killed the man who planted heroin in your luggage.”

“But how did that work? I think that was all part of the frame, the heroin and the dead body, so that I could be charged with drug trafficking and murder at the same time. Who was the dead man in my bed at the guest house? And why had they chalked his temples so he would look like Harry Spurgeon?”

“Harry Spurgeon,” the Chief said. “He’s everywhere in this, isn’t he?”

“But what’s his job? Was he pulling my chestnuts out of the fire or poking them in deeper? I think he must have tipped off the cops that I was holed up in the Strand. If he knew the phones were out, he’d have been able to figure out that I could only have called from within the Strand. Then a simple inquiry at the front desk would have told him what room I was in. But who was he working for? Crombie?”

He sighed. “I’m not sure of Mr. Crombie,” he said. “At first I found his idealism quite plausible. His wealth is literally beyond measurement. The desire for profit could hardly continue to motivate him. Having so much, how could he want more?”

“They always want more,” I said.

“That’s what I failed to grasp, my boy. That’s how they get that rich in the first place. By never being satisfied with what they have. By always wanting more. Oh, I’ll give Crombie the benefit of the doubt. I think he was sincere enough at the beginning, wanting to do some good in the world. But how could he avoid wanting to do himself some good at the same time?”

“And in Burma?”

“Trade concessions,” he said. “Development rights. The Chinese have the inside track, and a main competitor of Crombie is hooked in tight with the Singapore Chinese. And Crombie’s hand in glove with a consortium of Dutch and Belgians out of Jakarta.”

He went into more detail than I needed to hear. Crombie, he felt sure, had not sent me to Burma in the hope that I’d fail, purposely sabotaging my mission in the bargain. But the Singapore faction could have had a spy in his organization, and Harry Spurgeon was very likely their man on the scene.

“They want SLORC in power,” he said, “and hanging an American and tying him to Jakarta would help reinforce their position enormously. Crombie can’t really hope to get SLORC out of there, but anything that loosens their hold helps pressure them into opening up the country to other interests, not just handing it to the Chinks. Well, there are all sorts of ramifications, aren’t there?”

We discussed some of them in some detail. Then he said, “I’ll tell you this much, Tanner. Mr. Crombie is well pleased with your efforts.”

“He is?”

“He likes results,” he said, “and you’ve produced some, or at least it looks that way. There seems to be a full-blown insurrection in the Shan state, and some of the other hill tribes are said to be joining in. Now you and I know it for sheer coincidence, but if Rufus Crombie thinks otherwise, why don’t we let ourselves take the credit?”

“Why not?”

“SLORC put a lot of effort into making peace with the ethnic minorities. The last thing they wanted was for the Shan and the other hill dwellers to make common cause with that woman and her pro-democracy faction, but that’s what seems to be happening. And SLORC is making concessions on reforms. They’ve restored journalists’ access to that woman, and she’s giving interviews left and right. And they’ve allowed other trade interests to come in and compete with the fellows from Singapore.”

“So it all worked out,” I said.

“And there ought to be a bonus for you,” he said, “seeing as you’re alive after all, and came out of the affair empty-handed. I’ll see that you get it, Tanner. And I suppose you’ll need a new passport as well.”

“The one I have is Irish,” I said, “and I’m afraid it’s not authentic.”

“You might as well have a fraudulent American one to go with it. I’ve found an absolute wizard who can fabricate passports that pass the scanner. Build a better mousetrap, eh?”

“While he’s at it,” I said, “how is he on whipping up phony green cards?”

“Child’s play for him, I should think. But what on earth do you need with a green card?”

“It’s not for me,” I said.

“My Vanya,” Katya said, the green card in hand. “Now I am legal? I can stay in this country?”

“You’re as close to legal as you can get,” I told her. “The government didn’t issue that particular green card, but it’s every bit as good as the real one. No INS agent could find anything wrong with it.”

“Katarina Romanoff. That is a good name, yes?”

“It should guarantee you a good table in any restaurant in Brighton Beach.”

And that was where she lived now, in the Russian neighborhood at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. She’d stayed on 107th Street at first, but neither she nor Minna was entirely at ease with the arrangement, and after a week it was clear to all of us that she needed a place of her own. When I took her to Brighton Beach for dinner and a walk around the neighborhood, she felt instantly at home.

Our own romance had been very much a creature of circumstance, fueled by shwe le maw and malaria, and we were both ready for her to take a small apartment in a good Russian neighborhood and make a life for herself. Lately she’d been keeping company with a Russian Jewish gangster who was, she assured me, very proud of her heritage. That her forebears had very likely launched pogroms against his forebears evidently didn’t distress him.

Minna was relieved when Katya moved out, and so was I, truth to tell. It was good to have the apartment to ourselves again. I got busy with my correspondence, catching up via letters and faxes and e-mail with some very good people all over the world. I got to work studying Burmese in earnest, and the Shan language too, while I was at it. I didn’t expect to go back to Burma, but I hadn’t expected to go there the first time, either, and if I did return I’d be prepared.

I relaxed, I settled in. I got a job writing a thesis – on Prince Kropotkin, coincidentally enough, and it infuriated me that I couldn’t remember the confidences he’d shared with me while I writhed in the throes of malaria.

Speaking of malaria, I found a doctor who thought he could knock it out permanently. So far I haven’t had any more attacks, but it’s too early to say whether or not the cure is permanent. Maybe it will hang on, making its unholy presence known every once in a while.

Like Harry Spurgeon.

“Hello?”

“Evan Tanner,” a voice said. “Can you believe it? I heard you were dead.”

“But it turned out I was only sleeping.”

“So it would appear, yes. You never did come to tea that afternoon, old boy. I waited and waited.”

“I hope you ate all the sticky buns.”

He laughed. The connection was clear as a bell, but that didn’t mean he was down the block. He could be anyplace with decent phone service, so all that ruled out was Burma.

“I just wanted to pay my respects,” he said, “and to say I’m just as glad it wasn’t your neck that got stretched by a Burmese rope.”

“Just as glad, are you?”

“Indeed. You’re a worthy adversary, Tanner. If that indeed is what we were this time around. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Do you want to know something? I have the certain feeling that we’ll meet again. Have you ever had that sort of feeling about someone?”

“Once or twice.”

“I have it now. Perhaps we will be on the same side next time around. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? You and I, working together.”

“Interesting.”

“Or we might come up against one another, and that would be interesting, too. In another way, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s all I have to say, Tanner. That and to wish you good luck.”

I looked over at the shelf above the fireplace, where the three ivory figures stood in Oriental – sorry, Asian – splendor. Good Luck, Good Health, and Long Life.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’ll be seeing you, Tanner.”

“Yes,” I said. “You probably will.”