Tanner On Ice

Chapter 5

“By God. Tanner. All these years I thought you were dead. Part of the game, of course. You get a man, and he’s good, and you rely more and more heavily on him. And then one fine day you learn that he’s dead. You remember Dallman?”

He thought Dallman had recruited me, and in a sense I suppose he had, handing off some documents to me in a pub in Dublin just before some players on the other side caught up with him and took him out of the game, wiped him right off the board. The Chief and I had raised a few glasses to Dallman’s memory.

“The better a man is,” he said, “the more he dares, and the greater the risk that he’ll be killed. They tell me it’s the same with hang gliding. When you become expert, you can fly much higher. But if the wind changes suddenly, all your skills don’t help you a bit. And you have a longer way to fall.” He ran a pipe cleaner through the stem of his briar, took it out, sniffed inquiringly at it. “Or so they tell me,” he said. “I’ve steered clear of hang gliding myself.”

“So have I.”

“It’s probably wise,” he said. “We’re neither of us getting any younger, Tanner. Although I have to say you look the same.”

“So do you, sir.”

“Ha! Decent of you to say so, Tanner, but that’s an awful load of cod wallop and we both know it.”

It was codwallop, all right. He was an older man when I met him the first time, perhaps the same age as the calendar said I was now, and he hadn’t had the benefit of a few decades in a frost-free Frigidaire. He had to be ninety, or close to it, and he looked about a hundred, with wispy white hair and a time-ravaged face. His tan suit looked expensive, but he’d lost weight since he bought it and it hung loosely on him. His shoes were freshly polished but down at the heels. His striped tie had been inexpertly tied, with the rear part longer than the front. His collar was frayed, and there were food stains on his shirt front.

But his mind was still as sharp as ever. I wasn’t sure just how much of an endorsement that was, because I was never entirely certain how much the Chief had on the ball in the first place, but it was reassuring all the same to see that he hadn’t lost it. Truth to tell, I was glad enough just to know he was alive.

“Where were you, Tanner? What the hell happened to you?”

“I was frozen,” I said.

I hadn’t planned on telling him. So far I’d only told Minna, and she’d kept it to herself. The Chief was hardly a confidant of mine – my reports over the years were sketchy at best, and often highly imaginative. But the words came out of their own accord, and before I knew it I’d filled him in completely.

“So that’s how the Scandinavians deal with spies and secret agents,” he said. “They put them on ice. Well, it’s a cold climate, isn’t it? I suppose ice is abundant in their part of the world.”

“I was in New Jersey.”

“Yes, and they didn’t literally use ice either, I don’t suppose. Still, you take my meaning.” He made a clucking noise. “We’re a pair, Tanner. They put you on ice and they stuck me in mothballs.”

“Mothballs?”

“The mothballs are metaphorical, the same as the ice. They put me on the shelf, Tanner. Tied my hands. Took my box of toys away from me. Cashiered me, man. Relieved me of my duties.”

“The bastards,” I said.

“First it was age,” he said. “Some nonsense about mandatory retirement. But I had them there. My whole operation was always unofficial, you know. Off the books, deep in the shadows. How do you strike someone off the books when he’s never been on them?”

He took out a handkerchief, coughed into it, and examined the result. Evidently satisfied, he said, “But they kept cutting my appropriation. Slashed my budget. Reduced my staff. Still, I held on. My boys are like you, Tanner. No names, no pack drill. Make their own way, write their own tickets, employ and develop their own resources. And often as not turn a neat profit in the course of things, so they’re not greatly troubled if there’s no money coming their way from Washington.”

What enabled them to ease him out, he went on, was success.

“The fucking Russians,” he said with feeling. “Who ever expected the sons of bitches to quit on us? They were the enemy, along with the damned Chinese, and damned if they didn’t plain fall apart. The whole Evil Empire collapsed like a pack of cards. Maybe we played a small part in it, and maybe we were entitled to a little bit of the credit, although I wouldn’t care to sit on a hot stove waiting for it.

“Doesn’t matter. The Soviet Union is gone and the Red Army’s soldiers are begging for food on Moscow street corners, or enlisting in the Russian Mafia, or standing around with signs – ‘Will Work for Roubles.’ Will work even harder for hard currency, I shouldn’t wonder. Russia fell apart and China ’s become a bastion of State Capitalism. Still the same rotten lot running things, and still the same repressive government, the iron fist in the bamboo glove. We’ll go up against them someday, mark my words, but just now they’re our good friend and trading partner. So’s Vietnam, for God’s sake. Men who fought there are going back with tour groups, taking pictures, buying souvenirs. You believe that?”

“I believe everything.”

“You might as well,” he said, “because sooner or later everything comes true. Just a question of sitting it out. And that’s what I had to do when the idiots at the top decided there was no threat to our security anywhere in the world. Except for Cuba, and if the refugees didn’t own half of South Florida the government would have made peace with Castro ages ago. No threats, nothing but peace and love, so that was it for me. Out you go, old fellow, and be a good chap and don’t slam the door.” He sighed heavily. “What did I just say? About sitting it out? I sat and waited, and along came Rufus Crombie. Ever hear of him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No surprise there. He’s kept as low a profile in his area as we have in ours. Worth billions, but you won’t even find him on the Forbes list. Business interests all over the world. Rubber plantations in Malaysia. Copper mines in Shaba province in Zaire. Oil tankers sailing the seas. Microchips, textiles, superconductors – you name it, he’s got a finger in the pie. Unless he owns the whole pie outright. Been at it for years, Crombie has, and lately he’s pretty much turned over the management duties to his four sons. Not because he wants to slow down, but so that he can concentrate on what really matters to him.”

And what was that?

“He wants to do some good in the world,” he said. “Not by giving to charity. Doesn’t much believe in charity. Said as much to me the first time I met him. ‘Give a man a fish,’ he said, ‘and you feed him for a day. Teach that man to fish, and for the rest of his life you can sell him rods and reels and hooks and leaders and flies and lures and God only knows what else.’ I’d heard something like that before, but Crombie put a different spin on it. Shows you the kind of man he is.”

“I guess it does.”

“He wants to have an impact,” the Chief said. “Stir the stew. Make waves. Wants to work behind the scenes, naturally. Not for commercial gain, although if a trading advantage comes along he won’t turn his back on it. But that’s not the main objective. Hell, the man’s already got more money than God.” He coughed again, used his handkerchief. “Where we come in. His eyes and ears, don’t you know. Hands and feet as well, you might say. Stirring the stew for him. Pulling his chestnuts out of the fire. The metaphors are piling up, but you get the idea, don’t you?”

“The general idea.”

“Well, let me get more specific, then. Suit you, Tanner?”

“Of course.”

“ Burma,” he said. “How’s that for getting down to cases? What do you know about Burma, Tanner?”

“I know they don’t call it that anymore.”

“They call it Myanmar. Know what old Thoreau said about enterprises that require new clothes? Said to beware of them. Well, same goes for countries that feel the need to change their name. One thing when it’s a colony that’s gone independent. You can see why the Belgian Congo would want to call itself something else once it got rid of the Belgians. Still, most of those nations merit wary treatment. But when a country’s been on its own for years, and all of a sudden decides out of the blue that the old name’s not good enough anymore, that’s cause for alarm, isn’t it?”

“Anything the SLORC generals do is cause for alarm.”

“I see you know about SLORC. You’ve been catching up since you got out of Sweden.”

“ New Jersey, actually.”

“Well, six of one, eh? Point is you’ve been doing your homework. Nasty buggers, the chaps of SLORC. Between them and the bastards before them, they kept the country isolated from the rest of the world for thirty years. That’s even longer than you were on ice, isn’t it?”

“By five years or so.”

“Well, what’s five years in the mysterious East? ‘Better twenty years of Europe than a cycle in Cathay.’ I forget who said that but I suppose it must have been Kipling.”

“It was Tennyson, actually.”

“Same difference. Sweden, New Jersey. Kipling, Tennyson. Six of one.”

Maybe it wasn’t entirely accurate to say he hadn’t lost a step. Maybe he was missing a whole staircase.

“For years,” he said, “they wouldn’t let anybody in. Tourist visas were for a maximum of seven days, and you could only go to a couple of the big cities. They changed the names of the cities, too. I forget what they call Rangoon these days.”

“ Yangon.”

“That’s it. Tried to change Mandalay while they were at it, but they gave up and changed it back. If you’re lucky enough to have a city with a name like Mandalay, you’d have to be out of your mind to change it. Same goes for Rangoon, of course. I had a professor once, used to ask the class, ‘What time does the noon balloon leave for Rangoon?’ His version of ‘Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’ but it’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it? ‘What time does the noon balloon leave for Rangoon?’ Try that with Yangon and it won’t work at all.”

“Won’t get off the ground,” I said.

“Ha! Very good!” He cleared his throat, filled his glass from the water carafe. We were in a bare office on the seventh floor of a commercial building on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties, sitting in chairs on opposite sides of an old metal desk. He said, “The names are the least of it. The regime’s extremely repressive. Doesn’t trust intellectuals, and you’re considered an intellectual if you own more than three books, or write letters, or wear glasses. You run a risk of jail or a beating or worse. There have been massacres. They’re not the Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge, not by a long shot, but they’re a right bunch of bastards all the same. They’ve got statues all over the country to Aung San. He’s the lad who got them free of the British. First he joined the Japs to fight the Brits, then he saw what swine the Japs were and took his ten-thousand-man army to the other side. Fought for the Brits, and managed to get the country independent in 1948. So Aung San’s the national hero, and one of the first things SLORC did was put his daughter under house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi’s her name, and she-”

“Chee,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Aung San Soo Chee,” I said. “That’s how you pronounce it.”

“Then why spell it with a KY?”

“Well,” I said, “that’s Burma for you.”

“If you ask me,” he said, “they should have let the Brits go on running the show. At least you had people speaking English and spelling things the way they sound. Any rate, 1988’s when SLORC got in. They put Suu Kyi under house arrest and wouldn’t let her participate in the national elections, which they figured they were in a good position to steal. Well, she won anyway. With all their fiddling, they still got voted out of office.”

“But they stayed.”

“Of course they did. Threw out the election results and held onto the power. Kept the lady under house arrest while they were at it, and of course that got her the prize from your friends in New Jersey.”

“My friends in New Jersey?”

“Is that what I just said? Well, six of one. I meant Sweden, of course. Stockholm. Gave her the Nobel peace prize. Best way to get that is to be locked up by the government of a country nobody gives a shit about. You’d think they’d have given one to Salman Whatsit-”

“Rushdie.”

“-after he got the death threats from Whatsisname-”

“Khomeini.”

“-but do that and you piss off the entire Islamic world. Give it to the Burmese girl and all you piss off is SLORC, and who cares?”

“Not me,” I said recklessly.

“Or anybody else, either. So she’s still under house arrest, and they’ve stopped letting journalists see her, and God knows how many other enemies of the state are rotting in jails in Rangoon and Mandalay. Meanwhile, they’ve made peace with some of the ethnic minorities, but they’re still fighting with the Shan and the Kareni, and suppressing the others.”

“The hill tribes,” I said.

“They’ve got some exotic ones there,” he said. “Women with necks like a giraffe. Ripley wrote about them in Believe It or Not.”

“The Padaung,” I said. “They put copper rings around a young girl’s throat and keep adding more as she grows.”

“Until she winds up with a neck a foot long.”

“The neck isn’t actually lengthened,” I said. “The ribs and collarbone are pushed down. If you remove the rings, the woman can’t hold her head up.”

“Out of shame?”

“No, literally. The muscles haven’t developed. Remove the rings and her head flops over and she suffocates.”

“Women,” he said heavily. “Who can figure them?”

“Uh.”

“We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them, Tanner.” That last sentence came out as a dry croak, and he drank some water. “This past year,” he said, “SLORC decided to join the twentieth century while there’s still time. Started issuing longer visas, making a pitch for tourism. Let the Chinese come in and build hotels all over the country. Forced the minority tribes to pay a heavy labor tax, with each family sending a member to work on the roads. They’re getting good roads built, you have to give them that, but they’re not scoring high marks in human rights.”

“Are they getting tourists?”

“Not too many. Before they kept the reporters away from her, Suu Kyi was telling the world to stay away, that tourist dollars only helped SLORC. There’s another side to it, the argument that opening up Burma to the outside world is the best way to press for a change of government. As to who’s right, your guess is as good as mine. Mr. and Mrs. Tourist can stay home and read Kipling if they want. Far as I’m concerned, there’s only one person who has to catch the noon balloon to Rangoon.”

He didn’t have to tell me who that person was.

“Passport,” he said. “What kind of shape is yours in?”

It was rectangular, as I recalled, but that wasn’t what he meant. “It’s expired,” I said, “and that’s annoying, because it had a few years to go the last time I used it.”

“You haven’t renewed it?”

“I’ve been busy getting caught up,” I said. “And I didn’t know I’d be going anywhere.”

“I’m not sure it’s renewable at this point,” he said. “It’s probably too long out of date. You met young Cartwright, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, you will. He’ll have some forms for you to fill out, and he’ll get your photo taken. We’ll see to the passport and arrange a Burmese visa. That usually takes a while, but I still have strings I can pull. By the time you’ve had your shots and got started on your malaria pills, your papers should be in order. A few days, I’d say. A week at the outside. You’ll get word as to where and when.”

It was hard to know what shots I needed. A yellow-fever inoculation, for instance, is good for ten years, and I’d had one in 1969. That was either three or twenty-eight years ago, depending on how you counted. On the one hand, I couldn’t explain to a public health official in a third world nation that I’d spent all that time in cold storage. He’d want to see the right numbers on my health certificate. But how would my system handle one shot three subjective years after the last one?

I got the shots the book said I needed and let it go at that. I had two days of muscle aches and low-grade fever, but it wasn’t so bad. Truth to tell, I was too busy trying to learn Burmese to pay much attention to how I felt. It didn’t come easy. A language is always more difficult for me when it has its own alphabet, and the Burmese alphabet was particularly elusive, with all the letters looking pretty much the same. They were made up of circles, with or without tails, and a page of written Burmese had the look of a colony of bacteria seen under high-power magnification. The letters didn’t actually wiggle around the way germs would, but after a while they seemed to.

The spoken language was a little easier, but it gave me trouble, and I wasn’t sure how much point there was in the little time I had. As far as I could tell, most Burmese had at least some English. The British had run the place long enough for their tongue to have had lasting impact, and what the empire had failed to accomplish in that regard was now seen to by CNN and SkyNews. If Burma was opening up to tourism, that meant they were opening up to English. In recent years it had become the whole planet’s second language.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I’d always hated the whole idea of Esperanto, the simple tongue specifically created to tear down the language barriers between nations. As a man who spoke so many languages, I liked those barriers; they kept out other people while I slipped right past them. But the mother tongue of Chaucer and Shakespeare was a little different from the artificial creation of L. L. Zamenhof. I still disapproved on principle, but I couldn’t work up much in the way of righteous indignation.

I wasn’t sure how well English would serve me in the tribal areas. I read a dozen books on the country, and navigated the Internet to half a dozen web sites, most of them passionately anti-SLORC. Among the many intriguing facts I learned was that 350,000 of the Chin people lived in Burma, and that they spoke forty-four mutually unintelligible dialects. There were barely enough of them to make up a city the size of Albany, and the odds on being able to ask your next-door neighbor for a cup of shrimp paste were 43-to-1 against. When you butted up against a fact like that, it was hard to say it would be such a bad thing if they all learned English.

I had ten days to study Burma and its languages before the phone rang and Minna handed it to me and that same uninflected voice said, “Hotel Maxfield, Room 314, half past two.” A.m. or p.m., I wanted to ask, but he broke the connection before I could get the words out.

I’d never heard of the hotel, but I found it in the yellow pages. It didn’t even have a bold-face listing, and when I got to it, on Forty-eighth Street west of Broadway, I could see why.

The desk clerk eyed me suspiciously. I guess he wasn’t used to customers unaccompanied by young women in hot pants and halters. His face changed when I gave the room number, and he pointed me toward the staircase and told me unapologetically that the elevator wasn’t working.

The Chief was waiting for me. They’d had, he said, a little trouble with my passport. “It’s your face,” he said. “Dammit, you don’t look like you were born in 1933. We thought of doing some computer aging of your photo, but then it wouldn’t look like you, and where does that get us? Just look like you were using a stolen passport.”

“Couldn’t you get the passport and alter the date?”

“That would work fine for getting you into Burma,” he said, “but you might have problems reentering the States. The data on the passport wouldn’t jibe with what’s in the computer in Washington. That could set off an alarm or two.”

“I see.”

“Same problem if we took the easy way out and forged a passport for you. We’ve got good forgers, but they’ve got scanners that are even better. Makes it almost impossible to get into the United States with a forged passport.”

“Suppose it’s not a U.S. passport?”

“We thought of that. Give you a forged American passport for getting into Burma and a forged Belgian passport, say, for getting back to the States. Too risky, too much of a juggling act. Best thing was for you to have a legitimate United States passport, with the right photo and the wrong birth date. Same day and month, so it’s easy for you to remember, but 1958 instead of 1933.”

“But if it’s not a forgery and the date’s not altered-”

“We forged a birth certificate for you, and let the government issue a bona fide passport with an erroneous date.” He handed it over with a flourish. “Evan Michael Tanner, born 1958. Hang onto this, why don’t you? Be a nuisance to go through that again.”

I took the passport, flipped through it, winced a little at my photograph, found my visa for Burma.

“Tickets,” he said, with another flourish. “A bit roundabout, I’m afraid. You have to change planes twice, in Seoul and in Bangkok. Coming back, well, you may have to sneak out of Burma, so you probably won’t be able to use your return ticket out of Rangoon. But if you can get to Bangkok, there’s an open return to New York.”

I looked at the tickets. “Business class,” I said.

“We’re not working for Uncle Sam anymore, Tanner. And Rufus Crombie doesn’t make his boys sit in the back of the plane.” He passed me another envelope, a thick one. “Expense money,” he said. “Spend it freely and keep whatever’s left over.”

I was beginning to like the sound of this.

“You leave the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Not much advance warning, but the passport and visa took longer than planned. Sooner gone, sooner home, eh?”

“I suppose so,” I said. “There’s one thing, though.”

“Oh?”

“Either I wasn’t paying attention,” I said, “or you haven’t told me yet. But I’m not too clear on what I’m supposed to do once I get there.”

“Ah. Well, the first thing you’ll do is take a sounding. Put out some feelers, get the lay of the land. Then you’ll want to go to ground so you don’t have some SLORC lackeys following you around all the time.”

“And then?”

“Then you want to look for the best way to destabilize the government, don’t you? You’ve got the dissidents in the cities, and you’ve got the ethnic minorities in the outlying regions. From where I stand, Aung San Suu Kyi looks to be the key.”

“So should I make contact?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “What the boys in the Company would call ‘contact with extreme prejudice.’”

I looked at him.

“Kill her,” he said. “What better way to make the balloon go up?”

He got a faraway look in his eyes. “The noon balloon to Rangoon,” he said. “Sailing far overhead.”