No, of course I wasn’t going to kill her.
In the first place, it’s not the sort of thing I do. I’m a long ways from nonviolent, although I like the idea of nonviolence. But I’m certainly not an assassin.
Assassination, according to Bobby Kennedy, never solves anything. Well, I’m not too sure about that. You could argue rather forcefully that assassination had solved Bobby Kennedy. And, just as I’ve wondered how history might have been different if the Kennedys had not been gunned down, so I’ve wondered what difference a well-placed bullet or bomb might have made with Hitler or Stalin as the target. It was a little late in the game by the time Von Stauffenberg and his pals tried to take out the Führer, but suppose someone had nailed the son of a bitch in, say, 1930, or ’35 or ’40. Would we have been spared Auschwitz? Might we have avoided the Second World War altogether?
Recently, in the course of catching up with current events, I’d read about the Gulf War and wondered why nobody had thought to knock off Saddam Hussein. Surely it had to be more cost-effective than sending a whole army halfway around the world, and more humane than bombing hospitals in Baghdad, or burying enemy infantry battalions in the sand. And, if it was simply too difficult to pull off in the beginning, why not do it at the end, when the Iraqi army was reeling? Just drop in an airborne unit with instructions to find him and string him up. Down the line you could always attribute the action to dissident Iraqis. There had to be a few of those around, and if you just kept quiet about the whole thing, some of them would very likely jump up and claim the credit anyway.
I wouldn’t call myself a big proponent of assassination. I think it’s tactically unsound most of the time, and I didn’t need the bald-headed guys in the red robes to tell me it was bad karma. But it still has the same thing going for it as capital punishment – i.e., it’s a good bet that particular son of a bitch won’t give you any more trouble. Right or wrong, humane or barbaric, it’s unquestionably final.
That didn’t mean I favored knocking off some of the good guys as a way to achieve their goals. That might make sense if the end justified the means, but it doesn’t. And even if you thought it did, what kind of ninny would want to assassinate Aung San Suu Kyi, who, according to everybody in the world but the SLORC generals, was a sort of cross between Mother Courage and Mother Theresa?
No, I don’t think so.
So what was I doing in Burma? Why, feeling that way, had I caught the noon balloon to Rangoon?
I could say I’d always loved to travel, and I’d had a yen to see Burma since I read the Kipling poem. (As a boy, I was especially fond of that couplet that goes “On the road to Mandalay / Where the flying fishes play.” For some reason I always pictured them playing gin rummy.) I could say, too, that I’d been spending too much time around the house lately and I was long overdue for a change of scene.
All true, and all beside the point. I’d accepted the assignment because, the way I looked at it, I didn’t have any choice.
If I didn’t go, they’d send someone else.
I never knew how many men worked for the Chief when he was working for the government, and I couldn’t guess how many had followed him into private service, or whom he might have recruited recently. But I damn well knew I wasn’t the only arrow in his quiver. After all, he’d managed without me for twenty-five years, and if I didn’t want to go to Burma, someone else would.
And my replacement would very likely get the job done.
Because it didn’t strike me as all that hard to do. SLORC’s flunkeys were keeping people away from Suu Kyi, and they said it was for her own protection, but I don’t think they really expected anyone to believe it. They wanted to keep her away from her supporters, and from the journalists and TV cameras. While they were busy trying to attract tourists, they didn’t need clips of her on the evening news, holding court on her front porch and telling the world not to visit lovely Myanmar after all. Now that they were opening up to foreign trade and investment, the last thing they wanted was Suu Kyi, Nobel laureate and darling of the media, calling for economic sanctions against her homeland. If they couldn’t muzzle her, they just might have to kill her themselves.
Isolating the woman, albeit in the guise of protecting her, was a far cry from providing her with any real protection. They might block off her street, but I couldn’t believe it would be all that hard to slip around the barriers, or to get access by going over rooftops or through backyards. SLORC might not want her dead – if they really wanted her dead, she’d already be dead – but neither did they think there was any real threat. Since they were her only enemy, where was the danger?
My assignment was to kill her. And my own personal mission was to accept my assignment and fail to carry it out. That was child’s play – any fool could spend a couple of weeks visiting pagodas and releasing birds and slurping noodle soup – but if I did it right I could make it clear to the Chief and his mysterious billionaire that I had given it my best shot, that it was a practical impossibility, and that perhaps there might be a better way to achieve one’s ends in Burma. Because otherwise I’d just be postponing the inevitable, and they’d send someone else later on to do what I’d been unable to do.
The only problem was that I didn’t know how I was going to pull this off. Especially in light of the warning on the bottom of the bird cage.
Leave Burma or die.
Terrific.
It was dark by the time we left the noodle shop. I hadn’t seen any other Westerners in the place, but neither had any of the other patrons registered much surprise at seeing me there. The Burmese, I could see, were an unfailingly polite lot. An-ah-deh was consistent with the whole feel of the country. They didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.
I paid the check, as I’d taken it for granted I would do, and I was surprised to discover that Ku Min had assumed we would split it. With all the beer we’d had, it still came to less than ten dollars for the two of us, so you couldn’t call it a grand gesture on my part. But it reinforced a decision Ku Min had already made: I was a genuine good fellow, and the closest thing to a brother Shan.
“You must come to my country,” he said, as we stood outside the little restaurant. “You know what I mean when I say my country?”
“The Shan state,” I said.
“The independent Shan state,” he said.
“Of course.”
He swayed, and grabbed a lamp post to steady himself. We had swallowed beer from all over the world, and it was not without effect, on his body as well as his spirit. “You are my friend, Evan. You are my brother.”
“The Shan must be free,” I said.
“Yes!”
“Free of SLORC,” I said, and I spat, and he cried out with delight and spat himself.
Maybe he wasn’t the only one feeling the beer.
He had invited me earlier to accompany him to a boxing match – he hadn’t known the word for it, nor had I understood when he said it in Burmese, so he’d mimed it, throwing punches at the air. I’d turned him down then, and I did so now when he repeated the offer. I could imagine what boxing was like in this gentle Buddhist land. No doubt some physical equivalent of an-ah-deh applied, and you took pains to avoid striking a blow that would cause your opponent to lose face. The end result was probably more like ballet than boxing, with the winner the one who had not actually struck his opponent, but whose blows had missed their mark in the more artful manner.
“Evan,” he said, his eyes moist in the light of the street lamp. “Evan, my Shan brother, how I find you again?”
“Our paths will cross,” I said. And we embraced, and he went one way and I went the other.
GET OUT OF BURMA OR YOU DIE
I stood beneath another street lamp on another street and read the note again, not that there was much chance I’d forget what it said. But maybe there was a clue for me in the words themselves or the way they were written.
Printed, that is. In block capital letters that looked clumsy to me, or awkward. As if the author of the note were unaccustomed to the Latin alphabet? Or as if he had deliberately used his left hand (or his right hand, if he chanced to be left-handed) to disguise his handwriting. People did that in ransom notes, I seemed to recall, and in the messages they shoved across the counter at bank tellers, PUT ALL THE MONEY IN THE SACK, that sort of thing. I couldn’t see how any of that fit the present circumstances, and decided not to try reading too much into the seven words in front of me. The message itself was plain enough. I didn’t have to go rooting around looking for subtext.
But had the note been meant for me? Young Master Shit, the bird salesman, had been recruited for the occasion, and who was to say that all Westerners didn’t look alike to him? Maybe he’d given the bird to the wrong person.
No, I decided, that wouldn’t stand up at all. The envelope, which was just too bird-limed to hang onto, had had my name on it, in the same spidery letters as the note it contained. I had been instructed to be in a certain place at a certain time, and a few minutes after the appointed hour a kid gave me an envelope with my name on it. No matter how much beer I’d had since and irrespective of its country of origin, I couldn’t sell myself on a case of mistaken identity. TANNER EVAN was what it said on the envelope, and, last I looked, that was me.
NO comma between TANNER and EVAN. That suggested an Asian hand had printed those letters. An American would have written EVAN TANNER. A European might have put the last name first – a Viennese, I thought, would have made it HERR DOKTOR EVAN TANNER – but there would have been a comma if the Tanner had preceded the Evan.
But how did I know that there wasn’t? I’d have had to scrape away a lot of birdshit to find out. It hadn’t seemed worth it at the time, and it didn’t seem worth it now, not that I still had the option.
My friends in Burma, the contacts of my contacts in Thailand and Singapore, were the source of the rendezvous at four-thirty in Shwe Dagon Pagoda. There was no getting around it. The people I was looking to for assistance had responded with threats. Nothing veiled about it, either. No an-ah-deh type niceties. Get out or get killed – just that and nothing more.
Unless…
Wait a minute. Was it a threat or a warning? It made just as much sense either way. Suppose my friends had learned that the other side was on to me, and that I was likely to be killed if I hung around. They’d want to warn me, but they might be afraid to make direct contact with me, for fear that SLORC had me under observation. That would explain the whole business with the boy and the bird cage.
Sure, that made sense. If they wanted to intimidate me, why send a boy and a bird to do a man’s job? It wouldn’t even take a note. Just a couple of dangerous-looking men (assuming a man in a skirt could look dangerous) telling me to get out of town if I knew what was good for me.
So it was a warning, not a threat. Unless, of course, the Burmese preferred gentle threats, with no loss of face on either side…
It was hard to say for sure, hard to tell a threat from a warning. And it was even harder to figure out what to do next.
For starters, I kept moving.
I walked a lot, for the exercise and to walk off the beer, and to transform an acquaintance with maps and guidebooks into a real feel for the city. I didn’t want to stray too far from central Rangoon, but I could stay within the immediate area and still wear out a lot of shoe leather.
And I paused from time to time – to buy a few kyats’ worth of tamarind candies from a vendor, to snack on fried vegetable rolls at a hole-in-the-wall around the corner from the National Museum, to duck into a teahouse and sip a pot of tea while two men at the next table puffed on cheroots and played a passionate game of dominoes, slapping the tiles down with a vengeance.
In the swank bar of the Traders Hotel I had a whisky and soda and spoke French with a wine salesman from Nice. He had been all over Southeast Asia and disliked it all, but he especially disliked Burma. “If you think that this city is disgusting,” he said, “and believe me, I do – well, Mandalay is far worse. The sanitation is primitive, the cuisine is lamentable, and the women are neither skilled nor attractive. Have you noticed the pale circles on their cheeks? They paint them on to make themselves beautiful. They look like clowns in the circus.”
He was glad of my company because I spoke French, and he was starved for conversation in his own language. He got plenty of it in Laos and Vietnam, but lately he’d been in Singapore and Bangkok and Jakarta, where he’d had to speak English. “Everywhere English,” he lamented. “What a stupidity. If there must be a single language spoken throughout the world, certainly it ought to be French.”
“The language of Voltaire,” I said. “Of Racine, of Corneille, of Molière. The tongue of Victor Hugo, of De Maupassant, of Proust and Sartre and Camus.”
“Ah, my friend,” he said. “You are an American. And yet you understand.”
“Mais certainement,” I said.
When I left the Traders Hotel, I got disoriented for a moment. (Or disasiaed, I suppose, to be politically correct.) I turned left when I meant to turn right, and walked half a block before I realized it. Whereupon I turned around and headed back where I’d come from.
And realized I was being followed.
I don’t know why it took me so long. I haven’t had a great deal of experience at following or being followed, and it’s not something I have on my mind much. But I should have this time around, especially after the threat or warning, whichever it was, that I’d received that afternoon at Shwe Dagon. There were people who knew I was in Rangoon, and some if not all of them were not happy about it, so it was a good time for me to grow eyes in the back of my head.
The only eyes I had faced forward, and I hadn’t done a great job of using them. I’d probably been followed all day, and the first intimation I had of it was when I spun around abruptly on Sule Pagoda Road and, half a block away, somebody darted into the shadows of a doorway.
You’ll go to ground, the Chief had said, and it seemed to me I should have done that right off. Even if I wouldn’t be sleeping in it, I needed a place to hole up, a room where I could shuck off my backpack and unsnap my Kangaroo and kick off my shoes and relax. But first I had to make sure no one knew where my refuge was, and that meant giving the slip to the man in the doorway and any little helpers he might have brought along.
It would be easier, I thought, to dispose of a tail in a city I knew. It’s a cinch in New York, with so many public buildings with multiple exits. And there’s the subway – you can hop on and off, and if you time it right your shadow has to ride forlornly on to the next stop. Ditch him on the train at Columbus Circle, say, and he’s stuck until the train gets to 125th Street, just over three miles away.
In the present instance, however, I didn’t know the city at all, and the man or men on my tail presumably did. So I would have to be clever, and for starters I couldn’t let my pursuer know that I knew I was being pursued. I had to lose him without looking like I was trying.
That meant walking on at a leisurely pace and not looking back to catch a quick glimpse of him. It’s not as easy as it sounds, though, especially when you don’t know who the bastard is or what he’s got in mind. It’s one thing if he’s just a snoop, trailing relentlessly after you, content to keep his distance. It’s something else if he’s stalking you, waiting for the opportune moment to close the distance between you and slip a knife between your ribs.
And the latter was a real prospect, if not an appealing one. I had been threatened or warned that I would be killed if I didn’t leave Burma. And I hadn’t left Burma. And here I was, walking down a darkened street in an unfamiliar city, with someone tagging along in my wake.
I pressed on for a block or two, turned left, walked another block, turned right. I was on a main street now, with empty taxis trolling for fares. I hailed one, jumped into the front seat beside the driver, who looked quite startled.
“Take me somewhere east of Suez,” I said, “where the best is like the worst.”
He looked straight ahead, avoiding my eyes entirely. I wasn’t looking at him much, either, after a quick glance. I was too busy looking out the back window.
“Just drive around,” I said, and handed him a two-hundred-kyat note. “I want to see Rangoon.”
I had to spell it out, but he got the idea, and by the time he pulled away from the curb, my shadow was in a cab of his own and ready to resume pursuit. That was good. I wanted to lose him, but I didn’t want it to look as though that was what I was doing.
And I wanted to get a look at him.
The poor cab driver thought I wanted a sightseeing tour, and pointed out this pagoda and that public building, all in an accent that would have been hard to make out if I cared to try. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to shut up.
Then he said, “That guy following us.”
How had he noticed? The son of a bitch had been tracking me for hours before I got a clue.
“Like in the movies,” he said with satisfaction. His English was much better now that he had Hollywood films on his mind. “Cocksucker. You want, I lose him.”
First, I explained, I needed to know who he was. He thought that one over and hatched a plan. I rolled my window all the way down, held my backpack on my lap. He picked out the place where we would make our move, a narrow and poorly lit alley off a street that wasn’t much to begin with. We were a hundred yards or so into the alley when another car turned in after us and immediately cut its headlights.
“Stupid,” he said. “He think we not see him. But now he don’t see us.” He hit the brake. “Now!” he said. “Go!”
And I went, tossing my backpack out the window, thrusting myself feet first after it. The car was moving again before I hit the ground, and from a hundred yards back it must have looked as though he’d feathered the brake pedal to avoid running over a cat, or to dodge a pothole. My door never opened and the dome light never went on, and he’d picked a nice dark place to do it. I had a reasonably soft landing on a patch of bare earth, and I stayed down and rolled deeper into the shadows.
I wasn’t sure where my backpack had wound up, but I could wait to find out. Right now I wanted to make the most of my chance to spot my shadow. He’d be in the backseat, and he’d probably be leaning forward, his attention concentrated on the car in front of him. It would be a great opportunity for me to get a look at him, except for the very factor that had made it easy for me to give him the slip.
Namely the lack of light. A dark alley was the perfect setting for Act One of our little melodrama, but Act Two ought to be taking place on a main thoroughfare, with dozens of bright lights blazing.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen. In the dark I wouldn’t get much of a look at him. The best I could hope to do was tell if he was a local or a Westerner, and I wasn’t by any means sure I could do that. That was one flaw in the plan. Another was that sooner or later he’d catch up with my cab and see that I wasn’t in it, and he’d know I found some cute way to get away from him, and I’d hoped to keep him from realizing I was on to him.
And the third flaw was that I’d landed on my right shoulder, and I could tell it was going to hurt worse than root canal in a couple of hours.
All this takes longer to tell than it took to happen. Because I crouched there in the dark, waiting, and the pursuit vehicle made its deliberate way through the alley. It seemed to stop for an instant when it was right in front of me, but I think that was just my perception of the moment, as if it were a stopframe, frozen in time.
The guy in the backseat was facing forward, one hand on the back of the seat in front of him. His face was in profile, but the cab’s interior was too dark for me to make out facial features, and far too dark to provide a hint of his skin color. All I saw, really, was a dark face and an even darker head of hair.
And a blaze of white at the temple.