The Burma Effect (11 page)

Mai spoke again in Thai to her brother and to the watchman, and then came over to give Delaney a light kiss on the cheek. Her brother's face darkened.

“Thank you for coming to help me, Frank,” Mai said. “We will find Nathan, right?” “Yes, Mai,” Delaney said.

“Thank you, Frank.” She walked over to the Mazda with her brother. Delaney shook the watchman's hand.

“I'm coming back tomorrow,” Delaney said. “To see Mai again.”

“OK,” the watchman said. “Daytime is better.”

Ben said something in Thai to the watchman, who said nothing in response.

“Let's go,” Delaney said.

He walked to Ben's car and got in the back. “The girl's brother is not a happy guy, Frank,” Ben said. “He doesn't like farangs.”

“So I'm told. Didn't like Nathan very much at all, I'm told.”

“So? He doesn't like any Western guys.”

“So Nathan's disappeared.”

“No way, Frank,” Ben said. “No way. That's not how it works. These guys are not stupid people. Guys like him. They don't like the farangs who sleep with their sisters but the whole family gets something. Directly or indirectly. Always.They would not break that.”

“You sure about that, Ben?”

“Sure,” Ben said.

Delaney was not convinced.

They headed back to the Royal. Delaney filled Ben in, trusting him totally and relying on his insights into regional politics, business, social relations. Then Ben waited in the lobby with his newspaper while Delaney went upstairs. Despite his post-flight nap, Delaney was feeling the effects of the long trip from London.

He checked emails on his laptop computer. Another one from Rawson that simply said:
What you got? JR.
Frank emailed back, saying:
On the ground in BKK and on the case.
Rawson was not usually so inquisitive so early. Something important was going on, something potentially important. Another message from the Jung Society, express ing disappointment that, again, Delaney had failed to deliver his promised paper. No message from Kate. But one from Harden.

Dear FD. Would have appreciated a bit more of a discussion with you before you headed out this time. Call me ASAP. Need to talk column, assignments, logistics, chains of command. Thanks and regards, Harden. (Editor-in-Chief).

That Harden had bothered to remind Delaney of his position and title was a worrying sign. Delaney looked at his watch, calculated that Harden would still be at his desk and decided to wait before calling. Best to hit voicemail for something like this. He would make the call later. The opinion page editor had been at work and Harden would need soothing.

Delaney called Mordecai Cohen's mobile phone. The photographer answered immediately. It sounded like he was on a construction site. “Cohen,” he shouted over the din.

“Mordecai, it's Frank Delaney. Where the hell are you?”

“I'm in a tuk-tuk on Khao San Road. It's fucking hot and noisy. You in town?”

“Yeah,” Delaney said. “Not far from Khao San. At the Royal.”

“I figured you'd be through eventually. Kellner's still AWOL.”

“I know. I saw Mai today.”

“Drinks? Too noisy for me to talk anyway,” Cohen said. “When?”

“Half hour, more or less. Depends on traffic and this tuk-tuk. It's an antique. Say an hour. At the press club.”

“Not here?”

“Nah. I hate the fucking Royal.”

“OK,” Delaney said.

Delaney realized that he was very hungry. He hadn't eaten since breakfast on the plane. He went downstairs and ordered some
pad thai
in the bar and more beers for himself and Ben and they talked over what Delaney had gathered so far.

Ben thought, after hearing what Delaney told him, that Kellner had gone into Burma on some secret assignment. A lot of Western reporters tried periodically to go in, usually on tourist visas, but the regime was tough on the foreign media and turned most reporters back. Those who got in without official approval risked arrest and, if discovered, at best a short stay in Rangoon's Insein Prison and a fast deportation back to Bangkok. Such reporters would usually be barred for life from entering Burma again.

Kellner, however, was an old hand. If he had gone into Burma without a journalist's visa he would probably have gone in by road, with plenty of U.S. dollars for bribes.Through Mae Sot on the Thai side into Myawadi on the Burmese side. Then by very bad road anywhere else in the country until he got caught. Or so Ben thought.

“Why would he not tell Mai where he was going?” Delaney asked.

“He didn't want to worry his woman,” Ben said.

“He always worried any woman he has ever been with. That was no big deal for him.” “Maybe he's softening up,” Ben said.

Delaney was not convinced. He saw the Burma connections firming up but saw also that with a man like Kellner, those connections could go wrong outside Burma as easily as inside. It could also be any number of other connections gone bad, other stories and other deals gone bad. Delaney wanted to pump Mordecai for information and knew that the press club would be the place to do it. It risked, however, being a very long night.

Ben dropped Delaney off in the crowded parking lot of the Dusit Thani hotel.The press club, improbably, was located at the very top of the high-rise, a deal made years before with the hotel management. The club drew in many reporters, of course, but also hangers-on, VIP speakers, diplomats, girlfriends, wives, spies. A mutually advantageous arrangement for the hotel and the press club executive board.

Delaney insisted that Ben go home. He would be drinking with Mordecai and his crowd for hours and Ben had young children. Delaney remembered once having had the rare privilege of going to Ben's modest little home on the outskirts of Bangkok. He had watched as Ben's boy, about 10, and his daughter, maybe 12, had raced across a dusty field to leap at their father and hug and kiss him as if he were the best and most important man in the world.The children, and his wife, were intensely proud of Ben, of his profession, his friends from around the world, and of his lovingly maintained little car.

Delaney always tried to prevent Ben from staying out too late, especially if it was just to wait outside some drinking establishment of dubious reputation. They always had the same argument, but in the end Delaney always prevailed.

“Family, Ben. It's important,” Delaney said.

“Yes, grandfather,” Ben would say, smiling. “Yes, grandfather.” But Ben would always go home in the end, in such circumstances, except if there was real work left to do or if Delaney really needed help. Delaney, no family man, had other priorities. He wondered, as he watched Ben's car disappear into the humid Thai night, just what these had come to be. He needed someone to remind him.

W
hen Delaney emerged from the Royal Hotel the next day, he was in extremely ragged shape. Ben Yong just shook his head sadly and took Delaney's equipment bag from him.

“Was I not wise in advising you to avoid the press club last night, my friend?” Delaney said. He ordered a litre-and-a-half bottle of mineral water from the barman and a foil packet of aspirin that the bar staff always also kept in stock. Ben was drinking tea.

“Not so very wise, it looks like,” Ben said. “What time you finish?”

“It seems like a very few minutes ago, Ben,” Delaney said.

The night, as expected, had been a classic Asian press club night. Delaney had run into Cohen in the crowded lobby of the Dusit Thani. Cohen, as always, looked like he had just stepped off a helicopter in from a dirty, dangerous war zone. He wore the regulation combat green photographer's vest with many pockets, battered khaki pants and sturdy hiker's sandals. He did not, however, have a giant Nikon or Canon camera dangling from his neck, not so much because he was off duty but because he was rarely on duty and not a very good photographer at all.

Cohen, like some expats of a certain type in Asia and elsewhere, had energetically adopted the freelance news photographer lifestyle, dress and attitude without actually having paid his dues on the job. He got the occasional assignment from minor magazines, and sometimes played second or even third string to other more respected shooters, but it was common knowledge that he had neither the technical skill nor the experience to make it big.

In fact, word was that he very much preferred things that way. He used the photography to finance his rundown apartment, his dope smoking, his girlfriends and his painting. No one among the Bangkok expat crowd quite knew if Cohen was a better painter than he was a photographer. No one had seen his paintings and no one really seemed to care. Cohen was amusing to have around in a drinking session and he was a solid, reliable contact for soft drugs. Occasionally he produced a news picture that appeared somewhere in the world's media.

Cohen was arguing with the hotel's impeccably dressed night manager about where he had left his car. He had parked the filthy old Ford directly outside the glass entrance doors, under the hotel's sweeping awning. It was unmistakably his because it still had the letters
TV
applied in various places to the pocked window glass and the roof with heavy tape—
de rigueur
in battle zones, less so outside downtown five-star hotels. Cohen had not been anywhere vaguely resembling a battle zone for a very long time, but left the TV markings on his car as a badge of honour.

“Fuck it, man, that's where I always leave my car. I could be called out again at any moment,” Cohen was saying to the manager, pushing his long unruly hair back from his eyes. “I'm a press club member. I may need to get to my car in a hurry.” The hotel man was patient, polite, very Thai. “Please, you must remove this car. We have many guests arriving tonight. Tour buses also,” he said quietly.

“No way. I may need it at any time.” Cohen spotted Delaney and said to the manager: “Here is my colleague now, from the
Tribun
e. Frank, could you please explain to our friend here that you and I may at any moment be called to the frontline?” He grabbed Delaney's hand and shook it furiously. Obviously stoned, well on his way to being drunk as well.

The manager gave Delaney a slow wai. “Gentlemen, please, that car cannot remain there tonight.”

“Mordecai, just move the car, OK?” Delaney said. “It's bad for property values.”

Cohen hesitated, then fished his keys out of a vest pocket and handed them to the hotel man.

“OK, fine, OK,” he said. “But tell your valet we may need this vehicle at any time. Urgent business.”

The manager took the keys and handed them to a uniformed doorman, who looked decidedly unhappy about having to get into such a disreputable vehicle with fresh clothes on. Cohen pulled Delaney toward the elevators.

“Cocktails,” Cohen said. “On the
Tribune
,I would imagine.”

Delaney had spent a lot of time that night greeting reporters and cameramen he had known from previous assignments or other newsrooms. The press club, and its crowd of regulars, never changed. The focus was, of course, the bar. People tended to crowd around it rather than sit at any one of the 20 or so small tables they could have used at any given moment. The tables in the press club were almost always empty while the bar stools and bar area teemed with people. An adjacent small dining room was where people usually sat if they felt they had to or if they wanted to eat instead of simply drink.

“No idea where Kellner's gone, no idea,” Cohen said much later, after he and Delaney had gone through the social niceties, if they can be called that in a bar where journalists congregate. “He just, like, disappeared.”

Cohen had been useless all evening, in his customary haze and never clear at the best of times about what Kellner might have been working on at any given moment.

“What were you guys up to lately?” Delaney asked again.

“Us guys? Kellner, you mean,” Cohen said through a mouthful of beer nuts.

“You were often working on stuff together, no?”

“Nah, not much anymore,” Cohen said. “When I first came over maybe, the odd picture for his mag, the odd thing together upcountry around Chiang Mai when I first came over. Not now.”

“Surely you've got some idea what he's doing, where he's gone.”

“Honest to God, Frank, I've got no clue. The guy was supposed to come over here a few weeks back, to do another version of his wonderfully boring do-gooder speech about safety training for corros in war zones. He never showed up. That's it.”

“Have you pissed anyone off lately?” Delaney asked.

“What, me personally?”

“You guys. You two. You ran together.”

“Not so much anymore.”

“Dope?”

“Ah, minor stuff, man. We did the odd minor deal together, nothing heavy. He fronted me a bit of cash for deals sometimes, but it was small stuff, very small stuff. Recreational use, a little on the side for friends. Thirdand fourth-hand deals. Westernerto-Westerner stuff. Nothing.” “You burn anyone lately?”

“Frank, come on, we're talking small stuff here. Friends and family. No rip-offs.The generals are the big players in Thailand. We're nobodies.”

“What about Burma?”

“What do you mean? Dope?”

“No. Was Kellner going in on a job?”

“I don't know, Frank. Maybe. He liked that Suu Kyi broad, I know that. The lady. He liked what she was doing over there.”

“Did he have an interview set up?”

“She's under house arrest, Frank. She's not talking to the press. You know that.”

“Mai says some guys were at their place, asking whether Kellner was going to Burma, whether he had been in.”

“Aha,” Cohen said. “The plot thickens.”

“Mordecai, you really don't seem to be taking this seriously,” Delaney said. “Kellner's been out of the game for more than a month. You don't seem to give a shit.”

“He'll turn up. I'm sure he'll turn up here any day now. He's off on some adventure somewhere. What's your angle anyway? You guys weren't such close pals. What you doing over here looking for him anyway?”

Delaney found himself getting more and more exasperated. He knew he was battling through Cohen's deepening late-night trance, but had expected more information, more concern
.
Delaney didn't answer. He ordered more beer. Cohen was going to be dead end. That night, in any case.

More journalists had rolled in to the club. Delaney's information gathering ceased.

Ross Laverton was there, holding court. In Delaney's view, one of the most insufferable specimens that Canadian journalism had ever produced.

A weekly newsmagazine man, under no particular pressure to produce, and under no particular pressure to produce anything other than matchers for breaks in the newspapers. Laverton had been in Bangkok for too long. It showed in his sallow complexion, his rumpled tropical weight suit and expanding beer gut.

“My round,” he shouted to no one in particular. This news did not stop the intense buzz of conversation.

“Delaney,” Laverton shouted. “Surely you must allow me to buy you a glass of beer. And Cohen, come on. Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Delaney and Laverton had been at odds, if not enemies, ever since they had started out together on the
Tribune
a lifetime ago. Laverton had seen Delaney as a competitor. Delaney had never seen Laverton as anything more than a modestly talented middle-class boy from Montreal's western suburbs.

Beers were purchased; pleasantries, near-pleasantries exchanged.

“I read your column regularly, Frank, of course,” Laverton said eventually. “A new beat for you, really, isn't it. Political trends.” “Not really, Ross,” Delaney said.

“Well, I mean, the analytical side of things,” Laverton said.

“Don't use words of more than two or three syllables maximum with this dickhead,” Cohen said drunkenly. “Delaney gets confused easily. But he thanks you for the beer. Right, Frankie?”

“No really, I mean, it is quite a departure for you, isn't it Frank? A weekly column? No?”

“I was actually quite used to filing every day, Ross,” Delaney said, not yet drunk enough to be offended, not sober enough to completely let things go.“I find the weekly rhythm very easy to take, actually. Quite relaxing.”

“Touché,” shouted Cohen. “Touché, you weekly fucking magazine scumbag. Still your round, Ross.”

More rounds of drinks were bought, many more rounds, by a series of other reporters, hangers-on and knaves. More stories were exchanged; more complaints about the media game were aired. Ferocious little arguments started and stopped. Colleagues and competitors were slandered or praised. Plates of Thai food were consumed very late. Then, for Delaney, a jumbled impression of the gently spinning hotel lobby; handshakes, embraces, exchanges of business cards, exchanges of notes. Backslapping, handshakes, cars.

Then a freezing air-conditioned taxi ride back to the Royal, a long slow fumbling for keys, and a cool pillow rushing up to meet Delaney's face. He woke, in his clothes, to the warble of the room telephone. Ben Yong was waiting for him downstairs.

Ben dropped him off at the end of Kellner's soi. Delaney told him he would call if he needed a ride toward the end of the day. The watchman was neither friendly nor unfriendly. He offered Delaney a brief wai and then went back to reading a newspaper on his wooden bed. He didn't go down the corridor first to announce Delaney's arrival as he had done the day before.

Mai didn't look good when Delaney pushed open the screen door. She had been crying again, it appeared. She was feeding goldfish in a small tank. She looked very tired.

“Mordecai Cohen was no help last night, Mai,” Delaney said.

“He would know where Nathan is, Frank. If anybody would know,” Mai said sadly. Neither of them had much more to say for the moment.

The key thing now was Kellner's study. Delaney went in right away. Mai watched TV in the living room, kept company by cats.

The first thing that struck Delaney was the pictures. Ten or more, pinned up on the big bulletin board over Kellner's old wooden desk. Aung San Suu Kyi in a variety of poses, at various stages of her career. The biggest one, a reprint of an Associated Press news picture, showed Suu Kyi standing on a platform behind the fence of her house in Rangoon, addressing party supporters and democracy campaigners. Hard-looking Burmese soldiers looking on uneasily. The fence was decorated with images of dancing peacocks, symbols of the student democracy movement and of Suu Kyi's party, the New League for Democracy, the NLD.

The picture was dated November 2000, about six months ago—and a few months after Suu Kyi had been placed under house arrest for the second time by the military regime. She had been free, or relatively free, for about five years before that. She'd been under house arrest for the first time in the late eighties, Delaney recalled, until about 1995.

Other pictures showed Suu Kyi looking very attractive in other settings, in wide Burmese woven hats with flowers in her hair or at the nape of her neck. A charismatic, Oxford-educated beauty, whose fate it was to return to Burma to visit in 1988, just as the democracy movement was taking flight and as the generals panicked and cracked down. Now the leader of the strongest pro-democracy political grouping in the country and a thorn in the side of the regime. She had an open invitation from the generals to leave Burma, but she did not leave, even when her husband was dying back in England, saying she feared she would never be allowed back in to her home country again.

Under the pictures, Kellner—Delaney had to assume it was Kellner—had pinned slogans and quotations, written by hand on pages from a reporter's notebook.