The Burma Effect (9 page)

When he got back to the hotel, the message light was flashing. Winton had called, had left a mobile number. Delaney called him right after opening a miniature bottle of Johnnie Walker from the bar fridge and pouring it over ice.

“Winton here,” the editor said when he answered. He was in a noisy place, probably a bar, probably the Groucho Club, Delaney thought.

“It's Delaney,” he said. “You left a message.” He was still annoyed and impatient with Winton after their lunchtime conversation.

“Yes, quite,” Winton said. “Look Delaney, there's something I neglected to tell you this afternoon.”

For some reason, Delaney did not find this surprising.

“I had a word with the editor-in-chief, Rodgers, and he thinks we should tell you that we had a little visit recently from some officials at the Burma embassy here. They came in to the office. Saw Rodgers, then Rodgers and me together. Asked about Kellner's work.”

“Why didn't you tell me that this afternoon?” Delaney asked. His annoyance increasing.

“Wanted to get the OK from Rodgers, I suppose. Wasn't sure it was anything terribly significant,”

“You must be joking,” Delaney said.

“Seemed rather routine to me. I mentioned to you, I think, that the embassy had not been happy some while ago with a couple of things Kellner had written. They watch the media very very carefully. It was just a matter of a few lines, a way of describing the regime, the way they were handling the Aung San Suu Kyi issue. Nothing major.

“Why did they come in again? When was it?”

“About three weeks ago now.”

“Just after Kellner disappeared.”

“Quite.”

“What did they want?”

“They wanted to know if Kellner had been working on a piece about Burma. Whether he had filed anything on Burma recently. We very politely told them we couldn't help them. No comment. None of their business. That was our view.” “Had he filed anything?”

“No nothing at all. I don't think he was even working on anything about Burma before he disappeared.”

“You said this afternoon he assigned himself. How would you know what he was working on? You said you thought he might try to go in again soon.”

“I just didn't get the sense he was very far along on that project, Delaney,” Winton said. “Rodgers agrees with me on that. In any case, we told the Burmese nothing. We very politely showed them the door.”

“Is there anything else you have forgotten to tell me, Jeremy?” Delaney said.

“Look, Delaney, I'm afraid I don't like your tone. I didn't like it this afternoon at lunch either. We are trying to help you. We are under no obligation.”

“One of your people is missing in the field,” Delaney said.

“We are taking steps to find out what has happened to him. We have set the wheels in motion.”

“That's the very least you could do if one of your reporters goes missing, Jeremy.”

“What more would you have us do, Delaney?”

“You could tell me everything you know, for example.”

“I have just done that. And I really do not like your tone. You are sounding more like a policeman than a journalist, Delaney.”

“And you are sounding more like a bureaucrat than an editor with a missing colleague,” Delaney said.

“I see no reason why I should have to listen to this,” Winton said.

“I'll give you some reasons after I get to Bangkok, how does that sound?” Delaney said.

“We have nothing to apologize for,” Winton said.

“I'll get back to you on that,” Delaney said.

B
enjarong Yongchaiyudh was as proud of being a professional driver as other middleaged men in Thailand might have been if they were doctors or lawyers or Buddhist priests. He was particularly proud that life had dealt him the hand of being driver to a series of international journalists. His little business card said it all:

BEN YONG, Media Driver.

Experience in all areas of Thailand and environs.

References available—CNN, ITN, VisNews, Reuters,

AP, New York Times, etc.

War zones OK.

Day rates, fuel extra however.

Tel/Fax 0 2467 0811.

The
Tribune
was not on his list of references. But Delaney had used Ben Yong many times, on many assignments, not all of them safe, not all of them for the newspaper and not all of them successful. And Delaney was always thankful when Ben's wife, who handled most of the telephone requests for his services, answered in her singsong affirmative that Mr. Ben would, easy, no problem, be available once again for Khun Frank when he arrived at Bangkok airport.

Ben spent any waiting time polishing his immaculate Toyota Crown station wagon with a selection of soft cloths he kept in a special metal box in the back. Sometimes wax was applied, but Ben usually caressed the aging vehicle's turquoise and white twotone paint job for the sake of it, for the love of it. Delaney had known many media drivers, in many countries—Sierra Leone, Nigeria, East Timor, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, just about everywhere there was a story and where he had been on assignment. And the good ones always, without fail, took loving care of their vehicles, no matter how old. These cars represented their livelihood, their badge of honour and, very often, their last refuge when the going got tough.

The good drivers, the ones who knew how the media operated and how journalists needed to work, elicited affection, admiration and respect from the reporters who often entrusted them with their lives. When a well-known, experienced and reliable driver died or left the game, word would shoot around the world's press clubs and news desks at a speed approaching that achieved when a veteran foreign correspondent died on assignment.

Ben had gained weight, and lost hair. He was one of the few Thai men with a balding problem. He gave Delaney a slow, elegant wai, and then rushed over to shake his hand at the entrance to the airport terminal building. There was the usual chaos at the doorways and Ben extracted them from it expertly— negotiating the crowded sidewalk, fending off other drivers and tourist touts and sliding Delaney's small suitcase and equipment bag into the back of the car. Ben had long ago made a deal with the parking police and he was always able to wait just at curbside, sparing himself and his clients a long hot trek to the jammed airport parking lots.

“Too long now since you are in Bangkok, Frank,” Ben shouted over the headrests, grinning happily as he manoeuvred the Toyota through impossible tangles of cars, buses and motorbikes heading for the airport approach road. “What's up, you need to buy some shirts?”

Delaney always sat in the back of the car, no matter how many times he used Ben's services and how well he got to know him. Ben preferred it that way. It left the front passenger seat empty and available to store anything that might be required immediately to hand and, Ben had always said, it could elicit respect for the passenger in back, sometimes, when police or soldiers stopped the car for paper checks or to demand bribes. Only greenhorns and aid workers rode in the front seat with their driver; this was Ben's theory.

The car's aging air conditioner was beginning to kick in, but it was a noisy system and conversation had to be at high volume. As always in Thailand, conversation also had to battle with local music scratching its way out of bad loudspeakers and aging tape players.

“I'm still working through my shirts from the last trip over, Ben,” Delaney said. “And the paper's not sending me to Asia like it used to.”

“Everywhere is the same,” Ben said. “All the guys, the same now. No travel like before, bad budgets, even for TV. Bad for me, guys like me.”

“I'll need you for a few days at least, Ben,” Delaney said. “At least.”

“Good, good, very good,” Ben said. “Where we going?”

Ben didn't mean which hotel. He knew that Delaney always stayed at the venerable Royal Hotel, in a teeming neighbourhood near the Democracy Monument. It was aging badly but had a long history with media people and locals alike. Delaney and Ben had been sitting together in the hotel's famous lobby bar in 1992 when Thai soldiers chased in a crowd of pro-democracy demonstrators and shot a few of them behind the check-in counter.

“Not sure where we're going this time, exactly,” Delaney said. “Stick around Bangkok for a while, maybe have to go outside later on.”

He wanted to wait until they were sitting down to a couple of cold Singha beers before telling Ben about Kellner and asking for a rundown on what he had heard around town.

The lobby of the Royal was quiet. A few Thai businessmen in dark blue suits sat in the lobby bar, as did a few taxi drivers in brightly patterned shortsleeved shirts. The prostitutes had not yet shown up for the afternoon shift. The ceiling fans turned lazily as they had for the past 60 years, still in service if only because of the hotel's ramshackle and notoriously unreliable air-conditioning system.

Delaney got the room he had requested, in the hotel's original building and not in the so-called new wing, which had actually been around since the bad old days of 1970s hotel décor. He asked Ben to give him an hour. He wanted to perform his postflight ritual of 20 minutes sleep and a long hot shower. Ben said he would sleep too, in the car where he had parked it behind the hotel out back, in perhaps the only reliable patch of shade for kilometres around.

Ben was waiting for him in the bar exactly an hour later, with two cold Singhas already poured and a small wooden bowl of mixed nuts at the ready. Ben had never once in Delaney's experience been late for anything, except when detained by police or soldiers. Even then he always managed to extricate himself in record time from whatever the problem might be.

“What we working on, Frank?” Ben said, always eager to get started.

“Nathan Kellner,” Delaney said.

“He coming too?” Ben said. “Haven't seen him for a long while. I don't think Khun Nathan is around.”

“That's what we're working on, Ben. Kellner's gone to ground. I'm looking for him.” “You not doing a story?”

“Might be. Depends what Kellner's up to. I've been asked to find out where he's gone.”

“He's in trouble maybe. Like that?”

“Yeah.”

Ben was eating nuts one by one, as he always did. He drank beer very slowly and ate peanuts as if time had stood still.

“I never see him now. Never drove for him much anyway. He used another guy. I could ask a few people maybe.”

“OK. I'm going to go see his girlfriend. She's Thai,” Delaney said.

“All your guys have Thai girls here, Frank. You would too, in Bangkok,” Ben said with a smile.

“They've been together a long time,” Delaney said. “Not like with the other guys, I would say.”

“Maybe not,” Ben said. Not convinced. “Bar girl? Used to be?”

“No. I don't think so.”

Ben was clearly not convinced.

“Let's take a run over there so I can talk to her.”

“Sure, OK.”

“His place is on a little soi off Thanon Sathon.”

“Near U.S. Information Service?”

“That's it.”

“I know where,” Ben said.

The traffic was dense, but not as dense as Delaney remembered from the last time he had been in Bangkok. It seemed to be getting ever so slightly easier to move around the city each time he came. Perhaps because of the Skytrain that had at long last been built. Perhaps because Bangkok, like so many Asian cities, was becoming more and more Westernized, adopting Western trappings such as traffic lights that worked and driving schools for young people and policemen who, occasionally, refused to look the other way when confronted with egregious infractions of the traffic rules. Perhaps.

The watchman in the dirt courtyard of Kellner's apartment block stood up when Delaney arrived. He had watched from a reclining position on his wooden bed when Delaney got out of Ben's car and had sat up when Delaney turned to come onto the property. He stood up only when it was clear Delaney wanted to go inside the building. He offered the Western visitor no wai, a rare failure in Thailand and one that Delaney noted with interest.

Delaney offered the wai and said: “Nathan Kellner's house.”

No smile from the watchman. Another rare failure in Thailand.

“He is not here,” the watchman said, looking past Delaney's shoulder to the car where Ben was already reading his newspaper.

“I know. I am here to see his girl,” Delaney said.

“You are a friend?” the watchman said; dubious.

“Yes.”

“Whose friend? Mai or Khun Nathan?”

“Both.”

The watchman looked at him closely.

“Canadian?”

“Yes.”

“I'll go see,” the watchman said.

He slid into his sandals, classics with soles made from old automobile tires, and headed through an arch into a ground floor corridor that led to a line of doors painted maroon. Delaney remembered that Kellner's apartment was on the ground floor. He turned around to look at Ben Yong, who gave him the thumbs up and an interrogative shrug. Delaney shrugged back.

From far down the corridor, Delaney heard quiet words in Thai, then the slap of the watchman's sandals as he came back. Now the wai was offered.

“So sorry, my friend. Mai is waiting for you now. So sorry.”

“Any troubles here?” Delaney asked.

“You know,” the watchman said, looking intently at Delaney. “Mai will tell you if you don't know.”

“Lots of visitors for Mai now?

“Yes.”

“People you know?”

“Some of them.”

“People Mai knows?”

“Some.”

Delaney could see Mai through the screen door of the apartment as he removed his shoes and placed them on a low stand in the corridor outside the entrance. She was sitting on a large Thai reclining platform, resting against triangular upright cushions and stroking two tiny kittens. A big-screen TV flickered CNN images silently in a corner. The place was very dim. Even in the dim light Delaney could see she was as heartstoppingly beautiful as ever. She did not get up.

“Kuhn Frank,” she said.

“Mai, my friend.” Delaney pushed open the screen door and moved across the coolness of the shining waxed floor to shake her hand. She offered up a cheek and he kissed it, feeling a breath of fine silky hair on his own cheek as he did so. The cats scattered.

“Where is Nathan, Frank? Where has he gone?” Mai immediately started to cry softly. “He has never been away so long without calling me.”

“I know that, Mai.”

“Have you come to give me some news?” she asked.

“No. I've come to find out where he has gone,” Delaney said.

“Oh good. Good,” she said. “I miss him, Frank. I am worried this time.”

“We'll find out what he's doing,” Delaney said.

“Please.”

Mai made him tea.The cats chased her bare feet and legs as she padded around the apartment getting things ready. Delaney could not keep his eyes off her. She moved with fantastic grace. That alone would capture any Westerner's eye. She was older than most of the girls living with Western correspondents in Bangkok, at least the ones Delaney knew. Late twenties, thirty maximum, or so Delaney had been told. But looking far, far younger.

There was a lot to discuss. Mai told him that Kellner had not appeared worried or distracted in the days before he left. He was always working on something or other, she said, and often he did not tell her much about what that might have been. Kellner and Mai had a quiet lifestyle in their dim, immaculate apartment, she said. Visitors often came from embassies, particularly Asian embassies, often people who went into Kellner's study with him and closed the door. Usually men who carried with them cartons of cigarettes and bottles of Johnnie Walker as offerings when they arrived.

But these visitors did not stay to eat or drink after such meetings. Occasionally another Western correspondent would come, usually with a Thai girl like Mai. There would be food on those occasions, prepared by Kellner's housekeeper before she left for the day, and then lots of marijuana. And vodka and beer for the men. There would be much talk of journalism and Asia and travel and there would often be video movies on the giant TV screen and more marijuana and vodka and beer. Sometimes the guests would sleep in the guest bedroom, sometimes not.

Kellner worked from home. Delaney wanted very much to look closely at what was on his desk and in his desk and in his appointment book if that had been left behind. He had not decided whether to ask to do this later that day, on the first meeting with Mai. He wanted first to hear everything she had to say about how Kellner had disappeared.