Lawrence Block - Tanner On Ice

“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.”