Lawrence Block - Tanner On Ice

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.