Tanner on Ice

Page 37

Our next stop was a Shan camp perhaps a dozen miles past the checkpoint. We drove through an opening in a stockade fence and entered a large open area. A two-story frame house was flanked by half a dozen low concrete-block buildings that looked like barracks. We wound up on the large front porch of the frame house, where men in fatigues were drinking Tsing Tao beer out of long-necked bottles. Someone handed bottles to each of us, and to the driver.

One, with gray hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache, seemed to be in charge. He asked which of us was Evan Tanner. I said I was.

“And your friend?”

“Katya Singh.”

“Singh? That is an Indian name.”

“My husband was Indian,” she said.

“You are a woman,” he said. He seemed a little dismayed not to have noticed this himself. “A woman dressed as a monk,” he said, and repeated the line in his own language, whereupon all of his fellows had a good laugh.

“Ku Min said two monks,” he told me. “He said nothing about a woman.”

“Well, you know Ku Min,” I said.

He laughed, and translated for the others, and everybody laughed.

“You are a woman,” he said to Katya. “And you are alive,” he said to me.

“Actually,” I said, “we’re both alive.”

“Yes, but we were told you were dead.”

“Me?”

“Evan Tanner.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Who told you?”

“It was on the radio. It was also in the newspaper. Do we still have that newspaper?” He turned and barked an order, and one of the younger men ran off to check. “He will look for it,” he said. “But you want to bathe, yes?”

“God, yes,” I said.

“And perhaps you are tired of dressing as monks, eh? You have other clothes?”

“I’m afraid this is it,” I said.

“We have clothes that will fit you.” And he said something else I didn’t understand, and one of the youths indicated that we should follow him.

An hour later we were back on the porch. We’d had showers, and I would have liked to stay under the stream of hot water until my fingerprints washed off. It wasn’t as luxurious as the loo at the Strand, but it was at least as welcome. We dried off and dressed in khaki fatigues, the same as the others were wearing. My shirt was a little tight across the shoulders, and the pants ended an inch or two prematurely, but otherwise it was a good fit.

Katya told me, admiringly, that I looked very military. Her own effect, clad in khaki, was hard to sum up. She looked at once waiflike and combat-ready, and the ruby ring was back on her finger.

Back on the porch, there were handshakes all around, and drinks poured, and toasts offered. We went from there to dinner, where we sat around two long tables and passed around platters of rice and vegetables and several kinds of meat. There was goat and chicken, and there was something I wasn’t sure of, but I’m fairly certain it hadn’t spent its time on earth barking, or turning around in a circle three times before lying down.

Our after-dinner drinks were that orange brandy Katya and I had come to know and love. I don’t suppose it had aphrodisiacal properties – I don’t suppose anything does, really – but we seemed to wind up making love every time we drank it, and that sort of thing establishes an association in your mind. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I sensed we were two minds with but a single thought, and a prurient one at that. Time to make our excuses, I thought. All that walking out in the hot sun, and such a fine and substantial meal, and it was really time we got to bed, wasn’t it?

But instead I heard myself asking the fellow in command if he’d had any luck finding that newspaper.

“The newspaper! Yes, we still have it. Now where did he put it?” He called out something to someone. “I will show it to you,” he said, “but will you even know what you are looking at? Do you read Burmese?”

“No.”

“Then it will look like nothing to you.”

That wasn’t quite true. I’d glanced uncomprehending at Burmese newspapers in Rangoon, and the articles didn’t look like nothing. Generally they looked like a staph infection reaching epidemic proportions.

“Here. ‘Evan Tanner, American soldier of fortune.’ That is you, is it not?”

“Soldier of misfortune,” I said.

“Also a terrorist and an agent provocateur, it says here. Apprehended after an intensive police investigation and subjected to intensive interrogation – you know what that means?”

“Torture?”

“Of course. After all that, you admitted your role in the terrorist bombing of Shwe Dagon Pagoda and-”

“What bombing?”

“The great pagoda. Do you not know it?”

“I was there my first day in Rangoon. It didn’t look as though it had been bombed.”

“It happened more recently. Ten, twelve days ago.”

After we’d left the boat and struck out on foot from Bagan. We hadn’t had a drop of news since, from Rangoon or anywhere else on earth.