“I don’t think so.”
“No surprise there. He’s kept as low a profile in his area as we have in ours. Worth billions, but you won’t even find him on the Forbes list. Business interests all over the world. Rubber plantations in Malaysia. Copper mines in Shaba province in Zaire. Oil tankers sailing the seas. Microchips, textiles, superconductors – you name it, he’s got a finger in the pie. Unless he owns the whole pie outright. Been at it for years, Crombie has, and lately he’s pretty much turned over the management duties to his four sons. Not because he wants to slow down, but so that he can concentrate on what really matters to him.”
And what was that?
“He wants to do some good in the world,” he said. “Not by giving to charity. Doesn’t much believe in charity. Said as much to me the first time I met him. ‘Give a man a fish,’ he said, ‘and you feed him for a day. Teach that man to fish, and for the rest of his life you can sell him rods and reels and hooks and leaders and flies and lures and God only knows what else.’ I’d heard something like that before, but Crombie put a different spin on it. Shows you the kind of man he is.”
“I guess it does.”
“He wants to have an impact,” the Chief said. “Stir the stew. Make waves. Wants to work behind the scenes, naturally. Not for commercial gain, although if a trading advantage comes along he won’t turn his back on it. But that’s not the main objective. Hell, the man’s already got more money than God.” He coughed again, used his handkerchief. “Where we come in. His eyes and ears, don’t you know. Hands and feet as well, you might say. Stirring the stew for him. Pulling his chestnuts out of the fire. The metaphors are piling up, but you get the idea, don’t you?”
“The general idea.”
“Well, let me get more specific, then. Suit you, Tanner?”
“Of course.”
“ Burma,” he said. “How’s that for getting down to cases? What do you know about Burma, Tanner?”
“I know they don’t call it that anymore.”
“They call it Myanmar. Know what old Thoreau said about enterprises that require new clothes? Said to beware of them. Well, same goes for countries that feel the need to change their name. One thing when it’s a colony that’s gone independent. You can see why the Belgian Congo would want to call itself something else once it got rid of the Belgians. Still, most of those nations merit wary treatment. But when a country’s been on its own for years, and all of a sudden decides out of the blue that the old name’s not good enough anymore, that’s cause for alarm, isn’t it?”
“Anything the SLORC generals do is cause for alarm.”
“I see you know about SLORC. You’ve been catching up since you got out of Sweden.”
“ New Jersey, actually.”
“Well, six of one, eh? Point is you’ve been doing your homework. Nasty buggers, the chaps of SLORC. Between them and the bastards before them, they kept the country isolated from the rest of the world for thirty years. That’s even longer than you were on ice, isn’t it?”
“By five years or so.”
“Well, what’s five years in the mysterious East? ‘Better twenty years of Europe than a cycle in Cathay.’ I forget who said that but I suppose it must have been Kipling.”
“It was Tennyson, actually.”
“Same difference. Sweden, New Jersey. Kipling, Tennyson. Six of one.”
Maybe it wasn’t entirely accurate to say he hadn’t lost a step. Maybe he was missing a whole staircase.
“For years,” he said, “they wouldn’t let anybody in. Tourist visas were for a maximum of seven days, and you could only go to a couple of the big cities. They changed the names of the cities, too. I forget what they call Rangoon these days.”
“ Yangon.”
“That’s it. Tried to change Mandalay while they were at it, but they gave up and changed it back. If you’re lucky enough to have a city with a name like Mandalay, you’d have to be out of your mind to change it. Same goes for Rangoon, of course. I had a professor once, used to ask the class, ‘What time does the noon balloon leave for Rangoon?’ His version of ‘Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’ but it’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it? ‘What time does the noon balloon leave for Rangoon?’ Try that with Yangon and it won’t work at all.”
“Won’t get off the ground,” I said.
“Ha! Very good!” He cleared his throat, filled his glass from the water carafe. We were in a bare office on the seventh floor of a commercial building on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties, sitting in chairs on opposite sides of an old metal desk. He said, “The names are the least of it. The regime’s extremely repressive. Doesn’t trust intellectuals, and you’re considered an intellectual if you own more than three books, or write letters, or wear glasses. You run a risk of jail or a beating or worse. There have been massacres. They’re not the Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge, not by a long shot, but they’re a right bunch of bastards all the same. They’ve got statues all over the country to Aung San. He’s the lad who got them free of the British. First he joined the Japs to fight the Brits, then he saw what swine the Japs were and took his ten-thousand-man army to the other side. Fought for the Brits, and managed to get the country independent in 1948. So Aung San’s the national hero, and one of the first things SLORC did was put his daughter under house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi’s her name, and she-”
“Chee,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“Aung San Soo Chee,” I said. “That’s how you pronounce it.”
“Then why spell it with a KY?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s Burma for you.”
“If you ask me,” he said, “they should have let the Brits go on running the show. At least you had people speaking English and spelling things the way they sound. Any rate, 1988’s when SLORC got in. They put Suu Kyi under house arrest and wouldn’t let her participate in the national elections, which they figured they were in a good position to steal. Well, she won anyway. With all their fiddling, they still got voted out of office.”
“But they stayed.”
“Of course they did. Threw out the election results and held onto the power. Kept the lady under house arrest while they were at it, and of course that got her the prize from your friends in New Jersey.”
“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.”