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.
Then he said, “That guy following us.”
How had he noticed? The son of a bitch had been tracking me for hours before I got a clue.
“Like in the movies,” he said with satisfaction. His English was much better now that he had Hollywood films on his mind. “Cocksucker. You want, I lose him.”
First, I explained, I needed to know who he was. He thought that one over and hatched a plan. I rolled my window all the way down, held my backpack on my lap. He picked out the place where we would make our move, a narrow and poorly lit alley off a street that wasn’t much to begin with. We were a hundred yards or so into the alley when another car turned in after us and immediately cut its headlights.
“Stupid,” he said. “He think we not see him. But now he don’t see us.” He hit the brake. “Now!” he said. “Go!”
And I went, tossing my backpack out the window, thrusting myself feet first after it. The car was moving again before I hit the ground, and from a hundred yards back it must have looked as though he’d feathered the brake pedal to avoid running over a cat, or to dodge a pothole. My door never opened and the dome light never went on, and he’d picked a nice dark place to do it. I had a reasonably soft landing on a patch of bare earth, and I stayed down and rolled deeper into the shadows.
I wasn’t sure where my backpack had wound up, but I could wait to find out. Right now I wanted to make the most of my chance to spot my shadow. He’d be in the backseat, and he’d probably be leaning forward, his attention concentrated on the car in front of him. It would be a great opportunity for me to get a look at him, except for the very factor that had made it easy for me to give him the slip.
Namely the lack of light. A dark alley was the perfect setting for Act One of our little melodrama, but Act Two ought to be taking place on a main thoroughfare, with dozens of bright lights blazing.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen. In the dark I wouldn’t get much of a look at him. The best I could hope to do was tell if he was a local or a Westerner, and I wasn’t by any means sure I could do that. That was one flaw in the plan. Another was that sooner or later he’d catch up with my cab and see that I wasn’t in it, and he’d know I found some cute way to get away from him, and I’d hoped to keep him from realizing I was on to him.
And the third flaw was that I’d landed on my right shoulder, and I could tell it was going to hurt worse than root canal in a couple of hours.
All this takes longer to tell than it took to happen. Because I crouched there in the dark, waiting, and the pursuit vehicle made its deliberate way through the alley. It seemed to stop for an instant when it was right in front of me, but I think that was just my perception of the moment, as if it were a stopframe, frozen in time.
The guy in the backseat was facing forward, one hand on the back of the seat in front of him. His face was in profile, but the cab’s interior was too dark for me to make out facial features, and far too dark to provide a hint of his skin color. All I saw, really, was a dark face and an even darker head of hair.
And a blaze of white at the temple.
Chapter 10
I had a mini-flashlight in the Kangaroo strapped around my waist, keeping my Swiss Army knife company. It would have been handy for getting out of the alley, and I opened the zipper of the Kangaroo, groped around until I found the light, and then, reassured by its presence, decided to leave it there. Spurgeon’s cab might well circle the block and make another pass at the alley before I cleared it, and I wanted to be able to disappear into the shadows if I had to.
Meanwhile, I did what I could to avoid falling on my face. The alley was evidently where the citizens of that part of Rangoon stored their spare stumbling blocks, and it’s hard to keep from getting tripped up by objects in your path when you don’t know they’re there. I stubbed my toe a couple of times, and almost fell more than once, but I stayed on my feet. It struck me as a good thing I wasn’t traversing holy ground. The trek would have been murder without shoes.
At the mouth of the alley I looked both ways without knowing exactly what I was looking for. I saw cars passing in both directions, and any of them could have been Harry Spurgeon’s cab. If it had had any distinguishing marks or characteristics, I hadn’t noticed them.
Unlike the man himself, who sported a distinguishing mark on either side of his head. That patch of white hair was as vivid and unmistakable a field mark as the white feathers on a magpie’s wing or the eponymous scarlet of the red-winged blackbird. I hadn’t really given Harry a thought since we’d shared that cab from the airport. Now, suddenly, I could think of nothing else.
And now, of course, it all seemed obvious. The way he’d so neatly picked me up when I cleared Customs, the way he’d suggested our sharing a cab. He was a type, the old Burma hand, knocking around Asia at his employer’s behest, grumbling a little about each country’s less palatable idiosyncracies, and making the best of it all the while. Bluff, open, friendly, especially to another English speaker-