“Where?”
“To where they were waiting for you,” he said. “Until they learned of your death.”
I don’t know what did it, the nat blessing or the herbal tea or the shwe le maw, but the stretch from the monastery to Taunggyi had been smooth sailing compared to what we’d been through earlier. Katya’s malaria had one more night to run, as she’d predicted, but the third night was relatively mild, as she’d also predicted, and we got through it with ease.
The days were cooler, too, as we moved into the Shan highlands. The nights were cooler as well, and we spent them outside. We’d have been cold if we hadn’t huddled together for warmth, but that did the trick, along with the shwe le maw, two bottles of which I managed to buy every afternoon along the way.
I knew what to ask for now, and became pretty good at spotting the market stalls that were likely to have it on hand. It continued to take people aback – a monk in his red robes was not expected to buy intoxicating spirits – but I decided I didn’t really give a damn if the locals regarded me as the Buddhist equivalent of a whiskey priest. The nights were chilly and my companion had a taste for the burnt-orange brandy and, truth to tell, so did I.
We had a taste for each other, too, which led to our huddling together for more than mere warmth. And, tossing the ten precepts to the four winds, we drank and screwed our way to Taunggyi.
I don’t know that my friend the alpha monk would have been proud of me. But I was having a good time.
Thein Lwin’s son drove us eastward in a Toyota Corolla that needed springs and shocks and, for all I know, a quadruple bypass. But it was amazing to me how much faster it was than walking. In twenty minutes it would cover as much ground as we could manage in the better part of a day. We’d been walking for so long that a walker’s pace had become our frame of reference.
The drive was pleasant, and the only time it got the least bit dicey was when we stopped for a roadblock manned by government troops. A snotty little functionary took a long hard look at our driver’s papers while troops kept automatic weapons trained on our car. The Corolla had been backfiring periodically the whole trip, and I had visions of it doing so now, and sounding like gunfire to the smooth-cheeked kids pointing guns at us. I could imagine how that scene would play out. We’d wind up looking like the last frame of Bonnie and Clyde. But the car maintained a respectful silence, and the self-important little shit who took such a keen interest in the driver’s papers didn’t spare more than a glance at the two monks dozing in the backseat. He stepped back and waved us through, and the next roadblock was manned by Shan insurgent forces who recognized the car, greeted the driver by name, and didn’t care who or what he had by way of cargo.
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.
“But it’s such a beautiful structure,” I said. “Was the damage very great?”
“There was very little damage to the pagoda. A shrine disturbed, some Buddha images injured. But lives were lost. Three tourists, two French schoolteachers and a retired Austrian businessman. And four Burmese schoolchildren.”