The Burma Effect (12 page)

“The work of our national movement remains unfinished. We still have to achieve the prosperity promised by the dragon. It is not yet time for the triumphant dance of the peacock.”
Suu Kyi.

“Some people in Burma spend the period of the Thingyan spring water festival in April in meditating, worshipping at pagodas, observing Buddhism's eight precepts, releasing caged birds and fishes, and performing other meritorious deeds. Children are told that Sakya comes down from his heavenly abode to wander in the human world in the days of Thingyan, carrying with him two large books, one bound in gold and the other bound in dog leather. The names of those who perform meritorious acts are entered in the golden book . . .”
Suu Kyi

Kellner had underlined, in red, the word
Sakya
.

The final quote was not attributed. It said:

“To turn Aung San Suu Kyi from a martyr into a saint could only further harm an already-tarnished image of the military regime.”

Delaney found it hard to imagine Kellner, a veteran foreign correspondent of the most cynical and hardened kind, pinning up inspirational quotations about any democracy movement, anywhere in the world. Kellner was not the type to idolize movements, or ideas. Women, perhaps. Not movements or ideas.

The bulletin board also contained a mishmash of business cards, receipts, postcards, memorabilia— none of them immediately noteworthy. Cohen's business card was there. Another for the military attaché at the Taiwanese embassy. One for the Canadian consulate's press officer. A schedule of court times for Kellner's badminton club.

Delaney started looking methodically through Kellner's drawers. The usual pens and paperclips in the top right. Cassette tapes, with names of interview subjects and dates. He would have to listen to those, perhaps, but later. That would be a long job.

The second drawer down was full of reporter's notebooks, tossed in a jumble but quite well labelled on the back with story subjects, interviewees' names, dates. It looked like Kellner had been at an arms fair in Singapore about two months previously. Lots of notes from interviews conducted there. Nothing that stood out.

In notebooks from the period prior to that, a series of interviews and story subjects one would expect for the correspondent for
Defence Monthly
. Possible heavy equipment purchases by the Thai military. Maritime signalling equipment possibly being bought by the Taiwanese. What looked like notes for various political features. Nothing at first glance at all about Burma, or Suu Kyi, however. Delaney found this odd.

Then he spotted a slightly larger notebook, the kind university students use in class. It was in Kellner's jammed in-tray on top of the desk. This one had the word
Oz
written in the top-right corner in felt marker pen. It was full of densely written notes about what appeared to be a construction contract in Burma, for an access road to a casino complex being built in Mongla, in northeast Burma near the Chinese border. Australians were involved, the notes indicated, providing engineering support and subcontracting services for equipment and materials. And, Kellner had indicated, for project security.

Kellner had written in the margin in that section, apparently later, with a different pen, the word
mercs
. Delaney wondered if this meant Mercedes or mercenaries. In that part of the world, it could well be either.

Mongla used to be just another backwater Burmese village, in the Shan State. Now it was a notorious drug-running and people-smuggling centre, and also a place where thousands of Chinese tourists poured in on tour buses from across the border in Yunan Province to gamble and watch seedy transvestite sex shows and get drunk. Mongla was the turf of one of Burma's most powerful ethnic Chinese drug warlords, Min Lingxian, who had long ago cut a deal with the Burmese military regime to share profits from the opium trade in the wilderness bordering China, Laos and Thailand.

There was huge money to be made in Shan State, most of it of dubious origin, but some, as it appeared for the Australian consortium working the road deal Kellner had become interested in, more or less legal. Legal, but dangerous, financially risky and impossible to conduct without a nod from the military regime, the local warlord, and probably both. Impossible to conduct without protection of various sorts, military and political.

The area was awash with weapons—another reason Kellner and his magazine would have been keenly interested. Min Lingxian was reported to have more than three thousand heavily armed militiamen looking after his interests there. No foreign company could ever hope to operate in Mongla without dealing, directly or indirectly, with Lingxian's people. Construction companies from Thailand had built many of the roads in the parts of Burma run by drug traffickers. Now, it appeared, an Australian company was getting a slice of that business too. And Kellner was onto the story.

Kellner put the big notebook into his equipment bag to study further at the hotel. He didn't bother to tell Mai. She would surely be unaware of the details of Kellner's journalistic activities, and probably of much of his other activities as well. She would never miss the odd notebook or sheaf of papers.

Kellner's deep bottom drawer was even more interesting than the rest, in a much different way. This was where he kept some of his stash of marijuana and smoker's paraphernalia. Small plastic bags of dope. Other smaller quantities in grey-plastic 35millimetre film canisters. Also small chunks of black resin wrapped in bits of aluminum foil, almost certainly opium or possibly Afghani hashish. No hard drugs apparently, no tablets or cocaine or heroin. Just smoker's supplies and various pipes, rolling papers, matches, lighters. There were also DVDs, with Chinese-language labels showing pictures of naked women.

Delaney fired up Kellner's laptop, hoping it would not need a password. He would want to read files on that computer later on. No password was requested. Delaney put one of the DVDs into the proper slot and clicked on the play function. Hardcore pornography poured across the laptop screen; young Chinese girls, obviously heavily drugged, having gynecologically explicit sex with rough-looking Chinese young men. No plot, no dialogue except moans and grunts; just plain old hard-core porn.

“Nathan and I used to watch those together,” Mai said quietly from the doorway. She had apparently heard sound from the film and come in to see what Delaney was doing.

Delaney found himself blushing; a small boy caught looking at naughty pictures. He turned off the show.

“Nathan liked to watch that before we went to bed together,” Mai said. “You like that?” “Not my thing, Mai,” Delaney said.

“You are finding all there is to know about my man. His little secrets,” she said. “Now you have to find out where he has gone.” “I'm trying, Mai,” Delaney said.

She looked past him at the pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi.

“And you see the pictures of his other lady,” she said. “No picture of me there. Just Suu Kyi. With clothes on.”

“I see that,” he said.

She gazed at the pictures on the bulletin board for a while.

“Did you see Nathan's scrapbook?” she asked. “Is that the word? Scrapbook, where you collect things on paper?”

“Scrapbook?”

“Yes.”

Mai reached up onto a shelf near the bulletin board and pulled down a ragged scrapbook with a floral-patterned cover—the type any school kid would use for special projects or to collect pictures. Kellner's was full of clippings about Aung San Suu Kyi. They went far back. Some as far as her release from a first period of house arrest in 1995, then through her increasingly important pro-democracy activities and her struggle to force the military regime to recognize the results of the 1990 election that her party clearly won. Then house arrest again in 2000.

On one recent clipping about Suu Kyi's daily, almost monastic, routine in her secluded house on Rangoon's University Avenue, Kellner had written in felt pen: “From martyr to saint.”

“What does he mean by that?” Mai asked when she saw Delaney looking at the inscription.

“I'm not sure,” Delaney said. “The two words are quite similar in some ways, in English.”

“I thought martyr meant a dead person,” Mai said.

“I thought so too,” Delaney said. “The word s
aint
also.”

“Nathan always said Suu Kyi was a caged bird. He said she shouldn't be in a cage like that, in Rangoon. He seemed angry about that sometimes.”

“Angry.”

“Yes. At the generals, for keeping her in her house like that, for years.”

Mai went back into the other room and sat down on a rattan chair. Her hands shook and she tried very hard not to cry again. She fought back her grief and her fear, and also her shame at what Delaney had had to learn. She tried hard to believe that this nice Canadian man, this friend of Nathan's, would help end this nightmare and allow her to resume her little life again. She tried hard to believe that because she believed, with all her heart, in men.

She had believed in Nathan when he picked her out, for reasons she still could not quite understand, to be his woman. She was not a bar girl, not as pretty as some Thai girls, not as experienced in the ways of pleasure that brought so many Western men to Bangkok, to Thailand, to Southeast Asia. But he had picked her and, to her own very great surprise and delight, he had been kind and loyal and caring to her now for years. She allowed herself to believe he loved her.

He was not like most of the other Western men in Bangkok, who took young girls when they felt the urge and kept them like exotic sexual pets for a time and then threw them aside. She had been with some of those men, had known their aggressive desires, had seen them use their bodies against Thai women like weapons.

Nathan was not like that. He was a different man. He liked women—he told her that often—he liked their presence around him. He liked her presence around him, he liked her. He did not say he loved her, but Mai did not need that very much, she did not need to hear that. She just wanted to be with him, to feel his presence in their space, to yield to his intense, but never aggressive, desires.

And now he was gone. Now she knew she was not his only lady—that in his mind there was another object of his intense desire. Mai did not understand that desire, where such obessional desire came from and where it was meant to lead. It was beyond her comprehension, beyond all comprehension.

Mai sat in her rattan chair in the ordered dimness of her man's space, the space they had shared for years, and she fought back her grief and fear and shame. The air was hot and still. She felt a sudden intense desire herself, her skin tingled with desire. She felt a sudden need for sex with her man, for the sort of sex that could leave no doubt, no possibility of doubt, about anything whatsoever.

Delaney had put away the pornography and resumed his searches. He wanted to know more about Kellner's apparent obsession with Aung San Suu Kyi. He wanted to know much more about this Australian business deal in Burma. He wanted to know if somehow, according to some convoluted logic, the two issues could somehow be connected, if only in the mind of a man like Kellner, a mind clearly not always functioning on a rational level. Delaney himself, however, knew what it was like to be guilty of obsession with a woman. He considered that for a while as he sat quietly looking at the pictures of Suu Kyi.

Delaney found Kellner's 2001 agenda book, such as it was. There were various entries for interviews, meetings, badminton games. One page per day. But surely too few entries on any given day for a busy reporter like Kellner. He probably failed to enter much of what he was doing on any particular day or week. Or perhaps preferred not to record certain things. But certain recurring entries caught Delaney's eye. Periodically, a short stretch of two days, three days, would be blocked out with a line running from top to bottom of the pages. These entries said simply: “House.” Earlier in the year, some entries said “House preps.”

Delaney rummaged around on shelves and found other agenda books going back a few years. In late 2000, there were more “House” and “House preps” entries. In the 2001 book, one recent entry, from March said: “Stefan et al at the house. With gear.”

It was possible Kellner referred to his apartment as the house, but Delaney thought this unlikely. He wondered what “gear” could mean. Drug slang, in some countries, but usually referring to hard drugs and the related paraphernalia. He went outside with the books and showed them to Mai.

“What do you make of these?” Delaney said, showing her the house references.

“What does it mean?” she said.

“I don't know. Does he mean this house? This apartment?”

Mai looked at some recent dates.

“Why would Nathan write down that he was at this house? He was here a lot. He doesn't need to write that down. It is not a house anyway.”

“Did you have another house somewhere? A house at the beach?”

“No, Frank,” Mai said, looking up at him. “No other house.”

That you know of
, Delaney thought. He sensed Mai was now thinking the same thing.