The Burma Legacy (26 page)

‘To try to prevent a killing.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘I will.’

‘Otherwise that girl of yours’ll be broken-hearted.’

‘Maybe.’

His less than certain reply caused her to lift her eyebrows.

‘You’re not sure?’

He shrugged. ‘There seems to be another man on the scene.’ He kicked himself for telling her that.

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ But her eyes said she wasn’t sorry at all.

‘I guess it’s the price one pays for not being there all the time,’ he said, ignoring the alarm bells clanging away in his head.

‘I guess it is.’

She didn’t say any more. And that was the last either of them spoke about their private lives. They talked a little about London and Sydney and the beats they worked. About friends who did normal jobs and led predictable existences. And about how, despite all the hassles, they couldn’t imagine themselves doing anything else.

‘We ought to go,’ she announced eventually. ‘It’ll have to be a taxi. The river buses will have stopped for the night.’

They paid up and began to walk towards a main road. To their left a Buddhist temple gleamed under spotlights, its gold stupa rising above an explosion of red and blue. Beside the road, small, savoury-smelling food stalls glimmered under oil lamps, their customers crouching on benches to eat. The night air was still very warm, but pleasantly so, with less humidity than earlier. Sam found himself putting an arm round Midge’s shoulders. She didn’t object. He wondered uncomfortably if Jack might be doing something similar with Julie back in London.

The main highway when they reached it was busy with tuk-tuks and cars. Within a couple of minutes a cab was pulling into the kerb.

Midge used her Thai to ask the price of a ride back to the city centre, then scornfully waved the driver on his way.

‘They’re robbers, some of these guys. Total con men.’

Another car stopped soon after and this time the fare was acceptable. They sat in the back not speaking, aware of the decision they would each have to make in a few minutes time.

Midge’s hotel was only a couple of blocks from Sam’s. Walking distance. They both got out there and he paid off the taxi.

‘So …’ he said.

‘So …’ she replied.

They smiled awkwardly.

‘Feels like we’ve been here before,’ he told her.

She laughed and looked down at the ground. He put his arms round her waist.

She looked up and it seemed only natural that he should kiss her. She let him, parting her lips and drawing him in. Then she put a hand on his chest.

‘I don’t know …’ she breathed, pulling back a little and resting her forehead against his chin. ‘I mean I like you a lot. But …’

He bent to kiss her neck.

She shivered at the feel of his lips on her skin and pressed her hips forward instinctively. Then pulled back again.

‘Not drunk enough,’ she mumbled.

‘You have to be drunk to make love?’

‘No … not if the circumstances are right.’ She frowned and banged a hand against her head as if
trying to get a grip on what she felt. ‘I mean …’ Her eyes rolled for a moment. ‘I’m not saying things
aren’t
right, Steve. It’s just that I don’t know you very well yet.’

‘I know a good way to remedy that.’

She pulled a face. ‘Need a good night’s sleep. I’m flying to Chiang Mai for a conference tomorrow. Runs through Saturday. And …’ She gave him an apologetic smile. ‘And also, I don’t know what’s going on in your head.’

Which was fine, because he didn’t either.

‘Then it’s goodbye, I guess. Until the next time.’

‘Make it soon, Steve.’ She gripped his hands.

‘Goo’night.’

He turned and began to walk.

‘Steve …’

He swung round again.

‘There
is
something you could do that would kind of clinch it next time round.’

He detected mischief in her eyes.

‘What’s that?’

‘Get me Jimmy Squires.’

Yangon

Earlier that same day

The hotel which Saw Lwin’s aunt had transferred Perry Harrison to the day before was costing him eighty dollars a day, four times what he’d been paying at the Inya Lodge. But he’d passed an extremely comfortable first night there and he’d told himself he could afford it.

Early that morning, when the sun was still low in the sky, Saw Lwin had driven him and Tin Su back to the jailer’s house. His former wife’s dislike of him and her annoyance at what he’d persuaded her to do had been more apparent than ever. In the car she’d kept her face turned away, and when they reached the prison officer’s home she’d walked several paces behind him.

As soon as the door opened Perry had known the answer. The man was full of self-justification. Tried his best. Passed on part of the Englishman’s ‘present’ to other officials further up the chain. But in the end the request for a special visit to a political prisoner had been refused. The best he could suggest was that Harrison apply for a permit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It might take months, but if he could
prove he was the father of Khin Thein, then there was every possibility of success.

Tin Su had touched her hands in gratitude for the man’s efforts and walked quickly from the door. As they returned to the car she’d told Harrison he shouldn’t have come back to Burma. Should’ve left them all in peace.

Then Saw Lwin had taken them back to his hotel. Harrison had got out, with Tin Su remaining in the car, waiting to be taken home. He’d lifted a hand, half salute, half wave, but she hadn’t been watching. As the car disappeared at the end of the drive he’d felt a terrible loss. For several years she’d been his life, and he’d thrown it away.

Back in his hotel room he’d sunk into a deep depression. If he’d had the courage he might have ended it there and then. The medicine bottles he’d brought from England contained quite enough to kill him. It was fear that stopped him. Fear of what death would be followed by.

He’d believed in reincarnation since he was a teenager, because it made better sense to him than concepts such as heaven and hell. In general he reckoned he’d done more good than harm during his present existence, so hoped for a reasonable placing in his next life. Even his plans for the Japanese Lieutenant amounted, in his view, to a long-delayed triumph of good over evil. But his confidence in his standing had been eroded now by the knowledge of the suffering he’d caused Tin Su. His prospects beyond the grave would have dimmed.

He spent the rest of the day in his hotel room,
drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the call from Saw Lwin’s aunt that might or might not bring news. By the time it came, the shadows were lengthening outside the windows of his ground-floor room and the fierce daylight was beginning to mellow.

‘It has been
very
hard, Mr Harrison,’ she stressed. ‘
So
many phone calls. I have to make them from my sister’s house because my phone still not working. In the end I have some luck. Mr Tetsuo Kamata has reserved two rooms at the Jade Palace Hotel in Mong Lai tomorrow night and Friday night.’

Harrison’s heart somersaulted. He scrabbled for the pad and pen which he kept on the bedside table.

‘You would like me to arrange things for you? Book you into the same place? They have beautiful suites for thirty dollars. And the flights I can do at a very good price. When you want to go?’

‘I need to think about this.’ His heart was thudding uncontrollably.

‘Yes. But you must think quick. There is a flight to Heho every morning about seven-thirty but it always full. Another flight at eleven. You want me to try book you on it?’

‘Yes. Yes. Book it please.’

‘I will do it in the morning. Airline office closed now. And the hotel?’

He hesitated. ‘Is there another place?’

‘Golden Lion. Not so nice, but clean.’

‘Then please book that.’

‘I will come round to your hotel tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. All right?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’ll be fine. And thank you. Thank you very much.’

He replaced the receiver and smiled for the first time that day. Fate was beckoning. Challenging him. Somehow he would have to do the deed alone, but if he could achieve that it might earn him extra merit. The trouble was he had no idea
how
he would manage it.

Time to resort to prayer, he decided. Not to the Christian God who’d ignored his pleas for release from suffering in 1943 and 1944, but to whatever amorphous force it was up there that controlled the destiny of humans.

He looked out of the window at the reddening sky. There was only one place to be when the sun set over Rangoon and a man wanted to commune with the heavens.

He made his painful way to the lobby.

‘How quickly can you get me a taxi?’

‘One waiting outside Mister Wetherby. Where you want to go?’

‘The Shwe Dagon Pagoda.’

‘You pay taxi 300 kyat. I tell him.’

The clerk ushered him through the door and into the car, speaking briefly to the driver.

Harrison slumped in the back as they accelerated down the drive. Within minutes they were entering the car park at the base of the temple, drawing up outside the entrance for tourists.

There was a freshly painted notice beside it:

Entrance fee for foreigners $5. Includes camera
.

Last time he’d come here he’d walked up one of
the long, covered ramps that took Burmans to their place of worship without charge.

In the entrance hall he took off his shoes and placed them in a rack, then paid his fee and began moving to the lift that would take him to the platform. A studious but attractive young woman waylaid him, asking if he wanted a guide.

‘Five dollars,’ she said.

A few years ago he’d have taken her on, in the hope that in the hour or so of the tour he could work his spell on her and get her to share his bed for the night. He smiled at the memory of what he used to do. Memories were all he had left.

‘No thank you.’

He stepped into the lift and half a minute later the doors opened onto the main platform of the temple. The bell-shaped
zedi
towered nearly a hundred metres over the mound, its gold-plated bulk picked out by floodlights against a purple-red sky. To his right, in a corner of the courtyard, a banyan tree towered, its aerial roots encircling the trunk like creepers.

Harrison stopped beneath the
zedi
and looked up. Somewhere nearby a guide was reciting numbers. Thirteen thousand plates of gold on the banana bud at the top. Thousands of diamonds and other precious stones on the decorations above that. Fifty tons of gold leaf on the bell itself.

Such statistics were repulsive to him. The unacceptable face of Buddhism – of any religion adhered to by the poor. He began to walk around the platform, clockwise as custom demanded. Despite the glitz, for him the place radiated spirituality. Dozens of
smaller shrines surrounded the main one. Everywhere he looked people kneeled in prayer or sat in quiet meditation.

Prayer was what he’d come here for and he turned towards a side pavilion that looked empty. The significance of the shrine was unimportant to him. All he sought was an atmosphere in which to focus his thoughts. He climbed the steps.

Inside, an elderly woman and a young girl knelt before an unsmiling Buddha, a photograph of a young man placed on the ground between them. Their eyes were closed, their hands pressed together. Perry dropped stiffly to his knees behind them.

He looked up to the face of the Buddha. Then he cast his eyes down and closed the lids. To concentrate. He tried to ask for a boost from above in these last, frail days of his life, but the words wouldn’t come. His thoughts simply wouldn’t mould themselves into prayers. For several minutes he remained where he was, yearning to connect with the superior force. Soon his knees began to hurt so much that he had to get back to his feet. He stood in solemn silence for several more minutes, then finally admitted defeat.

As he stepped back onto the paved courtyard beneath the
zedi
, the pain in his back was like a bayonet slicing through his vertebrae. He sat on a low wall, despair and weariness engulfing him.

How,
how
could he do this thing on his own? This act he’d waited over fifty years to carry out. It wasn’t the issue of applying sharp or blunt instruments to living flesh that worried him – he’d proved himself still capable of that by disembowelling a goat kid at
Bordhill a few days before leaving the place. It was the lack of strength. He simply didn’t have enough any more. Not in his spirit nor in his body.

Yes, he could make it to Heho. Yes to the hotel at Mong Lai. Yes even to confronting Kamata at the memorial. But then what? Without the support of a man of Rip’s local knowledge, contacts and sheer bloody bravado, he would fail. And worse than that, would risk humiliation again. He felt close to tears after coming so far.

He looked at the placid Burmese faces gathered to witness the sunset. Old and young. Men and women. Accepting what the religion taught them, that they should put up with their lot without protest. Something he had never been able to do.

He watched a quartet of young monks squatting by a small Buddha, chatting like schoolgirls. Shaved heads, maroon robes. They’d rejected worldly goods. Rejected sexual pleasures. And looked happy with their choice, a choice he could never have made.

A sense of peace began to descend on him. Shwe Dagon was working its magic. It was dawning on him that he was finished. That he’d reached the end of the road and this was as good a place as any to die. Here. Tomorrow evening, he could do it. With the rest of the morphine patches plastered to his skin, a box of pills and a bottle of water to swallow them with.

His life would end, fittingly, as the sun went down.

He felt extraordinarily calm, having decided that, and let his eyes wander. Above him bats flitted blackly against the gold of the
zedi
and the purple of the sky.

He studied the others who’d come here. The
flat-faced Burmans from the central plains. Those with Chinese features from the north of the country. And a few Europeans. A handful only. Elderly mostly. Independent-minded travellers impervious to international calls for a boycott of this place.