Had he sent the cops a-knocking on my door? That made the most sense. If he knew the phones were out all over town, he could have figured that my call would have had to have come from within the hotel. Once he knew that, it was a fairly simple matter to check with the desk and fill in the rest of the puzzle. Yes, Mr. Spurgeon, we did have a recent check-in fitting that description. A Mr. Edmonds, a Canadian gentleman, and he’ll be coming down soon to show us his passport and a credit card, neither of which was close to hand when he checked in.
Maybe calling him from the Strand wasn’t the best idea I ever had.
But what else could I have done? Lurked across the street from the Strand, hoping he’d show up? And what if he did? Then what?
I still didn’t know where he fit in, or even where I fit in. What exactly had happened last night? Someone had been shadowing me, someone I’d presumed to be Harry Spurgeon because of his whitened temples (which I was beginning to think of as whitened sepulchres, but that was wrong). But my tail could as easily have been the Spurgeon manqué, the Burmese fellow who turned up dead in my bed at the Char Win Guest House.
Scenario: X, a Burmese man who is attempting for reasons of his own to look like Harry Spurgeon, has the job of shadowing me. I give him the slip, but he circles the block and picks me up again without my spotting him. For camouflage, he picks up a prostitute and checks into the Char Win, where he goes to my room and plants a foil-wrapped brick-shaped package in my backpack.
Then the prostitute, revealing a heart of something other than gold, stabs him to death, goes through his pockets, takes his money, and leaves him there.
Or try this: Spurgeon is on my tail, and I ditch him successfully when I dive out of the taxi. But his backup man, X, stays with me. They hook up together, slip into the hotel together, and enter my room, where Spurgeon murders his partner, whitens his temples, tucks him into bed, stuffs the brick into my backpack, and takes off.
Or, as an alternative-
Never mind. You get the idea. I had too little in the way of data and too resourceful an imagination, and I could thus concoct no end of scenarios, one as plausible as the next. None of them made much sense, and all of them raised more questions than they answered.
“Feeding time,” Stuart said. “Here comes the bloke with the key, and there’s Gran with the tray.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”
“See how enthusiastic you are, mate, when you see what’s on the tray.”
Our guard unlocked the massive padlock, then unholstered his gun and pointed it in our general direction while he swung the door open. Then a little old Burmese lady, shrunken and wizened, brought two trays of food, one at a time, and set each in turn on the floor of our cell. Then she turned without a word and left the room, and the guard swung the barred steel door shut and went back to his desk and his magazine.
Stuart took a tray and sat on the edge of his mattress. “What have we here?” he said. “Why, I do believe it’s chopped muck with rice. How unusual.”
“It doesn’t smell very nice,” I said.
“Nasty pong, eh? Doesn’t smell as bad as durian, but it doesn’t taste as good as durian. Tastes like old lawn clippings.”
“And smells,” I said, “like a goldfish bowl.”
“With the fish floating belly up,” he said. “That’s the fish sauce. They put it on everything.”
“It’s the same in Vietnam,” I said. I dug in. “But it tastes better in Vietnam.”
“It tastes better in Burma,” he said, “in a proper restaurant. I don’t suppose jailhouse food ever gets a star in Michelin. Poor old thing that brought it, I wonder if she cooks this muck herself.”
“It’s amazing enough that she brings it. She looks about a hundred years old.”
“She’s actually twenty-one,” he said. “It’s the diet that does it.”
I put my fork down. “I don’t know if you noticed,” I said quietly, “but our friend over there didn’t fasten the padlock.”
“I didn’t notice. Are you sure?”
“See for yourself. But don’t let him see what you’re doing.”
“I can see it from here. You’re right, mate. He forgot to lock up.”
“Has he done this before?”
“Not since I’ve been here.”
“We could walk right out,” I said.
“On our tippy toes,” he said. “He’s between us and the door, and he’s got a gun.”
“I know.”
“In fifteen minutes or so he’ll collect the trays,” he said, “and he’ll see the door’s unlocked, and he’ll lock it.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“You’ve not finished your food, Evan.”
“No.”
“If you’re done with it, shove it over.”
“I didn’t think you liked it.”
“I fucking hate it. But wait till you’ve been here a few days. You’ll be cleaning your plate and wishing for more.”
“I was in a Turkish jail once,” I remembered.
“Stone the crows. Like Midnight Express?”
“Before Midnight Express.”
“Couldn’t be. Years ago, that was. You’d have been a babe in arms.”
There might be a time when I’d want to tell him about my sojourn in Union City, but not this early in our relationship.
“Before I knew about Midnight Express,” I said. “They fed me the same meal every day. Pilaf, pilaf, and pilaf.”
“Sounds like a Russian law firm.”
“I suppose it does,” I said. “But the thing was, it was great pilaf. Really tasty. It was still jail, and it was no picnic, but I got so I looked forward to mealtime.”
“If they gave you durian three times a day,” he said, “I could stand this place.” He thought about it. “No,” he said, “I take it back. I still couldn’t bear it.”
I held a finger to my lips, then pointed at our guard. He had emerged from behind the desk, but he wasn’t shuffling over to collect the trays. Instead he turned and headed for the stairs.
“He’s left it unlocked,” I said.
“So? Any second now you’ll hear that sodcutting basketball. Thump thump thump as he dribbles. Clink as it hits the backboard, thump as it hits the floor. Then another round of thump thump thump.”
I waited. “I don’t hear it,” I said.
“Maybe he’s using the toilet.”
“And maybe he went out for a beer,” I said, “or to check what’s playing at Loew’s Maha Bandoola.”
“What are you doing?”
“Getting the hell out of here,” I said.
“He’ll spot you.”
“I don’t think he’s there.”
“But-”
“And what if he is? All he can do is bring us back and lock us up. But I think he left the door unlocked on purpose. I think he’s supposed to let us out.”
“So we can be shot trying to escape?”
“If they wanted to shoot me,” I said, “they’d have done it already. I’m going, Stuart.”
“You’ve got no shoes,” he said.
“So?”
“And no belt. We’re both of us barefoot and beltless. What are you going to do, race around on tiptoes with one hand holding your pants up?”
“If I have to.”
“Even if you get away,” he said, “then what will you do? You’ve got no money and no passport. No ticket home, no credit card, no place to stay.”
“No Lariam tablets,” I added. “No clean underwear. No Swiss Army knife. I don’t give a damn. I’m out of here.”
“But where will you go, mate? What will you do?”
“I’ll-”
“Yes?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said.
Chapter 14
There was a different clerk behind the desk of the Char Win. The fellow last night had had a mustache, albeit an unimpressive one. This one was clean-shaven, and better fed.