8
Two days later, Edgar received a message from the War Office. They had secured an extra berth on a teak ship with the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. The boat would depart from the docks at Prome in two days. He would leave for Prome on the train; the trip to Mandalay would take seven days.
In his four days in Rangoon, he had hardly unpacked. Since the hunt, he had stayed in his room, leaving only when called upon by various officials, or occasionally to wander the streets. The bureaucracy of the colonial operation astounded him. Following the shooting, he had been subpoenaed to sign testimonies at the Departments of Civil and Criminal Justice, the Police Office, the Department for Village Administration, the Medical Department, even the Department of Forests (because, as the subpoena stated, “the accident occurred in the act of wild game control”). At first he was surprised that the event was even reported. He knew that if all the men had agreed, it could easily have been covered up; the villagers would never have found a way to complain, and even if they did, it was unlikely that they would have been believed, and even if they had been, it was unlikely that the officers would be disciplined.
Yet everyone, including Witherspoon, insisted on reporting the incident. Witherspoon accepted a minor fine, to be distributed to the victim’s family, along with army funds set aside for such compensation. It all seems remarkably civil, Edgar wrote to Katherine, Perhaps this is evidence of the positive influence of British institutions, despite the occasional aberrance of hasty British soldiers. Or perhaps, he wrote a day later, after signing his seventh testimony, this is all merely a salve, a tried and effective method of dealing with such terror, to absolve something deeper, The afternoon is already blurring behind the screen of bureaucracy.
Witherspoon and Fogg left for Pegu as soon as the paperwork was completed, arriving on time to relieve a pair of officers who were returning to Calcutta with their regiments. Edgar didn’t say goodbye. Although he had wanted to place the blame for the incident on Witherspoon, he couldn’t. For if Witherspoon had been hasty, he had only been two seconds hastier than the rest of them, all of whom shared the bloodlust of the hunt. Yet each time Edgar saw him after the accident, whether at meals or in government offices, he couldn’t suppress the memory of the rifle raised against the heavy jowl, the beads of sweat running down the back of the sunburnt neck.
As he had avoided Witherspoon, Edgar avoided Captain Dalton as well. On the night before his departure, a messenger brought an invitation from Dalton, once again inviting him to the Pegu Club. He declined politely, excusing himself as too tired. In truth, he wanted to see Dalton, to thank him for his hospitality, to tell him that he held no anger toward him. Yet the thought of reliving the incident terrified him, and he felt that all that he shared with the Captain now was that moment of horror, and to see him would be to relive it. So he refused the invitation, and the Captain didn’t call again, and although Edgar told himself that he could always visit the Captain when he came back through Rangoon, he knew that he wouldn’t.
On the morning of his departure, he was met at his door by a carriage, which took him to the railway station, where he boarded a train for Prome. While the train was being loaded, he stared out over the bustling of the platform. Down below he saw a group of small boys kicking a coconut husk. His fingers reflexively fingered a single coin that he held in his pocket, that he had kept since the hunt: a symbol of responsibility, of misplaced munificence, a reminder of mistakes, and so a talisman.
In the chaos of mourning, when all had left, carrying the boy, Edgar had seen the coin lying on the ground, tipped in the dusty imprint of the boy’s body. He had assumed that it had been overlooked, and he picked it up simply because it was the boy’s and it didn’t seem right for it to be lost at the edge of the forest. He didn’t know that this was a mistake, that it had been neither forgotten nor missed: in the sunlight it glinted like gold, and every child eyed it and wanted it. But what the children knew, and he didn’t understand, he could have learned from any porter who loaded crates onto the train below. The most powerful talismans, they would have told him, are those that are inherited, and with such talismans, the fortune is inherited as well.
In Prome he was met by the staff of a district army officer, who took him to the docks. There he boarded a small steamer of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, whose engines had already begun to turn by the time he boarded. He was shown to his berth, with a view of the left bank of the river. It was small but clean, and his apprehension about the trip was assuaged. As he unpacked, he felt the steamer push away from the shore, and he walked to the window to watch the banks disappear. Still thinking of the tiger hunt, he had noticed little in Prome, only some crumbling ruins and a bustling market by the port. Now, on the river, he felt a lightening, a separation from the hot, crowded streets of Rangoon, of the delta, from the boy’s death. He climbed to the deck. There were several other passengers, some soldiers, an older couple from Italy who told him they had come sightseeing. All new faces, none of whom knew of the accident, and he vowed to put the experience behind him and leave it on the muddy banks.
There was little to the view from the center of the river, so he joined the soldiers in a game of cards. At first he had been hesitant to meet them, remembering the haughtiness of many of the officers he had met on the ship from Marseilles. But these were enlisted men, and when they saw he was alone, they invited him to play, and in exchange, he entertained them with news about the football leagues; even month-old news was fresh in Burma. He knew little about the sport, really, but he had tuned the piano of a London club owner and been given free tickets to some matches. On Katherine’s suggestion, before he had left, he had memorized some scores to, in her words, “facilitate conversation and meeting people.” He reveled in the attention, and in the soldiers’ enthusiasm for the news. They drank gin together and laughed and proclaimed Edgar Drake a fine chap, and he thought how happy these young men were, And yet they too must have seen terror, but here are content with stories of two-month-old football matches. And he drank more gin, laced with tonic water, which the soldiers joked was “prescribed by the doctor,” for the quinine in the tonic fought the ague.
That night he had his first good sleep in days, heavy and dreamless, and he awoke long after the sun had risen with a heavy headache from the gin. The banks were still distant, with little relief from the wooded shore other than scattered pagodas. And so he joined another card game, and treated the soldiers to several more rounds of gin.
They drank and played for three days, and when he had repeated the football scores so many times that even the drunkest soldier could recite them, he sat back and listened to them tell stories of Burma. One of the soldiers had been at the battle for Minhla Fort during the Third War, and he recounted the advance through the mist and the fierce resistance of the Burmese. Another had served on a mission in the Shan States in the territory of the warlord Twet Nga Lu and he told his story, and to this Edgar listened carefully for he had heard the name of the brigand many times. And he asked the soldier, Have you ever seen Twet Nga Lu? He hadn’t, they had marched days through the jungle and everywhere found evidence they were being followed, dead fires, shapes shifting in the trees. But they were never attacked, and returned with neither defeat nor conquest; land claimed without witnesses is never land truly claimed.
Edgar asked the soldier more questions, Had anyone ever seen Twet Nga Lu? How far did his territory extend? Were rumors of his ferocity true? To these the soldier answered that the warlord remained elusive, and sent only messengers, and that few had ever seen him, not even Mr. Scott, the political administrator to the Shan States, whose success at forming friendships with tribes such as the Kachins was legendary. And yes, rumors of his ferocity were true, the soldier had seen with his very own eyes men crucified on mountaintops, nailed side by side to rows of timber X’s. As to the extent of his territory, no one knew. There were reports that he had been driven deep into the hills, beaten back by the sawbwa of Mongnai, whose throne he had usurped. But many felt this loss of territory was insignificant; he was so feared for his supernatural powers, for his tattoos and charms, for the talismans he wore beneath his skin.