steadfast mate had failed to turn up for his shift. In the past year alone there have been thirty such incidences of whom he knows.'
'Were they reported to the police?' I asked.
Clive passed on the question.
'In the case of a Burmese being registered and having a Thai sponsor,' Clive said, 'the employer would go to the police station to report that one of his workers had vanished mysteriously. The response would invariably be that the Burmese are a notoriously unreliable race and the worker probably found some other place of employ that offered a more substantial stipend. There was, however, no explanation as to why he would be of a mind to leave behind his clothes, possessions, and, in some cases, his Burmese ID card and money.'
'Is there a theory as to where these missing workers may have gone?' I asked.
Another dialogue.
'There are tales,' said Clive. 'Seafarers' yarns about deep-sea slave ships. Vessels whose crews work under armed guard, never paid. Subsistence rations. Torture and cruelty. Out at sea for a month transferring their catch to smaller boats. No way to tell of their plight. And in case of a mutiny, a bullet to the head.'
'Or a machete to the neck,' I added.
'Quite so. Nobody has ever returned from such cruises.'
'So, if nobody returns…?'
'Hmm. I shall inquire.'
The Burmese chatted. In the middle of their conversation Shwe's left leg started to play the Thai national anthem. He laughed and rolled up his trouser cuff. There, taped to his calf was a cell phone in a holster. He switched it off. He obviously wasn't about to calmly hand over his phone to the police. Necessity was the mother of invention.
'There is no cement evidence,' Clive said. 'But the slices fit together to make the cake. The account from a drunken Thai crew member. The sight of a man being bundled into a truck. Missing Burmese. Body parts found on a beach…'
'So there have been other parts?'
'Again, rumors.'
It wasn't any type of tale a journalist would touch with a long bamboo pole. The Internet was full of this stuff. Not a shred of evidence.
'Why wouldn't Aung want me to hear this?' I asked.
'For the same reason you won't write about it,' he said.
Shwe smiled.
He was right. I was a journalist in spirit. There might be facts I could follow up on, statistics, hospital records and the like, but I wouldn't get much from the Burmese. Why would they want to bring a rock face down on themselves? Who'd volunteer to have his precarious life crushed by getting involved in an investigation into a bunch of unsubstantiated claptrap? The missing were missing. The dead were dead. The police didn't care. Protect yourself and your kin, that's the way of it. I asked whether Shwe knew anything about the head on our beach. He said he didn't, but he'd ask around.
I drove Clive back to Pak Nam, and he was pleasantly quiet. I assumed this was his inauguration into the horror of life for the poor fisherfolk. This wasn't the yellow-paper-chain world, or the world of asexual hand-puppets telling each other to use a condom. This was the world where people got eliminated. There was no evidence, but I could tell that he believed what he'd heard. When he stepped out of the Mighty X, I asked him how he knew Shwe.
'I consult with him from time to time,' he said. 'He used to be the head of urology at the East Yangon General Hospital.'
'So what's he doing here drying fish?' I asked, although I was sure I knew the answer already.
'The poor blighter has a son back home with muscular dystrophy. In his old job he didn't make enough to medicate the boy. This pays twice as much.'
All this excitement and it wasn't even lunchtime. Just as well because I was supposed to be the one making it. I don't know how I ended up with kitchen duty, but it was by far the hardest job in the household. Mair looked after the shop, which was currently Kosovo. Arny minded the chalets, all but one of which were empty. Grandad Jah watched traffic. I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner and solved world problems. You can see where all the pressure fell in our family.
I pulled into the car park and saw a crowd standing around the latrines. Nobody was doing anything. They just stood by the concrete block, staring like tourists at the pyramids. It didn't occur to me at first, but as I walked down to the beach, I noticed some geometric anomaly with regard to our public loos. The entire block was leaning at a thirty-degree angle. When I reached the scene, the problem was clear. The sea had claimed the entire beach right up to the crest. The water was scooping out the foundations of our toilet block wave by wave. We weren't talking tsunami here. This was a deceptively gentle rise of the tide. To my left, the polite surf was already lapping at the top step of the front cabin. The plants bobbed up and down in their plastic pots. The picnic table was sub- aqua. In the four hours since I'd left, our resort had become Venice. Captain Kow was right. Earth was in the process of wreaking revenge on its abusers.
As King Canute discovered to his chagrin, there isn't a lot you can do to turn back the sea. We stood and watched. Our kitchen, farther inland, had a thirty-centimeter wash, and the carport was a quay. But this was a kindly reminder from Mother Nature that we lived beside several trillion liters of water. If it wanted us, it could have us any old time. I stood beside Mair as the toilets dipped another four degrees.
'Should I get buckets?' she asked.
I laughed and she smiled. It wasn't inconceivable that one day our entire resort would become Atlantis and they'd make TV documentaries about us. But today all I could think of was Grandad Jah unblocking the U bend on a toilet that was now deep beneath the surf. Like I said, the monsoons had a sense of humor.
We had lunch that day crammed around the bamboo table on the veranda of my cabin. I hadn't had a chance to tell anyone my findings about the Noys. Noy genius had embedded herself beside Arny. I had no idea what chemistry would draw a future Nobel prize scientist to a man who shaved his buttocks. She was so in love with him I didn't have the heart to mention that my brother's fiancee would be back from Hong Kong the next day. I really didn't want to tell her that Kanchana Aromdee, three times national bodybuilding champion, could easily rip Noy's skinny arms out of their sockets. And I didn't want to point out that Arny was not flirting with Noy in the least. Didn' t even understand the concept. He was just being his sweet, honest self. But, in fact, I knew I'd have to point all this out because Noy, alias Thanawan, had enough problems already and the last thing she needed was a broken heart. I'd wait for an appropriate moment.
'What do you intend to do about your toilet block?' Mamanoy asked.
'I was thinking we might issue snorkels and goggles to customers asking to use the bathroom,' I said.
'I must say you're all taking this remarkably calmly,' she said.
'You know where your cheeks are, but that doesn't stop you biting the inside of your mouth from time to time,' said Mair, looking out to sea.
We all nodded. None of us had any idea what that meant, but our guests had obligingly learned to surf my mother's squalls. They were becoming family. I wanted them to stay. Having found out what had happened in the States, I knew I'd never sleep again if I couldn't make some sense of it. I didn't want to scare them off by asking directly. I needed a ploy to squeeze information out of young Noy drip by drip without her realizing what I was doing.
In order to obtain their trust, I decided to share my Burmese findings with them. Severed head stories aren't always the best accompaniment to a meal, but the Noys appeared to take them all in
'Serves 'em right,' said Grandad Jah.
'For what?' I asked.
'Turning against the British,' he said.
I was surprised the old man knew the first thing about regional history.
'Stick with the Brits,' he went on, 'and you've got a royal family at your back. Can't beat royalty for political
