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He’d already done the calculations.
Khin Myat scratched a two-day stubble on his cheek as his eyes narrowed. He watched Naing Aung lick the juice from his finger after devouring another slice of orange. Naing Aung ignored the disdain in that look as he wiped his hand on his trouser leg. Calvino wondered if Khin Myat had shot such a glance at his Walmart supervisor the day he told him that he was quitting and returning to Burma, and the supervisor had replied, “You’ll be sorry.”
“Just tell me what you want me to do,” he said to Calvino.
“It’s a stakeout.”
Khin Myat laughed.
“I was born to watch.”
SEVENTEEN
The Cold Pill Stakeout
AT ABOUT 10:00 A.M. business at the 27th Street covered market picked up. Customers wandered in from the street, and the big customers parked their pickups and vans in the back and used the rear entrance. Khin Myat ran a thumb through the thick wad of lottery tickets he’d taken along on the job. He remembered from TV that people watching other people needed a cover so they wouldn’t be noticed. Khin Myat didn’t need to invent a cover. People on the street knew that he sold lottery tickets on the street for his uncle.
He wandered through the parking lot in the back, showing the lottery tickets as he walked. He watched as medical supplies were unloaded, stacked on carts and then pulled into the market, the wheels clanging as they bumped over the uneven concrete floor. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. He followed one of the carts inside. It was just another business day, with local customers and merchants exchanging cash for merchandise. It reminded him of watching endless hours of security tapes when nothing happened except someone pulled a box of corn flakes off a shelf and put it in their basket.
Sometimes a tourist might walk down one of the dark corridors and take a couple of photographs before turning around and walking back to the street. Local housewives wandered inside to shop for bargains at the stalls selling women’s and children’s clothes. Calvino had been smart to hire him and send him inside, Khin Myat thought. He moved down the corridor and no one paid any notice. Seeing he had lottery tickets, most turned their backs as a sign they weren’t interested.
The real business took place in the rows of stalls with medical supplies and drugs stacked in shelves. Clerks squatted on stools in front of their shelves and waited on customers who pointed at boxes.
Khin Myat milled among the shoppers in the market that first morning, looking for the stall whose number Calvino had given him. Hands hanging at either side of his longyi, he occasionally raised a fistful of tickets toward someone at a stall, and they would gesture for him to keep on moving. Calvino hadn’t used the term “surveillance detail.” He’d kept it simple, saying he needed both an inside and an outside pair of eyes. Calvino had picked Khin Myat as the inside man, and Naing Aung was to work out of his office as he listened to the dreams of his clients.
Khin Myat had been one of the first people to enter the market when it opened. He continued wandering past the stalls, skirting the phantom shapes of old Chinese bicycles leaning against a wooden platform. The concrete floor was cluttered and dirty. Shoes and sandals were shoved under stools in front of the stalls. Workers helped themselves to water from large plastic jugs as he passed.
The interior of the covered market was medieval. Nothing like it existed in places like New York. Birds nested in the ceiling, and cats stalked the dark lanes between the stalls. He wished he had a pair of night vision goggles as he finished one lane and turned to enter another one.
If Rangoon had a heart—though no one doubted that it had a head—the covered market was likely it. It was a land of spirits, superstitions, family and neighbors sharing their dreams with each other and with astrologers, monks and gurus, all looking for a winning lottery ticket number and all within the shadow of a sacred Hindu temple. You could also buy any modern drug you wanted there.
The vendors at the quieter stalls slumped over their newspapers, eating curry and rice as they waited for customers to shuffle up and point to a box of drugs or a modern medical device. Khin Myat continued, largely ignored as he wound his way along the market stalls. All around him was merchandise intended for those whose health had failed—the injured or maimed, the frail or disabled. He passed through a fleet of wheelchairs ready to roll through a world of demons, portable toilets for pit stops in the unrelenting search for ghosts, crutches to keep up with a fast-talking fortune teller, blood glucose monitoring systems as a hedge in the world of faith healing, scales for weighing medicine when brewing up herbal recipes and slimming belts to strap on before entering a ritual of black magic.
Every disease, condition, genetic malfunction or accidental injury had an infinite choice of remedies. Wholesalers, retailers, doctors, healers, nurses and hospital workers all shopped at the market; so did junkies, quacks and hypochondriacs. It should have been a fertile ground for lottery ticket sales.
“Things are upside down everywhere,” Khin Myat muttered to himself, holding up his sheaf of lottery tickets. “But in Burma they’re so confused that no one can tell the arms from the legs.”
He stopped beside a row of products near the stall Calvino had told him to target. He picked up a green box labeled “essence of chili,” looked it over, put it back, picked up a bottle of cod liver oil and finally one with garlic oil. Sitting at the stall, a small man removed his glasses, put his newspaper aside and arranged his longyi like a barnyard bat looking to drop from the ceiling and sonar out for a snack.
“This might be your lucky day,” Khin Myat said. “Buy a lottery ticket and become rich.”
“Are you looking for something or just wasting my time?”
Khin Myat returned to examining the labels on boxes. After a moment the man asked him again what he was looking for.
“Medicine for my mother. She has a bad cold,” he said.
“A good son would take her to the doctor and not hang around a market trying to sell lottery tickets,” he was told.
He’d received similar messages from a couple of other vendors. He should visit a proper pharmacy and not a wholesale market. What kind of a man was he? He must be one of those returnees who’d returned to make money and leave their mothers to die alone at home.
Several times Khin Myat caught himself just as he was about to defend his dignity and mother by telling the merchant that he was on an important assignment. Instead he wandered off, cursing under his breath. This part of a stakeout he’d never seen on American TV—the dead time, the sheer boredom of it, standing around and trying not to be noticed. The sick mother story had backfired. He trimmed his story to the bare minimum and concentrated on selling lottery tickets to a bunch of hardcore merchants who watched him with steely eyes as he circulated past their shops.
Calvino had told him to observe the activity, not just at the target stall, but around it. Khin Myat began to take notes of what he found displayed on tall, rickety wooden shelves in the nearby stalls. He noted the names on the boxes of drugs: Moxiget, Oncet, Loram, Diabenol and Solvin. He walked on past stalls specializing in medical instruments: chrome hammers for testing reflexes, long tapered scissors with gold handles, a large corkscrew device that looked like an instrument of torture, wraps for shoulders and knees, scales for weighing medicine, thermometers, bandages and canes. Wooden shutters for locking everything up at night were pulled back, and their padlocks hung from thick rings. The security system to protect the inventory was basic. He turned the page in his notebook and kept on writing.
Khin Myat closed his notebook, stuck it in his back pocket and rocked back on his heels as he looked around. The most striking feature of the interior area around the medical equipment and medicine stalls was the silence. It was the kind of stillness normally induced by anesthesia in an operating room. Words were exchanged in the hush of a hypnotist. There was none of the loud crying out or jostling that happened around the stalls that sold clothes, bagels, lottery tickets, flowers, peanuts and other food. He’d never been on a stakeout before and wondered if his experience was normal. Calvino had said, “Keep your eyes peeled and ears open.” He’d been more specific than that, adding, “Watch everybody who stops at the target stall, photograph them with your cell phone, and if anyone walks away with a large quantity of drugs, follow him and see where he goes.”
The second time he walked down the lane with the target stall in the middle, Khin Myat slowed down and picked up a box of Actifed. The clerk, a middle-aged woman, sat on a beach chair, half secluded behind the large counter. She nursed a baby.
