The Burma Legacy (30 page)

‘I thought you said you’d been to this place?’

‘Yes, boss. Hard to find last year too.’

They paused for directions a couple more times before Tun drove into a field and stopped. White buffalo grazed, tethered to stakes by long ropes.

‘Where is it?’ Sam asked.

There was nothing here that looked remotely like
the picture in the cutting, but Tun pointed to a fence at the end of the field, beyond which a cherry tree blazed with blossom. Beneath it was a rough canopy of sun-bleached corrugated plastic supported by white-painted posts.

They got out. Beyond the fence, beneath the canopy, was the memorial, a spike of white-painted stone little higher than a man, with Japanese script painted on it in black. The site was deserted. A table and chair stood at one end of the canopy, and on the table lay a book of remembrance. Sam opened it and turned to the page for today. There was an unsigned entry in English which chilled him to the bones.

We said we would never forget. And we haven’t
.

Sam looked around. He peered beyond the fence but there wasn’t a soul in sight. The stillness of the place was eerie. Then the gate in the fence creaked open and an elderly woman entered the memorial ground, dabbing her nose with a handkerchief. She eyed them with deep suspicion.

‘You speak English?’ Sam asked.

The woman made some angry noise which he took to be ‘no’. From her looks he guessed she was Japanese.

‘Tun. Ask her what happened here today.’

The Burman began speaking to her. Her reaction was hostile but eventually he coaxed it out.

‘This morning Mister Kamata come here to pray. Alone. Come by taxi.’

‘What time?’

‘She say nine-thirty.’

Sam checked his watch. Seven hours ago.

‘Two Englishmen already here, one as old as Mister Kamata, the other younger. They come in a big jeep with two … she call them dacoits. Have guns.’

Two
Englishmen. Had the elusive Rip finally turned up?

‘They take hold of Mister Kamata and drive away with him. Mister Kamata very angry. He shout to this woman to tell the police what happen. She go to Mong Lai in Mister Kamata’s taxi and say it. Then police come here. She show them this book which the Englishman write in. Then they go away again. This all she know. Very unhappy woman,’ Tun added. ‘She say Mister Kamata come here every year.’

‘Has she any idea where they took him?’

Tun asked and it was clear the answer was no.

Sam stared at the memorial. ‘How many Japanese died around here in the war?’ he asked.

Tun checked. ‘More than one thousand.’

So many casualties and yet the memorial was so simple. No tablets. No lists of names. So different from the massive commemorations of human sacrifice made by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It was as if the memorial had been erected in a hurry by people who didn’t want to remember what had happened here.

They made their way back to the car, Sam fighting off a sense of hopelessness. If Kamata had been kidnapped seven hours ago, the chances were he would already be dead.

‘How well do you know this area, Tun?’

‘I been here some time, but it not my home. What you want to know?’

‘Some ideas about where they could’ve taken Mr Kamata.’

‘I cannot tell that.’

Of course he couldn’t. Sam swung himself into the passenger seat of the 4-wheel drive. If there was an answer to his question,
he
had to find it. He tried to think himself into Perry Harrison’s mind. The man was controlled by the past. So perhaps it’d be
in
his past that he’d locate the answer.

Something niggled at the back of his mind. He dug into his rucksack for
A Jungle Path to Hell
, turning to the chapter where Harrison described the day he’d decided to marry Tin Su. He fingered through the pages until he found the section he was looking for.

I was totally infatuated with this young woman, and wanted to be alone with her. I realised that if I was to get her to submit to me I had to move her away from her familiar surroundings. To knock her off balance and crack that veneer of self-control that many Burmese women affect to disguise their shyness. I knew she would not be able to resist me so easily if I could destabilise her a little. And my determination to have sexual intercourse with her was extremely strong
.

I hired a car and driver for the day and we took off into the hills. It is a pretty landscape around Mong Lai. Because of the altitude there is no thick jungle in this part of Burma. Temperatures at night can drop below freezing. The earth is red and fertile and in the lower-lying areas much of the land was richly cultivated. The place I instructed our driver to take us to was a pretty waterfall called Pak Chin, which even in
the driest parts of the year had crystal clear water passing over it. I knew it from when I was a child. In those days an expedition there from my home in another hill town had involved a three-day trek with mules
.

I had had more recent experience of the place, however, because in 1943 my platoon used the falls as a source of drinking water. We had been there on the day before my capture by the Japanese. The village where we were ambushed was not far from the falls and the place where I had hidden after being wounded was a ruined temple at the top of an escarpment above them
.

I felt a certain sense of trepidation as we neared the place. There were ghosts to be laid and I was not sure I would be able to cope. The falls were accessible by a bumpy track. When we reached them the driver parked in the shade and proceeded to go to sleep. My desire to make love with Tin Su was extremely strong and I am sure if she had been a European woman nothing could have stopped us. But I was very conscious that simply by being alone with me in such circumstances Tin Su had already cast her culture’s social customs to the four winds. To try to take her further down the Western road of intimacy without her believing that I was strongly committed to her, would have been grossly unfair
.

We had our picnic by the waterfall. It was a late lunch because our departure from Mong Lai had been delayed by problems finding sufficient petrol for the journey and then by a puncture. It was already mid-afternoon, and the more we talked the more I became both enchanted by her and, unusually for me, determined to control myself and respect her ways. In the back of my mind, unsettling me, was the knowledge that not far from where we lay in the shade of a
tree was the place where my descent into hell had begun ten years earlier
.

I knew I could not leave that place without seeing the ruins again. The sun was beginning to get low in the sky when I suggested we climb up to the ridge to watch it go down. Heart in my mouth, we set off. There was no track as such, so we scrambled diagonally up a bank of loose stones. Twice she lost her footing and I had to reach out a hand. Necessity made her take it, and it was the first actual physical contact we had had that day, so mindful had I been about her sensitivities
.

At the top of the ridge we stopped to catch our breath. The old temple was not as I had remembered it. More dilapidated. More overgrown. And it felt a place of great peace, whereas ten years before I had lain there in fear, a throbbing wound in my side, listening to the rustlings in the scrub around me, terrified that every crack of a twig marked the footfall of the approaching Japanese
.

The main
zedi
had been constructed of mud bricks, the paint and plaster that had originally coated it washed away by centuries of rain. The bell shape had collapsed on one side, creating a small cave. This was where I had hidden in 1943. It was strangely liberating to see the spot again, because, as I said before, the place felt so peaceful now. I thought for a brief moment that I would tell Tin Su of the last time I had been here, but quickly stopped myself, knowing that her questions could lead to a territory I could not bear to revisit
.

We stood on the edge of the
zedi
’s base watching the sun go down. The magic of the moment overwhelmed me and before I knew what had happened, I had asked Tin Su to marry me. Not only that, but she had accepted. The power of
that place must have had a remarkable effect on us because for my part I had had no intention of marrying again. I was not even divorced. And I suspect that until that moment Tin Su had also never considered marrying a man not of her culture
.

We made our way down the slope again, so the driver could negotiate the worst of the track before darkness enveloped us. Tin Su let me hold her hand in the car. I can remember to this day its smallness and its delicacy, but as we bumped our way back to Mong Lai, a part of my mind was still up there at the old temple. I recall resolving never to visit it again until all my ghosts had been laid to rest. Which meant being certain that the man who had tortured me would never be in a position to harm me again
.

Sam snapped the book shut and beckoned to the driver. ‘Pak Chin, Tun Kyaw. Know where that is?’

The Burman slid onto his seat, his brow furrowed.

‘It’s a waterfall near Mong Lai. You know it?’

‘No boss.’

‘Then ask someone.’

Tun Kyaw drove the Suzuki from the field and back onto the rough track leading to the town. On the outskirts was a tea shop where he stopped to consult the customers. While he went inside, Sam watched three young girls walk past. Dressed in white blouses and carrying woven bags for their schoolbooks, their smooth-skinned faces were caked with
thanakha
paste as a protection from the sun. They smiled shyly at him, then quickened their pace, turning to one another to giggle.

Tun climbed back behind the wheel.

‘How far?’ Sam asked.

‘Maybe one hour.’

Sam clicked his tongue. Sixty minutes on a gamble that might prove fruitless.

‘They all talk ’bout Mr Kamata,’ Tun said suddenly.

‘In there? What are they saying?’

‘That he taken away by two Englishmen and police not know where they gone.’

‘Then we have an outside chance of finding them first,’ said Sam, grimly.

Tun Kyaw drove for twenty minutes on the road east, heading ever closer to the Shan lands controlled by the Wa. Twice they were halted at military roadblocks where Tun’s connections came up trumps. At each he produced a paper which turned scowls into smiles and salutes. But Sam’s relief at the strength of the Burman’s contacts was tinged with unease. To be
that
close to the military who ruled this divided land, Tun Kyaw
had
to be working for them too.

‘They grow poppies around here?’ Sam asked, after the second roadblock.

‘I don’t know, boss.’

‘The Tatmadaw still seem to be in charge.’

‘For thirty kilometres more. Then Myanmar soldiers finish.’

‘We’re going that far?’

‘No, boss. Very dangerous. We turn off road very soon. You see the
paya
?’

He pointed ahead where a
zedi
stood incongruously in the middle of a small field to their left. Its bell
looked recently gilded and garishly out of place in this seemingly empty landscape. Tun slowed down, searching for the track which he’d been told was just past it. The lane when they found it was the width of a single vehicle. The Suzuki bounced and banged over its stony surface. The first stretch was on level ground between rice paddies worked by women wearing coolie hats. Then the road began to climb and the ground on either side became rougher. Cultivation was replaced by scrub peppered with wild flowers and punctuated by stands of bamboo and eucalyptus.

Sam looked behind as they climbed. A plume of dust lay in their wake, its colour warmed by the late afternoon light. They’d be visible from miles away.

‘Stop, Tun.’

The driver braked, then turned to him expectantly. ‘What matter, boss?’

‘You’ve never been here before, right?’

‘No boss.’

‘So you have no idea of the layout of this place. What other roads there may be.’

Tun appeared not to understand. ‘In the restaurant they tell me waterfall is five kilometres from main road.’

‘The place we need to get to is above the waterfall. On a hill. A ruined
paya
. And if the people we’re looking for are there, it’s better they don’t see us coming.’

‘Then when we get close, maybe it better you walk, boss.’

Sam noted he’d said it in the singular. He couldn’t blame him. This wasn’t his fight.

‘Okay. Drive on. But try to keep the dust down.’

The ground undulated, an inhospitable landscape of boulders and outcrops of rock. At times the track became all but invisible and Tun slowed the Suzuki to crawling pace to negotiate the stones.

Sam felt appallingly unprepared. He had no idea what to expect. If the Englishman with Harrison was the elusive Rip, then the man must have significant contacts to have conjured up two armed local men as escorts.

And
he
was unarmed, his sole weapon his tongue. His only hope lay in trying to talk Harrison out of whatever he planned to do – if he hadn’t already done it. That’s if he could get to him without being shot to pieces first.

Ahead of them the skyline was marked by an almost continuous escarpment. Sam scanned it for evidence of a ruined temple but couldn’t see any. A lookout up there would have had a perfect view of their approach and there was nothing they could do about it. As they neared the place, the track began to follow the course of a stream. Most of its bed was dry, but a thin sliver of water wetted the middle. White wading birds pecked in the shingle for grubs.

Sam clasped his hands until the knuckles went white. Uncertainty gnawed at his belly. He had no instinctive feeling this time, nothing to tell him this
was
the place Harrison had come to with his prisoner. He looked around at the terrain they were crossing,
trying to visualise Japs and Brits bayoneting each other half a century ago.

Soon they reached a denser clump of trees and the track petered out. Tun Kyaw stopped the car.

‘Now you walk, boss.’ It sounded more a command than a suggestion.