“You must come to my country,” he said, as we stood outside the little restaurant. “You know what I mean when I say my country?”

“The Shan state,” I said.

“The independent Shan state,” he said.

“Of course.”

He swayed, and grabbed a lamp post to steady himself. We had swallowed beer from all over the world, and it was not without effect, on his body as well as his spirit. “You are my friend, Evan. You are my brother.”

“The Shan must be free,” I said.

“Yes!”

“Free of SLORC,” I said, and I spat, and he cried out with delight and spat himself.

Maybe he wasn’t the only one feeling the beer.

He had invited me earlier to accompany him to a boxing match – he hadn’t known the word for it, nor had I understood when he said it in Burmese, so he’d mimed it, throwing punches at the air. I’d turned him down then, and I did so now when he repeated the offer. I could imagine what boxing was like in this gentle Buddhist land. No doubt some physical equivalent of an-ah-deh applied, and you took pains to avoid striking a blow that would cause your opponent to lose face. The end result was probably more like ballet than boxing, with the winner the one who had not actually struck his opponent, but whose blows had missed their mark in the more artful manner.

“Evan,” he said, his eyes moist in the light of the street lamp. “Evan, my Shan brother, how I find you again?”

“Our paths will cross,” I said. And we embraced, and he went one way and I went the other.

GET OUT OF BURMA OR YOU DIE

I stood beneath another street lamp on another street and read the note again, not that there was much chance I’d forget what it said. But maybe there was a clue for me in the words themselves or the way they were written.

Printed, that is. In block capital letters that looked clumsy to me, or awkward. As if the author of the note were unaccustomed to the Latin alphabet? Or as if he had deliberately used his left hand (or his right hand, if he chanced to be left-handed) to disguise his handwriting. People did that in ransom notes, I seemed to recall, and in the messages they shoved across the counter at bank tellers, PUT ALL THE MONEY IN THE SACK, that sort of thing. I couldn’t see how any of that fit the present circumstances, and decided not to try reading too much into the seven words in front of me. The message itself was plain enough. I didn’t have to go rooting around looking for subtext.

But had the note been meant for me? Young Master Shit, the bird salesman, had been recruited for the occasion, and who was to say that all Westerners didn’t look alike to him? Maybe he’d given the bird to the wrong person.

No, I decided, that wouldn’t stand up at all. The envelope, which was just too bird-limed to hang onto, had had my name on it, in the same spidery letters as the note it contained. I had been instructed to be in a certain place at a certain time, and a few minutes after the appointed hour a kid gave me an envelope with my name on it. No matter how much beer I’d had since and irrespective of its country of origin, I couldn’t sell myself on a case of mistaken identity. TANNER EVAN was what it said on the envelope, and, last I looked, that was me.

NO comma between TANNER and EVAN. That suggested an Asian hand had printed those letters. An American would have written EVAN TANNER. A European might have put the last name first – a Viennese, I thought, would have made it HERR DOKTOR EVAN TANNER – but there would have been a comma if the Tanner had preceded the Evan.

But how did I know that there wasn’t? I’d have had to scrape away a lot of birdshit to find out. It hadn’t seemed worth it at the time, and it didn’t seem worth it now, not that I still had the option.

My friends in Burma, the contacts of my contacts in Thailand and Singapore, were the source of the rendezvous at four-thirty in Shwe Dagon Pagoda. There was no getting around it. The people I was looking to for assistance had responded with threats. Nothing veiled about it, either. No an-ah-deh type niceties. Get out or get killed – just that and nothing more.

Unless…

Wait a minute. Was it a threat or a warning? It made just as much sense either way. Suppose my friends had learned that the other side was on to me, and that I was likely to be killed if I hung around. They’d want to warn me, but they might be afraid to make direct contact with me, for fear that SLORC had me under observation. That would explain the whole business with the boy and the bird cage.

Sure, that made sense. If they wanted to intimidate me, why send a boy and a bird to do a man’s job? It wouldn’t even take a note. Just a couple of dangerous-looking men (assuming a man in a skirt could look dangerous) telling me to get out of town if I knew what was good for me.

So it was a warning, not a threat. Unless, of course, the Burmese preferred gentle threats, with no loss of face on either side…

It was hard to say for sure, hard to tell a threat from a warning. And it was even harder to figure out what to do next.

For starters, I kept moving.

I walked a lot, for the exercise and to walk off the beer, and to transform an acquaintance with maps and guidebooks into a real feel for the city. I didn’t want to stray too far from central Rangoon, but I could stay within the immediate area and still wear out a lot of shoe leather.

And I paused from time to time – to buy a few kyats’ worth of tamarind candies from a vendor, to snack on fried vegetable rolls at a hole-in-the-wall around the corner from the National Museum, to duck into a teahouse and sip a pot of tea while two men at the next table puffed on cheroots and played a passionate game of dominoes, slapping the tiles down with a vengeance.

In the swank bar of the Traders Hotel I had a whisky and soda and spoke French with a wine salesman from Nice. He had been all over Southeast Asia and disliked it all, but he especially disliked Burma. “If you think that this city is disgusting,” he said, “and believe me, I do – well, Mandalay is far worse. The sanitation is primitive, the cuisine is lamentable, and the women are neither skilled nor attractive. Have you noticed the pale circles on their cheeks? They paint them on to make themselves beautiful. They look like clowns in the circus.”

He was glad of my company because I spoke French, and he was starved for conversation in his own language. He got plenty of it in Laos and Vietnam, but lately he’d been in Singapore and Bangkok and Jakarta, where he’d had to speak English. “Everywhere English,” he lamented. “What a stupidity. If there must be a single language spoken throughout the world, certainly it ought to be French.”

“The language of Voltaire,” I said. “Of Racine, of Corneille, of Molière. The tongue of Victor Hugo, of De Maupassant, of Proust and Sartre and Camus.”

“Ah, my friend,” he said. “You are an American. And yet you understand.”

“Mais certainement,” I said.

When I left the Traders Hotel, I got disoriented for a moment. (Or disasiaed, I suppose, to be politically correct.) I turned left when I meant to turn right, and walked half a block before I realized it. Whereupon I turned around and headed back where I’d come from.

And realized I was being followed.

I don’t know why it took me so long. I haven’t had a great deal of experience at following or being followed, and it’s not something I have on my mind much. But I should have this time around, especially after the threat or warning, whichever it was, that I’d received that afternoon at Shwe Dagon. There were people who knew I was in Rangoon, and some if not all of them were not happy about it, so it was a good time for me to grow eyes in the back of my head.

The only eyes I had faced forward, and I hadn’t done a great job of using them. I’d probably been followed all day, and the first intimation I had of it was when I spun around abruptly on Sule Pagoda Road and, half a block away, somebody darted into the shadows of a doorway.