“ Burma,” he said. “How’s that for getting down to cases? What do you know about Burma, Tanner?”

“I know they don’t call it that anymore.”

“They call it Myanmar. Know what old Thoreau said about enterprises that require new clothes? Said to beware of them. Well, same goes for countries that feel the need to change their name. One thing when it’s a colony that’s gone independent. You can see why the Belgian Congo would want to call itself something else once it got rid of the Belgians. Still, most of those nations merit wary treatment. But when a country’s been on its own for years, and all of a sudden decides out of the blue that the old name’s not good enough anymore, that’s cause for alarm, isn’t it?”

“Anything the SLORC generals do is cause for alarm.”

“I see you know about SLORC. You’ve been catching up since you got out of Sweden.”

“ New Jersey, actually.”

“Well, six of one, eh? Point is you’ve been doing your homework. Nasty buggers, the chaps of SLORC. Between them and the bastards before them, they kept the country isolated from the rest of the world for thirty years. That’s even longer than you were on ice, isn’t it?”

“By five years or so.”

“Well, what’s five years in the mysterious East? ‘Better twenty years of Europe than a cycle in Cathay.’ I forget who said that but I suppose it must have been Kipling.”

“It was Tennyson, actually.”

“Same difference. Sweden, New Jersey. Kipling, Tennyson. Six of one.”

Maybe it wasn’t entirely accurate to say he hadn’t lost a step. Maybe he was missing a whole staircase.

“For years,” he said, “they wouldn’t let anybody in. Tourist visas were for a maximum of seven days, and you could only go to a couple of the big cities. They changed the names of the cities, too. I forget what they call Rangoon these days.”

“ Yangon.”

“That’s it. Tried to change Mandalay while they were at it, but they gave up and changed it back. If you’re lucky enough to have a city with a name like Mandalay, you’d have to be out of your mind to change it. Same goes for Rangoon, of course. I had a professor once, used to ask the class, ‘What time does the noon balloon leave for Rangoon?’ His version of ‘Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’ but it’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it? ‘What time does the noon balloon leave for Rangoon?’ Try that with Yangon and it won’t work at all.”

“Won’t get off the ground,” I said.

“Ha! Very good!” He cleared his throat, filled his glass from the water carafe. We were in a bare office on the seventh floor of a commercial building on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties, sitting in chairs on opposite sides of an old metal desk. He said, “The names are the least of it. The regime’s extremely repressive. Doesn’t trust intellectuals, and you’re considered an intellectual if you own more than three books, or write letters, or wear glasses. You run a risk of jail or a beating or worse. There have been massacres. They’re not the Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge, not by a long shot, but they’re a right bunch of bastards all the same. They’ve got statues all over the country to Aung San. He’s the lad who got them free of the British. First he joined the Japs to fight the Brits, then he saw what swine the Japs were and took his ten-thousand-man army to the other side. Fought for the Brits, and managed to get the country independent in 1948. So Aung San’s the national hero, and one of the first things SLORC did was put his daughter under house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi’s her name, and she-”

“Chee,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Aung San Soo Chee,” I said. “That’s how you pronounce it.”

“Then why spell it with a KY?”

“Well,” I said, “that’s Burma for you.”

“If you ask me,” he said, “they should have let the Brits go on running the show. At least you had people speaking English and spelling things the way they sound. Any rate, 1988’s when SLORC got in. They put Suu Kyi under house arrest and wouldn’t let her participate in the national elections, which they figured they were in a good position to steal. Well, she won anyway. With all their fiddling, they still got voted out of office.”

“But they stayed.”

“Of course they did. Threw out the election results and held onto the power. Kept the lady under house arrest while they were at it, and of course that got her the prize from your friends in New Jersey.”

“My friends in New Jersey?”

“Is that what I just said? Well, six of one. I meant Sweden, of course. Stockholm. Gave her the Nobel peace prize. Best way to get that is to be locked up by the government of a country nobody gives a shit about. You’d think they’d have given one to Salman Whatsit-”

“Rushdie.”

“-after he got the death threats from Whatsisname-”

“Khomeini.”

“-but do that and you piss off the entire Islamic world. Give it to the Burmese girl and all you piss off is SLORC, and who cares?”

“Not me,” I said recklessly.

“Or anybody else, either. So she’s still under house arrest, and they’ve stopped letting journalists see her, and God knows how many other enemies of the state are rotting in jails in Rangoon and Mandalay. Meanwhile, they’ve made peace with some of the ethnic minorities, but they’re still fighting with the Shan and the Kareni, and suppressing the others.”

“The hill tribes,” I said.

“They’ve got some exotic ones there,” he said. “Women with necks like a giraffe. Ripley wrote about them in Believe It or Not.”

“The Padaung,” I said. “They put copper rings around a young girl’s throat and keep adding more as she grows.”

“Until she winds up with a neck a foot long.”

“The neck isn’t actually lengthened,” I said. “The ribs and collarbone are pushed down. If you remove the rings, the woman can’t hold her head up.”

“Out of shame?”

“No, literally. The muscles haven’t developed. Remove the rings and her head flops over and she suffocates.”

“Women,” he said heavily. “Who can figure them?”

“Uh.”

“We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them, Tanner.” That last sentence came out as a dry croak, and he drank some water. “This past year,” he said, “SLORC decided to join the twentieth century while there’s still time. Started issuing longer visas, making a pitch for tourism. Let the Chinese come in and build hotels all over the country. Forced the minority tribes to pay a heavy labor tax, with each family sending a member to work on the roads. They’re getting good roads built, you have to give them that, but they’re not scoring high marks in human rights.”

“Are they getting tourists?”

“Not too many. Before they kept the reporters away from her, Suu Kyi was telling the world to stay away, that tourist dollars only helped SLORC. There’s another side to it, the argument that opening up Burma to the outside world is the best way to press for a change of government. As to who’s right, your guess is as good as mine. Mr. and Mrs. Tourist can stay home and read Kipling if they want. Far as I’m concerned, there’s only one person who has to catch the noon balloon to Rangoon.”

He didn’t have to tell me who that person was.

“Passport,” he said. “What kind of shape is yours in?”

It was rectangular, as I recalled, but that wasn’t what he meant. “It’s expired,” I said, “and that’s annoying, because it had a few years to go the last time I used it.”

“You haven’t renewed it?”

“I’ve been busy getting caught up,” I said. “And I didn’t know I’d be going anywhere.”

“I’m not sure it’s renewable at this point,” he said. “It’s probably too long out of date. You met young Cartwright, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, you will. He’ll have some forms for you to fill out, and he’ll get your photo taken. We’ll see to the passport and arrange a Burmese visa. That usually takes a while, but I still have strings I can pull. By the time you’ve had your shots and got started on your malaria pills, your papers should be in order. A few days, I’d say. A week at the outside. You’ll get word as to where and when.”