Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
waiting car and driver. The waiter and maître d’ shrugged regretfully
when I informed them that Mr. Glick had said he would pay. Thus, I
was stuck with the bill, a rather costly one, given the number of
people, and the quantity and caliber of alcohol that he ordered for
all and which he largely consumed. But at the hotel the next day,
Heinrich apologized profusely for his “sudden illness” and hasty de­
parture. He said he would make up for the lunch bill by deducting an
equivalent amount from our hotel charges. “How much was it?” he
asked, and I rounded the number down a bit and he rounded it up
with a sweep of his pen. In this manner, he ingratiated himself to his
clients, dined lavishly free of charge, and pilfered from his employer.
As you can see, he was a slippery charmer and a thoroughly dis­
honest man. He once told me he had managed the Mandarin Orien­
tal in Hong Kong, a claim I found hard to believe, given that he knew
not a whit of Cantonese. “What’s good to eat there?” I asked, bait­
ing him. And he said, “Sweet-and-sour pork,” the favorite of those
who know nothing of Chinese food and are unwilling to try anything
else. So I knew he was full of poppycock, and it was maddening that
he showed absolutely no shame about his lies. He never lost the
gleaming smile.
Some of the other tour leaders told me he was not really a hotelier
at all. He worked for the CIA, they said. He was one of their best op­
eratives. The accent was faked, the Swiss nationality a sham. He was
an American, Henry Glick, from Los Angeles, the land of actors. In
the early days, when he first came to Asia, he listed his occupation as
“waste management consultant.” On other visas, he said he was a
“water purification engineer.” “Waste” was code for CIA targets,
don’t you see, people they wanted to get rid of. “Purification” was
code for filtering information through sources. For a spy, a position
in the hospitality industry was ideal, since in this capacity, or rather
as the incapacitated host, he wined and dined all sorts of govern­
ment officials in Thailand, China, and Burma, and gave off the im­
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