Matthew, the small Burmese Kayin man who worked the front desk at the Lotus Guesthouse, was the first one to suggest that Mr. Benny might be dead. "Benny went back to Burma so he could die near his family," he told me, his eyes fixed on the TV set as flickering Shiites danced in the streets of Iraq. "He was too sick to live in Thailand any more."

I had just returned to the rainy border town of Ranong, Thailand, after an absence of five months. It was April 9, 2003, the day U.S. tanks rolled into central Baghdad. Matthew had been squatting in the guesthouse lobby, translating BBC commentary for the other hotel workers — all of them illegal migrant workers from Burma. Deciphering the images from Iraq proved to be a difficult process, since even the BBC commentators didn't seem to know what was going on. Had Baghdad fallen or not? Were the U.S. soldiers welcomed or reviled? Nobody knew for sure, but when a soldier on the TV flung an American flag over the head of the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square, the Burmese workers had let out a cheer, as if Rangoon's junta would be next.

When the BBC cut to a commercial, Matthew finally looked over at me. "How did you know Benny?" he asked. Matthew's eyes were dark, fringed by faint yellow; he wore a crisp Oxford shirt, and his black hair was just beginning to show gray. A devout Baptist like many ethnic Kayin, he was painfully earnest in his beliefs — a quality that would eventually get him fired from the guesthouse.

"Mr. Benny was my barber," I said. Benny had also been my best friend in Ranong, and one of the most remarkable men I'd ever met. He'd evaded death so many times in his life that I found it hard to believe that he would submit to a quiet end back in Burma. "Are you sure he's dead?"