The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  Without warning the toe of Calvino’s running shoe hooked into a cross-stitch of thick green vines that had feelers snaking into the canal. Rather than preparing himself for the fall, he let his momentum carry him forward toward the ground. At the last moment he braced himself, but it was too late, and he hit the scorched earth with a thud. For a few seconds he lay on his stomach, dazed. Raising himself on his elbows, he noticed for the first time, no more than half a meter away, a woman stretched out on the ground.

  He closed his eyes, hoping the image would vanish. Eventually the visions of the dead always faded to static in his head—faded to sky, buildings, grass, palms or cars—and the world would rush back, embracing him with a mother’s comforting touch. Eyes still closed, he rose to his knees and opened his right eye just a slit, then his left eye. Now with both eyes wide open, he gazed at a woman in a blue tracksuit with white piping, still motionless. He crawled closer, reached out and touched her neck for a pulse.

  Calvino sat back on the ground, staring at the body. She couldn’t have been dead for long. In the tropics bodies decompose quickly. The heat changes the color of the skin, bloats the stomach and chest cavity, and turns the face into a shrunken horror mask. This woman—she was more a girl, no more than eighteen—might almost have been sleeping. Calvino stood up, looked around the area. In the near distance were a couple of houses. They appeared empty. There was no one around.

  He leaned close to the body and noticed that the woman’s hair, long and black, was flayed outward across the grass. No one fell to the ground with hair ending up in that position. Someone had made a point of spreading her hair out like a peacock’s tail feathers. She had an uncommon beauty, with a perfect nose, full lips and eyes, still open, that had been reshaped from Asian to farang. For someone so young, she’d had a lot of plastic surgery. But dead people with perfect features, it occurred to Calvino, have no more future than dead people with malformed ones. She could have been a movie or TV star, or one of the “pretties” who work in auto shows. Calvino carefully reached inside one of the pockets of her tracksuit. Nothing. He slipped his hand out and tried the other pocket, turning it inside out. Again it was clean. Not a scrap of paper, no cell phone, credit card or Thai ID. Ordinary pockets are never that clean, he thought. He sat back, staring at the body. He studied the dead girl’s perfect face, incongruent in this remote overgrown area of the Tobacco Monopoly Land, her unblinking eyes staring up at the sky. Who was she, this girl with the clean pockets, the sleeping beauty with no means of identification?

  “Who are you?” Calvino said aloud.

  Her face and swan-white neck showed no cuts, bruises or scrapes, no marks of any kind. It was as if the young star had emerged from the makeup department and taken her place on a film set. Murder victims in real life are never beautiful, Calvino knew well. They’ve been knocked around, shot, stabbed, strangled or poisoned, and each method of death leaves a calling card on the body. Calvino continued his search for evidence of a struggle. He checked her hands, examining the fingernails, none of which were broken, and there were no signs of someone else’s skin or blood there to suggest a struggle against an attacker.

  The tracksuit was expensive. The logo on the left hip had a silver anchor embedded in a spray of ferns. One of those imported $300 designer suits that hi-so women wear, he decided. It wasn’t the usual knockoff he saw on women joggers circling the track around Lake Ratchada. He checked the label. Juicy Couture. The dead girl had a taste for high fashion and a budget to go along with her taste.

  How could someone that beautiful and young be dead, with not a scratch on her? Next to the small canal he stared at a face sculpted into absolute perfection. A great deal of time and money had been invested in that face. A face that appeared as if touched by an angel, a face of symmetry and balance not known in nature. He expected her at any moment to sit up, stretch her arms, smile and say in an easy voice, “Hello. Who are you? Where am I? Did you bring me here? Have I been sleeping long?”

  “You’re dead,” he said to the body.

  “Please don’t say that,” he could almost hear her reply.

  “Can I take a closer look at your throat, your chest?” he asked the corpse.

  “If it makes you happy,” the voice in his head told him.

  He zipped the front of her tracksuit down far enough to examine her throat and the top of her chest. She wore no bra under the tracksuit top. As with the face, her breasts appeared to be the product of plastic surgery, though again without telltale marks.

  He couldn’t control his pounding heart. He dripped with sweat and felt short of breath. Her skin was cold to the touch.

  “No... no...” he repeated to himself.

  “What natural cause could have taken your life?” he finally asked the girl.

  This time no voice responded. Rising to his feet, he walked a few feet down to the edge of the canal. The water ran slowly. In the weeds he discovered a small shrine—a wooden spirit house—half hidden, tilted to the side. Its little figures of soldiers, mythic gods, costumed dancers and elephants spilled onto the canal bank. A water glass held half a dozen burnt incense sticks. The stubs of yellow candles as narrow as a pencil were mixed in the debris. Calvino picked up one of the melted candles and smelled the wax. Not long ago it had been hot. He dropped it back on the ground.

  This new discovery was disturbing and reassuring at the same time—disturbing as he’d found evidence that someone had been making an offering, and that person must have seen the body; and reassuring in that it confirmed that what he was seeing was real. It wasn’t just his mind projecting images.

  FIVE

  IT WAS 7:45 A.M. and still cool. He glanced back at the mysterious body in the designer tracksuit; it would need to be removed to cold storage. Calvino was in running gear—off the rack of a Sukhumvit street vendor. He had left his condo without a cell phone, money or any ID save for his plain-white condo security card.

  Calvino always advised clients never to leave their offices or homes without ID; complacency, he’d learned the hard way, was the major long-term enemy of an expat. Assuming there is no danger, letting one’s guard down and thinking that everything will always continue to be normal: he knew that these are the habits a fool allows himself. You might, for instance, stumble upon a body. Only a fool ignores the possibility of a man’s normal world flipping into abnormality in the blink of an eye. Move off the normal path and the odds against you increase. Calvino hadn’t followed his own advice. A flash of anger and self-hatred bent him forward and left him breathing slowly. His lungs full, he took off in a full sprint, running back through the grounds toward the lake and the track.

  He reached the track as the 8:00 a.m. playing of the national anthem blared from the loudspeakers. Everyone in the park and on the track came to a complete stop, observing a moment of silence until the music finished. No one moved. The security guards stood at attention as Calvino ran past. The anthem created a cone of silence, and for that brief time the dead and living observed the same stationary speechlessness. The sight of a farang running through the park and onto the track during the national anthem drew hostile stares. Calvino kept running until he saw the two Thai government workers, who now stood still on the track.

  As the anthem ended, Calvino waied the senior Thai.

  “I need to use your cell phone. It’s an emergency.”

  This was the same jogger who’d taken the call from a woman who’d made him regret not being born gay. He hesitated.

  “It’s very important. It’s about a woman.”

  The Thai smiled, handing him the cell phone, a gesture as if to say he understood the role of women was to cause emergencies.

  “Thanks,” said Calvino. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  The other jogger said, “You should stop when the anthem is played. What you did is very disrespectful. You could be arrested.”

  “This is an emergency.”

  The two joggers watched as Calvino phoned Colonel Pratt.<
br />
  “Pratt, I’ve found the body of a woman on the Tobacco Monopoly Land. Yeah, just a few minutes ago.”

  The eyes of the phone owner widened.

  Colonel Pratt replied, “This isn’t your phone.”

  “I’m on the track at Lake Ratchada. I left my phone at the condo, so I’ve borrowed one from a jogger.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  The government officer shook his head, his face gone pale.

  “What’s your name?” Calvino asked him.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “The police. I’ve reported a body.”

  The blood drained from the jogger’s face. Calvino handed him the phone.

  “Here, talk to the Colonel.”

  The jogger, wild with disbelief, stared at the phone before slowly putting it to his ear. He gave his name and address and explained that he had nothing to do with the body. After the call with the Colonel ended, he collapsed against his friend. This hadn’t been a good day for him. He’d received an annoying call for money from a minor wife, and then a crazy farang had run through the playing of the anthem to use his phone to report a death. Jogging was supposed to be good for a man’s health. That notion was obviously bogus, a lie.

  “The Colonel asked me to go with you to view the body,” said the jogger, “and to call him back with what I find.”

  “Why doesn’t he come himself? What’s this have to do with you?” his friend asked.

  They stared at Calvino, waiting for him to answer the strange request.

  “The Colonel wants confirmation,” said Calvino.

  Both joggers looked at Calvino as if he were crazy. In the last year Calvino had come to recognize that look. He’d been getting it a lot.

  “But why?” the jogger pleaded.

  “He wants you to confirm that I didn’t imagine a dead body.”

  “Do you imagine finding dead bodies?”

  Looking away at the road, Calvino shrugged his shoulders.

  “I have a history of seeing ghosts. This isn’t a ghost. I saw a real body. Come, I’ll show you.”

  The two joggers exchanged glances. The cell phone rang. Calvino could tell it was Colonel Pratt on the other end from all of the “khrap, khrap” that came from the jogger’s end of the conversation. Sir, sir, sir—like a needle stuck on an old LP repeating a single lyric in a perpetual loop.

  SIX

  THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, April 11, Calvino made his way to Silom Road, where Dr. Apinya’s office was on the seventh floor of an old high-rise office tower. For years there had been a wedding planning business on the ground floor. White gowns, veils, bouquets and smiling couples in cinema-poster-sized poses. The business had vanished long ago. The ghosts of all the happy couples are all that remain, Calvino thought as he walked through the ground floor. Taking the elevator to the seventh floor, Calvino walked into the office. He felt as if he’d stepped into a Chinese opium den with the soft lighting, lava lamp and new age music. A receptionist sat at her desk, wiggling ivory chopsticks above a plastic container with eight slices of salmon lined up in a neat row. She looked up as Calvino came in.

  “Can’t make up your mind?” he asked, looking at the sushi.

  “I never know whether to start at the bottom and work my way to the top, or start at the top and work my way to the bottom,” she said.

  “I thought Thais started in the middle and worked both directions at once.”

  Without replying to his observation, she said simply, “The doctor will be with you in a few minutes. She’s running late.”

  Half an hour later, Calvino walked into the office of Dr. Apinya, a woman in her late thirties with long hair tied behind her head. Her glasses had thick black rims that gave her a serious academic appearance. Her Chinese face, large and oval, was soft, gentle, caring. Her eyebrows had been carefully sculpted, rising over the glasses as if indicating perpetual interest or surprise. From each of Dr. Apinya’s pierced ears, gold earrings, small, rounded like a matching pair of wedding rings, fit snug against the lobes. On her tailor-made baby blue silk blouse, her name on a name tag pinned above her left breast.

  She looked up from a file with Calvino’s name on it.

  “Vincent. Sit down. Would you like coffee?”

  Every session she asked the same question. He shook his head, sitting in the chair opposite her desk.

  “How have you been doing?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  Do I tell her or not, he asked himself.

  “We talked before about holding back. There is no reason for you to. You need to feel comfortable enough to tell me anything.”

  “I passed a restaurant on the way here that sells shark fin soup.”

  “You found that disturbing?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, I did. I saw your receptionist eating sushi. And I asked myself why that wasn’t disturbing but the fins were.”

  She made notes in his file, her glasses pushed forward on her nose. He watched her write with her left hand in slow, careful strokes.

  “What feelings do you have about shark fin soup?”

  He explained that one day it had dawned on him what chain of events had been set in motion each time the soup appeared on his table. The degree of coordination and cooperation, from the moment a fish trawler left port to the time it caught the sharks, cut off the fins, threw the live sharks back and returned to port. Then the packing, the cold storage, the loading and driving of trucks, the unloading, the storage again, the loading of the fins on smaller trucks and the fins’ arrival, crated, through the back door of a restaurant kitchen.

  The image of bleached out fins in the window of a Chinese restaurant in Siam Square flashed through Calvino’s mind. He had stopped and examined them—the shape, texture, size and placement—thinking about their source. He wouldn’t eat the soup anymore, nor could he bear watching anyone else slurp it down. He told Dr. Apinya that he wanted to shout from the rooftops about the murder of sharks.

  “It’s too bad that sharks have so few friends,” she said.

  The chatter took on an aimless quality bouncing from subject to subject, violence, alcohol, hookers, murder victims, until abruptly he asked, “You know the Tobacco Monopoly near Rama IV Road?”

  She smiled, waiting for more shark fin observations.

  “I jog around the lake most mornings. Yesterday morning I made a detour through the grounds. I was jogging along an open area near a canal. I stumbled and fell, and when I started to get up, I saw a body.”

  “One of the same bodies you’ve told me about before?”

  Calvino had expected the reaction, but it didn’t stop him from shaking his head in frustration.

  “No. This was a real body.”

  “Okay, it was an actual body.”

  “A young woman’s body.”

  “Have you seen her body before or was this the first time?”

  “Dr. Apinya, I am not talking about a body out of my head. I called Colonel Pratt. He had the same patronizing bullshit reaction: Vinny’s crazy again, seeing things, making stuff up. When he showed up and saw the dead body, secretly I think that maybe, in a strange way, he’s relieved.”

  “Why would the Colonel have been relieved, Vincent?”

  “Because he saw I was telling the truth. I had found an actual, real dead body. A young woman.”

  For the first time in a couple of months, Calvino noticed that Dr. Apinya looked uneasy, off-balance.

  “How did you feel when you saw this body?”

  “I asked myself if I was crazy.”

  Colonel Pratt, Calvino added, had also been unprepared for the reality of Calvino’s discovery. They’d stood together at the scene with the two Thai joggers and a platoon of cops. A police forensic team had arrived and worked the crime scene as anonymously as the waiters who cleared the dishes at the Last Supper.

  He told the doctor what the Colonel had said to him: “Vince
nt, I don’t want you to get involved any further. You’ll be asked to answer some questions. That’s routine. After that go home, go back to getting better.”

  She leaned forward, touching her left gold earring. Calvino read that tell like a professional poker player and anticipated the card that would be played next.

  “You feel that you have a right to some control of the investigation? Like control over a restaurant that serves shark fin soup?”

  Calvino was disappointed.

  “Everything comes back to that, right—control? I’m having problems because of losing control in Rangoon. The kid getting shot in the space I controlled. His girlfriend blown up in Bangkok, a place where supposedly I’m in control. We’ve talked about nothing else the last three months.”

  He looked at his watch and pushed back into the chair.

  “What I do best is find people who’ve gone missing. The girl I found is a missing person. The police have her body. They don’t know who she is. When they know that, when they know what happened to her, I’ll be happy to go back to my usual ghosts. Have the regular conversations. Right now, I’m not trying to control anything. Or anyone. I just need to know who she was.”

  “Are you self-medicating?” she asked.

  He thought about whether to tell her about the two fumbled attempts with Nui but couldn’t bring himself to utter the name of Nui’s bar, Mama, Don’t Call.

  “Do wine and whiskey count as medication?”

  He realized his session was coming to an end before he’d read his latest journal entries.

  “Is that the purpose for drinking, Vincent?”

  A flicker of genuine concern crossed her face.