The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “It’s the only purpose for drinking.”

  He found himself grinning at her.

  “You kept your journal?”

  “Never missed a day. I was going to read to you about finding the body, but...”

  “You’re right, our time is up. But since you seem to be in crisis... I have an opening later today if you’d like to come back, and we could start with your journal.”

  “I could do that. I promise I’ll leave shark fin soup off the menu.”

  He smiled as he closed the door behind him. The empty plastic container with the chopsticks folded inside sat next to the computer keyboard.

  “The doctor says she’ll see me again later today.”

  He found himself staring at the tiny grayish piece of ginger wedged like a tiny body between the receptionist’s teeth.

  “Try the California roll next time,” he said, looking away.

  Six months of therapy before he was allowed to get his gun back from Colonel Pratt. There was one other small detail—Dr. Apinya, the Colonel’s recommendation—had to sign off that he was “of sound mind.” Even the receptionist had power over his future.

  Back on the street he made a point of walking by the Chinese restaurant with the shark fins in the window. A group of Chinese businessmen occupied one of the banquet tables. A waiter served them bowls of the soup. If anyone needs a little more control of their lives, he thought, it’s the sharks, who continue to swim in the waters controlled by the Chinese. He recalled an old Chinese saying, to the effect that when you don’t control where you swim, look for a safe harbor to escape and hide.

  Dr. Apinya had been nagging him about trying to control outcomes. She didn’t understand that he was merely trying to find a safe harbor in a land where all waters were patrolled by powerful predators and even they weren’t safe as bigger sharks preyed on them.

  SEVEN

  CALVINO CLEARED HIS throat, looked up at the doctor, locked eyes with her and looked down again at the short stack of typed sheets on his lap.

  “Why don’t you just finish reading it yourself?”

  She smiled.

  “I want to hear you read it.”

  Of course she was right. The tone and emotion were as important as the words. The personal landscape stripped of its voice was dead as ash and tar on a hot summer evening. Calvino sucked in his breath and resumed reading his entry for Tuesday, picking up after his call to Colonel Pratt.

  I called Pratt, and he said to wait for him at the scene and that he’d be there shortly. I checked the time. I figured I had thirty, forty minutes before he arrived. I jogged back to my condo, changed clothes, unplugged my cell phone from the charger and found my digital camera on the bookshelf. As I returned to the crime scene—I was assuming it was a crime—I saw the two Thais awkwardly waiting some distance from the body, whispering and throwing me heavy, dark stares. They weren’t happy to see me dressed like a lawyer, the suit and tie, watching me standing near the body, taking photographs. I moved in for a closer look. The Thais also inched closer. I turned around and took their picture, with one of them fingering an amulet on a chain around his neck. Two frightened, bugged-eyed civil servants who suddenly wished they’d paid the money to join a gym. Free jogging tracks come with some hidden costs.

  Two things were clearly bothering them. It was hard for them to know what was more disturbing -- the dead body in the designer jogging suit or me, the live farang, transformed in appearance. Dealing with the dead was a piece of cake in comparison. Here I was, no longer the farang jogger in baggy shorts and a T-shirt, but a man dressed in a suit during the hottest month of the year, and that made me either a very powerful individual or a crazy and dangerous farang. Whether I liked it or not, I was asking them to make the kind of choice each of them made every day as civil servants surrounded by those asking for favors. They’d had a lifetime of reading the social position of Thais in their fashions and accessories, but with farang, making a status call made them feel like an illiterate asked to sign something they couldn’t read. They looked insecure, anxious. I paid no attention to them, and that no doubt added to their troubled state.

  Most farang have no obvious alphabet that spells out their social status or rank. To the Thais we are more like those ancient cave paintings. How to translate a farang into the Thai context? It’s a risky business. The rule of thumb is that a farang can be safely ignored, but now and again, one of the bastards makes a Thai official’s life miserable. Making the wrong decision about that black swan carries the potential to be a career killer. Near a lake with white swan paddleboats bobbing on the shoreline, could I be the dreaded black one, gone onto land? They weren’t sure.

  Fear in their eyes. Scared and silent. Both men stood waiting for the police. Not that they had any choice. A police colonel already had their names and cell phone number. I could see how much they wanted to run away, but they couldn’t. Frustration, annoyance and fear, like fruit on an Atlantic City slot machine, had lined up perfectly, showing them to be losers.

  If they bolted, then what? What excuse would they give when the cops finally caught up with them? “I had an appointment to throw water on the weekend, and needed time to prepare my water gun”? Their big mistake was letting a farang borrow a cell phone. Regret etched sharp lines in their faces. I snapped another couple of photos of the Thais just to remind myself how regret furrowed a face like a rice field ploughed by an ice addict.

  I squatted down and took close-ups of Jane Doe’s face and neck, her hands and fingernails, and the silver anchor logo on the hip of her tracksuit. When you’re photographing a Jane Doe, you don’t think about her being dead. You think, do I have all the angles covered?

  Colonel Pratt and a squad of uniformed men came up from behind, fanning out around me, leaving me in the middle of a semi-circle. No one smiled or said anything. They stared at the body, waiting for someone to make a decision about what to do first. A forensics officer pressed the neck for a pulse. He looked up and gave the obvious verdict: “She’s dead.”

  Brilliant, I thought. But then I decided to cut them some slack. Don’t be a smart-assed farang, I told myself. Give them space. I moved away from the body.

  The forensics guys arrived, shouldering their own bags of misery. Turmoil over changes among senior positions in their department had caused them to wonder if their careers still had a pulse. Two of the officers knelt down and inspected the corpse, pointedly demonstrating that no one was going to rush them—not the cops, not these civilians. One member of the team measured distances with a surveyor’s tape, and a colleague wrote the numbers in a notebook. The forensics team came alive once one of them discovered the small shrine, ten meters away in the tall grass. They smiled and joked as they bagged the incense sticks, the candles, the spirit house, the tiny toy-like elves, demons, soldiers, elephants and dancing girls made of plastic, clay and porcelain. It looked like someone had pillaged a child’s dollhouse.

  I walked over to Colonel Pratt. Seeing me approach, he shook his head.

  “Vincent, why did it have to be you?”

  And I said, “That’s a question for the gods. What should I have done? Walked away? Fled the scene? Pretend I didn’t see the body?”

  Pratt fell silent and after a moment recovered his thoughts. Then he was back to business, asking me, “Are these the two joggers who helped you?”

  Two cops were taking their statements. Nodding, I said to Pratt, “I borrowed the phone of the taller one.”

  Pratt sighed. “You got them involved.”

  There was no good way for him to say I’d ruined his holiday. Songkran—one of the most important family holidays in Thailand—starts this weekend, and like every other Thai, Pratt had been planning to take off mid-week, ahead of the rush, and settle in for quality time with his family. He wasn’t the only one who was going to feel disappointed. This new case had the elements of a big story in the press. In the heart of Bangkok. Dead, beautiful girl. Police believe the girl was killed over
a personal or business conflict. Blah, blah, blah. Soon there’d be a reenactment of the crime in front of the assembled press. The problem was the cops had no murder suspect. That fact led to the ugly possibility that their holiday leave would be cancelled.

  All the cops around the dead girl shook their heads, saying among themselves that they saw nothing but trouble, paperwork, long meetings and reports converging at a point beyond the time horizon and approaching infinity.

  I told Colonel Pratt how much I wished someone else had called it in. After a while he seemed less upset, adjusting to the situation. That was his nature. Accepting that he has a problem is his first step in dealing it. Determining whether the death was by homicide or natural causes would require an autopsy and lab work and a report. For now, an hour filling out paperwork and he’d be back home. He’d deal with the rest once the holiday had come and gone.

  So it was a real body, and I hadn’t been hallucinating. That was the bright side. The upside. And I could see he was thinking that maybe, just maybe, the old Vincent was coming out of the dark tunnel of wild half-lit dreams.

  One member of the investigation team—who had the look of a Muay Thai boxer storming out of the corner as the bell rang for the first round—asked me questions and then asked if I’d mind going to police headquarters to talk. No surprise. The cops would naturally have questions for any person who found a body. The surprise was Colonel Pratt’s attitude—his official Thai cop expression. He said, “Vincent, go with these two officers and give them a statement. I’ll come along later.”

  I was thinking that it wasn’t that long ago that Pratt had stared down uniformed men, pulled rank, told them he’d handle it, and they’d slip away like hungry ghosts who’d been exorcised.

  “Talk to them, Vincent. I’ll follow after I finish up here.”

  The first thing a criminal lawyer advises is never talk to the cops. Boldface, underscore, italicize “never” and then blow it up to size 24 font: Never. There was no percentage in ever talking to them. Don’t try to explain or to justify. It is futile. Keep your opinions to yourself. Keep your mouth shut except to demand a lawyer. I am a lawyer. I know all of this. So what did I do? I talked to the cops. I violated Calvino’s Law because I had this urgent need to talk to somebody about the dead girl. That’s what I’ve been doing for nearly a year since I came back from Rangoon: talking about dead people. It was a natural extension to talk about this dead girl. The fact that my conversation partners were cops didn’t enter into my decision.

  Big data, small data. We swim in a vast sea of data. The best you can hope for is to keep your head above the surface. But there’s no shore. Only sea and sharks circling. You drown or get eaten. That’s your choice. It’s like that in a police interrogation, when they want to squeeze data from you in the old-fashioned way. Inside an interrogation room you are attuned to the smallest details. Everything in that room has the potential to hurt you, cause you to doubt yourself, force you to confront the fact that nothing is under your control. They have you by the balls.

  I’ll paint the interrogation room for you. The walls are a smoky green like a house lizard’s tail. Inside, it’s hot. It feels like a sauna laced with the smells of garlic, cigarettes, coffee and stale food. The air hangs heavy, so that it feels solid enough to touch. Air isn’t supposed to feel like anything. Everything about the room screams at you that your plane is about to crash. Pull the rip cord on your parachute now. Get out before you crash. But you can’t leave. They won’t let you. The cops take you to places like this because they want to let you know you’re in a place that belongs to them. No one is going to come into that room and say a stern word to them, no matter what they do to you. That piece of metadata is transmitted through every detail in the room.

  There was no table. Or chair. I sat on a stool. The kind of plastic stool that costs ninety-nine baht and that food vendors slide under foldup tables along Sukhumvit Road. I look up. Above me a naked light bulb hangs from a moldy old cord. This is a room designed to extract data in the form of a “confession,” and these data collectors have no computers or keyboards. What they have is vast experience in opening suspects like data files. They break down the suspect’s login and password and help themselves to what’s inside. The room itself is their algorithm.

  Calvino looked up from the paper. First at Dr. Apinya, who wondered why he had stopped. He looked around her office. How could she have any idea what he was talking about? Her vase of flowers, the coffee table, the comfortable chairs for clients, her teak office desk, its top as clean and innocent as a newborn baby’s head... The bookcase was filled with rows of books. Her diplomas were framed and hung on the wall. Framed photographs of her family stood on a side table behind her. This was another confessional room, one designed for the private confession that he was paying to make.

  “You’ve not finished, Khun Vincent,” she said. “Is there a reason you’ve stopped at this point?”

  She glanced down at the stack of paper.

  “You were about to talk about the actual interrogation. How did you feel when the police officers asked you questions about the dead girl? Or would you rather continue reading? The choice is yours.”

  The only difference, thought Calvino, was her office was designed to make him feel comfortable enough to confess his feelings willingly. He had a choice. He could leave at any time, even if he refused to cooperate. A police interrogation room, he thought, is a rabbit hole that swallows a man, stoking his feelings of dread until he admits to a crime. In such a room, as in the afterlife, there are no good choices. You can never break free. Never wake up.

  Calvino looked down at his journal pages and continued reading.

  For three hours the two cops interrogated me. They said that I was the prime suspect. They worked well together, dropping hints about how nasty things could become if I didn’t give them some straight answers. That meant telling them what they wanted to hear. Cooperating by confirming their story of what happened. That’s the job of interrogators.

  “If you were jogging, why did you wear a businessman’s suit?”

  “I changed after I found the body.”

  “Because you wanted to destroy the evidence?”

  It looked bad even in my own eyes. I went quiet, but it was too late for silence.

  “Who was she?” said the other cop in an ice-cold voice. He was late-twenties but a veteran. The interro-gation room was his ring. Thin, fast, tight-lipped, Ice’s large eyes tracked me like a cat’s eyes track a mouse.

  “I have no idea,” I said. With cops it’s best to keep your answers short. Embroidery is good for old ladies making doilies; in a police interrogation long answers stitch up a blanket they’ll later use to suffocate you.

  The second cop was lugging an extra layer of fat that bulged at his waist, opening the bottom of his T-shirt like a window blind. He looked a few years old than the Ice boxer. He stood like an anchor in front of me, sending the message that he wasn’t going anywhere and neither was I. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans and a knockoff Rolex. Or it might have been a real one. I couldn’t tell in the dim light. The two cops’ clothing shared something—no nametag. No cop ID. No bullshit.

  The fact is, neither of the two cops liked my answer. Thais have a way of disguising anger with a smile. These two guys—Ice and Fire—weren’t bothering with the formality of a smile. That’s a commodity used to milk tourists for cash. Cops have other ways to extract what they want. Police departments should make their interrogations a spectator sport. It’s nothing like the movies. Thai cops are old-fashioned data collectors who only know how to use analogue methods, well-suited to medieval training.

  The two cops closed in around me. It was showtime, and I was their audience. Fire had mastered the hostile, aggressive, threatening posture. Ice’s expertise was in the clenching of teeth and fists. He weaved and bobbed. I was an eyelash away from a kick to the head or chest or groin or stomach. He left all of the options open to my imagination. All actors,
if you look long and hard enough, have a tiny residue of boredom on their faces. After all, they are only acting out a script like any actor or bargirl. The bored faces I remembered from the police at the crime scene had vanished. But these faces displayed the low-heat simmer of disgust. This wasn’t an audition for an angry cop role. This was the real thing. Resentment worked into their voices, bodies and clenched fists, setting the stage for escalation to the next round.

  “You think you’re somebody special because you know a colonel? That means nothing. He won’t help you. He can’t help you. You can only help yourself by telling us why you took her to the park.”

  “I didn’t take her to the park. I don’t know her. I saw her for the first time exactly where you saw her. She was already dead when I found her.”

  “What’s her name? Tell us. Get it over with. You had a fight. She insulted you. She refused to let you touch her. It happened fast. You didn’t mean to hurt her. We can understand that.”

  “I don’t know her. Never met her.”

  Short and to the point, the kind of answer guaranteed to ramp up the pressure to make me crack. Have you ever wondered how the police get false confessions from innocent people? Civilians can’t stand up against the emotional terror that is the main purpose for enhanced interrogations. Ice and Fire had changed out of their uniforms into street clothes and put me in a room they controlled. That’s a situation no one teaches you how to handle when you’re in school.

  By the time the second hour had passed, their hostility level had ramped up another peg as they started in on the subject of human sacrifice. How did they come to that conclusion? One of them had seen a farang movie about sacrificial killings, and there was evidence at the scene of the crime of some kind of ritual with the spirit house, burnt candles and incense sticks. Photographs of the scene were slapped down on the table in front of me.