The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  Calvino patiently waited until she glanced up. Was she going to disappear into the cliché of the overworked NGO? Or would she stick her head out of the shell—her real self, not the one buried in the iPad.

  Finally she relaxed and looked up to meet his eyes with the beginning of a smile.

  “If you want to know the truth, it’s depressing. With the fire at the camp, how else could I feel? I should have been there. Instead I was in Bangkok.”

  Any true human connection between two strangers starts with an expression of their state of mind. In Judy’s case, guilt whorled inside her head, fed by heat, smoke and fire.

  Who wouldn’t feel depressed working inside a refugee camp along the Burmese border? One that had been destroyed by fire, he thought, remembering the smoke and flames on the TV. No one could ever imagine what another person might feel in circumstances like those. Witnesses to destruction and death can find themselves cut off, Calvino knew, isolated from others who haven’t shared the experience. In the presence of others Judy tried to shake off her feelings of estrangement and guilt, or least not to show them to a stranger like Calvino.

  “You look troubled,” he said.

  Watching her twist the ring on her right hand, he couldn’t decide if it was a wedding ring or a birthstone.

  “I can’t stay long. I must leave for the airport soon.”

  She glanced at her wristwatch.

  “Going back to Oslo?”

  He looked at her bag.

  “No, I’m going to Mae Hong Son,” she said, expecting a reaction.

  When she saw a blank look on Calvino’s face, it was clear that the name of the province hadn’t registered any emotion.

  “You may not have been following the news,” she said.

  “I saw the fire at the refugee camp on the TV news,” he said, leaving out that the TV hung above the bar at a beer garden.

  “Then you know.”

  She pressed her fingers together, making a bridge with her hands.

  “One moment there is a community,” she said. “The next, ashes and death.”

  He shook his head, sipped his black coffee.

  “Watching TV news doesn’t tell you much about what really happened,” Calvino said. “The official version is what you’re expected to believe. News is sorted into three letterboxes in your own personal post office—false flags, disinformation or misinformation. After a while you get pretty good at spotting the sleight of hand. You know the tricks, the fades and the misdirection. You learn how it works, and once you know that, you see through the act. After the performance, you can figure out who wrote the script. So to answer your question, yeah, I saw the news about the fire at the refugee camp, but I don’t know the real story. Maybe after you go back, you could let me know what really happened there. Because I’d like to know.”

  The beginning of a smile bloomed into a full one.

  “Thank you for that.”

  Calvino shrugged. Part of his therapy was to avoid watching or reading the news. The doctor had ordered a mental rest from the constant barrage of violent images that the news delivered.

  “I can understand why you’re in a hurry to get back. You knew the people.”

  The undercurrent of distrust she’d felt upon her arrival at their meeting shifted somewhat. She thought Calvino might be open to listening to what she had to offer.

  “It’s true. I knew them by name. I wouldn’t be here now if I could have caught an earlier flight.”

  Being aware of what had happened the previous day and being there on the ground were two different states of being.

  “A refugee camp burnt to the ground,” she said. “No one has a confirmed count. The numbers might reach a hundred dead. Hundreds more burnt. Many more are in a state of shock. The survivors have all lost loved ones. Children...”

  She paused and couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “More than two thousand people have nowhere to sleep or cook. They have nothing but the clothes on their back. Everything was destroyed. Everything, Mr. Calvino.”

  He watched as tears clouded her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “‘Sorry’ is a small English word. And small words like ‘sorry’ are sounds that disappear into the noise of an ordinary person’s day. For the people in the camp, they are burying their dead.”

  She stopped talking and concentrated on opening a new email. She toggled through a dozen attached photographs.

  “Give me a moment,” she said.

  Calvino watched as she sipped her coffee, looking at the photographs of flames, billows of thick, black smoke, masses of people dressed in sweatshirts. A young, thin father wearing a gray baseball cap holding his baby, its head covered with a pink hat. Hundreds of people behind them.

  “I’ve been getting pictures since last night,” Judy said.

  “That explains why you look like you haven’t slept.”

  It also explained why she’d been absorbed by what was on her iPad screen—a feed of images had been coming through as she sat across from Calvino.

  “How does anyone sleep?”

  She hadn’t looked up. Shaking her head, she scrolled through the latest batch of photographs from the camp.

  Calvino knew that volunteer refugee workers experienced the front lines, bumping up against misery without escape, the desperation of people whose lives were in free fall. They burnt out after a few months, a year or maybe a couple of years. It was only a matter of time. One day they found they couldn’t stop crying. They saw things that weren’t there. Heard things underneath the silence. Calvino understood that empty space, a place without enough kick room to break free from the wide-open jaws of the dark whale.

  “You asked me to meet you about a missing person,” she said.

  “I want to show you a photograph. Tell me if you recognize the woman.”

  Calvino took his iPad from his briefcase and opened up the folder with the photos of Jane Doe. He slid the device across the table, lining it up next to Judy’s. Calvino thought about the old days when he had showed people actual physical photos. Now it was a file with dozens of scans. To survive, a Bangkok private eye needed to adapt to the times. He’d known that when he slipped into the anonymity of a coffee shop, most of the customers would be hunched over their tablets and smart phones. A private eye could blend right in using his own electronic device, showing photos of a dead woman without raising an eyebrow from someone at a nearby table.

  “Why would I recognize her?” she asked, her eyes narrowing as she stared at the folder and looked up at him.

  “Scroll through the pictures. Then I’ll take you to the airport.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds.

  “Okay, I’ll have a look. But you don’t need to take me to the airport.”

  “I have a car. It’s Songkran. You won’t find a taxi. You’re almost dry. You should try to stay that way for your flight.”

  Judy looked at the pictures of Jane Doe. Calvino set up a facial recognition test. Anyone looking at a photograph of someone they recognized reacted by sending a set of visual signals that translated as I know that face; I know this person. Liars who denied the recognition counted on others not picking up the signals. Like most skills, the reading of reflex reactions could be learnt. With someone like Innes it might be possible, with years of training as a high-level hired gun negotiator, to control the automatic responses, override the built-in giveaways in the subtle changes in the position of the eyes, the jaw and the lips, and the movement of the whole body.

  Calvino carefully studied Judy’s face as she looked at the headshot of Jane Doe. What he hadn’t expected to find were signs of personal recognition.

  “Do you recognize her?” asked Calvino.

  She puffed air into her cheeks, exhaled, repeated the process, scrolling through more of the JPEGs.

  “She might be a girl from my camp, called Mi Swe,” she said, looking away from the iPad, her eyes drawn to the water throwing in the street be
low.

  Calvino followed her gaze. A pickup in low gear prowled the street, the back loaded with barrels of water and a half dozen soaked kids with white-powdered faces, targeting anything that moved. Water shot from the back of the pickup, hitting men, women and children, and the bands on the street returned fire. Ice water with chunks of ice hurled through the sky. The escalation of the Songkran water war began with ice and ended in the fire of Mekhong whiskey.

  “Might be? You’re sure that you don’t recognize her?”

  “It looks like...” she said, her teeth touching her lower lip as she paused. “There’s something strange about the face. When someone is sleeping they look different. But like I said, it might be Mi Swe.”

  “You’re going back to the camp. You’ll need to tell her family.”

  “If it is Mi Swe, her mother, father and brother were killed in the fire at the camp. Her sister’s alive. That’s how I know.”

  She sought to read Calvino’s reaction as he stared at her, not knowing how to play it forward.

  “The girl in the photos isn’t sleeping. She’s dead.”

  Judy touched the bridge of her nose with her right hand as her eyes filled with tears.

  “Dead?”

  She left the thought hanging and looked away to the street below.

  “How did she die?”

  She sipped the coffee and reopened her iPad. Having found what she was looking for, she turned the tablet around for Calvino to look at the image on the screen.

  “This is Mi Swe’s sister.”

  Calvino saw a face that looked very much like Jane Doe.

  “They look like twins.”

  Judy swallowed back a sob, shaking her head and laughing and crying at the same time. People at other tables stared at her, wondering what the farang had said to cause such suffering.

  “Mon Hla is a year older. Is, or was. I don’t know what tense I’m in. It’s like a nightmare. Look behind Mon Hla. That’s the refugee camp in Mae Hong Son. That’s what it looked like before the fire.”

  The camp, Mi Swe and most of her family had all ceased to exist. All that remained to clutch onto were a few memories—a mental photo album of a smile, laughter, the small acts of kindness and grace. Death and fire had closed the album, leaving images frozen in the past like flies in amber.

  Calvino touched her hand.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I am not okay,” she said.

  The grief swelled inside her. He’d seen this expression of sorrow a hundred times before as a relative, a spouse or a friend felt the sudden jolt that death left behind as a calling card.

  “You wanted to meet me and tell me Mi Swe was dead? How did you know she came from my refugee camp?” she asked, using a paper napkin to tab her eyes.

  Calvino opened another JPEG on his iPad.

  “I didn’t. But I had this,” he said.

  On his iPad screen, Mi Swe’s blue JAI ankle tattoo appeared.

  “Did Mi Swe have a tattoo on her ankle?” he asked.

  “She might have had one. Tattoos are a new fashion. Old people don’t get it. Why are you asking me?”

  She sat back, arms folded, shaking her head.

  “The initials in the tattoo match the first letters of your three names.”

  Her head snapped up from the screen.

  “So you didn’t know she came from my refugee camp?”

  “I had no idea. The police have no idea who she is. Or that she came from a refugee camp.”

  “Do they know who killed her?”

  Calvino shook his head, noting that he hadn’t said Jane Doe had been murdered.

  “They’re investigating a few leads,” he said, looking at the photo of Mon Hla. “To answer your question, they don’t have a clue.”

  Her head bent at a slight angle, and a shaft of light streaming through a window highlighted her blonde hair. The Skytrain ran past in a blur outside the window. She watched till it disappeared from view.

  “Are you the man in Bangkok who bought Mi Swe?” asked Judy.

  “What makes you think that?” asked Calvino.

  A crooked smile made him look, in that instant, like a stroke victim. He’d been accused of many things, but buying illegal immigrants for sexual slavery had never been on the list of his crimes of passion and profit.

  “That you set this meeting up. You have Mi Swe’s picture. You want something. The way you looked at Mon Hla. The way men look at a woman they’re involved with or want to buy. I saw you staring at Mon Hla’s photo. Men can’t help give themselves away when they look at a woman.”

  “I had no idea Mi Swe was Burmese from one of the refugee camps.”

  He looked up from the photo.

  Judy studied his eyes, and said, “Not just one of the camps. The one in Mae Hong Son that’s completely destroyed.”

  Her tone had turned harsh, judgmental, and caused Calvino to wonder what he had done, if anything, to set off her sudden burst of hostility.

  “Did I say or do something?” he asked.

  “It was the way you looked at Mon Hla. The way men look at beautiful women. Disgusting,” she said.

  “She reminded me of someone I knew in Burma. Nothing more. Tell me about Mon Hla’s family and the fire.”

  “Mon Hla helped out at the camp clinic. She told one of my colleagues from Holland that a helicopter dropped a phosphorus bomb. They were attacked. Someone started the fire deliberately.”

  “Maybe they’re related?” asked Calvino.

  An impatient expression crossed her face.

  “I already told you that Mi Swe and Mon Hla are sisters.”

  “Not that connection. This is something different. Might there be something to connect Mi Swe’s murder and the fire?”

  She searched his eyes to see if he was being serious or playing a game.

  “What kind of connection?”

  “I don’t know. People, events and things can have all kinds of invisible wires connecting them in strange, non-obvious ways. I’m asking you for your opinion based on what you’ve seen, heard and read. Like you asked me if I ‘bought’ her. You were making an association. Not the right one. A minute ago, you thought you’d found a link that might make sense of why I stared at your photo of Mi Swe’s sister. Like you I’m trying to make sense of Mi Swe’s world. We share a common purpose. From what you’ve told me, she was sold to someone in Bangkok. Maybe a farang, maybe a Thai. But that’s a good start. It would be better to wind back to the beginning. Tell me about her family. How old was Mi Swe?”

  “She’s eighteen, nineteen.”

  “Her sister, Mon Hla, how old is she?”

  “Twenty.”

  “The family didn’t try to sell the sister to someone in Bangkok?”

  “No.”

  “Was there a reason one sister was sold and not the other?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Short, clipped answers. Calvino recognized them as the same order as the ones he’d spit out during the police interrogation. He decided to roll the conversation back to confidence building.

  “You’ve volunteered at the camp for how long?”

  “Six months. Not that long. But long enough to know most of the people living there.”

  She hated the word “volunteered,” as if what she did was just show up and supervise. She worked as a nurse, one of two for two thousand people. No one volunteered for living in the middle of that scale of misery.

  “You met Mi Swe?”

  He was asking to see if she’d lie.

  “Never. Mon Hla showed me pictures of her sister and the family.”

  Judy nodded, sipped her coffee, holding the mug with both hands.

  “Mi Swe left two years before I arrived at the camp. I know her family and her cousins. I think that’s her picture. I can’t remember. At least, not a hundred percent.”

  He liked her honesty about the past. Most people were dead certain what had happened in the past even when they weren’t present.
For them it was enough to believe the stories of those who had been there.

  Earlier she’d had tears welling in her eyes as she’d looked at Mi Swe’s photos, her face shaped in the pattern of someone who grieves upon seeing the body of someone they know. A few minutes later Judy wasn’t sure if the girl in the picture was Mi Swe or some other girl who looked like her. Calvino’s frustration deepened.

  “When you get back to the camp, talk to Mon Hla. I’ll email you some photographs. Ask her to confirm that this is her sister. Will you do that for me?”

  “You’re asking a lot,” said Judy.

  “Wouldn’t you want to know if your sister had died?”

  “It’s chaos at the camp. You don’t understand the situation.”

  Calvino slowly shook his head.

  “It was a long shot, my asking you for some help in finding the person who killed Mon Hla’s sister,” said Calvino, softly. “But you’re too busy. That’s okay. It happens.”

  “I’ll ask Mon Hla about Mi Swe. That’s all I can do.”

  “And ask if she knows anything about the tattoo on the ankle. I’ll email a photo of it to you.”

  Judy raised an eyebrow. He opened the Jane Doe photo folder and dozens of other tiny JPEGs appeared on the screen like tiny lights side by side in infinite rows.

  “You didn’t see all of the pictures,” he said.

  He opened another photo of the JAI tattoo.

  “Ask her about this.”

  On the drive to the airport Judy talked about her training as a nurse in Norway. Medical careers ran in her family—her father a doctor, her mother a nurse. She had witnessed her first autopsy at ten years old. Her mother supported her decision to volunteer in a refugee camp in Thailand. As Calvino parked at the old Don Mueang Airport, she reached back and lifted a small carry-on bag from the backseat. She opened the car door, stopped and looked back.

  “One thing I wanted to ask you.”

  “Ask.”

  “You found me because of the tattoo?”

  Calvino looked at her as the door opened and she moved to get out.

  “One with your initials—J-A-I,” he said, punching each letter.

  “It means heart in Thai,” she said with the newcomer’s confidence, hinting that she had something to teach Calvino.