The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  He shrugged, nostrils twitching.

  “Not so hard to believe, Mr. Calvino. She was a Karen and a human being. That’s enough. I never had the pleasure to meet her, not when she was alive, and if I had, I would have said, ‘It is my duty to see you safely out of Thailand.’”

  Calvino didn’t have the time to listen to speeches.

  “You’re making no sense. You went to meet a girl you never met or talked to. Was this a blind date?”

  “That’s it exactly. She’d came to me through my contact.”

  Calvino saw that his hook had lodged, and it was time to let the fish run before reeling him in. He let the questions about Deen Alam’s contact ride.

  “Ploy wasn’t the first person you’d been asked to smuggle out of the country. You’ve done this before,” said Calvino. “Helping Rohingya get out of Thailand and the occasional Burmese—does that sum up your side business?”

  Deen Alam smiled, puffed out his chest.

  “It is not a business. It is my solemn duty to my people.”

  Patterson Roy’s source had been accurate. The Soi Cowboy nut vendor was a cog in the clockwork of refugee smuggling. How he fit into the network was of less interest to Calvino than figuring out who had connected him to Ploy. Somewhere along that road was the person who was with her when she died.

  “Ploy was Burmese, not Karen. Your contact lied, Deen. What was she to you?”

  “Someone who needed help.”

  “You did it for the money.”

  His shoulders shook and he shuddered, more sweat rolling down his cheeks.

  “I was paid. With the money, I could help rescue six of my people and get them into Malaysia.”

  “You’re a humanitarian who doesn’t care about the money?”

  Calvino tapped his pen on the side of his notebook. He looked up at Deen Alam. A few minutes were left before the guard would come in and take him back to his cell.

  “If she was loaded, she didn’t need you. She goes to any travel agent, buys a ticket and gets on a plane.”

  “My friend said she had no travel documents.”

  “Did you know her family? Were you in contact with them?”

  “No, I didn’t personally know her. How could I know her family?”

  “Did you know she was from a refugee camp?”

  That question slowed him, twisted his expression so that his lower lip stuck out, touching the edge of his mustache. One of those “tells” that Calvino imagined signaled the anxiety level was rising inside his skull.

  “No,” he said in a raspy voice just above a whisper.

  “If you’d known, would it have made a difference?” asked Calvino, pushing him down the refugee camp road to see where it would end.

  “It was a business deal. She wasn’t Buddhist Burmese. Her people weren’t the ones killing my people. Besides, she had money. People in refugee camps don’t have that kind of money. Believe me, they have nothing. I think you are getting bad information.”

  “Give me the name of the contact between you and Ploy.”

  “I won’t burn him. He’s my friend.”

  “Burn him? From what pirated TV show did you pick up that phrase? Focus on the word ‘friend’ and ask yourself if this guy really is your friend? He’s the reason you are sitting in jail, and he’s free to walk the street. Your friend isn’t facing the death penalty in Thailand. You are. Don’t you think I should have a talk with him?”

  Deen Alam sighed, a long, despairing expulsion of air. He hadn’t thought of it that way until Calvino had made it starkly clear. Still, he refused to believe in the possibility that his friend would have betrayed him. The Prisoner’s Dilemma only worked when both men were in separate rooms, both getting deals to turn on the other. Whoever the friend was, he was on the outside.

  “He will stand by me when it comes to it. I have confidence.”

  Calvino spotted the sweet point in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game—when one man declares his confidence in his partner. By merely raising the issue, he was questioning his belief.

  “How’s that confidence worked out so far?”

  He started to weep, sobbing deeply.

  “Are you going to tell the police my true name?”

  “You gave it to me as your lawyer. So, no, I won’t tell them. What you can do for me, Deen, is tell me the name of this broker who is your best friend,” said Calvino.

  Calvino leaned in with his nose touching the mesh screen.

  “He doesn’t have to know where I got the information.”

  “Please continue to call me Akash.”

  Calvino cocked his head to the side.

  “Does it really matter?”

  Two minutes later the guards came in and yanked Akash Saru off the stool and dragged him away. He looked back, holding the Bangkok Post with the story about the hanging sentence.

  “Please come back soon,” he managed to say.

  He vanished with far less dignity than the rat that had earlier exited through the same door.

  NINETEEN

  ANAL KHAN FROM Uttar Pradesh, Akash Saru’s friend, lived in a hotel on a small soi in the Pratunam district. Calvino found the run-down building, whose occupants sweated through drug-fueled dreams of snakes within striking distance and authorities knocking loudly on the door to demand papers. Buildings like Anal’s were home to illegal migrants who silently streamed between cheap hotels, sweatshop factories and miserable, overcrowded prisons as if they had connecting doors. Calvino had seen an identical building in Bangladesh.

  Anal—the name translated as fire—lived in a room on the fifth floor. Anal’s name and the appearance of the hotel made Calvino wonder if the same blueprints had been used. He recalled the Bangladeshi factory that had recently caught on fire and collapsed, killing a thousand people. Dozens burnt to death in the Mae Hong Son refugee camp. Fire and flames, destruction and rubble were on his mind as he walked into the lobby.

  In the lobby an old woman sat selling fried bananas. He looked around. No elevator. The old woman smiled and nodded at the staircase with scraps of food and paper leaving a trail. Calvino climbed the stairs. By the time he’d got to the third floor, he’d worked up a sweat. Reaching the fifth floor, he stopped to catch his breath, taking in the same smells of decay, rot, urine and curry that he’d experienced in the prison corridor.

  A string of people whispering in twos or threes wound down the corridor. He looked at the first door number and made his way to room 512. Burmese, Indians, Nigerians and Bangladeshis in various stages of undress—some in shorts and no shirt, others with a towel wrapped around their waist, hairy with bony ankles and barefoot. There were no women. A couple of men smoking cigarettes and talking agitatedly pressed against the walls, blocking Calvino’s way.

  A wall of men between him and the door he was looking for parted as he pushed through. A habit they’d learnt from Orwell’s time—make way for the sahib who has been summoned to bring order out of the chaos. The door of room 512 was open. Those standing nearest to the door held a cloth over their nose and mouth. That was never a good sign.

  Calvino stepped inside to find two uniformed police officers standing next to a swollen, bloated body. The torso looked like someone had inflated it with helium and soon, lighter than air, it would float up to stick against the ceiling like a child’s horror house balloon. The face was black. A rope was knotted around the throat. A large brown stain covered the carpet, soaking in—the discharge of a leaking corpse left in the heat.

  “What was his name?” Calvino asked one of the police officers going through the dead man’s wallet.

  The cop pulled out an ID card and read it in Thai to his partner: “Anal Khan. Indian national. Born in Uttar Pradesh.”

  “Died in Bangkok,” said Calvino.

  First impressions matter in both love and death. Calvino’s first impression of Anal Khan was it looked like he’d hanged himself. He checked himself, though, knowing that love and death both require more reflection. Deat
h by strangulation could be made to look like suicide, though in a dump like this one, there was no incentive to overturn the first impression. He figured the police report would take the easy way out and conclude the deceased had hanged himself. Given the circumstances of the building, suicide was a common cause of death. And there was the cultural bias. The Indian disappearing-up-the-rope trick sometimes backfired and the rope took its revenge.

  “Who are you?” the uniform asked Calvino as he sifted through the cash in the dead man’s wallet.

  Calvino caught sight of two reds and three greens. Sufficient cash to buy two bowls of noodles from a street vendor and a large Singha beer, or the old woman’s fried bananas in the lobby.

  “A visitor. I’m looking for a man named Deen Alam,” said Calvino. “Is that Deen?”

  “No, this is Anal Khan. Look at his ID.”

  A grinning Anal Khan, hair combed, young and handsome, caught in a moment of happiness or joy. The image bore no resemblance to the blackened face on the bed.

  The other cop stepped away from the body and walked over to Calvino.

  “We know from the neighbor that Deen Alam was this man’s roommate. We’d like to talk to him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s not been around since this man died. He hasn’t come around, for what reason? He left Anal, for what reason? Did they have a fight? We don’t know. We want to ask him some questions.”

  “If you find him, phone me,” said Calvino, giving him his name card. “I’m a private investigator, and Deen Alam stole my client’s money.”

  The two cops examined Calvino’s card and exchanged a look of incomprehension.

  “You, a farang, are looking for a thief?” one of them said.

  The attitude of the cops indicated they didn’t want to stick around any longer than necessary. The fact they’d been dispatched at all was evidence of a prior sin, and wiping the slate clean required them to deal with the Anals of their district until their bad karma was paid back.

  “That’s a Thai police job,” said the other.

  “You can punish him. My client only wants his money.”

  That explanation made perfect logic to the two cops. Who wouldn’t want to get their money back? Getting money was police work, but giving it back to the owners, that was better subcontracted to private investigators. The cop fingered Calvino’s name card, slipping it into his shirt pocket and taking out a mask.

  “This man might have been a thief.”

  He slipped a white paper surgical mask over his mouth and nose, adjusting the elastic around the back of his head.

  “Men chip-haay,” he said, his muffled voice echoing the Thai words for “fucking stink.”

  His partner nodded, putting on his mask. They were right; the place had an overpowering smell of rotten flesh.

  Calvino disappeared through the crowd of confused neighbors.

  “What can you tell us?” asked a skinny-chested black man with a long, gray beard.

  “From the state of the body, I’d guess Anal’s been dead for a couple of days.”

  A gasp escaped from the man’s throat.

  “Terrible, terrible, to die alone. No one checks on you. Until there is a bad smell.”

  “You did the right thing calling the police. They’re handling it. You can go back to your room now.”

  The old man’s two bony hands clasped Calvino’s right hand, shaking it. Calvino had figured this was the guy with the sensitive nose, the good citizen who had anonymously alerted the police, reporting a terrible odor from room 512. Given the competition from the general rat-shit smell of the place, it must have taken some time before the smell entered the consciousness of the building’s other residents.

  If Calvino was right about the state of decay, Anal had died around the same time as Ploy. The two deaths must be linked, and Calvino struggled to connect the dots. Anal had arranged for Akash to pick up Ploy. She had arrived dead or been murdered earlier and her body dumped, and not long afterwards Anal had hanged from the end of a rope. Why would a man kill himself after he’d enjoyed a good payday? Maybe he’d let someone into his room to pay the money owed, and that person had decided to cut out the middleman, keep the cash and get rid of a loose end. The killer had either wanted something from Anal or wanted to silence him or to close down a competitor. Maybe the killer had gone for one reason and then changed his mind and decided Anal was a liability.

  Deen Alam had lost not just a friend but an alibi. Anal had been working in the human smuggling racket with him. They were engaged in a dangerous, violent business with potentially high rewards. One member of the smuggling team was alive. Was Calvino the only one who knew that Akash Saru and Deen Alam were the same man? The fact was that under duress he’d spit out his client’s real name. And unless Deen had trained as a professional actor, he had no idea that he’d sent Calvino to discover Anal dead inside his hotel room. The Indian nut seller who called himself Akash Saru was a Rohingya involved in a human smuggling case that had gone sideways. Calvino had come with questions to ask Anal. That interview wasn’t going to happen. But it didn’t stop him from asking himself those questions and wondering where the answers might be found. Who gave you the job for Ploy? How long have you and Deen Alam been in the business of smuggling Rohingya out of the country? How many others have you worked with, and what are their names? Who are the uniforms you paid off to stay in business?

  The last of Calvino’s questions concerned the names of the others who weren’t cops but were in the payment chain. Which of them had expertly tied a square knot in the rope around Anal’s neck? It seemed that Akash Saru, locked up in prison, had a perfect alibi. Had Anal tied his own knot? That would be the police report conclusion. Any whisper that Anal might have had a little help in hanging himself from someone he thought was his friend remained inside the building.

  TWENTY

  CALVINO ARRIVED FIFTEEN minutes late for his therapy session. The doctor’s receptionist frowned as he walked through the door. He’d stopped at a shopping mall to buy her a California roll. Calvino set it on her desk. She opened the plastic lid and looked inside.

  “Dr. Apinya’s waiting.”

  The doctor greeted him with the awkward smile of someone who is trying not to show annoyance.

  “How was your week?” she asked, as he sat down opposite her desk.

  “Same old, same old,” he said.

  Calvino watched her nose carefully to see if she picked up the smell of the decomposed body on his clothes.

  “Are you still seeing bodies?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” he said.

  No twitching of the nose.

  Dr. Apinya pushed her reading glasses tight against the bridge of her nose and made notes.

  “That’s a setback, Vincent.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. It had been a bigger setback for Anal Khan. And compared with his client, Deen Alam—a.k.a. Akash Saru—whose prospects remained nearly hopeless, Calvino thought that in the land of setbacks, he’d had a relatively good week. Calvino also sensed that a comparison of his mental state with those of the dead and the imprisoned wasn’t information Dr. Apinya wanted to hear. He nodded in agreement.

  “You’ve been making good progress,” she said, “until now.”

  “Have I?”

  “Why don’t you read your journal entries for me? Then we can both decide, progress or no progress.”

  She raised an eyebrow, waiting as Calvino shifted his weight in the chair.

  “I fell a little behind this week. It’s been busy. I know I promised. Sometimes life intervenes, and what you promise can’t be delivered on time. Like late delivery of a pizza, you get a free one next time.”

  “I don’t want a free pizza. What I want is for you to get better. But you have to make your getting better a priority. I feel you’re not quite there yet. You’re fighting getting better. Is that because you’re happy with the way things are?”

  He shook his head, think
ing about the bargirl named Pizza and the boyfriend who had wanted her for free.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he said. “I’m unhappy with the way things are working out. I have a plan to change that.”

  “I’m afraid you’re still trying to change the world rather changing the way you live and feel about the world.”

  He shrugged, leaned forward for the water glass and took a sip.

  “Tell you what, Dr. Apinya. When I leave your office, I’ll go home and type up on my Remington—my visions, hallucinations, dreams, nightmares, obsessions, strange smells, music and sounds.”

  “You could make it easy on yourself and type your thoughts on your computer and email me the file.”

  She had raised his use of a typewriter before. Only now she was more insistent, more direct. If the intent had been to get a reaction out of Calvino, it worked.

  “Right, I’ll run along home and clean the crap out of the gutters clogging my mind, stuff it into words, store it in neat Word files, email it to you. Those who read our emails might find what I say interesting.”

  “Who do you think care enough to read your emails?”

  “I’ll type up a list of names. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds hostile.”

  “You’re sweating,” she added.

  “I’m hot.”

  “You’re defensive and secretive.”

  “Check.”

  “You’re at war inside your mind.”

  “Check.”

  “Wouldn’t you like a ceasefire?”

  “And you’ll be my personal peacekeeper?” he asked.

  “Tell me what happened in Rangoon.”

  “We’ve been through it.”

  Pressing the end of her pen against her lower lip as she looked down, she turned the pages of notes, read silently, turned another page.

  “I have a feeling that something happened in Rangoon and you’re bottling it up inside. Reach down where you’ve hidden the secret. It’s tough. Bring it to the surface. You’re finding it difficult to trust yourself or me with what you’ve hidden away. It’s there. Waiting for you, Khun Vincent. Release what you experienced in Rangoon by talking about it. Tell me how you felt. How you feel now. What did you see or do that you can’t allow yourself to talk or think about?”