The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Pratt, I was about to phone you.”

  Calvino had loosened his necktie. Half-moon dark sweat stains were outlined under the armpits of his jacket.

  “April’s the hottest month,” said Colonel Pratt. “No one wears a suit jacket in April except a masochist, a capitalist or someone carrying a gun.”

  “You came to check on my tailoring?”

  Calvino opened the door to his unit, removed his shoes and stood to the side as the Colonel followed him in.

  “I thought you’d want to know about Jane Doe’s autopsy report.”

  Calvino led Colonel Pratt into the main living room, scooped up a remote and aimed it at the air conditioner.

  “That was fast. The last I heard, the autopsy reports from May 2010 still hadn’t been finished.”

  “That’s political. Jane Does speed through the system. The decision to hang the four men in India gave them an incentive.”

  Ninety-two people had been killed in the streets of Bangkok in May 2010 in political disturbances. Finding the cause of death and those responsible in those cases had proved as challenging for the authorities as finding an elementary particle with a knife and fork.

  Calvino took off his jacket and folded it over a chair. Colonel Pratt noticed the absence of a gun. Calvino grinned as he removed his shirt and tie. He walked into the bedroom and soon came back out wearing a polo shirt and a smile.

  “You thought I was packing?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  Colonel Pratt stood in the sitting room, looking around at a display of photos related to the car bombing: the shell of the blown-up car, glass and debris and body parts on the street, publicity photos of Mya and Rob Osborne’s band, Monkey Nose, elaborate pen-drawn diagrams of the scattered fragments, hand-written notes, faded newspaper clippings taped to the windows, enlarged photos of Mya standing in front of the Irrawaddy Bookstore, her family’s business in Rangoon.

  “Have you told Dr. Apinya about this?” Colonel Pratt asked.

  “About what?”

  Colonel Pratt gestured at the rat’s nest lined with hundreds of clippings, printouts, documents, folders, photographs, models and bits of debris from the scene of the car bombing.

  “You mean my research materials?”

  “This isn’t normal research, Vincent. And to call them materials is a stretch.”

  “If I told her, do you think she’d write me off as crazy?”

  Calvino fought back a grin.

  “It’s not a joke.”

  Calvino sat on the couch, leaned over and grabbed a photograph of Rob Osborne and Mya.

  “I told you that Rob saw things,” said Calvino, looking at the photo.

  “I remember at the time, you said he had strange hallucinations.”

  “At the time I thought it was crazy talk.”

  “Now you’re not so sure,” said Colonel Pratt.

  He turned toward Calvino, his face showing the sadness of a friend staring at someone he recognized but no longer understood. The Colonel hadn’t decided whether it was the shock of the bombing itself or Calvino’s PTSD-driven obsession with understanding the tragedy that was the root cause for the hallucinations.

  Colonel Pratt had not only known Mya and Yadanar but had played the saxophone in a Rangoon nightclub with their band. He’d been booked to go to New York to perform with them. He’d felt the loss as much as Calvino.

  Calvino pulled out a poster of Mya on stage, singing into a microphone.

  “As you opened the door, you said something about how you were about to phone me,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino put the photo down on the pile of photographs.

  “Ploy had a Burmese name, Mi Swe. You heard about the refugee camp in Mae Hong Son that was burned down?”

  “It’s been in the news.”

  “Mi Swe was a refugee in that camp. Her family were killed in the fire.”

  “It is very difficult for anyone to leave a refugee camp.”

  Calvino nodded.

  “Not so difficult if the money is right.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Vincent?”

  “Her family sold her to a buyer in Bangkok.”

  Colonel Pratt sat on the sofa to Calvino’s right side.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “According to an NGO at the camp and Ploy’s yoga teacher. The yoga guy is a sixty-something Canadian named Yoshi Nagata.”

  He opened his MacBook Pro and clicked on his favorite sidekick in investigations—Mr. Wikipedia.

  “Nagata is some kind of mathematical genius. He was born in a Japanese-Canadian internment camp in Alberta in 1945. Taught at the University of British Columbia, MIT and Cambridge before he retired three years ago. It says here that he’s won all kinds of prizes, awards and honorary degrees. Look at the list of publications. Nice Wiki photo. He looks younger with black hair.”

  “A professor,” said Colonel Pratt, looking over Calvino’s shoulder.

  Calvino found that the Thais were inevitably impressed by anyone with a Ph.D. and an academic title.

  “Will he come to the morgue and ID her?”

  Calvino nodded.

  “I told him to expect a call from the police. It seems that Professor Nagata was the only person in Bangkok that Ploy trusted. That’s what her sister in Mae Hong Son told my NGO source.”

  He pulled up a photograph of Judy from Facebook. “That’s Judy, the NGO at the camp.” Colonel Pratt looked at the screen. “The autopsy report confirmed Ploy had been sexually violated,” said Colonel Pratt. “It also confirmed that she was six weeks pregnant.”

  “Did they do a postmortem fetal DNA test for the father’s DNA,” said Calvino.

  “Preliminary DNA says the father was Asian.”

  “That narrows things down to roughly a billion possible candidates. No chance of determining gender,” said Calvino. The futility of information gaps and big numbers depressed him.

  “No chance. She died too early in the pregnancy,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “That doesn’t leave a lot to go on,” said Calvino. He saw the colonel’s signature smile, the one that met his search of his memory of the Bard had found a reply.

  Colonel Pratt responded as held that faint smile, “‘That function is smothered in surmise. And nothing is but what is not.’ Macbeth. We might start by asking who is this person that Ploy trusted? Maybe he knows something that can narrow down who the father was.”

  Calvino switched back to the Wikipedia page for Professor Yoshi Nagata.

  “You met him,” the Colonel continued. “What doesn’t that page tell me about Professor Nagata that I should know?”

  “He’s gay, Pratt. He never mentioned his Ph.D. or that he’s thought of as some kind of genius in the world of six-dimensional geometry. And he collects samurai swords and little statues of gods.”

  “Gods?”

  “Like Ganesh, the elephant god. He had about a dozen different ones. Some small enough for a spirit house, others the size for a prayer room shrine.”

  “Ganesh is the Hindu god of beginnings,” said Colonel Pratt. “This professor left behind a brilliant academic career. Why?”

  “Advice from the gods?”

  “I am serious, Vincent. Why does a man like that walk away from everything to teach yoga in Bangkok? There’s a line from Richard III: ‘When clouds appear, wise men put on their cloaks; when great leaves fall, the winter is at hand; when the sun sets, who doth not look for night?’ What cloud appeared that caused Professor Nagata to put on the cloak of a yoga teacher?”

  “I don’t know and don’t care. All that matters is Yoshi Nagata isn’t your guy. And no way my client killed her. Unless the pathologist found a DNA match to Akash when he examined the body.”

  “She’d been violated with an object. A sex toy is a possibility.”

  “Is that what the report concluded, that the murder weapon was a sex toy?”

  “She’d been drugged. The khaek drugged her dri
nk, violated her, and she died on him. I don’t believe he intended her death. It was bad luck.”

  “My client’s a peanut vendor in Soi Cowboy. Exactly how does he meet and drug Ploy? What drug did they find in her? Is there evidence she worked in a go-go bar? Or that she was a streetwalker with a movie star’s face patrolling Sukhumvit Road in a designer tracksuit trolling for customers? And that she worked for peanuts?”

  “He confessed,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino shook his head and clenched his fists.

  “How many phone books and broken ribs did that take?”

  “Now that we know who she is and have the man responsible for her death, you can concentrate on getting better.”

  “I’ve never felt better.”

  “Good. Glad to hear that.”

  “I’d like to see a copy of the autopsy report.”

  Calvino waited in silence. Colonel Pratt had been sidelined in the department, his authority stripped, when during the course of the investigation into the car bombing, someone had revealed that he’d given a report on the bomb components to Calvino. His superior had wanted to know why and how he’d allowed a farang civilian to become involved in a highly sensitive investigation. Quoting Shakespeare to his superior about the nature of friendship hadn’t helped.

  “I’ve already told you what’s in it,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “And I’ve told you the name of a man who can make a positive ID of your Jane Doe. But you still need to talk to him, take him to the morgue, go through the formalities.”

  “I am a police officer.”

  “Pratt, arrange for me to get a copy of the report.”

  Colonel Pratt thought about a line from Much Ado about Nothing as he looked at Calvino: “Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.” His friend Vincent Calvino had been in a deep state of grief for months, and he was using the dead woman’s case to master a larger grief. He removed an envelope with the autopsy report and placed it on the glass coffee table.

  “It’s in Thai.”

  “Ratana will go through it with me,” said Calvino.

  “She gone through a lot with you, Vincent.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN THE OLD days, to find someone missing in Bangkok, a private investigator relied on limited sources and on luck to pull the joker from the deck. There might be a chance of getting a photograph from an acquaintance or a friend, or a description of the person. The police had sketch artists. It was hit and mostly miss in those days as the details were too vague, mistaken or outdated. No need now for wasting shoe leather when a mouse working a cursor was faster.

  Vincent Calvino sat in front of his computer, and within a couple of minutes he’d found Bow’s page on Facebook. Bow’s picture showed a reasonably presentable undergraduate, a young woman in university uniform—tight-fitting white blouse, top two buttons open to expose a bit of breast, and a short black skirt. He studied the picture Bow had chosen to tell the world something about her personality. Her message rang out: here is a confident, friendly, open, adjusted and feminine student. And, it might have added, available.

  His goal was to befriend her. Like all good Bangkok private investigators, Calvino maintained a dozen Facebook pages under different identities. Three of his bogus pages had the right fit for Bow’s Facebook profile. He asked himself which of the young Asian males living in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo would work best.

  He selected Takashi and added, under Books, “Professor Yoshi Nagata, Six-Dimensional Geometry.” Then Calvino sent a request from Takashi asking Bow to accept him as a friend. Mr. Takashi, on Facebook, was a twenty-six-year-old engineer from Tokyo. The Nagata connection would give comfort, he thought.

  Calvino had guessed her security level spot on the money. Bow accepted Takashi’s friend request within thirty minutes. As a friend, Calvino could access her timeline and read her last two-dozen posts, including the ones about her upcoming graduation. Next he scrolled through ninety-five personal photos—Bow shopping at Siam Paragon, Bow at an RCA nightclub, Bow with her father, mother, sister, brothers, friends. Bow and more of Bow shot from every possible angle. There was a lifetime of information on her timeline—friends, food, fooling around at parties, clubs, the campus, cats, dogs, relatives and more food.

  Calvino not only knew where she would be; he knew when she would be there, who she was going with and who was doing her hair, nails and makeup. He also knew exactly what she looked like. He searched for information about the graduation ceremony and found that about a thousand students would show up to receive their degrees on Saturday. Each graduate would arrive with an entourage of half a dozen or more relatives, family friends, neighbors, photographers, boyfriends and girlfriends.

  “It looks like a scene out of the movie Gandhi, except with Thais instead of Indians as the extras,” said McPhail as they walked through Queen Sirikit Center on the morning of graduation day.

  Thousands of people milled around or squatted in corners, eating, talking, resting. Graduates in their black robes flocked like crows flitting from tree to tree, swarming down a hallway, blocking out everyone as they moved through the dense crowds. Their families followed behind like medieval court retainers.

  “Have you spotted her?” asked Calvino.

  “Vinny, all of these young women look like the Thai version of Stepford wives,” said McPhail.

  “What’s with you, McPhail? Can you not see something without thinking of some movie? Gandhi, The Stepford Wives... where does it end?”

  “That guy over there looks like the Thai version of the lead in Breaking Bad.”

  With the Stepford Wives remark, though, Calvino had to admit that McPhail had hit the bull’s eye. The hundreds of young Thai women mobbing the place, underneath their makeup, must have had individual identities, but they had been erased with identically painted masks.

  Calvino had Bow’s Facebook profile photo saved on his Samsung. He looked at it and pushed his phone in front of McPhail’s face.

  “Man, I know what she looks like,” said McPhail. “I’ve never seen so many women who looked like they’d been cloned from the same DNA.”

  “She’s here somewhere,” said Calvino, craning his neck to look over the crowd. “She might be outside.”

  He soon gave up. There were far too many people crammed into the confined space. He found that the claustrophobic feeling of the walls closing in struck farang much faster than Thais—if it struck the latter at all.

  Streams of graduates, friends and family spilled out of the main hall and spiraled into the surrounding area. Hundreds of people in that pre-locust swarming mode filled the walkway around Lake Ratchada. The track boiled up countless young Thai women, all sweating and shaky in their high-heels, black robes and sashes with orange piping and red strips of ribbon. Their families, friends and neighbors hovered around the newly minted worker bees who’d soon be out in the field harvesting pollen with the rest of them. It was their big moment. A time for everyone to feel that the size of their face had inflated to blimp dimensions, casting shadows over the lake.

  Calvino and McPhail split up at the lake. McPhail headed to the park and Calvino walked along the track. He followed a possible Bow who trooped behind a photographer. Platoons of photographers like seal trainers coached their subjects on where to walk or stand, when to smile and which tree or bush to stand before to make a good frame. Everywhere Calvino looked, he bumped against another hired hand for the day ordering his client into position below a planter of flowers or next to a small canal or a palm tree—all grayish shaft and green tube-like spurt, with faraway fronds that slowly moved in a light breeze.

  As each black-robed woman passed, Calvino slowed down and searched her face before moving on. He checked Bow’s photo again on his cell phone screen. He needed the refresher. Her face had blurred in his memory and blended into the endless painted faces crowding the public areas of the park and the track. Their hair had been sprayed unt
il it acquired a lacquer-like quality as solid as African marble. Not only was their makeup identical, but adding to the sense of one person photocopied hundreds of times, they had the same hairstyle. In their black robes the women looked like cult members hatched from a honeycomb deep inside the Tobacco Monopoly grounds.

  Calvino glanced at his wristwatch. It was 9:30 a.m. Not a single jogger could be found on the track. The graduates had invaded and held their ground. None of them were running. And none of them turned out to be Bow.

  McPhail cut through the park and found Calvino on the track.

  “She ain’t in the park,” he said. “I guarantee it.”

  “She’s in plain sight right in front of us. Only we just haven’t seen her.”

  “Let me have another look at the photo.”

  Calvino handed him his cell phone. McPhail, a cigarette in one hand, shaded the screen from the glare of the sun and scrolled through the Facebook pictures.

  “I’ve seen this guy with the funny glasses and crooked smile.”

  McPhail looked up from a photograph of Bow with her father and mother.

  “The old woman looks familiar too.”

  Sometimes McPhail showed signs of genius. If all the graduates looked alike, then look for their relatives and hope they hadn’t gone through the same beautification process.

  Calvino grabbed his phone from McPhail.

  “Let’s go find them.”

  The graduates and their entourages now milled around the park benches. McPhail headed back to the park, and Calvino followed after him.

  “The guy in the photo was smoking a cigarette over there.”

  He pointed to a tree with a group of graduates and their families on both sides. Expats lived in confederations of autonomous individuals. They had trouble adjusting to tight-knit Thai families organized like military units, staking out territorial positions next to a park tree.

  Everyone was smiling. Why wouldn’t they be happy? The young women with flowers in their hair, their robes and short skirts underneath, the robe thrown back for the photographer to get the desired look of sexual abandon by a lake and under a palm tree. Photographed with their families, little sisters and brothers running around. Old grandmothers in their finest dresses stood under umbrellas, and mothers hovered around their beloved like mother hens, bewildered that it had all gone so fast. Where had the time gone?