The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  Ratana stood up from the sofa and walked over to the window overlooking the lake and the Tobacco Monopoly Land. She looked at the traffic below.

  “At lunch Ajarn Yoshi seemed genuine, a sincere, good person. He paid for Ploy’s funeral.”

  “There’s something he isn’t telling me,” said Calvino. “Not yet.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking.”

  “Did Colonel Pratt talk about Ajarn Yoshi?”

  Naturally Ratana wanted to know if the Colonel shared her high esteem for Ploy’s yoga instructor.

  “Pratt agrees with you. But I saw an Agni statue on his bookshelf, and another turned up near Ploy’s body. It’s not like everyone in Bangkok is running around with an Agni icon in their pocket.”

  “Would you like me to go with you to see Ajarn Yoshi?”

  Calvino stood up and joined her at the window.

  “It’s not necessary,” he said.

  “Did I do a good job at Dr. Nattapong’s clinic?”

  The doctor’s name drifted like a bird looking for a place to land. She waited for him to say something, but for a moment he remained silent, staring into the distance.

  “You did good. I couldn’t have planted the security cameras without you.”

  She looked happy.

  “Thanks. What did Dr. Nattapong say to Colonel Pratt?”

  “He said nothing.”

  “He was scared?”

  “He wasn’t cooperative.”

  Calvino had hoped to avoid telling her about the carnage they’d found when they’d stumbled into the surgery. But he knew it was only a matter of time before she found out. She had been busy cleaning and washing, but news of the double murder would soon reach her through the social networks and local newsfeeds.

  “That surprises me,” she said, looking back from the view.

  “The doctor’s dead. The receptionist too. Both of them shot at close range in the surgery. The surveillance camera captured two men in Guy Fawkes masks in the reception area. It also recorded Pratt and me coming in a few minutes later. The bodies were still warm. We’d just missed the hit.”

  The color drained from Ratana’s face, her knees buckled and she started to collapse. Calvino caught her before she hit the floor. He carried her over to the sofa, gently laid her down and went into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. Her eyes were open when he returned. He sat next to her. She raised her head, drank some water.

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “Who they were and why they killed them are the big questions. We didn’t stick around after finding the bodies. We walked to the park and stopped at the location where I’d found the first body. Pratt showed me the Agni icon forensics found at the scene. We talked about Agni and how to handle what we found in the clinic. Everything was happening so fast it made my head hurt. When we heard the police sirens arriving at the clinic, Pratt headed back there. He said I should go home. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “Playing the part of your wife at the clinic...” she said. “It wasn’t hard to do.”

  “You were convincing,” he said.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I used the key to let myself in.”

  “What you did was a good thing, Ratana. What comes next won’t be easy. The police will know that we went to the clinic. They will want to know why you had an appointment with Dr. Nattapong, and why I used ‘Jack Smith’ rather than my own name. Tell them it was my idea. I was investigating a wrongful death, and the victim had been a patient of the doctor. That’s all you know. That’s all you have to say.”

  She nodded, sipped from the glass of water and slowly rose up to a sitting position.

  “I am not afraid,” she said.

  She drank more water.

  “That’s good,” he said, smiling. “Because I am. So is Pratt. He’s on the outside of something looking in and seeing something much bigger coming at him, you and me. It terrifies him.”

  “Khun Vinny,” she said, “what can I do to help? Tell me what you want. I trust you and want you to know that you can trust me.”

  She’d been thinking of the doctor and his receptionist. The doctor had trusted her. She had likely said words to the same effect. He had believed in those words, shallow, empty and hollow as an unmarked grave.

  “I know. And that makes all the difference,” he said.

  He wasn’t thinking of the doctor or his receptionist. Instead Calvino was thinking that there had been no one there for Ploy. Or if there had been, something had gone wrong.

  “Dr. Nattapong had a wife,” Ratana said.

  Calvino nodded.

  “Yeah, he did. Think she knew about him and the receptionist?”

  From the sofa Ratana gazed out the window at a group of young men, shirtless and in shorts, playing football on the large open dirt patch beside the MRT station. They looked so young, carefree and happy, as if they lived in a totally different world.

  “Well, do you?” asked Calvino.

  “Maybe,” she said, nodding. “She might even have warned him about the sword tree,” she said.

  “What’s the sword tree?” he asked, waiting for her to explain.

  Instead of explaining, she said, “You’d never heard of Agni and a million other things either.”

  She suddenly sounded upset, frustrated as she got up from the sofa, found her handbag and walked across the room.

  “Don’t you want to have dinner?”

  “Sorry, I have plans.”

  He found her in the hallway, slipping on her shoes at the entrance with the door open.

  “Take care of yourself, Khun Vinny,” she said.

  Without a further word she left. He had no idea what he’d said or done. Or if her sudden change of mood had even been about him. Her attitude had shifted after she’d mentioned the sword tree, and something about it seemed to upset her.

  After Ratana left, Calvino raised his hands over his computer keyboard. He was about to Google “sword tree Thailand” when he caught a glimpse of a regular visitor. A phantom image, moving like a wild animal, like a large black cat, darted across the wall as if climbing out of one of the newspaper clippings taped there. The presence wasn’t stable enough to disclose its form. The presence had entered the room and that was all that mattered. He felt her, smelled her and tasted her—Mya, the Black Cat—circling the room.

  His hands shook as he typed a journal entry. He would describe exactly what he saw in front of him. Dr. Apinya would be asking him for his diary again, and he’d have something for her this time. His fingers struck the keys on the old Remington. He watched the shadows moving across his room. When he paused, Calvino thought of how he’d been shuttling between doctors’ offices like a permanent patient—one doctor to cure the insane and the other to enhance the bodies of the vain. One was alive, one dead.

  Ratana had brought him order. The place was clean. Why did he feel a dead spot in his heart, and that it was decaying and soon his entire heart would be dead? He tried to pull himself together. He ripped the paper out of the Remington, balled it up and tossed it across the room. With a fresh sheet into the typewriter, Calvino started again, slowly typing as if pushing a boulder up the mountain, hoping to find answers.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  DR. APINYA REMOVED her glasses, lazily cleaned the lens with a tissue and slowly peered up from Calvino’s typed journal pages. Sixteen days had passed since Calvino had found Ploy’s body.

  She had put down her pen.

  The doctor leaned back, her head against the headrest on her chair, her long immobile fingers touching. She studied him, thinking about what he’d written. For a moment she was silent, as if digesting something, seeing in him a stranger who’d revealed an inner core. It was the first time. She knew that when patients choose to write honestly about their fears, that is progress. It means there is genuine hope. But in Calvino’s case Dr. Apinya wasn’t so sure. With this patient there was no clear line between his
fears and the scent of fear that he’d extracted from others and made his own.

  “How frequent were your hallucinations this week?”

  “Four times,” he said, watching her pick up her pen and write down his answer.

  She looked up from her notebook.

  “How long did the longest hallucination last?”

  “They all last about the same. Forty-five minutes to an hour.”

  “Were you in the same place each time?”

  She waited for his answer. He rotated his shoulders, moved his head.

  “Once in my office, but the other three times in my condo.”

  “Do your office and condo have a similar layout?”

  “I use the same organization of working papers and evidence of the car bombing in both.”

  “Do the hallucinations emerge out of the papers and evidence?”

  Calvino nodded.

  “They burst out,” he said, his tone sharp and firm.

  She asked, “Do you feel a sense of violence?”

  “More like extreme urgency. The visitors arrive in a worked-up state. Upset, threatening and worried,” he said.

  “How do they make you feel?”

  “Frustrated, angry.”

  “Do you know why you feel these emotions?”

  “This time they cried for payback. Revenge. They howled for Thanet’s blood. Told me how I’d broken my promise to nail him. How I’d failed, failed. Why had I allowed this murderer to live free with their blood on his hands?”

  “Have you ever tried to make the hallucinations disappear?”

  He laughed.

  “It doesn’t work that way. If it did, I wouldn’t be in your office.”

  “So you feel that they are powerful and you can’t control them?”

  “No more than I can control storm clouds, fire and rain.”

  “Like an act of nature.”

  “They’re outside nature.”

  “You know they aren’t real?” she asked.

  “They are washed out, faded, indistinct, but I know each of them by their form and shape. Like an old black and white TV show with lots of atmospheric static blowing through. Is what you see on TV real? If you can’t turn it off, what does that mean?”

  She saw him rubbing his hands.

  “They make you anxious.”

  “They are both real and unreal. I can’t explain it any other way. You can know it’s someone even though the image is clouded, vague—you know, shifting in and out of focus.”

  “What triggers the hallucinations? Is it the same each time?”

  “I’m still working through the bombing case. I’m tired. I get lost in the details. It makes me feel sad, irritated. It’s night. I’m doing this for them. I’ve had a couple of drinks. I close my eyes, open them, and the visitors appear.”

  “Why do you call them the visitors? Don’t they have names, or are these strangers?”

  “They are the worst kind of visitors. They invite themselves. They stay as long as they want. They demand that I help them. Names? Yeah, they have names. Rob, Mya and Yadanar. They scream and rage at each other. They shout obscenities. They talk about hate. They make threats. They insult each other. Sometimes they play musical instruments and sing. The lyrics are filled with blood and revenge.”

  “Are you afraid when you see and hear them?”

  “I tell myself they aren’t real. They’re coming from inside my own head.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I’m not sure anymore. I believe a lot of things. One of them is that unless you’ve experienced what I’m talking about, you haven’t got a clue how it feels.”

  He glanced at his watch. Time had slowed down. He closed his eyes, wishing it would speed up, wishing the visitors would appear and she could see what he saw.

  “I thought we agreed the first time we met that you’d be honest with me. That without honesty, therapy wouldn’t work.”

  “I’m being honest.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re hiding facts, important events.”

  “Like?”

  “Anal Khan. Why didn’t you write about what you saw when you found his body?”

  “He lived in a shoebox room half the size of your office. The room was in an area of Bangkok you wouldn’t have ever seen. Mainly Africans and low-life types from the Middle East, black, dark, bearded, slender and hungry. All of them barely surviving, running some scam, planning a heist. Desperate and dirt poor, living no better than rats. You walk into their lives and you see close up what it means to live hand to mouth, and when one of them dies inside one of those rooms, you see how it all ends. Anal had been dead a couple of days. No air-conditioner, no fan. The bacteria in his gut multiplied. He’d been dead long enough for the smell to drift down the hallway and into his neighbors’ rooms. Someone called the police. By the time I arrived, the police were inside the room standing next to Anal’s bloated body. His face had gone black as coal. It no longer looked like a human face. More like one of those too-real Halloween masks that scare kids. That’s what I saw.”

  Dr. Apinya poked her lower lip with the end of her reading glass frames. She tried to hold her composure, not blink or show any reaction, but it wasn’t easy.

  “How did you feel inside that room?” she finally asked.

  Calvino shrugged.

  “Disappointed. I’d wanted to ask him some questions. One of his friends is in big trouble with the law. Instead I had to spend my time answering questions from the police about what I was doing there.”

  “What did you tell the police?”

  “Just what I said. I didn’t know him. A farang in the building wasn’t what they’d expected. We all have our expectations about what and who belongs in a place, isn’t that right, Dr. Apinya? And when something happens to surprise us, we react with anger, fear or frustration.”

  “Why do you think that, Khun Vincent?”

  “It’s our wiring. We have this need for everything to be certain, precise and predictable. The unexpected makes our head hurt because we have to ask lots of questions to try to make sense of it, and when we can’t make any sense of it, we suffer.”

  “You’ve suffered for some time,” she said. “Halluci-nations are a way some people try to find answers to difficult questions.”

  Calvino thought about the body and the cops. That had been real enough.

  “Dr. Apinya, Let me ask you a question.”

  “Please ask,” she said.

  “How did you know I found Anal Khan dead in his room? I mentioned last time that I’d found a body, but I didn’t give you a name.”

  Her white Chinese face blushed, turning her cheeks a bright red. She softly pushed the wing of her eyeglasses against the inside of her lower lip, as she picked up her pen and wrote in her notebook.

  “You’d missed an appointment. I phoned Colonel Pratt because I was worried. I’d not heard from you. I thought something might have happened.”

  “You could have called my office.”

  Dr. Apinya struggled for a reply, her eye movement rapid as she searched his face.

  “I wanted to know how honest you are in this office.”

  “You discussed my case with Colonel Pratt. Is that the deal you made?”

  “No, nothing like that. What you say is confidential. It always stays inside my office.”

  “There’s a smell, Dr. Apinya,” he said, twitching his nose, “like something has died. That stink is beyond what’s coming from a dead body. The smell of trust gone cold and dead is one you can’t get out of your mind.”

  “I want you to get better.”

  He rose from his chair and stood in front of her desk. She looked up to meet his eyes.

  “Did the Colonel mention a Dr. Nattapong or a woman named Sukanya?” he asked.

  Her perplexed expression suggested he hadn’t told her. That’s something, he thought. He’d given her selective information.

  “No. Should he have?”
r />   “No reason I can think of,” he said.

  By evening she’d remember this precise moment as she watched the news. She’d remember his words, “No reason I can think of.”

  He turned to leave the office as she called out his name. Calvino didn’t break his stride. He opened the door and left without turning to say goodbye. He walked past the receptionist without a glance. All he wanted was to be outside, on the street, to fill his lungs with the polluted air of Bangkok to cleanse his nose of the smell.

  Only then could he begin to find an answer to the question he’d wanted to ask Dr. Apinya: why is death stalking me, and why can’t I shake it? On the way to her office he’d felt that she might help him find an answer. But back on the street again, he was now certain she had no more idea than he had.

  As he walked to his car, the scorching heat wrapped its arms around his neck and throat like a determined strangler. He slowed his pace. Maybe there were some people that death chose to accompany him on his rounds, companions to witness the places of the dying or soon-to-be dead. A missing person case in Rangoon had kick-started Calvino’s apprenticeship as death’s assistant. Maybe the daily visitations from the dead were not his plague; maybe they were his reward, the key to the door, and all he had to do was open it.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  YOSHI NAGATA ANSWERED the door in a loose-fitting white shirt and trousers. He stood barefoot by the door as Calvino walked in and took off his shoes. At five after ten in the evening, he’d been meditating. His last students had left at eight and he had eaten alone, a light dinner washed down with green tea. He’d been expecting Calvino. To quiet his mind, he’d meditated. When the doorbell had rung, his mind had cleared. He smiled up at Calvino, who stood a head taller than him.

  Nagata bowed and gestured for Calvino to follow him.

  “I have prepared tea.”

  “You heard about Ploy’s doctor and his assistant?”

  It was clear from Nagata’s expression that he’d been sealed away from the outside world.

  “They were murdered,” said Calvino, waiting for a reaction.

  “That’s unfortunate.”