The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “If you were tracking her, then you knew she was dead.”

  “I had disabled the tracker three days earlier,” Marley said. “I found a hacker who might or might not have been in Russia trying to break into the system. I coded the program in a high-level encryption. They were trolling for exotic encrypted data and flagged it. It told the hacker there was something worth stealing. NSA, outlaws, a kid in his bedroom with the door closed—it could have been any of them. I work in a bad neighborhood. Digital muggers prowl my turf, waiting for the moment when I blink. Whoever it was, they were good. I shut down the tracking because I didn’t want them to locate Ploy. I told Ploy the system would be offline for a few days. And if any strangers tried to contact her, she should phone me immediately. I played cat and mouse with the hacker. Once he, she or they gave chase, I faded away. The project will come back in another place, with a new look, and the cycle will start again. If you look into the past, you get a glimpse of the future.”

  “We are a small rescue unit. A very discreet one,” said Nagata.

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “We need your help,” Marley said.

  “Two geniuses from Canada need my help? Wait till I write my relatives in New York. They’ll say, what’s the punch line? And I’ll say, I have no idea. Is there a punch line?”

  “We’ve checked your background,” said Marley.

  Calvino raised an eyebrow.

  “I bet you have. And you’ve found I’m an ex-New York lawyer who has a marginal private investigation business.”

  “Which is a surprise given that a few years ago you became independently wealthy,” said Nagata.

  “Nothing on the order of Marley. And you too, Professor Nagata,” said Calvino.

  Nagata replied with a smile.

  Marley jumped back in with a story that struck Calvino as based on highly competent investigative work: “But you continued to accept new cases. Not for the money, but because you felt it was the right thing to help someone who needed it. You’ve been looking for Ploy’s killer even though you’ve been pressured to let it go. Your Thai police colonel friend is an honest man too. You’ve worked together before.”

  Marley Solberg’s voice, soft and confident, carried a deep sense of conviction.

  Calvino looked at her and at the professor, trying to understand what he could bring to them that in any way would justify the risk of exposing their little rescue operation to a stranger.

  “I’m no boy scout,” he said.

  “We’re not asking you to escort us across a busy street,” said Marley.

  “I’d like to hear more about what I’d be getting involved in. And after you level with me, I can’t promise I can or will help. But I’ll think about it. It’s up to you.”

  “That’s a very Thai phrase, Mr. Calvino,” said Nagata.

  He sat erect, motionless, as he had done for a couple of hours.

  The discipline to stay in a fixed position had a positive affect. Calvino thought anyone who had some mastery over his own body had a good shot at approaching every other aspect of his life with the same iron determination.

  “We’ve been very careful to limit our exposure,” said Marley. “I have refined, expanded and improved my original equations. What we’ve come up with is more powerful, more secure and accurate than the previous generation of algorithms.”

  She stopped and stared at Yoshi Nagata. He nodded his approval.

  “Not all those who are inside the one percent turn a blind eye to what is going on around them,” Marley said. “Please wait a moment.”

  She disappeared into another part of the condo and then reappeared with a laptop. Nagata cleared a space for it on the table. She folded her legs underneath her as she sat down on a bamboo matt. Opening an application, she typed in a password and clicked on an icon in the shape of a star. A map of Thailand appeared, and on the map three red dots flashed. The designations avoided names and instead used numbers—1, 2 and 3—for three camps.

  “We targeted the detention centers with the worst records of abuse,” said Nagata. “Those centers were paradise compared to illegal camps in the South are under the control of the local mafia. They own the authorities and make their own rules. They are dangerous and heavily armed and connected. Rohingya who’ve washed up on the shore—the ones not pushed back to sea in boats with no motors or supplies—have been sent to these camps.

  “We found detention centers and illegal camps scattered across the South. Some are versions of hell. More than one trafficking network is feeding off the human misery inside. We had credible information from inside Camp 1 that young Rohingya women are routinely abducted. Men in uniform, carrying weapons, arrive at dawn in pickups and load the women into the back. The others in the camp are helpless to do anything to stop what’s going on. Any NGO who complains is threatened. Several Rohingya men who protested have since disappeared. The women are taken to a remote location and raped. Afterwards, they are sold to brothels in Malaysia.

  “Camp 2 was nicknamed the Body Shop. The Rohingya men are sold to sweatshops, canning factories and fishing boats, where they work in virtual slavery. Each fresh supply of refugees find themselves transported to employers who have bought them. Camp 3 was Marley’s idea. It wasn’t a Rohingya camp. Camp 3 housed Burmese refugees. We knew a girl from Camp 3. And Ploy told Marley about a number of young women who’d been sold to brothels in Chiang Mai.”

  “Ploy feared her sister was next. It was only a matter of time before she’d be sold,” said Marley. “You saw her at the funeral. It was a reasonable fear.”

  “In phase one we isolated a group of five or six women and men in each camp,” said Nagata. “We employed a Canadian nurse from East Vancouver whose hobby was tattoo art. She used the ink prepared by Dr. Solberg. It was injected into their skin.”

  “A tattoo artist? How would you get such a person into the camp?” asked Calvino.

  “Our lawyers processed her credentials,” said Nagata. “It wasn’t a problem. Our nurse had paid her way through nursing school working as a tattoo artist. We had a nurse and tattoo artist in one person. Without her, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go ahead with phase two.”

  Marley clicked onto the Camp 3 red dot and photographs of the Mae Hong Son camp—before the firebombing—appeared. She moved the cursor over one of the old photos and pictures of five refugees popped up—Ploy looked younger in the shot as did her sister Mon Hla and the group included three young men.

  “We tracked each person, storing full bio records,” said Marley. “We knew each brothel, sweatshop or fishing boat location. We knew exactly where they’d been taken. We had read-outs of their mental condition, how often they were fed, the length of time they worked and the amount of sleep they had. You look at the records and you see a true picture of slavery in human terms.

  “Phase two was our rescue plan,” said Nagata. “We could have anonymously given this information to the UN or local authorities. But we knew that local officials would deny involvement, and nothing but committee meetings and reports would result. That’s when having a lot of money makes a difference. We recruited three five-man teams to rescue refugees. A rescue in three different places of refugees would make enough noise internationally that no one could ignore what was happening. We would shame governments into action. The overwhelming evidence we’d accumulated would make denials impossible.”

  “The rescue screwed up,” said Calvino.

  Silence descended as Marley opened more files.

  “We were betrayed by someone on the inside, someone we recruited,” said Nagata, “or we were hacked from the outside despite all our precautions. The point is, someone closed down my system. The screen went blank the day before the rescue was scheduled to launch. We lost track of all fifteen people who’d been tattooed with the nano implants. We had no choice but to call off the rescue.

  “I saw an opportunity. With the tracking system down, no one could follow the refugees, and
that included Ploy. She was already in Bangkok. The Rohingya underground had already been paid to pick her up. We weren’t certain if they’d been compromised. We tried to contact Ploy, but she hadn’t turned on her cell phone. She’d used the excuse of having some minor surgery to leave her condo. Whoever killed her had knowledge of the spot where the smugglers would meet her and escort her to the boat. The killers might have told her that her family was waiting for her. The refugee camp went into lockdown mode once our tracking system had been discovered. I think you know the rest.”

  “I still have gaps in what I know,” said Calvino. “Why does a pregnant woman go for plastic surgery the day she’s fleeing the country? If she’s on the run, why is she stopping to have plastic surgery? It makes no sense.”

  Nagata nodded.

  “Women often have reasons that men can’t understand. When they are young, they still think things always work out for the best. The fallacy of best-case scenarios isn’t limited by age.”

  The professor hadn’t answered his question.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that she had a doctor’s appointment that day? It has the look not of plastic surgery but of an abortion. She didn’t want to be on the run and pregnant.”

  “She would never have thought of an abortion,” said Marley.

  Nagata said, “Frankly, we will never know.”

  “We want to identify the person who killed her and her child,” said Marley. “He will be the same man who tried to frame our two local men who helped us arrange safe passage for smuggled refugees out of the country.”

  “You knew she was pregnant?” Calvino asked, looking at both of them.

  “We suffer for what has happened to Ploy, her baby and her family,” said Nagata.

  “You’re about to tell me about phase three,” said Calvino, “and I have a strange feeling that you’ve run out of equations. When a mathematician runs out of numbers, he figures there’s nothing to lose in bringing in someone who knows how things work on the street.”

  “You can help us find out who did this,” said Nagata.

  Calvino searched Marley Solberg’s cold blue eyes, which remained focused on the computer.

  “You’re hiring me to work with you and Dr. Solberg?”

  “We will pay your usual fee and expenses,” she said.

  Marley turned back to the screen, which now displayed dozens of photographs of himself, his clients and newspaper clippings. She clicked on one photograph, enlarging it to fill the entire screen—the blasted, torn shell of the Benz that Mya and Yadanar had been riding in when a roadside bomb exploded.

  “What if it turns out that we’re looking for the same killer?” she said.

  “You’ll be paid either way,” Nagata said.

  “That’s it? It’s just about the money?”

  Marley’s blue eyes fixed on Calvino as if she could see straight through him. She seemed to find a connection there that brought a smile to her lips.

  It was Calvino’s turn to go quiet, asking himself how much she thought she knew and how much she might be bluffing. In between was the reality of how much she actually knew.

  “It’s about much more than the money, Mr. Calvino,” she said.

  “Will you take our case?” asked Nagata.

  “I’ll think about it,” Calvino replied.

  In the world Calvino had been living in lately, stability and coherence no longer dictated reality. All pattern recognition depended on those two elements functioning together. He’d been through the evidence of the car bombing hundreds of times and had visualized multiple realities until he could no longer fix on just one. His experience had been more like that of a glass blower than a private investigator—someone with the basic skill to create objects, each a unique vision, each feeding on the heat generated by the flame of evidence—and he’d shaped the silicate tubing each time until the object emerged. And each time there had been a tiny flaw in the pattern, and he’d destroyed the glass.

  THIRTY-SIX

  CALVINO HAD A hunch that Marley Solberg wanted more from him than he could deliver. In his experience that was the problem with women—they either wanted too much or not enough, and a man could never quite figure out which end of the “want barometer” he was reading. She had wanted him to arrange a meeting with Colonel Pratt. His first reaction had been that whatever Marley and Nagata had been working on was something the Colonel should know about. Trust over a couple of decades rested on sharing information. But this case felt different. On reflection, as he looked at her in the hallway outside Nagata’s condo, he thought about what options Colonel Pratt would have. Sometimes knowledge doesn’t set a man free; it chains him to a limited number of choices. In this case the choices stretched along the road ahead as traps, ambushes and heavier chains.

  “Do you like jazz?” Calvino asked Marley.

  They were on the elevator as she escorted him to the lobby.

  Looking puzzled, she said, “I’m not very good at small talk.”

  “Have you heard of Dexter Gordon? He’s a jazz legend. He even starred in a movie about a sax player.”

  “Round Midnight,” she said.

  Calvino smiled, tilted his head.

  “On Sunday, how’d you like to meet a man who played with Dexter Gordon in Paris? He’s a friend of Colonel Pratt.”

  “Your colonel made a good impression a few years ago at the Java Jazz Festival,” said Marley.

  “Is there any information you haven’t found out about me or Pratt?”

  “Get used to it. This is only the tip of the information pile that others have access to.”

  “Then you know I’m in therapy for hallucinations?”

  The realization that a stranger—or anyone—might have compiled his complete personal information caused him to squirm. He felt a shiver. It was like stepping into an elevator full of nuns with a bargirl in cutoff jeans hugging him and calling him tilac, or his weekly humiliation of writing down a full account of his personal thoughts and fears for Dr. Apinya to dissect for signs of madness.

  “I’ve found life makes the thoughtful a little crazy,” she said.

  “That’s it? The new normal is a little crazy?”

  “No, the new normal scales to a different level of insanity.”

  A light drizzle fell as they walked through the Sunday afternoon crowds of desert people at the lower-numbered end of Sukhumvit. Arabs in traditional white robes, veiled women pushing prams through a throng of other nationalities—three-day bearded, hard-looking men in shorts, sandals and T-shirts, smoking cigarettes, no umbrellas to shelter them, talking as they elbowed their way forward. Not a white-toothed smile to be found among the desert faces.

  Calvino and Marley followed behind the ragtag army of foreigners who descended on the stalls selling compasses, knives, brass knuckles, shirts, underwear, porno DVDs, perfume and knock-off Viagra. Now and then a man would break formation and disappear into a massage parlor, a restaurant or a luggage shop. The sound of the street was colored by a dozen languages as potential customers negotiated with sidewalk vendors, streetwalkers, pimps and door girls. On the street side of the pavement, transactions were forged with calculators in hand to punch out final offers.

  They slipped into the entrance of the Check Inn 99. Marley folded her umbrella. Calvino was a step behind her.

  “For years a dwarf worked out front as the doorman.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “No one knows. He disappeared. No one had any reason to go looking for him. You’re only missing if someone notices and wants you found. Some people stay lost because no one cares enough to worry about them. No one hires a private investigator to look for someone they don’t care about. ”

  Bird’s composition “Visa” drifted from the stage to the entrance. Calvino recognized Colonel Pratt’s tenor sax and smiled. It was a popular jazz melody for long-term expats who had their own blues story to tell about visa runs.

  “That’s a Charlie Parker piece called
‘Visa,’” he said to Marley. “Sad case, Parker. Don’t know if you know, but he died in New York at thirty-four. When they opened him up for the autopsy, the doctor thought this old man’s time had expired. His liver was gone. His heart had exploded like a supernova. But in those few years, he made music no one would ever forget. It’s like John Coltrane at forty in New York—his liver gave out. If Henry Miller had died at thirty-four or forty, no one would ever have read his books because they’d never have been written. Henry had an indestructible liver. The history of musicians and writers is a study of the durability of the liver.”

  The sound of guitarist Billy Clarke blended and shaped the sax like a fine single malt whiskey kissing the throat of a sad, lonely man whose parched life had turned to sand.

  The interior of the room was as dark as a half-moon night. One of the ancient waiters stepped from the shadows and showed Calvino and Marley to a table near the stage. A scattering of people sat at the bar and a few more patrons sat on stools, slouching against a wall. Marley ordered white wine and Calvino a Johnnie Walker Black on ice and a glass of water on the side. Colonel Pratt worked the buttons on his sax, leaned forward and dipped the horn at their table. Billy Clarke flashed an electric smile at Marley Solberg. He had a Parisian’s eye for a beautiful woman, and even in the near darkness, peering out from the stage, Billy saw a vision of heaven who’d floated in on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Her attention was elsewhere. To the left of their table was a grotto with Christmas tree lights and two large plastic flamingos standing on stick legs in a fake grotto, the backlit in a soft porn like electric blue.

  “In Vancouver, Stanley Park is filled with flamingos,” she said, seeing Calvino watching her.

  “In Bangkok flamingos are plastic. They do better in the pollution.”

  The fake flamingos stood amid a garden of fake flowers and ferns.