The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “The ones I remember as a child were real. When I was four years old, my mother would wait until I counted them. Each Sunday we’d return to Stanley Park and I’d count flamingos at the same place. I’d announce to my mother if any were missing or new ones had joined the flock.”

  “In New York we’d count the number of junkies, homeless, dropouts and losers. There was always someone missing, and some new ones to take the place of those who’d flown away.”

  “You’re making fun of me,” she said.

  Calvino took the Johnnie Walker Black from the waiter and threw back a long drink.

  “Not really. Your counting flamingos led to a brilliant career. My counting drunks and junkies prepared me for finding the birds that flew away to Bangkok.”

  Colonel Pratt was halfway through his set. They listened as Billy Clarke introduced the next song.

  “This song by Dexter Gordon, “Our Man in Paris,” is for our friend Vincent Calvino and his friend, whoever she might be.”

  Billy Clarke led in with the guitar and Colonel Pratt, wetting the mouthpiece on the sax, looking out at Calvino’s table, eased into the melody. No matter how often Calvino heard his friend play, he still found something strange about the way Colonel Pratt embraced the saxophone. No other musical instrument looked so much like a machine with the skin stripped away and internal workings on display. It was as if the backbone of an ancient creature that had hit an evolutionary dead end had given the blueprint—a latticework of tubes, struts, buttons, bends and twists that moved in synchronized fashion to produce a signature sound, free and pure, climbing through the scales of sadness and despair to joy and the sublime.

  As they played on stage, a camera fixed to the ceiling projected their images onto a screen on the near side of the grotto. From the moment Calvino saw the images of both men projected on the screen, he froze; he stopped breathing. Neither man looked like a man. Billy was black, and the Colonel brown, but their projected images were a ghostly, faded splash of white. The saxophone and guitar blurred against their bodies. He turned back to the stage. Both men appeared normal, defined in shape and color, but the screen images were the same ones he saw inside his condo. Only those people were dead. He recognized the forms as the indistinct figures of Mya, Yadanar, Rob and Kati. It didn’t matter that most of the detail was absent. The remaining twenty percent was enough to identify each one amid the vague, surreal fog stripped clean of all identifiable face, neck, trunk, arms and legs—all one moving sheet of white in constant motion.

  After the set ended, Colonel Pratt joined their table.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Not yet, but the day isn’t over,” said Calvino.

  He made the introductions between Marley and the Colonel. Billy Clarke came over too and started to sit down, but one of his fans who’d been at the bar walked over to drag him away for a drink. Torn between wanting to sit next to Marley and drinking with a fan, he had the decision made for him.

  “Billy, go have a drink and come back,” Colonel Pratt said.

  “I told Marley you played with Dexter in Paris,” said Calvino.

  “I’d like to hear that story, Billy,” she said.

  “I won’t be long,” Clarke said, as if he meant it.

  After Clarke had left, Colonel Pratt and Calvino exchanged some small talk, the equivalent of dog paddling until someone decided which end of the pool they were swimming to—the shallow end or the deep end, where fools and plastic flamingos were found face-down and motionless. A silence started out like a crack, then widened to a yawning gulf.

  “Colonel Pratt, what happened to Ploy isn’t unique. It happens many times every day in Thailand.”

  Marley’s opening was a little abrupt. Calvino thought she might be nervous. But in any event, no one got anywhere with a Thai police officer starting with a lecture.

  Colonel Pratt’s smile turned into a strained expression.

  “I accept that her case isn’t the only one. We have people inside my country who, when they think of the illegal Burmese, would agree with Shakespeare: ‘Having nothing, nothing can she lose.’ Not even her life.”

  “Sorry, Colonel, if I’ve crossed a line.”

  The smile returned to Colonel Pratt’s lips.

  “Yes, the ever-shifting line that, when we retrace it, walking back and forth, following where it has gone, makes us look like we are staggering drunks.”

  It was an awkward way for the Colonel to prepare them for his shame. Calvino had only seen that look of defeat on his friend’s face a couple of times. Colonel Pratt had the resilience and strength to endure the trouble he brought down on himself by being a good, honest cop. He expected a rough ride and gave as good as he got.

  “Dr. Marley is a world class mathematician,” said Calvino.

  “The last time we sat down with a world class mathematician named Andrei we almost didn’t get up,” said Pratt, exchanging a glance with Calvino. He remembered how the scaffolding of their friendship and luck had been enough to keep them alive.

  Calvino turned to Marley “We were working a case a few years ago in New York, and Andrei was involved.”

  Calvino and Pratt shared a history of head on collisions with ambitious people in the business of international criminal activity. They spoke in a shorthand code used by old friends to outline a common space in the past where a double coffin had been prepared for them. The full name of Andrei, the mathematician in New York, came into Marley’s mind.

  “Not Andrei Smirnov?”

  “You know the Russian?” asked Pratt.

  “Only by reputation and that he disappeared. No one has heard from him.”

  “He had some good reasons to disappear,” said Pratt.

  “What’s up?” Calvino asked him in Thai. He could see that Pratt was agitated. “Mee arai rue plow?”

  “I’m about to disappoint your friend. She came to talk with a police officer, only to find an officer who has been suspended,” he said in English.

  “It’s bullshit. Appeal it,” said Calvino.

  “I’ve been assigned to an inactive position pending an investigation into the circumstances of my possessing a video from a murdered doctor’s office. Men in white masks made it a political case. That makes any investigation toxic. Everyone is running away from it, except for me. I ran straight into it. Appeal? There is no one to appeal to, Vincent.”

  The Colonel hadn’t told his inquisitors that the video had come from Calvino, though they weren’t buying his story of an anonymous source either. Colonel Pratt had protected him. Any link between Calvino and the video, and he’d be back in lockup. It shouldn’t have mattered who made the video; the video spoke for itself—the images of the two Thai men walking in and the sound of the handgun from the room next door. Bodies falling. But none of that was important to them, only who had made the video. Whose side were they on? Who was their paymaster and what was his position?

  “I am very sorry, Colonel,” said Marley.

  “‘Sorry’ is what I’ve been getting since I was given the news. When you hear that word, you know one thing for certain,” Colonel Pratt said.

  He waited a moment, looking at Calvino before focusing on Marley.

  “You know what that thing is?”

  She shrugged, fingering her wine glass.

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “And I believe that’s an honest reply, what you just said. You’ve never experienced failure. I’ve failed as a cop, failed as a musician, failed as a man. My failure makes a lot of people feel sorry.”

  “Pratt, you’ve never failed as a friend,” said Calvino.

  Billy Clarke was back on stage strumming his guitar.

  “Back to work,” said Colonel Pratt, as he rose from the table.

  Calvino reached out and grabbed Colonel Pratt’s arm.

  “We’ll make this right,” he said. “The fight’s not over. This is only round two.”

  They could hear Colonel Pratt’s sa
x playing a Coltrane blues piece as they left the Check Inn 99. The drizzle had turned to rain. The street vendors in the narrow walkway clogged the foot traffic like grit in a fat man’s arteries. But luck was with Calvino, who managed to flag a taxi. Marley climbed into the back and Calvino followed, closing the door. The taxi had passed several other potential passengers. A farang with a mem-farang was blood in the water for a taxi shark. With some well-chosen Thai words Calvino made it clear to the driver, who was fingering half a dozen amulets hanging from the rearview mirror, that this wasn’t his lucky day and that he should turn on the meter.

  Marley leaned against the door. She remained silent as the taxi inched forward in the traffic, slowed by the rain.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I want your opinion about a complex puzzle I’ve been working on. I’m stuck. I can’t fit the pieces together. Could you have a look?”

  “Where is this puzzle?”

  “It’s at my condo.”

  “That’s one of the worse pickup lines ever.”

  “I’ll settle for a ranking in the top ten. But the puzzle I’m talking about is real.”

  The fact that ghosts periodically jumped out of the puzzle was, he felt, better left unsaid until she got to know him better. First she should have a chance to look at his collection of puzzle pieces and how they fit together to tell what he thought of as the car-bombing story.

  They sat in the back of the Bangkok taxi, a huge space between them, each looking out their own window. People are a puzzle, he thought, even as she asked herself, would puzzles continue to exist if there were no people? Had her wealth changed her, he wondered, and would it have changed him? She asked herself what his reaction had been to finding out who she was, and whether, if he’d known before, that would have changed anything.

  In the digital information age, the gradual discovery of a new person, and the element of mystery that entails, had long since dissolved into the analog past. People never had a chance anymore to learn information over the first days and weeks and months of an acquaintance. Marley’s life had been revealed in full on Calvino’s screen.

  He’d Googled her name and found enough information to fill every warehouse inside one of those small industrial estates on the Eastern Seaboard. The details of her life were public knowledge; she’d been profiled in magazines and newspapers in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, London, Berlin and Paris. Dr. Marley Solberg had already been a celebrity in the cyber world when she walked away with a cool $250 million in cash and shares. She’d sold a series of data mining programs. She was called the Queen of Quantum Algorithms.

  “You have to understand something about Pratt,” he said. “When you have enough wealth to move a mountain, what you don’t take into account are the limitations the rest of us face moving in the real world. There are lots of people like Pratt and me living a few hours’ hike up that mountain doing the best we can. We’re hanging in, thinking we might still climb a little higher, when really we should be grateful we’ve got as far up that mountain as we have.”

  “When you reach the top of the mountain, do you know what you think as you look out at the view?”

  Calvino shook his head.

  “Nothing has fundamentally changed for me. I make certain I’m still anchored to planet earth. No one escapes gravity.”

  She stopped just short of recommending Professor Nagata’s yoga practice as her pair of gravity boots.

  “Pratt was shoved off his mountain,” said Calvino. “When you’re in free fall, you see the ground coming up fast, and there’s nothing to break your fall. When you live on top, you forget what it’s like for someone who’s been thrown off the top. You saw Pratt. He’s not in good shape because he’s still falling.”

  The last time Calvino had talked with Colonel Pratt, he had still been in the job. The reassignment must have come down on Friday. That figured about right. The senior brass could disappear for the weekend. Leave Colonel Pratt a dangling man.

  “I liked him,” said Marley.

  “People love him. Pratt was a hit at the Java Jazz Festival. But that was a few years ago. I thought, he thought—we all did—that he was going to make it big-time with the saxophone. It was his dream to leave the police force and tour at music festivals, getting bigger and bigger gigs. He waited and waited for a breakthrough. When he was in Rangoon, he played with a band that drew crowds. The owners of the 50th Street Bar loved Pratt. The band had a great vocalist, too. She was a young Burmese singer named Mya. Her nickname was the Black Cat. Pratt was riding high on that dream boat, seeing himself in the middle of the ocean when he was still in the harbor. The band’s piano player had big plans too. Yadanar—that was his name—not only played the piano, but he came from big Rangoon money and had high-level connections in the government and the military. Yadanar signed a contract with the Blue Note in New York. My cousin helped set up the gig. Pratt saw himself meeting up with the two of them in New York. He’d play the saxophone at the Blue Note. They’d draw the crowds just like they’d done in Rangoon.”

  “What happened?”

  Calvino looked at her as they arrived at his condo. He took out his wallet and paid the driver.

  “The Black Cat and Yadanar were killed when the car they were in blew up in Bangkok. The case is in the unsolved file. It’s a puzzle.

  “That’s the puzzle you were talking about,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s the puzzle. But there’s another one. Pratt’s a decade older than Coltrane when he died. Does he still have time?”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  CALVINO OPENED A bottle of red wine and carried two glasses from the kitchen into his sitting room. Marley stood in front of the artifacts of the car bombing he’d reconstructed across the walls. It looked like a modern art collage—images, glass, metal and paper. A4 color printouts, photographs and zippered plastic bags segregated by content—glass, nails, metal, upholstery and clothing. All the pieces had been hand-gathered from the scene of the blast. He came up behind her quietly as she leaned over the Remington typewriter about to advance the carriage return and read what had been typed on the paper.

  “I haven’t seen one of these for a long time,” she said, having a quick look at the heading on the paper.

  From: Vincent Calvino

  To: Dr. Apinya

  Confidential: Patient/Doctor Privilege

  He slipped the paper out from the paten, wadded it up and threw it in a pile of crumpled papers. “It’s gone. With a computer the words are never gone.”

  “True,” she said. “But revision is a nightmare.”

  “If you write for only one person and from the heart, there’s no need for revision.”

  “The medium is the message,” she said. “I don’t know if I agree with it, but I like the sentiment.”

  He stepped away from her and the typewriter and stood beside a map. “The location of the bomb was there,” Calvino said, holding the two wine glasses, pointing at the map suspended from the ceiling.

  “When you came in just now, you scared me,” she said, her hand touching her throat.

  He poured wine into the glasses and handed her one. Her hand was shaking.

  “I sometimes get scared in this room too. I’ve been known to get the shakes standing here.”

  He gestured toward a photograph of a crater in the middle of the street.

  “The bomb was detonated by cell phone. Someone waited for the car to pass. There had to have been more than one person involved. The bomber needed to know that Yadanar’s Benz would pass over that precise stretch of road and to be ready to target it during a narrow window of time.”

  “That wouldn’t be difficult. It’s a simple logistical problem. Why haven’t the police arrested someone?” said Marley.

  The tone of her voice—deliberate, emotionless—had the feel of a careful mathematical formula. Calvino wondered if she had ever used the coy dance of a beautiful woman as a shortcut, a way to break
through the defenses of men to harvest information she wanted. He seriously doubted it. She had discovered resources powerful enough to run circles around any man. Feminine charms, in comparison, were crude tools.

  “The failure of the police investigation is a very long story,” said Calvino.

  “If you want me to help with the puzzle, I need to understand something about these pieces.”

  Calvino nodded, sipping the wine.

  “You’re right.”

  He leaned forward, reaching for a newspaper story with a half-page color photograph. In the picture a dozen forensic and bomb disposal experts squatted and bagged evidence within a ten-meter radius fanning out from the point of the explosion. There had been a lot of twisted shards, burnt debris and smashed and broken things scattered along the road and sidewalk. The men in the picture were dressed in green single-piece jumpsuits, peaked black caps and white surgical gloves.

  “That’s what the road looked like the next morning.”

  She studied the photograph.

  “You’ve reconstructed pieces of a puzzle from the crime scene. So what’s missing? What piece are you still looking for?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s here somewhere, staring at me. Mocking me. I just can’t see it.”

  “Because you see what they want you to see. You’re focused on what’s in front of your eyes. What if what you’re looking for is not in this evidence?”

  She sat on the sofa and opened her handbag, removing a thumb drive.

  Nodding at his computer, she said, “I’d like to show you something.”

  She inserted the thumb drive, and an icon appeared on the right side of the screen. She clicked on it and opened a menu, scrolled down and opened a file.

  After two or three minutes of searching, she said, “The police identified the time of the bombing. A cell phone was used to detonate it. I’ve triangulated the cell phone traffic, text messages and other calls half an hour before and after the explosion.”

  Marley scrolled through a spreadsheet file with pages of columns containing codes, dates and times, locations of senders and receivers, cell phone numbers and IDs.