“How did you get this information?” asked Calvino.
She looked up from the screen.
“The Israelis have an effective piece of technology called a GSM interceptor. It intercepts text messages, and if you want to be very clever, you can change the message. Write a false flag message or an incriminating one. It’s great for monitoring calls. But if you want to gain access to the call logs, that’s another device. I simply modified the two devices so they worked together, gathering call information from a central database.”
“And what have you found?”
“From that location and at the time of the explosion, there were one hundred and twenty-eight separate text messages and calls. One of the text messages was sent to an encrypted phone. The message said in Thai, ‘Set laew, mot panha.’”
“It’s done, no further problem,” said Calvino.
He stared at the screen, reading the details of the message. Marley had enlarged the font size to make it stand out.
“The location of the caller was fifty meters from the blast site.”
“He had a line of sight to the car.”
“It was sent two minutes and thirty-four seconds after the bomb went off,” she said.
Calvino sipped his wine, shaking his head.
“If the receiver was using encryption, that sounds like someone with connections to military intel or the government.”
“Private companies are big consumers of encryption these days, for their cell phones and computers. They actually believe the sales hype that it keeps their communications secure.”
“You know who received the text message?” Calvino asked.
She thought for a moment.
“I can tell you who is the registered, listed person for the phone. In this case it’s a company. The Diamond Flagship Import and Export Ltd.,” she said.
“Twenty-third floor, Abdulrahim Place, Rama IV Road.”
“That’s the one.”
She sat back from the screen, watching Calvino, his eyes half closed, shaking his head. For months he’d been studying the evidence before him, and he could have kept on studying for years and never found a link to the bomber and his employer.
“Wait a minute,” he said, disappearing into the master bedroom.
He came back holding Sukanya’s iPhone. He handed it to Marley.
“It belonged to Sukanya, the receptionist at the plastic surgeon’s office. I nicked it. She and Jaruk set Ploy up. Maybe you can find something.”
He thought of Jaruk, whom he had tailed, and suspected that the phone he’d used to call Sukanya was the same one that had been used to set off the bomb.
“I’ll check it. There’s more,” she said. “When I sifted through the database at the time that the Mae Hong Son refugee camp was firebombed from the air, a text message from that location was sent to the same encrypted number. And the same message: ‘Set laew, mot panha.’”
She ejected her thumb drive from the computer and slipped it back into her handbag. The iPhone also disappeared into her bag.
“The Burmese woman who died in the car bombing... If I’m not mistaken, you cared very much for her,” Marley said.
A heavy sadness hit him like a punch on his blind side. When that happened, the visitations always followed. He waited for the washed out figures to float through the wall of evidence.
“Her name was Mya. The Black Cat was her professional name. She was a jazz singer. I’d gone to Rangoon to find her boyfriend, a young musician named Rob Osborne, who’d run off to be with her.”
He stopped, picked up his glass and sloshed the wine in the bottom against the sides.
“She’s not in there,” said Marley.
Calvino grinned.
“No, she’s not. It’s complicated.”
“So is encryption. But no matter how secure something is, there’s always someone who can find a back door and get inside. But you have to need something inside to make it worth the effort.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t know what, Mr. Calvino?”
He filled her wine glass, buying time. Thinking, afraid and waiting, feeling a presence that pressed against his chest. Then he felt something inside shift, a blockage cleared, and he could breathe.
“I slept with her only once. Her family owned a bookshop in Rangoon, the Irrawaddy Bookstore on 42nd Street between Maha Bandoola Road and Merchant. Orwell had bought books there in the distant past. The night I slept with her was the same night Rob was killed in Rangoon. I should have stayed at the hotel and watched over him. But I didn’t. I never told Pratt or anyone what happened that night. Or the night when we showed up at Yadanar’s birthday party. The party was in a mansion with many rooms and what seemed like hundreds of guests. On the walls were paintings of dreams from his parents and relatives, going back several generations. We were separated at the party and someone pulled me into a room. Mya was inside along with Yadanar and a couple of other people. Against the wall I saw three people tied up with hoods over their heads, two men and a woman. The hoods came off. The woman was a Thai named Kati. I knew her.
“Kati’s Thai elegance and beauty, two assets that had given her an edge as a ‘pretty’ in the circuit of auto shows and perfume and watches, had been punched until it was hard to imagine the face had ever sold anything. Kati hadn’t been smart enough to see the warning signs ahead and had got involved with some dangerous people. She’d shot Rob in my hotel room when I’d been with Mya. I’d been brought to the upstairs room in Yadanar’s house for a specific reason. Yadanar handed Mya a gun. The hood covering her head was pulled off and I saw the damage done to her. Her face was puffy, bruised, her lip cut. You could see the terror in her eyes. Mya stood in front of her, and slowly she glanced over her shoulder at me with the same look I’d seen when we made love. I felt the swell of words rising in me: ‘Don’t kill her.’ Each of the words failed to escape; they stayed in my throat, black, empty sounds with no place to go. She held that expression, an intimacy that had passed between us in a room. Yadanar saw what had passed between us and must have guessed what it meant. She held the gun in both hands and shot Kati in the head. After the body fell over, Mya smiled and found my eyes watching her. ‘That’s for Rob,’ she said. ‘And it was for you, Vinny.’ In truth it was for Mya. Her guilt about what happened to Rob vanished at that moment.”
“But you felt guilt.”
“I felt nothing. I could see what she was doing, why she was doing it, but I did nothing to stop her. I watched her pull the trigger. Killing Kati solved nothing. It just made things that much worse.”
Marley reached over and pressed her hand against his.
“I think you’re going to be all right, Mr. Calvino.”
He was on his feet, pulling down the bank of photos taped to the wall, the zippered plastic bags, the clippings.
“I should have told Pratt what happened that night. But I didn’t. I locked it away. Why did I do that? Do you have an equation to explain why I’ve told you something I’ve told no one else?” he asked, wadding up the paper and tossing it on the floor. “Do you have any idea how I’ve tried to forget what happened that night at the bookshop with Mya or at Yadanar’s house? I kept the sex and the murder—my personal involvement in what happened—as a private thing. I kept it so secret that I lied to those close to me. At first I kept it inside, and one day it tumbled out into this room. I had a problem. I couldn’t wipe my memory clean of what happened in Rangoon, or what happened to them here. I’m worn down by the living and the dead.”
“But you kept on going because you couldn’t stop,” she said. “You had no choice but to find out who killed Mya. But you hit a dead end. You discovered Ploy’s body, and unconsciously you found a second chance to redeem yourself.”
“You sound like Yoshi Nagata,” said Calvino.
“I was his student.”
She watched him standing with wads of paper scattered around.
“Are you finished with you
r puzzle?”
“I’m ready to get back to work,” he said. “I’ll take your and the Professor’s case.”
Marley gathered up her handbag and rose from the sofa.
“That’s good news. How much money do you want me to advance?”
Calvino stretched out his hand, made a zero with his thumb and forefinger.
“I want you to stay.”
She searched his eyes and found tears. Dr. Marley Solberg had no algorithms to process his tears. This was Yoshi’s world, the one where Janus and Agni stood guard, looking to the past and the future at the same moment. She faced a man in the present whose past had opened a vein and spilled out of his heart.
She reached for his hand.
“I promise not to forget you,” he said.
“That’s a good start, Mr. Calvino,” Marley said.
“My name is Vincent. Vinny.”
“Vinny, then.”
And so it was to be. That balmy late April night in Calvino’s condo she helped him transform his sitting room. They cleaned out every scrap of the debris. What he’d so dearly clung to for months fit into two large plastic garbage bags.
At dawn the next morning, when they returned to the sitting room, Calvino felt free for the first time he could remember. He stood by the bank of windows overlooking the Tobacco Monopoly Land and didn’t feel sadness welling up. He felt like his old self, a person he’d forgotten existed. He smiled at Marley, who sat at his side, her arm wrapped around his waist.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“The visitors didn’t appear last night when I sat in the sitting room,” he said.
Calvino had emerged from a room of darkness. He wanted to hold that moment and this woman in a way that would stop time. But the river of time couldn’t be dammed.
“I’d given up thinking that was possible,” Calvino said.
He’d slept the entire night for the first time in months. With Marley next to him, he told himself that he’d woken up. That she was real. Still, some small part of him thought his visions had only temporarily vanished and would return.
“You are real, aren’t you?” he asked, running a hand gently down her skin from her neck to her belly.
She smiled.
“Do I feel real?”
He kissed her as the warm light of early morning revealed Marley Solberg, eyes open, staring at him.
“I’m glad that you didn’t die at thirty-four,” she said.
“Thirty-four?”
“Charlie Parker died at thirty-four in New York,” she said. “John Coltrane at forty.”
He smiled, wondering if this woman remembered every number she’d ever heard, each attached to a name. Charlie Parker, thirty-four. John Coltrane, forty.
“That would have been a shame. We’d never have met,” he said.
Her breath on his neck, soft and regular, signaled a quality of intimacy.
“The probabilities are very much greater that we would not have met.”
“We were lucky,” he said. “How do you explain luck?”
“Patterns repeat themselves, and if you can filter out all the noise, you can find them like hidden jewels. Luck is what we call it when we find hidden treasure that enriches our lives. Some people who die young still manage to find it in music, poetry or numbers, while some with long lives never get beyond building sandcastles. Living is the quest to understand the reality of life. You need to go deep into the information and not just scratch the surface. The point is not to get sidetracked. That’s hard because the distractions are infinite,” Marley said, her blue eyes filled with kindness, the numbers all drained out.
“You’re sounding like Yoshi again.”
Being naked next to her gave him the license to use the Professor’s first name. She lay still against his body.
“It is something he said.”
“You want to stop the human trafficking with a formula or an equation?”
Marley raised her eyes and found his eyes.
“How would you stop it?”
Calvino grinned.
“I’d exile the traffickers into the world I just left. I’d beach them on an island from which there was no escape. Let them live among the angry ghosts of the people they’ve murdered.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
HIGH-RISE CONDOS THREW long, thick-bellied shadows over Colonel Pratt’s family compound. In the past his neighbor had raised orchids, but the neighbor and the orchids had long since gone. The Colonel had planted trees to screen what was left of his garden’s privacy. The canopy of trees blocked some of the lower condo balconies from sight, but higher up the building, eyes watched him and his wife through the branches.
Colonel Pratt and Calvino sat in the teak sala at the far end of the garden. The Colonel had his saxophone strapped around his neck. His garden shears and gloves lay on a small wooden bench his father had once used. Calvino watched as Manee, the Colonel’s wife, walked down the stone path into the garden with a tray. She smiled at him. Manee, who was middle-aged, wore her years like a cloak lightly thrown over the shoulders of a younger woman. Colonel Pratt reached down and opened the small gate to the sala.
As Manee set the tray down, she nodded toward the south wall.
“Vincent, do you remember Khun Somchai’s orchids that used to grow along the top of that wall?”
Colonel Pratt watched as his wife poured tea.
“Khun Somchai’s family moved to Pak Nam a few years ago. They bought a three-rai plot on the beach. He still grows orchids, and they have a pond and banana, mango and papaya trees. Each day they watch sunsets and sunrises looking over the sea. They have money in the bank. No worries in the world. They don’t miss Bangkok.”
“But they miss their friends in Bangkok,” said Calvino.
“We will visit them next week,” she said. “Maybe we will stay.”
She looked over at Colonel Pratt, who smiled.
Manee had always fought for her husband, stood by his side. She wanted him to retreat away from the city, return to another time and place, one she had locked in her memory—smaller, more intimate, slower and connected with nature. That her husband had been sidelined in the police department had broken something in her life in Bangkok. She wanted out. She wanted Colonel Pratt to turn away from the political infighting within the department.
“You could come and stay with us,” she said.
Calvino raised the teacup.
“I remember the orchids,” he said.
“Khun Somchai is very proud of his orchids. A man needs to have pride in what he does.”
She took the empty tray and walked down the three steps of the sala to the lawn.
“I’ll leave you two.”
Colonel Pratt drank his tea slowly, watching his wife walk back to the house. Calvino sat on one of the cushions, arms stretched out, admiring a large frangipani tree, smelling the intoxicating scent, part jasmine and part coconut. It reminded him of Marley’s scent. He smiled as he looked at the star-shaped flowers with a deep yellow fanning outward from the center.
“Manee is campaigning to sell the house and move out of Bangkok,” said Colonel Pratt. “She’s had agents around.”
“You’re ready to pack it in? Leave your job?” asked Calvino.
“My job has left me. I’ve been transferred to an inactive position. That’s where the department sends the living dead.”
Calvino recalled that the scent of frangipani was sometimes associated with vampires.
“It’s temporary, Pratt. You’ve come through worse,” said Calvino. “You’ll bounce back. It’s part of being a cop in Thailand. Sooner or later you’re sent to the inactive position doghouse, and then they let you back in.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Colonel Pratt. “Manee’s right about how things have changed. Our neighbors left a long time ago. What’s left to hold us here?”
Until ten years ago they had sat in the garden of Colonel Pratt’s Sukhumvit family compound and watched the sunse
t. But that view had vanished a long time ago. It lived only as a memory of another time and place. The modern world had closed in, and high-rises like weeds had overtaken the garden. The real estate agents that Manee had showed around the property had told her that it would easily sell to developers. With the money they could move on from the land of his inactive post, become independent and live in a place where they could once again watch the sun set and admire orchids. The value placed on the family compound land came in at a cat’s whisker under four million dollars.
“You’re going to sit on a beach and play your saxophone all day and night?”
Colonel Pratt tilted his head as he set down his cup.
“‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’”
Hamlet was the right play for Colonel Pratt to seek refuge in. Especially when it came to making a decision about selling the family land and moving out of Bangkok.
“You know what we’ve become, Pratt?”
“Tell me, Vincent. What are we?”
“Two troubled men drinking tea in a sala and trying not to give in to despair,” said Calvino. “When you get older, it becomes a full-time job.”
“When you got big money, you didn’t run. That’s what I tell Manee,” said Colonel Pratt. “And you know what she says?”
Calvino shook his head, inhaling the scent of frangipani.
“‘Vincent sees ghosts seven days a week and a shrink once a week. Maybe he should have run.’ The system breaks people who challenge it. That’s never changed.”
Calvino let the silence stretch for a minute.
“In Rangoon there were things that happened that I haven’t told you about.”
Colonel Pratt’s attention shifted from the biscuits and tea.
“A secret?”
“Exactly right. A secret. The night Rob was killed, Mya and I… we… we made love. It happened at her family bookshop. The place where Orwell bought books in Rangoon.”
Colonel Pratt grinned.
“Given the way you looked at each other, that’s no surprise. Hardly a secret.”
“There’s more.”
The Marriage Tree Page 25