The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  She nodded as she stuffed the twenty baht notes into her bra.

  “He came back several hours ago.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “I didn’t see anyone with him,” she said.

  Calvino gave her another two hundred baht. She looked confused.

  “For your dinner,” he said in Thai.

  Akash’s room was on the sixth floor. They walked up the fire escape stairs, passing migrants camped out on the landings.

  “Nice joint,” said McPhail, looking back at Marley.

  “Compared with life in a refugee camp, this is luxury,” said Marley.

  Finally reaching the sixth floor, they walked through the open fire door. The empty corridor, dirty and smelling of hash, vibrated with the deep bass of heavy metal from one of the rooms. Doors of the dingy, tiny rooms stood open to the hallway. Inside, brown-skinned people sat in their underwear in front of fans. Only a few children ran up and down the hall, shouting and playing.

  McPhail wiped the sweat from his face.

  “I’ve been in cooler saunas,” he said.

  Marley didn’t complain. She stood behind McPhail, just listening.

  “We’re on the right floor,” said Calvino, checking a door number.

  “Give me a minute. I’m winded,” said McPhail, leaning against the wall.

  A four-year-old ran past him with a water gun, laughing. He aimed the water gun at McPhail’s head and squeezed off a blast of water.

  “Man, why is it, whenever you ask me to go somewhere, I’m the one who gets ambushed?”

  “He’s just a child,” said Marley.

  “An apprentice gunman is what he is.”

  The boy disappeared into one of the rooms.

  The illegal migrant diaspora collected in buildings like this one like overflowing gutters after a torrent. They lived in neighborhoods populated by violent, scared or dangerous people like a pack of hungry dogs showing their fangs over every bone. Calvino, as a private investigator, retained his comparative advantage in such streets and slums. No mathematician or brain surgeon could calculate the life inside such places. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know what or whom they should pay attention to. As an ex-New Yorker, Calvino understood before there were computers that most of the murders, assaults and robberies in the slums are committed by slum dwellers killing, mugging and robbing each other.

  As they continued down the corridor, Calvino waited for Marley to stop beside him.

  “Here’s how it works,” Calvino said. “You stay on that side of the door.”

  He pointed to a spot.

  “Wait until it’s clear that nothing funny is going on, and then you can follow us in. But wait until I tell you it’s okay. If it’s not okay for any reason, you go back the way we came. Only go much faster.”

  “If you’re trying to scare me, I want you to know I am not scared,” she said.

  She worked the probabilities by the numbers. He worked out things using a different calculator—his gut feeling.

  Looking at McPhail, he said, “Let’s say hello to Akash.”

  Both of them stood to the side of the door. Calvino moved forward and knocked three times. The door opened and Akash stuck out his head. Calvino pulled him out into the hallway. Akash nearly fell down. Recovering his balance, he leaned over, grabbing his knees and catching his breath.

  “Anyone else inside?”

  Akash gestured to the door.

  “My friend, Sarah from Wisconsin.”

  Sarah stood in the doorway holding a bible with a thick black leather binding. On the front cover was an embossed gold cross. Sarah appeared to be in her early sixties.

  “Marley?” she said. “I had no idea you were coming.”

  Calvino looked at the two women hugging.

  “You know each other,” he said, realizing why she’d not been frightened in the corridor. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Without Dr. Solberg’s sponsorship, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Turning to Marley and trying not to show his anger, he said, “What is it with you and secrets?”

  “I wouldn’t have come along if I wanted to keep my friendship with Sarah a secret. And don’t forget, you’re working for me.”

  “So that’s how it is,” he said. “It’s always good to clear the air with a new client.”

  She had insisted on coming along because she knew Sarah would be there. Her way of revealing information, piece by piece, on a need-to-know basis, had become a pattern in their relationship. They walked into Akash’s squalid little room, taking in at a single glance the unmade bed, the crumpled, dirty sheets, the pillowcase gone grayish and the smell of a room that hadn’t been aired for months.

  Akash closed the door and turned on a small floor fan.

  “How long have you been working with Akash?” Calvino asked Marley.

  “About a year ago we set up an underground railroad to move Rohingya women and kids out of the country,” said Marley. “Akash and Anal Khan helped us make arrangements in some cases for refugees hiding in Bangkok.”

  Calvino, his mood swinging to the black end of the spectrum, looked upset as he paced back and forth in the room, his jacket armpits wet with sweat. He had a gun under the jacket. He left it on. He had no reason to show it.

  “You said you had something for me, Akash. Is this what you meant?” he asked, looking at Marley and Sarah from Wisconsin.

  “Boss, I wanted you to know I didn’t hurt that girl,” Akash said. “I was trying to do good. Like Miss Marley said, I help people. Akash always wishes to do nothing but to help my people.”

  “That didn’t quite work out for Ploy,” said Calvino.

  “I did nothing wrong, boss,” Akash said.

  “I’m not your boss,” he said and turned to look at Marley. “She’s your boss.”

  Marley came to his defense.

  “When Akash found Ploy, she was already dead. He walked into a trap. He’d been set up. This wasn’t an accident or chance. It was planned.”

  Calvino believed those words were true—they had walked into an ambush without realizing that sooner or later it was inevitable. The trap wasn’t a black swan of bad luck that blindsided them. An amateur operation run by outsiders would be living on borrowed time, existing only until the Thais noticed it was cutting into their own business interests and shut it down.

  “You don’t know who set up Ploy?” said Calvino. “Or why he wanted her dead?”

  Their silence offered no hint of an answer.

  “The probability is it was Thanet,” said Marley, breaking eye contact with Sarah.

  “He bought her?”

  Marley nodded.

  “He owned her.”

  The buying and selling of illegals was done through a hidden backdoor into the refugee system, creating a form of modern slavery silently absorbed into the economy. It was a difficult system to escape. Those who tried and failed to escape paid a high price as did their families. For anyone wanting to stop it, the problem was finding evidence incriminating a buyer. Powerful men like Thanet were unlikely to have any direct connection with an individual human trafficking case. Like the top boss running an illegal drug operation, he was bound to have a group of walk-around men to keep him in the clear. There were no average customers among the buyers. Average men didn’t have employees like Jaruk on the payroll to help them buy and sell migrants like any other commodity. Ploy had become damaged goods. What does a man do with such goods?

  “You’ve got evidence to connect Thanet and Ploy?” asked Calvino.

  “He was obsessed by her,” said Marley.

  “That’s not evidence,” said Calvino. “That’s an opinion.”

  Marley closed her eyes, shaking her head.

  “I met with Thanet, several times. I offered him a blank check for Ploy. He refused.”

  “Did he say why?” asked Calvino.

  “He told me he was in love with her,” said Marley. “He wouldn’t let her go. This love didn’t
stop him from hitting on me.”

  McPhail flapped his arms.

  “That’s crazy. Not only that he hit on you. But that he would kill her if he loved her.”

  “She didn’t love him,” said Marley. “He did everything he could think of to keep her.”

  “The autopsy said Ploy was six weeks pregnant,” said Calvino. “What are the chances it was Thanet’s? DNA tests would establish if he was the father. Would he have killed her if he’d known she was carrying his child?”

  Marley shook her head.

  “She’s dead. That’s your answer.”

  “I feel responsible,” said Sarah. “I should have seen this coming.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. I was very careful,” said Akash.

  They all looked at him, wondering if he’d misunderstood what they’d been discussing.

  “No matter how careful you think you are, sometimes the condom breaks,” said McPhail, who had kept quiet.

  The two women looked at him with revulsion.

  “They break sometimes. That’s a fact,” he said.

  “Ed’s got a larger point,” said Calvino. “Everyone was being careful. But it wasn’t enough.”

  In the underworld of illegals the amount of chaos and noise made “careful” an exotic concept.

  “We were betrayed,” said Akash.

  “Who betrayed you?” asked Calvino.

  “Anal,” he said.

  His partner had been found dead nearby.

  “What was his motive? And why was he killed?” asked Calvino.

  Akash shrugged.

  “Anal was very unlucky,” he said.

  “Right,” said McPhail, rolling his eyes.

  The default when no one could explain why someone had been killed was always the same. It came down to bad luck.

  “Someone has been watching us,” said Marley, glancing at Sarah and Akash, who looked away. “Killing Ploy was Thanet’s way of sending us a message. Keep out of our territory. Stay away from the illegals. And he was saying something else quite specific: ‘If I can’t have her, no one can.’”

  “Thanet’s men saw something. Spotted a couple of Rohingya getting into an SUV or getting out of one. Or saw one climbing onto a boat. It could have happened a dozen different ways,” said Calvino. “Or Thanet found out by ordering you followed and your telephone tapped.”

  “That would have been difficult,” Marley said.

  Calvino believed that to be true. She was, after all, a security and surveillance expert who could have set up a string of blind alleys and dead ends. But she wasn’t a Bangkok expert, and Thanet had a wealth of other resources to draw on. Human traffickers, Calvino knew, create networks staffed with the eyes and ears of many people, from the camps to the halls of power to the streets where mules are recruited.

  Calvino looked at the two women. Both of them were outsiders who lived in a bubble of illegal immigrants. Marley and Sarah likely had no idea that sooner or later someone connected to the network would hear a whisper about a refugee who got out of Thailand for free. Farang. Sticking their long noses into Thai business. Farang. That word would have been said with a long hiss. They’d talk about the rumor for days. Like a communicable disease it would spread. People up the chain would start to hear of this farang virus infecting a perfectly healthy, well-oiled distribution system. Ears and eyes, switched from passive to alert status, would have a good look around, ask questions, watch and report back. More talk, gossip and rumors would bubble just under the surface—Thais talking to Thais with eyes adjusted to the dark of night.

  Someone had heard a rumor about a non-Thai group helping refugees. Akash had been soliciting money on Soi Cowboy from punters. If the word had spread from Soi Cowboy that an Indian nut vendor was collecting money for refugee assistance, it would have been passed down the line. Marley had seen the non-Thainess of her small group as their strength, as if what they were doing were encrypted in a code the locals could never beak. But as Calvino knew well, that kind of encryption came with a built-in weakness—foreign secrecy could never work because the secret keepers still have to function inside Thai society, and no one can ever keep a secret in Thailand. People always talk, even if in a roundabout way. Akash had been talking without knowing his words were being heard, remembered and passed along via the bamboo telegraph.

  Thais break down the codes of others in the old-fashioned way, through the brute force of social interactions. Observing each gesture, move, relationship and snippet of small talk, Thanet and his circle would not have been working in total isolation. Girls on Soi Cowboy had brothers and husbands who drank with men who knew men in the network. Marley and her group had no choice but to move among the Thais. Keeping numbers encrypted was a universe away from concealing a people smuggling operation. She had believed that she could camouflage a society of amateurs, not understanding that whatever they did, said and planned was in plain sight. Not to notice an operation of that kind would have meant they had gone blind and deaf.

  There is competition in every business, but in an illegal business there are other ways of discouraging competition, especially an operation that gives away a valuable commodity and service for free.

  “How did you work out pickup and delivery?” asked Calvino.

  Dr. Marley Solberg shot a long look at her two colleagues.

  “We had a formula that worked for over a year,” she said.

  “I am trusting that it will work one more time,” said Akash.

  “McPhail, take my car back to the condo.”

  Calvino tossed him the remote for his Honda.

  “You can show me how it’s done,” said Calvino, looking at Marley and Sarah.

  FORTY

  THE TWO WOMEN sat in the front of Marley’s SUV. Calvino sat in the back with Akash. The eighty-percent tint on the windows stopped anyone from looking inside. The front fender sported a logo from the Royal Sports Club, the windscreen a logo of the NGO and a small Canadian flag. The plates showed Thai letters for vehicles registered in Bangkok. Sarah had been careful to never transport more than three refugees at a time. She entered the elevated expressway at the Port of Klong Toey. They were on their way to the Eastern Seaboard.

  Sarah headed an NGO—Women Helping Women—with its head office in South Pattaya. She occasionally disappeared in the SUV and drove to pick up Rohingya refugees delivered by Akash and Anal. The other staff, by design, were kept in the dark about the sideline operation.

  Five staff members provided counseling and advice for sexually abused women and children, HIV/AIDS awareness programs and a women’s shelter. Marley paid the bills and salaries. No one on staff suspected the organization had a sideline of smuggling Rohingya refugees out of shelters, camps and detention centers; they had started small and remained under the radar by staying that way. Marley funded two more NGOs in Indonesia and had set up a camp for Rohingya refugees on the island of Java. Fifty or sixty refugees bunkered down while Marley used her connections to negotiate with UNHCR for the outside chance it might find other countries to accept them. But it had been a tough, slow battle.

  In the huge ocean of Rohingya refugees flooded out of western Burma, the number of refugees Women Helping Women had helped to escape was no more than a rounding-off error. Marley Solberg said that would all change once the tracking tattoos came online. She had a working database with locations and personal details already in place. The information was stored in a safe box in the cloud.

  Her plan was to collect irrefutable evidence of the official lies about trafficked refugees and go public like a good whistleblower to expose the space colonized by corruption, greed and brutality along with the names of those involved. As he rode in the SUV, Calvino thought about what Colonel Pratt had said about the gods being untouchable. But he kept his thoughts to himself. The Colonel’s assessment, based on a lifetime of experience, was no doubt right, but being right required finding a way through the wall that protected the gods.

  As the SUV entered Bang La
mung district, Marley was saying, “The Rohingya need camps with proper medical equipment, medicines, nurses, schools, clean water, shelter and food.”

  “That’s what they need,” Calvino said, “but how will it work out once those have been provided? Once the word spreads that Thai camps are better than their hellholes at home, anyone with an education or money will take their chances. Smugglers will then ask for more money to deliver them to these well-equipped camps.”

  “So we should just turn our backs on them?” she asked.

  “All life flowed through channels of cruelty and violence. It’s as common as the air around us. We no longer think about it except in a remote way when we read about someone who was washed away.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Marley asked.

  “In Rangoon I had a similar discussion with a singer about taking sides. She said there’s a war raging inside everyone. On one side you have George Orwell, and Henry Miller on the other. Those who refuse to accept injustice and violence and inequality quote Orwell’s work. Miller accepted that the murderers would continue to roam free, making the rules to their own advantage, and for the free man, escape was losing oneself in the world of song, dance, wine and sex. Miller didn’t believe that any principle could protect you against those with real power. He thought that nothing can blunt the exercise of power over the exploited. Miller’s idea was simple: stay off the predator class’s grid. When someone puts their life in the hands of a human smuggler, they ignore the fact that it’s his job to deliver them to their new masters. It doesn’t matter that you pray for a savior who thinks like Orwell because you’ll never have a chance to live the free life of a Henry Miller.”

  “The fact that you can’t eliminate all the pain and suffering isn’t an excuse to retreat as much as you can,” said Marley, who had turned in her seat to look at Calvino.

  He said nothing in reply. He appeared lost in thought as he stared out the window at the fields, factories, shops and houses. They drove on in silence.

  She hadn’t expected him to disagree with her, but she knew that abstractions at this level are like the water cooler in the desert that everyone claims as their own. Calvino realized that Marley’s beautiful mind, decorated by a thousand elegant equations with a glossy coat of Yoshi Nagata’s spirituality—like a penthouse on top of Akash’s slum building—was at odds with the real world run by men who ran smuggling operations under Thanet’s big tent. She was rich beyond the imagination of most people, but one woman’s wealth wouldn’t prevent a couple of hundred thousand refugees from being cut adrift and sold off like livestock. Most people who spent a lifetime riding a high moral horse failed to experience what it was like to spend a lifetime walking behind the horse and knowing they could never escape what came after horse’s tail lifted.