The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  The SUV turned in to a soi that served as an entrance to a Buddhist temple. Monks’ quarters, salas and large grounds lined both sides of the narrow road. Tourist buses were parked in front of one sala.

  “They sell amulets to the Chinese tourists,” said Marley. “They come in huge buses by the hundreds every day.”

  The soi narrowed as they drove past the temple buildings and gardens and finally into the local rural community. Ramshackle structures, weathered by the seawater, stood isolated amid the lush overgrown green of an encroaching jungle. The road turned into a single-lane dirt path, inclining to a fork. At the juncture stood an ancient bodhi tree with sprawling branches brushing against the ground.

  Sarah braked, slowing the SUV to a stop as Calvino looked out the window. Marley powered her window down. Calvino looked out at the gnarled trunk of the bodhi tree, wrapped with dozens of traditional Thai costumes, shiny sequins reflecting the light from copper, red, green, yellow and blue dresses, all fixed to the tree.

  “Shopping at the local clothes market?” asked Calvino.

  Marley’s laughter echoed through the SUV.

  “It’s not a market. It’s a sacred place. The bodhi tree has been converted into a marriage tree,” said Marley. “The belief is that young women who die before marriage should have a husband in the next world. Their relatives bring a wedding dress and monks to this tree and perform a wedding ceremony. The spirit of the dead woman is married to a famous singer, poet or magician who died many years ago. The families believe that he’ll be a good husband and will look after each wife as if she were the only one. He’ll lavish riches and sublime wisdom, wash their feet at night with his hair and serve them fruit and tea at bedtime. He’ll entertain them with illusions. Cards, coins, dice, rabbits, colored balls that he juggles for hours. He’ll be forever in their presence, never leaving their side or turning away.”

  “In other words, he’s the perfect husband,” said Calvino.

  Akash looked on silently. His eyes were wide open and fearful.

  “I am not liking ghosts,” he said.

  “The spirits of the young women are at rest,” said Marley, “if you believe the legend.”

  “I am believing that spirits never rest. That is their misfortune. They have no choice but to roam endlessly and never to arrive. It is our belief.”

  It wasn’t difficult to understand how a Rohingya had come to adopt such a view of the fate of those in the afterworld, a place that mirrored their world on earth.

  “You’ll be safe, Akash,” Marley said, glancing back at him.

  He didn’t look comforted. His wet black eyes blinked as he stared at the tree.

  “I would feel safer if we continued.”

  Marley powered the window up, and Sarah turned right at the fork and drove ahead, pulling into a large secluded mansion on the beach. A small dark man in his early twenties stood at the gate, smiling. Spindly legs, thick with black hair, stuck out of his red longyi; he wore his long raven black hair to his shoulders. A second Burmese servant, older by a decade, who appeared wearing a green longyi, helped close and lock the heavy iron gate. A couple of soi dogs, tails wagging, circled the servants. Calvino noticed the CCTV cameras on the gate and what appeared to be sensors along the driveway that curved around the garden. The SUV pulled in close to the house, and Sarah switched off the engine. A third man, wearing a baseball cap, appeared dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He opened the door for Marley and bowed to her as she climbed out.

  “This is my crew,” she said, checking her watch. “We still have a little time before Akash must leave us.”

  Sarah gestured for Akash to follow her. At first he ignored her, his mouth wide open, staring at the house.

  “Come inside. We have a case with clothes and necessities for your trip.”

  He stumbled forward as if in a dream.

  “Where’s he going?” asked Calvino.

  “Norway, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  Calvino followed her as she walked down the flagstone pavement surrounding the house and emerged through a gate into the back garden.

  “We have a history of helping people escape. You should read our history sometime.”

  The two-story mansion was set back thirty meters from a white sandy beach. A concrete pier extended out another twenty meters, and midway down the pier Calvino spotted the dock lines anchoring a power launch and used-tire fenders cushioning the boat from the concrete pier. The tide was coming in. The launch had an enclosed cabin and a radar dish rotating on the roof. A small Norwegian flag flew on one side, a Canadian flag on the other.

  “He’s going to Norway in that boat?”

  “No, that would be impossible. The launch will take him out to meet a Norwegian ship, and the captain will make sure that Akash arrives in Norway. Smuggling people is like any equation. Each sequence must have its own beauty and lead to the next.”

  “Your place?” asked Calvino, looking back at the mansion.

  She nodded.

  Sarah and Marley’s crew worked together to smuggle Rohingya refugees out of Thailand and on to Norway, Indonesia and Malaysia. Akash had received a warning from stone-faced men to restrict his business on Soi Cowboy to selling nuts. Akash and Anal had brought dozens of refugees to rendezvous points in Bangkok, where they had all climbed into the SUV so that Sarah could drive them to Marley’s compound. Neither Akash nor Anal had any idea where the refugees ended up. If they had known, the weight of too much truth might have broken their will, and they’d have wanted out too. The deal had always been that they’d be looked after. Marley had been true to her word.

  Inside the house Akash stood in the window, looking at the launch and the sea.

  “It is so beautiful,” he said, repeating the phrase.

  He’d helped Rohingya to get out of the country before. The only difference this time was he was the one going. He could see the endgame, and for the first time since he’d been beat up in prison, he smiled.

  Marley saw him in the window and waved. He looked resigned to his fate, like a man auditioning for a police crime reenactment.

  “With Akash safely delivered to Norway, you’ll be out of business?” said Calvino.

  “That’s what we want Thanet and his friends to believe. But we’ve just changed our business model.”

  “With all the money in the world, this is what you choose to do?”

  “How do you spend your time?”

  She paused.

  “What you do,” she said, “helping people find lost ones, is not that different.”

  Finding the missing, he thought. Reuniting them with those who care for them. He accepted individual cases, one at a time. One person who’d disappeared. But Marley’s client was a large group of people who’d gone missing. She operated on a different scale, which expanded the scope of risks.

  The Rohingya fled with the clothes on their backs and with memories of villages burnt, women raped, men killed as their wives and children looked on. They carried with them images of monks in robes at the front of a mob, inciting violence, as if the lid of decency had blown off the pot of humanity. Marley was a small-time player on the fringe of the big-time Thai operators, the men with the network whose eyes and ears were plugged into the ranks of the military, the navy, the police and the immigration authorities. At every intersection someone had their hand out, taking a cut, to pass the refugees through the long intestine of a hungry dragon. It was nothing personal. It was the nature of business and clans; it was the way the hands moved on a clock face—one second, one minute, one hour at a time, relentlessly, as time and business never rest or stop.

  One day Marley had woken up. Yoshi Nagata had helped her open her eyes. She’d crawled out of bed with the sheets wound around her neck, shutting off the oxygen flow to her brain, and once she’d cleared the air passage, she breathed in the truth of where all those numbers led her—to individual lives retreating from violence, hatred, brutality and death. It
was too late to return to bed and the sanctuary of sleep. She was awake. Eyes wide open, what had she found? That despite all her knowledge, education, connection and wealth, she could carry no more than a candle as she stepped into a dark, deep forest.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE NEXT MORNING Marley’s SUV stopped in front of the marriage tree shrine, and she and Calvino got out and walked over to it.

  “That’s a new dress,” she said, gesturing to a traditional Thai silk dress—long, sleek, the shoulders lightly padded.

  An old woman came out of a nearby house with a small bowl of rice, candles and flowers on a tray. She carried them to a table next to the tree.

  “Grandmother, who left this dress?” asked Calvino in Thai.

  The old woman flicked a cigarette lighter and touched the flame to a candle.

  “They never said their name. I heard their pickup last night and saw them out the window. A couple. Old or not, I can’t say. It was dark. I went out to the road and asked them to come back in the morning.”

  “They said it was already done,” she continued, lighting another candle. “They left me money to look after Joom’s spirit.”

  She pulled a five hundred baht note from inside her blouse and showed it.

  “They said Joom was killed in a motorcycle accident in South Pattaya. It has happened before.”

  She walked a couple of more steps and touched another of the dresses.

  “This one, Tim, died on a motorbike in Rayong. This is her dress. They are young and never think it can happen to them. That is the meaning of being young.”

  At the bottom of a tray was a picture of a young, smiling girl. The old woman lifted it and showed it to Marley and Calvino.

  “The dress is for Joom for her marriage in the next life.”

  The old woman stepped closer to the tree and waied, her head half-bowed. She was silent for a couple of minutes, ending her meditation by running her fingers through her long, graying hair. She looked at Marley as she pointed at another wedding dress on the tree to the immediate right of Joom’s.

  “That’s Pook. She died of AIDS. Wouldn’t take her medicine.”

  Her finger moved to the next dress on the tree.

  “Kaeo died of a drug overdose, Nee was a suicide, Pui was found murdered and Toy drowned.”

  She paused like a good curator, getting a good grip on her audience.

  “Each was young, unmarried, with a life ahead of her.”

  Marley took a thousand baht note from her handbag and held it out for the old woman.

  “You live in the big house over there,” said the old woman, nodding at the right fork in the road. “I’ve seen you many times.”

  “I’ve seen you too,” said Marley in Thai.

  She held the old woman’s hands in her own.

  “I hope that I’ll see you again,” Marley said.

  The old woman smiled with a slight upward curl of the lip, an expression of the old who have come to terms with lies that belong to the future, and they are unlikely to travel to that destination.

  They drove half an hour toward Bangkok in silence, listening to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

  Lowering the volume, Marley broke the silence.

  “Last night you said Thanet was beyond the law.”

  “Law is just one tree in the Thai garden,” said Calvino. “It’s pruned down, so it’s hard to see among the forest of tall, important men.”

  “That is profound coming from a lawyer.”

  Calvino shook his head, watching a black pickup cut in front of Marley as she braked to avoid hitting it. He saw nothing abnormal in the behavior of the pickup driver. Marley caught her breath, held it and then slowly let it out.

  “Nothing profound in avoiding a collision,” he said. “When you work for years in the garden, your hands are used to turning over dirt. The law of what survives and what dies rests with nature and not in human documents. You think the law is your friend. It can also be your adversary’s weapon.”

  “I won’t be defeated,” she said.

  “This is beginning to sound very personal.”

  “It is. No way am I letting that bastard get away with murder. That would be surrender.”

  He glanced over at her.

  “Who’s talking about surrender?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been saying? Let nature take its course?”

  “Human nature is the nature I’m talking about. Colonel Pratt said only the gods can bring down another god. I’m thinking about how to plant a ‘god’ killer app inside Thanet’s garden.”

  Ratana’s story about the sword tree and the old woman’s stories about the marriage tree had him thinking about the forces that would lead an army of angry gods to Thanet’s door, forces that would deliver the magic key to opening it and the strength to pull him down from his pedestal.

  She looked over at him.

  “Nothing would please me more.”

  “Can you pull up all of Thanet’s cell phone records? Sukanya’s iPhone had Jaruk’s number.”

  “Numbers,” she said. “He used more than one.”

  “Trace them. Then grab all of his emails,” he said.

  She nodded, serving up her reply with a knowing smile: “Can.”

  “That’s very Thai—can, cannot.”

  “What else?”

  “He uses a secure phone. How difficult is it to get the locations and times? Text messages?”

  “Depends. How many phones does he use? How good is his encryption?”

  “You need someone who works on the inside.”

  She smiled.

  “Of course, that would make it much easier. Who do you have in mind?”

  “An employee,” said Calvino.

  “That’s how all the best stuff is found. A disgruntled employee.”

  “Only this one isn’t disgruntled.”

  “Then why would he help you?”

  “You flip someone for one of two reasons. He’s afraid you’ve got something that will discredit him with his boss, or he’s greedy. One is shame and humiliation and the other is cold cash.”

  “How much cash to flip the employee?”

  “Around ten million baht would do it.”

  She looked at the road.

  “Okay, ten million baht. And for that we get the phones registered in other names but used by Thanet?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “When do you need the cash?”

  Calvino shrugged as he glanced at her.

  “I know that’s a lot of money. And there is a possibility of a double cross.”

  “What are the probabilities?”

  “Sixty, seventy percent we get the information.”

  “That’s an honest assessment.”

  “I put up half,” he said, smiling. “Never trust a man who doesn’t have skin in the game. To be on the safe side, I’m also thinking you might be able to find out a few things if we can get Thanet’s credit card numbers and bank accounts.”

  “I like the way you think, Vincent Calvino.”

  “That means I no longer work for you. We’re partners.”

  “I’ll have the cash tomorrow, partner,” said Marley.

  “It’ll take a day or two to set it up,” said Calvino. “I’ll need Sukanya’s iPhone, if you’re finished doing what you need to do with it,” said Calvino.

  “I’m finished with it.”

  Marley never asked for the name of the employee. She only cared what the employee might deliver for the money. They both knew that “employee” was a broad term, covering different personalities, capabilities and risks. Some serious unpacking would be required before the money could be handed to Jaruk.

  FORTY-TWO

  CALVINO DEBATED HOW to handle Jaruk. He had one chance to get it right. Jaruk’s number was stored in Sukanya’s iPhone. Ratana could phone him and request a meeting. Or Calvino could return to Thanet’s office on Rama IV and stake out the parking lot. After Jaruk dropped
the boss at the office, Calvino could corner him. The first option had some problems. Giving Jaruk time to think and plan and organize a response meant losing the element of surprise. There was the risk that Jaruk might see no good choice and take off, disappearing into the woodwork.

  The second option, surprising Jaruk, also had some downside. Likely he’d be armed, and as he was in the killing business, his instinct would be to use his weapon to get out of a corner. Timing the ambush would depend on predicting Thanet’s schedule. He travelled around the city to meet up with his minor wives, he played golf, and he attended business appointments. He was one busy criminal. Determining when he might be at his office would be like forecasting the weather.

  McPhail sat in Calvino’s office, slouched back in the chair, a cigarette in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. Calvino turned away from the window. The small sub-soi below was empty except for an old woman who slowly walked to the end with her offerings for the spirit house.

  “If we hang out in the parking lot a couple of days, we’ll get picked up by the security cameras,” said McPhail. “No good.”

  With a couple of gin and tonics in him at ten in the morning, McPhail was fueled with insight.

  “We could get lucky,” Calvino added.

  “We go back to the Ladprao house and wait until he comes out.”

  “And if he stays inside?” asked Calvino.

  “The smart money says Jaruk is a creature of habit. My guess is that he goes back to the same restaurant as before and orders the same bowl of noodles.”