The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “If he helps us, he knows that he can’t live in Thailand anymore. That gives him a strong incentive to fuck with us.”

  “Vinny, for ten million baht he won’t care about living in Thailand.”

  The bet depended on calculating the scale of Jaruk’s greed against his loyalty to Thanet. Would that amount of money turn him? Jaruk had scammed a doctor for a half share of three hundred thousand baht. Calvino suspected that Jaruk had also grabbed another two hundred grand from Ploy’s handbag. That would have been the amount for the illegal abortion. Jaruk had helped set up Ploy’s death. It had been a lot of risk for what translated as a fifteen thousand dollar crime. It hadn’t taken much money to turn him then, and he’d shown that if cornered, he eliminated the problem—doctor, nurse, Anal—and cleaned up his own mess before walking away. His prior record shouted his willingness to engage in a cool-hearted betrayal if the price was right.

  “When is the last time a guy like Jaruk had dinner alone?” said Calvino. “He’ll be meeting with half a dozen friends,” said Calvino.

  “We grab him on the soi.”

  “No need,” said Calvino.

  He pulled out the receptionist’s cell phone.

  “I’ll give him a call from a familiar number. One that will get his heart pounding.”

  McPhail nudged Calvino when the compound gate on Ladprao opened and Jaruk rolled out on his motorcycle. When Jaruk was twenty meters along the road, Calvino phoned his number on Sukanya’s iPhone. They saw the motorcycle brake light flash as Jaruk pushed his phone under his black helmet. A moment later he pulled his motorcycle off to the side, removed his helmet and looked over his shoulder.

  “Hey, Jaruk. Sukanya said to say hello. She didn’t recognize you in the white mask.”

  Jaruk’s hand reached into his jacket. Before his hand emerged, he looked down the barrel of Calvino’s .38 Police Special at him.

  “Easy now. There’s no reason to make a problem. Don’t give me a reason to shoot you. I have a problem. And I need your help.”

  “Why I help farang?”

  “Because I’ve got a business proposition that’s going to make you rich,” said Calvino, keeping the .38 Police Special trained on him.

  “Farang speak bullshit.”

  His eyes wild with fear, he looked over his shoulder and around the street to see if he was being observed.

  “Yeah? You’ve been talking to the wrong farang. This farang has some truth and a lot of cash. You’ll agree that’s a good combination. Get inside and we can talk over your future, come to an understanding. Everyone will be happy. No one gets hurt or has a problem. Or I could send the videotape of you and your friend in Guy Fawkes masks killing the doctor and his receptionist. You think your boss might recognize you behind the mask? It’s up to you.”

  McPhail, who was in the back, opened the rear door. Calvino had parked on an isolated stretch of the soi, pulling to the curb beyond which rose a high stone wall overgrown with vines that twisted through the iron spikes on top. Branches from old mango trees from the other side swayed lightly. Opposite the wall, another mansion and another family with tentacle-like vines on the wall weaving into the grid of power. There were no street vendors, shops or foot traffic.

  The streetlight pooled around Calvino’s car. Outside the cone of light it was pitch dark. Jaruk stared at Calvino’s .38 and nodded.

  “Make me rich,” he said, sliding into the back next to McPhail.

  His face in the back of the car, still lit by the streetlight, had the look of a man who had woken up to find a sheet tightly knotted around his neck, cutting into his oxygen supply, gasping, and with no chance to pull himself free.

  “I want a list of Thanet’s friends. Names, phone numbers, rank or position. I’ll make it easy. The top twenty-five big guys your boss pals around with, has dinner with and plays golf with. The ones he does business with. His giks, girlfriends and wives too. What I don’t want are names and phone numbers of drivers or luk nongs. I want the nai, the bosses, his women.”

  Calvino stopped and let the request soak in for a minute.

  “You understand what I’m asking?”

  Jaruk grunted, and it could have meant anything. McPhail took away Jaruk’s gun and gave him a hard elbow in the ribs.

  “You didn’t answer the question,” said McPhail.

  “Okay, understand,” he said, looking at his own gun pointed at his chest.

  “What do you know about explosives? Can you make a car bomb?” asked Calvino.

  Jaruk’s jaw firmed and he looked ahead in the darkness outside the window.

  “He asked if you know how to blow shit up?” asked McPhail.

  “I was in the army. In bomb disposal unit,” said Jaruk, slumped back against the seat, smarting from the elbow in the ribs.

  “Remember almost a year ago, when a car bomb killed two Burmese in a Benz? A cell phone was used to remotely set off the device. I want that cell phone. Can you get it for me?”

  “Don’t fuck with us, Jaruk,” said McPhail, both hands on the gun. “I’ll fucking blow out your brains even if I have to clean up the car later.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “You have the phone? Yes or no?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I want it. You are going to get it and give it to me. Understand?”

  Jaruk understood that he had no choice but to agree.

  “Khowjai,” he said—I understand.

  “I’m not finished. I need information. The numbers of Thanet’s bank, financial statements and credit card receipts. You’ve seen his bank statements and credit card slips lying around his office. Get me the bank and credit card names and account numbers. The ones in his name and his wives’ names. Here’s how you get paid. Email me the information. After you’ve delivered, I wire four million to your bank account, which you will send me in the email. We meet and you hand over the phone used in the bombing, and I give you five million cash.”

  Calvino reached over and opened a briefcase on the passenger side.

  “There’s a million baht upfront. Goodwill money. You have forty-eight hours.”

  Calvino glanced at his watch.

  “From now.”

  Calvino passed the briefcase to the backseat.

  “If I don’t hear from you, your boss will hear from me. A few weeks ago in Bangkok a driver and a couple of his friends killed a big boss. Someone who was rich and famous lost his life because he got careless in trusting his people. That has made a number of bosses nervous. Thanet is looking at his people and thinking, could someone like Jaruk tie a rope around my neck and strangle me? It doesn’t take much for a boss to think, better to get rid of a luk nong than to be sorry. That’s how bosses think. He’d listen to what I have to tell him. What do you think he would do?”

  Jaruk had no more fight left.

  “Ten million baht?”

  “You’re getting out of this much better than anyone should, Jaruk. You have some luck on your side. But don’t push it. Luck comes unstuck when pushed. And there’s usually a mess to clean up.”

  “Are you listening?” asked McPhail, slamming the briefcase hard into Jaruk’s chest.

  A huff of air released from his lungs and he muffled a groan.

  “Yes, yes. I hear you, okay?” said Jaruk.

  Calvino turned in his seat and stared hard at him.

  “Inside the case is a piece of paper with an email address. Send the information to that address.”

  McPhail opened the door and Jaruk climbed out, clutching the briefcase. Calvino wasn’t finished with him. He powered down the window, stuck his head out.

  “Remember something, Jaruk. Thanet can squeeze your balls until you pass out, and squeeze them again until you die. There’s only one way this can go. Don’t think your problem will disappear. You missed removing Sukanya’s phone from the office. That should tell you something. You didn’t know her as well as you thought. You aren’t as good as you think. I
’m giving you a chance. One that Ploy, Sukanya and Nattapong never had. You won’t get a second chance. I’ll be waiting.”

  He drove off, leaving Jaruk standing next to his motorcycle, still clutching the briefcase.

  FORTY-THREE

  RATANA GLANCED UP from her computer screen as Calvino closed the entrance door behind him. He walked into the reception area with a wide grin on his face. Behind his back he hid a bouquet of orchids he’d bought at Villa Market.

  “At Pratt’s house Manee mentioned how their next-door neighbor used to grow orchids. Then he sold his family compound and moved everyone to the beach.”

  He held out the flowers.

  “These are for you.”

  She took the flowers, pressed her nose against an orchid, a slow smile crossing her lips.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  She’d matured from the early days, when she had come to the office in tight-fitting skirts and gold chains. Even her self-consciousness over a scar left from a childhood dog attack receded to another story among many. She’d come to terms with how her life had turned out, accepted herself and her situation. It helped that her mother no longer lobbied for her to leave her job and marry a rich Chinese banker. Her family had resigned themselves to the choices she’d made.

  Ratana racked her memory for the last time, in all the years she’d worked for Calvino, that he’d brought her flowers. She decided that the previous instance had been seven years before. Calvino had arrived at her hospital room with flowers the day that her son, John John, had been born. From her hospital bed she had opened her eyes to find him standing next to her like a proud father. John John wasn’t his kid, but that hadn’t mattered to him. He shared her happiness.

  She judged her boss as the kind of man who gives a woman flowers to mark a special occasion. Flower giving without a holiday obligation behind it seemed to her to mark the gap between heterosexual and homosexual men. He showed no indication of becoming gay, so she suspected that the flowers meant that something special had happened. She looked at her calendar. It was the Tuesday after Mother’s Day.

  “Thanks for cleaning up my place. Another week and my condo would have been jungle vines and spiders and snakes. But you saved the day with your dusting, washing and cleaning. Doing your thing.”

  “Doing my thing?”

  She removed a vase from a shelf, untied the string around the orchids and put them in the vase, carefully arranging them until each flower had a precise place. She could see from the way he was standing that he had something on his mind.

  “I like the way you handled yourself at the plastic surgeon’s office. You pulled it off like a pro.”

  “You mean, pretending that we were a married couple?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, that.”

  There had been a silent agreement about the use of the M word. Marriage was a subject they avoided. Like a katoey showing up with his draft notice for a medical examination, the outcome was certain but nonetheless embarrassing for everyone involved. She was widowed with a child, and he was single with a recent history of hallucinations.

  “It wasn’t that difficult,” she said.

  “Of course not,” he said a little too quickly. “Like married people, we know a little too much about each other’s faults. It’s like we are family members. Tied together for life, but no one would call the tie a marriage.”

  “What would they call it?”

  Calvino shifted weight from one foot to the other, the tips of his fingers balanced on the edge of her desk. He pretended to smell the flowers. She wasn’t making this easy.

  “Family,” he said, looking up from the flowers. “That’s what they’d call it. Family. When two people come to terms with each other’s strengths and weaknesses and accept what they find. A bond of intimacy binds them. When people work together for years it happens.”

  “We rely on each other,” she said.

  His face brightened.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

  “I’m not certain I understand,” she said.

  “It’s like this. I can share my full range of moods, failures and craziness with you. People who are married have too much at stake, so they share a lot less information. They agree to share an illusion of each other’s best self; they pretend they’re on the perfect, eternal date, sealed with sex, that promises to never end. No married couple could ever know all the stuff that you know and I know about each other. We know too much. To stay married, you need a fair amount of ignorance. Selective forgetting is what makes close proximity possible. It’s what we forget about someone that lets us find some peace, some happiness.”

  “Thank you for the flowers, Khun Vinny,” she said, turning back to her computer screen.

  Calvino continued to stand in front of her desk. She glanced up.

  “There’s something else?”

  “Pratt told me what happened in Rangoon and how Manee found out.”

  “Is that why you brought me flowers?”

  His first reaction was to deny, but he knew that wouldn’t work.

  “I brought you the flowers because I thought you liked orchids, and I wanted to say thank you. And yeah, I wanted to know how Manee is dealing with this.”

  “You once told me that the real reason always comes last.”

  “There is one more reason, Ratana. I’m seeing someone. A new client. She’s a Canadian-Norwegian named Dr. Marley Solberg. I don’t know where it’s going or if it’s going anywhere. But there is a possibility. I didn’t want you to find out from anyone else. Or think I was hiding the fact I’m seeing someone.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Not a real doctor. A Ph.D.”

  “Anything else?”

  Calvino shook his head.

  “There’s someone waiting for you in your office.”

  Ratana smiled and nodded toward the closed door.

  “Who?”

  Her smile widened as she turned away and focused on the keyboard, her fingers flying as if affettuoso—passion and feeling—had inspired her. Calvino took her non-response as an invitation to discover for himself the person waiting in his office. McPhail, he guessed, would have pulled his office bottle out of the desk drawer and helped himself. When he opened the door, it wasn’t McPhail who looked up. Dr. Marley Solberg sat in a chair, her Mac Power Pro open on a table, with his papers and books pushed into neat piles behind it.

  “Did you hear my conversation with Ratana?”

  Marley looked up.

  “It is a small office, Vincent.”

  He stood in the door, Ratana behind him, Marley in front of him—in a straight line between the two women—and he felt balanced on a rope walking high above the street.

  “Every word?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why? Does speaking from the heart embarrass you?”

  “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “That’s pretty obvious.”

  “The thing about being a doctor…”

  She cut him off.

  “I have good news. I can save the ten million baht for Thanet’s cell phone information.”

  “You tracked down Sukanya’s phone directory?” asked Calvino, walking around to his desk and sitting down.

  “I’ll spare you the technical details. We ran an intercept on Jaruk’s phone. So we had several of Thanet’s numbers. He had secure phones and used them to phone an unsecure phone. He was lazy or stupid. I met Thanet’s receptionist when I went to his office. I gave the name to Ratana, who found a mutual friend. Thanet’s private secretary has worked for him for fifteen years. She knows everything. Once we had that name, we traced three more cell phones registered in her name. Ratana is translating the names and details of the people we traced. We have locations, times and duration of all of his incoming and outgoing calls. We know everyone he’s talked to in the last year. And there are patterns in his phone call data. Certain calls at certain times with the same people.”


  Calvino sat back in his chair, shaking his head.

  “How many minor wives?”

  “Three minor wives, a couple of giks. Thanet’s been a very careless and naughty boy,” said Marley. “He mixed up his phones. Once that happens, everything is easily revealed. You need special ops training to run secure phones. Play acting only works in the movies.”

  “When can I see what you’ve found?” said Calvino, staring across the room.

  The image of Ploy’s body lying in the grass flashed through his mind. The bodies of the doctor and the receptionist then merged into Mya’s face next to his and Yadanar’s on his birthday. It was different from the visitations. He wasn’t seeing ghosts going through walls. He was experiencing the memories of the people he had known whom Thanet had dispatched to the other side.

  “It won’t be long. I also have information about his friends, including generals, monks, civil servants, politicians and businessmen and telephone data about their wives and minor wives,” said Marley.

  Calvino felt a shudder that comes when a possibility is so disruptive that all stability is lost. Once gone, it can never be established. When a ship sinks, everything on board goes down with it.

  “We can take it any number of ways,” he said.

  Marley agreed, nodding and listening to the sound of Ratana, typing again at her keyboard in the next room.

  “It’s time to put Thanet’s minor wives in contact with each other. The sisterhood needs the ability to compare notes on monthly payments, cars, condos and extras. Let’s see what they do with it. If that doesn’t work, we go and find his associates’ minor wives. We tip over the whole hive of wives. Hornets would weep with envy at the sting of a colony hit with that stick.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” said Calvino.

  “Why not? It will work.”

  “So will chemical weapons of mass destruction, but we still ban them.”

  “Okay, Mr. Henry Miller. It was your suggestion to get the information.”

  “I know, I know. Using it is another thing. Colonel Pratt’s convinced that the law doesn’t apply to the gods, that only the gods can dispose of another god.”