The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “The wives of gods are god killers,” she said. “Welcome to a brave new world for gods, where they can no longer keep their secrets.”

  “How are you going to contact his wives?”

  “They’re all on Facebook and Twitter. They’ve uploaded photographs. At the beach, their food, their dogs, with their friends,” said Marley, “but never with Thanet.”

  Ratana walked into Calvino’s office with a printout.

  “I told Marley the legend of the sword tree,” said Ratana.

  The two women exchanged a smile. Ratana handed her the printout.

  “That’s the English translation of their latest Facebook updates,” Ratana explained to Calvino.

  “There’s one more thing,” said Calvino.

  Both women waited for him to continue.

  “I want the cell phone used to set off the bomb that killed Mya and Yadanar. I offered Jaruk five million baht for it.”

  Marley shook her head.

  “He’ll have thrown away the SIM card. Having the phone is not going to prove anything.”

  Calvino removed his jacket. He wore a shoulder holster and his .38 Police Special over an Oxford blue shirt.

  “You don’t understand how the mind of someone like Jaruk works.”

  “Enlighten me,” said Marley.

  “The SIM card is an insurance policy for down the road. I don’t need to tap into a vast database or run algorithms or come up with equations. People in the killing business don’t throw away their Get Out of Jail Free cards. There’s only one way to find out if I’m right. Get the phone and check the SIM. Only then will I know for sure if I’ve found the man who killed them.”

  “And what will you do then?” Marley asked.

  “What would you do?”

  He stared at her until she looked away.

  “The rich never dirty their hands. They hire shadow men like Jaruk to do what they can’t stomach doing themselves. I don’t subcontract revenge. Neither do I enjoy it. Making things right means doing what’s right.”

  “Sometimes you sound like George Orwell,” she said, smiling.

  Ratana nodded at Calvino. She understood what was inside his heart and soul. As he’d reminded her a few minutes earlier, she understood the places where he stored his hopes, dreams, disappointments and failures, and saw that he needed to close the case with Mya if he was ever to move on.

  FORTY-FOUR

  JARUK WAS NO one’s fool and neither was his boss. Ploy had first double-crossed Thanet. She had second thoughts. She knew what he was capable to doing. She changed her mind reasoning that double-crossing the Norwegian woman had less risk. Marley would be angry and disappointed. But Thanet would kill her family. Could outsiders like Marley and Yoshi could protect her and her family? It wasn’t, at the end, a hard choice for Ploy to make. She started to doubt whether outsiders like Marley and Yoshi could protect her. She’d told Thanet that she’d agree to an abortion. By this time Thanet had made up his mind to get rid of her and assigned Jaruk the job. She thought Jaruk was taking her for an abortion. The thought made him smile. Stupid girl, he’d thought. She’d made it so easy.

  He’d made a quick half a million baht setting up an abortion and a hit, and now he’d already pocketed another million from the farang. It wasn’t enough to achieve self-sufficiency at the level to which he’d become accustomed. Five million would make all the difference in the world, he thought. In the back of his mind he had no doubt that Calvino and his friend would expose to his boss that he’d been double dipping by making a side deal with Sukanya. The farang was also right that Thanet, like most of Thanet’s friends, had been joking nervously about whose driver would be next to murder one of them for three million baht. They laughed like it was a joke, but Jaruk smelled genuine fear when he overheard them talking. He had decided to take a precaution. Thanet had been extra-attentive about his driver’s private life, asking about Jaruk’s family and friends.

  Jaruk sat down in an Internet café in Khao San Road. Backpackers wearing headphones chatted on Skype to their parents or girlfriends or boyfriends. He pulled out the piece of paper with Calvino’s name written on it and put it next to the keyboard. He’d managed to get the name by running a trace on the license place of his car. He smiled when the name came back. It wasn’t Jack Smith, the name he’d used at Sukanya’s office. He thought how stupid she had been to have believed the farang was who he said he was.

  The tourists left him alone to conduct a search. He found that Vincent Calvino, a private investigator, an American from New York, was also an ex-lawyer. What interested him most was Calvino’s connection with the people killed in the Bangkok car bombing. Calvino had a personal connection to the man and woman, a couple of entertainers from Rangoon, who’d died in the bombing. After the blast Calvino had become personally involved in the case. Now Jaruk knew why Calvino wanted the cell phone.

  Calvino had gone too far in his investigation. Some cops discovered the farang had taken evidence from the bombing site. A Thai police colonel, Calvino’s friend, had been removed from working on the case. The case was personal for Calvino. And that element meant the farang wasn’t going to go away. Jaruk didn’t have a lot of good options. Once he had emailed Calvino with the information about Thanet’s cell phones and banking and credit cards, meeting the farang to hand over the phone would involve a high risk of violence.

  Jaruk spent hours thinking about where and how to execute the handover, traveling on the BTS and MRT to the farang places in Bangkok, public places where he’d feel safe. The more time he spent, the more Jaruk decided there was only one way to deal with the farang. He’d lure him to his own turf. He’d ambush him, kill him, snatch the money and take off. With five million baht he’d set up in Cambodia, where old army buddies had gone into hiding after a drug bust. They’d been bailed in Thailand and skipped over the border to a safe house where he could stay.

  “Hello,” Jaruk said into the phone.

  He paused.

  “I have it.”

  Calvino heard him breathing on the other end.

  “You have the phone?”

  “Have. You meet me second floor parking lot, MRT Ladprao.”

  “I avoid meeting in parking lots,” said Calvino.

  “No one will see us.”

  “I want people to see us.”

  “Why?”

  “It makes shooting me riskier for you,” said Calvino. “That’s a pretty good reason, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Where you want to meet?”

  “Siam Paragon. Kinokuniya. You come alone. Don’t send someone else to pick up the money. I want you to hand me the phone personally. Got that?”

  Jaruk cleared his throat, clenched his jaw. His line of work, like any other business in Thailand, had more uncovered manholes than an unlit street in Islamabad. It made him very careful where he walked.

  “What is Kinokuniya?”

  “It’s a bookstore. You know, a place where they sell books. Those bound paper objects you read in school. Ring a bell? It’s on the third floor. There’s a corner near a window. I’ll be sitting on the bench. I’ll be there with your money.”

  “Five million baht.”

  “Four million. Remember, I gave you one million already. And I transfer another five million when you give me Thanet’s cell phone numbers, bank and credit card details. That was our deal.”

  “Ladprao is better.”

  Calvino laughed.

  “Not a chance. I like bookstores. You can learn something. Parking lots make me nervous.”

  Calvino waited for Jaruk to say something.

  After a couple of seconds, Calvino added, “If you want to call it off, no problem. Your boss can handle you in his own way.”

  “Bring the money in thousand baht notes. In two hours we meet,” said Jaruk.

  Typical, thought Calvino. The Thais are either two years late or two hours early in business deals, depending on whether they’re paying or getting paid.

&nbs
p; “The original SIM card has to be in the phone. If it’s gone, no money.”

  “Okay, okay, whatever.”

  Jaruk ended the call. He hadn’t waited for Calvino to negotiate the time. It was his little victory. Setting the deadline. Confirmation and questions made him restless and angry.

  Calvino put his cell phone down on the coffee table. Marley sat on the sofa across from him.

  “That was Jaruk. He has the phone I want.”

  He checked his watch and got up. She reached across and took his hand.

  “Vincent, let it go.”

  He smiled.

  “My therapist said the same thing to me.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I need to finish this. Afterwards I can let it go.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  He shook his head, taking her hand in his, raising it to his lips and kissing it.

  “You need to understand who I am. What I need to do.”

  “You’re going to kill him,” she said.

  Her eyes froze with an arctic fear. Viking women must have had a sudden realization of what their men were about to do as they left for their waiting ships.

  “Killing someone in a busy bookstore would be a lousy idea.”

  “Promise me you won’t.”

  He stood holding her hand, noticing a coldness in her eyes and wondering what numbers she used to measure the value of a promise.

  “I don’t make that kind of promise. But I want you to understand this much—Jaruk is a small wheel inside the clockwork. What he did wasn’t out of hate or malice or revenge. It was a job, an assignment from his boss. The mission is to take Thanet down. I’m betting that when I give you the SIM card, you’ll find that he phoned his boss on that phone after detonating the bomb. That’s a little present I want to give Colonel Pratt. Not that it will make any difference. Thanet is a god, after all. But I want Pratt to know I’m not crazy.”

  “He knows you’re not,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow, smiled.

  “When you live in Bangkok long enough, you start to believe ghosts might be real after all. You become crazy in a different way.”

  Calvino spun the combination lock on his wall safe, opened it and removed stacks of thousand baht notes, stuffing each wrapped packet into a backpack. The notes weighed about four kilos and fit inside easily. Marley watched from the doorway as he counted the money and arranged it.

  “Corruption is a mixture of greed, opportunity and secrecy,” said Calvino. “If you watch your boss cheat and lie, always putting himself first, his conduct becomes your role model. In Jaruk’s mind, he’s not doing anything different from what his boss taught him. He knows that if he sticks around, he’s dead. He’s less afraid of me than Thanet, or he wouldn’t have phoned.”

  “When you get the phone, call me. I’ll put the number through the database right away to see if there’s a match to any of Thanet’s cell phones.”

  “I am looking for a series of outgoing calls to Thanet at the time the bomb exploded,” said Calvino.

  “Maybe Jaruk didn’t phone his boss or he used another phone,” said Marley.

  “Phone me back either way,” said Calvino. “I want to know if there’s a match at the time and place of the bombing.”

  From the safe Calvino pulled out a device the size of a thumb drive. He opened another pouch of the backpack and then a hidden pocket within it, where he slipped the device inside. He zipped up the backpack.

  “That’s a tracking device. We’ll want to know where Jaruk is going next.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  CALVINO ARRIVED AT the Siam Paragon branch of Kinokuniya fifteen minutes early. He walked in wearing the backpack over a blue polo shirt, dark gray trousers and black loafers. He looked like a middle-aged tourist shopping for a paperback as he wandered around the fiction section, picking up books, reading the blurbs and asking himself why the fictional world of criminals never quite exposed the real one. The boredom, the sparks that almost ignite an act violence but fizzle out, the daily life of gangsters, mostly filled with utter, useless stupidity, old recycled jokes, expensive clubs. Or their confusion, half-baked ideas, schemes and plans, and their laziness and sense of entitlement. Or how good cops in a corrupt system, cops like Colonel Pratt, struggled to believe they could make a difference despite being compromised, sidelined and stripped of their dignity. If someone wrote a book that real, no one would buy it, he thought.

  Images of Mya in her family bookstore in Rangoon floated through his mind. How many Burmese women had read Henry Miller? She’d mainlined Miller like he was a drug that opened a new landscape of consciousness. In the non-fiction section Calvino found a shelf with a collection of George Orwell’s writings. He took a few of the volumes and sat on a bench near the window, facing the view. While in Rangoon he’d grown to like Orwell’s take on the dangerous hairpin corners of life, judging that not much had changed since the author’s time. People crashed at the same points and for the same stupid reasons—greed, envy, arrogance and desire. Orwell had spent a short life writing out a system of road signs. But most people were ignorant of them or ignored them. Reality was discouraging.

  A few minutes later Jaruk appeared, dressed in jeans and a nylon workout shirt. Muscled and young, tough looking, he stood looking out the window near Calvino. He didn’t look like someone who belonged in a bookstore. Calvino sat reading Orwell’s Burmese Days, a story about an outsider joining a private club and the obstacles in the way. It occurred to Calvino that the world is filled with Jaruks, excluded from club membership.

  Calvino saw a reflection in the glass window. A young Thai man in black—black jacket, black T-shirt and black jeans—slipped in like a cat stalking a mouse.

  “You might like this book,” said Calvino.

  Jaruk turned from the window. His eyes said he didn’t think so.

  Calvino gestured for him to sit on the bench.

  As Jaruk sat down, Calvino said, “You told your boss that you threw away the cell phone.”

  Jaruk looked at him.

  “In a klong,” said Jaruk.

  “You lied to him. How do I know you’re not lying to me, that the phone you’re giving me is the one that you used?”

  “Check it here.”

  “I will,” said Calvino, as Jaruk slipped the phone onto the seat next to Calvino.

  Calvino picked up the phone and called Marley.

  “Check this number,” he said. “Phone me back with what you find.”

  They sat side by side, staring out the window. A couple of Japanese housewives walked past, stopping at the shelf of Japanese books.

  “Give me two, three more days to get the other information,” said Jaruk. “The boss will be out of town. I can get it when he’s gone.”

  Calvino opened another book, a collection of Orwell’s essays. He’d bookmarked “Shooting an Elephant.”

  “Two days, no more time after that. Do you understand?” asked Calvino.

  Marley’s SMS intercepts indicated Thanet was planning a trip to Hong Kong in two days.

  Jaruk nodded, and Calvino saw one of the Japanese housewives leave with books. He returned to Orwell’s account of a colonial official who’d been pressured into shooting an elephant. The creature had destroyed a market and killed a man, but its musk-fed rage had ended by the time the official caught up with it, and the elephant grazed calmly in an open field. The field was ringed with thousands of villagers waiting for the big boss, the man with the gun and the authority, to show the use of both.

  Calvino figured that men like Thanet were like that colonial official who must restore order after someone has committed an act of outrage against his authority. Not shooting the elephant was never an option. For that reason Jaruk had always understood that one day he might need a means of escape, some insurance against the eventuality of his boss needing to make an example of him. That day had arrived. Calvino’s own cell phone rang.

  “It’s th
e real deal,” said Marley.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Time, location match the bombing. He phoned one of Thanet’s cell phones moments after he set off the bomb.”

  Calvino moved the black backpack with his foot in front of Jaruk. He lowered his cell phone from his ear.

  “The cash is in the bag.”

  “All four million? How can I trust you?”

  “Because I need your cooperation to pass along Thanet’s cell phone and financial information.”

  Jaruk slipped one arm and then the other through the straps on the backpack and smiled.

  “Good thinking. You cheat me, and I don’t what give you want.”

  “The backpack matches with your outfit,” said Calvino.

  “Don’t try and follow me.”

  “One thing before you go,” said Calvino, pulling Jaruk back down on the bench. “You set the bomb and detonated it?”

  Jaruk pulled a face, shook his head.

  “It was long time ago. Why you ask?”

  “The Burmese girl that your girlfriend killed and that you dumped at the Tobacco Monopoly Land was pregnant.”

  Jaruk still wore the same “Why you ask?” expression. What in his childhood had stripped the guilt of killing from his conscience? Calvino couldn’t begin to formulate an answer. He doubted Jaruk could either.

  “Thanet was the father?” said Calvino.

  “No, that was the problem.”

  Calvino stared at him hard. This wasn’t the kind of man that looked back. He only looked forward. He had blown up two people and helped plan the murder of a pregnant girl, but the memories had flown away like a caged bird. Calvino could see from the look in Jaruk’s eyes that Mya’s and Ploy’s deaths were just two on a long list.

  “There is a video of you and a friend in white masks murdering the doctor and Sukanya. With the mask it’s difficult to identify you. But I think you wouldn’t want anyone to try.”

  “You have the phone. That’s our deal.”

  He rose back to his feet, and this time Calvino made no effort to stop him. What was the point? Jaruk didn’t kill out of passion; it was the way he made his living—killing and cleaning up the mess of death. A cleaner restored order. Jaruk worked those ropes, tied those knots, like a sailor who understood how to stay afloat on the open sea, and never had any reason to dive below the surface where the bodies fell.