The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  FIFTY

  ON SUNDAY MORNING the uniformed security guard relaxed, listening to music with earbuds as he made his rounds through the levels of the parking garage. There were never many cars there on a Sunday. His routine was to check registration plates to see whether someone had parked his car in a place authorized for another car. Nothing caused more conflict in a Bangkok building than a tenant discovering a strange car parked in his reserved parking slot. The building management pressured the security company to pressure the guards—and the buck stopped with a guy making four hundred dollars a month, who had to deal with people who couldn’t read, or refused to read, the signs that prohibited unauthorized parking.

  Every couple of weeks a security guard on weekend duty interrupted a couple using a car as a short-time hotel. Most of the time it wasn’t unauthorized parking, but nude bodies still caught a guard’s attention on a Saturday or Sunday. A gentle tap on the window would register a jolt inside the car, the flurry of hands and arms in motion, reaching for clothes, the covering of faces. It was one of the rare opportunities for a security guard to receive a large tip—the size that sometimes matched the guard’s share of all tips distributed at New Year’s.

  It was this guard’s occasional good fortune to find a goldmine rocking the chassis of a luxury car. Once he’d received a five hundred baht tip from a SUV owner. On this particular morning, as he walked past a familiar yellow car, he saw a man inside. The guard pulled out the earbuds. Only a circus acrobat could make love in a yellow Lamborghini Gallardo sports car without causing a hernia. The security guard cupped his hands against the window and peered at the man seated behind the wheel. He wasn’t moving, or if he was, it was at such a slow rate that a happy ending might take some time. The security guard scratched his chin, circled the car and tried to look through the window on the passenger’s side. From the angle of the man’s head on the steering wheel, the security guard could see a hole with dried blood around the ragged edges. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He thought for a moment about whether to open it. Finally he got up the courage, opened the door and stuck his head inside.

  He pulled himself out of the car. Walked a couple of feet away. He wanted some distance between him and the car with the body in it. His hands shaking, he raised his walkie-talkie and called his boss.

  “Phone the police. We have a dead man on the third floor. Yellow Lamborghini. Khun Thanet’s parking spot.”

  The security guard walked around to the front of the car and noted the license plate number. Within twenty minutes several police cars had arrived and parked near the Lamborghini. A police van disgorged a forensic team. Wearing white surgical gloves and one-piece jumpsuits, they took pictures of the car and the dead man at the wheel. They asked the security guard if he’d touched the body, and he said he hadn’t. They took his name, copied down his ID and snapped his photograph. After the police finished questioning and photographing the guard, he rushed downstairs and bought a lottery ticket with the car’s license number.

  The police waited for the arrival of another car, a gray BMW carrying senior police officers. An important man had been found dead. The officers who reached the scene first briefed the brass that a security guard had discovered the body while making his routine rounds. He’d found Thanet’s body slumped over the wheel of his luxury sports car, a bullet wound in his left temple. A 9mm handgun had been found on the floor on the passenger’s seat along with three amulets on a gold chain. The brass listened as the head of the forensic team told them that his team hadn’t found any sign of a struggle. No bruises on the face. An autopsy would confirm if the body had cuts, wounds or abrasions elsewhere. Nothing appeared to have been stolen from the car. Thanet’s wallet, cash, credit cards and the amulets hadn’t been stolen. No cell phone was found on the body or in the car, however. That was a mystery. Who would have killed him for a cell phone and left everything else? The police had already ruled out robbery. His office had quickly confirmed that Thanet had returned two days earlier from a business trip to Hong Kong.

  He’d been under a lot of pressure at work. His secretary had told the police that her boss had been depressed by marital problems. For this understatement the secretary deserved an award for discretion beyond the call of duty. On Friday they had launched an investigation into the murder of Thanet’s long-time driver. Jaruk’s murder had caused them a serious headache. Now, on Sunday, his boss had shot himself in the head. The police at the scene wanted Thanet to have been the one to pull the trigger. A verdict of suicide cleaned the gutters of suspected killers, and in a high-profile case, especially one involving an influential figure, the gutters were clogged with a multitude of personalities, some obscure, some connected, most with reasons to see him dead.

  Colonel Pratt arrived on the scene in the back of a police car. The car had been dispatched to his house, which was filled with shipping boxes. Officially, the Colonel had retired from the force. For the Colonel, leaving the police force brought to mind the old saying about bargirls—you could take the girl out of the bar, but it was much harder to take the bar out of the girl.

  His old boss had informally asked the ex-colonel for a favor. Come to the scene before Thanet’s body is removed. Colonel Pratt couldn’t formally participate in the investigation, but his commander had a reason. Thanet’s name had been raised during the police investigation into a car bombing. When Colonel Pratt showed up, the senior brass asked him for an unofficial assessment. As long as it remained unofficial, no rules would be breached.

  The 9mm from the car had been bagged and tagged. One of the forensic cops handed it to the Colonel’s old boss.

  “That’s the gun the guard found inside.”

  “Whose name is it registered in?”

  The senior cop frowned.

  “I sent in a request, and it came back registered to Jaruk, his driver, the guy who was murdered near the river.”

  “Doesn’t mean much. Influential people have guns registered in the names of their drivers, maids, minor wives and secretaries,” said Colonel Pratt. He’d deliberately slipped minor wives into the laundry list.

  “Someone murdered his driver. But they didn’t use a gun. They used a knife,” said the Colonel’s old boss. “Could the same person who killed Jaruk have stolen his gun and used it to kill Thanet? What do you think?”

  “I’d want to know if Thanet was right-handed. If so, would someone who is right-handed use their left hand to shoot themselves?”

  His old boss scratched his stubble of a beard on his cheek. He was going to miss Colonel Pratt. Smart, honest cops had their value, but rarely did they last to retirement.

  Colonel Pratt leaned forward with his head in the car, looking at the body.

  “If he was killed, he knew or at least trusted his killer enough to let his guard down. You say there was no sign of a fight. It looks like suicide. But you can make a murder look like a suicide.”

  “His secretary said he was having trouble with his wife.”

  Colonel Pratt thought about what he should say next.

  “People kill themselves for personal or business reasons. The same set of reasons they’d murder another person for. I’d say, wait until the autopsy. Tell the press it appears to be a suicide at this stage. But until there is a pathology report, the final decision has to wait.”

  “I don’t know. Men like Thanet rarely kill themselves.”

  Colonel Pratt nodded.

  “Rare things happen.”

  He watched as the forensic team took fingerprints from the interior of the car. His old boss looked on as police officers climbed inside.

  “You think he paid import taxes on this car?”

  Colonel Pratt grinned.

  “One more thing to check out. Not that it much matters now. I doubt if he killed himself over tax fraud.”

  “His business meeting in Hong Kong was connected with the Triad.”

  “But if the Triad was behind the hit, how do you explain his driver’s gun was found
at the crime scene?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Good luck.”

  Now that Colonel Pratt had retired, he could engage in some light irony, even though it sailed over the general’s head. In his freshly starched uniform the general leaned in close to the Colonel.

  “Let’s keep in touch.”

  They exchanged wais. The general walked back to his men, and Colonel Pratt stood apart from the others. For the first time he wasn’t one of them. Like other civilians, he was on the other side of the fence.

  As Colonel Pratt walked out to Rama IV Road, searching for a taxi to take him home, he wondered if the suicide theory would hold. Only in books and movies, he knew, is it easy to fake a suicide. In real life one small telling detail, like an acorn found growing in the Arctic, can blow a hole in a hundred theories. But only an experienced investigator looks for that detail, the one in plain sight that everyone sees and ignores, while the brass want to keep the freezing winds circulating, blowing freely across the landscape. Colonel Pratt’s gut told him that if Thanet had been whacked, it might have been for something unconnected with the money, the bombing or the trafficking racket. The list of suspects had a lot of names.

  Once Thanet had discovered that Jaruk had been sleeping with two of his minor wives, he wasted no time in dispatching someone to kill him in a way that would make a statement—a cleaner could be cleaned, gutted and defiled. He thought about what he’d recently told Calvino, about how in Thailand bringing a god to justice was no easy matter, and how only another god could do that. What he’d neglected to tell his friend was that gods like Thanet had multiple wives and complicated secret lives, and the main or minor wife of a minor god, once betrayed, sometimes learnt that she had the cool heart of an executioner.

  Calvino had been right—Thanet had likely ordered Yadanar killed because he had shut down the Burmese cold pill smuggling racket. That had caused a big financial loss, and Colonel Pratt had learnt that the Hong Kong people had a part of that business. Yadanar was murdered for business reasons—for revenge. In the underworld the rule of law applied capital punishment to a range of activities, and betrayal was a capital offense. Yadanar must have known in the back of his mind that he might be marked for a hit. He had made enemies. No one could touch him in Burma. But being young convinced him that he was immortal, made him forget to watch himself once he left home.

  Yadanar had been wrong about a couple of things, one of which was judging his Thai partner’s character. Udom, the gangster who had given him flowers after he performed on the saxophone at the Living Room, must have known the flowers weren’t for his performance but for his funeral. Udom carried out his part well. Colonel Pratt suspected Udom had been instructed to phone Jaruk when Yadanar and Mya left the stage. Udom didn’t have to give him Yadanar’s destination. That part had been prearranged. Yadanar had the address where he’d pick up fifty grand US in cash, money that Udom owed him from their last deal. The girl had been collateral damage. No one had anything against her. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Ratana had put the Colonel wise to the back-and-forth among Thanet’s wives. From their first frantic calls, it must have crossed Thanet’s mind that some people, and not just his wives, might want him dead. But he’d no doubt told himself, “I am a god, and gods can’t be easily killed.” He had three famous amulets that were advertised to make the wearer bulletproof. A superstitious man thinking he was a god was never going to turn out well.

  Colonel Pratt had a heavy feeling of the inevitability of Thanet’s fate as he sat in the back of a taxi. As a police officer, he’d been blind to what had been in front of him for years. Now he felt that his eyes had finally opened. He stared out the window at people on the street. He breathed in a deep lungful of Bangkok air and coughed. Bad air didn’t matter, though; he was about to escape to freedom. At the new house he’d breathe freely, draw in the breeze from the sea, walk along a sandy beach, water his mango trees and cut wild orchids for Manee.

  Still ringing in his ears were the last words of his old boss: “Keep in touch.”

  Colonel Pratt had said nothing. There had been nothing to say. He didn’t want to lie and tell him that he would. But he thought they both knew that he wouldn’t.

  He was leaving behind an old life, one that had worn out. Soon enough it would be nothing but a patchy collection of memories belonging to another time.

  FIFTY-ONE

  THE HORIZON DISSOLVED to black as a squall quickly swept ashore from the sea. A hard monsoon rain pounded the coconut and banana trees and left branches scattered on the road. By the time the rain passed, they had arrived. Calvino had started over twice counting the number of monks sitting on mats around the bodhi tree. The branches still dipped toward the ground, heavy with rain. Umbrellas obscured some of the monks’ faces; others were half-hidden by the enormous gnarled trunk of the ancient tree. The monks, with their shaved heads, saffron robes, similar stocky bodies and cloudy eyes, looked like one person at different stages of life. Their sameness made concentration more difficult. Calvino’s first count was twenty-four monks, but on his second count there were suddenly thirty-three. The inflation continued on the third count with thirty-seven monks, as novices appeared and disappeared like the phantoms of his old hallucinations.

  Marley had asked her house staff to arrange for nine monks to perform a blessing on her launch. Somewhere among the throng of monks were her nine, but there was no way to tell which ones they were.

  Colonel Pratt and Manee were in the back of Marley’s car.

  “Any idea what’s going on?” asked Calvino.

  The Colonel leaned forward.

  “It’s a tamboon ceremony,” he said. “I’ve never quite seen one like this before.”

  “Your new neighborhood is filled with surprises,” said Calvino.

  “It’s a blessing ceremony,” said Manee, opening her door and getting out.

  “It’s a good number, thirty-seven,” Marley said.

  “It’s a large number,” said Colonel Pratt.

  The Colonel considered ceremonies with nine monks lavish enough. This “blessing,” to use his wife’s English word, was beyond the means of ordinary country people. He stepped out of the car, and from what he could see, all the people present fell into the ordinary category.

  The sky toward the seaside had cleared. The rain had blown through, and appearing between the breaking clouds were brilliant patches of blue. Marley switched off the car engine and got out and joined the others. Calvino walked ahead to where the tables had been lined up end to end and were covered with pots of green curry, rice, chicken, pork, somtam, fried fish and fruit. Manee and the Colonel, hands raised in respectful wais toward the monks, stood in the back of fifty or sixty villagers who had gathered around the bodhi tree, seated on mats, hands folded into wais as the monks chanted. The villagers chanted along with the monks. An old woman with missing teeth and deep wrinkles shooed flies away from the food table with a bamboo fan.

  What caught Calvino’s eye wasn’t the food but a large stupa—the Thais called the structure a chedi—that had been built from sand not far from the bodhi tree. Colonel Pratt walked up beside Calvino and examined the chedi.

  “You ever see a chedi made of sand?” Calvino asked him.

  “I like the idea,” said the Colonel. “A sand chedi reminds us of the impermanence of all things, and that message is the essence of Buddhism.”

  “I thought a chedi was a place used to keep Buddha relics,” said Calvino.

  “Only in some temples. But mostly ashes are placed inside. Usually a monk’s ashes,” said Colonel Pratt.

  He watched his wife guide Marley over to the head monk. A middle-aged man wore silver-rimmed glasses that made him look owlish. He had a line of sweat on his upper lip, which quivered slightly as he chanted. Also he looked at Marley as if he recognized her. Apparently, the monk spoke some English.

  “Ashes of a monk and sand a chedi. I can
’t think of a better definition of impermanence,” said Calvino.

  “A chedi is sometimes built as a tree of life. But that is more a Tibetan tradition. The belief is that you make a powerful wish,” said Colonel Pratt. “A chedi is also a place of meditation.”

  “It might be a sign of good luck,” said Calvino.

  “I could use some of that,” said the Colonel.

  Calvino paced around the sandcastle chedi, stopped and squatted down, tracing a finger along the intricately sculpted furrow that ringed the chedi with terraces reaching to the top of the spiral structure. Set against the terraces the walls were hundreds of small, brightly colored stones and pieces of glass and ribbons. A large red umbrella had been placed over the chedi to protect it against the rain. Patches of sunlight caught the colored glass, creating a rainbow that arced toward the bodhi tree.

  The music started softly and gradually increased in volume. A popular Thai song from sixty years ago was sung in a style that belonged to another time.

  A young Thai girl sat behind a small table adjusting the sound system—speakers, old-fashioned turntable, vinyl records and a framed picture of a Thai singer who wore his hair in a style like someone who walked out of a 1950s Thai movie. The monks’ chanting drifted until it reached a finale. Two monks’ assistants removed the umbrella over the chedi. The DJ lowered the arm of the record player onto an old LP. The wailing of a male voice singing of love, longing and broken hearts filtered through the air. The ceremony entered a second phase. Several of the villagers served food to the monks and offered them robes, followed by a second offering of yellow plastic buckets filled with instant noodles, soap, toothpaste, candles and incense sticks. After the merit making, the villagers left the monks to eat and lined up at the food table, talking over the music.

  Manee asked a small group of village women about the ceremony. They were happy to talk about the rich mem-farang who had paid for all of the monks, the building of the sand chedi, the food and the DJ to play the music. The villagers waied Marley as she walked to the bodhi tree, tracing her finger over the dresses hanging from the vast gnarly trunk. One of the dresses was nearly swallowed up by the others. The size was small enough to fit a child’s doll. Manee and her group watched her bow her head and appear to say a prayer. When she opened her eyes, she saw Manee and three or four village women beside her.