The final wreath was for the Rohingya, those who had died at sea and those who had recently died by fire. Yoshi Nagata stepped forward, taking it from Ratana. Nagata then spoke to those on deck.
“Not long ago, our TV screens filled with images of the Pope throwing a wreath into the Mediterranean Sea to honor the illegals who’d drowned there trying to make it from Africa to Europe. No one placed a wreath in the Gulf of Siam for the Rohingya dead. The sea had swallowed the Rohingya as surely as it had the Africans the Pope wished to remember. In the memory of the Rohingya who died striving for safety and freedom, we wish that you find eternal harmony and peace, a place free of conflict and pain.”
Nagata then gave a short benediction for the Karen-Burmese who had died in the fire at the Mae Hong Son refugee camp. Nagata’s words merged with the chanting, the slapping of waves against the side of the boat and the sound of one of the monks, green-faced, vomiting with seasickness. No one knew who these people were—their names, ages, how they looked, whether they had fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands or sweethearts, or what their plans were for a life free of violence. Mourning in the abstract was an intellectual exercise and satisfied the mind, yet with the heart disengaged it was also empty and shallow.
Nagata didn’t say a word as he offered the wreath for a blessing. When the senior monk nodded, Nagata went to the railing and sent the third wreath on its way. As the pace of chanting accelerated, Marley leaned forward, watching the wreaths over the gunwale.
The others came to the railing then, holding hands, staring at the wreaths floating on the water. The red roses rocked back and forth gently in the small waves that slapped against the yacht. The chanting had stopped for a couple of minutes. The the void was filled with silence, one broken by the soft slapping of the sea against the yacht.
Colonel Pratt opened his leather case and removed his saxophone. He played Dexter Gordon, one of the down-tempo melodies that reminded him of being lost on a dark street at three in the morning in a strange city. It was the Colonel’s vision of death.
As Colonel Pratt played, he looked at the faces in front of him, people touched by his music but with their real emotions unable to ignite a flame of anger from the cold numbness they felt for the deaths of these faceless refugees they didn’t know. Why were sorrow and grief so far out of reach when it came to the death of a stranger? Calvino looked for the answer encoded in Dexter Gordon’s music.
The group watched the three wreaths become more distant until they disappeared. The other women followed Marley to her captain’s chair. And Calvino, Pratt and Nagata sat in the salon.
“Some were thrown overboard,” said Nagata, settling himself on a sofa. “Others were left without food or water by authorities who towed them out to sea and cut them adrift.”
“It’s hard to accept this diamond-hard cruelty, but these aren’t isolated events. Cruelty is deep inside man’s nature,” said Calvino.
Nagata smiled.
“Do you know what haunts us? It’s our potential for savage cruelty. The possibility of cruelty forces us to feel loneliness, fear and mistrust. No one is immune.”
Colonel Pratt packed up his saxophone.
“Hamlet says, ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’ Don’t you think that our conscience stops the worst behavior? It takes a kind of brutal courage to be cruel.”
“Shakespeare was right, of course ,” said Nagata. “Except not everyone has a conscience, Colonel. You must know that from your police work.”
“I am no longer a colonel.”
“Colonel or not, you are right about the nature of evil. Vincent told me of your interest in Shakespeare. Quite unusual for a Thai police colonel to quote the Bard.”
“Ex-colonel,” said Calvino. “As with ‘expat,’ you have to understand the ‘patriate’ part before the ‘ex’ makes any sense.”
Nagata’s eyes brightened.
“Yes, that explains the ‘ex,’” Nagata said. “Shakespeare also wrote, ‘Good without evil is like light without darkness which in turn is like righteousness without hope.’ It is like the sky to the sea, at times a seamless whole that taunts us to find the horizon. It isn’t possible to defeat evil any more than we can banish the sky. But we can understand its nature, prepare ourselves and give shelter to those who flee the darkness.”
“How many Rohingya have you and Marley smuggled out of Thailand?” asked Calvino.
Nagata smiled, slowly nodding his head.
“One hundred and forty-eight. If a man is on his knees, you have two choices. Finish him off or give him your hand to pull him up. That is the choice between darkness and light.”
“Why did Marley give the unborn child a name from the Norse gods?”
“That’s a question you’ll have to ask her.”
FIFTY-THREE
AFTER THE CEREMONY the yacht returned to Marley’s estate. Inside the mansion the group settled around a large dining table. After they’d finished dinner, they found it natural to break into smaller groups sharing their feelings of the day. It wasn’t a night for the mind; it was a night for matters of the heart.
Ratana started talking about trust—how men trust women and women trust men in different ways. It was a brilliant way to clear the trivial from their isolated conversations, giving the atmosphere of gossip traction and respectability. Earlier Judy and Sarah had told Ratana it looked like they’d have to close down their rescue mission. After what had happened, they wondered who they could possibly trust to work for the refugees. Sarah talked of giving up her job and returning to Wisconsin.
“It’s real culture, the one at street level, that defines a culture of trust,” said Sarah, whose storefront was around the corner from Walking Street.
“Or distrust. Along with culture, I’d take a look at geography, and figure out how much you need the cooperation of others to get anything done, and whether those people are taught to cooperate,” said Judy, thinking of lives of the Burmese in the camps along the border.
Colonel Pratt quoted Shakespeare: “‘He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love or a whore’s oath.’”
“King Lear,” said Nagata.
Colonel Pratt arched an eyebrow in surprise.
“Yes, Act III.”
Just as the conversation appeared to flicker like the end flame of a candle, it came back to life, as if a flare had been shot into the night sky.
“Who can you trust not to be cruel?” asked Manee, turning her head, taking a glancing look at her husband and then looking back at Calvino.
“That is never an easy question,” said Nagata. “It’s very messy. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t place trust in others. It means don’t be indiscriminate, and don’t think trusting is ever an easy decision. Shakespeare understood that madness is trusting without first carefully weighing the possibility of betrayal or compromise. The worst crime isn’t the violation of trust but the failure to recognize that human nature means there are some people you should never trust. And it’s up to you to find that out.”
“We live in a world where no one can keep their secrets safe,” said Marley. “That is tragedy beyond the hardships found in Shakespeare’s world.”
“Opacity is the stepchild of tyrants. But it has also been the godchild of those who wage battle against tyrants. It is both a sword and a shield,” said Nagata.
Colonel Pratt wondered if Nagata might have been Thai in his last life. He possessed a natural ability to see how the prism shifted the light waves depending on the angle at which it was held to catch the light.
“What happens with the underground Rohingya network?” asked Calvino. “Who can you trust now?”
“We will need time to rebuild,” said Nagata, looking over at Marley.
Marley nodded her agreement.
“On the boat this afternoon, with the monks chanting, I asked myself Vincent’s question. What happens now? Do we stop? Do we move on? Like Janus, do we focus on t
he past, or on the future, or do we work to rescue these despised people in the present?”
Ratana, who’d sat quietly listening to this part of the conversation, said, “I will help.”
Manee reached across the table and squeezed Marley’s hand, “And so will I.”
Marley saw Judy and Sarah had stayed quiet. She asked them how they felt.
Sarah said, “I feel burnt out.”
“I can’t decide,” said Judy. “I mean it’s hard knowing that no matter what you do, it doesn’t make much of a difference.”
“Think about it. You don’t have to decide tonight,” said Marley, who put her arm around Sarah’s waist. Judy stood up and the three women hugged. It was a language working on a different frequency, penetrating to places beyond the reach of words.
“I’ll stay, if you’ll have me,” said Sarah, sniffling and wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m so emotional.”
Twenty minutes later they’d switched to talking about the differences between the morality of Jane Austen novels and that of the TV series Breaking Bad. Judy and Sarah slowly drifted upstairs to one of their rooms. A door opened and closed, silencing their voices.
Colonel Pratt and Manee disappeared with the expertise of two professional magicians who’d worked together for a long time. They sat in their room overlooking the sea, the jetty and Marley’s yacht, tied there. Lights beamed from the radar unit, like lasers programmed to produce a smooth, clean line in a regular rhythm. In a half-trance Colonel Pratt felt his mind circle back to the bodhi tree. He remembered the singer from his boyhood. He’d never thought of him as being a saint. He doubted the singer was anywhere but a mist of molecules fanning through space, leaving such a small trace that no sentient being could ever discover it. But there he was. He’d become the spirit of a bodhi tree, with the spirits of young women sent to his side to marry and entertain. The more he thought about the singer, the more he thought about whether the dead heartthrob was the Thai version of Sisyphus.
Ratana returned to her room, sat on the edge of the bed and phoned her son, who’d stayed at her mother’s, and learned they’d been fighting over the completion of his homework.
Nagata gave Calvino and Marley a small bow as he left for the meditation room. His parting look at Calvino lingered almost a minute as if he were studying an object he hadn’t seen before.
“Is there something?” asked Calvino.
“No, nothing of any importance,” Nagata said.
“If it’s not so important, then it should be okay to ask what’s bothering you,” said Calvino.
“I was thinking how earlier today, when I saw you pet those two stray dogs, you seemed to see a chance for a connection. As one outsider to another, I saw myself through your eyes, and I saw the dogs for the first time.”
Nagata turned and left, leaving behind a sense that nothing much escaped his notice.
The day had been filled with events—tiring, confusing, surprising, boring and exciting in turn. There’d been too much to absorb in the span of a day: the monsoon rain, the bodhi tree marriage ceremony, the arrival at Marley’s mansion, boarding her yacht, the chanting monks, the wreaths thrown into the sea and a dinner conversation touching on trust, betrayal and the nature of compassion. Nagata had been the one to suggest a third ceremony—an unwinding of the day’s images and words and thoughts, letting them go into the mist of silence.
In their room alone with her husband, Manee gently massaged her forehead. She felt a throbbing behind her eyes. She was exhausted.
“My head is hammering,” she said.
Colonel Pratt gently pressed two fingers to her forehead.
“It will pass,” he said.
Smiling, she leaned toward him.
“It always does.”
FIFTY-FOUR
OUTSIDE THE WINDOW a flash of lightning warned of more rain. Marley and Calvino sat alone downstairs in the living room surrounded by empty glasses and wine bottles. With the room to themselves, it was their first chance for the private discussion they needed. More lightning outside caught Marley’s attention.
“Welcome to my world,” she said. “Thunder and lightning reminds me of home. Thor and his hammer.”
Calvino looked around the large sitting room, with its paintings, books, vases with flowers and a large statue of a bearded man.
“Is that a god?”
“That’s Henri Poincaré. If you’re a mathematician, he’s a god. He believed that intuition was the lifeblood of mathematics. He conceived chaos theory and relativity from his intuitive imagination. Add those to his more exotic theories, like hyperbolic geometry, number theory and the three-body problem and yes, you have the mind of a god.”
“I’ll stick with Henry Miller,” said Calvino. “He found the mind of God among the ordinary people on the street—the hustlers, whores, racketeers, gamblers, drug addicts, drinkers and whoremongers. All of them outliers who survived by gut instinct.”
“You speak of them as if you’re one of them,” she said.
“I know them, and they know me. We don’t judge each other or invent theories about the meaning of life. We get by day to day, celebrating that we didn’t get eaten by a bigger fish,” said Calvino, pouring wine into her glass and his own.
Marley lifted her glass in salute to the statue.
“To you, Henri.”
She turned and clicked Calvino’s glass.
“And to you, Vincent, another intuitive man who finds the missing person someone cares enough about to look for.”
He raised his own glass.
“To Henry Miller, who went missing in Paris for seven years,” he said, smiling.
He drank from the glass.
“When Miller found who he was, he went home,” said Calvino.
“And when will you go home?” she asked.
He grinned.
“I am home.”
Most of the people Calvino knew who lived inside the zone accepted his presence, even though he wasn’t the kind of man who had always been one of them. Most of them had no such choice. Their membership had come attached at their birth. Calvino had been born into the world of normal people who got up every morning and went to normal jobs and returned home at night to normal lives. When that life and world had vanished from his life, Calvino had made a living as a go-between, slipping into the zone, learning from the inside the meaning of their abnormal lives, appetites, loyalties and violence.
“Why do you think so many foreigners go missing in Thailand?” she asked.
Calvino rotated the wine in his glass, pondering how to answer a question that had no intuitive answer.
“Why do ordinary people drop off the grid? For a number of them, they’ve found a new world that’s alive and without delusions, and it makes their normal world seem as dull, gray and dead as last week’s dream.”
“Escape,” she said.
“One person’s escape is another’s liberation.”
He was an honorary member of both tribes—and that gave him safe passage to find and pull out those missing from the normal world.
She set her glass down.
“I want to go and walk in the rain. Do you feel like joining me?”
The storm had moved in from the sea, bringing a light rain that pelted against the windows. It seemed a strange request, but she was already pulling out two large umbrellas.
“Let’s go,” she said, as she stepped outside and opened her umbrella. “I can think better in the rain.”
“I think better with a whiskey and Coke,” he said, raising his umbrella.
He followed her down to the beach. The first quarter moon, passing through the sign of Virgo, was invisible behind the storm clouds. They walked barefoot in the rain. The lights on the pier exposed the hulls of wooden squid boats dragged onto the beach, anchors lying sideways, dug into the sand. Feeling the warm, wet sand under his feet and between his toes, he wondered how long it would be until the rain destroyed the sand chedi, leaving just a smear of we
t gray ash under the bodhi tree. Calvino inhaled the smell deep into his lungs. Illusions like the sand chedi are as fragile as cut flowers, he thought, and wedding dresses, monks, rain and whiskey can’t stop the inevitable withering and dying process at the heart of each day. The impossible idea of death seemed exposed like the squid boat hulls. Maybe, he thought, death is nature’s way of establishing the boundary line between truth and lies, existence and non-existence, and the limits of what can be thought and known.
He folded his umbrella and felt the rain on his upturned face. She watched him, his eyes closed, feeling the water. Calvino had been troubled for days. He’d tried over and over to work out the facts of the case, assembling the chain of deaths, examining each one as part of a larger chronology and always arriving at the same conclusion.
“Ploy belonged to Thanet,” he said, opening his eyes. “He owned her. She was an off-the-books sex slave. She was his private property. But he fell in love with her. She pumped him for money to pay for the plastic surgery needed to reinvent the new Ploy. Maybe she thought that by creating a new self, she could be free. But then she found out she was pregnant and panicked. She asked you to help her and her family. You did your best. It just didn’t work out the way you wanted. All the talk around the table tonight about trust and betrayal made me think that something more than the Rohingya was behind it. It was about Ploy and you, wasn’t it? Something went sideways between you two. Maybe you want to tell me what happened.”
Marley had been walking along the water’s edge, the tips of the waves splashing against her ankles. She stopped and slowly turned toward him.
“What makes you think something happened between us?”
“You and I went from employer and employee, to partner and partner, to lover and lover, but what’s missing from this transition is your connection with Ploy. I know it was about more than getting her and her family out of Thailand. I asked Nagata.”
“What did Professor Nagata say?” she asked.
“He said to ask Marley. So I’m asking.”
The Marriage Tree Page 35