The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  They continued walking along the beach. She walked a couple of steps ahead. Then she waited until he caught up.

  “Yoshi knows everything,” she said.

  Calvino leaned down to pick up a small stone and pitched it at the moonlight pooling on the sea.

  “I figured he did,” he said. “But I don’t know what secrets you’ve shared. Don’t you think it’s time you told me?”

  Marley stopped, leaned down to pick up a stone and threw it in the sea. The sound of the splash seemed fragile, distant and inconsequential.

  “It no longer matters,” she said.

  “What goes missing does matter. Whether it’s a person or the truth, finding them matters.”

  She brushed back her hair, wet with rain. She stared out at the black sea, raising her umbrella again.

  “Ploy and I had an arrangement.”

  “Yeah, what kind of deal?”

  “She agreed to act as a surrogate mother. I am thirty-eight years old. I couldn’t get pregnant. I saw the best doctors in New York, London and Singapore. None of them could help. One suggested a surrogate. One of my eggs and a donor’s sperm was the only way I could become a mother.”

  “And who was the donor, the father?”

  “I asked Professor Nagata if he’d consent. He agreed but not without a week to think it over. It was a big decision for him to go to a fertility clinic.”

  It was Calvino’s turn to find a stone in the wet sand and throw it into the sea.

  “How did Thanet find out she was pregnant?” he asked.

  He was guessing that was what had happened.

  “It came out in a routine medical check. Thanet had all of his women checked every month by a doctor. When he found out, he was happy. He thought it was his. Ploy could have played along, but she told him it was someone else’s child. He told her to get an abortion. She refused. He insisted. They fought.”

  “Ploy didn’t tell you about the monthly medical checkups, when she agreed to carry the baby?” asked Calvino, kneeling on the beach, touching the sand with one hand, letting it fall between his fingers.

  Marley knelt beside him, watching him pour sand onto a small mound.

  “She never told me.”

  “Strange she wouldn’t. She must have known he would find out.”

  Marley sighed and stood up, brushed her hands on her jeans.

  “I guess she avoided thinking about it. She knew I planned to fly her to Vancouver. Another few days for the visa and she would have been on a plane. All she had to do was wait.”

  “You were her hero, and she thought you’d come to her rescue,” said Calvino.

  “I was so close to getting her out,” she said. “I told her to hang on a couple more days and I’d put her in a safe house. But Jaruk tricked her into going in for plastic surgery. He told her that the doctor, who’d already done work on her, had promised a big discount. It was a crude way to achieve what his boss had ordered, which was to handle the problem—get rid of her. Jaruk had a way with Thanet’s women. He lured her out from the place I told her to stay, a place where she would have been safe. It was so stupid of her.”

  In the night rain she could no longer conceal her feelings of alternating helplessness and bitterness, and regret and rage.

  “And also it was so stupid of me to trust that she’d do what I asked,” she said.

  “Something’s been bothering me. How could you know Ploy’s baby was a girl?”

  Marley watched the sea as if searching for an answer. “I had a very strong feeling it was. A baby girl came to me twice in a dream. My baby was reaching out to me.”

  The rain had stopped as they walked back and then along the pier, passing the pools of light, until they reached the yacht.

  “Thanet couldn’t have killed Jaruk,” said Calvino. “He didn’t have enough time. Someone was waiting for Jaruk when he walked into his room. Someone who knew that he’d left Siam Paragon. You were tracking his location. You had seen the SMS traffic and knew his secret hideaway. When he walked in the door, you were waiting with the sword. Was he surprised?”

  “Is his kind of evil ever capable of surprise?” she asked.

  “You didn’t answer my question. Was it you who killed him?”

  She sat silently, one leg folded under her like a schoolgirl. He could sense that she was thinking over whether to tell him and hadn’t decided.

  “What do you think? You’re the private investigator.”

  Calvino sighed and looked at the moonlight on the water.

  When he turned back and she was still silent, he said, “You found a 9mm in his room and slipped it into your handbag. It would take a mathematician to calculate the odds of a dead man’s gun being used in a later homicide. It’s a perfect murder weapon, one traceable to a dead man. I think you’d need to be very smart. What did that French genius Henri Poincaré call it—intuitive, the bubbling up of a creative idea from the unconscious mind?”

  Her answer was silence.

  “And Thanet?” Calvino asked.

  On this subject she didn’t need to say anything. Her answer was in the tilt of her head, the total control and calmness that came with the truth tumbling through the body—the eyes, the mouth, the hands, the posture.

  “Thanet ordered the bombing that killed your friend from Rangoon.”

  “I know that. So does Pratt, but we could never prove it.”

  “If you’d had the evidence to prove his guilt to the police, would it have mattered? He would never have been charged. You had to live with that fact. Not the lack of evidence, but that he was untouchable. You told me that the very wealthy never bother going to the police. They handle matters in their own way. They see no need to wait for the cops or anyone else because they know a shortcut in the equation. I would have done it, again and again. No matter how many times he was reborn, I would have shot him. I planned to. We had an appointment. But it turned out that someone else got to him first. Thanet was already dead in his car. The car door was unlocked. I climbed into the passenger’s side. I put the gun in his cold hand where it had fallen on the passenger’s seat. And I left,” she said, her voice breaking as she spoke.

  Her arms trembled at her side. Her heart was clearly broken as she stood on the deck of her yacht, the soft moonlight falling on her shoulders, face and hair. She looked an unlikely avenger as she stepped closer to Calvino, wrapping her arms around his waist. Her body stiffened against him and she dropped her arms.

  “Now what?” she asked, looking up to read the expression on his face.

  “I don’t know, Marley. I don’t know ‘what’ and I don’t know ‘now.’ But it looks like someone was trying to set you up for his murder.”

  “That’s what Yoshi thought too. He said that in Buddhism those whose lives are filled with evil become hungry ghosts when they die. They will be reborn in days, weeks or months. I pray that Jaruk and Thanet return as Rohingya escaping for their lives, sold into slavery, begging for rescue.”

  “And if they come to you for help, then what?” said Calvino.

  “I would help them,” she said.

  Calvino wanted to believe that what she said was true. She continued to tremble. Folding her arms over her chest, she walked across the deck to the salon, and Calvino found her curled up on a sofa.

  “When you live in the normal world,” he said, “you believe sociopath’s death ends the misery and suffering he’s created. But it only brings a change of faces. Nothing else changes in the world he leaves behind. The next in line steps forward to take over the leadership. Otherwise, everything stays pretty much the same.”

  “That night at your condo you summed me up as a woman of abstract ideas, while you said you’re a man of the street, of instinct, intuition, blood, smoke and ash. You said we come from completely different worlds, one bounded by feelings, sensation, pleasure and action, and the other a closed world of ideas, theories, equations and pure thought. You told me how Mya experienced the reality of life through her
music. How she seized life with both hands. She imagined herself as a woman for whom all things were possible and limits were only failures of imagination. In Rangoon you watched her kill a Thai woman named Kati. She was avenging the death of the young man you planned to return to his father in Bangkok. But she wasn’t acting out of instinct; she’d planned the execution in great detail as a performance for you. It wasn’t for her. She killed Kati as an offering for you, Vincent. She knew it was the only thing she could give you. The rest of Mya was going in a different direction, on her way to another place and time. You wouldn’t be there, but you would remember that performance forever. Was it your karma that she fulfilled? Or was it something else?”

  She grabbed his hand.

  “I didn’t kill him, Vincent. And I regret that I didn’t have the chance.”

  The slight motion of the sea turned the boat into a gently rocking cradle. She reached over and switched on a light, and the moon outside the port window disappeared. Flowers left over from the wreaths lay on the table—roses, orchids and carnations, scattered like children’s toys.

  She rested her head against Calvino’s shoulder and told him that she trusted him with the truth. Marley had been both avenging an unborn child’s death and competing with Mya. The problem with her confession was it implicated him as well. He felt a twinge of a dark, dense feeling of sadness. He tried to remember the words he’d used to describe what had happened in Rangoon. Whatever they had been, Marley had remembered. He regretted speaking of the events of that night.

  Calvino snapped his fingers. As a gesture, it lacked the magical power to turn time back and trade those disclosures for the hallucinations of before. When did murder become a sign of commitment, loyalty and affection? Or was there always a part of humanity that adopted that side?

  “How did you find Jaruk’s hideaway?” he said, feeling the wine and the movement of the sea.

  In Calvino’s world finding people and hideouts required skill, experience and luck. Any inside information she might have to improve his future luck had potential value.

  Marley understood his motivation. It seemed natural. She smiled as if she’d stumbled across an underground tattoo parlor in Riyadh. If access to knowledge and information are reflections of power, he thought, then she must be one of the most powerful people in the world.

  “I collected information about Jaruk from earlier intercepts. It wasn’t that difficult to track his movements and location,” she said. “As with most people, his actions were predictable—in the routes he took, the people he met, the time of day and location. He set the whole thing up with the receptionist. He took Sukanya to his secret room in an old building near the river. But she wasn’t that special; it was also where he took Thanet’s mia nois in the afternoons.”

  Jaruk’s secret sex life expanded far beyond anything D.H. Lawrence imagined in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s English gardener wasn’t a cleaner or a hit man, and Lady Chatterley’s life was uncluttered by the actions of her husband’s mia nois. Multiple minor wives were Jaruk’s specialty. Inside his small room Jaruk had spun them stories of grand dreams and grander adventures, mapped out plans, told lies, made pledges, talked about their lives together, and how Thanet had loved only Ploy.

  “It wasn’t you who killed Jaruk,” he said.

  When she didn’t reply, Calvino pressed her.

  “Who was it? You either paid someone or sent someone you trusted. Given the timing, I’m guessing it was someone you trusted.”

  She whispered the name.

  “Yoshi. He agreed that I could tell you.”

  Calvino’s deadpan expression signaled the he wasn’t entirely surprised. Dressed like a monk or a laborer, Nagata would have gone unnoticed in Jaruk’s neighborhood. Yoshi, the man of peace.

  “You have no right to condemn him.”

  “His earlier talk about cruelty is starting to make sense.”

  Marley had monitored in real time Jaruk’s location after he left the bookstore in Siam Paragon and saw that he’d headed back to Soi 35 Ladprao. She’d timed the release of information to Thanet’s wives to coincide with Jaruk’s departure from the bookstore. Then, after the call from Thanet, he’d swung back from Ladprao and headed toward the river. She knew it had worked. Nagata had arrived at the back of his building earlier that morning by boat. He’d had lots of time to gain entrance to Jaruk’s room and wait for him to come through the door. They had planned it together.

  “And that takes us back to Thanet,” said Calvino. “He decided that Jaruk should get rid of his problem. Jaruk was just a tool. You personally wanted Thanet dead. Only someone else saved you from shooting him. You rarely find someone like Thanet alone.”

  “Unless you’re a woman and he wants to have sex with you. We arranged to meet in his office. When I went to his office, it was closed. I tried to phone him. I knew where he parked his car. I went down to the parking level and found him. Just as you found Ploy, already dead.”

  All of the alarm bells had rung at the same time for Marley.

  “I had no idea if the killer was still nearby. I knew from reading SMS messages that one of his minor wives had texted another that Thanet hadn’t paid the tax on the Lamborghini. The police have been cracking down on the rich who import expensive cars without paying the tax. His driver had been killed. He had revolt in his harem. His friends refused to talk to him. I found out that the people in Hong Kong had threatened him. I wasn’t the only one who was reading his emails and text messages. Someone knew I was meeting him. They had the place and the time.”

  “Someone tried to set you up,” said Calvino.

  “I should have been more careful. He had a lot of enemies suddenly wanting him eliminated. One of them got to him before the others. I believe there was a very long queue.”

  The police at the scene had agreed that it was better to write down the word “suicide” as the word “ghost” was not something the police were permitted to use officially.

  Having finished her story, Marley waited for Calvino to react. Had she not known Thanet’s security had been breached and others had hacked into his communications? She was supposedly a genius. How could she not know?

  “It was a professional hit?” asked Calvino. “You designed a reality that he could imagine. Only someone got there before you.”

  Marley wore her melancholy like an old heavily disguised bruise. A flicker of a smile illuminated this hidden sadness and like a flare it quickly died.

  “Basically, yes.”

  She came from a world of numbers and equations. Mya had come from a world of music and lyrics. The two had reached a common solution using different languages. Calvino leaned in close to examine Marley’s features, just as he had Mya’s that night in the bookstore in Rangoon. He understood that some people are natural programmers cradled inside the Big Sleep, and that the sleepers drift along under the illusion that they are fully awake and that the optimal path was theirs alone to take. Dangerous dreams were something Calvino knew something about. It was a major reason why people he’d been hired to find had gone missing in the first place. As he sat in the yacht in the presence of a beautiful woman who had helped to kill one man and conspired to kill a second, he wished, for her sake, that it had turned out differently.

  What he believed, though, was that it is never an option to return to the original state of not knowing. Oblivion is the only place where that could occur. He wasn’t ready for that place yet. His failure to accept what had happened had brought him the hallucinations to witness the performance of his mind at war with itself. Now that they’d gone, he wouldn’t miss those performances. Nor did he regret having lost a part of himself when Mya died.

  “I want to sleep on the boat tonight,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Calvino.

  He picked up his wet clothes from the floor and moved toward the master bedroom.

  “Alone, in the moonlight,” she said, eyes sparkling. “Second floor, third bedroom on the right is you
rs.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  She smiled.

  “Good night, Vincent.”

  Calvino returned to the mansion and on one of Marley’s computers drafted a message to Dr. Apinya. In it he explained why he wouldn’t be going back.

  The next morning when he came down for breakfast, he found the others sitting and eating in the kitchen. No one had seen Marley. Sarah told him she’d seen Nagata go outside. Calvino found him at the end of the pier, seated in the lotus position, his thinning white hair brushed back. In his rough cotton blue shirt, he might have passed as one of the local rice farmers whose faces, like sculptures made from wood, had been sandpapered down with the years, leaving deep furrows, hollowed-out cheeks and a faint memory of the rough bark of youth. Calvino saw reflected in Nagata’s face a mirror image of himself down the road—a semi-old man sitting on a pier, silently gazing at the horizon with a sense of loss and longing. One of the soi dogs from the day before stretched out beside him, its muzzle resting on its paws. Nagata’s hand stroked the dog’s neck. Calvino walked out onto the empty pier.

  Marley and the yacht were gone.

  “Did she say where she was going?” asked Calvino, kneeling next to Nagata.

  Nagata shook his head.

  “She wrote me a note,” said Nagata.

  “What did it say?”

  “I’ve gone missing.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  Again Yoshi shook his head.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Any idea why she’d write something like that?”

  Nagata looked out at the sea again.

  “Don’t you know?”

  A wise man like Yoshi Nagata had the ability to write a book that started with those three words. Calvino waited for his first chapter, the one in which Nagata told his version of what had happened. Instead Nagata said nothing.

  “Know what?” Calvino asked.

  Nagata scratched his chin as he reached into a pocket with his free hand and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “She wrote it out for you to read. She said you’d understand.”

  The note had been hand written. Calvino did understand—hadn’t Marley once quoted Marshall McLuhan that the medium was the message?