The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Tomorrow,” said Calvino, raising his glass. Achara touched the rim of his glass to Calvino’s. The gong on the clock sounded, like the roll of thunder heralding a distant storm rolling in.

  Calvino and Pratt waited outside Montri’s mansion for a valet to bring Calvino’s car. Inside the mansion the Thais mingled, told stories, exchanged gossip, and bragged about their business deals and political connections. It had been time to leave. Chini’s artwork was on the wall, the ceremonial part of the evening had ended, and they could get down to business.

  “ ‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water,’ ” Pratt said, quoting Act 4, Henry V, as he got into the car.

  Calvino smiled, starting the engine. “Only it’s the other way around. Men’s evil is written in water and the amount of wealth in brass.”

  “Does that mean you regret selling the paintings?” asked Pratt.

  Calvino shook his head, checking his rearview mirror. “For the money Montri paid, I don’t care what he writes in brass or water. Besides, remember, I’ve got visitation rights.”

  “Do you know who Zhang is?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino shrugged as he drove away. “Wealthy Chinese.”

  “One of the most wealthy.”

  “He made the point that wealth and taste don’t necessarily go together with the tacky clock,” said Calvino. “It was a perfectly-timed gift. Listening to the tick-tock reminds them that their time is running down.”

  “Most people were impressed. They don’t think their time will ever end.”

  Calvino glanced over as he entered the highway. The car backfired, belching a cloud of black smoke. “Wasn’t that the whole idea? To gain face with Montri’s crowd, who are feeling a little nervous about what’s happening on the street.”

  “Is your car going to get us back to Bangkok?”

  “Old George’s car is for sale. The widow wants fifty thousand baht.”

  Pratt looked straight ahead, nodding as if he were thinking about the possibility of Calvino’s driving an even bigger wreck on wheels. “You’re thinking of buying it?”

  “It’s twenty-five years old. But it doesn’t have a lot of miles on it.” He glanced over at Pratt, whose face revealed nothing.

  Calvino’s description sounded a lot like Montri talking about one of his women.

  “You should keep this car,” said Pratt.

  “Thanks, Pratt.” They both knew the gratitude had nothing to do with cars. It had everything to do with the art collection. The evening had been the end of a story that had started a couple of years earlier, on the evening of the coup. Pratt had removed all the paintings from Weerawat’s house—the deceased owner of the Chini collection—near the Chao Phraya River. The colonel and his men could have kept them, sold them off. But Pratt never had any doubt as to what he should do: Deliver the paintings to Calvino.

  Plundered art should be restored to the rightful owner or his next of kin. Calvino was Chini’s next of kin. In the colonel’s mind, it was a straightforward and appropriate restoration. After the sale of the paintings to Montri, Colonel Pratt had refused to accept any compensation.

  Calvino used part of the money to buy his old office building—and registered it in Pratt’s and Ratana’s names—and then he moved into a large condo overlooking the lake near the Queen Sirikit Center. Gradually he wore better clothes, shoes—everything had been upgraded over the oneyear period except his car. It had been a long haul, Ratana guiding him through the process one pair of shoes at a time.

  NINE

  CALVINO AWOKE THINKING a five-hundred-pound bomb had exploded outside the building. He shook off sleep and listened for another explosion. Weeks before, a bomb had been thrown from an overpass onto a group of Klong Toey protesters. One man had been killed.

  Calvino sat up in bed, peeked through the blinds, wondering if the bombers had returned. But it wasn’t a bomb—the explosion came from the direction of a tangle of overhead electrical wires hooked in a crazy-quilt patchwork to a vertical wall of transformers. The coils were tied to metal crossbeams bolted to forty-foot-high concrete pillars, along with switches and fuses, insulation peeling off, flapping in the wind. Like an old star, the magnetic core became unstable and the transformer exploded in a shower of fireworks. No black hole. Just a smoldering meltdown of wires and insulation, sending a pungent column of smoke over the shophouses, as the owners waited for a repair crew to restore electricity to the neighborhood.

  He lay back in bed, careful not to disturb Siriporn, who had slept through the blast. Partitioned off from the rest of the world by her wall of dreams, she hadn’t moved. For all he knew, exploding transformers may have been a traditional part of her upbringing, and she no longer took notice when one blew up. Calvino liked that about Siriporn, who slept in the nude, her long, thin legs sticking out from the rumpled sheets as she lay on her stomach, her hair splayed out like a fan over her back. Looking at her in bed, Calvino had to remind himself that she was his stockbroker and financial adviser.

  Siriporn lived in a unit on the ninth floor of his building. The night before, she had stopped by his condo to discuss his portfolio of shares. Halfway through the briefing, she smiled in a way that made him forget profit-and-loss and balance sheets, and once she let her hair down, he no longer cared about the market crash. Naturally enough, or so it seemed at the time, Siriporn spent the night. It was one of those small changes that friends like McPhail had pointed out to prove that money changed the kind of yings a man attracted. Especially the pool of yings willing to take off their clothes and slip into bed, talking about commodity prices, Eastern European foreign policy, or the science of the mind.

  The shift away from the ranks of cartoon-watchers, comic book-readers, and ghost-fearers had come gradually. Calvino was amazed at how his stockbroker had slept through the explosion. Losing other people’s money didn’t seem to trouble her. He worried about his investments. The stock market had exploded, too, and she hadn’t heard that one either. Another look at those long, tapered, sensual legs, thin arms like a catwalk model’s, and he quietly rolled out of bed, slid back the wooden door, and walked into the living room to open the blinds and look down at the street. He stared at the wall of ruined transformers, which continued to spit sparks and flames. The fire brigade came to watch the flames and thick smoke. He looked back at Siriporn still sleeping, unmoved and silent.

  Calvino sat, hands folded, on the balcony of his condo overlooking the skyline, meditating. He tried to watch his breath entering and leaving his body. But he kept thinking about the party the previous night. The heinous clock, Achara’s bruised face, Colonel Pratt’s questions about the security—all of it spun around inside his head.

  No one inquired how Calvino became rich overnight. A collective shroud of silence cloaked such matters in Thailand. There were certain questions people didn’t ask—where you made your money, where you met your wife, what were you running away from. It was better not to ask.

  But it didn’t stop people from thinking that wealth came from avenues that were fed by underground streams. No one ever thought it was the result of a miracle or of good work. A deeper, more fundamental connection with karma kicked in, justifying the newfound wealth. Calvino’s turn of fortune for the better had raised no eyebrows, launched no investigations. With the receipt of Montri’s money came a new freedom for Calvino to turn down cases. He could take a case to help someone who needed assistance but didn’t have money. At least that was the theory of how he’d take on new clients. Instead he found himself working for a rich deadbeat with a drinking problem and a dysfunctional family. Brandon Sawyer hadn’t fit the bill as the prototype of Calvino’s new client. Tanny Craig represented the blowback from taking on Brandon’s work. Someone had been sent to check on the quality of his investigation and to bring pressure on Brandon. Poor people were just grateful for whatever help he could muster. Men like Brandon attracted nothing but problems, and their cases had little to do with securing
justice but amassing and maintaining power.

  Calvino went back inside. He walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge door, and filled a glass with orange juice.

  He picked up his cell phone and checked the new messages. He drank his juice as he scrolled through them. Two were from Brandon Sawyer: turn on radio thailand news. nice surprise. He ended the message like a bar ying, with a happy-face icon. Calvino put the orange-juice carton back in the fridge, carried his glass and cell phone into the large sitting area. He settled in, finding the remote-control device, aiming it at the radio, and flicking through the channels until he reached Radio Thailand. An English-accented newscaster read the news. The police had arrested a twenty-three-year-old man who confessed that he killed Kowit, the reporter for the Daily Asia Times Thai-language newspaper.

  The man was identified as Tongchai Silavipah, an ex–police officer. Tongchai said that he shot Kowit because a piece on police corruption written by Kowit caused him to lose his job. He told police that he acted alone.

  Calvino switched off the radio. He walked back to the sliding glass door and walked out onto the walled balcony overlooking the lake and the city. A few minutes later, Siriporn joined him. She leaned against him, hugging him.

  “I was surprised. I woke up. And you were gone.”

  Calvino nodded. “You slept through an explosion.”

  “Another bomb?”

  He smiled. “A transformer blew up.” The explanation seemed to reassure her. He pointed to the power lines below, where the transformer still smoldered and kicked out sparks that would have impressed the guests at a Chinese wedding celebration. But there was no wedding, no guests.

  There was a small crowd of people from the shophouses on the soi gathered below the transformer. Explosions attracted an audience. But there was no encore, and soon people moved on. Except for Siriporn, who had wrapped an arm around Calvino’s waist, signaling that she had other ideas. She wore his favorite Hawaiian shirt, the one with bottlenose dolphins, taken from his closet. Slipping it on, fastening a couple of the bottom buttons, and wearing no bra or panties, Siriporn no longer remotely looked like a stockbroker.

  Calvino’s problem was how to get her out the door without her taking offense, selling his well-diversified holdings, and investing in Russian junk bonds. It was all about money—the only difference was the nature and scale of involvement. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and nothing else, it was difficult to distinguish a working ying broker from one who carried out the brokerage business at night.

  “My mother said I could sleep through World War Three and not hear a thing.”

  He glanced at his watch, his eyes narrowing. “Time to go to work.”

  She squeezed his waist. “Why would you need to do that?”

  She has strength in her fingers, he thought. And she was letting them do her talking.

  He watched the traffic moving below.

  “I want the information on Achara’s listed companies. We discussed it last night. I’d like it in two hours.”

  She removed her arm from around his waist, taking a deep breath. She had remembered that discussion and hoped that it was an icebreaker to another level. If it had broken any ice, the sea had frozen up again, the illusion of a Northwest Passage into Calvino’s life vanished against a dreamy blue horizon. “I’ll e-mail it to you in the next hour.”

  He had led her to think that his interest in her was strictly on the investment side. But keeping her in that compartment was doomed once he got a good look at her legs. Mission creep had come to dominate his life. He slept with his broker. His only client had roped him into advising on business deals. Next he would be writing letters to the editor of the Bangkok Post to start a campaign to inspect transformers before they exploded, disturbing the sleep of good people. All he could salvage was that Siriporn hadn’t asked him why he wanted the information on Achara’s companies. He could love a woman like that. She lingered as if waiting for him to say something else. When he didn’t, she turned and slipped back through the sliding door. She told herself that Calvino had a lot on his mind.

  In the doorway she looked back and caught him grinning at her. “Thanks.”

  The warm smile said it was all he needed from her.

  “Sorry, I’m a little distracted.”

  “It’s no problem. If I can do anything else, phone me.”

  He caught himself before inviting her to stay. “Yeah, see you later,” he said.

  What was reeling through his head wasn’t about her.

  Her sister, nicknamed Film, had once told her, “A man with too much money can have any woman. No good for the woman. They are different from other men.” Film hadn’t meant it in a good way, and when Siriporn had asked her how they were different, Film had said, “Rich men are indifferent to the needs of women. That’s what all that money buys them—the freedom to ignore what you want. They don’t need to care about you.”

  Film pretended to be an expert on men, but as far as Siriporn could tell, the expertise hadn’t brought her the right man or any amount of happiness living on her own. After Siriporn left, he thought she was exactly the kind of woman he’d been looking for and wondered why he’d pushed her away. Tanny had lingered inside his mind, the kind of woman he should push away but who was now sitting in his office. He walked along the balcony, hands on the rails, following a spidery network of narrow sois—a scribble of micro roads that, from a distance, might have been designed by a drunk. Craig—what was she really doing in Bangkok? And was there some way he could get her out of his office? He didn’t have the answers.

  He watched the cars below his building navigate the looping, winding, spidery network of roads that brushed against the edge of shophouses, condominiums, a couple of small factories, straightening out past the bottled-water storage facility, the auto-body repair shop, and the YMCA. Trucks, vans, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, vendors pushing metal food carts, and pedestrians shared the narrow sliver of dull concrete. Understanding people came from watching how they used their common space.

  In Thailand that space was used according to the Zen of Thai Traffic, which meant there was a consensus on applying the non-rules of the road. Watching the traffic bump and grind to a stop, then barrel ahead, cars overtaking on blind corners, Calvino was certain that Tanny Craig had no idea how the Thai rules of the road and the rules of business came out of the same playbook. He was proud of himself, thinking this might be a way of reaching out to her. A few lessons in the Zen of Thai Traffic might help give her insight into the movement, gesture, and body language—the ballet that Thais performed daily, both on the road and in the boardroom.

  Thai drivers were part ballerina, part bullfighter, and part hockey-night thug, hidden from view by iron, steel, leather, and tinted windows, in love with acceleration, alienated from the idea of braking, crazy about flashing their running lights and smoking rubber on titanium wheels. On the soi below, an Audi performed a perfectly executed arabesque around a hairpin turn, avoiding a head-on collision with a BMW coming from the opposite direction. It wasn’t long before new players entered the hairpin. Near misses, one after another. None of the drivers kept their cars within the yellow line. Each assumed that the road belonged exclusively to him. In a way, the yellow road-dividing line didn’t matter.

  Everyone claimed both sides of the road when it suited him. Nothing in any driver’s behavior suggested that crossing the line had any meaningful consequence. After all, it was only a hairpin turn—why shouldn’t the entire road be available for each one alone?

  Am I any different? Calvino asked himself. He’d started the evening painting a yellow line down the road in his relationship with Siriporn. At the first chance, what had he done? Crossed the line. Not just crossed but erased it, only to find her standing there in his Hawaiian shirt looking like a girlfriend, and his immediate instinct was to pick up a paintbrush and redraw the yellow line. Any other woman would have been enraged. Not Siriporn, who responded with a smile and a hug. She possess
ed one of those lineerasing smiles that made a man think there might not be enough yellow paint in the world to keep that road divided.

  TEN

  CALVINO WALKED ALONG the street. Under a gray bank of clouds, the motorcycle boys looked up as a clap of thunder tore a jagged white streak against the far horizon. A couple of minutes later, the rain fell, a heavy curtain, splashing off the gutters, scattering the motorcycles to shelter under bypasses and trees. The rain killed the motorcycletaxi business stone dead. A brave passenger fighting with an umbrella as the taxi sped down wet streets was closer to Russian roulette than to public transportation. The world had already seen enough of the mayhem of risk-taking fools—that was for sure. But the rain and accidents, in Bangkok, had a natural way of whittling down their numbers.

  Ever since Calvino came into his windfall, Colonel Pratt no longer felt restrained from suggesting an upscale meeting place. There were a number of them around the corner from Pratt’s office at police headquarters. A farang showing up on a regular basis at his office set tongues wagging. Two doors down from Pratt was a senior officer whose ultranationalistic views had come into fashion, and he was said to have powerful allies. This was General Suchart—whose political aspirations were well known. Suchart looked with disfavor on the colonel’s friendship with Calvino.

  Some said that Suchart was an ultra-nationalist; others said the general was merely another example of a successful product whose mind had been molded by childhood textbooks. The prevailing sentiment about foreigners shifted along with the heavy weather of politics in the streets. Mobs had taken to the streets in Bangkok, and followed selfappointed leaders to occupy Government House. The mob were promised an escape to a glorious past, a distant point in time when foreigners were few, and those on the ground were remote and mostly hidden and kept their opinions to themselves. Suchart had appeared at some of the rallies, his supercharged speeches bringing the audience to their feet, and their clapping hands beating in unison.