The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  At least Siriporn lacked Tanny’s identity problem, Calvino thought. But it was far more complicated than that. Two women had tumbled into his life: Tanny, who didn’t know who her birth parents were, and Siriporn, who didn’t know that her wearing his Hawaiian shirt and sleeping through an early-morning explosion had him fearful about what lay waiting around the hairpin curve. He thought about both of them on the way back to his office.

  “Get in,” he’d said to Tanny Craig, who hovered at the door of his car, as he was about to leave Old George’s funeral. Calvino tilted his chin down, looking at the floor and wondering what he’d done. He had grabbed Siriporn’s hand, given it a squeeze, and walked her into his bedroom. There were a couple of things wrong with the picture inside Calvino’s head. First, investors didn’t hold hands with their broker and take them into the bedroom. And second, brokers only metaphorically fucked their clients who paid them fees for the privilege. But once Calvino had done the hand-grab-and-squeeze operation, it sent a powerful message—by crossing the line from the sitting room to the bedroom, Siriporn had stopped being just his broker. She had the potential to be something else, and what that else might be was left unsaid. Calvino’s actions had spoken the magic words: Here’s your invitation. Get into my life.

  One way of looking at it, thought Calvino, was to visualize that he was occupying the space between two drops of honey. How long before the flies, house lizards, cats, dogs, and fighting crowds gathered?

  ELEVEN

  CALVINO WALKED INTO the office in a good mood. Tanny watched him ease into his chair, check his e-mail, humming to himself.

  “Ratana’s upstairs with her son,” said Tanny.

  “That kid loves books about dragons,” he said.

  “You’ve got something you want to tell me? And tell me it’s not about dragons?” Tanny asked. She smelled the Spanish coffee on his breath and twitched her nose in disapproval.

  He looked away from his screen, pretending without much success to appear surprised. “Good news.”

  She wondered whether he was drunk. “Yeah? I could use some of that. Pour me a double.”

  “We can cancel the appointment with Achara. You can return to New York tomorrow or hang around, if you like. I was just getting used to you in the office. But it is a little crowded. You know, for two people trying to work.”

  Tanny raised an eyebrow. He was only a few feet away, but his attitude was in another universe. “Why would we cancel the appointment?”

  “The police caught the guy who popped your reporter. I just got back from a meeting with Colonel Pratt. The guy the police arrested is the killer. They’ve got the gun. He acted alone. They’ve got his confession, and they’ve got a motive. They didn’t beat him up or anything. Guess he had a guilty conscience. You don’t find many of those around. The main thing is, the murder had nothing to do with Brandon and Achara’s joint venture. There. Aren’t you happy? I’m happy.”

  “I can see that,” she said. It suddenly became evident why Calvino had danced into the office like someone who’d just won the lottery.

  Only, when he studied her face, he had the sinking feeling maybe he’d misread the number on the ticket.

  She paused, broke eye contact, glanced at her watch.

  “Something on your mind?” he asked.

  “There are some other issues,” she said.

  Calvino inhaled deeply, held in the breath, trying to calm the voices screaming random directions inside his brain. The unthinkable unfolded—the specter of a hard, pointed blade finally pulled from the sheath. “Like the issues in that envelope you handed Brandon?”

  She studied his eyes, confused, angry. It’s turning into a situation, she thought. “Marshall Sawyer has information that Achara took commissions from a couple of local suppliers. The kickbacks went straight into his pocket. I call that activity raising issues of corruption.”

  He heard for the first time the real reason the Sawyer family had sent her to Thailand. She had said her specialty was corporate investigations.

  “Marshall could live with Achara’s being a killer but not a thief, is that the executive summary?” asked Calvino.

  “The murder case was just a phony cover.”

  “Of course Marshall wanted the murder case cleared. But it doesn’t mean that was the only concern he’d put on the table.”

  It was as if someone had fired a flare gun and illuminated the landscape so that Calvino could see the real advance of troops on the unguarded flank. “Brandon isn’t expecting this.”

  “That was the intention.”

  “You didn’t trust Brandon to follow up about the commissions?”

  He unbuttoned his jacket and leaned back in his chair. This woman doesn’t trust anyone, he thought. Her mother had put her up for adoption. How could she trust another human being with that kind of history?

  “It wasn’t my call. Marshall doesn’t trust him.”

  “Or me,” said Calvino.

  She didn’t say anything; there was no need to.

  Calvino nodded, got up from his chair, put on his jacket.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Ratana said it was a thirty-minute drive to Achara’s office.”

  She’d been pumping his secretary for information. Had Tanny also asked Ratana for the password to access his computer files? He had a bad feeling that came from a sudden punch thrown hard and in close quarters. It was an hour before the appointment. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s on the way, and it won’t take long.”

  “Unless it’s directly connected with the investigation, I’d rather take the extra time to go through some documents,” she said, holding up a thick folder.

  “It’s connected. Trust me.”

  She drummed her fingers on the folder, never once breaking eye contact, never once smiling, as if she were staring through him. In an ideal world, no one laid snares to trap the unsuspecting. In the real world, traps were the rule. Avoiding them an obsession. Calvino felt he’d been caught in an unnecessary trap set by Tanny. He didn’t like it. He’d assumed that she had come to Thailand to investigate Achara’s possible involvement in the murder of a reporter. That, as it turned out, had only been the bait. Like any animal caught in a trap, he at first struggled, and gradually resolved to find another way to reverse his misfortune.

  Calvino wheeled his Honda to a stop, kicking up dirt on the shoulder of the road. His eyes narrowed as he looked up ahead about twenty meters, to where the road fell away as it disappeared into a blind curve. He waited until Tanny looked at him, then smiled. He switched on the car radio.

  “There’s a good reason you pulled over?”

  “Do you like Grover Washington Junior?”

  Her sigh sounded as if the rubber rings on a valve had collapsed, allowing a bolt of steam to escape full throttle.

  “Please, Mr. Calvino.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Craig. Now that we’ve got our pleases and thank-yous out of the way, we can settle down to serious business.”

  “I would like nothing more. But I don’t see the point of why you parked here.”

  “I’ve been thinking that you’ve got some gaps in your Thai education. And that’s holding you back in your job.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And you’ve decided to fill them in? No thanks.”

  “That’s the wrong attitude. If you don’t learn, you don’t grow. If you don’t grow, you get washed away.” He paused, glanced over, finding her face stern, unyielding. “You’ll really thank me.”

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  He ignored her doubt and focused on the blind curve. From his condo balcony, Calvino had studied the activity around that spot, though distracted by Siriporn, who was wrapped inside his favorite Hawaiian shirt. She had slipped her arm around his waist, lifting herself up on her painted toenails, and sniffed his neck. Sniffing necks and cheeks was an old custom. Smells mattered. Smells mattered more than, say, keeping within the lines. O
r watching drivers stay within the lines. He’d looked away from the road. Calvino had started to believe that was the story of his life. With Tanny he didn’t need to worry about taking his eye off the ball. It gave him the opportunity to explain how blind curves had no smell, touch, or feel but, just like a woman, could be deadly if ignored. He opened a brown bag, exposing the neck of a bottle, screwed off the cap, and took a long pull, then held out the bag for Tanny.

  She waved it away. “You shouldn’t drink and drive,” she said.

  “I’m parked. I’m not driving. It’s Gatorade.” He held it out again. “Want some?”

  She shook her head. His smile faded. She was not only tough; she was unyielding, demanding, and bullheaded. Was she willing to learn? The last question was the essential open-ended one. If her mind were open just a fraction, then what she was about to witness could help her understand some of the basic wiring of people in Thailand. He wasn’t encouraged by her reaction. So far, her mind was as open as a fundamentalist preacher’s listening to a bearded college professor explain the theory of evolution.

  Her eye roll told Calvino that he had an uphill battle on his hands. Being in a good mood made it easier to shrug off her stubbornness. He listened to the music, moving his head to the beat of Grover’s saxophone, as the memory of a naked Siriporn suddenly reappeared in his mind.

  “The meeting with Mr. Achara is important. Shouldn’t we go?”

  “We’ve got time. I’m asking you to do something for me. I want you to keep an eye on the yellow line. I’ll give you a hundred baht for every driver who turns in to the corner and stays within the yellow line, and you give me five baht for everyone who doesn’t.”

  She thought about this, looking at the line, watching the first couple of cars wheel into the oncoming lane as if the yellow dividing line didn’t exist. “What’s the point of this game?” she said.

  “It’s to teach you traffic lesson number one,” said Calvino.

  “It’s a Zen thing. You know about Zen, right?”

  She folded her arms like a teacher whose head was about to explode. “It’s the name of a department store.”

  Nice answer, Calvino thought. Brandon Sawyer wasn’t the only stand-up genius working the audience in this case. He had some competition imported from New York. There was an outside possibility that this was really the only Zen that had entered her private universe.

  “Zen’s a philosophy. It’s a way of looking at things. Understanding their true nature. It works on people, too. So you want to understand Achara? Zen is a good place to shop for insight,” he said.

  “That’s why I’m meeting him.” She paused before whispering to herself, “Duh.”

  Like an American passport, the origin of her response was unmistakable.

  “Traffic lesson number one is your homework for the meeting. It will help you understand how someone like Achara thinks. It only takes a few minutes. Trust me.”

  She stared ahead as if trust weren’t anything that came naturally to her.

  The curve coiled like a narrow belt around the waist of a condominium. A sharp corner of the building had been built close to the inside of the curve, obscuring vision from both directions. The six-story redbrick building looked like a fort jogging out into the bend of a river. The structure would have slowed down a boat, but it did nothing to slow down cars, trucks, and motorcycles on the soi. Once in a blue moon, a taxi, driven by someone in the know, hugged the corner tight in order to avoid the oncoming traffic, which ignored the yellow line, turning into the oncoming lane.

  “Ratana said the corner had bad feng shui,” said Calvino.

  “When the gods of feng shui were angry, then what? Tear down the condo? Forget about it. The gods never got that angry. Instead someone sends out a crew to paint a yellow line down the center of the road. The yellow-line rule goes something like this: Stay on your side and I’ll stay on my side. But no one ever drives inside the line dividing the road. Their side is both sides. That’s the Zen lesson. The yellow line’s decorative; it’s a suggestion, take it or leave it, a way of seeing the curve in the road. It’s roughly the same Zen principle that applies to business in Thailand—the local partner knows where the line is but never bothers to stay inside it. Not so much because he’s cunning; it’s mostly inattention and the convenience of the moment. It’s easier to cut across the line than to stay within it. It’s more like a natural right. To ignore the yellow line is to be free.” Tanny screwed up her face. “Free of what? That makes no sense.”

  “In the land of the free, sometimes things don’t make much sense. But it doesn’t mean they’re not real and you don’t have to deal with them.”

  Ignoring lines painted on the road might have had some larger cosmic meaning, but for purposes of day-to-day driving, the yellow paint might have been just one more feature of the scenery, like trees, security guards, and garbage cans—a stream of people and things that didn’t register as having much significance or purpose.

  Calvino answered his cell phone, keeping his eyes on the traffic ahead.

  “The prime minister has declared a state of emergency,” said Ratana. “It was just on the news. And Achara phoned in with the news. He wanted to cancel the meeting.”

  Calvino relayed the government order to Tanny.

  “He doesn’t want to cooperate,” she said, arms folded on her lap, looking straight ahead as if it had all become perfectly obvious that Achara was avoiding her. “That’s not acceptable.”

  “I said he wanted to cancel because of the state of emergency. Ratana already told him we’d left. We were on our way. And he said never mind, he’d meet us.” Calvino still had Ratana on the line as he spoke, letting her listen in.

  He expected Tanny to ask what a state of emergency meant, whether it meant danger, tanks, soldiers patrolling the streets, the possibility of gunfire. She was strangely incurious. Her lack of interest in anything other than the case had started to bother him. It was also a challenge, making him wonder how he might bore through her shell.

  Colonel Pratt had warned him, “Get rid of the Brandon file. Bury the case in your filing cabinet and get a new case. You don’t need the money. You don’t need the grief. And you don’t need to get in the middle of a conflict that isn’t yours to resolve.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Ratana?” he asked Tanny now.

  She shook her head. Her frustration, like a bad earache, drained her energy, her strength, and made her tense, cranky, and miserable. So much for the depth of Tanny’s new girlfriend-to-girlfriend relationship with his secretary. He ended the call and slipped the cell phone into his jacket pocket. Another BMW swung into the wrong lane as it headed around the blind curve. He took another swig of Gatorade, removing the bottle from the bag. Tanny noticed, but the show did nothing to lower her contempt level—she had a full tank. They waited in vain for the sound of metal and glass crunching. Calvino sat with both hands on the steering wheel, keeping the beat as if to a tune inside his head.

  “Does the state of emergency restrict our travel?” she asked.

  “It suspends the rules of the road.”

  “Are you ever serious?”

  Calvino shrugged. “When desperation intervenes. I’ll let you know when I hit that point.”

  He leaned forward, changed the radio channel to the news, and turned up the volume. Grover Washington Jr. gave way to an announcer who read from a script about how the army had agreed to remain neutral. The demonstrators at Government House would be allowed to continue their Woodstock-like festival. For the moment no cracking of heads or ribs, no breaking of arms and legs.

  “I understand the message, Mr. Calvino. Perhaps we can go to the meeting. Let’s find out how Mr. Achara manages to drive over the yellow line and not crash into cars coming at him. That’s a discussion I wish to have.”

  As Calvino pulled back onto the soi, an SUV almost slammed into a Toyota at the blind curve. As the SUV came closer, Calvino expected to see a face twisted by terror and ange
r, but instead the SUV driver smiled, eyes dreamy and distant, a face unchanged by the possibility of a headon smash-up that hadn’t happened. As the government prepared to crack down, all near-death experiences became more tangible, urgent, and immediate. The two drivers had been dancing a ballet, and they’d been taught from birth that all Thais were members of the same extended family. And no one died so long as they followed the same steps in the ballet. People in the same family automatically forgave each other. Brothers and sisters all glued together with their samakki. Until the moment when the glue cracks and breaks and everything it’s held together flies apart.

  TWELVE

  THE HIGHWAY RAN south of Bangkok toward Malaysia. Calvino ran his hand through his hair as he drove in silence. Sometimes, out of nowhere, that ancient feeling of wanting a cigarette hit with the surprise force of a mugger’s knife. The presence of Tanny Craig had set off a need for nicotine. Women who triggered a former addiction usually spelled trouble.

  As they passed signs for Hua Hin, he thought about Colonel Pratt’s idea of finding Tanny’s birth mother. And her father. But from the Thai point of view, everything depended on finding the mother. Fathers were optional in constructing and operating the family vehicle. Another Hua Hin sign flew past. He glanced at Tanny. Did he really want to find this woman’s mother?

  “Do you ever think about what happened to your Thai mother?”

  She cleared her throat. “Are we close to Achara’s office?”

  That was the answer he got, another question that had nothing to do with her biological mother. At least he could tell Colonel Pratt he’d tried.

  “Not long,” he said. “When are you going to tell me what was in the envelope you gave to Brandon?”

  “It’s confidential.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Give me a break.”

  Calvino slammed on the brakes and pulled off the road.

  “There’s your brake. Where’s my hint?”

  “It’s a way to end the problem between Marshall and his brother.”