The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Siriporn gave the impression of searching for the earring in the low light of the sitting room, working her way toward the kitchen. As the two women locked eyes, Calvino moved behind Tanny, who stood at the stove, stirring the pasta with a large wooden spoon. Siriporn offered a tentative wai, which Tanny didn’t return. Maybe she still didn’t know that in Thailand it was culturally more acceptable to pull a gun than not to return a wai.

  “How’s the pasta?” he asked.

  Neither woman thought that this was a particularly helpful question.

  “Siriporn this is Tanny Craig. Siriporn’s my stockbroker,” he said, almost convincing himself that it was normal for a stockbroker to show up at night searching the place for missing jewelry. The expensive bottle of wine wasn’t lost on Siriporn. She had a stockbroker’s nose for market value.

  Siriporn switched into Thai, asking Tanny Craig where she was from, and was just getting into the question of her age—necessary to determine whether she had to call her pee or nong.

  “I don’t speak Thai,” Tanny said, wishing she had the sentence on a tape recorder that she could replay every time the question was asked. “I’m a private investigator from New York,”

  “Tanny’s from New York,” said Calvino.

  “We’re working on a case together,” she said.

  “Colleagues,” said Calvino.

  The out-of-town part and the American part and the colleagues bit provided enough comfort to satisfy Siriporn that Tanny wasn’t a long-term threat. What came in and out of Thailand was rarely competition; it was only a temporary inconvenience. Siriporn’s face softened, and she managed a smile. “Well, I can’t find it. I guess it’s lost,” she said, exhaling as if she’d just experienced a near miss—like a snake falling out of a banana tree. It had been that kind of day. “I should go. It seems you two have business.”

  Tanny brushed catlike against Calvino’s shoulder. It was a fine performance. Siriporn tried to mask her discomfort. The women locked eyes again for a long moment. Calvino turned down the flame on the gas burner. A couple of competitive women around knives and fire had started to worry him. He led Siriporn out of the kitchen and back to the door.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Khun Tanny,” said Siriporn.

  “Have a nice day,” said Tanny.

  At the door, Siriporn’s parting shot was aimed at Calvino, a Thai expression that translated to “A man with more than one woman has invested his fortune in grief.” After she was out the door, Calvino walked back into the kitchen. Tanny had taken lettuce, tomatoes, and onions from the fridge and found a knife and cutting board. She glanced up from slicing a tomato.

  “There’s a Chinese saying that a banker who loses her earring in your bedroom will lose your investment in the street.”

  Calvino smiled. “I don’t know that one.”

  “It’s from Chinatown in New York.” She grinned, putting the slices of tomato into a bowl.

  Calvino checked the pasta, then a pesto sauce, and turned off the burner. “But you have a point,” he said. “I’ve got a history of falling into uncovered manholes.”

  “You should look where you walk.”

  “That’s what my mother always said.”

  He opened the wine and poured two glasses, handing one to Tanny.

  “Here’s to your mother,” she said.

  “Here’s to Chinatown,” said Calvino. “The smoldering hole in the financial center of the universe.”

  The rim of his glass touched hers, and they drank, drifting through a patch of silence as a new jazz piece came over the speaker system.

  “I need to phone Marshall,” Tanny said.

  “It’s eight in the morning in New York,” said Calvino, glancing at his watch.

  “In an hour, then,” she said, sipping her wine, eyes half hooded.

  “You impressed Achara with your speech about family,” Tanny said, finishing with the salad. “Is that a sideline?

  Giving speeches about family values?”

  He shrugged and removed the pasta. It was overcooked.

  He’d lost track of time once Siriporn had arrived. He thought about starting over but decided to go ahead, hoping the pesto sauce would mask the error. Tanny, though, wasn’t letting go of the speech about family. As he topped up her wineglass, she pressed him for details.

  “I’m curious about the speech you made. It must’ve had some impact.”

  He described Montri’s mansion as making Achara’s place look like a guesthouse for visiting Chinese cultural attachés, and the group of men in dinner jackets who’d attended a private art exhibition’s opening. When he’d been asked to speak, at first he was at a complete loss as to what to say.

  “If you think about it, the most important things about life and morality come down to family. It’s what binds people in this part of the world. Ancestors are essential for them. Laws, rights, and justice get adjusted to fit the importance of family. It’s the opposite of America.”

  “Meaning men run the show,” said Tanny. The effects of the wine had opened the possibilities of all kinds of impressions escaping from her lips. She jabbed well, and as long as he kept weaving, Calvino thought he’d avoid most of the punches. It was difficult to believe that this was the same woman whom fear had stretched and pulled into a state of terror, unleashing a torrent of tears in the car.

  “Respect and loyalty are the show runners. It’s tribal.

  And the women let the men think they’re running the show.

  Most people are happy with the illusion.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” she said.

  “You’re from here but not really from here. So why would you buy into how the place wires people? Family is part of their religion, their politics, and their legal structure. For the Thais, family is sacred. It’s what they get taught in school. What’s with the Sawyer family argument?”

  “There’s no argument. Just two different points of view of what’s good business.”

  “Marshall doesn’t want Achara’s shares. You lied to him. My gut tells me that Marshall’s got a plan to flip Brandon’s shares in the Thai company because New York’s bleeding money and he needs the cash. The problem is, Brandon doesn’t want to sell. And Achara doesn’t want to play along.”

  “Brandon told you what was in the envelope,” she said.

  Calvino nodded. “Achara doesn’t want to sell his shares. Brandon isn’t interested in selling. Digging up dirt on Achara isn’t going to get Marshall what he wants.”

  “Marshall always gets what he wants.”

  “Yeah, then he’s a lucky man. He’d be careful enough to arrange a Thai buyer for the company?” asked Calvino.

  “Because he’d need Thais to hold the majority interest. It’s the law.”

  “Marshall has the best lawyers.”

  “And they help him do whatever it takes, even if it means fucking over his brother.”

  “And that was in your speech?” she asked as Calvino refilled her glass. The flush on her face from the wine gave her the radiance of a celebration in progress.

  Calvino smiled, drank his wine. “Okay, you got me. I left that part out.” He’d just begun to like her when she reverted to a New York hard-ass dead set on winning. For a moment he wondered if he’d pushed the wrong woman out the door.

  Tanny followed him to a low table surrounded by rattan seat mats on the floor. Plates, cutlery, cloth napkins, water glasses, wineglasses—the table had been preset by a woman; another woman could tell in an instant. Tanny wondered if that woman might have lost an earring.

  “And what do you say?”

  It was the kind of open-ended question that a couple of glasses of wine could bring Tanny Craig to ask. They carried the food to the table.

  “I have a few more questions,” he said as he filled her plate with pasta.

  “Such as?”

  “Why you came from New York to close a share-sale deal? How did you know about the payment Achara made? What happens if Brandon and A
chara won’t play ball?” She toyed with her pasta. “Anything else?”

  “Will you stay tonight?” He grinned, waiting for her reaction. It was a short wait.

  “Isn’t that crossing the yellow line around a blind corner?” she asked. “Not to mention the evidence of considerable traffic to your bed.”

  The Zen of Thai Traffic had the capacity for spilling off the road and into the bedroom, and he found himself nodding. “The banker?”

  She nodded, too, squirming as if a scorpion had crawled inside her thong. “Broker. I thought she was your broker.”

  “We’re talking fender bender,” he said. “Minor damage. One lost earring.”

  “That’s your way of looking at her damages. She might not agree.”

  Calvino didn’t have an immediate answer, and Tanny liked that he stumbled to find one.

  “Forget about your broker’s damage, let’s get back to your other questions. Brandon told Marshall about Achara’s payment to the Thai official. He bragged about it to his big brother, as if Marshall were going to be impressed by corruption. Marshall’s lawyers had reviewed the payment and said it raised flags. That’s why he sent me all the way from New York. Marshall’s a fair man. He wanted to give Achara a fair chance to clarify the payment. Whether he really paid the money. It’s clear that he did. As for my own family in Thailand, that’s not so easy. I was adopted as an infant. I was three months old when I left Thailand. My father found me in an orphanage run by missionaries. My mother had left me there. So you can forgive me if I have a slightly different view of Thai family values. If my father hadn’t taken me from that place, what would have happened to me?”

  There came a turning point when a woman’s defenses thawed out and she opened to the possibility of something more. Sitting across from her at the table, Calvino saw up close the subtle change that had drifted over her. He warned himself about letting things get out of hand, getting personal with Tanny, issuing the regulation “Get in” message that led to the bedroom. He refilled his glass, facing resistance against strong natural impulses. It was like lighting matches to peer inside an open container of gasoline. The impulse won; he couldn’t help himself from reaching across and touching her hand. She didn’t take hers away. And from what he saw, it appeared to be a mutual feeling. He knew exactly what had gotten to him. It was like seeing a magician show how he does a trick, then still being fooled when the trick was done. Full-knowledge tricks did the most damage to a man’s sense of free will. Tanny lived inside a Thai woman’s body but never had a chance to learn what it meant to be Thai, to know what being Thai meant or how it felt, or to fully understand someone like Achara. She was a Thai without the brainwashing. Tanny was what you got when the official line had never been registered from the first day in school. Everyone in Bangkok looked like they might be relatives, but after three seconds it became clear to them and to her that something beyond genes and DNA had been responsible for her psychological wiring, the glide path of her destiny. She was a cultural freak. And there was some incredible appeal she had as a result. In time, he told himself, he’d figure it out.

  Instead that night, he looked her in the eye, holding her hand, and said, “I might be able to find your mother.”

  It was as if she suffered a flashback of the green snake dropping from the tree. “I’m not sure. …” Her voice trailed off and she reached for her wineglass.

  “Not sure of what?”

  “Whether I ever want to meet her.”

  “But she’s your mother.”

  “I know. And all Thai daughters worship their mother. So why should I be any different. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  “Why not let me check it out? It’s not like I have a dozen clients knocking on my door. Finding people is something I’m reasonably good at.”

  “Finding earrings isn’t something you’re particularly good at,” she said, smiling.

  “I am if they’re on the person I’m looking for.”

  “You want another client?”

  He tilted his head to one side, pulled his hand away from hers, and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You mentioned something about having a kid,” he said, brushing off her question.

  “A six-year-old boy. Jeffrey. Jeff’s what everyone calls him.”

  “I remember. You talked about him with Ratana in the office. I was standing in the doorway listening.”

  In New York, Calvino had a daughter, Melody, who was no longer a kid but he remembered her at six, the age when every girl loved her father, looked up to him, held his hand, smiled when he read to her, and then one day something changed. “Growing up” was what they called it.

  “You must be missing him,” he said.

  Her eyes glistened as she nodded. “I do.”

  “Maybe your mother feels the same way.”

  “Are we back to that?” she asked.

  “I didn’t think we’d left it.”

  Maybe he’d been pushing her a little too far; the shell now started to extend over her. He stopped short of telling her that her musical hero on the saxophone had thought it was the right thing to do, and instead he split the last of the wine between the two glasses. Tanny pulled a cell phone from her handbag. The spell was broken as she moved back into professional gear.

  “I need to phone Marshall. Is there a place where I can have some privacy?”

  “You can use the bathroom.” He pointed over her right shoulder to a door opposite the illuminated globe. “You can turn on the shower if you want. No, it’s not bugged.”

  Calvino sat on the sofa, telling himself it was just as well it had happened like this; it was a good way to end the evening. She’d finish her call, collect her files, and leave, and tomorrow she’d be back at the office. He’d have to look at her all day, trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that he’d held her hand, made a play for her. Time would stop. She’d immediately tell Ratana, who’d stick her head into his office and stare at him. He felt doomed; maybe that was how a state of emergency was supposed to make a man feel. It was how rejection by a woman made him feel.

  FIFTEEN

  TANNY WAS AWAY for no more than fifteen minutes. Enough time for Calvino to clean up the table, sit on the end of the sofa, and stare out at Lake Ratchada and the Queen Sirikit Center, the lights like night running lights on a car, creating shadows that fell away into an absorbing darkness. He thought about the state of emergency across town. It helped him put his own feelings in perspective. Would this be the night the police or the army waded in with batons and guns to clear the grounds of Government House? Or would they wait and wait—impose one of those medieval sieges that lasted years, until those inside succumbed from thirst, starvation, smallpox and cholera, leaving no survivors. Then he heard something strange. It was the sound of the shower from behind the bathroom door. He smiled. Tanny had seemed so relaxed, her professional face back in place, but the reality was different; she was definitely being paranoid, running the shower to mask her phone call, he thought. He checked his watch.

  Half an hour after Tanny had gone into the bathroom, she walked out wearing a fluffy blue towel knotted above her breasts. The light showed the outlines of her collarbone and shoulders—broad, strong shoulders that seemed to overshoot her armpits by a couple of centimeters from where they should have stopped. Using a builder’s plane, a master carpenter would have trouble matching that perfect straight line. She smiled, seeing Calvino’s jaw still hanging by a thread, as she switched off the bathroom light behind her and walked over to the window. She knew the impact that she had on men.

  “I was going to ask how it went with Marshall Sawyer, but I’m not so sure I care,” Calvino said.

  She smiled and padded across the marble barefooted, held out her fist, and slowly opened it. A gold earring rested like a crown on her palm.

  “Is this what she was looking for?”

  She dropped it into his hand.

  He closed his hand and slipped the earring into his pocket. F
or once he was speechless. The effect brought one of her rare smiles, like one of those flowers that bloom once every hundred years in the desert. Surprises came in many shapes and forms, but having her emerge from the bathroom wrapped in a towel registered at the outer limit of expectations. A state of emergency across town and a state of undress in his condo, with Calvino at a loss to know which presented the greater danger.

  “You spoke with Marshall?” he asked, looking at her bare shoulders.

  “He’s disappointed but hopeful,” she said. Outside, Asoke Road glistened with rain, cars taking the bridge over Rama IV plowing through a low spot and unleashing a spray as they briefly blurred inside a watery envelope before reappearing on the bridge.

  “That could describe my life.”

  She walked back to the windows and looked out at the Bangkok skyline, rows of high-rises stretching from Sukhumvit to Sathorn Road in the darkness, thousands of tiny windows strung out like neoimpressionist dots painted by Georges Seurat.

  “You got Marshall to understand that Achara’s payment wasn’t corruption? And that it was Achara’s own money, right? It had nothing to do with company money,” said Calvino, edging close to her, his hand slipping around her waist.

  She nodded, sitting on the sofa. “That doesn’t matter. Marshall doesn’t want to be involved in the company.”

  Calvino sat down beside her in time to see a dark shadow streak across her face and said, “Maybe Achara ought to sell his shares to his friend Zhang. That guy’s rolling in money. They’ve been skiing in Canada together.”

  “Not a bad idea,” she said. In the half darkness, she pulled him forward and kissed him on the lips. “I can think of something else that’s not a bad idea.”

  She rolled onto her back, tilted her head to the side, looking out the window. She reached down with her hand, stroked his leg.

  He gently squeezed her waist, leaning down to smell her freshly washed hair. It was the same scent as Siriporn’s. They’d both showered using the same plastic bottle, he thought. It wasn’t right. Women shouldn’t smell exactly the same; it was confusing.