The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Researching Roman emperors was a way of filling the time. And he had plenty of time. After an hour or so, he grew edgy, like a bear confined in a small cage at the Rangoon Zoo.

  Calvino phoned McPhail and told him about his latest Google search of the five Roman emperors. An extended silence followed after Calvino finished, and McPhail finally said, “Do you want me to pretend to be interested? What’s happening with Tanny’s mother search?” McPhail didn’t want to talk about Roman emperors; he wanted to talk about work. “The wheels are turning, but the car isn’t moving,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, that job. We found Tanny’s mother.”

  “Man, you could have told me.”

  “I am telling you.”

  “Then why did you start off talking about fucking Roman emperors?”

  Calvino didn’t have an immediate answer. “Send me a bill.”

  “I will send you a bill.” The connection went dead. Calvino stared at the phone, McPhail’s tinny voice fading as fast as distant footfalls from a cut-off, a retreating Roman legion. Calvino put down the phone, having decided McPhail was well through four vodka tonics and in no condition to discuss ancient Rome. There was always Colonel Pratt, who’d listen to his latest discovery into the politics of the Old World only to remind Calvino that he had enough to deal with in the politics of the current world.

  Shakespeare must’ve said something about Roman rulers. But Colonel Pratt’s cell phone was switched off. It was lonely in the office, and as silent as a meditation room after a bag of Prozac had been passed around. Calvino stretched his arms and legs and kept walking around the room, the way a prisoner paces a solitaryconfinement cell—happy to be able to move and at the same time sad for the restrictions on the space available. He started to miss Tanny and wished she were at the office. He had the radio tuned to Radio Thailand. An announcer spoke English in a strange accent that randomly switched back and forth between England, Australia, and America. The announcer read the latest report about the protest at Government House. The number of demonstrators occupying the grounds had stabilized at around three thousand. New recruits had been shuttled in like troop reinforcements from the rear to support the original protesters. The morning newspaper carried photos of a member of the self-appointed security detail pointing to the main grounds with a golf club. Eventually Ratana returned from Ayuthaya, went upstairs and checked on John-John, then walked into the office. By way of greeting, she said, “Tanny must have been happy.”

  “I haven’t told her.”

  Ratana tilted her head, lips firm. “Why not?”

  “She’s not in her room, and her phone is turned off.”

  “She’s shopping. I forgot. She told me about going to buy some jewelry.”

  Calvino nodded. “Yeah, for her boss’s wife.”

  “You talked about jewelry with Tanny?” Ratana looked amused as she sat down at her desk.

  “She talked about lost earrings. But it’s a long story. I want to know, what’s her mother like?”

  “Her mother wasn’t home. A child answered the door.

  She said that Auntie had gone to Bangkok. Dressed in yellow and wearing a backpack.”

  “She’s joined the demonstration?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” said Ratana. Before the last coup, along with Colonel Pratt’s wife, Ratana had been a fixture at the earlier round of demonstrations organized a couple of years earlier. But this time Ratana wasn’t out on the street. Things had changed for her; she had followed the arguments, agreed with a lot of the frustration and anger people felt, but she worried about her place and that of her son in what the leaders of the protest promised was the “New Order.”

  Calvino slipped on his jacket. “I’ll go to Government House and see if I can find her.”

  “Good luck.”

  She looked like she wanted to say something, but whatever it was, she kept it to herself. There was only so much a Thai could say to a farang who was about to walk into the middle of a major demonstration. On the way out of the office, he phoned McPhail and told him to meet him at the Phrom Phong BTS station.

  NINETEEN

  McPHAIL AND CALVINO hired motocyle taxis parked at the foot of the BTS station at Phaya Thai to take them to Government House. Both motorcycle drivers looked amused at the two farangs. One whispered to the other that the farangs were crazy.

  McPhail overheard the remark. “Not crazy, brother.

  We’re a couple of drunken tourists.”

  The drivers smiled as McPhail handed them cigarettes.

  They climbed onto the motorcycles, and the bikes gunned down the road as if avoiding incoming rounds.

  Calvino’s driver pulled ahead on the wide avenues. This part of the city had a different feel and terrain; old Bangkok with shophouses run as mom-and-pop operations selling paint, tires, and rice. No high-rises blocked out the sky. No tourists in shorts squinting at maps. No yings in high-heeled shoes and short skirts hooking their arms around a farang on their way to a shopping mall. On the government side of town, except for the presence of the traffic, the mature trees, the manicured bushes and lawns, the motorcycles might have shot through a portal to a time fifty years ago. This was how Bangkok looked before the Chinese-Thais and Indian-Thais discovered that stacking tons of concrete half a mile high on Sukhumvit Road resulted in mega profits. This area was the last refuge of the Thai-Thais.

  The motorcycle-taxi drivers dropped them at the junction of Phitsanulok and Nakhon Pathom roads, parking their bikes outside the main entrance of Government House. Calvino stood in front of the open massive black gate. McPhail followed him, running his hand along a string that divided the pavement into two channels: Entry and exit. It was the first evidence of the demonstration leaders’ planning and organizational skills. The second piece of evidence was the security guards, dressed in black T-shirts and jeans and easy smiles. McPhail raised his hands high, cigarette clenched between his teeth, like a suspect waiting for the police to pat him down and arrest him.

  “You want to see my ID or something, buddy?” he asked.

  Calvino walked past. “He wants to see the back of you,” he said.

  On the right, a wide road was lined with vendor stalls stretching half a mile. Vendors hawked plastic clappers with three molded clown hands, yellow T-shirts, wristbands, souvenirs, and trinkets—like any other open-air market. On the left, a security station had been cobbled together from dusty planks. The materials looked like they’d been lifted from a construction site—the floor was made by stacking wooden pallets on the ground. A handwritten sign in English advertised bodyguard service 24 hrs. On the bench, a man who was as huge and solid as a teak stump, slept with one hand over his eyes, his massive belly slowly rising and falling.

  “You want a bodyguard?” McPhail asked Calvino.

  “There’s your man.”

  In front of the guard post were several golf clubs tied to wooden slats, hanging like samurai swords. “Tiger Woods call home,” said Calvino, looking at a seven-iron. “We’ve found your caddie.” He was sleeping a chip shot away from the gate. But the man was a long-drive wood away from the green, where several bodyguards stood steely-eyed looking at McPhail and Calvino with the concentration of men aiming to sink a twenty-foot putt.

  “Tiger is half Thai. Of course he keeps a caddie on the payroll in Thailand. He’s got a caddie in every fucking country in the world where there’s a golf course. I hadn’t thought of that before. You are a genius”

  “I wish Old George could’ve seen that bodyguard,” said Calvino.

  “It wouldn’t have surprised him. Most of his staff are daytime sleepers. But so are a lot of his customers.”

  Calvino nodded, remembering the back booth where they sometimes curled up. “I guess Old George saw enough sleepers to last a lifetime.”

  He’d already lost McPhail, whose attention was now focused on a poster. McPhail drifted over to a bulletin board, lighting a fresh cigarette and blowing smoke out the corner of his m
outh. Someone had stapled the photocopy of a Thai woman’s ID card to the board. Calvino put a hand on McPhail’s shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”

  McPhail held firm, jabbing a finger at the poster. “That’s Nueng,” he said. “I’m telling you, that’s her. What the fuck is her picture doing here?”

  There had to be a hundred thousand women in Thailand named Nueng; it translated as “Number One.”

  “That’s not who we’re looking for,” said Calvino, holding up the photocopy of Tanny’s mother. There was no resemblance between the two women.

  “Nueng, you know her. She works at One Hand Clapping. Don’t you recognize her?”

  The photocopy pinned to the board was a grainy blowup taken from her ID card; one side of the photo was one of those calibrated height charts, in this case showing that the woman looking into the camera was 159 centimeters tall. It wasn’t a bad photo, thought Calvino. Not the usual scary official document photo. Nueng’s hair, pulled back, revealed her heart-shaped face, the lips frozen in a sly smile.

  Calvino remembered her; he passed her on the stairs as she walked up to the floor above his office and went into the day-care center that had been Ratana’s idea. Nueng’s kid played alongside Ratana’s John-John.

  “Yeah, I remember her,” said Calvino.

  “So what the fuck is her picture doing here?” asked McPhail.

  “Don’t know.”

  There was a typed caption in Thai script, a paragraph below the photo. Calvino tore down the copy, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

  A photojournalist named Somkit, a couple of digital cameras hanging around his neck, appeared out of nowhere. Calvino remembered seeing him around Bangkok. Somkit was a good crime-scene photographer for the Bangkok Post, and he’d come upon Calvino at more than one location where the police were kneeling over a dead body. He recognized Calvino and waved. He snapped several photos of a couple of demonstrators, a mother and daughter by the look of them, buying hand clappers.

  “Vincent, you come to have a look at the protest?” asked Somkit, lowering his camera. His nose twitched as if Calvino smelled like burned flesh.

  Calvino waied him. “Somkit, how you doing?”

  “Good. Someone gets killed?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Calvino. “But thanks for asking.”

  “It’s just—” Somkit broke off.

  “Soi 33,” said Calvino. “I’d rather forget about it.”

  The last time he’d seen Somkit, the photographer was also working the street; in fact, he’d been shooting what remained of a couple of bodies on Soi 33 not far from Calvino’s office.

  Two hit men, one riding pillion—who pulled a nine with a silencer—and his helmeted driver, had turned into the soi for a drive-by, but the motorcycle encountered a problem: Calvino had earned an assisted goal by redirecting a vendor’s cart into its path. The motorcycle driver T-boned his bike at fifty kilometers an hour, smashing into another bike parked beside a banyan tree. The back of the stationary bike had been overloaded with gas cylinders. Somkit had been first on the scene to snap the charred remains of the two men. It wasn’t in Calvino’s vocabulary to call them victims. Instead he had said the only good thing coming out of the crash was that it had saved their relatives the cost of a cremation.

  Now Calvino smoothed out the copy of Nueng’s photo he’d taken from the bulletin board near the entry gate. “Khun Somkit, what’s this say?”

  The photojournalist slipped his reading glasses over the end of his nose, cleared his throat, nodded, and sighed before handing it back to Calvino. “Says that this woman is a prostitute and that she’s been banned. Security found condoms in her handbag and a business card from a massage parlor. They said she was hustling for clients, giving the demonstrators a bad name. She wouldn’t be the first to turn a trick on the grounds of Government House.”

  “You’re a cynic,” said Calvino. “But this is different. I know this woman. She wouldn’t come here to hustle. That’s crazy.”

  “It’s crazy times,” said Somkit, watching Calvino fold up the photocopy. “Everyone’s on the hustle.” He nodded at one of the vendors demonstrating a hand clapper for a potential customer.

  “Commerce,” said Calvino. “Everything has its price.”

  “You mean everyone.”

  “You’ve been on the job too long,” said Calvino.

  “Look who’s talking. But at least you’ve got an out. You can go back to New York. What about the rest of us? We’ve got no place to go.”

  McPhail saw Somkit put the camera to his eye and snap a series of shots of a family, all dressed in yellow, walking hand in hand as if they were in a laundry-detergent commercial.

  “Hey, you’ve been walking around looking at people. Any chance you saw this woman?”

  Somkit took a look at the photocopy of Tanny’s mother. He studied it, touching his hand to his jaw, rubbing it for a moment, shaking his head. “No. Haven’t seen her.” He handed the photocopy back to McPhail, smiling. “She could be anywhere. But I’d start over there.” He pointed at the far gate. “Go that way. It will lead you inside.”

  Somkit walked a few steps, took a few more shots, lowered the camera, and turned back around. He tilted his head to the side. “You don’t have any more photos of women you want me to identify, do you?” He grinned, shading his eyes as the sun broke through the clouds.

  “Lead us inside where?” asked Calvino.

  “Where the prostitutes aren’t allowed,” said Somkit.

  They watched Somkit stroll down the road, still smiling smugly.

  McPhail said, “I thought we were inside.”

  They watched Somkit snapping pictures for a moment.

  “Let’s try the next inside,” Calvino said.

  They walked ahead past a high black iron fence that until the occupation had symbolized power and authority. The sound of hundreds of clappers beating the air, filtered through the fence. And Calvino couldn’t help but think about the massage parlor next to his office, One Hand Clapping—a good name for a massage parlor. The mamasan had been ahead of her time, and even though she didn’t have a political bone in her body, she was the type to start scheming, huddled with her yings, inventing reasons to claim a royalty from the clapper sellers. Two baht each, one of the yings would say, another would say five baht, and before long the royalty on a clapper would equal the price of an ordinary hand job.

  Opposite the iron fence, sprawling trees and lush lawns and winding roads covered the eleven acres of Government House. The main building was the size of a palace and topped with golden domes. It looked like a magical Disneyland fairy-tale castle. Hand clappers, but no amusement-park rides for the kids.

  McPhail stood beside Calvino, shaking his head. “This doesn’t look Thai. It looks like some crack headed European built the mansion in Gone With The Wind.”

  “The columns are from the Palazzo Ca’d’Oro in Venice. Fifteenth century.”

  McPhail rolled his eyes. “Man, you’re not going to tell me your great-grandfather built this motherfucker? Or painted it?”

  “Annibale Rigotti. That’s the name of the ‘crack headed European,’ the architect. Does that sound like ‘Calvino’ to you?”

  “It ends in a fucking vowel.”

  Calvino punched McPhail on the shoulder, hard enough for him to back off. He decided it was better not to mention that his great-grandfather’s rival and enemy from Florence, Corrado Feroci, had decorated the building during World War II, when Thailand and Italy were Axis partners. “Fit for a doge or a Mussolini, but not a McPhail.”

  “I said it looked European. You’re the one who started on about the Italians.”

  Calvino sighed, shaking his head, thinking that after enough time with anyone—man or woman—if you were working together, you ended up like an old couple, getting into stupid fights over who forgot to turn off the light in the kitchen. “Let’s find Tanny’s mother,” said Calvino.

  On the other side of the int
erior iron gate, the clappers’ sound increased. It was like a swarm of locusts beating their wings as they settled on a wheat field. Calvino looked around and suddenly saw thousands of people shaking their clappers, using them to applaud political speeches shouted from a stage. The stage had been erected about a hundred yards from the gate, and protesters sat in plastic chairs, row after row of plastic chairs, until those in the back watched the stage on TVs. The TV platforms had been strategically placed, like pillboxes along a coastline, ensuring that everyone could see. The sound system registered a white hiss of noise. A woman’s voice cracked as she spoke into the microphone, the clappers welcoming her. She stood in front of a podium, a yellow headband holding her hair back from her face. Behind her a group of musicians erupted into a vocal version of “Happy Birthday.” Their broken English filled the air as hundreds sang for the woman smiling at the podium. It might have been Woodstock, as the compound of Government House, in every direction, was filled with thousands of people, sitting on those plastic chairs perched on a sea of wooden pallets sinking in the mud.

  “Find her where? Look at the size of that crowd.”

  McPhail, hands on his hips, slowly turned 180 degrees; nothing but solid yellow.

  It was easy to feel discouraged, overwhelmed by the size of the audience. If Calvino had a dozen men, divided the grounds into sectors, sent a man into each sector, then they might have a chance. But there were just the two of them. As he started to say something to McPhail, he turned and saw that McPhail was gone. Maybe he’d decided to split; looking at the size of the crowd, and the light rain that had started to fall, Calvino wouldn’t have blamed him. Calvino worked his way through the crowd until he caught sight of McPhail standing near the end of a long line. Funny thing was, McPhail was the only farang in line, and the only person not wearing a yellow shirt, scarf, or headband. He stood out.