The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  The relaxed atmosphere of the day had vanished with the setting sun, and now the security guards and bodyguards no longer slept on pallets next to their golf clubs. They were on patrol of the grounds. The night stretched endlessly ahead as the demonstrators watched the TV broadcast from the stage, waiting for a call to repel invaders. The drone of preacher like voices railing against evil and injustice and promising salvation. The TV voices buzzed across the night.

  The two women sat on the edge of a cot. A couple of volunteers sat behind the table handing out tablets to demonstrators who looked more in need of vitamin injections. Calvino waited until Tanny asked what she’d told him would be her first question: “What happened to make you give me away?”

  Mem shuddered at the words. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “It’s important that I know.”

  “You must hate me.”

  “Did you ever think about me? I mean afterward?”

  “Every day. It was all a mistake. It wasn’t my choice.”

  Tanny looked down, exhaled.

  “Can I tell you how it happened?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “My father was a senior government officer, conservative and strict. I have no doubt that he loved me as his daughter. But he was part of a government that we hated. I had just finished nursing school when Tee, my boyfriend, who was a young doctor, decided to fight in the jungle against the government. He asked me to go with him. My father refused permission for me to go. He said if I left without his permission, he would disown me. I left. The communists at that time occupied strongholds in many places in the south, north, and northeast. We took a bus to Chiang Rai province. I worked as a nurse and Tee worked as doctor. We worked side by side in a field hospital. Many times we operated by candlelight, listening to mortars rounds and M16s close by. Still, despite all the work and difficulty of living in the jungle, I got pregnant.”

  One of the women at the desk came back with a bottle of water for Mem. She filled three glasses and handed them out.

  “Tee?”

  “Yes. Your father was at first surprised.”

  “And then?”

  “I guess he was happy. Proud. The way men are when they make a woman pregnant.”

  “But not proud enough to raise me.”

  “Bum, it wasn’t his fault.”

  “It was your idea?”

  “After you were born, we were constantly on the move. We couldn’t live anywhere for more than a couple of days. The army was always close, tracking our movements, shelling us. One day a missionary came to our camp. He saw me nursing you. The fighting the day before had been particularly intense. Five of our comrades were killed on that day, when the missionary and a deputy nai amphur—he was a good man, someone who was, in his heart, on our side—slipped into our camp. He asked if I’d registered your birth. Of course he knew that had been impossible. But he said that he’d take care of it.”

  Mem didn’t know the English for nai amphur and turned to Calvino. “District officer.”

  “Thanit was his name, and he was a young graduate like us. Tee had known Thanit at university. It was funny seeing him in his uniform and us in dirty rags. How different our lives had turned out. Thanit had made some effort to find us. Looking back, I think he knew that we were about to be overrun and wanted to do something about the children. He’d been shocked to find us in our condition. There were other children, too. We decided to permit Thanit to evacuate the babies and children. That night they left the camp with you and the others. They thought we were sleeping. Thanit didn’t want the mothers to see their children leaving. But I watched them walk away, the big missionary from America carrying you in his arms. It broke my heart. Three days later the army raided our camp, and I escaped with four others. Everyone else was killed. The government listed me as one of those missing and presumed dead. My parents were notified. They thought I was dead, too. When a mortar round made a direct hit, there wasn’t much left to identify.”

  “Where was my father?”

  “Tee had gone ten kilometers north toward the border. The men had been in a firefight and were almost overrun. A patrol followed a couple of our men straight to the field hospital. Tee was operating inside the tent when government forces captured him. When I heard what had happened, I went into hiding. It took me three months before I got a message to my parents. I told them that you had gone with an American missionary to somewhere safe. But by the time they’d received the message, it was too late—you’d been adopted, bundled off to America for a new life. Your father had been interrogated for days by the military; he barely survived the beatings and torture. They threw him into prison and it was two years later that he found out what had happened to you. And to me. They’d told him that we had both been killed in an air raid. It was to break his spirit. But Tee never broke. After the amnesty Tee came home, and we had another child, another daughter, we called her Jeab.”

  “I have a sister?” asked Tanny, eyes blazing, reaching out and touching her mother’s face.

  “You had.” Mem’s lower lip quivered; she tried to speak but couldn’t. She raised her hand as if to stop Tanny from saying anything. “She was killed in 2003.”

  Tanny raised her hands to her face. “How did it happen?”

  “It was called the war against drugs. The police killed many people in 2003.”

  “Was Jeab involved with drugs?”

  “Never.” It was a fierce, clench-jawed answer. “At night, after Jeab was murdered, I told myself it was a blessing that you had been adopted out of this land. We have too much blood and tears and corruption. So stupid and senseless.”

  Calvino wondered if others around her knew about her background with the communists. “You might have a problem if people here knew about your past,” he said.

  Mem shook her head, reached for a tissue from the small table next to her cot, and blew her nose. “It’s okay. They know. It was a shock for some. One said I might be a spy. I said spies had better things to do than stitch up wounded demonstrators. Mostly my old comrades are on the other side. So they were right to be suspicious. But like in the jungle, practical things matter more than ideas. The leaders here have no experienced medical staff living inside the compound. And those staff who come during the day didn’t have battlefield experience, so they took a risk on me. Things were much better after the night we suffered our first casualties. I’d seen lots of wounds. But these weren’t combat wounds. What I saw was more like street fight damage—broken hands, noses, jaws. Nothing like what I had treated in the jungle.”

  Mem didn’t have to say it, but she knew exactly what was required, and worked without complaint, without sleep. She had earned their respect.

  “I don’t understand,” said Tanny. “It happened years ago. What can they do to help you?”

  Mem broke into a smile. “Bring me justice by punishing the person who murdered Jeab. That’s all I want.”

  “And they will do that?”

  She looked her daughter over, touched her face with the back of her hand. “It is the only way left.”

  “Go to the police.”

  “It was the police who killed her.”

  Calvino had been quietly listening. “And you’re sure that she was killed by the police?”

  “I am a combat nurse with field-hospital experience. I know how to field-dress most kinds of wounds—knife, shrapnel, gunshot—and I can tell you how far apart the shooter was from the target. I can tell if the shooter was higher or lower than the victim. I saw Jeab’s body after it was taken to the hospital. I personally examined her gunshot wounds. I’d seen it before—on the bodies of comrades executed on their knees. The bullets had been shot at an angle entering the skull from the top, and in my daughter’s case two of the bullets had gone through her hands, which had been cupped over her head.”

  That had answered his question and a couple he hadn’t asked. For Mem, joining the demonstration had a single purpose—bringing the killer of her dau
ghter to justice. The daughter had died in a political pogrom. It seemed natural to Mem that the new group of politicians might move against the old regime that had sponsored the war on drugs, and there was no better way, in her mind, to discredit the old politicians than arresting and trying one of the killers who’d done their dirty work.

  “And where is my father? Is he alive?”

  “Tee?” Mem’s smile faded into a bitter half grin. “After Jeab died, he left me for a younger woman. It’s not a new story. I know. It seems to happen to others, and then one day it happens to you.” It was a cliché, trite and empty as a wino’s bottle until you came face-to-face with the wino or the abandoned wife and saw up close the accumulated loss in their eyes.

  “Does he think people here can help you?”

  “I haven’t asked. We don’t talk. He has a new wife.”

  Calvino stretched out, looking at the growing line of people waiting to see Mem.

  “I’ve talked too much,” she said, nodding at Calvino.

  “This farang will think that I don’t love my country.”

  Calvino had long ago learned that no matter the personal horrors, indignities, or injustices, none of the suffering ever quite extinguished the Thais’ love and loyalty to their country. “You don’t need me hanging around,” he said. “Go on,” said Tanny, “I’ll be okay.”

  She’ll be safe, thought Calvino. Her mother would be more comfortable telling the domestic secrets without a farang listening, judging, and reporting what was said. Mem glanced up as a man crawled his way to the front of the line, holding up his wobbly wife, pale, eyes rolling, feeling nausea. Mem took one look at the woman, shining a flashlight into her eyes.

  “You’d better go with him,” she said, squeezing Tanny’s hand. “I have to work.”

  Calvino waited for Tanny to decide whether to stay with her mother.

  She squeezed her mother’s hand in return, eyes pleading.

  “I can stay and help. Please.”

  Mem said, “Tomorrow we can talk again. One thing. Do you have a picture of your son?”

  Mem’s curiosity about her grandson had gotten the best of her. Tanny took out the picture of Jeff and showed her mother. Mem admired the little boy in a white shirt grinning behind a hint of Asian eyes and a farang nose. With his father inside a federal prison, his mother at an illegal occupation of Government House in Thailand, the kid looked innocent, like all children who had no idea of the circumstances of their parents.

  Mem smiled, handing it back. “Keep it,” said Tanny.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jeff.”

  Mem said the name slowly, looking at the picture. “He’s very handsome.”

  Tanny thought about her son standing before his grandmother.

  Her mother smiled and reached out her hand.

  “I’ll be back,” said Tanny.

  Her mother nodded, receiving her daughter’s wai. Not even a rebel fighter would wish her daughter to abandon that gesture of respect, no matter that foreigners might label it as subjugation and an insult to the class struggle. Thai pragmatism never encountered an ideology that stripped it of the ancient gestures of respect giving. Finding her mother was the first piece of good luck that had come Tanny’s way in many years.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE LAWNS AND pavements inside Government House were wet and slick from the rain. Calvino thought about Thailand’s vast library, shelf after shelf stacked with millions of hard-luck stories—not that the Thais had a monopoly on the genre. People played their best hand, knowing they’d drawn a couple of deuces, and it had taken long for the slowest of the green players to find out that they held a doomed hand. If Mem’s father had had a famous family name, the cards would have dramatically improved. He’d have shuffled from the bottom of the deck to help his children, his relatives, his friends and neighbors. Some called the famous-name system karma—the good deeds from the last life earned a person birth into a privileged family—while others fled to fight in the jungles, figuring that karma was another delusion of the mighty worth fighting against.

  Some lives had an abundance of luck, others a steep trail of tears and sorrow on a march that offered no good ending. Mem had been seeking justice for Jeab’s death for years. As they walked out of Government House, Tanny said, “Will you help me find the man who killed my sister?”

  “How do you know it was a man?”

  “All the executioners are men. It’s what men do best.”

  “I just found your mother.” Mission creep was normal; this was mission gallop into the void. Calvino needed to decide whether looking for an upcountry cop who’d killed someone in the war against drugs was what he wanted chiseled on his tombstone. Helping to find Mem was one thing—he hadn’t found her, Ratana had that honor, and besides, he told himself that he had retired from investigations—but looking into a five-year-old murder that happened as part of the war on drugs wasn’t a different kettle of fish, it was an ocean patrolled by sharks.

  “Will you?” She pressed against him.

  Calvino’s law: Once a man slept with a woman, he opened himself to the existential question of all relationships—Will you help me?

  “I represent Brandon Sawyer. This could be a conflict of interest.”

  “You fired him. Remember, I was there when you threw him out of your office.”

  Of course she was right, he thought. That was the fallout from sleeping with an educated, smart woman. “But I’ve thrown him out before.”

  “That’s sick.”

  Finding people who didn’t want to be found, or who were lost, was much easier than being a referee between a couple of brothers who’d been trying to stab each other in the back since childhood because their mother hadn’t given them enough time or love.

  Calvino grinned. “That could be dangerous.”

  “If you’re afraid, I’ll find someone else.”

  “You’ve got to understand what you’re asking for.”

  “I know what I’m asking for. A man.”

  She pulled her hand out of his, turned, walked across the street, and got on the back of a motorcycle taxi. He watched as she struggled to communicate her hotel address to the driver. And he wondered if she had any idea how far they were from the hotel, and how the ride on the back of a motorcycle that distance would have her head spinning for days. She didn’t seem in any mood for his advice. After a moment the motorcycle left with Tanny on the back. She didn’t turn to look at him standing near the gate, hands in his pockets.

  What she needed wasn’t a private investigator—she needed a patron. A patron who came loaded with power and influence to shelter her as she sought information against people involved in the murder—and those people had their own network of patrons. It came down to whose patrons had more juice. Calvino might have been a lot of things, but he knew his limitations—he wasn’t in a position to be anyone’s patron. Digging into a murder carried out during the war on drugs could cause a problem for Pratt.

  The following morning Calvino waited until Ratana walked downstairs from the day-care center. After she settled at her desk, he withdrew the copy of Nueng’s photo and smoothed it out in front of her.

  “I found this posted at Government House,” he said.

  Ratana’s smile evaporated. She blinked back tears and turned away. She pulled out a handful of tissues, blew her nose, dabbed her eyes. Whatever had been written on the paper had been deeply troubling. “Do you know what this says? How could anyone do this?” Her voice broke. He almost never heard Ratana display anger.

  Calvino had given considerable thought to whether to show Ratana the poster. But he had his reasons. It was possible the police could be coming around asking questions, and Ratana needed to be prepared. “I’m sorry,” he said, as if the messenger were required to deliver an apology.

  “How many posters did they put up?”

  “I wasn’t really looking for them.”

  “You should have looked and torn them all
down.”

  “You want me to go back tomorrow and do that?”

  She shook her head. “No. If you did that, something bad might happen.”

  She had a good point. A farang ripping down posters would likely bring to life the black-shirted security guards, golf clubs swinging as they chased him through the grounds. It wasn’t an image he felt he wanted repeated outside his imagination.

  “So she’s banned from the grounds. What does she care? Yeah, she works at the massage parlor, but she’s not a prostitute,” Calvino said.

  “It says on the notice that they found condoms in her handbag and a business card from One Hand Clapping. But it’s not fair. Nueng went to Government House to meet her older sister. The sister works as a secretary for the railway. She came to Bangkok to support the demonstration. She used her own money. Nueng was proud of her. They planned to have dinner, and her sister asked her to come to Government House to meet her friends.”

  “Some friends.” He paused, sighing, shifting his feet. “It seems that Nueng didn’t tell you about her little problem at Government House.” The loss of face for her would have been so complete that no plastic surgeon would have been able to stitch it back onto her head.

  “She never complains,” said Ratana. “Nueng accepts too much.”

  Calvino thought about the sister walking into the grounds with posters of Nueng plastered everywhere, calling her baby sister a whore. Ratana ran out of the office and up the stairs, where she gathered Nueng’s little boy and her son in her arms and wept.

  The two sisters had planned on dinner. Nueng was a humble, friendly woman who had volunteered her time at the day-care even though it meant fewer customers at the massage parlor, and less money. If Nueng had any idea that Ratana knew about the poster, she would lose face. Once that happened, anything was possible from avoiding eye contact to replacing friendliness with a haunted, discouraged look—to something much worse.