The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  “I am a bad person,” she would say. “It’s my work that is a sin. They look down on me. But they have a right to do so. I hope that I’ve not hurt my sister. I didn’t mean to cause her a problem.”

  She might slit her wrists or take an overdose of sleeping pills. Or she might do nothing, because, like a slave who’d been trained to wear her chains without complaint, Nueng would have been taught to know her place and to stay away from decent people.

  TWENTY-THREE

  BRANDON SAWYER, ONCE he’d sobered up, bathed, and checked his e-mail, decided that he’d made a huge mistake. He phoned Calvino. His voice sounded mellow, contrite. “You’ve been drunk, Calvino. You know how things can get out of hand. Let’s forget the other day.” Calvino’s long sigh carried over the grid like a gust of mournful wind.

  “Okay, I’ll say it. I need your help, Vinny. I was an asshole. There. I said it. Now come out to my house and let’s get drunk.”

  Calvino sat alone in the office. Ratana was working upstairs at the day-care nursery looking after her boy and a ragtag jumble of snot-nosed kids whose mothers worked at One Hand Clapping and other hole-in-the-wall operations in the sub-soi. Tanny had gone back on her own to Government House to be with her mother. In a way she had become detached from Marshall Sawyer’s mission, and Calvino hadn’t decided whether that was a good result.

  Sometimes clients gave up, shrugged off a loss, and moved on. Sometimes it also happened to private investigators. At the other end of the phone, Brandon rattled ice cubes around the inside of his glass and barked for a maid to bring him a fresh drink. Calvino had nothing but Roman emperors on his desk; joining Brandon, kicking back, and forgetting about the rest of the day had a powerful attraction.

  “Let’s find a drink in town. On your tab.”

  “Thanks, Vinny. You won’t regret it.”

  “Yes, I will. But that’ll be tomorrow. And bring a replacement for my office bottle you drank dry.”

  “I only drank a quarter of it. Put four drinks on your next bill.”

  “Bring a bottle of Black or fuck you.”

  “Okay, okay. You got it, a bottle of Black. Anything else?” His voice, with an eager-to-please tone, remained unbroken by the demands.

  Calvino said nothing for a few seconds.

  “Well?” asked Brandon.

  “I’m still thinking.”

  Brandon groaned, smacked his lips.

  Calvino thought about asking him to make an appointment for another day. He was still sore at being accused of double-dealing. But it was an opportunity to find out what documents Tanny had handed over to Brandon. She’d been right about one thing: Brandon was the only person who would tell him what they were about. Also, this was Brandon’s lucky day, and if he were truly lucky, he might find a way to get his brother off his back so that he could resume watching his pool yings giggling and splashing as they clung to rubber rafts at the shallow end. “Bring a couple of Havana cigars,” said Calvino.

  “Roger that.”

  It was two in the afternoon when Calvino arrived at Brandon’s private club on the thirty-eighth floor of a domed steel-and-glass high-rise with sweeping views of the Chao Phraya from the bar, mid–Silom Road traffic moving like stoned ants escaping a hungry predator down below. Brandon had poached most of his pool yings from among the hostesses, who formed a long greeting line at the club’s entrance. Other club members despised Brandon for harvesting the newest, most beautiful recruits, and there had been a half-hearted movement to cancel his membership.

  “You should’ve come out to the house. All of them are going out on a tamboon.” The entire staff—gardener, driver, maids, and pool yings—had piled into a rented van and driven two hours to a wat upcountry in order to make merit, and afterward line up to ask one of the famous monks to tell their fortune. “The usual superstitious tree-hugging bullshit,” he said, finishing his drink.

  Calvino had seen the ritual before. Women sitting in a circle around a monk, his eyes closed, a sign that he was performing his mind meld with rocks and trees and the world of spirits, transporting his consciousness to a niche in nirvana where the holy shouted at clouds and danced barefoot on tall elephant grass. And for an additional twenty baht, a guru would wave his hand and pluck winning lottery numbers out of the cool blue sky.

  “It makes them happy,” said Calvino. “Relaxes them.”

  “The sad thing is, it takes so little to make them happy but so goddamn much to keep them at that level. You ever notice how they’re in a full-blown mania one minute, then you turn around to pour yourself a drink, and before you take a sip, they’ve flipped into a deep depression. That bored, glassy-eyed look—what’s it called?”

  “Catatonic,” said Calvino.

  “That’s the word. But what the fuck do I care? There’s always a chance that the new crop will be more stable.”

  Brandon’s eyes followed one of the new hostesses, who, having been briefed, steered clear of Brandon’s table. Brandon chewed a piece of ice, swallowed the fragments as sharp as blades but didn’t feel a thing.

  The truth was slowly dribbling out as Brandon drank. He’d been as lonely and restless as Calvino had been. The house empty, he’d probably phoned the top half of his drinking-buddy list before he got down to Calvino’s name. He reached into his bag and pulled out a one-liter bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and put it on the table in front of Calvino.

  “Sex with a strange woman is still the best deal in town,” Brandon said. “No history. A blank slate, and you can write whatever you want on it. She’s all mystery. No baggage. But that only works for the first time. The second time, you know what you’re getting. It’s a steep falloff by the third time. By the fourth time, she’s fucking you on her own script. Count on it.”

  Brandon was a little drunk, images and ideas bounced off the sides of his mind like mud bricks made with too much straw. Watching a barge on the river below, the new hostess hiding in the back, pretending to be invisible—Calvino understood the unwritten rule to never interrupt a drunk in the middle of a riff on the meaning of sex.

  “What is it between Marshall and you? Did you beat him up when you were kids?” asked Calvino, turning the bottle over in his hand to find out in which duty-free shop Brandon had bought it in Singapore.

  Brandon had now reached the cusp between drunk and too drunk to give him an honest answer. “He beat me up until I got bigger, and one day I kicked the shit out of him. You’d have thought it would have taught him a lesson. Changed the balance.”

  “But it didn’t. And he’s still doing it.”

  “Marshall has a Napoleon complex. He’s five-nine, and that makes him a midget in New York. He should be living in Thailand, where his height would make him the star guard on the Thai Olympic basketball team.”

  Calvino held up his glass as a waitress filled it with one of Brandon’s member bottles of single-malt whiskey.

  Brandon raised his glass for a toast. “To Marshall, the family’s little Napoleon, looking to take over Russia, China, and Thailand.” He drank, rattled ice around in his glass, and said, “It’s like he’s lost his mind but still has all his teeth. Marshall likes eating. Thinking only makes him paranoid. He shouldn’t attempt thinking.”

  “The state of emergency isn’t helping.” Calvino considered telling Brandon about going out to Government House, but it would only have fed his paranoia.

  “Everything connected to Thailand worries him. I told Marshall to forget about the politics. Business is like an ugly woman with a good heart. You gotta shut your eyes and think of that pure heart beating inside.”

  “Marshall wants you to sell out. How are you going to change his mind?” asked Calvino.

  “He hates controversy. He can’t handle it. The thing with the journalist getting whacked…well, it fucked him up. If Achara did it, then he had an excuse to pull the plug on the deal. When he couldn’t connect Achara to the murder, then he got the bright idea to jump on the corruption bandwagon. That’s nothing
but a smoke screen, though. You just figure out how to buy the bandwagon.”

  “Who’s behind the screen?”

  “Some people think that GM food causes infertility, turns babies into blind midgets, and curls their toes into claws. They’re crazy. But it doesn’t matter. For them there’s a tumor incubating inside every cup of rice. They think our company is part of a conspiracy to destroy the health of the Third World by making them eat genetically modified rice. They’ve written letters, sent e-mails. The government. Congressmen. Governors. Mayors. Newspaper editors. Any gasbag with a web site. Who haven’t they written? Fucking beats me.”

  A bottle of Scotch was opened, and Brandon mentioned that Marshall Sawyer had a larger problem. That caught Calvino’s attention.

  “Marshall’s a cover-your-ass kind of brother. He learned it at home. My mother admires that. It reminds her of what a mistake her own life has been.” He smiled, savoring the moment, his tongue darting into his glass. Then he smacked his lips and sighed. “Marshall’s gone overboard.” Brandon leaned across the table, his head only a couple of inches away from Calvino. He glanced around, as if anyone in the nearempty room were listening. “He’s digging for any excuse to sell the company. Going from one thing to the next. And he knows I ain’t gonna let him do it.”

  “Someone’s got to blink first,” said Calvino.

  Brandon nodded gravely. He clenched his pinkish fist around his glass, turning his knuckles the whitish yellow of chicken gristle. “I’m not worried. I’ve got my brother by the balls. And he knows it.”

  “Then squeeze,” said Calvino. “Or let go.”

  Brandon had given a revocable voting proxy of his shares in the company to his brother. With that proxy Marshall could pretty much control the company. What he said at board meetings wasn’t just listened to, it was the law. “My brother needs my shares if he wants to keep playing the hotshot. I told him to go along with my GM deal with Achara or—”

  “You’d revoke the proxy.”

  “You clever bastard. How did you ever guess that?”

  “Whiskey and luck.”

  “He knows I won’t sign the document his delivery girl delivered.”

  “Have you told him?”

  Brandon’s lip curled like a dog’s that was about to bark.

  “I told him.”

  It had started to make sense. Brandon had made a threat, and his brother, playing for time, had dispatched Tanny Craig to dig up dirt on Achara. The best she could find was the money for the ancestral temple. Marshall must have known that Brandon wasn’t going to back off just because his Chinese partner wanted to keep the souls of his dead ancestors from entering the bodies of his pet lions.

  “I said, ‘Marshall, maybe it’s time for me to go back on the board. With all the bad financial shit, why don’t I come home to New York and let’s go through all the books and deals and decide what needs to be sold off.’ ”

  “He didn’t take it well,” said Calvino.

  “He fucking freaked out. It was like holding a cat over a swimming pool.” His smile, menacing, had just enough of a whimsical element to throw his intentions into confusion. Brandon assumed that his brother was terrified that Brandon would tear up the proxy and return to New York. Calvino wondered if Brandon was overplaying his hand.

  “How much time did he give you to come around?” asked Calvino.

  Brandon reached across and slapped Calvino on the shoulder. “Wrong question, Calvino. It’s how long am I giving him? He’s got two more days.” He pulled one of the paper napkins from the table and tore it in half, then tore it again, stuffed the pieces into his clenched fist, blew on his fist, pulled out a whole and undamaged napkin.

  “Nice act, Brandon.”

  “Drunk or sober, there are certain things a man never forgets,” he said, smoothing the napkin out on the table and grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  “But I’m not the audience you need to work,” said Calvino.

  Brandon fingered the edges of the napkin. “You hit me pretty hard the other day.”

  “When I deliver a message I like to know it’s been received.”

  Calvino didn’t look away as Brandon stared at him.

  Violence, Calvino had learned, was never a matter of pride or swagger. A man carried the capacity of violence inside and released it only for a good reason—someone pushed you, you pushed back. It wasn’t something that he thought about; it was pure instinct. Push. Shove. Leave out the period between the two. There was never time for a pause. The grammar of violence turned on a verb. And he used only enough to get the job done.

  “Okay, I got the message,” Brandon added. “Happy? Have another drink. I liked what you said the other day.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “About keeping your agreements.”

  “A man’s only as good as his word. I told Marshall I had agreement with Achara. I quoted you about keeping agreements.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He accused me of trying to get him sent to prison.”

  Calvino held out his glass as Brandon refilled it with the expensive Scotch, the color of ripe oak timber. He drank from the glass and set it down on the mysteriously reconstituted napkin. Brandon had reached out and grabbed a passing hostess and pulled her onto his lap. He pinched her cheek. She tried to maintain her dignity, balanced on Brandon’s knee, as he wrapped his hands around her small waist. He bounced her on his knee, and she jerked up and down like she was riding a mechanical bull in a redneck bar.

  “I feel the urge for a little rodeo time,” Brandon said.

  “Some roping and bucking.”

  “There are two kind of cowboys,” said Calvino. “One rides hard and chews up the trail behind him. The other just gets himself chewed up.”

  The glint in Brandon’s eye made him look less like a cowboy than a circling shark. “I’m the kind of cowboy that will die with his boots standing straight up by the side of the bed.”

  Inside his jacket, Calvino’s cell phone rang. He answered it as Brandon kissed and pretended to bite the hostess’s neck.

  “Where are you?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino heard from Pratt’s tone that this wasn’t a call that had much to do with where he was. “What’s happening?”

  He watched Brandon as he spoke on the phone.

  “I’m at Khun Achara’s house. You’d better come out to meet me.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Brandon’s with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since two this afternoon.”

  “You’ve had a couple of drinks.”

  “That’s what retirees do in the afternoon.”

  “Achara’s dead. Don’t say anything to Brandon. Not before I can talk to him.”

  Calvino clocked the time, feeling sober all of a sudden.

  “When did it happen?”

  “We won’t know until forensics does some tests on what’s left.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “See you in an hour.” Colonel Pratt terminated the call.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ACHARA’S ESTATE SWARMED with cops and emergency service people. Calvino locked his car. He continued along the driveway past four police cars. An ambulance slowly backed over the lawn, stopping around the corner from the gate and out of sight of the drive. The rear door of the ambulance was open. An attendant stood beside it, earphones in his ears, smoking a cigarette and keeping time to the music with his foot. No one was inside the ambulance. Two uniformed cops approached Calvino, smelled the whiskey on his breath, and ordered him back to his car. Colonel Pratt, dressed in his brown police uniform, walked along the path, telling the cops to let the farang come through. They exchanged a look with each other, then with Colonel Pratt, and the Thai cops reverted to their default setting in such circumstances—they pretended that Calvino no longer existed, as if he’d evaporated like a puddle on a hot April afternoon.

  “W
hat happened to Achara?” asked Calvino.

  “We’re still trying to work it out.”

  “You said he was dead.”

  Colonel Pratt started to say something, but words failed him. “Have a look.”

  The roar from one of the lions made the cops jumpy. One cop’s hand automatically reached for his holstered handgun.

  Neither Calvino nor Pratt said anything as the lion roared again. The colonel exchanged a hard look with one of the cops, telling him to get more plastic bags, the large black ones that gardeners used to bundle up grass cuttings and leaves.

  They walked along the side of the mansion, keeping to the stone path that ran along the back, across the garden, through the ferns and the banana and coconut trees. They passed the tree where the green snake had almost fallen on Tanny. No snake eyes today, Calvino thought. Colonel Pratt entered first, through the two huge stone guardian lions, into the area behind the property where the lions were caged. Cops wearing surgical gloves combed the ground, putting bits of paper and scraps into large Ziploc bags. The ambulance attendants stood beside the cage. One leaned against a rake. The other hunched down next to the gurney, waiting.

  A dozen cops loitered outside the lions’ enclosure, covering their noses and mouths as they watched the lions and waited. A bellyful of death had made a couple of them sick. They vomited behind the banana trees. The sour stench from the retching and the stink of death thickened the air. Being good Buddhists, they had no desire to accumulate bad karma by shooting the lions. There was no good reason to do so. No ranking officer had given an order.

  “We’re waiting for the tranquilizer gun,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino nodded. “When I was here a few days ago, Achara’s vet had tranquilized them before treating them.”