The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Once dinner was finished, Colonel Pratt and Calvino settled into the colonel’s study. The colonel shut the door, pulled his saxophone from its leather case, tilted his head, and slipped the strap over his neck. His tongue touched the rubber mouthpiece, his fingers pressing against the keys. He played for five minutes, taking a Miles Davis riff to another level of despair. The selection of Miles Davis hadn’t been random. Davis had been a heroin addict, and America’s own war on drugs claimed Davis and Charlie Parker and a stadium full of other jazz players. They hadn’t cleared the air about Calvino’s involvement in the death of Tanny’s sister and what it meant—everyone knew that Calvino was under his protection. Pratt found that his saxophone was the best way to put things right in the world, in a friendship, and in a heart filled with hurt.

  “We asked them your question, Vincent,” Colonel Pratt said, the saxophone resting on his lap.

  Calvino scratched his head and wondered aloud, “I guess someone on the staff must have heard Achara scream. You get eaten by two lions, you’re going to empty your lungs screaming in horror. A bloodcurdling scream like you hear in the movies. A bloodcurdling scream turns your guts with fear.”

  Calvino only needed a few words in Pratt’s study: “Did anyone hear a scream?”

  Colonel Pratt had carefully double-checked with the staff. “No one heard anything.”

  “There are two possibilities. Achara was either already dead or unconscious when he was dumped in with the lions,” said Calvino.

  The maid brought in a tray with two cups of black coffee. Only then did Colonel Pratt remove the strap from around his neck and tuck his saxophone back into the case. He sipped his coffee and waited until Calvino drank before picking up the conversation. “Maybe he had a heart attack,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Or a stroke.”

  “Or he committed suicide,” said Calvino, putting down the cup. “Fed himself to the lions.”

  “I’m trying to be open-minded, Vincent.”

  “Open-minded is good. But there’s a limit. We’ve got to think about how a man is torn apart by a lion and no one hears a sound. Achara was in good health. He didn’t seem depressed when I met him. And the way he was holding on to his business with Brandon Sawyer indicates he planned to be around in the future.”

  “We’re working on all theories.”

  “I didn’t like the look on the face of Achara’s gardener.”

  A rat-faced, grinning monkey looking for someone to turn his back before cleaning out his stash of bananas. “I got the feeling that he was holding back something.”

  “If people’s looks were evidence, policing would be a far simpler matter. All the ones who look guilty, you lock up. All those who look innocent, you let them walk.”

  The colonel had, in a way, summed up the prevailing system: It functioned mostly on appearance.

  Calvino checked his watch. “It’s getting late. Ratana needs to put John-John to bed.” He rose from his chair.

  “About the sister of that Craig woman. Be careful, Vincent.”

  It was as close to a warning as Calvino could ever remember hearing from Pratt. He thought it would have been familiar to the woman, who’d watched two men walk into the kitchen and shoot her mother dead. The colonel saw that New York look of mild amusement cross Calvino’s face, and he leaned forward, patting him on the shoulder.

  “You can go fast. Or slow. Ultimately you arrive, but one way takes a little longer. If that preserves harmony, we must take it, even though it may taste bitter in the back of the throat.”

  It wasn’t clear whether Pratt was talking about Achara or Tanny’s sister—he could have been talking about both of them. Calvino grinned.

  “Is your sax broken, or are you getting too old to play for more than five minutes?”

  The words about preserving the harmony reminded him of how Chinese in attitude Pratt was—the sax, the Shakespeare quotes, the time abroad, shaping Pratt’s way of understanding the world. How else could he understand it?

  The half wail, half moan of Charlie Parker poured out of the sax as Calvino leaned back, thinking about harmony. Jazz had it. But it meant something else in Asia. In the nineteenth century, the British businessmen making money in the drug trade had a realization: What can we build to speed up the transportation of all this great opium? Someone must’ve looked over his pint glass and said, “Train.” From that one word to a functioning railway, things moved incredibly fast.

  No one had bothered to ask the Chinese for permission to build a railway. The British had built a secret one. When the royal court found that a railroad had been covertly built, the Chinese bought the rail line from the British. The intention wasn’t to run it as a railroad; they bought it so they could tear down and destroy every engine and track, reducing the lot to scrap. Nothing left was recognizable as a train system. Harmony had been restored.

  That was Colonel Pratt’s slow march forward, sheltering in the past, moving cautiously ahead, suspicious of outsiders with new ideas threatening structure of life that had always been. Pratt escaped through his music and reading. Most had no avenue of escape; they were caught on one side or the other, and harmony a distant dream.

  The door to the study opened, and Manee peered in.

  The evening had ended, and it was time for Calvino to leave. There hadn’t been time to tell Pratt how Tanny’s mother had gotten it into her head that Jeff, her grandson, was the reincarnation of her murdered daughter. That association had made it personal for Tanny. And as Calvino left the colonel’s study, he found himself thinking of Tanny Craig and wishing she were waiting for him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ON FEBRUARY 12, 2003, forty-five-year-old Surachai, his younger brother Komchai, their sixty-two-year-old cousin Paskorn, and fifty-nine-year-old Sahit, who was the village head, traveled by truck in Phetchabun province after having gone to talk with officials at the district office. Two of the men had received notices to report to the authorities the previous day. The district head said they’d been invited to clear the air. One of the men drove while another sat in the passenger seat and the two other men sat on the bed of the truck. Eighteen kilometers from the turnoff to their village, all four men were found dead. The doors of the truck had been left open. The invitation was on Surachai’s body.

  Like all of the other bodies, Surachai’s had been dumped on the road. From the way the bodies had fallen, it looked as if they’d been lined up. One thing was for certain—the manner of their deaths. Each of the four had been shot, execution style, in the head. The guns had been close enough to their skin to leave powder burns. This happened on a public road during daylight hours. There had been witnesses who said they’d seen uniformed police kill the men. After a week, none of the witnesses could remember seeing anything. The family requested copies of the autopsy reports. They were informed the reports weren’t available.

  Ten days later the crime evidence disappeared, including the police notice that Surachai had been sent. Komchai and Paskorn had similar letters. The police said they’d checked, but couldn’t find who had issued the letters.

  After the tally of people killed in the war on drugs was announced, the polls showed that the shoot-to-kill policy enjoyed a high level of public support. One university poll reported that 92 percent of respondents backed the government’s approach.

  The police had invited Brandon Sawyer to appear for an interview in connection with Achara’s death. There were exactly two parts of this that Brandon didn’t like. First, starting with the invite: You were invited to birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, maybe, stretching it even to a policeman’s ball, but he’d never heard of anyone getting invited to a Thai police station because someone in uniform thought you might be worth knowing. Instead they invited you if they had a hunch that you had something to do with the murder of a business partner. Second was the interview bit: You were interviewed for a job, for a bank loan, or, if you were a celebrity, by journalists an
d broadcasters, but cops interrogated people because they were looking for clues or, better yet, a confession. They had means of persuasion not open to a bank officer trying to collect on a bad loan.

  “I’m topping up your retainer.” That was the first thing Calvino heard when he picked up the phone. The next thing was the faint splashing of the yings in the pool in the background.

  Calvino drew in a long breath. “What do you want?”

  “Have you opened your new office bottle?”

  Calvino had no intention of thanking him for the replacement bottle. “Why don’t you get in the pool and swim twenty laps and call me back.”

  “Hold on. Don’t hang up.” A frantic strain colored his throaty voice. “Okay, I’ve got an invitation.”

  “Brandon, tell me what the fuck this is about.”

  “The cops. They’ve invited me for an interview.”

  “You applying for a job?”

  “Vinny, I want you to go with me.”

  Calvino leaned back hard, his head banging against the headrest of his chair. He left his head there, rolling it from one side to the other, then leaned down and pulled out the office bottle and free-poured two fingers’ worth of Black into a water glass. He blasted it, hiccupping like he’d swallowed a grenade. He smacked his lips and blew air into the receiver.

  “They think I had something to do with Achara’s death.”

  “Did you?”

  “Are you fucking nuts?”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I loved the guy. Why would I kill him?”

  “When is the appointment?”

  “Then you’ll come with me?” asked Brandon. “It’s tomorrow at ten.”

  “I’m going to regret this.”

  “No, it’s an interview. I’ve been invited. What could go wrong?”

  Calvino met Brandon at a coffee shop in a shopping mall near the police department. Brandon unscrewed the cap of his hip flask and topped up his coffee.

  “You want a pull?” Brandon asked.

  Calvino shook his head.

  “You gotta be grateful living in a country where the politics gives you an ironclad reason to drink. By the way, you’re invited to hear me speak tonight at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I’m talking about our rice-growing project. Achara had planned to be on the panel. I’m a lastminute replacement. I’ve booked you a table. Bring a guest. I’ll need all the support I can get. That place is full of leftwingers who hate businessmen. What do you say?”

  “You’ve got more than your share of invitations. My advice is to concentrate on the one from the cops.”

  “They’re gonna waste my time, and for what?”

  “They’re going to ask you if you had any conflict with Achara.”

  “I loved him like a brother.”

  “Like Marshall loves you?”

  Brandon frowned. “I take your point. Brotherly love isn’t the way to go.”

  “When was the last time you saw Achara?”

  Brandon pulled a diary from his briefcase and flipped through the pages. “One week ago.” He looked up like a student who was expecting a gold star from the teacher.

  “Where did you meet?”

  “I went out to his place.”

  Calvino sighed. “You saw the lions?”

  “I’ve seen them many times. He called them his babies. They were the biggest goddamned lions I’d ever seen.”

  Brandon shivered, a gesture that reminded Calvino of Tanny’s reaction to the green snake.

  “What did you talk about?”

  Brandon gestured using both hands. “We talked about hiring a couple of experts to manage our project. He had a doctor from China who was interested. We went over the budget, the résumés, and the timeline. We discussed Marshall, and I told him not to worry. Marshall wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Any arguments about hiring the guy? Or about Marshall?”

  “None. That’s why I liked doing business with him. No bullshit.”

  “Who do you think killed him?”

  “Fucked if I know.”

  “You don’t want to say that to the cops.”

  “What should I say?”

  “You don’t know enough about his other business or personal relations to give an opinion.”

  Brandon finished the coffee and poured another two shots into the empty cup. “His death was a tragic accident, Vinny.” The way he delivered the verdict, Brandon almost sounded Thai.

  “The police may have reasons to think otherwise.”

  “I was at my club with you, getting drunk when it happened.”

  That was Brandon’s ace in the hole—during the time the lions had sent Achara to meet his ancient bloodline, Brandon had been in no shape to herd a couple of house cats to a litter box. In theory it was the game stopper, the point when the interrogation would end, but in Thailand every wealthy mastermind of a killing had an alibi, so it merely made the cops think there had been some good planning.

  Calvino leaned forward and stopped Brandon from pouring another shot. “In Thailand you only have to reenact the crime, not the alibi.”

  Three uniformed police officers were inside the interrogation room. The room was spartan—chipped paint, fluorescent lights, scuffed metal chairs, and a table with initials carved on the surface, plus a dragon and elephant. Maybe Brandon will carve a lion, thought Calvino. One of the uniforms, arms folded, stood beside the door, while another cop sat on the table, one foot planted on the floor, the other dangling as if ready to make a free kick. The third uniformed cop, who wore his sunglasses indoors—never a good sign—leaned against the wall smoking a cigarette, flicking the ash on the floor.

  The cop moved off the table, walked around it, and took a chair.

  “Sit down, Khun Brandon.”

  Still rattled, Brandon cleaned the ink from his finger pads as he lowered himself into the chair. It had been the only invitation he’d ever received where the host had fingerprinted and photographed him. Walking into the interrogation room, he winked at the translator, a young woman, who returned an icy stare, no hint of a smile. Hitting on a woman was an art—right place, right time. An interrogation room in the early afternoon violated both place and time.

  “This is my lawyer, Vincent Calvino.”

  Calvino wasn’t his lawyer, but let the phony introduction ride. He wasn’t even Brandon’s friend. Calvino had once been a lawyer. He had done a couple of criminal cases in New York. But that had been years ago. The interior of the room and the sight of the police had his heart galloping like a horse on steroids. Getting into a fight over his status in front of the cops would have caused complications. That didn’t stop Calvino from kicking Brandon under the table.

  “He can’t be your lawyer,” said the cop in Thai across the table. The translator explained to Brandon in English.

  “Why?” He waited for the translator to finish.

  The cop pointed at Calvino as if he were a heavily bruised mango in a wet market. “He’s not Thai.”

  Brandon waied the translator, who lifted her eyes from her notepad, stared at him as if she were looking at a pedophile farang, and brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes.

  He sheepishly grinned at her. “Tell him that Calvino’s my alibi, then. Or does an alibi have to be Thai, too?”

  The cop glared at him as the translator explained in Thai what Brandon had said. The failure of his irony had been obvious on the faces of the cops. That seemed to give the translator more satisfaction than it should have.

  “You had an argument with Achara,” the cop said in English.

  “If every argument turned into a fistfight, there’d be hundreds of millions of fights every day, and if every fistfight turned into a homicide, you’d get a million murders a day. In the real business world, people mainly argue. It ends there.”

  Calvino slowly closed his eyes. Everything he’d told Brandon had gone out the window. He was sparring with the police. That was a battle no one o
utside the movies ever won. The rule was, never talk to the police. Except that rule was difficult to keep in Thailand, where the police used all means to make a suspect talk. The preliminary fingerprinting and photo session had wound up Brandon; that was a part of the deal—humiliate the person in small ways, haul him into a small room crowded with cops, and watch him fall apart. Cops weren’t stupid. They knew how to break open someone like Brandon like a piñata and wait until all the secrets tumbled out.

  “Is that how your argument with Achara ended?”

  Brandon looked dazed. “I never said we had an argument.”

  “You said arguments turn into murder.”

  “I was making a joke.”

  “You think murder is a joke?” The cop had switched back into Thai. The technique of switching from Thai to English and back again sometimes worked to disorient the suspect. Brandon gestured for the translator to continue doing her job.

  Luckily, he’d been drinking with Calvino, pulling yings onto his lap during the time the murder had happened, or they might have thought he had something to do with Achara’s death. They were going through the motions because they had to, and nailing a farang for the murder would mean recognition, promotions, medals, and a sigh of relief that it hadn’t been a Thai who’d killed Achara. The translator said, “You kill because it’s funny?”

  Calvino shook his head. If translation were an art, this translator was a graffiti artist. Calvino leaned over and whispered to Brandon what the cop had asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Brandon. “Lions aren’t a joke. I hate big animals. Besides, I’m American. We love guns. We invented them. We use guns to kill. Not fucking lions. That’s just plain gross. I don’t care who you are. Only savages kill people with lions. Or Romans. I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life. Achara was my friend. One of the few friends I could ever count on. We both collected Thai coins. I sold him coins, and he sold coins to me. He knew everything about the history of Thai coins.”