“You killed him for his coin collection,” said the cop.
“Was Achara’s coin collection missing?” asked Calvino.
“You had a business conflict with Khun Achara,” said the cop, taking another tack.
“They’re fishing,” Calvino whispered loud enough for the translator to hear.
The translator shot Calvino a hostile look, the kind that says, you’ll pay a price. Calvino smiled and nodded.
Colonel Pratt had stayed away from the interrogation.
He’d told Calvino he wouldn’t attend. The Department of Special Investigations had been assigned to handle the case, and part of the reason Pratt thought this had happened was his friendship with Calvino. In normal circumstances the case would have gone to the Crime Suppression Department. And these cops turned up the heat, circling Brandon in the room, holstered guns brushing against his shoulder as they walked close to him.
Cops use intimidation because it works. It makes even the most smart-assed suspect sweat. And Brandon dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief, a large white billowy cotton rag that was soon drenched.
“You put him in the cage with the lions,” said the cop as if it were a matter of fact.
“Not that, no. I would kill another human being, but I am fucking afraid of lions. And I was with Mr. Calvino. Why don’t you ask him? He’s sitting here. That would clear up everything. Wouldn’t it?”
He sought reassurance from Calvino. “Can’t you say something?”
But Calvino understood that holding back played to Brandon’s ultimate interest: Walking out of the room and going home. Calvino shrugged. “The police will ask the questions they want. That’s how it works.” Then he repeated the same thing in Thai, not trusting the translator to butcher it into something like, “The police can do whatever they want with you. And there’s nothing you can do.”
It would have been true as statements go, but it wasn’t what he wanted the police to believe had come out of his mouth. For the next half hour, the interrogator asked Brandon about how he’d spent the afternoon on the day Achara died. The time he’d left his house, the route his driver had taken, whether they’d stopped, if he’d made any phone calls, the time he signed into the club, what he’d ordered, where he’d sat, and what he’d talked about with Vincent Calvino.
“Your brother in America didn’t like Khun Achara.” Brandon shrugged. “I don’t like my brother.”
“Blood is thicker than water.”
“People always say that. But when you’re thirsty, what do you drink? Water.”
“Mr. Calvino, you’ve lived in Thailand a long time. You know that if you lie today, this will be a big problem. Not just for you, but for your friends.”
He was threatening Colonel Pratt, dragging him into the equation.
“Check with the staff of Mr. Sawyer’s club. I signed in, and so did Mr. Sawyer.”
The cops huddled around the interrogator, a thick cloud of blue cigarette smoke hanging like a collective halo above their heads. “We will prepare something for Mr. Sawyer to sign.”
After Brandon heard the translation, he said, “I ain’t signing a fucking thing.”
“Mr. Sawyer will be pleased to sign the document,” said Calvino in Thai.
The translator shot him a dirty look. He flashed a winning smile. “I’d say that was a fair translation, wouldn’t you?”
The cops and the translator left the room, closing the door on Sawyer and Calvino.
“What did you tell them?” asked Brandon.
“You’d sign the document.”
“Shit, Calvino. In Thai?”
“They will do an English version. You sign that one.”
“What if it’s a confession to murder?”
“It won’t be.”
“How will I know?”
“Brandon, it’s gonna be in English. You can read English, can’t you?”
Brandon looked around the room. “You think it’s bugged?”
“Does a lion like fresh meat?”
An hour later the cops and the translator returned carrying papers. They had hammered out a statement in English and passed it to Brandon. “Sign here,” said the cop, handing him a pen.
“I want to read it,” said Brandon.
The cop’s face turned stormy, and he looked like he wanted to belt Brandon. “You think we make mistake?”
Calvino gestured before Brandon could reply. “Of course he doesn’t think there’s any mistake. He only wants to make certain nothing was left out.”
“That’s what I was going to say,” said Brandon.
Together they read through the three pages of typescript.
“Doesn’t anyone edit this shit?” asked Brandon.
Calvino kicked him under the table. It didn’t matter that every third word had a unique spelling and the grammar and syntax looked like they’d been boiled in a pressure cooker. Calvino asked the police for the Thai version. It was fished out of the file and slid over the top of the carved-up table. He would let Ratana and Colonel Pratt have a look later.
“Can Mr. Sawyer keep a copy of the statement?”
“No problem,” said the cop.
The English version had a slightly different take on what Brandon had said. “I scare of big lion. I no like. Big headache. I think I use gun much better. No bad ghost with gun. Murder like funny joke.” The last words were the translator at her artful best; the English translation was passed to Brandon, who broke out laughing. The statement read like English subtitles flashed under a Thai movie.
“I used to be funny,” he said. “But I was never that funny.”
Not that no, he wouldn’t kill another human being, but no, he was fucking afraid of lions. That was the statement in a nutshell, and Brandon Sawyer scribbled his signature at the bottom and slid it back across the table.
“Now sign the Thai version,” said the cop.
Calvino shook his head.
“He can’t sign what he can’t read. That’s why he signed the English version. Unless you’re unhappy with the translation?”
The cop pursed his lips, staring bullet holes into Calvino.
“Don’t leave Thailand,” he said.
“Either of you.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
THERE HAD BEEN a long, noisy line at the buffet. Throngs of journalists, NGOs, embassy people, narrowly avoided colliding as they wove in and out, carrying plates loaded high with pasta, chicken, rice, vegetables, dumplings, pork balls, and somtam. Some of the meat had been harvested from no apparent known species. Someone in the line mumbled, “Genetically altered rabbit.” Another replied, “Mutant cats.” The line was divided between those who giggled and those who took the comments as sober cultural observations.
Calvino and Tanny found themselves at a white-clothcovered table—a chrome stand held a piece of paper designating it as Number 9—within arm’s reach of the upright piano. Calvino hovered for a moment, looking around the room. The table had been booked under Achara’s name.
His friends had failed to show up, and Calvino inherited the table. If it had been a nightclub, Calvino could have turned his chair and played some Ray Charles—if only he’d learned to play the piano. He put his plate on the table and sat down. Tanny sat on the opposite side, her back to the head table and the stage. It was as if she were happy to avoid eye contact with Brandon Sawyer.
The head table, positioned near the stage—behind which hung a large blue banner announcing The Foreign Correspondents’ Club Of Thailand—was occupied by the panelists, club officials, and several journalists and VIPs. Calvino’s table, wedged like a bread stick between the head table and the piano, had a clear view of the stage. Brandon Sawyer sat a knife’s throw away. He leaned back in his chair and nodded at Calvino, pointing at Tanny and shaking his head. He’d fully recovered from the sweatdrenched ghostly figure who had left the interrogation room shaken. From where Calvino sat, he had a view through half-open blinds out the window overlooking the balcony. Smok
ers, the bored, the conspiratorial, and the depressed congregated on the balcony, watching the rain streak through the canyon of high-rises on Ploenchit Road.
Most of the tables at the club were filled. In the back were the bar and the pool table converted into a buffet table. Calvino recognized some of the faces among the crowd, and the odd tank commander assigned to protect Thai political operatives. The bar was randomly divided between the redwine drinkers and the serious drunks.
Brandon, who occupied a place at the speakers’ table, sat squeezed between the club vice president, a balding farang with a Lenin goatee, and a Thai newspaper journalist who never stopped smiling. Brandon worked his meaty fist around a whiskey glass and flexed his arm like the slide on a pump-action shotgun. The organizers had worked to isolate Brandon from the two other speakers, a member of the opposition and a green activist, both of whom avoided him. Every so often Brandon turned around in his seat, glanced across the room at Calvino, gestured at the other panelists, and rolled his eyes. Tanny caught his attention, and Brandon waved at her as if she were an old friend. She waved back before lowering her gaze and studying her plate. Maintaining contact with Brandon was tiring. He held up his glass like a quarterback making a Statue of Liberty fake, catching the attention of a waiter, which hadn’t been difficult, as Brandon had repeated the action several times in less than half an hour.
On the elevated platform was a long table with name cards that identified each member of the panel. Brandon Sawyer was on the far right; Virote, the opposition member of Parliament, in the center; and on the left the green activist, Scott Baker, slightly built, red-haired, with a well-kept short beard, gold-rimmed glasses like an investment banker’s, the classic eighteenth-century minor-royalty bone structure. Baker looked to be late thirties, early forties. A number of tables were filled with his friends and supporters.
“Brandon asked if you were going to take notes for his brother,” said Calvino.
“He’s a headcase,” Tanny replied.
Calvino thought the Thai police had reached a similar conclusion before cutting him loose.
“He plans not to sell the company,” said Calvino. “He told me that he has another Thai partner lined up. This one doesn’t keep lions.”
Tanny sighed, looking over the crowd. “To spite Marshall.”
“What if he thinks it’s a good opportunity?”
“Like a Somali pirate sizing up a passing freighter.”
“That’s capitalism.”
“What does he know about genetically engineered rice?”
“We’ll find out tonight.”
“Brandon may expose the company to bad publicity by doing this. He should have asked Marshall first. This is a not a small thing, Vincent.”
“We’re all looking for something,” said Calvino. “And when we find it, it’s not really what we thought it was going to be.”
Drawing no response, he ate in silence Tanny picked at her food without much appetite; her attention had been drawn to the framed photographs on the opposite wall, an exhibition of war and natural disaster—a wrinkled old Vietnamese woman; bleached human bones in the dirt; three wailing women, white paper masks hanging around their throats; a family standing in front of rubble that had been their house; a Chinese tank flying a red flag. The one she couldn’t take her eyes off showed a woman with red hair, mouth frozen in anguish, holding a framed photo of her smiling daughter—in front of a destroyed building. Calvino saw Tanny study the photo; lost in thought, her mind seem to float away. She was in the room but not in the room.
“You’ve been staring at that photograph. You must like it.”
She looked away, searching Calvino’s expression and trying to assess if he was being ironic. “Looking for one thing and finding another. Like when you were talking about finding my mother.”
Calvino speared a carrot with his fork. He figured that the mother had known “how things went” as well as anyone who had taken up arms against the government, had fought in the jungles, only to return to society and find that her daughter had vanished and to have the second one killed in a police ambush years later. “I was thinking about what your mother’s looking for at the demonstration.”
“Nothing will stop her from finding the men who killed my sister.”
“You inherited her fire. An emotion that can make you rich in one country can also get you killed in another.”
“My mother isn’t afraid of anyone.”
“She’s a brave woman.”
Tanny had something else on her mind. “Ratana keeps saying how easy it was for her to trace my mother. Maybe she thinks I didn’t try before. Which isn’t true.”
“She understands.”
“You told her?”
Calvino nodded. “Yeah, I told her.”
“I was going to, but …”
“You were afraid she wouldn’t believe you.”
“I never had any reason to question my parents,” she said.
Tanny’s adoptive parents had instilled in her their own version of how they came to adopt her, and it squared with what her real mother told her. The people she’d called Mom and Dad hadn’t lied to her about the circumstances; it was just that they didn’t have all the facts. Her American mother had said that Tanny’s natural parents had been killed in a firefight in the north of Thailand. Her mother had been a nurse, her father a doctor. And both had been killed in action when the military overran their position. They had adopted Tanny believing that she was an orphan, to give her a fair chance in life. She hadn’t searched for her Thai parents because it would have been pointless—she’d been told they were dead. Initially she thought that Calvino was wasting his time trying to track down two ghosts. But she let him try. She had nothing to lose—only a story to confirm.
“You’re the first man who didn’t ask me about my first name.”
Calvino tilted his head, smiled. “What’s with Tanny?”
“Tanny is my adopted mother’s family name. Craig comes from my father’s side. My mother said that made me special. If they’d adopted a boy, he’d have been Craig Tanny. Funny, isn’t it? How my parents decided on my name.”
“That’s a new one. It makes you special,” said Calvino.
Tanny Craig’s ambiguity was complete. She’d lost her birth identity and had received, like a heart transplant, a new one cobbled together from two American families. Her story confirmed one of Calvino’s laws: What may be a dinner-table anecdote for you can represent an entire life for someone else.
TWENTY-EIGHT
VIROTE, WHITE SHIRT and dark business suit, pushed back his reading glasses as he droned on about the importance of protecting people’s health, and launched into the government’s six-point program for national security. At just about point two into his lecture, even the wine drinkers at the bar switched to whiskey. Nothing he said had anything to do with the topic, but no one seemed to mind. The moderator pointed at his watch when Virote seemed stalled at point three and factions of drunks in the back openly threatened revolt. Virote wrapped up his little speech by saying he’d be happy to explain the remaining points during question time. The thought horrified the audience.
The next panelist, Thanom, whose catering experience at Government House, in a week, had qualified him as a food safety expert spoke next. He ended his speech by holding up and shaking a plastic hand clapper at the audience, and he appeared endlessly surprised when no one replied with a hand clapper.
By the time Scott Baker’s turn came, the moderator said, “We’re running late. Would you limit your remarks to ten minutes, Mr. Baker?”
Brandon Sawyer leaned forward, blew into the microphone. “He can use my time if he wants.”
The audience laughed.
“Free,” he whispered into the microphone, drawing more laughter.
Brandon’s presence had drawn cold stares earlier in the evening. But his showmanship was gradually winning over the audience, and the more popular Brandon became, the more emotional it
made Scott Baker. “You, sir, are a bioterrorist.”
“I ate the same thing as you tonight. Am I in trouble?”
Again the drunks at the back of the bar laughed the hardest, supporting the man they clearly embraced as a fellow reprobate. Calvino leaned forward over the table. “Brandon’s going to do stand-up. This should be interesting.”
Tanny shook her head, whispering, “Is he drunk?”
“I don’t have a baseline to answer that.”
“Look at him. You begin to understand why Marshall wants to sell the company,” she said.
The moderator raised his hand. “Scott, you’ve been involved as an activist against GMO for over ten years. Can you explain why the rice project planned by Mr. Sawyer’s company should cause us concern?”
Scott cleared his throat, glanced at his watch. “I’ll try,” he said.
Brandon mouthed at the audience, “I’ll try, if I can ever get this frog out of my throat—before I croak”
The bar had somehow organized into their laugh brigade. For people who lived exclusively on drink, they could be smug about food safety, thought it was a joke, seducing overworked sober people who were food-obsessed. These people didn’t eat food. So long as the booze wasn’t poisoned, they had no beef.
Baker waited for a break in the background chatter before leaping back in. “Excuse me. Consider this possibility: Someone injects a virus or an antibiotic-resistant gene into rice grown in Thailand? This becomes a public-health issue that we need to address. Is the political system strong enough against the large corporate giants who will exploit the relatively lax laws in Thailand?” He spoke like an Englishman who’d diverted his passion for sex and football into battling genetically engineered foods.
Like a cat tracking the movement of a bird, Scott pointed at Brandon as he continued his speech. “Your Defense Department is funding GM rice to make it a military-grade weapon system. Deliver infertility to a billion people. That’s the evil you represent.”
The Corruptionist Page 23