The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Calvino stood the man he’d pulled from the van against the wall. He didn’t look like a member of the team from the hotel; they’d looked professional—buzz haircuts, late twenties, muscled, and dressed in tight-fitting black Tshirts and training pants. He remembered the men from the underground parking lot.

  “Who paid you to do this? Wei Zhang?”

  The man glared at him like a wounded animal. “Go home, farang.”

  “Tell me, you asshole.”

  The man reached behind his back and pulled out a large knife, the blade catching the light from the flame. But his body hadn’t fully recovered from the shock of the crash. He was unsteady on his feet, blinking away the blood that flowed from his scalp into his eyes.

  “Wait for me in the parking lot. That’s what you were told to do. Wei said make it look like an accident. He got his accident,” said Calvino.

  The man’s injuries and the heat of the fire worked to give Calvino a chance to use one of the muay Thai moves he’d seen at the kick-boxing joint in Washington Square. Calvino swung the heel of his right foot, smashing it into the man’s right knee, making him cry out as if he’d been shot, drop the knife, and collapse next to the wall. Another car came along the road, its lights shining on the burning van, the man still rocking back and forth against the wall of the condo and moaning. The car slowed, the driver rolled down his window. “You have accident? You need help?”

  “Yes, and yes,” said Calvino. He kicked the knife across the street, and continued, “Are you the one who killed Brandon?” The man spit blood, his eyes locked onto the ground. He slowly looked up, knowing that Calvino hadn’t finished with him. “Or were you the one who got to have the fun with the yings? You even filled the short-time room with confetti.” Calvino drove the toe of his shoe into the man’s leg.

  The man groaned in agony.

  “I’ll kick your ass over the Great Wall of China.” Calvino nodded toward the retaining wall across the street.

  “Go to hell,” he said to Calvino.

  “Your friend dies for Wei Zhang. Is that what you want?”

  In the glow of the fireworks, the man’s face was filled with hatred.

  Calvino threw the bag with the Taser into the trunk of his car. The first police car, blue light on the roof flashing, stopped, blocking the road, and called in for backup. “Two guys in the van didn’t make it,” said Calvino.

  “Make what?” asked the cop.

  “The team. They got cut. They’re dead. And this one, he got out just in time.”

  The cop began to write Calvino a ticket because his car was illegally parked in the wrong lane and, along with the van, was blocking traffic. He gave Calvino every chance to settle the ticket. But Calvino insisted that he preferred to pay it at the station. The cop frowned and shook his head, thinking the farang was stupid or crazy. As an ambulance came, along with a body snatcher’s pickup to collect the dead, Calvino phoned Colonel Pratt and said he’d been in a little accident.

  “The cop’s deciding whether to throw me in jail or write me a ticket for blocking the road.”

  “Give him your phone.”

  Calvino held out his phone. “Someone other than your wife is about to change your day.” The cop looked at the phone as if it were radioactive. “The colonel wants to talk to you.”

  The cop slowly put the phone to his ear, taking a long, hard look at Calvino. The anger drained from his face after a couple of minutes.

  By the time the cop handed Calvino back his phone, he’d torn up the ticket and thrown the scraps into the flames. In the meantime the fire brigade arrived, and the firefighters were hooking up a hose as smoke curled from the wrecked van.

  “Pratt, the van crossed the lane at the T-junction—that blind corner near my condo? The van shot into my lane, lights off. The three men inside were dressed for combat. It was a setup. The guy I pulled out of the van isn’t talking about who sent them. Maybe you can get something out of him. Take him to a quiet place and ask him in that special way that makes not talking a bad option.”

  “Go home, Vincent. I’ll handle it,” said Colonel Pratt. It was a variation of what the survivor of the wreck had said.

  A half dozen cops, their cars jamming the road, milled around the wreckage. As a fireworks show, the scene had become something of a letdown. The cops inhaled the smell of gunpowder, an ancient Chinese invention, which swept down the street.

  None of the cops interfered with Calvino as he crossed the road to his car and drove the five hundred meters to his condo. Why hadn’t one of them made an attempt to stop him? He’d just emerged from a major road accident, leaving behind two dead men in black tracksuits, another near-dead commando wannabe, and a black van that had lit up the sky.

  The problem was, no one could ever trust a cop, know who was a cop or who was an ex-cop working for a politician. Colonel Pratt understood that the line between criminal and humanitarian sometimes blurred. From the description of the scene from the cop at the scene, he’d made a field judgment that Calvino was on the wrong side of someone who had sent in his own private militia to eliminate the problem.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  CALVINO PARKED ON the third floor of the condoparking garage, sat forward, leaning over his steering wheel. He got out and opened the trunk, reached inside for the bag, and pulled out the Taser. He examined it, put it back, picked up the bag, and closed the trunk. He preferred his .38 police special. Zhang would know where he lived, thought Calvino. Had news gotten back to Zhang that his boys had caused some fireworks on Sukhumvit Road? Calvino thought how the cops had stood in several small groups across the street near the blind corner. They had no idea he’d taken the Taser from the van.

  Closing the front door to his condo, Calvino flipped the dead bolt, switched on the lights, and examined the weapon in the front hall. A cartridge was loaded and ready to fire. He walked into the guest bedroom, switched on the light, looked around the room for a target. Fluffing a couple of pillows together, he set them on the bed like a headrest. He walked back a couple of feet, aimed, and fired. The probes slammed into the pillows, and dozens of tiny strips of confetti scattered across the room, floating like a mist, landing on the king-size bed, the parquet floor, dusting a couple of surreal paintings of twisted masklike faces, and leaving a residue on a chrome chair with a red cushion attached. Calvino rummaged in a drawer until he found a jeweler’s loupe. He put a piece of the confetti under the loupe and wrote down what looked like a serial number. He phoned Mike Scully.

  Scully picked up after the sixth ring. “Whoever the fuck you are, do you know what time it is?”

  “It’s Calvino. I’ve got a serial number I want you to check out with your FBI friends and see if it turns up in their database.”

  Scully backpedaled once he knew who was on the other end. Calvino could hear his wife complaining. But Scully ignored her as if he’d thrown a blanket over a caged parrot.

  “It’s midday in Washington,” said Calvino.

  “I hear you,” Scully said, his wife screaming in the background.

  “Scully, it’s a good time to make that call, and I’d like the information sooner rather than later. See you at the Lonesome Hawk for lunch tomorrow at noon.”

  Calvino hung up as Scully’s wife ranted about “this little job is not little, only the money is little, and the risk,” and listened to the peaceful silence of his bedroom. The fact was, Scully had contacts, but he’d qualified them as “not magical sorcerers who could conjure information from thin air,” and Calvino had shrugged. Just get them off their asses to check the serial number and see if they can trace the origin of the knockoff Taser he’d taken from the van.

  Calvino had heard Scully’s cover-your-ass excuses—in that department there was no separation from his personal and professional lives—which was why he’d given Scully one grand up front. Money stopped an excuse train from getting up a head of steam and pulling out of the station.

  He put the Taser back into the bag and store
d it on the upper shelf of a closet. When Colonel Pratt arrived half an hour later, Calvino was in the sitting room logged on to a Web site that sold Tasers. He was reading about the standard specifications when the colonel took a seat.

  “It’s taken care of,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino nodded. “Pratt, it’s like Whack-A-Mole. You knock off one and three more pop up.”

  “This time all three were taken out,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Before Calvino could answer, the doorbell rang. He looked at the colonel and shrugged. “I’ll get it,” said Calvino. He picked up his .38 from the bedroom, crossed back through the dining area, and squinted through the peephole. Siriporn stood outside, smiling and dressed like a movie star hitting the marks for her big scene.

  He opened the door and pulled her inside, looked up and down the hall. “I tried to call you many times,” she said.

  “Where have you been? And why are you holding a gun?”

  “Shooting the breeze,” he said. Behind her the elevator pinged, the pneumatic doors opened. Calvino closed the door, leaving only a crack so he could watch if there was someone following from the elevator. There was no one else.

  He holstered his .38. Siriporn stole a quick glance inside the hallway, checking to see if another woman might be behind him. She half expected to find “that Craig woman,” as she called her. Instead she stood eye to eye with a Thai police colonel who had appeared behind Calvino. Siriporn smiled, looking half relieved.

  “You make me nervous,” she said, looking at the colonel.

  “Guns make me nervous.”

  “That’s the main purpose of a gun.” Calvino looked over his shoulder at Pratt.

  “Colonel Prachai, this is Khun Siriporn.”

  She waied the colonel, glanced back at Calvino, and said, “You’ll phone me tomorrow morning, there is a company I have been researching for you. I want to give you the information.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Calvino.

  She left Colonel Pratt and Calvino standing in the doorway.

  The entry hall smelled of Siriporn’s perfume, sweet and soft like a spring day with the flowers in bloom. Except it was night and a couple of men had just been killed. Calvino and Pratt walked to the window overlooking the scene of the explosion. The fireworks had ended; the emergency vehicles and police cars had left. The street was again dark and wet in the rain. Calvino left Pratt brooding and staring into the darkness. He went into the kitchen and poured the colonel a glass of water and filled another glass with two fingers of single-malt. He returned with the two glasses, handing the water to Pratt.

  “I can’t decide if your timing is either very good or very bad,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Tonight it’s been both.”

  “Who’s the woman? Was she in the car when all this happened?”

  “She’s my stockbroker. It’s desperate times in the markets.

  Brokers are making late-night house calls.”

  “None of this is funny, Vincent. You left quite a mess tonight.”

  “You should be talking to the person who made the mess.”

  Colonel Pratt stared down at the street below before slowly removing documents from his briefcase. “There is a statement you need to sign.” Pratt handed him a densely typed three-page statement written in Thai.

  “What’s it say?”

  “That you witnessed an accident in which three men were killed.”

  “There’s a slight problem. First, two men were killed,” said Calvino. “And it wasn’t an accident.”

  Colonel Pratt handed Calvino a pen. “Three men died,” he said. “And it’s best for all concerned, at this point, to keep what happened as an accident.”

  It didn’t sound like Pratt.

  “You’ve got orders from someone high up. Or you’ve forgotten what an accident looks like.”

  “You said on the phone that you’d been in an accident.”

  The colonel had a point. The crash had been set up to look like an accident. The plan had been for the van to crash into Calvino’s Honda, for one of the men to jump out and zap Calvino with a lethal Taser blast, for the police to write it up as a fatal crash. It would have been no one’s fault; he’d be written off as one more victim of Third World road design and feudally inspired driving practices. Only it hadn’t turned out that way. To stay with the accident scenario required a little rewriting of the script.

  “They wanted it to look like an accident. But that doesn’t mean it was one.” Appearance meant everything. If it looked like an accident, then that was the end of the matter.

  Powerful people had the means to reward cooperation and punish disobedience. Mostly, Colonel Pratt found a middle way to keep his job, and cooperated only in those cases where he hadn’t needed to wrinkle up his nose and turn away from a bad smell. The fragrance of this incident had entered his nose and lingered. Calvino had the choice to go along with the story or come up with a different version from that of everyone in authority who’d been on the scene. He looked up from the report Colonel Pratt had asked him to sign.

  “One of the men in the van still had some fight in him when I left.”

  “Sign it, Vincent. Or not. But it’s up to you. I can’t make you.”

  “You’ve got someone pushing you hard, Pratt.”

  “Don’t know about that. That curve is dangerous. You’ve said so yourself.”

  “Accident.” Calvino nodded and leaned forward and signed the document; he understood that the man he’d pulled out of the van hadn’t succumbed to the kick in the shin he’d administered. Someone had helped him into the next life.

  Calvino handed Pratt the signed document. He thought about how someone had gone to the trouble of finishing off the sole survivor. And that was a succinct message intended for Colonel Pratt and for Calvino to think about. Someone had decided that it was better if no one from the van walked away from the scene of the accident. It was far safer in the long run to keep matters simple and neat. Things had gradually started to make sense to Calvino—why no one had questioned letting him leave the scene. Colonel Pratt was asking him to sign a document that he’d witnessed the accident involving three dead men and had tried to save them but failed. It also explained the absence of an English translation of the document.

  “What happened to the Chinese guy I pulled out of the van?” asked Calvino, having a good idea of the answer. In the land of delusion and self-deception, the act of committing perjury had little meaning.

  Colonel Pratt folded the document and put it in his briefcase. “ ‘Men were deceivers ever; one foot in sea, and one on shore, to one thing constant never.’ ”

  “Since when did Shakespeare become a Thai cop’s best friend?” asked Calvino.

  “It’s time you traveled outside the country,” said Colonel Pratt. “Tonight luck was on your side. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

  “Google Wei Zhang and look for the article about him in Macao. There’s a picture of him with a couple of Thai big shots sitting around a table. You might recognize the men. What kind of influence do you think Zhang has?” asked Calvino.

  “Our world is suspended in the air, Vincent. Influence, power, arrangements that have stood the test of time are all being questioned,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “And friendship. Is that also up in the air?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if that were true. I’m speaking as your friend. Have I ever said to you, ‘Leave. It’s too dangerous. I can’t control the situation. I can’t protect you?’ The answer is no. But there are limits to what I can do. You are looking to your world for answers. In that world, evidence and facts are used to solve problems in a different way. The world here has its own way, and you have to accept that. So yes, I am saying, for your own good, leave for a couple of months. The travel would do you good. Given a little time and things will have been resolved one way or the other. ”

  Colonel Pratt sipped his water, walked over to the window, and looked out at the city in the
distance. The lights still burned in the string of high-rises circling Sukhumvit Road like a necklace of pointy teeth.

  “Pratt, don’t take this personally. But I’m planning to stay.”

  Pratt nodded. “You do what you wish, Vincent.”

  “Aren’t Ratana and I invited to dinner this weekend? Or do you wanna cancel?”

  The colonel smiled, put a hand on Calvino’s shoulder. “Please come to dinner.”

  After Colonel Pratt left, Calvino called Siriporn and, with more velocity than a bull market, she walked into his bedroom. She removed her watch and her bracelet before slipping her dress over her head. Underneath, her naked body caught the lights from the street below. “I knew you’d call,” she said with confidence.

  She knelt forward on the bed and kissed him. He wondered if a curious tongue was a requirement for being a good broker. He hoped so, since she was also advising him on investing his money. Siriporn softly stroked a couple of blotchy bruises on his shoulder. “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “You should’ve seen the other guy,” he said.

  “You were in a fight?”

  “An accident.”

  “Serious?”

  “It depends who you ask.”

  “I am asking you,” she said.

  He smiled. “It set off some fireworks.”

  And she smiled back at him as he leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead.

  Later, as he lay in bed and looked out the window, with Siriporn curled up beside him holding a pillow against her stomach, he thought about Achara and Brandon and Zhang. Two of them were dead. And that included his last paying client, a farang who’d had the courage to keep going ahead after the death of his Thai business partner. Brandon had no longer looked happy; he must have had some suspicion that he wasn’t safe. Someone had gone into that shorttime room and shot him with the Taser, and in that instant everything would have become clear, the illusions and delusions exploded with the load of confetti from the Taser cartridge scattered across the bed and the floor.