The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  “I told you the Naxis were superstitious,” said Tagme in English, shaking his head. He conveniently left out the superstition of the Tibetans and Han Chinese.

  The old woman continued with her story. After Zhang’s birth, his father organized a birthing ritual with some shamans, one of whom was Tsier’s uncle, a man of great reputation for casting out devils, taming demons, and lifting curses. The dead baby was cremated and his ashes buried in a bronze urn. It was the location of the urn, the holding of the secret ceremony, along with her presence at the birth and ritual that she swore on pain of death never to reveal. It was said the spirit of the baby returned to haunt Zhang’s family twice a year.

  Calvino drove back with Tagme to his hotel in Lijiang.

  The ride had been mostly in silence. Tagme said he thought the old woman might be insane. Calvino shrugged, saying, “She looked sane.”

  “A Naxi trick played on foreigners.”

  Less than a week after meeting Tsier Qidgu, Calvino knew that the time to leave Yunnan had arrived when two uniformed police officers showed up unannounced. They approached him in the lobby of his hotel and asked for his papers. They looked over his passport, his visa, and the letter from the New York editor. They asked why he was so interested in Zhang’s personal life if he were writing a business article? And specifically they asked Calvino why he’d been asking about exotic new weapons. And what was he doing talking to an old Naxi witch about superstitions? Someone with certain skills must have turned the toothpick on Tagme to get the background for those questions. Calvino wasn’t allowed to leave his hotel until Kincaid’s editor confirmed his assignment. Then he was told he had to leave the country. At the airport, he saw Tagme hanging around.

  He was wearing his hat, sucking his teeth, the toothpick firmly in the side of his mouth. His head remained on his shoulders.

  FORTY-TWO

  CALVINO HAD TYPED all the names and addresses of everyone he’d interviewed and put them into a database. The JPEG of Zhang in suit and tie was open on his computer screen. Calvino took a large red apple from the wicker basket that Colonel Pratt and Manee had sent to welcome him back from New York. He re-read Manee’s handwritten note attached to the basket. He was glad to be home. He finished reading Manee’s words again. He understood how McPhail had felt about avoiding seeing Old George at the hospital. It was easier to avoid others than to avoid living with yourself. It sounded like one of Tagme’s slogans, he thought, looking for the whiskey bottle in the bottom drawer.

  He hadn’t been back in the office more than an hour before he told Ratana the truth. Then he phoned and told Pratt. “Glad that you’re safe,” said Colonel Pratt. Meaning he was happy that Calvino was still alive, and with the movement of events, no one talked about the van explosion or the three dead men or Wei Zhang. He didn’t want to talk over the phone about what Calvino had found in Yunnan.

  He didn’t say he was glad that Calvino was back.

  Calvino picked up the phone to call Scully. He bit into the apple, cradling the phone in the crook of his neck, waiting for Scully to answer his cell. Calvino left a voice message saying he was back in town and suggesting lunch sometime during the week. He put down the phone and rummaged through the basket of cookies and fruit. Manee’s note also said that she had made offerings at the wat for him, praying that his travels had fixed his broken heart. He thought about the people he’d met in Yunnan. They’d learned that despite suffering loss and pain, it did no one any good to whine to others. Everyone had a horror story to tell, every life had been shattered, glued back together, broken again.

  Going through his e-mails, he found one from Tanny. It was a couple of weeks old. She had written, “I hope that you understand, I had to do what was necessary. Family is everything to a Thai person. But you already know that.”

  She’d signed it “Love, Tanny.” She included a photograph of her son, with a big grin, eyes squinting against the sun. Also a second photograph, taken in the compound of Government House with her mother, both women wearing yellow headbands, smiling, and each with her arm wrapped around the waist of the other. At the end of her e-mail was her Skype address. Calvino re-read the e-mail as if searching for a clue as to her intentions for writing. He’d seen enough of the boy’s photo to understand what she had wanted and what he would have been unable to give to her.

  Calvino showed Ratana the note and photos as he told her that he’d had no intention of going to New York. He’d expected a negative reaction from Ratana. But rather than showing hostility for being deceived, she looked positively elated.

  “I thought you went to New York to be with Tanny. I assumed you would bring her back,” Ratana said. Her sense of relief was overwhelming, and for moment it looked like she would hug him, but instead she rewarded him with a smile and then went back to her desk.

  She looked up, still smiling. “I don’t think you’re over her.” Translation—shaving the truth was acceptable so long as potential rivals had not only gone from the front row of the picture but had been dumped from the frame. Calvino stood beside her desk, watching her type. His downcast expression was like that of a man who’d suffered a kind of honorable defeat.

  “There was nothing to get over,” he said. “Phit faa phit tua.” The lid doesn’t fit the pot. It was an old phrase referring to a mismatched relationship. “I liked the lid, but the lid didn’t like the pot.”

  Ratana smiled. She liked Calvino’s way of falling back on a Thai phrase to explain a romantic misadventure even when it wasn’t exactly the one she’d have used.

  Relationships, like cooking utensils, were things close to the Thai heart—the breakdown in a relationship found its place inside the vocabulary used for stuff inside the kitchen. Ratana had seen a long line of his women flash like fireflies into his life before disappearing into the night; none of them were the right fit for her boss.

  “Did you translate the Ministry of Commerce documents?”

  “I e-mailed you the file,” she said. “Kincaid phoned.

  His editor wants the story. He said you’d know what that meant.”

  That was the risk of a good cover story.

  He returned to his desk, clicked back on his in-box. He scrolled down and found Ratana’s. “Subject: shareholders and directors translated.”

  “What time is your meeting with Scott Baker?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Three in the afternoon.”

  “Your getting involved in food safety is great,” she said.

  “If our food isn’t safe, what is?” He thought about telling her he’d hired Scott Baker to go out to the two-thousand-rai plot that Achara and Brandon had developed for the genetically engineered rice to perform tests on the soil and water.

  “The food in China didn’t make me sick,” he said.

  She smiled. “Of course not. That problem with milk and candy was stupid. Something the foreign media blew up to make China look bad.”

  “Because they don’t like the Chinese competition,” said Calvino in a flat voice.

  “That’s correct.”

  “And the Chinese like competition?”

  Ratana sighed, her face clouded for a moment, and then she laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She looked over his shoulder, and Calvino turned in his chair, glancing out the window. A farang had tripped over a bicycle and fallen against three large trashcans, knocking them over, scattering the rubbish. He cursed and had trouble getting to his feet. The man was a morning drunk. Calvino pressed his hands against the window as he looked out and saw Bill from the Lonesome Hawk falling-down drunk in the rain. Seeing the state that Bill was in reminded Calvino that in Bangkok it was the wise man who never forgot the difference between falling into the gutter and a freefall into the abyss.

  Bill had built a firewall out of booze, one that promised to protect him against life’s despair and sorrows, but sometimes the wall collapsed and all that sorrow broke through like floodwaters threatening to drown him. No ma
tter how much he drank, he couldn’t stop the breach from catching him by surprise. He binge-drank when that happened.

  Ratana watched from the window above as Calvino helped Bill to his feet. The old man’s eyes, hollow and red, were empty except for the void of sadness.

  “Bill, where are you going?”

  “McPhail blames me for George’s photo falling off the wall.”

  “Don’t let him get to you.”

  His old face tensed, his mouth narrowed as if he might howl. “I only wanted to help.” Booze and self-pity filled Bill’s shot glass in equal amounts.

  Calvino guided Bill to the Honda and loaded him into the passenger side. He sat, arms folded like a scolded child, as they drove to Washington Square. When Calvino turned in to the parking space in front of the Lonesome Hawk, he opened his door. But Bill looked straight ahead. “Come inside, Bill.”

  “McPhail should know that I loved George,” Bill blubbered, wiping away tears and snot with his hand. “I’m a vet. Just like George was.”

  Calvino patted him on the shoulder. “Let me buy you a coffee.”

  “Buy me a drink.”

  “You’re already drunk.”

  “Not drunk enough.”

  Calvino understood what Bill meant. He’d heard it before. Drunks had no use for their sober self; better to bury it in liquor. Extinguish the memory of how it felt to be a sober man who’d reaped only failure. When Bill, like most drunks, said he wasn’t drunk enough, what he really meant to say was that his drinking masked the pain that came from the realization that despite all his sober ambitions and belief in hard work, his life had amounted to an unbroken string of peacetime failures. It had been easier being shot at during the war, expecting to die. Being a drunk was much harder, but it had one redeeming benefit: No one expected much from a drunk.

  After more encouragement that another drink was waiting for him inside the bar, Bill finally caved in and balanced himself on Calvino’s arm, climbed out of the car, and staggered into the Lonesome Hawk, where he flopped into the first empty booth. McPhail was standing on top of the table next to the Ghost Wall with a hammer and nails. Old George’s photo, in a new frame, leaned against the wall.

  “Hey, buddy, I didn’t expect to see you here,” said McPhail.

  Bill stared up at Old George’s photo and blubbered.

  “Bill, hand me a nail,” McPhail said. “Stop crying and make yourself useful.”

  “Go easy, Ed,” said Calvino. “Bill’s got the strange idea you blame him for the accident with George’s picture.”

  McPhail put down the hammer and climbed off the table. He hugged Bill and kissed his cheek. “You old fart. You’re more sensitive than a woman going through the change of life,” said McPhail.

  “You said I screwed up. That it was my fault.” The anguish of failure staring him in the face, Bill dropped his chin and shook his head. He drank long from his glass of gin and tonic.

  “Okay, I admit it. But I got it wrong, you old goat. Baby Cook says the meat loaf special made the hungry ghost angry. I told her to take the meat loaf off the menu. Problem solved. What else do you want, you old bucket of spent ammo?”

  “How about you buy me a drink.” Bill’s crooked grin reappeared, and he held up an empty glass the previous patron had left.

  “You wanna drink on my tab, then you’re gonna tell me how you and the other Rough Riders followed Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill.” McPhail snorted, lit a cigarette, and waited for Bill’s drink to arrive.

  “I’m old, but I ain’t that old.” Bill was coming around to the soldier self who clung on in the no-man’s-land as his sober and drunken selves slugged it out. “But I admit I don’t know too much.”

  McPhail exhaled from his cigarette. “So long as you remember your ATM card number, you don’t have to know very much else to live happily surrounded by things and whores.”

  The firewall was being rebuilt, word-by-word, one glance, and one gesture at a time. Calvino slipped out of the Lonesome Hawk, leaving McPhail and Bill to hang the newly-framed photo of Old George. All it needed was more alcohol, and it would hold until the next suicide bomber of sorrow slammed into it.

  FORTY-THREE

  SCOTT BAKER’S WHITE lab coat made him look like a young professor or a doctor. He had in front of him a tray of beakers, slotted in rows of three. He’d been expecting Calvino since three in the afternoon. It was after four by the time Calvino had been cleared through three levels of security before being admitted inside the lab and office at Science Park. All the doors needed a personal ID card to open. Calvino walked down the corridor, past offices and labs on the cutting edge of the development of new technology—solar power, hydro engines, genetic research, and DNA and blood-analysis research. A security guard knocked on a nondescript frosted-glass door—water treatment analysis systems read a small sign in a metal holder, reinforcing the transitory, anonymous feel of the complex. They called it an incubator facility. The companies were like eggs; some would hatch, others would die inside the shell. Choosing doors that could have been copied from public toilets in New York reinforced the impression of Darwinian competition. Most of the experiments would never produce a commercial result.

  Calvino liked the fact that there was no company name on the door. It fit his image of Scott Baker as a rebel, not so much without a cause but with no anchor, drifting in the commercial world to some distant shore that promised a better future. Like most idealists, Baker had a burning sense of mission. By middle age his mission would remain, but he’d likely be no closer to shore. He’d have the usual range of choices, disillusion, and drink or revenge and intrigue, or he could give up and sell out. As he approached the door, Calvino tried to guess what fate held in store for Baker.

  A lab assistant opened the door. She smiled as Calvino handed her his name card. He saw Scott Baker, his back to the door, sitting on a high stool, working at a long bench.

  “I have an appointment with Scott,” Calvino said.

  “Scott, Mr. Calvino’s here!” she shouted across the room.

  They were the only two people in the lab. “Would you like coffee?” she asked him.

  Calvino smiled. “Black. No sugar.”

  Scott Baker climbed off his stool, his hand extended as he approached Calvino. “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said.

  Calvino shrugged as if Baker hadn’t been in Thailand long enough to know that one hour late was being on time.

  “You mentioned you had something for me. Something that was going to make me happy,” he said. Anytime people told him they had something that was going to make him happy, it normally meant that it made them happy and he was expected to join in the celebration. It rarely worked out that way, except with a woman. He watched the lab assistant making him an instant coffee. She interrupted Baker to deliver the mug. Calvino took a sip and watched her settle into a chair behind a computer terminal. The sight of her made him happy.

  “Getting what you asked for makes most people happy,” said Baker.

  “I’m happy enough,” Calvino said. “And I rarely get what I ask for.”

  “I’ve got a report, and all the lab tests are attached,” he said.

  “Does this space belong to you?” asked Calvino.

  Baker stroked his reddish beard. “Not mine personally. It belongs to Friends of Natural Food. They’re based in Leicester. That’s England. East Midlands.”

  “The lab is a long way from England.”

  “Food from Thailand, especially rice, is shipped to England. I can’t think of a better place to have a lab.”

  Calvino, holding the coffee mug, followed Baker across the large, open space. Open but white. Everywhere. Scott lifted the tray of beakers and put them in a centrifuge, closed the door, and turned the machine on. Its low hum made the sound of a Tibetan mantra whispered in the wind. “You don’t want to know what’s in these,” he said, glancing at Calvino.

  “A whiskey mixer.”

  “It came from a klong.
It’s toxic.”

  “As you said, I don’t want to know.”

  “But this water is from a test paddy. It is perfectly drinkable.”

  “The English drink anything.”

  Baker cracked an ironic smile. “I’m saying that the problem is basically solved.” He pulled a file out of a filing cabinet and looked through it. “It’s a contract with EDragon (Siam). They’ve agreed with each of our conditions.

  And best of all, they’ve agreed to limit the first generation testing to less than fifty rai.” He handed the agreement to Calvino, who looked at the first page and then flipped to the last page. He wanted to know two pieces of information: The name of the two parties to the agreement and those who had signed on behalf of the companies listed on the first page. Wei Zhang’s name was on the signature page; it was clear and elegant and somehow disconnected from the indecipherable man. Beneath the signature line, Zhang’s name had been printed, eliminating any doubt he’d signed on the dotted line, and there was a signature by another company director—a Thai name that looked familiar.

  Calvino stared at the second name and signature for a moment before he recognized the surname.

  The director was a brother-in-law of General Suchart. Looking at the scribbled name, Calvino remembered the police general’s wife, whose spidery web of power affiliations made her the big cheese at the Government House nighttime meeting, and the way the fear caused the Thais to bend over backward to pay her deference. He’d been one of them, handing her a basket of fruit. Ratana had supplied a map showing the relationship of family names of the new shareholders and directors after the shares were transferred following Brandon’s death. The shareholders included nominees, four of which were other limited companies each holding ten shares, but the bulk of the shares were in the names of two individuals—Tamarine being one of them and her brother the other. They were both listed as members of the board of directors. It was public information—the one place to identify the masters of the universe, who inevitably were company directors. Ratana had spotted Tamarine and her brother’s names immediately on new E-Dragon (Siam) directors’ list.