The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  When Calvino tried to open the first folder, he got a prompt for a password. He typed in Siriporn’s name, the name of her company, the condominium, his own name.

  If she had encrypted it, he figured no matter how many random attempts he made to guess it, he was doomed to fail. But private eyes knew a thing or two about human nature. Such as how most people stored their passwords.

  They created a file called “password.” A simple search for a file using that word usually did the trick. No matter that the IT department sent around endless warnings about password security, people being people, they found it hard to resist the convenience. He found her password: “OneLoveSweet” was inside an unencrypted file labeled “password.”

  He read for several hours, taking notes as he scoured her memos, charts, graphs, reports, and Excel files. When Calvino turned around and looked out at the lake, it was late afternoon and the sun had broken through the clouds, gilding the gunbarrel color of the water with a skin of soft light skidding across the surface. In the kitchen he poured a shot of singlemalt into a glass and walked over to the window, sipping the Scotch and watching the lake and the traffic below. Siriporn had assembled all the pieces. It wasn’t clear whether she had fitted them into the pattern that Calvino saw as clearly as he saw the sun on the water. Zhang had established a network of officials, politicians, military and police brass. The builders of the black house—but not just construction workers, who would leave the premises, these people would also be co-inhabitants. As shareholders and directors, through a web of nominees—Siriporn had found and recorded the links—the companies would acquire licenses and permits for agriculture, weapons, mining, banking, airlines, casinos, land development. All the activity would occur offstage, inside the black house, a space with no windows, the doors locked, and Zhang held the master key. All he had to do was fund the election of his police general and his political party. The party promising democracy, a fresh start, and a break with the past—they had already worked out the talking points and the general’s charismatic warrior image, the strong but fair man who would appeal to the upcountry voters who would sweep him to power. Calvino sat back, wondering whether Siriporn had seen Zhang’s finished product from the blueprint she’d stitched together.

  He checked the time. It was mid-morning in New York. Time to make that call he’d been putting off. He pulled up the menu for Siriporn’s Skype account and typed in Tanny Craig’s name. He dialed, and a moment later Tanny’s face filled the computer screen.

  “Using your girlfriend’s computer,” she said, smiling.

  “She’s dead.”

  That wiped the smile off the screen. Tanny’s face contorted. “What do you mean, dead?”

  “As in killed by Wei Zhang.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. He doesn’t even know her.”

  Calvino hadn’t intended to start the conversation with an argument about Zhang’s prior knowledge of Siriporn. But sometimes there was no control over the direction of words uttered by people who had so much to say to one another and no clue about where to start. “I read your e-mail.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk before I left.”

  He waited for a beat, studying her face on the screen. She had her hair tied back and sat in an office chair. There were books on a shelf behind her. A diploma framed on the wall. A framed photograph of her and her son was on her right. Jeff, that was her kid’s name, thought Calvino. And a yellow hand clapper she’d taken back home from the demonstration. “The way that you left didn’t leave much to talk about.”

  “You’re not that different from Wei Zhang,” she said.

  “Like Wei, you believe deeply that what you do is right.

  Most men don’t. Doubt cuts them down.”

  “Seems that you got to know Zhang better than you did me.”

  “All men hide things from women.”

  She’d pried Calvino open like an oyster, one that felt the knife slide along the rim of the shell, cutting the muscles, but was powerless to pull away. “You could teach me a thing or two about sleight of hand.”

  When Siriporn had returned to search for her lost earring, Tanny had seen a crack in his world open. Siriporn’s attempt to assert control over his space had him edgy. But maybe her return to his condo had nothing to do with control. It happened that people forgot things. They were easily distracted. In reality most people drifted through each day with only a sketchy plan, relying on half-baked reasons and assumptions, lurching from one lapse of memory or judgment to the next.

  Tanny said, “You don’t like it when a woman challenges your space. Arrives unannounced in your little kingdom. It’s your secret fear. One that Siriporn didn’t understand.”

  “What’s your secret fear?”

  “Being abandoned.”

  Two words bundled a lifetime of terror.

  “How does that explain Zhang?”

  “You were the one who said you couldn’t help me. I needed a patron.”

  “You’re saying I abandoned you?”

  She shook her head. “I had no choice but to help my mother.”

  “Signing on as a shareholder and director of Thai companies was to help your mother?”

  “It’s public record. I knew you’d find out.”

  “But you didn’t care.”

  “Vinny, there are levels of caring. Men don’t understand. Caring isn’t all one neat thing on one plateau. Choices are hard to make. But when it comes to helping her mother, every woman is clear about the choice.”

  “Even if it means betraying someone else who cares about you?”

  She stared at the camera. “All you had to do was tell Brandon to sign the documents.”

  “He never would have signed. You knew that. So did Marshall.”

  “He was a hopeless drunk. But he listened to you.”

  In a lucid moment, Brandon had once said that it was easier to cure a man of his addiction to drugs and alcohol than to wean him off stereotypes. Brandon listened to no one.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  The request made her blink, move closer to her desk, as if pressing her face closer to his. “What kind of help?”

  “Does Zhang still go to Veera to have his fortune told?”

  Tanny laughed, covered her mouth with both hands, and sat back in her seat. “Is that why you phoned?”

  “I phoned because I can’t seem to get you out of my thoughts. And I don’t know why that is. I thought you might have an answer.”

  Her laughter stopped. All lives were scrap heaps composed of a paste-up job of messy details. Only a fool believed he could clean up the mess in his own life by finding the right broom. Only a saint would have enough faith to try to clean the debris of someone else’s life with his bare hands. But before the screen went blank, she gave him a name, one that he’d heard before. “He’s close to Ajarn Veera if that’s what you are asking.”

  That was what he’d been asking and now he had his answer.

  Around two in the morning, Ratana had gone downstairs to One Hand Clapping, woken up Nueng, and borrowed her ID card—no questions asked or answered. Nueng handed it over and went upstairs to look after the children. Ratana unlocked her silver BMW and backed out of the sub-soi onto Soi 33. The street was quiet. The usual service-car touts were absent from their squatting places near the mouth of the soi. She stopped at Villa, a twenty-four-hour expat supermarket, and bought groceries for Calvino. Then she drove a kilometer and a half to Calvino’s building.

  She pulled to a stop at the security gate and waited for a guard to approach as she rolled down the window. She flashed Nueng’s ID card, saying she was booked to see a farang on the fourteenth floor. The guard looked at the BMW—the brand and model of the car broadcast that she had money. Women with money were always let inside the velvet rope wherever they went. Using the farang’s name she intended to visit made it all the easier on the guard. She remembered the name Justin from the chattering heads in the front office
who passed the time gossiping about the sex lives of foreigners living in the building. One lived on the fourteenth floor. She’d been in the office settling up Calvino’s water bill. She paid it and listened to the stories about Mr. Justin. His name worked like a charm at three in the morning. Ratana assumed that someone was watching the building and had greased palms for any information about anyone who arrived asking for Calvino. They wouldn’t have been looking for Justin.

  Ratana slipped her car into Calvino’s parking spot and sat behind the wheel, her heart pounding. She marveled at how much working for Calvino over the years had changed her—from a conservative middle-class Bangkok woman into one who borrowed a massage woman’s ID card to pass herself off as a hooker to gain access. Working for Calvino had changed her in ways that made her understand the woman she’d become. She found her own way of handling a sudden snap of terror, by not giving into the impulse to panic. The way forward in an emergency situation was one step at a time, keeping the overriding fear in check, guarding against a reaction caused by surprise. From her years of working as Calvino’s secretary, she’d learned certain skills from him, and they’d come in handy this evening.

  She had just heard from Manee that Pratt had been shot. She’d cried, dried her eyes, only to start crying again. She told herself that controlling her emotions was important, because she didn’t want Calvino to see her falling apart as she delivered the news about Pratt. Manee said it was bad but that Pratt probably would make it. Manee and the kids were at the hospital. Ratana thought of them standing around Pratt’s bed, and she started to weep again. This was not good. She couldn’t get out of the car looking like a nervous wreck. People remembered crying women. The image stuck in their minds even this early in the morning after they’d had too much to drink. In a few minutes she calmed down, composed herself as she freshened her makeup, then got out of the BMW to walk over and stand in front of the bank of elevators, waiting for one to stop. She told herself that she was nearly there, only a couple more minutes.

  When the elevator arrived, Ratana found herself standing beside another woman, short and overweight, shaking water off her umbrella. The woman got in and pushed the button for floor eighteen. Ratana pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The woman smiled, looked at Ratana as she sniffed the air and announced she was visiting her boyfriend who was very rich and generous. She commented on how foul the weather had been. Ratana nodded at her as she stepped out of the elevator at the fourteenth floor, waited until the doors closed, then used the stairs to walk down to the eleventh floor. She walked along the tiled hallway, windows overlooking slums on her right.

  Reaching Calvino’s door, she glanced around, checking for any activity in the corridor—there was none. She set down the shopping bags from Villa and knocked on the door. Then she pressed the bell. When Calvino opened the door, she reached down and picked up the Villa bags and walked in. Calvino closed the door behind her. He hadn’t been expecting her. She hadn’t called. She wore her blue dress, the one she sometimes wore when they went to Pratt’s house for dinner. Her hair piled into a bun, she might have passed for an average-looking Chinese-Thai housewife who’d just come in from shopping.

  Single-malt whiskey, bread, cheese, olives, pickles, and yogurt spilled from the bags as she reached inside for file folders she’d removed from the office and hidden under the food. Calvino leaned down and picked out the whiskey bottle.

  He stared at the contents of the shopping bags; it looked like a week’s supply for a Mafia don who had gone into hiding. He glanced at her, marveling how efficient she was, how mindful and thorough.

  It was then that she broke down.

  A thick sob caught in her throat. “He’s been shot.”

  “Who’s been shot?”

  “Pratt.”

  “When?”

  “A few hours ago. He was outside a jazz club across town. He had sat in for a couple of sets.”

  “You talked with Manee?” he asked.

  She nodded, sniffing. “Pee Manee said it had something to do with an internal investigation he was doing. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, he must’ve been close to a finding a missing fingerprint. How bad is he?”

  “The doctors operated on him.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “Khun Vinny, you can’t go there. Impossible. He was shot because of you.”

  Calvino knew where they’d take a police colonel. “He’s at the Police Hospital.”

  “Please, Khun Vinny. You will cause a bigger problem. Pee Manee said to tell you that she’ll phone you when it’s safe.”

  His mind raced as he downed two fingers of Scotch. “He was shot because of you,” continued to careen inside his head. Ratana was making a statement of fact; it wasn’t an accusation. The truth of it rang like a medieval church bell, loud and clear, carrying across the commons, through the windows, and into the rooms for all to hear.

  “Is he going to die?”

  “Only Buddha can say.”

  “He’s conscious?”

  She nodded.

  He went into the bedroom and found a box of Kleenex.

  He handed the box to Ratana, who’d followed him there; she took a tissue and blew her nose.

  “I still can’t believe it,” she said.

  The scent of Siriporn’s perfume lingered in the bedroom, rising from the sheets and pillows like a morning mist. He turned Ratana around and walked her out of the room.

  “I’ll work it out. It will be all right,” he said.

  She stared down at the groceries on the floor, shaking her head. “It won’t.”

  Calvino thought that if they had intended to kill Pratt, they could’ve done the job. But that would have caused them too much trouble. Questions would be raised, an investigation that might be difficult to control. Pratt was a colonel, after all, and killing police colonels was a serious business. Putting a couple of slugs into him would have been good enough for their purposes—it would take him out of circulation and send a clear message to his farang buddy Vincent Calvino that it was time to back off. Calvino’s patron on the police force now had his own problems to deal with and was no longer in any position to offer the cloak of protection Calvino had become accustomed to sheltering under. Whatever move Calvino made, it would be on his own. And without Pratt to watch his back, he might find he had a bull’s-eye painted on his forehead. That message was intended to keep him inside and out of the way.

  He sat her down on the living-room sofa and brought her a glass of water. She unfolded a copy of the Bangkok Post on the table, then took the glass and drank. They talked about Pratt. It was decided that she’d go to the hospital and stay with Manee. Nueng promised to look after John-John, since it was too late for Ratana’s mother to pick him up for the night. John-John would sleep with Nueng in a room above the massage parlor.

  “I think of him,” she said.

  Calvino thought she was talking about Colonel Pratt.

  “John,” she said.

  A few years before, Ratana’s American boyfriend had been killed in Bangkok. Calvino had been having dinner the night John Lovell had been murdered. He had told Lovell to leave Bangkok, but Lovell didn’t listen, and he didn’t have anyone to cover his back. The pain of that loss hadn’t ever gone away for Ratana; all it needed to fire up again was a reminder like Pratt’s getting shot, and Ratana looked no different now from the way she had the day her boyfriend had been killed. The full load of that memory mingled with the knowledge that Colonel Pratt was in a serious condition. What bothered her at this moment was how she could go through each day so easily, mostly not thinking about what had happened to her life after the father of her boy had died.

  Calvino offered her the guestroom. “It’s late. You can leave in the morning.”

  “I’ve finished delivering my message,” she said.

  Calvino’s eyebrows knitted.

  “I told security I was going to Justin’s unit. I’d been sent by an agency.”
/>   “Inventive.”

  “Careful. Please be careful.”

  “Get word to Pratt that I won’t give up.”

  “Wait until he’s out of the hospital before you do anything.”

  “That could be some time.”

  “It’s better for him, better for you.”

  “Tell him.”

  “I’m not certain that’s what he wants to hear.” She took the keys to her BMW, her prized possession, and held them out to Calvino.

  He looked at the keys. “What are you doing?”

  “You will need a car.” She dropped the keys on a table next to the door. “Be careful, Vinny.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

  After she’d gone, Calvino opened the newspaper. Under a captioned photograph of General Suchart ran an article reporting a trial balloon from a well-placed source that the government should approach the Chinese government to borrow money to save the country as companies closed down and unemployment rose. The figure was a handsome amount—ten billion dollars. What the article neglected to mention was that there were enough strings attached to put together a full orchestra of nothing but harps.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  MONTRI ADJUSTED HIS gold-rimmed glasses, as he stood tall and smiling at himself in the mirror. The glasses were imported and expensive, giving him a sense of mystery and authority. This evening he needed whatever edge he could muster. A current of cool air tousled his hair. The invitation he had sent to Zhang said that the ceremony started at precisely 8:23 p.m.—the time was auspicious, and the maw doo Ajarn Veera had insisted that Zhang bring something personal: Two dozen white orchids, and a photograph of his mother and father.

  Several days after Colonel Pratt had been shot and refused to die, Montri had made the necessary arrangements. He whispered to Zhang what Calvino had told him: “Ajarn Veera was visited by a spirit calling himself Chou, who wishes to deliver a message. His spirit wanders. He’s calling out for you.” How else could Ajarn Veera know about Zhang’s long-dead stillborn brother other than through a channel to the afterlife? Nothing would have kept Zhang from meeting Ajarn Veera after that message was delivered.