The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  He climbed into the pickup, inserted the key, and drove up to the sixth floor, all the way to the end. There were lots of empty parking places. It was far away from the elevators and people were too lazy to walk the distance. He parked the pickup, got out, locked the doors, and walked over to an SUV covered with a tarp.

  The dust that coated it suggested that it hadn’t been moved for a long time. Dragging the tarp to the pickup, he heard the muffled sound of a cell phone from the back of the pickup. He stopped, turned around, and thought for a moment. Better to leave it unanswered; whoever was calling was in for a disappointment. Someone would come looking for them soon enough. He pulled the tarp over the pickup, knotting the tie holds in front and back. Moving the pickup to another floor and covering it with the tarp would only slow them down, but eventually they’d find it. The security guards would have a record of its coming in and not going out.

  Calvino looked over the wall and saw a couple of workmen who had arrived for an early shift at the factory below. There was no going over the wall without being spotted. He couldn’t go back to his unit. And he couldn’t stay in the parking garage. He smiled as he pulled out his key chain and fanned through the keys like a card shark through a poker hand until he found the key to Siriporn’s unit on the ninth floor. She’d left it on the kitchen counter with a note telling him not to be a stranger. That had happened not long after Tanny returned to New York. Siriporn said he could let himself in anytime. That time had arrived. He wondered if her relatives had changed the locks. One of them might even be inside.

  He quietly opened the door, slipped inside, stood still, looked around, and listened. It seemed empty. He had the place to himself. By the time he had closed the door, the first rays of sun lit up the sky.

  Calvino walked across the unit and into Siriporn’s bedroom. He opened the closets and found her clothes still hanging inside. He sat on the edge of her bed. They’d always met at his unit. It seemed strange that the first time he’d sat on her bed, she was dead. Everything appeared to be untouched, left the way it had been on the last day of her life. He picked up her scent—a lavender and mint smell—a comb, a scarf, and a set of earrings. When he opened the dresser, he saw neatly folded panties and bras. On the floor of the closet, her polished shoes were lined up in neat rows. He leaned down and looked closer. One red shoe had a blemish, a scratch, a nick, making the shoe look like a neglected orphan. When he walked back to the bed, he found a file folder with his name lying on the nightstand. Inside were printouts of e-mails, Excel files, a matchbook from a restaurant where they’d eaten, and a couple of photographs printed on glossy paper.

  Calvino thought about himself next to her on the wrong side of the yellow line, loving it, smiling—or he was smiling? And she was next to him laughing. It had been after Tanny had gone back to New York, and he’d told Siriporn a joke about how things had ended with her, using the Thai expression kon maw mai than dam. It struck Siriporn as funny, imagining Calvino as an old-fashioned rice pot whose bottom hadn’t yet turned black from being held over the fire. That laughter captured in the photograph was the way he wanted to remember her. He lay back in her bed remembering how after they’d finished lunch at the Greyhound Restaurant, they’d run into one of Siriporn’s colleagues, another broker, who had taken the photographs. Being surrounded by her things, the full weight of her loss struck him.

  People who cared enough to love you were not replaceable.

  All he could do was stretch out on her bed and wait. He slipped into a deep sleep.

  FIFTY

  SIRIPORN’S SISTER, FILM, had arrived on a bus from upcountry. She had let herself into the condo at seven in the morning. She sensed immediately that someone else was inside and thought of turning around and going for help. Instead she pushed open the bedroom door and found Calvino sleeping in her sister’s bed. She let out a scream, her hands automatically covering her mouth. She froze in the doorway, unable to turn and run, unable to rush forward to attack the man in bed before he attacked her. Before she could recover herself, Calvino had sat up, holding the .38 aimed at the source of the scream. Instantly he felt embarrassed, lowering the gun and sliding it into the holster as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do when someone came through the door. He tossed the holster on the pillow, smiling, holding up a forefinger as if to claim the right to speak.

  Calvino recognized Siriporn in the woman’s features: The high cheekbones, porcelain clear, smooth skin, and warm, full lips that took a hard edge when displaying anger.

  “You’re Film,” he said. Siriporn had shown him family photographs. Thais always had photographs to show others.

  “Why did you point a gun at me?” She spoke like someone out of breath.

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “What are you doing in my sister’s bedroom?” Her hands trembled.

  “I was sleeping.”

  “I didn’t see you at the wat. Not once did you come to pay respects. My mother and father asked about you. There was nothing I could say. Other than it had been your car that killed her. She died because of you.” Her suspicion and dislike, if they’d been blades, would have sliced him into wafer-thin slabs. The flash of hatred twisted her mouth, and she ran forward, both fists clenched. Kliat khao sai, with hatred deeply lodged in her guts, would be an appropriate expression for Film’s feeling for Calvino at the moment.

  He grabbed her arm and let her land a couple of punches with her free hand before pinning her down on the bed. Her hatred registered slightly below the hatred to the bone Calvino had felt as he shot the man in the parking garage.

  “Someone tampered with the car.”

  “The police said it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Let go. You’re hurting me.” She struggled against his weight. He released her and she started to sob. “She didn’t deserve to die. Why didn’t you say good-bye to her? You should’ve been at the funeral.”

  Film worked in the movie business. Though from her performance in the condo, Calvino was convinced she wasn’t acting. No one could have faked the kind of emotion that she’d uncoiled, rendering her helpless, defeated. “If you know who did this, why haven’t you told the police?”

  “The police are involved.”

  “Farang baa,” she said, crazy foreigner.

  He responded with a crooked smile. “You think it’s crazy? I’ve got a friend who’s a cop. He was shot investigating Siriporn’s murder.”

  “Is this true?”

  “Ask General Suchart’s True Sons of The Soil Party,” he said.

  “My sister had nothing to do with politics. She wasn’t political.”

  “You don’t have to be political to get caught in the crossfire.”

  Film softened, puffing out her cheeks and slowly exhaling. Tears rimmed her eyes, and she looked away before wiping them with her hand. “My sister said that she loved you.”

  She looked up, studying his face and trying to see what exactly her sister had found to love in this man. Nothing obvious came to her as an explanation. It was, like many things with Siriporn, a mystery, one that she had taken to her cremation.

  Calvino let her words fall away. “I know,” he said. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Film nodded.

  “The men who did this are dead.”

  Calvino waited for a reaction. Her face clouded, thoughts rushing through her head. He watched her filtering through the options that suited the crazy-foreigner vision she possessed of him.

  “How do you know?” She wasn’t clear whether she wanted information about how he knew who her sister’s murderers were or how he knew they were dead.

  “Tomorrow morning there is going to be a news conference. Why don’t you come along with me?”

  “I want to know now. How do you know they’re dead?”

  Extending his right arm, Calvino pointed his forefinger, bent his thumb as the hammer, and pulled back his middle finger. She looked at his .38 in the holster
and back at his finger gun. “I know.”

  She saw in his eyes that he had killed them. And as a teardrop escaped, she nodded. “Thank you.”

  Three days after Calvino walked out of Montri’s gallery, a press conference was announced at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at 10:00 a.m. Three days was a biblical number, but in this case no one was resurrected from the dead. A news conference, though, was the next-best thing to happen for the living. Calvino and Film arrived late, edging into the back of a room packed with press, cameras, and lighting and sound equipment. At ten in the morning, a scrub of the correspondents still moved slowly, as if their blood wasn’t yet fully circulating.

  Kincaid sat alone at the table on the platform, hands folded, fresh haircut, the blue Foreign Correspondents’ Club banner framing his solitary figure. He was hardly recognizable in a suit and tie, claiming journalistic privilege not to reveal his sources. Reporters jammed the room, lining up five deep behind two microphones. His statement was finished, and the club president opened questions from the floor. It was never too early for a journalist to belt back a drink, but this morning no one was drinking, and no one carried on the tradition of loud side-conversations that usually rumbled like an angry tide washing forward from the back of the room.

  The correspondents understood that Kincaid had somehow managed to break one of those rare stories that a journalist worked a whole lifetime to find, the kind the major media players with large resources broke.

  The atmosphere at the club was like the one at the press conference when the footage of the Pol Pot interview had been released many years before. An American reporter then had hit the big time. Now it was Kincaid’s turn at the brass ring. Kincaid, who blended into the room with dozens of other freelancers, had a Pol Pot–size exclusive. The others in the room envied him. China had blocked all YouTube videos, locked down its entire media, and ignored the overseas press, pretending that the video of Zhang didn’t exist. The Thais had blocked the video only on YouTube. But it was too little, too late—clips played on every major international channel.

  “Do you have a book contract?” asked a reporter from one of the wire services.

  “My agent has several publishers in New York bidding. But there’s nothing firm. Not yet.”

  News reporting had moved online. Kincaid was living proof of a new era.

  Kincaid grinned, looking like a fox with a mouthful of feathers. The BBC and CNN cameras rolled with closeups of his moment in the limelight. He soon learned that the story wasn’t about him. It was a big China story. The phrase Kincaid used circulated around the globe: “Disruptor Tycoon.” Disruptor was the name of the weapon Zhang had planned to manufacture in Thailand. Other reporters labeled Zhang a “Chinese godfather.”

  Zhang had abruptly departed for Yunnan, flying direct to Kunming, looking forward to a homecoming—and before anyone could criticize the government for letting him escape, it was reported that he had been arrested and charged with misappropriation of state money. Chinese TV showed him being led away by uniformed police with their hard, blank faces as they escorted him from the airport. It had been a busy time for airport stories. The Thai government got a black eye when General Suchart and Tamarine slipped over the Cambodian border, then boarded a plane to Sweden. A spokesman for his political party said it was a fact-finding mission into bank-rescue plans. In Stockholm, General Suchart appeared before the cameras, grim-faced, exhausted from his overland escape and the jet lag from the flight, saying that he had been a victim of anti-democratic forces, that he didn’t feel he could get justice in Thailand, and that his lawyers were drafting an application for political asylum.

  Tamarine’s astrologer told her over the phone as she paced in the first-class lounge at the airport in Phnom Penh that no one could have foreseen an asteroid coming out of nowhere to disturb the transiting of Venus as it passed through the Sextile Natal Sun. The general had been a victim of celestial mischief, knocking out the influences that had guaranteed his political and financial gain, and turning their happy travel for the year into a harrowing escape.

  He offered no refund on his fee. Tamarine phoned several friends in Bangkok complaining about the astrologer; the news of her disappointment rolled like thunder along the bamboo telegraph.

  The general and his wife’s escape to Sweden and Zhang’s arrest in China had been linked, and the story played on BBC, which flickered on TV monitors around the room in the club. One of the correspondents asked Kincaid, “Any idea if someone tipped Zhang about the video?”

  Kincaid said he didn’t have that information. Meaning he didn’t know how Zhang had managed the old Indian rope trick.

  “Was it a political decision to let him leave?” another correspondent asked.

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” said Kincaid.

  “What do you think will happen to General Suchart’s Party?” asked the same correspondent.

  “My privileged sources say it’s having a leadership crisis.”

  A polite way of saying that it was dead on the arrival of General Suchart’s plane in Stockholm.

  Calvino liked being called a privileged source as he sat at the bar in the back of the room. He had said nothing. It was Kincaid’s show. A freelancer beside Calvino leaned over and whispered, “Kincaid must have had to blow a horse to get this story.”

  Calvino shrugged. “A whole stable of stallions.”

  “No one is so lucky in this life,” said Film.

  Calvino nodded. He knew she was talking about Siriporn. No amount of persuasion would convince Film that luck could account for Kincaid’s break. The fact that anybody won recognition and fame was news; it was a miracle, and it was a promise of hope no matter how illusory. She accepted that Calvino had taken care of those responsible for her sister’s death. He’d lifted the veil on that mystery, and regardless of the pain of the loss, she felt a sense of relief and closure as she stood next to Calvino and watched as Kincaid dug Zhang a fresh grave in China.

  The blueprint for constructing a Thai black house had had two chief architects: Wei Zhang and General Suchart. But their plans never got off the drawing board; if they had succeeded, Colonel Pratt said it would have been only temporary before the house of cards collapsed. The government and the military had gone silent, like a cat fully alert, watching, waiting to see what rat would next run across the floor. They had no idea how to react, so they did what governments and the military do in such circumstances—nothing. First they needed time to regroup, find out who had been implicated, who could be protected, and how to tell the story without causing any more problems with the Chinese. The ministers and the police were eating enough aspirin to have the same economic impact as a small-scale infrastructure project. No one inside was talking to anyone on the outside. But they were all talking to their astrologers.

  Kincaid had said that ministers had been invited to the club to give a briefing; they’d all declined. The demonstrators were baying for blood, and the government, while still standing, had given the street leaders more rocks to throw at the wobbly black house even as its occupants tried to distance themselves from the scandal.

  A government spokesman said the cabinet had agreed to set up a committee to investigate the licenses that Dragon (Siam) had been granted and another committee to investigate the trail of money that Zhang had brought into the country. Investigation into the transfer of large sums from E-Dragon to General Suchart’s party had been assigned to another committee. No one mentioned whether the Thai authorities would call the Chinese ambassador in for an explanation, as it had been agreed that both countries had been duped by rogue elements. The ten-billion-dollar loan from the Chinese had disappeared off the radar screen, vanished like Zhang into the twilight world, under the beds of Beijing politicos.

  Ratana and Manee and John-John sat around the table after dinner. Manee had a coloring book filled with dragons, garudas, temples, and warriors, plus a box of crayons. John-John grabbed crayons with his fists.

 
“Color inside the lines,” said Ratana.

  John-John tried staying in the lines but soon gave up. She guided his hand and carefully positioned a gray crayon over the outline of an elephant. He sliced the crayon across the page. It didn’t matter if he stayed within the lines, she told herself just as Manee said, “He’s having fun.” She was teaching a lesson to a future driver about life on Thai roads.

  After a couple of minutes of drawing, the outline of the elephant disappeared in a maze of crisscrossed gray lines, pointless and sloppy. Let him be, she told herself. Manee and Ratana, in effect, colored inside the lines as they talked about their mothers, their children, and an entertainer who was divorcing his wife. Nothing was said about politics. That was messy and all over the place. It didn’t make for a pretty picture. But it was impossible to keep the outside world from invading the house. One of the kids had turned on the TV in the next room, and reports of demonstrators occupying the airport filtered through the house. The women pretended not to hear how the demonstrators had been bussed from Government House to Suvarnabhumi Airport, and all flights in and out of Thailand had been canceled. The demonstrators had agreed to allow foreigners to leave the airport, but none of the leaders had stepped forward to confirm their release. Politics was like love, in that it was possible to lose one’s way, and also like love in that it sometimes led to obsessions, and the obsessed, by definition, never lost their way—they took down anyone who stood between them and the object of their desire.

  Colonel Pratt, who’d lost five kilos, looked gaunt, like a man who’d survived a jungle ordeal. But his smile was still the same. He slowly moved toward his library, turned, and saw Calvino hanging behind. “We should have that talk,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino followed Pratt inside, and they sat, poured each other drinks, and listened to Miles Davis in the background.

  “Zhang got out in time,” said Calvino.

  “Meaning he received a tip.”