The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Calvino had told Pratt that the Chinese process of selecting the Panchen Lama had as much to do with spirituality as General Suchart’s proposal to select a new government had to do with democracy. Deception and manipulation in the name of some larger purpose was Suchart’s game, and he had made it clear that there was only one true vision of Thai goodness.

  This wasn’t a suitable time for a Thai police colonel to explain his motives for helping a foreign private eye to sift through the details of the investigation surrounding a murdered Thai reporter. The mood created the risk of someone starting a rumor that Colonel Pratt was disloyal, or worse. While the Thais might ignore the rules of the road, there was a yellow line that foreigners were forbidden to cross. Investigating a murder case was one such line. Inside the entrance to the restaurant, Calvino handed his dripping umbrella to the waitress, who acknowledged him with a smile. She pointed at the back of the room. Colonel Pratt sat alone at their usual table. He looked up, saw Calvino, and nodded. The waitress smiled again. “Mr. Calvino, your friend is waiting for you.”

  Colonel Pratt’s hands were clasped around a cup of tea. He looked tired as he watched Calvino cross the length of the restaurant. As Pratt slipped his glasses back on, Calvino had slipped into a chair. Fatigue etched lines around Pratt’s eyes. He muffled a yawn.

  “You look terrible,” said Calvino.

  “Thanks,” said Colonel Pratt. “I’m working to improve my image.”

  “Forget about it. So what’s the latest at Government House?”

  Pratt wrinkled his nose in disgust. “The stench is too much.” The stink of unwashed bodies, garbage, and human waste clung in his nose.

  “Perfume and revolution. They don’t really belong together,” said Calvino.

  The official name of the occupied building was Thai Khu Fah, and thousands of protesters had taken over and settled into the premises, planting rice and vegetables as if they had some long-term plan to stick around to harvest the crop. “The protesters are demanding the city supply them with toilets and food,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino smiled. Only in Thailand does the mob expect to be supplied with rice by the government it sought to overthrow. “And your buddy General Suchart is trucking in the portable toilets and pillows. What next? Someone’s going to establish a mob catering policy?”

  That brought a smile from Colonel Pratt. “Something’s cooking, but I can’t tell you exactly what’s on the menu. Not yet.”

  Calvino understood that there were limits as to what the colonel could disclose; he lived inside a network of loyalties, and nothing could tempt him to cross the border that separated where foreigners and outsiders dwelled. The harsh smell of betrayal rose hot and dense in the air above Bangkok. No one trusted anyone; no one felt safe or secure. Old alliances were being redrawn, as if crooked politicians were redrawing election districts. Children were weeping in the heat against their mothers’ breasts. No one was making the first move.

  Colonel Pratt explained how the grounds of Government House had been turned into mud and garbage, bras hanging out to dry on bushes, how children were running around the mountains of empty plastic water bottles, discarded newspapers, and discarded food that had been colonized by insects and rodents the size of small cats. People as far as the eye could see were camping out on rattan mats, squatting on cushions, sitting on chairs; others hunkered down in makeshift shelters made from plastic sheets and hung from poles sunk into the dirt. It might have passed for a medieval village, except that it was buried under a mountain of Styrofoam. Or a modern relief camp, squalid and hopeless, crammed with refugees escaping massacre by invading forces. The Venetian Gothic structure of Government House—Khu Fah, translated as “Partner of the Sky”—had been designed by Italians in 1908 as a symbol of power, and the demonstrators who occupied it announced that the partnership with the sky was at an end.

  Calvino and Pratt sat in a restaurant inside an upscale shopping complex and frequented by Chinese-Thai businessmen, rich housewives, high-level government officials, and playboys with their latest trophy ying to impress their friends. The restaurant was the kind of meeting place that Calvino could now afford. If the colonel were spotted in the presence of a farang, then the main room laundered the meeting as something social, and no one at the surrounding tables, even if they recognized the colonel, would think much about it. In other words, the place was another universe away from Government House and the cramped and hungry mob. It was business and social. Politics was only whispered between courses.

  “Nothing has gone right since the coup,” said Calvino.

  “I recall that you came out all right,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino had to give it to him. “Don’t confuse causation with correlation,” said Calvino.

  “The point is, you went from a slum to a penthouse.

  That’s a bigger jump than most of the coup-makers got.” The colonel drank his tea and sighed.

  “It seemed like a good thing at the time.”

  “That’s the definition of a coup.”

  The chaos on the night of the coup had provided cover for Colonel Pratt; he used it as an opportunity to remove the Chini paintings from an old row house near the Chao Phraya River and take them to a secure location. In normal times the fact that there had been bodies riddled with bullet holes inside the house would have been a problem. During the chaos of a coup, normal policing wasn’t possible. But even in abnormal times, the violent death of an influential person couldn’t be ignored. It was complicated getting the bullets from the bodies to disappear after the autopsy had taken some effort to organize. That was just as well, since the slugs would have matched Calvino’s handgun.

  “We’re at that same point again,” said Calvino. “When things go sideways, strange things happen and are accepted. It looks like a cutoff killing. Maybe the triggerman took a contract. But is he going to drop the dime on the mastermind?” Calvino shrugged his shoulders, looking straight at the colonel. It was the same reasoning that the police had often used. There was hardly a distinction between a cover-up and a real investigation; both followed the same internal logic.

  Colonel Pratt motioned to the waitress. He ordered sticky rice and mangoes, thinking it might help kill the smell of decay that refused to dislodge from his nose. After the waitress left, Calvino watched a table at the other end of the room erupt in laughter.

  “We got the right man,” said Colonel Pratt.

  The sticky rice and mangoes arrived on a large blue and white China plate.

  “No one hired him for the job?”

  Colonel Pratt shook his head, his spoon and fork working on the fruit.

  “He had personal reasons to kill Kowit.”

  “An old-fashioned crime of passion,” said Calvino, sipping coffee.

  “That explains most crime,” said Colonel Pratt. “Passion pressed too far.” His attention drifted, eyes wandering to those at tables in the front.

  Calvino felt a surge of guilt. He’d asked for help. But it had been the wrong time to ask for such help, and a worse time to follow up on what Pratt had found out about the murder investigation. “Have I told you that Brandon Sawyer is under a lot of family pressure?” He regretted saying this almost immediately. The duress Sawyer suffered at the hands of his family wouldn’t have shown up on Colonel Pratt’s radar screen, except for Calvino’s pressing him.

  “Get a different client,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Pratt had met Brandon; he hadn’t liked him. And the colonel didn’t have an especially high regard for Achara either. Pratt remembered him as an officious, pompous, and proud man. Someone who spoke Thai with a Chinese accent—an affectation, as Achara had been born in Thailand. Pratt saw Achara as part of a rich, closed Thai-Chinese circle that excluded Thais like him. As much as Colonel Pratt would have liked that the evidence of the murder had pointed to Achara, the fact was, it didn’t. Achara was the species of Thai businessman whose empire had grown exponentially as a result of his high-octan
e political connections. Achara was the sort of man who could have the colonel transferred to a Burmese border posting. The sort of man who skied Whistler in Canada and received invitations to Montri’s mansion.

  “Vincent, you can let Brandon know that his partner didn’t murder the reporter.”

  The colonel had read the confession, he’d talked with the officer who’d been present at the interrogation, he had reviewed the evidence—nothing had tied Achara to the Kowit murder case.

  “Thanks, Pratt.” Calvino pulled out a roll of notes and signaled the waitress for the bill.

  Pratt remained silent as the waitress came and collected the money.

  “They’ve made a big investment. Not a lot of people are lining up to invest in Thailand,” said Calvino. “It means jobs.”

  Colonel Pratt rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what it means. And neither do you.”

  Achara and Brandon’s company controlled over two thousand acres upcountry. Half had been planted with seeds from a modified rice stock. If the projected yields came about, their consultants told them, they could duplicate the project hundreds of times over, feeding billions with a steady supply of rice that would not rot—firm, strong, engineered rice. No mathematical genius was required to see the potential upside for a business that got it right. The other half of the land had been earmarked for wind turbines. Kowit had been investigating the story about this genetically modified rice at the time that someone slipped into his house and pumped several rounds into his head as he stirred a pot of soup over the kitchen stove. His wife was on the way home from school with their three children.

  “Kowit’s investigations caused Achara and Sawyer a problem,” said Calvino.

  “I am more concerned whether we are going to have a country to live in. Foreigner investors worrying about if their money is safe … well, it isn’t a priority.” Colonel Pratt sipped his tea. Like everyone else in Thailand, Pratt had read the local newspapers, which had circulated rumors about those who had a motive for killing the reporter. Certain newspapers shilled for powerful families who would have been happy to take Achara down a couple of notches. By the third day of reporting, Achara had dropped to the numberfour spot on the list of suspects.

  “Achara’s not in the medals!” Brandon would later scream at his brother over the phone. But business in Thailand didn’t play by the Olympic rules. The other suspects with a motive included a government official, a high-ranking cop, and a firm with a contract to lay a pipeline. All this speculation only led to the huge disappointment that it was none of the above. It had been a petty domestic murder, nothing political. His murder hadn’t come from the usual combination of stupidity and greed but had been done by someone outside the money loop. The killer had the best wishes of many people who’d been grateful for his intervention. Looking at the history of Kowit’s investigative reporting, it had been a minor miracle that he’d lived as long as he had. Thirty-seven years.

  “I’m up to my eyeballs in scorpions with the investigator Brandon’s brother sent. They’re checking out whether there’s been a cover-up.”

  “She’s wrong,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “That’s what I said.” He shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “Some people don’t listen, except to take in what they want to hear. Craig’s one of them.”

  Pratt nodded as if he understood. Some people plainly had been overwired for talking, and the wires for listening had never been connected. “Then you’ve done all you can. It’s her problem. Brandon’s problem. I don’t honestly see why you’re making it your problem. You have enough money. Why put yourself through the agony?”

  “Mission creep.” Calvino considered for a second telling the colonel about Siriporn. Parts of his life were better left out of sight, he decided.

  “Brandon is a creep. You shouldn’t have let him define the mission.”

  “Saints and Nobel Prize winners don’t coming knocking on the door of a private investigator in Bangkok. It’s usually a farang with a suitcase full of great expectations, as if he’s a character from Charles Dickens but all he got from Dickens is a miserable, fucked-up family life and a football-stadiumsized delusion about starting over in Thailand. And what inspires most of my clients? He’s in love with a bar ying but has some doubts whether she truly loves him. So he hires me to confirm his brilliance in character analysis about his loved one. And pays me before I lay out the photos that expose his stupidity. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Get a hobby.”

  “Brandon’s case gives me a reason to get up in the morning. Don’t tell me you don’t need the same thing. When I tried to give you a bunch of money so you wouldn’t have to work as a cop, what do you do? Something that should get you kicked off the force if your colleagues knew. You wouldn’t take the money from the farang. How crazy is that? I asked you, and you said, ‘It’s the only life I know. It’s the only life I wanna know,’ ” said Calvino, gesturing with both hands. He observed his hands in midair, and suddenly they seemed to belong to someone else. He thought how his father used to do the same thing and how it had disturbed him. Now he was sitting across the table from Pratt, doing his father’s gesture. “I need a reason not to hang out in a Washington Square bar in the afternoon and drink.”

  “Your father used to gesture like that with his hands,” said the colonel, smiling.

  “I was thinking the same thing. We repeat this stuff and don’t even know we’re doing it. Like the way you’re smiling, tilting your head. Just like your father.”

  Colonel Pratt sighed and nodded.

  Calvino dropped his arms, resting his palms flat on the table. “Brandon’s okay. Strange but harmless, and living like a raja.”

  “We know what happened to the Raj,” said Colonel

  Pratt, who not only knew Shakespeare but also had studied Chinese and Indian history.

  There was no denying that the colonel had grasped the essential nature of Brandon’s problem. Calvino admitted that he’d gotten sucked into an ego ride, letting Brandon Sawyer gradually expand his brief from investigator to adviser. As an investigator, Calvino could find people who didn’t want to be found, or information hidden in layers of passwords, or objects disguised as other things—he had a knack for tracing the lost into the most unlikely hiding places—which resulted in his clients’ assuming that those skills qualified him to advise on their business and their life. Bangkok was lousy with schmucks selling advice. He avoided these farangs in their dress shirts with French cuffs, expensive neckties, and gold-embossed business cards. Opinions were as cheap as life in Asia. Voicing the wrong opinions made life even cheaper. Pratt warned him that Brandon Sawyer was asking Calvino to take on way too much responsibility; and Calvino wasn’t paying close enough attention to see where it was leading. Pratt had warned Calvino to stay away from giving an opinion on whether the Thai partner was involved in the murder and to keep out of the business.

  “Tell Brandon the police have caught Kowit’s killer. And it wasn’t Achara. Then tell him that you are moving on.”

  “There’s something else going on, Pratt.”

  “That’s the definition of life. There will always be something else going on.”

  “If Brandon’s brother backs off. Then, yeah, I’m outta the case.”

  “This investigator his brother sent from New York. Ratana says she’s Thai. Attractive. Single. She says you look interested.”

  The colonel had been talking to Calvino’s secretary. If there’d been a two-person committee appointed to run his life, they were the two permanent charter members.

  “Craig, Thai? If you put her behind a screen and told her to talk and then she walked out, you’d fall over. She got adopted from some orphanage when she was a baby. She never knew her Thai parents. Interested? I can’t believe Ratana said that. She knows that woman’s occupying my office. How can I help but look at her? She’s sitting in my line of vision.”

  Colonel Pratt’s smile softened his face. Family talk was som
ething he liked. “Ratana told me you were spending more time in the office.”

  “Am I in my office?”

  “You protest too much.”

  “You should be telling that to the people at Government House.”

  The colonel smiled, again that half-bemused, knowing smile of his father. Calvino shuddered to think what kind of crazy idea his sleep-deprived friend was about to offer. The waitress who had already cleared the bill returned and asked if Calvino might want another cup of coffee. He nodded. “Make it a Spanish coffee.”

  “Tanny brought along her Thai birth certificate,” said Colonel Pratt. “That might mean something. Show her your stuff. Find her Thai parents. How can a Thai woman be whole without knowing her mother and father? It will get you out of the office.”

  It was, in other words, incomprehensible to Pratt and Ratana to conclude that this hadn’t been Craig’s real mission. In their collective view, Tanny Craig had obviously come to Thailand on Marshall Sawyer’s dime with the intention of finding her true identity. Brilliant. It made her straight-from-the-mint Thai. For Colonel Pratt and Ratana, her presence in Bangkok made perfect sense.

  “Track down Tanny’s mother?” asked Calvino, warming to the idea.

  “And wash your hands of Brandon Sawyer. It’s a reason to get out of bed.”

  “Get out of bed for Tanny? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Colonel Pratt nodded. “Or is there someone else you’re not telling me about?”

  As the Spanish coffee arrived, Calvino held the large mug to his nose and inhaled deeply. After a long drink, he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “I’ll think about it.”