The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  That was about as much as he would get out of her. He put the car into gear again and pulled back onto the road. Achara’s office was situated in a compound near Samut Sakhon, a small hamlet on the outskirts of Bangkok. They passed a scattering of skinny dogs with blotchy, infected skin lying by the road, thin bags of bones with ribs showing. Along the road ran canals, the water brackish, still, as if a shaky hand had cut the earth with a dull tool. In the distance, pools of water formed as smooth as glass—malaria factories, with fast-moving overhead clouds reflecting the sun off their surfaces.

  As they came to the outskirts of Samut Sakhon, the land flattened as if it had been hammered until every dent, wrinkle, or gully had been smoothed into one continuous sheet of earth. Vendors sat on chairs under umbrellas at their roadside stands. Behind them were bags of salt stacked into high pyramids. There were no customers. Given that the state of emergency had just been declared, there hadn’t been time for panic buyers to converge on the stockpiled salt.

  Behind the vendor stands, salt flats stretched to the horizon; leathery men and women in rattan hats bent from the waist, working the fields. A couple of children shuffled, rakes in hand, against the horizon, clawing the salt from the cracked ground, dragging it into piles as if it were sand and they were at the seaside. As the car passed the latest stretch of billboards screaming in flashy smiles, heads the size of cars staring out, hawking insurance, soap, mouthwash, and condominium developments, Calvino wondered if Tanny had a reference point for what she saw.

  “That’s a spirit house,” he said. The modest spirit house, which looked like a wedding cake from a dangerous cult, abandoned on a concrete platform, passed in a blur.

  “That’s a car dealership,” Tanny said a moment later, mocking him.

  Calvino absorbed her verbal right hook. He knew how to take a direct punch to the ego from a woman.

  “Another spirit house,” he said.

  “You don’t ever give up, do you?”

  They drove past rows of shophouses, the concrete painted like Wedgwood china plates, identical balconies suitable for potted tropical plants and a birdcage. Large factory complexes, all gray cement and blue-tiled roofs, smokestacks looming in the distance. Now and again, with the regularity of a McDonald’s franchise, a complex with a wat and salas, each wat identical to the last, bearing the same traditional Thai gabled roof with the buffed gold and red trimming like a fairy-tale castle. The chimney sticking upward was as black as an eighteen-wheeler’s exhaust pipe. Each time the dead were burned, another thin layer of smudge was added.

  He thought of Old George as they passed lumberyards and a police station. Dust flew up as he pulled off the highway and into a narrow side road that was half dirt. “Almost there,” he said. She fidgeted in her seat, never taking her eyes off the scenery passing in a dusty blur on her side of the car.

  After a kilometer on the country roads, Calvino stopped the car at a security gate. The guard looked inside, took Calvino’s driver’s license, then stood back from the car and waved them inside the compound. Calvino cut the engine and got out of the car and had walked to the other side as she emerged. “See the canal?”

  She saw the light glitter off the water’s surface. “Achara has a private boat. He claims he can follow the canals all the way into the city.”

  “He’s a man who makes lots of claims,” she said, unimpressed.

  A servant showed them into a large combination banquet hall and meeting room used to greet VIPs. In the center was a long table lined with high-backed chairs. She disappeared and returned with glasses of water. But she avoided answering Calvino when he asked her if Achara was on his way.

  “What did you ask her?” Tanny wanted to know.

  Calvino drank from the glass of water, looking at a huge carving of a winged red-breasted garuda—fierce eyes and mouth, snapping-turtle beak, eagle claws, the talons extended ready to seize prey. “I asked her if she had any whiskey. To bring the bottle.”

  That answer satisfied Tanny, and it showed with her tiny smirk, as if she’d seen the talons in the wall dig into Calvino’s hide. “I’m glad she ignored you.”

  “I thought she was ignoring you.”

  Along one wall a dozen French doors stretched the full length of the room. All the doors opened onto a garden lavish with coconut trees, bamboo shoots, rubber and banana trees, and a row of mango trees lining the edge of the canal.

  A couple of the doors stood ajar. A light breeze, first ruffling the yellow bamboo, lazily blew through the openings in the doors, buffeting candle flames with the calm, firm hand of a mother rocking a cradle. The candles were lit even though it was afternoon, and the fleshy white petals of lotus flowers puckered tight like innocent lips in the midst of a first kiss, lending the flowers a rich, sensual look. The smell of the canal and bamboo and lotus lingered like the perfume of a familiar lover.

  Tanny sat underneath the high-vaulted ceiling that sloped as if into an ancient cathedral. Calvino looked down the table, past the candles and flower arrangements—three separate arrangements, dwarfed by the length of the table, like lights on a taxiway.

  “The position of the flowers and candles follows feng shui. That stuff about the yin and yang, water, earth, fire, wood, and pizza,” said Calvino to see if she was actually reading the papers in her folder or just pretending.

  “Feng shui is Chinese,” said Achara.

  He had slipped in through a side door at the back, drying his hands on a towel. Observing Tanny and Calvino, he stood beside a lacquered Chinese cabinet, black ebony, inlaid gold outlining a fairy-tale kingdom populated with angellike figures in flowing robes, men in boxy hats, while the women, thin-necked with heart-shaped faces, flew above a forest and villages. He finished drying his hands and held out the towel for a servant to take away.

  Achara wore a tan safari suit, the top button undone, with his skinny arms sticking out of the short sleeves. His hair, combed to one side like a schoolboy’s, was pure white. He looked smaller than the other night when he had suited up in a dinner jacket to attend the Chini exhibition. The black jacket and tie had inflated him into a larger man. Achara’s face, kind and open, had a hint of worry, but his large brown eyes, clear and shiny, unencumbered by uncertainty or anger, focused on Tanny Craig. Then he looked away as he walked past the twin larger-than-life bronze busts of an elderly man and woman. Achara brushed his fingers against the spray of orchids placed as an offering at the base of these busts of his father and mother, their hollow, lifeless eyes in a perpetual gaze at the throne.

  “Vincent, it is good to see you again. The Chini paintings are remarkable. You are blessed to have such a famous ancestor. It explains how your karma brought you to live in Thailand. And, Ms. Craig, I’m so sorry there was a misunderstanding about our appointment. Last night I had a medical emergency. Not me personally, but two of my animals, and I needed to call in the vet. You’ve no doubt heard the news about a state of emergency.” He sighed, studying his two guests as he broke into a smile. “Our lives are, for the moment, one emergency after another.”

  If he were lying, Calvino gave him full marks for creativity—he’d substituted the word “animals” for the normal usage in those circumstances: Water buffalo. He might have done better just sticking to the government’s declaring a state of emergency. Tanny gave no indication that his explanation made the slightest difference. “We heard,” said Calvino.

  Achara sighed, shaking his head. “Why don’t I tell you something about this room?” Achara walked to one end and stopped in front of an elaborately carved throne. The back and arms of the throne were embedded with hundreds of semiprecious stones and sported gold filigree and spires rising like flames from a skyline at dusk. A thin red cushion covered the seat.

  “I bought this chair in Chiang Mai. The previous owner was a wealthy Chinese merchant. The merchant had bought it many years ago during his travels inside the Shan State. But he’d fallen on hard times and was forced to sell it. The dealer said it was one
of the last of his possessions the merchant had sold. After the rest of his fortune had been exhausted, he sat in the chair and pondered his adversity. Six months later the owner shot himself in the head. The antiques dealer hoped that the new owner would have a better karma, one that would entitle him to sit in harmony on such a chair for a lifetime, an old Chinese blessing.”

  “Blessings can be hit and miss,” said Calvino.

  “So true, Mr. Calvino. It all depends on your karma.”

  It was the second time Achara had referred to karma in speaking to him.

  Tanny stared at the throne, tapping the end of her pen against the file folder on the table. She figured that the chair was worth a small fortune. In a smaller room, it would have looked pretentious, but in the vastness of the banquet hall the dignity of its lineage had found a home.

  “You mean luck,” said Tanny. Having let the first reference pass without comment, she found herself drawn out.

  Achara smiled again, nodding toward her, leaning over the table. “And your luck depends on how well you lived your last life. That is what Thais believe.”

  He gestured at the wall. Two fire-breathing, goldlacquered dragons hung there, two beasts each forever struggling to slay the other and eternally frozen in deadly strike position, never able to pull back or deliver the blow. Colonel Pratt was in the habit of quoting Shakespeare. Calvino remembered a line from Othello:

  “I am one, sir, that comes to tell you, your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.” It came to his mind as he gazed at the dragons and at Craig.

  Achara’s talk of karma, of luck, of the throne chair and dragons and garudas had begun to seem more like a stalling tactic than a speech by a proud householder on the meaning of his possessions.

  Achara had pulled back his chair when a Thai man came in through one of the French doors and, barefoot, crossed over and whispered into Achara’s ear. He nodded, and the man, like a ghost, left by the same door through which he had entered. “If you will excuse me. My vet wants me to come and look at my lions.”

  Calvino’s crooked smile caught Tanny like a sock puppet thrown by a child.

  “Singtoh mai sabai,” said Calvino in a matter-of-fact tone, using the Thai expression for the condition of the lions. Achara nodded in confirmation. There was no misunderstanding.

  “Ms. Craig, Khun Achara has a sick lion,” said Calvino. Achara corrected the math. “I have two sick lions.”

  It seemed she had little choice. She could either join them outside or stay seated at the long table and watch the candles flicker and wait until they returned. She closed her file folder and pushed back her chair. It would be something to put in her report to Marshall Sawyer. Business partner keeps lions on his property. Not that amateur zoo keeping necessarily violated any contractual provision. But it did reflect upon the habits, lifestyle, and priorities of the Thai partner.

  THIRTEEN

  ACHARA LED THEM to the enclosure housing his lions. Calvino and Tanny followed him along a flagstone path, weaving between the bamboo and banana trees. They watched a boat slowly gliding down the canal as they walked. After a few more steps, like a rope thick with algae, a green snake dropped from a banana tree in front of Craig.

  She screamed, frozen in place, her fingers splayed over her mouth as if holding back a primeval howl. Calvino leaned down and snatched up the snake, holding its head between his thumb and forefinger. He stared at its shiny, beady eyes, its forked tongue licking the air. “It’s harmless,” he said, putting it back on the banana tree.

  Ahead of them two enormous granite lions flanked the path. Later, Achara would tell them that the features—Rastafarian-like manes, muzzles in a snarl, right leg propped on a ball, with claws extended—had been carefully modeled from Ming-dynasty lions. But the snake had had a more immediate impact. It wasn’t clear that Tanny even noticed the stone monsters as she passed by them.

  The snake had unnerved her, rattled loose the tight control she kept over herself. “Mr. Calvino is quite right.

  Snakes, lizards, and spiders are all part of a tropical garden,” Achara said, smiling like a professor giving an impromptu lecture on God’s little creatures. She regretted not staying in the banquet hall, but it was far too late to retrace her steps alone.

  In the distance the roar of a wild animal rolled like a clap of thunder. Then another lion roared as if part of a duet. The blood had drained out of Tanny’s face as she instinctively grasped her throat. Some ancient roaring-lion gene had automatically kicked in, and she suddenly felt wobbly on her feet. “Are they caged?” she asked.

  Achara smiled. “Don’t worry. I keep them caged this time of day. I only let them out into the compound for an hour before sunset.”

  She examined Calvino for some clue in his body language signaling an intention to run, laugh, or ignore the lions’ roar.

  She found nothing. Distracted by watching the green snake slither along a large coil of banana leaf, Calvino seemed to take the roar in stride, as if he were sitting behind the wheel of his car, watching vans and cars cross the yellow line as they turned sharp curves. Achara walked ahead. “Yes, they are in their cages this time of day. Come, let me show you.”

  Calvino carried on a few steps before stopping again, waiting for Tanny, who stood stock-still on the path. “You want to go back to the house?”

  “Thanks for being supportive,” she said.

  In a voice thick with irony, Calvino took her hand and said, “You worry too much.”

  “Did you ever think that you might not worry enough?”

  The answer, wrapped in fear, rolled across the garden.

  “It’s safe. I promise,” said Achara, waving at her.

  They came to a small grassy clearing. The assistant who’d earlier come into the banquet room worked next to the vet near a large structure, a concrete pad that measured ten meters by five meters and was enclosed with heavy bars, at one end a metal gate with a brass padlock. The assistant, a young man, was alert, his excitable eyes scanning the lions inside the enclosure like a bank robber glancing at the CCTV camera, figuring that his time was running out along with his luck.

  Inside, two sleep-groggy lions lay in the shade, their rib cages slowly rising and falling.

  “They’ve been sedated,” said Achara. “I’ve never had a break-in. Living on the canal, you sometimes worry about someone coming in a boat and stealing your silver. The one on the right is Fu. She’s one hundred sixty kilos. Fu means “happiness” in Chinese. I don’t worry so much about her. She is recovering well. But Shi’s a male, and he’s not responding so well to the medication. In Chinese tradition lions are the protectors, the gatekeepers. Perhaps you’ve seen the stone lions at Chinese temples?”

  “I had a client who lived in a mansion outside of Pattaya. He raised goats. Someone murdered his gardener. But this is my first case involving a client who raises lions.” Calvino paused, scratching the back of his head. He wished he had a drink. His mouth felt dry. If Achara, with his low-key excuse of a medical emergency for his animals, had intended to play it cool, then he had succeeded. Calvino had thought Achara had been talking about his dogs.

  He glanced at Tanny, who shrugged, still pale, shaky on her feet. “Is he dying?”

  Achara sighed, looked longingly at Shi in the back of the enclosure. “Let’s hope that’s not the case. To lose a protector is an omen,” he said. “You see, it impresses my friends when they come out and see Shi and Fu. It makes them feel secure.”

  Tanny looked as if she felt anything but safe. Achara turned away and entered into a discussion in Thai with the vet, gravely nodding as the vet spoke.

  Calvino overheard the vet talking about medication, a regime of shots, and his belief that both lions would recover. There had been a legitimate reason to cancel the appointment after all. Calvino gave Achara credit for coming up with an excuse that he’d never heard before. “Are you okay?” he asked Tanny. Her eyes were wide as she watched the vet and Achara enter
into the enclosure and squat down beside Fu.

  “Fine. Just fine.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke, gooseflesh on her bare arms.

  Calvino squeezed her hand; it felt ice cold.

  After Achara came out with the vet, he locked the padlock and smiled. “Aren’t they beautiful animals?” He beamed like a proud parent.

  “Lovely,” said Tanny as if pronouncing a dirty word.

  “They look powerful,” said Calvino, regarding the thick necks, the strong, muscular legs and chests.

  “Yes, they are also surprisingly fast for big animals. No one should ever underestimate the true nature of a big cat. They are wild deep, deep inside. The Discovery Channel always shows them at a distance. Hunting. Killing. Sleeping. Having sex. I’ve had Fu and Shi since they were cubs. They know me as part of the pride. I play with them. But would I turn my back on them, and pretend to run so they would chase me? That would invite trouble.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Fu killed a stray dog. Shi helped her eat it. They contracted canine distemper virus, and it made them sick. It can easily kill a lion.”

  “They ate a dog?” asked Tanny in horror at the image of the terrifying scene.

  “That’s rare,” said Achara, defending his lions.

  “How much do they eat?” asked Calvino, staring into the enclosure.

  “Fifteen kilos of red meat. Each. They’d eat a lot more in the wild. But that’s because they never know how long they might have to go between kills.”

  “Thirty kilos?” asked Calvino, thinking that was a fair chunk of cow to carve up and parcel out on a daily basis.

  Achara nodded. “I have it delivered fresh. The blood’s not yet curdled.” He gestured with hands like a Muslim in prayer. “We have business to discuss. Ms. Craig has questions for me. We can go back inside if you like. Or talk in the garden. Up to you.”

  If you like, thought Tanny. “Like” didn’t come close to describing how much she wished to return to the table inside. It no longer matter where he put her, on the blessed or the cursed side; she just wanted to be inside the confines of a room.