The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  A taco came apart like a cheap tailored jacket in Calvino’s hand, spilling lettuce, hamburger meat, onions, and sauce onto his plate. He reached for a paper napkin and wiped his fingers. “Retire? And then what? Sit around the Lonesome Hawk all day waiting for you to get my photo hung straight?”

  Calvino dabbed the grease from his knuckles and finished his whiskey, raising his empty glass until the bartender saw him and nodded.

  “Okay, don’t get a bug up your ass.” McPhail lit another cigarette and blew smoke off to the side, which the fan immediately blew back over the shattered taco spill on Calvino’s plate.

  Calvino pushed the plate away. He was one taco from paying the bill and getting out the door.

  “Hold on, buddy. You just got here. I thought you wanted to talk about something.” McPhail flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette onto the floor.

  Calvino slumped back against the booth. “You ever see a lion up close?”

  McPhail’s eyes widened as smoke curled out of his nose.

  “What are you drinking? I want a double shot.”

  “Yesterday I saw two lions. I was close to them—about the same distance as we are to Bill.” Bill was ten feet away, balancing himself against the bar on his elbow, one ankle hooked over a barstool, mouth ajar like he was about to say something, only that was just the way he looked—nothing came out of his mouth. McPhail turned, looked over his shoulder at Bill, who purred as a waitress massaged his shoulders. When Bill turned maudlin his mood infected the other drunks, whose long faces and vacant stares registered new lows as if they had discovered that the cook secretly spit in their soup.

  “Lions? You’re sounding like Henry. Only he sees little forest fairies dancing around naked at four in the afternoon. So what’s it got to do with your new case? One of the lions cheating on the other, and you’ve been brought in by Mr. Husband to investigate?”

  Calvino took the fresh glass of whiskey from the waitress.

  “I could use your help in finding someone.”

  “Someone’s cub has gone missing?”

  “It’s a missing-persons case.”

  “Yeah, who’s missing?”

  “The client isn’t sure.”

  “You want me to find someone, but you don’t know who? How does that work?”

  “It’s called private investigation. I have names, dates, and places. That should be enough to track the two Thais I’m looking for.”

  “Then you don’t need me.” McPhail blew smoke, his eyes glancing up at Old George’s photograph. Bill hovered around, pacing back and forth, sucking his teeth and muttering.

  “The problem is, the information is old.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-two years old.”

  “And the trail’s gone dead cold.”

  “You’re right, McPhail. I doubt you’d ever be able to pick up a trail that old. Two hundred a day plus expenses is what I had in mind. Maybe I should ask someone else.”

  That set McPhail off. “Maybe you should do it yourself.”

  “I don’t have much time. The client is in Thailand for less than a week.”

  “This isn’t the same woman who kicked me out of your car at George’s funeral?” A cloud passed across his face, and his shoulders twitched as he picked up the hammer in a manner that suggested that suddenly the whole world looked like a nail.

  Calvino nodded, thinking McPhail had a curious way of remembering what had happened in the car on the day of Old George’s funeral. “She wants to find her mother. And father.” The father was a whispered afterthought. The smoke inhaled into McPhail’s chest held tight like one of those storm fronts from Canada hovering above New York. “They abandon the family house without telling her? I couldn’t blame them. She looked as tough as coffin nails.”

  He picked up one of the nails, exhaling smoke.

  “She was given away for adoption as an infant.”

  “I’d say the parents made the right choice. From what I saw, I doubt they could have sold her.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, McPhail.”

  “Showing up at George’s funeral. What the fuck was that? Strangers shouldn’t hang around a stranger’s funeral.”

  “She came because of me. We had an appointment.”

  “And you told her to meet you at a funeral?” He put the hammer down and launched into his drink with both hands, the wet paper napkin around the glass disintegrating in his hands.

  “Are you in or not?”

  “Two-fifty a day.”

  “There’s a depression. You should be working for one and a half.”

  “You’re loaded.” McPhail stared at him through the cigarette smoke, waiting for an answer.

  “And I got a world of people waiting to help me lighten the load.”

  McPhail picked the wet paper off his fingers, balling it up and throwing it at the back of one of the drunks slumped over the bar.

  “Look at Henry. It’s not even one, and he’s passed out. You remember that big lug of a guy named Jailbird Hugh? He was from South Dakota and claimed he went to school with Tom Brokaw. He drank more than a bottle a day. He’d slump over the counter, slide off the stool, end up on the floor, snoring and shitting his pants. When that happened, people came to help him. Hugh’s problem was, when he kneeled over with a heart attack at the bar, face on the counter, everyone in the bar thought he was sleeping. He must’ve been dead half the day before someone realized he wasn’t sleeping.”

  The life of men with no purpose but drinking had the burn rate of a candle lit at both ends. The twin flame of boredom and regret ate up a wick faster than a bar ying downed a lady’s drink.

  Calvino lowered his head, looked McPhail in the eyes.

  “Okay, I’m in, goddamn it.”

  SEVENTEEN

  RATANA SAT INSIDE the day-care center, a book open on her lap, reading to children who formed a semicircle around her stool. Downstairs, Brandon had arrived outside Calvino’s office to find it empty. Ratana hadn’t been gone long. She’d temporarily relieved Meg, who had gone out to buy sliced pineapple from a street vendor. His pounding on the locked office door echoed up and down the soi. The rapid punch of fists indicated that their owner had no recent practice of the dharma. Only a farang would assault an office door; bar yings had been known to attack locked condo and hotel doors, but with less force than a frontal military attack. One of the yings who worked at One Hand Clapping massage parlor strolled by eating pineapple and complaining that a mean-looking farang had given her an ugly look as she passed him on the staircase.

  By the time Ratana walked down one flight, Brandon, hands in his pockets, looked like a man in need of anxiety medication. He was in a sorry state, his hair wild, his eyes fired with the kind of booming anger that frightened most Thais. Ratana ignored his conduct the way she would a child’s; she smiled, then waied Sawyer, who stepped to one side as she fit a key into the door.

  “Where’s Calvino? I’ve got an appointment. Why does he make an appointment, then leave a locked office? That’s no way to run a business.”

  She held the door for him.

  “Mr. Calvino will come soon,” she said. “Can I get you coffee or water?”

  “A whiskey. Make it a double. He keeps a bottle in his desk. But you know that.”

  He was a man with a long list of questions, an even longer list of demands, and questions and demands spelled trouble, and trouble led to dangerous possibilities. Brandon didn’t care if others liked him; he ran no popularity contest and, like many rich people, went to pieces the moment anyone appeared to challenge his entitlements, which were multiple and, in his mind, inviolate.

  Ratana felt she was in no position to argue with her boss’s only client. Opening Calvino’s bottom desk drawer, she pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and poured until she had filled half a glass. It was more than enough to soften his rage. As her eyes followed the glass, she hoped that Brandon wasn’t the kind of drunk who could drink a bottle and on
ly get meaner before pitching forward and falling flat on his face, breaking his nose, and losing a few teeth. Calvino had had more than one such client in the past. Good payers, bad drunks. She handed Brandon the glass, and he took a slow sip, sighed, champed his lips like a horse too long in the stable, before gulping down the rest of it, shivering, holding out the glass. “One more,” he said. Not asked but demanded. She unscrewed the cap on the bottle, and refilled the glass. She left the bottle on Calvino’s desk. By the time Calvino returned from lunch, Brandon was slouched in a chair, slurring his words and not making a lot of sense.

  “You know how fucking long I’ve been waiting?” Then he burst out laughing.

  Calvino crossed over to Ratana’s side of the office. “He’s drunk.”

  “He drank most of your whiskey,” she said.

  “She forced it on me,” he said, smiling, looking at Ratana.

  “Shape up, Brandon.”

  “Put the whiskey on my bill!” Sawyer yelled. “I’m good for it!”

  Calvino sat behind his desk, pulled out his bottom drawer.

  “You’ve talked with Achara,” he said, taking the bottle and putting it back into the drawer. It wasn’t a question. Brandon nodded.

  “What about Marshall?”

  His brother’s name had the effect of attaching jumper cables to Brandon’s genitals. He twitched, he squirmed, and he belched a gaseous cloud of Johnnie Walker Black. “My dear brother and I talked. Then he shouted. That was before he hung up.”

  “What is it with you and Marshall?”

  “Ask our father.”

  “You told me he’s dead.”

  “It was a figure of speech. You ever hear of a figure of speech?”

  Calvino stared at his client, who was lost in the haze of a self-pitying drunk. He’d talked with Brandon the day before and briefed him on Tanny’s meeting with Achara. But he’d edited out a few details—the snake, the lions, the lost earring, the way he had pulled the towel in the darkened room away from Tanny’s body. Otherwise it had been, he was convinced, a full and complete report.

  “What’s Marshall’s wife like?” Calvino asked.

  “Don’t even mention that bitch.”

  “Is their marriage, you know, okay?”

  “I may be drunk, but you’re fucking nuts. Why do you care?”

  “I’m trying to build a profile. Understand the personality.”

  Brandon swatted the air with his hand as if to catch a fly.

  “Marshall’s a controlling, selfish, arrogant, devious bastard. That’s his profile. That’s all you need to know. Marshall and Laura are perfect together. When they flush the toilet, they see the other one’s image reflected as the water drains from the bowl.”

  Brandon had lapsed into drunk speak, a language that inevitably crawled out of the toilet bowl. Calvino pulled the whiskey bottle from the bottom drawer and refilled Brandon’s glass. “It’s about what’s in that envelope Tanny gave you, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me what Marshall wants?”

  “The moon.”

  “He wants to sell your shares,” said Calvino.

  Brandon sprayed good whiskey over Calvino’s desk. “He wants to interfere. He wants to destroy me. He wants to control the world. Only he doesn’t have the balls. Marshall said, ‘Let’s give it a few more days, and then I can make a decision everybody can be happy with.’ In other words, stay of execution for up to a week, then we sell the company. That’s the way Marshall works. He can’t look me in the eye and say, ‘Brandon, I’m pulling us out of Thailand. We need the money; our credit line is canceled.’ That would be simple, to the point, and no bullshit.”

  Calvino leaned back in his chair, wrapped his hands behind his head, watching the sweat beads form on Brandon’s forehead. The combination of heat and whiskey cooked him slowly, like a pig rotating on a spit. “Brandon, there’s nothing more that I can do. You sell or you don’t sell. It’s not my business. I don’t see what else I can do for you.”

  “You want to abandon ship?” Brandon’s jaw dropped, and Calvino wasn’t certain if it was because he was drunk, or was having a seizure, or whether it was just a bad punch line from his days as a stand-up comedian.

  “It’s not a ship, Brandon. It’s a business. Work it out with your brother. There’s nothing I can do to help you on that score. I’m not going to be your buffer. And you’ve put yourself in this bind because of your mouth. You bragged to your brother about how Achara handed a suitcase of cash to the official who signed your permits. What did you expect him to do once you mouthed off? You handed him a bat to hit you with. Bragging on an open phone line about how your business partner in Thailand knows who to pay off. It’s called corruption. He may have thought you were setting him up for some fall in the States, knowing that your ass would always be in the clear here. You fucked yourself.”

  Brandon clenched his jaw. “You sound just like Marshall. I can see now why you didn’t mind his mole coming here and using your office. You’ve been working for Marshall. He turned you with more money. How much is he paying you?”

  Calvino walked around his desk and hit Brandon in the stomach, hard, knocking the air out of him. His knees buckled, and he fell onto the floor, moaning as if a drawbridge had landed on his gut. Standing over him, fists clenched, Calvino said, “Drunk or not, no client walks into my office and accuses me of betraying him. I keep my agreements—all of them. Do me a favor and get the fuck out.”

  He helped Brandon to his feet.

  “Can’t we discuss this?” Brandon asked. The punch had sobered him up.

  Calvino hooked an arm around Brandon’s shoulders and walked him out of the office, to the entrance in front of Ratana’s desk.

  Calvino shook his head. Brandon shrugged his shoulders, sighed, turned, and murmured under his breath, “Fuck it. I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody. Achara’s my only true friend. He’ll know what to do.”

  He was shaking a ham-hock-size fist at Calvino as Tanny appeared. She stopped on the stairs as Brandon staggered down, holding on to the rails with both hands. He locked eyes with Tanny. He looked unsteady, out of wind, the huge fist he’d shaken at Calvino clenched again into an ugly claw. Was he going to throw a punch at her? She stopped, waited for a punch that never came.

  “My brother has made a big mistake,” he said.

  “Marshall doesn’t think so.” She stood her ground.

  Brandon’s eyes widened as if he’d had a moment of absolute clarity. “You should go into comedy. Marshall needs a straight man.”

  Shaky, his guts churning from the punch, his brain swimming in Johnnie Walker’s pool, shoulders slumped, he looked defeated. She watched him fall down the stairs, thinking how he reminded her of Achara’s lions, slipping and sliding in a tranquilizer haze, all roar and no bite.

  “What was that about?” Tanny asked Calvino.

  “I just fired my client.”

  She smiled.

  “What a good way to start the day.”

  Sometimes he wished that Tanny could be a little less New York.

  EIGHTEEN

  TWO DAYS AFTER Calvino punched Brandon Sawyer in the gut and threw him out of his office, he sat behind his desk memorizing the names of Roman emperors. It was something to do while Ratana was at the district office in Ayuthaya province, standing in a line waiting her turn to ask an official to assist her in finding the address of Tanny’s parents; that meant access to the house registration files that contained their names and ID numbers. Ayuthaya was a good hour-long drive from the office on Sukhumvit Road. She had gone to the office twice before seeking information, but not much ever happened until Colonel Pratt placed a phone call, asking a friend to arrange for his friend Ratana to be given a glass of water on one of those tiny, shiny aluminum trays they use for VIPs. An hour later, an official slipped a copy of the mother’s ID, including her picture, into Ratana’s hand and refused any payment.

  Ratana got back to the office and told Calvino about her success. She kep
t it simple. “Got it,” she said. He studied the photocopy but didn’t see much resemblance between the mother in the picture and Tanny.

  Ratana caught the perplexed expression on his face as he looked up from the photocopy. “Why don’t you phone Tanny and give her the good news,” she suggested. “The mother’s registered at a house five kilometers northwest of the city.”

  “Good work,” he said.

  She paused. “I’ll go upstairs in a few minutes and check on John-John.”

  “Did you talk with Tanny’s mother?”

  “She wasn’t in.”

  She saw printouts of the Roman emperors laid out on his desk. “Those generals all look pretty much the same,” she said.

  “They look like Romans. Look at the nose. Look at my nose.” He touched the end of his nose.

  She smiled, thinking, same-same but different. But she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “Phone Tanny. Give her the good news.”

  “I’ll phone her.”

  Satisfied, Ratana returned to her desk. Calvino sat back at his desk and pulled out his cell phone. He glanced again at the photocopy of Tanny’s mother. Ratana had gotten it right about how all the Roman emperors had a certain look. He wrinkled his nose at their stylized faces, hooded eyes, hooked noses, and solid chins. The generosity gene turned up less than one percent of the time. Ratana possessed that gene, and she used it to give others moral clarity when it came to treating people.

  Calvino tried phoning Tanny at her hotel, but she wasn’t in her room. He tried her cell phone, but it was turned off. He was like the man who craved a salami sandwich only to be told they’d run out of mustard and fresh rolls. He settled into his office, twisting his chair from side to side as if his mind were deep in concentration but his body had detached like a rotary blade with unused forward motion. He looked down at a set of flash cards and repeated the names.

  The five good emperors were Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Not one of them would have allowed Brandon to rifle his office bottle, get sloppy drunk, and then call him a traitor. Trajan would have exiled him. Hadrian would have sold him as a slave. Marcus Aurelius would have had him publicly executed. Calvino had a tradition to follow. But times had changed since the days of the Romans—Calvino accepted that a punch in Brandon’s gut was sufficient retribution. He thought that Tanny would like to know she had something in common with the five emperors—like her, all five had been adopted.