The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Calvino slumped back, as if somebody had pushed him, as he regarded the image of Zhang, cigarette smoke frozen in the air. Calvino had positioned the camera on the doublehelix sculpture. Behind Zhang was one of Galileo Chini’s nudes hanging on the gallery wall, and the other paintings in Montri’s collection surrounding it.

  Looking at the image on the computer screen, Calvino thought that Zhang bore a slight resemblance to the man he’d shot in 2006. Or was it early-morning tiredness playing tricks on his mind? Look-alikes or not, they made Calvino wonder if his karma had gotten itself tied up in a bunch of Chinese knots that never seemed to voluntarily come undone. He stared at Zhang talking, unaware that he was being filmed. He was a natural: Self-confident, calm and cool in the certainty that Calvino was just another Western fool who had no more of an idea of what was happening than a man trying to read time from a clock with only a minute hand.

  Power of conviction lasted until the executioner raised his arms and the blade of the ax hovered a second before cleaving through the extended neck. After Calvino finished editing the video clip down to ten minutes’ running time, he pulled a new office bottle from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured a double shot, splashed the whiskey around the inside the glass, took a deep breath, and emptied it in one swig. He poured a second round, checking the level in the bottle. He raised his glass, saluted Brandon’s memory, thinking of him sitting on top of the ladder making people laugh.

  Calvino used a proxy server to open YouTube on his Mozilla browser. He typed in the login information and waited a couple of beats. Clips of The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman popped up on the screen.

  The funnymen had top billing. People needed a good laugh, to enjoy the folly of the human condition and to forget how serious and dangerous the world really was. Brandon had known better than most how humor worked as a temporary drug against sadness and despair.

  Calvino had plugged the high-definition video camera directly into the USB port. All that was left was couple of keystrokes to upload it to YouTube. Next he opened the website Wiki Whistleblower in a separate screen and uploaded an eight-page report linking Zhang to General Suchart and listing the names of the shareholders as his close associates, documenting the history of Zhang’s PLA connection, the electroshock-weapon manufacturing, and the transfer of three million dollars to E-Dragon (Siam). He headlined the article “Chinese Warren Buffett’s Electrifying Journey On The Silk Road.”

  Calvino sipped the whiskey, felt the sting on his tongue, in the back of his throat as he set the glass down. He had no doubt what he needed to do. Zhang had, in a way, made the decision easy—daring him to build a window for anyone to peer into the black house where the Chinese mafia divided up the money.

  Big decisions grew to massive proportions once a man understood the depth and breadth of the entanglements involved. Zhang’s mission had been littered with casualties and fenced with lies and deceit, and in a world of funnymen the challenge for Calvino was untangling the relationships, reflecting on possible outcomes, and thinking about the consequences of exposing others at a time when emotions were raw and people were demonstrating in the streets.

  Zhang had no problem with letting Calvino walk out of Montri’s mansion. Calvino had no choices left; every move he’d made had been checkmated, and now the game was over, and in Zhang’s mind he had won. The ritual cleansing at Montri’s mansion had given him confidence that his past was behind him. Zhang had stared at Calvino for the last time in the gallery, told himself that he was looking at a defeated man, a man who would submit to his will. What he hadn’t seen was Calvino’s tiny video camera perched on the helix structure. It had been rolling from the moment Zhang came into the gallery.

  The video was a couple of clicks away from an upload to YouTube. The Wiki page would be vetted and might take days before it was posted. But the YouTube video would appear immediately on the Net. He’d link the YouTube page to the Wiki article and hope for the best. But didn’t everyone who uploaded a video? Calvino gazed at Jon Stewart’s face on the YouTube clip. Eyebrows raised, a large ironic smile frozen in time as if he knew a secret millions of others wanted him to share. Would Zhang’s confession be noticed in the vast digital sea of videos?

  It was said that a butterfly flapping its wings in a Brazil rainforest might cause a hurricane along the Texas coast, or even more dramatically, change the orbit of the planet. Small events had potentially huge consequences, Calvino thought. A young woman in Isan was summarily executed in the war against drugs. Her death echoed through time, calling out to those left behind, including Tanny Craig. An unborn baby was incinerated in Yunnan province, but his spirit haunted his surviving brother. A political void had opened in Thailand, and money and lives and schemers tumbled in, head over heels—colonels, businessmen, players, dreamers, dealmakers, all entangled in ways no one fully understood. But like the butterfly, which required wings for flight, the Thai power brokers required influence to fly, one with another, flying in formation, and the misery of the world flowed from the realization of the near impossibility of changing the laws of motion. But it was worth a try, thought Calvino. He had no other plan in mind.

  He smiled, watching the screen as the file loaded, sipping his whiskey. To start a media fire, he needed a reporter. A hack would do the trick, as most real reporters had long ago lost their jobs. Even the hacks he’d known from the old days were retired or dead or had packed up and gone back home to die. By the time the Europeans had set up enough committees to decide what to do with the story, Calvino told himself that he’d likely be dead. That left Kincaid, the American writer who’d hung out with Brandon the night of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club panel discussion.

  What writer wouldn’t kill for an exclusive that had the potential to be picked up and broadcast around the world? Calvino figured Kincaid was his man. He’d spent a career getting freebie hotel rooms, buffets, and buckets of wine. He knew everyone in the press corps. And Kincaid would know where to feed the story—Reuters, DPA, CNN, BBC, and AP. He searched through his desk until he found Kincaid’s card, and, having forgotten the time, he punched in the number. When Kincaid answered on the fifth ring, he screamed into the phone, “You whore! I told you to stop calling me! It’s the fucking middle of the night! And if you want money.”

  Calvino sensed that the “fuck-you moment,” followed by the slamming down of the phone, had just about arrived, and interrupted, “This is Vincent Calvino. I met you at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club the night Brandon Sawyer spoke.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “A political corruption story.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Chinese funding General Suchart’s political party. Government contracts. Kickbacks. Big money.”

  Silence. Kincaid’s kick-ass anger dropped like an anchor. Calvino had hit the right sequence to speed-dial through to where Kincaid kept his ambition and greed under wraps. He described the video and what Zhang had said on tape, then e-mailed the YouTube link of the video to Kincaid, who watched it as Calvino heard him murmuring, “What is this?”

  “A video confession from Wei Zhang, a key player.”

  Calvino opened his desk drawer, took out his passport and a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He stuck the passport in his inside jacket pocket and divided the cash, sticking it into various side pockets. Looping his arm into the leather shoulder holster, he secured it around his neck. It fit snug against the left side of his chest. He pulled out the .38 police special and checked the cylinder. Calvino always kept the .38 loaded—otherwise what was the point? Throwing it at someone wouldn’t do much good.

  Calvino had a good idea that Zhang was less interested in retrieving the prototype weapon than in finishing the business that had gone sideways twice, once in the botched job using a van and a second time when the device wired in his car had killed Siriporn. Zhang couldn’t lose—either Calvino would run or he’d show up at his condominium for the appointment. And the Chinese
believed that the third time was a charm.

  But Calvino had a couple of ideas himself how to prepare for the next encounter. He’d given a security guard a thousand baht to borrow the CCTV tapes from the previous two nights prior to Siriporn’s murder. He loaded the tapes onto his hard drive and studied each one—the faces of every delivery person, resident, friend, whore, gambler, and retiree who’d been buzzed into the lobby the night someone had wired Calvino’s Honda.

  One man stood out. His hair was closely cropped to a fine burr against the skull, and he had full lips right off a carved stone head from Angkor Wat. Calvino remembered this face, saw the man pull a nine-millimeter handgun out of a bulky red insulated carrier with a pizza logo and aim it at his head. In slow motion the gunman pulled the trigger.

  The sound of the round echoed in his ears. Calvino had awakened, sitting upright, covered in sweat. His gut told him that the Thai man in his mid-twenties who’d been captured on the CCTV tapes was more than the stuff of a nightmare. He thought the chances were good that he’d seen the face of Siriporn’s killer on the tape. He asked himself what the odds were of meeting the man who had been in the tape; hit men in Thailand were as numerous as hookers, and just about as interchangeable.

  As he sat in his office, getting ready to leave, he wondered if the face he remembered from the tapes was waiting for him at the condo. There was only one way to find out. He removed the compact video cam from the USB port and slipped it into his pocket. He checked the time. The fact that the police were no longer staking out his condo told him everything he needed to know. Zhang’s general had a long reach. The fist had come out of the glove, and the knuckles had been brassed up, sent on a mission. Calvino switched off the light, locked his office, and walked down the stairs. He looked both ways as he reached the street level. The silent street yielded no one. A cat stretched, rubbed itself on the edge of the stair, and slipped away.

  Calvino walked to Ratana’s BMW, parked in front of the office; he had the keys in his hand. Zhang’s security detail would have seen the car at Montri’s. They’d be waiting for it at the condo. He pocketed the keys and walked up the soi, where he found a motorcycle-taxi driver who was both awake and sober early in the morning, and asked, as the young man pulled on his helmet, to stop within walking distance of the condominium. He paid the driver and cut through the back lane to the side of his building. A small walkway separated the building from a factory that manufactured stainless-steel industrial-size kitchen equipment—huge pots, sinks, worktables, and cupboards. He looked through a window, but the inside of the factory was dark and there was no movement. An outside light on the wall bounced off rows of steel sinks. A large rat ran over his shoe and disappeared under a stack of half-constructed basins piled high against the common wall. Halfway up the pile, a cat hunched down, eyes burning. Calvino climbed up, one kitchen fixture at a time—they made a natural ladder—until his hands touched the top of the wall.

  Calvino pulled himself up, looking at the empty ramp leading to the first floor of the parking garage. After jumping down onto the ramp, he shook off the muscle burn in his shoulders and arms. He hurried up the ramp, pushed open the first-floor fire door, and walked up the stairs. By the time he reached the second floor, he no longer felt the cramp in his right shoulder, and had drawn his .38 from its holster.

  Leaning against the door as he reached the fifth-floor fire door, Calvino thought that this was how it was when there was no possibility of backup from Colonel Pratt. There was no question in his mind that Pratt would have wanted to be at his side. But the colonel was dreaming morphine dreams of sandy beaches and beautiful women—there was only one way the matter could be settled, and that was to run or settle it alone. He’d tell Pratt the full story later. Assuming he’d be around to tell it and Pratt to listen.

  Calvino pressed his ear against the door. He picked up the low murmur of conversation from the other side. Two voices, two men talking about how the farang was late. He flattened his shoulder against the gray metal door. Through the small crack, he saw the two men. Both were young, slender, fit like men who worked out in the gym. One of them leaned against the back of a black Isuzu pickup, the kind with chrome mag wheels and a retractable roof that was cranked up, looming above the bed. He wore a black T-shirt tucked into his jeans, tattoos of a garuda and dragon chasing each other down his arm. He casually smoked a cigarette, flicking the ash with the nail on his little finger.

  He also had a gun holstered on his belt. The second man was positioned in front of the bank of elevators. His posture was picture perfect as he stood with his back turned to Calvino.

  Slowly the man watching the elevators looked around at his friend beside the pickup. “Watch the ramp,” he said, pointing at the ramp leading up to the fifth floor. Nothing was moving.

  “He’s not going to show. Come on, let’s get out of here,” said the man with the tattoos.

  From the doorway Calvino made the sentry by the elevators as the same guy he’d watched on the CCTV tape walking in the lobby dressed as a pizza deliveryman. From the setup it looked like he was running the show, the point man delegated to make the decision on the ground—stay or pull up the tent and leave the area. “Give it a few more minutes,” he said.

  The man with the tattoos grumbled and flicked away his cigarette.

  Calvino fixed the silencer on the barrel of the .38 and opened the door.

  “Who you looking for?” he asked, standing in the doorway, training the gun on the man in front of the elevators.

  “Zhang sent us. You got something for us.” The guy didn’t lie all that well. His eyes glanced at his partner. The tattooed man standing beside the Isuzu saw the signal, and his expression changed as he slipped his hand down to reach for his sidearm. Calvino crouched in a firing position; he shot him twice in the chest. The man pitched forward and dropped chin first as if he were dead before he hit the ground. “You were here before,” said Calvino to the survivor, who had raised his hands. “You fucked with my car.” He stood in front of Ratana’s BMW; the hood was open. “And you’re trying the same thing again?” There was no mistake that Calvino projected what the Thais called kliat khao kraduk dam—hatred strong enough to go to the bone. “You shoot my friend, the police colonel? Well, did you, asshole?”

  He was scared, and the predator’s blood lust Calvino had seen in his eyes had been extinguished, replaced by not so much fear as desperation. Finally the man swallowed with difficulty, sighed like something jagged had gone down his throat, and he made the same futile reach his partner had, and Calvino shot him in the stomach. He let him fall to his knees. “Did you shoot the police colonel?”

  The wounded man spit blood on Calvino’s shoes.

  “I take that as a yes.”

  “You have no friends,” the man said.

  “Maybe not.”

  Calvino shot him in the head. His body fell over.

  Calvino holstered his .38 and pondered what to do about the two dead bodies. It was too early for heavy lifting. He dragged the first body from the area in front of the elevators and loaded it into the back of the pickup. He rested for a moment, pulling a cigarette out of the pack from the other dead body, found the lighter, lit the cigarette, took two hits, dropped it, and ground the long butt under his heel. He sized up the crime scene, thinking how the police would gather evidence and reconstruct what had happened to the two men. They’d look high and low until a bulb went on in someone’s head that maybe the men had messed up their assignment. But that meant doing some rearrangement of both the bodies and the pickup in order to give himself some time.

  Calvino flipped through their identification papers; both men carried old police IDs. They could have been real. Or not. They were a couple of years out of date. That pointed to ex-cops who hadn’t kicked the habit of carrying their old IDs. He put their wallets back in the pockets where he’d found them. He fished the keys to the pickup from the front pocket of the tattooed man, and then he loaded the body into the back.
He was sweating by the time he’d finished. He thought that since both men might be cops, things would turn ugly. In the back of the pickup, he found a black gym bag. Calvino unzipped it and looked inside.

  He pulled out a Ziploc tightly packed with white powder. There were half a dozen packages in the bag. That had been their play, he thought. The new war on drugs was taking a different direction: The cops decided that the person they hit needed to be a drug kingpin and required an investment of a couple of kilos of heroin. Like a Chinese loan, the white powder would find its way back to the source.

  In the first war against drugs, the death squads had used a standard method to support the verdict of the dead person as a drug dealer—crude, but effective: Shoot the man or woman or child and plant drugs beside the body, in the pockets of the clothing, or inside a body cavity. Calvino threw the Ziploc packet into the bag and zipped it up.

  The cache of drugs gave him a moment of relief, until he remembered that rogue cops operated under the protection of influential crooked friends on the force. Two bodies with a duffel bag of drugs would normally make the news. Calvino figured that there was an even chance, using some creative forensics, that the two men would be reported as victims in the new war against drugs.

  He closed the roof of the black Isuzu until it made a perfect cover on the bed like a lid on a pot. No one got shot in the chest without a rope of blood splattering the area. Shoot two men at close range and there’s enough of that rope to hang a man. He pushed open the fire door, opened the doors to the utility closet in the hallway, and pulled out a bucket and mop. He worked against the coming dawn. It wasn’t a professional job by any means, smearing blood around until it looked like something else had been spilled on the area. By the time he’d finished cleaning the floor and walls and put away the bucket and mop, he was running out of time.