The Corruptionist Read online

  THE CORRUPTIONIST

  A NOVEL

  BY

  CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

  Published by

  Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Christopher G. Moore

  Discover other titles by Christopher G. Moore at Smashwords.com:

  A Killing Smile

  A Bewitching Smile

  A Haunting Smile

  Chairs

  Publisher’s note

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  In evil as in art there was illumination.

  —Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

  When a nation is filled with strife, then do patriots flourish.

  —Lao-tzu

  It is certainly sordid to do the wrong thing, and anyone can do the right thing when there is no danger attached; what distinguishes the good man from others is that when danger is involved he still does right.

  —Plutarch

  For Tito Haggardt, John Paulos, and Chris Coles

  ONE

  THE THAIS HAVE an old saying about the troubles caused by a drop of honey. It goes like this. Nam phueng yod diew. The translation is straightforward: “a drop of honey.” It doesn’t sound like a big deal. More like a sweet nursery rhyme. That judgment is a big mistake. A drop of honey foreshadows a tsunami of problems. The farmer on the way to market loses a drop of honey along the way. Next thing, flies swarm over the honey; then a house lizard, what the Thais call a jingjok, spots the flies and starts eating them; then the cat leaps in and eats the jingjok; then a dog bites the cat, the owner of the cat kicks the dog, the dog and cat owners get into a fight. Neighbors and bystanders join in, taking sides, and soon there is a full-scale riot. In English we settle for the parable of the kingdom lost for the want of a horseshoe nail. Nail or honey, the idea is pretty much the same—something small can change just about everything. What the Thais don’t tell you is that every few years there is a coup and a freight train of honey gets derailed. When that happens, the predator feeding frenzy accelerates at warp speed and anyone caught in the crossfire becomes a meal. The lesson remains the same: There is a chain of predators, each one feeding off the one below, and sooner or later even those at the top of the chain start to feel insecure.

  One woman, at a funeral, sitting in the back of the church, attracted carnal thoughts and like a drop of honey had started attracting flies. Tanny Craig had been in Bangkok twentyfour hours and already had caused confusion in a land that was an “us against them” kind of place. Maybe most places had a prejudice against the outsider. But Thailand had turned it into an art, even an educational mission, teaching children about the dangers of khon nork—the outsider. Blame the Burmese for sacking Ayuthaya not once but twice.

  Tanny Craig’s polished bronze fittings on her black leather picked up the early-morning sun as she sat alone in the rear of the church. Dressed in a tailored black dress with an Aztec motif stitched around the scooped neck, her long dark hair held in place with a mother-of-pearl clip, her eyes hidden by designer eyeglasses, she might have passed as a local movie star. Tanny didn’t know the deceased inside the coffin at the altar or anyone else in the church, except for Vincent Calvino. Calvino said to himself that her presence was an omen. And in this part of Asia, omens came in two packages—one with a winning number inside and one with a whole lot of suffering, pain, and loss. In a place where few winners could be found, the sudden appearance of an omen, especially at a funeral, made Old George’s friends hopeful that their luck had changed for the better.

  Tanny waited for him like someone determined not to lose her man. She had the looks that drew men’s attention. Most would have been happy to have such a woman stalking them at a funeral. Because that was what it amounted to; their arrangement had been to meet after the funeral, but she broke the agreement and showed up. Maybe she was curious, or maybe she had other reasons.

  Calvino resisted looking over his shoulder.

  “Goddamn it, Calvino, how can you get a woman to stalk you to my funeral?” Calvino heard Old George’s voice and in his mind’s eye saw Old George slowly shaking his head, jowls swaying like an aging go-go dancer’s ass, sucking his teeth and issuing a fatwa-like warning.

  As Calvino shifted, trying to get comfortable on the hard wooden pew while waiting for the funeral to begin, he remembered the last conversation he’d had with Old George—it was about women. One afternoon after a couple of beers, Old George had asked a question—if you can outsource the drudgery from a marriage and make your partner happy, why not outsource the pleasure and make yourself happy?

  Someone who’d been in the bar remembered Old George’s rhetorical question and whispered it to a friend in the pew in front of Calvino as they waited for the service to start. Calvino felt her eyes burning into the back of his neck. But it didn’t much matter; he had continued to ignore Tanny, shut her out of his mind by way of pretending she wasn’t there. Giving her any satisfaction of acknowledging her presence was like ticking off an item on the checklist of what a person should do with a stalker—only Tanny was no ordinary stalker, and that simple fact compounded the problem like an accelerated interest penalty on a bad loan.

  Calvino concentrated on his memories of Old George, since that was the purpose of a funeral. He visualized Old George on his perch in the bar. That was the only place where the image would reside, inside his mind. It took some getting used to thinking of Old George as that deceased person in a coffin. Calvino sat in the chapel of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Soi Ruam Rudee wondering how everything had become clear at the end for Old George, like in a good mystery. The problem, Old George said, was, “Life’s not like a book. You can’t go back and relive it knowing the things you can change, the things you just gotta accept because that’s how things work.”

  The rotating blades in the overhead fans stirred the muggy air. A fat Thai woman swept dead leaves and flowers with a broom. Attendants removed wreaths from stands in front of the coffin. The back-office crew carried out the small tasks required to run a funeral. Lined up against the rear walkway, several men smoked, looking out over the jammed parking lot of the church, wondering who would show up and who would roll over and go back to sleep. A couple of Lonesome Hawk regulars who had been trying to determine who the strange, beautiful woman in the back of the church was, turned their attention to matters of faith. One whispered about whether a Jew could get a ticket into heaven by having a Catholic funeral. Another regular said Old George had hedged his bets. If you picked only one religion, that was risky; it was better to take a chance with a couple of religions. It was a stronger hand, and you could plead your case that at a minimum you were entitled to a timeshare in heaven. “And if there ain’t no God, then that meant Old George won, only he’d never know that he’d won because there’s no him. That’s how George figured it.”

  “How do you know? He tell you that? Doesn’t sound like George.”

  “He was a lawyer and a Jew. He knew all the angles. He didn’t need to tell me.”

  Inside the church, a woman sang a hymn. A hundred or so people filed in, slidi
ng into the pews as the priests had already taken their position at the altar. The outer doors on both sides were open, and a slight cross breeze cooled the room. For a nine o’clock funeral in Bangkok, Old George had more farangs inside a church than a bishop holding Christmas mass.

  George had died of old age. Everything fell apart. The faint click of the wind chimes on the roof outside the window filled the silence when the organist stopped between hymns. During the readings and the eulogy, Calvino glanced out the window. Beyond the wind chimes and battered TV aerials from the Stone Age of broadcast TV, relics of tangled, twisted metal, and potted plants, dry and shriveled, three green domes of a mosque rose like jade jar lids against a gray morning sky. George, Calvino thought, smiling, the good Jew, was getting himself a Catholic funeral in the shadow of a mosque and later in the morning would be cremated at a Buddhist wat. The mourners ahead of him might have been onto something. Old George was like a gambler who placed his bets on three horses—Jewish, Christian, Buddhist—in a three-horse race. Calvino imagined for a moment he heard the call for prayer coming from the direction of the mosque, making it a four-horse race.

  But it was only the wind and the sound of those chimes echoing through the church.

  The service ended with the singer letting loose on “Amazing Grace.” The crowd had slowly risen from the polished wooden pews, bones creaking like the sound of a native clearing bamboo with a machete. While it was still early morning, the heat of the day had cranked up a notch to a couple of degrees below egg-frying temperatures, and the pallbearers groaned under the weight of George’s coffin. Arms shaking, knees buckling, like a line of old rumba dancers they managed to load the coffin onto a gurney, and the attendants wheeled it out the door and to a hearse parked in front of the church. The back hatch door was open, and the pallbearers struggled once more to slide the coffin inside.

  After the Catholic funeral, the cremation service was scheduled at a wat on Phetchaburi Road. The crematorium was nestled in a compound of buildings with orange gabled roofs. The wat overlooked an expressway ramp, cars lined up to pay the toll, drivers looking out their windows getting an image of the last tollgate they would one day enter. Calvino left the church and stood with other friends as George’s widow stood beside the hearse, clutching a framed photograph of her husband. The widow, the photo of George in one hand, gently dabbed a tissue to her eyes. Tanny sat in the last pew away from the door, where she watched Calvino. He had seen her but hadn’t acknowledged her presence. He looked away as Tanny glanced at her watch, then glanced up to see Calvino embrace an elderly man in a safari suit and with tears in his red-rimmed eyes. They patted each other on the shoulder the way men do, and then the man in the safari suit stepped forward and comforted Old George’s widow.

  Some of the bar regulars were dry-mouthed before ten in the morning, itchy for the taste of the first beer of the day, scratching at their collars, underarms sweat-stained from the exertion of carrying the coffin. They broke into groups, figuring out who had transportation to the wat and who had decided to cut out and find something to drink. McPhail came to old George’s funeral dressed in a necktie and a brown shirt. He looked tense, beaten down, working the kinks out of his knuckles. The knot in his tie, crooked and creased in the wrong place, along with his haggard expression would have let him pass as the foreman of a hung jury deadlocked after forty-eight hours of deliberation. McPhail crossed over and hugged Calvino, whispering in his ear, “Don’t look. But inside the door there’s a ying who’s been clocking you.”

  Calvino patted him on the back. “Tanny Craig.”

  “Second to last pew, she’s seated about noon. You have to move to your left a foot or so,” McPhail went on until Calvino’s words sank in. “You know her?”

  Calvino nodded and, to prove his point, walked to the entrance of the church and looked inside. Tanny, in her perfect black dress, sat, legs crossed, half turned, a black briefcase on the pew beside her. She lowered her sunglasses and stared at him. Calvino frowned, letting her know he wasn’t happy that she’d bird-dogged him to the church. They had an appointment, but it’d been agreed that that was after the funeral. But she couldn’t wait; she had to follow him, to be certain he would make the appointment. He ignored her and turned his attention to McPhail. Calvino had nothing he wanted to say to Tanny that couldn’t wait until the funeral had finished and they were back at the office. And looking at McPhail, he realized that he had nothing more to say to McPhail. So he said nothing. Had this been her idea of putting Calvino through some kind of test? The appointment was to attend a meeting with Brandon Sawyer, who was Calvino’s client. She had managed to get the information about the funeral from Ratana. Calvino turned around, facing the altar, arms folded across his chest.

  “Foxy,” said McPhail.

  “She’s from New York. Strictly business.” His voice was flat and dull.

  McPhail’s eyebrows rose. “You’re joking.”

  Calvino said, “She’s not the kind of woman you joke about.”

  “She’s got something about her. Class.”

  Any Thai ying who wasn’t a hooker and carried a briefcase had class in McPhail’s book. Calvino saw no good reason to disclose that Tanny Craig was a private investigator in Bangkok on assignment from New York. Calvino wanted to forget that she was at the church. The prime directive was to concentrate on sending Old George off to the next life before attending to unfinished business in this one. The service was over, and the pair of priests stood outside the church near the widow. They looked smaller, more human than when they drank from the chalice on the altar. When they’d offered Communion, it was just the wafer that was given. The chalice wasn’t extended. One of the mourners had gone back to the altar and discovered that there was only olive oil in the chalice. He had badly wanted a drink. He spit out the olive oil, crossed himself, and went back outside to join the others.

  A procession of cars drove to Phetchaburi Road, where a couple of the motorcycle-taxi boys in their orange vests stood in the road directing traffic, letting the procession turn into the driveway of the wat. Calvino got into his car, and then McPhail and two others from the service climbed in, slamming the doors and demanding the air conditioner be turned on full blast. “Aren’t you gonna offer her a ride?” asked McPhail.

  Calvino watched Tanny walk toward his car. McPhail smiled as she approached.

  “I should leave her to find her own way.”

  “This explains why you’re single,” said McPhail. “You gotta sweet-talk a woman a little, Vinny. Abandoning her at George’s funeral isn’t gonna get you laid.”

  Somehow Calvino felt that George would forgive him. She rapped her knuckles on the window. Calvino rolled it down.

  “Can I have a ride?”

  McPhail opened the door, climbed out, holding the door for Tanny.

  “Get in,” Calvino said. As he watched Tanny and McPhail change places, he was thinking that’s how it always began, the “get in” part, and down the line it usually crashed into a call to “get out.” As McPhail groaned getting in, Calvino avoided looking at Tanny. He was already regretting the invitation, but telling her to get out would set a record even for Calvino in terms of time together. He gave it a pass. It was strange, looking back, how two simple, small English words—“get in” or “get out”—could become the source of so much regret. They’d deserted Calvino at the speed of buckshot, abandoning him to the pretty woman who’d mooched a ride from Old George’s funeral. Inside the van McPhail and the others congratulated themselves for being heroes, giving Calvino the chance to close the deal with the hot ying. They figured that Calvino owed them a round of drinks. McPhail said, “Make that a couple of rounds. He can afford it.” Calvino had a different take—the men had felt some primal instinct that told them to flee while they could. He had felt the same urge. That was the problem with driving. He was stuck behind the wheel with a woman in the passenger seat who had every intention of spoiling a perfectly good funeral.

  TW
O

  “BRANDON DIDN’T HAVE anything to do with Kowit’s murder. Achara’s not a murderer.” Brandon was Calvino’s client; Achara came into the picture as Brandon’s Thai business partner. Kowit’s murder had briefly turned a spotlight on Achara, but in Thai style it was less a spotlight than one of those prison-wall searchlights scanning the swamps just outside the grounds for someone lurking in the shadows. It soon moved on to others.

  She had flown into Thailand on Saturday, arriving on a late-night flight. He’d met her at the hotel for a drink. She’d worn one of those professional suits with tailored woolen trousers that a New York senator might wear. Tanny had spent Sunday going over a number of documents at Calvino’s office. It wasn’t an unreasonable request given the circumstances—a desk, a chair, and a computer had been installed in anticipation of her arrival. She was moving in for a temporary period to work out the details of a business deal between Brandon and his brother Marshall. The office accommodation had been part of the deal. Brandon, who never let the money train pass without pulling off a bag or two, got his brother to fund the officeequipment expenditure, rent, telephone, and transportation.

  Marshall didn’t blink; he wired the money to Calvino’s account and e-mailed him that when Tanny left, he could keep the extra computer or give it away. Brandon said not to consider the offer one of generosity.

  “Marshall’s fucking with you. That’s his way of doing it,” he had said.

  Tanny’s human resources—meaning Calvino’s services—had been part of the package.

  Tanny Craig was the only ethnic Thai he’d ever met who didn’t flash the automatic smile. That default grin had been refined over centuries to oil the hard gears of daily life, which feudalism had the tendency to gum up. Thailand had cultivated the idea of itself as the “Land of Smiles,” used it to sell the place to tourists who’d do more tricks than a circus dog for one of those smiles. The smile was among those human expressions, like sex, that had been successfully repressed in the West. At least the one that had no real justification for itself; in the West, a person who smiled for no apparent reason was the village idiot. Not in Thailand, where the smiles were abundant and largely for no reason.