The Corruptionist Read online

  The smile was unearned, because you never truly knew where you stood. Most everyone got a smile for nothing. But no one cared; earned or not, the smiles lit up the place, and all that grinning often kept people from one another’s throats.

  By the time they shook hands at the end of the evening on Saturday, Calvino had decided that Tanny Craig wore her professionalism on her sleeve, like some people wore their heart. And for the same reason: They couldn’t help it. On that first Saturday, she had let him do most of the talking. The next morning, Sunday morning, and early morning, too, it was more of the same. He talked, she listened. It was a good interrogation technique. People didn’t understand that in investigation the best weapon to put into the field was a patient listener. People wanted to tell their story, talk and talk, until the sunset, through nightfall, until dawn if you let them.

  Brandon said Marshall had picked Craig because she would “fit in.” Fitting in was something that Marshall valued as a business asset. In Tanny’s case fitting in meant she not only looked Thai but also was Thai. She’d been born in Thailand. Her biological parents were Thai. But other than the genes, below the surface, where identity is made, Tanny Craig was 100 percent American, a wonk whose professional life consisted of taking notes and memorizing figures, forecasts, and termination provisions of contracts.

  Watching American Idol, eating McDonald’s, going to Disney World with her kid. She’d bought the American package. Or another way of looking at Tanny was that she was the American package, right down to the bows and ribbons. Brandon had insisted on keeping Calvino on the case. Like a punch-drunk boxer, he was in no condition to change managers halfway through a losing fight. Marshall worked behind the scenes from his New York office trying to control the financing of his brother’s Thai joint-venture project. Marshall had insisted on bringing in someone from a large professional investigative firm. “An American firm,” he said. And he’d kept repeating that phrase like it was a chant in some two-bit cult. Once she arrived in Bangkok, it hadn’t taken Tanny long before she understood that she was stuck with Calvino unless she could figure out a way to cut him out of the deal. It would be her case; Marshall would control the ring. That was the theory. She pored over the details, searching for any scrap of fact to show over billing, corruption, conflict of interest, or a connection to the contract-killing of the journalist who’d stuck his nose into the joint venture—all possibilities that had run through her checklist. Any one of them would be a knockout blow. That’s what she wanted. A one-round fight. Get the work done, get on a plane, and go home.

  That was what Tanny Craig thought about on the way from the wat and the last belch of gray smoke, as Calvino drove to Brandon Sawyer’s house. Tanny sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead.

  “You don’t talk much,” Calvino said.

  “My client would be happy to pay you a severance fee,” she said.

  “Yeah?” He glanced at her. “He wants to buy me off?”

  “Think of it as streamlining the case.”

  “Meaning he wants me out of the stream and for you to paddle the boat alone.”

  She didn’t say anything, turning her head slightly and gazing out the window.

  Calvino pulled over to the side of the road and set the handbrake. Cars and trucks raced past like high-speed trains that had jumped the rails. A cloud of thick dust kicked from the shoulder of the road and slowly settled over the car. There was nothing opposite the shoulder other than rows of parked pickups, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, and a few vendor shacks selling mangoes and oranges.

  “This is Sawyer’s house?” She looked confused. “It’s a wet market. I’ll be back in five.” He left the car engine running. Calvino had parked Thai style, with the rear half of his Honda City blocking the lane, causing cars approaching from behind to swing out into the oncoming lane without so much as a sideways glance, passing as a matter of right. As she sat in the car, one or two drivers shot her an angry, menacing look. No one honked, no one shouted. The Thais had a huge capacity to store rage until it overflowed into pure white-heat violence. Tanny puffed up her cheeks, sighed, and shook her head as if she had an audience. She glanced at her watch and then out the window. Fifteen minutes later there was no sign of Calvino, just street vendors, shoppers, throngs of students eating ice cream and smiling. As the moments passed, her sense of frustration increased until she pulled out her cell phone, and called him.

  He picked up on the first ring. “I’ll be right there.”

  He hung up before she could explain how upset she was becoming. She was never late for a meeting. It wasn’t professional. Men like Marshall expected punctuality. But Calvino was something else. This man had blocked the road, abandoned her in his car, and if she tried to get out on the passenger side, she’d be run over. She convinced herself that Calvino had done it on purpose, one of those macho power plays.

  She waited and waited, stewing in the air-conditioned car, remembering newspaper stories from somewhere like Arizona or New Mexico that appeared now and again, about how someone had left a baby, an old person, or a dog unattended in a closed-up car in desert-heat conditions.

  She turned up the air conditioner. It was newsworthy if the person or dog died from heat exhaustion. He’d pulled this stunt to play with her mind, throw her off balance, and make her lose her self-control. But she wasn’t going to allow that to happen. The fact was, it was Calvino who was in the stifling heat, shopping in an open wet market, gutters running with animal blood, guts, and feathers. When Calvino returned carrying plastic bags, he knocked on the glass and waved. She rolled down the window. “Flowers?”

  She half turned, reaching out to the orchids.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” He closed his door, smiling.

  “I should’ve told you that it was gonna be a Thai five minutes. But I keep thinking that you are Thai and know how things work. Like ‘driver flees the scene’ is a phrase of high modern art.”

  She didn’t return his smile, turning back around and facing the windshield. He noticed that she wore her seat belt, sitting knees together, hands folded on her lap. What a careful Girl Scout this one was, he thought. “You’re upset with me.”

  “I am not upset.” She said it in a tone indicating that the “not” didn’t belong in the sentence.

  Calvino glanced at her, putting the car into gear. He’s thinking that she’s more than upset. She’s on fire with rage, and nothing I say is going to do anything but stoke the flames. It was time to see how far she’d burn down. “Did your mother teach you to sit like that?” asked Calvino as he turned back into the stream of traffic.

  “We should be there already,” she said, glancing at her watch.

  “Sawyer should fire me, right?”

  She refused to acknowledge his smile, arms folded tightly under her breast and staring straight ahead. “Have you met his brother, Marshall Sawyer?”

  “Brandon and his brother have—”

  “Issues,” she said.

  He nodded, passing a truck overloaded with pool tables, stacked one on top of the other and tied with rope to the rear fender. “Am I wrong in thinking that Marshall wants me off the investigation?”

  “You’ve finished your job. So yes, he thinks you’re hanging on when you should let go.”

  Calvino gave her a crooked smile. She thought of him as a used-up boxer, and she’d come to tell him it was time to throw in the towel.

  “That’s up to Brandon.” He glanced at her, the smile evaporated. “He tells me to stop, I stop. You tell me to stop, no disrespect, but that don’t mean anything.”

  This was turning out to be more difficult than it should be, Tanny thought. “Why don’t you tell me what work you did for Brandon? And what work is left for you specifically. In your opinion, of course. It can be off the record.”

  It was like being interviewed by a journalist. “I don’t talk off the record. So why don’t I be upfront with you? A moment ago you wanted to bribe me to throw Brandon under the bu
s. Now we’re working together? And you want me to tell you all the inside information about Brandon. You’re remarkable. And you want all of this to happen in a New York minute. But you’re forgetting an important piece of information. This is Bangkok, where a minute is known to stretch a time zone with little effort.” He could tell from Tanny’s accent that she wasn’t a native New Yorker. He guessed that she was from somewhere in the Midwest, one of those flyover places with accents as flat as the land outside the plane window.

  “I’m learning.” She was still annoyed over the amount of time he’d left her in the car. Calvino read it as one of those throwaway jabs she lobbed out of desperation when she couldn’t get in close enough to deliver a couple of decisive body blows.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Calvino said. When a man was winning, it was no sweat to ease off. “You know about Brandon Sawyer’s Frankenstein rice- and turbo-winddriven power-generating windmills.”

  “That’s what you call the joint venture.”

  “It’s a nickname for it. Don’t get touchy.”

  But she was the touchy type, and he was trying to get used to her style. She sulked, looking straight ahead at the road.

  Calvino continued, “You knew before he came to Thailand that he worked a year or two as a comedian in New York?”

  He watched for her reaction; she clearly hadn’t known that Brandon Sawyer was a onetime funnyman before going into two businesses that comics made a good living telling jokes about. Brandon was finding that a sense of humor and business didn’t mix. Losses and risks were never funny unless they happened to someone else. Tanny was in town to make certain that that someone else wasn’t Marshall.

  “He’s unstable,” said Tanny.

  “The political situation is unstable.”

  “That’s another reason Marshall’s unhappy. This place seems to be coming apart.”

  Thousands of demonstrators swarmed through the streets of Bangkok, holding the government hostage, chanting, marching, and demanding a new political order. That wasn’t exactly the kind of talk businessmen liked to hear. They liked the old order; they disliked disorder—it made them edgy. No one knew who had authority to set the rules. Brandon was holed up in a world of people hanging on with both hands, pretending that they might be knocked off the ride and into the gutter. Calvino understood why Marshall had sent Tanny to investigate a way to shut down the amusement park. Only thing was, Brandon was having a great time in never never land, and no one was going to push him off the roller coaster just because it was a little dangerous and badly maintained.

  THREE

  BRANDON SAWYER USED his right hand to rake his blond hair, moving it to the side, away from his face. A bulge of flesh hung over his trousers, ballooning out his shirt; when viewed from the side, it appeared he wore a concealed all-purpose money pouch. But the bulge was Sawyer’s bloated stomach. His matted hair formed a tangle on his forehead, in the style of an old-fashioned crooner. The “look” had been part of his act.

  It was the waiting to go on that was hell. Pacing backstage while the previous act worked the audience. Only he wasn’t backstage; Brandon was at home. And his audience would consist of Vincent Calvino and a private investigator named Tanny Craig. He tried to occupy himself with other things. Except it didn’t work. Waiting made him sweat, and his skin had that cold, clammy post-collision daze.

  Calvino had never seen Brandon wear anything other than a tailored silk shirt with three buttons undone, showing a pelt of blond hair on his chest, along with dark trousers, barefoot on the marble floors. Pressing his lips firmly together, Brandon watched while his gnarly toenails the color of amber flew across the room as they were clipped by one of four yings who lounged around his mansion. Brandon sat on an overstuffed chair, holding a glass, sipping his gin and tonic, careful not to dislodge a sliver of lime snugly wedged over the rim. He had laid out all the papers Calvino had asked to examine, gotten one of the yings to spread them out on a table. Most were reports about the recently closed investigation into his partner, a thirty-seven-year-old businessman, a Thai-Chinese named Achara, who’d known the murdered journalist.

  Brandon scanned the papers and felt happy. It wasn’t an ideal place to work, but it was his home, not an office. He wanted this Craig woman to see him in his home and report back to his brother how Brandon’s yings fussed over him. Brandon had done his stand-up work on the small-club circuit in the Village. It was something he had to get out of his system. Calvino, who’d been back to New York, remembered seeing his act. They had talked. Who would have guessed that one-day the comic would be living in Bangkok and hiring Calvino to make subtle inquiries about Achara and his family? What struck Calvino was that the gap between Sawyer’s stage persona and his day-to-day personality was as tiny as the space between the bricks used to build the pyramids. You couldn’t have slipped a knife blade between the two.

  Calvino’s uncle had owned one of the clubs where Sawyer had performed. That had been in the early nineties, when a lot of people in New York thought they were funny. Humor was changing, but Sawyer’s act didn’t. It was dated when he started; it had grown ancient by the time he called it quits. Why had Sawyer gone through the humiliation? Comedy was an act of rebellion against his family and his brother Marshall, who’d been their mother’s favorite. Sawyer’s show-business career had lasted about two long, frustrating years. And when he returned, hat in hand, humbled, to the family business, no one even seemed to notice that he’d tried his luck at comedy, stumbled, fallen flat on his face, and crawled home. Marshall grinned with satisfaction. The sound out of the back of his throat was as close to a laugh as Brandon ever got from his brother.

  Brandon smacked his lips, rattled the ice cubes against the inside of his cut-crystal glass as if throwing the bones for a reading of his future. He’d been expecting the woman his brother had sent with Vincent Calvino, and they were running a half an hour late. Like most lonely men, Sawyer drank in large swallows, draining the glass. Then he lifted the empty glass and nodded. A ying massaged his ankles while a maid took the glass and walked across the room to the wet bar. The other two yings played cards at a table in the corner. The yings had the large-screen TV tuned to the cartoon station. The remote control lay on the table. One of them had pushed it into the pot of twenty- and one-hundred-baht notes and called the others. She grinned, convinced she had the winning hand. Sawyer felt agitated, as if he were about to walk onstage, going through his act in his head.

  He rehearsed, mumbling to himself, the speech he’d planned to deliver to Marshall’s private investigator. The plan was to start with something along the lines that the world had changed but Marshall never changed. Marshall never accepted Brandon’s judgment, his recommendations, or his version of events. The same was true for his friends, his ideas, or his lifestyle. It had been that way since they’d been children. Marshall did everything in his power to retain control of every situation. If Brandon hired an expert, Marshall found something to discredit the person. He’d been trying to do the same thing with Vincent Calvino. Marshall had sent his own hired gun to find a way to kick Calvino off the case. That would leave Brandon alone, isolated, and Marshall would again win the toss. But Brandon hadn’t given up; Calvino was still on his side. He had a fighting chance.

  Brandon fidgeted, brushing his hair, wringing his hands; a nervous, unsettled stomach revolted against the gin and tonic. He counted the toenail fragments flying across the room, yelling, “Incoming!” He belched and took the refilled glass from the maid, moving across to stand in front of air circulating from the blades of a couple of floor fans. “Other leg,” he said to the ying in white shorts and blue tank top, braless, a gold chain swinging as she massaged his leg. She shifted to his other leg, diving in with hands shaped like claws. “Softer,” he protested. “That’s my leg, not a hunk of Kobe beef.”

  The ying, who was twenty-one, had no idea what Kobe beef was, but understood he wanted a gentler touch. She smiled, blew him a kiss. That was the kind
of audience Brandon loved best—adoring, responsive, tireless, and at his feet. All morning a crew of electricians had been fixing the air-conditioning, and several fans circulated the hot air without doing anything to reduce the temperature. The yings and the other staff couldn’t have been happier; they hated air-conditioning, saying it gave them headaches, colds, bladder problems, skin eruptions, that it attracted rats and ghosts. Sawyer just stared at them when they carried on conversations that defied cause and effect. How such irrational beings had occupied every room in his life sometimes troubled him. It was the trade off for nonstop massage and refilled glasses, he told himself. Living in Thailand, he had grown to accept many peculiar aspects of living.

  Where the fuck is Calvino? he wondered. His man was running late. He remembered something about a funeral. People died every day. Running late because of death was hardly an excuse. If anything, it was a good reason to speed up, he thought. Maybe something had gone wrong. He started to worry about the things that might have happened—that Marshall had gotten to Calvino. Sawyer’s mind, heataddled and gin-plied, had begun to play tricks, throwing out images of Calvino sitting in his office, unknotting his black funeral tie, having tossed the case file into the wastebasket.

  Brandon’s brother could have paid him off. The implication had been that Calvino was a local hire and wouldn’t be up to the job required. Would Vinny have taken his brother’s money and not have told Brandon? Calvino was a lot of things, but money-driven wasn’t one of them. Yet Marshall said every man has his price, and every woman sooner or later morphed into Lady Macbeth. With their mother, Brandon never questioned the last part of Marshall’s equation. Most people in Sawyer’s family suffered various degrees of paranoia, and if scientists ever figured out the gene sequence, he was certain they’d find that it came from his mother’s side of the family. That’s where the money had come from, and if he gave up always looking over his shoulder, assuming that someone was trying to get him, eventually someone just might get lucky. Paranoia was a major corporate asset; it never deflated, and retained its value, especially in hard times. Sawyer had never liked his brother’s attitude. Marshall was always causing trouble, and looking for some angle to trip Brandon up, make him fall flat on his face. As far as Brandon was concerned, this imported investigator from New York was part of a conspiracy intended to get his money, kill a profitable deal, and drive him out of Thailand. “I’ve got a cramp in my right foot,” he said, making a face.