Cavalier woke early on Tuesday after a fitful sleep and was preparing to go for a run when he noticed the numbers of soldiers in the street. Something was up, possibly either a demonstration by red shirts or Gaez supporters. Instead, he had a work-out in the gym. After half an hour on the running machine, he felt a familiar strain in his right Achilles. Irritated, he stopped to stretch it out and massage it for three or four minutes before resuming exercise using light weights. As he returned to his room, he received a text from Rafferty, telling him the second cricket match—in Bangkok—was still on. Cavalier texted back, asking if he knew a good physio. Rafferty gave him the name and number of Waew Ing, describing her as the ‘best in BKK’.
After showering and dressing, Cavalier took his coffin, including his cricket gear, to reception. Because of his injury making the coffin more difficult to carry, he asked for it to be delivered by courier to the curator at the cricket ground, fifty kilometres north of the city. The hotel staff told him that the streets were clear of rebels and police after the early-morning confrontation at Asok. He walked the short distance to Soi 8 and again had breakfast at Viva, then rang Waew Ing. It was arranged he would have a session at her Soi 23 office, off Sukhumvit, at 3 p.m.
Cavalier read the papers and checked the internet. There were several previews of the fight, but they focused more on the Russian, who, it was claimed, had never been beaten. The junta, meanwhile, was moving forward with its coup. It had fired a raft of governors, police officers, and even generals within the armed forces, and shifted others to lesser positions. In each case, it had replaced the dismissed individual with a crony or compliant operative who would support it. Editorials in both the daily Bangkok English-speaking papers concerned their journalists being detained in retaliation for articles they had written. Once more, there was no reference to the king’s condition, only more photos of the generals waiing a huge gilt-edged photo of him.
A breaking story claimed that the king was ‘fully supportive’ of the junta and what it was doing. This would help legitimise the new regime, which, Cavalier was coming to believe, was backed, for the moment, by the bulk of the population. He’d found that most Thais preferred not to discuss politics and the coup. Instead, they went about their business, seemingly unconcerned. They had experienced this kind of thing intermittently since 1932, which meant that almost all of them had become familiar with unstable governments and military intervention.
*
Cavalier rang Dr Na and invited him to the fight. The doctor, who had tried and failed to obtain tickets, was most grateful. At 2.30 p.m. Cavalier walked down to Asok and made his way across Soi 21, off Sukhumvit, to Soi Cowboy, a popular sex strip for foreigners, which connected to Soi 23, where he was surprised to see twenty or so soldiers sitting at the bars. But they were not carousing with the women. They were on duty, watching every passer-by as if they might be a suspect.
The heat was at its most intense; the air was still. The traffic was heavy but not yet in peak-hour gridlock, although the number of military trucks and cars were helping it along. There were a few bored-looking women touting for customers among those who dared sit among the soldiers. Cavalier knew that they would be more spirited at dusk, when foreigners from every nation would be wandering along Soi Cowboy, if the military’s presence did not put them off. He noticed some early signs of what he referred to as the ‘slow march of the codgers’, with their mandatory raggy and sleeveless vests, unshaven faces, potbellies, concave arses and slightly drunk manner. They strolled along the street, or sat on bar stools having monosyllabic intercourse with women a third of their age.
Cavalier reached the uneven footpath of Soi 23, which was nearly empty. Most people, even locals, were staying out of the boiling, debilitating sun. He had to step over a couple of dogs prostrated near a 7-Eleven shop filled with lingering customers. They were reluctant to leave the air conditioning and face the forty-plus heat, which promised to climb higher before sundown. The only vigorous action was by rats taking advantage of a big mound of rubbish bags that had been there for a couple of days. At night they would run the gauntlet of wild cats, but the extreme heat during daylight hours kept their mortal enemies in the shade, too lazy to chase and attack them. The sun’s intensity also brought out a nauseating stench from the pile as Cavalier passed it and sidestepped several scurrying rodents.
On his left, he could see the towering Grand Millennium. He stopped by it for a moment. There were armed guards at the rear entrance, indicating that Mendez was probably there. Cavalier tipped his fedora over his forehead, adjusted his dark glasses and wandered on, avoiding the few girls from massage parlours who had ventured out, despite the conditions, to offer him their services. He found the Massage, Therapy and Recovery Centre, where Waew Ing worked, above a hairdressing shop. Hesitating outside the salon, he decided to have a cut. Fifteen minutes later, and with short back and sides, he was walking upstairs, feeling more denuded than he had since his air force days.
Waew, thin and bespectacled, looked strikingly like an Asian version of a young Jackie Kennedy, with large eyes set wide apart. She went to work for an hour, rubbed a special balm on the Achilles and then strapped it.
‘You’ll need more intense work,’ she said, ‘if you want to be right for the cricket.’
They made a second appointment for Cavalier, at his hotel at 10.30 p.m., between the end of Jacinta’s fight and start of the curfew.