Maier had always liked the shallow easiness of Bangkok. The Thai capital was a mind-your-own-business-unless-you-would-like-us-to-mind-it-for-you kind of place. A city where the unchangeable was not tampered with and everything else mutated as quickly as possible. Sometimes even quicker. A metropolis of ten million people who never talked to each other but smiled and smiled and smiled. Every now and then, the Thais’ reluctance to communicate erupted in wild cataclysms of political violence and military coups, sponsored by aspiring demagogues. The streets would run red with blood, and the violence triggered by deep-rooted dissatisfaction was almost always manipulated or paid for and eventually petered out. The very same people who’d been killing each other a few days earlier would now clean
