ANGKOK

These days the big money here is all on when — not if — they will whack Chuwit Kamolvisit, the massage parlor tycoon. After all, this is a gambling town. We already know the probable method: a two-man team on a motorbike (the traffic jams make getaway cars something of a joke, and even big motorcycles are risky — they're hard to control when you jump them up on the sidewalk and weave between lamp posts).

One of my best sources here, Somchai, who is a businessman with some underground dealings and refuses to have his full name used, speculates hyperbolically that if it goes on much longer, the betting on Mr. Chuwit's likely demise will suck money out of the illegal casinos — even the cockfights will suffer.

Not that Somchai is above placing a bet on the precise date of a gangster's murder. Indeed, he took the precaution of consulting his astrologer, who took the precaution of taking a look at Mr. Chuwit's horoscope, which, thanks to the interest of thousands like Somchai, is readily available on the black market. The astrologer dismayed Somchai by declaring that Mr. Chuwit will not die before the Year of the Dragon, which is more than seven years away. Now Somchai has an excruciating decision: nobody is betting that Mr. Chuwit will live out this Year of the Goat — but suppose the astrologer turned out to be right? Somchai could make millions.

So what about Chuwit Kamolvisit? He is a sex industry magnate who at the height of his influence decided to resolve a property dispute by hiring the army to bulldoze dozens of shops and bars in Sukhumvit Square at 4 a.m. one Sunday in January as the police watched. The outcry was so loud — the businesses had leases, although Mr. Chuwit owned the land on which they stood — that the police investigated the army, which promptly blamed the police, who then investigated themselves and found themselves blameless. Mr. Chuwit was arrested and spent May in jail.

Everyone understood that karma was playing out here: Mr. Chuwit was being punished for his hubris. But who would punish the police for theirs? Well, Chuwit Kamolvisit would. For quite some time now, in revenge for his arrest, he has been entertaining Thailand with detailed accounts of the millions of baht per year he has been paying the police to turn a blind eye to his illegal massage parlors. He appears on TV and gives the initials of senior policemen whom he has been bribing monthly for a decade, then waits while people like Somchai put their money on whom they think he's fingering. In the meantime, 17 prominent police officials have been suspended.

Mr. Chuwit is a slim, charismatic fellow with darting eyes and a pencil mustache. Foreigners like me see a gifted clown, a self-promoter of near genius, but Somchai knows better. For him, Mr. Chuwit is a man on his last dance in death's disco. They'll whack him for sure, whatever the astrologer says. Or will they?

From all this you might conclude that Somchai is the type who spends his days on street corners asking male tourists in a whisper if they want a girl; not so. He is a successful businessman of Chinese extraction who owns some (legal) language schools as well as shares in an illegal casino, and regularly pays bribes to the police in relation to both businesses. He calls it "the system" and looks at me with disdain when I express sympathy for his plight. Somchai, you see, pays almost no taxes, gets work permits for his English teachers without difficulty, and makes a nice fat profit from his casino interest. The way he sees it, the Thai system is more efficient than ours: no expensive army of bureaucrats to cast a shadow between investment and profit. Police bribes amount to less than 10 percent of his income. How much tax would he pay in a Western country? Thirty, 40, 50 percent?

For Somchai, the Chuwit case is an example of the system regulating itself with precision. Sure, Mr. Chuwit should not have knocked down Sukhumvit Square: dozens of small businesses lost everything, prostitutes were forced to walk the streets, people lost faith. On the other hand, the police should not have arrested Mr. Chuwit, not after he had paid his dues so conscientiously. So now the system is punishing both. In the fullness of time the police will probably whack Mr. Chuwit, whose posthumous hit men will whack some senior officials and when it has all blown over things will be back to normal.

But isn't there something just, well, humanly unacceptable about this level of corruption?

"Enron," Somchai says admiringly. "WorldCom. Now that's corruption." A frown and a shake of the head: "But it's not democratic. A small businessman like me can't buy a tax inspector over there. Only big business can do that. It's terribly unfair."

I take my leave to get my hair cut at Su's. Su was plucked from her go-go bar one night and whisked off to Zurich by a wealthy Swiss. The relationship failed after a couple of years, mostly because Su was bored out of her mind (loathes skiing, hates snow, happy if she never sees a mountain, or Zurich, again), but her paramour gave her the seed money for her thriving business, which happens to be right next to the ugly urban gap that is all that is left of Sukhumvit Square.

So what does she think about the bulldozing? It is part of the great charm of Thai people that they so rarely indulge in outrage. Su looks sad and says a few words in Thai that mean that she feels bad whenever she thinks about it; after all, her own business started out there; she could have been ruined herself.

"That would never have happened in Zurich," I say, provocatively. Her answer is too fast for me to catch, so she translates: The Thai system is no good, but it's better than cuckoo clocks.

John Burdett is author, most recently, of "Bangkok 8," a novel.