The Big Fix Read Online Free PDF Page B

those games would turn out. Sometimes he had just enough money to ride the bus down to the stadium, which had become the only place where he hoped to make a few dollars.
    In his own fixes, Perumal was learning the valuable lessons of experience. He learned that the fix was not always easy to complete. Players were unreliable. They wouldn’t follow directions. They would score when they were supposed to be scored upon. They were sometimes hungover, or they just didn’t care. Perumal would watch as the clock wound down on a match, and all he needed was his chosen team to let in one more goal, but sometimes it just wouldn’t come. He would harangue the players, but it was clear that even though he paid them money, they didn’t feel like they owed him anything. To them, he was just a small-­time criminal. He couldn’t control them. He was missing something.
    Perumal would escape it all at Orchard Towers, Singapore’s “Four Floors of Whores,” a shopping complex that turned into a sprawling boudoir in the evening. Here there was business to be done. Perumal mingled with soccer players there, many of them foreign players, the high-­priced imports with the disposable income that Perumal was trying to secure for himself. As the European players tossed money around and as the girls laughed and wanted in on the action, Perumal sauntered into their circle. He approached one of the players, this time with a new strategy.
    M ichael Vana was Czech. Perumal knew him from watching Singapore’s Geylang United matches. And from what Perumal could surmise, Vana was disinterested. At times, he was the strongest player on the field. At other times, it was hard to pick him out of the lazy back-­and-­forth of the play. As he spoke with Vana over the music at Orchard Towers, Perumal asked him to win.
    Perumal had been fixing single games by compromising the defenders and goalkeeper, compelling them to allow the opposing team to score. Now he saw how the fix could work in another way, with a foreign player who was slumming, on the downside of his career, stuck in an Asian lower league for the nightclubs, the easy money, the women, not the glory that he had once imagined, but which had long faded from his aspirations. In those nights at the Orchard Towers, Perumal realized that the players were just like he was, living without a thought for tomorrow, concerned with money only to spend it. Perumal and Vana locked eyes in agreement over the flashing lights of the action.
    Perumal instructed Vana to jog along with the rest of the players throughout a game, until that moment when he needed a goal. Perumal would then shout from the stands, like an impassioned fan. That was the signal, and Vana would exert himself. In the first game that Vana played for Perumal, he scored four goals. Vana easily controlled the intensity with which he played, especially since he was superior to the competition he faced. The partnership thrived. Things went well, so successfully and profitably that Vana started suggesting fixes. Perumal realized that he was not the only one getting addicted to easy money.
    Perumal was liquid again, and he rejoined Kurusamy’s poker game. He wasn’t consistently winning at Pal’s table, but he was bragging plenty. The Boss listened closely to what Perumal said, even if he didn’t let on. And soon Vana had slipped through Perumal’s fingers, gone to work for Kurusamy. Perumal was left with nothing besides a costly lesson in the fix. Players had fleeting loyalty. Fixing partners had none at all. Years later, such realities would upend the high life that Perumal had constructed for himself.
    There was another lesson that was more valuable, though Perumal was not ready to learn it. Since Kurusamy had many influential ­people on his payroll in Malaysia and Singapore, he felt comfortable enough to boast. He had spent ten years in prison, starting in the 1980s, and through that