Escape (15 page)

Some years earlier, a Thai servant had stolen the personal jewellery of some princelings while working at a Saudi palace. The jewels had found their way to Thailand, and an investigation began. The palace worker had sold the gems to Thai dealers, one of whose wife and child had been found dead in a staged car accident. Anything royal is always a serious matter in Thailand, so Maj-Gen Phoont’ang took immediate charge of the case. A combination of brutality and inducement quickly led to the recovery of part of the haul.

Everyone concerned was pleased with the outcome until the gems were examined after their return to the princelings. Over a quarter were fakes. Phoont’ang had somehow arranged for glass copies to be substituted for the rubies, emeralds and diamonds. The Major General and some of his lieutenants were arrested, and since then witnesses were being systematically killed before any might testify to a link with Phoont’ang. The Saudis later sent a businessman close to the palace to investigate. He, too, was abducted and killed.

This unwell major general recovering in intensive care was someone with whom I should speak so I called for the hospital trusty to arrange an appointment. The trusty soon appeared. A wild-eyed marionette so wired on hospital amphetamines that he rarely stood still.

‘Impossible, good sir.’ The trusty skipped and bounced at the porthole. ‘The general is sleeping now.’ He then made stagy hard-guzzling gestures with an imaginary bottle and a long arm and then winked. ‘Two bottles of whisky. Every day,’ he stated, proudly thumbing his chest to credit the regular supply of Phoont’ang’s medicine.

‘Anyway, today’s show is about to start. Come and see!’

I paid for a seat and was then shown to the darker of two operating theatres. I sat in a chair near the door so I could watch for Jean-Claude’s arrival. A withered Thai patient had been lifted to the dark green vinyl of the operating table. The small audience gasped as a sheet was removed by a trusty with a magician’s flourish to reveal a man whose chronic infections had rendered the flesh of both legs no more than gnarled bark.

‘He’s alive,’ insisted the trusty-nurse. ‘Come and feel his pulse!’ We spectators suspected some ugly surprise in this and no one moved.

From a curtain I caught sight of Jean-Claude’s matchstick legs walking along a corridor. I stood to leave.

‘But wait,’ called the trusty. ‘See the bones.’ He lifted the long-dead husk of thigh muscle and skin whose underside dripped from the pustulations below to reveal a surprisingly clean femur. I left the theatre as the stench of putrefaction reached my nostrils.

Jean-Claude was seated at the bedside of his old soldier friend, his head bowed and with a long webbed curtain of yellow hair half covering his face. There was no conversation between the two. I brought a chair from the doorway of the half-empty ward and sat next to Jean-Claude. The ward’s beds were steel-framed relics, only one step up from the sponge mats used everywhere else in the prison. The other patients, perhaps ten, were quiet although one would sometimes find the strength to cough.

‘I’ve brought that Temple Grandin article for you.’ I rolled an old
New Yorker
as a tube and then had to close Jean-Claude’s fingers around it so it would not drop.

Jean-Claude looked up and spoke. ‘Thanks. You know, I first met poor Luc in Phnom Penh. That was before Pol Pot ended everything. He was quite something then. No man could play tricks on him in those days.’

There was to be no talk of secret vans and escapes that day. Luc’s eyes were now open only as slits through which a milky fluid was turning crystalline. I felt his wrist and lifted it as slightly as possible. Guessing, I thought Luc had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. Luc—or perhaps some friend—had folded and packed his shirts and two books in a plastic bag placed next to his bed. I spoke with Jean-Claude for some time and then walked with him back to Building Six. It was no big thing to see the minivan-stowaway scheme die as well. The story of these old men was surely at an end.

After lunch the following day Raymond called by with a gift for me from Jean-Claude. It was a hand-made leather belt in good condition. Stitched into a panel on its left side was a bird’s feather.

Raymond looked doubtful as he gave it to me. ‘It was Luc’s, you know.’

‘I’m not superstitious,’ I said, unrolling the belt. ‘And it’s just my size. What kind of bird do you suppose this is? Looks like a hawk’s feather.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Raymond squinted at the quill. ‘Maybe the bumfeather from a dodo.’

The visit pens were crowded when I arrived to see Dean Reed. Crowded with fifty Nigerians who, after a dozen or more years of imprisonment, were finally hearing words of hope. Two Nigerian Embassy representatives had that month flown in from Lagos to find some solutions to an old problem. Nigeria kept no diplomatic offices in Bangkok so it had been impossible for Nigerian convicts to renew their passports. Without that basic facility these prisoners could not begin to request royal pardons from the Thai government.

Klong Prem’s 120 long-serving Nigerian inmates were excited by the prospect of release but much remained to be done. Photographs taken, forms completed and, most troublesome, money to be found for airfares home. Thailand would be happy to see the Nigerians go but was not willing to pay for that happiness. The bigger smugglers had started a fund so far contributing only for themselves and their friends. Debts were being called in, threats and promises were being made and embassy officials were scribbling some prisoners’ home contacts. It was noisy.

‘You’re looking sharp,’ I called to Dean Reed.

‘I shouldn’t be. It’s been a hard week.’

Eric, the slimiest of the visit trusties, began herding the Nigerians from the visit pens. Someone they had been expecting had failed to arrive. Dean looked toward Eric but I shook my head. To pay Eric for the use of the lawyers’ cage would spark his meretricious curiosity.

‘So, Dean. It’s been over four months. No one will agree to terms?’

‘Well, they agree to terms all right.’ Dean held the bars with both hands. ‘But not for the kind of money we have.’

Dean detailed the list of people in need of fixing. A judge, a prosecutor, some policemen and all the spongy cement that held them together. A total of US$250,000.

‘That seems a lot for my small case. Less than 200 grams found—and found not with me, only in the large airport I once used.’ I added that this price was about five times the amount Bangkok assassins would charge to kill them all, ‘Just by way of a comparison.’

Dean shrugged. ‘There are complications. A small case, in some ways. But people are ... interested in you.’

That would have been the moment to ask about the mysterious suit who’d spoken to Sharon at the Rembrandt. Yet there was no point. If Dean had spotted any surveillance either he would have told me or done something about it. If he were blind to spooks telling Dean would not improve his eyesight and might scare him out of the game. Either way more money would not help.

I folded my arms and leaned forward. ‘Dean, I think we need to stop being golden geese. Keep things simple. Keep in mind that the single object that would get me out of here is no more than a piece of paper. A piece of paper sent from the court at six any evening. You can manufacture that paper.’

I gave Dean my own list of people: minor functionaries who deal with court papers; those who carried the documents from court, the jailers who stamped bail orders when received and those who passed them on to others who unlock the lucky few after nine each night. ‘You’ve talked your way in here for months using bogus embassy letters. How hard can it be to make bogus court papers?’

‘Possible. Yes, possible.’ Dean answered too quickly so I knew he had something else in mind. ‘David, I don’t want any more money.’

I wasn’t expecting that.

‘If you give me a contact—one in Europe, I mean—I’ll do the business. Just a kilo or so. That is, I’ll make the money we need, come back and then it will be
one, two, three!
’ Dean snapped his fingers. ‘All I really need is someone you know who’d be ready to see me.’

Now that was something to wonder at. Never before had Dean mentioned going into trade. I returned to Building Six thinking of someone suitable who could be ready to welcome Dean Reed with all the care his efforts deserved.

April and the Songkran Water Festival when unimprisoned Thais cheekily splash water on each other in a celebration of life. At Klong Prem the mutual bucketing altered the canvas of the jail in one big wet, with no one truly joyous, just going about the business of survival with the addition of drenched clothes.

Sten and Swiss Theo had built a hut behind the chief’s office and had both taken hobbies. Sten’s included oil paintings that took longer to explain than paint. In lighter colours Theo painted wobbly tables and chairs of his own making to ward off the fear of a long sentence. He then painted the walls of their hut, the outside of the chief’s temple, nearby trees and had begun whitening the kerbstones leading to the gate of Building Six.

Calvin had been sentenced to twenty-five years, the minimum for attempted export. ‘That’s okay. I’m pleased with that,’ he’d said, looking suicidal.

Dean Reed had submerged into his new mission as a smuggler without asking for any further guidance. After some time a huge care package had arrived from Dean postmarked Hat Yai, southern Thailand, containing useless and expensive clothing, carved boxes, delicate Japanese prints, religious ornaments and hand-made stationary. All carefully wrapped in tissue paper under flocked giftwrap. Everything smelled of incense. No note.

Charlie Lao had been granted a royal pardon at last. One night, in a rush, he ran to cell #57 and had breathlessly shown me the long-awaited document. Simply worded but bearing a huge regal seal. ‘I have to go to Sydney,’ Charlie had said, then promised, ‘I’ll be back.’

My little cat was growing, although not well. Her mother had lost interest in nursing after less than a week and then the kitten had been kidnapped. Jet put up reward posters and Dinger—so named as her mother had been gonged on the head by a guard—was returned. (The posters made the threat that further kidnappings would be costly.) Her captors had fed her spicy food resulting in long-term intestinal damage. Cats in KP learned to move fast. As soon as they grew beyond cuteness they would often become subjects of the inmates’ surgical experiments. Dinger now required especially bland food to restore her health. Our cook, the middle-aged cheque-kiter Bo-Jai, was kind enough to prepare each day a tiny portion of milk-boiled chicken. Bo-jai ran his busy evening-meal take-away service from the boot shop. It was Sten who’d privately renamed him Blow-Job. (Due to his physical similarity to
Goldfinger’s
Odd Job and his aikido skills—the surly and brusque chef would sooner charbroil customers than kiss them.) Each evening Jet would fetch the stack of steel tins from Bo-Jai with the tiny tin for our ailing cat.

Americans Big Bill and Andy had disappeared. Suspicions about the pair’s resilience became very strong when they began to have frequent visits from two DEA agents dressed in the matching black suits of Jehovah’s doorsteppers. Bill and Andy had agreed to return temporarily to the US to appear as state’s witnesses against a Chicago rookery of Nigerian smugglers. After testifying Bill and Andy would be returned to Klong Prem despite their unwritten contract with the DEA. One that included quick transfer back to a US prison followed immediately by parole.

Referring to his former employees Big Bill said, ‘Those idiots, they even paid for one of our tickets using a stolen credit card,’ this lapse presumably making Big Bill’s role as state witness a fair response. ‘No wonder the Feds knew all about them.’ Andy held fears of a hatchet job once back in KP by agents of the Nigerians. Neither would be in any danger. The damage of the testimony would have been done, the fallen quickly forgotten and the Nigerians saw no value in financing an unprofitable revenge for those whose luck had failed. As for DEA policy, clearly its administrators were now demonstrating that there would be no more collusion with the drug traffickers. Other than colluding to strike a deal for prosecution testimony, a tradition too useful to sacrifice.

By the time the waters of Songkran had dried I had surveyed almost every foreigner who’d shown any inclination for escape. After eliminating those who were incapacitated and those unlikely to keep silent, the list was short. Just Sten from Sweden, Theo and I formed the vanguard of a non-existent counterforce.

‘And if I hear anyone suggest an escape committee, I’ll quit!’ Sten said, although none of us held illusions of team spirit.

The next month’s court hearing brought some new faces to the show. As I shuffled along a corridor to the courtroom I was given a beaming smile from the police major who’d arrested me in Chinatown. He had never appeared in court before this day. With him was a tall, urbane Westerner in an expensive suit and I intuitively thought of him as the friendly gent Sharon had met at the Rembrandt. After taking my seat at the defence table I asked Montree who he might be.

‘An American. He’s with the major.’ Montree tapped the desk, indicating that no more information had been given.

This day’s witness was a seedy police detective wearing a black leather jacket. He claimed to have found a bag at the airport. A bag containing 200 grams of heroin. He also said that he had seen me at the airport that day.

‘Don’t ask him anything, Montree. Please,’ I said when the time came for cross-examination.

‘I didn’t plan to,’ Montree whispered to me, at the same time smiling at the judge. Montree knew the policeman would have been well schooled to say bad things if asked any wider questions.

As I returned to the holding cages a great fuss of guards’ shouting broke out near the parking bay. The prisoners’ buses had been moved for some important arrival. Then two new, sparkling police cars arrived at speed between which a black Lexus with tinted windows and glaring halogens was guided to the cage doors. A policeman adorned with medals quickly stepped out to open the rear door of the modest limo.