Escape (20 page)

Jacinta rested her arms upon my shoulders and spoke low across my cheek as ribbons of her hair veiled my eyes.

‘That doesn’t matter, Daniel. I never come on a first date anyway. You just tell me what you like. I’ll do anything you want.’

Devoted parents, do not carry misgivings for your children. Airliners are seldom storm tossed. They make only scars on the sky and your Jacinta sought no secret intelligence, merely laurels through sorcery. As for me, although I carry superstitions in the field I see no rewards from temperance.

Some little time later Jacinta and I stood before the indicator lights of the lifts. At some moment—can’t say when—Jacinta had taken a black velvet scrunchy from her hair and had encircled it around my left wrist.

‘When did you manage this?’ I asked, removing the black band. ‘Are you in mourning? Am I?’

Of course, she did not answer. One of the lift doors opened and just before stepping inside, she said, ‘I’m going to my room. And you’re going down,’just as her door closed and the second lift door opened. To this day, I still toast Jacinta’s timing.

By half past two I’d returned to the Oriental and twenty minutes later folded into bed. Finally, one full day spent in Bangkok.

The phone at my bedside woke me at eleven the following morning. I assumed from the slight accent that a reception clerk wanted to know how long I’d be staying.

‘… if you could tell me what your plans are?’

I made some meaningless noises and looked with dismay at the large breakfast trolley, untouched, by the window. I’d let a waiter wheel it in at a ludicrously ambitious seven in the morning before falling back to bed.

‘… David, wake up. I didn’t think you’d still be here.’ It was Tommy. He’d made me promise to call him from the transit lounge in Copenhagen. When I had not he used the details I’d given him to call the Oriental. Not good.

‘Where are you calling from?’ I asked, as if this would help.

‘Home. Chiang Mai.’

Enough. I claimed stupefaction from lack of sleep and promised to call back. Over a slice of oatmeal and a splash of fruit I convinced myself that Tommy had called from his office. Given his jumpiness when I’d met him there was a possibility his phone was tapped. If by Thai police any information would eventually go to Australian Fedpol, as they called themselves then. Tommy had once made a spectacular showing in Australia. These interagency mechanisms are slow in Thailand but not slow enough to risk staying put just to test their responses.

By early afternoon I’d checked out and was on my way to meet Myca at his new house. In Melbourne Michael would be using my mobile phone to put our recorded conversation into the air, confusing any listeners. On the road to Myca’s I stopped at the Four Seasons’ business centre to re-jig my flight reservations. In the process I realised what a mess I’d made of my schedule by staying overnight. To return to Melbourne by Friday I’d have to forgo Europe. I would blame Sam for this deserved punishment. Now I was booked for a Thursday exit, this time via Singapore.

Still in the business centre I called Tommy to tell him that I was convinced he was under surveillance.

‘Not a chance,’ he said then made a familiar speech. ‘I have friends in high places, their names would astound you; friends in low places …’ Tommy said there was no need to go to the shop next door to talk. I had no hard evidence Tommy was drawing heat. Nor from the Oriental or from Jacinta despite all her poolside tomfoolery and certainly not from the street.

No evidence of anything but the friendship of Myca in whose house at Prakhanong I stayed that night. The house had been built as an outgrowth of interconnecting treehouses that allowed us to take our evening on one of the tower balconies away from the insects. Wearing a sarong Myca sat reclined and cooled his belly with a beer bottle.

As he saw that I was becoming sleepy Myca ended the night by fetching a remote control for a TV visible from the balcony.

‘Take a look at this.’ Myca played a tape he must have set in the machine before I had arrived. ‘I had it transferred from the old eight-millimetre Kodachrome.’

On the screen appeared a young Myca leaning on his old Buick. In the film he was talking about the land and waving his arms at the trees. ‘In a year this will be all different, Mikey. We’ll have a fish farm over there and here I will make a house for you. Away we’ll go there now. We’ll make shops, apartments.’ I had been behind the camera in those days. And I was Mike, the shiny, happy example of the West’s glittering bounty.

‘Ah, we were in so much of a hurry then,’ Myca buttoned off the tape. ‘Wanting to do everything at once. But you’re tired. Sleep now. Tomorrow I’ll take you to something new.’

‘Myca, I told you. I have to go.’

‘Sure, sure. Sleep now. Tomorrow.’ Myca left, leaving the remote near my hand.

Naturally I didn’t take any of this good advice. After our lunch the following day Myca drove me halfway to the airport in his Lexus. I’d told Myca that I was spooked and would appreciate the sharp eye of a local. We drove around Seacon Square and then north to Bang Kapi.

‘Nothing,’judged Myca.

‘Thanks. I’ll take a taxi from here.’ This mid-point drop was a tradition with Myca.

Although I’d thought Sam Gilburne might be at Don Muang Airport that afternoon if he’d kept to his schedule, it was unnerving to see him checking in at the counter two rows from mine for his Swissair flight.

More unnerving were the airport people around us whose stance and movements identified them as ‘watchers’: a white-suited technician talking to an X-ray machine operator, a spiky woman shouldering authority at the business-class check-in zone at Qantas, two men standing between check-in and immigration who were furtively side-valving each other (talking without moving their heads). Also a pair of older men, one European, the other Thai, leaning at the rail of an overhead balcony a few metres apart yet unmistakeably linked.

At first I attributed all this bad company to Sam, for he would be carrying. At a distance he and I communicated with head-tilt and eye-slide semaphores through which he said, ‘Yes, I see them but they’re not mine!’

Time to see if Sam was right. I placed my Westlake passport on the counter. Immediately a ripple passed along those people I had seen. I suppose Sam had shivered too for by the time I’d turned around, he had stepped from his queue and was abandoning a bag that was too big to carry discreetly and perhaps not worth so very much.

Turning back to the counter I caught the clerk flicking her eyes back from the man near the immigration counters.

‘Mister Westlake?’ She held my passport as though it had been lifted from a dead man floating in the Chao Phraya. ‘Do you mind if I check your reservation on the office computer? We are having just a little trouble today. I won’t take a minute.’

Nor would I.

It was possible that the people at the airport meant me no harm; that I could’ve been allowed to board and fly so that others might enjoy the harm-doing. I did not want to stay to find out. Although there were taxis within sight arriving at the departures hall, I moved quickly downstairs to arrivals and took a taxi from the middle of the pack.

My first stop was the Dusit Thani Hotel as it was right on a major intersection. There I bought some envelopes and stamps before posting some notes and the remaining Westlake documents to London. Then another taxi to the Sheraton where I sat in the corner of a bar for fifteen minutes, carefully removing a fresh passport from the lining of my bag. I had plenty of money and at least one passport whose name was surely unknown. It bore no entry stamp for Thailand but Myca could fix that. Yet before going to Myca’s house I had to be certain that I would not be leading a posse to my friend.

Even at the Sheraton I felt sure the trace had been through Tommy. Not with his knowledge but through his phone call to the Oriental. Too much time had passed between his call yesterday and the airport that afternoon. Time enough to find the name Westlake and to match that against airline reservations. Quite some effort and had it been the Thais alone, Tommy should have known. So perhaps Australian police working with the Thais.

At the Sheraton I had to accept something else: that in an instant this latest in a series of lives had evaporated. There would be no more mornings in the Collingwood office, nights with Sharon in her warm house. The trivial things that thread together a life—clothes worn, chairs whose comfort is known, the shape of people learned, familiar voices versed, a dwelling’s odours absorbed, faces seen daily—were now gone forever and the exhausting work of re-creation must begin.

In less than a day it would be impossible to call family, Sharon or friends without risking a trace. It was then five days before Christmas so if there were farewells to be made, it might be safe to do so only till nightfall. From the Sheraton I rode by
tuk-tuk
to the Silom Center, and then moved from floor to floor, looking for followers. There was one call that I had to make first. Knowing Tommy’s phone was tapped I hoped to lead my pursuers south. At a payphone I called Chiang Mai.

‘Tommy. Trouble at the airport.’

‘Are you sure?’ Tommy usually doubted eyewitness reports.

‘Absolutely. I’m going underground. I’m just calling to let you know.’

‘Where are you going to go?’ Tommy could be relied upon to feed lines.

‘I’ll take the train south and cross over the border to Kota Bharu. From Malaysia, well, I don’t know,’ I said.

‘How can I keep in touch?’

‘Forget about that. It’ll be like The Three Monkeys: hear nothing, see nothing, know nothing.’ Perhaps Tommy would read that clue.

I rang off early, not wanting to stay on Tommy’s poisoned line any longer. I planned a path to Large Raj and Tramshed’s Chinatown travel agency that would be sure to ditch anyone following me. There I’d spend an hour on the phones making my last safe calls to the life I was leaving.

Again on the street and still engorged with failure, I stalked toward a sun whose mandarin webbed fingers slipped from the edges of high-rise buildings with occasional flares. I felt my flesh overrun with blind fire ants and a brain lowering implacable bulkhead doors against a sea change I wanted to deny.

A spluttering rickshaw drove me through narrow streets of tinware shops, hardware shacks dripping with G-clamps, shop fronts barricaded with leaning stacks of plastic buckets, unfinished cane furniture spilling from footpaths to gutters, street-food barrows with oily glass shades, old men hammering ruined metals on their anvils, and cobblers dredging stubby fingers through biscuit tins of bent tacks. These weathered craftsmen looked at my boots as the rickshaw inched through this late-hour traffic. The boots I was wearing had been made in London fourteen years earlier. A shoemaker’s cellar in that city held, still in exile, pine lasts of my feet. As I walked those very boots then began to disintegrate (a real event I wince to include here for such coincidences are found only in tired fiction). Even so, to muffle the fact for its hollow ring might be presumptuous.

Lights in the shops of the jewellery district took over as darkness fell and I began to feel lighter, having survived sunset. On foot I cut through the textile-market mazes, slipped through dank one-bulb corridors and arrived at the arcade in Chinatown. I stopped to observe the travel agency. Large Raj sat behind his desk. The office was otherwise empty. Two Thai men in black leather jackets stood nearby. Their cigarettes had been smoked almost to the filters so they could not have been followers.

I stepped into the travel agency to be greeted by Raj.

‘Hi, David. Come in. Tommy called twenty minutes ago. He said you might come by.’

Now that’s something it’s taken me a long time to remember. Possibly because, at that moment, four men moved swiftly into the shop. Of course, at first I thought they were thieves. The US$50,000 I had in my shoulder bag must have produced that assumption. Very often it isn’t easy to distinguish thieves from policemen as both use similar body language during operations. However, their exposed hip holsters rapidly gave them a name.

There was no way out. No rear exit and in the arcade there would be more police nearby. I had nothing to say and if they wanted to say something, an Indian travel agency in Chinatown was not where they wanted to say it.

They moved me in a close pack to an underground car park, one almost full. As I waited while some other policemen unlocked car doors, I leant on the radiator grille. It was almost cool. However they had come to know that I would be heading for Chinatown they’d had time to drive and park. Neither the Thais nor the Australians could operate a live phone tap so quickly to provide that information from Tommy’s call. There must have been some other group, obsessed and technical and I couldn’t understand their interest in me, an independent C-list druggist. Who would care?

I was not astonished to later be prosecuted for Sam Gilburne’s abandoned grams. As often as not the drugs luckless pedestrians are charged with belong to friends or fellow travellers.

While in Klong Prem I could become as obsessed if not as technical as that unknown third force that had directed my arrest. Thailand held the data and maybe I could not move on until they were revealed. Maybe information has a life of its own, holding everything in its grip until it takes a recognisable form, even if we are too distracted to admit its shape.

The train had just left Bolzano—that’s Italy, you know—and then she became very friendly, smiling all the time and she was wearing many white things and we were alone, you know, and the train was moving very fast. She was kissing—I don’t know how that started. I can speak to you David of those things because I see you have your own everything, everything under control. You understand? So, of course, I’m thinking this is all very good with this girl, you know, and she is giving me pleasure with her mouth but suddenly in this fast train (it is moving and the lights are moving) I know then she is putting something into me and I’m not the one giving to her.’

‘Was it painful?’ I ask.