Escape (34 page)

After the usual morning run I nodded at Pornvid on the steps and ascended the stairs to our cell.

Approaching the cell door I saw Ding the cat waiting for me, sitting with her paws tucked under her chest. With the cell keys in one hand I scooped up the cat with the other.

‘Dinger, young lady,’ I scolded. ‘Don’t sit in the corridor. Some nasty man will come along and boot your head in.’ One of our Building Six guards had a liking for kicking at cats with his heavy shoes. Dinger’s mother had been brained that way and had delivered early.

In #57 I set the cat on a pillow and returned the keys. Once back, Ding watched me remove a cloth-wrapped roll of small tools that I’d had tucked in my waistband. Her eyes wide, as a child watches television. Taking the scroll poster from its hook on the wall I tore the
Desiderata
from two supporting rods. Using pincer pliers I split the rods enough to tear them apart with my hands. From the splinters I removed the four hacksaw blades that Michael had hidden inside. I saw he’d wrapped each blade in the foil travellers use to safeguard their photographic films and had then sealed the blades with wood filler. He must have used a radial-arm saw to cut channels in the dowelling. A delicate job, for sure. Removing the blades had taken twenty minutes and generated some noise. Noise that would be reckless at night.

After I’d hidden the blades behind the shower screen, I placed the fragments of wood and torn pieces of the poster into a cloth sack that usually held my damp exercise clothes. Turning to the cat I knelt at her side by my bed. With one hand, I encircled her tiny neck. She was so small that, with the same hand, I easily and gently pinched the scruff of her neck with two fingers. She began to purr as she always did at any touch. I could feel the throb on the palm of my hand. With my other I took a small syringe from my kit and flicked bare an ultra fine twenty-nine-gauge needle. Ding’s purring was unaltered as I slid the needle into the furry arch of skin behind her neck nor for the next thirty seconds as I pressed the plunger home—injecting her with 200 milligrams of heroin. Then the purring stopped, her head flopped and she went limp. I held her body to my ear to listen for her heart while I capped the needle. At seven months she weighed no more than a lady’s kidskin glove. I put her body in the sack with the broken spars.

In Klong Prem it is difficult to throw anything away for there are always people poorer than the ones you see. I had to wrap the cloth sack in paint-splashed newspapers before throwing it into the deepest pocket of the rubbish dump.

Young Steve from Hampstead joined Sten, Calvin and me for lunch. In that last week Sten and I raised occasional conspiratorial eyebrows but never the subject of the escape. This nodding acquiescence to each other’s position was enough. During lunch I let my guests do the talking. More than ever their faces held the awkward camaraderie of deserting husbands.

In a perfect scheme I should have helped with some good humour. Made jokes. But on that day I couldn’t join in the laughter of captive men at all.

On Sunday afternoon I finished my job as censor of the foreigners’ mail by sending the outgoing letters to the Klong Prem mail office. I then turned to the fat ledger at my desk and removed every record of my limited use of official post.

The factory was almost empty. The sun, low in the sky, began to slip into the office as it usually did for twenty minutes when no one was there. Sten, Jet and Calvin had already begun the afternoon amble to #57. Miraj would already be in our room. In his corner.

As I had for the past five days I set the padlocks of our cupboards to appear locked, although they were not. This so I could unfasten the doors in silence at any time. All set, I went upstairs to dinner.

As Jet folded our picnic blanket I stepped up to the shower to wash my hands. Pausing at the window I saw that the new guard’s trusty had not prepared his master’s bedroom below our cell in the dining hall. That meant he would not be on duty this night.

Turning from the window I briefly forgot where I was. I saw a cell with four men sitting on the floor. Dropping down from that lost moment, I joined them, helping Calvin with a birthday card for his boy in Hawaii.

A few minutes before midnight I switched off the light to encourage sleep. The new ceiling fan whirred smoothly, allowing the sounds within Building Six to state their business. The disputes of dice players, some distant applause rewarding late-night storytellers. Then laughter and retorts. Someone in a private cell took a shower to take the heat from his skin. Outside a guard responded to a trusty, sharing a joke through the bars.

Climbing to our window in four barefoot steps I saw the guard turn away. Above his trousers he wore only a thin undervest stretched over a heavy paunch which he rubbed in contentment as he moved away. His bed was under a canopy in a distant garden.

As I returned to my place I saw that Sten was awake, although his eyes were closed. I spoke quietly.

‘Sten. You awake?’

‘What’s up?’ Sten opened his eyes to the half-light, asking again. ‘What’s doing?’

‘It’s a nice day for a white wedding,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’ Sten pulled himself upright.

I nodded to the window. ‘It won’t get any better.’

‘You got everything set?’

‘As set as I know how,’ I said to keep it short.

Sten hunched forward, his arms loosely folded around his knees. ‘Okay.’

Not long after midnight Building Six became quiet. I sat in #57 beside the weak light from the corridor unrolling fifty metres of army-boot webbing, a ribbon of green nylon. Sten was next to me, awake but silent—lying back, arms folded behind his head. A legionnaire at rest. Before me Jet, a sleeping servant. At his side, Calvin, an ally by heritage. Then there lay Miraj, whose heart was a pea in a whistle, a squealer by uncontrollable nature.

Of the 700 in Building Six five-sixths were beyond easy hearing and sight but many had rooms that faced the path I would take beyond the bars. Of these 120 fellow prisoners, 119 would shriek in explosive alarm should I be seen passing. (In cell #71, the 120th man was a crippled mute so might do no more than rake the bars with his crutch.) Inside the accommodation block the guard on our floor slept on his elaborate but temporary bed sixty metres from #57. Outside another guard slept in the factory gardens and a third on the floor of the chief’s office. Beyond Building Six five guards were at the central command post and set for a drinking session while half a dozen more were spread among some of the eighteen guard towers, happy to be above the mosquitoes. Seven officers manned the front gate, playing cards. Next to this Klong Prem prison of Lardyao sat the Bangkok Special Prison, Bumbudt Remand Prison (the Cure) and Bangkok Women’s prison—each with its own complement of staff.

Over and around the Klong Prem moat sat guards’ residences, a live-in training college and the homes of the multitudes whose incomes relied upon the prison complex. In the nearby streets predatory police cars trawled the night. In addition to those officials there idled a society of institutional parasites ready to claim just reward for any service. Within this sub-city there slumped a monastery stocked with monks. Among them those who had briefly comforted two inmates who had been jolted from the electric cables atop the north-east tower before falling to the ground. The monks had held them until the prison guards arrived.

Inside the cell I set the rope aside and began freeing the hacksaw blades from their groove in the shower screen. There was no point in waking Calvin and Jet. They would wake soon enough.

Returning to my bed for the last time, I turned to Sten, sitting alert in the darkness.

‘S’go.’

Handing Sten one of the saw blades, I packed a soft but tough bag with the backup passport, a penlight, two sets of keys and padlocks wrapped in cloth and a set of clothes including long trousers. Only civilians and guards were permitted to wear long trousers.

Sten stood from his bed as I lifted my mattress to the wide table below the window. I set the mattress to muffle the sound of standing feet.

‘I’ll begin on the first bar,’ I whispered to Sten before checking at the cell door for any movement.

I could just see the outline of the guard sleeping under his net on our third-floor landing. He was still. I then eased out a nest of tables near the shower, creating steps to the high table beneath the window. Stepping up, I removed the window’s flywire screen and set it at the cell door where it could not be knocked over accidentally.

The plan was to remove two of the two-and-a-half-centimetre diameter bars from the window in four cuts to allow an easy exit.

Pressing the saw blade lightly above the base weld of the first bar, I drew its teeth back in a long stroke. The blade’s tiny teeth flaked away a dozen layers of paint covering the bar and shaved enough minute curls of steel to leave a half-millimetre notch in the shaft. The sound of the rasping vibration, amplified in the bars, had thrummed into the concrete surround. An alien call in the still night.

‘Use the oil.’ Sten was standing behind my legs.

‘Soon. I’ll go slow for now.’

Curling my left arm through the bars, I held the tip of the blade with a folded square of damp cloth, pulling it taught and giving sideways pressure with my other hand. I focussed on direction, not wanting to snap the blade. After ten minutes I’d cut a quarter through the bar.

Stepping down from the table, I gave the blade to Sten with a warning:

‘The oil will make it quieter. But longer to cut because it won’t bite so well. These blades are brittle. I nearly snapped the thing when it stuck.’

‘No,’ Sten disagreed. ‘The oil will make it cut easier.’

‘Okay.’ This was not the time for disputes. ‘We’ve got another three. We can lose two without disaster.’

As Sten stepped up to the window the table’s badly set legs groaned under his weight. Turning to the darkened room I saw a forced rigidity in the limbs beneath the light blankets. All three were awake but so far following cell etiquette by ignoring secret nocturnal activity. This good form might not hold once they realised that this was no simple unsealing of a stash.

I checked for any movement in the corridor before taking from a shelf Michael’s phoney can of aspic delicacies. I peeled off the lid and removed the Swiss army knife nestled within.

The cupboard above my bed was divided into nine pigeonholes, all painted black. One was less deep than the others. Using a short blade from the pocketknife I cut through a back plate made from balsa wood. The wood was soft and easy to remove. Breaking away the fragments, I removed the hidden contents quickly to the bag at my side. If seen, the contours of a large automatic pistol and bulky silencer would terrify three in the cell and distract Sten.

I hung my soft teardrop bag on a hook and turned to find Calvin awake, sitting up. With his blanket still over his knees he picked at the wrapping of a soft pack of cigarettes. I eased down on my haunches to speak.

‘I tried to warn you, Calvin. Told you it wasn’t a good time to come to Six.’

‘Ah—yup.’ Calvin kept his thoughts to himself.

He held a lighter to his cigarette, looking around the cell as though for the first time. He saw it for the cryptic launch platform that it was: the stepped tables leading to the window, the furniture made from seven-and-a-half-centimetre timbers, the triple layers of sound-catching nylon mosquito screens covering the cell door, the heavy clasps that held the window’s screen—now serving as handgrips. And across one wall the bookshelf plank, so heavy it required five triangles of steel to support it yet had never been firmly attached. Calvin looked from side to side, taking in the careful selection of roommates. He nodded to himself and made the most of his cigarette.

‘It’ll be best if you don’t look like you’re part of the show,’ I whispered, gesturing to Miraj’s blanket-lump in the corner.

Sten loped down from the window to tell me he needed to move the bench so he could cut from a better angle. He looked down at Miraj. ‘He’ll have to move.’

Crouching before Miraj’s quivering coverlet, I tugged at the fabric. Wide eyes appeared above the hem.

‘Miraj. Listen now.’ I assumed the tone of a field surgeon. ‘Nothing will happen to you if you stay quietly in your corner. Don’t make any noise.’

Miraj said nothing as he pushed himself to the corner with his feet and then bundled his blanket to his stomach. Sten and I moved the bench to a more central position.

As Sten resumed his attack on the bars, Calvin stood and silently moved to the bench. He held its edge with both hands to steady its movement. Sten looked down to Calvin and then irresistibly rasped at Miraj.

‘Not disturbing your sleep, are we?’

I thanked Calvin for his support and told him it was unnecessary. ‘The bench is on rubber mounts. It won’t move.’ There was nothing I wanted Calvin to do.

I saw Jet standing on his mattress, pedalling the sponge with his toes. As I moved to the cell door I unstrapped my watch and gave it to Jet with a wink. In the corridor there was no movement and almost no sound. From my bag I took a cheap but nearly indestructible digital watch and strapped it to my wrist. It was already after one in the morning. Pressing my face flat and against the bars of the cell door, I peered hard. I held my breath to listen for any sounds below the scrape of metal teeth against steel. From the other cells, the source of this sound would be difficult to locate.

Every ten minutes I checked on Sten’s progress before returning to my corridor vigil. After half an hour I gave him a break, taking his place and with a new blade. Progress was slow: this first bar only at the three-quarter point. Working on without oil I stopped a millimetre short of the final cut.

‘Sten. I need to give my hands a rest.’ I stood down and rubbed my fingers. ‘Sweat’s running in my eyes.’

Within two minutes of Sten’s renewed cutting, the bar sprang away from its welded base with a clean snap and a vibrating sprong.

‘Well done, mate!’ I was quickly up at the window with an armful of wet towels. ‘One for you and the rest around the bars. The next cut will carry more noise. Whole building must’ve shifted over the years since that went in. Twisted the frame.’ I tested the bar with a tug. It barely moved. ‘Let me get started, Sten. Stop for a drink.’