Escape (38 page)

A day later I went back after our arrangements. He was on the phone again. We didn’t speak much. ‘Your ticket’s there. All confirmed,’ and pointed to the coupon under a puckered aluminium ashtray. ‘You’ve paid, I think?’ And then back to his caller.

The point of all this is that the handwritten ticket provided the means to have a booking made in the two Christian names of my passport. It’s a common error in Asia. If the ticket works you’ll hear from me at my next port. If not—you’ll hear from me much later!

I shan’t dwell on it but I’m lucky to be here. Just before takeoff on my last leg I expected a posse with nets and tridents to jump on board and me with no defense other than a targeted spurt from a single-serve UHT milk portion.

More seriously, I owe a debt to my new friend from the Orient, Charlie. Chas might have mentioned he’s soon to open a restaurant in Sydney. For those of us accustomed to a lifetime of triple-crossers, any promise fulfilled silently and at a distance remains a source of wonder. What is it that the evolutionary behaviourists say about friendship? That fidelity is no more than a trader’s selective altruism, based on the soundness of reciprocal guarantees. Isn’t that it? Or perhaps that wonder of friendship is not to be dissected
—
best left intact.

There were close moments too on the big night. One, halfway to morning, when all energy seemed spent. Although I wasn’t going to surrender I ask myself now, what it is that drives us on when fear and pain have been numbed by excessive application? A belief that there is another country beyond? Or some vainglorious need to prove a point? No, nothing noble, that’s for sure. In the end there’s only that irresistible lure of opportunity. And maybe, just a little, to say something to all those doomwatchers in KP. Twelve thousand of them and behind them tenfold as many ghosts haunting the corridors. All sitting like children cross-legged in Sunday school receiving false instruction about absolute power. Not one wondering if he’s listening to an absolute lie. In the darkness with my bamboo poles I did so want to call to them and say, ‘You don’t have to stay!’

Well I say that now to clothe the naked stubbornness that I’ve had since my own childhood, my only real motivation. I’ll tell you how it all went down someday when it’s quiet. I suppose if I run through the one hundred things leading to that night, it might seem as though it was easy or just a process with an inevitable result. But holding to it all wasn’t easy and if any one of those one hundred things had gone wrong, I wouldn’t be here to write this.

It’s only the living who get to tell their stories so maybe all those survivors’ stories added together seem like a picture of how things are. I can’t see that as true
—
the real world is down there with the many who fail, whose histories are cut short or passed over.

My very best to Chas to whom I’ll write when I reach the land no one tribe has conquered.

Love

D

26th August 1996

From: Phillip Keel, Fedpol, Canberra

To: T MacLean, Joint Taskforce Operations, Melbourne

Tom

This is a transcript of a call intercepted here at the bunker. One of your old targets, I’d say. It’s nothing official. Just another ‘signal test’ as we say here. Before you ask where the call originated from, I’ll tell you we can’t tell. International, yes, and the originator shown is the USA. But our friends say it’s a bulk telecoms router. He probably called a discount call line in the US from somewhere and then used the service to re-route the call.

The good news is that there’s an effort to cross-match all departures from BKK that day against lost/stolen passports. That might give us a name. When I say all departures I mean those with AUST/BRIT/CAN or US documentation. The way it is now, you can forget European cross-matches. Not likely though that he’d be on anything too foreign. I’ll let you know if there’s any joy.

Best wishes

Phil

TRANSCRIPT:

MS: Hello. Yes?

DMcM: Go placidly amid the noise and haste.

MS: Ah, it’s you. You scallywag. Right. There was nothing on the phone display, so I hoped—Anyway, you okay?

DMcM: Yeah. Not used to being without my cook. Missing Chang.

MS: What the fluck?

DMcM: I mean, fun’s over. Flag planted, photo taken. Now back to being pursued. Is this toy okay?

MS: (Referring to new mobile phone) Speaking its first words today, the little whippersnapper. Got it from an old lady who only phoned her bookie on Sundays.

DMcM: Sure?

MS: I swear by the eyebrows of Oscar Homolka. It’s safe.

DMcM: Okay. There are some messages for you down at the watery place.

MS: Watery?

DMcM: The print shop.

MS: Oh, right. Got you. So you need anything?

DMcM: That little numbered edition still available? I’m feeling a personality disorder coming on.

MS: Yep. Still intact. You want it post or courier?

DMcM: Let it sit for now. I’ll keep it for some fresh disaster. How tropical are you these days?

MS: Still smoking. They take an interest—from a distance. Don’t collect overtime, as far as I can tell. You need money?

DMcM: Thanks. Not for now. I’ve got a tombkeeper from London to call Western Union. Look, I’d better end this. Usual reasons. Just wanted to hear the ghostly voice.

MS: Okay. You have my pager number.

DMcM: Sure do.

MS: Take care then.

DMcM: (Laughs)

MS: And watch out for exploding cigars.

NB We’re sure the ‘little numbered edition’ refers to a hidden passport.

Friday 30th August 1996, Karachi

Dear Michael

Your package arrived just before I left my last rest-station. Thanks. Good to have music and even better to have the freedom to listen to it. I never could stomach music in the Klong. I get your selection: Arvo P, Danny O’K, Górecki, Robbie R
, Hejira—
music for travellers who’ll never reach home. Not a random grab was it? Marc Jordan sounds less cynical these days. And is that a Fazzioli piano I can hear? Ack, what would I know? It’s been a long time without air.

Landed in Karachi quietly. ‘Welcome to Sindh province mister Peccavi,’ said the immigration man and I felt like an imperial agent, too. That’s the last we’ll hear of Mr Charles, Arthur. All ashes now. Any new editions will be locally modified. Not as bad as you might think. Here there are set quality levels of forged documents, although we have to watch for spelling mistakes. Why would anyone want a third-rate passport, you ask? Well they’re not meant to work, they’re only meant to convince the customer they
might
work
, insh’allah!

I’ll be ducking under the radar for a while. Staying with an old friend for a couple of months. However, you’ll receive a SIM card and a phone sent from Europe by November. I can’t bring myself to rely on the old wayz.

As ever

David

Saturday 21st September 1996, Baluchistan

Greetings Chas

Seena has just brought my breakfast to the balcony as I write this. She is the daughter of my host, Mir Noor-Jehan Magsi, a tribal lord of the Magsi clan.

Seena tells me she is returning to school next week and today she will go to Quetta to shop with her mother and a small entourage. She is shy and modest. As she left the tray on the table her eyes brushed over a cool block of butter and a pot of marmalade. No one other than I appears to have eaten from either. A courtesy as though it must be demonstrated that no one may meddle with the honoured Englishman’s condiments.

This is N-J’s heartland, the three-storeyed house the largest in a small town between the Arabian Sea and a big toe of Iran. My bedroom has this balcony from where I can breakfast in the shade and look over a sunblasted excavation of empty rooftops for the town’s houses all look like rocks. Scraped roads spike toward orange hills. It is dry.

His Lordship has just burst into the room. ‘What’s this? No one home?’ before he waves aside the oddly heavy curtains. Although we are both wearing the
shalwar khameez,
mine is as close-fitting as N-J’s tailor would allow. This morning N-J appears as a small barque in full sail. Billowing white trousers and a shirt embroidered with jade silk. He fiddles with the fan-control box by the window and tells me we are off somewhere special today and that he’d like me to dress English. Be a
gora
(a white man).

Before I can ask why he switches. ‘This fan is working well? You like the heat, eh?’I tell him I don’t like the ceiling fan chopping over me when I wake. I offer tea and toast. Noor-Jehan declines and looks over the balcony. He is an early riser and would have eaten hours ago.

‘So today we travel to see friends. Kamran has the car ready.’ Noor-Jehan speaks his native Baluchi, excellent Sindhi, commercial Urdu and almost no English. While he makes a concoction of words from his larder he thinks I’ll understand, I often reply in mock-Fitzrovian which N-J enjoys as the salute it’s meant to be.

Chas, something I was looking forward to all that time in BKK was speaking English again to native English speakers. It hasn’t happened and seems it might not for a while. I don’t mind so much at all. Even though I understand there can be no answer to this letter for who knows how long, I’m happy to be rattling on.

Sunday

Yesterday we drove south to the coast road, turning east toward Karachi before reaching some beachside ship-breaking yards early afternoon. For miles I could see nothing behind high patchwork fences that hide the goings-on: the business of dismantling the world’s discarded tankers, liners and cargo ships. This is hugely profitable so it was unsettling to find the surrounding junkyard township made of the scrap for which even the scrap dealers have no use.

After the heavy chains and bolts of the seaside entrance were withdrawn by scowling sentries, we were escorted to a well-appointed office with uncommonly large windows overlooking what remained of the beach. The carcasses of three huge vessels had been drawn to the oil-clogged shoreline using bunches of linked anchor chains, the only remaining entrails of a hundred digested ships.

At my request our party moved on to the sand to be closer to the ships. We became small under the shadow of a nameless cruise liner. Her prow seemed to have been torn away by the jaws of some invisible, giant beast. Revealed from within her rust-stained carcass were sudden-drop gangways, a theatre of shattered cabins, unfloored corridors; even a dance floor slowly raining parquetry upon the eviscerated decks below. Only the impacted boilers were holding out against dismemberment.

The teeth of the consuming monster became visible as I moved closer. A writhing colony of human workers, infesting every exposed pore and armed with little better than heavy hammers, crowbars and a few blowtorches. It looked as though this ill-equipped army, trained by injury, would win every battle for their numbers are legion. To the liner’s portside, a supertanker was being cleaved of its sheeting and to her starboard a container ship had been halved. At perilous height at the tip of a freighter’s mast, a lone worker struck out at the last fittings.

When I turned back toward N-J and his friends I heard him laugh deep above the clang and sparks from the shore but his Mayan walnut face crinkled at me with a conspiratorial wink
—
undoubtedly signalling that some villainy was being hatched. My job was to appear reserved, serious and deftly judgemental. I don’t know what Noor-Jehan is plotting and I don’t much care. So I arched my eyebrows and nodded at the group before marching back to the office. Using the binoculars there, I saw that my mast-worker was in fact a shattered antenna complex turning in the breeze, perhaps a warning to the dozen ships that lay at anchor awaiting the factory’s attentions.