Escape (9 page)

‘He’s an imbecile but the best carpenter around,’ Rick said as we stood on the drying cement. ‘Most respected by the old-timers.’

An old-timer himself, our new builder had spent his adult life in KP and had a permanently curved spine from early years hunched in the factories. He built by rule of thumb, one of which was missing, and he measured every strut and plank from the piece last hammered to the wall. When completed the plastic-covered screen appeared skewed as though by a hurricane but solid enough, held by twenty crippled roofing nails per plank.

‘I hope he’s not connecting our electricity,’ I suggested to Rick. ‘I was hoping to put in a light switch. I think we’ve bought enough trust from the chief for that. My boy says our ceiling fan should be here by this afternoon.’

I was referring to Jet, my new manservant. I’d found him working in the umbrella factory filling his days drawing large charcoal portraits of prisoners’ girlfriends, children and parents from tiny snapshots. Jet was adept at bossing about the humbler factory workers and attached himself to me to make sure ‘nobody cheat you’. This service in exchange for English lessons. I readily accepted this as it was unwise to rely only on Rick or other foreigners for financial negotiations with the Thai guards.

Jet’s English never improved much beyond the few words he already owned and abused when we met but as he stepped into the role of head butler, this proved an asset. We learned to communicate almost silently, assume and meet each other’s needs without the tangle of long conversations. Jet was miniscule in height and outlook but rarely abused the power over others given to him by belonging to a moneyed household. He was serving a twelve-year sentence for armed robbery. With a pistol in each hand, even a four-and-a-half foot kid is taken seriously.

Jet arrived at our new cell shepherding a bearer hefting a new porcelain toilet bowl.

‘My teacher.’ Jet meant me. ‘Pornvid want to see you downstairs.’ Pornvid was the guard in charge of the accommodation block.

Rick squinted at me through heavy spectacles. ‘I’ve squared up with the chief. You don’t have to give Pornvid anything.’

I disagreed. ‘I don’t want him feeling left out. Anyway I’ve given him my credit card for the day. He should be back from the ATMs by now.’ Three things made this safe: I was now a benefactor to the chief, Jet was my witness and Pornvid believed I was going to be here forever. Therefore there was no real risk of my card being misused.

‘How much?’ Rick wanted to know.

‘An honest ten percent.’

‘Let me go to the chief for you. Only five percent. He collects my money every time my wife visits. For nothing.’

‘Rick—’ I didn’t need to mention the constant demands for donations Rick suffered under the eyes of the chief each day.

‘Okay. Have it your own way.’

The following day I found Eddie having his hair cut. The barbershop was attached to the coffee shop. The hut had two surgical chairs salvaged from the
Titanic
and coiffed Johnny Fontane photographs on the wall, now fading to blue.

Taking the vacant chair I told Eddie of my plans to set up an office in a quiet place in one of the factories. ‘Just a desk and someplace to do some cooking. Jet’s found an ice chest and some cupboards.’

‘Kind of settling in, aren’t you?’ Eddie raised his eyes from under an electric trimmer.

‘We want it to look that way, don’t we? Besides, it’ll take some time to check out the other buildings. Most of the foreigners are over in Building Two but have you seen the size of their—’ I paused because one of our cutters had stopped talking and they would know the word for bars. ‘—arrangements. Any ideas for another two for our room here?’

Rick had promised bed space to a Pakistani foreigner’s trusty and ledger-keeper from the chief’s office. Including Eddie I had argued for Jet (it was a rule, in any case, that foreigners have at least one Thai in their cell) and Eddie had found a South African named Albert.

‘He’s not much.’ Eddie stretched long legs over his footrest. ‘But what can you expect. At least he can pay his way.’

‘You think he’d be someone who’d want to come along? To take the full pardon, I mean?’

‘Wait till you meet him,’ Eddie despaired. ‘It will be enough if we can shut him up when we want to sleep.’

Although not yet thirty, Albert’s beer gut and puffy, red-lined face told of many sunny afternoon benders. He told me the rest over the next two weeks. Albert dimly remembered waking to a yellow phosphor streetlight and Bangkok traffic fumes gusting in slabs through an open second-floor window of his shabby hotel. For him it was not so much sleep ceding to wakefulness but rather choking out of a coma into a sensation of stunned nausea.

The images that arose in his mind were layers in an excavation of fear: two Nigerians shouting over the racket of a Hillbrow bar in Johannesburg (the details dulled by liquor); then the pale-green arrivals hall with the sign: ‘WELCOME TO BANGKOK’ (visible only because of the dilution of in-flight drinks); the cheap girlie bar of the night before his arrest where he’d asked for his swollen nose, the result of a head butt or a fall while attempting to dance on a table—fortunately numbed with firewater. And behind every memory a rear-projection of the broken and tired earth of the dorp of his birth and childhood in the South African countryside.

That night Albert had struggled to remember something recent and positive. Not something actually done but a firm resolution made: he would demand a greater reward from his employers for the run. Leaning on his elbows, sweat running from the back of his neck, he still could not remember the exact amount of the agreed fee. Or quite with whom.

Stumbling to the window Albert wiped the sweat from his face with a handful of drapery, stopping to cough and spit when curtain dust coated his mouth. He knew what he had to do and would waste no time finding a bar where he could strengthen his resolve.

Some time later, perhaps the following day, Albert woke with a jolt as his taxi bounced from a freeway pothole. He then smiled at the thought of driving a tough bargain with the Nigerian before taking another step. Albert’s new girlfriend from Johannesburg would want him to stand firm. A few miles more and the sight of Albert’s small travel bag at his side combined with that of the ticket jutting from a shirt pocket triggered the realisation that he was already on his way to the airport. He was leaving the country, his bag holding 2.7 kilograms of heroin loosely taped under the lining.

The taxi stopped in front of Don Muang’s glass entrance. Albert peeled himself from the plastic-covered seat, digging into the tight pockets of his stained jeans for some of his few remaining banknotes. He was still arguing for change when two Thai plain-clothes policemen moved forward. One held Albert’s arm as the other took his bag.

‘But how did you get into this?’ I asked when Albert had run out of bad memories. We were talking on the third night in our new cell. The smell of paint was still strong.

‘I’ll show you something.’ Albert reached under his mat for a plastic bag thick with ragged sheets of paper. He produced a small photograph of a girl with an orange Afro cut and freckled white skin. ‘This is Melli. Things were going well for her but then she got this job in a bar in Jo’burg. Before I’d met her. After a few months there she fell in with a rough crowd. We had some problems and I decided I’d better put some money together. As it happens she knew some people who had connections over here.’

Looking at the picture it wasn’t easy to imagine these two as a couple. I asked if she had written. Albert had been four months at Klong Prem.

‘No. My sister says she’s not working there anymore.’

Rick didn’t look up from his book but must have been listening as he asked, ‘So, Albert, how long was it that you’d been going out with your little tiger before you came to Thailand and got arrested?’

Albert did not speak for a minute and then answered, ‘Three weeks.’

So not much honey in the trap for Albert. Sobriety in KP had done little to clear his vision. For the next few weeks Albert would slyly confide to everyone that his mercenary soldier pals within South Africa’s right-wing extremist Broederbund would soon be staging a commando raid on the prison to free him. That was before a letter arrived from his mother. She had written that the man who had spent afternoons drunk in the kitchen of their small farmhouse was not his true father. A Jewish merchant from Pietermaritzburg had, in fact, sired Albert on one of his mother’s town visits. Immediately Albert’s heritage changed.

‘David, I’ll be out of here in two—no, two-and-a-half weeks,’ Albert stage-whispered one morning from behind a factory pillar. ‘The JDL are coming for me. Probably a chopper. They don’t fuck around, those guys!’ Words may be the tool selected by nature to deceive our competitors but Albert had practiced so thoroughly on himself that he now fell under every bus with a cunning smile.

No aircraft arrived for Albert piloted by young aviators from the Jewish Defense League, only his final court van taking him for sentencing. No one had taken the trouble to translate the court proceedings to Albert so he arrived back at KP in time for his visit with his sister. She had arrived in Bangkok the previous day with the intention of saying something good about Albert in court. She was a nurse and a fine woman. Albert’s court-appointed lawyer had not wished to spend another minute on the case so the sister was not called upon, nor told what was going on. Halfway through their visit a trusty translated the news to the siblings: Albert had been sentenced to death, reduced to one hundred years in consideration of his guilty plea.

Eddie had been on his way back from speaking with some Swiss officials when he paused with Albert and his sister. ‘You know,’ Eddie later told me, ‘even with all the crying and madness Albert still pushed that stupid list through the bars to his sister.’ Albert had been adding items to his shopping list for weeks, at the top of which was a deck recliner for his place in the umbrella factory.

‘As much as Albert’s a dork,’ Eddie said sympathetically, ‘it’s terribly inefficient of him to let his case turn to shit like that.’

Not so inefficient for the Thais who had him transferred to Bangkwang the following day. Watching him that night in his chains I hoped I would soon find someone to take his corner who would have a longer shelf life.

Perhaps the greatest luxury of our cell was the light switch. When we had tired of cards, Scrabble and storytelling, the darkness provided an illusion of freedom for some of us. Only the slow turn of the ceiling fan and the low murmur from our secret radio provided rhythm to mark the hours.

Outside in the grounds I had found a quiet space for rent. In a small garden behind the art workers’ factory I set chairs, tables, a desk, iceboxes and cupboards. Under a canvas awning Jet and his friends cooked and kept Thai visitors away. Foreigners were usefully kept beyond the factory gate by the factory guard. The old man cast the most fearsome expression from under hooded eyes as he sat at his desk, bare except for a ’kerchiefed glass of water and a pack of cigarettes. In truth he was perennially hung over and quite tame. We rarely spoke to each other beyond a nod each week as I would carefully place an envelope of money next to his cigarettes. Over the months we built a mutual respect from those silences. He would post my sealed letters without comment. Since he had no special interest this seemed safer than asking Pornvid or the chief.

All this was well enough but now, able to breathe, I had to look beyond relative comfort and to a way out. My trial could not be delayed forever, many doors remained to be tested and other people tried.

Corruption in high places may be a phrase that rings with promise and hope but rarely gives reliable service. That’s not because those highly placed are less corrupt but because they lean to the safety of corruptly servicing those also in high places. People at the fringes are usually no more than as gardeners are to movie stars: spoken to with false confidentiality while never invited on set.

Dean Reed arrived, as promised, a couple of months after his release. He’d taken some care preparing for the visit by printing a phoney letter from an embassy and then bribing his way into the lawyers’ area. Wearing a white suit and tie with jacket held over a shoulder, Dean appeared alarmingly official now that his beard was gone.

‘I gave Eric a couple of thousand for you,’ he said, waving at the trusty from Hong Kong. ‘Anything I can get you from the shop?’

Sceptics of human nature wouldn’t like any of this flattery. I tried all the usual gambits: ‘I’ve a friend coming over to help. He’ll stay with you and handle the money. He’s a cut-throat by profession but don’t worry, his instincts are sound. And don’t forget you’ll have to get something out of this—you can’t be doing this for nothing. And then there’ll be your expenses …’ But Dean didn’t blink.

So I gave Dean a Bangkok telephone number and a note requesting he be given US$10,000. There’s always a fat slice of vanity in trusting a scoundrel yet I’d had some success in the past with unlikely people. The name I’d given Dean was one such. Myca was a man I’d known for fifteen years and when we met he was close to poverty. The link to Myca had been one Johnny from Patpong.

In the 1970s those smugglers who claimed roots in the counterculture tried to keep a reputation for street credibility. This usually meant scoring from strangers in the red-light districts of unknown cities. Bangkok’s Patpong Road had red lights and a wide range of touts. Most of them tied to local crooks of influence. That could mean trouble as local crooks normally paid local cops, both hoping to profit from the foolishness of strangers. So the thing was to avoid street hustlers with those rough connections. The Patpong stroll demanded the rejection of those touts who seemed too enthusiastic.

‘Lie show, mister?’

This spoken by Johnny, I remember, who quite reluctantly peeled himself off a wall after I’d rejected two earlier solicitors. Some confusion at first: I’d taken Johnny to mean ‘light show’. That had sounded a bit tame for this part of town.