Escape Read online

  Martyn and I moved away from the shoulder-rattling roar of the chorus, taking care not to stare directly at the wire-topped wall.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked Martyn.

  ‘No real hazard.’ Martyn swept his eyes across the electric wire. ‘Connected to the 240 volt mains. No transformers that I can see so you’d have to be well earthed to get any arcing.’

  ‘So what’s all this stuff about people being fried on the wire?’

  ‘Only expectations.’ Martyn thought that those few who had climbed near the wire had felt a tickle through their sweat. Fear was enough to make them fall to the ground.

  ‘Staying in Six?’ he asked.

  ‘I have to. Six’s got four major walls just to get to where we are now but I cut off my options if I go anywhere else.’ I outlined the new plan.

  Rather than deal with cell bars and scale five walls I would take advantage of a friendship formed with some of the Frenchmen I’d met in Klong Prem allowing me access to the car-repair yard. Although the prison’s autoshop in Building Six was more or less off limits to foreigners, a tiny patch of ground had been allocated to an old man whose poor health rendered him harmless.

  Jean-Claude rarely moved from his chair beneath a tamarind tree where he spent his days reading books on mysticism. The old man’s career with the underground médicaments sans frontières had ended with his arrest for keeping a bucketful of amphetamine tablets under his bed. Night-time snacking had made him too talkative. His existence and needful condition would allow me to visit. The old man’s meals were brought by his compatriot, Raymond, who was the best cook in KP. Already I’d given Raymond books for Jean-Claude about psychiatric curiosities; much in vogue at the time and unaccountably sent in large numbers to us by the British Embassy.

  The greatest difficulty with the new plan would be the high level of co-operation needed from people outside the prison. It would require that a VW Combivan be modified with internal panels to provide at least coffin space for one person. Raymond was supposed to be on good terms with a guard who arranged the private repair jobs in the Klong Prem area. The doctored Volkswagen would be delivered to the guard for a re-spray. This van then brought into Building Six by the guard, painted during the week, then returned for collection on the following Monday. This guard normally drove these vehicles out from the prison before noon. Once inside I would not be missed until early evening.

  ‘How many people would knowingly be involved?’ Martyn, I could tell, saw more ifs in this plan than I.

  ‘Certainly not the guard. He would believe only that it would be just another repair job. Probably old Jean-Claude. If the van is parked in a bad spot he might need to pull a heart attack as a distraction. I’ve got a friend outside who can make up the secret panel.’ I was thinking of my former Thai partner, Myca. Then I stopped talking, waiting for comment. None came.

  In the pause between psalms I asked Martyn, ‘What do you think are the odds?’

  ‘From that, not knowing who the people are—’

  ‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘I mean the odds against anyone getting out of here using any scheme.’

  ‘Well, since no one has ever done it there’s no percentage success rate from which to draw a table,’ Martyn began in his considered-opinion mode. ‘Imagine this. You’re sworn to secrecy and led to a ginormous warehouse. Big enough for a Saturn V rocket. Inside, this warehouse is filled with black marbles. Billions of them. But there’s just one red marble. You go inside where it’s pitch dark. You’ve been asked to select only one marble and you flop around in there being bruised before realising nothing you do is going to make any difference. So you grab one and ask to come out.

  ‘In the bright sunlight you find yourself holding the one red marble. You think you’re pretty special but your hosts tell you that everyone in the world comes to this warehouse at least once in his life. All six billion of us. You still think you’re special and damned lucky, too, till you ask what’s the prize for the red-marble picker and they say, “Oh, nothing. We don’t give a monkey’s who picks what. We just don’t give a toss. After all, sooner or later someone had to pick the red ball.”

  ‘Look at all those people singing to the heavens, praising a creator.’ Martyn gestured to the congregation who had now turned to the real business of the morning: trade. ‘They feel pretty special. Around all the stars with all their planets there had to come a creature who would one day think about the rarity of his existence. We’re probably the only creatures in this galaxy who try to build machines like ourselves but it had to happen sometime. We feel special and we just can’t help it. We can more easily tell our hearts to stop beating than prevent ourselves from instantly forming theories based on the feeblest throb from any one of our senses. Add sight and sound and the thing becomes a fact. Tell another of your experience and a universal truth is born. We’re programmed for this. Seeing something special in red marbles used to save our lives. Don’t worry about how people judge the odds, David. Let the plan evolve, one thoughtful jump at a time.’

  That afternoon French Raymond was in our office cooking us lunch. A new set of coiled elements on our electric stove produced iron-foundry heat that forced him to keep both wooden spoon and spatula constantly scouring deep into the large wok.

  ‘Always I like to work fast,’ Raymond said. ‘Outside I am the same. Fast.’

  Raymond was four years into a twenty-five-year sentence for a trifling eighty-five grams he’d been moving too fast to conceal at the airport. He would soon be repatriated to France to itch through a few years more at St Denis prison before release. Raymond was not a career criminal yet accepting enough to help those who were. Like many in Klong Prem he was simply careless with his drugs. His one earlier drug arrest had occurred in rare circumstances (bus stop, bomb threat) in Paris and after Thailand he would end his courtship with heroin.

  The food was ready. While standing close to Raymond as he plated five servings I was advised, ‘The man you need to speak to is Luc. The friend of old Jean-Claude, not in the autoshop, he’s in the hospital. Sick, dying I’m sure. I told Jean-Claude you’ll go there next week. He visits his friend often.’

  As a young man, the now-dying Luc had put himself about in Algeria with his friends until he was no longer welcome. Rejoining some of his group Luc went to Vietnam making soldierly trouble before moving on to Thailand. From stories he had heard Raymond thought that Luc’s old mercenary chums were just the team to weld and shape the VW van into the habitable steel vault I would need for the autoshop plan. I was less sure.

  After we had done with Raymond’s duck Jet served slices of pannetone to go with some pineapple wine aged since August. While playing butler Jet was chewing the scenery with a tray. He wanted to secure the introduction of the latest stray for our family.

  ‘All right.’ Sten took the tray from Jet. ‘Let’s see your ice man.’

  Jet led forward a short young man with Persian features who would have been stocky had there been more flesh on his bones. Jet shoved a chair behind his knees and he sat perspiring under perma-stubble over transparent skin that revealed blue veins.

  ‘So you’re looking for a career in frozen goods, young fellow?’ I tried to sound avuncular.

  Jet took over the interview. ‘His Thai is shit, my teacher.’ Jet explained that Arib, as the Thais called him, spoke some Persian, incomprehensibly accented Arabic, gutter Thai and a few words of English. He had no first language to share with anyone else. An only child he recalled only the cooing of a Kurdish nurse from infancy and had never been to any school.

  ‘So how old are you, Arib?’ He looked thirty, I thought.

  ‘Ah, I not know exactly—’

  Jet flew in. ‘Twenty-four, we think, but no one—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Jet,’ Sten said kindly. ‘Let him speak! He’s got the bullshit ice-picker-upper’s job, okay. We’re just asking.’

  After some time pooling languages we found that Arib was probably born in Jordan but had
been moved to an aunt and uncle in Isfahan when aged about five. The couple told Arib that his parents were dead, blaming some warring factions and they did not burden Arib with any schooling in their large, cold-floored house. Arib did not learn to read so his memory of place names and even dates had been garbled with new accents. At some point the Isfahan house was sold and Arib was given a little money, a ticket and a passport of some kind (‘Red!’ claimed Arib responding to our subsequent question, pointing to a cucumber) as he was taken to the airport. From there the sixteen-year-old Arib landed in one of the Gulf states (don’t ask) where his new uncle’s driver collected him and took him to this uncle’s house where Arib was promptly forgotten. Neglected in the social sense; there is no starvation, corporal pain or sexual misuse in this story.

  Within eighteen months Arib and his new uncle moved to Thailand. This new uncle was a Jordanian diplomat, Arib thought, although he was unable to recall His Excellency’s name and was too shy to ask the servants and even less inclined to ask his uncle’s frequently changing Thai girlfriends who left the big house in taxis.

  ‘Is this poor cunt simple or what?’ Sten exasperated, now conceding Jet’s authority in such matters of the street. Jet assured us that Arib was simply without communication skills.

  After a few months in the new house the new uncle was called away on affairs of state more and more often; sometimes absent for weeks at a time. Arib, tiring of the maid’s food and her Udon Thani nattering, began sorties into Bangkok. Having no money Arib mostly walked. He apparently made some friends and would spend nights away from home. Following a week away from his uncle’s house he returned home to find the maid gone. A caretaker, previously unknown to Arib, told him that the master had returned to Jordan. Arib returned to the streets, his new friends and was soon arrested for what we would call vagrancy.

  Arib’s one-year sentence for being poor had been completed and he now found himself in the unfortunate position of being a stateless foreigner.

  ‘How long ago did he finish his sentence?’ I asked Jet who then turned not to Arib but to the circle of bent old men outside our office who hungrily scooped rice at the carpenter’s table. ‘Meua-rai?’ yelled Jet.

  ‘Five years!’, ‘It’d be five, easily’, ‘A good five,’ agreed the wrinkled KP pundits without pausing in their gumming or looking up.

  A considerate five, according to the prison authorities, for Arib would normally have been sent to the notorious Immigration Detention Center to starve or to the insane asylum where, by now, he would be mad. In losing Arib’s file the prison authorities had performed an act of kindness.

  ‘So can he stay, my teacher?’ asked Jet after sending Arib to the taps with our dishes.

  ‘Of course, Jet,’ I replied. ‘Let’s not give him the ice pick for a day or two, eh? Start him off with the basics of carrying the blocks, just so he doesn’t get lost.’

  Old Jean-Claude was not yet at the hospital when I arrived so I spent a few minutes with the doctor complaining of kidney stones. The doctor had no particular experience with renal calculi but gave me what I wanted: an appointment for an X-ray in Building Nine. That was the AIDS hospice, adjacent to Building Six and on my list for study as it was one block closer to the wall.

  The hospital honoured an architectural tradition of impressive façades (typical of Thai prisons) with its reception and administration area appearing newly glassed and brightly gloss-painted. The doctor made a practiced speech about the need for constant donations in order to provide the latest equipment. He did not seem a total incompetent, just supremely uninterested in his patients.

  Near these consulting rooms was a newly built, air-conditioned suite with an engraved sign in English: INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. Looking through its glass porthole I saw what could have been a guest room from any one of Bangkok’s four-star hotels. Except that there were heart monitors, respirator pumps and machines with many dials, their connecting tubes neatly looped and their casings covered by colourless matt plastic. In one corner stood a dialysis machine. None of these devices surrounding the large bed was in use. The gently breathing lump under the silk bedspread had a face I recognised—that of Police Major General Prompon Phoont’ang, admired for his investigation into the case of the Saudi royal gems robbery.

  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 plast
ic 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.