Escape Page 16

  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.

  14

  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.’

&
nbsp; ‘Was it painful?’ I ask.

  ‘No, no. I mean she is taking my spirit and putting something bad from her into my mind. Like she is a witch, you know. This was too bad. I wanted to throw her off the train. I did not. She got off at Innsbruck. There was something wrong with this girl. Some reason she was there. Now there’s this magazine,’ he trumped, proof upon proof.

  ‘Magazine?’ I was talking to the Czech, Karel Stendak, serving thirty years for the usual 2.7 kilos. Stendak sometimes arrived at my desk when Jet was not around to warn me.

  ‘Yes. The magazine,’ Stendak began, confident in his evidence. ‘I was not in my chair in the factory. I think somebody called me away. So I come back and on my chair is this magazine. Catalogue, really. For some clothes. And, of course, I see her picture there—the same girl. So. It’s no accident, eh? And on my chair. You know who put this magazine? Maybe you saw someone?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you still have it?’ I saw Jet carrying something he’d found back to our office so began signalling for help.

  ‘No. Of course, somebody took it after they made me see it.’ Stendak lowered his eyes, rather disappointed I hadn’t guessed. ‘Because anyway, I don’t realise it is the same girl until later. Too late by then, they know. But, you see?’

  ‘My teacher.’ Jet had arrived. ‘The chief wants to talk to you about your cat. He says your cat’s shit!’

  ‘Really, Jet. We’ll have to see about that!’ I stood, turning to Stendak. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. The chief. The cat, you know. The shit.’

  ‘Okay, my friend.’ Stendak rose from the ice-chest seat but didn’t move so I began poking through cupboards as though searching for a weapon to deal with the troublesome chief. ‘You are very quiet here, David. It must be good. Can I move into your room? We can talk at night?’

  ‘We’ll talk about that sometime,’ I said escorting him to the gate.

  Once Stendak was out of sight I doubled back to the office and stared at Jet who was laughing.

  ‘Jet—“The chief says my cat is shit.” Was that the best you could think of?’

  Karel Stendak had alerted me to the conspiracies against him before. Unhappily schizophrenics can spot me from a great distance and they see a friend. Karel told me of the card players secretly plotting against him aboard a ferry from Caligari and the little boy on a rollercoaster in Plze who had transferred his toddler’s fear to Karel by some dark magic. Most of these revelations came during travel in large machines. The key to these mysteries had been inserted during an emergency operation he’d had under general anaesthetic following a motorcycle accident, 1,000cc. He was sure the doctors had placed a microchip in his ankle which had since been transmitting voices into his brain. Stendak’s imprisonment was, of course, all part of the conspiracy.

  I had been discouraging visitors to the office that month as I was working on the latest escape plan.

  Sten, Swiss Theo and I were to let ourselves out of our cell late at night and then head for the wall. The challenge would be to walk along the corridors without the trusties and other informers forming a chorus of alarms as we passed. Our armour would be in our appearance for we would be dressed as United Nations medics: Sten and I wearing blue caps, white tunics and UN insignia. We would carry Theo on a stretcher. Theo would be mostly covered by a blanket decorated with red crosses. We would wear surgical masks to protect us from a mystery virus.

  The safety of such an apparition in the Building Six corridors might not seem feasible at first—or even second—thought but it would play to our audience and keep those watchers silent as we would move toward the sleeping guard of Six. In addition with each stop at any wakeful guard the option of taking an alternative uniform would present itself. However, none of us saw any value in trying to appear as a Thai guard. Sten and Theo were too big to squeeze into most of the uniforms and that illusion would work only at a great distance.

  The stretcher upon which Theo would lie could conceal the spars for a ladder that we would assemble at the wall near the hospital building.

  ‘What about an assault through the main gate?’ Theo had suggested after we’d calculated the time it would take to tape together an eight-metre ladder.

  ‘A few more there than you might think.’ Sten had found this out after questioning his friends about late-night releases for deportations. ‘Sure, there’s only four, maybe five guards on front-gate duty after midnight but half the guards in the prison get down there to play cards and drink. Plus the local cops call in all hours to join the party. We’d have our hands full.’

  ‘And what about the key to our cell?’ Theo rightly saw the cell door as the main barrier. ‘Are you sure that’s going to work, Dave?’

  I was not, especially as the key would be made from old clock parts and epoxy resin. As well access to the cell door’s keyhole was blocked by a large steel plate on our side of the bars. I was making a device of wooden gears and levers that could be operated by hand from within the cell. Operated blind and adding stress to the key held in its grip. For all that I had yet to manage a few minutes alone with the real key to take an impression.

  ‘The UN doctors making house calls?’ Sten shook his head but was still smiling. ‘What if the elephant man sticks his leg out for treatment?’

  ‘It wouldn’t fit.’ I had to defend the plan. ‘I’m talking about a glimpse and even then just by a few prisoners as we pass. The uniform, the symbols, the stretcher, the sight of high authority, international stuff, the outbreak of disease. Just flash and filigree. They’ll be excited but respectfully quiet. And Theo, you won’t have to do a thing until we get to the wall. Just lie there.’

  That sounded good to Theo until, ‘What if a guard stops us?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I pronounced as if it were all simple. ‘You spring from under the blanket and throttle him!’

  That week I had an unpleasant visit from an Australian federal policeman, Jonathan Snapes. We sat opposite each other in the executive-visits hut. Like all police from Western embassies he carried a blue diplomatic passport as immunity from arrest. Snapes placed his business card on the table for me to take. I took it as the Fedpol logo was not yet in my collection.

  ‘There are just one or two things we would like to clear up.’ Snapes was slightly flabby and sweated within his suit. ‘For the sake of completeness, you understand.’

  ‘Completeness?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, we know pretty much everything already. And you’ll be here for some time. Twenty years, most of us agree. Over that time, well, your memory may fail.’

  ‘Fail?’ I would ask him to explain everything.

  ‘Yes. Now look, the heroin from Tommy Marchandat. Only 200 grams. Not much use to you?’

  ‘No use at all.’ As Snapes was alone I presumed he was wired for sound.

  ‘I mean, packed properly you could take more. In some stuffed toy, for example.’ Snapes must have been told about the Steiff bear I had given Tommy.

  ‘A bit old fashioned, don’t you think?’ I frowned in disapproval.

  The policeman leaned onto his interlocked fingers. ‘What’s it like in here? Pretty tough, so they say.’ Snapes had had enough of my being coy. ‘No chains, I see.’ He looked to my file as though searching for an explanation of this oversight.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ I had to lead him away from that. ‘They’ll go back on once I’m sentenced.’

  ‘Good to see you’re being realistic. Ah, now, one last thing,’ Snapes said clarifying a trifle. ‘Your mobile phone. The one you use in Melbourne. Who has that now?’

  ‘Gosh, I couldn’t possibly say. They seem to have a life of their own, don’t they?’ Evidently Michael had made the red-herring call, not that it had done any good. ‘I say, Snapes, on your way out I don’t suppose you could stop at the prison shop and buy me a jar of instant coffee?’

  I told myself that I wanted to give the impression that in Klong Prem I had few resources, although I knew the image of Jonathan Snapes battling with the ornery
prison guards’ wives who ran the shop would make for an easier night. Snapes would not refuse; such time-honoured courtesies to the defeated were universal. This Snapes might resent the act of kindness but would tell everyone at his embassy of his magnanimity.

  I was a few minutes late arriving at our room #57 that night as I’d found some excuse to talk to the key boy. He’d been making up the bed used by the night-duty guard. The guard slept in a room with an oblique view of our cell door. Crouching to where the guard’s head would rest I could see that his view of #57 would be just blocked by a low dividing wall.

  When I walked into our cell Bruce the Pakistani was finishing his account of the latest from the Nigerian front.

  ‘No passports, no tickets, nothing.’ Bruce propped pillows against his wall and leaned back, hands behind his head. ‘So they are very angry, very upset.’

  ‘What have I missed?’ I undraped Dinger the kitten from my shoulder and placed her at the foot of my bed. She was still limp from some encephalitic cat flu and had stopped eating the previous week.

  Bruce then detailed the misfortunes of those Nigerian prisoners who’d thought their time had finally come. After many visits with the special delegation of Nigerian consular officials from Lagos, the funds had been raised for airfares home. All the passport photos had been taken, the forms completed. To earn their release money some had convinced girlfriends and family members to run brown dope to Morocco. Others had traded, fought and clawed together the funds from within the prison. Then the silence.

  The consular officials had disappeared. Checked out of their hotels. Emptied the bank accounts. Flown. Today news had been delivered by one of the local dealers that these officials had no connection with the Lagos foreign office. Or any office for they were conmen who had spent the past months fleecing the Nigerian inmates and their supporters. They had used phoney letterhead to contact the prison and fake diplomatic passports to gain entry.