Escape Read online

  Whatever he meant was silenced by the sudden action of a small Thai man with a deeply pockmarked face. As the heavy truck slowly passed the old man, he dived forward. Hands flat to the ground, he turned his head sideways to face the twin rear tyres grinding toward him.

  From where we sat a ribbed tyre briefly seemed to spin faster and the truck rose a little. Then the sound of a sumo wrestler falling on a watermelon. Eerily quiet yet powerful. The old man’s shoulders twitched, his left arm flipping up from the ground before disappearing. When the truck passed it seemed his head was facing the wrong way. An illusion caused by his scalp and face being repositioned over the remains of his skull.

  A small group of prisoners rose toward the body and were then quickly herded back by a guard who shouted orders to his trusties to remove the body.

  ‘Bravo! Well done.’ Daniel complimented the deceased. ‘Did you see that? No fear at all, just concentration on his face.’ Daniel must have been watching him for some time.

  The judge hearing my case was giving my lawyer, Montree, a puzzled look as though asking: What’s this performance for? Montree had risen from his chair and swaggered toward the witness like Clarence Darrow. Quaking behind a small podium in the centre of the court stood a Thai immigration officer. He need not have worried. The performance was for me.

  ‘Now tell me, officer. Can you remember this particular passport? I mean, how can you tell if it was the one my client had?’

  The arrivals clerk flicked a glance at Montree before responding. ‘Oh, well, that’s because it has my number on the stamp. It must be me.’

  ‘But how many passengers would you stamp on a shift? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?’

  ‘Maybe a hundred. Eighty?’

  ‘So that’s just one day. One day from over a hundred days ago. Thousands of people before and after my client?’

  ‘Yes—’ The officer shrank farther into his ill-fitting uniform, wishing someone could have told him more of the answers before this had begun.

  ‘So since nothing special happened that day, you can say only that this passport has a stamp with your number on it,’ Montree then nodded to himself. ‘Nothing you can remember tells you that Westlake was actually there that day. The passport and the stamp could both be forgeries. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, it’s not easy to tell if a passport is a forgery.’

  At this Montree smiled at me in victory. The judge looked to the heavens and the prosecutor closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose with one finger.

  ‘Anything further, Khun Montree?’ The judge reached for the microphone of his dictating machine.

  ‘I think not,’ beamed Montree. ‘This witness has said all he can.’

  The judge then spoke into his tape recorder: ‘On cross-examination the witness said that fake passports can easily be forged. The witness is free to go.’ This then became the court’s record of my lawyer’s most excellent cross-examination.

  Montree was a gentle, round-faced man in his thirties. His college training was in microbiology and after taking on lawyering, he had contracted for hustler Abe Souzel until a money dispute pushed them apart. I thought it kind of Montree to put on a show for me, even though it would have no effect on the final verdict. He didn’t ask for much money and he was happy to provide as many delays as I needed.

  Village folk with flaming torches rampaging behind the high priest; ivy-league gentlefolk murmuring to gowned nobles at the Supreme Court bench. Between these variants are the courts we know well and a Thai court appears as others, with black robes and players working each side of the room. The accused is either damned or dismissed, the judge’s way of calling the match. In Western courts, tradition demands an occasional release of the puck to give the contest credibility. Thai judges are not so burdened with any quota of acquittals.

  Witnesses’ testimonies, prosecutors’ claims, the defence’s pleas and views of exhibits are all transformed into the judge’s words as he speaks into his tape recorder. A typist knocks these out while wearing headphones as the trial is heard. Everyone concerned is then required to sign a copy of his honour’s thoughts at the end of each session. After the guilty verdict and sentence (the maximum is always given first, often halved for a guilty plea; the minimum for any amount of heroin seized at the airport is twenty-five years) the appeal courts take on the bargaining. In trials with many accused in the dock, some are later acquitted for economy and convenience. In practice few executions take place and death is mostly commuted to life following pleas of mercy to the king.

  In less civilised times the Thai judiciary condemned to death those found guilty by suspending them in chains over glowing coals and roasting them overnight. The twentieth century brought law reform. Capital punishment is now by machine gunners firing at a red cross painted on a cloth hung in front of the prisoner. Even a last meal is available. A feast perhaps only for those with strong constitutions as the condemned receives thirty lashes with barbed wire before the last supper.

  Montree had asked the judge that I sit with him at the defence table rather than between court guards as was usual. We were able to swap stories of trials we had known. I’ve never chosen a lawyer on any criteria other than his talent for telling funny stories and being good company. We were both nominating our favourite witnesses of all time and snickering a little when the judge interrupted with a question.

  ‘He wants to know how many witnesses you want to call,’ Montree told me, nodding at the judge. ‘What do you want to do with your case?’

  As I scribbled a list of lesser-known actors I asked Montree about defence options.

  ‘Ah, the defence case,’Montree capped his fountain pen. ‘The dream.’

  ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘My words? No, that’s what everyone in court calls the defence case. The dream.’

  The new court building had been built with American government charity. It had a special lift in which guards would return prisoners to the ground-level holding cells. Courtrooms were mostly on the upper floors so I was often alone with my guards on the way down. The journey began next to a deserted stairwell and it would take at least two minutes for the small lift to arrive. At that time floors six and seven of the court building were unoccupied. Even though I was always in chains and handcuffs, this quiet place had possibilities. It would later be the setting for one of the first escape schemes.

  The holding cells appear as a large underground car park divided into a dozen huge cages with twice as many corridors, all constructed from iron bars and mesh. The sound of 700 prisoners in chains moving on two acres of concrete shouting at visiting families and friends pounds the ears like a mining site. It also looks like a deep-earth excavation: everyone in brown, sweating; water dragged across the floor by foot chains from flooded toilet blocks; transport vans growling in and out; guards bellowing, shotguns protecting their cargo, with a steel lift pushing the ore up for processing.

  Slumped between two Thai boys I was counting the lift movements when something caught the edge of my vision. A flash of navy blue and white among the visitors. A woman, slim and small in a knee-length skirt, a white face, a businesslike gait. Eyes searching, looking up to thread through a knot of visitors. It was Sharon.

  ‘Sharon. Here!’ I called.

  ‘David!’ Sharon’s eyes widened, then became rounder, pooling. My God, look at you! But she hadn’t said that. Something else, bright, cheery; lost in the ear-numbing fusillade of lamenting women and children at the bars.

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll talk to someone.’

  ‘What?’

  Hand signalling a two-minute delay, I found a guard and settled on THB1,500 for a visit in the lawyers’ room. Clanking to the end of the cell rows allowed me a couple of minutes to collect my thoughts. None was to be found.

  Shuffling into the air-conditioned chill of the interview room I struggled with an opening joke. ‘Sorry to call you all the way to Thailand, but I’m sure I left my toothbrush in
your bathroom.’

  ‘Oh, David.’ Sharon stood, found herself half snared on the bench and then reached with an arm. ‘I just had to come. Didn’t you get my message from the embassy?’

  There had been no message. As we hugged briefly and kissed uncertainly, I tried to fit together my life abandoned to the life of iron around me. No surface matched.

  The guard didn’t approve of the kissing. ‘None of that here. You’re supposed to be lawyers not criminals.’

  We sat.

  I began talking softly. ‘Sharon, when your crooked boyfriend disappears and gets himself snaffled in Thailand you’re supposed to take a powder. But I’m impressed. Thank you.’

  She smelled good.

  ‘No one was helping.’ Sharon spoke close to my neck. ‘No one was doing anything. It was awful. I had to do something. I just got on a plane. Your friends, they wouldn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘They’re thinking. Watching. Wisely they submerge to silent running when things like this happen.’ Covered only by the thin court outfit I was chilled by the air conditioning. ‘Experience has taught them that. You look very professional in that white shirt.’

  ‘It was a tough Christmas.’ Sharon didn’t mean money. ‘I was decorating the tree. You’d only been missing for a few days. I opened the box of ornaments you’d brought.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ There was nothing I could do with this.

  ‘The angel is still on top of the tree.’

  Okayyy.

  The visit setup for prisoners at Klong Prem was bad. A couple of hundred men shouting across two sets of bars to prevent close contact. Arranging something better was real work, especially as Sharon would taxi from her hotel that afternoon. Managing these difficulties was a good thing to break the coma of mere observation into which I had settled over the past weeks.

  Sharon was at the gate by the time I’d been returned, had my leg chains levered off, showered, haggled and struck a deal with the Skull. We would get a table alone. A table on the kerb of the roadway next to Building Two but sunnier than the dank cages of the visit coops.

  ‘Was Prompon happy with THB1,500?’ I asked Sharon once seated. Prompon was the jail official in charge of foreigners.

  ‘Hard to tell. His smile didn’t go brittle.’ Sharon fished in her bag for sunglasses. ‘Said, “no, no, no” as he pocketed the money. Anyway I had a flash letter from the Oz embassy. Gavin was helpful, as you said. He put lots of rubber stamps on the letter. Look.’

  I looked at the visit-request letter from the Australian consulate blooming with official stamps. ‘All different colours. That’s a nice touch. Goes down well here.’

  ‘So, David. What happened?’

  ‘I haven’t figured it out yet. They were there at the airport. Waiting for me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Thai cops, American spooks, Australian feds, the Salvation Army, I don’t know.’ I waved a hand in the air. ‘That I can guess at. Some careless calls to my hotel. But Chinatown doesn’t make sense. I mean, I didn’t know I was going there myself and even then I moved in faster than they could. Still, they were waiting. A couple of white men at the station when I was taken in. They didn’t speak.’

  ‘Do you think you were betrayed?’ Sharon’s guess would be the usual answer but I’d always been lucky dodging treachery.

  ‘No. It must have been something very unlikely. As it usually is. I’ll let you know if I ever find out.’

  This was leading nowhere so Sharon told me how she had spent Boxing Day. I’d given her a duplicate key to my flat a few weeks earlier. One quiet afternoon a couple of days after my arrest she’d let herself in.

  ‘I looked in the kitchen cupboards, all your breakfast cereals. Went into the bathroom. Took your soap bar from the shower. Looked at the garden where we once were. Then lay down on your empty bed and cried.’ Sharon locked our legs together under the table. ‘David, you’re not going to send me away now?’

  An hour passed quickly at that sun-bleached table. Our history just handprints on ancient rocks. The odd, stir-fried breeze came from the city and jets passed from the airport over the thousands entombed in their own land. We chose to see ourselves as two small comets being vaporised by the sun. Isn’t that cute?

  Returning to Building Two carrying Sharon’s gift bag of groceries, it felt as though I’d been shopping through a stargate. No earthly link between her world and mine. She would return to Melbourne by week’s end so there would be just two more such stargate journeys.

  Calvin called me as soon as I stepped back in.

  ‘Dave, come over here. You gotta hear this. Some poor Portuguese guy. He’s just come in. He was busted at the airport with a couple of kilos. Not taking it out, he was bringing it in! You won’t believe it.’

  ‘I think I will,’ I said while giving Calvin some amoxicillin capsules from my supermarket bag. I didn’t explain where they came from. Calvin had recently torn a toe and infections often became chronic without access to outside medicines.

  Paolo retold his story as we packed our night food at a table. He had been recruited as a courier in a Spanish resort town. There were Nigerian connections and although Paolo had made three runs into Europe without problems, he had not been paid in full. After making complaints to his handlers he was told he would get everything after a final short run to Malaysia.

  Malaysia executes drug smugglers surely, routinely and often. While Paolo didn’t much like that choice of destination, he needed the money for he was, by then, quite broke. His contact, good old Joe from the Bangkok guesthouse, sympathised.

  ‘My friend, we don’t want to do this business but we must. In Africa we Ebo people are enemies within our own country. We are clever but the stupid, powerful dictators don’t let us run our own affairs. So we have to do this thing. It’s like the Palestinians and the Israelis.’

  As to which side of the walls of the holy lands Joe believed he fell, we would never hear. At that point in the telling of Paolo’s story a factory guard began his daily session of beating those he’d decided were his laziest five workers. With the unlucky five stretched out on the ground to receive their punishment, we moved to a corner of the yard. Paolo picked up the story as he arrived in Kuala Lumpur with his hidden cargo.

  It was exceptional enough that he had flown to Malaysia rather than travel overland but more unusual that there was no one at the airport to meet him. Paolo scraped up some money for a phone card and after three hours sitting on his suitcase near the taxi ranks, he finally spoke to Joe in Bangkok. Joe was surprised, too.

  ‘Didn’t you get on the plane?’

  ‘Of course I did! What do I do now? Who can I call here?’

  Apparently no one. Paolo collected some money that had been quickly sent through a transfer office, then checked into a fleabag while Joe arranged a ticket back to Thailand. It did seem, even to Paolo, that this would lose them the opportunity to move the dope onward to the West rather than to return it to the source. As ever, Paolo was kept too impoverished to make balanced choices.

  On arrival at Don Muang Paolo was immediately arrested. This time the phone call to the airport was made on time. A week earlier a Friday afternoon party at the US Embassy had resulted in staff neglecting to arrange Paolo’s arrest the first time. Apologies all around. Joe was reimbursed. Paolo was finished.

  We all expressed the usual outrage and sympathy. I gave Paolo a Mars bar. Martyn sealed his vegetarian food canisters and added, ‘In a perfect realisation of hell, one would not know he was dead. Life would be hellish without even that rare comfort of certain damnation. And the knowledge that suffering can get no worse. In the imperfect hell of the living, things always get worse.’

  Within a few weeks I felt I had taken as much of the Cure as would be useful. Bumbudt was so overcrowded no real privacy could be bought. I’d heard better things of the buildings in the greater Klong Prem jail next door so began negotiations to move. Most of the other foreigners wanted to move but not all had the means.
Greater Klong Prem was for sentenced prisoners so a transfer required money or light pressure from embassy consulates. Eddie, being Swiss, found immediate compliance with a firm official letter, although British Martyn would have to wait for the weak gravity of imperial support. As I saw things, both men had something to offer. Martyn, his skills, and Eddie, his fearlessness.

  Calvin was reluctant to move. We spoke of it one night, my last week in the dormitory. He had been warned by Vice Consul Judy that heroin was cheap and available in the larger Klong Prem. ‘That Judy, she’s like a den mother and we’re her cub scouts. She doesn’t want me to get tangled up in the dope gain. She’s got all this money my mother keeps sending, bless her.’ Calvin told it like that but it was he who had asked the consulate to restrict payments to his prison account and to leave him in the Cure.

  ‘If I get back on the shit in here, I’m fucked.’ Calvin had said.

  Considering this I found myself absently staring at a tall Thai boy, new to the dorm and then being chained to the floor. That afternoon he had been sentenced to life. As the key boy locked him in place, the new lifer caught my stare.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he apologised. ‘Everything all right. This is Thailand. No problem.’ He even attempted a smile through some winces as he was held in place. What comparable apology might ever be heard in the West? A convict is being strapped into a Californian gas chamber. Some strangers appear. He feels a need to apologise to these witnesses for his own people’s cruelty. What creatures could these visitors be? Civilised aliens from Mars? And what did such a convict think of these aliens that he imagined he caused offence?

  Nearby a small circle of listeners had gathered to watch a weather-beaten country boy from Laos sing folk ballads. He wore a red and white checked blanket draped over his head and shoulders and sat holding a banana for a microphone. His earthy, natural voice carried soft and high sounds across the cell. The dialect was quite foreign to Bangkok ears and no one translated his simple songs of love and loss. A farmer’s son with a face aged by hard times, he added few sentimental contortions and held his notes. When he had finished his audience applauded and the tall boy set his plastic bottle aside to clap as well.