Escape Read online

  Most of the foreigners of Building Five were African, more than two hundred; their days absorbed with food issues. A few years before they had spilled into an aimless riot of frustration. It had led nowhere. Few had made it beyond the gates of Building Five. When some Thais were pushed to the ground the afternoon of the short knives began, with fifty yard-cooks supplying twice that many would-be Thai boxers with hatchets, choppers and paring blades. They formed mobile gauntlets and cut the Africans to pieces.

  Some buildings were out of bounds. Building Seven, a punishment house, was overgrown with vines and low-hanging trees. Utterly quiet yet full, we were told. Sweepers, ragpickers and kitchen workers were housed in Building Eight. Buildings Nine and Ten had short-term prisoners and students without a school. Both near the wall but off-limits to foreigners. Officially guards volunteered as teachers. Diplomas were advertised on a colourful notice board, priced by grade. The only accommodation with cell bars as thin as those of Building Six was in buildings Eleven and Three. Building Eleven had 500 prisoners dying from AIDS and the hospital-recovery wards of Building Three held large dormitories rather than cells. Although any climb from Building Six to the outside wall would require scaling three internal walls, all other available accommodation in KP had fat steel crosshatched over cell windows. Even the most well-equipped mountain climber would never see snow if he could not first open his bedroom door.

  Gambling within Thai prisons is forbidden and therefore an especially clandestine pleasure. Even the most powerful trusties kept their decks of cards hidden. Possession of a pair of dice carried the risk of a costly punishment. Consequently daytime betting was often facilitated by those possessing some unpredictable handicap.

  One such was a young man who had an advanced parasitic infection in one limb. His right leg was swollen to the size of a tree trunk. He would sit by the toilets most mornings attempting to extract one of the thousands of worms that riddled his leg. These thin parasites under his skin looked like fishing line and seemed just as long. The only method of removing a worm intact was to pick out a looped segment as it moved into view through one of his weeping pustules. Then to roll the worm carefully around a pencil until completely extracted. If the worm broke the two halves would live on to produce large families.

  Eddie and I were calling odds one morning as a small crowd of Thais and foreigners bet on the number of worm-centimetres that would be visible before a snap. Charlie Lao had joined us and as he was no gambler, I waited for a break to take Charlie aside.

  ‘David, you know the coffee shop is coming up for sale. It would be good for you. I can speak to the chief, if you want,’ Charlie offered.

  ‘How much does he want?’

  ‘Maybe US$10,000. There’s one Thai man bidding but I can keep the price down.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s for me,’ I said with thanks.

  ‘You can make your money back in six months, maybe four.’ Charlie saw the coffee shop as the ideal investment for any would-be KP tai-pan.

  ‘It’s not a question of money,’ I told Charlie and went on to explain my hopes to excuse myself from all further KP sports. By the time I’d finished outlining a few escape plans we were walking through the clotheslines, that morning heavy with drying bed sheets. Charlie’s smile had frozen.

  Charlie had been in Klong Prem for over seven years. He had seen the few escape attempts fail tragically and had heard of one attempt from the courts that had become notorious. He hoped the story would teach me a lesson.

  ‘These were Chinese guys, David,’ Charlie implored. ‘So they had friends, you know. Some money, too.’

  Charlie’s recollection of the escape plan of the four inmates from their court-bound van mirrored the dreams of almost every prisoner transported through hours of stalled traffic to his courthouse. For eight months five men had been held on remand at Klong Prem for the same drug case. Before the trial began the oldest among them had become too ill to attend hearings and was confined to the hospital. The remaining four had planned their escape three months earlier and had used local—that is Thailand-based—contacts only for acquiring equipment and finding a safe house. All those who were to use guns had been brought from Hong Kong. They spent several weeks on motorcycles learning routes and techniques for threading through Bangkok’s congested streets. Few, if any, Thais were involved. The father of one of the escapers later confided that an earlier version of the plan had been to make a snatch from the courthouse as the prisoners arrived or even at the jail upon return. These ideas were rejected because the court police are too heavily armed and, at the prison, the guards in the towers had a serious advantage with their rifles. Shooting would have been assured with inevitable losses.

  The four men had left KP one morning on the bus, along with fifty others. They had prepared carefully with each man knowing the location of the safe house in case any found himself separated. Their confederates had planned well, too.

  Underneath the first overpass from the prison a stolen truck stopped and stalled in front of the court bus. Abandoning the heavy truck its driver and another man left their cabin and walked amiably toward the bus driver before pulling down masks. They kept the talk to a minimum by unloading a few shots from handguns into the driver’s window. At the same time two others moved up quickly from behind the prisoners’ bus, one pointing a shotgun at the rear guard. The rear door, as usual, had been open to give the guard some air. The second man took the guard’s keys to unlock the prisoners’ cage.

  Of the four prisoners who planned to leave that morning one had second thoughts at the sight of guns and the sound of cold threats. Worse, those inmates not part of the plan noticed his hesitation. With the cage door open his more willing accomplices quickly picked their way through the pack and slipped to the roadway, catching and tripping over their chains. The masked invigilator at the rear door had the sense not to speak to the doubter directly but shouted encouragement at all the prisoners. A few began to move but not he who had his doubts. Oddly the guard was moved to protest at these fresh prisoners attempting to join an escape not of their own making and had to be put to sleep. The sight of that ended any initiative by the remaining prisoners.

  Several motorbikes had arrived. A masked pillion passenger from one went to work snapping the steel ankle rings of the three freed men. As this seemed to take too long there was shouting and the bolt cutters were abandoned. While the masked gunmen kept their weapons trained on the prison guards, the prisoners were driven away on fast off-road bikes. Less than a minute later the last of the gunmen backed to a car waiting by the roadside, climbed in and was driven behind the others through a building site to a far entrance. There the gunmen took to bikes of their own and the freed prisoners transferred to another car.

  ‘So they got away all right.’ I turned from Charlie, pleased at last to hear of some success.

  ‘Well, the four main men got to a small place in the middle of town,’ Charlie continued. ‘Too many police were everywhere. Too risky to move outside.’

  And too risky to stay inside. Minutes after the prisoners who had not escaped had been hauled back to Klong Prem, they identified the one who had hesitated. He was then questioned. He held out for almost four hours. That night a special police unit raided the house in Thonburi. Two of the policemen were hospitalised from injuries caused by their own ricocheting bullets. Six of the seven people in the house were killed immediately, the last dying during the night in a police station.

  Charlie was using this story to tell me that what hadn’t been done, couldn’t be done.

  ‘It’s not destiny,’ I protested. ‘Destiny is when you stand around looking stupid in a pineapple hat while the bad men are at the door instead of going for the back fence. As soon as that chicken one wouldn’t go the others were crazy to stay in Thonburi. Anyone can see their mistake!’

  ‘Can you see yours?’

  Charlie had me there. Even then I still could not understand why the Thai police had been waiting for me at
Chinatown.

  Around the same time as I heard that dismal tale of the massacred Chinese I found problems with Swiss Eddie. We had been sitting behind the coffee shop watching Rick cook lunch, something he rarely attempted.

  On a bare patch of earth Rick was cooking a chicken in what he called a Russian-army oven. A ten-gallon oil drum had been taken from the autoshop and then cleaned. A fizzy-drink bottle was half filled with water and wedged upright in the ground. The chicken was then jammed in the top of the bottle.

  ‘I learned this in Dubai,’ Rick explained as he lowered the tin over the chickened bottle. ‘Now I seal the tin good with some dirt. And now throw on the rags.’

  The rags were three large oil-soaked jute sacks that had cost more than the bird. These were set alight to make Rick’s pressure-cooker. Almost engulfed in flames and to whet our appetites, Rick told a long story about the pet chicken that entertained his customers from the days when Rick ran a bar in the Persian Gulf states. The chicken was deranged, apparently, and had been named Floppy. Although Rick’s feast was ready in twenty minutes, the unfunny chicken story made it seem longer.

  As we ate Floppy II Eddie announced that he was intending to receive his sentence in court the following week.

  ‘I thought you were waiting for your uncle to come from Zurich—to say nice things in court?’ I’d been expecting Eddie to delay his trial as I had.

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s not coming,’ Eddie looked around. ‘And I’m sick of waiting. I just want to get it over with.’

  Later that day in our factory I told Eddie something he already knew: ‘You know, if you get more than thirty-five years you’ll be off to Bangkwang. Okay, it’s got no moat but you’ll be on your own. Does the court know about your past?’

  ‘It seems so. Well, not about Switzerland. The court knows my Thai record.’ Eddie meant the year he had served for stealing a TV-set from a hotel.

  ‘You did your bit in the Swiss army, Eddie. Why don’t you soldier it out here. Then we can both get away.’

  ‘Look, David. You know I wasn’t in the army. Pretended to be crazy—remember? And seriously, you don’t think you can really get out of here? I mean, come now!’

  That left nothing more to say. Eddie had been the most fitting candidate for an escape partner.

  I looked across the factory towards two old guards wearing their ill-fitting uniforms. Happily arguing with each other like mummified but animated corpses, their chicken necks shrunken within the fabric so carefully pressed by their trusties: a version of Larson’s cartoon of the Old West in which vultures pick over the bodies of dead pioneers. Just for fun one vulture has strapped on a corpse’s six-guns and donned a big hat. ‘Hey, lookit me!’ the vulture says to the other birds. ‘I’m a cowboy!’

  Within a fortnight Eddie had been sentenced to fifty years. He was sent to Bangkwang the next morning.

  A day after that a letter arrived from England containing a small black-and-white photograph of Eddie. It was for Eddie’s new, false passport, copied from a large charcoal portrait. Originally a colour snapshot taken of Eddie in front of a street stall in Phuket. Little Jet had sketched a copy, carefully eliminating the background and that I had sent to London. Jet, for some reason, had no talent for making portraits from life. I placed Eddie’s picture in my drawer along with spare buttons and paper clips.

  That afternoon I was looking for an excuse to get away from the sour atmosphere of Building Six so when Charlie told me that most of Klong Prem’s Australians were at the visit pens, I left Jet in charge of our office and began walking to the gate.

  ‘Embassy people?’ I asked Charlie.

  ‘Not yet, but they’re coming. Right now, some Christian girl is for the boys.’

  The girl was in her twenties. She looked as though she had slept through infancy on one side of her face for otherwise she would have been called pretty. The visit pen was packed and deafening so the boys were taking turns with the young missionary. A sallow-skinned man in colourless shorts was calling through the bars.

  ‘I haven’t got any more horror stories for you, luv. I’ll see what I can do next time.’

  Others were not so unkind and were pleased to see someone from the real world. Even so this meeting was more a chance for the Australians from different buildings to get together than to supply the girl from the Christian Brotherhood with material for prayer meetings. Since their grandfathers’ survival of the WWII prisoner-of-war camps in Singapore, Australians had a reputation of resourcefulness and pluck. Unfortunately this lot looked like they’d never left that Changi camp.

  While Sallowface yelled at the girl I was introduced to Rickets, who also had skin inflammations; Hollowcheeks, whose yellow skin advertised liver damage; Greengills; and Looseskin, who had matted hair and was taking his time dying from AIDS. These were the years before anti-retroviral drugs.

  The noise in the pens made talking hard work, the mosquitoes’ scouts had signalled a formation attack and I’d seen enough. I walked with Greengills across to the hut reserved for officials. Inside two consular reps spoke with a Czech–Australian and another Aussie in a wheelchair who had tuberculosis. A woman with a large handbag and short hair was telling a story about her work. As a vice consul one of her frequent tasks was to repatriate tourists who had found themselves in Thai nuthouses. Usually those visitors who had stopped taking their antipsychotic drugs in favour of oriental medicine. Jill would collect them from the asylums, usually meeting them as they stood behind ward bars ranting obscenities.

  ‘That I don’t mind,’ Jill told us. ‘It means I get to fly back to Sydney at least twice each month. It’s when they spit on me I get upset. They spit a lot, I don’t know why.’

  By the time the remaining Australians had coughed and limped their way to the official hut Frank Maugre, another vice consul, was closing a large file on the Czech. The Czech’s file included half a dozen theft convictions from Australia as well as several minor arrests in Europe involving explosive arguments with strangers. He’d been asking for support for a royal pardon in Thailand. His sentence was thirty years, about the average for foreigners in KP.

  ‘Sorry to say it mate but you’re fucked!’

  Frank then announced that royal amnesties would no longer include those with drug convictions. Royal amnesties occurred almost every year in which the king’s birthday contained a zero. Sentences would normally be halved.

  ‘As you know, murderers have never been eligible,’ explained Frank. ‘Now it looks like you druggies won’t see any change out of a dollar either. Some of the other embassies have never been too keen on the amnesties as it is.’

  By that Frank meant the US State Department which saw the amnesties undermining the attractiveness of its prisoner-exchange program. American prisoners who were due to be sent home would first be re-sentenced at the Thai jail before departing to US prisons. The sentences could be reduced by a high level of co-operation with the DEA and long Thai sentences were one way to encourage that.

  This news ended the consular visit so we all wandered from the hut back toward our buildings. Greengills was serving forty years and had spent the last six in Bangkwang prison before moving to Klong Prem.

  ‘It’s better there, really,’ he coughed. ‘It’s more high security so they leave you alone. Not so many rules so you can do what you want.’

  ‘More high security,’ I asked. ‘Like how?’

  Greengills stopped for a moment, puzzled. ‘I don’t know. You know? Real long-termers. They let you just get on with it.’

  Stopping at the gate of Building Six I beheld that group of shrunken and lost people. It seemed that I could have held them all together in my arms as a thatch of rubbery sticks. Given time I would be as they: an afternoon’s diversion for consular staff, a foreign nuisance for Thais; the pathetic madman to whom family and friends sadly would post books and food parcels. A man whose letters would ramble. Sapping the strength and resources of those outside who still cared. A creature without t
he dignity of dogs and dolphins that, when denied their own world, would die quietly and quickly. Worse, given that ruthless adaptability of man I might somehow survive twenty years in this place. Eventually released, with no mind left other than that of a once-caged circus bear, able only to take two paces forward, then two steps back.

  8

  Once or twice each year the prison would allow open visits where inmates were permitted to sit in contact with their visitors. These took place in a large walled garden with marquees shading tables. These special visits were limited to prisoners of excellent behaviour and the wealthy so put little strain on Klong Prem’s management. Besides, few prisoners had anyone prepared to visit them.

  Charlie Lao was on duty pretending to be a trusty and had set up a small table with a beach umbrella to shade Sharon and me from the crowd. Sharon wore a light dress and looked good.

  Sharon seemed to imagine my imprisonment in KP was some kind of self-indulgent whim of my invention. Now she thought it high time I stopped playing on Devil’s Island and that I should simply leave.

  ‘There are one or two difficulties in that, my love.’ I waved an arm at the eight-metre walls.

  Sharon frowned dismissively.

  ‘Oh, you’re not going to let that worry you. I know you’ll come out.’ She then unpacked the food she’d bought while bouncing around Bangkok playing giddy tourist. ‘I believe in you so much you’ll turn in to who I love, even if you don’t think you are. You won’t be able to help yourself!’

  As I tried to figure that out we became children at a pretend afternoon tea party, pouring imaginary milk, crumbling fictional biscuits and toasting the air, all to disguise kisses. Then I ate a real salmon sandwich and looked over people we knew in snapshots that Sharon had spread upon the table.

  ‘What can I do for you, David? Tell me.’

  I put down the sandwich and looked thoughtful. ‘Did you bring your camera?’

  She had.

  ‘Have someone take your picture out there near the moat. There’s a shop that sells some of the crap they make in here.’ I nodded toward the front gate. ‘Not too close. It’d be good if the guard towers were in the frame.’