Escape (22 page)

No one knew.

‘Years ago I was on a train from Silvaplana. I’d been in Italy and was going home to St Gallen. This was a small train, nothing special, and the carriage I was in was empty except for one man who sat at the other end. He was a country fellow—I could see from the way he dressed. An old farmer type but dressed well, as they do when they travel to town.

‘Now before I tell you about this old farmer, I have to tell you about my uncle. Or really, the uncle I never had. He died long before I was born, as a child really.’

Theo stood and turned down the control dial of the ceiling fan so that he could light a cigarette.

‘My mother and her brother—my uncle—lived in a small town when they were children. My grandfather was the manager of the town’s bank and the family all lived in the house attached to the bank. The kids had to stay away from the front banking part but they used to play in the back yard and on the stone stairs inside. I suppose my mother would have been about six or something like that.

‘Anyway in those days banks kept a gun around the place. I don’t really know why. I suppose they expected bank managers to shoot at robbers. I can’t see my grandad ever doing that. My uncle was eight years old at the time and, of course, he liked to sneak out with the house gun and play with it whenever he got the chance. One day he and my mother were playing in the stairway. Little Theo—he had the same name as me—had the gun. It went off. Funny thing is that the bullet never hit him directly. It bounced off the wall—two times, they said. He was dead straightaway.’

‘That must have been tough on your mum,’ Rick said. I gave him a dark look.

‘Yes. She never talks about it much,’ Theo continued. ‘But that’s not the point. Like I say, I’m on this train. This is a few years ago now and I suppose fifty years since my kid uncle died. Now I don’t know this farmer guy but we get talking. Why that was, who can say, we weren’t sitting near each other.’ Theo held up a finger to underscore that point.

‘Anyway he tells me he comes from a town nearby. An even smaller town my family lived in before they went to the bank. And this old guy remembers my uncle from when they were young. He tells me this story—just some little thing, nothing really—a story about how when my uncle was six or something. The old man’s dad was the mechanic in the town. He fixed the cars and sold the petrol. So the doctor’s car comes into the petrol station one day. The doctor has been out to see my grandmother, you understand, just finished seeing her for some fever and now he’s stopped at the petrol station. There’s some noise at the back of the car and, one thing and another, they open the trunk and there he is. My uncle, six years old and he’s stowed away in the trunk of the doctor’s car. No big deal, they all laugh and take him home. But it was the only time this old guy now on the train ever saw him. He said my uncle was a little tearaway, always getting into trouble.’

There was no third finger to this story so Theo ended by saying, ‘I would never have known that except for the man on the train. And he wouldn’t have remembered it if something hadn’t happened with little Theo getting stuck in the doctor’s car. The chance of me ever knowing about my uncle were very small but it happened. You see. Fate!’

No one had anything to say. Theo looked around the cell for some response. Rick emptied out the last Scrabble tile from the green bag. It landed face down. Sten had fallen asleep. Bruce, in the far corner, had been reading a magazine, not listening, perhaps thinking of his forthcoming release. Bruce spoke.

‘The life of a woman is easy, really. Easier than for a man. I could even cope with motherhood if necessary. In every way easier.’ Bruce folded his magazine. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t stand the idea of being fucked by a man, that’s all.’

I turned off the light and took a final look at the guard to see if he’d ‘moved. No change.

Friday. Key day.

The key to the cells of third-floor-north hung with a bunch on a neck-sized ring kept hooked to the wall of the guard’s restroom.

During the day the building was empty of prisoners other than the principal key boy and three other trusties who mopped floors. Inside the accommodation blocks guards rarely touched keys. Mornings and evenings key boys would race along in front or behind guards, locking and unlocking. Between times the building was off limits to the other 700 prisoners with two exceptions.

The first, a small, shiny-nut-headed prisoner who was called Dr Rotkhendek, whose gift for languages supported his claim to having been a diplomat with the Thai foreign service. He insisted his imprisonment was the result of encouraging students within the democracy movement. This was unsupported by his jail file which credited him with the axe murder of his wife. His money had bought him a cell in which he lived with two servants. Dr Rotkhendek’s habit was to move in and out of Building Six several times each morning, never moving far from the gatekeeper Pornvid’s lounge at the top of the steps.

The other exception was Westlake, who had lately taken to mid-morning runs around the compound wearing a tennis outfit. I had convinced Pornvid that these runs left me in need of a shower—with the usual economical argument—and that it would ill behove a guard of Pornvid’s status to have a prized tenant showering with the common herd. Well, he took the money anyway.

The large dining hall was being cleared for a special event that morning: the Klong Prem annual beauty contest and talent show. The benches had been removed at one end and others stacked to make a stage platform. As I completed my laps of the compound the blind man within the hall was packing up his sweets and hand-made cigarette stall behind the chicken-wire windows. At each pass I heard the old man hacking and spitting out the previous night’s accumulation of phlegm. Careful in his nest he would locate a gap in the wire with his gnarled fingers before releasing a gob massive onto the bitumen path. His projected sputum made an increasingly hazardous minefield each time I passed. After my run I would arrange distractions for Pornvid and his trusties so that I might take an impression of the cell key undisturbed.

On my final lap alongside the smelly old geezer’s kiosk my attention was divided between the sight of foreigner-trusty Tanveer talking to Pornvid and high stepping through the medallions of mucous on the ground. Too late, I turned in mid-stride to see the grizzled Chinaman standing at the chicken wire as I approached. His twisted fingers tangled in the mesh, his cloudy eyes staring beyond the infinite and his rubbery lips working through the gap, tongue coiling like a vinegar-splashed worm.

Projectiles often travel faster than the sound of their explosion and the gurgling clap reached my ears just as my eyes focussed on the salvo that had left his stretched mouth. Two sensations remain in memory: one, a monstrous glob shooting through the wire, a yellow–green spoonful of putrid tracheal slime with three flailing arms and several embryonic eyes, spinning through the air in full-throated attack. The other, the sickeningly warm thump of the bow-legged trader’s bacteria-laden viscid petard slamming into my white Lacoste single-knit. I fell sideways into a crumbling plaster lion at the entrance to the accommodation block, cursing the old bastard and trying to tear the condemned T-shirt from my chest before the alien snot ate through the fabric.

‘You old prick! You’ve been waiting for me at every turn, haven’t you?’ I shouted, quite convinced that a suggestion of a smile flickered under the cigarette seller’s lips.

Soon afterwards in our office I found a new T-shirt and tried to make Jet stop laughing long enough to deliver messages on this important day.

‘Jet, run over and take Dr Rotkhendek over to Theo.’

I had arranged for the diplomatic axe murderer to translate a court document in Theo’s playroom at the rear of the chief’s office.

When Jet had left I took from a locked cupboard three small pencil tins. Each had a layer of Plasticine within, ready to receive the key impression. Pocketing the tins, I moved quickly to the army boot factory to find Viet Tan.

Tan was a Vietnamese American who had grown up in San Bernardino spoiled by his hard-working parents. When he turned twenty-four Tan was asked to help at the family bakery. In retribution for this outrage he signed on as a courier for a Bangkok–Chicago run. He’d reasoned that if he got through, this would prove he didn’t need his parents support and if he was arrested, then that would show his folks they’d pushed him too far. On the day of his flight from Bangkok Tan connived with himself to miss his plane and so leave later in the evening for Honolulu. He had heard of high dope prices on the islands and convinced himself that the Chicago criminals would overlook the theft of their drugs. This plan was ruined when he was arrested by suspicious airport police. He had been at the check-in zone for six hours, alternately sitting upon his suitcase (for fear that it and its precious contents might be stolen) or watching it from a distance while drinking slurpees, building a cunning defence that any drugs must have been planted in his absence. Tan never developed this defence in court. He pleaded guilty, received twenty-five years and now lived on his parents’ wire transfers to the US Embassy.

Tan was in his factory corner training his two Burmese servants to iron his T-shirts. These hard-working Burmese had spent enough time in Vietnamese camps to learn the local language and were unthinkingly attached to Tan. Their master looked worried when he saw me.

‘Dave, come over here. Out of the way. If the guard sees you he’ll be ragging me for money in a minute.’ Tan drew me farther into the factory.

Nodding toward the factory workers spreading heavy glue over army-boot soles, I sniffed. ‘Can’t see how you pay much for this place. You must be dizzy from the smell.’

After a further exchange of unpleasantries I told Tan a version of the morning’s needs.

‘Tan, I’d like your slaves to get over to the trusty outside the building. He’s messing with the foreigners’ food again.’

‘Dave, don’t use that word!’ Tan looked to his staff from Burma. ‘They know that word “slaves”.’

Once calmed Tan agreed to send his boys over to speak with the Burmese trusty. Foreigners’ food amounted to white rice, an egg and a scoop of chicken-foot soup issued daily to each non-Thai inmate. Rumoured to be paid for by some United Nations fund this nourishment would be collected by poor foreigners who then bartered with it. Wealthier foreigners exchanged the food for clothes-washing services. The trusty-in-charge this day was trying to take an unreasonable cut of the bartering and settling that dispute would keep Tanveer and the food trusty away from the accommodation block. To Tan I provided a different cause.

‘The thing is, Tan, all this is right outside my office. When they start arguing about food they all start shouting and you know the Africans can out-shout anyone else. The noise is too much. It upsets everyone. Wakes up my guard. You get my point?’

The crazy Czech, Karel Stendak, was standing at the edge of the smoking charcoal fires where the homeless cooked their meals. He was frowning at a group of Thais performing surgery on each other. The heavily tattooed chief surgeon was inserting the last of a dozen polished beads of mollusc shell into the penis of his patient. These operations resulted in the cauliflower dick heads so much admired among those motherless city tribes who impress each other with body decoration.

‘David, have you seen this?’ Stendak pointed to the deformed wanger. ‘They think girls like it like that. They say it gives them pleasure.’

‘Not if you believe the newspapers.’ I was talking of a recent story in which a prostitute in Khorat had refused to service a customer whose dork she’d described as a praying mantis. The customer had complained to the authorities. The girl had been freed by a sympathetic judge. ‘Karel, have you been over to the chief’s office today?’

Stendak shook his head.

‘Funny thing,’ I said. ‘Rick was telling me the chief has you down as a former airline pilot. You dark horse, you! You never told me you were a top flyboy. Boeing, Boeing!’

That was enough to send Stendak off to the chief’s office. The confusion would, I hoped, take quite some time to be resolved. Especially as I hadn’t warned Rick of this subterfuge. Rick should instinctively play along.

Pornvid, reclining at his station guarding the accommodation block, waved me through as I picked at my unsticky T-shirt and wiped no sweat from my brow. The building was deserted and a band in the food hall was tuning its instruments.

As I sped along the jail’s clear corridors and passed the empty rooms, the cells seemed open-mouthed and hungry in their silence. I lifted the keys from their hook in the guard’s room, gripping the bunch tightly to lessen the noise. Already I knew the key to #57 by sight so I kept the others clear when turning the old mortise lock in the cell door. The turn was tight, requiring a twist similar to that for a pickle jar left too long on the shelf. The key boys had found trouble with this tight lock before, I’d noticed. However, to change cells now could take months.

Inside the cell I hung the keys on a nail, took off my T-shirt, draped a towel over one shoulder and picked up Dinger who was sitting on my bed. I took the cat to the corridor and placed her on a sheet of paper she might find interesting for a few minutes. Returning to #57 I hoped Dinger would respond in her usual timid manner to the first sight of strangers and jump back into the cell.

Within two minutes I had Play Doh impressions of both sides and the tip of the cell key. I pocketed the pencil tins. A minute later the keys were again hanging from the guard’s room wall and Dinger was watching me take a shower, wondering why her breakfast was late.

By the time I was at my desk the Klong Prem all-stoned band was meeting popular demand by playing Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ and the more adventurous Thai boys were dancing with each other in the hall with a free-form jitterbug.

Taking the key impressions to a small table I kept at my first office (a narrow space behind the factory alongside an inner wall), I set the three tins next to each other. From a cupboard I mixed resin and catalyst to pour into the moulds. This I added quickly and then placed the tins in the cupboard before locking its door and moving to join the other spectators in the dining hall. I would have to wait until every prisoner was out of sight before inspecting my work.