Escape (26 page)

‘I think the man was there to see what Sharon was up to. American, I think. Took some interest in Dean. Not part of any operation—but I’m guessing there—maybe just some curious official. One thing’s for sure, I’m going to get hammered.’

Chas was ever reluctant to talk in certainties yet conceded, ‘I don’t think you should have any good expectations for the courts.’

‘I can’t stay, of course.’

‘No. I expect not.’ And with that, Chas moved on to the subject of absent friends.

Dinger had been taking care of the office while I was away and had expressed her disapproval of unfocussed management, as Jet reported immediately.

‘She shit on your desk, again. Big shit.’ Jet accused me of being a bad parent.

Perhaps I had been too quick with the interventions to keep the sick kitten alive and, clearly, she blamed me for not curing her chronic enteritis. One morning when I’d squawked at her over another desk mess she seemed to squawk back, ‘Well, do something! What have I got to do—shit on your head?’ Dinger had no appreciation that not all events were under my control.

Miraj didn’t take to Ding in #57, notwithstanding his Hindu wrap. That night the cat wandered too close to Miraj’s mat in his corner as he feasted on a chapatti the size of an eyepatch and a nubbin of tacky dhal. Miraj unleashed a blow with the force of a loosened shoelace that perceptibly tickled Dinger’s ear.

Sten looked up and frowned at Miraj. Miraj gaped at Sten’s knees and suggested, ‘The cat’s got to learn.’

Sten, never much interested in Dinger, flicked two fingers at Miraj’s head sending the Indian deep into his corner. ‘No. You’ve got to learn,’ Sten rebuked casually. ‘The cat was here first.’

To be persecuted by both outlaws and the law is a rare achievement. I suspected Miraj had realised this inevitability early in life and so became accommodating yet miserly without delay.

To end the silence that followed I asked Jet about this day’s little mystery. Seven trusties occupied cell #58 and were usually gleeful and talkative. Yet for the past two days they had been creeping about, moving in pairs to their cell and making only subdued noises at night. It seemed unthinkable that they might be planning an exit.

‘So, Jet. What’s going on next door?’ I passed Bo-Jai’s rice pudding to Sten. ‘And why don’t you want to tell me about it?’

Jet didn’t want to tell me about next door for perfectly good reasons, none of which he could express. Stupidly I steamed on and was told that three of the trusties belonged to the Chinese box factory and its insufferably mean boss, a guard unhinged by the frustration of not being able to extract money as fast as he could drink it. This guard and his trusties served up a little heroin in Building Six and in protecting their reputations as law-abiding men would pounce on a careless junkie every new moon. The hophead would be beaten and sent to the
soi
for a week or two.

This week the box-factory guard had gone too far with his specially made lead-weighted truncheon after the dopester had spoken back. By the time accounts were settled the boy was in poor shape. The trusties took him to the back of the factory to recover. When he did not they took him to their room for the night. There they administered first aid by injecting an amount of heroin they hoped would beget a fatal overdose. The plan was to put the body behind the toilets in the yard early next morning. However, the boy had a strong resistance to a drug the trusties were too stingy to mix effectively and was still breathing at sunrise. Change of plan. The blue-shirts jumped up and down on the boy to hasten his death and then left him in their room for the day.

‘So he’s alive now?’ I asked Jet. ‘Next door?’

Jet looked down. ‘I don’t know, my teacher.’

We in #57 could have slept more easily without knowing about this and would spare the gentle reader that knowledge, too, were it not for the change that this caused in the events of the following day.

This was a day for parole decisions for ‘simple offenders’. An annual event when short-term prisoners would be interviewed, assessed and—possibly for those serving less than five years—released. Such a celebration was too good a spectacle not to be used for the education of young Thai citizens so several busloads of schoolchildren were brought to Klong Prem. The children were escorted through the streets of Building Six to see the rehabilitation in action.

In preparation for this the usual rejects were locked in their cells, the foreigners confined to the dark channels of factories and the cripples, the deformed and all others considered alarmingly ugly were swept from the streets. Kerbstones were whitewashed and the bare earth raked. The coffee shop’s bank was shuttered and its displays transformed with royal portraits. Uniforms were unpacked from dank storage and issued on loan to those inmates due to go on show. Some of these prisoners then presented themselves as bowed and penitent, sitting at benches in the food hall as they awaited assessors who ruled from five tables, centre stage. Other prisoners were set to marching gaily—and endlessly—around the compound, singing national songs of praise. Sten and I were exempt from the roundup of undesirables as we were KP landowners and effortlessly lived the lie of co-operation.

At lunchtime a colourful saffron rice-and-chicken meal was provided for the visible prisoners in the mess hall.

‘Do they usually eat this well?’ Some of the schoolgirls would ask the trusties.

‘A bit special today,’ a trusty might confide. ‘They don’t always get dessert at lunchtimes.’

Jet listlessly brought to our office plates of the special food.

‘I wouldn’t eat this if it was mine.’ Jet slid the plates for Sten and me on a table. ‘It’s shit.’ Jet was serving twelve years and so was dejected at the sight of so much freedom on offer but denied to him.

Sten sniffed at and then dismissed the food before speaking impassively. ‘The main door to the building’s locked. Even Pornvid’s making himself scarce. No one wants to be around when the junkie gives up smoking.’

The boy in #58 was still thoughtlessly refusing to die on this special day and the trusties had left the side door to the cell block open and unattended as all cells were locked. Perhaps they thought they might blame the boy’s death on passers-by. Anyone using this side entrance would be invisible to trusties, guards and the schoolchildren.

‘This might be just the time to grab our new bookshelf,’ I said to Sten. ‘The plank was still there this morning.’

Sten and I walked from our factory office to a secluded miniature garden where a compound guard slept at night. A two-and-a-half metre scaffolding plank had been abandoned within the garden. Work had just finished on an open gazebo built in the classical style, a gift from the portrait workers to their guard. We lifted the plank and then trotted around to the side of the accommodation block. Sten paused to set two pot plants on the plank as though the long board were merely transportation.

This plank would make a bookshelf almost as long as our cell. Usually we would buy our furnishings rather than steal them but this piece would cause too much talk, need too much explaining. Unfamiliar Western amusements often bothered our keepers. Only a month earlier I had to make a financial fuss to retrieve a model plane kit that had arrived by parcel. ‘It’s powered by a rubber band,’ I’d assured the chief. And Sten explained, ‘Made of balsa wood. We want to play with it on the sports field,
basta
, that’s it!’

The corridors of Building Six were empty as Sten and I padded through its side door. We stopped once inside the entrance and Sten smiled a ‘Why-not?’ Certainly everyone else was locked in or distracted by schoolgirls but there were so many walls within KP, even dominance of Building Six allowed no real freedom. I returned Sten’s look with a grin of rueful hopelessness. We would not get far making a mad dash and with a plank for a ladder.

‘The keys?’ Sten suggested as we reached #57.

‘Not today, not now.’ I lowered my end of the plank and offloaded the potted palms. ‘I don’t feel lucky today.’

We slid the plank through the cell door’s bars, letting it flap to the floor and then deposited the plants in the empty guardroom. Moving back to the stairs, Sten paused at #58.

‘Wanna look?’

As far as I knew the battered narcomane was still inside. ‘No. If we’re not going to do anything, what’s the point?’

Sten looked anyway and didn’t say anything until he grew tired of me not asking.

‘A lump under a blanket. Not moving.’

Our quiet neighbour died before nightfall. His body was taken to the hospital where medical staff declared he had died from a self-administered overdose.

Our new bookshelf appeared dangerously heavy once mounted on the brackets nailed into the decaying concrete wall. For safety we positioned it above Miraj so that any noise would be muffled if it fell during the night.

A hospital trusty arrived at my desk the following day. The blue-shirt told me that I had an appointment with a specialist. For my kidney stone, I presumed. I’d almost forgotten about that complaint since it had been part of Dean Reed’s schemes to provide a judge with a reason to grant bail.

While waiting on the benches at the hospital I tuned in to a conversation between one of the doctors and the box-factory guard from Building Six.

‘You should have brought the boy here earlier,’ confided the doctor. ‘I could have done something.’

The guard looked uncharacteristically troubled. ‘We had the special day. All those schoolchildren—nosey visitors.’

‘We have a driver, you know. Many times we take them to the hospital.’ The doctor was talking of the practice of loading the dead on an ambulance and thereafter taking the corpse to the military hospital. Officially the dead would always be alive when they left Klong Prem.

‘Mister Westlay?’ A doctor new to me stood at a doorway with a thin file cover. ‘This way, please.’

The doctor sat at his chair in the small consulting room and folded his hands. He looked past me to the door and gestured with his hand. ‘Please see the specialist in the side room.’

The side room looked like a place where staff ate their lunch. At a table with a plastic cover and two bottles of fish sauce sat Tommy Marchandat, last seen by me on his day trip from Chiang Mai before I left him for Chinatown.

Tommy stood and smiled. ‘David,’ and held his arms open in offhand astonishment at this pretty pass.

I had trouble stifling a smile in return. ‘You could at least have worn a white coat.’

Tommy was too cautious to be seen visiting a foreigner—well
this
foreigner—and had leased this practice for the afternoon.

‘I don’t suppose you could take me with you?’ I had to ask.

‘If only it was that easy,’ Tommy had to say. ‘Chas came to see me a couple of days ago. Sorry I haven’t been down before this, I’ve been waiting for things to go quiet.’

‘When they shoot me—things will be quiet after that.’ I was being childish.

‘Don’t be like that. This is Thailand. My country. You’ll see.’

I nodded. ‘You were seen arriving back in Chiang Mai with your teddy bear.’ I wanted to dig up the past. ‘You know you were being followed? That your phone was tapped? Still is, maybe.’

Tommy wasn’t having any of that. ‘I’d know if that was true. I even checked with the police. It’s very unusual to tap phones in Thailand.’

‘It’s unusual for Thais to be told, more often.’ Then I turned to family matters. ‘Who’s running the store for your uncle?’

I went on to suggest Tommy’s uncle was executed by his deputies. They were all Chinese. Uncle Lou was not. Tommy countered that after uncle was hit by the truck all diligence was shown with investigations. However, I could see that Tommy didn’t much like the sound of his own explanation.

‘Tommy, there’s so much heat around you I’m catching fire. A few more Americans in our lives than there should be, too. You know they can listen to any phone in Thailand without telling anyone. Now you tell me, what’s going on?’

Tommy did not answer as we were joined by the subordinate doctor and lunch was served.

Eventually and later in the day than I’d hoped I heard the story that mattered. It was bracketed within other laudatory Uncle Lou tales. Many years earlier in the 1970s when Tommy and I were still independently looking for trouble, Uncle Lou had wider, grass-roots control of his narcotics fiefdom. He would personally visit farmlands, laboratories and town shippers. At that time the US DEA ran a four-man office in Chiang Mai. Its agents were told not to venture further afield than the office water cooler.

One ambitious agent wanted more. Using the office maps he drove to an opium-growing village within the realm of Lou. The agent offered inducements and promises to the village headman. Left his card, as crusading spooks might.

The village headman thought about living in America for a month or two before calling uncle. Unfortunately the American scout’s visit had already been reported to Chiang Mai where Lou was troubled by this mutinous hesitation. For peace of mind he had the headman beheaded. News of the decapitation soon reached the DEA office, as intended. The chief of DEA operations, CHM, was angry with his inferior officer and ordered him to stay close and keep quiet. Perhaps misunderstanding the tirade of his superior, the agent then began making open threats and public allegations about Uncle Lou. Neither close nor quiet.

Uncle Lou was in his late fifties at that time and experience had taught him not to go about killing Americans promiscuously. Instead, Lou arranged an object lesson.

The wife and two children of the DEA man were also living in Chiang Mai for the term of the tour. The children were taken each day to a private school by a driver in the company of their mother. One morning as the family were on the way to school, their car was intercepted by two gunmen who put aside the driver and then took the American family to their own minivan. The plan was to hold them for a few hours and then release them as a warning against snooping. We should remember that in the 1970s, events in the Middle East gave thoroughly misleading recommendations as to the value of kidnapping Westerners.