Banging the Monkey

by Tod A

  Glasses had the best English, so he did all the talking. He introduced himself, then Mole and Chainsmoker. I immediately forgot their names, as I always do when I am nervous—which is whenever I am in the presence of Authority. It was their smiles that disturbed me most.

  “Mr Mark,” Glasses began.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. It was my standard policy to suck up to cops. It was invariably what they wanted.

  “I am sorry for my English,” Glasses continued.

  “I am sorry for my Madunese.” I was sincere. It was their country, after all.

  “What you relation to Mr Frank?”

  “He’s my . . . he was my boss.”

  “What profession you practice?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “What you write?”

  “You know, books . . . stories. Product descriptions, at the moment. Website copy.”

  He stared at me blankly.

  “For the internet.”

  A glimmer of recognition. Glasses had heard of the internet.

  “So you work computers, IT.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” I said. It just seemed easier.

  I was ten thousand miles from the Tombs, yet the room smelt unnervingly familiar. The industrial-strength air freshener failed to mask the malodor of ashtrays and halitosis.

  “And you stay Mr Frank villa?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In the guest bungalow.”

  It occurred to me that I would no longer be able to do that, now that my host was dead.

  “When you arrive to Madu, Mr Mark?”

  “On, um, October eighteenth, I think, sir.”

  “You think?”

  He opened a manila folder and pulled out some papers. I recognized my handwriting on the pink immigration forms from the airport. As he leafed through my file my eyes wandered the room. The dingy walls, dented filing cabinets, and scuffed linoleum floor summoned back the many awful hours I had passed in police stations. Sobriety did not improve the experience.

  “October nineteen,” he corrected. “Why you no have passport?”

  “As I told you at the bar, sir, I left it in a taxi on the day I arrived. I’m still waiting for my new one to arrive.”

  “You have police report?”

  “Yes, sir. Right here.”

  I pulled it from my bag and handed it over.

  He glanced at the creased and folded paper, then slowly smoothed it on the desk in front of him.

  “You have other identifications?”

  “No. The consul has a photocopy of my passport. Everything else was in my wallet. Which is gone.”

  Glasses turned and said something to Mole, who left the room.

  We waited.

  Glasses and Chainsmoker watched me, smiling.

  I tried to look as innocent as possible, while trying not to look like I was trying to look innocent.

  Cops have a way of making you feel guilty even when you’ve done nothing wrong—and these three were experts. Above their phony smiles were cold cop eyes: opaque, arrogant, and cruel. Familiar emotions welled up in me, along with memories I didn’t care to recall.

  Mole came back with Pompadour, who’d filled out the report about my lost wallet. Pompadour squinted at me for a while, then nodded to Glasses. Glasses uttered a monosyllable. Pompadour left the room. It seemed they’d decided I was who I said I was. For a moment I started to relax.

  Not for long.

  “So you been working here in Madu, Mr Mark,” Glasses said.

  “Well, yes.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “But you enter Madu with tourist visa,” he said, nodding at the pink papers. “It never cross your mind that you are working in this country without proper paperwork?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean no, sir.”

  “Yes, sir? Or no, sir?”

  “I don’t know, Frank said he’d take care of the immigration stuff. I just did what he told me.”

  He seemed to study me, his face moving incrementally closer to mine.

  “When the last time you see Mr Frank?”

  “In New York, about a week before he offered me the job.”

  “Then you come to Madu, you move into his villa, and Mr Frank just disappear?”

  “He never showed up at the airport. I didn’t even know he was back in Madu until they told me he was dead. It’s fucking weird.”

  He glared at me.

  “I mean, it’s just weird, sir.”

  “Weird, yes. Very weird.”

  The way he spun it, it did all sound a little odd.

  “Look, talk to Sanjaya, Frank’s assistant. He’ll explain.”

  “Don’t tell us our job,” he said, removing his glasses and wiping them with a cloth. “We already speak to Mr Sanjaya. Mr Sanjaya say you look after Mr Frank’s business.”

  Good old Sanjaya.

  “Yeah, a little. But only because Sanjaya is useless. Frank left everything in a big mess.”

  “So maybe you try to take over Mr Frank’s business, eh? Maybe you want to be the new Mr Frank?”

  “Are you kidding me? What do I know about import-export? I’m just a writer.”

  “A very rich, successful writer, ja? Who no need any extra money, am I correct?”

  “Are you accusing me of something?”

  “We only search for truth, Mr Mark,” he said, soothingly. “Try to get to bottom of this question. You don’t want to help us get to bottom?”

  “Of course I want to help. I’m cooperating. I’m here voluntarily, aren’t I?”

  “Ja, you here now. But before you somewhere else. You a very difficult man to find. Where you hiding all this time?”

  “Hiding? I went to back-island to take pictures for the Post.”

  “With this Mr Raj.”

  “Yes, Raj Curry. Researching an article. We stopped off in Longa for one night with some friends.”

  “We know of this man Curry, but we unable to contact him as yet.”

  “He said something about going to Singapore.” I sighed. “Look, plenty of people saw me in Dimana. Hundreds, probably.”

  “Perhaps you can provide their names?”

  “The names of everyone in the village?” I was starting to lose my cool. “Look, I stayed with a woman there. Wulan. At her guest house. She nursed me through the fever.”

  “What fever?”

  “Dengue. I was sick as a dog. Here’s her card. Call her.”

  He looked at it for a moment, then picked up the phone and dialed. I could hear some ugly electronic sounds from the tinny speaker. He put the phone down.

  “Mobile service not working.”

  “What about the consul? Consul Fitch. He saw me there.”

  “The consul a very busy man. We talk to him in due time.”

  He turned and looked at Chainsmoker, who looked at Mole, who looked back at Glasses, who looked back at me. Nobody said anything. Chainsmoker stubbed out his fourth cigarette and lit another.

  “Mr Mark,” Glasses said, finally. “We have law in this country.”

  “Of course you do, sir.” The finest legal system in the world.

  “And law says, murder is a very serious crime. Very serious crime, indeed.”

  “Am I being charged with murder?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean? I couldn’t have killed him if I’d wanted to. I’ve been in back-island for almost two weeks and Frank’s only been dead for a week!”

  “How you know how long he is dead?” Glasses said. “I never mention this.”

  “That’s what Cooney and Monty said. And Kubu.”

  “These alcoholics from the bar.”

  He leaned forward, brandishing the papers.

  “Like I say, we h
ave law in this country and that law say, in Madu no work without work visa.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m real sorry about that. I didn’t know. Frank said—”

  “Frank said, Frank said,” he mocked. “Ignorance of Madunese law is not excuse.”

  “Look, if you could just—”

  “No! You look! And you listen! We have many questions. And we are not satisfied with your answers. You no have identity papers. You stay in dead man’s house. For your whereabout during time of crime you give no proof. You admit to working in Madu without proper visa. Many questions, Mr Mark. Too many questions.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “So you say.” He squared all my papers and put them back in the manila envelope. “But I think we hold you until we are satisfied with answers.”

  “Hold me? For how long?”

  “Until we are satisfied. You will be allowed visitor, of course.”

  “I think I need a lawyer,” I said. It was already a little late for that. “I’d like to see the US Consul, please. I demand to see the American consul.”

  “As I say, I will inform consul Fitch, as per normal protocol.”

  Glasses stood up. “Interview is finished. You can go now. The officers will escort you.”

  “Escort me where?”

  Mole and Chainsmoker lifted me from my chair by my elbows and bum-rushed me out of the police station to the van, their smiles as cheerful as the sun on a summer’s day.

  I’d been in worse jails. 100 Centre Street, in lower Manhattan—affectionately known as The Tombs—was a stinking subterranean shit-hole that I wouldn’t recommend anyone visiting, for any reason, for any length of time. I’d been through ‘the system’ more often than I care to recall. Forty-eight hours underground would usually put me back on the straight and narrow for at least six months. The stale baloney sandwiches, the creeping minutes with little hope of sleep, the stench of sweat and piss, the ever-present threat of violence—were always sufficient to remind me that I was not cut out to be a convict.

  Neraka Prison was different. Whitewashed walls surrounded a wide yard filled with grass and flowering shrubs. There was a vegetable garden, tended by a few wiry inmates. The cell blocks hugging the perimeter were painted baby blue for male and pink for female—a color scheme more suitable for a kindergarten than a criminal detention facility. Swallows flitted to and from their nests in the eaves. If it weren’t for the watchtowers, the razor wire, and the machine guns, I might have been standing in the courtyard of a budget Asian hotel.

  I’ll admit to harboring some less-than-patriotic feelings about my homeland. Yet Americans are raised to believe that no matter how grim things get, you can always seek justice, somehow, eventually. Here, I had serious doubts. I had no idea what the laws were, what my rights were, what my chances were. Three hours ago I had been standing at the bar at Cooney’s, a free man. Now I was leaning wearily on a column in some tropical penitentiary. Everything had happened too fast.

  It was all so terrifyingly mundane: the five minute drive to Neraka with Mole and Chainsmoker before being signed over to the prison officers for induction, my belt and lighter and knife and phone confiscated, my information tallied in a huge ledger, strip searched, anally probed, the whole la-de-da, then issued a plastic bucket and dumped in the yard without a word. And now, for all I knew, I would rot here.

  I kicked myself for talking to the police without a lawyer present. Monty might have been some help, had he not been tripping his brains out on Cooney’s concoction. I’d foolishly assumed that, having nothing to hide, I had nothing to fear. The cops had caught me off-guard. Hungover from my Longa bender, my mind still feverish, I’d waltzed, oblivious, into a seriously scary situation. I should have listened to Cooney and run for it when I’d had the chance. Weak and dizzy, I sank onto the tiles.

  It was visiting hours. The yard echoed with the voices of inmates and relatives. Seated on rented cane mats, the adults chatted and smoked as children ran around them shrieking. Peddlers flogged snacks and cold drinks. It felt more like a bus station than a prison, except for the ever-present guards and their very real guns. I slumped there in a daze, the chaos of the yard swirling around me, until the sun turned the tiles pink, and the guards herded the visitors out.

  Lock-down in Neraka was no holiday. There were seven other prisoners in my cell, all mayat. There were no mattresses, no fan or ventilation. We sweated like pigs, crammed together on rattan mats on the greasy concrete, with a filthy plastic bucket for a toilet. Nobody said anything beyond begrudging grunts of greeting.

  It was a long night. My stomach growled incessantly. The mosquitoes were relentless. Whenever I managed to drift off for a few minutes, either the boozy Belgian would kick me in his sleep, or the detoxing Spaniard would start screaming. Finally the sky finally began to lighten, and at sunrise a guard unlocked our door. My whole body was stiff and sore, but as we filed out in our shorts, I saw that we mayat actually had it easy. The cells for locals were crammed with twenty men or more.

  I followed the others to join the long shower queue. We filled our buckets at the pump and were shoved, six at a time, into a tiled area. We had three minutes to splash water over ourselves. The other inmates had soap, shampoo, toothbrushes. I rinsed myself as best I could. Then it was back to the yard to dry off under an ambivalent sun.

  At seven we lined up again, this time for breakfast. I minded my own business. Never make eye contact: I’d learned this much in the Tombs. A strong offshore breeze continued to hold the rain at bay. Sunlight stabbed intermittently through gaps in the clouds. When my turn came, I was handed a woven palm leaf bowl with half a banana, a clump of sticky rice, and a mound of vegetable curry. I found an empty patch of ground and tucked into the food like a starving dog. I hadn’t eaten since the previous morning.

  “You’ll want to make that last, Sunshine,” said a voice from behind me. “That’s breakfast, lunch and tea.”

  I looked around to find a grizzled mayat in tattered shorts and T-shirt.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Wish I was, mate. Just arrived, yeah?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Always spot a fresh face. What they got you for, anyway?”

  “Murdering my boss.”

  He laughed. “Ah! Living the dream, eh?”

  “I didn’t do a god-damned thing.”

  “Me neither, mate, believe me. But that ain’t neither here nor there. Once they’ve got you, they’ve got you, innit?”

  If not for the piercings and tribal tattoos, he could have been some East End character straight out of Dickens.

  He held out his hand. “Blacky.”

  “Mark.”

  He sat down beside me and began breaking up a hot dog into his rice.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Girlfriend,” he said. “You’ll want to acquire yourself one if you’re staying for a while.”

  “Girlfriend or hot dog?”

  “Both, preferably,” he laughed. “Here,” he said, holding out half. The meat-like substance was luminous pink. “Go on, take it. Keep your strength up. You won’t get any fucking protein in this place.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Welcome to Neraka.”

  “Paradise in the Tropics.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Blacky was nearing the end of a five-year stretch for hash possession. He filled me in on the basics of Neraka life. Apparently, what I’d been doled out that morning—one bucket of water and a single plate of food—was the daily rations. Apart from that, the prison provided nothing.

  “We don’t get fuck all, Sunshine. No drinking water, no beds, no tea. They don’t even have the bleeding wherewithal for proper prison uniforms. Look at me! I look like a fucking castaway. And doctors? You’re dreaming. They ain’t got a bloody aspirin tablet between ‘em. You’ll
need to make some friends on the outside if you don’t want to waste away in this shithole.”

  “I guess toilet paper would be out of the question, then.”

  I was thinking of the bucket in my cell, and how I would eventually need to use it.

  “Ha!” He pointed at my own bucket. “There’s your bloody bog-roll. Splash your ass, Indian style. You might want to save few pints from your bath tomorrow.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “Eh, don’t worry, mate. You’ll get used to it,” he said. “You’ve got a bit of dosh tucked away, I hope.”

  “Money? A little.”

  “You’ll be alright, then,” he said. “Ain’t no problem that can’t be solved in here by greasing the right palms.”

  “Good old baksheesh.”

  Same as outside, all it took in here was some well-placed rupees to bend the rules. Blacky spent about fifty pounds a month on the basics of survival. Anything beyond that merely made life more tolerable. Guards relied on bribes to augment their slim salaries, so extortion rates had been standardized for convenience. Visits were supposed to last fifteen minutes, but could be stretched to two hours for about a dollar. You could even get cold beer, in exchange for a ‘donation’ to the guards. If you wanted something stronger, arak ran six bucks a bottle, hash thirty dollars per gram—double the going rate on the gangs of Kang-Kang.

  Blacky wasn’t much fazed by the irony of sitting in prison smoking the drug that had put him there.

  “A man needs to escape somehow, don’t he?”

  “Why not over the wall?”

  “Every now and then some poor crazy bugger runs amok and tries it.”

  I glanced up at the guards with their big black guns.

  “Nah, they don’t usually shoot you. It looks bad.” He spat on the floor. “But even if you make it, where you gonna go? It’s a bleeding island. Unless you’ve got wings, it’s damned sure the sea pigs will get you. You’d just earn yourself a stretch in the Rat Room, plus time on your sentence.”