The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  ‘Why don't people cross downstream, away from the border crossing?’ I asked.

  ‘They do,’ my guide answered.

  I checked my watch. There was only an hour until the bridge closed for the day and I still hadn't found what I was looking for.

  ‘Can you show me,’ I said, hoping I sounded casual, ‘where people cross out of sight of the border guards?’

  The guide stared at me for a couple of seconds, then simply shrugged and nodded his head. We walked back up the hill through the markets and crossed the road leading to the bridge. Carrying on a little further, we came to a casino and turned back towards the river. A well-worn track flanked with vegetation led down to the water. A small boat was moored on the Thai side, its apparent skipper snoozing on a straw mat laid out on the river bank. The boat looked like it could take about five people plus the skipper and I guessed the boatman was lazing about in between trips. Beyond the boat was a cluster of bamboo huts and, behind them, a four-storey budget hotel.

  ‘Why do people cross here? Isn't it risky?’ I asked.

  ‘It cheaper than the bridge, so people willing to take risk,’ he said.

  I looked across at the boatman; he didn't look as though he was worried about anything. I was sure the Burmese army must know about this crossing, which didn't seem covert at all. I guessed that stopping this small boat from transporting illegal immigrants would have little effect, but I figured the lack of action by the border authorities went a bit deeper. Some cop, soldier or official was probably taking kickbacks from the boatman to look the other way.

  I found out later that there were more crossing points a kilometre or so upstream and downstream of the bridge, where the water was only ankle deep and maybe 25 metres across.

  I'd even heard of a ‘safe’ illegal crossing controlled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) south of the bridge, which charged a fee of 400 baht (about A$16) each way, but I didn't like the idea of coming into contact with soldiers from a Burmese private army. The various ethnic groups in the region supported a complicated array of armed forces. Some fought the Burmese army, some fought for the Burmese army, and others fought each other! I couldn't even begin to unravel the complexities of the politics in this part of Asia. There had been attempts to stop illegal crossings in previous years when fighting broke out between the Burmese military and the Shan State Army. The Burmese government instigated a ‘wet pants’ policy, where anyone caught with wet clothing below the waist risked being sentenced to six months in gaol, and any person found near the river, even if not wet, risked a three-month sentence.

  What I didn't tell my guide was that I'd found what I was looking for: the boat was the answer. The bridge crossing closed at 6 pm, and I planned to look for underage girls that night on the Thai side, and if they were Burmese (which was the most likely scenario in Mae Sai), get them back across the border under the cover of darkness after the bridge closed. I needed to get the girl, if I found one, out quickly because staying overnight in a hotel with her was far too dangerous for me.

  I had considered finding a crossing point further downstream, but this might present additional dangers, such as the girl getting lost in the Burmese jungle, or running into a Burmese Army patrol or one of the armed rebel groups and being raped or killed. We headed back to the bridge; I paid my guide for his time and crossed back into Thailand, with half an hour to go before closing time. Once off the bridge I turned right and walked down the road about five hundred metres until I spotted the hotel and huts that I'd seen from the Burmese side of the river. I picked my way between huts and around fences until I found an empty block of land that gave access to a river. Two men sat smoking inside a small shed on the edge of the vacant patch.

  I started walking through a gate on to the empty property and the men came out and intercepted me. ‘Mai dai, mai dai! Cannot, cannot!’

  Reaching into my pants pocket, I pulled out some notes. I handed each of them 100 baht, which seemed to placate them, and they waved me through. The boatman was still lying on his straw mat. I reckoned that if you'd jumped in the boat and given it a good push it would have made the other side without even having to dip an oar in the water.

  The boatman opened his eyes and looked up. I greeted him. ‘What time do you finish taking people across?’ I asked him in Thai.

  ‘Eight pm,’ he said.

  ‘Will you make special trip for me, later tonight? I give you 100 baht now, 500 later.’ I said nothing about the possibility that I might bring an underage sex worker to him.

  He agreed to my offer and gave me his mobile phone number.

  I went back to my hotel and had a shower, grabbed something to eat and fell asleep with the air conditioner whirring quietly. I slept deeply for four hours; I hadn't realised how tired I was. It was 10.30 pm when I woke, and time for me to get to work. I drove the hire car back to the bridge and turned left then right, following a road that passed under the bridge. This took me to an area along the river where I knew I'd be most likely to find a girl. The streets were pretty empty now that the market had finished for the day, and it felt kind of surreal driving along the nearly deserted streets. The occasional bar or karaoke would stand out of the dark like an oasis of garish colour, light and noise in an otherwise bleak landscape.

  After sussing out my likely targets, I turned away from the river and drove about three hundred metres until I found a quiet street where I could park. I got out and walked back to the riverfront. Several women called out to me as I passed the karaokes, but they all looked well over the age of consent so I kept going. Eventually I stopped at a bar that I knew doubled as a brothel, and had a drink.

  I got chatting to the mamasan and ordered some food. It was pretty good. A girl came and sat next to me and rubbed my thigh under the table as she tried out her limited English on me. I bought her a drink and her friend came and joined us. The new girl's English was better and I continued to buy them drinks as we chatted.

  Both of the young women were Burmese. Although I casually tried to broach the subject of the availability of younger girls, they predictably weren't interested in pointing me elsewhere for business. I downed my drink and decided there wasn't much for me in the riverfront bar.

  Walking away from the water, it seemed I was the only person out that night. However, as I approached the main street of Mae Sai I stumbled across a seedy-looking bar. Absent were the flashing lights and the upbeat music; instead a few girls sat quietly on a bench next to a darkened doorway. There were three plastic tables outside the door with chairs for customers. The bar had an air of impermanence, almost as though the girls and the furniture had been left out on the street as part of some closing down sale. Three men sat at one table, drinking and talking among themselves, and at the other table sat a Thai policeman in full tight-fitting tailored uniform, a glass and bottle of Mekong whisky in front of him.

  I had seen cops in brothels before. It wasn't that unusual, but it made the situation a bit messy if I had the opportunity of carrying out a rescue. In some cases cops in bars were just looking for a drink, but others came for the girls, whose services I assumed were part of a kickback by the owner for protection.

  I assessed the situation and thought that I would see if I could get any information out of the drinking policeman. I sat down at his table. ‘Can I buy you drink?’ I asked him.

  He was already half drunk and that made his slurred Thai very difficult to understand. He waved off my offer and called for a girl to bring us another glass. When the waitress set it down, he slopped a shot of Mekong into it and pushed it across the cigarette-scarred table to me.

  ‘Cheers.’ I raised the glass to my mouth and reluctantly threw it back. Mekong is truly terrible stuff and it burned all the way down. The cop refilled the glass. It was one in the morning now and I soon realised I'd get little sense out of him. I was just about to say my goodbyes when a girl emerged from the darkness of the bar and sat down on the bench with the others.

  She had the
dead eyes – either bored or jaded or both – of the experienced working girl, but she couldn't have been more than thirteen. Despite the lifelessness of her stare, she was still physically pretty. She should have been at home in bed, getting her rest before a day at school, instead of sitting with a bunch of other sex workers in the small hours of the morning.

  I couldn't leave now. I chatted with the drunken cop as much as possible, but missed most of what he was saying. I would laugh when he laughed and clap him on the back to maintain a sense of camaraderie, but I kept my eyes on the young girl. Another glass of Mekong might have killed me, so I beckoned to the girl I suspected of being underage and asked if she could organise me a soft drink.

  Watching her walk inside, I saw they kept the drinks in a large icebox to the left of the door, rather than a refrigerator, which added to my impression that this was a shoestring, fly-by-night place that could disappear easily if it had to. When the girl brought the soft drink, I asked her name.

  ‘Mya.’ Unsurprisingly, given the poverty across the border, Mya was Burmese and the only words of Thai or English she spoke were her price: 600 baht an hour, or about A$24.

  I made a decision and called the mamasan over. ‘I want to take this girl to my hotel – tomorrow night. Okay?’ I asked this question to make sure there was no problem with her leaving the premises. Sometimes young girls, such as Kem, the earlier rescue, were kept as prisoners in their rooms or in the confines of a brothel.

  ‘Yes, okay,’ the mamasan said, to my surprise. ‘But now 900 baht.’ I agreed to the increased price, relieved that I could so easily get the girl away from the place. It was too late to do anything that night, though, so I texted the boatman and told him I wouldn't need his services this evening. I stood up and said goodnight to my new friend, the policeman, but he was hammered by now and just waved me away. I'd been nursing my Mekong while he'd kept downing glass after glass, and he looked like he was about to pass out.

  I went back to my car, drove to the hotel and climbed the steps to my fourth-floor room. As I passed the room next door I heard a faint thump, thump, thump, and adults' and children's voices. It sounded like a bored kid bouncing a ball against a wall with the consent of over-indulgent parents. I felt wrecked. Climbing into bed, I could hear the thumping even louder through the adjoining wall. I was in no mood for it, having just spent a few hours in scumbag heaven, drinking rotgut whisky. I picked up the bedside phone and rang the room number next door. They answered. ‘Stop it,’ I yelled into the handset, then hung up. The noise stopped. I smiled and went to sleep.

  I woke at ten and went down the street for breakfast, feeling a bit worse for wear. I stopped at a local café and had a Thai omelette and a latte. The Thais have good, home-grown coffee.

  A month earlier a friend and I had gone out to a Vietnamese restaurant in Chiang Mai with a group of students. One was from Nepal, one from Laos and another was from an agricultural college in Burma. My friend explained to them over dinner what I was doing in Thailand, and they all offered help if I needed it and gave me their contact details. Now, over breakfast, I searched for the Burmese student's number in my mobile phone and called him, asking if he was prepared to deliver on the promise he'd made over dinner. He said he was. Next I called the boatman and told him that I would need him tonight or maybe tomorrow night, and I would pay him an extra 200 baht to keep him on standby. He agreed and I hung up.

  I went to a local internet café to email Emma. While I was there I got talking to an American guy. The conversation drifted to women, as it often did when I was talking to expats.

  ‘Man, it's hard to guess the age of the bar girls here,’ I said to him casually. ‘They all look so young . . .’

  The American nodded his head, and told me I'd be able to find plenty of sixteen-year-olds in Mae Sai, but added that there were places in Burma where one could get thirteen-year-olds. He must have figured I was a fellow traveller with a liking for young girls, as he didn't hold back. We were the only ones in the internet café at the time and we weren't talking in hushed tones. It was bizarre – like we were discussing the best place to buy local handicrafts. He offered to show me around the best places in Burma for young girls and I told him I might see him again, but added I had no intention of going into Burma for girls as the place was not my preferred country for gaol time.

  I had several hours to fill before meeting Mya that night, so I called a guy I'd met previously who was a gem dealer and who had seemed like a really nice guy. He had mentioned that he'd donated a water purifier to a local hill tribe school and offered to take me there. We met at a café and went in my car to the village, which was in the rugged country south-west of Mae Sai.

  The school we visited was one of the King of Thailand's local benevolent projects and it reaffirmed to me what a great job the monarch was doing. On the day we arrived all the kids were getting free haircuts, donated by a local barber. There were certainly some good Thai people out there. I had become more and more cynical the longer I stayed in Thailand, confronted as I was by the depravity of paedophiles and traffickers, but every now and then I'd find myself pleasantly surprised by human generosity.

  We met with the kids, talked to the teachers and spent an enjoyable hour at the school before heading back to Mae Sai. I spent the afternoon walking around the markets to kill some more time and was surprised at the quality of the replica weapons for sale. They looked like the real thing, some with metal parts and intricate attention to detail. There was a veritable armoury of weapons available, from pistols to M16 and AK-47 assault rifles. Some even fired their BB pellets on automatic. I later discovered from a police friend that the replicas were illegal but the police just overlooked the law, in the same way some turned a blind eye to child prostitution and trafficking.

  I ate a quick dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town then went back to the hotel. I was feeling keyed up, but I needed to ensure I was well rested, so I put my phone on charge and lay down on the bed, falling asleep without much difficulty. I woke at 10 pm, and drove straight to the brothel, parking about 200 metres from it. Sitting in the car, I rang my Burmese student acquaintance in Chiang Mai to check he was awake and on call. He confirmed that he was good to go.

  Tonight there were only two male customers seated at one of the cheap plastic tables outside the dingy bar and, thankfully, Mya was again sitting on the bench near the door. Not wasting time with pleasantries, I called the mamasan over and paid her the 900 baht she'd asked for. She spoke to Mya in what I assumed was Burmese and the girl nodded. Wanting to show I meant business, I put a hand on Mya's shoulder and steered her down the street towards my car. Mya didn't flinch. She simply walked in the direction I pointed, like she was on autopilot.

  As I've mentioned, the girls I rescued rarely showed any emotion. Around the world, women are oppressed to varying degrees. In Thailand their acceptance of their fate and low status usually begins at an early age with the cultural programming that children have a duty to support their parents, whatever it takes. In the absence of social security and pensions, some would argue that this is necessary for the parents' survival. However, the traditional way of life also makes it easy for traffickers, in much the same way that it does in parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East where trafficking is also prevalent. I often found that, at best, women in Thailand were treated as second-class citizens; at worst they were viewed as a necessary filth. As one Thai proverb says, ‘to have a daughter is like having a toilet in your front yard’. Theravada Buddhism holds sway in Thailand and Burma; in that belief system, being born female or being forced into slavery are viewed as obvious evidence of past misdeeds. Girls are taught that they must accept and endure their fate in order to accrue positive karma with the hope of a happier incarnation in the future. Since only monks can attain Nirvana (enlightenment), the best a woman can do in this life is to build up enough good karma to be reborn as a man. That way they, too, can become monks and climb the ladder towards liberation fr
om all suffering. People traffickers in Asia must give thanks to Buddhism daily, although I doubt it was ever the Buddha's intent to oppress women. I could never figure out whether hill-tribe religions contributed to the problem or not.

  So whether it was through some indoctrinated duty to her parents, or as a means of building up good karma, or both, Mya came willingly with me back to the car. We got in and I drove up the road and turned into the main street, pulling over near a convenience store. Mya didn't bat an eyelid. I took out my phone and called the Burmese student, then handed the phone to her.

  Mya took it and listened, then seemed to visibly brighten at the sound of someone speaking the language of her homeland. A look of bewilderment, perhaps disbelief, crossed her face. Every now and then she said something to the student, no doubt asking him questions and probably trying to confirm that he was genuine. Occasionally her eyes darted to me.

  I settled into the car seat and let them talk. After about fifteen minutes she looked at me and handed back the phone.

  ‘She will go, now,’ the Burmese student said to me.

  That surprised me. I had expected that I would have to see Mya a few times to build up her trust and to try to explain what I was offering her. Even if she did agree to escape the brothel I thought she would want money, or ask to go back to her room for her possessions, but that was not the case. As I would learn, no two rescues were ever the same. It reminded me of a Thai slogan I'd seen on plenty of T-shirts: ‘Same same but different’. I asked the student to tell me Mya's story, but he said she had not wanted to divulge too much about herself. He did say, however, that she wanted to go home.

  Still, I wanted to make doubly sure that Mya was ready, willing and able to go home. ‘Ask her if she wants to stay as a sawpennee,’ I said; sawpennee is Thai for sex worker. I handed Mya the phone again and the student relayed the question.