The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  She looked at me. ‘No!’ she said in English, and for the first time I read real emotion and sadness in her face, as though she was now almost pleading with me.

  I took the phone back. ‘That's good enough for me.’ I had a few more questions and with the student's patient help I discovered Mya had no ID or passport, and that while she was keen to go home, her village was ‘far’ from the border. However, he said Mya knew someone she could stay with on the other side of the border before starting the journey north to her village.

  Mya's lack of travel documents meant a legal crossing over the bridge was out of the question, so I thanked the student for his help and called the boatman. It was 11.15 pm and I told him I would come to him at midnight. I wanted to make it sooner, around 11.45 pm, but I was lousy at explaining times in Thai, so I settled for midnight to avoid confusion.

  I gestured with my hand for Mya to stay in the car and went into the convenience store, where I bought some savoury buns, chocolates, water and chips. I had the cashier put them in a brown paper bag, as a white plastic one would stand out if we had to move covertly in the darkness later on.

  We had an uncomfortable wait until our meeting with the boatman. I tried to explain that we were waiting for midnight and I attempted some small talk, but it was difficult and Mya was pretty unresponsive. I couldn't blame her. I had no idea what she had been through and her mind must have been in turmoil as she contemplated the offer of escape, agreed to it, and now found herself waiting in a car with a stranger. Deciding to just shut up, I took out a savoury bun and gave one to her as well. We ate in silence.

  I thought of my own daughter, back home, and how fortunate we are in the west. Truly, to be born in Australia is to be born lucky. Even if you are on unemployment benefits in Australia you are in the top 10 per cent of income earners in the world. Sure, we have our problems, but our system generally works and creates less suffering than the majority of the world's inhabitants endure. When I studied anthropology my lecturers had tried to instil in me the concept of cultural relativism – the idea that no culture was better than another, and that they all had their worth. By the time I started my degree, though, I'd already had enough life experience to ensure that that idea didn't take with me. I have since developed my own version of cultural relativism – my theory is that all cultures are relatively stupid, including my own. Granted, my own country has done pretty well in delivering equality and minimising oppression, but much of the world has a long way to go, especially when it comes to trafficking.

  The night was cool so I gave Mya my jacket and she shrugged her way into it while continuing to eat her bun. I also handed her the paper bag with the remaining snacks. Finally, I reached into my pocket and took out the equivalent of three hundred Australian dollars in Thai baht. A flicker of surprise lit her eyes as she looked at the wad of cash, then placed it in the pocket of the jacket, settling back in her seat.

  I checked my watch for the umpteenth time, and saw it was 11.50 pm. I started the car and headed for the riverside rendezvous. I drove past the gateway to the vacant block and carried on further up the street, parking in the shadows. I rang the boatman, who told me he was sitting in the shed where I'd first seen the crossing guards. We walked to the empty plot and I pointed out the shed to Mya. I peeled off some extra money and pointed to the shed again, indicating this was for the man inside. I didn't want her flashing the bigger wad of cash in front of him.

  I knew this could all go to shit in a moment and I was nervous as hell. I hadn't seen anyone following me and the street seemed to be deserted, except for an ironing shop-cum-restaurant-cum-bike hire shop nearby where, through an open doorway, I could see a woman's face illuminated by the flicker of a TV.

  Without a word, Mya got out of the car and walked towards the shed. As she approached the gate she turned back to look at me, as if unsure where to go.

  The boatman stepped out of the shed. Mya passed him the loose notes and the pair of them walked through the vacant lot. I walked back to the car, started the engine and drove past the vacant lot again and parked about fifty metres past the gate. I got out and walked quickly into the adjoining property. I made my way towards the river's edge between a couple of rusty old corrugated-iron carports. I wanted to make sure the boatman lived up to his end of the deal.

  I got to the high bank above the river and looked down to see the boat just nosing into the Burmese side. The security wall of the casino across the border cast a shadow that kept the water's edge in darkness, but there was just enough light reflected from the river for me to make out Mya's slim figure stepping hesitantly from the boat. Once on dry land, she never looked back as she scrambled up the muddy path, I hoped from now on she would only ever look forward.

  Before I headed back to Chiang Mai, about five days later, I drove past the dingy backstreet brothel in Mae Sai a few times to see if Mya had returned, but there was no sign of her sitting on the bench outside with the other girls. I like to think that she made it home, but I don't know. If I could do things over again, I would not send rescued kids back to their villages on their own, as I did with Mya and Kem and some of the others, but at the time I didn't know any better. Today, The Grey Man sends children to reputable, privately run shelters, or if the police take them from us into protective custody they are sent to government shelters.

  I do fear that if the kids we rescued earlier did make it home they may have been trafficked again by their parents. Whether the parents had simply been duped by traffickers or had sold their offspring in a deliberate cash transaction, there is always a risk the same thing will happen to the child all over again. The parents who sold or handed over their children may still be poor and out of work, or addicted to drugs, and everyone needs to eat. Sad to say, some children are also probably sacrificed to feed their parents' appetite for status, which in south-east Asia can be bought and evidenced in the possession of mobile phones, televisions and jewellery. A few possessions seem like a poor exchange for a child's mind and body, but that's how it goes in some villages.

  SIX

  A Life of its Own

  There was still plenty of work to do, so when I got back to Chiang Mai I went to one of the karaoke bars that double as brothels, and started talking to one of the girls who worked there. We were sitting right outside the place, to the left of the door, at a wooden table. It was night-time and the city was coming to life, with people out looking for food, drink and, of course, sex.

  Since I hadn't been able to find an underage girl in the karaoke bar, I was taking the opportunity to practise my Thai with the bar girl, having a quiet drink and a laugh with her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a Thai guy walking towards us, carrying a white plastic bag. I don't remember exactly why, but I thought there was something odd about him, perhaps his expression or his movements. He seemed to be carrying the bag in an awkward way, as if concerned about the contents.

  Before I had time to process my observations the guy hurled the plastic bag in my direction. I pushed the bar girl away from the table, out of harm's way, and half leaped, half fell off my bench seat. The bag landed where my feet had been and burst into flames with an audible whoosh.

  The girl yelled and people were scattering as the flammable liquid that had been in the bag – I'm not sure if it was kerosene or petrol – started running down the sloping footpath. Flames danced along the ground, heading towards a row of parked motorcycles and scooters. Shit, I thought; while the firebomb hadn't done any real damage so far, if the flames made it to the bikes there was a very good chance they could set off a more serious explosion.

  I darted around the snaking blaze and started dragging the parked bikes out of the way. The bar owners were shouting and people were calling for water or sand or an extinguisher. I looked around and saw the man who had thrown the bag climbing into the driver's seat of a tuk tuk. He started his engine, revved the throttle hard and took off.

  Fortunately the bag had been thrown into a fairly open area and the f
uel inside, perhaps a couple of litres, hadn't caught hold of anything flammable. While I moved the bikes, the two bar owners extinguished the fire. Afterwards I sat down and had a drink with them. It seemed that the guy had thrown the bag directly at me, and I guessed it was possible that someone had found out what I was doing in Thailand and wanted to either harm me or send me a message. I didn't want to voice these concerns to the men I was drinking with, so I asked them what they thought the firebomber's motivation was.

  ‘There sometimes trouble between different bars,’ one of the owners said circumspectly.

  I nodded. I wanted to believe the bar owner, that it wasn't a personal attack on me, but in my mind's eye I saw again the Thai man looking at me just before he threw the bag.

  While I never heard any more about that incident, or confirmed whether I was indeed the target, some months later I talked to an Australian journalist who'd been involved in child rescue work about twenty years ago and who'd had a similarly close call. He had gone undercover to investigate the problem of child prostitution and in the process of writing his story he'd also tried to help get some kids out, working with a few of the local NGOs. At a notorious brothel out in the countryside he and the westerners from the NGO were recognised by one of the working girls. The girl had alerted the brothel owner and the westerners had to do a runner.

  ‘We headed out to our car, jumped in and took off,’ the journo said. ‘This Thai bloke got on a motorcycle and started following us. When I was in the car I remember hearing this ping, ping, ping noise and thinking, “What the fuck is that?” When I looked back I could see the guy had a pistol and was shooting at us!’ The journo joked that during the chase he'd been more worried about being killed by their own Thai driver than the gunman, but the truth was that there was a substantial element of risk in the work we were doing.

  In one sense it would have been ironic if I had been killed in this firebomb attack, because I no longer felt that I was doomed to die in Thailand. Indeed, for the first time in years I felt alive. The firebombing hadn't put me off at all, if indeed it was aimed at me, and I still felt more than happy to do anything and take any risk to continue to rescue kids. What had changed, though, was my motivation. I was no longer just looking for five kids, to meet my promise to Emma, or setting off each night not caring if I lived or died. Rather, I felt that I had finally begun to find my purpose in life. While it had taken me longer than I'd expected to find and save the first girl, I was now becoming more and more aware of the problems of child exploitation and trafficking and I wanted to build on the work I'd started.

  For the first time in years I had a future, and a big part of that future was my daughter. I went on to complete my fifth child rescue within the revised deadline I'd discussed with Anna and I was now looking forward to getting back to Australia and being there for Emma's first day at school. Anna had been sending me pictures of Emma and I'd been calling my daughter once a week and sending her small presents every now and then.

  While I would be sad to leave Thailand I realised my army pay would soon run out and that if I was going to carry on with my rescue work, from a base in Australia, I would need to get a job to cover my expenses. I thought that maybe I could work for six months to a year in Australia, accrue some leave, and then go back to Thailand to carry on the rewarding work I'd begun. In fact, I already had a line on a job. A few weeks earlier I'd heard from my good friend James, with whom I had travelled through the Middle East years earlier. James worked for the Queensland public service and he wrote to tell me that a job had come up. He urged me to apply for it. I sent my application from Thailand, and soon heard back from the recruiters, who asked me to prepare and submit a paper on a topic that they chose and then I would face an exam and an interview over the phone.

  I prepared the paper in between running down leads on kids and paedophiles. Initially the recruiters were going to send me the interview questions by email, but the local internet service went down in Chiang Mai. I tried to get them to fax the questions to me, but the fax broke down. Stuff like this happens all the time in Asia and you just have to be Buddhist about it. Finally I rang the person in charge of recruiting and he said he would read the questions out for me an hour before I had to present myself via a conference call to a panel of five interviewers based in different parts of Queensland. I got to the pay phone centre at the appointed time and the phones broke down! In the end I had fifteen minutes before the assessment to hear the questions, down a poor phone line, think up my answers and present to the panel over the same line. I had scraps of paper and post-it notes strewn all around the little booth I'd commandeered.

  I didn't get that job, but I'd apparently impressed the panel and when someone was promoted I eventually found my way into the department, about six months later.

  It was great to see Emma when I got home, in January 2005. She'd grown in the months I'd been away, but she was still incredibly cute. I wondered how I could ever have contemplated not seeing her again. I caught up with Anna and told her what I'd been up to. She said Emma was looking forward to her first day of school.

  I remember my own first day of school. I didn't want to go and I started crying and wailing and my mother virtually had to push me through the gate. I braced myself for a few tears on both sides as I walked Emma up to the entrance, took her to her classroom and met her teacher. I drew a deep breath. ‘Okay, here we are.’

  ‘Okay, thanks Dad,’ Emma said as if she'd been doing this for years. ‘See ya.’ She hugged and kissed me, turned and strode off to meet her new classmates at her first school. What an anticlimax, I thought. I should have stayed in Thailand!

  If someone had asked me, before I went to Thailand, to sum up my life so far, I would have said: ‘What the fuck was that all about?’

  After returning from my extended trip to Thailand I would have said: ‘What the fuck was that all about? – but at least I saved a few kids.’ Although I'd achieved something, I knew it was just a drop in the ocean and now that I'd found the right path I wanted to continue on it. I knew the scale of the problem and the difficulties, and I knew that there were girls and boys up there in Asia living a life of hell that they wanted to escape. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.’

  As well as the five I'd successfully rescued there had been a couple more girls like Lek, the very first girl I approached, who didn't want to leave their life of prostitution. As much as my successes it was the memories of those failures that drove me on. As I learned more about the reasons why girls stay in prostitution I discovered that we needed to catch the girls early on in their lives in the brothels or, even better, put more resources into the fledgling support projects I'd helped finance in the hill tribe villages, to prevent kids being sold and trafficked in the first place. I knew, too, that a rescued child would have the best chance of remaining out of the brothels if we got her into education and a stable environment, either in a shelter or back with her family. However, all of this would require time and money.

  I'd established a good network of contacts in Thailand and once I was back in Australia I started getting a steady stream of calls and emails from people there wanting to pass on intelligence about underage kids they'd come across or heard about, or the presence of western paedophiles. Even if I'd wanted to escape the problems in Asia, I couldn't. It was now a part of my life.

  Jacques was a former French Foreign Legionnaire in his fifties who had been around the blocks. He emailed me, telling me he'd got wind of a paedophile.

  Bonjour John, he wrote to me, I have good intelligence on a western paedophile operating here. I know where this man drinks and where he is staying. It would be very easy for me to terminate this man. I have friends in the police who will cover for me. What do you think?

  I'd heard this kind of line from other former Special Forces people from a variety of nations whom I'd met in Thailand. Just as western criminals sometimes think they can act w
ith impunity in a place like Thailand, and buy their way out of trouble, so too do some of the so-called good guys. I had a bit of a laugh but wrote back to Jacques with a very emphatic non! I tried to explain to him that I was not a vigilante.

  I'd get strange calls in the middle of the night from cagey, secret squirrel types and wannabes who'd picked up my name and number from somewhere. I started to realise that even if there were good leads coming through, and the people contacting me were good operators, it was virtually impossible for me to keep a handle on things as one man back in Australia.

  The other thing that annoyed me was that I would get calls from people – usually expats – who would phone or email me with information about kids being exploited, or paedophile activity, but they would baulk at calling the Thai police.

  ‘I'm a teacher at a school in Chiang Mai,’ a British guy told me over the phone one night, ‘and I know for a fact that there are Thai teachers here abusing underage kids. Can you do anything about it?’

  ‘I'm in Australia, mate,’ I said. ‘Why don't you just call the local cops?’

  ‘Umm ... I can't,’ the man replied. ‘I'm worried that if I get involved all the Thais would know it came from me. I'd lose my job here and I wouldn't be able to get another one in Thailand.’ That kind of gutless behaviour made me sick. I couldn't believe that this man, whose job it was to care for kids, would rather let abuse go on unchecked than risk his job. So many people in Thailand – locals and expats alike – were shit scared of upsetting the status quo, or losing their job or their visa. This moral cowardice was like an infectious disease.

  Because of my background, most of the guys who were working, or trying to work, on my behalf in Thailand were former military people – mostly with a background in the Special Forces. Some of them also shared the extreme views of Jacques the Legionnaire, that paedophiles deserved to be killed in cold blood. While I've met some people during my time in Asia whom I would be very happy to see dead, there was no way I could be involved in an organisation that sanctioned vigilante killing. Through the loose network of people that I was still, sort of, overseeing from Australia we did manage a couple more successes. A former army guy who was working for me was able to find a girl and get her out of a brothel, but he spoke no Thai and the child spoke very little English, so she became confused and frightened. I received a call in the middle of the night from the guy in question, who put the terrified Thai girl on the phone to talk to me. I was able to calm her down, explain in full what was going on, and ascertain that she was, in fact, happy to be free again.