How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  The taxi stopped in an area where there were no other cars. The street had become a narrow lane between two foul-smelling gutters. Most of the traffic now was on foot and we joined them, Sid leading me down a side lane where high walls kept out the relentless sun. I would have preferred the sun. He pointed to the ground and instructed me to walk quickly but look where I was placing my feet, for one side of the lane was a sewer, and spilling from it, or flowing to it, filth waited to trap me. I hurried to keep up with Sid who walked placing his feet casually on rare dry ground, until I realised he was moving at whatever pace I was and if I slowed down so would he. He led me into an even darker and narrower lane and to a door where a giant stood guard, a man so fierce that he would have made Palmenter’s cowboys look like puppies.

  Inside was a paved courtyard. Around the perimeter were boys, teenagers or perhaps older, seated silently on stone blocks as if they were waiting for something and had been waiting for some time. They eyed me suspiciously, heads down except for furtive glances. I was reminded of the outback lizards that remain in the open but absolutely motionless in the hope you don’t see them. None of the boys spoke. After the crowd and noise, the constant yelling and laughter outside in the street, this shrinking to be invisible was disturbing. I knew why, without being told.

  While Sid talked to two men who sat by the other entrance, I looked at the boys. Many had missing arms or crippled legs. Several were blind. I could choose my own kidney in the way I might choose a live crayfish from a tank at a restaurant. It was abhorrent but even so I found myself assessing each for vigour or signs of disease.

  Sid came to me with one of the men who offered me some tea.

  ‘No, this is not what I want.’

  ‘You prefer coffee?’ Before I could answer he signalled another man who scurried off to collect coffee.

  ‘No, I mean the boys.’

  ‘They are good boys, healthy. This is the finest.’

  ‘Finest?’

  ‘Yes. Other market, I think not so good. Here, all healthy.’ He motioned to one of the closest boys who limped across as if terrified. The man placed his hand across the boy’s forehead and opened an eye wide with his thumb. ‘See.’

  ‘But...’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘Who are they? They are just boys.’

  ‘Oh yes, and very healthy too. Maybe they are too old, are not getting so much at the begging. So...’ Sid shrugged. ‘They only need one kidney.’

  It was true. I should have realised that selling one of your kidneys was commonplace, but the reality was shocking nonetheless. These boys were maimed, had been beggars. I remembered a scene in Slumdog Millionaire where they blinded boys so they can beg.

  ‘I guess when you have only one arm, or are blind, there is not much else you can do but beg.’ I said it sort of to myself, sort of to say something, and sort of to test Sid, to test the horror theory forming in my head.

  ‘Oh, yes, this is surely true, but when they are growing older the begging is not so good.’

  ‘So they were unlucky enough to be born like this?’

  ‘Oh, I think unlucky to be born, but their bosses do this for them. Unlucky for them, but lucky for your father. Come, drink coffee, then we make talk, discuss payment.’

  The coffee was sweet but tasted bitter in my mouth. These teenagers were slaves who had been bought as children and maimed to increase their begging potential. When they got older, when they stopped bringing in money off the streets, this is what happened to them. A kidney. Not only a kidney. Everything. Of course they would tell me it was just one kidney but what was the value of a cripple who had no other body parts to sell? I knew how these people were thinking, because I was one of them. Sure, Palmenter had started everything but now it was me. I ran the business and I knew how these people thought. Boys and girls were sold by their desperate parents into slavery in the thin hope that they might live, and in many cases the money would be used to pay me to take the luckier members of the family to Australia.

  I told Sid I wanted to think about it.

  ‘Oh, no, we must make an offer. We cannot leave without making an offer and then, if it is too little, we leave and everyone is happy. But once you make an offer, you should make another offer a little bit more, because these are the best and much much better than those old ones and for your father it would be best to have the best one, no?’

  ‘How much should I offer?’ I could see I was not going to win any argument with him. I’d go through the charade and later, in the taxi, tell him I wasn’t comfortable with it. It would have been so much easier to go to one of the hospitals and pay the money and fly my dad in and it would happen without my having to do anything other than pay the money. I had plenty of money. I would pay extra to do it like that, to have someone else do the dirty work.

  Sid regarded me with something between amusement and concern. He had met me at the airport because Newman had told him to. Newman had told him what I was after, and I recalled a conversation we had one time on Palmenter Station. It might have been the last time Newman was there. We had the tourism and the import business both running full throttle. The de-stock was in full swing and we were putting on a free weekly barbecue for travellers. Sally was vegetarian and we would have great discussions about it, about the eating of meat and the ethics of killing creatures and in particular I remember Newman saying how it was ethical to eat meat if you were prepared to do the killing yourself. He was having a go at Sally because she said we shouldn’t eat meat full stop. Pretty soon the whole conversation was about other things, about how we do so much in modern life where others have to do the dirty work. We pay the money and don’t have to think about where things come from.

  That was what I wanted now. And what was wrong with that? If you are lucky enough to be born on the right side of the fence. Those barbecues were great, the way all the backpackers and refugees and my staff would sit around the big open pit fire, and between songs on the guitar argue about all things under the sun. There was always someone who had something interesting, a retired judge or farmer or stockbroker on their grey nomad trip around the country, or gap-year students, graduated foreigners out to see the world.

  ‘American dollars. This is best.’

  ‘How many? A thousand?’

  He spluttered. ‘Oh, no, this is too much. Two hundred American dollars I think is plenty. Then you will get for your father a new kidney for two hundred and twenty dollars. This is plenty.’

  A couple of hundred dollars for a life. To sell. And to buy. My father was paying a few hundred each week in tests and scans and dialysis.

  My father died in India. Sid took me to a hospital and I talked to a doctor who understood enough English for me to feel comfortable with him, and then I had the difficult task of persuading Dad it was a good idea. I emailed Simon first, and then Mum, and told them what we could do. Of course they said no but I persisted, and first Simon and then Mum came around, but I don’t think Dad would have agreed if he hadn’t been getting steadily sicker. The waiting list in Australia was long and as an older patient he was classified as low priority. Low priority. That’s what Palmenter used to call the imports. When it finally dawned on my father that he would die of kidney failure long before they offered him a transplant, he agreed to go to India. He and Mum flew into Mumbai on a Tuesday and I met them and introduced them to the doctor. My father was dead by the weekend.

  20

  I have some privileges here because of what they call ‘good behaviour’. I admitted and then pleaded guilty to the murder of Palmenter, I cooperated with the police inquiry into everything else that had been going on at Palmenter Station, and now I do what I’m told by the people in charge. Good behaviour!

  Once a week a tutor comes and we have creative writing classes. That is how I first came to write this down. I am allowed unlimited books so I read a lot. I’m hopeless at art but I enjoy the gardening.

  I keep having flashbacks about things Palmenter said and one of them was about how
you never learnt real things from books. In my first two years here I finished the MBA and I noticed that so many things Spanner and I had done were based on sound business principles. But the thing you don’t learn, the thing Palmenter was not good at, was that none of it matters if you don’t look after people. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if you have no friends. People to visit you.

  Mum comes up to visit as often as she can. We walk around the gardens where I can show her what I am growing. That is where I usually work. She brings books and magazines she thinks I will be interested in and we discuss them. She’s joined a refugee advocacy group and she is the director of the charity. When Dad died I thought Mum might never speak to me again. She cried as we stood together in the office in Mumbai trying to sort out the paperwork. But now I know she never thought it was my fault. At the funeral when she hugged me she said, ‘You gave him a chance.’

  I keep hoping that someday Ingrid might come to see me. She and Sally have been deported for overstaying their visas but sometimes I dream that they could get some sort of special visa to return to Australia or, in some sort of bizarre twist, that they smuggle themselves in. I’m sure Newman could still arrange it. Between charity visits he’s running surfing safaris off the coast of Roti. In carbon fibre boats. I think that’s funny. Joseph and Chad got sent home as well and I guess they are doing all right.

  I also hope that one day Charles or Simms will come to visit me. I know Cookie is dead. They shot him. And Judy and the kid. I heard the shots. But there is a chance that Charles and Simms got away and I hope that they will reappear out of the wilderness where they have been hiding, and visit me. Perhaps they did get away, perhaps they heard the gunshots and realised what was happening. But I know it is unlikely. Simms wasn’t that sharp and Charles was too good a fellow to run away and hide if his mates were in trouble.

  My brother has visited a few times. Working at the mine is now five weeks on and two weeks off but he still loves it. Has his freedom, he says, and then gets to spend two weeks with Michelle. They travel together to lots of places and have visited the hospital in India where Dad died and they were treated as celebrities. It is still tough there, but we continue to send money for medicines and supplies.

  Michelle is terrific. We chat via email. I’ve only seen her once since the trial, that was when they did the trip to India – they flew via Darwin so they could see me. It was nice to see the two of them together but it left me very flat afterwards. They are so happy together. She’s pregnant and the baby is due in November. I won’t see the baby until it’s older unless I can get exchange to Melbourne and they say there is not much chance of that. I should get parole before the twenty is up but, even so, he or she might be a teenager before we meet.

  That first time Michelle met me she must have thought I was hopeless. I broke down on her doorstep and rambled and cried and then left all of a sudden, but when the truth came out and I admitted to the shooting of Palmenter she was completely supportive.

  I have a computer and we have access to a whole range of courses, not online but packaged so we can work through the modules in our own time. I am allowed email, although it is all checked beforehand. Some of the guys have smuggled in phones so they get uncensored mobile internet but I haven’t done that. They say to me, ‘You’re a smuggler, you could have whatever you want,’ and it’s true, prison is easier to get stuff in and out of than the country is, but I’m not interested. They don’t get it, and neither did the lawyers. That was part of why I started to write my whole story down.

  After my rescue and arrest, in the interviews, my lawyers wanted me to say things in a way that painted me in a better light. I was in the room with the lawyers and several police and I’d be explaining something, how some part of it worked or why something happened, and afterwards one of the lawyers would say to me, ‘I just wish you had discussed that with me first.’

  ‘Why, you want me to lie?’

  ‘No. But there are ways of saying things, or perhaps just not saying everything. Leave out parts of it if it is not relevant. You should just wait for them to ask a question and then only answer what they have asked. You keep volunteering information.’

  ‘Because I want them to know everything.’

  ‘They will take what you say out of context.’

  ‘Well, you will have to put it back in context.’

  ‘It is not as simple as that. Once the impression is made, once the inference is there. They intend to make an example of you.’

  ‘What? People smuggling is worse than shooting someone in the head?’

  I wasn’t the easiest of clients. They wanted me to plead not guilty, explain the extenuating circumstances and negotiate a lesser charge. Maybe they were right and I was about to get the book thrown at me, but I didn’t care. I deserved it. I had shot Palmenter in cold blood. I had seen and been told of some pretty nasty things and Palmenter had been doing some of the nastiest, but if I was allowed to take justice into my own hands what then were the people who daily came through our business allowed to do? Surely those who had seen or been part of real violence to themselves or to their families, those who had witnessed far worse, they had far more right than I to exact revenge. But murder and violence, in cold blood or in anger, only ever escalates into a cruel tit-for-tat that leads to civil war. That was exactly what many of these people were trying to escape. There is no excuse. I said this to the lawyers but I did not argue with them, because you know when people argue with you that their case is weak. And, it didn’t matter what Palmenter had done. Because, the truth is, I only found out about the full extent of it after I had shot him.

  The lawyers were good. Simon said they were the best. During the case, they made me out like a saint. For example, when we described how we had de-stocked the station the prosecutor said that suddenly the Aboriginal stockmen were out of work and that we had only done it to keep the station isolated, and it was part of my single-minded and ruthless strategy, a strategy that began long before I shot Palmenter and continued afterwards. True, I had worked out that the cattle were costing us money and I had said so to Palmenter. But the fact was that in any case Palmenter never paid the stockmen, all they got was free drinks and a meal in the canteen and some promise of money, so when the prosecutor brought that up, my lawyers were able to turn it around on them and tell how the tourist business employed the locals and trained them and how Palmenter Wildlife Conservancy became one of the must-see places on the outback tourist circuit, and how it made a profit in its own right, and he made out it was all up to me, my big idea.

  The prosecutor tried to show that I was a cold and calculating bastard who systematically removed anybody who was in my way. He even tried to cast doubt that Newman existed. Newman was some character I had invented to take the blame. If he did exist, the prosecutor said, he was probably another of my victims, his was one of the many bodies the police were still trying to identify. As to the rest of my story, that was completely fanciful and the extensive lies of a criminal mastermind who will say anything to avoid incrimination. That opened the doors for my guy. All that I had talked about in the hours and hours of interviews came out. About Spanner and his fishing camps and the bicycles and Newman and the health clinics and he even had statements from Ingrid and Sally about how the English classes were my idea. He took me from being the ringleader of a ruthless crime syndicate to a clueless patsy alongside Palmenter with the real Mr Bigs unknown and still at large. And then he turned me into the brains behind a tremendous humanitarian operation that was ever so slightly just outside of Australian law. It was remarkable. I even began to like myself. Despite how I was feeling about being a murderer.

  It is hard to say exactly when I took charge. It certainly wasn’t the day I shot Palmenter. I was in charge, I don’t deny it. I was the Mr Big of People Smuggling. But it was built up over time and not to any plan, so in that regard the prosecutor was wrong. But he was right in that by the end I was clearly and systematically running t
he business. When the change happened I can’t say for sure.

  I could say it was the time I decided to de-stock the station and we began offering some genuine tourist experiences because I clearly remember the discussion Spanner and I had, but that was after I drove Lucy’s family to Melbourne and I set them up in the house. I had made sure they were all right and was driving north with Ingrid and Sally and we visited Simon’s camp and I determined to take charge of my life. I would enrol in university as I had always intended because Simon told me Dad was disappointed I had not come back to study as I had promised.

  And there were a whole lot of other times, perhaps not pivotal moments but nonetheless times I can recall being aware of the slow change. Like, later, during the MBA, I was learning about project planning, writing out business plans and I remember at some point I realised that all my life I had been waiting for things to happen to me. I was learning about planning but had never planned my own life. So you might say that was when I took control, but that wasn’t true either, because I recalled a time long before that lying awake all night in my swag, cold under a brilliant diamond sky.

  It was things Zahra said, and the way she was, but more than that, not only these four I was travelling with: I was thinking about refugees and how they take their destinies into their own hands and set off across the planet in search of a better life, and here was I, living what to them must be a glorious life, and what did I want to do? Leave. That was my only plan. Leave, then what? A life on the run, always looking over my shoulder and worried for the time after someone discovered Palmenter’s body and they came looking for me? Palmenter was gone but I would still be allowing someone else to decide what was going to happen in my life.

  For what was the difference between me and them if we all just ran away? Were they really taking charge of destiny by fleeing to a foreign country unsure of what would happen next? Somewhere, someone had to take charge and help build the world that ought to be.