The following afternoon I ran across Calvin as he was collecting some bread from the bakery outside Building Six. I was clanking back from court in my chains.
‘Calvin, you finished there? Come with me while I get these off.’ I tugged at the string supporting my chains. ‘You know what the bastards have gone and done?’
Calvin dropped the spongy loaves into a canvas sack he carried. ‘What’s that, Dave?’
‘Only gone and finished their case on me.’
Lawyer Montree had that morning been surprised too by the prosecutor announcing that he would not present the remaining eight witnesses on his list. Beyond doubt, five of those eight were mere scarecrows (names of foreign police to impress the judge) but calling time on the case seemed sudden. Lawyers rarely axe shows with guaranteed fees.
‘Why was that?’ Calvin asked as we approached the chain-levering machine at the steps of the administration building.
‘Not sure. Someone must be impatient, asking for a result. They wanted me to give my defence today but Montree howled. I’m back there in five weeks. Supposed to produce my witnesses.’ I crouched to loop my ankle ring over the hooks of the machine. ‘Cal, give that lever a tug will you. I’m not going to wait for a trusty.’
‘Have you got any?’
‘Any what?’
‘Witnesses. To speak for you?’
My ankle ring stretched open and clattered to the ground. ‘No. Well that would be a waste of time. Nope, I can make a speech if I like but that’s about it.’ I positioned my other foot and Calvin attached the hooks. ‘And I’ve got a feeling that as soon as Montree stops talking the judge will smash down with a verdict and sentence before the day is over.’
Calvin dusted his hands of rust from the old machine. ‘Any idea what to expect?’
I stood, holding the now open steel C-ring. ‘I’ve never seen how they weld these things on. I heard they slip a bit of rubber sheet around your foot so’s you don’t get electrocuted.’ I looked up at Calvin. ‘It wouldn’t pay to sweat.’
Walking back to Building Six we again passed the bakery, now closed.
I said, ‘You could have got Jet to stand in line for the bread. He would have sent one of his underlings.’
‘It’s okay, Dave. Gets me out of the place.’ Calvin twisted the bread bag in his hand.
‘Settling in all right?’
‘Yeah. Good, better than Two.’
‘Be a bit careful about scoring in Six,’ I had to say. ‘They catch on quick and will use it against us. Now please understand, it’s nothing to me. Whatever—’
Calvin broke in. ‘It’s under control, Dave. I just had to meet someone here today to settle some old business. Nothing new.’
We banged on the steel doors of Building Six and waited for the gatekeeper.
Calvin rubbed the back of his head. ‘You know, I got a bad batch not long ago in the American hut in Two. Overdosed or poisoned or something. Thought I was going to die.’
The smaller door opened and we stepped inside.
‘My whole life flashed before my eyes,’ Calvin said. ‘And you know what? It didn’t even hold my interest.’
Sten had cast aside painting and now spent most of his time working out with an improvised set of weights made from wooden staves and concrete blocks. He would take breakfast at the coffee shop, call at the office for lunch and leave soon after eating.
‘The carpenter wants to make you a desk,’ I offered that week. ‘It’d be rickety crap but maybe not a bad idea if one of us could be around mornings.’ No response so I added, ‘I’m normally over in my old place mornings. Better reception for the World Service for some reason. Less metal, maybe.’
‘Less metal? That’s your theory is it?’ Sten sat finishing his macaroni, holding his plate in one hand.
So I thought I’d best get to it. ‘You missed a good story with the Israelis this morning. You should have come.’ I’d hoped Sten might’ve shown an interest in the breakdown.
‘I can see their story in their legs.’ Sten cleared his plate. ‘Don’t need any more sad stories this week.’
‘Sad but interesting.’ I adopted a tone of academic curiosity. ‘Entirely down to a lack of preparation on their part. And of all people here you’d think they should have known better.’
Agarn and Benny had separately completed their service with the Israeli military before they had met when scamming water trucks in the West Bank. Returning to Haifa they sold drugs on the coast until saving enough for their first Thailand run. Agarn was the stocky, quiet one and Benny talked more. Still in their late twenties both had lives complete with earlier tribulations, quirky adventures, infatuations and unexpected opportunities.
However, not one article in all that softens the folly of the path they chose after their arrest in Chiang Mai with two kilos of heroin. It was their fourth visit to the city. As other soldiers have so endured, they too woke after that first night of captivity, reluctantly rising through a black-water sleep to the seared landscape of statutory war. They resolved to fall back, retreat but not retire.
Chiang Mai is a town of just over 150,000 people: small; provincial. Agarn and Benny were confined in the Central Prison near Ratwith Road in cramped but relaxed conditions, sharing a cell with a mere dozen. A consul had flown north to see them from the office suite that is the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok. Having been contacted by police, he could hardly refuse. The visit was brief. They were told that they were a disgrace to Israel and that they should expect no help. Unluckily for Agarn and Benny this attitude was conveyed to the prison superintendent.
Through a combination of guile, tolerance to discomfort and the confusion among their keepers about their foreign ways, the pair managed to keep almost US$15,000 about their person from the police station to the jail.
When it became clear that they would spend the next twenty-five years in the very same cell, Agarn and Benny made their escape plans. They bought a dozen hacksaw blades and made ropes from blankets. The old Chiang Mai prison is almost in the centre of town. Every night they could hear the sounds of the living through the bars. Benny had said that sleeping was difficult most nights before one in the morning when the traffic noise and fumes settled. One cool night they paid off their cellmates, cut their way out and then bridged the three-metre gap to the wall with strips of bedding tied to rocks. They were free by five in the morning.
Here then arrived the moment. Agarn’s and Benny’s years in the army had allowed them an amount of tough resourcefulness. Yet it had not given them perspective. Chiang Mai is a square of moats and walls yet neither of them accepted that their easy climb from the central prison was only the first of many ramparts of a larger stockade. Seeking rest and comfort too readily, they sought the guesthouse where they’d stayed on an earlier run. It was small, quiet and the owner was a happy scoundrel who had scored gram bottles for Agarn before they’d found a major vendor. The innkeeper welcomed them back and gave them special rack rates for escaped prisoners, promising to keep quiet.
It took the guesthouse owner almost two weeks to leech just over US$10,000 from the Israelis. The prison had posted a THB50,000 reward for information and tuk-tuks puttered like mad ants throughout the city with photocopied enlargements of Agarn and Benny pasted to their fuel tanks.
From the guesthouse the fugitives tried to contact their major vendor but he wouldn’t come to the phone. As well their host never delivered on a promise of special transport, passports and disguises. Still, they were together.
The day after they told the innkeeper that they could pay no more, he reported them to the police. The raid, when it came, was all through one wooden door so Agarn managed to crash through the glass door of the room’s balcony to escape again. He was arrested at eight the following morning in the waiting room of the White Elephant Gate bus depot.
Legs were the things that the prisoners had escaped upon so legs were what the prison guards took from Agarn and Benny when they were brought back to the ja
il. They were chained to a wall in a small cell and worked over with iron bars, then wedged with stones so that their breaks would set askew.
‘They were tough, though,’ I told Sten as he glumly spooned into some melted ice cream, a morning gift from the coffee shop in celebration of its return to the Chinese owners. ‘They managed to move the rocks around a bit so at least they can walk again—as you can see. The story’s funnier the way Benny tells it.’
Sten lobbed the paper cup and plastic spoon to our bin. ‘So how come they’re in Klong Prem?’
‘The Chiang Mai court gave them a quick thirty years but the jail wouldn’t keep them. Sent them down here to save having to look at them. Fourteen hours in a tin box on the road. It’s quite timely, don’t you think?’ I was trying to make the best of this. ‘A good object lesson for us—what not to do.’
‘Well, I’d be fucked if I’d run into some poxy guesthouse.’ Sten leaned against a cupboard and folded his arms. ‘You know they were right next to a wall when they cut out?’ Sten had evidently made his own enquiries.
‘Near enough,’ I agreed.
‘What if they weren’t? I wonder what they’d have done if they’d stood on a sleeping guard when they climbed down.’
‘A couple of ex-army guys.’ I was picturing Sten up against Agarn and Benny for some reason. A close thing. ‘A sleeping guard—they wouldn’t have had much trouble handling that.’
Sten stared at the ground. ‘You ever think what would happen to Jet if we go?’
If?
But I said, ‘I’ll give him money. There’s not much around here you can’t do with that.’ Not that I was so sure, nonetheless it was alarming to hear Sten take this position.
‘You do care about what happens to Jet?’ Sten asked. ‘I mean, f’rinstance, you seem to care about keeping the cat alive.’
‘The cat stays alive because everything in here is trying to kill it. I won’t have that.’
Steady there, Westlake.
I ironed out a frown with the heel of my hand and then looked up, all fair and reasonable. ‘Look, Sten. I know you’re in a different position from me. Just tell me what you want to do.’
Sten wanted to stay. He did not speak of the dangers of night encounters or a five-point ambush when stepping into some departure lounge. No words spoke of a life on the run or some rehabilitation in Sweden. Instead Sten spoke of keeping Jet safe from the worst reprisals of the guards. He assured me, however, that he would help me cut out of the cell. In my turn I assured Sten that he would have enough money, then and later, to live well in Klong Prem.
So. I would be alone. It was out now. Quite a relief.
Jet sat before his easel at the factory wall under the carnival-blue tarpaulin where the light was better. Nearby at a low table our carpenter cheered his cronies with stories of the good old days when jail wasn’t the soft palace it is today. Calvin was slabbed out unconscious on a bench, part of my old office. He was sleeping it off. Or on—for he was still vacuuming tootskies of No.5 White on the sly. I didn’t disturb him. Jet looked at me and then at Calvin, wordlessly asking, ‘Should I set the living mummies on him and have him chased away?’ I shook my head.
‘What are you drawing there, Jet?’ I enquired. ‘Childhood memories?’
Jet was applying some charcoal depth to a large sketch of an automatic pistol. He paused to show me the colour photograph from which he worked. ‘It’s for the new guard. He likes guns.’
A new guard had been sent to Building Six by the superintendent. This guard was enthusiastic and had ideas. He didn’t fit in. Our chief saw him as a spy for an administration unhappy with its percentage of Six’s profits. Our old carpenter, having seen it all, disagreed. Through a series of rainforest shrieks and treetop gestures he argued that the new keen warder was simply a nutter no other building would tolerate.
He was probably right. That night the new guard, Ravvid, ordered his trusty to set up his bed and mosquito net in the smelly dining hall. As I doused our light in #57 at eleven I stood high on our new end table to look down from the window. Ravvid was still fussing with the drapes of his sanctum. His night-time post was directly in line with our cell, no more than a tennis-lob distance, as if served by our puny Miraj.
And I was sure this Ravvid slept lightly.
21
One Saturday about ten days later I began to feel some emptiness in the prison. Not so many around our factory, even though the numbers in Klong Prem were higher than usual. And those who were visible were more impoverished, too. More in search of food and too busy to notice me. Their faces looked expectant and their speech hushed. All a misapprehension by me, I’m certain—except for the impoverished part.
My days had become studded with frequent and brief walks around Building Six divided by long spells at the desk of my old office. This was located in a narrow gully between an inner wall and the shell factory. I can’t recall much of what people said in those weeks, although the sounds were plain enough. The clatter of wide spoons on plates as our extended family ate and murmured, the sudsy splash of water from our laundry (I’d taken to having my clothes washed and pressed each day), the constant slap of sandals and flip-flops along the paths and the dull whine of padded angle grinders as workers polished royal portraits.
At my desk I was lacquering a decorative tag attached to a key chain. The key was to an empty locker but the flat, wooden tag concealed the key Charlie had given me to the apartment in which he’d hidden my passport. Whatever happened, I did not want to have to explain that key if I was caught before the wall.
Nor could I explain away most of my other preparations should they be seen around the office or in our cell. Some things, such as the wooden block assembly (to hold the plank that would jut from our window), I’d made in sliding parts and would later conceal in #57 as a footstool. The old carpenter was much put out by my insistence on working by myself. I had been taking up to an hour after my morning runs modelling furniture and constructing panels. A new wall cabinet was now in place with pigeonholes for each of the cell’s residents.
The underside of that cabinet was false. Inside fifty metres of two-and-a-half-centimetre wide, flat nylon ribbon was held by pins making an arm’s-length skein. Building Six’s army-boot factory kept coils of the green canvas-like webbing to stitch across the heavy boots. Kept in a locked steel cabinet that took THB500 to open. I’d told Jet I planned to make a deckchair, crossweaving the ribbon into fabric, ‘Just as you’ll find on the best cruise ships, Jet.’ I’d shown him a sketch with which he seemed impressed. I was keeping secrets from everyone.
Almost every piece of good mischief that fails does so because of talk. Talk amongst the corps, talk from the best friend to his next-best friend, talk that’s called planning and drill; talk that’s called reassurance. We’re born to talk. We grin at our first words. Chattering and pointing. A single sighting of that rope in the wrong place would mean the end. Not just the end of the day and start again. The end. I wouldn’t talk in my sleep. I trusted Sten with my life but no talking meant just that.
Even now, years later, my temples throb a vestigial warning as I talk with this pen. There’s more, but I’m not talking until the night. I’m sure I haven’t even told you. Who knows what could happen before then?
A few metres behind my desk rose four metres of the inner wall for me an unintentional and enormous artwork, a mural rendered by nature’s casual hand. Sunlight had turned a twenty-year-old paint job to orange branflakes through which slanting rains had nourished green drools of mould, producing a gallery of long swords petrified in stone. At my side cooled an untouched bowl of ant soup, the steam from this dark broth commingling with a nearly invisible cloud of shell dust from the factory.
Chang, our first and best cook in the Cure, had once fried some ants for us. Swiss Eddie had been the only one brave enough to crunch into the bitter exoskeletons. Chang was sixty-three then and only now in Bangkwang had his sentence been reduced to ninety-nine years. Assu
ming he gets time off for good behaviour Chang would only have to cling on to life until his 140th birthday. Could happen. There’re those Russian peasants gumming blini on their sesquicentenaries. Happened in the olden days, too. Bible tells me so. Old Chang could make it home on a 797 to Taipei; just about tottering across the tarmac to meet his great-great grandchildren. Only to have his brittle bones and paper skin blown to dust by a taxiing Lear jet.
These days Eddie used his time industriously managing his intoxicants, I’d heard. However, the cost prevented him from eating at Chang’s table. Unquestionably a price too high, for Chang was still the best.
I’d had a report of English Martyn, too. Quite mad, they’d said: Martyn sitting blindfolded at his table wearing boxing gloves. Smashing half-cooked peas (chick and garden) with his insensible fists, wailing, ‘At last, a free lunch!’
I’m sure this madness-in-chains hypothesis is oversold. A week ago I’d passed the crazy Czech, Karel Stendak, as he was being escorted to his new accommodation in Building Two. The Czech government had allowed him to be a citizen again after establishing his Moravian birth. He’d paused at the gate and hefted his bedroll on one shoulder as he turned to me.
‘David, I can fool some of myself some of the time but I can’t fool all of myself all of the time.’
Perhaps I’d been enlisting the wrong people.
Dean Reed had returned to Bangkok and was helping a German businessman retrieve some assets tangled up in the Thai courts. Dean was having trouble keeping up appearances. He’d sold those bits of glitter that remained from the US$48,000 he’d finagled out of Myca. Probably now regretted stashing my getaway clothes at the luggage depot rather than selling those, too.
Did I tell you that Sharon had visited just after Christmas? She’d spun down into the Klong Prem walled garden. Between shows, for her new band was doing well. There were only a few tables of foreigners at that time of year so we were undisturbed. Sharon sat and sang ‘Whatever Became of Me’ and looked tired.
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