Inside I closed the door. Turned the lock. A cubicle: toilet facing the shower stall, a small washbasin with a mirrored cabinet above and a second mirror mounted on the wall above the toilet. This was it. Charlie had described the mirror behind which he said would be the doctored passport. Complete with an entry stamp and immigration card. If it were not there, I would have to stay in Thailand.
About this time at Klong Prem, Building-Ten guards would be wondering at the two taped ladders rising against the wall and in Six, trusties would be staring at the twisted bars of #57 where, inside, Jet would be hiding under Sten’s wing as Calvin paced in a tight circle. Miraj would be prostrate in the chief’s office, in full lava flow.
I looked at my face in the mirror.
‘Charlie, old chum,’ I said to myself. ‘Are you the genuine article?’
Picking out the file tool from the pocketknife I slid it behind the mirror. It halted at a paper something. A brown envelope. Quickly tapped and torn, I removed the British passport. Its original holder had crossed many borders and according to a triangular stamp had entered Thailand three-and-a-half weeks ago. And there was I, smiling from the inside cover. I touched the passport to my head in salute.
I stepped from the bathroom to find the young man still in his underwear, poking at a jar of compacted coffee granules with a spoon.
‘Sorry I can’t stay for breakfast,’ I put the key on the dresser by the door. ‘Give this to Charlie and say hello for me.’
‘You want coffee?’
‘I’d like to but I’ve got to take the bus to Pattaya this morning.’
Before questions could begin I stepped out into a day that was warming rapidly. The next taxi took longer to find and as I should have known, it took me straight back to Klong Prem. The V Rangsit Highway passes in front of the prison on the way to Don Muang Airport.
As we passed, I touched the belt I wore from the dead Frenchman and sank low in my seat. This was the third taxi with unnaturally soft seats. From the ledge of the taxi’s side window, I looked to KP. The prison had not vaporised from the earth. I had merely left it.
At Don Muang my driver finally accepted that, although I’d insisted on getting out at arrivals, I did not want him to wait. I burrowed in to the stairways and then emerged at departures. No special atmosphere. Just a working Monday morning. I could see no bad people waiting.
I took out a receipt from my pocket and walked to the long-term luggage depot. Presumably this pick-up would be uneventful. Oh yes—did someone notice—I still had the receipt for my clothes that Dean Reed had left at the Moh Chit bus terminal. There’d be a warm welcome there for me if I stayed in town. Instead I carried a receipt for parcel C589 in the name Cisco Pike for a bag deposited two months earlier by a Mr Walker. After collecting the in-cabin sized bag, I found it contained two sets of clothes (labels removed), a bag of toiletries and a paperback. No frills travel.
Staring up at the electronic departures board, I searched for a temporary home. A long-haul flight would give me too many hours imagining incredible feats of detection. There were three flights on offer, each with a full compass of onward connections: Manila, FINAL CALL; Hong Kong, leaving at ten o’clock; Singapore, flipping to NOW BOARDING as I watched. Over-the-counter tickets for immediate departure are not cheap so I moved quickly to a bank of ATMs.
Having dispensed most of my cash in #57, I was now dependent on two Visa cards, neither of which matched the name in my passport. The first card—the one that had kept Pornvid relaxed for over a year—was declined. The previously blank-faced ATMs took on ugly personalities but using the second card, the third ATM rewarded me with a gurgling shuffle from its heart. Even so I was lucky the flight to Singapore was an unpromoted Lufthansa hop that had originated in Frankfurt, otherwise I would have boarded penniless.
‘You’ll have to hurry,’ said the clerk. ‘I’ve one window seat left. Is that okay?’
‘A window’s fine.’ I picked up the boarding pass and moved on to the immigration desks.
All of the immigration officers appeared alert and intelligent. The cross-eyed moron I’d hoped for must’ve missed his bus. I forged a passable facsimile of Gerald Griffin’s signature on the departure card and then queued. I put myself in a line behind two girls who were digging into narrow handbags for documents before a full-faced and tall immigration officer. They were giggling as though only they’d just realised what the queue was for. Fullface found this charming and fooled around for an extra minute. As they angled off I stepped forward, shrugging my shoulders down as fits a tired businessman defeated by wily Thais. I let him take the passport from limp fingers.
If Fullface’s mind was still occupied with the vixens, he was not slowed at his terminal. He pawed the keyboard with one large hand and held the passport pinned to his desk with the other. Just a minute—
Did I really expect that the Chinese friends of my Chinese friend would do any more than bang a stamp in this stolen passport? That they’d meet with Thai contacts at the airport and find a quiet moment to enter the name, number and incoming flight details into the computer for a passenger who didn’t exist? I wondered if immigration clerks had a silent alarm button at their desks or if they used a signal. A sound broke this unwholesome reflection. The thunk of an exit stamp onto paper before Fullface returned my passport and nodded farewell.
On board the Airbus I downed a couple of glasses of too-cold water and waited in my seat. It was twenty past ten and we were already late departing. I would later come to know that guards from Klong Prem had driven to Don Muang, arriving just after ten to look for their missing farang. On board my plane, a Captain von Slagian announced, ‘Ah, there will be a slight delay, I’m sorry. We are waiting for one passenger.’ As we waited I entertained myself by staring rigidly at the back of the seat in front of me. Eventually I heard the sound that is an angel’s kiss to every smuggler, the fwump of sealing aircraft doors. The guards of Klong Prem were at the airport but too shy to state their business.
As the ascending jet banked into the clouds, I cast a final look to Bangkok through the port windows. I said nothing to myself, allowing the roar of the turbofans to do the talking.
At Singapore’s Changi Airport the previously reluctant Visa card consented to whatever figures I keyed. I did this before passing through immigration. At the transit-lounge shops I bought sunglasses, a radio and a pair of bathing trunks.
A floppy-haired immigration officer stamped my passport almost immediately before casually flipping to the photo page. He didn’t like something about my photograph. It was grainy. In a frozen moment, he held it before the UV tubelight and I was back in Chinatown. British passports then included three invisible crowns edging the holder’s photograph that only became pinkly visible under ultraviolet light.
The friends of Charlie Lao had been meticulous. After a moment I had the passport and was seeking a taxi outside the terminal.
As customary, two taxis broke the connection to a hotel of choice before I checked-in, making many factual errors when completing the registration card.
Following a brief shower I took a towel and left my room for the rooftop swimming pool. As it was noon on a workday, the small pool was deserted. Less than twelve hours had passed since I’d turned off the light for the last time in #57. There, another country, another name abandoned. In silence, I took three rapid steps to make a low dive into this so transparent pool, spearing underwater from end to end. From the deep end I expelled air before surfacing and lifting myself to the tiled edge in one movement. Still draining water, I stepped to the railing and rested, looking to the Panjang hills. There I remained for some time watching a row of blackthorn shrubs straining inland with the wind before turning and taking to the pool again.
A Random Chronicle of Traces: the balance of the year from some letters
[To Connie Stanford, wife of Chas]
Friday 23rd August 1996, Singapore
Dear Connie
This might have taken a wee
k or so to reach you—a friend in London mailed it for me, as you can see from the envelope. I’m at the beginning of a long journey north. From here to central Asia where I plan to stay with an old pirate friend.
After years of transit travel this is the first time I’ve spent more than one day in this tiny state. And not just because a fellow can get strung up here for littering. Despite being one of the world’s smallest countries, SQ tenders the world’s largest-value currency notes, the S$ 10,000—worth about US$6,000! Making up for small size, I suppose.
After a long, dreamless sleep on my first night in town, I had my first meal among strangers for quite some time. I found the waitress at the hotel as soulless as the city itself.
‘Most girls in Singapore work to have the five Cs,’ she said when serving me a bowl of tiger prawns. ‘Cash, career, credit card, condominium.’ That contrasts Confucian contemplations considered contentment in earlier times, eh?
I shouldn’t have eaten that public food. I paid for it later. Made me ill. After lunch I walked through the wide suburbs surrounding the hotel and didn’t stop. I became a passenger on board my legs, ignoring taxis and buses, counting hills till I stopped at some docklands. Point covered, I launched back toward the city centre in time to send some faxes, rent a postbox and send a message to the Ghost [Michael Sullivan]. I’ll chance a brief call tomorrow.
Connie, I’ve found a little-known note in the basket of world currencies. Called International Floral Units, the exchange is ultimately to flowers. Interflora invented this borderless currency. I sent 1,500 IFUs. I know it’s utterly wet but there you are! However, I won’t call her until it’s safe. Mr Plod will probably be all over Sharon’s phones until he loses interest.
By the time I got down to Orchard Road the cooler evening breeze had drawn people into this bright shopping street. Silver dials and coated lenses sparkled from the electronics shops and the sounds of countless radios created strong machine froth. I see that the slinking kids have adopted the European fashion for T-shirts the colour of bain-marie peas. Smells of burning peanuts still mingle with the cat spray but some things have changed. Chinatown’s been razed and even Raffles is no more than a shell of depleted mystery. Foolishly I ate at a busy chowhouse on the main drag, hoping its brisk supply chain might limit the bacteria. (Funny, I can’t remember being this phobic about food before.) Then walked two miles into exhaustion and back to the hotel.
Not too exhausted though to forget the precaution of taping my passports and money underneath a plastic chair on the balcony.
At breakfast I saw a small piece in The Straits Times. No pictures but it started me thinking about how some pestiferous investigators might get a lead. And if they did, I’d be stuck. Yet there’s still one way to get tickets in names just different enough from a passport. So I went out in search of a particular type of travel agency. The kind of place where they write tickets by hand. A place where the staff aren’t too fussy. I found one within the cramped offices of some huge commercial block.
As I sat in the owner–manager’s cubicle I had a chance to take in the adornments. Behind his paper-strewn desk this blubbery agent leaned in a weight-skewed black-vinyl recliner erupting with patches of pink foam. While one bunch of his ringed fingers gripped the handset of a blistered green phone with big buttons, those of his other hand kneaded the folds of his chins. There’d been several stillborn tries at a beard. He sweated under two layers of stretch wool, maybe to support the fantasy about working air conditioners. On his desk a Scotch-taped model Pan American stratocruiser nosed toward coffee-stained Venetian blinds, and a paper poppy drooped from a dusty Shalimar bottle. Behind his chair the yellowing laminate of a world map had countries with names that are history. Ceylon, New Hebrides, even British Honduras. He was speaking to a client with chipper assurance, although his pauses became instant frowns as his eyes flew from a miniature, sun-browned Turkish flag to his overflowing trays for in, out, stuck, incontestable and irredeemable. The place was perfect.
A day later I went back after our arrangements. He was on the phone again. We didn’t speak much. ‘Your ticket’s there. All confirmed,’ and pointed to the coupon under a puckered aluminium ashtray. ‘You’ve paid, I think?’ And then back to his caller.
The point of all this is that the handwritten ticket provided the means to have a booking made in the two Christian names of my passport. It’s a common error in Asia. If the ticket works you’ll hear from me at my next port. If not—you’ll hear from me much later!
I shan’t dwell on it but I’m lucky to be here. Just before takeoff on my last leg I expected a posse with nets and tridents to jump on board and me with no defense other than a targeted spurt from a single-serve UHT milk portion.
More seriously, I owe a debt to my new friend from the Orient, Charlie. Chas might have mentioned he’s soon to open a restaurant in Sydney. For those of us accustomed to a lifetime of triple-crossers, any promise fulfilled silently and at a distance remains a source of wonder. What is it that the evolutionary behaviourists say about friendship? That fidelity is no more than a trader’s selective altruism, based on the soundness of reciprocal guarantees. Isn’t that it? Or perhaps that wonder of friendship is not to be dissected—best left intact.
There were close moments too on the big night. One, halfway to morning, when all energy seemed spent. Although I wasn’t going to surrender I ask myself now, what it is that drives us on when fear and pain have been numbed by excessive application? A belief that there is another country beyond? Or some vainglorious need to prove a point? No, nothing noble, that’s for sure. In the end there’s only that irresistible lure of opportunity. And maybe, just a little, to say something to all those doomwatchers in KP. Twelve thousand of them and behind them tenfold as many ghosts haunting the corridors. All sitting like children cross-legged in Sunday school receiving false instruction about absolute power. Not one wondering if he’s listening to an absolute lie. In the darkness with my bamboo poles I did so want to call to them and say, ‘You don’t have to stay!’
Well I say that now to clothe the naked stubbornness that I’ve had since my own childhood, my only real motivation. I’ll tell you how it all went down someday when it’s quiet. I suppose if I run through the one hundred things leading to that night, it might seem as though it was easy or just a process with an inevitable result. But holding to it all wasn’t easy and if any one of those one hundred things had gone wrong, I wouldn’t be here to write this.
It’s only the living who get to tell their stories so maybe all those survivors’ stories added together seem like a picture of how things are. I can’t see that as true—the real world is down there with the many who fail, whose histories are cut short or passed over.
My very best to Chas to whom I’ll write when I reach the land no one tribe has conquered.
Love
D
26th August 1996
From: Phillip Keel, Fedpol, Canberra
To: T MacLean, Joint Taskforce Operations, Melbourne
Tom
This is a transcript of a call intercepted here at the bunker. One of your old targets, I’d say. It’s nothing official. Just another ‘signal test’ as we say here. Before you ask where the call originated from, I’ll tell you we can’t tell. International, yes, and the originator shown is the USA. But our friends say it’s a bulk telecoms router. He probably called a discount call line in the US from somewhere and then used the service to re-route the call.
The good news is that there’s an effort to cross-match all departures from BKK that day against lost/stolen passports. That might give us a name. When I say all departures I mean those with AUST/BRIT/CAN or US documentation. The way it is now, you can forget European cross-matches. Not likely though that he’d be on anything too foreign. I’ll let you know if there’s any joy.
Best wishes
Phil
TRANSCRIPT:
MS: Hello. Yes?
DMcM: Go placidly amid the noise and haste.
MS: Ah, it’s you. You scallywag. Right. There was nothing on the phone display, so I hoped—Anyway, you okay?
DMcM: Yeah. Not used to being without my cook. Missing Chang.
MS: What the fluck?
DMcM: I mean, fun’s over. Flag planted, photo taken. Now back to being pursued. Is this toy okay?
MS: (Referring to new mobile phone) Speaking its first words today, the little whippersnapper. Got it from an old lady who only phoned her bookie on Sundays.
DMcM: Sure?
MS: I swear by the eyebrows of Oscar Homolka. It’s safe.
DMcM: Okay. There are some messages for you down at the watery place.
MS: Watery?
DMcM: The print shop.
MS: Oh, right. Got you. So you need anything?
DMcM: That little numbered edition still available? I’m feeling a personality disorder coming on.
MS: Yep. Still intact. You want it post or courier?
DMcM: Let it sit for now. I’ll keep it for some fresh disaster. How tropical are you these days?
MS: Still smoking. They take an interest—from a distance. Don’t collect overtime, as far as I can tell. You need money?
DMcM: Thanks. Not for now. I’ve got a tombkeeper from London to call Western Union. Look, I’d better end this. Usual reasons. Just wanted to hear the ghostly voice.
MS: Okay. You have my pager number.
DMcM: Sure do.
MS: Take care then.
DMcM: (Laughs)
MS: And watch out for exploding cigars.
NB We’re sure the ‘little numbered edition’ refers to a hidden passport.
Friday 30th August 1996, Karachi
Dear Michael
Your package arrived just before I left my last rest-station. Thanks. Good to have music and even better to have the freedom to listen to it. I never could stomach music in the Klong. I get your selection: Arvo P, Danny O’K, Górecki, Robbie R, Hejira—music for travellers who’ll never reach home. Not a random grab was it? Marc Jordan sounds less cynical these days. And is that a Fazzioli piano I can hear? Ack, what would I know? It’s been a long time without air.
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