Escape (10 page)

‘No, you know,’ Johnny persisted. ‘Lie show. Girls.’

Ah,
live show.

‘Um, not for me.’

‘I get you nice girl?’ Johnny did his best to demonstrate nice.

‘No, not what I’d like.’ I was being coy.

‘You want boy? I get you boy!’

‘No. What do you take me for?’

Some puzzlement then in Johnny, stretching his imagination to grapple with whatever exotic perversion this
farang
might want. Then, eureka.

‘You want Thai stick?’

And so we were in business.

Johnny was a fussy dresser for a man so plug-ugly. Shiny, electric-blue shirts and inflated black hair that might have come as one plastic shell from a novelty shop. As we would drive away to score there would always be a few minutes spent refining the Johnny-look in the mirrors of his borrowed Toyota.

On arrival Johnny would leave me in the car while he disappeared into one of the many rusted, peeling and dimly lit apartment blocks where he claimed his contacts lived. Leaving me in a littered alley was only to keep me from seeing the large massage parlour where Johnny would do his business.

One afternoon Johnny had to call at his digs to respray his hair and I stuck with him. An acre or two of skewed, muddy planks holding up ill-fitting corrugated roofing. Inside rooms had been partitioned with three-ply veneer and only a resident could tell one family from another.

While waiting for Johnny I spent a few minutes with a young man who lived in a room and a half with his wife and baby. He appeared more Hispanic than Thai and although we exchanged only a few words, he offered a subdued look of sympathy at my having to deal with Johnny. The next day I returned to this rickety maze behind the old Metro Hotel. I found Myca at home and we sat on the floor to talk.

Myca was not yet thirty but spoke six languages as though he’d grown up in a yellow taxi plying through five continents. In some ways he had: only three snapshot memories of infancy in Waziristan before teenage life in Bangkok. Then to South America working on coastal traders until chance took him to Greece and then a Mediterranean dockland with the damp-carpet rooms of a dozen boarding houses. Myca’s miniscule savings quickly lost on return to Thailand a decade later. A chauffeur service gone bust and, by then, the only evidence his cherished 1969 powder-blue Buick set fast on the forecourt of the one-pump petrol station next to the Metro Hotel.

I returned to Thailand three weeks later, entrusting Myca with most of my life’s stealings (I was nineteen) as he bussed north to the Golden Triangle. Not wishing to make any more new friends, I retired to a modest hotel in Silom Road to wait. After a long eleven days looking at wet skies Myca returned, pleased but still modest. In Western cities the heroin I’d known well from small paper folds in cafés or in sandwich bags in car parks, was ordinary stuff. A starchy mix of cream flecks and sugary if pressed. Myca laid upon my hotel-room quilt a sofa-cushion sized clear bag of the purest white crystals, rolling under their laboratory’s brandmark like Styrofoam pellets.

Later in another country, as I exchanged the pouch for a suitcase full of money, I felt a fool’s sadness, as though selling a fair child into slavery. I didn’t want to see such purity leave my hands.

By the early 1980s Myca had bought a fine new house, become a landowner and saw his children with the fumblings of class distinctions. He had no other customers, however sensible that might have been. With time out we travelled to his ancestral province near the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. Super-8mm film recorded the homecoming with Myca introducing himself to tearful village ancients. The tribe soon collected a roomful of cloth-bound hashish for Myca and me to scratch our heads over.

Contrasting fortunes and different skies had since kept Myca and me apart for eleven years. We had managed only a brief meeting during the heady three days before my arrest. No warmth had been lost over the years and we remained old-fashioned friends. If nothing else, Dean Reed could describe my circumstances accurately. Until some clear vision explained my arrest I would not send Dean north to those with real influence and power.

Although I’d paid my way out of trouble in the past, I was too superstitious to await one plan’s failure before launching the next. Besides, bribery is more a hope than a plan. One of these early schemes required outside help. So who in KP could best provide secure communication?

I found Charlie Lao at the tailor shop being fitted for a new uniform as a blue-shirt trusty. Top-drawer trusties usually paid several thousand baht for their jobs as they would recoup this fee within a month. Some guards bestowed trustyhood to ruthless blackmailers for the regular cut they’d receive. Others appointed loathsome grovellers who met their every comfort. A fine example of this grovelling was provided that week when I had been convincing the accommodation guard Pornvid that I needed to return each day after breakfast to my room to take a shower after exercise. It was forbidden for all except key boys to enter the cell blocks during the day.

‘Why don’t you shower at the tank like everyone else?’ asked Pornvid without moving from his recliner.

‘I’m shy,’ I suggested, giving Pornvid an envelope.

The guard understood and throughout the negotiation, Pornvid’s trusty was servicing his boss with a deep-fingered leg massage, given in utter silence. When I looked down at this toady he returned with the most theatrical expression of rapture-in-servitude, as though the pleasure were all his. Charlie was different. He bought his rank outright and attached himself to no guard.

Charlie’s new uniform had all the trimmings: the braided lanyard, an engraved nametag, extra flaps and sewn creases, even the aviator’s wings and a parachute-regiment badge. For all that Charlie was not to become an extortionist or sycophant.

‘I’m going to work on the visit area.’ Charlie dropped a banana into the hip holster where other trusties kept a baton. ‘This will be good for you. I can help you. Anytime you get a good visit.’

As we left the tailor shop I explained to Charlie that I needed to make a secret phone call. He then took me to the secret phone booth, a stack of rice bags behind a curtain in the coffee shop.

I dialled a pager number in Adelaide. The pager was one of many kept by Harvey Oldham and would have been silent for months. Harvey did not keep many friends so we could each have unique numbers.

Harvey Oldham had been a professional bank robber since quitting his job as a clerk in his twenties. He had been behind the counter of the Commonwealth Bank one afternoon when three men entered the bank with guns. They’d left five long minutes later without the money from the time-locked safe and had made a mess of the manager. Harvey thought he could do a better job of it.

Fourteen stick-ups later (one conviction had set Harvey back a few years) and he vowed never again to work with anyone other than a driver. He had since been successful and was living under a carefully constructed identity that included membership of a respected gun club. Such was his fine reputation that the renamed Harvey had been granted a license for a machine gun so he could participate more fully in the club’s sporting events.

After fifteen minutes among the rice sacks the mobile phone I’d been given vibrated. Harvey must have found a phone booth. He spoke as soon as I opened the line.

‘I was wondering when you’d call.’ Harvey’s interest in small talk was limited and even that was greater than his interest in flamboyant living or intoxicants. Even food Harvey regarded as mere fuel. It is rare to find someone who enjoys his work for the simple pleasure of a bad deed well done rather than for the celebrity life.

After giving an outline of my position I asked Harvey to fly to Thailand and make an appearance in the courts of justice.

‘I’ll have more detail after another court date or two,’ I said. ‘In a month there’ll be a lemon letter for you at your postbox.’ We had been using ultraviolet ink for many years now to conceal messages under plain text letters but the old lemon name had stuck.

‘How’s the traffic outside those courts?’ Harvey often worried about the getaway.

‘Shitful. But if all goes well, it won’t be an issue.’

‘If all goes well—’ Harvey paused. ‘I’ll do a bit of research. Let you know.’

Ten days later the steel bus taking me to court was packed. I could barely see daylight as each lurching stop jerked my head from someone’s pimply ear to another’s rancid armpit. The bus stopped at the old city prison to collect more prisoners due for hearings.

A guard shouted, ‘Make room. Get back. Plenty of space down the back.’ Those at the rear whose faces were pressed into waffles by the mesh might have argued, if they’d been able to speak. With a little nuzzling from the guard’s machine gun, half a dozen more prisoners clattered their chains up the steel steps. One of them, a paleface, tripped but merely fell into the press of bodies.

Over the next hours of fuming traffic he introduced himself as Roddy Keyes, an Englishman who was awaiting trial in an airport case concerning just less than a hundred grams of heroin. He had a case partner. Nothing unlawful had been found on Roddy but the young woman had been undone during an X-ray of her lower body. Cassie was arrested; Roddy and his girlfriend were allowed to board their plane. Cassie held out for a solid five minutes before implicating Rod, who had barely buckled his seat belt before being hauled from the Tokyo-bound flight.

‘So is Cassie going to stick to her story?’ I asked.

‘It’s not in her interests to say a word in court.’ Roddy was trying to sound confident. ‘The only thing is that she’s had a good moan up and that’s been all over the London papers. The BBC films our every court date. All that can make a person want to stand up and sing.’

‘I hear you’ve got some well-known lawyers.’ I wanted to know if using the high rollers would make any difference. ‘How are they calling it?’

‘Fifty-fifty. Which is what all lawyers say. I suppose it’s all down to how the Thais see the publicity.’

Roddy told me more of the way Thailand’s big lawyers operate and that when it came to foreigners, few of their usual tricks work.

A year later Roddy would be acquitted. Cassie received thirty years but was home in England within two years using the prisoner-transfer scheme. In many ways she found life in British prisons harder, although she did well with a coquettish book of her adventures. Roddy gave up smuggling after that, although I don’t think he felt a lot better for it. He had been lucky the cameras had been there and that there was someone to take the fall.

The evidence presented against me that day was thin. Literally. It was a newspaper cutting taken from a Melbourne tabloid the day after my arrest in Thailand.

‘It seems your embassy has decided to assist in your case,’ my lawyer, Montree, said with sarcasm.

The story quoted two local narcotics policemen giving their idea of the inside story. ‘Caught with just a sample,’ said one. ‘Would have been one of the biggest dealers in this part of the country by now,’ pronounced another. To give it authority, a translator from a university read the story into the court record.

Surely a second-hand bite of hearsay from a distant scandal sheet could not be held against me. ‘Well that was a waste of time,’ I said to Montree, dusting my hands.

My lawyer looked down at his papers, and held his hands over his head, not wanting to say more.

By the time I climbed into the van to return to Klong Prem I had the best part of a plan in mind. At my next court appearance I would be escorted as usual to the eighth-floor court by one or two guards. I would be in leg irons but without handcuffs. The previous afternoon Harvey, by then in Thailand, would have gone to the court wearing one of his banking outfits: suit, wig, briefcase and an identity tag claiming something diplomatic. From the seventh floor—at that time still vacant—he would’ve let himself into the emergency stairwell that runs adjacent to the small lift that moves prisoners to and from courtrooms.

Harvey’s large briefcase would hold quite a lot. A mobile phone, a gun, two pairs of handcuffs, large cable ties and duct tape; a set of foldable bolt cutters with extendable handles, another wig and a suit. The suit, my size, and the wig, blond, to contrast with my dark hair. Being thoughtful Harvey would include some sandwiches and a flask of coffee, for he would be spending a long night camped in that stairwell waiting for my arrival. A dusty stairwell upon which I’d seen no recent impression of human feet, although more than a few from birds alighting from the open windows.

An accomplice would be needed for Harvey. Someone to note which courtroom I had been taken to—any of nine spread over the upper three floors. That someone should phone Harvey to tell him when I was on my way out and who would be with me. Nothing more. As soon as the guards closed the single door from the courtroom corridors, Harvey would appear from the stairwell as we waited by the lift. Harvey would have the gun in his hand. A brief conversation would ensue.

Harvey and I would then lug the trussed up and by-then peaceful guards to a stage landing of the unused stairwell. Harvey would sever my chains and I would try on my new shoes, adjust my tie and straighten my wig. Harvey and I would then take to the main stairs and walk from the courthouse steps to the roadway. Any accomplice with half a brain would be on his way to Rio so I suppose Harvey and I would have to catch a cab to the domestic airport. From there south to Hat Yai, then across to Satun and the short ferry to Langkawi Island, Malaysia.

On my five-centimetre foam mattress that night, under the condensation of these freshly baked plans, I could see nothing that might deflate this simple recipe.

With the loss of Albert of Johannesburg there was a gap to fill in our room. Building Six provided many candidates as all newcomers went there first. The worthy Thais who arrived were usually snapped up and who could blame them for not wanting to share a room full of crazy foreigners. Foreigners who either spent the night in a morbid funk or would flop about laughing at absurdities.

Among a new batch of foreigners was Sten from Sweden. While his English was perfect he was not inclined to speak of family, his youth in Uppsala or lost loves. So, having met these initial conditions for entry to room
ha-sip jet
(room 57), big Sten was welcome.