Escape (19 page)

I finished packing after seven so went downstairs to the Riverside Café for some alcohol to clear my head. With only twenty minutes to spare before leaving for the airport I ordered a fruit salad, a Cointreau with ice and lemon and began reading an
International Herald Tribune
taken from the lobby. Frank Zappa’s death had allowed rock historians a few columns and Boris Yeltsin was in trouble. Our universe would be spared never-ending expansion by a mysterious dark matter and Europe’s internal borders were to be unmanned. A small box in the paper reprinted an angry letter from 1922 complaining of the continued requirement for passports at international borders. The Great War was over, wrote Angry, so the need for such intrusive documents had gone.
Groundhog Day
was playing everywhere, opening to more screens due to word-of-mouth recommendations. I raised my snifter, swirled its crushed ice and drank to Sam. I made a decision.

At that moment, looking through the glass, a girl had appeared in the diamond lights of the hotel entrance some nine metres away. She descended the timber steps to the torch-lit garden. Softer than the night and dressed in wind-drifted layers of yellow and sunset-orange organdie, the tall blonde floated in an arc around me to the water’s edge, quietly taking a corner seat at a large table. I thought it unusual to find a woman such as she unattended, for she was beautiful. She lifted her eyes from her hands, spread flat upon her table, and spoke.

‘Would you care to join me for a drink while I wait for my girlfriend?’ Her voice, kept low, easily carried across the three-metre gap as the sounds of Bangkok had suddenly stilled. She spoke with a New York City accent a touch harder than her features.

‘Of course. That would be nice.’ I abandoned my newspaper to take a seat at her table.

Her name was Jacinta, mine was Daniel. I wondered if hers had been adopted between boyfriends or, as mine, between terminals, for unchivalrous suspicions were beginning to form.

‘I’ve been drinking brandy but I’m ready for a change.’ I signalled a waiter.

‘I feel like champagne.’ Jacinta then spoke to the waiter though keeping her eyes on me, ‘Do you have Dom Pérignon?’

As the waiter left I defended the wine from the prevailing taste. Jacinta broke in saying, ‘The first bottle’s on me. My treat!’

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I said lifting my key tag to the bar staff to indicate billing to my account (and taking the opportunity to replace it face down from Jacinta). ‘The hotel mark-up here is 300 percent.’

‘I never worry about that,’ she replied before sending the waiter away with a Platinum Visa card she’d produced from a golden handbag. ‘So what is it that you do, Daniel?’

‘I’m a goatherd, heading for the Osaka convention.’ I emptied my glass. ‘And yes—before you ask—the pay is everything you’ve heard but I think we make a difference.’

‘Really?’

‘Indeed. Jacinta, you’re not staying at the hotel, I guess?’

‘Oh, no,’ she replied, faintly troubled. ‘We just decided to come here for a drink.’

At that a small, somewhat mousey girl—also in her late twenties—arrived at our table. Introduced as Linny, Jacinta’s travelling companion. Jacinta eye-signalled the waiter before saying, ‘Linny, Daniel has invited us to dinner. What do you think?’

‘Why not? But let me have a drink first.’ Linny’s voice was from the New Hampshire class that tries not to speak of money. Never college roommates, these two.

As a child I’d seen a cabaret act with a Zoltan the Great and his sequinned assistant. The assistant would sparkle at a customer’s table while her blindfolded master on stage would intone, ‘Does the young man at table five have a scar on his wrist from a skiing accident?’ That act, too, required fine co-ordination between two performers.

Jacinta announced an excursion to the toilets, allowing me to question Linny. The girls were on vacation, she said. Had just arrived from Vietnam and were due to travel to northern Thailand the next day. Jacinta had hinted earlier at being employed as a travel consultant but Linny sidestepped work talk to reveal her companion’s well-masked sadness.

‘Jay has just ended a long relationship with an older man. They shared a house on Fire Island.’

‘Fire Island? That was once some kind of artist’s colony wasn’t it?’ However, my time questioning Linny was over. Jacinta had returned, absent not long enough to find the toilets, much less use them.

My suggestion to eat at If It Swims We Cook It, the open-air Thai family restaurant in Phetburi Road, was dismissed without negotiation. The girls had chosen The Joss Stick, a multi-storey tourist venue with execrable food. Jacinta and Linny asked our driver to stop at their hotel for repairs. I left them at the Rembrandt after promising to return within twenty minutes. The Grace was not far away.

Sam Gilburne broke his rule and allowed me to come directly to his room after I’d called him from a house phone in the lobby. The door was open when I arrived and Sam was at the balcony railing, letting warm, damp air pour in.

‘Don’t jump Sam,’ I said by way of a greeting. ‘It’s only two floors.’

Sam smiled and said, ‘Come in. I didn’t expect to see you until whenever.’

‘Yah, well. You know how it is.’ I closed the room door. ‘Plans change. How was The Big Pouffe?’

‘La Grande Bouffe,’ Sam corrected. ‘Not so good. Too much sugar in—were you watching me?’

‘And just as well. I think.’ I poured myself some water from his jug. ‘Do you mind?’

‘As well about what?’ Sam slid the balcony door shut.

‘Sam, have you ever heard the phrase, “A Night on the Town”? In smuggling terms, that is.’

He hadn’t so I took my time telling him the Keith Kellaway story. Sam didn’t interrupt and I assumed nothing that Sam knew contradicted my description. When I got to the part where Kellaway leads Chubby into an alley where the knife-wielding locals attack, Sam objected.

‘Didn’t the fat guy put up a fight?’

‘Maybe but less effective when you’ve just gulped down five Halcion in your last drink. He wakes up the next morning in Doctor Rangoon’s spare room looking at a hedgerow of catgut stitches.’

‘And having put on weight,’ Sam had caught on.

I ended this account with Kellaway and Chubby driving through the Seattle checkpoint to Canada in a rented car.

‘All right,’ nodded Sam, thinking these events through. ‘But one thing I can’t see. How did Colin—or Keith Kella-whatever-the-fuck—how did he find a doctor in Vancouver to operate on Lardass. I mean, I just don’t see it happening.’

‘Kellaway is not a man who’d pay for anything he didn’t have to.’ I stood from the suitcase rack and folded my arms. ‘Kellaway arrived back in Port Moody alone. Chubby was never seen again. I can only assume Kellaway played doctor at the roadside somewhere. Only without closing him up.’

Sam raised himself from the bed and moved to a writing desk. Staring vacantly at a large mirror, he opened an empty drawer and then closed it, all without purpose.

I sat at a bedside chair and, to give the silent room some sound, added, ‘Only a few people know the story. It got around a bit a few years ago. Not enough for anything to stick to Kellaway. I thought you might have heard someone say this or that guy deserves ‘a night on the town’ or whatever.’

‘So you know this scumbag?’ Sam was turning on the messenger but he spoke to my chair rather than to my face.

‘I don’t suppose he’d recognise me. I only saw him once or twice. It’s a face I made a point of remembering and maybe not such a bad thing that I’m a collector of little histories. Sam, never work for a man with bad teeth or a beard. Were you planning on working for Kellaway? Before, I mean.’

‘No.’ Sam had nothing more to say. He had begun to pack.

‘Okay, Sam. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go eat an awful dinner. I was chatted up for no good reason by some doll and I have to find out if she’s been sent by someone.’ Sam wasn’t listening. ‘Sam, where’ll you be staying?’

‘Anna’s Café,’ Sam answered, which was sensible.

Attempting conversation at The Joss Stick required hand signals as every surface was hard and reflective. As a consultant Jacinta must have been compiling a traveller’s advisory on the worst nightspots of Bangkok for she then became insistent on worse: the dank nightclub of the Dusit Thani Hotel, a low-ceilinged purple mistranslation with pudgy, just-sponged vinyl chairs squishing into beer-foam-and-ash scented carpets. Strung out with maybe ten customers, all ugly professionals; men and women with everything to lose.

‘I’m starting to believe your story,’ I shouted. ‘These places must be on your list!’

‘What?’

‘Never mind, finish your whisky essence and let’s get out of here.’

I had wanted to walk through the streets to wherever next we were going but Jacinta would not. She had conspired to avoid any place that allowed conversation. We hunched inside a taxi for two minutes. Linny was in the front seat staring at the lights next to the driver, his open mouth far enough forward to bite the steering wheel. Jacinta sat in the back seat kneading my fingers, whispering: ‘Do you think you’re gonna get lucky tonight?’

However reasonable it might have been to defer to the girls’ supposed fear of being led around a foreign city by a near stranger, their final venue—the Hard Rock Café—was somehow sadder even than those industrial-scale brothels with their glass serveries, the sister bedrock of the tourist’s Thailand.

At the Hard Rock I left the girls with those watery drinks that give alcohol a bad name and walked outside to get some air. On my way I passed the platform where a local jazz-funk band was struggling with a drunken, cretinous audience interrupting each song. The singer, a Thai girl who fronted the band, was fending off a tanked and wired imbecile with wet, curly streak-bleached hair, howling requests while grabbing at her elbows between turns to his blotto mates for applause at his spit-spraying wit. I stopped, about to make a bad day worse, but then the front door opened and the night air pulled me outside. Through the haze of the city sky a jet climbed into the clouds. Possibly the plane on which I should have been slumbering. Jacinta appeared at my side.

‘What’s the matter, Daniel?’

‘Don’t tell me you like places like this.’ I looked at the ground. ‘Okay, there’s no reason why every night out must be an evening of authentic Thai culture but there is nothing at all of Thailand in these places. I won’t go on.’ It wasn’t clear if Jacinta was with me in this but she could tell I was about to walk.

‘Okay, Daniel. We’ll go.’

I had to block myself from yelling, ‘And stop calling me Daniel!’

Another taxi. The Rembrandt; its lobby, the lift.

Jacinta had pressed the button for the Rembrandt’s rooftop as soon as the three of us had stepped into the lift. Once in motion Jacinta held my arm and Linny punched the button marked eleven. No words were exchanged.

The eleventh floor. Linny: ‘I guess I’ll see you guys later. Nice to meet you, Daniel. Good night.’

I find Jacinta has no suite on the roof of the hotel. She shares her room on the eleventh with Linny. The rooftop floor has a swimming pool and it is deserted. It’s one-thirty in the morning.

Jacinta leads me to the pool then drops my hand and walks to the rooftop railing to admire the view. There is no suggestion of swimming.

After a minute Jacinta joins me, talking about how girls and boys court despite all my efforts to shift the conversation and we sit at the edge of the water. Earlier we had been talking relationships. I’d rather have been discussing dentistry. To bring this to a close, I suggest:

‘You could take on a temp when you get back home.’

‘A temp?’

‘Yeah. An intermediate boyfriend that you can dump when you find someone you really want. The trick is to grab someone who gets lots of invitations to galleries, restaurant openings, first nights, weddings, that sort of thing. Wherever the pickings are good. Remember now.’ I looked down, playing the good counsellor. ‘Not someone obviously gay. That would give the game away.’

‘You think that would be best?’ Jacinta spoke softly and crinkled a smile. Then leaned back and with two fingers lifted a squashed marijuana spliff from between her breasts.

‘Well, no one would think of looking there,’ I said before asking with precise spontaneity. ‘Get that locally?’

‘Hell, no. I brought this from LA. I’d never risk buying in a foreign country.’ Jacinta lit the joint. ‘Anyway, I must be choking you with my cigarette taste.’ I’d been kissed. ‘This way we both taste the same.’

The grass was too weakly mixed to be identified as either Californian or Thai. Not strong enough to make either of us do anything we might normally not. A hotel security man in a neat suit leaned out briefly from the terrace entrance before quickly retreating.

Even with the entirely planned and controlled night that Jacinta had thus far managed, it suddenly seemed hugely improbable that she could be some agent provocateur. Even so, since I’d come this far the feeble spliff allowed me to move forward.

‘You might want to be careful with this stuff, Jay.’ I returned her the lion’s share of the joint. ‘Thai cops in the southern resorts make a fair living from busting tourists.’ And continuing, ‘The airports carry a premium for some reason. Penaltywise.’

‘Oh, I’d never take anything out. Myself.’

Uh-huh.

However, I was wrong about her motives. Jacinta went on to tell me of some card she carried. A pass that when swiped through machines at US airports would allow her ingress without being questioned by customs authorities. (She was referring to INSPASS which does not bypass customs, however it might seem when used.) Jacinta then stressed she would never be a carrier. ‘If anything I’d be organising it.’

By then I’d stopped listening carefully. Jacinta was only saying things she thought I’d like to hear and was certainly not seeking information. No agency would use such obviousness. I began swatting mosquitoes.

‘They’re a nuisance, aren’t they?’ She stood close and drew me closer by taking my hands behind her back. ‘Sorry, I share the room with Linny. We’ll be fine here. There’s no one around.’

In response I spoke the words best used for initially declining an offer of intimacy. Helpless words about fidelity to a distant lover. Spoken with compliments and consideration. There’s no reason to cite them here: in no circumstances are they ever accepted by women with the grace gentlemen are compelled to pretend.