Escape (2 page)

‘No. I came for the water festival.’ I raised an envelope kept visible on my clothing pile, showing a few thousand baht in small notes. ‘Can I keep this?’

‘No money here. We keep for you.’ The Skull waved me over to the book-keepers. This qualified as a mission ordered by the Skull so I dressed quickly and sidestepped the bum-prober who was busy poking through a prisoner’s hair with his glove.

The trusties at their registers logged the cash and then asked for my court papers. New arrivals have two: a notice of the next court date and a copy of the charges stating the weight of the drugs. This second sheet I had shredded at court following a conversation with a Hong Kong Chinese. He’d been wearing heavy chains that were welded around each ankle. While most prisoners’ chains were rusty and dragging, his had been carefully polished and held aloft by home-made metal garters. He looked as though he’d been through most of it, and he had. His advice had been from the deepest shadows and I had taken it.

The registry clerk was getting frustrated. ‘Your charge paper? Police paper!’

I looked on, dumfounded and halfwitted. ‘I give to lawyer. No have,’ I replied, shrugging and using broken English to confirm the Thai trusty’s belief that all
farangs
(Westerners) were stupid. Then, fumbling, I pulled out a lawyer’s card on the back of which was written: ‘41.9 GRAMS’. This was entered in the ledger and I was sent to the bench to await the prison barbers.

Those prisoners charged with more than 100 grams were sent to a bench on the other side of the street. There each was fitted with heavy leg chains, ankle rings squeezed into a bracelet by a trusty swinging down from a seven-foot lever of a jail-built contraption. These leg irons would remain attached for the years until the trial’s conclusion.

By the time the sun had set the last of the confused, humiliated newcomers in their hacked rags were shorn of the hair of former lives. Scalps reduced to chewed, patchy stubble; the shears having transferred scabies, lice and nematodes through bleeding nicks. The barbers understood that, as a Christian, I was not to be shorn, a religious observation as new to me as it was to them, having been revealed just as I was waiting on the bench.

When those newly chained had shuffled back to the bench, greasy aluminium plates were set out. A meal of rancid, brown rice and fish-head soup was then ladled out from a battered oil drum. A third among us ate, those with a determination forged in the hardship of street life. As we stood to be led into the dormitories, the prison kit was issued: a small, much-used plastic bowl that served as a food dish, a water-scooper for bathing and a carry bag for chunks of soap and smears of toothpaste. Many searched for bits of string with which to lift the chains from the ground so they might walk with less pain. Some questioned how they might remove their shorts through the ankle rings for washing. Others, once fast friends from their week in the police station, rapidly became shy as they could barely recognise each other, their shaven heads now revealing scars of night encounters and many lost battles.

At the bars of our second-floor dormitory two trusties fingered their neck-sized key rings, discussing the difficulty of housing another forty-eight. The dormitories were long, open cages with prisoners sleeping on the floor. Some long-termers had bits of cardboard for beds. One hundred and twenty to each cell, the size of a family garage. When these were full the corridors became open cells.

A few minutes after we found crouch space in a dormitory there was an accident with one of the forty-four-gallon drums used as a toilet for corridor inmates. The plank seat had broken, wedging a prisoner sideways and overturning the heavy drum. Ammonia, water and shit gushed to the floor forming putrid lava that raced for the metal stairway. The toxic mixture of bile, rotting food and slime dropped through the stairs onto yelping inmates unseen.

A trusty locked our cage as we stood with our bowls and clothes, surrounded by current residents squatting on the concrete. Standing on a large square of plastic linoleum in one corner was Lim, the room leader. He was dressed in white shorts, a T-shirt, long socks and had a whistle strung around his neck. Crouching at his feet were his two boys: his lapdog and a housemaid.

‘Right! You don’t like it and I don’t like it,’ Lim began in his provincial Kanchanaburi accent. ‘But for one night, I hope, we’ll all have to do our bit and share the room. It means some consideration for others.’

Lim waved an arm across one side of the room. ‘You lot move to the other side. Squeeze up a bit and you’ll just get down. Not on my lino though. There’s a limit! I’ll let my boys share my lino.’ The boys exchanged a look. ‘But,’ Lim peered over imaginary spectacles, ‘I can’t be the only one with his ass in the air, as it were. You newcomers will have to sort yourselves out along one side.’

Although Lim’s boys nodded and gestured, ‘That’s fair; reasonable enough,’ and ‘can’t argue with that’, it was clear there was not enough space.

‘A couple of tips, lads—I don’t like to say orders but why call a knitting needle a chopstick? Now, the trick to sleeping here is to get yourselves head-to-toe. You know, like those little tins of fish. Got that? And don’t wiggle about. Makes one hell of a racket in your chains. Won’t make you any more comfortable and definitely will wake me up. Now that’s something we don’t want, eh?’

Lim paused for signs of dissent. Someone coughed.

‘No, don’t go asking me a lot of questions. Save them till tomorrow when you go to your own section buildings. One more thing.’ Lim inclined his head and toyed with his whistle. ‘One thing I can’t stand at night is the smell of piss. Can’t abide it! So all of you hold your water,’ he ordered, now wrinkling his nose at an old man in chains trembling near the single hole-in-the-floor toilet. ‘As for number twos, don’t even think about it!’

Four minutes later, we had found spaces. I had managed a corner with a couple of blankets next to my new friend, Tam, from the police-station cells. Others found themselves in the narrow walkway next to the toilet. Lim’s boys had spread his dinner on place mats across his vinyl and Lim laughed as he ate.

‘Watch that one,’ my friend Tam nodded toward Lim. ‘He’ll offer you dope then inform on you the next day. He doesn’t make much money here.’

One day after my arrest Tam had arrived at the police station. He’d been arrested on a minor trafficking charge and was facing ten years. That day in the police station, I’d reluctantly woken under the greenish fluorescent light to the windowless cell and to the everlasting smells of chicken and cabbage that lived with the sweat in the walls. Sleeping on the next mat was a tall Nigerian, John, arrested at Klong Toey cargo port while signing for locally made water coolers ready for shipment to Lagos. Barely concealed inside the coolers were thirty-five kilos of heroin. It had been a genuine shock for John who had been given a ticket to Bangkok with instructions to buy jeans. ‘And just take five minutes to see to those water coolers, will you?’ John was crushed. He had spent the previous day hunched and crying about the loss of his life and planned marriage to a village beauty.

Tam, by contrast, had arrived fully equipped at the cell with bags of clothes, blankets, an icebox, and plenty of food that his girlfriends were to supplement twice each day. Chubby Tam arranged shopping for me and told me what to expect.

‘Seven days here. Good time, police let us buy everything. Then jail. Bad time. But first you go to court, five minutes, and you’ll go back every two weeks for the next three months. Then waiting starts. A year, maybe three. The courts not good. If you say not guilty they give you full time. You say guilty, they make you half. The African,’ Tam looked at John, ‘he’s the end. Death or ninety-nine years if he says guilty. Your case, an airport case. A problem.’

Tam asked if anyone from my embassy had come. When I said yes he didn’t like it much.

‘Never ask for embassy,’ he advised.

‘I didn’t. Several were waiting before I hit the police station.’

Tam said that nothing would make any difference now. Those whose friends could not release them from the police station were going to the jail. And, he added, those who remain in jail are almost certain to be found guilty. Yet the appeal courts, where the lights were lower, could be made more understanding. ‘But not for you. You’re a foreigner.’ Tam was about to tell me why my money would be no good in the higher courts when I was suddenly taken from the cells to an upstairs corridor for questioning.

The massive police station was built in the 1930s, since remodelled and partitioned into departments. Its corridors and windows offered limited avenues for escape and near-certain recapture for a foreigner. A young police captain found a translator. We took seats at an empty bench. The captain, Surasak, rolled paper into an old typewriter. The translator—a young woman attached to the tourist police—was an avid trinket collector. Her name was Noi and she was determined to educate the captain on her hobbies. This then is the result of Surasak’s investigation of the Westlake case. It was our only interview and Surasak spoke no English:

SURASAK:
‘Tell him I’ll type this interview which will go to the judge in court.’

NOI: [to me] ‘How do you like Thailand? I work sometimes tourists. This is a nice policeman.’

WESTLAKE: ‘Okay.’

SURASAK:
‘Ask him who he gave the 250 grams to at the airport.’

NOI: ‘He want to know 250 grams at airport. How much you pay?’

WESTLAKE: ‘What?’

NOI: [to Surasak]
‘He says he doesn’t want to say how much he paid.’

SURASAK:
‘Tell him he doesn’t have to answer questions but I want to know about the case.’

NOI: ‘It a lot better you say guilty. Save time. I collect beautiful telephone cards. You have a foreign telephone card?’

WESTLAKE: ‘Plead guilty to what? I’ve got some English telephone cards but the pretty ones are from Singapore. You can have them if you want.’

NOI: ‘Okay, give me please. [Then to Surasak]
He’s in the drug business in Singapore. Has his connections in England. I have to meet my girlfriend in an hour.’

SURASAK: (while typing professionally)
‘Tell him I’ve been given a travel bag with US$12,000 in it. He also had US$3,000 in his pockets. Did he bring this money to Thailand?’

NOI: ‘Did you bring money from Europe? Australia? USA? Is drug money. We must keep.’

WESTLAKE: ‘That’s travel money. I don’t know anything about drugs.’

NOI:
‘He says he’s been travelling to buy drugs but he’s not sure how much they cost.’
[Then to me] ‘Can I have your new shoes? You no can have shoes in jail. You go there long time!’

SURASAK:
‘What did he say?’

NOI:
‘He said you type very well. Very quickly.’

Returning to the cells we passed an open window. Only three floors to the ground. Too low.

A Chinese-Lao group of seven was now in our cell, already playing poker with lots of smiling curses and easy wins. An old man, clearly their leader, appeared to be calmly losing.

‘Not much of a player,’ I suggested to Tam as I sat.

‘I don’t know about that. By the end of the day the old man will have convinced the two younger ones to confess and save him.’

And save him they did. With the police chief’s approval the driver of the car carrying sixty-four kilos of heroin agreed he was acting only with the youngest member of the group. The old man and another—the real driver—would be set free and five would go to trial. The police chief then offered to act as negotiator with the appeals court to acquit the three flunkies in a few years’ time. The old man, however, preferred to make those arrangements himself. He was released the following day but not before arranging a feast for those remaining. At that even the women prisoners in the next cell woke from their continuous narcotic sleep. They surfaced from an igloo of clothes to receive many colourful plates of delicacies from a nearby restaurant. John and I were given a large cream cake decorated with reindeer. My Nigerian cellmate could barely eat and slipped quickly once more into the hollow carved in his heart. For his life was over and it was Christmas Day.

With time I would come to know the future of those of our cell. Tam’s generous spirit would not serve his best interests. Once drained of money those accomplices still free would do little to shorten the eight years he would serve.

The old Chinese man returned to his northern enclave to continue bidding and forbidding; those three underlings expecting their freedom to be purchased in the higher courts would remain in prison. With the wisdom of age their master had decided it would be too expensive to set them free; just as well to pay for their food, clothes and occasional visitors to bring them hope, year after year. More importantly they had proved themselves unlucky. There was no place for the unlucky in the old man’s world. John from Nigeria was sentenced to death; commuted to life in Bangkwang prison where he remains to this day. His constitution turned out to be much stronger than anyone expected.