Read Online Escape by David McMillan - Free Book Online

vaporised by the sun. Isn’t that cute?
    Returning to Building Two carrying Sharon’s gift bag of groceries, it felt as though I’d been shopping through a stargate. No earthly link between her world and mine. She would return to Melbourne by week’s end so there would be just two more such stargate journeys.
    Calvin called me as soon as I stepped back in.
    ‘Dave, come over here. You gotta hear this. Some poor Portuguese guy. He’s just come in. He was busted at the airport with a couple of kilos. Not taking it out, he was bringing it in! You won’t believe it.’
    ‘I think I will,’ I said while giving Calvin some amoxicillin capsules from my supermarket bag. I didn’t explain where they came from. Calvin had recently torn a toe and infections often became chronic without access to outside medicines.
    Paolo retold his story as we packed our night food at a table. He had been recruited as a courier in a Spanish resort town. There were Nigerian connections and although Paolo had made three runs into Europe without problems, he had not been paid in full. After making complaints to his handlers he was told he would get everything after a final short run to Malaysia.
    Malaysia executes drug smugglers surely, routinely and often. While Paolo didn’t much like that choice of destination, he needed the money for he was, by then, quite broke. His contact, good old Joe from the Bangkok guesthouse, sympathised.
    ‘My friend, we don’t want to do this business but we must. In Africa we Ebo people are enemies within our own country. We are clever but the stupid, powerful dictators don’t let us run our own affairs. So we have to do this thing. It’s like the Palestinians and the Israelis.’
    As to which side of the walls of the holy lands Joe believed he fell, we would never hear. At that point in the telling of Paolo’s story a factory guard began his daily session of beating those he’d decided were his laziest five workers. With the unlucky five stretched out on the ground to receive their punishment, we moved to a corner of the yard. Paolo picked up the story as he arrived in Kuala Lumpur with his hidden cargo.
    It was exceptional enough that he had flown to Malaysia rather than travel overland but more unusual that there was no one at the airport to meet him. Paolo scraped up some money for a phone card and after three hours sitting on his suitcase near the taxi ranks, he finally spoke to Joe in Bangkok. Joe was surprised, too.
    ‘Didn’t you get on the plane?’
    ‘Of course I did! What do I do now? Who can I call here?’
    Apparently no one. Paolo collected some money that had been quickly sent through a transfer office, then checked into a fleabag while Joe arranged a ticket back to Thailand. It did seem, even to Paolo, that this would lose them the opportunity to move the dope onward to the West rather than to return it to the source. As ever, Paolo was kept too impoverished to make balanced choices.
    On arrival at Don Muang Paolo was immediately arrested. This time the phone call to the airport was made on time. A week earlier a Friday afternoon party at the US Embassy had resulted in staff neglecting to arrange Paolo’s arrest the first time. Apologies all around. Joe was reimbursed. Paolo was finished.
    We all expressed the usual outrage and sympathy. I gave Paolo a Mars bar. Martyn sealed his vegetarian food canisters and added, ‘In a perfect realisation of hell, one would not know he was dead. Life would be hellish without even that rare comfort of certain damnation. And the knowledge that suffering can get no worse. In the imperfect hell of the living, things always get worse.’
    Within a few weeks I felt I had taken as much of the Cure as would be useful. Bumbudt was so overcrowded no real privacy could be bought. I’d heard better things of the buildings in the greater Klong Prem jail next door so began negotiations to move. Most of the other foreigners wanted to move but not all had the means.