Tanner On Ice

Chapter 13

The cell was a cage built into a corner of the room. It was a perfect ten-foot cube, with the floor and ceiling and two walls making up four of its six sides. Steel bars formed the other two sides, with a door fashioned in one. It had swung open to admit me, and had swung shut with me safely inside. A padlock the size of a man’s hand assured it would not swing open again.

There was a mattress in one corner of the cell and a chamber pot in the other. That would have been fine for one person, but there were two of us. My companion was sitting cross-legged on the mattress when they shoved me into the cell, and he didn’t change position or utter a word until they left. Even then he remained silent until I looked up at a sound of rhythmic thumping overhead.

“He’s dribbling,” he said. “The guard. Dribbling a basketball. Didn’t you see what they had on the ground floor? There’s a basketball backboard and a few other odds and ends of athletic equipment. When he can’t stand sitting at the desk and staring at me, and when he doesn’t feel like stretching out on the couch and ignoring me, he’ll go upstairs and shoot baskets. I don’t know if the ball ever goes through the hoop. There’s no clue from the sound if he’s missing or making his shots.”

“You’re Australian?”

He grinned. “The accent, right? Yeah, I’m from Melbourne. And you’re a Yank.”

“From New York.”

“Never been there. Always wanted to go. What did they get you for, mate?”

“Lariam,” I said.

“Lariam,” he said. “What the fuck’s Lariam?” His eyes widened. “You mean for malaria?”

“Against it, actually.”

“Stone the crows,” he said. “You can get high on Lariam?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what do the sodcutters care if you take it?”

“They’re going to analyze it,” I said, “and see if it’s heroin.”

“Is it?”

“No, of course not. But I’d guess the lab report will say whatever they want it to say. If they just want to deport me, they’ll say it’s Lariam. If they want to kill me, they’ll call it heroin.”

“Kill you,” he said. “Would they do that?”

“I hope not.”

“Stone the crows.” He got to his feet, a very tall and slender young man with shaggy hair and a full beard, all of a reddish blond. “What we’ll do,” he said, “is we’ll sleep in shifts.”

“I won’t be able to sleep.”

“You think so now,” he said, “but wait until you’ve been here a couple of hours. If the heat doesn’t put you to sleep, the boredom will. Don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette, do you?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Very wise. Fucking things’ll kill you. Wouldn’t help if you did, because the sodcutters’d confiscate ’em, same as they did mine. Took me belt and shoes, too. Yours as well.”

“Yes.”

“So we won’t hang ourselves, though how could you? Nothing to hang from. And the shoes are a right puzzler. Mine didn’t even have laces, they were slip-ons, and they took ’em anyway.”

“I think they’ve got something against shoes,” I said. “Not just in monasteries and pagodas. I think they disapprove of them altogether.”

“You ask me,” he said, “they hate the whole idea of feet. Fucking sodcutters would be happier if everybody was cut off at the knees. We’d all be scooting around on little wheeled platforms, eating rice and kissing Buddha’s arse.”

“There’s a picture,” I said.

“It is, isn’t it? Name’s Stuart, mate.”

“I’m Evan.”

“And you’re a Yank and I’m an Ozzie, and here we are in a fucking jail. Not even a proper jail, either. A concrete block shithouse of a building with a sodcutter playing basketball on top of our heads.”

“I wish he’d stop.”

“Oh, he will. Then he’ll come downstairs and sit over there and stare at us, and you’ll wish he’d go upstairs and dribble some more.”

“How long have you been here, Stuart?”

“I dunno. I can’t say what day it is, and don’t tell me because I don’t know what day it was when I came here. I don’t think it’s two weeks yet, but I can’t be sure. See, day and night’s all one here, ’cause there’s no window to let the sun in and no clock on the wall. And they have the light on all the time.”

“They must have more than one guard.”

“There’s another chap, or maybe two of them. It’s hard to tell ’ em apart. They all do the same. Bring a tray of food now and then. Empty the slop jar now and then. And go upstairs now and then and play fucking basketball until you want to scream.”

“What are you in for, Stuart?”

“I’m ashamed to tell you.”

“Keep it to yourself if you’d rather,” I said. “But I’ve been around some. I don’t shock easily.”

“Oh, this won’t shock you, Evan. And I don’t mind saying. It’s durian.”

“Durian?”

“Durian.”

“Is it an Australian word? Because it’s a crime I’ve never heard of.”

“I was eating durian,” he said.

“Eating it.”

“Yes.”

“Is it some kind of drug?”

“No.”

“Or an endangered animal species? Is it like eating whooping cranes?”

“Jesus, no. It’s a fruit.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I thought it sounded familiar. What’s wrong with eating it? Does it get you high?”

“Not like drinking pints does.” He sighed. “I say, mate, you wouldn’t have a pint in your back pocket, would you? Nice frosty pint of Foster’s?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Like I thought. Can’t even get Foster’s in this sodcutting country. Just the local brew. Mandalay. Tried it yet?”

“Yes.”

“Tastes like piss, don’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

He frowned. “Thought you said you tried it.”

“I did,” I said. “But I never tried the other.”

“The other.” He thought about it, then let out a whoop. “Stone the crows! You never tried piss. Jesus, I never tried it meself. Never hope to try it. Mandalay beer’s as close as I ever hope to get.”

“Same here,” I said.

“S’funny how people will say that. ‘Tastes like piss.’ But how would they know?” He shook his head in wonder, then lapsed into thoughtful silence. I had to ask him why he’d been arrested, then, for eating fruit. Was it stolen?

“Nope. Bought and paid for.”

“Legal for them to sell it to you?”

A nod. “And legal for me to buy it. Oh, I don’t mean to make you drag it out of me. I was eating it in my hotel room, and you can’t do that.”

Now I remembered what it was about durian. “The smell,” I said. “It smells, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he said. “Has the most almighty pong you ever smelled in your life. You get a whiff of it and you think a man’d have to be stark mad to put it in his mouth. Then you get a taste of it and it’s so good you don’t care a fuck what it smells like.”

“What does it smell like?”

“Like sex,” he said.

“Like sex?”

“Like sex, but that’s just part of it. Imagine if you and a really trashy Sheila was to smear yourselves head to toe with limburger cheese and then have sex on top of a heap of rotting fish.”

“Oh,” I said.

“That’s a fair description of the smell. The taste is something different.”

“It would have to be,” I said, “or no one would ever have a second bite of it.”

“I can’t describe it,” he said, “but once you taste it, all you want to do is have more of it. I bought a single durian – it’s a sort of a melon, like – and I took it to my room and ate the whole thing. And then I went out and bought two more.”

“But it doesn’t get you high?”

“Not like a drug will, or a couple of pints. It’s just good, is all, and you’re so glad to be eating it you’ve got room in your mind for little else. And in no time at all you don’t mind the smell, and the time comes when you begin to like it.”

“It must taste wonderful,” I said.

“It does.”

“And it must smell terrible.”

“It does that as well, and it’s a smell that lingers. The hotels have rules against bringing durian into your room, because once you do it’s ages before they can rent the room again, because it pongs so bad.”

“But you didn’t know about the rule?”

“I knew,” he said. “But I thought, what harm? So I’ll open a window after, air the place out. I was three days and three nights eating durian in that room. They’ll be three months fumigating it and airing it out.”

“Oh,” I said. “Still, to jail you over it-”

“They want damages,” he said. “For all the nights they can’t rent the room, plus the cost of clearing the smell out of it.” He cupped his beard in his hand, sniffed deeply. “There’s still a whiff of it in me whiskers,” he said, “if you want to get the sense of it.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “How much do they want from you?”

“Five thousand U.S.,” he said, “which is absurd, but I’d say they’d take less. But all I’ve got is a couple hundred and me ticket home, and they’ve taken that away from me along with me shoes and me belt. And who’s going to send me that kind of money?”

They’d let him try to call home, on a rare day when the phones worked, but getting through to Australia had proved to be impossible. He’d written letters to everyone he knew back home, and they’d taken the letters, and he could only suppose they’d mailed them, but God knew when they’d get there.

“And what are me mates going to think? ‘Oh, that Stuart, he spent all his cash on drink and whores, and now he wants to cadge the price of the next girl and the next few pints.’ Catch them falling for that line, eh?”

“The Australian consulate,” I suggested.

“Oh, right. Would the U.S. consulate lend you a few thousand to pay for stinking out a hotel room? Well, neither would ours.”

Somewhere in the course of his recitation the basketball stopped bouncing, and a few minutes after that our guard made his appearance. He was short for a Burmese and even shorter for a basketball player, and I didn’t suppose he got too many chances to dunk the ball.

He sat at the desk and watched us for a while, then picked up a magazine and turned its pages. He’d evidently lost interest in us, and it didn’t take me long to lose interest in him.

It was getting on for tea time, I thought. That reminded me how long it had been since my breakfast of steamed buns and sticky rice. I kept hunger at bay by thinking about Harry Spurgeon. Was he at a table in the Strand ’s lounge, having his tea? He might well be, I decided, but I rather doubted he was glancing at his watch, wondering what on earth was keeping me.

Had he sent the cops a-knocking on my door? That made the most sense. If he knew the phones were out all over town, he could have figured that my call would have had to have come from within the hotel. Once he knew that, it was a fairly simple matter to check with the desk and fill in the rest of the puzzle. Yes, Mr. Spurgeon, we did have a recent check-in fitting that description. A Mr. Edmonds, a Canadian gentleman, and he’ll be coming down soon to show us his passport and a credit card, neither of which was close to hand when he checked in.

Maybe calling him from the Strand wasn’t the best idea I ever had.

But what else could I have done? Lurked across the street from the Strand, hoping he’d show up? And what if he did? Then what?

I still didn’t know where he fit in, or even where I fit in. What exactly had happened last night? Someone had been shadowing me, someone I’d presumed to be Harry Spurgeon because of his whitened temples (which I was beginning to think of as whitened sepulchres, but that was wrong). But my tail could as easily have been the Spurgeon manqué, the Burmese fellow who turned up dead in my bed at the Char Win Guest House.

Scenario: X, a Burmese man who is attempting for reasons of his own to look like Harry Spurgeon, has the job of shadowing me. I give him the slip, but he circles the block and picks me up again without my spotting him. For camouflage, he picks up a prostitute and checks into the Char Win, where he goes to my room and plants a foil-wrapped brick-shaped package in my backpack.

Then the prostitute, revealing a heart of something other than gold, stabs him to death, goes through his pockets, takes his money, and leaves him there.

Or try this: Spurgeon is on my tail, and I ditch him successfully when I dive out of the taxi. But his backup man, X, stays with me. They hook up together, slip into the hotel together, and enter my room, where Spurgeon murders his partner, whitens his temples, tucks him into bed, stuffs the brick into my backpack, and takes off.

Or, as an alternative-

Never mind. You get the idea. I had too little in the way of data and too resourceful an imagination, and I could thus concoct no end of scenarios, one as plausible as the next. None of them made much sense, and all of them raised more questions than they answered.

“Feeding time,” Stuart said. “Here comes the bloke with the key, and there’s Gran with the tray.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

“See how enthusiastic you are, mate, when you see what’s on the tray.”

Our guard unlocked the massive padlock, then unholstered his gun and pointed it in our general direction while he swung the door open. Then a little old Burmese lady, shrunken and wizened, brought two trays of food, one at a time, and set each in turn on the floor of our cell. Then she turned without a word and left the room, and the guard swung the barred steel door shut and went back to his desk and his magazine.

Stuart took a tray and sat on the edge of his mattress. “What have we here?” he said. “Why, I do believe it’s chopped muck with rice. How unusual.”

“It doesn’t smell very nice,” I said.

“Nasty pong, eh? Doesn’t smell as bad as durian, but it doesn’t taste as good as durian. Tastes like old lawn clippings.”

“And smells,” I said, “like a goldfish bowl.”

“With the fish floating belly up,” he said. “That’s the fish sauce. They put it on everything.”

“It’s the same in Vietnam,” I said. I dug in. “But it tastes better in Vietnam.”

“It tastes better in Burma,” he said, “in a proper restaurant. I don’t suppose jailhouse food ever gets a star in Michelin. Poor old thing that brought it, I wonder if she cooks this muck herself.”

“It’s amazing enough that she brings it. She looks about a hundred years old.”

“She’s actually twenty-one,” he said. “It’s the diet that does it.”

I put my fork down. “I don’t know if you noticed,” I said quietly, “but our friend over there didn’t fasten the padlock.”

“I didn’t notice. Are you sure?”

“See for yourself. But don’t let him see what you’re doing.”

“I can see it from here. You’re right, mate. He forgot to lock up.”

“Has he done this before?”

“Not since I’ve been here.”

“We could walk right out,” I said.

“On our tippy toes,” he said. “He’s between us and the door, and he’s got a gun.”

“I know.”

“In fifteen minutes or so he’ll collect the trays,” he said, “and he’ll see the door’s unlocked, and he’ll lock it.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“You’ve not finished your food, Evan.”

“No.”

“If you’re done with it, shove it over.”

“I didn’t think you liked it.”

“I fucking hate it. But wait till you’ve been here a few days. You’ll be cleaning your plate and wishing for more.”

“I was in a Turkish jail once,” I remembered.

“Stone the crows. Like Midnight Express?”

“Before Midnight Express.”

“Couldn’t be. Years ago, that was. You’d have been a babe in arms.”

There might be a time when I’d want to tell him about my sojourn in Union City, but not this early in our relationship.

“Before I knew about Midnight Express,” I said. “They fed me the same meal every day. Pilaf, pilaf, and pilaf.”

“Sounds like a Russian law firm.”

“I suppose it does,” I said. “But the thing was, it was great pilaf. Really tasty. It was still jail, and it was no picnic, but I got so I looked forward to mealtime.”

“If they gave you durian three times a day,” he said, “I could stand this place.” He thought about it. “No,” he said, “I take it back. I still couldn’t bear it.”

I held a finger to my lips, then pointed at our guard. He had emerged from behind the desk, but he wasn’t shuffling over to collect the trays. Instead he turned and headed for the stairs.

“He’s left it unlocked,” I said.

“So? Any second now you’ll hear that sodcutting basketball. Thump thump thump as he dribbles. Clink as it hits the backboard, thump as it hits the floor. Then another round of thump thump thump.”

I waited. “I don’t hear it,” I said.

“Maybe he’s using the toilet.”

“And maybe he went out for a beer,” I said, “or to check what’s playing at Loew’s Maha Bandoola.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting the hell out of here,” I said.

“He’ll spot you.”

“I don’t think he’s there.”

“But-”

“And what if he is? All he can do is bring us back and lock us up. But I think he left the door unlocked on purpose. I think he’s supposed to let us out.”

“So we can be shot trying to escape?”

“If they wanted to shoot me,” I said, “they’d have done it already. I’m going, Stuart.”

“You’ve got no shoes,” he said.

“So?”

“And no belt. We’re both of us barefoot and beltless. What are you going to do, race around on tiptoes with one hand holding your pants up?”

“If I have to.”

“Even if you get away,” he said, “then what will you do? You’ve got no money and no passport. No ticket home, no credit card, no place to stay.”

“No Lariam tablets,” I added. “No clean underwear. No Swiss Army knife. I don’t give a damn. I’m out of here.”

“But where will you go, mate? What will you do?”

“I’ll-”

“Yes?”

“I’ll think of something,” I said.