Thai Horse Read online

  Had he betrayed a trust? Had cynicism robbed him of all sense of value? Was this the price for intolerance, for the arrogance of pride? The cross-examination was endless. He went to sleep with the questions on his lips and awoke with no answers, for even his memories had convoluted into fiction.

  His calendar scratched out on earthen walls, Hatcher’s clock was a shadow flitting across the floor. Only a dream of freedom kept him alive, and after three years that had dwindled to a mere flicker of hope, hardly enough to inspire escape.

  At first, Hatcher seriously considered escape. He had survived five months in the steamy backwaters of Laos and Cambodia and walked out to tell about it, had led two crewmen out of the southern jungles of Madrango when his planeload of arms had crashed, although one had died of snakebite just before they got out.

  So memories helped to stave off madness — memories and the dream of escape. There was no rush. He would take his time. He studied his prison carefully until he knew the layout. He memorized every niche and crack in the walls, studied the jungle paths and made elaborate escape plans, which he drew on the dirt walls and floors of his box so he could revise them. The cell window was easy. Time and erosion had crumbled the wall around the bars.

  A little work with sticks he could smuggle back to his box could work it loose. From outside he carefully studied the face of the prison. It was old and rotten. Climbing the sheer wall to the top of the citadel would be a breeze. He had learned that lesson well from Cirillo.

  It was a day he would never forget and he played and replayed it in his mind.

  Hatcher had clung to the rock as if it were a magnet while the wind tore at his clothes and pulled at his bleeding fingers. If he could have, he would have dug a hole in that rock and crawled in. He was seventeen years old and petrified.

  It was not a mountain — no way you could have called it a mountain. It was a spear, a slender spear a hundred feet high with a flat top and sheer sides, snuggled against the foothills of the Green Mountains, three hours from Boston. And what had started out as a warm clear-skied September day had suddenly turned ugly.

  Cirillo was ten feet above him, inching like a spider up the face of the cliff. Cirillo had no equipment. No rope. No axe. Just a canteen and a small bag of resin, which he had attached to the back of his belt. Free climbing, he called it, and the only way to start vas to do it.

  Before starting, Cirillo had stood looking up the rock face.

  ‘This looks good,’ he said. ‘Not too high for a beginner.’

  ‘You talkin’ about me goin’ up that?’ Hatcher had said with an edge of panic in his voice.

  ‘Gotta start somewhere.’

  I don’t gotta start anywhere,’ he answered.

  ‘That’s right,’ answered Cirillo, ‘it takes a little guts.’

  He had laid another resin bag at the base of the cliff.

  Then Cirillo ran his fingers across the perpendicular face of it until he found a small fissure. He dipped his fingers in the resin bag, blew the excess resin off them, and started feeling his way up, clambering hand over hand, foot over foot, looking like a giant crab as he went up the cliff by his fingertips and toe tips, using cracks and ridges to haul himself up. The kid watched in awe.

  ‘You’re nuts,’ the kid said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What happens if you run out of cracks?’

  ‘You fall.’

  ‘Great, just great!’ Hatcher said.

  Cirillo kept going, his muscular arms bulging as he worked his way laboriously up the cliff.. Hatcher watched, began to feel embarrassed. He walked close to the cliff and ran his hands tentatively over its surface, feeling its ridges, cracks and tiny ledges. Finally he picked up the bag of resin, attached it to his belt and, copying Cirillo, started painfully up the wall.

  ‘Don’t be in a hurry and don’t look down,’ Cirillo said quietly. ‘The ground ain’t goin’ anyplace.’

  Hatcher had started up, his fingertips aching, his toes aching, his stomach aching. An hour later he was forty feet up the side, hugging the spear like a found child hugging its mother.

  Cirillo was near the dead end, the ledge at the top of the cliff that projected out over his head.

  ‘I can’t go any farther,’ Hatcher’s wobbly voice yelled. ‘Can’t find anything to get hold of.’

  ‘To your left, kid,’ Cirillo yelled back. ‘A little farther . . up a coupla inches . . . there!’

  Hatcher’s bleeding fingers found a split in the rocks barely deep enough to get a fingernail in.

  ‘Not enough,’ he yelled back, still hugging, his eyes closed.

  ‘It was good enough for me,’ yelled Cirillo, ‘and my fingers’re twice the size of yours.’

  Hatcher dug his fingers in, scraped dirt out of the tiny ledge, made a crevice deep enough to slowly pull himself up another six inches. Fear was bile in his throat.

  That’s when it had started getting darker. The clouds blew in on a cold, biting wind that carried with it the dampness of rain.

  The wind picked up, battering him. He could feel his fingers trembling.

  ‘It’s turning bad, kid,’ Cirillo yelled. ‘Pick it up, keep movin’.’

  ‘Can’t . .

  ‘Bullshit. Get your ass in gear or you’re gonna be nuthin’ but a puddle.’

  ‘Shit,’ was all Hatcher could manage. His fingertips were raw and bleeding and his toes ached as they had never ached before. His arms trembled with exertion. Sweat stung his eyes and tickled the corners of his mouth.

  He was hanging on for dear life. The first drops of rain had begun to pelt Cirillo’s face and panic began to gnaw at him, too. But he couldn’t let the kid know that.

  Cirillo was at the overhang, he reached up and slowly crawled the fingers of one hand toward the edge, stretching out as far as he could until he very cautiously reached around the edge and felt for a finger hold. His aching fingertips found a small trench. He dug at it, making sure it would hold him, then pushed himself up and out and swung free of the face of the wall. He hung there by one arm, staring down at the kid, who clung to the wall, pressing against it like a piece of moss.

  Cirillo switched hands. Hanging with his right arm, he extended his left toward the kid.

  ‘C’mon, another six feet, I gotcha.’

  Hatcher inched his way up, snatching a peek at Cirillo and then closing his eyes and feeling for another finger hold. Finally his head bumped the overhang. No place else to go.

  ‘Grab my hand, kid,’ Cirillo said.

  Hatcher looked at him through terror-stricken eyes, stared at the fingertips wiggling an invitation to him.

  ‘Trust me,’ Cirillo said.

  The kid had never trusted anyone before. He started to look back toward the ground.

  ‘Don’t — look down,’ Cirillo said quietly but sternly, and the kid closed his eyes and clung on for dear life.

  ‘Gimme your hand, kid,’ Cirillo ordered. Hatcher reached out very slowly, stretching toward the cop’s bulging arm. He felt Cirillo’s callused fingertips, felt his hand slide across his palm, felt the powerful fingers enclose his wrist.

  ‘Okay,’ said Cirillo, ‘swing free.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Do it now, I can’t hang on here forever.’

  The kid closed his eyes, swallowed, and freed his other hand. He was hanging in midair with nothing below him but space. Cirillo gritted his teeth and slowly lifted the kid’s dead weight.

  ‘Okay,’ Cirillo whispered, ‘hang around my neck.’

  Hatcher reached up and wrapped his arms around Cirillo’s thick, bulging neck as the cop chinned himself on the ledge.

  ‘God Almighty,’ he whispered as Cirillo hauled himself over the lip of the ledge and rolled to safety. Hatcher lay on his face, his breath blowing little billows of dirt away from his mouth. His heart was beating so hard his teeth hurt. Then suddenly he started laughing hysterically.

  ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘we’re alive! We’re a-fuckin’ live!’ />
  He had confronted and cheated death, a new and seductive experience for him.

  ‘I did it!’ the kid yelled at the forest and it echoed back:

  I did it!’

  ‘Just remember, kid,’ Cirillo said. ‘Ya can’t quit in this life. Quit and yer dead. Ya take a job, ya do it. Ya don’t hold back nothin’, ya put it all on the line. Ya don’t leave yourself any outs.’

  Hatcher turned to Cirillo. ‘Let’s do another one,’ he said eagerly.

  And Cirillo had smiled.

  ‘We still gotta go back down,’ he answered quietly.

  Yes, Hatcher thought, these old walls would be a piece of cake. Getting through the jungle, that was the tough part.

  Then the rains came. The face of the prison became a slimy river of muck. The rainy days became rainy weeks and then months. With each passing day, climbing the wall became more treacherous. he drew rough maps on the floor, trying to remember directions and distances from the trip upriver. And finally he accepted the reality that without weapons or even a compass, without maps or any knowledge of the area, escape was suicidal. As the rains continued, the challenge slowly faded.

  And so he imposed upon himself a daily regimen:

  calisthenics to keep his muscles from atrophying; mental exercises to keep from going mad, although gradually madness and sanity became one.

  To postpone insanity, he thought about the women he had known. Sometimes names eluded him and he associated them with events in his life. He tried to reconstruct his first high school romance — what was her name, Haley? He remembered touching her the first time, in the backseat darkness of Cirillo’s Chevy, groping, feeling her soft down and feeling her rise to his touch, moving his hand to her breasts, those soft buds just beginning to bloom. He was terrified, she was impassioned. But after the first time, their fervor approached insanity. They did it everywhere, in the darkness of the balcony of the town’s only movie house, rolled in blankets in the green Massachusetts forest, and once, late in the afternoon, in the girls’ locker room at the high school, abandoned for the day, the tin rattle of the locker door providing rhythmic cadence as they stood against it, thrashing in the agony of youthful passion.

  Then he had gone off to the academy and she had fallen madly in love with the high school wrestling champ.

  The loss of his innocence haunted his fevered memory as his mind wandered freely in time, back to the alleys of Boston, where Cirillo had nabbed him. Hatcher was a tough, crafty street orphan, and Cirillo a just-as-tough cop who had taken him in hand and changed his life forever. It had been Cirillo who had forced him to go to high school, challenged him not only to climb walls but to show his best, and finally arranged the appointment to Annapolis, where Harry Sloan had discovered him. Sloan. Hatcher’s torment was that he could no longer imagine life without that treacherous intrusion, could not remember the precise moment when he had traded truth for expediency, had traded light and beauty for the shadows of the shadow warrior, and in his desolation, Hatcher, like many men and women in less desperate conditions, futilely cried out to relive that moment and change his destiny.

  At first, hate was all Hatcher had. Sitting in his box at night, he would imagine every conceivable kind of torture he could inflict on Harry Sloan. But as time passed he began to look elsewhere, to shift the blame to someone else. But in the end it always came back to the same thing. Sloan had betrayed him, had set him up and condemned him to a living death.

  Cirillo had been Hatcher’s salvation, Sloan his destruction.

  And yet the cord was difficult to break. Sloan had been more than a friend, he had been Hatcher’s mentor, had exposed Hatcher to experts in every conceivable field of lawful and unlawful endeavor, from lock-picking to murder, had taught him how to survive under the worst conditions. In a strange irony, Sloan had prepared him to survive Los Boxes.

  Yes, Sloan had delivered his promises. His silver tongue promised adventure and romance, spiced with words like ‘patriot’ and ‘duty’ and ‘country’. Well, there had been plenty of both. There had been a lot of good times. Tokyo, Singapore, Manila.

  Hong Kong and Bangkok.

  He always thought of them together, remembering Cohen and the weekends when he would fly to Hong Kong from Bangkok just to get away from the hell of the river wars for a little while.

  And the special suite he had at the Peninsula in Kowloon, shared only with Daphne.

  God, Daphne. What a memory - Was she still alive? Was she still as beautiful as ever? Daffy, he had called her and it fit.

  There was also Sam-Sam Sam and Joe Cockroach and the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the secret lair of the Chinese river pirates. And there was Tollie Fong, the triad assassin who had sworn a blood oath against Hatcher for killing his father, his uncle and four of his most trusted gangsters.

  He could never go back to Hong Kong and Bangkok. Too many ghosts. Too many enemies. Too many unsaid good-byes.

  And so Hatcher always thought of Sloan with mixed feelings. The bond between mentor and student was almost as primal as that between father and son. In his misery, his feelings toward Sloan wavered. One day he thought of Sloan with affection, the next he damned him to hell.

  What he eventually learned was that there was no precise moment when his values changed. When he met Sloan he was young and impressionable, easily charmed by Sloan’s omnipresent smile, and seduced by his soft-spoken promises. It was what Sloan did best, spinning images of mysterious worlds with that silver tongue of his. In the end, Hatcher had to accept the responsibility for what he was and where he was, a house of his own making.

  Life in Los Boxes became Hatcher’s penance.

  Then one night he heard a scratching on the wall. He thought it was a roach or perhaps a rat until a small stick punched through the wall, augured for a moment, and was withdrawn.

  ‘Psst.’

  Hatcher leaned over and put his ear close to the tiny hole. And heard a voice, an ancient voice, hoarse with disuse. ‘One twenty-seven?’ the voice said.

  126

  Hatcher would not answer, could not answer. Paranoia and fear prevented any response. Suppose it was a guard, testing him? He would not risk having his tongue ripped out. He leaned against the wall, his ear against the pinpoint, listening.

  Again the hoarse whisper: ‘One twenty-seven?’

  His mouth was dry with suspicion. He sat for a moment, then he coughed.

  ‘Ah, very good, very clever,’ the voice whispered in Spanish. ‘I am one twenty-six. I knew your predecessor for many years. He was a journalist in my country. A famous journalist. Green berries and belly worms got him.’

  My God, to hear a voice, a friendly voice, was like a postponement of his madness, and finally Hatcher asked himself, What good is a tongue, anyhow, if you don’t use it?

  ‘I am here,’ he whispered back, and immediately, reflexively, stuffed his fist in his mouth.

  ‘Ah, ’whispered 126. ‘Salvation.’

  ‘I am Hatcher, what is your name?’

  ‘Immaterial, immaterial,’ 126 said in flawless English. ‘There is no parole from here, no pardon, no escape. I am one twenty-six. I will be one twenty—six for eternity. You are one twenty-seven.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since God created cockroaches.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘A lie for the convenience of the state.’

  ‘And I, too,’ said Hatcher.

  ‘To give such a lie relevance is to perpetuate it. Why I am here, why you are here, that is no longer material. By now even the courts have forgotten us. And if nobody else cares, what matter is it to ourselves? It is, quite simply, a lie.’

  ‘It helps me to think about it. It gives me a sticking place.’

  ‘There is no vindication in hatred. Besides, we are all products of our own devils.’

  ‘I’m not sure I agree with that. My devil had a silver tongue.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ answered 126. ‘Show me a devil who doesn’t. Fo
rget hatred, it will drive you mad.’

  ‘If something else doesn’t first.’

  And so in the ensuing months and years, Hatcher had decided that if he ever saw Sloan again, perhaps he could forgive him. Forgive but never trust him again. He knew Sloan very well, well enough to know that Sloan would betray him again if he thought it was expedient.

  ‘Did you kill?’ 126 asked one day -

  ‘Yes, but it was my duty.’

  ‘Many crimes are committed in the name of duty.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Hatcher said.

  ‘Listen, when one shares the secret of murder, then one is guilty of murder.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Sometimes we can excuse anything in the name of patriotism and so an outcast can only find redemption by claiming to be a patriot. Are you a patriot, one twenty- seven?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Yes. I think I was.’

  ‘Well, you are certainly an outcast.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a fact.’

  ‘Then it stands to reason that you are probably not a patriot. But it’s all relative. I am here because I thought I was a patriot. Then I discovered one man’s patriot is another man’s traitor. . . . What I thought was an act of patriotism turned out to be an act of murder.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Hatcher replied.

  ‘Then you have had the experience.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, of course. You see what I mean. Righteous indignation comes much easier to the patriot than it does to the felon.’

  Hatcher’s lessons came hard. He forgot that in the hell of Los Boxes the rules never changed. One day, he had been working at the edge of the jungle, preparing one of the endless vegetable gardens that surrounded the citadel, when a wild boar had suddenly lunged from the underbrush and charged him. It was enormous, a hulking, stinking beast with curved tusks and insane eyes, snorting and hooking as it ran toward Hatcher.

  Hatcher took its first charge with the hoe, smacking it on the snout, but the beast merely backed off a few yards and charged again. Hatcher screamed for the guards as he parried tusk with hoe. The large tusks could easily have torn out his stomach, opened up a leg, ripped away his throat.