Escape or Die
Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, CambodiaSaturday, April 4, 2009
“Italian! You come here right now!”
The prisoner obeys. But he obeys slowly. A little too slowly.
He’s called Kasper. He’s an Italian prisoner. Kasper has been his code name for a long time, his battle name in a life filled with battles.
Now his only battle is to stay alive.
The Kapo shouts again. He has a hoarse voice. Among his powers, barking is the least dangerous. He narrows his eyes and growls out orders that split the silence of the already sweltering early morning.
“The Kapo” is the name Kasper has given him because he acts exactly like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps. His Cambodian name is of course different. And unpronounceable.
He’s a prisoner too, the Kapo is, but of a higher category. He helps the guards manage the camp. The job offers some satisfactions. For example, he’s allowed to beat lower ranking prisoners and does so regularly. With pleasure. And he can get money from them in exchange for protection and favors.
He tried that with Kasper.
One night he and some other kapos and an armed guard came to teach Kasper a lesson. They’d done this before, during his first days in the prison, by way of “welcoming” him to Prey Sar. At the time, Kasper was still in bad shape, hardly able to stand up. They used rubber-coated iron pipes, which cause great pain but no open wounds. As part of the “welcome,” they broke his nose and mauled his left ear. They looked satisfied. “Bravo, Italian,” someone said. Two more kicks. They were laughing.
Having learned how things worked in the prison, Kasper had prepared himself accordingly. When the men who had beaten him that first night came back, he was ready. The match was brief. They gathered up their injured and withdrew. But that was certainly not the end of it. The following day, they tossed him into solitary confinement, into a “tiger cage.”
A tiger cage is a ten-foot-deep hole, closed at the top with a metal grate through which they pass you shitty food and shitty water. When it rains, the hole floods, and then you must swim, along with the rats and cockroaches. Eventually you have to press your face against the grate and hope the water doesn’t rise any higher. A real nightmare for any prisoner, and the worst possible nightmare for someone who suffers from claustrophobia.
They left him in there for days, but ever since they let him out, they’ve steered clear of him. According to Chou Chet, the guard who’s been protecting him for some time, they’ve nicknamed Kasper “the Animal.” Chou Chet has explained that the money Kasper receives from his family in Italy will soon enable him, Chou Chet, to change his life for the better. “We’re friends,” he tells Kasper, in English.
“Friends, for sure,” Kasper repeats.
Kasper doesn’t want to die. He wants to walk away from Prey Sar on his own two feet and forget everything about it. Including the brute who barks at him.
The Kapo knows a few words of English, enough to communicate with the non-Cambodian prisoners, who constitute a tiny minority: a few Thais, two Chinese, a small group of Vietnamese. Among five hundred poor wretches, Kasper’s the only Westerner.
“Go to entrance.” The Kapo’s already pointing in the proper direction. “News for you.”
Kasper looks him straight in the eyes. Only for a moment. He doesn’t want a confrontation. Not today, of all days. Today everything has to go smoothly.
They’re both naked from the waist up. Both sweating, given the temperature in the 100s and the humidity that crawls under your skin. The Kapo’s checkered krama scarf is wrapped around his head. He stares at Kasper. His mouth barely moves when he repeats, “Go, Italian.”
Kasper heads for his “news.” He believes he knows what the news will be.
So here we are. Maybe it’s really going to happen. It is happening, on this Saturday morning in April, and he can scarcely believe it. He drags his Ho Chi Minh sandals and keeps a tight hold, both hands, on a precious nylon sack, hiding it as best he can. It’s camouflaged, wrapped up in a T-shirt.
He tries to put on his best mask. The time has come. He’s got to make it.
He’s got to.
He doesn’t want to end up like the others. Like the ones he’s seen in the past months and months. The tortured. The stomped-shattered-mangled. The drowned wretches facedown in the ricefields.
Kasper doesn’t want his life to end that way; he wants to go home to Italy. Today’s stakes are all or nothing.
But if he’s never to leave Prey Sar, if that’s his fate, then he’ll meet it like a soldier.
He squeezes the camouflaged bundle in his hands. Yes indeed, he will cause some shit before they take him out. Because, on this Saturday, April 4, 2009, dying seems preferable to the hell he’s been thrown into.
Whatever happens, one way or the other, Kasper’s leaving by the main door. Today and forever.
2
373 Days Ago: The Capture
Koh Kong, Cambodia-Thailand BorderWednesday, March 26, 2008
Clancy checks the outside mirror and the rearview mirror and wants to know how much farther they have to go.
“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that,” Kasper replies. “The third in an hour.” He passes a truck and gets back in his lane.
“So we’re getting closer all the time.”
“About twenty kilometers.”
Clancy takes off his sunglasses, blows on them, cleans them. “Nobody’s following us anyway.”
Good. With any luck, the whole thing’s bullshit, Kasper thinks. Nothing but a false alarm. Or maybe some stupid fucking April Fool’s joke, a few days early. But Bun Sareun’s voice on the telephone sounded serious. The Cambodian senator wasn’t joking.
“Leave town now.”
Not one word more. Only those three, repeated several times, in the tone of someone giving Life Advice.
Leave town now.
When Kasper hung up and told his American friend Clancy, he called the senator back. Not many words, zero doubts. “We have to get out of here. We can try to figure out what the fuck’s happening later.”
They filled two bags, grabbed two pistols, and took all the cash they kept in the safe in their house, roughly seventy thousand dollars. Now this nest egg is lying with Kasper’s change of underwear at the bottom of his black bag. Clancy’s bag is the same military duffel he’s had ever since he was an energetic young CIA analyst. It probably reminds him of years that won’t come again.
They left Phnom Penh hoping the whole thing
