“We—ah, no,” Johan’s father said. His legs were covered in swollen mosquito bites, pasted sporadically with antihistamine cream. “We thought the money must be coming from you.”
Mum got out her notebook and wrote something down. “Not us,” she said briskly.
“You have sent him nothing?” Johan’s mother asked. She was looking at me with something akin to disgust. “Nothing at all?”
“Until three days ago, I couldn’t even get in to see him. I’ve had nothing but closed doors since he was arrested. I’d do anything to be able to help him, but the Swedish Embassy won’t talk to me. Nobody will,” I added bitterly.
Mum put a steadying hand on my arm. “We have a charity called Prisoners Abroad in the UK. They can arrange money for British nationals who’ve been imprisoned. Do you have something like that in Sweden? Could the money be coming from there?”
“No,” Johan’s father said. “Or, if there is, they do not know about Johan yet. And besides, it sounds like he is getting a very generous amount.”
Mum watched him. “Right,” she said. “Well, that’s something we can try to figure out. For now I’m going to go and negotiate with the guards. It’s meant to be no more than two visitors per day, but I’ll try to get you all in.”
Within a few minutes she had pulled it off. Johan’s parents would visit him first, then me and his brother, Lucas. I think the guard she’d shouted at a few days earlier was actually quite taken with her, which was typical.
Mum went off to the toilet while Kerstin and Fredrik went through with the first group of visitors, and I sat down at one of the long tables with Lucas.
“Please,” I said. I spread my fingers out on the table, like an offering. “You guys seem to know so much more than me. What is going on? What happened?”
“Johan is arrested for taking methamphetamine into this country,” Lucas told me, without any hesitation. “From Myanmar.” His voice was factual, almost to the point of detachment; he had no more idea how to process this information than I did.
Locally, the drug was known asyaba. It had come up in Mum’s list of hypotheses but even she had agreed it was not the sort of thing a middle-class kid from Sweden would be mixed up with.
The drug was catastrophically addictive and its infiltration into Thailand had been devastating. It wasyaba, Lucas said, in his hesitantEnglish, that had sparked the government’s war on drugs in 2003. Thousands of people gunned down without any judicial process—simply eliminated. Many had no connection whatsoever with the drug.
“But that is how seriously the government is to take it,” he said. “The drug is spreading across the country like fires. Children are now being addicted to it. Many people are dying. The government wants to protect their peoples. Johan has chosen the worst drug.”
“But Lucas,” I interjected. “You know him. Do you really believe it?”
Lucas didn’t respond.
Johan had dropped the shipment off in Chinatown the morning after he flew in, he said, but the police only learned of his part when they arrested the man to whom the drugs were ultimately delivered. Like Mum told me, they hadn’t been able to find him until the night before our wedding, when he’d withdrawn cash from an ATM down on Koh Samui.
Within twenty-four hours, the convoy had arrived on the beach and taken Johan away.
“He insists that he did it,” Lucas said. “Definitely. He was not a—what is the word?Droga mula.”
“Drug mule?”
“Ja, yes, drug mule. Johan says he knew what he was doing, definitely.”
His body crumpled, the energy of information sharing now spent. “I do not understand it, too,” he said quietly. “I know my brother. He is not this type of person. Never.”
We sat in silence while I thought about Johan’s late arrival on our first night. The strangeness of his energy and mood the next day in Chinatown, his insistence that we go to Nana, rife with prostitutes and prowling men. What was going on in those first twenty-four hours? Had the story about the dive permits been a smoke screen?
“There were no clues?” Lucas prompted. “Nothing happening that was strange?”
I told him what I remembered.
“I think the problem with the diving permits was real,” Lucas said. “He was emailing us about this problem, too.”
“It has to have been. I saw the email from the fixer in Myanmar, telling him everything was sorted. But I suppose…” I hesitated. It felt like the first real betrayal to say this out loud. “I suppose he could have used the permit thing as a red herring for the real cause of his anxiety. There was something else in the fixer’s email. At the end, something like, ‘No other problems.’ I wonder about that.”
Lucas sat back in his chair. There was a great heaviness in his body, which I knew well. Like me, he was finding it harder with the passing of each hour to believe that Johan was innocent—that the man we both loved was someone we could trust.
—
Kerstin and Fredrik returned soon after, and suddenly Lucas and I were in the relatives’ queue. Lucas seemed unable to respond to my small talk, so I stopped. This young man, no matter how calm he might have appeared earlier, was fraying at the edges, too.
