Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-three.
I realize I’m shouting, fists balled. The wind outside is howling away, a hymn to this cracked-open moment, this reckoning, many years too late.
Johan comes back to the table and sits down. “I’m sorry, Carrie. You should never have had to beg. You should never have been dragged into any of this.”
I sit back down, too.
“It is your right to know,” he says. “But—I…I don’t understand why your mum didn’t tell you the whole story.”
My stomach is beginning to knot. “You mean she knows? Because she specifically told me she didn’t.”
Johan sighs. “She’s known for years, Carrie.
When I was pardoned and sent home, the first thing I did was try to contact you.
But you were listed at hospitals all over the country—all over the world.
I had no idea which one you were at. Have you ever tried contacting a surgeon via a hospital switchboard? ”
I stare down at the table. Mum’s known for years.
“So after I called a few hospitals, I contacted your mother. I found her number in two minutes. I told her I’d been pardoned, that I was back in Sweden.
I told her everything. But when I asked for your contact details, she refused.
She said you’d worked far too hard at putting your life back together to have me swan back in again.
She told me you’d finally met someone else and I wasn’t to jeopardize that. ”
“She decided that? On my behalf?”
He watches me keenly. “It was hard to argue, if I’m honest. Who was I to send in a hand grenade when you’d finally moved on? She said you were happy, at last.”
I laugh, hollowly. There is, apparently, no limit to my mother’s capacity to steer my life. Mum and all the other people who’ve lied to me. Withheld or drip fed me information on a need-to-know basis. “And you told her the whole thing? The methamphetamine part, too?”
“Yes. She said she’d tell you in due course, but not now. Not while you were in the early stages of a relationship.”
“She never told me. She never said a word. And thirty minutes ago she told me quite categorically that she did not know why you brought methamphetamine into Thailand, or who for.”
“I suppose she felt it should come from me,” he says tiredly. “But, Carrie—I imagine she never told you back then because she felt like she’d caused you enough harm. Not to mention the fact that you had premature twins.”
He watches me for a moment. “Of course the methamphetamine wasn’t your mum’s fault. But none of this would have happened if she hadn’t asked me to deliver those antibiotics in the first place. My own mother still clings to that. And I imagine yours still holds herself partly to blame.”
“All these people deciding how I should be managed,” I say bitterly. “How I should be protected.”
Johan says nothing, but I can see his guilt.
“What about Bangkok?” I ask after a moment. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on when I visited you in prison?”
“I was owned back then. When I said your mum and Prawat needed to back down, I really meant it. The people who were controlling me…” Johan pauses, and I see the pain of remembering.
“They got word to me that if your mum and Prawat didn’t back off, they’d tell the Thai police that I’d moved multiple shipments of yaba over the border in recent weeks.
They said they’d provide all the evidence. ”
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly. And I’m sure you know the death penalty still exists in Thailand. It was quite literally life or death for me. That’s why I sent you home, and that’s why I cut you off.”
There’s a long pause. The wind moans its stories; the walls of the cabin creak.
“Why didn’t you tell me in January, in Stockholm? You weren’t in any danger then.”
“Because you clearly didn’t know anything about your mum. I wasn’t willing to blow up your life yet again.”
I point out that my life blew up the moment I found him on Roof, and he smiles, but it doesn’t last.
I close my eyes. “Look. None of these details really matter. Not in the grand scheme of things. The thing I need to know—I have to know—is who were you carrying the drugs for, and why. Please tell me, Johan. I can’t take another moment of this.”
“I carried them for someone who needed a hand,” Johan says quietly.
“It was actually a very small quantity, really; I believe it went over the threshold for personal use by about ten tiny pink pills. But they don’t mess around in Thailand.
After I was arrested I learned that that drug has even caused kids’ deaths.
It’s an awful thing. A real scourge. Is that right? Scourge?”
I nod.
“I did not understand how serious the drug was. I thought it was Adderall. That’s how it was explained to me. The local equivalent of Adderall, the guy said. I didn’t think it was any worse than the antibiotics I was carrying for your mother. I assume you know what Adderall is?”
“Of course.”
“The problem was it wasn’t Adderall. I did wonder when I saw the unmarked little bag; it seemed odd next to the packaged medications I was carrying for your mum.
But—and I can’t stress this enough—it all felt so legit, so well-organized, I didn’t pursue that thought.
I was told to drop off both deliveries in the same place to make it quicker and easier for me; they were going to send a courier for the ‘Adderall.’ But then that woman appeared and took the pills from my bag.
She was offensively charming and well-dressed; she caught me totally off guard.
Just like they planned. The whole thing had begun to feel slightly off, but it was her that made me worry. ”
“I thought she was your girlfriend,” I tell him. “I’ve spent years trying to remember her face. What she was wearing.”
I watch him wrestle with something. “I have to be honest, Carrie: that’s bothered me. You knew how we’d been. You and me. Did you really think I could have just forgotten and started sleeping with someone else?”
I almost laugh. “You were bundled into a riot van and imprisoned for drug trafficking on our wedding day. Anything seemed possible after that.”
He nods resignedly.
“So how did they find you? Why didn’t they arrest you until we were on Koh Samui?”
“Just before we flew down to the islands, they finally arrested the guy the drugs were taken to. Some Taiwanese guy, a trader who worked in the Bangkok financial district—he’d been on their radar a long time.
He stayed up all night using this godforsaken drug so he could work the financial markets in the US and Europe after working all day on the Asian markets.
His main supplier had a big shipment on its way, but he just needed, like, a week’s supply to get him through.
“I was in the right place at the right time. A guy I was working with in Myanmar asked me to take some ‘Adderall’ over for a trusted friend, and I said yes because Adderall’s…
well, it’s everywhere. It’s legit. My cousin in Canada’s been on it for decades.
It really helps with his ADHD. It wasn’t simply that I thought it was legit, though.
The truth is: I had my own agenda. I have to own that—I really just wanted to help the guy in Myanmar.
He’d sent his team in to get us out of a hairy situation with an organized crime syndicate who didn’t like us diving near their opium export routes.
He even got us upgraded—not just to better hotel rooms but to a whole other hotel, which felt like the most luxurious place I’d ever stayed after the shithole we’d been at before.
Stuff like that goes a long way when you haven’t had a day off in weeks. I wanted to repay him.”
“But I don’t understand—who was he? Did he work for the windfarm company that hired you?”
“No, he was our fixer. He lived locally, helped us organize stuff on the ground. Fixers iron out problems, make introductions, translate. But unfortunately this guy, who had been nothing but helpful, introduced me to one of the most dangerous drugs in Asia and solved only the problem of some trader’s drug dependence.
Never mind that I got twenty-five years. ”
He stops for a while, staring out at the dark sea. A boat is making its way through the blackness toward the mainland, obediently skirting the glowing green buoys. I get up and add a log to the fire, even though it doesn’t need one.
“But I must remember that I didn’t have to serve twenty-five years. It was a little over five.” He exhales slowly. “I’d be dead otherwise. I wouldn’t have survived.”
This was something I often heard from patients in clinic.
The pain will kill me. I can’t go on like this; I’m at the end of my rope.
But of course death is seldom the clinical outcome of psychological suffering; we are wired for survival.
Johan would have had to endure that mental agony day after day, year after year, with no way out except by his own hand.
He carries on. “The fixer in Myanmar, he actually wasn’t one of the bad guys. He was just a young guy like me, doing his job. But part of that job was keeping his boss happy, and his boss was definitely a bad guy.
“And it was as simple as that. One morning he got a message from his boss saying that one of their associates in Thailand needed a small shipment of yaba, to be delivered within forty-eight hours. And there I was, flying to Bangkok the very next day—it was so easy and straightforward. I already had your mum’s antibiotics; what was wrong with a bit of Adderall thrown into the mix, too?
“You can’t say no to bosses like his,” Johan says, sadly.
“Have I forgiven him? Of course not. But he was just doing what he was told. It’s how that world works.
The evil’s always at the top of the ladder; everyone below complies out of fear.
Men like his boss are more than capable of having noncompliant employees eliminated. ”