Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  LIFE AND DEATH SENTENCES

  In memory of Chaovaret Jaruboon, 1950-2012,

  a gentleman, a rock ‘n’ roller, a drinking buddy,

  and Thailand’s last executioner

  The executioner leaned over the barrel of the sub-machine-gun mounted on a wooden tripod bolted to the floor. He closed his left eye to focus on the target with his right. Then he adjusted the barrel so the target was a perfect bull’s eye in the gun sight. From this close he could not possibly miss.

  He wrapped his index and middle fingers around the trigger. In those two digits he held all the power that anyone can hold in this world; of life and death, of the government, police and courts, and the power to take revenge for murder victims and their relatives; always believing that he was saving many more lives by taking these ones, because he was a good Samaritan, not a legal assassin, or the guilt would have driven him insane long ago.

  Each time he leaned over the gun and wrapped his fingers around the trigger, that surge of power and responsibility made his shoulders hunch and the follicles on his scalp tingle.

  He squeezed the trigger nine times. That was the number of shots it took to kill most inmates. The bullets tore through the target painted on a white curtain and sank into the sandbags lined up against the wall.

  Excellent. The gun had not jammed or misfired. Everything was in working order.

  He stood up. He got a fresh magazine of fifteen bullets from the locked filing cabinet in the corner of the execution chamber. Each of the bullets he inspected by hand and with the trained eyes which had sent seventy-nine men and two women to their rebirths from this small chamber on the grounds of Bang Kwang Central Prison.

  Boonchu could not afford to make any mistakes today. Today was special. Today, he’d told his wife, was going to be an “elephant fair”: a very big day. The prime minister had ordered the first executions to be carried out in the government’s “War on Drugs” of 2003. Among the prison’s populace of seven thousand inmates a rumor had spread like HIV, making its way to his office in an hour, that this was going to be the biggest bloodbath in the jail’s history.

  AFTER CHECKING THE gun, he returned to his office, feeling a few centimeters taller and a dozen years younger. The in-tray on his desk was already full. One envelope was stuffed with bills, a kickback from a mobster who ran one of the illegal sweatshops in the prison. Beneath his desk, Boonchu pocketed the bills, wondering what all these rich kids would think if they knew their brand-name trainers had been produced by Asian inmates, working seven days a week, for the equivalent of ten dollars a month. Would they find that as amusing as he did? Probably not. Outside these prison walls, topped with brambles of barbed wire and manned by guards with hunting telescopes on their rifles, gallows humor inspired a lot more grimaces than guffaws.

  Also on his desk was a death certificate for an African drug trafficker who had died the night before. As a former guard, removing corpses from the cells had once been his job. Since the bodies could not be moved at night, they had to wait until morning. By then rigor mortis had set in.

  He read over the death certificate, remembering all the times he’d had to use a hammer to break the frozen-stiff fingers of an inmate before they could be fingerprinted. Each hammer blow, he imagined, had toughened him up so he felt like he was encased in concrete, not flesh, his bones reinforced with metal bars. For the past three decades, he had looked out at the world through this invisible cage no one else could see.

  That was nothing special in the penitentiary. All the guards and prison officials had built up their own fortifications to put a wall between their personal lives and the squalor of what was the size of a town built on violence, vice and pestilence. Some used alcohol as a moat, others gave themselves to adultery and gambling, Boonchu turned to his family and took up cooking.

  The official cause of death was a drug overdose, but the prisoner could have been killed by another inmate or a guard. In his early years as a guard Boonchu had tried launching a few investigations into human rights abuses, but they never went anywhere and neither did his career. Once he’d learned how to keep his mouth shut and become a yes man he had risen through the ranks, until he was now the prison’s Chief of Foreign Affairs in charge of overseeing the eight hundred and twenty foreign prisoners.

  Since the Africans had dark skin like him and were doled out the worst treatment by the guards and the other inmates, he arranged “contact visits” with their wives and other discreet favors. Using the kickbacks from mobsters, he made anonymous donations to an NGO that purchased medical supplies for them. What good had it done? The idiots kept winding up in prison and dying of drug overdoses, or killing each other, didn’t they? It was useless. Fuck it and fuck them. From now on he’d keep the money for his daughters’ educations. That was for the greater good. All he’d been doing was bribing his conscience, like the gangsters bribed him.

  From 10 a.m. until noon, the warden had organized a series of interviews for him with journalists, mostly from the local press. As usual, the warden had written out a series of instructions to follow: “Toe the party line. Repeat what the prime minister said, ‘Drug dealers have been cruel to our children so we must be cruel to them.’ Praise the director of the Corrections Department and myself for all the improvements in the jail, such as correspondence courses. Do not cast any doubts on the death penalty.”

  Every time he had to do any press he was gagged by similar orders. Once, just once, he wanted to speak out, to say how he really felt. Behind those concrete expressions he wore and inside that cage of bones dented by a thousand hammer blows, was incarcerated a boy, a prisoner, a different self, who wanted to be heard, too; but he was always overruled by the authorities who made him repeat the same anecdotes to the same reporters that he’d been repeating for years now. Sometimes he wondered if he even believed himself anymore. How many times could he repeat the same statements before they became lies?

  His imposing size and the way he swaggered into the office used for interviews made it a little too tempting for most of the journalists to see him as anything but a grownup version of a schoolyard bully. That tension in the shoulders and jaw made it look like he was always about to fly off the handle—tension that worked its way out in different quirks and gestures: cracking his knuckles, grinding his molars, drumming his hands on the table to a rock song on the radio in the next office. None of the journalists could say with any certainty whether it was anger or anxiety that bubbled up to the surface of his skin and simmered there so his dark skin gleamed like polished mahogany. To confuse them even more, he alternated between mumbling while staring off into a corner of the room and speaking in such a formal tone that he sounded like a student reciting passages he’d memorized by rote to a teacher.

  In the background, an old cassette of his played rock standards by Elvis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochrane and Chuck Berry; these were the tunes he’d grown up with and used to learn English. At times, a favorite melody would make him smile and he’d drum his fingers on the desk, enjoying the music more than the interviews.

  He pulled himself away from “Summertime Blues” and turned to the journalist. “Let me give you an example of why the death sentence is necessary. I’ve only had to execute two women…” He looked off into the corner of the room. “Yes, two. It’s not easy, no, it’s not really easy to discuss.” Apologetically, he mumbled, “They had families and loved ones too.” He looked away again and his voice turned robotic. “But we have to face the unpleasant facts. Both of them deserved to die. One of them killed an infant, gutted the poor child like a fish, then packed her full of heroin and tried to carry her across the border into Malaysia. The other woman kidnapped a child. Her and her accomplice buried that boy alive and he choked to death on dirt. What can we do with people like this?”

  The reporter looked up from his notepad and across the long wooden desk where Boonchu, dressed in his beige uniform with black epaulettes and golden buttons, sat framed by a Thai flag, portraits
of Their Majesties the King and Queen, and a wall-mounted shrine with a Buddha image. “So you think these two women deserved to die?”

  He stared off into the corner again. Was there a lack of feeling in his voice or was that just resignation and boredom talking? “It’s not important what I think. It’s only important what the police and the courts and the judges say. In the end, they are the ones who decide. I have nothing to do with that process.”

  “So you don’t have any personal opinions on the subject of capital punishment?”

  He cracked his knuckles again. He twisted his lips from side to side. “I have no personal opinions, no, only what I just said that in certain cases capital punishment is necessary. If anything, I believe that we have saved many more lives by taking these ones, because…” He looked off into the corner of the room again. “Because I’m a good Samaritan doing a difficult job that many people resent. Other than that I let the legal experts decide. We must trust their superior judgment.”

  This was as much as his conscience would ever permit him to admit. To confess to any personal culpability, to even suggest that there was an element of choice at work, would be the first step in dismantling the life he had built, which was a different kind of prison: the job, the marriage, the thirty-year mortgage, the three daughters, and the past he never spoke of to anyone, not even his wife of thirty-five years.

  Throughout the interviews that day, he kept his hands folded over his enormous stomach. The press corps assumed he was ashamed of his beer belly.

  That was not it. Through an act of concentration and willpower he had learned from an abbot and meditation master at the temple where he ordained as a monk for nine days before his wedding, Boonchu directed all those arrows of stress and sorrow away from his head and heart to a place in his stomach where he did not have to think about them. There they remained, eating through his stomach lining. At first it was only upset stomachs and outbursts of gas. Later it was ulcers. Finally cancer.

  Not long before his death, just two years into his retirement, Boonchu’s stomach had swollen up to the size of a pregnant woman about to give birth to a ten-kilo tumor. The nurses thought he was hallucinating on painkillers when he kept crying out, “That Siamese fighting fish I swallowed has given birth to a hundred other fish that are tearing out my stomach. Please stop them,” but he was just remembering his childhood.

  AT AN AGE when the worst thing that could happen to most boys was falling off their bicycles, or falling out of a tree and breaking an arm, Boonchu was already running errands for the gangsters, drunkards and hitmen who converged at his father’s gambling den for Siamese fighting fish, which also doubled as the family home, where his father bred and trained the combatants himself. Behind their old wooden house, the backyard was filled with dozens of large earthenware urns containing the fry of the fighting fish. All over the house—even on the toilet tank—stood glass bottles, each containing a single fish. Pieces of cardboard separated the glass cells. This prevented them from going into a fighting frenzy when they spotted a rival, but could not stop the fish from trying to attack their own reflections in the glass.

  The creatures with the longer fins, named after a Chinese emperor’s robes, and the ones with the shorter fins who were trained to fight, came in the same iridescent shades of green and red, blue and purple as the soap bubbles he chased and popped in the backyard. The boy spent long hours watching his own reflection in the glass as the fish glided through his eyes and across his forehead, their fins unfurling like sails. He pushed his nose against the cold glass and puckered his lips to imitate them blowing bubbles. He gave them the sort of names that boys give to their cats and dogs and talked to them in a language he invented. But the pla gat (“biting fish”) remained as remote as a dream, floating in their private prisons. They only acknowledged him at feeding time when he fed them dried worms or living brine shrimp, and when he pressed a finger against the glass they would try to bite it.

  Even before he could read and write his father had taught him how to develop the fighters’ stamina by putting a male in with a female for every fifteen minutes every morning and evening so he could chase her around. To toughen their scales, he showed his son how to put Indian almond leaves in the water.

  In the backyard, under the shade of a jackfruit tree pregnant with fruit the size of cannonballs, the gamblers placed bets on dozens of fights going on simultaneously, the male combatants nipping at each other’s fins and scales for hours on end while the men sat around drinking, smoking and talking about things he barely understood. “If you put a gun in a woman’s cunt and pull the trigger, would the bullet exit through her tits, her mouth, or the top of her head?” “Depends really. You mean she’s laying on her back?” “Say I just fucked her and she’s not leaving fast enough.” Boonchu piped up with an expression he’d heard in the gambling den, “Mia dai mai seea hai tao lao hok (If my wife died it would be less of a shame than if I spilled my liquor),” and all the men cracked up.

  When not playing the joker, he served as the gopher, fetching beers and cigarettes for the gamblers. It was his job to release the losing fish into the canal behind the house and remove the dead ones from the jar whenever there was a kill, mostly in the first few minutes of the fight when the fish tried to tear each other’s gills off.

  The viciousness of these creatures went against everything their teacher was telling them about Buddhism at school. After the students stood at attention around the flagpole for the Thai national anthem and royal anthem, they had the morning prayer session, repeating the Buddhist sutra about how every creature is born, gets old, suffers and dies. Afterwards, they had to close their eyes, stand at attention and practice sending out pa medha, “loving kindness,” to all sentient beings.

  The boy sent out pa medha to the fish so they would stop fighting, to the gamblers so they would stop gambling, and to his father, so he would stop drinking and cursing all the time. Most of all he sent out “loving kindness” to the mother who had abandoned them— taking his baby sisters with her—in the hope they would return.

  Nothing changed.

  In the temple, kneeling before the main Buddha image, candle wax running down his fingers, he made extravagant promises to the Buddha that if his family was reunited he would set all the fish free by pouring them into the canal that ran behind their house.

  That had no effect either. The gamblers kept gambling. The fish kept fighting. His mother and sisters did not return, and his father kept drinking and insulting him. “Your slut cunt whore of a mother must have fucked somebody else because no kid as stupid and slow and fat as you could possibly be mine.”

  By the age of ten Boonchu had given up on Buddhism and finally become popular with the bad boys at school by teaching them a trick one of the cock-fighters in the gambling den had shown him: how to jam a lit firecracker in a frog’s mouth so when it exploded its head erupted in a geyser of blood and brain tissue.

  The boys thought this was the coolest thing ever. They were his first circle of friends, the boys who were either too cool or too stupid to study, who could not, or could not be bothered, competing on the sports field.

  To keep them as friends he had to keep upping the ante. So he stole from shops, pulled dangerous stunts on his first motorcycle, swallowed live fish, got in fights, stole liquor from his father to give them, and showed off his collection of Siamese fighting fish. “When they try to tear each other’s lips off like this it’s called a ‘spiral kiss.’ So you faggots better be careful with your boyfriends.”

  Years later, when the warden asked a roomful of guards if there were any volunteers to take over the position as executioner, only one man stepped forward.

  What he could not bring himself to admit to the journalists, because he could scarcely acknowledge it himself—it sounded too weak, childish, pathetic, not at all like the tough personae he’d cultivated—but the real reason he’d become the executioner was to be the best at something, no matter how sinister, to gain the a
dmiration of his peers, and to show the world that he was not the gutless, incompetent idiot that his father said he was.

  THE REST OF the interviews were boring. All the reporters wanted were the usual blood and carnage stories. So he repeated them by rote. The fire in the jail that claimed several hundred lives (most burned alive in their cells). The inmates who commandeered a laundry truck and tried to drive it through the front gates (all five shot dead by the guards). The legendary serial cannibal who spat on the robes of the monk giving him a final blessing.

  He took the warden’s advice and repeated the prime minister’s remark about the reasoning behind the “War Against Drugs” which had now claimed the lives of some two thousand five hundred alleged drug dealers, who had been shot dead by police and other drug dealers over the last three months. But he said it with such little conviction that anyone could have heard a few undertones of opposition in his voice. “Drug dealers have been cruel to our children, so we must be cruel to them.”

  He added: “I think we need to look on the positive side too. Thanks to the warden and the director of the Corrections Department there have been many improvements in the jail, like correspondence courses in seven different subjects.”

  The only journalist who proved to be at all different or interesting was a lanky Australian guy with a soldier’s haircut who was dressed in army clothes. The earrings he wore looked as gay as the jail’s ladyboy hookers, and he wasn’t the sort of man Boonchu could ever be seen with in public, but at least he spoke some Thai and wanted to know the man behind the sub-machine gun. Unlike all the other reporters, he actually took notes when Boonchu told him that his favorite pastime was cooking, and every morning he woke up at five to go to the fresh market to buy meat and produce so he could have breakfast on the table for his wife and daughters by seven.