by Jim Algie
One of the strangest things about being the executioner was that most of the men he met, when they found out what his job was, wanted to outgun him with their own tales of violence and bravery under fire. This guy was no exception. He told Boonchu a long story about how he’d been shot on the streets of Bangkok during the “Black May” political crisis of 1992.
Smiling, Boonchu taunted him in a good-natured way, as he did with all the macho men who wanted to win his respect but only received his mockery. “Yes, you make protest while I sleep. Can you believe I never vote in election, never believe in politics? Maybe you are more strong than me. You want my job?” Boonchu tipped his head back and laughed, so he could see all the dead flies lying at the bottom of the light fixture.
“No, thanks. I don’t have those kind of killer instincts.”
“Yes, you do. Everybody can know sometimes. Maybe your family is threatened, somebody kidnap your wife, kill your baby, then you find out. Sure.”
Boonchu leaned forward. He lowered his voice. He would not dare to steal the spotlight and show up any of his seniors and superiors on such an important day, but he could at least hint at his surprise. This guy could get the word out to the international press and the scientific community. If the experiment worked, it would make the “War Against Drugs” look trivial. “You want to know something secret? Off the record, I am a scientist, ichthyologist.”
The Aussie lowered his voice to a whisper too. “An ichthyologist? What’s that?”
“Expert on fish. I make big experiment for many years. Maybe I can tell soon and give you exclusive story, if you want.”
“Absolutely. I’d be well up for that. You know, I have to say, for a professional killer you seem like a very nice guy.”
“Yes, I must say, for a journalist you are a nice man too.” The belly laugh made his hands tremble.
The phone on the desk rang. It was the warden. He said, “Lock-down at 3 p.m.” That was the code they used; whenever executions took place the prison was locked down an hour earlier than usual. “Today, we need your team to pick up six men.”
“Six? We’ve never had that many in a single day before.”
“I told you. The prime minister wants us to set some stern precedents in the War Against Drugs. Let’s make sure our department is not the weak link in the chain of command or our careers may get the death sentence too.”
The warden read out the names and numbers of the inmates so Boonchu could write them down. Even after all these years, the way that the warden could recite the roll call of the condemned, like he was ordering a meal in a restaurant, chilled the sweat on the executioner’s forehead.
ALL OF BOONCHU’S sex education classes came from watching the fish mate. During the breeding season, when a male and female were put together, the male would build a bubble nest in one corner of the tall square glass. Then he’d wrap his fins around the female to fertilize the eggs while they swam back and forth in a languorous mating dance that could last for half an hour or more. One by one the male would then extract the eggs and swim up to place them on the bubble nest.
The boy said, “Look, dad. Who’d ever think that creatures so mean could be so gentle?”
“Just you wait, kid. The sweetness never lasts for long in any love affair. It gets ugly again really quick.” His father took slugs from a bottle of rice liquor in between puffs on a cigarette made from tobacco rolled up in a dried banana leaf. “Look at that! Exactly like I told you. The female is trying to eat her own eggs. That’s all you need to know about women. They’re as nasty as a kick in the balls. You know something, I think your own mother wanted to have you aborted. If it weren’t for me you wouldn’t even be here. So show some gratitude and get me another bottle.”
The boy fetched the bottle from the fridge. His father was right. He was dumb, he was ugly, he was fat. He didn’t deserve anything better. If it were not for his father he would never have been born. It was lucky for him that the old man tolerated him at all.
And he could be generous too. To celebrate Boonchu’s fifteenth birthday, when he reached the legal age of consent, his father took him aboard one of the floating brothels that cruised the canals of Bangkok until the mid-seventies, so he could lose his virginity.
Much to the bafflement of his father and the two gangsters they were with, he chose the oldest prostitute—almost twice his age—on the boat.
Each of the cubicles, partitioned off with plywood, had a mattress on the floor and a sink for washing. The sound of thighs slapping against each other merged with the waves lapping against the hull. In those airless cubicles, cooled by ceiling fans, the sweat took on an even sharper and fishier smell. Combined with the rocking of the boat, he felt drunk and queasy, not aroused at all.
It was embarrassing. He did not know what to do with this woman. He’d never hugged or kissed anyone before, never seen any pornography except a few old magazines. All he knew how to do was wrap his arms around her like the male fighting fish wrapped his fins around the female, to nip at her neck and shoulders. Before she could even get his pants down he’d passed out. When one of the gangsters came to check up on him, the light from the hallway fell on Boonchu sleeping with his face buried in her bosom, his arms around her waist, like a little boy who’d awakened from a nightmare to take refuge in his mother’s embrace.
Three months later they were married. On his seventeenth birthday his first daughter was born. The year after that he began working as a prison guard because he needed a regular job with a decent salary and benefits, like health care and a pension, to take care of his family.
Beaten down by his father from a young age, and performing tricks on command for the other kids like a bear in a circus, this mama’s boy made the perfect civil servant: obedient to his seniors and superiors (all of the older men became surrogate father figures to him), unquestioningly loyal and willing to do anything to appease them, even the job that nobody else wanted.
He wasn’t really the executioner. Those death sentences were decided by the cops, the lawyers and judges. He was only the authorities’ triggerman; he was their scapegoat, their dupe.
But the journalists and crime reporters who trooped through the meeting room that morning, true to their shallow and moralistic profession that frames complex issues like capital punishment in the black and white newsprint of five hundred-word op/ed pieces, persisted in seeing something macho, something dangerous in this man and his profession.
As Kendall was leaving, he said, “I couldn’t do what you do, mate. You’ve got the toughest job in the world.”
Boonchu smiled sadly and folded his hands over his enormous stomach. “No, it’s the easiest job in the world.” He held up the index and middle fingers of his right hand. “All you have to do is point the gun and go click, click, click, click. The hard part is what comes after.”
ALL THE GUARDS and prison officials referred to the death chamber in quasi-Buddhist terms as the “room to end all suffering.” It was surrounded by trees, freshly cut grass and flowerbeds brightened with red and yellow dahlias. These were some of the last sights the condemned men and women would ever see, after they received a blessing from a monk and the offer of a final meal, before they were led into the rectangular chamber that was the size of a windowless, one-bedroom apartment.
The building’s Thai name and its garden had drawn the flak of Western journalists who saw them as the whitewashes of a barbaric injustice system. Seen from a local perspective, however, was there not a Buddhist sense of compassion operating here? That the condemned man or woman’s last moments could be made a little more pleasant in the presence of all this foliage and the butterflies which flew up and over the brambles of barbed wire; even an inkling of the Buddhist belief that human nature is subject to the same law of impermanence that governs the natural world.
Off to one side of the chamber stood the “spirit house”: a miniature Buddhist temple on a pedestal that served as a shrine and a home for the prison’s guardian spi
rit. Before each execution took place, Boonchu and the rest of his team, holding candles, incense and lotus blossoms, asked the deity for forgiveness while praying that the ghost of the deceased would not come back to haunt them, because they were not killing him out of malice, they were only doing their duty.
The two guards who led the prisoner inside the death chamber then blindfolded him and tied him to a wooden cross. The guards put offerings of incense, a candle and a lotus blossom in his hands and tied them together with the sacred white thread that Thai monks use to bless people or ward off evil. Behind the cross was a ceiling-high bank of sandbags darkened with bloodstains. The sub-machine gun, mounted on a wooden tripod bolted to the floor, was the long arm of Thai law pointing an accusing finger at the condemned person’s back.
The first five executions that afternoon went off like clockwork. After almost twenty years on the firing line, Boonchu was stunned that he could walk into the death chamber and no longer be terrorized by all the memories and ghosts which had once lingered there to ambush him: prisoners screaming abuse or pleading for their lives, leg irons rattling, screams and gunshots, that horrible woman who gutted the baby and packed her full of heroin shouting, “I’ll kill you in my next life, you fat, ugly buffalo!”
All was silent now. Either his conscience had made peace with the job or he and his team had become calloused old hands going through the motions on an assembly line of death.
The trouble started when the guards led the last dead man walking into the chamber. He twisted out of their grip and fell to his knees in front of Boonchu. He began stammering in mangled Thai, broken English and some hill-tribe language, “Please, sir, I’m innocent. I didn’t know what was in the truck. I really didn’t know. They just paid me ten thousand baht to drive it.”
When Boonchu had read through his file earlier today this was the case that had bothered him the most. The inmate was only twenty-five. He had four years of education and came from a hill-tribe in Burma that Boonchu had never heard of. He’d been arrested driving a truck with fifty thousand methamphetamine tablets hidden in the back at a border crossing between the two countries. The kid claimed he didn’t know what the secret cargo was, an alibi reiterated by most drug dealers, but in his case it would not have been difficult to dupe someone with such little education.
When the kid started weeping and wailing for his mother and sisters Boonchu walked out of the execution chamber. The warden was right behind him.
The executioner stood in a trench of shade cast by the building’s eaves, smoking a cigarette and staring at the blindingly bright flowerbeds.
The warden said, “What is going on?” He looked at his watch. “We’re now almost four minutes behind schedule.”
Boonchu did not look at him. He kept staring at the red and yellow dahlias. “I don’t feel good about this one. The kid is only twenty-five. I’ve never had to execute somebody that young. Think about it. Think of all the mistakes we made at that age and nobody ever killed us for them.”
“I agree with you. It is a tragedy that someone so young should turn to trafficking in narcotics. Personally, I blame it on greed and laziness. Young people today just don’t have the kind of work ethic we had. They expect all the riches in the world without having to work for them. But if we can make an example of this one that should stop hundreds more young people from entering the drug trade. Think of the long-term benefits.”
The warden and the executioner were a study in anatomic contrasts, the former as pale, slender and balding as the latter was dark, stocky and hirsute.
The warden had the tunnel vision of the lifelong bureaucrat, focused like a magnifying glass on the most microscopic of tasks that fell under his jurisdiction, but blind to any of the bigger issues outside of his department. He could not even see any of the foliage that Boonchu was staring at. Right now he could not see anything except the hands of his watch, because their schedule had been delayed and he would have to answer for it.
Boonchu said, “I used to believe it when we told the journalists that capital punishment was a deterrent, like that old proverb about ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkeys,’ but the prison population… I don’t know… it’s bigger, much bigger, maybe even double or triple since we started here.” Why could he never remember these statistics and facts when he needed them? “And the men on death row, there’s more of that, I mean them, too. It’s bad, it’s worse than ever.”
“It’s not our fault that society keeps getting more violent and people are becoming more and more materialistic all the time. Then they turn to crime to satisfy those base instincts and cravings.”
A former lawyer, the warden began building up his case, like he was in front of a judge. “At least we’re better than the barbaric Chinese is all I can say. Last year, they executed close to thirteen thousand people, and those are only the semi-official figures. Many of those executed have their organs harvested to sell on the black market. Up until a year or two ago, the Chinese had mass executions in sports stadiums. Soldiers walked along lines of men and pumped a single bullet in the back of their heads while they knelt on the ground. Then the government sent the family of the deceased a bill for the bullet. Nice touch, huh? Now they have these vans, these execution chambers on wheels, so as soon as person is sentenced to death they march them out of courthouse and into the van, inject them with lethal chemicals and they’re dead in ten minutes.”
The warden put his arms behind his back and walked to and fro.
“Singapore now has the highest per capita rate of executions and in the state of Texas alone there are more men on death row than in our entire country. So let’s put everything in perspective and be thankful that we’ve still got more of a Buddhist sense of mercy and decorum here in the kingdom of Thailand.”
“One way or another, the condemned all end up dead. So what’s the difference?”
This time Boonchu would not be cowed by the warden’s intellect and eloquence. He would not grovel when the warden said that the prime minister was waiting for the word on the last execution of the day so he could hold a press conference to say what a success the “War Against Drugs” had been thus far. “Fine,” Boonchu said. “Tell him to come down and shoot the last man.”
“What is eating at you now?”
Boonchu refused to look at him. He kept his eyes on the gilded spirit house. A pair of pigeons were eating the offerings of food that he and his team had left for the guardian spirit. It was funny, sadly funny, how religion and prayer were just as useless now as they’d been when he was a boy.
“What’s eating me? Oh, thirty-five years in jail and more than eighty executions. I feel like a prisoner too, a prisoner doing a life sentence with no chance of parole.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that for much longer. After today we’re both going to be out of work. Here we are five or six years away from collecting our pensions, and you have to throw it all away for some ignorant hill-tribe kid and your latent guilt complex.”
He turned to face the warden. Women thought Boonchu’s most attractive feature was his large, deep brown eyes. His body and face had aged, but those deer-like eyes had retained a glimmer of boyish innocence. “Can I ask you something? What did you want to be when you were a boy?”
The warden looked at his watch again. He sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. I was quite keen on Formula 1 and used to fantasize about winning the Grand Prix at Le Mans, taking the checkered flag, opening a bottle of champagne and spraying it all over those sexy models, not the most subtle kind of Freudian symbolism. And you? What did you want to be?”
At long last, the prisoner within, the boy, the shadow self, spoke up, “I wanted my father to love and respect me, and I wanted my mother and sisters to come back. Those were my only ambitions then and I didn’t accomplish either of them.”
Over a three-decade career as a lawyer, judge, prison authority and advisor to the Ministry of Justice, the warden had honed his greatest and most dubious
talent: how to exploit people at their most vulnerable while making it look like he had their best interests at heart. After all, a person facing a death sentence is not going to argue when his lawyer demands another large sum of money. “And look what happened! From that misery you created your own happy family. You’ve got three beautiful daughters, you’re still married after all this time, and everyone knows you don’t cheat on your wife, which is more than you can say for most of us. You, my son, are a paragon of one man’s triumph over adversity, and you will not let your family down now. You will not turn your back on them and forsake your career. You will not let me down either, or the director of the Corrections Department, or the prime minister. When it comes right down to it, you are the bravest man in this prison system, the man who’s lasted the longest in this job. When we finally switch over to lethal injection next year, you will go down in Thai history as not only the last executioner but the greatest and most heroic of them all!”
The warden had fenced him in. Boonchu looked at the guard tower. He looked at the tangles of razor wire crowning the wall. He looked up at the blue sky and over at the gilded spirit house where the birds feasted and chattered. He looked at the cellblocks and finally, reluctantly, at the “room to end all suffering.” Who was he fooling? There was nowhere he could go. This was it. This was his life and his career.
He felt like a Siamese fighting fish trapped in a glass cell. It only looked like he was free, but everywhere he turned he kept running into barriers.
Most of all he could not escape the truth. The warden was right. It was exactly as he said. Boonchu was not that fat, ugly, slow-witted kid from a broken home. He was the record holder, the greatest and most heroic executioner of them all, a loyal husband and father, a man who had triumphed over adversity.
Now he must do his duty and not let his family, country and superiors down. They were all counting on him.
Boonchu dropped his cigarette and ground it out under his army boot. “Okay, but this is the last one. Let’s get it over with. Let’s rock ‘n’ roll. Then I’m done with this job forever.”