Authors: T. M. Hoy
On his twelfth birthday, no one mourned when Ling announced that he was leaving for Bangkok to make his fortune. They thought it was an unlikely, even laughable goal. His uncles, aunts, cousins, and siblings made it clear that he would receive nothing but abuse if he returned empty-handed.
Their mockery turned his resolve “as hard as jade,” and he swore to them he’d die before he’d go back to the tedium and drudgery of rice farming.
With a 500 baht note (twenty dollars) and a small sack of personal items his mother surreptitiously gave him, he stole away in the wee hours one morning on the fifteen mile walk to Khorat. He never looked back; the quiet sobs of his mother couldn’t dissuade him from his quest.
Fortunately for Ling, Bangkok in the late sixties and early seventies was booming. Spendthrift American soldiers on R & R from fighting in Vietnam threw their money around. The Black Market flourished, and heroin and prostitution were growing industries that would soon make the city infamous.
Ling was fanatically motivated as only a desperate boy could be. No matter what shape or size he might be, he knew he’d create a niche for himself amidst the chaotic maelstrom of the “City of Angels.”
He started out as a tout, trying to charm and cajole soldiers and tourists into his employers’ bar. His youth and enthusiasm stood him in good stead. By the time he was sixteen, he was fluent in English, had gained tremendously in polish and experience, and was promoted to the job of ‘handling’ the prostitutes.
He was responsible for collecting the owners’ cut of the girls’ earnings. He saw to it that they kept clean, mediated in their fights, listened to their gripes and problems, and served as the liaison between the owner and the girls.
An ugly, adolescent boy, eager for praise and affection, he brought out the girls’ soft side. His success earned him more in a week than his family earned in a year. Regardless, Ling remained unsatisfied. Life in the wild capital had whetted his appetite for greater things.
At twenty, he’d settled on his ultimate desire. He didn’t know how to achieve his goal, but he wanted no less than to be a “Poo Yai,” or Big Man. The sort of man that made villagers tremble and city girls lavish attention
upon him. How to gain those heights eluded him, though he pondered the issue every waking moment in the corner of his mind.
Years passed, and being trustworthy, he had risen to the top of the hierarchy of employees at the bar—he handled the money for the owner.
Ling was both honest and highly intelligent, and these qualities aided him to become, by the standards of village life, extraordinarily wealthy.
His family held him in awe, and he laughed at the power he had given his mother to bully them with all the money he sent her. It tasted bitter as gall—it wasn’t even close to his dream.
His mother, alone among his family was privy to the details of his life— albeit a carefully censored version. She couldn’t understand his unhappiness and pointed out how far he had climbed. He had bought hundreds of hectares of land, bringing his family into the first rank of local gentry. He had a beautiful house, a brand-new car, and all the female companions anyone could want. What else was there in the world to strive for?
The answer screamed at him day and night, relegating his achievements to meaningless drivel. He wanted power over men. He wanted people to fall silent at his approach, smiling nervously at him while avoiding his gaze. He wanted women to beg and fight each other over him. He wanted an end to the rude jokes and cruel laughter his face evoked. In short, Ling wanted the respect granted only to politicians, high-ranking military officers, and mobsters.
Politics was beyond someone whose looks earned him open mockery. He had passed the age at which one begins a military career, which didn’t appeal to him anyway. The other, and last, category appeared to be an impossible objective to reach.
Until the day he met the grim stranger.
Just before dawn, Ling was in his boss’s office, counting out the day’s receipts. His boss had been acting troubled for weeks, irritable, snappish, and strangely fearful. This particular day, the boss was unable to follow Ling’s counting, and demanded Ling start over three different times.
As he counted the last few bills, the door burst open—an unthinkable violation of privacy which had never occurred before. In the doorway stood a thin, scowling man Ling didn’t know and the cringing figure of the owner’s head of security.
The guard was a monster—six-foot-four, weighing over 300 pounds, most of it muscle—with a character as vicious as a crocodile. That he
could
be afraid of someone was a revelation. That he was afraid of the slight, skinny man in the doorway was almost beyond Ling’s comprehension.
The bodyguard stumbled into the room, and his stammered excuses were waved away by the boss. He, too, was nervous with fright, and he practically leapt to offer a drink or cigarettes to the skinny man.
Both were curtly refused. The stranger calmly closed the door and walked up to the desk. He stopped only when his face was inches away from the boss, and his voice was as cold and cutting as surgical steel.
He demanded “his share” of the weekly take, and the boss rushed to comply. The man took the bulging envelope and merely grunted while riffling the purple 500 baht bills.
Unsatisfied, he rudely shoved Ling aside, scooped up the big bills on the desk, and stuffed them into his pocket, revealing the deadly Colt .45 hanging butt-first in a side holster at his side. Neither the boss nor the bodyguard dared to move, hardly breathing.
The stranger patted the boss’s head—an act so demeaning in Thai society (which holds the head to be sacred in Buddhist lore) it could provoke instant violence in the mildest persons. The boss took it, and even managed to smile!
With a final warning for making him come to the office to pick up the money, the stranger left. Ling had trouble believing he had witnessed such effrontery. A stranger demanding cash that he had no right to, to be delivered to him! Of course, the unimaginable had occurred.
The instant the stranger’s footsteps could no longer be heard on the stairs, the boss and bodyguard broke out into a shouting match over who was to take the blame for the devastating loss of face.
Ling devoted every fiber of his being trying to discover the stranger’s secret. How could he find out who and what the man was? Ling ignored the argument raging in front of him and quietly slipped away.
Two weeks passed in a daze before some dark deity took pity on him and revealed the stranger’s source of power.
It happened one morning behind the bar in the girls’ changing room. Ling, so familiar to the girls that his presence was hardly noticed, were gossiping about their latest boyfriends. One girl proudly spoke of a Poo Yai who had given her a heavy gold bracelet and promised to take her out of the bar to be his mistress. This happened every day—some guy promising a bar girl he’d take her away from a life of prostitution. This time, however, the girls went quiet at the mention of a name. The one bragging filled the silence with how happy she’d be in a week or two.
Ling asked who she was talking about, a man named Gop (‘frog’ in Thai). At his prodding, the girl described him, and Ling’s heart began to beat a quicker rhythm. Could it be the stranger?
She added a detail that made him certain: this man was the owner’s new ‘partner.’ Ling controlled his excitement and asked the crucial question: What did Gop do for a living?
At first, the girl teased Ling with evasive answers. Frustrated, he made her realize how serious a matter it was. Eventually, she gave in. Gop was a hit man.
Of course! How stupid of him not to have figured it out! It was the fear of death that allowed someone to rule over others.
His boss and bodyguard were tough, dangerous men, but they were no match for the likes of Gop. They preyed on weak, ignorant country women, easy to manipulate once they became addicted to drugs. They took their money from the pockets of foolish, rich farangs, who considered such sums pocket change.
In the presence of a man like Gop, who killed without the slightest hesitation, his boss was spineless, as was his bodyguard. They were mean-spirited, but they weren’t hardened murderers.
Ling pondered the new knowledge carefully. In threatening death, great respect was automatically granted. The price, however, was very high. Did he want respect so badly that he’d kill for it? Was the power worth the cost?
By the end of the week, he’d made up his mind. As was said in an old Thai song, he would “walk on the dark side.” The temptation of having people cater to his every whim was too great to be denied.
He started with Gop. After hinting he’d “take care” of the hit man, his boss embraced him: promising a share of the business and everything he could to make it happen. The boss bought him the gun he’d requested—a brand-new 9mm pistol, and he’d set up a trap betraying Gop to Ling.
They met in the back room of a Thai restaurant late at night, on the pretext the boss wanted to discuss some new ‘business ideas’ with Gop. At first, the hit man was suspicious. When his boss swore that only he and Ling were to be there and that he could take whatever precautions he wanted, Gop agreed.
Sitting at the table together, Ling focused on fighting the hard knot of anxiety in his stomach.
Killing things was commonplace on the farm, and he was no stranger to death. He’d helped kill the water snakes that lived in the river and invaded the rice paddies in monsoon season. He’d killed the rats that ate the stored bags of rice and that stole chicken eggs. He’d killed chickens with his mother at festival time; he’d helped his father butcher pigs for sale in the market, and once a water buffalo for a village feast.
This was different. Pigs and chickens didn’t chat with you or stare you in the eyes before you killed them. Shooting a man in cold blood was far removed from the casual death of animals on a farmyard.
A dark deity again intervened in the affairs of mortal men. Hesitating, uncertain of his ability to carry out the act, Ling got the goading he needed.
Gop looked at Ling contemptuously, and said: “Is your little lady-boy on drugs? He’s been acting like a bitch since I got here!”
The boss shared the laugh with Gop, as Ling pulled out the 9mm and shot Gop in the eye. The sound was huge in the back room and seemed to echo for ages. At last, the ringing in Ling’s ears stopped, and silence returned … no one came to investigate the noise.
Ling’s life changed irreversibly. The bodyguard ventured in after a while, refusing to meet Ling’s gaze. Ling sat frozen in shock. The bodyguard, together with the boss, cleaned up the mess and carried the body away.
Ling couldn’t help but notice that in death, Gop’s face was a smiling mask. It was an image that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
He soon discovered the pitfalls and difficulties of his new chosen profession. To begin with, it didn’t pay much, mainly because there were too many people willing to kill others for a pittance. It was both surprising and depressing that he was far from unique.
To make matters worse, his boss was only respectful for a week or two, after which their relationship returned to what it was in the “old days” before the murder.
The boss was a little too disrespectful one day, airily dismissing Ling’s polite request for a share of the profits. It was his second killing, followed shortly thereafter by killing the bodyguard. He took over the three bars the boss had owned and sampled the first tantalizing tastes of the power he craved.
Lording it over a few dozen whores quickly lost its allure. When Ling was approached by a mafia that ran half the bordellos in Thailand, he signed on as a heavy-hitter, an enforcer. He paid dearly in slaughter for his new status, though the lifestyle he gained was sweet. He met TV stars and entertainers. He partied with the trendy and the powerful as an equal. His dream had come true.
One after another, the murders Ling committed multiplied. He killed politicians; the troublesome rivals of businessmen; the unfaithful husbands of wives seeking revenge, and vice versa. Anyone the mafia leaders asked him to kill.
He traveled all over Thailand and knew the first names of police chiefs in towns and cities throughout the country. Ling wisely paid off the police every time he killed someone and billed the customer. In this way, he managed to ply his trade for twenty years.
In time, he grew tired of life in the fast lane. He settled down with a beautiful village girl his parents chose for him and enjoyed domestic tranquility. He had children and assumed the role of one of Khorat’s chief Poo Yai’s.
He knew his karma was awful, despite all the money he gave to the monks for their blessings, and that ultimately he’d have to pay for his crimes.
His downfall happened so fast he hardly had time to reflect on the strangeness of life. He took a job to kill a businessman but, due to sloppy planning, caught the man when his family was home. Wearing no disguise, he had no choice but to kill the man’s wife and children.
Unbeknownst to Ling, the man was the brother of a powerful member of Parliament. The intensive investigation that followed the tremendous public outcry uncovered the customer, who gladly betrayed Ling in return for a light prison sentence.
Ling’s notorious past was revealed, and he was doomed to spend the remainder of his life in heavy chains; a dangerous animal lucky to be caged, rather than shot outright as some desired. His political connections saved him.
Ling now traveled the country as a guest of His Majesty’s Department of Corrections. His schedule took him to every town and city with unsolved professional hits, where Ling would review the evidence and let the police know which hits were his. They’d charge him with the crimes; he’d plead guilty and receive a twenty year sentence for each one. In return, he was treated with respect by prison officials and was allowed to buy his own food and get regular contact visits from his wife and family. He was also allowed to keep his precious photo collection—snapshots of ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.’ The surreal album proved his story.