Taichung City, Taiwan
BO – THE MAN SOME CALLED Smiley Face – had not always been as he was today. For anyone who worked for him now it was hard to believe it, but he had once been a choirboy. Raised by a God-fearing Catholic family, part of the two per cent of Taiwan’s population that follow the Roman Catholic faith, the young Bo had attended the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Taichung City. He said his prayers, went to Mass and did as he was told. Until he was fourteen and met Feng.
Feng’s weathered face looked prematurely aged for a boy only just into his teens. It spoke of a hard life on the streets after escaping from an abusive orphanage. But Feng had something that impressed the young Bo: money. Lots of it. He would wait for his friend outside the church after choir practice, then take him for an ice cream at a place round the corner where the staff seemed strangely respectful to one so young, treating him and his guest like VIPs. Often he’d be wearing designer clothes, a brand new watch or showing his friend the latest gadget he’d acquired, without ever giving an entirely clear answer as to where these things had come from.
It was several weeks into their friendship when Feng showed him the packet wrapped in cellophane. The proposition was simple. Take this to the address I’m about to give you and there’s a reward in it for you.
‘What reward? Show me!’ the young Bo had replied.
Feng had given him a knowing smile as if this was exactly what he had expected him to say. He put his hand into his pocket and took out an envelope. It had Bo’s name written on it.
‘Open it,’ he said, and Bo did as he was told.
His fingers closed around three crisp banknotes, which he pulled out. ‘Three hundred US dollars? This is for me?’ He was incredulous.
The errand was straightforward. What Bo didn’t know at the time was that this was just a test, set up by the people who controlled Feng. The packet contained nothing more exciting than a few grams of sugar. It was a simple initiation measure to see if he could follow orders and be discreet. Bo passed.
By the time he turned fifteen he had left the church and the choir far behind. By now he was making regular deliveries of methamphetamine to addresses all over town. Bo’s own parents could see the change in him and they did not approve. They thought about sending him away to a strict academy, but a visit from a well-dressed man made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that this would not be advisable. ‘Your son Bo,’ he informed them, ‘has a promising future in “a business enterprise”,’ and depriving him of that ‘would not be good for anyone’s health’. Scared and powerless to intervene, the couple watched their only son morph into a person they hardly recognized. He treated the family home like a hotel, coming and going at all hours, bringing girls back at two in the morning and indulging in noisy sex in his room without the slightest concern for his parents next door.
But Bo’s carefree existence was about to come to an abrupt halt.
It should have been a simple delivery. His friend Feng was driving, Bo beside him in the passenger seat, and in the back, some new kid they were supposed to be mentoring. It was a late-night drop-off outside a club in the Dajia district of the city, not a part of town they knew well. They pulled up, as arranged, on the opposite side of the street from the club and in the darkened space beyond the streetlamps. Nearly twenty minutes had elapsed and still there was no sign of the customer. It was time to go. Feng reached forward to put the key into the ignition. The figure appeared suddenly at the passenger-side window.
Later, Bo found he could remember every detail of what had happened that night: every moment, every word, every bloodstain. The figure at the window was that of a short, well-built man in his late twenties. He motioned for Bo to wind down his window. Bo shook his head. ‘Let’s go!’ he shouted to Feng, but it was already too late. In the few seconds it had taken for their attention to be distracted someone else had crept unseen to the driver’s side, another muscled figure, his face in shadow. He yanked open Feng’s door and, with his left hand, he grabbed his ponytail, pulling his head back. In the same instant his right arm shot out, his hand holding a long, cut-throat razor. The next thing Bo saw was a crimson fountain of blood as it spurted in an arc from his friend’s throat, splashing over the dashboard and windscreen.
Bo didn’t hesitate. Driven by an instinctive, animal sense of survival, he shoved open his door, sending the man on his side sprawling onto the asphalt. Bo was out and running for his life before the man could pick himself up and recover. Bo had no idea where he was heading: all he knew was that he had to get away. He zigzagged through the empty, darkened streets, past the shuttered shops and the empty market stalls, nearly tripping over discarded packaging as he heard the clatter of running feet on wet pavements closing in on him from behind. There were at least two of them, maybe more, he couldn’t tell. He never spared a thought for the kid in the back seat. Not his responsibility. He would just have to fend for himself.
Bo spent that night hiding in a large rubbish bin. He covered himself in discarded fast-food packaging as his pursuers went past, then tried to ignore the cockroaches that crawled all over him. Cockroaches didn’t carry switchblade razors. At dawn he made his way back to his neighbourhood. He didn’t go home. He went straight to the Collection Point, the place where he and Feng were given their assignments, and their cellophane-wrapped packages. He asked – no, he demanded – to see the dai lo, the boss, and he was eventually granted a five-minute audience. He spared him no detail, he described the arc of blood that had jetted out from Feng’s slit throat, he gave the best description he could of the man at the passenger-side door. The dai lo nodded. He seemed to know exactly who had done this. It was all part of a turf war and these boys had stumbled into it. He reached into his breast pocket, took out a roll of banknotes, peeled off ten and handed them to Bo.
‘Give half of these to Feng’s family and keep the rest for yourself,’ he told him. ‘Now, go.’ Silently, Bo put five of the notes into his pocket and handed the rest back. This was not what he had come for.
The dai lo threw him a menacing glance. ‘I told you to go. Why are you still here?’ he said.
‘I want a job. A proper one.’
The dai lo gave him one.
By the age of seventeen, Bo had become ‘a cobra’, a hitman, for the triad. The fact that he was still technically a child meant his targets often didn’t see him coming until it was too late. And he was good at it too. A fast learner, he watched how others carried out their work, then developed his own subtle variations. But what everyone noticed was that whenever the hit went down, whether it was bullet or blade, Bo could be seen smiling.
He had become Smiley Face.