Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

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  PRAISE FOR SERPENTINE

  “The most bizarre true-crime narrative since the Manson story Helter Skelter.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Riveting.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “This pounding [true] story of larceny and murder from Hong Kong to Paris . . . should hold readers . . . in coils of intrigue, twists of coincidence.” —Time

  “Shocking impact . . . [Serpentine] marks Thompson as one of the finest non-fiction writers of the decade.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A prodigious feat . . . A parade of loves and furies, cultures and countercultures . . . Its shocking message will have a resounding effect for years to come.” —Los Angeles Times

  “A massive unraveling of one of modern history’s most nefarious drug and rob men . . . Thompson is a dogged reporter and a tireless detective and, most of all, a keen observer of human nature.” —Houston Chronicle

  “Overwhelming . . . Monumental . . . The best yet by a master journalist.” —Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “Compulsive reading . . . Alive . . . [Serpentine] unravels like fiction, but afterward haunts the reader like the document it is.” .” —The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

  “Riveting . . . A writer of tremendous power and achievement . . . [Serpentine] is first-rate storytelling.” —Detroit Free Press

  “A stunning successor to Blood and Money . . . undeniably impressive.” —St. Louis Globe-Democrat

  “Polished, intricate, fast-moving, superb . . . Sobhraj has the cobralike appeal, the mesmerizing attraction . . . of the truly evil. His magnetism is almost impossible to resist.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Tempestuous and bizarre with enough sex and betrayal and intrigue to fill the darkest scenario . . . proof-positive that truth is stranger than fiction.” —Nashville Banner

  “[Thompson’s] evocation of the exotic locales . . . and his descriptions of the operations of criminal justice systems on the other side of the world are among the virtues of Serpentine.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Sensational . . . Astonishing . . . Fascinating.” —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] true crime tale of epic proportions.” —Library Journal

  “Breathtaking . . . Sizzling . . . Thompson moves from bloody murder in Texas to a one-man tidal wave of blood sweeping across Asia, telling his story with the same focus and intensity—and even more horrific detail.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Serpentine

  Thomas Thompson

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is, in essence, a true story. However, the reader should know that due to the nature of events, I have changed several names and altered a few identities. This was done at the request of those persons directly involved, or their families, or the police of many nations. I do not believe it disturbs the integrity of the book.

  It is impossible to thank the hundreds of people who co-operated with me by sharing time and information, but I want specifically to express my appreciation to the police of India, Thailand, Nepal, Iran, Turkey, Hong Kong, and Greece. Interpol headquarters in Paris was also courteous and helpful.

  Last, as I conducted interviews in a dozen different languages including such exotic tongues (for me) as Hindi and Urdu, any errors in translation, if they exist, should be considered benign ones.

  “Coincidence, if traced far enough back,

  becomes inevitable.”

  —Inscription on a Hindu temple near

  New Delhi and quoted by Carl Gustav Jung

  On a July noon in 1978, Judge Joginder Nath entered his modest courtroom in Old Delhi to make known his long-awaited decision. His chamber was thronged, in a state of agitation, each person present having passed through a gauntlet of soldiers with fixed bayonets on their rifles and a commando squad of police trained in judo. During an hour or two of last-minute suspense, while the judge attended to paper work in his office, the monsoon rains had assaulted the city, the courthouse roof sounding as if the gods were dancing amid a million penny nails. But now, as the judge cleared his throat and requested silence, the torrents stopped, abruptly, as if even the gods wanted to hear the end of the story.

  For more than a year Judge Nath had presided—refereed was perhaps a better word—over a murder trial both tempestuous and bizarre, one that contained enough sex and betrayal and intrigue to fill the darkest scenario. But it was larger than that. Beyond the massive borders of India, blood had spilled over many countries in Southeast Asia, blood attributed by police to the principal defendant.

  Over a period of several months in late 1975 and early 1976, tourists had been found slain, their corpses strangled and stabbed and burned and drowned, from the paradisical beaches of Thailand to the awesome slopes of the Himalayas to beside the holy river Ganges. Police of half a dozen Asian nations finally affixed the number of deaths at twelve—although one Delhi detective suspected the total could double—and perhaps double again.

  The murders were savage, seemingly totally at random. Capricious. Inexplicable. Cruel pranks of fate. The victims, Americans and Europeans, had come to the East on varied personal missions, none knowing that beyond a certain bend in the road was waiting the agent of their deaths.

  “Would the defendants please rise?” asked Judge Nath, peering through thick glasses at the two men and a woman. He seemed troubled, his face worn and melancholy. Perhaps it was because what he was about to say would neatly wrap up one murder, but it contained no answer to the most important question of all. Why? Why did these deaths occur? Why did these lives collide?

  PROLOGUE

  The threat of still another familial war with Pakistan and a swelling moon the hue of lemon topaz hung in contradiction over the capital of India on this torpid autumn evening in late October 1971. The government of Indira Gandhi had ordered a blackout, but in Delhi the stubs of candles flickered like massed stars, and the embers of street braziers glowed like cats’ eyes.

  The old part of the city was electric with tension and passion. If India had her way, the nuisance of East Pakistan would no longer squat like a malignant tumor on the shoulder of the subcontinent. One quick war, as swift as the slash of a great sword, would sever the squalid Moslem annex and transform East Pakistan into Bangladesh. It would be a new nation, but one as obedient and docile toward India as an adopted pup. Indira Gandhi knew that she had little to fear from Pakistan, but nonetheless she directed her country to gird for war. One hundred miles to the south of Delhi, camouflage netting and bales of straw swaddled the Taj Mahal for the first time in three centuries. But like a veiled woman, her beauty was not concealed, only transformed into an unmistakable silhouette of mottled bronze.

  As this night began, another woman was in torment at Delhi’s Ashoka Hotel, a sprawling pink palace set down in gardens of orchids and bougainvillaea, a structure larger than many Indian villages and built by Nehru with uncharacteristic extravagance. He had ignored the criticism, for he wished to celebrate the new India and provide a house of reception for the world leaders who would come to see what Britain had surrendered.

  The woman, who called herself La Passionara, decided to defy the blackout. No degree of international tension could interfere with her toilette on this of all nights. She could not risk making up her face by candlelight. Drawing the heavy drapes, she cursed the
thought of war and turned on a soft light. It was time to dance. In rose water and jasmine she bathed, rubbing oil of sandalwood onto her body, seeking to knead away the tightness in her legs and the knots of muscle. For her face, she selected a whitish base and powder, calculating that it would enhance not only her dark eyes—enlarged with a half moon of kohl and glistening from a drop of glycerine—but also the crimson silks she wrapped about her slender body. She envisioned how they would float like ethereal clouds, provided the cretinous stagehand (actually the busboy) remembered to switch on the electric fan for the finale. On her arms she heaped antique bracelets of filigreed ivory, and about her neck she placed her one real treasure, a necklace from the Moghul dynasty, of hammered gold, with enameled plaques of the gods in erotic play. It was a gift from an admiring maharaja whose grandmother had worn the piece to kneel in London before Victoria and Albert.

  When she was done, La Passionara rose from her dressing table and swirled happily about the room, catching fragments of her reflection in the mirrors and brass lamps. “I am beautiful,” she reassured herself by custom, “because I am a dancer.” Like Isadora Duncan, she considered herself torn from the breast of Terpsichore. But when she stopped, and switched off the forbidden lights, and began the long walk down the hotel corridor to an elevator that would drop her one floor to the Club Rouge et Noir, La Passionara was assaulted by crosscurrents, besieged by emotions beyond normal stage fright. Would anyone even come to see her dance with all this stupid talk of war? Would the hotel management permit the spotlight? Even though she had personally begged the vice-president in charge of entertainment, pleading tearfully that one lonely beam of stage light would not summon the warplanes of Pakistan, and even though he had smiled and bowed and promised, she knew that nothing was ever certain in India until it happened. Why were these forces working against her, menacing what could be the turning point of her life? If all went well—she hardly dared think it, suspecting somehow that karma was teasing her—there would be no more performances for diplomatic wives in embassy auditoriums, no more cultural centers where her fee was a cup of tea and a piece of stale raisin cake, no more hotel managements that booked her into claustrophobic, smoke-shrouded cellars from Ankara to Lahore and then requested, after her first performance, that she make the act more—hemming and hawing here—more provocative. I am not a cabaret dancer, I do not take my clothes off, she had always snapped at the Philistines, summoning hauteur. I am an artiste, a student of the Kalakshetra school of dance. I am a museum of classical music and movement. I am keeper of the flame, seeking not to stir man’s blood, but his heart, perhaps even his soul.

  Now, finally, a decade of frustration might be swept away in a single hour. The portal of opportunity had reared abruptly in her path. She had fought her way past other, less dedicated supplicants to the head of the line. Gulping deep breaths, she stood behind the screen near the cash register, hearing masculine talk in the gloom beyond. Indian men rarely brought their women to night clubs. The night before, in this very spot, she had waited after the performance, perspiration drowning her face, straining to hear if the desultory applause would sustain a second bow. And then the waiter had brought her the silver tray. On it rested a calling card with exquisite engraving. On the front, discreetly, was printed “J. Lobo, Director, The Casino at Macao,” and, following an arrow to its back, “I admire your dancing. Can we discuss a possible engagement at my casino? Perhaps tomorrow night? A bientôt.”

  Each time she read these words, La Passionara was filled with fear and the promise of power. The man who wrote them was out there now, at this moment, somewhere in the blackness. Who was he? Where was he sitting? Please, she prayed, please let him sit next to a well-mannered table, not to a collection of boors who would cackle and slurp while she danced. It does not matter, she reassured herself. Mr. Lobo will know that the dances are dedicated to him. She kissed his message and smuggled it within the red silks at her breast, hiding it next to her pounding heart. Then she sent a silent plea to Isadora Duncan, her idol and imagined patron—watch over me tonight!—hearing the drums and tambura announce her entrance.

  At this moment, in the old section of Delhi, in a far more modest hotel in a serpentine alley near the Red Fort, the man who called himself Lobo was also dressing with care, as was his custom. He chose a shirt of Egyptian cotton, and a tie of muted gray by Sulka. His suit was Cardin, tailored to accommodate his wide shoulders, small waist, and muscular thighs. On his wrist he placed a Lucien Piccard watch, and in his pocket he put Dunhill’s slimmest gold lighter. He cast but a hurried glance at the shadowy reflection that met his eyes in the candlelit bathroom mirror, for he had no need to confirm his appearance. Long ago he had learned its appeal and marketability. But for a moment he did smile. Lobo! The name was selected by caprice, but it suited him. With great brown eyes flecked with yellow and resting atop ridges of cheekbones that flared up like wings, he did indeed resemble a wolf, or a panther, for his legs were slim and built with grace and power. At first meeting, most people would take this man to be an Asian, but then, as acquaintance deepened, undertones of Europe came into play. He was a mélange of East and West, a small man, five feet eight at most, but he emitted messages of raw sexuality. The possibility of brutality was scarcely hidden, his hands rough and strong and eminently capable of snapping the bones in a neck. He bespoke danger, but it came wrapped in couturier jackets and very tight pants. He held appeal for most women, particularly those who shuddered at, yet secretly cherished, the element of risk. Not quite thirty years old, he had been merchandising this body for most of his adult life, and tonight was very important.

  Hurrying out into the darkened quarter, Lobo ignored the sleeping bodies of the poor, wrapped in gray blankets as thin as an old woman’s skin, and huddled against the shops of Chandni Chowk bazaar like sacks of grain delivered carelessly in blackness. The streets, chaos under normal conditions, were tonight madness. The blackout had raised the collective blood pressure of the people: taxis raced more insanely with blue paint splashed over their headlights, rickshaw drivers pedaled recklessly in and out of slumbering cows and huddles of men on street corners screaming hatred of Moslem Pakistan. Martial music swam from open windows; half-naked children dueled with sticks. In the silver market, merchants nailed boards over their shopwindows and slept with their best wares locked to their bodies. Placards of Indira Gandhi, wrinkleless, looking like a film star or a madonna, were held aloft by the mobs, bobbing like the saints on feast days in Rome. They screamed her name and her legend, “Indira is India—India is Indira!” Before the night would be over, scores of Moslems would be slain, many by neighbors of a lifetime, and their blood would flow in the ancient streets.

  Lobo cursed, for he could not find a taxi. All he could engage was a “putt-putt” and, thrusting twenty extravagant rupees into the driver’s hand, rode in less than splendor to his rendezvous with great fortune. On the way, he put aside his anger and replaced it with calm. His head could not contain impurities, else the plan might spoil. He remained serene while the three-wheeled motor scooter fought its way out of the fetid and lunatic embrace of Old Delhi and into the startling quiet and decorum of the new city, through the Delhi Gate, into a completely different place of wide boulevards, lavish embassies, traffic roundabouts redolent with the scent of marigolds, and great villas guarded by dour men with carbines at their shoulders. At this point in his journey, Lobo must have felt his pulse quickening. Meditating for a moment, drawing on Jung and Nietzsche—a symbiotic relationship and one that always nutured him—Lobo summoned peace again. He would have it no other way. Though his life to this point had been one of outrageous extremes, his fortunes leaping and falling like the line of an electrocardiogram, Lobo was certain that tonight began an ascendancy.

  When he entered the Ashoka Hotel by a side entrance, La Passionara was already halfway through her program. But Lobo did not hurry to the Club Rouge et Noir. His stroll was leisurely, a tourist promenading through the hotel’s sh
opping arcade, pausing only briefly at the Rajasthan Emporium to note that it was closed. One candle in the corridor threw a faint glow against the display window, but even in the burnished shadows Lobo could see a tray of brilliant gems—sapphires, rubies, diamonds, golden bracelets; necklaces and figurines of rare ivory, spilling out over forest green velvet as if a sultan had emptied his treasure box to tempt a princess.

  In a corner of the hotel’s vast lobby, Lobo found a chair and slumped down. And waited. He was still there when La Passionara completed her final number, ecstatic that the spotlight was embracing her, that the fan was billowing her silks, that even the musicians seemed caught up in the fervor of her dance in homage to Lord Shiva, her hands entwined like serpents, her body in combat against the demons, an imaginary fire consuming all but her.

  But when she was finished and had managed to squeeze an unprecedented three bows from the few dozen people in the room, Mr. Lobo did not present himself, nor send another card, nor invite her to his table. Disappointment chewed at her as she waited behind the screen, wondering if she should take a table in expectation of his summons. But that seemed brazen, inappropriate, for, she reasoned, a genuine artiste should be encountered presiding over a doting claque of admirers, tasting champagne, accepting compliments, dispensing bons mots, perhaps even unable to find a place at her altar for a man who did not keep appointments. Finally, dejection becoming humiliation, La Passionara returned to her room, stripped off her makeup, changed into an old robe, and was well into a tantrum when a soft rap sounded at her door. It was midnight. Frightened, La Passionara chose not to respond. The rap came quickly again. “It is Lobo,” said the voice outside.

  “You are much younger than I thought,” said Lobo, when his quarry finally opened the door, after promising her it was of no importance that she was unprepared for visitors. “The lighting in the club is very bad. It makes you look ten years older.”