Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  In November, his ninety-day visa expired, Charles was foolish enough to steal a car parked outside a cathedral in Marseilles and take a young woman on a joyride. They drove along the Riviera, stopping to view the jeweled lights of Cannes from a winding mountain road, then turning north toward Grasse, the city where Queen Victoria spent winters and where roses, jasmine, and bitter orange blossoms are cultivated to form the great perfumes of France.

  En route, Charles was stopped for speeding, which led to an arrest for car theft and for being in France without proper papers sentenced to six months in prison, Charles was to be expelled from the country after completion of the jail time. Charles served his first prison sentence in an orderly manner, working in the kitchen of an old prison near Grasse. “It was really no worse than working for my father,” he would later say. “And it wasn’t a total waste. I learned karate and Italian.”

  On the day he was released, Charles was told that the court was giving him thirty days to put his affairs in order before deportation. He would then be placed aboard a ship leaving Marseilles and forever banished from France. Once again he turned to his mother, who had not known of her son’s imprisonment. Nor did he tell her now, only that the immigration bureaucracy had trapped him like an innocent forest animal and he now had no place to go. His notion, explained Charles, was to leave voluntarily, slipping across the border into Italy. There he would wait until his case died from lack of attention, and there he could obtain documents that would enable him to return to France. He needed to borrow a few hundred francs for the journey. “I want to stay in France,” he pleaded with Song. “I am French. You made me French.”

  Quickly Song shook her head. She had no more money to spend on her son. He had not paid back the sum she had sent to retrieve him from the Bombay port police. The boy would soon be twenty, he was a man, he must handle his problems alone. Charles’ mood turned dark. He accused his mother of never having loved him. Song, unbending, showed Charles the door. She would not see him again for more than a decade, not until he had become one of the most famous men in a world whose boundaries stretched from Paris to Hong Kong. And on that distant day, she would crawl on her knees until they were bloody. And then she would ask God to kill him.

  Charles hitchhiked to Paris, where he lost himself easily in the Vietnamese community, thousands of refugees having streamed into the city after France withdrew from Southeast Asia. Among them Charles moved unnoticed for months, drifting from one cheap hotel room to another, working a night or two washing dishes, always keeping an urgent eye open for the random policeman who might question him for the most minor infraction and set in motion his expulsion from France. The tightrope on which he walked was extremely shaky. Dazzled by the temptations of the Champs-Elysées and Boulevard St. Germain, where the young girls strolled and stirred his passions, Charles had no money to pursue them. Worse, he had no carte d’identité, a vital document in a time when the streets of Paris were heavily patrolled by police in search of terrorists and their plastique bombs being detonated to oppose De Gaulle’s withdrawal from Algeria. Christmas Eve, 1963, was passed in the backroom of a Vietnamese cafe near Montparnasse, playing dice with old men who stripped him of everything he had, even the coat that his father had sewn for him in Saigon. After midnight, he dared walk openly along the quais beside the Seine, feeling that the police would be benevolent on this holiday morning. It was bitterly cold; he was in despair. He cursed the tailor in Saigon, who surely at this moment was stuffing goose into his stomach; he cursed his mother in Marseilles and the sick, carping soldier that she had married. Never had he felt so alone. “I was a sack of garbage,” he would later say. “My family put me outside and waited for the truck to take me to the dump.”

  Just before dawn, Charles found himself on a narrow, cobblestoned street near the École des Beaux-Arts. The shopwindow of a fancy foods grocer who sold pâtés and puréed chestnuts and elaborate fruit tarts caught his eye. He looked at the expensive temptations for a while, then picked up a stone and threw it into the window. Reaching inside, he scooped up a box of chocolates and a cold quiche and a bottle of champagne. Then he ran quickly toward the river, where he found a secluded place, and there he crammed the rich food into his mouth and drank the wine. He slept. But as dawn neared and the bells of Notre Dame called worshipers to Christmas mass, his stomach churned and he vomited into the river.

  Charles fell in with a Vietnamese hoodlum who had been operating in Paris for a few years. He called himself Romain, and he set about educating his naïve younger countryman in the street life. Necessary immediately was further instruction in karate, which Charles had only begun to learn in the Grasse prison. There was more, far more to karate than breaking boards, tutored Romain. That was for night clubs. Karate was a philosophy, the way a man could both defend himself and at the same time emit auras of strength, like a child guarded by a watchdog. Charles studied the origin of martial arts in the ancient monasteries of Tibet. The monks of those days traveled once a week down the mountain paths to a village for provisions. En route, bandits lay in wait to rob them. The head monk, Daruma Taishi, studied the problem and created a method of self-defense that would protect, not kill. Nature was his teacher and inspiration, and the monk devised defense postures in which the human emulated nature—the praying mantis, the lion, the snake, the pine tree. In his book was a passage that Charles memorized: “Only when one can face death without fear can one face life.” Another passage caught his attention. It decreed that the student of karate must develop a mind like a pool of water. When the water is absolutely still and calm, the moon is reflected perfectly, in all its beauty. But when a pebble is thrown into the water, the moon is distorted, broken, fragmented. The analogy was easy for Charles to understand. He had spent too much time railing at the injustices of his young life, when what he should have been doing was shoving these extraneous grievances aside and concentrating totally on whatever was at hand.

  Romain’s trade was minor crime—an occasional robbery-at-knife-point of a passenger in a Métro station late at night, shoplifting, car stripping. It was his intention that Charles become his right-hand man. But he could not risk employing an apprentice thief who had no identity papers and was thus in continual jeopardy of arrest. To remedy this, Romain led Charles one night to a secluded house on the outskirts of Paris where new lives were for sale. In a workshop lived an old Oriental man with a face of pale ivory. He spread out his wares. A student visa? Five hundred francs. Carte d’identité? Eight hundred fifty francs. Passports? What nation? The old man reached into a locked box and picked up dozens of passports, letting the small leatherette booklets dribble through his hands. The prices ranged from 1,000 francs for a poorly altered Swiss to 5,000 for a fresh new United States of America. On a side table, Charles noticed an array of precision tools, small needle punches, pots of ink and dye, a stack of assorted photographs, even fake visa stamps from many countries. “Who do you want to be?” whispered Romain, as Charles shook his head in bewilderment. He had never been anyone, and now was the opportunity to become a hundred different men.

  In a six-week period in the early spring of 1964, Charles committed—by police count—eleven different robberies, most of a petty nature, trying to amass enough money to buy an identity. He stole a woman’s coat from a restaurant, a suitcase from a train station, a sewing machine, 164 packages of cigarettes, a purse, a knife, a bit of change from a merchant’s cashbox. The goods he sold at flea markets, his goal being 3,000 francs for a passport. Perhaps he would have reached it had he not become enamored of a pretty young Parisienne whom he took for a ride in a stolen car. Driving too fast on the Autoroute du Nord, Charles was stopped. He reached for the registration papers, knowing that they were in the glove compartment. But the policeman instead asked for his carte d’identié and all Charles could thrust forth was a stolen certificate of high school graduation that he had found, and to which he had sloppily attached his photograph from a vending machine. For a few unsuccessful
moments, Charles tried to pass himself off as an instructor at the Sorbonne.

  The judge of the Tribunal de Grande Instance de la Seine held the police report in his hands and lectured the thin young Oriental man standing white-faced before him. It was the judge’s considered opinion that the streets of Paris were no longer safe, due greatly to the flood of foreigners streaming in from former French territories in Africa and Asia. Examples must be set. The citizens must be protected from outlaws who imported the savagery of foreign cultures to the City of Light.

  Charles pleaded that he stole food because he was hungry. He stole clothing because he was cold. He tried to make the judge understand what it was like to be a stateless person, born during a war, reared by parents who neither loved him nor wanted him. None of this touched the magistrate. Did this defendant steal a car because he was hungry? Did he rob a grocer because he was born illegitimate? Did he forge a certificate of matriculation because he was unloved?

  Charles Sobhraj was sentenced to three years in Poissy Prison. The enormity of the punishment did not really settle on him until he was led manacled from the courtroom. Then his mind began to spin and he whirled, prepared to scream curses on the unfeeling judge. But at that moment he remembered the Tibetan monks, and he commanded his mind to become as still as the pool of unmolested water. He would endure this. He would not even give the bastards the pleasure of seeing him weep. With that he smiled serenely and nodded obediently and walked in chains toward his destiny.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the 16th Arrondissement of Paris, bastion of the rich and the pretenders, there lived at this moment a proper young gentleman named Félix d’Escogne, elder son and heir to a substantial family holding in forestry. His flat, near enough to the Auteuil racetrack to hear crowds cheer the blooded horses, contained a few good pieces of art, mostly of Eastern origin, worn but real Persian carpets, shelves of books on philosophy and biography, and a record player whose needle rarely touched anything more tumultuous than Debussy. Nearing forty, he was shy, unmarried, though he appreciated the companionship of women, and employed as a young executive in the computer division of a conglomerate. He had a boyish, almost babyish face that was aging suddenly, and his clothes were usually rumpled from lack of attention. He was like a favorite house slipper, a cherished uncle, a solid and dependably comfortable easy chair. Uncommonly, for the French are not an especially charitable people, he was also imbued with a social conscience. For generations his family had recognized the duty of the privileged to share a portion with the needy, though normally it was accomplished by discreet contributions that did not soil the hands.

  Félix, however, preferred to labor personally and his special interest was the penal system. One day each week he assumed the role of visiteur, a volunteer who is admitted to prisons and permitted to help the inmates with letter writing, minor personal needs. Most important, he provided an attentive ear for men who needed one.

  His accreditation was at Poissy Prison, the ancient and ugly prison of Paris that had, centuries before, been constructed as a convent, later seized during the French Revolution, enduring home for most of France’s most notorious criminals including several Nazis of World War II. “It is a horror,” said Félix after his first few visits there. “One enters the place and chills pass through the bones like stepping into a cellar. Each moment I am inside, I am repelled.” It was a place where time stopped two centuries ago, where there was no attempt at rehabilitation, where the business of each unfortunate man locked inside was survival, little else.

  Poissy had several sections—one for the chronically ill, another for the maniacally dangerous, still another for those prisoners—usually foreigners—that the authorities did not know what to do with. Charles fell into this category, mixed in with a hundred men in a communal ward during daylight hours, locked into a chicken coop of a cell at night, large enough for only one. Discipline fell just short of perverse cruelty. Prisoners were not allowed to make a “home” out of their cells by tacking up family photographs or keeping a box of personal possessions. During the day, when the men were in the common room, guards liked to “inspect” individual cells and tear them apart. Radios were not permitted, nor newspapers; even letters were ruthlessly censored and often withheld.

  In the fall of 1966, Félix paid a visit to Poissy after returning from a holiday in Yugoslavia. There he had visited the families of several prisoners and had hand-carried letters. His courtesies were received with such outpourings of emotion and gratitude that now, as the cruel fortress came once again into his view, he shuddered for the men inside. When he passed through the thick, massive gates and waited in the entrance lockup for an escort to the deeper regions, a guard appeared to compliment him. The Yugoslavian prisoners had all but enshrined him with their praise. “You did so well with the Serbs and Croats,” said the guard, “perhaps you would like to take on a Vietnamese? One has been asking for a visiteur.”

  Down a long, dank hall, footsteps echoing on stones laid before Louis XVI, Félix found the visitors’ chamber and waited. He would one day remember the next moments in detail:

  “Presently my eyes beheld a frail, frightened, yet arrogant young Oriental boy with ears sticking out to here. He sat down on the bench and stared at me. In fact, he tried to stare me down—or frighten me. After a while I said, ‘Look here, are we playing a game?’ Still more staring. I glanced at my watch. Only thirty minutes were allowed, and twenty of them were gone. I said, ‘I don’t care to wait. It doesn’t seem likely to get any friendlier.’” Félix rose and started to rap on the door for the guard outside to unlock it.

  At that point Charles cried out, “Wait!” He had been studying Félix to determine if he could be “trusted.”

  And?

  “I don’t know,” said Charles. “I’ve made the wrong decision too many times.”

  Félix asked how he could be of help.

  Words rushing out now in torrents, Charles asked Félix to act as mediator in negotiating a rapprochement with his father in Saigon. In Charles’ continually shifting loyalties, the pendulum had swung from his mother back to the tailor once more. During almost two years of imprisonment, in the insomnia of his chicken coop, the revelation had come that he loved only his father and wanted his support. It was his intention to finish his prison sentence and then return to Vietnam, if the tailor would help him get travel papers and agree to accept him.

  “Does your father know all this?” asked Félix.

  Charles shook his head and answered softly. No. He had not heard from his father in almost five years.

  Now Félix was confused. Surely Charles did not expect him to fly off to Saigon, where a war was intensifying, and extend a son’s love to a tailor? Charles smiled—appealingly, noted Félix—and shook his head. No. Not now. All he wanted was Félix to continue visiting him in prison and as the time passed they would become better acquainted. Once Félix knew and understood the complex history of Charles’ life, then perhaps he could be a family peacemaker.

  Time was up. Félix took his leave. But not before Charles intoned a pretentious little epilogue. “In my body flow two rivers,” he said. “They are the East and the West, and they are separate, never joining.”

  Eyebrows raised, Félix gratefully bolted for fresh air.

  Félix encountered a priest in Poissy who served as one of the chaplains. The two men were friends and occasional conspirators, smuggling uncensored mail in and out on behalf of the prisoners, and filling shopping lists of needed items like soap and stationery. The priest knew that Félix had seen Charles Sobhraj, and he had words of caution. Charles would try to “overwhelm” Félix. He would attempt to “take command” of the visiteur’s life.

  In the year just past, the priest had obtained—at Charles’ directive—books on theology, philosophy, palmistry, yoga, essays by Voltaire, plays by Molière. And as he read them, Charles made up enormous long lists of words he did not understand and was continually soliciting the chaplain for definiti
ons. They had quarreled vigorously over the relative virtues and defects of Christianity vs. Buddhism. Charles had asked for—and received—a chess set, and not only had he taught himself the game, he quickly became the ranking master in his section. “He has a mind like an anteater, sucking up every scrap of information he can obtain,” remarked the priest. And the letters! “The man can go through a tablet of writing paper in a day or two. I think he became an expert at chess just to win money for stamps.”

  The priest and the visiteur shook hands and walked in their separate directions—Félix toward the sweet air of Paris gilding for a Saturday night, the priest toward the chapel, where he would pray for the men in society’s cages. The next time they met, the young clergyman reminded himself, he must caution Félix against Charles’ adroitness in lying. He was a champion at that, too. So much so that the priest wondered if the prisoner even knew the difference between truth and fantasy.

  On the next visiting day, Charles leaped up when Félix entered the room, his eyes as happy as if he were welcoming a classmate at a school reunion. Immediately Charles seized control and began to outline the course of their friendship. If Félix were to understand him, then Félix must know his biography, which Charles was prepared to deliver, in installments. Wondering what in God’s name he was getting into, Félix settled back. For the next several Saturdays, Charles delivered his life story as an expert monologist, theatrical in the telling, raising his memories at moments to the category of Greek tragedy with the forces of nature and the gods united against an illegitimate child born of parents who did not want him. And more often than not, there were lies, or, as Félix charitably reasoned, alterations in character analysis. One week Song was a whore, parading around Saigon in tight-ass dresses, painted like a denizen of Pigalle, men panting in her wake. The next, she became a madonna, clasping Charles to her breast, murmuring lullabies, squeezing a favored place for him in the French lieutenant’s crowded rooms. Sobhraj the Tailor alternated from a tyrannical brute whose sadistic switches rained bruises and welts on the boy’s tender skin to a gentle, religious holy man whose every utterance should have been carved in stone.