Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Caught in a vise—a customs agent at one end and onrushing police at the other—Charles smiled, appreciating the insanity of the moment. And he did what any prudent man would do in a quandary like that. “I’ll be right back,” he told the baggage inspector. “I have to go to the toilet.” With that, Charles nimbly leaped across one long table, found a promising hallway, ducked through an empty office, and threaded his way into the brisk midnight air that contained enough fog to mask his long and successful race to sanctuary.

  Behind, on the customs table, was left the flight bag. One ripe fragment of irony remained. The inspector had glanced routinely inside, saw nothing, zipped up the bag, chalked his mark of approval, and was waiting for the passenger to return from the toilet when Pradash arrived with the police, falling on his stolen jewels with tears and laughter.

  The next morning Charles slipped quietly onto the first train for Bombay. The humiliation of losing the gems still stung, but there remained a sense of excitement that had possessed him throughout the long weekend in La Passionara’s hotel room. He would later tell a friend, “I would have happily gone through the entire experience again. I felt alive every moment—and dead when it was over.” Delhi’s newspapers were full of the audacious enterprise. La Passionara’s photograph had captured her in a bad moment; she looked like a woman just rescued from a capsizing ship with her hair in wild disarray, her face wrinkled and worn. She told a vivid tale of her captivity. Pradash told police that the mysterious “Mr. Lobo” was probably a professional killer because his eyes had gleamed homicidal. Charles kept the newspapers, for they would verify that the gems had been reclaimed at the airport. He did not want Maurice, his patron, to suspect that he had not been honest in losing them.

  From Bombay, Charles flew to Teheran, encountering no difficulty in leaving India—word does take a while to get around the enormous subcontinent. He was also traveling on a new stolen passport, an item as easy to purchase in Bombay as a sweetmeat on a street corner. In Teheran, Maurice was surprisingly docile, although he did lash his bumbling apprentice with questions and criticism. Charles had anticipated more, indeed the blade in his pocket was well honed. But there was no need for violence. Maurice had another proposal. As Charles was now in debt to the Englishman for the $3,000 advance against his Macao gambling losses, and the substantial sum required to prepare the aborted jewel robbery, perhaps the young man would like to undertake a robbery in Bombay. The object was a small neighborhood bank which normally had insufficient moneys to draw Maurice’s attention. But on a certain afternoon it would contain substantial funds from a lottery. One man could easily handle it. Charles agreed. He was given a pair of tear gas pistols which could be used solely as bluff, but if required they would cover most any difficulty. The two men parted once more, planning to meet several days hence at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay. Maurice murmured his good wishes for successful endeavor, adding that it was in Charles’ best interests to accomplish this work quickly and efficiently.

  Charles was reunited with his near hysterical wife at a hotel room in Bombay, but he had no time for Hélène’s rantings about her loneliness and bewilderment. He made cursory apology for having been away for so long, but blamed it on “business.” The child, Shubra, was one year old and a vivacious pixie with dark curly hair and deep-set brown eyes. From his pocket Charles pulled a gold ring with a modest ruby stone, one that he had somehow failed to put in the flight bag. Hélène thought it was a love token for her, but instead Charles put it on the tiny finger of his child, frowning that it was far too large for the baby. “We’ll have it cut to size,” he announced.

  A few days later, on November 12, 1971, Charles was walking briskly through side streets near the wonderful old Taj Mahal Hotel, a spreading jumble of Gothic and Indo-Saracenic splendor, when he stopped at a cafe frequented by an occasional film star, and by scores of those who pretended to be connected to the fantasy world of inane music, pageantry, and discreet sex that is cinema in India. Once Charles had been asked by a director to be an extra in a crowd scene that required foreign faces, and although he did not have time at that moment, the notion of becoming a film star someday was tucked in one corner of his head.

  While he stood at the cafe entrance and looked around for a friend’s face, two policeman observed him, walked up, and, of all things, arrested him on charges of car theft and fraud. One of his long ago customers, a lawyer to whom he had sold one of the “imported” European automobiles, had recently been ensnared by authorities for illegal paperwork, and he had revealed that the seller of the Mercedes car he was driving had been one Charles Sobhraj. The lawyer had given police a detailed and accurate description of the man in question—late twenties, slim, Oriental caste to his face, horn-rimmed glasses, powerful hands, well dressed, well spoken, very very smooth.

  Charles exploded with wrath over this outrageous case of “mistaken identity” and he reached for his identification papers. In his breast pocket he normally carried a false passport to smooth over uncomfortable encounters like this. But he inadvertently withdrew as well one of the calling cards that announced “J. Lobo, Director, The Casino at Macao.” As every newspaper in India had for the past week carried breathless details on the Ashoka Hotel robbery, it did not take long for police to realize that a major fish had swum into their net.

  When someone called Hélène to inform her that Charles was in the embrace of India’s police and being transported to Delhi to be held without bail, she wrote in her diary, “Nov. 14, 1971. My life ends.” Then she thought awhile, took the ring that Charles had planned to cut down to fit Shubra’s tiny finger, sold it, and purchased a plane ticket for Delhi.

  Almost enthusiastically, Charles made elaborate confession. Throughout his career, he generally made an immediate statement to police, for he well knew that such could not be used against him in most courts. Moreover, he chose to speak in French, realizing that much would be lost or garbled in translation—a point he could capitalize on in his defense. And he knew that by confessing he would avoid being roughed up by police, whose reputation for pounding admissions out of suspects was a fact of life on Charles’ side of the street.

  The statement was not only breathtaking in its lack of veracity, but a revealing self-portrait of how Charles wanted the authorities—and anyone else who read it—to view him. Much of it was purest fantasy, what he felt his life should have been:

  I was brought up by my father in Saigon. He is a very important businessman who owns four tailor shops and a hotel. I had schooling in Saigon and France. There I went to the Sorbonne, where I completed my university education in 1963–64. I then studied law for three years, and thereafter I went to a scientific academy where I studied for two more years. I met my wife at the University where she was taking her master’s degree in Spanish. I fell in love with her and we got married in 1969. After my marriage, I took a job with a fire extinguisher company, where I got 20 per cent commission on sales, earned from $1,000 to $1,500 a month, and had 20 persons working under me. I also studied an IBM programming course. I left this company after one year and then started my own business. I would purchase goods from manufacturers and supply them to shopkeepers. From time to time I engaged in foreign travel. I left this business in 1970 to begin an export business with my father in Saigon …

  That Charles took the dirt of his life and by alchemy transformed it into gold was less remarkable than his accusation that Esther Markowitz, alias La Passionara, was part of the plot to rob the Ashoka Hotel jewelry store. Cruelly and ungallantly, Charles swore in his statement—apparently in punishment for the preliminary alarm the dancer had sounded—that La Passionara had been in on the scheme from the beginning, that she had purposely booked Room 289 of the hotel, and that she had lured the robbers into her confidence. He made it sound so convincing that police arrested the artiste, now a major celebrity in Delhi and drawing packed houses, and flung her into Tihar Prison on the outskirts of Delhi, where her screams impressed no one.


  Several days after his arrest, while waiting in a police lockup outside a magistrate court for an appearance, Charles suddenly doubled over in what seemed excruciating and genuine pain. His face blanched white, his body convulsed with spasms. His pain seemed so genuine that the officer in charge ordered the prisoner taken to a hospital for examination. There, when a young doctor pressed his fingers against Charles’ lower right abdomen, the confessed jewel thief screamed. “It’s an old ulcer,” he gasped. The decision was made to perform an appendectomy, and at this Charles got more than he had bargained for. It was his intention only to gain admittance to the hospital for a day or two, during which he could perhaps find a way to escape. During his years in prison, his confreres always said the best place to spring out of confinement was a hospital. When the diagnosis was made, Charles tried desperately to backpedal, but it was too late. Very well, he must have thought, we’ll see what we can do with a missing appendix.

  A few days later Charles was recuperating in a private room guarded twenty-four hours a day. He was not permitted to go to the toilet without a policeman to whom he was handcuffed. But he was permitted to have visitors, and on the night of December 4, 1971, his wife Hélène brought him a bouquet of marigolds and a tin box of macaroons. The guard pawed through both flowers and cookies and was satisfied they contained nothing inappropriate. This was the young woman’s third or fourth visit, and by now the guards were accustomed to her.

  The hospital room was dark and stuffy, the blackout still in effect throughout Delhi. The guard would not permit even a candle. Charles was handcuffed to the railing. Hélène’s nostrils were assaulted every time she sat beside her recuperating husband. The marigolds she brought could not overcome the odors from decades of sick and unwashed who had slept in this room.

  The young couple spoke softly in French, even though the guard had forbidden the foreign language. Whenever he clapped his hands and ordered, “English!” they would obey, making mundane remarks, then slip gently back into French whispers. An hour passed. The guard said it was time for Hélène to leave. Could she not have but a few more minutes? she begged. The guard agreed. Another hour crept by. There was silence in the room. The guard, sitting in a straight-backed chair, tilted his head against the wall. A few more moments of breathless suspense. Then, gently, just as Charles had predicted, the guard began to snore, rattles building like a drum.

  At that, Charles gently touched his wife’s hand. She nodded. They had rehearsed the scene many times. Hélène knew what she was supposed to do. Trembling, she sent feathery fingers dancing into the pocket where the guard’s keys clearly protruded, tightened her grip, slowly extricated the ring. Quickly she unlocked the handcuffs that imprisoned her husband. Charles rose silently from the bed, kissed his wife, murmured “Je t’aime,” and slipped out into the darkened hospital corridor. Hélène took his place in the bed, pulled the covers over her head, and tried not to cry out from the fright over what she had done.

  With studied calm, Charles strolled out the front door of the hospital in his pajamas, hardly an unusual costume in India, where millions of men wear the same. He hailed a taxi and ordered the driver to cruise around an upper-class residental neighborhood near the embassy district. Police later theorized he was looking for a suitable house to burglarize. But, apparently unable to find a score, Charles directed the taxi driver to take him into a swarming district near the old Delhi train station. There he found a cheap hotel and slept fitfully. His incision had broken open, and he tore the sheets to bind it anew. At dawn he wrapped a blanket around his body, swirled the remaining strips of sheeting about his head, and, thus resembling a peasant of the lowest caste—staggered to the station and bought a ticket for the next train to Bombay. As he spoke to the clerk, a policeman noticed him, suspiciously wondered why a vigorous-looking young man with a European aura was masquerading as an untouchable, and started over to ask questions. Foolishly Charles bolted, trying to run, but there was no strength in his legs, and he surrendered readily when a cordon of police delightedly made capture.

  Of course Hélène was now under arrest as well, fortunate that hair was still on her head when the duped guard seized her and yanked her from her husband’s sickbed. She pretended complete innocence and spoke with a thick tongue, as Charles had instructed her. The drama called for her to suggest that somehow Charles had drugged her—a remarkable feat for a handcuffed man—and had tossed her unconscious body onto the bed. Nobody believed a word of it, nobody was affected by Hélène’s copious Gallic tears. And as she passed her first long night in a Delhi jail, she wondered how she had let Charles talk her into the dangerous charade. He had been so convincing. He had sworn in their first visit together after his arrest for the jewel theft that he had been forced to take part. The gamblers who held his IOUs from Macao had threatened his life, and Hélène’s and the baby’s as well. He was only trying to protect his adored wife and daughter from the flashing knives of Oriental killers. Now he needed Hélène to help him escape from the Indian authorities. As soon as he was safely out of the country, he would write the judge and swear that Hélène was innocent. “They wouldn’t keep a French citizen with a baby in custody,” insisted Charles. The French Ambassador would cause a lot of trouble. Hélène made mild protest that she was not theatrically capable for such a performance, but Charles propped her up with silky whispers and promises of an immediate return to Paris. All of this she replayed in her throbbing head as she sat huddled against a mustard wall in the police lockup and watched an old woman with no teeth and a face darker than a mahogany table importune her to sip milky tea from a glass that had, in Hélène’s estimation, probably been used by lepers.

  Presently she was released on $300 bail put up by a friend with connections at the French Embassy. And promptly Hélène made plans for a return to France with Shubra, even though when her handbag was returned to her from police custody it no longer contained her legitimate passport, $200, and an air ticket from Hong Kong to Delhi. The loss hurt, but she would have forfeited a decade of her young life to be out of jail. One of the policemen taunted her that she now had a substantial dossier with Interpol, and though she was not certain how this could be true, Hélène feared that just from being Charles Sobhraj’s legal wife she was guilty by association. To a friend in Paris she wrote: “All I want to do is leave this pagan part of the world and come back to civilization—France! And I never want to see Charles again.”

  But one midnight in late December, as Hélène waited for word from her parents, or Félix d’Escogne, to whom she had sent an urgent cable beseeching money, a rap came urgently at the door of her hotel room. When she answered, no one was there. But a note fluttered at her feet in the chill breeze of the open-air hallway. She read it quickly. “Charles is dying. He took his life to save yours.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ten miles from the heart of Delhi, in the core of an enormous military reservation, squats the hideous prison known as Tihar, which, by Indian standards, is not such a bad place. When a Western attorney once visited the forbidding fortress where ravens perch in symmetrical intervals like carved gargoyles along the mustard walls, where old women using prehistoric tools hammer at granite rocks, smashing them into pebbles for road repair and earning five rupees a day, he shuddered. The lawyer wondered out loud how human beings could be confined in a place that was barely fit to contain American zoo creatures. “India is a poor country,” the guard said. “We have six hundred million people and many of them are hungry and many of them have no place to sleep except the streets. Why should we provide better accommodations inside the prison than out?”

  Hélène flew in heavy grief to the prison, screaming at the taxi driver to hurry. But the cabs of Delhi are fatigued contraptions, long since bereft of springs to shield passengers from potholes. And rare is the driver who puts more than two pints of shockingly expensive gasoline into his tank, just enough to go a few miles until the next fare provides coins for a bit more. The road to Tihar is etern
al, the last few miles through villages choked with children playing in the red clay ruts, families washing at a pipe that dribbles occasional water, oxen occupying the right of way and oblivious to horns and cries. Anyone who takes a taxi to Tihar begins to wonder if the destination will ever be reached, particularly since the last few miles are usually punctuated by the disturbing boom of cannons firing at target practice.

  Her prayer was that she would reach Charles before he drew his last breath, for she knew now that she still loved him. Whether the love was genuine at this point, or the acknowledgment that Charles was the only person on this side of the world who cared for her and could probably get her out of India was not a matter for internal debate.

  At Tihar, Hélène had to stand outside the front gate for sweltering hours, in confused mingling with the other women who had brought their men containers of thick curried soup and dried fruits. No one seemed to know anything. The guards spoke but few words of English, and Hindi was as incomprehensible to Hélène as French was to them. She attempted tears and cries, but they served only to make the guards withdraw; smiles and flirtations accomplished even less. Finally a man who seemed to possess authority as well as a kind face and a command of English told Hélène that she could not be admitted inside the walls without written permission from a magistrate, or in the company of an advocate. At that, Hélène’s patience snapped. She sank to the earth howling. These barbarians had somehow killed her husband, and now she was going to reveal to the world how foreign nationals were treated in this hellhole of a country! The man looked stunned, excusing himself. When he returned, he brought startling news that Charles Sobhraj was not dead at all, only a little weak from refusing to eat. Some sort of hunger strike to protest his treatment. The official led Hélène to a room where polychrome photos of Nehru and Indira Gandhi smiled benevolently on her, as did two guards. Eventually her husband appeared, wan, subdued, and chained—but still very much alive.