Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  One broiling April noon, when the earth was parched and prayers were being offered in the mosques for an early monsoon, Red Eye saw an unusual parade approaching the huts of Western prisoners. A large squad of police and soldiers was escorting a young man who was wearing the latest style in French suits, with tinted glasses shielding his eyes, with expensive shoes gleaming from recent polishing. The elegant man carried a leather attaché case and walked with grace and authority. For a moment, Red Eye thought the approaching newcomer was a high-ranking government minister, perhaps the Prime Minister’s son. But he was rudely deposited in the mud hut, just like the other prisoners. The new man looked around, grimaced, and introduced himself. His name was Charles Sobhraj, and as soon as the guards left him alone, he announced immediate plans to escape. “Lots of luck,” said Red Eye. The prison had more guards than inmates. If anybody ever drifted near the wall, he was shot.

  Red Eye studied the new man with interest. On his wrist was a Patek Philippe watch that had to sell for $2,000. How had he managed to keep that? And the attaché case? And what had brought him to this dead end? To a mud hut prison? “They’re fools,” said Charles. “Somebody told lies about my passport. Fortunately my wife managed to get out. She’s in Teheran waiting for me.”

  “How long are you in for?” asked Red Eye.

  Charles shrugged. “That isn’t relevant,” he said. “What’s important is how long it will take to get out.” Quickly Charles dropped a few weighty biographical facts about himself, in the bragging manner of a new kid in the neighborhood who is contending for team leadership. He said he had to reach Teheran posthaste, as there were, in addition to his wife, jewels waiting to be sold. His business, he told Red Eye, was the exporting of gems from India and their sale in other countries to wealthy Arabs and Europeans. In the first ten minutes of their association, Charles offered Red Eye a job as courier and said he could make $5,000 a month to start. Red Eye hadn’t encountered a hustler like this since he had sold encyclopedias door to door at the age of seventeen in Oregon.

  Immediately Charles began pacing around the hut, studying its dimensions, making sketches on the dirt floor with a stick. The room was approximately nine feet wide by twelve feet long and contained six prisoners. The “Western section” was considered minimum security, and aside from the eternal footsteps that sounded on the roof, the guards paid these men little attention, save a cursory check once or twice a day, sometimes not at all. The huts were directly adjacent to the main prison wall, beyond which was the bazaar. The cries of merchants and shoppers haggling could clearly be heard. The bazaar was enormous, an easy place to disappear if only the wall could be transgressed.

  After half an hour of earnest study and calculation, Charles determined that a tunnel could be dug from the floor of the mud hut, underneath the wall, and surface once again at the edge of the bazaar. He opened his briefcase and produced a metal spoon, stolen from a hotel in Delhi. “Who wants to go with me?” he asked, holding up the spoon.

  “What are you going to do with that spoon?” asked Red Eye.

  “Dig the tunnel,” said Charles, whereupon Red Eye, modestly stoned at the moment, broke into laughter and rolled into the corner of the hut in a merry ball.

  “I’m quite serious,” said Charles. “It can be done. But I need help.”

  “Not a chance,” sneered Red Eye, who theoretically had but two months left to serve. He did not wish to risk an extension.

  Two other prisoners in the hut, an Englishman and a Canadian both refused as well. But a Frenchman in his fifties, a distinguished-looking gray-haired man who brought to mind the actor Jean Gabin, spoke up softly. His voice trembled. “I should refuse, too,” he said, “but I want to get out. I am going to kill a woman.” Red Eye knew of whom the Frenchman spoke. He had heard the story many times. The woman in question, after quarreling with Frenchie over something trivial, had been expelled from his hotel room and out of spite she informed the police that his luggage contained several passports. A search by authorities turned up six, including false identity papers and a few gems, the ownership of which was unprovable. Frenchie was given two years as a smuggler, and he had served more than half. Every day of his confinement he cursed the betraying woman with the rawest of hatred.

  “Good,” said Charles sympathetically, “we begin.” He bent the teaspoon, crouched down, and made a modest scratch in the rock-hard earth. Red Eye watched with fascination. He predicted silently that the elegantly dressed newcomer would abandon the idea within the hour. But by nightfall, Charles had reached a depth of three feet, having already excavated rocks as large as melons. At this point, Red Eye grew nervous, for if the tunnel were discovered by guards, then every man in the hut would receive punishment. To ensure his non-alignment, Red Eye moved to the hut next door, an easy enough thing to do. Though he declined to join the diggers, Red Eye made an important contribution to their security. He had previously obtained a set of bongo drums at the bazaar and now he sat in the doorway of his hut, beating them all day long, until his hands were weary, camouflaging the noise of the excavation. And if guards seemed headed toward the hut that contained Charles and the Frenchman, Red Eye would find a way to divert them with conversation, at least long enough for the tunnel to be covered with a blanket.

  On the second day, Charles faced the problem of what to do with the dirt he was excavating. Some of it could be emptied into the outhouse toilet, concealed in the men’s shirts when they went there for relief. But as the toilet was cleaned once a week, the diggers could not risk putting too much earth into it. Charles directed that the debris be spread evenly on the floor of the cell underneath the bamboo mats on which the prisoners slept. Every day the floor grew in height, and after four days of digging the guards had to actually step up to enter the cell. But still they did not seem suspicious. Whenever a guard approached, Red Eye signaled, and Charles extinguished the faint twenty-watt light bulb, lighting a candle instead that gave the scantest illumination. When one senior guard, proud of the prison’s electricity, wondered why the stupid foreigners preferred candlelight, he was told by Charles that it attracted fewer insects.

  On the fifth day, concluding an incredible marathon of more than a hundred hours during which Charles hardly slept or ate but still retained his mental and physical powers, the tunnel was nine feet deep, whereupon it curved and continued straight ahead for another fifteen feet, then back up again to within a few inches of an exit just on the other side of the prison wall. Charles and Frenchie crawled its distance three times to check its safety and accuracy. Then he summoned Red Eye. “We’re going. Tonight. Do you want to come along?” Tempted as he was, Red Eye refused. But he did promise to meet Charles one day again, somewhere, someplace along the trail of the wanderers.

  Red Eye asked one favor. Inside Charles’ attaché case, which the guards had still not confiscated, was a small vial of chloroform. Charles had shown it to the American one day. Red Eye knew that the moment the escape was discovered a volcano of recrimination would erupt. “I want to be totally out of it,” said Red Eye. “If I’m really zonked, maybe they’ll leave me alone.” He asked Charles for enough chloroform to ensure a heavy sleep. “I want to be convincingly dead to the world when the guards start hitting people.”

  Charles agreed readily, grateful for the interference Red Eye had run with his bongo drums. He poured out an inch of clear liquid into a small cup and gave it to Red Eye, who wondered if he would ever wake up once it was consumed. He realized his options were slim. Either drink the chloroform or get the hide stripped off his back.

  On the night of the escape, Red Eye was lying on his blanket, reading by a candle stub, when the prison was shattered by a cacophony—sirens, shouts, whistles, the barking of dogs. He sat up quickly, saw Charles running into the hut. “We’re busted,” cried Charles, his eyes wild, his body covered with dirt.

  “Sorry,” said Red Eye, prudently reaching for the glass of chloroform. Without hesitation he drained it and waited for u
nconsciousness to shield him from the wrath of the guards. He would later learn what had happened to Charles and Frenchie—an exceptional stroke of rotten luck—or fate. The two men, Charles leading, had crept safely through their tunnel, under the main prison wall, and up again on the side of freedom. Charles removed the last remaining chunk of dirt and saw the stars of a hot night brilliantly welcoming him. With caution he raised his head into the open air and checked to see if anyone was watching. How unkind was this moment! An off-duty prison guard happened to be strolling toward the bazaar and had stopped to light a cigarette. At that instant, he saw a human head rising from the earth, like a miraculous cabbage, or a rabbit sniffing out danger. The guard drew his gun and fired a quick shot, whereupon Charles prudently withdrew and hissed at Frenchie to retreat back to the prison hut. The guard meanwhile discovered the tunnel and attacked it with a stick, forcing a cave-in. Then he raced to the main building and reported an attempted escape. The major in charge, a stout man with a beautifully tended mustache, reacted violently. As if charging an enemy encampment, he raced to the line of huts that housed foreign prisoners and ordered each of them into the common yard. There were ten, including Red Eye, who was yanked from his drugged sleep and dragged to the lineup. Two guards had to prop up his body. The major surveyed the motley group for a few moments in silent suspense. Then he grabbed the rifle of an aide and pointed its bayonet at Red Eye’s throat. “No one escapes from my prison,” he said in thickly accented English. He drew the bayonet back, and Red Eye feared that it was the moment of his execution. The major’s eyes bulged and the veins on his temples pounded in angry red streams. One of the sergeants boldly grabbed the rifle and whispered something at the major, presumably the suggestion that it would be troublesome to kill an American in front of so many witnesses.

  His face now as red as the morning sun, the major ordered the ten prisoners to his office, where they were told to stand in a circle, hands held, facing outward. The guards now played a torturing game, circling slowly, demanding information as to the name of the ringleader, slapping faces, punching stomachs. Charles readily confessed that it was he, and he alone, who dug the tunnel, but the major refused to believe him. Red Eye noted that the major seemed to treat Charles with a certain deference, as if a man who wore French clothes, a $2,000 watch, and who stayed in luxury hotels did not have the capacity nor the deviousness required to soil his hands in digging. The men began to bleed and faint. Red Eye tried to slip back into unconsciousness, but even the chloroform failed him. Charles cried many times, “Please believe me. It was me, only me!” But the major would not accept the mea culpa.

  The beatings lasted until dawn. The Frenchman passed out sometime after midnight, and Red Eye later learned that he had gone into severe shock. Finally the major grew weary of the interrogation and ordered the prisoners taken back to their cells—in handcuffs that could not be removed. Guards tore apart the huts, confiscating spoons, anything that might be used as a digging tool. But they did not take Charles’ briefcase. Red Eye assumed that somewhere along the way money passed hands. But at this point he did not care. His eyes were so swollen from the beatings that the world was two narrow slits. Mercifully he fell asleep.

  After a while he awoke. Charles was standing over him. His handcuffs were unlocked and dangling from one arm. “I’m sorry for so much trouble,” said Charles. He knelt and with a key easily unlocked Red Eye’s handcuffs. “Don’t take them off,” cautioned Charles. “If the guard comes around, make it look like they are still locked.” Red Eye was astonished to learn that in one hidden compartment in Charles’ briefcase were nine different keys, all supposedly masters to the handcuffs of nine separate Asian countries. Charles confided that he had bought them in Hong Kong and was thus able to foil the police wherever he went. “I paid enough for them to buy a Rolls-Royce,” he told Red Eye. “There are times when they are more valuable.”

  Late that afternoon, the guards appeared and moved the ten Western prisoners into maximum security, that being little more than a dirt box three feet wide and five feet long, high enough for a man to crouch. Two prisoners were put into each box, stripped nearly naked, and left to cope with the spiders, the dark, the cold. Red Eye drew Charles as his roommate, and he still possessed his briefcase. The one privilege that remained for the men in solitary was to send the errand boy, the bacha, to the bazaar for rice, beans, or tea. When the youngster came around to take orders, Red Eye’s shopping list was brief: some hard candy that would linger in the mouth for hours, and Mandrax, a powerful sleeping powder. Charles asked the bacha to go to the pharmacy and purchase a large syringe—not an unusual request as the prisoners frequently bought paraphernalia to use in their drug ventures—and a drinking glass.

  “What the hell are you up to?” asked Red Eye. Charles shrugged, but in his eyes were the makings of another escape plan. Red Eye marveled at his capacity. Clearly Charles would hatch scheme after scheme until something worked.

  When the boy returned with the requested purchases, Charles seized the large syringe, big enough to draw blood from a horse’s limbs, and studied it carefully. Then he called to Red Eye, waking him from a Mandrax-induced sleep. Red Eye could barely focus, but when he collected his senses, he realized what Charles was planning. He shuddered, with a large measure of horror. Charles was plunging the syringe into his own arm, then filling it with his own blood. “Empty this into the glass,” he directed Red Eye, who obeyed, but turned his head away as he expelled the dark fluid from the syringe. “Now give it back to me,” ordered Charles, taking the syringe again. The water glass was a quarter full. Twice more Charles filled the syringe and twice again Red Eye emptied his cellmate’s own blood into the glass. Now it was almost full.

  “Thank you,” murmured Charles weakly. “I will see you again someday. Don’t forget you can always work for me.” Whereupon he threw his head back and drank in his own blood, forcing himself to cough and spilling it on his chin and shoulders and staining his shirt red. He looked now as he had schemed to look—like a man with critical internal hemorrhaging. Red Eye screamed for a guard. When the guard came, he was stunned—Charles seemed to be on the threshold of death. A stretcher was brought to take the bleeding prisoner to Vazir Akbar Khan Hospital, his feet and arms handcuffed. Red Eye sat down on the earth and pondered the exceptional lengths that this man would go in pursuit of freedom. But they were beyond his comprehension.

  At the hospital it was determined that Charles had a bleeding ulcer and would be treated for several days. He was placed in a private room under twenty-four-hour police guard. Someone started to take away his attaché case, but Charles pleaded that it contained photographs of his wife and daughter—and as he was probably going to die, could he not keep these precious icons in his reach? Permission was granted.

  A day or two later, when Charles seemed to be mending, the handcuffs were removed and only his feet remained locked to the bed. He asked the guard for a cup of tea. The guard agreed, ordering one for himself as well. When the tea arrived, the guard accepted the tray, put it down, and went to shut the door. In that fraction of a moment when his eyes were off the prisoner, Charles poured a splash of chloroform into the guard’s teacup. Five minutes later, the guard was in the embrace of Morpheus. Calmly, just as he had planned, Charles found a key in his briefcase that opened the cuffs on his feet. He walked quietly out the front door, two weeks to the day from when he was first thrown into Damazan Prison.

  Sometime later Red Eye got a postcard from Teheran. On the front was a photograph of the crown jewels, and on the rear was scrawled: “Safe trip out. No problems. Thanks for everything. Hello to friends. Love, C.” Red Eye stared at it for a long time and then he began to laugh, so raucously that the guard pounded a rifle butt on the mud hut roof as a warning to shut up.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In Charles’ own words, dictated patiently to a police stenographer a few years later, his travels during 1972 were astonishing. The stenographer tried to follow the ro
utes by marking red lines on a map of Europe and Asia but after a time gave up. The map was starting to resemble a demented spider’s web.

  Having escaped from police custody in India and Afghanistan, Charles spun around half the globe like an overwound top. Some of his story was surely fancy, but again much of it was true—as police would one day satisfy themselves. The stenographer wrote an appropriate addendum at the bottom of Charles’ statement: “This man lies on every point.” But she nonetheless typed out a report that would become part of a burgeoning dossier:

  “After I left Kabul,” said Charles, “I left my wife there to look after the charges against me. I went first to Pakistan and bought a forged passport. Then I went to Karachi and Teheran, where I stole the passport of an American businessman. I flew to Rome in mid-1972 using this American’s passport. In Rome I remained only a few hours and then flew to Paris to visit with my mother-in-law and to pick up my daughter, Shubra, who was very glad to see her father. We telephoned Hélène in Kabul and sang a song to her on the telephone. We then flew to Rome, Copenhagen, and stayed about two days. There I hired a big Fiat and paid about $150 advance deposit. I drove with Shubra to Yugoslavia and was headed for Bulgaria. I had purchased about twenty passports from hippies in Rome near the Spanish Steps. These were professional hippies, so I was fully satisfied that the passports were clean. When I got to the border crossing between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, everything was fine until my daughter made water on the car seat where my passport was resting. It got wet, and the customs authorities were suspicious. They told me to pull my car to the side, and when they opened the luggage trunk, they found the twenty passports I had purchased in Rome. There was no important official at the border at this hour of the night—about 11 P.M.—so they took me to a village about eleven kilometers from the border. The car was detained by customs authorities. They told me to report the next day at 9 A.M. to see the chief. My daughter and I had a late supper, then we decided to leave. We took a taxi all the way across Yugoslavia to Italy. Oh, I forgot to say that along the way I managed to buy two new passports, one for me and one for my baby girl. We put our pictures on them and changed the names. It was thus easy to cross the border back into Italy … We flew to Rome. There I was able to buy ten new passports, all good ones, and I flew next to Beirut—not a good city for my line of work. Then we went to Pakistan and finally back to Teheran, where my wife Hélène was supposed to join us. We stayed at the Hilton Hotel. I met an Italian girl at the Hilton whom I had known earlier in my career. She managed to get one passport for me from a businessman, and when this man reported the theft, the Italian girl was arrested. She informed the police about me, and I was picked up. My daughter was put in the care of the French Embassy. Shubra was sent home to Paris to live with her grandparents, and I was convicted on passport fraud and given six months’ imprisonment. My wife Hélène flew to Teheran from Kabul and came to see me in prison. Then, on my advice, she left for France …”