There was a certain amount of truth in the odyssey—the day would come when police of a dozen nations would attempt to trace every step that Charles took. But there was considerably more to the tale from the point that Charles poured chloroform into the Afghanistanian guard’s evening tea up to the day that Hélène “on my advice” left for France.
For one thing, he used so many different false names that the wonder was how he could keep track of just who he was supposed to be at any given moment. The report that Iranian police compiled on Charles’ activities in 1972 alone showed that he called himself Dr. Jalian Clair, Charles Sounder, Adolph Nomer, Dr. Marshall Golian, and Salim Harady. He represented himself to be everything from a professor of classical literature at the Sorbonne to an Arabian oil sheikh. His principal endeavor during this period seemed to be traffic in gems and stolen passports, small potatoes crime.
But it would one day come to light—and an official accusation be made—that Charles participated in a far more serious matter during his 1972 crisscrossing of Europe and Asia. He was believed to have killed a man, presumably his first. By the time that the Interpol office in Pakistan tied the murder to his coattails, it would be almost insignificant considering the rivers of spilled blood attributed to the violent young nomad. The victim, said the Pakistani authorities, was a fat tour guide and chauffeur named Habib, who lived in Rawalpindi, the ancient city once the interim capital of Pakistan. Habib was engaged in September 1972 by a handsome young French couple who called themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Damon Seamen.” He was commissioned to drive his customers to Peshawar, a city fabled for its Street of Storytellers, where for centuries traders from all corners of the East have gathered to tell tales, barter lambskins for dried fruits, and haggle over the price of knives. But Habib never returned.
A year later, Pakistani police arrested a woman named Maria Nunez, who told a horrifying story of what had happened to Habib the guide:
I was with Charles on the trip to Peshawar … Along the way he gave the driver, Habib, an injection of something to make him sleep … Pretty soon he died … So Charles put the man in the car trunk because he was dead … A kilometer or so down the road, Charles threw the corpse into the river in a forest …
A charge of murder was thus filed against “Damon Seamen,” later discovered to be an alias for Charles Sobhraj, and the news telexed to every border station in Pakistan. But arresting the suspect would be something else, and peeling the artichoke down to the core where lived Charles Sobhraj would take years. From this point on, Charles rarely used his real name. He was a different man every week, with a different identity, personality, language, and passport. He was on his way to becoming one of the most brazen and ingenious—but not necessarily successful—operators of modern Asian history.
In late 1972, Charles appeared in Teheran under one of his assumed names and checked into the Hotel Napoleon. From there he cabled money to Hélène in Afghanistan and she hurried gratefully, if angrily, to his side. Almost a year had passed since Hélène had slipped into her husband’s bed in Delhi and allowed him to escape, and still they had not made the promised return to Paris. But her temper was softened by a reunion with the little girl, Shubra, now almost two. Charles had stopped off in Paris during his journeys and fetched his daughter. The child looked tired but otherwise adorable and full of chatter about all the interesting places where her daddy had taken her. The young family—father, mother, child—spent a tranquil week in Teheran dining at the best restaurants, watching a royal parade, feeding elephants at the zoo. Charles had expensive bracelets and earrings to adorn his women, and to any passerby the family must have seemed rich and sophisticated and loving.
Late one evening in their hotel suite, however, Hélène lost the thin edge of composure she had so desperately tried to maintain. Tears became screams. Anger filled the room. Charles slapped her. Hard. She threw a chair at him, nicking his cheek and causing a trickle of blood. He wiped it off and flung it onto her face. Falling to her knees like a supplicant, Hélène begged to know what was happening. What was their life? What was to be their future? If Charles put as much energy into some legal business as he did into illegal work, she accused, then he would be a millionaire, and his family would be secure.
When Charles responded with a mocking smile—and silence—Hélène rushed into the bedroom, snatched her sleeping child, and began throwing clothes into a bag. She was going to the French Embassy and if it was closed she would sleep on the steps for the night. The next morning, she was going to find passage back to Paris. If it were necessary to stand on the street and sell her sex, she would do it. The boil was lanced. For three years of marriage she had waited in hotel rooms or prison lobbies. “I even have a police record thanks to you,” she cried. “And for all I know, so does my baby daughter.”
Quickly Charles sought to pacify his distraught wife. He took her in his arms. He crooned his old song, that he was only trying to save enough money for the good life—for her, for the baby. They would leave tomorrow for France if she was all that insistent, but it would be more convenient if he could wait just a few more days in Teheran for a courier who was on the way from Rome. Charles was setting up some sort of international “network” for his “export business.” Once again, wearily, Hélène agreed. During the night she wrote a letter to her parents in France. “We have had trouble,” she wrote, “but Charles is changing for the better, and he still loves me. Shubra is precious.”
A few days later, Charles was arrested while standing in the lobby of the Teheran Hilton. Someone had informed on him. In his briefcase police found several passports that were not his, plus assorted foreign currencies and gemstones that aroused their suspicion. Iran’s fearsome secret police, SAVAK, began questioning Charles to determine if he was part of a ring that provided passports to terrorists who slipped in and out of Teheran and plotted against the Shah. For several lonely but familiar days, Hélène was once again in the dark as to her husband’s whereabouts; he had left their suite one morning saying he would be back by lunch. Then the French Embassy rang to inform her that Charles was once again in jail—and in serious trouble. An official told her that Charles’ situation was grave. The Iranians did not deal lightly with those who were in opposition to the Shah. Actually Charles did not have a political thought in his head; his reasoning stopped at the daily money exchange.
Could she at least see her husband? asked Hélène. The French diplomat shrugged. He would try. In December, Hélène played the scene again, wife visiting husband in prison, this time with one variation. She was resolute. “I can’t live anymore like this,” she told Charles, who for the first time since their marriage was pale and frightened. Bruises colored his arms and neck. He said he had been beaten. “I think I’ll always love you,” she went on, “but I have to think of our daughter.” The French Embassy was advancing her the plane fare back to Paris. There she would file for divorce. There she would change her name. There she would hide. If Charles ever tried to find her, she would hire a bodyguard. Charles listened to her well-rehearsed farewell, but he could not even raise his voice. Three guards with machine guns watched him, at arm’s length. He spoke urgently in rapid French. His plight was minor, he insisted. It was a mixup, a case of mistaken identity. He would be out “in a day or two.”
Hélène held fast. She fought back tears. “The French Embassy says you will never get out of Iran,” she said. “And my darling, I somehow hope they are right.” Hélène rose and did not kiss her husband goodbye. All she said as she left the room was, “Adieu, Charles.” Her husband’s cries echoed after her, tormenting her as she boarded the plane for the return to Paris. She could not sleep, not on the long journey, not on the taxi to her mother’s home, not until she fell into her parents’ embrace and fainted. It was Christmas Eve, 1972. The next morning she went to mass and lit a candle and prayed to God that she would never see Charles Sobhraj again.
In France, Charles’ family knew little or nothing of the errant son.
Not since he had disappeared years earlier with a pregnant bride had Song seen or spoken with her firstborn, the only news being an occasional postcard drifting in from some elegant hotel in the Far East. The message was always more or less: “Am in Hong Kong seeing the sights, doing business. Hélène and the baby are beautiful. Love, your son Charles.”
Félix d’Escogne, however, knew more. Twice he had received urgent cables from Charles or Hélène in the East, beseeching money for bail, and once his suspicions were confirmed when he visited Bombay on business and was welcomed by Charles in his best maharaja mood. Not even Sobhraj the Tailor had received this kind of joyous embrace when he visited Paris. Charles leased a suite at the Taj Mahal Hotel, filled it with roses and vintage wine, escorted his patron to the most favored clubs and restaurants of the city—a remarkably bold undertaking as Charles was wanted by Delhi police for the Ashoka Hotel robbery. But Félix was not fooled. He saw the unmasked pain and worry in Hélène eyes, and even as he bounced his goddaughter Shubra on his knee, he knew that Charles was engaged in some unspeakable enterprise. Often Félix tried to draw his troublesome friend into private conversation, but whenever the touchy subject of Charles’ real private life was approached, some excuse was found to cease talking. All Charles would tell Félix was that he was a successful businessman, planning to open discos and drugstores in Asia, involved in something vague which seemed to be buying old slot machines in Beirut and importing them to Asian casinos. Fortune, if Charles was to be believed, rained blessings each day on his family.
Over the years, Charles continued to write voluminously to Félix, telling of a $5,000 Rolex watch he was buying, of a trip to the United States that never came off, of losing $50,000 in various casinos, of being asked to star in an Indian movie, finally of the break with Hélène. But as Charles told it, he caught his wife having an affair and threw her out.
“With deep sadness I write this letter,” he told Félix. “I have decided to divorce Hélène … I am going to give her 5,000 francs. It’s a very very long, very very tragic story. Little clues and indications and putting things together have finally spelled the truth. I got the proof two days ago … It is such an incredible sadness, even though I know it is the truth. She wanted me to open a private bank account for her, and when there was enough money, she would leave for Hong Kong with her new man. So I refused! Finally I have come to believe that in life you can be confident in friendship only from man to man, like you and me …”
And while Hélène waited miserably in Kabul, after Charles’ great chloroform escape trick, she had written Félix a letter ripe with pain and worry. “I won’t go into the details of these last months,” she wrote, “but I will say that Charles’ situation with Interpol is not very good. Neither is mine after what recently happened. My name has a dossier now, for the first time. My father would die if he knew it.
“On July 2, Charles and I were put in prison in Kabul, and on the evening of July 29 he escaped from the hospital. Three weeks have gone by and I haven’t heard from him. The only thing I know is that he hasn’t been caught. Maybe it’s better that he left Afghanistan. I hope he won’t set foot here again. I’m worried sick, but I must stay strong to fight all the new problems. Charles really must stay ‘quiet’ for a few years after all his trouble. He has been ‘noticed’ too much these last months. He has so many other problems—material and psychological … Marriage to him has not been the happiness that I wanted it to be … Tell Charles never to come back to this country or to France. It’s too dangerous for him … My fear is that he will run out of places to go.”
Félix did not pass along the disturbing news to Charles’ family. He was particularly careful not to tell André Darreau, the one member of the family who beseeched him regularly for news of Charles, and the one member of the family who seemed most like his half-brother in every disturbing way. In manhood, André had become a twin of Charles, the same slim, powerful body with roughened hands honed by karate, the same piercing brown eyes, the same mélange of East and West in his facial caste, the same grace and power in his step. André had come to Paris in the early 1970s, had knocked on Félix’s door, and when it was opened the older man gasped. He thought Charles was on his hearth. But as the two men became friends, Félix was relieved to discover that André was unscarred from growing up in a household that contained a capricious Vietnamese mother and an invalid French father and a half-brother who stirred tempests by stowing away on boats to Africa. But clearly André still worshiped Charles, and Félix feared that the most muted siren call from the East could lure the youngster there.
Because André was well educated, bright, and full of promise, Félix helped him find a small flat, loaned him a few sticks of furniture, steered him into a job as apprentice clerk in an insurance office. The incessant questions about Charles’ whereabouts soon thinned, then after a time they stopped. Figuratively holding his breath, Félix watched with tenuous pride as the twenty-year-old youth worked responsibly and began a routine life in the most beautiful city on earth.
One summer night in 1973, the telephone rang in Andrés apartment, and when he answered it, the crackle and static of a faraway call waited for him. “André?” finally came the voice that was instantly recognizable. “C’est Charlot.”
The receiver trembled at his ear. André could feel the power of his half-brother, Out There, from whatever romantic and mysterious place he was calling from. “Just hearing his voice sent chills across my body,” André would recall years later.
Once before, when André was seventeen, Charles had called when the boy was a student in Marseilles. He had offered André a job “in my organization,” and with reluctance André refused. But he could recall the conversation word for word:
Charles: “You are older now. You must be tall.”
André: “One meter seventy.”
Charles: “Almost as tall as your big brother. It’s time for you to join me. Come to India. I’ll send the ticket. Meet me at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay.”
The temptation had been enormous, but André could not put down a coincidental wave of fear. He rejected his brother’s overture. Now, as he heard Charles warming up with family inquiries over the crackling long distance line, he suspected a second invitation was forthcoming.
“Do you remember the last time we talked?” suddenly asked Charles.
André held his breath. “Yes, of course. It’s been sleeping in my mind.”
“Then it’s time for you to become a man. I’m in Istanbul. I need someone I can trust. I’m sending you a plane ticket.”
André could not answer. He began to stammer.
“There are two kinds of people in this world,” said Charles. “Those who take risks, and those who don’t. I’ll meet you at the Istanbul airport. You’ll recognize me, won’t you?”
“Yes,” whispered André. “Oh yes.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Even as the Air France jet taxied toward the Istanbul terminal, André Darreau saw his half-brother through the window. There was no mistaking Charles, dressed as he was in sleekest navy blazer, a celebrity’s dark glasses masking his eyes, two aides hovering in discreet attendance. He looked like a Greek tycoon, or the son of one, and André felt threadbare in his slacks and turtleneck sweater. When André pushed his way through customs, apprehensive over reunion with a brother he had not seen for almost a decade, he heard his name paged. On the courtesy phone, Charles spoke brusquely. “Welcome,” he said. “When we meet outside, my name is Alain. Comprends? Alain Gauthier. I will explain later.”
André found his luggage, cursed its cheap plastic exterior, and walked slowly toward Charles/Alain, waiting for him with a broad smile. The two men fell into one another’s arms and kissed on the mouth. Charles introduced his two aides, a garde du corps and his homme à tout faire, explaining that his business interests were such that he required both a bodyguard and a Man Friday to serve him. Several days would pass before André learned that the bodyguard, whose shou
lders were a yard wide, was a Dutch killer, and the secretary none other than Pierre le Premier, who had bribed his way out of India, just as Charles had taught him.
Charles had summoned his two henchmen to Istanbul after one of his less spectacular escapes from custody in Teheran. The Iranians had granted Charles bail while an investigation was made of the stolen passports found in his briefcase. Giving Charles bail was like telling a cat not to prowl at night. Immediately Charles made his way to the Iraqi border by stolen car, thence overland to Turkey, where, in Ankara, he romanced a wealthy young woman and “borrowed” enough money from her to set up shop in Istanbul.
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