But during the night, water backed up in a drain two cells away and a Lebanese prisoner yelled for a guard. The next morning, authorities searched every cell to determine if some prisoner had been messing with the plumbing. A squad of guards appeared in Pete and Snapper’s dim and dirty cell, looked about, but, incredibly, did not spot the piece of paper and the hole underneath.
Finally it was decided that no prisoner had anything to do with the minor flood, and after a day or two prison routine resumed. With one irksome change. A more or less permanent guard now stood outside Pete and Snapper’s cell because from that vantage point he could eye several others. It was impossible to resume digging.
This did not turn out to be a problem for Pete and Snapper because within a few weeks their lawyer won their release, using money sent by Snapper’s parents. The Americans came around and shook hands with Charles and André and kissed them comradely and promised to meet again someday. Charles waited a decent amount of time for them to get out of Greece—a day or two—then he called the warden and tattled on them. He pulled off the piece of paper in their cell and revealed the hole. He would have informed sooner, he said, but the Americans had threatened him, and they were big and strong, and he was slight and afraid. The reward was less than Charles had hoped—double milk rations for a week. He had anticipated a job as orderly in the hospital, from where he could have taken flight.
But Charles did not stay in favor very long with the prison administration. Somebody squealed on him. He never learned who spilled the tale of the tunnel; it could have been some prisoner with a grudge, perhaps some spurned homosexual with a grievance. Whatever, guards marched into Charles’ cell one April morning in 1974 and accused him of masterminding an attempted jailbreak. Hauled before a magistrate and—still known as André Darreau—Charles was given an eight-month sentence on the usual charge of “disobedience to the Greek government.” With it came a chilling punishment—transferral to the island prison of Aegina, a place of utter dread. The Greek version of Devil’s Island, Aegina was considered escapeproof, perched on savage volcanic cliffs with a sheer drop of several hundred feet to the choppy sea. The prison site was rich in history, having been a fortress in modern centuries, but before that a lookout for great sea battles. Only sixteen miles from Athens, the island had changed hands more often than a bone of the crucified Christ, occupied at one time or another by Mycenaeans, Dorians, Spartans, Athenians, Romans, Venetians, Turks, and pirates. Briefly it was even the capital of Greece. After World War II, Aegina became a popular day trip for tourists who wandered about the well-preserved temple of Aphaea and sunned on beaches or admired the yachts that bobbed like toys at rest in the harbor. Within a few days, Charles had learned all of this, and the dimensions of the island, and the precise distance to Athens, and even the number of police who lived and worked there. But it did him no good. The prison of Aegina was built before “rehabilitation” became voguish. Prisoners were locked in tiny, barren cells that opened onto dark and narrow corridors. There was no recreation area. Life began and ended in the cell. And if Charles had any notion of digging here, his tunnel would need to bore through five hundred feet of rock, then open onto a sea whose waves smashed angrily against rocks that had even turned away Odysseus. They looked like the jaws of a sea monster. He tore his brain searching for a way to escape. There was none. The walls of the prison echoed with terrible stories of men who had tried, whose broken bodies were found on the rocks, who were shot dead before they could reach a nearby grove of olive and pistachio. Medical complaints were dealt with by a local doctor who dropped by on request. There was no hospital ward. Mail was heavily censored. Scant news of the outside world filtered through the thick stone walls. Around him, men were going mad. He could hear their babblings in the night.
Charles endured almost a year in Aegina. One day he fell ill, to his advantage, he reasoned. It was a touch of dysentery, but Charles decided to turn his complaint into a matter of the gravest medical import. He started to fast, not so the guards would notice him, but by burying his food. Within a week he was thin and pale and feverish. He found a stone and stripped off his clothes and pounded his stomach until he raised bruises. He prayed they would be taken for internal hemorrhaging. Then, barely able to stand, he pleaded for a doctor.
The decision was made that Charles should receive an examination and tests in an Athens hospital with better diagnostic equipment. Once a week, a boat from Aegina went to Piraeus delivering the seriously ill men, then brought them back again. On the morning that Charles left Aegina, he was almost carried out of the prison, but though his body was weak, his mind was clear. He turned to look at the terrible place. He was getting out of hell; he swore that he would never return.
A young doctor at the Athens hospital examined the prisoner known as André Darreau, drew blood, collected urine, studied vital signs—and ordered that he be returned to Aegina pending the outcome of tests. The prisoner did not seem critically ill, only suffering probably from nothing more serious than stomach flu. Charles fought for a reason to stay. What about the bruises on his stomach, he cried? The doctor shrugged. Perhaps the prisoner had fallen down and did not remember it. The tests would show if there was internal bleeding; he would be only an hour away by ferryboat. Charles almost wept, begging with passion that seemed unlikely in a man as sick as he pretended to be. But the doctor denied his plea and went away to summon guards. Charles was left alone for less than two minutes. But in that fraction of time he was able to rifle a nurse’s or patient’s purse that had been carelessly left on the counter. And in the purse he found a possible means of freedom.
When the guards came, Charles allowed himself to be led away without complaint, praying that they would not search him. As insurance he put on his near-death act, looking so desperately sick that the guards did not want to touch him, or chain him. Charles was placed in the back of a small police van with four other prisoners. The human cargo was dispatched to the dock at Piraeus, where the prison boat would take the men back to the island.
There was an unexpected wait. The boat was overdue. Charles peered out the cage windows of the van. Outside were old women with mesh shopping bags crammed with items purchased in Athens, and young sailors in tight white pants, and whores both on duty and waiting to go home and visit Mama on an outer island. Charles was pleased to see the crowd building; more than two hundred people milled around the police van.
He had to move quickly. Softly he asked the prisoner on his right for a match. They were officially forbidden, but most prisoners usually had them tucked away, in the event a cigarette could be obtained. Charles was in luck. His seat mate handed over a full book. Suddenly Charles stood up, reached into his pocket, pulled out a large bottle of French perfume and, blessing the woman whose purse contained it, broke off the neck like christening a ship and splashed the perfume onto a pile of oily rags. Then he ignited the book of matches and flung it on his concoction. Fire burst out, spreading greedily. The prisoners began to scream, pounding on the walls of the locked van. One of the guards peered through the mesh curtains and rushed around to open the rear door. Men on fire came tumbling out, their screams infecting the crowd standing nearby. Pandemonium! Sirens pierced the air. Tourists snapped pictures. Burning men rolled off the dock into the water.
And Charles Sobhraj slipped quietly into the crowd, moving gently at first, then running with a speed he summoned from deep within his abused body. No policeman saw him get away, none of the people on the docks even tried to stop him. When embarrassed police returned empty-handed from a search of the immediate area, they asked some of the onlookers why no one had intercepted a dangerous criminal in his escape. One old woman spoke up, grinning: “I thought it was actors,” she said. “I thought it was a movie.”
A few days later the telephone rang in the apartment of Félix d’Escogne in Paris. Beirut was on the line. Charles, sounding fit, pretending to be in the embrace of success, spoke animatedly to his old friend. Then he wondered, by the
way, had Félix seen Hélène lately? Félix tried to stall and change the subject, but Charles would not tolerate it. He demanded the truth.
Félix spoke bluntly. Hélène had met an American. She had divorced Charles. She had married the American. She had recently moved to America with her new husband and Shubra. “I don’t think you could ever find her,” said Félix sadly.
“I see,” murmured Charles.
Félix pleaded with Charles not to interfere. “If it helps,” said Félix, “I think she still loves you. But she can’t live with you.”
Charles hung up and spent several days in silence. He was not even stimulated by the crowds of free-spending Arabs who filled Beirut’s hotels and casinos. He entertained anger, self-pity, despair, and indecision. One afternoon, walking alone on the spectacular beach near a strip of high-rise condominiums, he distilled his situation to basics. He must regain his strength. He must fill his pockets. And he could do that only in the East. His destiny was clearly there, in the enormity of Asia. There were countries left where the police did not know him or want him. And even in those where he faced arrest, he was not overly apprehensive about entering. India was a subcontinent; what happened in Delhi was not known necessarily a thousand miles away in Bombay. He booked a plane reservation for Hong Kong, with the idea that he might get off somewhere along the way.
When word of Charles’ spectacular escape reached André, still in Korydallos Prison in Athens, he promptly informed the warden that a grievous mistake had been made. The man who escaped from the burning van was Charles Sobhraj. He was the real André Darreau. Never was such salt rubbed in a wound. While André waited confidently for his release—hadn’t Charles promised it would work?—the Greeks responded rather differently. Perversely, in fact. Instead of turning him loose, the Greeks delivered André into the eager arms of the Turks. In an Istanbul courtroom, before three judges in thick crimson robes, André Darreau, the real André Darreau, was sentenced to eighteen years at hard labor.
Just before he sagged limply in the arms of his attorney, André was heard to cry out, “Charlot! Aides-moi!”
Book Four
SERPENTINE
“Either we live by accident and die by accident—or we live by plan and die by plan …”
—Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In her eighteenth year, Jennifer Maria Candace Bolliver fell deeply, joyously in love. “He is perfect,” she wrote to her friend Carmen in Los Angeles. “He is forever.” Jennie’s choice was a lad named Christopher Ghant, who was fire-pole thin, and almost six and one half feet tall, with a trace of blond beard dribbling on his chin, and a countenance of such serenity and peace that women gathered in small groups to remark on his beauty as he passed. He strode through life on stilt-like legs, finding his way through haunting blue eyes, and he was gentle. No one ever saw him flare in anger or even raise his voice much beyond the softness of a muted cello. When Jennie slow-danced with Christopher, she came only as high as his breastbone, and he could almost wrap his arms around her twice. It was the merging of a firecracker and a taper, but so quickly did they become lovers that both believed forces deeper than they could understand had willed their union.
Christopher possessed a restless mind that leaned toward the slightly weird, having studied the Rosicrucians, white magic, yoga, and assorted oddities. He was also an excellent mime and adept at T’ai Chi, the Oriental marriage of mental and physical disciplines. These he taught on an informal basis at the Nova School in Seattle, where teachers were called “co-ordinators” and often were not much older than their students. The school was interesting, the ultimate result of an era when the avant-garde—some critics say foolishness-was in educational vogue. Nova was a school without rules or structure, where fifty specially chosen youngsters were in attendance, the criteria being intelligence and a leaning to the off beat. Anybody could do or not do whatever came to mind. Students decided what the curriculum was to be, hired and fired co-ordinators, attended class or played hooky, according to the juices flowing on any particular day. They could bake bread for six hours, or weave blankets, or study Euclidean geometry, or gestalt therapy, or skip rope from nine to three. Classrooms were in an old office building in the core of the city, and when Jennie applied and was accepted, she felt it was the most important accomplishment of her life. Her past would not have seemed conducive to awarding a girl like Jennie complete freedom. She would not have seemed to be the kind of young woman who could walk on a path without directions, but she found Christopher, and he was the guide that she had sought.
Changes, remarkable changes, washed over Jennie. Banished suddenly were the eccentric coiffures, and she took to wearing her hair long, naturally brown, and soft. She washed and brushed it so religiously that each strand gleamed. Her peacock feathers and fringes were bestowed on a friend, and in their place Jennie chose simple long skirts and blouses. One necklace was sufficient instead of ten, and her earlobes bore only modest gold circles instead of bangles that tumbled to her shoulders and jangled when she danced. Drugs were still around—after the abortion of her baby Jennie had spent two solid weeks in an LSD haze—but upon entwining her life with Christopher, she seldom used them other than to attempt “mystical experience.” She wrote to Carmen: “I haven’t smoked grass in a month. My boy friend and I get high on yoga and meditation and each other!”
Christopher was equally smitten. He told a friend about Jennie: “I liked her on first sight, I fell in love with her after a week. She has long curly hair, big romantic eyes, quick wit, a very sharp mind, a little lazy, but adorable to look at and be next to.” A thread that bound the young couple was their need for someone to cling to, neither having a stable home life. Christopher’s parents had been killed in a plane crash, and he, the only child, inherited enough money to fend off state agencies that sought to declare him a ward of the court. Somehow he managed to live on his own, and rather well, and invited Jennie to join five or six other similarly socially disenchanted youth in a communal house located in the Queen Anne district. As Jennie decorated her “space”—putting up paper lanterns over bare bulbs, tacking fabric remnants from Woolworth’s onto walls, painting floors lacquer red, and constructing perfectly appropriate furniture from orange crates, she began to cry, and Christopher went to her in concern. “I’m not sad,” she sobbed. “I’ve just never been so happy.”
Sex for them was not the urgent coupling of teen-agers, but that of experienced lovers, touching slowly, caringly, softly, with quiet guitar on the stereo and a fire dancing to expel the fog from Lake Washington that shrouded windows in the old, old house. One night Jennie told Christopher, “This was meant to be. We had nothing to do with it. All we can do is pray it will last.”
The Queen Anne district also contained a large colony of old people, mostly struggling to get by on pensions, frightened of crime, wanting little more than a dignified ride down life’s last hill. They envied the youth and beauty of all the Jennies and Christophers, strolling with arms locked, oblivious to trash in the gutter and shadows behind the trees. Jennie became friendly with many of the old people in her neighborhood, in particular a dramatic woman with majestic though fallen bosom and purple hair. She called herself Madame Crystal and was probably eighty, although she admitted only to fifty-five. She also claimed to have danced with the Paris Opera Ballet, on legs now thick and varicosed. She recalled extraordinary suppers at Maxim’s in Paris and the Savoy Grill in London, but she was so poor near her own last midnight that all she could offer Jennie was a mock Italian supper from time to time. Madame Crystal once set pasta à la Caruso on her table, and Jennie recognized it as Kraft’s macaroni, twenty-five cents a box, with extras tossed in. But she ate it with gusto. Madame Crystal sang arias from Tosca for Jennie, sometimes switching in mid-song to Traviata if memory failed her, and she served jug wine in jelly glasses as grandly as if they were Waterford. She spoke of continuing beaus who pestered her solitude, but Jennie never
saw one, discounting the “maintenance engineer” from down the street who was really a janitor and who took Madame Crystal to a bingo game and gave her the Westclox alarm that he won.
Often Jennie accompanied Madame Crystal on errands, or lunches at the senior citizens’ center, where for fifty cents a plate of hot food warmed old bones, even to the county hospital where the old people had to wait, often for three quarters of a day. Through Madame Crystal, Jennie met Sadie, who was soon to die of a stroke, and William, a retired civil engineer with six grown children who telephoned him faithfully once a year—on Christmas morning—but not otherwise, and The Dealer, a former Broadway stagehand who would be playing gin rummy—prophesied Madame Crystal—on the day they lowered him into a pauper’s grave. Jennie loved them all. Not only were they full of life, they were funny and dear and almost pathetically grateful when children as callow as Jennie called on them and sat next to them and touched their arms and listened. Jennie called Maggie in Southern California and said, “Grandma, I’ve been thinking of you all day. I love you and Cap so much.” Maggie murmured her appreciation. But Jennie was not done. “I want you to forgive me for putting you and Cap through all that hell.” Maggie dispensed immediate forgiveness. She still loved her tempestuous granddaughter; she had never stopped, even in the hours of crisis. “My life is changing, Grandma,” Jennie went on. “I’m discovering new values. I’ve become very interested in the problems of being old in this country.” After graduation from high school, Jennie planned to study the new field of geriatrics. After the frenetic years of rebellion and meddling with her head, Jennie was content; she had purpose, and a man to love.
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