Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  There was more to tell. Intimate details. On their last night together, Charles—and that was the name only his closest friends called him—had stolen her away from Bernard for a few moments and had whispered that he was in love. “He wants me to come back to Bangkok and visit him,” blurted out Marie-Andrée.

  “Well, are you going?” asked Denise, who was not shocked, only happy over her sister’s uncharacteristic fling into romantic madness. Marie-Andrée hesitated, and Denise saw in her eyes a sense of loss. Then she shook her head. The old demeanor settled over Marie-Andrée’s shoulders like a spinster’s shawl. No. Of course not. Enough money had been spent on impulsive adventure. Now it was time to return to the Clinique d’Orthopédie, to resume la vie normale.

  “Perhaps someday …” began Denise.

  Marie-Andrée shook her head. She was resolute. She would never see Charles again. Besides, it was silly and something she should not have done. “But at least you have the memory,” said Denise. “That’s more than most people have.”

  Marie-Andrée agreed and held her sister tightly and blessed her for understanding.

  The first letter to arrive was a poem. Noting its Bangkok postmark, Marie-Andrée opened it carefully. And then she read:

  Eternal woman,

  Eternal love,

  Eternal petite Andrée,

  I love you,

  I adore you,

  Come back to me.

  —Charles

  She had been home less than a week.

  Then, while these words burned Marie-Andrée’s heart, quickly came more:

  “Petite femme adorée, I love you, and I want you to become my wife. I need you, your presence, your love … I want you to believe in our love, chérie. True, we must not make decisions quickly. But these opportunities do not repeat themselves every day. It is necessary to know in life, chérie, when to seize the opportunity. When you want it, my love, you can become my wife … I kiss you tenderly, my love … I adore your body, my darling …”

  Fourteen postcards arrived in one day, each embarrassingly encrusted with love from Charles. And telephone calls, from the far side of the world, catching her at work, at home, a sensuous voice reaching out from India or Sri Lanka or Thailand, exposing her in the mundane spaces that marked her life. Each night after work she raced home to search her mailbox and sit beside the telephone.

  She wrote back to him noncommittally, addressing her messages to poste restante, spare letters of ordinary news—the weather, her family, her Pinto, a veiled and painfully constructed sentence or two at the close thanking him for his attention. His letters intensified, in number and in passion:

  My adored Marie-Andrée:

  If you come back, when you come back, I will have much more time to devote to you … I want us to take ten days rest on an island in the Philippines in a little villa on the beach. There you don’t see anyone, there we can make love, there we can explore our bodies, talk intimately one to the other and plan our march toward the future … Until we meet again, I squeeze you very strongly against my body and I kiss you, my love …

  A few days later, his love came wrapped in promises of gold:

  My little adored girl:

  I cannot stop thinking of you and I feel very alone. One thing is certain—I am sure of my love for you, and my love is deep. Oh, petite fille, I want to squeeze you and murmur in your ear, “Je t’aime.” … I have just ordered a beautiful evening gown for you in red Thai silk—and another in turquoise … In two days, I will meet one of my clients, a jeweler, and I will buy from him a complete set of gems for you (precious stones, of course)—a necklace, earrings, bracelets, and a ring—made from rubies, diamonds, and gold—to go with your silk robes … Good night, chérie, sleep well. I am beside you. Reach out and you can touch me …

  Marie-Andrée tried to think logically and reason things out. For hours she sat beside the St. Lawrence, not interested any longer in the promise across the river. Quebec City, in fact, loomed provincial to a woman who had just returned from the far side of the world and who now had enough personal drama in her life to negate the need for fantasy. She read Charles’ letters, and reread them, throwing up a thousand barriers to his exhortations. During the first week on the houseboat, she indelibly remembered, Charles had scarcely looked at her. His eyes were trained mainly on Jeanne, or those three hippie girls in the cafe at Srinagar. And when Charles at last warmed to her, it was not until Jeanne had left. Their moments together were stolen, hidden from stolid old Bernard; an affectionate whisper here, a touch of his arm on her elbow while entering a taxi. And their one intimate afternoon together had been, at best, clumsy. She had been so embarrassed both at the ease of her capitulation and over the possibility of being found out that their lovemaking had hardly been the stuff of epic poetry. Had Charles even mentioned love when they lay in the bamboo shadows that afternoon? She could not remember.

  Suddenly a telegram arrived, offering a round-trip ticket to Bangkok, followed by another telephone call. Marie-Andrée chastised him mildly for spending so much money on long distance. “What is money?” he answered. “We are talking about love.”

  The decision was too weighty for her to make alone. Marie-Andrée summoned Denise to the apartment down the street from Mama, and showed her the letters. Denise read with raised eyebrows, swallowing the private thought that they sounded like love-sick letters passed between teen-agers at school. To her sister, these were obviously waves crashing against a deserted beach at midnight under the full moon. “It would be hard for a woman to resist such words,” Denise said tactfully. “What are you going to do?”

  Marie-Andrée burst into tears. “I don’t know,” she said. “I simply don’t know.” She was the prisoner of enormous torment.

  The counsel of a friend was sought, a lawyer in Lévis with whom Marie-Andrée had dealt professionally for years in business matters regarding insurance claims and medical reports. His name was Bouvin, and they respected one another. They met for drinks at the Tahiti Lounge, adjoining the restaurant where Marie-Andrée had moonlighted as a waitress to buy her Pinto. Now, over tall rum drinks, they reminisced about their years of friendship. Bouvin knew something else was on the girl’s mind, but he would let her get to it in her own good time. Always he had found Marie-Andrée to be diligent, a leader in her office, and a thorough professional. She was dependable. When she promised to produce a document, she did. On time. She was not a gadfly like the younger girls of Lévis. Hers were old-fashioned Catholic values—devotion to family, church, hard work. The only shadow on her life, Bouvin reasoned, was the lack of a husband. She was thirty and on her way to becoming an old maid.

  Marie-Andrée danced around the subject for a time, speaking animatedly about her trip to the East, then paused and blurted everything out. She showed him one of the letters. What would Bouvin think if she elected to accept Charles’ offer of a round-trip air ticket to Bangkok? “What can I lose?” she asked the lawyer, pleading for his favor. She answered it herself, “Only my job—and I can always get another one.” She had $2,000 remaining in her savings account from the knee injury settlement, and with that in her purse, a safe return home would be ensured. Just in case.

  Bouvin listened and pondered. He did not want to speak hastily. Of course he had already heard the delicious news, it having spread like brush fire through the small town. “Marie-Andrée’s caught herself a millionaire,” people were saying. Her lover had become, in random accounts as the gossip circulated, a wealthy businessman, or an important politician, even a fabulously rich maharaja who made love to her on a bed of tiger skins and poured emeralds into her ears.

  Bouvin knew Marie-Andrée well enough to realize that she was not an impulsive creature, that she had obviously been wrestling with this decision for weeks. Probably nothing he could say—or not say-would likely change her mind. All she wanted from him was a trusted voice of authority to say: No, You’re Not Crazy, and: Yes, Follow Your Heart. Still, a shard of worry nagged at h
im. Facts did not square. The girl on the other side of the cocktail table was not the most gorgeous, or desirable, or even intelligent woman in the world. If this “Charles” were all that much of a catch, why would his love be so quickly ensnared by what was—awful truth—a plain and quiet and dull girl from the Canadian boondocks? But Bouvin could not tell her this. He looked at his old friend and he saw the hunger of anticipation on her face. It shared a place with naïveté. Finally he smiled. And nodded. “What can you lose?” he agreed. Just one thing, he cautioned. If, upon arrival in Bangkok, there is any hint that this Charles is somehow involved in drugs, or in any endeavor that might solicit the attention of police, then get out fast. Come home. Thailand has a military government. Civil liberties are not what people take for granted in Canada. Lawyers cannot protect people the way lawyers can in the West. Marie-Andrée listened and nodded her appreciation for this information. “But Charles is not mixed up in anything wrong,” she said. “He’s a very rich man. He’s in the import-export business. He’s a multimillionaire.”

  If he is, mused Bouvin to himself, summoning the most charitable thoughts, then perhaps he can afford such folly. Maybe there is a dashing young millionaire over there who, for reasons known only to the heart, has fallen madly in love with an unfrilled secretary with a slight limp.

  For a few more weeks, Marie-Andrée suffered at this crossroads of her life, one path the familiar rut of thirty years, the other a new and untraveled avenue to … what? Where?

  The letters kept coming, and now they were written on hotel stationery whose imprints would make anyone’s imagination dance on the far side of reason. Charles wrote to her from the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, the Oriental in Bangkok, the Peninsula in Hong Kong. And his messages began to emphasize the baby they might have together, Charles having no doubt shrewdly calculated that this desire was the most potent card he could play. Two letters dated June 29, 1975, touched the maternal longings in Marie-Andrée:

  My darling … I love you more and more and desire strongly that you have my child … I would love for you to be my wife and the mother of my children …

  And, a second:

  During the past couple of days in Colombo [Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon], I met three Swiss couples from Geneva. They had come to adopt a Ceylonese baby. This meeting made me desire more strongly for us to have our own child. We would be able to have our baby by the end of 1976. What do you think, darling? Because by then, we will be stable. I have so many places and so many things to show. I desire your body and your caresses, my chérie adoreé …

  At a family dinner in late July, a few days after her thirtieth birthday, Marie-Andrée ate quietly as was her custom, complimented her mother on the meal, helped clear the table, and then, over coffee, made an announcement that was as startling as if a nun in the family had revealed plans to leap over the convent wall. She was (1) quitting her job, and (2) accepting Charles’ offer to join him in Bangkok. Marie-Andrée had her case all prepared. She presented it quickly, before the words stuck in her mouth. This was too good an opportunity to pass up. It was a “fling,” nothing serious. She would be back in Lévis in a few weeks. Her mother, Marie-Paule, burst into tears, and Augustin, her father, shook his head in stunned silence. His face was gray, and Denise, having learned the decision earlier that day but keeping a vow of secrecy, worried now that their father’s rusting heart would break. Everyone at the table, save Denise, began presenting reasons why Marie-Andrée should not do this. It was rash. She did not know this man well enough to accept such an expensive trip. Strings surely were attached. It was simply unlike this careful, cautious daughter to dance past midnight when good girls were at home alone. And safe.

  Marie-Andrée knew what was coming, and she clamped figurative hands over her ears to shut out her family’s protests. She had dreaded this scene and wanted only to end it. She loved her family, but she was weary of being dutiful and obedient and predictable. “I’ve done nothing but work, work, work,” she told them. Didn’t she deserve one tiny flash of erraticism? She was thirty years old, she reminded the family. “And you can’t stop me.”

  It is fair to consider, at this point of the tale, exactly what Charles Sobhraj was up to, streaking about the Far East’s toniest hotels and conducting an extraordinary overseas love affair that was scandalizing a remote Canadian town halfway around the world, devastating the heart of a neurotic woman who was an unlikely candidate for his ardor. What did Marie-Andrée have to offer him? Perhaps he was legitimately smitten. Perhaps she did indeed remind him of Hélène, both being French, subservient, quiet, the daughters of solid bourgeois families, women who inherently bore the respect for which he yearned. Then again, Marie-Andrée might have seemed the perfect woman to smuggle his jewels from place to place, she being the kind of anonymous person to whom little or no attention was paid. A psychologist might suggest that Charles was still looking for a mother, for a woman noble enough to be put on a pedestal and worshiped. But most likely was Félix d’Escogne’s analysis when, much later, he learned of the strange liaison between the boy he had met in Poissy Prison and the girl who had sat in loneliness on a riverbank.

  “Charles is a collector,” Félix told a friend. “And a destructor. For some reason he decided he wanted this girl. She was, for a few moments, as desirable in his eyes as an antique diamond. But was she someone he wanted to love? Or was she something he wanted to own?”

  After a cheerless farewell to family, Marie-Andrée flew alone to Bangkok at the beginning of August 1975. This time the journey was long and uncomfortable, with substantially less of the joyous excitement that had consumed her just four months earlier when she left on the same trip with Bernard. He had not chastised her when the decision was made known; he had wished Marie-Andrée well and had told her that he would always be there—in Lévis—should she need him. But behind his small smile was the grip of pain. She saw it in his face. It was something she understood all too well.

  En route to Bangkok—and Charles—Marie-Andrée wrote the first entry in what would become a poignant journal, and one day of interest to police in a dozen countries. “I am arriving in Bangkok,” she wrote with trembling hand. “I feel like a just married girl coming for the first time to the bed of her husband, nervous but happy by the thought of a journey to be taken and possessed by the man she loves.”

  She shut the diary and looked out the window, watching the land come into focus, masses of green and gray blurs turning into brilliant verdant rice paddies threaded by the muddy Chao Phraya River, a serpent guarding the city in its coils. Flashes of gold in the sunlight became the brilliant spires of Buddhist temples, like fantasy candles on a cake—and over the booming modern city a blanket of hazy smoke rising from the most infernal traffic jams in the world. Now apprehension gnawed at her. She wished for a few days alone in Bangkok, time to rest and smooth the travel wrinkles from her face and accustom herself to the exotic rhythms. She began to hope that Charles would not be at the airport, that a telegram would be his stand-in informing her that he had unexpectedly been called to Hong Kong and would join her in three days. But such worry was put aside when the plane landed and she searched urgently through the misted window for a glimpse of him.

  Indeed Charles was waiting for her at Don Muang Airport, but he barely made it on time. The day had been busy. It had included a lengthy visit to a jewelry store in a large, American-style shopping center next to a deluxe hotel in the swarming heart of Bangkok. The romantic might surmise that Charles went there to pick up a trinket of welcome to honor the arrival of the woman he supposedly loved and had seduced with written declarations of passion and palaces. But this was not exactly the purpose of his business. Or even close to it.

  It is necessary here to back up a few months to the very week that Marie-Andrée first made love to Charles in a cheap Bangkok hotel and returned to Canada with radically altered emotions. While the medical secretary mooned over the summer snowstorm of letters that soon fell on her, Charles was busy tr
ying to make a few bucks. He set up temporary “headquarters” in Bangkok, not because he liked the city. In truth he found it noxious, devious, and twice as expensive as India. But Bangkok contained several elements that were valuable to his line of work—an enormous tourist trade (and those who traveled so far were generally affluent), good airline connections, a jewel industry, and an air of hedonism that was as tangible as a whore’s perfume. Further, it did not escape Charles’ attention that the police of Thailand were notoriously corrupt and manipulatable in “the Asian way,” i.e., bribes. Paramount must have been the fact that Thailand was one of the precious few countries left in Asia which did not possess a dossier as thick as a travel guide on his criminal past. Charles knew that in some file somewhere rested an Interpol rap sheet, but he did not intend to use his real name here anyway. He was Alain Gauthier, and if that name caused trouble, he would change it again—and again—and again.

  During a day of casing the favored shopping areas for Western tourists, Charles had wandered into a hotel arcade, entered a plush store, and immediately saw a strikingly beautiful Thai girl glide toward him gracefully. She was dressed in an American-cut dungaree suit. Her name, he soon learned, was so unpronounceable to Westerners that she answered simply to “May.”

  At first sight, May mistook Charles to be a Thai, for his skin had the almond hue of her people, and his face bore the caste of Asia. But when she welcomed him in Thai, he could not reply. As she spoke poor French, they settled on English, the tongue of Western commerce in the city. On this first meeting, Charles did not purchase any jewels from the shop where May was a most decorative saleswoman. But he did seize an hour of her time, speaking rapidly about the gem business, revealing his plan to set up a business that would purchase stones direct from the mines at fabled Chanthaburi near the Cambodian border, then sell them directly to tourists at substantial markups. He said he held a degree in gemology from some European institute whose name May did not catch. And as he chattered, Charles sent his eyes roaming around the store, but now and then they settled briefly on May and she found herself ill at ease under his intense scrutiny.