Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Somehow Charles managed to squeeze Suzy into his life, fitting her neatly between Marie-Andrée, and May, and the sick people, and his travel, and his secrets. Often he dined alone at the coffee shop, always sitting in Suzy’s area, bidding her to select his courses, showering her with flattery and gifts. First came flowers, then he began leaving bits of sparkle as a tip. One night Suzy found a gold ring with an amethyst setting, and when she tried to give it back, Charles shushed her. “Before too long,” he said, “it will become a diamond.” Soon the waitress had a pocket full of semi-precious stones and was thoroughly confused. Was this customer so rich that he could strew jewels in her path, or was he after more? He never made the remotest semblance of a pass. In fact he occasionally returned with Marie-Andrée on his arm, apparently enjoying the icy barrier that he had erected. “He brings his wife in here and keeps flirting with me,” said Suzy to a friend. “She must be catching on. I’m afraid.”

  Quite true. As both Suzy and her predecessor, May, worked in the same hotel, it was not difficult for Marie-Andrée to sneak about and play pathetic detective, watching as Charles swiveled between the two young Thai women. The coffee shop, with convenient large picture windows, could be seen from an entrance road, and there Marie-Andrée melted between a souvenir shop and a collection of tiny Buddhist shrines to spy on the man she loved. When she had seen enough, Marie-Andrée confronted Charles with her discovery. He would not permit an argument, sighing and dismissing her accusations as foolish and misinterpreted. “Suzy is for business,” he said, falling back on his favorite excuse.

  In the first week of December—and Marie-Andrée would not discover this for some time—Charles asked the waitress to marry him, a routine now as common as sending roses. He confided that Marie-Andrée was not his wife—it was just a little charade they were playing, for fun—but his secretary. “I love you,” he told Suzy. “You’re the woman I’ve been searching for all over the world.” In understandable confusion, Suzy stammered her appreciation but begged for a breathing spell before she could give an answer. Here was a customer who had demonstrated unusual generosity, who had taken her out for but one or two “dates” after the cafe closed and had done nothing but kiss her almost paternally on the cheek. Now he was pressing for marriage! Suzy did what most well-reared Thai girls would do with a situation that was not only difficult but incomprehensible. She giggled and backed away.

  Now, sunning with Belle beside the pool, Marie-Andrée broke into angry tears as she spoke of Suzy. The night before, she and Charles had quarreled and screamed at one another for hours. Someone slapped someone. Somebody threw something against the wall. The sick people must have had much to entertain them.

  Suddenly Marie-Andrée controlled her crying and reached out for Belle’s hand as support. “He wants me to have his baby,” she said.

  “Well, are you?” asked Belle, wondering if these outbursts of emotion might be tied to the early months of pregnancy.

  Marie-Andrée shook her head bitterly. “Not likely,” she said. “The baby would be a monster—like its father.”

  Belle could not resist a quick foray into the coffee shop to behold the wondrous creature who had captured the erratic heart of her upstairs neighbor. All she beheld was a tiny young girl who looked little more than fifteen and who still bore—to Belle’s sharp eye—the familiar Oriental scars of acne. The girl was pretty in a wide-eyed, innocent sort of way, but she was certainly not in the social league where Alain Gauthier wanted to play. Suzy was one of a hundred thousand girls in Bangkok who looked exactly the same.

  All of this Belle mentioned to her husband, and the little French chef remarked that Friend Gauthier probably didn’t like women at all, other than as tools of his trade. Marie-Andrée was kept around to serve as dutiful homemaker and, as she was Western, lent a certain status to a man who despite his tailored clothes and French haircut still looked Oriental. And May? She was, as Gauthier said, valuable for her knowledge of gems and her contacts with customers at the hotel. And she was Thai and knew how to deal with government bureaucracy.

  Suzy the waitress was a puzzle. Raoul had no idea how she fitted into Gauthier’s life scheme. But there had to be a reason. He doubted if it was love. That Suzy was hauntingly reminiscent of a Vietnamese girl named Song was unknown to Raoul and Belle. They could not have realized that Charles had found a woman who was a double for his own mother, the one he felt had rejected him.

  Charles’ goal to raise $25,000 for establishing a legitimate gem business was in jeopardy by early December. He faced an end-of-the-year deadline, else lose an option to lease a building and purchase equipment for polishing stones and making jewelry. His income appeared to be substantial, according to later police investigation, derived not only from an occasional sale to a customer he met on the street or in a major hotel lobby, but also from those unfortunates who were last seen in his company. And never seen alive again. But his expenses were substantial, paying rent on two apartments, trying to keep three women happy by awarding them expensive gifts, feeding a dozen people each day. Unforeseen calamities also befell him.

  One day he was rushing around Bangkok in his brown Toyota when he ran a red light and struck a Thai youth on a bicycle. The boy was seriously injured, and a crowd gathered so quickly that there was nothing for Charles to do but escort the victim to the hospital, with two policemen in attendance. Once there he realized that he could not tolerate an investigation of any kind. Telephoning May, he beseeched her to meet him at the hospital. In hurried negotiation with the wounded bicyclist, May serving as interpreter, Charles peeled off 10,000 bahts (about $700) to obtain a release and to avoid further questions.

  “The next time I hit a Thai,” muttered Charles as he took May home, “I’ll make sure he’s dead.”

  In early December, Charles abruptly left Bangkok alone and flew to Hong Kong, telling Marie-Andrée only that he had urgent business. She suspected he was taking either May or Suzy along as excess baggage and was noticeably chilly at his leave-taking. Charles pleaded with her to support him, that he was working night and day to raise the money needed to start his business. And he promised to take a few weeks off later for a long holiday, perhaps on that remote beach in the Philippines.

  With $9,000 in his pocket, all the money he had, plus a few sapphires and rubies, Charles hurried to the airport. There he had no trouble buying a ticket and clearing customs, even though he was using the name and credentials of Vitali Hakim—who at this moment was a charred and unidentified corpse in a closet at Pattaya.

  Disappointment was waiting in Hong Kong. His plan was to hit the casino at Macao, where many years before he had won—and lost—large sums at baccarat while Hélène fretted and wept behind him. But when he checked into the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Charles encountered an old Hong Kong hand, a minor criminal who warned him to stay clear of Macao. Chances were good they would remember him from the decade-old debt that he had skipped out on. And the casino was now using a computerized list—with photographs—of undesirables who would be denied entrance, and whose very visage would summon police.

  The risk was substantial, for he knew that Hong Kong’s Central Intelligence Division already possessed a substantial dossier on him under his real name. Sooner or later, the various countries he had operated in would piece together the different identities and stolen passports and some computer would belch forth a “WANTED: INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL” flyer that would be pasted to the desk of every airport immigration officer in Asia and Europe. Charles was smart enough to know that the day was coming; that it was not yet here was testimony to the poor dissemination of police information, and to the brazenness with which he operated.

  Hong Kong was his favorite city after Paris, containing all the elements attractive to his life style. The city smelled of money, from the diamonds and gold Rolex watches and expensive Nikons that filled duty-free shopwindows, to the fire-engine-red Rolls-Royces that bore affluent hotel guests to and from the airport. Hong Kong attracts one m
illion tourists a year, and as it is often the first stop for vacationers on a Far East swing, they have money to spend. In 1975, tourists left behind more than $3 billion in Hong Kong, astonishing for a territory that could fit comfortably in a remote corner of Philadelphia.

  But the other side of this golden coin, and Charles knew it well, was the most sophisticated police force in Asia, with British brainpower and with computers linked to the Scotland Yards and FBIs and Deuxième Bureaux of the world. Immigrations and customs can be tough in Hong Kong, unlike Delhi or Bangkok, where a man in affluent garb and imperious mien could ride an elephant through passport control and not be questioned. In Hong Kong, sharp-eyed, humorless women paw through luggage gracefully—but thoroughly—and a passport is given Asia’s most thorough examination before entry—or exit.

  Beyond these nuisances, Charles was smart enough to realize that a free-lance drug-and-rob man could not operate very long here before he attracted the eyes of Chinese mobsters, men whose tolerance for alien competition is slight.

  On this night, Charles elected nonetheless to hunt—cautiously—and be alert for any tong game wardens in the forest. He selected, police believe, the area near the Hyatt Regency, a neon fantasia whose signs promising night club extravaganzas and massage parlors and live eels and disco dancing and aphrodisiac powders extend out from buildings to meet signs jutting from the other side. At night the district is a carnival, like walking beneath a thousand garish kites that hang and shimmer in the sky.

  At the Holiday Inn, a favored hotel of the more affluent young due to its basement disco and coffee shop, which produces reasonable approximations of American hamburgers, Charles sat down to watch television in the lounge. His eyes fell on a young couple who looked bone weary, a glaze having settled over their faces, as usually happens to travelers sated with far corners of the globe. The man was short, a little dumpy, with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard. He was about thirty, but in repose looked older. In his old age, he would no doubt have a potbelly and garrulously tell his grandchildren of this trip around half the world. His companion—Charles noted quickly that the woman did not wear a wedding ring—was blond, pert, and probably vivacious. She was a little younger, and deeply devoted from the way she fondly held her friend’s hand. They both watched the television blankly, probably ignoring the plot and just letting the images wash over them.

  Charles waited for one of them to speak, so he could pick up on their nationality. At first he thought they were Americans, and when he ventured a comment to the effect that the television show was boring, the man answered in perfect English. But an accent was there, a tiny one, and Charles knew right away he was dealing with a Dutchman and his lady friend. Tough customers, the Dutch. Charles once told his half-brother André that he would avoid them at all costs, they being inherently suspicious, parsimonious, and chilly. But at this crisis point in his life, Charles must have decided to try and hook whatever fish nibbled at his line.

  Henricus “Henk” Bintanja was twenty-nine years old and the proud possessor of a master’s degree in chemistry, yet it had not opened the doors to a good job, nor to medical school. He suspected it was somehow due to the fact that he was of mixed parentage-Dutch and Indonesian, and though it was not his fault that the royal house of the Netherlands sent out pirate ships to plunder the long ago world of Bali and its environs, he, like others in his country, felt the sting of discrimination. His lover was Cornelia “Cocky” Hemker, twenty-five, a nurse whose blond hair and blue eyes made her a poster for all things Dutch—silver skates, good health, cheese, and milk.

  They lived happily together in a neat little house near an unfashionable canal, where their cat dozed beside a tiled fireplace, where a string quartet played softly on the stereo, where Henk read his chemistry books and smoked a pipe. They rode bicycles about the city, and Cocky was of little help to Henk’s continuing war with his girth, for she made rich cheese pies and even a creditable rijsttafel, the unending feast of Indonesia. On rare occasions they went out dancing, or smoked marijuana at a friend’s house, but all in all their lives were decorous, unfrilled, and—the only word is Dutch.

  Frustrated by his inability to find work or further education commensurate with his intellect, Henk suggested to Cocky early in 1975 that they make an uncharacteristic splurge and “see the world.” Cocky agreed at once and began working extra shifts to earn her travel money. Henk told his best friend, Benjamin, a lithographer, “We’ll probably regret this—but we’re going to spend every dime we have. But if we don’t do it now, we never will.” Benjamin saw no financial peril. “Don’t look back,” he said, “don’t even think that the trip is a folie. It’s something everybody would like to do—it will pay itself back in a thousand unknown ways.” If the money held out, Henk hoped to visit Indonesia, where distant relatives lived. He had a need to inspect his roots. He also kidded Cocky about finding a grass hut and farming coconuts, to which she raised no objections. Theirs was a solid relationship, two people who respected one another’s intelligence, ability, and feelings.

  Charles must have dazzled the Dutch. Lunch at the Hyatt Regency and a stroll down the corridor of boutiques where fortunes in gems nestled against red lacquer boxes and pearls as large as eyeballs were fastened to the limbs of a silver and gold weeping willow. An invitation to his room, where uncut movies played from his television, and little bottles of scotch whisky or imported beer could be fetched from a machine that automatically entered the cost on the hotel bill downstairs. Henk was so impressed by the wonders of the room and the man that he wrote a letter home to his family in Amsterdam. It would one day become valuable to the police of half the world.

  An investigation would show that Charles led the Dutch couple through the streets of Hong Kong, across the waters of Victoria Harbor on the world’s best ferry ride, and into the duty-free shopping district where he escorted Henk and Cocky on a gem-buying expedition. The young nurse had made it known that she wanted to purchase a sapphire ring, and Charles warned her to beware of exorbitant prices and inferior quality. After visits to several stores where they obtained varying prices, Cocky was disappointed at the lack of bargains. That seemed to be precisely the attitude that Charles cultivated.

  As a “special favor” to his new friends from Holland, Charles permitted Cocky to buy a sapphire ring from his own “private collection.” The Dutch girl paid $1,600 and she must have been nervous. In a letter to her family in the Netherlands, she revealed the purchase, insisting that the price she paid for such a quality ring was about one half what she had encountered in Hong Kong’s best shops. “Our new friend’s name is Alain Dupuis,” she wrote, “and he has invited us to visit him in Bangkok.”

  “Alain Dupuis,” the name that Charles was using in Hong Kong (after gaining admittance to the territory by using Vitali Hakim’s passport), offered to send a car and driver to the Bangkok airport when the Dutch couple arrived, plus the offer of free room and board in his “penthouse,” where a “French chef” prepared the meals. It must have sounded like an apartment on the Avenue Foch, for Cocky informed her family in a letter that Monsieur Dupuis was fabulously wealthy—in addition to being helpful and generous.

  When Cocky and Henk landed in Bangkok and proceeded into the hall where they intended to give Alain Dupuis a telephone call, a young man rushed toward them with welcoming embraces. Alain Dupuis was waiting for them—astonishing, as he had not known their precise flight number. The Dutch must have been a little disappointed when the chauffeured limousine turned out to be a rented brown Toyota, and the French chef a haggard-looking Canadian woman. The guest apartment next door was hardly that of a millionaire, but it was free, and the Dutch were, above all, thrifty.

  It was the night of December 10.

  A day or two later, Belle rode the lift to the fifth floor and knocked on her friend’s door. No answer. She thought she heard Monique’s voice coming from next door, from the adjoining flat. Without knocking, Belle opened the door. Inside it wa
s dark, and it took a moment for her eyes to focus on the gloom. On a chair, his bearded face pale and sweating, his eyes swimming wildly in his head, sat a stranger. Beside him, slumped on the floor, was a blond girl, desperately sick, holding her stomach and trembling all over. They looked like figures in a wax museum tableau, and when light from outside streamed through the open door, both moved their lips soundlessly. Her heart went out to the unfortunate pair, but Belle could only shut the door and return the apartment to darkness.

  “Who are those poor people?” asked Belle when she caught up with Monique later.

  “Some Dutch customers,” answered her friend brusquely.

  Belle let it go at that, though she was troubled. That night, as she waited for sleep, an image kept running through her mind, an image that could not be discarded. She had only glimpsed the Dutchman for a moment, but it seemed now, in retrospect, that his hands had been tied behind him. He looked like a prisoner.

  As directed, Charmayne Carrou arrived in Bangkok in mid-December and checked into the President Hotel. There she was supposed to wait until Vitali Hakim contacted her. Never an adventuresome girl, Charmayne stayed in her room obediently, fearful that she would miss her lover’s call. But when two days passed, she grew worried. Vitali had mentioned the names of two or three hotels where he might register, and she began making telephone calls.