Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Laddie got through one year of political science and psychology at the University of Winnipeg, then took a job laboring in the silver mines of northern Canada to earn enough money for a six-month tour of the world. As he was not yet twenty, his family agreed to permit him one more indulgence of youthful passion before reining him in.

  But once home, life became nothing more than a time to earn more passage to get away, and as he was becoming exceptionally skilled with his camera and spoke of creating travel books and film documentaries of strange places, his parents knew that he would never spend his years getting up at three in the morning to feed game hens and shield them from the bitter winters. In 1974, he worked for three months in the arctic region, on the Beaufort Sea, acting as mate on a boat that sliced through the iced wilderness with giant suction machines to pull boulders from the bottom of the sea. Artificial islands were constructed of these great rocks, on which were placed drilling rigs. The job was cold and lonely and undemanding of his intelligence, but Laddie made $10,000, enough to stake him on one last circle of the globe. He would be gone a year at maximum, he promised his parents, and after that he would absolutely guarantee to return to Manitoba and complete his college education. He would seal his ears from the sirens.

  It happened that Laddie’s chronic case of wanderlust had also infected his younger brother, Barry, and when the two set out together, Mrs. DuParr was both relieved—and troubled. “Don’t worry about us,” insisted Laddie. “I know my way around pretty well by now.” Mrs. DuParr, a pretty, blond, sturdy farm woman, had to agree. Her home was already well stocked with travel memoirs—a bust of Napoleon from Paris, statuary from Greece, beads from the Middle East. And her son was a dependable correspondent, sending letters home at least once each week.

  The DuParr brothers traveled together in Europe, then separated somewhere in the Middle East, each having separate routes to explore. They vowed to meet either in Bangkok or New Zealand in early 1976. They would use their mother in Canada as a switchboard, calling in from time to time to check on the other’s progress.

  In early December, 1975, Laddie telephoned home from New Delhi, even as Annabella had done, and he expressed the same malcontent with the capital of India. The Western people he had met there were “mixed up,” he told his mother, and he felt “uncomfortable” in India. On to more exciting news: he was going to Katmandu and at least look at Everest. He planned to be in Bangkok by the first week of February and would meet his brother there. Money was holding out well; he had $1,200 of his stake left and that could easily stretch to pay for another two or three months to cap the most spectacular year of his life. His travel bags were filled with exposed film, and he felt there were the makings of a picture book. One chapter might have included photographs of a new friend named Annabella, posing on the shore of a lake called Phewa Tal, as blue and as cold as a frozen sapphire, in a Nepalese town where, it is believed, the Hindu gods reveled and made love. He shot a roll of Annabella striking absurd poses beside the lake and of her futile attempts to catch a white-spotted deer who seemed fascinated by the clicks of the camera. Then Laddie handed it to Mattie, who giggled and took a shot of a Canadian boy and a California girl, newly met, holding hands and looking adolescent, with the deer pawing the earth in mischief behind them.

  Freak Street is the name bestowed by the young to a district of tiny streets leading like drunken insect trails off Durbar Square in the center of Katmandu. The stuff of fantasy and fairy tale, Freak Street has cheap hotels with staircases built for people no more than four and one-half feet tall, grocery stalls that sell cabbages as large as soccer balls, and cafes with whimsical names like Don’t Pass Me By Restaurant and the Hungry Eye. There are improbable pastry shops where hand-hewn tables are spread with what looks like Thanksgiving Day at Grandma’s—mince, pecan, chocolate meringue, and lemon chiffon pies, initially demanded by the earliest Western visitors who indulged hash-induced cravings for sweets and taught tiny Nepalese women how to bake. Nearby is the Pleasure Room, where the customer must bend over double to inch through a dark maze of dungeonesque corridors leading to a main room where pillows are strewn about and where candles dance eerily against the stone walls. Hashish, smoked openly, is the principle refreshment, with scant regard paid to new drug laws installed in the early 1970s, due chiefly to pressure from the Nixon administration. The local story goes that the United States Government grew alarmed over its traveling young being able to purchase legal hashish in Nepal. It was a commodity for sale, like turnips and straw baskets, and a customer was allowed to sit down at a lunch counter and sample the various wares of the hash merchant, not having to pay until he found some to his liking, providing he was able to find his money and reel out of the shop without assistance. Supposedly the Nixon administration, guardian of its citizens’ morals worldwide, promised a grant of a few million dollars to help finance a badly needed sewer system for Katmandu, the quid pro quo being that Nepal outlaw drug sales. A deal was struck, new laws published, the money delivered. But it apparently got “redirected” somewhere in the royal bureaucracy, for the sewer system has yet to be constructed.

  On Freak Street, Annabella and Laddie, like most youthful tourists, were besieged by children no more than ten years old with hair shaved to the scalp to prevent lice nests. They were drug sellers, offering “hash, coke, acid, speed, or smack” in phonetic patter, and if a customer showed interest, he was led by the child into a dark doorway, up a fearful staircase, into a “souvenir” shop where the proprietor offered sweet tea, then reached into a huge roll of fabric and located chunks of powerful hashish as big as bananas. If the customer were shrewd, he could negotiate a buy for around $10, for what might cost $5,000 in the U.S.

  Laddie and Annabella took a room directly on Freak Street in a dump called the Oriental Lodge, whose clientele was principally the young and the drugged and the adventuresome. For a dollar fifty a night, they were given a room of minuscule dimension, whose thin pallets were hardly more comfortable than the floor, whose walls were splashed with the psychedelic fantasies of a vivid but not very talented artist, whose ceiling beams were painted to resemble a golden serpent with a sexy pink tongue. Somewhere nearby a flute was usually playing, and soft breezes floated through windows draped with yellow and red shades. Annabella loved it all, the Oriental being a hidden place where no one dictated form or rules. And beyond the threshold was the street itself, an enduring carnival of monks in orange robes walking with bamboo staves, and Tibetan women huddled in clumps and sharing secrets, and oxen dozing, and native artists whose quick strokes brought forth dragons and deities and cobras and tigers on parchment paper. Wherever there had been a dull stretch of wall, someone tied banners of brilliantly colored cloth. To be here, with a man she liked—confided Annabella to her Australian girl friends—was a far better conclusion to 1975 than she had imagined.

  Conversely, Laddie was disappointed, for on his first morning in Katmandu he discovered that an organized trek into the foothills of the Himalayas that he hoped to join had already left. Another was not scheduled for ten days, capricious weather permitting. Laddie considered striking out alone, but he was warned off by a tourist official. The morning fogs were thick, and trails were dangerous to a novice. The year before, an American boy had left Katmandu to camp out alone, sought refuge for the night in a farmer’s field, and was discovered the next morning with his head neatly severed from his body. Another couple had simply disappeared, never to be found, somewhere in the awesome reaches of the Himalayas. Nepal, on the whole, is a lawful and safe country whose people are peaceful. But once the city is left behind, another code exists among the mountain people, one that holds less obedience to laws.

  Annabella sought to cheer Laddie. Ten days would pass quickly, she insisted, and if ever there was a place in which a fortnight could be wasted gloriously, it was Katmandu, capital of a kingdom so unique that it sets clocks ten minutes ahead of India, to demonstrate a modest amount of independence from Nepal’s chief tr
ading partner and access to the outer world.

  One day they took a bus almost to the Tibetan border, close enough to see the Chinese guards at “Friendship Bridge.” Along the way, Laddie thought he spotted a sliver of Everest beckoning through a brief parting of the clouds. But when he asked the bus driver for confirmation, the answer was, “That’s a baby. You’ll know when you see the mother.”

  Sometimes they went their separate ways, Laddie having small tolerance for monuments. After years of foreign travel, he preferred to spend his afternoons sipping excellent tea at the Cafe Govin, where the serious mountain climbers swapped stories and Everest lore. Some days he went to the Yak and Yeti, a restaurant once part of a royal palace and now operated by a flamboyant white Russian named Boris Lissanevitch, who, some claimed, promoted the legend of the Abominable Snowman to boost tourism. “I had rather stand on the top of Mount Everest than walk on the moon,” wrote Laddie to a college friend in Winnipeg. “Of course, the problem is once you’ve reached the top of the world, then everything must be down hill after that … It doesn’t look like I’ll get very far up the old girl this time, but maybe I can make her acquaintance …”

  Annabella enjoyed sleeping late, taking breakfast at Aunt Jane’s, a home-style restaurant started by a U.S. Peace Corps member, then drifting over to Durbar Square, the heart of Katmandu, where young people sit in the sun and drape themselves against the steps of temples and pagodas, often having to shoo away goats and monkeys. One day she insisted on taking Laddie to a nearby temple void of architectural interest save ornate window frames and grilles, but fascinating to Annabella because of its principal tenant—a genuine, bona fide “living goddess.” Centuries before, in a dark time, the king seduced a beautiful young girl—really young, less than twelve years old—and she died of shame. Misfortunes rained on the king, directed, he believed, by angry gods to punish his sexual rapaciousness. The king therefore decreed that a nationwide search be conducted to discover the one perfect little girl in the kingdom. Once located, she would be called the “living goddess” and would be worshiped as long as she was pure, i.e., until first menstruation.

  To this day, a “living goddess” reigns, replaced only after an exhaustive search throughout the kingdom for a child who is usually around four or five, who is beautiful, unmarked by a single scar, and possessed of unusual composure. The last is necessary because one of the crucial tests has priests in fierce masks leaping out from behind pillars to scream at the finalist. Only that rare child who remains calm is selected. Once installed in office, the goddess lives in secrecy and seclusion, within the walls of the Kumari Ghar temple, tutored and fed by holy men, hidden from view until the one day a year when she is borne through the streets of Katmandu in spectacular procession, her tiny body smothered in silks and gems and blossoms.

  The tourist who wishes to see the goddess is admitted to an inner courtyard; if a few rupees are placed in the correct palm, the “living goddess” will occasionally come to a heavily grilled window and peer out blankly for a moment or two. Only part of her face is visible, her eyes ringed with kohl and an aura of the forbidden.

  Annabella went three times to view the child and was saddened and irritated to learn that the goddess’s future, postpuberty, was enforced eviction from office, followed by bleakness. Ex-goddesses never marry, legend cursing their prospects by claiming that any man who takes one to bed will die immediately. The small alumnae association thus consists of old maids, prostitutes, and desperately lonely women.

  All of this Annabella found fascinating, in a world of jets and computerized data banks. One night at dinner she told her friends, “I suppose we’re all living goddesses in a way. What happens to those little girls is not far off from what happens to any American girl.” The remark was cryptic and needed elaboration, but Annabella changed the subject, not choosing to reach into those places within her that still contained pain.

  Katmandu held continuing fascination for Annabella and Laddie, the perfect setting for a relationship to flower. Shy around girls, as many tall and gawky men are, the blond-bearded farm boy was not adroit in casual conversation. But as he and his new friend strolled about the ancient city, there was always something to remark on—be it a fountain with sixteen foreign languages inscribed on a slab with an attendant legend that whoever translates them all will cause milk to flow eternally from the tap. Or the processions of carved elephants and dragons and monkeys that guard the steps to temples, as fanciful as a linear carousel. Or the water gardens of Balaju, whose sleeping statue of Vishnu appears to float on lotus pads, guarded by stone serpents who, legend says, will spring into ferocious life if the idol is threatened.

  Each day Laddie went to the tourist office for weather information to determine when Everest might reveal herself. One morning, he awoke Annabella at 3 A.M. with an invitation to join a group of young people who were driving east from the city, where it is often possible to obtain a ravishing view of the greatest mountain in first light of sunrise. By 6 A.M., the couple was standing huddled and chilled on a lookout 7,000 feet up, waiting impatiently for the new sun to illumine and reveal Laddie’s passion. Only a few clouds molested the mauve horizon. Surely this would be the moment. Annabella clutched his hand tightly and prayed for his dream. On the serpentine climb to the lookout, Laddie had read from a magazine article concerning Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who failed seven times before he led Hillary to the summit in 1953 during the very week that Elizabeth II was crowned. “I have come back and tried again,” said Norgay in the article, “not with pride or force, not as soldier to an enemy, but with love, as a child climbs into the lap of his mother.”

  They waited an hour, the troubled girl from California and the excited boy from the flat Canadian plains, waiting until the sun chased away every dark corner of the night. But Everest draped a new shroud of fog around her—as if putting on a hooded robe—and remained hidden. Laddie was able to see only a part, lower down. The pinnacle was wrapped in cold grayness. On the ride home he insisted that he was not overly disappointed, for this was as close as he had come and he could “feel” Everest if not exactly see her. But Annabella shared his frustration. She began planning a Christmas party for the various Western kids they had met in Katmandu, hoping it would cheer Laddie and for a few hours push away the annoying mountain.

  A mile or so away from Freak Street, on a road guarded by toy soldier sentries, stands the Hotel Soaltee-Oberoi, at the other end of the tourist scale from the Oriental Lodge. The Soaltee in 1975 was the closest thing Katmandu had to a luxury hotel, housing dignitaries from Lowell Thomas to the random visiting prime minister. Beginning on the night of December 18, the hotel welcomed a well-dressed young man with Oriental visage which was apparently Indonesian in heritage. The guest signed the register as Henricus Bintanja, citizen of the Netherlands. His companion, a stylish and thin brunette woman who did not look the least bit Dutch, signed in as Cornelia Hemker, of Amsterdam. Both presented genuine passports which easily passed muster. The couple was attractive and obviously well traveled, and they blended well with the clientele of the Soaltee, many of whom were industrial tycoons from the U.S. and Europe bent on ravaging the ancient city and erecting high-rise hotels and shopping centers.

  It was not known to the hotel that the real Henricus Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker were at this moment quite dead, burned beyond recognition, and stuffed in a locker at the Bangkok morgue.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  On the steps of a temple built before the pilgrims found America, lovers were playing flutes purchased for less than a dime, carved from a rhododendron tree, when a striking couple appeared in their laid-back midst, rather like the rich on a charity tour of the impoverished. At any given daylight moment in Katmandu, there are hundreds of young people clustered around this temple, mingling with the goats and chickens that share temporary tenancy, sitting on worn stone ledges that once drained the blood from royal sacrifices, feeling like characters on the stage of ancient history. But
destiny’s script for this December afternoon called for Charles Sobhraj and Marie-Andrée Leclerc to survey the colorful pageant and to sit down beside Annabella and Laddie.

  Speculation must enter the tale again at this juncture—there are puzzling gaps still unbridged—and matters grow exceedingly complex. Careful attention is needed, for there are shifting identities, unknown motivations, and the exact means to the end can only be surmised.

  The end itself, however, is very clear.

  An investigation and the testimony of witnesses would reveal that Charles and Marie-Andrée spent a few days principally within the guarded environs of the Hotel Soaltee-Oberoi. In the casino that is an appendix of the inn, the only legal albeit small-time gambling house for thousands of miles in any direction, Charles lost heavily at vingt et un and roulette, while his woman pulled the slot machine handles in boredom. Around them Pakistani tribesmen and wealthy Indians from Delhi gambled dispassionately. The casino is usually as quiet as a church, as if crying out over win or loss is unmannerly. From the pattern of his life, Charles probably cruised about the hotel, trying to strike rapport with affluent guests. Obviously he was unsuccessful, else he would not have invaded the Freak Street territory of the young and frugal. He was a hunter whose shots went wide of the tiger and had to settle for a sitting duck.

  Ajay Chowdhury was also present in Katmandu, but was staying at another hotel. He was, however, usually in attendance, a step or two behind his mentor, waiting for instructions, totally committed to the destructive and deadly force that was Charles Sobhraj.

  From the moment they first met the well-dressed couple on the steps of the temple, Annabella and Laddie were elevated into fast company, caught up in what might pass for a social whirl in Katmandu. Their affluent new friends took them to dine at the Hotel Soaltee-Oberoi, an accomplishment out of financial range for their Freak Street peers, and they rode about town in the rich man’s rented white Toyota, a further piece of fortune among those who haggle fiercely to save pennies before engaging a bicycle rickshaw. Annabella returned from her first evening flushed with excitement. She told the two Australian girls, Mattie and Cora, that their new friends were a “Vietnamese-looking jewel dealer and his French wife.” She said the couple was “rich, friendly, and expert in buying gems.” Perhaps this was a principal weld that forged the instant friendship, for both Laddie and Annabella had purchased gems in Delhi and were known to be concerned about their quality.