Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Charles opened his hotel door warmly, courteously, a little annoyed at the intrusion to his holiday, but willing to answer any questions. He identified himself as Mr. Bintanja, of Amsterdam, and introduced his companion, “Cocky Hemker.”

  They were taken to the central police station, not far from a statue of Bhairab, god of terror. In olden days, suspected criminals were brought before the grotesque figure and questioned. If the suspect was lying, legend had it, he dropped dead immediately. As it would soon turn out, modern police could have used the help of Bhairab or any indicator of truth-telling to deal with Charles Sobhraj.

  He treated them as superior to inferior. He fell back on a favorite disguise, professor of “social sciences” at a European university, on sabbatical in the Far East. His lady, Cocky, was a genteel scholar and research assistant. Yes, he said, they had rented a white Toyota to view the shrines. No, he insisted, neither of them had ever met or heard of Laddie DuParr or Annabella Tremont. His face was haughty, like a social lion falsely accused of consorting with clochards. It was unlikely that they would encounter two hippies from Freak Street, as their frame of reference was the Hotel Soaltee-Oberoi. They produced restaurant receipts and documents from the casino showing currency exchanges for the time when police believed the two murders occurred.

  To all questions, Charles responded patiently. He was in complete control, as unruffled as a fat hen in a favorite coop. Only when one of the investigators started to take Marie-Andrée into another room for private questioning did Charles turn testy. Hadn’t the police bothered them enough? Hadn’t they answered every question? It was, after all, Christmas, and though the holiday was not celebrated in Nepal, they were Christians and entitled to be left alone on the sacred day of Jesus Christ’s birth. Enough! “My companion is a scholar,” protested Charles. “She has never had contact with the police before.” It worked. Police released them with appreciation for their answers, but warned of further questioning should the need arise.

  For two days, the couple was kept under casual surveillance by the hotel management, by police instruction. Neither “Bintanja” nor his companion seemed the least bit concerned. They feasted on Christmas Day and gambled enthusiastically in the casino. The police were about ready to dismiss the couple, when a detective named Preman Bizra found himself troubled. He thought it necessary to ask further questions concerning the articles found in the trunk of the rented white Toyota. The jeans were for a very tall man, six feet or more, and Henricus Bintanja was short, more like a Nepalese.

  Collecting a sputtering Charles Sobhraj at the hotel, Bizra drove him downtown for another round of questioning. Marie-Andrée was ill, “feminine problems,” and she was permitted to stay in her room. Charles endured another solid hour or two of questions, brushing off every query. The jeans in the car trunk? “They’re not mine and I have no idea how they got in there,” he snapped. “It is a rental car, and the jeans probably belonged to the previous renter. As for me, I never opened the trunk. Not a single time.” Nor did he know anything about the spectacles or the cap or the lens cover. His attitude changed from helpful to surly, and at nightfall officer Bizra thanked him and gave him a ride back to the hotel on his motorcycle.

  During the night, the young police officer slept poorly. A replay of the afternoon’s questioning tormented his peace. In the darkness and silence of his bed, it occurred to him that this man Henricus Bintanja was a bit too unruffled, too glib, too quick with his answers. Any man should be nervous when being questioned by police over two murders, at least a little bit nervous. This man seemed less concerned than he would have been if a waiter brought tea instead of coffee. And the woman! Why was she tense, and pale, and why was she twice as nervous as the man? Just as the young policeman drifted off, he decided to pick up the couple in the morning for one more round of questions. No doubt it would be futile, but Bizra was not yet totally convinced he had learned the whole truth from “Henricus Bintanja.”

  The next morning, when Bizra knocked at the door of Room 415 in the Hotel Soaltee-Oberoi, there was no answer. He knocked again. The room clerk and the doorman had just assured the officer that neither Bintanja nor his girl friend had left the hotel. They were still registered. Hurriedly Bizra swept through the lobby and public rooms and failed to find them. He found the manager and ordered him to open the locked door. “Curious,” murmured the manager. “It’s locked from the inside. They must be asleep. I can’t waken them.”

  The cop did not hesitate. Break down the door, he directed. The manager blanched. Would the police accept responsibility? Bizra nodded.

  The room was empty. The occupants had left their luggage behind and had escaped during the night. It was reasoned that the woman left routinely via the door and waited downstairs, while the man locked the room from the inside, slipped out the window, and in a breathtaking acrobatic feat somehow descended four flights by clinging to windowsills and jutting bricks. Bizra stared at the wall of the hotel and cursed, angry that he had not entertained his suspicions earlier.

  Immediately word was sent to the airport to watch all departing passengers; the roads in and around Katmandu filled with police looking for an alleged Dutchman and his girl friend. But at this moment, the quarry was far away. Charles and Marie-Andrée and Ajay Chowdhury were somewhere between Katmandu and the border of India, whipping a hapless taxi driver like a balky camel to deliver them out of the kingdom of Nepal.

  Behind them, in the hotel room, they had abandoned three suitcases with at least $2,000 worth of clothing, scores of paperback books including Palmistry Made Easy, and several oddments—a portable fire extinguisher (“a very good weapon,” mused Bizra), four pairs of men’s gloves (an unusual item for travelers in the tropical East and which police believed were used to avoid fingerprints), and a large world map on which someone had traced journeys. Lines crisscrossed the globe from Paris to Hong Kong, indicating hundreds of thousands of miles of travel, zigzagging back and forth, east to west, up and down the world, journeys beyond the imagination and endurance of a hundred Marco Polos.

  At the Oriental Lodge on Freak Street, investigators found very little in the room that had been occupied by Laddie DuParr and Annabella. In the boy’s address book was a new entry for someone named “A. Gauthier” with a Bangkok address, and among Annabella’s belongings was a piece of paper with the same name and address. A map was found that belonged to DuParr, showing his travel routes, and directly in the middle of the blue Indian Ocean was written the cryptic phrase “A. Gauthier is called Bintanja, Henk. Soaltee Hotel.” But at this moment in the macabre mess, the Nepalese police did not notice it nor make the connection. After several more days, when no identification was made for the male body that had been burned beyond recognition, it was cremated at Teku and the ashes put in a jar and stored on a shelf. Laddie DuParr would have to wait quite a long time before he was returned to the farm in Canada, just beyond the end of the road.

  For twenty-four hours they exhorted the taxi driver to hurry, ignoring his pleas that the road was poor and the route dangerous in the middle of a December night. A light snow fell as the taxi left the mountains and descended into a forest of acacia, thence to the flat savannah belt that is the bottom of Nepal and home to tiger, leopard, white rhino, and packs of wolves. Several times the taxi spun out, almost plunging off the road at hairpin curves. Marie-Andrée screamed, but Charles slapped her. She finally found the thinnest of sleep. Beside them, Ajay Chowdhury sat silently.

  When the border town of Birganj was reached, Charles paid the taxi and directed his companions to cross the checkpoint on foot. It was December 29. Each crossed separately, each presenting a false passport, explaining to the Nepalese guards that they were naturalists, on a wildlife trek, photographing flora and fauna. Once safely across and on Indian soil, Charles hired three horses from a farmer with the promise to return them in an hour. Half a day later, when the exhausted animals began to foam and convulse, they were abandoned. Indefatigable, Charles led his
companions onto a highway where he flagged another taxi, thrusting rupees by the handfuls at the driver, insisting that he take them deeper into India. Somewhere was a ferry that took two hours to creep across a swift river. Then another taxi. And another. They reached Patna, where five centuries before Christ a civilization of gasping opulence existed and where epic poetry was read in pavilions of gold and pink pearl. There they stumbled onto a DC-3 of Air India and were deposited quickly thereafter, on the last night of 1975, in Calcutta.

  Here it was cold. Strong winds drove the beggars and untouchables to press their bodies against the sides of buildings, hoping for warmth. The wretched wrapped themselves and their children in thin gray blankets and huddled together.

  Charles found a cheap hotel and helped Marie-Andrée into a room. She fell across an iron cot whose sheets were coarse. Her face was burning with fever, and when she tried to stand the room spun dizzily about her. Surely she was rueful. She had nothing left but the filthy clothes on her back, a purse with no money, a passport that was not hers. Charles had even robbed her of an identity, had lured her with the promise of love to the state of nothingness where he had for most of his life been a citizen.

  At midnight, the man who had promised her a palace but who at this changing of the years could deliver only a cubicle that reeked with the stench of lower-class India, this man kissed her and whispered “Bonne année, chérie.”

  Sometime before the first light of the new year, she wrote in her diary: “I think I am going crazy … I am sick … I will die with pain. I am dying, drowning, crushed. Nobody can take me out of this … I cannot trust me anymore. For I am nothing. Nothing …”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The river Ganges, Mother of Life, Mother of Death, Mother of India, flows from north to south, save for a few puzzling miles at Varanasi where, curiously, it changes directions. Some contend this is tribute from the gods to the holiness of a city as old as Babylon, the only place on earth where the most celebrated industry is death and transfiguration. The Western eye newly affixed on Varanasi is assaulted by a spectacle beyond imagination and comprehension, a carnival of ochers and rusts veined by the shock of yellow smoke rising from the biers of the burning dead, where the old come to wait for the end and the beginning. To die in Varanasi, they say, is to be closer to heaven, insurance of a higher status in the next life. Each dawn the Ganges performs two duties—dissolution of ashes and bones scattered by the mourners, and caressing and cleansing the living who bathe in the very same flow.

  Here widows wear white saris and sit in open-air pavilions beside the river, singing monotonous hymns of grief and loss. Here one of the most distinguished jobs is “caretaker in charge of burning.” At the principal crematorium, he and he alone ignites the holy wood that reduces a corpse to nothing but ashes. But the power of Hindu is that, even as the flames destroy, a new incarnation begins. Above the crematorium, guarding the roof of the house of the dead, carved tigers prowl in ferocious relief, metaphorically reminding that death is waiting for all.

  In the first week of January 1976, Charles Sobhraj escorted Marie-Andrée, Ajay, and a new acquaintance down the steep, slippery steps of a ghat, a stone porch beside the river, where hundreds of pilgrims, mostly women, were cautiously and modestly lowering their bodies into the cold and sulfurous-smelling waters. The new man, police would soon learn, was a young Israeli named Avoni Jacob, thin, bearded, a student in his mid-twenties who was interested in Eastern religions and nursed vague intentions of writing a book that contrasted them with Judaism. Note pads spilled from his pockets, filled with thousands of words each day. He was quiet and rarely spoke to anyone, but on New Year’s Day in Calcutta, Jacob had met a friendly and helpful Eurasian named “Alain Ponant.” When they discovered that both planned journeys to Varanasi, it was decided to travel together.

  Marie-Andrée had protested feebly that she could not possibly rise from her iron cot and accompany Charles and a “Jew man,” as Jacob was described, on yet another journey across India. But when Charles threatened to abandon her in Calcutta, she rose quickly enough and packed a few new clothes purchased to replace the wardrobe abandoned in Katmandu.

  Undoubtedly, Charles held the Israeli spellbound as he pointed out the sights and shocks of Varanasi. He always knew his territory. Here was where Buddha preached his first sermon, and over there the Emperor Ashoka built a temple in the third century, B.C., that contained a spectacular sandstone pillar supporting a carved lion holding the dharama-chakra, “wheel of law,” which is to this day part of India’s national flag. During their morning tour of the city, Charles suggested to Marie-Andrée that all bathe in the river. The devout believed it washed away illness and sin. Marie-Andrée frowned and shook her head. The river stank. It filled her with revulsion. Jacob, however, purchased a small clay jug and descended to the Ganges and filled it. The water he brought back smelled clean. It would stay sweet and fresh, legend said, for as long as it was possessed.

  They walked further along the Ganges, whose banks contain seventy-four ghats, each crowded with pilgrims, so many that it becomes difficult to see the rites. A boat was engaged and it bore Charles and his friends along the river for a better view of the spectacle. Jacob wrote in one of his notebooks: “The owner of the boat would not take us close enough to shore to see the bodies burning, but we could see the smoke from the pyres rising and drifting over the Ganges … Later we saw mourners bringing a dead man to the crematorium. A hundred men were packed tightly together, and their shoulders carried a wooden pallet on which the corpse rested … An air of celebration! Chanting, singing, shouting, it is a festival of death.”

  On the morning of January 6, 1976, a cleaning woman entered the hotel room where Avoni Jacob was an occupant. She screamed. Sprawled naked across his cot, the Israeli’s neck bore ugly purple marks. He had been drugged and strangled. His credentials and valuables were missing. Little was left save a few pages of his notebooks, one of which contained a final entry: “I would like to stay in Varanasi until I understand more. Every exit is an entrance. If one believes strongly enough, life can be lived without fear of death. Here one can almost touch what is hidden, what is beyond …”

  Police would quickly learn that Jacob’s killer had stolen his traveler’s checks and cashed two of them, worth $150, at a nearby hotel. The killer had no trouble with the transaction; he used Avoni Jacob’s passport. It was also determined that the Israeli had but a few hundred dollars to his name. “Not very much to die for,” said a detective, who would one day accuse Charles Sobhraj, Marie-Andrée Leclerc, and Ajay Chowdhury of the murder.

  In their wake, the number of dead was now eight.

  Avoni Jacob was cremated and his ashes thrown into the river beside which he had walked in awe a few hours before his death.

  In Bangkok, Belle and Raoul waited each day with the expectation that police would burst into their apartment building in search of the suspected killers. Surely the three French boys—Dominique, Yannick, and Jacques—were safely in Paris and had reported the ghastly tale of torture and death to Interpol. But New Year’s Day came and went, and January slipped by. Belle began to realize, sadly, that help was not over the next hill. The fact was that the three youths were so frightened that they did not want to risk further involvement. Alain Gauthier often said that his arm stretched across continents. And Dominique learned from a doctor in Paris that his blood contained strychnine.

  Courage is a rare commodity, conceived now and then in unlikely wombs. With her apartment securely locked, Belle stayed inside, alternating as the prisoner of fear and rage. Raoul continued to counsel his wife that the best avenue to travel was one that steered far away from whatever did or did not happen two flights above them. And though her head told her that Raoul was right, her heart disagreed.

  One morning she rose and drank coffee and stared out her window and decided to break open the chamber of horrors. She could not live with her conscience, otherwise the memories would torment her the rest o
f her days. The way to start, she reasoned, was to wangle entrance to Alain Gauthier’s apartment. At that very moment, destiny sent the housemaid to walk along the corridor outside her apartment. The maid had a passkey. She was Belle’s friend.

  Quickly Belle prepared a story about how she needed to get into her friend’s apartment because she had left an important document there. The maid, smiling conspiratorially, agreed. Later it would be revealed that the cleaning woman, as is the custom of those in her business, had sized up the situation inside Alain Gauthier’s apartment long ago—but was afraid to speak out for fear of losing her job.

  With her heart in her throat, Belle entered the apartment. She felt like a deep sea diver, prowling the wreckage of a party ship. Everything was dark, everything was shadows. Yet she felt the powerful presence of Gauthier. She fully expected him to step out of the closet and pour poison down her mouth. Hurriedly she crept about, daring only five minutes, but that was enough to locate the diary of Cocky Hemker, the Dutch girl, her handbag, shoes, and souvenirs purchased in Hong Kong. Belle carefully tore out one page of the journal and slipped it inside her blouse. In a large cardboard box she found a blizzard of documents—receipts, boarding passes, hotel bills—some bearing the names of people who had been brief guests in this room and who were now missing, presumed—by the three French youths—to be dead.

  A noise outside the apartment sent panic washing over the plucky French housewife and she made a hasty exit, not daring to grab documents from the cardboard box. It took the rest of the day for her heart to stop pounding.