Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Now Belle was convinced. No doubt remained in her mind that her friends were killers. But what could she do about it? One of the people in Bangkok whose opinion she respected was a French businessman and she told him the story, worried that he would think she was going insane. “I believe you,” he said quietly. “But I don’t think the Thai police will.” His recommendation was to seek pressure from the diplomatic community, the only foreigners who could exert influence on the police force. An appointment was arranged with a British diplomat who agreed to hear Belle’s story.

  The Englishman listened attentively with trademarked politeness, but as Belle’s dark tale poured out, skepticism and disbelief marched visibly across his face—the attitude officials have when dealing with nuts. True, he did make a few cursory notes, but he seemed anxious to usher Belle out of his office. Perhaps later the diplomat had second thoughts, for he did send a report to the Thai police. But nothing came of it. Either the report was not believed, or it was couched in disclaimers, or it got lost. It did contain one long and convoluted sentence that should have snared somebody’s attention at the police station: “Allegedly, Gauthier in the course of his jewel business would frequent the lesser known hotels in Bangkok, picking up young persons whom he would discover had traveler’s cheques, befriend them on the pretext of helping them buy gemstones, take them back to his flat where he would wine and dine them, invite them to stay, and ultimately extract their monies and valuables, disposing of them in the manner of the Dutch couple …”

  Even with this shocking accusation, nothing was done. Incredibly, the Thai police did not even send a patrolman over to Belle’s apartment for amplification. “I told you so,” said Raoul, when Belle finally confided in her husband. He complimented her on her moral courage, but suggested it was now time to stop playing Inspector Maigret. Visa renewal time was approaching for both of them, and it would not be wise to have their names listed on police reports. “Now forget about them,” pressed Raoul. “They’ll never come back here.” She agreed, but forgetting was not easy, particularly in the nights when she waited for her husband to return from the hotel kitchens, suspecting somehow that she had not seen the last of the tenant in Apartment 503.

  The subjects of Belle’s concern next turned up in Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the lower Western coast of India. When Charles and his companions arrived in the city of Panaji around January 7, 1976, the area was crowded with tourists—mostly young, mostly naïve, exquisitely ripe.

  How absurdly easy it had become. Within hours, Charles zeroed in on three young Frenchmen whom, police would learn, he encountered shopping in the Brick Market, where everything from pineapples picked an hour ago to antique statues of Catholic saints is sold. Goa was rich in religious artifacts as the first Christian colony in the East. All in their early twenties, the three youths were traveling in a van of recent vintage and seemed more affluent than Goa’s run-of-the-mill dropouts. They were the kind of Frenchmen encountered on the Boulevard St.-Michel in Paris, lean, stylish, attractive, flirtatious, and appreciative of all women. They kissed Marie-Andrée’s hand on first meeting, a touch of gallantry that must have been welcome after the frenetic events of the past fortnight that had begun on the night she fled Katmandu.

  By nightfall, they were fast friends, Ajay having materialized from the shadows to join the party, thus evening up the sides. The next day, a glorious interlude on the beach! Lunch was taken at a thatched hut cafe where great platters of cold lobster and crayfish almost spilled into their laps. Then, a siesta under coconut palms, and by nightfall, a hash pipe going around with Charles pretending to make liberal intake. None of the others knew that he would not risk consuming a drop of alcohol or a mouthful of consciousness-altering smoke. He faked being stoned, and no one knew how brilliant was his acting.

  The next morning, the French youths announced they were going to a remote beach near the coastal town of Karwar, further south, below Goa. Was there room for his party, wondered Charles? “Bien sûr,” answered Eric d’Amour, owner of the van. Just before departure, Charles slipped away and bought a quart of scotch whisky, an expensive indulgence in India that can cost forty dollars or more.

  The van stopped for the night on an empty beach beside the Arabian Sea, a place where it was possible to believe no one had ever set foot before. Marie-Andrée busied herself about the campfire, grilling two freshly killed chickens. A radio picked up a faraway station that played something akin to rock. Fueled by the whisky that Charles produced, and hash pipes, and the warm and sensuous breezes from the sea, everyone felt perfect. They danced and gnawed at the chicken and reveled in being young, unencumbered, occupants of a piece of earth so remote that no one could have conjured it in wildest fantasy.

  But sometime later, one of the French boys murmured with a thick tongue, “Alain, your whisky is very good. And strong.” One of the others stumbled and fell in the sand, giggling. Then all three dropped in their tracks. Thirty-six hours later they awoke in a hospital somewhere in the south of India, frightened, confused, their heads aching and empty. Their van, they would soon learn, was totally destroyed, and all of their personal belongings—luggage, camera, radios, passport, money—gone. So were the nice French couple and the Indian man whom they had met three days earlier in the Brick Market. What happened was not hard for police to reconstruct. The theory was that the scotch whisky was heavily laced with a tranquilizer, probably Valium, and when the French trio fell asleep, they were administered injections of a powerful sleeping powder. Empty packages of the drug were found in the wreck of the van.

  It was further believed that the three unconscious youths were tossed in the back of the van and their belongings removed. Then someone started the vehicle, reached a speed of 60 mph, placed a rock on the accelerator, and leaped out. The van was headed for a cliff that would send it tumbling into the sea. But the driverless vehicle swerved and smashed into a palm tree, a violent collision that the drugged Frenchmen did not even hear or feel. Nearby villagers heard and ran to the scene, pulled the unconscious victims from the van, thinking that they had been knocked out in the accident. “We were supposed to die,” said Eric d’Amour months later, “but fate gave us a second chance.”

  In Bangkok, Belle wrestled with her conscience—and lost. She decided to make one more try at getting someone in authority to believe her. This time she chose the French Embassy—her own government—where a lower echelon officer listened to the incredible story. Not only did he disbelieve, he delivered a stern lecture to Belle on the danger of becoming involved with a Thai police matter. He cautioned her that if she kept spreading this tale the police might arrest her as a co-conspirator. “Then and there I decided to stop being a detective,” said Belle. And then and there humiliation replaced courage.

  Charles led his followers across India, through Bangalore, the city whose name translates “baked beans,” down to Madras, then, apparently in search of new territory, to Singapore. Here Charles passed through airport control by using the passport of Avoni Jacob, the Israeli strangled in the holy city of Varanasi. He took the precaution of removing Jacob’s photograph and replacing it with his favorite pose—the portrait of himself he wanted the world to see. He was wearing a beautifully tailored jacket, tie, carefully combed hair, and a benign, somewhat mocking smile. He looked dignified and prosperous.

  On his arm Marie-Andrée entered Singapore using the passport of a man, Eric d’Amour, the unfortunate Frenchman whose van was wrecked south of Goa. She protested to Charles on the flight from Madras to Singapore that surely the authorities would note the discrepancy between her newly pasted photograph and a masculine name on the document. “Don’t be silly, chérie,” he answered. “In the East, they don’t understand Western names.” She was admitted to Singapore without a second glance, with no more trouble than when she used to take the ferryboat from Lévis to Quebec City a thousand years ago.

  They quarreled bitterly in Singapore, in a bleak room at the YMCA Hotel. If Charles did
not let her go, if he did not buy her an airplane ticket for Canada, for home, then surely she would go insane. Of course his response was to put on his soothing, healing, reassurance act, which must have been remarkable. While he whispered his devotion to Marie-Andrée and thanked her for loyalty and strength, he slipped a lovely gold Omega watch on her thin arm and took her to bed. Afterwards, while she slept, Charles slipped out of Singapore with Ajay and was gone for a week, on “business.”

  Marie-Andrée was left alone for the week. How easy it would have been for her to go to the Canadian Consul and report her passport stolen and cable her family for passage money home. But she did not. She had the opportunity to escape and she did not take it. Later, she would contend that she was frightened, that Charles had warned her that she was under constant surveillance by one of his Singapore colleagues. But the sorrowful truth seemed to be something else. One night in Charles’ arms was enough to reignite her passion and her hope that the day would come when she could claim his full devotion. The last entry in her diary, undated but probably written about this time, reflects the strange power of love:

  Day after day, a small piece of myself was taken out of me … Day after day I was hurt, I was destroyed little by little. But I’m still on my way, even though I fell in a ditch. I still have hope, and this hope is the only thing I have, and I must hold to it tightly.

  If Charles succeeds in taking me out of this ditch and puts me again on the road, I shall live.

  If Charles walks on my side and helps me to stay on the road, then I shall go very far, and I shall regain my happiness.

  He is the only man who can help me, for I love him so much that I can make only one being with him. I can only exist because of him. I can only breathe because of him. And, my love is increasing …

  A point of emphasis: according to the passport in her purse, Marie-Andrée Leclerc had become a Frenchman named Eric d’Amour. She was abandoned in a hotel in Singapore. The police of half the world would soon be seeking her. But her love for the man who had brought her to this desperate place was “increasing.”

  If only she had known that at this moment, the “business” that took Charles out of Singapore was a flight to Bangkok, where he spent an indolent and gratifying week with Suzy the waitress in the luxury of a deluxe hotel suite.

  In Amsterdam, and Paris, and Los Angeles, and Winnipeg, alarms were at last being sounded by families who were coming to the reluctant decision that their children were lost, or in trouble. The pattern was generally the same. Parents fretted for a few weeks over the absence of mail or telephone calls from their wandering young. Then denial set in, whistling-in-the-dark reassurances that mail from the East was undependable and slow. Worry reasserted itself. Sleepless nights multiplied. Finally, concern grew until they beseeched authorities for help.

  The parents of Laddie DuParr asked the Canadian Red Cross, the Department of External Affairs, and even the Royal Canadian Mounties to search for their son, unheard from for two months. Laddie’s last letter was postmarked Katmandu—dated mid-December—and in it he said he would rendezvous with his brother in Bangkok by February. The Canadian Government promptly sent cables to their diplomatic representatives in Nepal and Thailand. Back came the shocking news that Laddie DuParr was being sought for double murder, a ghoulish prank of fate that would not be cleared up until blame was affixed on the elusive shoulders of Charles Sobhraj.

  South of Los Angeles, Maggie’s fears for her granddaughter mounted. She first began to worry on Thanksgiving Day, 1975, when Jennie neither sent greetings by mail nor telephoned. “Jennie always keeps in touch,” fretted Maggie to Cap. He pacified her. Jennie was probably halfway up some Himalayan peak, meditating and drinking yak milk. Not to worry. “But she didn’t even write and let us know she reached the monastery safely in Katmandu,” countered Maggie. It was uncharacteristic of her granddaughter to be so thoughtless. As autumn deepened, Maggie wrote three letters to the Kopan Monastery. The first two were not answered. The third was returned marked “undeliverable.” By Christmas Day, Maggie was certain that something had happened to the child that she had raised.

  In early January, her fears were confirmed. One of Jennie’s Buddhist friends in Los Angeles telephoned to report that Lama Yeshe in Katmandu had written a disturbing letter. Jennie never reached the monastery. The monks and nuns had been expecting her and were concerned. Had Jennie abandoned her plan? “Dear God,” whispered Maggie. She rushed to the church and fell to her knees and prayed to St. Jude.

  Immediately, Maggie telephoned Seattle, looking for Christopher, and discovered that he, too, was off on another world journey and perhaps would meet Jennie at the monastery. That lifted the old woman’s spirits, for she trusted Jennie’s former boy friend and believed that he would let her know if anything was wrong. Then she rang the office of U.S. Senator Alan Cranston, got a brush-off, followed up with letters and telephone calls all over official Washington. At one point, caught in a frustrating trap of buck-passings and bureaucratic arrogance, Maggie lost her temper and yelled at a rude woman in the State Department, “I don’t give a damn what you can or cannot do! I’m a taxpayer and my granddaughter is missing!” Later, reflecting, Maggie would recall the moment: “I felt so helpless. Everybody was brushing me away like a crazy woman. I couldn’t even get the name of one single person to call in Hong Kong or Katmandu or Bangkok. Was I asking too much? All I wanted was somebody with sense who worked for my own government in Asia to help me. Isn’t that what we pay them to do?”

  And in Seattle, Jennie’s friends received the news of her disappearance with no great alarm. Margret and Cybilla both assumed that Jennie had met a man and was having “one last fling” before she cloistered herself in the monastery. Then both young women experienced strange dreams in which Jennie appeared to them in distress. Cybilla found her encounter with Jennie to be so vivid that it “was not a dream,” rather a meeting between the two girls “on the astral plane.” She “saw” her friend inside some sort of warehouse, surrounded by cardboard boxes, trying to struggle free, crying out, “Help me!”

  It must be remembered that Jennie’s friends in Seattle were mostly young women who had experimented liberally with drugs, and mysticism, and assorted exotic and esoteric philosophies. Perhaps their “dreams” and “astral encounters” should be gently put in the same category as séances. But one other curious occurrence in Seattle cannot be so easily explained. A group of feminists with whom Jennie had been associated held a weekend retreat in the woods during the time that she was missing. After a day of speeches and discussion and sisterhood, the women built a campfire and danced around it, linking arms. One of the women present, older, in her fifties, was known to be shy and preferred to go unnoticed. Someone asked her to join the circle, but she declined, saying that she did not dance well and was, in truth, clumsy. Her feet would probably trip her neighbor and cause the circle to tumble. But in mid-dance the woman suddenly rose and entered the dancing. She danced with passion, with enormous energy, with skill, with such abandon that the others stopped to watch, in wonder. It was as if a force had briefly taken command of her body. Later, Cybilla knew the reason. “Jennie came to us that night,” she would say. “Jennie entered this woman’s body and became part of us again.”

  When the dance was over, the woman had no recollection of what she had done.

  On the night of February 18, 1976, a date Maggie remembers well, for she is a no-nonsense person who lives an ordered life, an eerie experience gave her the information she needed. It cannot be explained, nor, on the other hand, can it be dismissed as the hallucination of a desperate, distraught old woman.

  Maggie was asleep, in her bed beside Cap, when she bolted awake. Or thought she did. Something was in the room. Some presence was pulling her out of sleep. Obediently, Maggie rose and went to the hallway and saw a light burning in the breakfast room. Strange, she thought. Never did Maggie leave this light on overnight, and indeed she well remembered turning it off in a sweep o
f the house before retiring. Electricity is expensive. Better turn it off, she muttered to herself. But when she reached the threshold of the breakfast room, her hand flew to her mouth. Someone was sitting calmly at the table. It was Jennie. The old Jennie, from years earlier, when she was young and fresh and radiant, the Jennie who danced on the sand, the Jennie whose face was unclouded by darkness, looking exactly as she did on the miniature portrait that dangled from Maggie’s family tree in the living room. Rushing to her, Maggie exclaimed, “Where have you been, honey? The whole world’s looking for you?”

  Jennie held out her hand in a command to stop. She spoke softly. “I was waiting for you to bring me home, Grandma. You promised. Remember how you promised?” Then she smiled, serenely, and laughed, laughed until a line of red rose from her throat to fill her face. It was as if she had washed in blood.

  In her bed, Maggie woke up screaming. Thank God, she reassured herself. Only a nightmare. But she glanced into the hallway and saw a light coming from the breakfast room. This time, fully awake and rational, Maggie crept fearfully down the hall. The breakfast room was empty. But the window was open. It had been stuck for more than a year after a painting and neither Maggie nor Cap even bothered to try budging it anymore. A cold wind blew against her face.

  At that moment Maggie knew, in a heart suddenly iced, that Jennie was dead.

  In Amsterdam, the families of Henricus Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker did not wait as long before asking The Hague’s foreign office to locate their out-of-touch children. When Christmas, 1975, passed, as well as another important family occasion, the Dutch parents sought help quickly. Last word received from the missing young couple was in early December, in letters written from Hong Kong. Cocky Hemker wrote ebulliently of their stay, of various souvenirs purchased there—a fan, black clogs, posters, the $1,600 sapphire ring—and she devoted several paragraphs to the attractive man they had encountered. His name was Alain Dupuis, a resident of Bangkok, a gem dealer.