Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Gemstones! Tuli whirled and returned to the anteroom. He informed Daniel Chaumet that it would be necessary to accompany police crosstown for further questioning.

  “I refuse,” said the custom-tailored Frenchman. His eyes glared.

  Shrugging, Tuli gestured to a pair of quite large Indian police who picked the pseudo-Frenchman up by the armpits and dragged him yelling out of the hotel.

  Jean Dhuisme parked the Citroën in a hidden back-street garage and worked his way on foot to the hotel where the girls were staying. It was midnight. He told the tale of the black comedy at the Vikram and in the telling it grew funny, particularly at the point when Charles was trying in vain to persuade the drugged tourists to go upstairs so they would pass out in private. Barbara and Mary Ellen began to giggle, but Marie-Andrée was stricken.

  “Where is he?” she begged.

  Dhuisme did not know. He had not stayed around long enough to find out, and it did not seem appropriate that he return to the Vikram and learn the dénouement. Nor did he seem particularly worried, Charles having wriggled out of tight places before.

  “What are we going to do?” said Marie-Andrée. The group had less than ten dollars between them. The branch to which she had clung had suddenly snapped, and now she was falling. She began to weep. Mary Ellen shook her by the shoulder and spoke sternly. She was strong and tough. “You’re going to shut up,” she ordered. “We’ll sleep and figure out a plan tomorrow.”

  Daniel Chaumet was brought to Tuli’s office, where the veteran cop bade him sit down. A bearer brought in glasses of hot sweet tea. Charles took one look, sneered, and swept it off the table as if presented with a sour goblet of wine. The glass crashed on the floor, spilling tea over the cold speckled tiles.

  In a quarter century of police work, Tuli had never encountered anyone like the seething man who sat before him. The performance, which endured this first night from midnight until past sunrise, was spectacular. More than once the cop felt the dreaded fingers of A Major Mistake creep about his neck. Perhaps he had arrested the wrong man, perhaps the French Embassy would be banging on his desk tomorrow morning in diplomatic protest. Charles’ act was most convincing. For the first few hours, he simply sat mute, his face contorted by rage. Then he exploded in French, demanding that the embassy send over an interpreter to sort out this grave misunderstanding.

  Tuli wasn’t buying that. “I think you speak English as well as I do, Mr. Chaumet,” he said sharply. “If not, it might take several days to find an adequate interpreter.”

  “Yes, I speak English,” said Charles, appreciating the threat. “A little.” He almost smiled, thought Tuli. Here was a man who appreciated the game of cat and mouse.

  Throughout the long night, Charles continued his harangue. He demanded that a cable be sent to Paris to confirm his identity. He insisted that he was a prominent importer-exporter who was exceedingly well known in the Parisian business community. He was in India to establish a major branch of his business, one that would enrich the economy and provide jobs. And now, here he was at the hands of barbarians. He threw out the name of a woman magazine editor in Paris. “Just call her,” he pleaded. “I will pay the charges.” He demanded a lawyer.

  “All in good time,” said Tuli. Where was Chaumet’s passport?

  He almost flinched. But he quickly recovered. It must have been lost during the scuffle at the Vikram Hotel. Ask the stupid manager, suggested Charles.

  Then where was Daniel Chaumet staying? In what hotel?

  “I refuse to answer any more of these insolent questions,” said the suspect. He folded his hands and shut his eyes. He held his body rigid, as if in a trance.

  Three other detectives rotated in and out of the room, reinforcing Tuli, dropping new pieces of information as they became available. Most of the tourists had been treated at the hospital and released. Three or four were serious enough to be kept under observation. Nobody was dead.

  “Why would I want to hurt these people?” asked Charles during the night. “These people are French. They are my friends. French people stick together.”

  Tuli pawed through Charles’ black crocodile bag. In it were several pills of various hues and shapes. “What are these?” the deputy chief asked.

  “Medicine. A man would be a fool to travel in India without medicine.”

  “Who is Monique?” asked Tuli quickly.

  Charles looked blank. He had no idea.

  “There was a girl named Monique with you in Agra. We know that. And two other girls.”

  “I have known many girls,” said Charles. “I can’t remember all their names.”

  To every query, Charles had a quick retort. Had he ever been arrested? “Of course not. I told you I am a respectable businessman. The only mistake I ever made was in coming to this country of savages. I assure you that the Delhi police force will regret this. I intend to take it all the way to Indira Gandhi.”

  Toward dawn, Tuli sent out for food. When it arrived, Charles stared at the plate of spiced vegetable patties and rice and nan, the thin circle of bread. He swept this onto the floor as well. He demanded that food be sent over from the Oberoi Hotel or the French Embassy. He did not eat “garbage.”

  At 7 A.M., Tuli waved his hands in disgust and Charles was taken away to a lockup cell. He could stew there awhile. Tuli wanted time to study the Interpol cables. He could have cleared the water immediately had he been permitted to take the suspect’s fingerprints and cable them to Paris for identification. But this was impossible. In India, fingerprints cannot be taken until after a conviction—and Charles, incredibly, had never been convicted of anything in India. Nor was the photograph which Hugey Courage provided of good enough quality to identify Charles positively. Similar, but not dead on.

  While Tuli read the cables, police were dispatched to every hotel in Delhi, trying to locate any European girls who fitted the description of those in the company of Daniel Chaumet at Agra. The task would take several days, there being hundreds of hotels, student hostels, and guest lodges. Airports and train stations were suddenly swarming with plainclothesmen, watching every departing tourist.

  Mary Ellen took charge and moved the group to a third-class dump near Connaught Circle. The Australian girl insisted that everyone stay put, that Charles would somehow send word. Marie-Andrée protested, pleading that she had to go to the international telephone office and call Canada. Her father was dying. “Not bloody likely,” threatened Mary Ellen. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Then you’ll have to kill me,” said Marie-Andrée, walking out of the room with false bravado. Mary Ellen was all bluff as well. In both women was a mounting wave of desperation. At the telephone office, Marie-Andrée placed a collect call to her sister, Denise, in Quebec and waited all day before it went through. She tried to keep her voice steady. She told Denise that she was in trouble, serious trouble, but innocent of everything. She implored Denise to help her get out of India. Denise knew more than she let on. A story had broken in the Canadian newspapers a few days earlier stating that a Quebec nurse named “Monique Leclerc” was wanted in Asia on charges of multiple murder. Denise had rushed home the day the story appeared, hoping to steal the newspaper before her father read it. The worry was that his failing heart would stop. But Augustin already knew. The phone in his house had scarcely stopped ringing. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had called. What in God’s name was going on? Marie-Andrée was his most dutiful daughter. She had never even stepped on an ant. She had gone to mass six times a week since she was old enough to stand alone.

  On the transoceanic phone, Marie-Andrée beseeched her sister to send Bernard, her old boy friend, to extricate her from the mess. Denise had a better idea. Why not just go to the Canadian Embassy in Delhi, tell them the truth, ask for asylum, and obtain the justice to which Canadians were entitled?

  “I can’t,” said Marie-Andrée. “I’m too afraid. Please send Bernard.” It was in her mind that the balding accountant who had accompanied h
er on her first trip to the East—could it have been only fifteen months ago?—would ride to her rescue. Denise promised to try, just as the connection became so poor that neither party could hear. Marie-Andrée hung up in despair.

  The next day, the girls and Jean Dhuisme fanned out to sell whatever they could. Money had to be raised. In Charles’ suitcase, they found several cameras and radios. They sold these. Their clothes. A hair dryer. Shoes. But the proceeds were only 800 rupees, less than $100. Then Mary Ellen ordered the group to the Oberoi Hotel to wait around the swimming pool. She said Charles had always told her to do this in case of emergency.

  At Delhi’s most deluxe hotel, the three young women and the sad-eyed Frenchman sat around the pool nervously, trying to blend in with the stewardesses and flight crews broiling in the sun. Marie-Andrée watched each new face that appeared, anxiously trying to read intent. She ordered a sandwich but could not swallow. While she stared at the food, resting on the table beside her chaise, wondering how she could wrap it up for later on, two ravens swooped down and seized the bread, fighting over it, shrieking, their razor beaks tearing at one another. She ran out of the hotel.

  The next day, after waiting ten hours, Marie-Andrée spoke again with Denise. Her sister had cheering news. Bernard had agreed to fly to India and help her. He was trying to book a flight that would arrive on July 7. Tomorrow! He would send a cable to poste restante informing her of his flight. Marie-Andrée hung up this time with tears of cautious happiness, feeling that her ordeal would soon be over.

  But tomorrow, as is its habit, never came. Nor did a cable from Bernard. After spending the day haunting both the poste restante and the airport, waiting with stretched nerves for every incoming flight, she returned to the cheap hotel in despair. At the desk she identified herself and asked if there was a message. And as she walked toward the stairs, two men blocked her path. “Monique?” asked one of them. She shook her head and tried to pass. The other presented his credentials. They were Tuli’s men. Handcuffs bit into her wrists. A few minutes later, Mary Ellen entered the hotel and was arrested. Both girls feigned indignation and anger, but their cries were for naught. By midafternoon on July 7, 1976, they were under arrest and taken to the same police building where Charles had been undergoing questioning—without breaking.

  That night police captured Jean Dhuisme when he foolishly went to check on his Citroën. And a few minutes after midnight, Barbara Smith, the brunette English girl, returned from the powder room at Wheels Discotheque and found two policemen sitting at her table, like newfound admirers. They were polite and pleasant, and when Barbara found out their mission, she laughed. She had smoked a very potent chunk of hash in the toilet and for a mistaken moment, she thought she was being arrested for drug use—not on suspicion of robbery, drugging, and murder.

  “We’ve arrested your accomplices,” announced Tuli on his sixth day of interrogating Charles.

  “I have no accomplices,” shot back the suspect. His composure was unruffled. He was as calm as a mirrored lake in Kashmir. He still wore the same clothes and Tuli marveled how he could look so tailored after almost a week of intense pressure, days when the thermometer stayed resolutely over a hundred degrees. And his manner remained regal. He refused to eat jail food, insisting that he could not tolerate the nourishment slopped for prisoners. At times he grew so indignant that he banged his head against Tuli’s wall, or cracked his handcuffs against his face. Like no actor Tuli had ever seen, Charles summoned anger, tears, rage, sardonic humor, menace, and Gallic fatalism. The experience was mesmerizing.

  And troubling.

  All the basic police interrogation procedures Tuli tried. One hour he was sweet, the next sour. He worked alone. He worked in tandem. He informed Charles, still clinging to the name Daniel Chaumet, that his friends were making statements implicating him. Charles glared in disbelief. “Then bring them in and let them accuse me to my face,” he demanded. Quickly Tuli backed off that bluff, suspecting that his prisoner would probably be able, through gestures or looks, to silence the girls.

  The quintet of suspects was stashed in various offices around the Crime Branch, Tuli visiting them each daily, like a doctor making hospital rounds. He discovered immediately that Marie-Andrée was as adamant as Charles. After the first few hours of fright and panic, she turned hard and testy. Demanding that the Canadian Embassy be notified to send an attorney, she was brusquely informed that in India a suspect is not entitled to legal counsel during police questioning. “That’s about what I would expect in a country as primitive as this,” she said. “I assure you that someone will pay dearly for this mistake.”

  Jean Dhuisme was also silent, mostly, but also a void. Tuli reasoned early on that the melancholy Frenchman was neither a veteran criminal nor even an important member of the group. The two other girls, Barbara and Mary Ellen, were the most vulnerable. Both began to weep the moment they were jailed, continuing to vomit and tremble during interrogations.

  Like any cop anywhere, Tuli was looking for the one brick loose enough to extricate, knowing that the wall would then collapse. He suspected that these young women were breakable. Purposefully, Tuli ordered that Barbara and Mary Ellen be placed in the same holding cell and he began to question them together. On the fifth day, Tuli was speaking in general of the special consideration that might be given to an “approver,” that being the Indian term for state’s witness. The Australian girl, who Tuli felt was the stronger of the two, began to weaken. Spasms shook her body, tears welled in her eyes. The detective asked courteously—and paternally—if she was unwell. She shook her head and laid it on the cop’s desk. Tuli placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” he suggested. “You’ll feel better.” Finally Mary Ellen nodded. She raised her head and looked at Tuli in surrender. “All right,” she said. “I’m one of them. We’re the people you’ve been looking for …”

  Tuli shifted his attention to Barbara. She nodded almost cheerfully. “Do you want me to dictate a statement?” she asked. His elation growing, Tuli nodded. And called for a stenographer.

  The news was delivered to Marie-Andrée. Her two female companions had confessed—everything—from the robberies in Delhi, to the entrapment, drugging, and death of Jean-Luc Solomon, the French boy found dying on the balcony of his Ranjit Hotel room.

  “Absurd,” snapped Marie-Andrée. If the police believed that, they would believe anything. She launched into an oft-heard tirade about her innocence and her desire to remain silent until a Canadian lawyer was brought to her side. Then she stopped and looked away, far away, out Tuli’s window to the awakening city of Delhi, to the thickening gray clouds that would bring the summer morning’s dependable storm. “Yes,” she finally said.

  “I beg your pardon?” responded Tuli.

  “I’m so glad it’s over,” said Marie-Andrée. “I’m so tired of running.” She then signed a thirty-two-page detailed statement that began with her life in Canada, continued through her fateful meeting with Charles Sobhraj on the romantic lakes of Kashmir, telling in a rambling, confusing narrative how the two of them crisscrossed Asia and Europe, but not confessing to any part in the crimes save that of companion and prisoner—unable to leave due to lack of money and credentials.

  But in another room was Daniel Chaumet. He did not even blink nervously when the three girls were paraded before him and pointed accusatory fingers at their leader. Tuli was exhausted. The insolent man sitting calmly on the other side of his desk had withstood questioning—hard questioning—for ten eternal days and was no closer to cracking than on the night he was seized. The walls of brick stood firm. “Surely if I was the man you were looking for,” insisted Charles, “I would have confessed by now.” No guilty man, he went on, could withstand the torture he was undergoing. Charles contended that once out of Tuli’s presence he was savagely beaten in the holding cell by police skilled in striking people on parts of the body that did not bruise.

  At the end of the tenth day, Tuli was
distraught. He was pleased to have the statements of the others—Jean Dhuisme had by now capitulated—but it was like catching a handful of guppies when the shark swam on unmolested in the tank. Then, in early evening while taking a catnap on an old couch, Tuli bolted upright. An old crime lodged in the back of his head like a bone in the throat suddenly came back in his memory. And while he had not personally investigated the case, he had studied it over the years and had always marveled at the brazenness and absurdity with which it had been staged. Police do admire professional work on the other side.

  He called to an aide. Bring the yellowing file on that long ago jewel robbery at the Ashoka Hotel, the one in which the American dancer had been held hostage in her room. For an hour Tuli studied the file, relishing the tale. Then he fairly flew back to his desk, first telephoned Wellington Hospital, then ordered that Daniel Chaumet be brought back for one last go-round.

  “Does the Ashoka Hotel mean anything to you?” casually asked Tuli.

  Charles shrugged. Everybody knew the Ashoka Hotel. It was like asking a Parisian if he knew the Ritz.

  “Were you ever at the Ashoka Hotel?” asked Tuli.

  A negative shake of the suspect’s head.

  “Have you heard, perhaps, of a jewelry robbery at the Ashoka Hotel in the autumn of 1971?”

  “Of course not.”

  Tuli nodded. “Then I will tell you the story of that crime. It is a very interesting story, and if nothing else, it will entertain you.”

  He told the story well, how La Passionara was enticed to open her door, how she was kept prisoner while two French-speaking men tried in vain to drill a hole from the floor of her bedroom to the jewelry store below, how the principal thief, “Lobo,” managed to escape police at the airport, only to be rearrested at the train station. Then, pausing in his narrative, Tuli looked sternly at Daniel Chaumet. He said, of all things, “Drop your pants, please.”

  “What?”

  “Drop your pants. Now.”