Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

“Are you going to beat me?” asked Charles.

  “I repeat. Now.”

  Charles opened his buckle and let his expensive trousers slip down his coppery, hard-muscled legs. Tuli directed his gaze directly at the suspect’s belly. And he saw what he had expected to see. “When were you operated on for appendicitis? I notice that you have a scar.”

  “That’s not for appendicitis,” lied Charles quickly and smoothly. “I fell out of a tree … You can verify it with my family physician in France.”

  Tuli smiled, the smile of a hunter who has found game in his trap. A call to France would not be necessary. He clapped his hands and the door opened. A doctor entered the room, a surgeon from Wellington Hospital. He bent over the scar and examined it and confirmed that it was the memoir of an appendicitis operation. Tuli led the doctor outside.

  “Did you perform the operation in 1971 on this man?” asked Tuli.

  The doctor could not be sure. The work looked very much like his own, the patient seemed familiar, but he had done hundreds of the operations in the past five years.

  Tuli pressed him. Could the doctor testify in court that this was the man he operated on in 1971 in the prison ward of the hospital? The surgeon shook his head slowly. No. Not positively. Not under oath. Not if his testimony might send a man to prison—or the gallows.

  Disappointed—for he knew he was right—angry to the edge of eruption, Tuli went back in and tried once more. This time he was tough. He grabbed the dossier that Interpol had cabled concerning “Hotchand Bhawnani Gurmukh Sobhraj” and spat out the contents, dropping details of the horrible murders in Thailand and Nepal like pellets of acid, warning that unless the suspect made a clean breast the government of India would fly in police from the countries involved and let them join the questioning of “Daniel Chaumet.”

  “Then do it,” snapped Charles, smugly, smiling. “If that’s what it takes to clear me, bring in anybody.”

  Numb with fatigue, Tuli took a break to clear his head. In the washroom he stared at his face in the mirror, and the shadow circles under his eyes and the new lines in his forehead were testimony that he was suffering more than his prisoner. The temptation was to book the exasperating young man on some technicality and let him stew for a while in Tihar Prison. Nearly two weeks of intense questioning had brought forth less fruit than a banana tree in the desert.

  That night he returned to his office with very little zest for another session. Hoarse, feeling a cold coming on, he spoke quietly to the suspect. His voice was soft. He had sent out for a tray of deluxe food from a good hotel and he sat quietly while Charles ate with approval. Then Tuli complimented him on his strength and endurance. He was paying respect, and Charles was touched, so much so that a new notion dawned on the cop. The one thing he had not tried was flattery. Would praise and honeyed words accomplish what everything else had failed? The two men began to speak easily. Tuli asked if he had children. Charles brightened and pulled a snapshot of Shubra from his pocket. “She’s very beautiful,” said the cop, truthfully. “She looks like her father.” Tuli spoke of his wife, whose name means “gold” because she came into the world after five brothers. Within an hour or two, Tuli had become, in some bizarre, unforeseen, upside-down way, a father figure.

  And that did it.

  When Tuli crossed the barrier and placed his arm around Charles as if he were a prodigal son welcomed home, he became the father that Charles had always wanted. He became someone to trust. Someone to obey. Charles looked up at India’s most celebrated cop, and he broke.

  “My compliments,” he said. “I never thought I would get arrested in India. I didn’t think you had the brains.”

  “Tell me about it, son,” murmured Tuli softly, afraid he would shatter the alliance. “You’ll feel much better.”

  Charles nodded, grasping the outstretched hand.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  An urgent cable was sent by Tuli to Interpol in Paris, which in turn flashed the news to police around the world. In Bangkok, Herman Knippenberg had just returned from a fishing trip and was heady over winning a prize for landing the largest mackerel of the day. He stepped out of the shower to discover the phone ringing with news of a more exciting catch.

  “Hooray!” cabled Herman to his wife Angela, visiting her parents in Germany. “Caught them all in Delhi. Hooray! Hooray!” Then Herman got uncharacteristically and gloriously ripped. He and the members of his Action Committee lost count after the third bottle of French champagne.

  In Paris, Félix d’Escogne read the headline and with great sadness clipped it out, slipping another entry into the thick file that began the day ten years earlier when he first encountered a skinny, frightened, big-eared youngster in Poissy Prison. He felt an enormous sense of waste and loss. And he remembered what a consular official for the Indian Government in Paris had prophesied so long ago: “This man will meet his destiny in India.”

  And in Marseilles, where the newspaper said that Charles Sobhraj was accused of at least twelve murders, Song wept in bewilderment. She told her husband that she must go on a pilgrimage. By bus she crossed France and journeyed to Lourdes. At the grotto where Bernadette Soubirous saw visions of a lady in white which were judged authentic by the Vatican in 1862, Song crawled on her knees amid the broken bodies and wheelchairs and crutches, stopping finally at the edge of the icy waters where miracles have occurred. But Song sought no deliverance from physical pain or twisted limb.

  “Seigneur,” she prayed, “if my son is truly guilty of these terrible deaths, then You judge him. If You find him guilty, take him to Paradise now. Don’t let the hangman take his life …”

  Once the prisoners completed their statements, Tuli sent them in an ancient, wheezing black bus to Tihar Prison. Charles was in chains and heavily guarded. Now Tuli was once again a national hero, his telephone ringing day and night with calls from Paris and Bangkok and New York. The reporters’ questions were usually along these lines:

  Q. Has Charles Sobhraj confessed?

  A. He has made a statement admitting the drugging of several victims. But he denies killing anybody. He says that no one ever died from his medications. If there were murders, he says, blame them on Ajay Chowdhury.

  Q. Where is Ajay Chowdhury?

  A. We do not know. Marie-Andrée Leclerc, in her statement, suggests that Charles killed him in Malaysia and buried him.

  Q. After the gang’s arrest in Bangkok and subsequent flight to Europe, why did they return to Asia?

  A. He had a lust. Something within him snapped and turned him into a killer. Once you taste blood, you must go back and have some more. And, of course, Charles Sobhraj was a hunter. A hunter is always stalking his game. His favorite place to hunt was Asia.

  Q. How could this man have operated so long without getting caught?

  A. He was caught, and often. But he always got out of his predicament some way. He is brilliant, and clever and dynamic—and always believable. He never traveled under his own identity. He always had a false passport, and he was able like no other man to change his appearance so that it would match the passport photograph. And if the picture were too far off, he would substitute his own photograph. He muddied the water better than any man I have ever encountered. He is an astonishing criminal.

  It was the worst of times to be arrested in India.

  Indira Gandhi, annoyed by the political opposition’s attempt to invalidate her election as Prime Minister, took the unprecedented step of turning the world’s largest democracy into a dictatorship. Invoking emergency rule, her draconian measures were supposedly to thwart what she termed “subversive and disruptive” forces. That more or less translated to mean her political enemies, specifically a group of judges, lawyers, and rival politicians. But her wrath spread far afield. Her government suspended freedom of the press, ordered mass arrests of those unfriendly to the Prime Minister, decreed that those suspected of being “subversive” or “disruptive” could be grabbed without regard for habeas corpus, thrown in
to prison, and held there indefinitely—without bail, with little or no civil liberties. A climate of fear swept over the nation; police knocked on doors in the middle of the night and took prominent men and women to jail in their nightgowns, thousands upon thousands. The prisons were quickly jammed. All of these dictates came under what was known as MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act).

  MISA applied to all prisoners, even those without a political thought in their heads—like Charles and his associates. It meant that the five men and women accused of murder could be held up to two years without bail, without going to trial, under the most harrowing conditions.

  Dubbed the “international killers” by India’s press, the five caused a stir within the thick and ugly walls of Tihar Prison, even though it was newly home to many prominent Indians. One of the prisoners was the Maharanee of Jaipur, a celebrated woman of beauty and enormous wealth. Theoretically she had been jailed because her family had hidden unlawful gold in its palace, but it was well known that the Maharanee was an outspoken opponent of Indira Gandhi. Nonetheless, in India caste is caste, and the Maharanee did not suffer quite as much as others. Her meals in Tihar were brought to her by a liveried waiter on a tray from the kitchens of the Oberoi Hotel.

  Marie-Andrée was led to the cell that would be her home. Now she was at the nadir. Classified as a “C” prisoner under MISA, the severest and lowest category, she was entitled to nothing save a food ration barely sufficient to sustain human life. Her entire daily allotment was one chapati (a thin bread patty), one half cup of milk that soured quickly in the blazing August sun, and a cup of dal, a mashed bean soup. She was denied a radio, a bed, writing material, cooking pots, and, most important, visitors. One thin blanket was issued, its threads containing colonies of fleas and ticks. Her mail from Canada was often withheld for weeks after its arrival, more often than not thrown away. The cell was infested with insects of wide and exotic variety, most of which bit and stung. Bold rats waltzed by, stopping to examine the new resident. On her first day there, the Canadian Consul in Delhi, John Church, paid a visit, after first obtaining a pass from a magistrate. He said there was very little the government of Canada could do, other than make sure she was provided with counsel.

  “Can’t you get me out of this hell?” she begged.

  Church shook his head. It would not be much better in the jails of Canada.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I’ve no basis for comparison. I’ve never been in jail before.”

  Church promised to try and get her classification raised from “C” to “B,” which would entitle her to more food and privileges. But he warned that it would be difficult under Mrs. Gandhi’s MISA. When he left, taking with him a fragile link to her homeland, Marie-Andrée sank into a corner of the cell and hunched on the dirty floor. The room swam around her, spinning like a carousel of the doomed. Two lesbians entered and squatted beside her and tried to touch her arm. Naked children, crying and hungry, beseeched her for food. Their mothers laughed and whispered, thrusting mahogany arms at the “white woman,” inspecting her as if she were a new animal in the zoo. Only five Western women were in residence out of three hundred female prisoners. And on the first night, tossing sleeplessly in the thick heat, she heard the babble and screams of the madwomen—condemned to the most grotesque Tihar chamber that housed the criminally insane. She wondered how soon she would become one of them.

  Conversely, Charles adjusted quickly and smoothly, not surprising for a man who had spent the majority of his adult life behind bars. Placed initially in solitary confinement, he managed to talk—or bribe—his way into a “C” cell with two Pakistanis. Then, through the prison grapevine, Charles heard that a Vietnamese criminal named Tete was in Tihar, and Charles persuaded a guard to transfer him there. The two men, Charles and Tete, had an emotional reunion. They had known each other for years, having common roots, having operated in the underworlds of Paris and Hong Kong. Tete was a fearsome sight. His face was thin, bony, with crumbling teeth and cold slits for eyes. An ancestor must have been in the shanghai business, for Tete looked like the kind of man most often encountered in dark alleys. He was in Tihar because of a faint resemblance to Charles Sobhraj. A few weeks before Charles was arrested at the Vikram Hotel, Delhi police had snatched Tete off the street, convinced that he was the man of the hour. For several days, Tete denied that he was the most wanted man in Asia, even though he had engaged in similar lines of endeavor. Finally, exasperated, police charged him with possessing fraudulent passports and flung him into Tihar.

  When Tete saw Charles Sobhraj being led, chained, into his cell, the first reaction was glowering anger. “You bastard,” hissed Tete, “you’re the reason I’m in here. They thought I was you.” But after a while they were laughing and pounding one another on the back and vowing to make the most of it.

  When two Canadian boys were transferred to the cell, it quickly became the most remarkable in Tihar. Within days, Charles had arranged a network of flunkies, both within the prison and out, who brought him food, ran his errands, contacted lawyers, and smuggled in accouterments not normally allowed to the lowest-class inmate. Radios, as Marie-Andrée learned, were forbidden. Absolutely. Charles had three. And a stereo tape deck. Each day he received several eggs, numerous containers of milk, onions, potatoes, even freshly killed chickens and roasts of beef, incredible in a vegetarian country and unbelievable in Tihar Prison. He obtained writing paper and pens. And books on the Indian judicial system. And paperback mysteries. And Carl Gustav Jung, whom he read every night by an oil lamp which was, of course, also forbidden.

  One of the Canadian youngsters, Pierre, a stocky farm boy with a Fu Manchu mustache, was amazed at his cellmate’s ability to get what he wanted. Pierre and his buddy, Rob, had been caught at the Delhi airport trying to smuggle out $500 worth of morphine powder. “This is India,” said Charles. “Everything can be bought with money … That’s why the country will never amount to anything. Corruption begins in the villages and goes to the very top.”

  But how, wondered Pierre, how did Charles get money? He was stripped of his valuables upon entering prison and so was every other inmate he knew.

  Charles smiled but did not answer. Only Tete knew. He had seen his old copain reach into his mouth one morning and extract a tiny, sparkling blue stone. A sapphire. Charles confided that he had sixty-eight carats of sapphires and rubies concealed in his mouth. If danger or an unexpected search arose, he simply swallowed the cache and extricated them later from his waste. Charles managed to smuggle tea, eggs, and an occasional chicken leg over to the women’s barracks, where they were delivered to Marie-Andrée. At one of the first court hearings in the case—the first of literally hundreds yet to come—Charles told the magistrate that Marie-Andrée was not guilty of anything. “She is a victim of love,” he said. “She should not be accused of anything else.” The judge, it was noted, showed little interest in this novel defense.

  One morning, Charles was meditating as was his custom—he began each day with at least an hour of silent introspection—and the others knew better than to even breathe heavily during these moments. The guards, however, interrupted at will. On this day they had another prisoner for the star cell. Charles looked up in annoyance, then the puzzle of trying to recollect crossed his face. The new man was tall, and rail-thin, and American, and his eyes were rimmed in crimson. “Red Eye!” cried Charles, recognizing the stringy Yank who had shared the abortive prison escape in Kabul, Afghanistan.

  Red Eye had gone from bad to worse. He looked terrible, his pasty skin as white as ivory. Finally released from jail in Kabul, he had waited for the snows to subside in the Khyber Pass and then wandered into India. In Bombay, he became enamored of a Swedish girl who took his money and was later arrested by the police as a smuggler. Then his passport expired in Delhi. Afraid to present himself to the American Embassy, he instead bought a British passport on the street. On his supposed last night in Delhi he attended a party at a student hostel and by
midnight the air was rich with hashish smoke. Police raided the party and Red Eye was accused of several minor offenses including passport fraud. He drew a year in Tihar Prison.

  “My karma is rotten,” he announced, grasping Charles’ arm and shaking as he sat down. The cell was growing more cozy each day. Charles had obtained two rope-sling hammocks, not only comfortable for sleeping but valuable for keeping one’s body off the floor and away from the armies of insects. French music played from the tape deck. One of the Canadian boys made Red Eye a welcoming sandwich of cold chicken with slices of potatoes. A pot of soup was simmering over a fire. Red Eye’s mood instantly lifted. “I thought Kabul was the worst,” he said. “I thought it was the ultimate in human suffering. But the Indians beat them all to hell. This place is incredible. You don’t get anything unless you pay for it. I tried to buy a book of matches yesterday and the guard wanted eight rupees.”

  “This is the jungle,” lectured Charles. “And only the strong survive.” Tihar Prison was a metaphor for India.

  Charles asked Red Eye if he had a good lawyer. The question brought a snort and a spit against the wall. “My parents sent me five hundred dollars and I gave it to the lawyer to make bail,” he said. “He took the money and didn’t get any bail. Then I got convicted of passport fraud, and the bastard wanted another five hundred dollars for appeal. My parents sent that, and the appeal was rejected.” Red Eye took a stick and wrote the lawyer’s name in the dirt. Then he rubbed it out viciously. “He’s a ghoul who preys on Western kids in trouble. He has cops at the airport on his payroll.”

  “You should have come to me,” said Charles. “I know all the lawyers in Delhi.”

  “No offense,” Red Eye would remember saying, “but if you’re all that well connected, what are you doing in Tihar?”

  “The question should be,” answered Charles, “how long will I stay? And the answer is, until I decide to leave.”

  Deeply stoned on hashish one night, Tete let slip to Red Eye that Charles had already negotiated the price for his escape. One million rupees. It would be difficult to raise, confided Tete, but he had no doubt that Charles would.