Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Red Eye agreed. Charles was just “strange” enough to do that.

  “Strange?” echoed Checkers. “He’s mad. Face it. The exterior Charles Sobhraj is personable, intelligent, charming, handsome. Only when he feels threatened does his trigger mechanism engage and he retreats ‘inside.’ And there lives a deadly sociopath. When he is threatened, he kills.”

  “He told me he didn’t kill anybody,” said Red Eye. “He said if anybody died, it was by Ajay Chowdhury’s hands.”

  “But where is Ajay?” teased Checkers. “The cops have turned every inch of Asia upside down looking for him. Poor Ajay is enriching the sod somewhere. And I don’t think he killed himself.”

  Checkers turned the conversation to Marie-Andrée. She was convinced that the Canadian girl had not participated in the killings. “Maybe she knew about them, but she was too scared to get out.”

  “Maybe,” said Red Eye. “The thing I don’t understand is why Charles fell for her in the first place. She’s not going to win any beauty prizes.”

  Checkers laughed. “That’s not the point … Don’t you understand that Charles Sobhraj is bonkers? Psycho? Marie-Andrée appealed to him because she is his total opposite. Resolutely smalltown. Never did anything wrong. She represents home, family, roots, permanence—all the things he never had. And when he introduced her as his ‘wife,’ to customers, they must have had confidence in a man with a woman so foursquare.”

  Red Eye looked about the room and saw Tete, the creepy Vietnamese, sitting in a particularly dark corner with a few other denizens who looked like they would stab a man for bus fare. Tete had also won conditional release from Tihar. Checkers shuddered. “They’re all sick,” she whispered. “They’ve all got holes in their lives, unfulfilled aspirations, gaps, missing pieces of the puzzle, and Charles is smart enough to spot those weaknesses and use them. Any form of madness generates a higher energy level.”

  Checkers rose to leave. She had a midnight date with a Pakistani friend who supposedly could get her a Swedish passport for only a thousand rupees. But she had one more thing to say: “Charles makes the others feel that by clinging to him they can realize their fantasies. He is carrying the dream. He says there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but he is the only one with a map.”

  They kissed affectionately and vowed to meet again, someday, on Fifth Avenue or Wilshire Boulevard. “I’ll bring Marie-Andrée with me,” said Checkers, “if Charles doesn’t kill her first.”

  Red Eye shook his head. “He won’t kill her. He feels guilty.”

  “Bullshit,” said Checkers. “He’s going to escape and leave her in jail to rot … She’s just another notch on his gun belt.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  A rumor wriggled out of Tihar and reached Tuli that his two star witnesses, Barbara Smith and Mary Ellen Eather, were feeling pressure from Charles. An informant passed along the news that the baby-faced British girl and her Australian friend were being squeezed to recant their confessions. If they refused and went to court as hostile witnesses against Charles, the informant said, the girls had been told they were signing their death warrants.

  Gravely concerned, Tuli hurried to the prison and asked to see the young women. He encountered difficulty in obtaining an interview, for MISA forbad anybody, anybody, from speaking to a prisoner without a signed authorization from a magistrate. Tuli permitted himself a rare flash of anger at bureaucratic nonsense. Two guards ran to fetch the girls.

  Barbara and Mary Ellen relished the opportunity to get out of their cell, even briefly. They were housed in a chamber for the “condemned,” though the assurance was that it was chosen only for security, not as prophecy. On their first night in residence, Barbara was attacked by a religious fanatic who screamed that the new girl was a reincarnation of an evil serpent. When they were brought before him, Tuli saw immediately that their nerves were frayed. He wondered if either or both could endure several more months of waiting, then hold up under what was certain to be savage cross-examination from attorneys for Charles and Marie-Andrée. The defense was clearly going to attack both young women as self-serving prostitutes and drug users who were co-operating with the state only to save their skins.

  “Has Charles Sobhraj threatened you?” demanded Tuli.

  The two girls looked at one another. Barbara, the dark-haired English girl with a complexion that somehow remained soft and creamy even in the hell of Tihar, answered with a giggle. She usually giggled.

  “I hear Charles is interested in what we’re going to say,” she answered. Beside her, Mary Ellen nodded cautiously. Both were afraid of Tuli, even though he had behaved courteously toward them. They were afraid of all police. It would not do their plight any good to tell the inspector that anonymous notes and whispered messages were warning them almost daily not to speak ill of Charles Sobhraj.

  “I hope you’re still going to testify,” said Tuli. He praised the two young women for their moral courage.

  Barbara giggled again. “I still am,” she said, “unless I die from the waiting …”

  From Bangkok, Colonel Sompol Suthimai wrote and telephoned Tuli to request that the accused killers be turned over to Thailand, which, unfortunately, had no extradition treaty with India. He wanted them badly. Finally the young officer’s patience and curiosity—he had never seen the subjects of his concern in the flesh—overwhelmed him and he flew to Delhi. There, Tuli received him warmly. The court proceedings were slowed by MISA, he explained. It was now ten months after the arrests, and trial had not begun. “We would like very much to try them in my country,” said Sompol.

  Tuli nodded. “And if they were found innocent in India,” he said, pausing, for he did not think the likelihood was substantial, “I would recommend that you get them next.”

  An interview was set up at Tihar with Charles, but the celebrated criminal sat stonily for half an hour, denying everything, scoffing at Sompol. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he insisted. He denied even knowing the people who were murdered. But, wondered Sompol casually, not wanting to give away the mass of evidence he had stored in the corner of his office, how did some of the victims’ belongings get into his apartment in Bangkok?

  Charles did not raise a concerned eyebrow. “I have no idea,” he said. “Perhaps someone planted them there.”

  Sompol asked the same questions over and over, but he did not receive an answer worth committing to a report. “He’s the coolest killer I ever encountered,” Sompol later said. “He is very sure of himself, and he is afraid of nothing.”

  Marie-Andrée was not at all happy to be yanked before the visitor from Thailand. She arrived for her talk with Colonel Suthimai, flashing fire in her eyes. Wasn’t it enough to cope with Indian police? Did she had to receive delegates from other nations as well? For several minutes, she stared mutely at the boyish and polite cop from Bangkok.

  “See my lawyer,” she muttered to every question. Sompol fell silent and they studied one another. “There’s no law that says I have to talk to you,” she finally said. “I’m so tired of everything.”

  Sompol nodded. In his kind face were understanding and a spot of sympathy. He tried another approach. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Is your health holding up?”

  Marie-Andrée was startled. Never had a policeman in Asia asked after her well-being. “All right,” she answered, “as well as could be expected … It’s just that the rats are driving me insane. They come out at night and crawl over me when I sleep. And the bugs. Every day, three times a day, I wash everything down with lye soap, but they thrive on it.” She held out her arms and legs for Sompol to see the clusters of red bites, standing out on her pale, colorless skin like stamps on an envelope.

  If, suggested Sompol, if a deal could be struck with the Indian Government, if they would release the two prisoners and turn them over to Thailand, if that could be arranged, would Marie-Andrée turn state’s evidence?

  “Would I go free?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,”
answered Sompol honestly. “I’d have to speak with my superiors. But I do think a deal could be discussed.”

  It was time, said Marie-Andrée, for her to start looking after Number One. She felt slim allegiance to Charles, and if she did not get out of Tihar soon, nothing would matter. Nothing would be left to bury after the bugs and rats destroyed her. It was now late spring in Delhi, and the cruelest heat was beginning. There would be no respite for months, until the monsoons came and went away.

  “The Indians tricked me, you know,” she went on. “I was so tired and so sick when they arrested me. They told me if I would make a statement and implicate Charles, then I would go free. And they wrote it in English, a language I didn’t understand at the time.”

  Sompol flew home to Bangkok and reported to General Montchai that Marie-Andrée seemed to be weakening. “The girl wants out,” he said. “I think she wants a deal.” The general doubted if the Indians would turn loose their famous prisoners anytime soon. Things go slow in India, he said. “They’ve got the prize and they’re not going to share it,” he said.

  The plan was ingenious in its simplicity. And it might well have worked if an informant had not tipped off Tihar authorities that Charles Sobhraj was preparing to escape. One morning a squad of guards burst into his cell. They seemed to know exactly what they were looking for. Charles rose in protest, but a guard seized his arms and pinned them behind his back. Another cocked a rifle and held it at his neck.

  On a nail in the wall, a khaki shirt hung, seemingly innocently. A guard ripped it down. In another corner of the cell, guards found a pair of khaki pants to match. An ordinary piece of rope was loosely tied around a cardboard box. The guards took that, too. In a niche in the wall, they located various regulation military insignia, even a medal for valor. In another hiding place were a wig, a beard, and a mustache. If all of these were put together—the pants, the shirt, the rope to serve as decorative braid, the wig and facial hair, even a turban—a very good approximation of an army uniform could be assembled. Charles Sobhraj, it was charged, had planned to dress himself as an officer and walk quietly out of greased doors to freedom. The guards also found the grease—8,000 crisp, brand new rupees, carefully concealed within the corrugated layers of the cardboard box. “I never saw a search like that in my life,” commented one of the prisoners who watched. “Had they been looking for a particular ant, they would have found it.”

  The theory was that Charles had arranged for his “contacts” on the outside to smuggle the clothing and other articles into Tihar. Of course he denied it, passionately, but his protests did not prevent the prison authorities from throwing him into a solitary cell for a few weeks. After that he was denied companionship and forced to change cells every few days. When Tuli heard of the clever plan, he had to smile. In fact he would have enjoyed seeing Charles gussied up in a military uniform with the beard of a Sikh. But then he shuddered. If Charles had succeeded, heads would have rolled, from the lowest guard to the minister of justice.

  The heat crushed everyone within Tihar. For a week in May the thermometer climbed to 110° every noon. Wet, sticky, exhausting, punishing, the intensity of the sun was paralyzing. In their cell, the two star witnesses, or “approvers,” lay limp and dehydrated. Barbara Smith had nothing left to giggle about. “I’m only twenty years old,” she said. “I never thought it would end like this.” Mary Ellen nodded weakly. She was a nurse in her native Australia, and now she was trying to remember the symptoms of sunstroke. She wondered how much heat the human body could take before all the circuits blew.

  “I can’t go on much longer,” said Mary Ellen.

  “Neither can I,” gasped Barbara. She spoke of the irony of their predicament. They had agreed to become state’s witnesses because the implication was that as soon as they had their day in court the prison doors would swing open. Now almost a year had passed, and there might well be another—and another. God knew how long they would rot in Tihar while waiting to co-operate with the government of India.

  For another day or two they endured the torment of the sun and the hell of their lives. Barbara had received a few letters from her father in England, but they were hardly comforting. “My dear old dad writes variations on the theme of ‘I told you so, I told you that you were no good.’ That’s just what I want to hear from my family-loyalty and support,” she told Mary Ellen.

  They began to discuss suicide. At first it was more of a game, something to pass the time. One girl suggested cutting wrists with a razor blade. Neither prisoner had one, but with enough money, anything could be bought. They had a few hundred rupees hidden for an emergency. The other girl countered with hanging, or strangling, somehow breaking the neck with a knotted blanket. Mary Ellen dismissed that; it would be painful, perhaps unsuccessful. “When you set out deliberately to break your neck,” she said, “it’s hard to do it correctly.” Next Barbara had a fanciful idea. “What if we went out into the yard and ate all the leaves we could find? Surely some of them would be poisonous.”

  Perhaps, agreed Mary Ellen. But on the other hand, the leaves might only make them violently ill.

  Up to this point it was only a game. But the two had now spoken of the sweetness of death for too long. Without really acknowledging it, their fantasies had come into focus. They began to plot their suicides in earnest.

  Mary Ellen was permitted to work now and then in the prison hospital, as nurses were at a shortage. She was a good nurse, and the hours she spent on duty reminded her that she really liked the work, found purpose in it. She wished she had never abandoned it to lie on the beach in Pakistan where Charles Sobhraj rode into her life in a silver Citroën. But now it was too late.

  One afternoon, Mary Ellen returned to her cell from the hospital and she beckoned Barbara into a corner. She spoke in whispers. The lock on the hospital’s medicine cabinet had been broken by another inmate, looking for morphine. The inmate had heard footsteps approaching and ran away, not knowing that the steps belonged to Mary Ellen. The Australian girl stared at the broken lock and put it back in place, so that it would seem unmolested.

  “So?” asked Barbara.

  “So there’s enough sleeping pills in that cabinet to put away half of Tihar. Are you game?”

  Barbara sucked in her breath. She could back out now. She could laugh. She could stop the game. But all she did was nod, slowly, wondering why no tears came to her eyes, or protest to her lips. That evening the two girls made their way to the infirmary. Mary Ellen told Barbara to stand outside as lookout. The plan was to steal a handful of barbiturates, take them to the cell, swallow them immediately, wave “night-night” to the guard who came around at 7 P.M. to lock the cells for the evening and count noses. At dawn, when the cell doors were unlocked, they would be discovered stiff and dead.

  With enormous caution, Mary Ellen grasped the doorknob to the medicine room and tried to open it. Locked! She swore silently! Ordinarily the room would be open at this hour, for nurses would soon be coming by to pick up evening medication for patients. Then she had an idea. Not a good idea, but an idea. Mary Ellen went to the head nurse and nonchalantly asked for the key to the medicine room. Her excuse was that she needed cotton wool to swab out the ears of a woman prisoner housed near her cell. The ears were infected from insect bites, a common complaint. The nurse looked suspicious. Mary Ellen tried to stay calm. She said she didn’t give a damn one way or the other, but if she handled the prisoner’s complaint in her cell, then the inmate would not take up space and time tomorrow in the overcrowded hospital. The nurse agreed. It made sense, putting the request that way. She gave Mary Ellen the key.

  Once inside the medicine room, everything went smoothly. The lock on the drug cabinet was still broken. No one had discovered it. Mary Ellen reached inside, found a large container of barbiturates, shook out almost two hundred into her hand, then hid them inside a pair of nursing gloves. She took a deep breath; she tried to stop trembling. It was over. She had found a way to die.

  Bu
t as she made an exit, the door abruptly opened and the night Resident Medical Officer bumped into her. He recognized Mary Ellen and was not immediately suspicious. But he did ask why she was in the medicine room. Quickly she told her cotton wool story. The doctor accepted it. Mary Ellen went further. Did the RMO need assistance on a patient matter? He shook his head. No. He had just learned that the lock on the narcotics cabinet was broken. He had to check and determine if any medications were missing.

  “I just did,” blurted Mary Ellen in hasty improvisation. “I counted all the pills and nothing is gone.” The RMO looked at the slender blond prisoner carefully. The logical question would have been: How did you know about the lock? But he did not ask it. Instead he only nodded, giving her permission to leave.

  Barbara was lurking around the corner. “I’ve got them,” the Australian girl told her cellmate. “But the RMO may be onto me. Hurry!”

  Without interference they returned to their cell and endured a few breathless moments until darkness gave them a shield. The cell door stood open, and neighboring prisoners wandered in and out. Normally the two girls were hospitable, but on this night they turned every caller away. Then the noise of doors slamming and locks turning began to fill their area. When their own door clanged shut, they nodded good night to the guards. Then, left alone, Mary Ellen handed over a fistful of sleeping pills. “Sorry there’s nothing to wash ’em down with,” she said.

  Barbara stared at the pills. “Should we say anything to one another?” she asked.

  “I dunno,” answered Mary Ellen. “How about, ‘Sorry for everything. See you later.’” She ate one pill slowly. Then another. She threw a handful into her mouth, like candy. The taste was awful, but what did it matter? Barbara sat squat-legged beside the nurse and began her own rite of passage. She encountered trouble swallowing, but after a few minutes worked at least eighty down her slender throat.