Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Checkers finagled her way into the courtroom, nodding cheerfully at guards she knew from Tihar, and stole a few moments with Marie-Andrée. “You look great,” she lied, for in truth the Canadian was still terribly thin with the pasty skin of the malnourished. “I hear the case against you is flimsy,” went on Checkers. “The talk is you’ll be acquitted.”

  Marie-Andrée smiled. “I think so, too,” she answered. Then a guard came and shooed Checkers away with the butt of his rifle. “Don’t worry,” cried Checkers. “Things are happening.”

  Indeed they were.

  In Paris, André borrowed money from his friends and purchased an air ticket for New Delhi. When Félix d’Escogne heard, he warned André to say away from his half-brother. “Hasn’t Charles brought you enough grief?” said Félix in dismay. The last time André answered Charles’ summons, he was imprisoned in Greece and Turkey. Was he foolish enough to risk more of the same? “Charles is my brother,” said André. “I love him. And he needs me.” The power of Charlot remained stunning.

  In the gloom of the Cave restaurant and discotheque, Checkers found Tete, the Vietnamese-born ally and chief supporter of Charles. She made it seem like a surprise meeting, but in truth she had been looking for him. Rumors were swirling about Delhi’s underground—rumors of a “commando force” assembling on behalf of Charles, rumors of weapons being smuggled in from Iran, rumors of moneys being raised to pay an enormous bribe. Was any of this true? she asked Tete. He neither confirmed nor denied. All Tete would say was that Charles had access to six separate sets of blueprints for Tihar, and one of the Tis Hazari courthouse. “Other options” were under consideration.

  “Charles will get out of prison when the time is ripe,” he told Checkers. “And on the day that this occurs, he will go directly to the airport—but not to an international flight. They’ll be watching those. His destination will be someplace in India. It’s a big country.”

  And then, wondered Checkers, what would the great man do?

  “Disappear into the landscape for a few months,” said Tete. “Perhaps he will alter his face, perhaps he will become a monk, or a Moslem, or a saddhu, or a diplomat, or a pilgrim, or an untouchable.” Once his escape died off the front pages, it would not be difficult for Charles to leave India, by car, or by foot across the border. He would proceed east to Pakistan, or west to Burma.

  “Whatever,” said Tete, “he will go free. We will see to that. Charles will escape from Indian custody and become the most wanted man in the world.”

  “That appeals to Charles, doesn’t it?” suggested Checkers. “Being wanted.”

  Tete grinned, his broken teeth like jagged rocks in a lagoon, waiting to tear a boat apart.

  “What about Marie-Andrée?” demanded Checkers. “Do these wonderful plans include her?”

  Tete shrugged. “Charles will do everything in his power to help her. But …” His sentence dangled unfinished. There was no need for more anyway. Checkers well understood that in this league, self-preservation did not include anyone else, even a woman who had destroyed her life in poignant response to a madman’s importuning.

  For several days Checkers smoked hashish and brooded over the injustices of life, expecting each morning to hear the news that Charles had escaped and left Marie-Andrée behind to feed the wolves. It occurred to Checkers that she had never really been involved with anything—not a lover, not a cause, not a passion, nothing save the excitement of a life on the edge. She also thought about Barbara Smith, envying the plucky girl’s appearance in court, admiring her well-spent courage. Even if Barbara died for her testimony, she had, in the language of karma, put out an exceptionally good “cause.” Checkers reasoned it was at last time for her to commit a positive, useful act.

  She decided to assassinate Charles Sobhraj. She believed that if the head of the snake were chopped off, then no one would care what happened to the tail. Surely it could wriggle away unnoticed.

  Like any cop anywhere, Inspector Tuli possessed a network of snitches whom he regularly leaned on for news and rumor. Very little went on in the swirling intrigue of the Charles Sobhraj murder trial that did not reach Tuli’s ears quickly. When André flew in from Paris to see his half-brother, he was hardly through passport control before a plainclothesman was on his tail. And when André went to the court and fell into Charles’ chained arms in an emotional reunion, Tuli was watching surreptitiously. “It’s uncanny,” he said. “They could be taken for twins.” By now Tuli was familiar with the nooks and crannies of Charles’ remarkable life, and he was aware of the identity switch that the two men had pulled in the Athens prison. He did not think a similar trick could be accomplished in his town, but Tuli nonetheless ordered a few precautions. The police guard around Charles was doubled. Everyone who entered the courtroom would be frisked and made to present satisfactory identification. André was placed under full-time surveillance. And word was sent out that, should any guard or prison employee succumb to the temptation of a fat bribe, then best that man plan to spend the money in paradise. “I won’t tolerate that killer escaping,” said Tuli.

  Checkers put aside her first impulse, which was to buy a jeweled dagger in the bazaar, hone it to jugular-severing sharpness, wait in the courthouse corridor, then rush forward with an avenging cry to plunge the blade into Charles’ heart. The theatricality was seductive, but she did not wish at the same time to forfeit her own life. Next she inquired around as to the price of a hit man, learning that under the special circumstances of Charles’ confinement, his assassination would cost at least 50,000 rupees. (An interesting comparison of fees here: the rumored price for Charles’ freedom was one million, and for his death only one twentieth of that.)

  Then Checkers remembered a favor that had once been offered. A year or two before, she had been in Pakistan to negotiate the sale and shipment of hashish oil to the United States. At a trading village near the Khyber Pass, she had met a tribe of Pathans, the fabled nomads whom the British always called the best guerrilla warriors in Asia. The Pathans possessed their own world, beyond the boundaries and laws of Pakistan, and were so feared that no local law authority dared molest them. Checkers had caught the eye of a chief who invited her to go riding on a magnificent black stallion. The ride lasted two months during which Checkers filled the roles of both daughter and lover to the chief, a man well into his seventies but more handsome and daring than the men with one third the years. On the day Checkers left, overwhelmed by the smell of unwashed bodies and smoky campfires of dried dung, the chief had said that the vitality she brought to his household was worthy of any favor.

  When Checkers later told the story of her long ride across the northwest frontier of India/Pakistan, no one believed her. But she had a stack of photographs to prove it, and as she looked at them again in the privacy of her Delhi hotel room, the idea was born. If she could slip out of India and into Pakistan, and if she could find the tribe again and if the chief were still alive, and if he remembered his promise, then the Pathans would ride to the rescue of Marie-Andrée! They would slice off the head of Charles Sobhraj and drag it through the streets of Delhi. The more hashish she smoked, the more she felt the scheme would work. That the plan was about as substantial as a suspension bridge made of gauze ribbons did not occur to her. That it was the fourth quarter of the twentieth century further escaped her attention.

  As if predestined, Checkers promptly met three English youths who called themselves “the Liverpool Connection.” Fortuitously, they were planning a drive to Pakistan, where they hoped to make a major hashish oil purchase. That was her territory, exclaimed Checkers. If they would give her a ride, then she would steer them to the proper drug merchant. By the next dawn they were bouncing out of Delhi in an old station wagon, honking at cows on the highway, hurrying toward the troublesome border of India and Pakistan. Checkers did not have a passport, but the Britons assured her it did not matter. Either they would buy one along the way, or they would devise
a method of smuggling her across.

  The public prosecutor was reasonably content after the first few days of trial. Barbara’s testimony was powerful, and even though Mary Ellen had recanted much of her original statement, the Australian girl still bolstered the state’s case. She placed Charles and his associates in the hotel where Solomon died, and at the restaurant where the chicken curry was allegedly poisoned. Now he had another forty witnesses on tap, ranging from the waiter who served the food to the room clerk at the Ranjit Hotel. “I am quite confident we will convict Sobhraj,” the P.P. told reporters. “And I will seek the death penalty … I also believe we will convict Leclerc because all that is necessary is to prove her association with this group.”

  The state next summoned a young Sikh doctor named K. S. Chaddha, who had been on duty at the hospital where Solomon was taken after being found nude and dying on the balcony of his hotel room.

  In a mustard-colored turban and a rich beard tied under his chin like the straps of a flight helmet, Dr. Chaddha routinely testified as to the medical efforts made to save the tourist’s life. An autopsy later revealed traces of methaqualone, a barbiturate, in the dead man’s stomach, kidney, and liver. Then the doctor roused the courtroom—and cheered Charles no end—by casually mentioning “needle marks” on the dying man’s arms.

  “Needle marks?” echoed Frank Anthony, like a drowsy man hearing a fire bell.

  “Yes,” answered the doctor. “There were needle prick marks on both arms, and signs of hematoma also …” Then what, specifically, was the cause of Jean-Luc Solomon’s death? asked Frank Anthony.

  Dr. Chaddha pursed his lips. “We could not come to any conclusion about this case,” he said. “So it was labeled ‘death by unknown poisoning.’”

  “Were these needle marks fresh?” demanded Anthony.

  Dr. Chaddha nodded again. The marks seemed to have been inflected within twenty-four hours prior to admission to the hospital.

  “Who treated him when he was admitted?” asked Anthony. Dr. Chaddha glanced at the case sheet. “Well, according to the case sheet, he was given a stomach wash first, and then intravenous fluids … I was not there then.” Chaddha went on to explain that he was only the hospital registrar on July 1, 1976, when Solomon was brought in for care.

  “Answer my question, Doctor,” said Anthony sternly. “Who treated him upon admission?”

  “The intravenous fluids were administered by a lady doctor,” said Chaddha. “It was the principal treatment given him before the patient died …”

  Anthony returned to the tantalizing needle marks. “These marks,” he wondered, “were there many on Solomon’s arms?”

  Dr. Chaddha rolled up his shirt-sleeves a little and gestured with a pencil. “Three or four marks on both arms,” he said.

  At this, Charles buzzed into Frank Anthony’s ear. The lawyer shook him off, obviously not requiring a defendant to point out a tempting line of questioning. “After having examined this patient and seeing these marks, were you of the opinion that the poisoning was done orally—or intravenously?”

  The doctor shrugged. “It could have been both ways.”

  Anthony nodded. “I put it to you, Doctor, that people who are narcotic addicts sometimes die of drug overdoses.”

  Dr. Chaddha could not argue with this, but he could not affix a precise cause of Solomon’s death. “I cannot offer an opinion,” he said. “It is impossible.” Standing next to Charles, Marie-Andrée was having difficulty following the testimony. The young doctor spoke in a rumbling baritone that was muffled by the ceiling fan. And the Canadian girl did not understand English all that well, although she was daily improving. “What did he say?” she whispered to Charles in French.

  “Solomon was a junkie,” shot back Charles, smiling broadly.

  “How much of a dose of methaqualone is considered fatal?” asked Frank Anthony.

  “Five grams,” answered the doctor. “It is available only in tablets.” It was well known in India under the name Mandrax. On the other side, the P.P. nodded knowingly. It was helpful for the judge to learn that Solomon could not have injected himself with the drug whose traces were found in his innards.

  “What is Mandrax?” asked Anthony.

  “A hypnotic drug,” answered Dr. Chaddha.

  “Is it not a tranquilizer?” pressed Anthony, presumably trying to make the point that the drug was something that women took for nerves.

  “No,” said the doctor. “It is a powerful hypnotic drug used for insomnia. Methaqualone is an ingredient of Mandrax.”

  The scar-faced Sharma, Charles’ new lawyer, took over and asked a few silly questions about sex, all of which seemed to annoy the judge. Sharma was trying to suggest that Solomon and Barbara Smith were taking downers for sexual kicks on the night in question.

  “Don’t people in the West use aphrodisiacs for stimulating the sexual urge?” asked Sharma.

  “I don’t know,” exclaimed the doctor, to the prim judge’s considerable relief.

  The defense posture was evident by the second week. The trio of defendants—Charles, Marie-Andrée, and Jean Dhuisme—would deny that they had ever even met Jean-Luc Solomon. The suggestion would be made that the two witnesses for the prosecution—Barbara and Mary Ellen—were prostitutes and drug users who were actually responsible for the tourist’s death, or, failing that, Solomon was an addict who might have died of an overdose.

  But there was also serious dissension in the defense camp. Frank Anthony—as if by divine right—had seized leadership of the several lawyers representing the accused, even though his client, Marie-Andrée, seemed to be in the least peril. The state’s case against her was not strong. No testimony was offered that she either participated in the seduction or the drugging or the robbing of Solomon. The best the P.P. could do was elicit from Barbara Smith that she had seen Marie-Andrée with Charles “sorting out drugs” in Room 315 of the Ranjit Hotel.

  Nonetheless, Anthony was usually the first lawyer on his feet for cross-examination, often exhausting the witness to the point that there was little left for the other attorneys to pick over. “He may get his girl off,” said a Delhi reporter, “but he sure isn’t doing Charley Boy much good.” After one session, the lawyer Chowdhury, who had done scut work for a year leading up to the trial, and who was now forced to endure Anthony’s hogging of the spotlight, could not conceal his irritation. “Anthony is putting on a wonderful show—as only he can—but he’s just showing off.”

  A reporter asked, “How has Anthony done so far?”

  Chowdhury smiled tolerantly, as if excusing an elderly uncle’s social gaffes. “What I think—and what the judge thinks—are, one hopes, two different judgments.” Just at that point, Chowdhury’s attention was diverted by the police guard escorting Charles out of the courtroom for a rest break. The lawyer’s face was an unconcealed study in disgust. “That man is a diseased animal and should be destroyed,” he said, a rather unusual comment from a defense lawyer whose client was intimately involved with the agitated little man in chains and manacles. Marie-Andrée trailed after him, busy whispering to Charles in French, as frenetic as a bird newly come on a branch of plump insects.

  “She’s very strong,” mused Chowdhury. “Foolish, yes. Impulsive, yes. Lovesick, yes. But aside from that slight limp she gets when she is very tired, Marie-Andrée is steel. I think it will be hard to convince the judge that she was a helpless willow blown in the wind.”

  While Charles continued to speak with his biographer during every break in the trial, Marie-Andrée was icy to reporters. She told one that her story was “valuable,” and that she would write it herself at some later date. The press had to be content with descriptions of her clothes and hairdos, neither very interesting, and the manner in which she looked at Charles, usually alternating between love and hate. But one afternoon she began speaking candidly to a heavy French-Canadian nun who had spent her entire adult life in India as a missionary, and whose face was as permanently crimson as the
sunset. “Of course I was a serious girl,” Marie-Andrée said, as if the whole world thought her frivolous. “I knew what I was doing when I returned to the East. Everybody in my family tried to discourage me … but I was thirty, my eyes were wide open. I analyzed the trip a long time. I had a round-trip ticket. I had two thousand dollars in cash. I said to myself, ‘What could possibly happen to you with two thousand dollars in your pocket?’ If things go bad, you simply get on a plane and go back home.”

  The plump nun nodded, agreeable to whatever the girl said. She was, after all, Catholic. “He started taking my money very cleverly,” Marie-Andrée went on. “First it was, ‘Let me borrow eight hundred fifty to buy some stones and we will triple it overnight.’ Then it was, ‘Let me have four hundred dollars just until tomorrow morning, when I collect from a customer. The banks are closed and I forgot to cash a check.’ Then it was something else, and something else, and before I knew it all my money was gone, and so was my return ticket, and my visa was expired, and I was totally in his hands.”

  She glanced across the room at Charles, engrossed in an anecdote. “The year I spent in jail in Delhi is better than all the time I spent with him before,” she said. “He used to tell me, ‘Stop worrying, I’m clever.’ And I used to answer, ‘If you’re so clever, why have you spent half your life in jail?’”

  And what was his response to that? wondered the Sister.

  “Sometimes he would laugh. Sometimes he would hit me.”

  On another day, the subject of Mary Ellen and Barbara’s unsuccessful attempt at suicide was being discussed. Someone asked Marie-Andrée if she had ever considered the possibility. Surprisingly she answered. “I would never commit suicide,” she said. “I am trying to save my life …” She thought a few moments, then amplified her remark. “But who can say something with finality? Suicide is the product of many months, of a whole life. Perhaps things are building within me that I do not understand.”