Serpentine Page 20

  They spoke in French, Charles whispering that he had bribed one of the guards with a few rupees to turn a deaf ear. Most important, he had just engaged a lawyer who was even now flying to Saigon to obtain money from Sobhraj the Tailor. When his father learned of the son’s desperate position, surely he would advance sufficient moneys to post bond. Once that was accomplished, assured Charles, they could leave Delhi on the next flight. For France! It was a promise. Charles made it sound less like a farfetched possibility than a guaranteed law of nature. Later, years later, Hélène would continue to wonder why she let herself by convinced by this man to stay at his side. But she was not the only one. The trail of those conned by his tender promises would by that time stretch further than Marco Polo’s peregrinations.

  Rupinder Singh was born in 1948, the year of India’s rebirth. He considered it symbolic. His would be a brilliant career in the law, following in the footsteps of his well-respected father, a leading Delhi advocate. Rupi, as everyone knew him, was rail-thin, black-bearded, and had weak eyes always hidden behind blue-tinted glasses. Unusually tall and thin for an Indian when he put on his ever-present dusty black blazer and one of the many bright-colored turbans for each day of the week, Rupi could have been a casting director’s dream to play a night club mind reader. It was Rupi’s good fortune to be in one of Delhi’s central jails on the day when Charles was booked for the Ashoka Hotel robbery. At the time he was attending to paper work necessary to post bail for another accused thief when he heard his name being called. Even though this was his first year as an advocate, and even though he was but twenty-three years old, Rupi’s ego and professional opinion of himself were substantial. His name, Singh, means “Lion,” after all, and though he more resembled a secretary bird, he was ever ready for combat. This is how he remembers his first encounter with Charles Sobhraj:

  I turned around me and beheld a very youthful man whose face was neither East nor West, but who had a commanding personality. I was not surprised to be engaged because I was very popular due to my handling of various murder and smuggling cases, and because of the honored reputation of my father. In that jail, people knew my name. Charles told me that he was the son of a millionaire in Saigon who would willingly post bond and pay all my fees. He was very convincing. He also asked me to look after his wife and daughter, whom he loved very much.

  Somehow Charles managed to obtain a prepaid round-trip air ticket for Rupi, and a modest cash advance, and off the young lawyer flew to Saigon, a city approaching the tragedy of war’s end. The address which Charles had given him, the Hong Kong Tailor Company, Ltd., no longer housed Mr. Sobhraj. The tailor sold his business three years earlier and was in retirement. No one knew where. Rupi went from door to door, imploring blank Vietnamese faces to help him, finally learning that the old tailor was living in a villa on the outskirts of town. There he found Mr. Sobhraj, aged, heavy, dying, jewels sparkling on thick fingers, attended by one Vietnamese wife and one French mistress, demanding that Indian food be served him at lunch, French cuisine at dinner. Rupi went directly to the point; his son was in prison, his son needed 40,000 rupees for bail; his son promised to pay it back; his son loved him. The old man sat silently on a brilliantly cushioned chair for several moments, staring at Rupi with what seemed to be simmering anger. Then the tailor sighed. “Ah, that boy,” he said, “he always had brains—but they are on the wrong side of his head.” He padded to a safe and found a brass box and withdrew the requested money. “What does it matter?” he said, dropping the bills into Rupi’s hands. “My life is over. This city is over. The sum of everything is nothing.”

  Hélène dispatched her daughter back to France in the care of a friend who promised to deposit Shubra with her grandparents in the Paris suburbs. With the baby went a note that did not fully explain the crisis that Charles and Hélène faced, only that they were ensnarled in difficulties of a red tape nature and that as soon as the bindings were cut then they would speed to France and collect the child.

  For the first few months of 1972, Hélène’s life style drastically declined from suites and room services. She lived in various cheap hotels, existing on the few hundred rupees that Charles managed to smuggle out of prison or pass from his lips to hers on visiting day. She never knew how Charles obtained money, but there was no doubting his resourcefulness. She gathered he always collected due bills and cashed them in emergencies.

  Remarkable also was his ability for long distance surveillance. When on a February night she attended a dance given by the French community in Delhi and spent a rare evening of laughter, Charles bitterly condemned his wife on their next meeting. How could she dance the night away and smile at men with her husband in prison? His mood was foul. “How did you know I went to the party?” asked Hélène.

  “I know every breath you take,” answered Charles. He had many people “working” for him on the outside.

  La Passionara spent several weeks of additional terror while she was caught up in India’s snail tracks of justice. No amount of indignant denunciation of Charles’ accusation that she shared guilt in the Ashoka jewelry caper moved the authorities to dismiss charges that she was an accomplice. An official First Information Report, the Indian equivalent of an investigation and police complaint, was lodged against the American dancer, replete with ripe and vivid language. Her participation was “a malicious and nefarious plan as a result of which the accused persons succeeded in their designs … She is an active member of the International Gang of burglars and has played an important part in commissions of crime … Keeping in view the intensity of crime she has done, it is strongly recommended that bail be denied and she be sent to judicial lockup … as she is likely to escape and leave India by one way or the other … perhaps by forged passports as is the custom of this gang …

  From their retirement in Arizona, Esther’s parents sent $2,500 to engage an advocate and pay for bail, which was eventually granted. The advocate asked the dancer if there were any way she could prove (1) that she had never met Charles & Company before the robbery, and (2) that she was indeed a serious artiste and not a jewel thief. Helpfully, La Passionara remembered writing her guitarist boy friend in Japan the very night that “Mr. Lobo” first proposed that she dance at the casino in Macao. The letter was located, its postmark verified, and its contents clearly those written by a breathlessly excited performer who had just been offered a potential leap to stardom by a mysterious “Chinese” businessman. That helped. But the knight who rode to La Passionara’s rescue was an eccentric maharaja named Gajapati Kaju. He was an old man in his sixties with a long and ill-tended gray beard, a wife and three large daughters, and the remnants of a family fortune that once included most of the elephants in Madras. Gajapati Kaju also jogged three miles each morning around the streets of Madras and ate only one meal a day, though hostesses in Delhi often remarked that he consumed more in “one meal” than most men did in a week. He was a patron of the arts who had taken an interest in La Passionara when she was studying dance in his city. On the crested stationery of his ancient family, he wrote an eloquent letter to the courts on her behalf.

  In it he raised numerous points with Sherlockian deduction:

  —La Passionara had not asked for Room 289, it was assigned to her arbitrarily by the management. In fact, she had not even liked the room and had requested a substitution because she disliked the long walk to the elevator in full makeup and costume.

  —Why didn’t she yell for help? Easily explained, reasoned Gajapati Kaju; she was terrified. She did not inform the various waiters and cleaning people who visited the room over the weekend siege because (1) Charles had a gun aimed at her liver, and (2) she was in a state of shock.

  —She telephoned the front desk immediately for help as soon as the robbery was completed and Charles was gone. If she was an accomplice, surely she would have waited until dawn, until Charles and “the booty” were safely out of Delhi.

  —If La Passionara had not acted with such dispatch, then the sto
len jewels could not have been recovered as they had been at Palam Airport.

  “It is my fervent prayer that all charges against this unhappy young woman be dropped as early as possible,” wrote Gajapati Kaju. “She has suffered very greatly.”

  Whether the letter was sufficient to melt the hearts of Delhi’s police and prosecutors, or whether its signature carried the clout of an imperial but not forgotten past, is not known. Whatever, the charges against Esther Markowitz were dropped “for lack of evidence” and La Passionara fled India without looking back. She did stop long enough to respectfully and gratefully kiss Gajapati Kaju, who, sometime later, went for his regular morning swim in the Indian Ocean near Madras and drowned. Only his spectacles were washed onto the shore.

  Rupinder Singh, using the tailor’s money, posted bond for Charles Sobhraj and was not very surprised when his client disappeared from India. Although authorities in Eastern nations usually seethe and cluck their anger at Western criminals who pay for the benevolence of the law and then abuse it by skipping out, the truth is that often this is a much desired solution. Thus are the courts relieved of further prosecutional responsibility and thus is a government spared the housing and feeding of an unwanted felon.

  Charles and Hélène began the journey home to France, where they would fetch the baby and begin a new life. But their route was hardly non-stop. Leaving Delhi for Bombay, where Charles purchased two crudely forged passports on the street, they proceeded to Pakistan, where more genuine-looking passports were for sale, then to Kabul, capital of Afghanistan and ancient crossroad of trade routes from East to West for a thousand years. Charles promised his wife that they would pause but briefly while he attended to “business.” Here Ghenghis Khan in the thirteenth century slaughtered so many people that the earth turned red and the rocks glistened with blood. And here, seven centuries later, 90 per cent of the populace lived in the most primitive conditions, the average resident earning less than seventy-five dollars a year and drawing more sustenance from kinship in tribes than to an erratic government structure that wobbled from monarchy to militaristic dictatorship with scant betterment in the way of life. Kabul held no interest at all for Charles as a sightseer, but it did contain a substantial number of smugglers coming or going from Europe to the East, plus a large colony of “hippies”—the word refused to go away—who relished the hashish of the region, despite the very real possibility that a hand might be sliced off by police in a public square should a dealer be captured. It would become the pattern of Charles’ criminal activities that while he generally angled for worthy trophies—i.e., a foolish dowager with rings on her fingers, cash in her purse, and an eye for young men wearing tight pants—he often had to settle for a near comatose youth whose backpack contained but a few dollars in traveler’s checks and an air ticket and a passport.

  For two months, Charles and his wife rested in Kabul, enjoying the comforts of a modern hotel. Somehow Charles had come into money again—Hélène never knew its source—and the long stay was a period of relative tranquillity for the couple. As much as Hélène yearned for the boulevards of Paris, it was comforting to have her husband beside her each night.

  In mid-1972, Charles announced it was time to leave and he booked air passage to Paris, with an intermediate stop in Istanbul. But they got no further than the Kabul Airport, where police rushed up, surrounded the couple, and arrested them both. It seemed Charles had neglected to pay the hotel bill for two months in residence. At the moment they were intercepted, Charles whispered urgently to Hélène in French, “Deny that you are my wife. Deny that you know me. Don’t tell them anything.” Hélène did as she was told and had to endure but one night in police custody before she was released. Her passport, unfortunately, was retained pending outcome of the investigation, and once again the young Frenchwoman found herself alone, broke, void of identity papers, and condemned to fending for herself in an exotic city where she spoke not a word of the language. That night she slept underneath a thorn tree amid a colony of Western youth and politely declined the hashish pipe offered her. A few days later, two men found her on the street and gave her a note, a false passport, and some money. It was from Charles, and in the note he apologized for the “small spot of trouble.” He was taking care of it, the note said, and she should wait for him in a hotel.

  Red Eye was his name, an appropriate description for orbs usually streaked with crimson irritation from the smoke of Afghan hash. Once Red Eye was the most clean cut of American youth. His name was Peter Tovale. On the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Pete was a freshman at a West Coast university. Polite, intelligent, and ambitious, he was surely directed toward membership in the community of buttoned-down young men who were so gracefully changing the country. A year after his president was killed, Pete’s hair was as long as Ringo Starr’s, and two years after that he was part of the belligerent occupation of the dean’s office at his university, protesting both the Vietnamese War and the school trustees’ refusal to divest its endowment funds of shares in businesses that operated in South Africa. Then a series of personal tragedies—the loss of a parent, the breaking up of a love affair with a girl who carried his baby and in anger aborted it—caused Pete to accept his draft notice and enter the fellowship of the U. S. Army. In the back of his head was the vague idea that if he were sent to Vietnam perhaps he could undermine the U.S. involvement there. But the fates instead dispatched him to Europe, where he found himself performing a most astonishing job in defense of his country. He was engaged as an Army censor, his franchise being advance viewing of Hollywood movies before they could be shown to the troops. His was not the only voice; he served on a committee which determined what films properly upheld the traditions and morality of the Stars and Stripes. The Green Berets, John Wayne’s strident trumpet blast of endorsement for America’s role in Vietnam, won enthusiastic approval, Pete’s vote of negation withstanding. But Easy Rider, the landmark film which presented Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as two counterculture drifters who were brutally murdered by Dixie rednecks, was deemed too radical and of moral danger to America’s soldiers.

  During his years with the military in Europe, Pete fell in love with a German girl and intended to marry her, saving $5,000 for their beginning. But the girl canceled the affair, throwing Pete into foul depression, and when his service was done, rather than return to the U.S., he elected to wander. Using the $5,000 to purchase an old camper, Pete pointed it East and drove through Europe, across the Bosphorus, and into Asia. By late 1971, he was broke, but rich with memories of girls he had found on the road and exotic grasses smoked in Turkey and Iran. He lost thirty pounds; he was gaunt, ill-nourished, and usually deeply stoned by each midmorning. Christmas found him sitting in a Kabul cafe frequented by young people and trying to determine if the Bangladesh War made it inappropriate for him to drive the camper through Pakistan into India, his next major destination. Another American man, named Dennis, was king of the cafe this night, the maypole around which all the disenchanted wanderers danced. He was from Oklahoma, a former star football player, now wearing a dirty Afghan coat whose fur blended with his beard. Dennis invited Pete, now known as Red Eye, to share a room where one corner was available to spread a bedroll. A couple of girls went along with the offer; Pete enthusiastically accepted.

  Two days later, Dennis was arrested at the Kabul Airport for hashish possession, and when police searched his room, they found sufficient crumbs of the illegal substance to seize Red Eye as well. The irony was that the hashish was not his; indeed he had not used the drug for several days, having grown concerned over the deterioration clearly taking place in his grotesquely thin body.

  Red Eye was put in a room behind the fire station, where foreigners were held, protesting his innocence and weeping on Christmas Day for lost dreams and a faraway home. A lawyer suggested that for $1,000, presumably to be spread around various official palms, Red Eye could gain freedom. By selling the camper and all his possessions, he accumulated
the needed sum. Then Dennis and another Western drug user managed to escape from the fire station, and hell rained on Red Eye. He was sentenced to a minimum of six months with an open end, then transferred by furious police to the central Kabul prison, Damazan, a fearsome place the color of mud. Huge, thick medieval doors with leather seams and studs swung open to receive Red Eye. His body went limp. He was half dragged to the “Western section,” which consisted of a row of one-room mud huts, adjacent to the main prison wall. Armed guards walked across the roofs of the huts, their footsteps pounding in each prisoner’s ears day and night.

  “As prisons go,” Red Eye would one day say, “Damazan was rock bottom. The depths.” Nothing was provided for prisoners save a cell to confine them. No food was served, and unless an inmate had funds to purchase sustenance, then he could wither and die from malnutrition. Nor were blankets available, nor medicine, nor protection from the rats that scampered through the huts in search of nourishment, nor the occasional adder that slithered in and had to be chased away with clumps of the earthen floor.

  By spring 1972, Red Eye had grown accustomed to his bleak world, having learned the way of life inside Damazan. If a prisoner had money, he could hire a bacha, an errand boy, who could be dispatched to the bazaar just outside the fifteen-foot prison walls. There food or clothes or drugs could be purchased, the last highly coveted, for there was little else to do in the Kabul prison save smoke enough hash or inject enough morphine to induce a blessed unconsciousness. Thus were nights gotten through.