Serpentine Page 30

  Each day contained new splendor, realized on a stage of impossible beauty. They hired shikaras, gondolas painted in hot colors, with cushions covered in brilliant fabrics, with matching curtains to pull for privacy like lovers do in a Paris restaurant. Behind the curtains stood the boatman, usually a strapping fellow of handsome mien and wide, strong shoulders, singing exotic melodies as he dipped heart-shaped paddles into the quiet waters, guiding his customers through the canals and water farms to the fabled gardens of the sultans, where waterfalls tumble down terraces, where groves of chenar trees from ancient Persia shade secluded pools.

  They drove an hour away from Srinagar to the village of Gulmarg where the world’s highest golf course spreads out at 8,700 feet above sea level. Here Alain staged his notorious haggling performance and after several moments of fury engaged the small but sturdy Himalayan ponies for all to ride up rocky trails, through thick forests where high noon is like twilight, across rushing cold streams from melted snow, stopping only at tent camps for tea and stale biscuits. At a summit, Marie-Andrée dismounted and looked out at a staggering panorama, the Himalayas above, the gentle valley of Kashmir below. Cold winds blew against her face and turned her cheeks rosy, and she went to Alain and said, with great emotion, “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I will never forget this moment.”

  There were also odd moments, puzzles. Alain took to disappearing from the houseboat for several hours, instructing the group to join him at a restaurant. One night everybody went to the designated place and Alain was discovered deep in conversation with three young women—two English, one Chinese, all vaguely hippie-ish. Jeanne called out his name, and Alain turned with quick annoyance that melted into what appeared to be embarrassment. It was noted that Marie-Andrée was the most upset upon encountering Alain surrounded by three vivacious women.

  And there was the matter of photographs. Or lack thereof. Throughout the week in Kashmir, Jeanne sought to take a picture of the entire group, either on the houseboat or shopping for lacquered papier-maché boxes at two favored stores—Subhana the Best and Subhana the Worst. Or lazing on the soft grass of Shalimar gardens. But each time she raised her camera, Alain ducked, or insisted that he, being a professional photographer, could better take the shot. Later, when she returned to Paris and had her film developed, not a single image of the man who dominated the week had been caught. Eerily, the two or three exposures that Jeanne clearly remembered as having included at least a partial piece of Alain’s face, were completely blank—as if he had forbidden the film to capture his features.

  On another day, when the two women were sunbathing privately on the Sultan’s Embrace, Jeanne drank in the beauty of the morning and sighed. She looked at Marie-Andrée, lying face down and tanning her back. “You are lucky,” said Jeanne, “being in a place like this with your boy friend.” Marie-Andrée raised her head and shook it in disagreement. Bernard, she said, was a very nice man. But she did not love him. Then, hastily, Marie-Andrée said that she had a secret lover back in Canada whom no one knew about. She was sending him daily postcards from Kashmir. “What’s he like?” idly asked Jeanne. This caused Marie-Andrée to stammer, and Jeanne tactfully changed the subject. She did not believe Marie-Andrée had a secret lover, or any lover for that matter. She did not think Marie-Andrée knew a damn thing about men.

  On the last night in the Sultan’s Embrace, Alain appeared for dinner in tight jeans and nothing else, his bare chest rubbed with oil. He produced a bottle of imported scotch, a rare and expensive indulgence in India. Its purpose was to seal the fellowship of a perfect week, he announced. Everyone sipped casually, everyone save Marie-Andrée. She drank heavily—and quickly was drunk. She took off her blouse and underneath was her bikini top. The night was torrid. Sex hung in the air. The girl from the village in Canada began vamping Alain as if she were an inexperienced hooker on the street for the first time. Dancing alone on the deck, clutching her body, she brushed past the man she wanted. Bernard tolerated her behavior for a little while, then angrily said good night and went to his room. Trouble was brewing, as surely as first thunder heralds an approaching storm. Jeanne whispered in Christian’s ear that it was best to take cover. She was French enough to hope that Marie-Andrée would get what she wanted, but she further hoped that the sun would rise without blood on the Sultan’s Embrace.

  Nothing happened. Alain and Marie-Andrée were left alone on the deck and he watched her dance for a few moments, then abruptly left and went ashore. Marie-Andrée was abandoned, and humiliated. She began to cry and she stayed alone until past midnight. The next morning she hid behind dark glasses and did not speak beyond necessities on the trip back to Delhi. “Alain’s a real bastard,” said Christian in dissection of the week. It was his accurate opinion that Alain was about to drive Marie-Andrée crazy.

  They all left for Agra on the Taj Mahal Express, a crack train that departs Delhi each morning at seven, reaches the city that contains the monument to love by late morning, then brings tourists back by dusk. Alain arranged everything and, en route, spun gauzy tales of the Taj. He told his stories well, how the great tomb was built by Shah Jahan, fifth Moghul emperor, to assuage epic grief over the death of his wife, a young woman who not surprisingly died while delivering her fourteenth child. Jeanne found the account diverting, but Marie-Andrée was spellbound, hanging on every word. The pain of the last night on the houseboat was either gone or hidden carefully. She looked exactly like a love-struck teen-ager, thought Jeanne, and she would no doubt forgive Alain for any wound.

  The Taj Mahal usually dazzles visitors, for it is one of the few monuments in the world that is even more beautiful than photographs. Marie-Andrée was transfixed, freed from a life that had ranged from the land of dull to the shores of bleak. At this moment, she was standing before the most beautiful building ever erected as tribute to love, and her guide was a man whose life was everything hers was not. Her face showed that nothing else mattered. She had this one moment, precious, precious enough to keep. Alain Gauthier was a son of a bitch, thought Jeanne. A transparent son of a bitch. But give him this: he made a frustrated woman’s life a little more bearable.

  On her last night in India, once again in Delhi, Jeanne surrendered to Alain’s wheedling and agreed to meet him for a private drink. He had been suggesting it for days, wanting to talk “business,” and, having considerable gratitude for the labor he had performed both in Kashmir and Agra as unpaid tour director, Jeanne consented. Christian warned her to be careful, and Jeanne laughed, assuring her friend that she had discouraged men more persistent than Alain on the Métros of Paris.

  Their rendezvous was the Cellar, a gloomy night club on Connaught Circle, the hub of Delhi, with walls dark as midnight, with reasonable facsimiles of American-style hamburgers to capture Western tourists, with secluded booths occupied—it is not difficult to imagine—by men who would not welcome a police knock at the door. When she entered, Jeanne saw Alain immediately, commanding a corner table and talking with two long-haired French boys who looked like junkies. As she approached, she noticed that one of them had a grimy hand outstretched, in which nestled a few tiny red stones. Alain was lecturing, frowning. Jeanne interrupted.

  “Ah, bon soir, Chérie,” said Alain, rising to kiss Jeanne’s cheeks perfunctorily and dismissing the French boys with a commanding wave. She started to sit down, but Alain wanted a change of locale. “It’s too noisy to talk here,” he said. The evening was new, but the rock music was already shattering. They found a taxi and Alain snapped, “Oberoi Hotel.” Jeanne was impressed by his choice, the Oberoi-Intercontinental being Delhi’s flossiest, direct from the Miami Beach school of architecture, but gathering place nonetheless for the rich and powerful. It was only a few minutes away from the Cellar, but on this night the driver elected to take a more circuitous route and increase the fare. Absorbed in an anecdote, Alain at first paid no heed to the driver. Then he glanced out the window and saw an unfamiliar street. Exploding with curses, Alain rock
eted forward in his seat and put his hand on the driver’s neck and squeezed—hard-threatening even more unless the man shut off his meter then and there and made the rest of the ride free. “You must act this way with thieves,” said Alain, returning to his story unruffled. But Jeanne was troubled, not only by the fearful way that Alain burst into violence, but because he always selected the weak and the subservient for his wrath.

  They drank a sweetish white wine in the bar and ate fresh oysters from the Arabian Gulf and looked down on the Oberoi’s huge swimming pool, where clusters of people were content just to stand in the shallow end of the tepid water, sipping tonic, trying to find relief from the night heat. In the distance, beyond Humayun’s Tomb, lightning crackled in the sky, but it was not yet time for the monsoon. This was May and only an overture. Jeanne was preparing a quick leavetaking when Alain reached across the table and took her hand.

  “I believe very strongly in destiny,” he said. Everything in life had a purpose.

  “For example?” questioned Jeanne.

  The way they met, answered Alain. He had not intended to take the Pan Am flight that introduced them. He was, in fact, booked on another. But at the last minute he changed reservations. Some force put him on that plane, that same force that collided his life with Jeanne and Christian—out of three hundred other people on board.

  But, pointed out Jeanne, that might also be called “coincidence.”

  Alain shook his head. “Nothing is coincidence,” he said. There are no “accidents.” If, for example, Jeanne left the Oberoi this night and had a choice of walking either to the right or the left, perhaps one destination would lead safely to her hotel, the other into the arms of a robber. “You make the choice,” he said. “You are responsible for every step you take.”

  Jeanne nodded in agreement. The only step she wanted to take was out. She began fumbling for a tactful farewell. Alain was not yet done, not nearly done. “You and I,” he said, “we are like brother and sister after one week.” That could hardly be the product of coincidence. It was destiny.

  At that, Jeanne relaxed. No longer did she worry about fending off amorous lunges from Alain, particularly since he considered their friendship to be “brother and sister.”

  “I want to talk business,” he reminded her.

  And what was his “business”?

  He did not hesitate. “The illegal business,” he answered, as routinely—and as pridefully—as a surgeon might speak of open-heart operations. Black market currency exchanges, buying precious stones in India and smuggling them into Europe and Hong Kong, stolen cars, fraudulent passports, all of it absurdly easy. “My customers are so trusting and so stupid,” he told Jeanne, listening openmouthed, astonished not only at the catalogue of horrors but at the brazenness with which he delivered his account—and to a person he had known only one week. At the conclusion of his tale, as if to prove something, he invited her to peek inside his jacket and glimpse three stolen passports. She nodded appropriately, for she felt it was important that she show respect. Then leave. Fast. She rose and mumbled an apology of fatigue, an early flight to Hong Kong and all that.

  “Wait,” ordered Charles. “Sit down. I want you to work for me.”

  Jeanne almost laughed. “Me?” she echoed.

  Many respectable people did, insisted Gauthier. Many. Did Jeanne remember the three girls in the restaurant at Srinagar, the two English and the Chinese? She nodded. They were employees of his, couriers of money, gems, passports, whatever, to countries that he designated. They were also commissioned to find men whose assets might be taken while in the pursuit of romance. And the two French boys earlier this night at the Cellar? Jeanne nodded again, dumbly. They worked for Alain Gauthier; the stones they were discussing would tomorrow be smuggled through customs in Rome and sold at a jewelry store near the Spanish Steps.

  Now his desire, what he had devoted this entire week to, was the hiring of Jeanne as his very special courier. Her credentials were appealing. Working for an airline, she traveled extensively, she was usually waved through customs with little or no baggage inspection, she looked respectable and ordinary. She could anticipate earning an easy $50,000 the first year. So could Christian, if she could enlist him.

  Indignant, Jeanne refused. The idea was absurd. She started to say more, but Alain smiled and shrugged. He had made his pitch. He had not been successful. It seemed of no more importance than losing a hundred francs at roulette. He would win it back on the next spin. What did seem important was the revelation itself. It’s crazy, thought Jeanne, but this little man wanted her to know he was a crook. She wondered if she was but one of a score of women whom Alain was importuning. One other thing struck her: Alain seemed pathetically anxious to collect people, make them dependent on him, like a lonely old woman Jeanne knew in Paris who took in stray animals and gave them names belonging to absent family members.

  Alain was scribbling something. He handed it to Jeanne. If she was ever in Hong Kong and needed money, all she had to do was call this number. As they walked out together, abruptly Alain turned the conversation to Marie-Andrée. Had Jeanne noticed the way she behaved all week? he wondered. “She has been after me,” said Alain. But, he rattled on, oblivious to the shock on Jeanne’s face from being asked to become a criminal, he was not interested in Marie-Andrée. “She is boring,” he said.

  At that, Jeanne rose to her friend’s defense. “Being shy and being boring are two different things,” she said testily. “And, truthfully, chéri, she’s too good for you. Au revoir, Alain.”

  “Perhaps,” said Alain, smiling, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. But Jeanne drew no warmth from the smile. She hurried out, not daring to risk even a farewell glance. The next morning, she and Christian flew gratefully out of Delhi, troubled and confused by the week, both wondering what would happen next—and to whom.

  Alain took dictatorial charge of Marie-Andrée and Bernard’s remaining days in the Far East. They must see Katmandu, he ordered, and quickly they were in the kingdom of Nepal—as guests of a man whose largesse seemed boundless. First-class hotels. Three-star meals. Gambling at the Hotel Soaltee casino. Abruptly he gathered the Canadians up and transferred them next to Bangkok. It was a new Alain Gauthier. No sexual posturings. No temper tantrums. Only gallant flattery for Marie-Andrée, respect for Bernard. He made their vacation perfect.

  But after a day or two in Bangkok, a city whose air is fouled by awesome traffic jams and whose restaurants offer dishes enhanced by spices alien to the Western stomach, Bernard felt his innards bedeviled. He took to his bed and was smote with severe nausea and stomach cramps. Alain was all consolation, delivering a lecture on the perils of food and drink in the East, producing a spoonful of some private medication. Bernard took it gratefully and soon fell asleep. Passed out is a better phrase, for he slept almost twenty-four hours.

  Just before he surrendered, however, Bernard weakly insisted that Marie-Andrée continue with her sightseeing. After all, she would never be in Bangkok again. He would be angry if she wasted a day at his bedside. Marie-Andrée agreed, reluctantly, but as soon as she completed a scheduled trip to the royal palace, she promised to hurry back and minister to her stricken friend.

  Viewing an old palace was not her intention. As Bernard slept, Marie-Andrée slipped quietly out of the hotel, found a bicycle rickshaw, and gave the driver her destination. He delivered her to a small hotel near the river, on a side street, beside an open air market where live eels were thrust at customers and where children played while wearing demon masks.

  At a designated room in the small hotel, Marie-Andrée knocked and waited nervously. She was preparing to run away when the door opened. Alain Gauthier smiled in welcome. He was a different man. His beard was gone, his hair was styled, his clothes were new. He smelled of French cologne. He took her in his arms and murmured that he had been waiting impatiently for this moment since the morning they first met at Srinagar Airport.

  Tenderly, capably, he put a thin gold ch
ain about her neck and undressed her. He marveled at her body. She went willingly to his bed, grateful for the bamboo shutters that threw shadows across the linens and hid the scars on her leg. If only the shadows would hide the secret that she was thirty years old. And this was the first time that counted. And she was frightened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Homecoming!

  Her family was waiting at the airport when Marie-Andrée flew back from her great adventure, bags overflowing with brass candlesticks, embroidered purses, sandals, silks, treasures for her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters, her employers, her priest. She was radiant as she flew into her family’s arms. A new vivacity emanated from her. Denise, her younger sister who bore a remarkable resemblance but who was far more aggressive and ambitious for accomplishment, noted something more. A woman’s intuition told her that it was finished between Marie-Andrée and Bernard. They were polite toward one another, but theirs was not the bond of lovers. And if Marie-Andrée was this ebullient in the wake of breaking off a prospective marriage—the only prospect that Denise knew about—then her sister must have found solace in the Far East beyond temple gazing. As soon as the two sisters could steal away for a private moment, Denise’s hunch was confirmed. “I met a man,” confessed Marie-Andrée, her eyes dancing. “He is very intelligent, nice, and cute. And rich!” Ecstatic memories poured from her—gondolas with heart-shaped paddles, sunsets over the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal on a blistering noon, a temple in Katmandu whose god was a golden monkey holding a parasol. And always Alain. Each sentence seemed to contain his name. Or sometimes it was Charles. Denise was confused. What was this man’s name? Alain? Or Charles? Marie-Andrée shrugged. “Both,” she answered. “He is a very important businessman and people call him by different names.”