Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  And when Charles was given French citizenship, a certain cockiness and arrogance were demonstrated, as if he were finally a member of the fraternity and could safely criticize its bylaws. A colleague in his section committed some minor infraction and was denied his daily ration of milk as punishment. Charles felt the man was ill, and in need of the nourishment of milk, so he shared his. When the generosity was discovered, the guards responded by cutting off Charles’ milk as well. Promptly Charles fired off a letter to the director of the prison in which he elevated the matter to the category of Dreyfus:

  Dear Mr. Director:

  I write to protest your judgment of me. When I get a just punishment, I will do it without protest. But when I am given a punishment based on reports that are unjust, a flagrant injustice, I protest. I protest!

  Even though I am in a low position in your eyes, I demand justice, the justice of human understanding, a humanity that every being in society should have. To punish me by taking away my milk ration just because I shared my milk with a friend in detention (who really needed it) is unfair! It was a gesture of solidarity on my part, nothing more. I find this action totally normal, even if I have a condemnable past in society.

  I discussed this with the chaplain, and he gave me comfort. But I believe you are only trying to repress us, not to rehabilitate us. Ours is a miserable state. What is your role in this place? To drown us? Or to try and help us get a future, a tomorrow in society?

  The report against me says my cell is kept in bad condition. The guards destroy it and then blame me. I will accept no further injustices! From now on, if you do not take my punishment away, I will not eat. I will die unless you repair these injustices.

  When an acceptable response did not come from the director, Charles proclaimed a hunger strike. Coincidentally he had been reading a biography of Gandhi, and he now cast himself in the role of martyr, his body wasting away in the name of humanity and justice. He sat squat-legged in his cell, meditating, chanting, refusing to acknowledge the taunts and curses of the guards. When the strike continued for several weeks, Charles growing so weak that he could not even walk to the visitors’ room to see Félix on Saturdays, his friend sent word to him that he was behaving like a fool. His cause was undeniably just, said Félix, but if he did not kill himself from malnutrition, he would risk an extension of his sentence for bad conduct, and when and if he were ever released, he would have to go directly to a hospital to see if doctors could save what little was left.

  Charles requested that the French press interview him, but when no reporter came, and when everyone seemed to lose interest in his drama, and when he began lapsing into unconsciousness, he declared on the forty-fifth day of his hunger strike that his purpose had been accomplished. He had illumined a dark place. His milk was resumed.

  In the last few months of his imprisonment, Charles wrote bitterly of his Poissy experience. “I’ve stopped having illusions about ‘humanity’ and the life in prison,” he told Félix.

  “The guards! Instead of trying to help prisoners rehabilitate themselves, au contraire they only push you lower in the dirt. The ones who do not want to be rehabilitated, the ones whom society fears, these are the guys that the guards give good reports on—just to get them out of here fast. And as soon as they get out, then society suffers. Don’t speak to me ever of justice and reform. Sooner or later, they are back inside, back ‘home.’ And they get the best treatment. Guards, you see, respect ‘Fame,’ even when it is the fame of a garbage pile.

  “Have I told you what it is like between prisoners, the life here? There should be solidarity, to help each other. But they eat each other up like wolves. I live in a jungle. Even though you have seen much and heard much, it is only half reality. For the total, one has to live in hell …

  “Ah, but don’t think I’m suicidal. What gets me through each day is intelligence. My only weapon here is intelligence. It lifts me above the others. The strong man is the smart man, not the man who is muscle-bound. No fall can break a man like me …”

  On the day of his release from Poissy, Charles was met by Félix, who walked with him out of the bleak prison into the brilliance of a spring morning in Paris. Félix was full of cheering news. Three suits of hand-tailored clothing were at this moment en route from Sobhraj the Tailor in Saigon. Several job interviews were lined up. And there was a party this very night to which Charles was invited.

  Charles stiffened, fingering the work clothes and ill-fitting jacket that were his legacy from Poissy. Would the party guests know about his past?

  “Not unless you tell them,” answered Félix. “Nobody has to know anything. The past is past. It means what it says.”

  Charles rode silently in the taxi, drinking in the splendors of Paris, marveling, Félix assumed, at how quickly he could leave the confines of an ancient prison and within minutes be on the way to a friend’s apartment in the most favored arrondissement.

  Something else was on his mind. Would there be girls at the party? Félix smiled and nodded. There would be many girls. Nice girls. Not the kind who quote a price and then lead a customer up a narrow staircase in Pigalle. “Then I cannot go,” Charles said. “I look like a clochard.” Félix ordered the taxi to stop outside a men’s boutique, and that Charles should go in and pick out something to wear. It would be a loan.

  With concealed fear, Charles stood before the boutique, like a child gawking at a police parade. Skinny, his yellowish skin pale from the sunless years of Poissy Prison, he seemed bereft of the necessary courage to enter. Félix felt a twinge of sympathy. His friend was twenty-four years old, but he did not know how to buy a pair of pants.

  They were late to the party because Charles spent most of the day in an elaborate rite of cleansing and grooming—scrubbing away the smell and feel of prison. He found a barber to sculpt his hair à la mode. He rummaged through Félix’s closet searching for underclothes and socks. Finally he put it all together, and when he emerged, Félix was astonished. A transformation had occurred. Gone was the malnourished youth who had stood trembling before a men’s boutique. In its place was an elegant young man in a well-tailored blazer and flaired trousers. His shoes gleamed like polished brass. He seemed to the manner born, an habitué of tout Paris, his face a mask of sophisticated arrogance. “I am ready,” said Charles. “Tonight I am newly born.”

  The two men drank a toast and hurried to the party, Félix feeling rather like a shabby cousin from the provinces, tagging along as a shadow. Indeed, Félix was a bit poorer on this night than he had been when the sun rose. Charles’ splendid new clothes cost $350, which Félix would never see again. And in Charles’ pocket was a handful of coins, which he had “borrowed”—without asking—from a hidden box in the closet. They were gold. Charles liked the way they clinked and felt in his pocket—and their sense of permanence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The cultural shock of leaving prison in the morning and attending a crowded, noisy party that very night was at first too much, even for Charles. He clung to Félix’s coattails like a child hanging onto a parent the first day of school. His bravado was gone. Three years within the cruel walls of Poissy had robbed Charles of social graces—or so Félix assumed.

  Then the girl arrived.

  Charles noticed her immediately, watching intently as she threaded her way through the crowd, laughing, accepting wine, teasing, earning compliments, and rejecting overtures. She had long chestnut hair with streaks of honey, and her eyes were pale blue. “Who is she?” whispered Charles. Félix smiled. Her name was Hélène. But he counseled Charles not to waste his time. Hélène was freshly on the rebound from an unhappy love affair with a man who was half Vietnamese. “I don’t think she would like to know another Oriental man this quickly,” said Félix. But if Charles heard the caution, he did not acknowledge it. He was transfixed by the vision before him. It was, Félix would remember, rather like a stage play in which the lights dim on all the characters but two. “An extraordinary moment,” Félix wo
uld recall. “From the moment their eyes first met, Hélène was lost. She no longer had control of her life.”

  When Charles learned her name, he pronounced it melodiously and led the young woman to a corner of the apartment. There they sat and mooned, as if they had been lovers from previous lives, murmuring words dipped in sugar and wine. Charles spoke with the language of his letters—florid, romantic, a little silly. Hélène was mesmerized. A simple girl from a suburb of Paris, she was barely twenty years old, the child of a butcher and his wife. Her world was solid bourgeois, her horizons extending only from her parents’ home to an office in Paris where she filed papers and performed office work for a financial investment company. She rode the Métro to and from work, purchased skirts and sweaters at Prisunic, dutifully went to mass and confession, avidly read France Dimanche and grew tearful over Queen Saroya’s failure to bear the Shah of Iran an heir. Now, suddenly, here was a man sitting beside her with the blood of the Orient and the manner of a Parisien—the son of a Vietnamese millionaire, or so he said—whispering about a cafe in Dakar he would take her to someday, quoting poetry written by a Moghul king to his favored lover. Later in this evening, Charles began reading Hélène’s palm, an art he had learned “from an old gypsy woman.”

  “Do you believe in destiny?” asked Charles.

  Hélène nodded hesitantly. She had never really thought about it before, being firmly planted in the garden of the Catholic church.

  “It’s good that you do,” said Charles. “For destiny will make it impossible for you to escape from me.”

  Félix would one day look back on the ensuing months after the lovers met as a tumultuous series of images. Their sum was chaos. One day Charles was a man, the next a child. At breakfast he would babble about honesty, it being the “foundation” of his relationship with both Félix and Hélène. But by nightfall, he would have stolen a tape recorder from a relative’s home, or bought clothes knowing that he had no funds to pay Félix when the bill arrived. When Félix took the couple out for dinner, as he did frequently, Charles insisted on a restaurant of grand standing, but once there he chose dishes with no regard for price and ate from the plates with no manners, food falling from his mouth as he gazed at the wondrous Hélène.

  Félix made appointments for job interviews; Charles failed to keep them. Félix came home from work and discovered that his apartment had been tossed about like a salad—books pulled down from library shelves and pages dog-eared, phonograph records stripped of their jackets and left exposed in the sun to warp, clothes fallen from hangers in pursuit of something to match Charles’ fancy of the moment. It took but a few weeks for Félix’s patience to snap and he directed Charles to find lodging on his own. The role of prison visiteur did not entail permanent adoption of a demanding son. Dutifully, if a little petulantly, Charles found a small flat near Hélène’s home. But Félix was no more successful in ridding himself of Charles than is a man in expelling a chronic pain that appears in the bones with each change of the weather. At 3 A.M. the front door often burst open—somehow Charles always managed to find a key, even when Félix changed the locks—and songs of passion and love would fill the bedroom, hymns to the glory of Hélène.

  When the growing nemesis turned up at Félix’s door to borrow a thousand francs, the older man refused. He had a substantial stack of due bills from Charles already, and indications were that they could never be cashed. Charles was behaving impetuously and expensively, charged Félix. Unless Charles found legitimate work, unless he erected fences around his life that would contain his destructive behavior, then Félix would prefer not to see him again.

  “Ah, Félix, you are right, you are always right,” agreed Charles. He was “ashamed” of his behavior, his only excuse that he had been trying to redeem three lost years. From the ages of twenty to twenty-four, he had reposed in Poissy Prison. “They took the most vital years of a man’s life away from me,” said Charles.

  Félix found vents for his steam. They took nothing, he said. Charles put himself in prison. And the way he was conducting his life, it would not be a stunning surprise to see his return. “That will never happen,” said Charles. “I will not permit it.”

  Briefly Charles worked as salesman for a fire extinguisher company, long enough to order and receive beautifully engraved business cards, of which Frenchmen are so fond. He pressed them eagerly into the palms of everyone he met. Often Félix caught him caressing the card, rubbing his finger over the name raised in type, relishing the illusive permanence and membership in society that the cards brought. “When this young man actually worked, he was a good salesman,” an official of the company later told Félix. “He was good at meeting people, at presenting our line of merchandise. He brought in business.” But Charles was incapable of stringing together eight solid hours of work. Either he overslept, or he was sick, or he claimed to have gotten lost on the streets of Paris. He took advances from petty cash and never paid them back, he borrowed money from the secretaries who spent a disproportionate amount of their time watching his panther body prowl the office. When the company dismissed him, some of the women employees complained.

  Another side of Charles existed which Félix knew nothing about, though later, when he learned, he was not surprised. The presence of Charles Sobhraj in Paris had not gone unnoticed by several of the copains with whom he had dwelled at Poissy. One of them, a Spainard named Porto, a grotesque giant with half his face scarred from a pot of boiling olive oil that a whore in Barcelona had thrown at him, asked Charles to join three men who were committing occasional robberies. Nothing major. Nothing dangerous. They were not overly greedy. It was sufficient to encounter a prosperous-looking man, preferably elderly, in a Métro station late at night where the sight of Porto’s hideous face and the flash of a Basque knife were enough to convince most anyone to surrender wallet and watch. Their most successful score had been the recent robbing of a baker, alone in his shop at closing time. They earned eight hundred francs for this quick and neat caper.

  Charles smiled and murmured congratulations. But eight hundred francs split three ways was minuscule reward for a risk that could bring a half century behind Poissy’s walls. As police would one day reconstruct the association, Charles offered a counterproposal. From his pocket he pulled a felt-tip pen and a piece of paper and quickly sketched the diagram of a large apartment. This, said Charles, was the home of a wealthy Paris lawyer who lived on the Avenue Foch and who had recently given a reception to which Charles had somehow gained entrance. While present, he made careful notes of possible entrances and exits, of closets that contained fur coats and dressers that nested jewel boxes. Porto stared with openmouthed fascination. This was the blueprint to a possible fortune!

  Seizing the paper, like snatching bread from a starving man’s mouth, Charles folded it up. How much would such a document be worth to Porto & Co.? The thief stammered. Charles elected to help him. The blueprint would cost precisely fifty per cent of the proceeds. And that was all Charles was selling. He would not participate in the actual burglary. And to guarantee that the profits were split equitably, Charles demanded a deposit of five thousand francs in advance. Refundable, of course, should it fail to reap the anticipated rewards. Many other opportunities existed in the same area of endeavor, said Charles, tantalizingly going no further. It was his intention, police later learned, to obtain blueprints of homes belonging to prominent people whose lives had brushed his—judges, attorneys, psychiatrists, prison officials. A dash of private and expensive revenge.

  Hélène did not know that the man who sent roses to her home and office several times a week, and who smothered her with kisses and poetry, was also a man who had spent three years in prison and was now negotiating with three ex-convicts to form a liaison dedicated to burglarizing some of the major residences of Paris. Had she been told this, she would not have believed it. Her lover was a man who walked with her on warm summer nights along a thin island in the middle of the Seine where they held one another ti
ghtly and watched the tourist boats prowl the river, accordion music floating across the water. Her lover sent telegrams at sunrise proclaiming his love. Her lover sent express letters to her office, and at lunch she read them until they were etched on her heart. “Eternal woman, little girl, you are mine,” read a typical one. “I simply cannot bear the hours we are not together. I toss in my bed unable to sleep, summoning portraits of you that fill the walls of my room. There is a god, chérie, and he sent me to you.”

  Whenever Hélène inquired about his past, Charles invented romantic adventures, set halfway around the world and therefore impossible to dissect or disprove. At given moments, he asked Hélène to believe that he was an actor in Indian films, a Saigon businessman, and a student of the law. His ambition was to become a lawyer and he was investigating the faculties of France to find the most challenging one for his intellect.

  And always, from the roses at dawn to the midnight embrace, he pressed her for marriage. Hélène demurred as best she could. It was not that she disliked the idea of spending the rest of her life in the arms of Charles Sobhraj; it was simply that more time had to pass. Her family was bedrock bourgeois, methodical people only once removed from the soil, intolerant of impulsive behavior. Her answer to Charles’ importunings was: Give me more time. We’ve known each other only a few months. Beyond that, she was fearful of telling her parents about the demanding new man in her life. On the one occasion when Hélène cautiously allowed Charles to fetch her at home—normally they rendezvoused at cafes or at Félix’s apartment—her father stared at the Oriental-looking young man like a diner presented with a spoiled fish. On his best behavior, Charles spoke trivially of the Paris summer, of Charles de Gaulle, and of his stepfather in Marseilles, who at this moment was transformed into one of France’s greatest war heroes. The meeting went well until Charles complimented the butcher on his suit of clothes, approaching the older man and fingering the cloth approvingly. He remarked that it would be an appropriate garment for “a ceremony.”