Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  En famille, they spent the summer months of 1971 in Hong Kong, where Hélène at first reveled in a life of hotel luxury, with room service obediently bringing the infant meals, and boutiques crowded with beautiful silk blouses and jewelry that could be charged to the hotel account. Silks at her breast and jade at her neck could not, however, conceal the disturbing signs that her marriage was collapsing. Charles never told her what he was doing in Hong Kong, nor would he answer her pleas to let her participate in his work, and, most critically, he was indifferent to her sexual hunger. When he was away “on business,” Charles wrote hugely romantic letters to his wife, remembering moments of passion, anticipating new ones yet to come. But upon his physical return to Hélène, he usually murmured about his fatigue, kissed the baby, and fell asleep on his side of the bed without even an arm outstretched to pillow his wife’s frustration. If Hélène initiated talk of sex, and the lack thereof, he snapped, “You are more woman than mother—I knew it!” To which Hélène shot back, “I can be both, can’t I?”

  But the answer, in Charles’ abnormal reasoning, was no. He wanted the madonna, not the whore; the Great Mother, not the Bad Woman. Each woman who came into his life was compared subconsciously to Song, the mother for whom he held complex love-hate. And if that woman passed muster, as Hélène apparently did, and was temporarily awarded the role of maternal goddess, then she could not hope to last very long in the pantheon.

  In June, Charles moved his wife and daughter to a hotel in Macao, where he could be nearer to the casino and not have to take the commuter hydrofoil from Hong Kong. He directed Hélène to wear her most stylish gowns and jewels and to hover in glamour behind his gambling chair, perhaps bringing him good fortune or, more pointedly, enhancing his desired image as an exotic international player who was at home in Monte Carlo or London and who was thus entitled to substantial deference and credit at this end of the world. Hélène performed her role well; she knew that the men in the casino looked at her approvingly. But on the nights when she wearied of posing as an objet d’art and returned to the hotel room, Charles did not even note her absence, so consumed was he with the lure of the cards.

  “I won twenty-two thousand dollars last night,” whooped Charles one near dawn, showering bank notes onto his wife’s groggy body. But two weeks later, he was loser by more than thirty thousand dollars. The jewels disappeared from Hélène’s case, sold to pay gambling losses, even his daughter’s pearl necklace. When Hélène beseeched her husband to stop playing baccarat, he swore at her. She had no sympathy. She was selfish. She put him in such a foul mood that it was no wonder he lost at cards. What else could he have expected from a girl who was reared in the sticks outside Paris? He would have dispatched her back to Paris a long time ago were it not for the baby. “I’m looking for a new mama for Shubra,” he often taunted, “and when I do …” The sentence always dangled, menacingly. Finally Hélène had enough and wrote her parents a desperate letter, asking them to cable air fare home to Paris.

  Back came a prompt answer. The butcher and his wife could not afford to send money. Their counsel was for Hélène to go to the French Embassy and ask for help. When she read the letter, Hélène knew the advice was sound but realized that she dare not risk presenting herself to French authorities. Already Charles had moved her and the baby out of one hotel in the middle of the night, without paying the bill, and now another simmering manager was calling her room several times a day demanding payment. “My husband is away for the day,” she had learned to say, haughtily. “Upon his return, the bill will be settled promptly.” If Hélène went to the French Embassy, perhaps they would discover her part in fraud and call the Hong Kong police. Scenarios of peril are not difficult to imagine in a city where intrigue seems to wait behind every door.

  In mid-June, abandoned at the Lisboa Hotel in Macao, Hélène was at nadir. The baby would not eat and was too thin. Hélène could not shake dysentery. There was no money, and room service rarely bothered to deliver her orders. When a telegram came from Charles saying he was at a hotel in Delhi and would be there several more weeks, Hélène felt panic. Then came a cabled money order with enough to tide her over a short while. While she waited for her husband to return, Hélène began writing letters, pouring out bewilderment, pain, and pleas for a change. These would one day become part of police files in Delhi and Paris, giggled over by secretaries and translators, and revealing of the frustration of a young woman who felt like a piece of left luggage.

  On one single day, June 20, 1970, Hélène wrote four desperate and impassioned letters to Charles, her tears actually falling on the pages and staining them. In each she pleaded for him to return and rescue his wife and daughter from “the psychological hell of Macao.” She revealed her sexual frustration over the weeks, sometimes months, of sleeping alone. She speculated that he was in the arms of other women while in pursuit of his mysterious “business” affairs. She begged him to abandon his gambling, his “violence” toward her, his dreams of great wealth. All she and the baby wanted, wrote Hélène, was for Charles to be with them; a thatched hut on a beach would serve as well as a palace. And in a poignant postscript to the fourth letter, written after midnight, Hélène cried out, “Help us, Charles! In the name of God, remember that you put us in this prison.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As Hélène suffered the twin demons of loneliness and sexual rejection, Charles was planning a robbery of such audacity and theatricality that a ballad would be sung on the streets of Delhi to mark it. According to his own statement made later to police, the seeds were sown in Macao when his luck turned bleak and the cards dealt him in baccarat refused to total the winning combination of nine. When his losses soared past $40,000, and the casino refused further credit, and the eyes of the pit bosses began to narrow and harden, Charles said he was approached by an Englishman offering sympathy. Polished and highly respectable-looking, the man called himself Maurice. He wore both a pinkish face and an attitude of complete serenity, as if earthquakes were only fissures to step across. He laid on a few names of mutual interest, including that of Porto, the scarred Spaniard, whose affinity for tempestuous women had finally resulted in a fatal stab wound to his abdominal aorta. Porto had bled to death in an alleyway near Pigalle. Charles murmured his sympathy, upon which Maurice suggested it was wasted. “Porto was planning to kill you, did you know that?” asked Maurice. Charles sighed. He did not appreciate violence.

  Maurice proposed to engage Charles as subcontractor for a major robbery which was, for all intents and purposes, already worked out. It would require skill, agility, a flair for drama; it would not require harm to anyone, if orders were followed. The rewards were potentially enormous. When Charles agreed, Maurice advanced him enough money to get the casino goons off his back, these being men who make IOU collectors in Las Vegas appear almost godly. Moreover, Charles gathered, Maurice was well enough connected in Macao circles to offer his word as collateral for repayment of the gambling losses.

  The summer months of 1971 were crowded with travel, logistics, and shopping. In Delhi, Charles and Maurice lived lavishly at the Oberoi-Intercontinental under assumed names while the Ashoka Hotel and its jewelry stores were scrutinized. They left in the middle of the night without paying the bill, Charles having learned how to abandon an inexpensive suitcase and a few dispensable items of clothing in a hotel room so as to keep chambermaid suspicion from being aroused. In Teheran, Charles would later testify, he purchased a pneumatic drill, flashlights, walkie-talkies, and other implements. The quality of merchandise available in Teheran was considered by the underworld superior to that of any Asian city. And in Karachi, Charles engaged two associates. Both were French, both trailed substantial criminal records including participation in robbery and murder, and both were named Pierre. They became, in Charles’ argot, Pierre le Premier and Pierre le Deuxième.

  By late October, the scenario had been written, polished, and rehearsed, with but one last chore to accomplish. From a Delhi printe
r who did not question what certain customers requested him to accomplish, Charles obtained calling cards of the highest quality. They introduced in discreet raised script, “J. Lobo, Director, The Casino at Macao.” On a late October night in 1971, Charles dropped one on the silver tray of a waiter in the Ashoka Hotel’s Club Rouge et Noir. Next to it he placed a twenty-rupee note. And he directed that the card be delivered to the night club’s struggling American dancer, performing tedious homage twice nightly to the gods of India.

  After an hour of trying to force the drilling bit through the thick floor of Room 289 in the Ashoka Hotel, Charles swore and silenced the machine. Pierre le Premier had another drill in his sack, but it was too noisy for use at 2 A.M. The decision was made to wait until the morning, when construction work elsewhere in the building would absorb the noise.

  On her bed, La Passionara summoned a shred of hope. Perhaps these dangerous men were going to leave and return at sunrise. She tried to keep her voice calm. “I think that is a good idea,” she said, encouragingly. “I need some rest for my performances.” Charles smiled and shook his head to stick a pin in that balloon. No. They would not be leaving. They would pass the rest of the night in the hotel room, one resting, the other spelling as guard, until dawn. “I think,” said Charles, “that you realize now we are serious businessmen. I do not believe you will cry out for help or do anything foolish. Because if you make a single sound, we will tie you up.” He stared at the dancer with such intensity that she felt not only terrified but naked.

  At 7:30 A.M., La Passionara swam out of a half-sleep and saw Charles sitting beside her on the bed. He wished her a good morning and directed that she order tea and toast—for two—from room service. When the waiter knocked, Pierre le Premier hid in the bathroom and Charles sat casually on the sofa, as if a contented lover or an early visitor. Nonetheless, he watched his hostage with a force that convinced La Passionara she would be shot if she so much as arched an eyebrow.

  Nourished by the light breakfast, the two men waited until 9 A.M. when the sounds of hammers and electric saws could be heard elsewhere in the hotel. Then they recommenced their own drilling, fighting the thick stubborn floor for twenty-minute bursts, waiting to let the machines cool and for Pierre to check the corridors outside to make sure the drilling noise had not aroused anyone’s interest. From time to time Charles spoke into a walkie-talkie, informing the dancer that a second accomplice—Pierre le Deuxième—was stationed in the hotel as guard and lookout. At one point in the morning, Charles laughed. “The ceiling in the jewelry shop below is shaking like an earthquake,” he said, as if delivering a news bulletin. “But nobody is paying attention to it.” When a bearer came to clean the hotel room, La Passionara went to the door and delivered the lines that Charles had given her, that she was ill and did not want to be disturbed. As she spoke, Charles stood behind the door and held a gun a few inches from the dancer’s liver.

  For most of this second day, the two men drilled, cursed, and choked on dust, menacing the hostage occasionally with a gun, or a knife, or, at one point, the drill itself. And at each mealtime, they instructed her to order from room service, being careful to replace the carpet over the drilling site. “Do you have to pay for this?” asked Charles when lunch arrived. No. Meals were in her contract. Charles nodded approvingly, as if he did not want the young woman to bear the expense of his board.

  But by dusk, as the purple haze of cooking fires fell over Delhi like a highwayman’s cloak, and the sounds of militant rallies and marches to gather steam for the defeat of Pakistan swirled about the city, the first drilling bit snapped in two. Then a second. They simply could not penetrate the floor of Room 289. Frustrated, Charles pulled a building plan of the hotel from his briefcase and pored over it. He found a fallback position. An air-conditioning duct seemed to lead from the second floor to the ceiling just above the jewelry shop. Both men were slim enough to squeeze through the foot-wide passageway. Anticipating a chill, Charles demanded sweaters from La Passionara. Then he tied her to the bed, spread-eagled, strips of sheet fastening her arms and legs to the four corners. A gag was stuffed in her mouth to discourage screams. Tears streamed down her face, and for the first time in her life Esther Markowitz felt completely helpless, caught up in a situation over which she had no control and no options.

  While Pierre le Premier stayed in the hotel room and watched La Passionara, Charles located the air-conditioning duct in the corridor. But after ten minutes of study he decreed that it was too narrow to accommodate even his slim frame. He reported this disappointing news to his accomplice, then sat down on the sofa, cupping his head in his hands.

  Pierre offered the suggestion that a hand grenade could be dropped down the air-conditioning duct. There were two flaws in the idea, answered Charles sarcastically. Number One: they did not have a hand grenade. And Number Two: it would not only blow up the jewelry store and probably send gems raining all over this end of the hotel, it would also summon half the hotel staff. Suddenly Charles snapped his fingers. Acid! A powerful etching acid could eat its way through the marble floor in La Passionara’s room, quietly, perfectly! He looked at his watch. It was a little past six in the early evening. Stores were closed. The blackout would be in effect again. It would be impossible to locate the right kind of acid until the next morning. “So,” said Charles, once again regaining his control, “we will stay another night with the internationally acclaimed dance star.”

  La Passionara, now untied, cried out, surprised that her voice would contain such authority. “But I must dance tonight!” she said. “Two shows!” It was Saturday, and the dancer knew that a group of friends from a classical music study group were planning to attend. Afterwards there was to be a midnight supper at a cafe in Delhi where hundreds of thousands of glass beads dangled in pink and amber strings from the ceiling, and where the few cabaret performers in the city went to unwind after performance.

  Charles gave a Gallic shrug and turned his palms upward. “Call the director and tell him you have the curse,” he said. La Passionara shook her head anxiously. “That’s not reason enough to cancel,” she said. “The show must go on—that is the code of all performing artists.”

  “If you dance tonight,” answered Charles with the hint of a tease, “it will be in this room—and only for me. Call the club director and cancel.”

  “He would never believe me,” pleaded the dancer. If she did that, the hotel would send a doctor to the room to examine her. The only reason a dancer would cancel a performance would be a broken leg. At that, Pierre le Premier smiled. In his eyes, La Passionara saw the ability to accomplish just such an excuse. Now she began to negotiate. Had she not obeyed every dictum thus far? Had she not remained silent, not interfering with their varied labors? Her entire life was devoted to dance, and on this night many important people had booked tables to see her. “Please,” she begged, “please let me dance.” If the two men chose to, they could occupy the best seats adjoining the stage, and, if necessary, Charles could train his pistol on her as she danced.

  For a few moments, Charles apparently toyed with the absurd suggestion. La Passionara sensed her captor’s indecision, and it was enough to give her fantasies full rein. Even with Charles sitting at ringside, surely there would be an opportunity to escape. She raced through the act in her mind. At several moments, her choreography whirled her past a carved teakwood screen. Perhaps she could detour behind it and yell for help. Or, if all else failed, she could simply fly headlong into the arms of a patron and scream.

  Charles shattered her scenarios. If he permitted the show to go on, then not only would he and Pierre occupy a prominent table, there would be several other accomplices scattered about the room. All of them would carry weapons. “If you made trouble,” said Charles, “a lot of shooting might occur, and a lot of innocent people, particularly you, would get hurt.” La Passionara chewed on this.

  “Would you really shoot me?” she asked.

  Charles nodded matter-of-factly. H
e hoped such tragedy would not happen, he went on, for he was opposed to violence, and he had come to like the American woman. Up to this point, she had caused no trouble.

  “Where would you shoot me?” asked La Passionara, pushing him a little.

  “There,” said Charles, gesturing at her heart. “I would not disfigure your face, or your legs. I have respect for them.” Pierre laughed. He heard a shade of gallantry in Charles’ answer, and he wondered what his superior saw in this fluttery, silly, long-in-the-tooth dancer. If he were in command, he would have stabbed her long ago.

  Charles ended the negotiations. No. He could not permit La Passionara to perform. He was tired, his nerves were taut, he could not tolerate a new risk. Moreover, it was not his choice to make. He was part of a “larger organization” that had conceived the undertaking. Le Passionara gathered that he was speaking of something akin to the Mafia, although he did not use its name. All he would say was that the “organization” imposed a code of honor on its employees, and Charles’ honor depended upon his successful completion of this robbery.