How had they ended up in Kabul? Chantal had no idea, and she wasn’t sure if Charles did either. Afghanistan had never been part of the plan, and now things were moving so fast, she didn’t know if she could keep up. She had abandoned herself to the challenge of surviving life with Charles. Since fleeing India she had lost track of all borders and distances.
Downstairs at the front desk of the Intercontinental Hotel, the manager was beginning to hint it was time for them to pay their bill and move on. Charles told her they would leave Kabul at dawn the next day to drive the 2,400 kilometres to Tehran, capital of neighbouring Iran. After six months on the run, it was to be their new home, he said.
All day they sped across seemingly endless deserts in a rented car, stopping only for dry biscuits and Coca-Cola in the village oases of a few mud houses clustered under date palms. After Kandahar, where they spent the night, they continued across the Dasht-i-Margo, the Desert of Death, dotted occasionally with the strange black tents of the Kochi tribes, until at sunset they drove into Herat, the last Afghan city before the Iranian border.
The dusty road was lined with casuarina trees and meagre, man-made streams from which women enveloped in ghostly chadors were drawing water to wash their clothes. Men squatted in groups in their baggy white trousers and grey vests. The road was crowded with horses and buggies, beautifully plumed with red and pink pompoms and ribbons. There was the smell of smoke from cooking fires and manure and dust. They would spend the night here and cross into Iran as soon as the border opened at dawn.
They parked outside the bank and went in to exchange their money, but two policemen stopped them. The car they had rented in Kabul should not have been driven out of the city limits, the police explained. Charles apologized pleasantly and promised to return it the following day.
‘We will go with you,’ said the police.
‘Fine,’ said Charles. ‘What time should we leave? Where will I find you?’
‘We will find you,’ the police said, and left them.
If they went back to Kabul they could be arrested for not paying their hotel bill and perhaps for trying to steal the car. It would mean jail. They ate a dinner of rice and meat in a chai shop. They must leave at midnight, Charles said, and drive into the desert as close to the border as possible, then cross into Iran on foot.
In little over an hour they reached Islam Qala, the Afghan border town, and the couple abandoned the car in the street. They walked into the desert. Charles said it would be easy to navigate their way across the border. It lay to the west, somewhere between where they were now and Taybad, the Iranian border town. Perhaps those were the lights in the distance. It was bitterly cold. All night they wandered under the glaring stars towards the lights of Taybad. When dawn broke there was nothing to guide them. They kept walking. It was hot now, over 100 degrees. Chantal was wilting.
‘Come on, darling. Soon we’ll be in the swimming pool of the Tehran Hilton,’ Charles said, trying to encourage her. After an hour or so she sat down. She couldn’t go on. Charles pointed to a cloud of dust in the distance, and slowly a truck came into view. He rushed over and asked the driver for water. Of course, the driver nodded, smiling and clearing his throat to spit. It was the police, the ones from Herat. ‘You said you would find us,’ Charles said with a friendly shrug.
On 3 July, Charles and Chantal were jailed in Kabul on charges of failing to pay their hotel bill, stealing a rented car, and attempting to cross the border illegally.
Once again, Charles wriggled out of jail and into a hospital. He estimated that it increased his chances of escape by about 75 per cent. But the Afghans were more thorough with their shackles than the Indians, Charles discovered as he lay on the straw pallet, both ankles chained to the iron bedstead. All that stood between him and freedom were the bored guards, one on each side of the bed, nodding off with .303 rifles between their knees.
He had got himself admitted into the hospital by duplicating the symptoms of a peptic ulcer. He had learned the trick of removing blood from his body with a syringe and vomiting it up – a relatively easy way to fake it, and superior to appendicitis symptoms because you weren’t rushed off and cut open. He would certainly have escaped that time in Delhi if he hadn’t still been weak from the operation.
Seeing the night-boy, he called out and asked him to bring some tea. Earlier the previous day, claiming to be in terrible pain, he had asked for sleeping pills. Now he had four of them, probably Largactil. One thing for which he could thank Western hippies was teaching him all about pharmaceutical drugs in Asia, where they were available over the counter without a prescription. Quaaludes, Mogadon, speed, Librium, Largactil, uppers, downers … and some overlanders actually enjoyed making themselves unconscious. Surely it was the sickness of a generation. Charles tried different kinds, different mixtures, and tested them on unwitting subjects in coffee, whisky and milk. A few downers dropped in a drink had made his getaways easier. Pharmacology had become part of his arsenal.
Now, while he waited for the boy to come back with the tea, he ground the Largactil to a powder in his hands. When the boy arrived with a battered silver tray and three glasses, Charles dropped the powder into the teapot, which he stirred and then roused the guards. ‘Hey, chai?’ Both men woke up with a start, grinned, and accepted the proffered glasses. They were not supposed to be dozing. They were big men, more than six feet, like most Afghans.
In twenty minutes they were snoring again. Charles stretched out, crawled along the floor on his hands, and just managed to reach the key ring attached to a belt. Within a few seconds he had unlocked his shackles and disappeared into the back streets of Kabul.
Still wearing the dirty prison pyjamas into which he had somehow managed to sew $300, he ran across the bridge where the carpets were hung out to dry. He stole down the steep, narrow streets of the bazaar, lined with rickety vegetable stalls and stands selling pots and pans and stuffed satin quilts, until he came to a clothing store. He pointed to the clothes worn by the proprietor.
‘How much?’ he asked in Parsee.
The man shook his head and spat fiercely on the floor. He sold only new clothes.
‘No, I don’t want new clothes. I’ll give you five American dollars for what’s on your back.’
A few minutes later, wearing a tattered striped coat, baggy grey trousers and an old turban wound around his head, he was transformed into an Afghan. He took a trishaw into the Shahr-e Naw, where the diplomatic quarters and the classier hippie hotels operated behind high-walled gardens.
He left the trishaw and walked down a footpath covered with the antique rugs and jewellery of the street vendors until he saw what he wanted, two stoned-out French boys lounging against the hood of a gleaming white Citroën DS.
‘May I speak to you?’ he said in French, his voice low and urgent.
They were surprised to hear this stocky, hawk-eyed Afghan speak their language. Charles told the two travellers a tale about how he had been stopped by the police for hash and then jumped from the police station. He offered them $200 to drive him east to the Pakistan border. They agreed.
Near the border Charles waited in the car by the side of the road until he saw a van, which he flagged down. It was full of young Westerners on their way for a holiday in India. Charles told them his colourful story about drugs and persecution. He asked them to hide him. A few minutes later Charles crossed into Pakistan’s Khyber Pass on top of the van, rolled up in a Persian carpet.
Sixteen days later, on 19 July, Charles was back in Paris. It was 8 a.m. and warm already. Bees buzzed around the boxwood hedges, and the brass doorknobs shone in the morning sun. The blinds were up in all the windows of the quiet street and one by one the cars pulled out of the driveways as residents left for work. Charles sat in the rented Mercedes opposite the house, watching the front door, waiting for Chantal’s father to leave. He knew if the old man spotted him, he would call the police.
It was dangerous for Charles to be in France now. He had been sentenced to one year’s jail in absentia for defrauding the bank. But he longed to see his baby daughter. He had a desperate plan to steal Madhu back and return with her to Asia, to reunite the little girl with her mother and rebuild his family.
Charles had also begun to form a plan to break Chantal out of jail. He would park a Volkswagen van with a trapdoor opposite her cell and tunnel under the ground into the jail. Madhu would be waiting in the van. All they needed were three false identities and they could start a new life. Madhu needed stability now; the travelling was harmful and the air-conditioning in hotels gave her colds. Charles did not want her to suffer the same insecurities he had as a child.
The door of the house opened and he saw Chantal’s father walk to the car with his briefcase and drive away. A few minutes later, Charles was ringing the doorbell.
‘Forgive me for disturbing you so early in the morning, Mrs Lemaître,’ he said, smiling reassuringly.
The woman’s mouth dropped open. Her son-in-law looked pale and gaunt.
‘Chantal is sick and they let me bring her back to France. She’s asking for you now and she wants to see Madhu. We’re at the Hilton.’
Mrs Lemaître asked Charles into the house. As she got herself ready, Charles embraced his daughter. She had grown so much in six months, and now she was walking. She looked well and happy.
‘What’s wrong with Chantal? How serious is it?’ Mrs Lemaître kept asking.
‘She’ll have to go to the hospital for tests, but I don’t think it’s too serious. Come quickly, let’s go.’ He didn’t want to give her time to think.
Twenty minutes later Charles, carrying Madhu, led Mrs Lemaître into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel and up to his empty room. He was registered in the name of a student whose passport he had stolen in Pakistan. Charles picked up the phone. ‘Hello, reception? Can you tell me if Mrs Sobhraj is with the doctor now? Yes? Thank you.’ He turned to his mother-in-law. ‘The hotel doctor is seeing her. She’ll be back in half an hour.’
Charles suggested he order breakfast from room service while they both waited for her. Mrs Lemaître accepted the invitation and Charles played happily with his daughter. He hadn’t seen her since the night he escaped from Willingdon Hospital in Delhi. Room service arrived with the breakfast tray and Charles added sugar and cream to the coffee and took a cup over to his mother-in-law. She drank it and soon collapsed on the floor.
Charles cradled his daughter against his waist and collected his small attaché case. Outside the door he hung the notice, ‘Do Not Disturb’. At the reception desk, where he had already paid two nights in advance, he told them not to wake his elderly relative who needed a long rest before taking an international flight. With the baby beside him, he drove along the Champs-Élysées and headed for the Swiss border.
It had taken Charles three weeks of evasion and adventure to return from Paris to Asia, and now he was on his way to free Chantal. From the front seat of a rented Chevrolet he watched the Pakistani landscape roll past, dusty and drab, while mangy dogs roamed on the side of the road, and in the back his daughter lay curled up on the lap of the English girl he’d hired as her nurse. He could do anything. What was an Afghan jail against Charles?
His life was charmed, he knew, something special. Back in France, he had survived a five-car pile-up in the mists of the Swiss Alps and the police had escorted him to hospital with Madhu for a check-up. Both of them were fine.
At the Yugoslav border there was another narrow escape. Madhu had urinated on his stolen American passport and the photo of himself came unstuck, which aroused the suspicions of the border guards. They had searched the car and found a dozen false passports and a set of radio microphones, which he had planned to smuggle to Chantal. They looked like fountain pens and could tune to any FM radio frequency.
The Yugoslavs had placed him under house arrest at a nearby hotel, but with little Madhu in his arms he wandered into the kitchen – searching, he said, for a special food for his child – then slipped out of the staff door. From there it had been a taxi back to Belgrade and some fast talking with friendly tourists to persuade them to smuggle him and his daughter into Trieste. Freedom again!
In Rome he bought a batch of passports on the black market and flew to Rawalpindi, where he booked into the Intercontinental Hotel. This morning he had hired an air-conditioned Chevrolet from Akbar Tours and told the driver – who, by law, came with the car – that he wanted to explore Pakistan’s tribal frontier. Now he was on the road to Peshawar, 160 kilometres to the north-west, a lawless town near the Afghan border.
As Marilyn, Madhu’s nurse, struggled with the baby’s nappies and bottles, Charles refined his jailbreak plan. He wondered whether Marilyn might, for a price, agree to get herself busted in Kabul, where she would be sent to the same jail as Chantal. He would teach her to draw up a precise set of plans of the layout. With another girl, someone to visit Marilyn and smuggle the plans out, it would be easy to tunnel inside and free his wife. All he needed was money to pay for a fast getaway car. The two Frenchmen who had helped him escape from Afghanistan would be waiting for him now in Peshawar with their Citroën. He had already offered them the job.
Charles looked at the plump Pakistani driver behind the wheel. This one would be no problem. When they stopped for lunch at a small town, Charles took the teapot from the serving tray and passed a glass to the driver.
Leaving Madhu at a cheap hotel with Marilyn, Charles walked down the narrow alleys of Qissa Khawani, the ‘bazaar of storytellers’, where the frontier tribes – the Pathans, Afridis, Tajeks, Uzbeks – and a smattering of Western junkies came to buy supplies. Under the relentless sun everyone shoved and pushed fiercely, shouting and spitting. With guns and knives dangling from their belts, their dark hooded eyes under dirty turbans, the men who strutted by ignored Charles. He felt at ease in this town, where the code of the Pathans demanded that all fugitives be granted the right of asylum. At a chemist’s he bought disposable syringes, a bottle of Largactil, and packets of Mogadon and Mandrax. The Chevrolet’s driver was already sleeping in the boot of the car, but Charles wanted to give him a shot of Largactil before dumping him on the way to their next destination, Darra, known as ‘the village of the gunsmiths’.
Charles walked back to the Park Hotel. It was so hot in the green windowless rooms that no one closed their doors. As Charles strolled through the courtyard, his glance fell appraisingly on the array of stoned overlanders stretched out on their beds. He saw a blonde girl wearing jeans. She was travelling alone and accepted his offer of a free, air-conditioned ride to Tehran. Her name was Diana and she was Dutch. Delighted with her luck, she climbed into the back seat with Madhu and Marilyn.
Charles drove south into the hard, rocky hills towards Darra, a town that had been duplicating Western armaments for over a hundred years. It was dusk. The trucks rumbled past them, painted like carousels, strung with lights and rattling with loose chrome. A caravan of camels trod in ungainly shambles on the side of the road. He drove until he came to a long, straight stretch of desert with no further signs of people, and stopped the car beside a crumbling mud hut. He could drop the driver here. By the time the man woke up they would all be lounging by the pool at the Royal Tehran Hilton. He opened the boot and immediately the stench filled his nostrils. The fat man lay in a pool of his own filth.
Charles began to lift him up, but when he saw his face, with its eyes staring unseeingly and the mouth hanging open like a door off its hinges, he realized that he was dead. The boot wasn’t airtight, so how could he have suffocated? Unless the Largactil was contaminated or, maybe, the man had a weak heart. Or the heat. It must have been hot in there.
It was irritation he felt more than anything else. Charles already had enough problems. Flies had discovered the corpse and started to buzz around his handiwork as he stood there lost in thought. Then he heard a gasp. The Dutch girl was standing behind him. ‘Diana, I told you not to get out of the car,’ Charles said.
They got back into the Chevrolet and Charles studied the map. Madhu had fallen asleep. In the now tense atmosphere of the car, Charles wondered whether Diana would tell the police. Luckily she knew nothing about him, not even his name. Still, he would have to make her feel involved, implicated, to buy her silence with fear.
They drove through the night, the country changing from desert to fields and from fields to forest. Somewhere, they crossed a bridge. Charles turned the car down a dirt track between the trees and got out. Moonlight shone across the rushing waters in a silver path. He assumed it must be the Indus river, swollen by the monsoon. Madhu and Marilyn were sprawled asleep on the back seat. He had to get rid of the body – intelligently, coolly.
‘Diana,’ he said softly, ‘lend me a hand. You’ve seen the beginning; now you must see the end.’
Charles unlocked the boot, averting his face from the smell. He dragged the body through the pine needles to the bank of the river. ‘Quick, help me undress him,’ he commanded. They stripped the body. Then Charles rolled it into the swirling waters, where it bobbed like a shining white seal before disappearing. Startled by a gasping sound, Charles turned to see Diana doubled up against a tree, vomiting.
‘It’s all over now,’ he said in a soothing voice, curling his arm around her shoulder. ‘Accidents happen. Don’t worry, no one will ever know.’
The Chevrolet continued its journey westward to Iran.
Charles walked into the lobby of the lavishly appointed Royal Tehran Hilton, owned by the Shah of Iran’s family, carrying Madhu in his arms. Marilyn trailed behind holding the baby’s gear. It was a relief to check in here after the punishing fifty-hour drive across dirt roads from Pakistan. Madhu had been restless and whining; Marilyn, increasingly unable to cope; and Diana sullen and uncooperative after the unfortunate incident with the Chevrolet driver.
Charles stopped at the desk, where he sensed something change in the clerk’s manner; a flicker of awkwardness. Charles guided Marilyn to the lift. Until yesterday everything had gone so well. The contraband passports he had picked up in Rome had been sold, and the two French travellers with the Citroën who had followed him across the border into Tehran were now standing by, ready to take him to Kabul. In order to implicate Diana in the crime, he had persuaded her to drop some Mogadons into the drink of a tourist at the bar of Tehran’s Intercontinental Hotel. Then, taking Marilyn with him, he had robbed the room. But yesterday Diana had taken fright and run away. Charles had spent most of his time since searching for her.
Up in his room Charles wondered if the police planned to arrest him. Probably some tourist had complained. Should he run? No, it would not be so serious. With cash, it was easy to smooth things out in Asia, and, anyway, Madhu made flight cumbersome. Watching Marilyn undress his sleepy child and put her in the crib, he said nothing about his apprehensions. As usual, he slept soundly.
In the morning, mist was still hanging over the Elburz Mountains. Charles could see them through the window as he was shaving, and they seemed to surround the hotel like a huge wall. Marilyn was dressing Madhu when he heard the knock at the door. He had not ordered breakfast so he knew it must be the police. Charles stood near the bathroom, naked from the waist up, watching as Marilyn put Madhu on the bed and opened the door.
A man wearing a grey suit and dark glasses came into the room. Charles saw the barrel of a machine gun pointing at him. He knew he was trapped. He would stay cool, smile, cooperate.
‘Good morning,’ he said affably. ‘You want something?’
‘Police,’ the man said.
Suddenly the room was filled with seven other men in suits and dark glasses, all carrying guns.
‘Who is this?’ asked the first man. Marilyn, in a T-shirt and panties, sat down on the bed and took the baby on her lap.
‘My daughter and her nurse. Do you mind if I finish shaving?’ Half his face was covered with foam.
‘It will have to wait.’
Smiling politely, Charles dabbed the foam off his face with the towel he was holding. Five men had stationed themselves along the plate-glass window as though they expected him to try to jump from the balcony. The one who appeared to be the boss picked up a black attaché case from the bed.
‘Open this, please,’ he ordered, gesturing at the combination lock.
‘I’m afraid it’s jammed,’ Charles said.
‘OK, we’ll blast it open,’ said the policeman, starting to take his gun from his holster.
Charles smiled again and shrugged. He flicked the combination and, opening the case, placed it on the bed. Inside were passports and valuables stolen from tourists. Several of the passports had his own photograph inside them.
‘Which one of these is yours?’
‘That is difficult to say.’ He smiled apologetically. He wasn’t worried. He had good contacts in Tehran.
‘Come with us.’
‘Certainly. Just give us a second to finish dressing.’
As Marilyn pulled on her jeans he smiled at her reassuringly. Followed by Marilyn and Madhu, Charles was escorted downstairs and out of the back entrance of the Hilton. Four black Mercedes were parked in the driveway. A few of the hotel staff members who saw what was happening shrank away as they walked by. Charles realized he was in a much worse situation than he had first thought. He was in the hands of the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police.
One of the men blindfolded him, and the car drove off. The police had the rest of his luggage in the car. When they searched it, they would find some hashish, ammunition and equipment for altering passports. Such minor infringements of the law did not interest the SAVAK. It would only be during his interrogation at their headquarters that Charles would learn why he had been picked up by the secret police.
After running away from him, Diana had spent the night with an Iranian. She happened to tell him about a Frenchman she knew only as ‘Charles’ who had smuggled a load of passports into Iran. Her lover turned out to be an agent for the SAVAK. Aware that the passports could be destined for the anti-Shah underground, he arrested Diana. After she was questioned, the raid was launched on Charles’ hotel room. It would take him more than a few hundred rials to get out of this. He was certain they would torture him first and then blast a hole in his head. Forced to sit tight and make a deal, Charles gave them the names of two Iranian anti-Shah activists. In return, SAVAK handed him over to a civilian court.
Back in Afghanistan, in her cramped, cold stone cell, the months were passing slowly for Chantal. There was still no word from Charles. She tried to be brave, to be worthy of him, but the uncertainty of her future was almost unbearable. She had no one she could talk to who would understand. She had written to Alain Benard frequently, without receiving a response.
On 30 October the Pakistani Times reported the arrest of a ‘gang of international swindlers in Tehran led by a Frenchman named Charles’. At about the same time Chantal learned that her husband had been arrested in Tehran and that Madhu, through the auspices of the French embassy, had been sent back to her grandparents in Paris.
Meanwhile the Dutch girl, Diana, had made a statement to Interpol about the death of the Chevrolet driver and the disposal of the body in the river. Charles was now sought by the Pakistani police for this alleged abduction and killing. The Chevrolet’s driver had been Mohammad Habib, thirty-five years old, the father of three children. His body was never found.
A few weeks later Chantal received a cutting from the 22 October issue of the Journal de Téhéran which reported the charges against Charles. It was the usual list of passport forgeries and tourist muggings. Charles was also being sought by Interpol, and would be returned to France to face other criminal charges. Chantal was shocked by the news and wrote to Benard. ‘What we have always feared for Charles has happened – his extradition!’ She wished she could do something. Could Benard help? ‘If you saw the face of our Charles in the picture,’ she wrote. ‘He looks exhausted. I’m afraid he has lost his will to hold on to life. I am afraid he might commit suicide.’
On 18 December, Chantal received a letter from Charles. He was sure he was going to be sent to trial ‘for another case’, this time in Pakistan. Chantal wrote to Benard: ‘I have the impression that this time Charles has reached the summit of all the idiotic things he could do. Since Delhi, he has been behaving like a moth hurtling itself towards a flame it knows will burn it after having, in desperation, torn a wing. In search of what? I have no idea. It is inexplicable. It must be some need for destruction.’
On 12 January 1973, Chantal was finally freed on bail. She would not be allowed to leave Afghanistan until she had paid a fine of 50,000 afghanis, about $1,000. It would take her family three months to bypass the stringent French regulations on the export of currency. In the intervening period, as she waited for her case to be cleared up, Chantal met a young American traveller in Kabul buying carpets and silk. They became good friends.
At the end of April, Chantal was at last allowed to go home. She had often written to Benard of how she would like to help Charles prepare his legal defence. Now she wrote: ‘My love for Charles has ripened. At present I am clear, Alain, totally clear, because I have suffered. I can’t wait to hold Charles and my child in my arms again.’
Six months later, in October 1973, a black Mercedes drove through the gates of Qasr Prison, Tehran. Minutes later it drove back out with Charles in the back. He had just finished a year’s sentence. The car swayed along mountain roads past truck wrecks and women hidden beneath their chadors carrying pitchers on their heads. Goats and hens scattered from the wheels. Charles wondered if the hawk-nosed men in the car in their suits and dark glasses would stick to the deal.
The year inside had gone smoothly and he had heard often enough from Chantal. By now she must be back in Paris with Madhu, waiting for him. But he was still afraid. These men knew he was wanted by the police in eight countries. Two of them, Afghanistan and Pakistan, shared a border with Iran.
As night fell, they reached a neat, scrubbed town lined with flags and pictures of the Shah. Charles was given chai and a kebab and put in a roadside lock-up. The next day the Mercedes sped through the desert and then past icy cabbage fields and sooty mud-hut villages. Finally, Charles noticed a long line of parked cars snaking up the mountain. He knew where he was. He had come this way many times. The Mercedes roared past the waiting line and the wayside truck-drivers cooking dinners by campfires. At the top of the hill stood a compound of tin sheds. The Mercedes pulled up and the man sitting beside him opened the door and gestured to him to get out. The man in the front heaved himself out of the passenger door. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Charles.
‘Laissez-passer,’ he said and pointed towards the customs shed. ‘Alvida.’
‘Goodbye,’ Charles said. ‘Merci.’
‘Bon voyage,’ the other man said and shook his hand. The Mercedes made a U-turn, and the two men got inside. Charles picked up his attaché case, now empty of stolen passports, and walked towards Turkey, and freedom.