Were Victor and Lucie going to speak to him when they returned to the station? I wondered. Had they spoken to him before they disappeared?
The stationmaster had never seemed like a cruel man, so for him to act in that manner meant he had to have been instructed to do so by Trieu. But why?
The only thing I could think of, the only link I could imagine between us, was the communists. The list of names. Maybe she knew that I had contributed to their deaths. Maybe one of them meant something to her.
I couldn’t feel the joy I wanted to about Lucie and Victor being accounted for because everything else around me was still tainted by Victor’s actions on the plantation. And my insufficient response since.
“Lanh, do you know the stationmaster here in Hanoi? Pham Van Dat is his name. Are you acquainted with him?” I asked as the market’s fruit vendors came into view.
“Acquainted, no,” said Lanh, slowing down. “But I do know that he’s permanently available to the highest bidder. Why do you ask?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied, starting to understand.
When the car was parked, Lanh asked if I felt strong enough to walk. I nodded. My vision was still a bit blurred, and my body weak from panic, opium, and the cocktail of poison that I guessed Trieu had given me this morning and perhaps every morning for weeks, but I was no longer fearful. My head felt straight for the first time in months.
On foot, Lanh supporting my weight with his arm, we pushed through the jumble of shoppers and fruit and vegetable sellers.
“How will we find her?” I asked.
“We will just have to be observant,” he said, gazing around. “Don’t look only for her face. Focus on people who move like Trieu. Look for her rigid posture.”
We stayed in that corner of the market for ten minutes, but as Lanh gestured for me to move on, I felt a sudden wave of nausea. I rushed to the edge of the crowd for more air, but quickly stopped in my tracks. Lanh grabbed me as I was starting to sway.
“I found her,” I whispered.
We both looked where I pointed, Lanh still gripping my shoulders protectively. Trieu was there, in her beautiful blue ao, with a bag of leafy vegetables under her arm, speaking to Marcelle de Fabry.
THIRTY-THREE
Jessie
November 20, 1933
I had never been inside Trieu’s bedroom. Almost two months in the house and I had never set foot in any of the servants’ rooms except Cam’s, since it adjoined Lucie’s. It was very neat. Spotless. There was a small bed, the covers pulled tight, a table and a chair pushed in as far as it could go, and a dresser with a mirror above it. In the closet, Trieu’s clothes hung neatly, her shoes spaced a few inches apart on the floor. Flinging open the closet door was the first thing I had done when I’d walked into her room.
I didn’t know how long she would be at the market or if she would even come to her room when she returned. But I was not leaving it until she did. I looked at her small clock on her bedside table. It was nearly four.
Trieu knew Marcelle de Fabry. I was aware they had met before, the day I’d been in bed after seeing the dead man, my second day in Hanoi. But had they known each other before that? I looked at the dresser again. Trieu’s hairbrush lay there, but nothing else. Not one photo, not one hairpin, nothing that revealed the true character of the woman I had trusted so implicitly. It occurred to me that though she had undressed me every day since I’d arrived, listened to my conversations, knew my food preferences, my sleeping patterns, my nervous tics, I had no idea who she was. I hadn’t bothered to learn anything. Who had I become that I hadn’t asked her a thing about herself besides her name? Had I lost my sense of humanity in the pecking order that the French imposed in Indochine? But even if I had, surely that wasn’t enough to make Trieu want to poison me. Or kill me.
Why would she despise me that much? I kept coming back to the men at Dau Tieng.
When I heard footsteps on the stairs, I looked at my watch, quickly flipping it to see the face. I had been in her room for