do you even know Madame de Fabry? Marcelle,” I said, my voice dropping as reality continued to hit me.
“Don’t tell the police, and I will tell you.”
“You tried to kill me!” I said, choking back something between laughter and tears. “Why shouldn’t I tell the police? About you and Marcelle!”
“I was making no attempt to kill you,” she said. “I was trying to get you to leave.”
“This house?”
“No. Indochine.”
“To go back to France?” I asked.
She nodded.
“But why?”
“Say it first. Say that you will not tell the police,” she said, crossing her thin arms defiantly.
“Fine,” I said. If she could give me reason to go to the police about Marcelle, instead, that was enough. “But you will never work another day in this house. Or in Hanoi,” I said. “Where are you from?”
“Nam Dinh.”
“You’ll be on the night train back there.”
We looked at each other, I standing above her, she sitting on the bed. I moved to the chair so I could face her, eye-to-eye.
“Marcelle wants you to return to France. You and Monsieur Lesage.”
“Yes, I gathered. Why?”
“Because you are making things worse than they were, and they were already awful.”
“In Hanoi?”
She looked at me with disdain. “On the plantations. No one in your family has ever bothered to come here, but maybe that was a good thing because now that you’re here, you’ve stripped the workers of even more, which I never imagined was possible. How can you take from people who have nothing? But you can, it turns out. You can take away their joy. Even their lives.”
“How do you know so much about the plantations? You and I have never discussed them before,” I said, not letting my mind go back to that room. To those men.
She looked at me defiantly. Her chin lifted proudly. “My brother worked on your plantations.”
“He did?” I said incredulously. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you? That he didn’t just work there, but died there? That he was kicked to death by his French overseer? That this Frenchman went to trial, one where your family brought the most expensive, aggressive lawyers from France? Even with those lawyers, he was still found guilty of manslaughter.”
“And he was imprisoned?”
“Imprisoned?” Her eyes were two black storms in her beautiful face. “No. He was not imprisoned. The overseer’s punishment, his only punishment, was a fine. He was ordered to pay my brother’s wife, his widow, five piastres. Five!” she shouted. “What is that to your family? Even for a coolie that is only a week’s pay. For you it is what? One or two of your double whiskeys?”
“Trieu. I don’t remember hearing about this,” I said, my voice falling from its fever pitch. “I’m very sorry for you. You should have told us.”
“Do you presume to know about every death that occurs on your plantations?” she spat at me. “You? Who are you, anyway? You’re just a pretty wife who thinks she’s more important than she is. Who thinks she has influence over the Michelin empire. I can tell you from years of observation that you do not. You may have gotten your husband here, but you don’t know anything about that company. There is no worse place than your plantations in Indochine. Nowhere. But you’ve already realized that. You and your husband saw it all. The rest of your family, they only hear about the terrible things that happen. The beatings, the hangings, but they can’t see it. You, you do see it, and yet you still carry on.”
“Yet you only wanted to kill me. Not Victor.”
“I was not trying to kill you,” she repeated. “I was trying to make you believe you were losing your mind again. Marcelle said that if we could do that, it would be enough to get your family to leave Indochine. That for you, for your health, Victor might leave. That little else would push him back to France. But that your well-being would.”
I looked at her in disbelief.
“What do you mean ‘losing your mind again’?”
“Marcelle has a dossier on you. Something she obtained in France. From a doctor.”
“From the Prangins Clinic?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It had a man’s name on it. I saw it once.”
“Docteur Faucheux?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, that’s it,” she said, triumphant. “A dossier from him.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, thinking of the countless hours I had spent in that man’s office.
“It’s not impossible,” she said. “As you said, money can make anything happen. She purchased it.”