at all, his body heavy in the officer’s arms. He was dead. I sucked in my breath and gripped the table. This could not have been what Victor was expecting. All I had to do was write things down, he’d insisted. Secretarial work. Instead, I was looking at a dead body.
The dead man’s face as they moved him, battered and burned, was visible to all of us on the street.
I stared, frozen. I watched the police, the dead man, the Annamite men and women coming up to see, the few children whose eyes were being covered by their mothers’ hands, and then I opened my mouth and screamed, gripping my chair for support. Embarrassed, I moved my hand over my mouth to make sure I didn’t emit another sound.
I watched as one of the French policemen helped move the body, grabbing the dead man’s ankles. Together, the officers sauntered a few paces, looking as if they were holding prize game, not a human being, and deposited the man in front of the blue door. He fell with a thud, his head rolling in the direction of the café, and I could see how badly bruised it really was. The burn marks around the man’s eyes and mouth were still raw. He clearly had not been dead for long. The older policeman, who hadn’t yet touched the body, put his boot against the man’s torso, rolling it even closer to the door, exposing the back of his head, which had large patches of hair missing. From the bloody flesh that was exposed, which looked sticky and not the least bit scabbed over, I guessed it had been pulled out just a few hours ago.
“Victor,” I whispered, not sure why I said it. He certainly couldn’t help me now.
I heard another scream, and then another. A woman shouted something in Annamese, and I saw someone hurry out the door to my right. It was a young woman dressed in a brown ao. She ran to the dead man’s side, slumping against the door of the blue house. I held my breath as I watched a rush of grief hit her.
She pulled the man’s body into her lap. She was facing me now, and I saw that she was quite pretty, perhaps in her early forties, with her hair tied back at the nape of her neck. She was weeping. The three officers said nothing, stepped over her, and climbed back into their car, driving off, their speed slow and leisurely.
I removed my hand from my mouth and shook my head. She had to be his wife. “Help her!” I called out in French, taking a few steps toward them. The café server followed and pulled me back to my table, wordlessly refilling my drink. This time she gave me whiskey.
I looked at her, picked up the glass, finished it in two swallows, and held it out for yet another pour. She motioned for me to sit back down.
“Communist,” she said, refilling my glass again when I was seated. “He is a member of the Indochinese Communist Party. They want him dead for long time. Now, he dead.”
“Communist?” I whispered, looking up at her.
“Yes, communist. Men in that party getting killed now. It’s very dangerous to be in the party. Especially to be in the party and to be talkative. This one talkative.”
“It’s this dangerous?” I asked, still whispering. I knew what a problem communism was the world over, but I didn’t think that in a French colony the consequences could lead to what was in front of me.
“They want independence,” she said as another patron lifted his glass to her for a refill. “From you,” she said without glancing at me. “The police in the black car, they Sûreté générale indochinoise. Political police. Dangerous police. This is how they do it. Kill people.”
“Because the people who die want independence?”
“Yes. Independence and more. They want the workers to lead the country and they want you out. But communists, they are stupid people. They won’t have it, never. Independence. You French. You are too strong for us.”
“I’m not French,” I said. “I’m American.”
“American,” she said, stopping to think about what that meant but evidently coming up with nothing.
“The wife there,” she said, nodding toward the sobbing woman. “She must forget it. If it is not the French in Indochine, it will be another. The Chinese again. Or the British also very greedy. Worse than the French, I think. Maybe they want us, too, and