affairs with local women in Burma. He even admitted to impregnating a particularly young one and having to pay her family off. We both accepted these not-so-hidden activities as part of our lives. He wasn’t loyal, Arnaud, and of course neither was I, but he was smart and fair. And even knowing that he would lose me completely to Khoi when we went, he still brought me to Indochine.
In February of 1931, Khoi and I finally found a policeman who had been working in the station at Haiphong the night Sinh died. For a fee, he gave us the dossier of the man who he was sure had shot Sinh. This man, Paul Adrien, was no longer living in Indochine. He had sailed back to France the year before. Anne-Marie, it seemed, would have to be the one to find him.
But she was proving very good at finding things. When the private secretary of André Michelin was no longer employed, as her boss had died in April of ’31, Anne-Marie located and befriended her, with the help of some sizeable bribes. This led her to discover a letter that a senior official in the Sûreté générale indochinoise, the secret police, had sent to André Michelin, in response to one of his telegrams.
“The boy in question will be banned from ever setting foot in France again. Your niece will be banned from ever coming to the colony. All parties will be the better for it. And from now on,” the letter read, “as you requested, we will be in touch with your assistant, Victor Lesage.”
NINE
Jessie
September 18, 1933
“Where shall I deliver this note?” asked Lanh politely as he took the small white envelope, my initials engraved on the back.
“To the home of the president of the chamber of commerce, Arnaud de Fabry. It’s for his wife, Marcelle. Do you know the address? I’m afraid I haven’t had time to find out.”
“I know it,” said Lanh with a smile. “I will take it there now.”
I looked at the envelope, white against his white gloves, a perfect image of the way two women began a friendship. But that was not the purpose of the letter. “Thank you. Please, if you can, make sure that it is delivered to Madame de Fabry herself, not to a servant.”
“Of course,” said Lanh, turning toward the front door. “Even if she isn’t in, I will wait until she is.”
I had hoped to meet Marcelle at the club, which I had visited every day since she’d called on me, but she was never there, morning or night. Victor had left on his long journey down to the plantations, and I had no one to confer with. See her as soon as possible, Victor had said. Do anything you can. He wanted to help, but he no longer had time. In the south, there was even more for him to worry about. He was finally going to see the plantations, to meet the two men running them and the thousands more working them. I had to deal with the question of Marcelle de Fabry alone.
This was not how I had dreamt about my time in Indochine beginning. It was supposed to be a safe world. A reprieve from Paris. Instead, everything that had gone wrong in Paris seemed like it had followed me across the ocean. Switzerland had finally started to feel far in the past, but here it was again. The memories had stowed away on the ship, refusing to be forgotten.
I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that my face had lost its color. I pulled my hair away from my face. It looked suddenly longer and unstyled. Stringy. I inspected myself from another angle, but I still looked lost and dead behind the eyes. I looked like my mother. If there was anyone on earth whom I could not resemble, it was my mother. And if there was anything I liked to think about less than Switzerland, it was her. Both of my parents.
I ran out of the room and let my shoes clack down the stairs the way Lucie did. It was not ladylike, but there was something rather satisfying about the sound. I was in Indochine, and even if my time here had not started off well, I could change things quickly. I had certainly proven to be the master of my own destiny over the years. I had put myself through school, then found a way to New York, to Paris, into