said I was to give it to the contact as a bonus.
I placed it carefully inside my bag, both wishing I didn’t have to carry such a sum of money with me and reminding myself that I was foolish to let my nerves get the better of me. How many husbands let their wives be involved in their work? Especially such important work. All Marcelle did was sun herself at the club all day. She certainly wasn’t allowed to have any involvement with Arnaud’s business dealings at the chamber of commerce.
I had decided to come to Indochine, and I had to be devoted to us prospering here. I looked at my reflection and saw a very competent woman looking back at me.
“Off to the house of a hundred suns?” said Lanh when he opened the door of the Delahaye for me. I got in slowly, then sat up rigidly in the back seat.
“The what?” I asked. “The house of a hundred suns?”
“That’s what I call la gare de Hang Co,” he said, closing my heavy door. He sat down in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and gently moved the car out of our driveway, launching into the story of why he chose that moniker.
I smiled, thinking about a young, hopeful Lanh. Haiphong was just a ray, then. A simple sun ray.
At the station, Lanh didn’t leave my side until he’d made sure the stationmaster was there to take care of me. In fact, the stationmaster and a porter met the car as it pulled up in front of the elegant building, then stayed with me until the train arrived.
Once inside the black steam-engine-powered train, I again sat rigidly, my back barely grazing the seat behind me, highly aware of the amount of piastres I was carrying.
The car was half full, and I was thankful that so far no one had sat beside me, or across the aisle. I felt a breeze and looked up to see eight fans on the carriage’s ceiling, one on either side of the four round light fixtures. The walls were a polished wood, the windows large and separated by decorative mirrored paneling—it looked as elegant as any train I’d ridden in France, perhaps even nicer.
A few men in light traveling suits boarded, hanging their hats on the hooks near every window. I watched for other female passengers, but there was only one in the car, and she seemed to be accompanying her husband. I kept my head in my book, Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which I’d brought with me from France.
As the steam engine hissed and the train started to move, the wheels chugging beneath us, I turned to watch the house of a hundred suns slowly disappearing, and then the city of Hanoi receding, too, as the train made its way to the mile-long Paul Doumer Bridge. In the distance I could see a tennis club, home to a game that was as popular in Indochine as it was at home. The train pushed past it quickly, and the houses and buildings thinned out even more as we started the bridge crossing. Below us flowed the Red River, palm trees leaning from its banks. The water, which looked murky during the day, especially from a distance, looked bright and dusted in yellow sunlight as we rode over it.
Beyond the river, the view gave way to rice paddies, the earth tamed into squares, the people working the land bent over, shielded by their conical hats while their feet sank in the mud. The rice paddies were almost an iridescent green, the plants pointing straight up into the sunny sky.
I didn’t close my eyes on the four-hour journey, as the sight of the countryside proved to be very calming. But eventually open space gave way to the sights of a city and the nerves crept my way again. When we stopped, I rushed off the train, the first to disembark. I reached for my bag, ignoring the porters trying to help me, and hurried across the station lobby’s marble-tiled floor.
I still had three hours before I had to meet the recruiter, but I quickly hailed one of the waiting rickshaws, climbed in with the driver’s help, and turned to look back at the facade of the small station. This particular sun ray was bright yellow.
After a quick ride through the city, which felt tiny after Hanoi, I checked into the hotel, the Hôtel du Commerce, an