loved Nguyen Khoi too much.
SEVENTEEN
Marcelle
October 4, 1933
I stretched my hands out wide on Khoi’s dining room table, enjoying the smoothness of the blood-red lacquer under my fingertips. Khoi told me that actual human blood was mixed in with the paint to make it such a color, a claim I liked to believe, even though it probably wasn’t true. It gave the piece even more history. Khoi had gone into the city to tend to some paperwork regarding the family’s factory in Nam Dinh. “The timing isn’t ideal,” he’d said after he’d received a phone call, “but we will do this again. And more often. It’s time our life in Hanoi resembled our life in Paris a bit more closely.”
Sitting at Khoi’s beautiful dining table made me think about something I’d been trying to push out of my head since arriving in Indochine, because I knew how unrealistic it was. Still, I couldn’t help but fantasize: What would it be like to eat a meal as Khoi’s wife instead of his lover? I would never know. It was the one thing I simply couldn’t will into being.
In the early 1920s a French woman married an Annamite man—the only such intermarriage in the colony, the newspapers had reported at the time. The French government intervened to stop the wedding. They succeeded the first time, but the lovebirds tried again, this time with the bride’s father declaring in writing that his daughter was of sound mind. It still remained true that while Frenchmen were allowed to impregnate any indigène woman who so much as sneezed in their direction, we French women weren’t allowed to marry their countrymen. We could only marry men like Arnaud and follow them to the colonies, provide a stable home for them, and help them be model colonists who wouldn’t grow lonely and seek local girls at night. That was our role.
But I had never been good at filling the roles assigned to me.
I heard a faint knock at the door and jumped. No one ever knocked at Khoi’s house. The door was always opened by an attentive servant before the visitor’s knuckles hit the wood. I rushed to answer it, suddenly aware that I was still wearing my dress sans undergarments. I flung the door open anyway and stared at the man in front of me, someone I never thought I’d see on Khoi’s doorstep.
“Madame Lesage boarded the morning train to Haiphong,” he said before I could bark at him.
The man’s name was Pham Van Dat, and he was the manager of the Hanoi train station. For the past two years, Khoi and I had been paying a small but regular amount for him to keep an eye on who came and went from the train station. He knew what the policeman who had killed Sinh, Paul Adrien, looked like, and he knew that if he was ever spotted, there would be a significant payout. Last month I had added two names to his watch list: Victor and Jessie Lesage. I had given him the formal portrait that had run in the newspaper when it was announced they would be coming to live in the colony. The reproduction was grainy, but Jessie was unmistakable.
“Are you certain?” I asked, after ushering him inside.
“Of course,” he replied. “And before you ask me why I appeared on Mr. Khoi’s doorstep, his valet was in the station today with his mother, helping her board a train for the coast. I heard him mention that all Nguyen Khoi’s servants had a day’s holiday.”
“But how did you know I was here?” I pressed.
“I assumed someone would be here if the servants were not,” he said. “You or Mr. Khoi.”
“So it was Jessie Lesage? You’re one hundred percent certain?” I said.
“Madame de Fabry,” he said patiently. “Please. Would I travel all the way out to Nguyen Khoi’s palace if I had any doubt? It was her. A man who was half blind would recognize her. And she was wearing a big red hat, as if she wanted to call even more attention to herself.”
“Wait,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “Did you say the morning train? Then she left hours ago.”
“Yes,” Monsieur Dat confirmed. “The nine o’clock train. It left exactly seven minutes late. No fault of mine. There was a child who refused to step away from the door. A French child.”
“But why are you telling me this just now?” I asked angrily.
“You do not pay me enough to allow me to