abandon my post and risk being fired. I just finished my work. As soon as I did, I came here. By bus. There was a chicken on it. It wasn’t pleasant.”
We paid him plenty, but I couldn’t argue now.
“When is the next train to Haiphong?” I asked.
“Tonight,” he said, adjusting his tie. I was very happy he had thought to change out of his uniform. “It’s a night train. Very slow, with a long stop in Hai Duong. You won’t arrive in Haiphong until morning.”
“I’ll be on it,” I said, then thanked him. “Wait here,” I added. I ran upstairs and took a handful of piastres out of the bag of notes Khoi kept in his dresser.
“Thank you,” I said, pressing them into his hands. “And next time, just leave your post.”
EIGHTEEN
Marcelle
October 5, 1933
I was groggy when the train pulled into Haiphong shortly after seven in the morning. After leaving Khoi’s, I’d had just enough time to rush home and change my dress. I’d left Khoi a note saying that I was spending the night on the coast, but didn’t elaborate. I knew he would think I was acting too hastily, that Jessie was probably just taking a train to explore her new country. But I knew it was more than that. She was not the type to sightsee in Haiphong, nor was she of the character to travel alone for no reason. She was going to Haiphong to do something for Michelin.
I had been to Haiphong many times over the last couple of years. The city, just east of Hanoi, was where all large ships traveling to the north of the country docked. It was also where Sinh had been killed, and where most people accused of communist activity were detained upon entry to Indochine. The poorest areas around Nam Dinh and Nghe An, also in the north, were still considered the largest red threats, but the party, even though they’d been forced to go underground, was spreading throughout Indochine, all the way to the edge of the sea. The party’s leaders in the north and elsewhere were educated men and women from the upper middle class, their members urban petit bourgeois and rural peasants. And an increasing number of those peasants had worked on plantations. The north was certainly prime recruiting ground for Michelin. In the 1920s, the truth of what life was really like on the plantations, the horrors, didn’t make it up north very fast, as the plantation recruiters had been able to sign hundreds of illiterate men to three-year agreements, which had no out clauses at all, except by escape or suicide. But when the first group of men arrived home at the end of the 1920s—a much smaller group than had left due to the high number of deaths—they brought the truth of life on a Michelin plantation with them. If they hadn’t interacted with underground communist cells when they were on the plantations, they were waiting for them when they got home.
I was the first passenger off the train at 7:20. I grabbed my small bag from the porter and hurried out of the yellow-painted station. With its palm trees in front and white stucco details, it looked as if it should be in Nice. Of course, I knew that I, too, looked as if I should be in Nice.
A driver in a private car tried to wave me over as soon as I emerged from the station. I would rather have taken a pousse-pousse, but I knew I could be fighting time. I had already cursed myself on the train for not driving, though I was a decidedly terrible driver.
“L’Hôtel du Commerce, xin vui long,” I said. “Please.”
“Oui, oui, madame,” he responded, stepping on the gas as we roared off in the direction of the famously beautiful hotel. Jessie Lesage was undoubtedly staying there. Anyone who could afford it did.
As the man drove, I stared at every Western woman I saw, but there were not many on the streets at such an early hour. Suddenly, the car turned sharply off the boulevard Paul-Bert and squeezed into a road barely wide enough for it.
“Why are you taking the back streets?” I shouted to the driver. “Please stay on the main road!”
“Quicker here, madame,” he said in French, navigating a bend expertly.
“I don’t like this route,” I insisted. “Please go back to boulevard Paul-Bert.” Jessie had only been to Haiphong when she arrived, and I doubted she’d seen more than the route from the