A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  “Even me,” I murmured.

  Khoi did fall asleep then, but I was too restless to join him. Instead, I put Anne-Marie’s letter in my pocket and had my driver take me home.

  When I walked inside, the first thing I saw was a letter on the ground. I bent down and saw that it was from Pham Dat. The stationmaster. I ripped it open: “I took your friend on a wild ride at the station today. She was on her way to Vinh. She never made it. You’ll be pleased by the outcome. PD.”

  I read the words again. “She never made it.” What had he done to Jessie?

  I had to get to the station.

  I ran out of the house and got in my little car, ready to drive it myself.

  I wasn’t a block from the house when I saw someone running at me, sprinting. I gasped and stepped on the brakes. I had nearly hit a woman. When she turned, I saw that she’d stepped close to the car on purpose. She came up to my door, and I rolled down my window.

  “We need to talk,” she said. “Now. But not here.”

  I nodded and pointed to the seat beside me. Pham Dat would have to wait.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Jessie

  November 20, 1933

  “Where is she right now?” I asked Lanh, who was watching the river as it moved slowly toward the Gulf of Tonkin. “Trieu. Where is she?”

  “At the house, I believe,” he said. “Shall we go? I have a feeling we might just find Monsieur Lesage and Lucie there, too.”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice finally sounding stronger.

  Lanh stood up and helped me into the back seat. We drove in silence, my mind flooded with memories of everything that had happened since we’d arrived. I looked down at my hand, my right one still bare. That, sadly, was not a hallucination.

  “When we arrive at the house, why don’t I venture inside first and see who is home?” Lanh suggested. “If your husband and Lucie are in, or Trieu, I will come fetch you. But if they’re not, there’s no reason for you to have to move back and forth. You are still weak.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, that’s a good idea,” I said. I was desperate to see Victor and Lucie again, but Lanh was right. If they weren’t there, I didn’t want to leave the car.

  When we reached the driveway, Lanh exited, closing the door softly, and went inside. He was gone only a few moments and then came back outside at a run.

  “Monsieur Lesage and Lucie are not there. Cam said that about a half hour ago, they came home from the station, very worried about you, but then left again.”

  “Left! Why would they leave?” I exclaimed. “Where did they go?” I was flooded with relief that they were together, and safe, but shaken that we had just missed them and now they were gone again.

  “Cam said they returned to the station to see if you might have gone back there, and to get the bags, which thankfully didn’t make it on the train without you. Cam will go there now and let them know that you’re with me. And that you aren’t ill anymore. Then you can all meet back at the house.”

  “That sounds fine,” I said, leaning against the window. “I’m relieved they’re all right. Though I still can’t understand why they ran off.”

  Lucie had never run away from me before, even as a toddler. But there had been a time when one of my youngest sisters, Josephine, had run away under my charge. There were so many children to watch, and I had always been able to keep them together, but that summer day, Jo had managed to escape. It took me hours to find her, but I finally did, on the grounds of the agricultural institute. She was holding the hand of a woman who went to school there. One of the very few.

  “I’ve found a new mother,” she’d said when I’d run to her. There weren’t tears in her eyes, just a look of determination plastered on her face.

  “Do you need a new mother?” the young woman had said to her, looking at me with concern.

  “I’m thirteen years old,” I’d replied with disdain. “She’s seven. She’s my sister, not my child.”

  “Of course,” she’d said, patting Jo on the head. “Why don’t you go with your sister now?” she’d said, letting go of her hand.

  Josephine had cried, had tried to hold on to the pretty woman, but she had scurried off, clearly not wanting to spend a moment more with us. We were dressed poorly. We weren’t bathed. We were not the kind of children people were drawn to.

  “I know it’s awful at home,” I’d said to Jo, hugging her tightly when we were alone again. “But I’ll get you out one day. I swear to you. You just have to wait a little longer.” I had wanted it to be sooner. I had tried to do it with my teacher’s salary, but it wasn’t enough. It had taken Victor and his money.

  “Trieu,” I heard Lanh say, bringing me back to the present. “She’s not at home either,” he said without turning around. “Diep, the cook, said she was at the market. The one near Truc Bach Lake.”

  “Let’s go there then,” I said as Lanh turned the car around quickly. “And Lanh?”

  “Yes, Madame Lesage?” he said as he accelerated even more.

  “I do know the name of our cook,” I said, managing a smile.

  “Of course,” said Lanh, turning left from our street, accelerating on the wider avenue.

  But I hadn’t known the name of the stationmaster until today, the man who had lied to me with such a straight face.

  Were Victor and Lucie going to speak to him when they returned to the station? I wondered. Had they spoken to him before they disappeared?

  The stationmaster had never seemed like a cruel man, so for him to act in that manner meant he had to have been instructed to do so by Trieu. But why?

  The only thing I could think of, the only link I could imagine between us, was the communists. The list of names. Maybe she knew that I had contributed to their deaths. Maybe one of them meant something to her.

  I couldn’t feel the joy I wanted to about Lucie and Victor being accounted for because everything else around me was still tainted by Victor’s actions on the plantation. And my insufficient response since.

  “Lanh, do you know the stationmaster here in Hanoi? Pham Van Dat is his name. Are you acquainted with him?” I asked as the market’s fruit vendors came into view.

  “Acquainted, no,” said Lanh, slowing down. “But I do know that he’s permanently available to the highest bidder. Why do you ask?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, starting to understand.

  When the car was parked, Lanh asked if I felt strong enough to walk. I nodded. My vision was still a bit blurred, and my body weak from panic, opium, and the cocktail of poison that I guessed Trieu had given me this morning and perhaps every morning for weeks, but I was no longer fearful. My head felt straight for the first time in months.

  On foot, Lanh supporting my weight with his arm, we pushed through the jumble of shoppers and fruit and vegetable sellers.

  “How will we find her?” I asked.

  “We will just have to be observant,” he said, gazing around. “Don’t look only for her face. Focus on people who move like Trieu. Look for her rigid posture.”

  We stayed in that corner of the market for ten minutes, but as Lanh gestured for me to move on, I felt a sudden wave of nausea. I rushed to the edge of the crowd for more air, but quickly stopped in my tracks. Lanh grabbed me as I was starting to sway.

  “I found her,” I whispered.

  We both looked where I pointed, Lanh still gripping my shoulders protectively. Trieu was there, in her beautiful blue ao, with a bag of leafy vegetables under her arm, speaking to Marcelle de Fabry.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Jessie

  November 20, 1933

  I had never been inside Trieu’s bedroom. Almost two months in the house and I had never set foot in any of the servants’ rooms except Cam’s, since it adjoined Lucie’s. It was very neat. Spotless. There was a small bed, the covers pulled tight, a table and a chair pushed in as far as it could go, and a dresser with a mirror above it. In the closet, Trieu’s clothes hung neatly, her shoes spaced a
few inches apart on the floor. Flinging open the closet door was the first thing I had done when I’d walked into her room.

  I didn’t know how long she would be at the market or if she would even come to her room when she returned. But I was not leaving it until she did. I looked at her small clock on her bedside table. It was nearly four.

  Trieu knew Marcelle de Fabry. I was aware they had met before, the day I’d been in bed after seeing the dead man, my second day in Hanoi. But had they known each other before that? I looked at the dresser again. Trieu’s hairbrush lay there, but nothing else. Not one photo, not one hairpin, nothing that revealed the true character of the woman I had trusted so implicitly. It occurred to me that though she had undressed me every day since I’d arrived, listened to my conversations, knew my food preferences, my sleeping patterns, my nervous tics, I had no idea who she was. I hadn’t bothered to learn anything. Who had I become that I hadn’t asked her a thing about herself besides her name? Had I lost my sense of humanity in the pecking order that the French imposed in Indochine? But even if I had, surely that wasn’t enough to make Trieu want to poison me. Or kill me.

  Why would she despise me that much? I kept coming back to the men at Dau Tieng.

  When I heard footsteps on the stairs, I looked at my watch, quickly flipping it to see the face. I had been in her room for over an hour.

  I watched as she opened the door. It was a very small room, she would see me in seconds, but for these few moments, I was watching her and not the other way around.

  “Madame!” she screamed as soon as she looked up. “What are you doing here?”

  It was the first time she had ever spoken out of turn to me, but I could already tell she knew exactly why I had come.

  “Where were you?” I said, looking at her empty hands. She must have already dropped the vegetables off in the kitchen.

  She entered without answering, pulling out the desk chair, stumbling over the legs as she did.

  “Be careful,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to get hurt.”

  She looked at me again, unable to hide the fear on her face.

  “I was at the market. Diep asked me to go.”

  “A simple errand, then, was it?”

  She nodded, leaning on the chair. Her fingers gripped the back tightly.

  “You’re lying to me,” I said, watching her posture change as I spoke. She had stiffened. Showing seeds of defiance. “I saw you with Marcelle de Fabry at the market today. And worse than that, I know about my special tea. A local recipe. Your traditional medicine. The king’s herb. Isn’t that what you called it? But I think you’d really only give such a thing to a king if you wanted him to start having visions. Hallucinations. To make him think he had gone insane.” I went up to her. “Or if you wanted to kill him.”

  I pulled the chair from her hands and stared at her. “Why are you trying to kill me, Trieu? I am not a king. I’m just your employer’s wife. So why have you been giving me poison since the moment I arrived?”

  “It was not since you arrived,” she spat back. “Perhaps you’re going insane on your own.”

  My heart was racing. I had always resisted confrontation, but rage was propelling me forward.

  Her face showed no sign of anguish or apology, no tears. I closed my eyes a moment, trying to regain my composure, then pushed her against the wall as hard as I could.

  “Speak. Tell me everything, or I will call the police right now and have you jailed for the rest of your life. You’d probably be sentenced to just a few years for attempted murder, but with a large bribe, I’m sure the authorities would be happy to hand you a life sentence. This is Indochine, right? With the right-sized payment, anything can happen. Money is what makes the colony move.”

  “I don’t care about your threats,” said Trieu, pushing me away.

  “You certainly don’t care about any part of me,” I said, “or else you wouldn’t be poisoning me until I was on the brink of insanity.”

  “How did you find out?” she said, looking at me with disdain.

  “No, I’m the one asking questions. Or shall we take a drive down to the police station?” I said, motioning to the door.

  She looked at me but didn’t say a word, walking over to her bed and sitting down.

  “Fine,” I said, going to her closet and starting to throw her clothes on the floor. “Where do you hide it? It must be in here.” I looked in her shoes, and when I found nothing there, I went to her dresser and opened the top drawer, but she lunged at me, maneuvering her body in front of it.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” she said, “though it was a good one.”

  “To try to kill someone you didn’t know? That wasn’t your idea? Well, that’s a relief,” I said. I pushed her aside and reached for the drawer.

  She pushed me back and sat directly in front of it. “Marcelle de Fabry asked me to do it.”

  I looked at Trieu, stunned silent by disbelief. She stared back at me with angry, wide-set eyes.

  “What did you say?” I finally choked out. “Marcelle de Fabry had you poison me?”

  I thought back to the night I first met her. To when she put her beautiful head on my shoulder, convulsing with laughter when we’d seen the naked minister. An instant friendship, I’d been sure. A spontaneous pull toward each other. How stupid I’d been.

  “You’re lying,” I muttered.

  “I’m not,” Trieu answered defiantly. “Why bother to lie now? She asked me to do it, and she paid me. Very well.”

  “We pay you very well!” I countered, although in reality, I had no idea how much she was paid.

  “I would have done it without payment,” she murmured. “And you don’t pay me well.”

  “How do you even know Madame de Fabry? Marcelle,” I said, my voice dropping as reality continued to hit me.

  “Don’t tell the police, and I will tell you.”

  “You tried to kill me!” I said, choking back something between laughter and tears. “Why shouldn’t I tell the police? About you and Marcelle!”

  “I was making no attempt to kill you,” she said. “I was trying to get you to leave.”

  “This house?”

  “No. Indochine.”

  “To go back to France?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “But why?”

  “Say it first. Say that you will not tell the police,” she said, crossing her thin arms defiantly.

  “Fine,” I said. If she could give me reason to go to the police about Marcelle, instead, that was enough. “But you will never work another day in this house. Or in Hanoi,” I said. “Where are you from?”

  “Nam Dinh.”

  “You’ll be on the night train back there.”

  We looked at each other, I standing above her, she sitting on the bed. I moved to the chair so I could face her, eye-to-eye.

  “Marcelle wants you to return to France. You and Monsieur Lesage.”

  “Yes, I gathered. Why?”

  “Because you are making things worse than they were, and they were already awful.”

  “In Hanoi?”

  She looked at me with disdain. “On the plantations. No one in your family has ever bothered to come here, but maybe that was a good thing because now that you’re here, you’ve stripped the workers of even more, which I never imagined was possible. How can you take from people who have nothing? But you can, it turns out. You can take away their joy. Even their lives.”

  “How do you know so much about the plantations? You and I have never discussed them before,” I said, not letting my mind go back to that room. To those men.

  She looked at me defiantly. Her chin lifted proudly. “My brother worked on your plantations.”

  “He did?” I said incredulously. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you? That he didn’t just work there, but died there? That he was kicked to death by his French overseer? That this Frenchman went to trial, one where your family brought the most expensive, aggressive lawyers fr
om France? Even with those lawyers, he was still found guilty of manslaughter.”

  “And he was imprisoned?”

  “Imprisoned?” Her eyes were two black storms in her beautiful face. “No. He was not imprisoned. The overseer’s punishment, his only punishment, was a fine. He was ordered to pay my brother’s wife, his widow, five piastres. Five!” she shouted. “What is that to your family? Even for a coolie that is only a week’s pay. For you it is what? One or two of your double whiskeys?”

  “Trieu. I don’t remember hearing about this,” I said, my voice falling from its fever pitch. “I’m very sorry for you. You should have told us.”

  “Do you presume to know about every death that occurs on your plantations?” she spat at me. “You? Who are you, anyway? You’re just a pretty wife who thinks she’s more important than she is. Who thinks she has influence over the Michelin empire. I can tell you from years of observation that you do not. You may have gotten your husband here, but you don’t know anything about that company. There is no worse place than your plantations in Indochine. Nowhere. But you’ve already realized that. You and your husband saw it all. The rest of your family, they only hear about the terrible things that happen. The beatings, the hangings, but they can’t see it. You, you do see it, and yet you still carry on.”

  “Yet you only wanted to kill me. Not Victor.”

  “I was not trying to kill you,” she repeated. “I was trying to make you believe you were losing your mind again. Marcelle said that if we could do that, it would be enough to get your family to leave Indochine. That for you, for your health, Victor might leave. That little else would push him back to France. But that your well-being would.”

  I looked at her in disbelief.

  “What do you mean ‘losing your mind again’?”

  “Marcelle has a dossier on you. Something she obtained in France. From a doctor.”

  “From the Prangins Clinic?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It had a man’s name on it. I saw it once.”

  “Docteur Faucheux?” I asked incredulously.