September 24, 1933
“Sang has been found out.”
“What?” I mumbled, Khoi’s words startling me awake. Since he had returned in 1930, one of Khoi’s first missions was to study the management pyramid of the Michelin plantations, which was easily done by traveling north into the rural provinces of Tonkin and finding former coolies who had worked there and were willing to talk for a modest sum. On each plantation, the laborers were divided into villages to live and then into smaller teams of ten to work. Each team of laborers was overseen by a foreman, native like them. Above the foreman was an overseer, who was usually mixed-race and spoke French. These overseers reported to the chief overseers. Above them all reigned the plantation manager. The Annamites could not rise above an overseer position, but those overseers were at least given their own rooms, unlike the laborers, who slept fifty to a barracks and had only a few square feet of living space to call their own. The mixed-race overseers came from varying backgrounds, unlike the French, who for the most part had gone straight from the army to Michelin. Plantations followed a strict hierarchy, and the number of men on them was massive and, according to the French, needed to be controlled. A mere civilian would not be capable of enacting such control. Those with military training, it was believed, might fare better.
Tran Van Sang was the mixed-race overseer at Phu Rieng who had agreed to send reports with any details he could uncover about the plantation management, but most of all, he was there to support covert communist activity in the plantations. He was to help hide such activity from upper management and to encourage the laborers to recruit more men into their fold. Khoi had paid Sang since he returned in ’29. He was our most important link to Michelin. Now Khoi was saying that his game was up.
“Are you sure?” I asked Khoi. He had been out late, and I’d fallen asleep waiting for him to return. I still hadn’t told him how Jessie expounded the praises of Michelin as the benevolent freedom-givers to thousands of coolies. Now none of that seemed important. Sang was our physical link to everything Michelin.
“I’m very sure,” he said, sitting up on the edge of the bed. He still had his beige suit on, the tie slightly loosened. “I received a note from my driver when I was at the Taverne Royale a few hours ago that I had an important telephone call, and we were able to connect. Sang is now in Saigon.”
“How was he found out?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Ask me instead who found out.”
“Victor Lesage.”
“Indeed. Victor Lesage. He has only been down on the plantations for a few days, but he already figured out that Sang attended a communist meeting that took place in village three at Phu Rieng under the guise of a play rehearsal.”
“A play rehearsal?” I said, remembering what Jessie had said at the club.
“Yes. A play rehearsal. They have recently added leisure activities to their slave labor. You know, fifteen minutes here and there where they can kick around a ball or sing a song. The overseers smugly assume that their benevolence will keep communism at bay, when really, it’s a perfect time for men who seldom meet to gather and spread their message.”
“Well,” I said. “Then I suppose I support this rise in the theater.”
“Yes, but Sang says Victor has figured this out, too, that plays and soccer games have become excuses for covert meetings of the communist party, so now he is putting an end to it all.”
“But how did he figure it all out?” I asked, trying not to become distraught. “Sang has been so careful. There have been no close calls at all in the last few years.”
“Victor Lesage attended this meeting, under the pretense that he is passionate about bringing art and culture to the workers, and it turns out he speaks enough Annamese to understand them. They had no idea and were still speaking freely.”
“Well, that’s extremely unfortunate,” I said, suddenly remembering how Victor had said that the family took language lessons in Paris. How could they have learned so much in only six months? I had been foolish not to pass that information on to Sang. “But how did he learn about Sang specifically?” I pressed.
“Victor didn’t discover his role right then, but he gave one of the laborers in attendance a handsome payout and money for a journey home if they could speak after the meeting was over. The man talked, of course, and he fingered Sang. Luckily, the worker had some shred of a soul left and told Sang what he had done, giving Sang time to run. He beat Victor to the plantation periphery, and because he’s not just a laborer but an overseer, they let him out. Now he’s hiding in Saigon, but we’re figuring out how to get him north quickly. He’ll be arrested and imprisoned immediately if not. You know what happened to the men who organized the labor strike in 1930.”
I did. Five years’ imprisonment in the French political prison on Con Son Island, a hell floating below Cochinchina.
“I did not expect him to act this way,” said Khoi. “Victor. I imagined he would barely spend time on the plantations at all, and not understand a word of Annamese or attempt to interact with the workers. With his background, I thought he’d spend his days at the Officers’ Club here and at Le Cercle in Saigon, focus on building relationships with government and business officials. Pocketing more people through bribes and cajoling. There must really be pressure on him from Clermont-Ferrand to keep the peace. No repeats of the murders and communist strikes. And he must have a handsome paycheck waiting for him if he succeeds. Now we have, well, I don’t know what we have. A disaster, I suppose.”
“We need someone to replace Sang,” I said, terrified not to have a contact on the plantations.
“We do,” said Khoi. “But he is irreplaceable. We won’t find anyone as capable. Still, as pressing as that is, the first thing to do is help Sang leave Indochine for a spell.”
“Of course,” I said, worried for a man I had never met. I looked at Khoi, who had lain back on the bed, exhausted. “Three days ago, I spent the morning at the club with Jessie Lesage,” I said quietly. “You should have heard her. She went on and on about how the capitalist system in America allowed her to change her own life. To bootstrap her way to the top. She is quite sure that what the Michelins and the rest of them are doing is paving the way for great opportunities for the poor. Smart as she claims to be, it’s impossible for her not to know that the Tonkinese coolies on their plantations went there because our colonial policies drove them to desperation. That we brutally eroded their way of life, their subsistence farming, and then imposed draconian personal taxes that have to be paid in cash and lead directly to financial ruin. Of course, that works out just fine for us French because it means cheap slave labor for the plantations. She refuses to admit that. Oh, how I wish you’d heard her. It was just awful, Khoi. Her blind idealism about how anyone can improve their station in life if they just work hard enough. As if there is some teachers’ college around the corner all the laborers can attend, and some rich savior a bit further down the road for them to marry if they just work hard enough. Indochine is not America. I don’t care where she’s from, whatever it was like, I know she had people to help her. Teachers who taught her how to read at the very least.”
“I believe it,” said Khoi. “But she is still not the one who licked the stamps sealing Sinh’s death sentence. Remember that.”
“I remember,” I said, growing frustrated. “But she married the man that did. And she’s supporting him now, fueling him, every step of the way.”
Khoi took off his clothes and lay down next to me.
“I’ll leave the house again in an hour. Try to sort out this whole mess with Sang. But I need a minute of rest first.” He laid his head on my chest and let his eyes focus on the picture of Sinh and Anne-Marie, which was half glowing in the moonlight.
“I miss Anne-Marie so much,” I said. “Spending time with Jessie—even if she’s untrustworthy—is reminding me what it’s like to have female friendship. I want that back.”
We were both quiet for a moment, listening to the whirl of the metal fan in the far corner of the room. Before there was electricity, Khoi told me, the rich colons used to have servants tie one end of a string to their big toe, the other to the fan, and pull all night while their masters slept under the cool breeze. He’d assured me that the Nguyens had never bothered with such a service.
“We need Victor to disappear,” I said quietly. “Both of them need to disappear.”
“He is proving to have a knack at quickly undoing everything we have spent years on,” said Khoi. “It terrifies me to think that all our efforts could fall away in such a short amount of time, and that Victor could rise to the top in the process, when all he deserves is to sink. I really was expecting him to be far less interested in being present on the plantation. It’s almost like he’s not a Michelin.”
“He is certainly a Michelin,” I said. “They both are.”
“This way of ours,” said Khoi, starting to fall asleep, “it’s exhausting.”
“But it’s the only way,” I said.
“I know,” he murmured. “And it’s the right way. But this is a battle with many fronts, and I’m trying to win them all. At this rate, I think I’ll be dead by thirty-five.”
“Never say that again,” I said, kissing his forehead. “You have two lives to lead now. Yours and Sinh’s. So you’ll have to live to be at least two hundred years old. On that note, we should probably stop drinking so much.”
“Never,” said Khoi, smiling. “It’s too much fun. At least the French haven’t taken that away from us yet.”
I waited until Khoi fell asleep and then got out of bed, too restless to lie still.
I walked toward his dresser, and the ukulele propped atop it. It was the same one that had been played the first night I met Sinh. Khoi bought it for a few francs from the partygoer, who had become a friend, after Sinh had died.
I ran my fingers quietly over the strings, the lightness of that phase of our lives feeling so far behind us.
I didn’t know what to do about Sang, or how to find the man who had put a bullet in Sinh’s chest. It seemed like the latter would elude us all forever. I didn’t even know what to do about Victor and Jessie, but I was certain of something. The Lesages’ visit to the colony would have to be a very short one.