September 5, 1933
Switzerland. It had been foolish for me to say anything, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve always been impulsive. These days that was a dangerous thing to be, but there it was—there I was—unable to keep control when it was most important to do just that.
I poured myself a glass of water from a crystal pitcher and looked out at the brick terrace where I was sitting. Our home was much smaller than the Lesages’ enormous one. The van Dampierres had five children; for them the large house on Rue de la Chaux made sense. For the Lesages, it was absurd. The Lesages. The Michelin Lesages. I leaned back in my chair and smiled, thinking about the way the muscles in her neck had tensed as I’d let it slip. Switzerland. I had almost laughed when I uttered it the first time but had managed to suppress the urge, smiling idiotically instead, though she didn’t seem to notice, too caught up in her own distress as soon as I pronounced the word.
It was ill-considered. Stupid, really, but I had to do something to smash her smugness, and that certainly did the trick. There she was lying in her palatial bedroom, propped up in her bed like a little marquise, emeralds strewn by her side, her blond hair, far too long for her age, arranged around her face like a halo. As soon as I walked into the room, I wanted to rip out those smooth golden tresses. But instead I said the one thing that I knew would shake her to her core, and that was even better.
Months before Jessie set one little foot in Indochine, I knew about Switzerland. I knew about every dark period of her life, but I knew that one incident had disturbed her like none of the others. That it still had the power to shake her.
Money was the grease that kept my world in Indochine on track, and six months ago, money helped me get inside the mind of Jessie Lesage. A picture of the Lesages had run in La Revue Franco-Annamite, the French colonials’ newspaper of choice, when it was announced that Victor would be coming to Indochine for an indefinite period, the first in his family to bother setting foot in the colony for more than a few days. A real honor for us all. I immediately clipped it out and sent it to the best private investigator in Paris. He was a quiet but thorough man, I was told, someone that a former neighbor of ours had used when she was sure her husband was having not only an affair but an affair with a man. He had been.
I needed to find out everything I could about Victor and Jessie Lesage, I’d written to the investigator. Payment would be generous.
A month later, he’d responded. Victor Lesage was interesting by birth, but seemed to be scandal-free of late, having given up a rather fast lifestyle after he married. His parents were divorced, and his father, a bit of an eccentric, perhaps even a bit mad, lived in Marseille. But it didn’t much matter since his mother was the Michelin, anyway. Victor, he said, was just a cog in the family company, though. Not remarkable, not unremarkable, just there. After tailing him and speaking with the utmost discretion to old school friends, the investigator found no traces of affairs, money mishandling, gambling, homosexuality, illness, drug use, or anything else untoward. But he still requested a large sum of money because what he’d found out about Jessie was worth it, he stated. He’d been able to track down a doctor she’d been seeing weekly for the last seven years. “Weekly,” he’d underlined. The doctor was a psychiatrist, and the investigator had managed to pay him in exchange for Jessie’s files, including her medical history. It was “an abundance of riches,” he’d written.
Her childhood had not been an easy one. The trauma from that lingered. But mostly the nerves she had, the tics, stemmed from what happened in Switzerland. He could send me the file, he’d said, but he demanded the money first. I immediately sent a telegram to my sister in Paris, telling her that if she could deliver a specified sum to the investigator, I would pay her twice that amount. All she had to do was obtain it from Arnaud’s banker. The promised compensation was almost as much as her husband brought home in a year, so I knew she would say yes.
It took over two months, but when it arrived, I read that file until it was nothing but creases and fingerprints. The doctor’s notes revealed that Jessie wanted to leave Paris. “A traumatic incident that brought up difficult memories from the past,” he had written, “made her suddenly sour on the city.” She was from then on “desperate for a change of scenery.” At the club, after Victor had praised his wife as some kind of latter-day goddess, rather than a simple farm girl who was lucky enough to be pretty, he’d told us he wouldn’t even be in Indochine if not for her. That it was she who’d suggested they come. I knew that no Michelin actually cared to see the realities of their plantations. It was far easier to ignore the atrocities from abroad. But Jessie’s desire to move made perfect sense. She didn’t want an adventure; she wanted an escape.
Switzerland. It could have been a coincidence, of course. That’s what Jessie would be thinking. Trying to decide whether there really was a case of new mother’s depression in my family, wondering what type of person my mother was, what exactly she had endured, which clinics Alice had sought information about in Switzerland, wondering and wondering.
But I wasn’t wondering about the kind of person she was anymore.
Jessie Lesage wasn’t just going to be one of the wives swimming laps at the pool and developing an alcohol dependency; she was going to be involved with the plantations. Why else would she have been there when the police tossed Huynh Dinh’s body onto the street?
It hadn’t seemed like she knew much about Michelin or her husband’s professional life when we spent the evening together at the Officers’ Club. Most women wouldn’t have cared about the details anyways, just what the profits could buy them, and I’d assumed she was one of those women. She was tightly wound, but open to having fun. Self-centered but, admittedly, also easy to like.
That part bothered me the most. Easy to like. Because I had liked her when we dined together. I had enjoyed our time spying on the drunk minister, so peaceful with his flaccid penis out and his one perfectly polished shoe on. I had liked laughing together, clutching hands so we wouldn’t fall, watching our husbands, two of the most powerful men in Indochine, shooting billiards together. And I’d enjoyed watching her stand up to Caroline when she branded her as some American temptress.
I was open to giving her the benefit of the doubt. She could, in fact, be a very separate entity from her husband. The woman whose dossier I had studied over the last several months had suffered difficult circumstances. Perhaps she was a misunderstood woman who wanted to get out of Paris, slightly cracked around the edges but decent at the core, unlike the family she had married into.
But no. I was with her this morning, though she couldn’t see me, in an inconspicuous Peugeot with wheels that deflated too quickly—shoddy Michelin tires most likely—and rust on the hubcaps. I had been skulking around her neighborhood out of curiosity, wanting to learn more about her, when she’d flown out of the house looking nervous. I’d decided to follow her expensive car through the French corner of the city, staying a few feet back. When she headed to the local neighborhoods and driving became a challenge, I’d followed her under the shade of a conical straw hat that I purchased right off the head of a noodle vendor, staying behind a large, rowdy group of young people. She did not see me trailing her to Café Mat Troi. On foot, I was able to tuck myself away in an alley across the street, a favorite shortcut for the pousse-pousse drivers, which gave me a direct view of her. She could have seen me, too, if she had only thought to look my way, but she was obviously concentrating on something else.
She’d stood up and screamed when she saw Huynh Dinh’s body dumped by his front door. It was the correct response considering what was in front of her, but it felt muted. The Michelins practically held a parade every time a communist was killed, especially one as powerful as Dinh, who was accused of distributing communist literature not only in Tonkin but also down on the rubber plantations, concentrating on Michelin’s. Jessie hadn’t celebrated, but something was off.
Before she’d screamed, Jessie had looked at her watch. A quick, furtive glance seconds before the car carrying the policemen had pulled up. She had known about the body being dropped; perhaps the Michelins even had something to do with it. I’d watched in horror as she’d smiled at the first policeman. She had even waved, like he was an old friend. Jessie Lesage was not separate from the Michelin machine. She was helping to turn the crank.