“Albert was my second husband, you know,” said Madame Daudet, gesturing to chairs around a table which bore a file of supermarché coupons. The corners of her mouth turned down in a sour expression. “I never had to do such things before but the pension’s not enough.”
She pulled her reading glasses on and read the autopsy report.
“What’s this ‘petechiae’?”
“In layman’s terms?”
“I don’t speak medicalese.”
“Red pinpoint hemorrhages in his eyes. Their presence indicates strangulation.”
Madame Daudet’s brows creased with concern. “I don’t understand.”
But Aimée thought she did.
“Did he have enemies?”
“Albert?” Though she shook her head, the tight curls budged not a centimeter. “He supervised the tire warehouse for forty years. A joker. Always good with his hands, he was.” She pointed to the built-in shelves, like in a ship’s cabin. “I told the police the same thing. Don’t you talk to each other?”
If she thought Aimée worked with the flics, why enlighten her?
“I just need to clarify. Why do you think someone would do this?”
Madame Daudet scanned the report. “Albert talked. ‘Big mouth,’ I called him. To his face, mind you. He knew what I thought. No lies between us. That’s why I wondered. . . .”
She paused, her eyes wistful.
“You wondered if he’d run off at the mouth and it got him in trouble?” Aimée asked.
Madame Daudet nodded. For the first time Aimée saw tears in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away.
“Was it something he mentioned to his comrades from the Sixth Battalion?”
“Some scam. For the first time, well, Albert kept secrets from me. I thought they were just old men with fantasies.”
“Fantasies?”
“Who comes out of war unscarred, eh?” she said, clipping the coupons, and putting them in the box. “But when the nightmares started again. . . .”
“Madame Daudet, what do you mean?”
“The nightmares Albert had!” Madame Daudet said. “He woke up screaming, bathed in sweat. The first year we were married, it happened every night.”
Aimée crossed her legs and shifted the file of coupons. Outside in the courtyard, footsteps sounded on the cobblestones. Despite the cramped warmth inside, a damp muskiness permeated the floorboards.
“From the battle of Dien Bien Phu, you mean?”
“He said odd things in his sleep,” she said. “Over and over, about a dragon.”
Aimée gripped the edge of the table. “A jade dragon? Did he mention that?”
Madame Daudet took her reading glasses from her nose. “A list of animals, he kept repeating it. But when he woke up, he denied knowing anything about them.”
The astrological animals of the Chinese zodiac? Excited, Aimée leaned forward. Was he one of the soldiers who’d looted the Emperor’s tomb? Did Madame Daudet know Gassot?
“What do his comrades in the Sixth Battalion say?”
“They’re scared,” she said. “Afraid the past has come knocking on their door. After I mentioned that his pants cuff was rolled up, Picq had such horror in his eyes. He hasn’t been in touch since.”
“Wait a minute.” Aimée scanned the autopsy report. In the description of Albert’s body there was a tattoo, a flower with a dripping knife, on his left calf.
“Didn’t you think it odd?”
“More like disrespectful, a careless staff error, so I made my thoughts known to the director.”
“I mean his tattoo.”
“They all had them. Some drunken Haiphong foolishness, Albert told me.”
“Doesn’t the Sixth Battalion keep in touch, meetings and so on?”
“You mean swapping war stories of the good old days in Indochina?” She shook her head. “Not like that at all. Albert was in the supply commissary. He hid behind his desk. I think he had seen some combat but he didn’t like talking about it. Most of the boys shipped in on transports, dallied with bar girls. But then who didn’t? Got shot up and shipped out in wood boxes or on troop transports. But me, I knew the old Indochina.”
Madame Daudet’s eyes took on a faraway look. “I remember the flame trees and the tamarinds by the grass lawn that spread all the way down to the mouths of the dragon.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, Madame.”
“The Mekong has nine tributaries, like the nine mouths of the dragon, the Indochinese say,” she said. “My parents had parties, magical soirées with lantern lights, the banana leaves nodding in the breeze, tables of hors d’oeuvres and so many servants we tripped over them.”
Aimée hoped this was going somewhere.
“My father planted rubber trees. Kept big accounts with the tire manufacturers he supplied on the île de la Jatte.”
Aimée tried another tactic. “Was your husband a rubber planter, too?”
“Paul, my first husband, was a naval attaché.” Her eyes misted over. “I polished his épaulettes, kept the gold braid just how he liked it. We’d go to Café Parisien, you know, where the right types were seen: the governor, and everyone of importance. Such a scent of frangipani in the courtyard! At one time they called it the Paris of the East. Gustave Eiffel designed the post office, can you imagine?”
Aimée didn’t think she expected an answer.
“But there’s no more rue Catinat now. Our beautiful ochre villa’s a community center, someone told me. They don’t even call it Saigon anymore,” she sighed. “We wore hand-sewn silk tea dresses. No one wears things like that anymore. And we changed several times a day, très élégantes. The humidity, you know. Dense, heavy like a wet blanket all the time. I’ll say one thing for the natives, they knew how to dress for the weather.”
“Did you know the de Lussignys over there?”
“My dear, we dined with them at the Café Parisien,”
Madame Daudet said, a trace of hauteur in her voice.
To Aimée it sounded sad, so long ago and so far away.
“Was the old man a jade collector?”
“He loved everything native, including his mistress,” she said. “Life seemed perfect until the guerillas bombed the café. As far as I’m concerned, it ended then. All the guerilla warfare that followed, attacks on us by the Hoa-Hoa and Cao Dai.”
“Cao Dai? But it’s a religious sect.”
“Religion cloaks many things.” Madame Daudet shrugged. “A political vehicle for les asiatiques. Paul always said that. The Cao Dai had an army. At first, I didn’t blame them. Starving on the streets, well, we could see that. With all those green shoots in the rice paddies, I wondered where the rice went but the guerillas took it. They brainwashed the peasants. Our servants, too. Imagine, after all those years, and how generous we were! Those betrayals hurt. But I prefer to think, well, not everyone.”
A true colonial childhood, Aimée thought. And now she had come to this. Aimée noticed the small armoire, the door ajar, which held only a few housedresses on hangers.
“When my old nanny died, a devout Buddhist, they laid a banana on her stomach, as a guarantee of an afterlife. Imagine!” she said, sighing. “The Cao Dai bury their dead sitting up.”
“With jade?” Aimée asked.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” she said.
Outside the weak sunshine slanted on the wall. The voices of children and the bouncing of a ball echoed from the recesses of the courtyard.
“How can I get in touch with Picq and Gassot?”
“Bad lot,” she said. “I always said it. They proved me right, the flics did.”