The Darkest Little Room (14 page)

‘Well, it's done now.'

‘Thank God.'

‘She meets someone in secret who must supply her with it.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't know yet.'

Zhuan furrowed his brow and looked across the way.

‘What's wrong?'

‘Oh nothing.' He drew on his cigarette. He watched a tourist being hustled by a little girl selling city maps. ‘It's just–'

‘Just what?'

‘I just hate to think of her back in her old trade.'

‘Didn't you warn me against her not two days ago?'

‘Yes, yes, yes. You're right. Only, I went to Club 49 on the night you first mentioned it. I believe I met her there. Her eyes were as you described, and she was like the photo, only without the wounds.'

‘Why didn't you tell me? Why did you go?'

‘For you, of course! I told you I would help you. From what I could gather she is very out of favour with the management there. Even if they have gone underground for a time and she is out on the street walking bridges … Well …' He stared across the road again. ‘It is a hard life on the bridges. She would need to befriend a policeman for a start.'

I was jealous that Zhuan had spent even an hour with Thuy, though I tried not to let my jealousy show. I tried not to think of her on the bridges being propositioned by tourists and drunks whose chief claims on her affections were a few hundred thousand dong bills, while she gave kickbacks in various currencies to some brute of a cop to keep her in a modicum of safety.

‘Well if she's put out on the street maybe some straight policeman will pick her up,' I said defiantly. ‘Put her in a rehabilitation program.'

‘Do you know what those are like?'

I did not.

‘The girls are kept in cells and lectured each day on moral dilemmas. Their instructors are from the Anti-social Force. They drill them with catechisms that include such gems of moral philosophy as, “If you are in a shop and you see something you want and no one is watching, what should you do?” They take herbal medicine, sing nationalistic songs, read anti-drug and anti-prostitution literature and perform manual labour, and on release, just a little further persuaded than before that there is nothing at all worth living for in this world, they take to their old habits with renewed desperation. And your girl runs greater risks than that if what you say about this darkest room is true … if she could bear witness against a gangster. Surely you know this? Surely you have thought of it?'

‘As you say, if that place exists.'

Zhuan frowned.

‘Yes.'

‘What is it?'

He leaned across the table.

‘I have heard a second man claim knowledge of that room.'

‘When? Who?'

‘Last night. A local jackal. I will tell you more when the thing is verified. But that is another reason why I am suddenly concerned for your girl.'

‘So what the hell should I have done?'

‘You should have sent her to me, like I asked. I know this country. I know the people. I could have helped. And now …' he sighed and shook his head.

‘She's a survivor,' I said bitterly. She'll manage.'

‘So you truly mean to give her up, Joe?'

I did not know the answer. But anyway I had done the thing. She had done it to herself. What did it matter what I said to Zhuan?

‘Yes,' I said, at once feeling I had lied. ‘Yes, I mean it.'

20

I had dinner with François at a French place he chose, with a Vietnamese chef who had trained in Paris. I do not remember the meal. I remember I drank too much wine and then we had
fines
and I agreed to go with him and report on some assignment or other in a jungle near Laos. Then he said something about student doctors and a nightclub.

‘On to Apocalypse!'

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't feel like dancing.'

‘You look unwell.'

‘I'm fine. You go on without me. I just need some air.'

I walked out of the restaurant not knowing where I would go. I walked for hours.

Without realising it I was looking for her. I went to Ben Than Market. To Cholon. But she was nowhere. I got a taxi to take me to Club 49 and the doors were shut and bolted. On a Friday night.

I went to a sports bar on Bui Vien and sat at a street-side table before they threw me off it at three in the morning and I leant against the door of my hotel as there was no doorman and the place had been locked. At four I watched her walking along the empty amber-lit street. A rat had been going through rubbish piled against a wall but scurried away when she might have stepped on it. For some fool, drunken reason I wondered that a girl so delicate and pretty did not shudder at filth and I thought perhaps it was a whore's talent, and as though she were some phantom of a dream or nightmare I hardly noticed that her skin was broken again, that the evil miracle she prophesised was accomplished and she bore the wounds again.

I stood and faced her. Her ankles bled before my eyes. I reached out to touch her and she was startled. Those dark eyes looked at me with infinite pleading and I knew again that I loved her. This wounded girl I loved more than my own life and I was powerless before her.

‘I don't care,' I said unable to hold back tears. ‘I don't care if you are a witch or a saint or whatever you are. I don't care if I'm mad or if I'm going to be killed. Come back with me and stay.'

She sank into my arms and I was at peace again.

21

I could not have known she was followed that night. It was two nights later that they came. I had tickets and passports on my desk. Two men kicked down the door at two in the morning. One levelled a gun at me. The other had Thuy by the throat. I jumped and punched his jaw.

‘She belongs to me,' I yelled.

I felt a gun against my temple and heard the hammer click. I grabbed and pushed the barrel into the air and the man shot the roof. I wrestled with him while the other fought with Thuy. I threw my man to the ground and kicked the gun out of his hand. The man who had been holding Thuy scrambled for the gun in the dark and I took Thuy's hand and ran down the stairs while people looked on from the corridors and screamed.

Where did I mean to run? It was not the blind alley where we ended up, where a dog yelped and nipped at my feet and a sleepless invalid woman swore at me and I shushed her while we waited beneath a string of ragged red lanterns and listened to footsteps that made a lead weight sink in my stomach.

The men turned a corner and were upon us. One drew a pocket knife and made a slash at my chest and I fell bleeding against the wall behind me. Thuy cried out and the other man punched her hard in the stomach and slung her over his shoulder. Now I could see his pock-marked face, the eyes set too far apart. I did not know him. The man who stood over me with a knife was just a boy. Thuy struggled back to the ground and the middle-aged thug slapped her so hard in the face that blood ran from her nose onto the concrete and she lay motionless against his shoulder like a sleeping child.

He pushed his boy aside and kicked me and busted my ribs. I still remember the shine of his black boots as I lay on the ground. He gave Thuy to his boy and dragged me up by the collar and put me on my knees and pressed his gun into my neck.

‘Đừng di chuyển
… Don't move,' he said. ‘We are leaving now with the girl. If you move I will shoot you dead. If you follow us I will shoot you but first I will shoot the girl in the gut …
Hiểu không?
Do you understand?'

I had no weapon. My gun was back in my room in my motorbike jacket.

‘Yes,' I whispered.

‘Lặp lại!
… Repeat!'

I had no gun and no knife. I could do nothing.

‘Yes,' I said again. I could not bear to say it in the language he understood.

And so the men and Thuy went back out of the alley while I knelt in filth weeping into my hands and the old woman who had backed into the dark of her hovel in fear returned to the lane and stared at me like some wounded dog.

I got a taxi to the French clinic the next morning and stayed through the day and the night. François treated my wounds then went home to his wife at midnight and I stayed with an orderly who watched football while I lay on the hard clinic bed without sleep. The next afternoon I checked myself out.

I went to Club 49 but again the doors were bolted and chained. I rode Saigon's streets for hours in hopeless search of her, from inner District One to the criminal locales of District Four to industrial riverside Cholon and over Thu Thiem Bridge into that unnerving dark that lay across the river and I rode on into the outlying suburbs, the road to Vung Tau, the infinite light and dark of highways that belong to nowhere, else seem part of the same impossible city of outskirts that exists everywhere in the world where everyone and everything is lost and untraceable.

I do not know what sign of her I expected to find, only I could not go back and sit down in the hotel room. But at some hour of the night I realised I could never exhaust these streets, that even if it were possible to ride them all tonight, she might appear on any esplanade or dark dirt road the moment I rode off it.

I went home and put what heroin was still in my jacket on foil paper and lit it with a zippo and inhaled the vapours. Then I walked to the bridge to District Four. I knew she would not come tonight, but of all the places in the city this remembered her best.

A middle-aged man in a red tracksuit pulled his bike up beside a prostitute and the two spoke and the girl got on the back of the bike without him even taking her arm. Then the black Citroën drove up to the crest of the bridge and sat on the side of the asphalt. Whoever drove waited a long time and it occurred to me that he was alone. A long-coated man got out and leant against the railings and looked down to the dark water. I walked quickly. Rain was slanting across the city and falling through the bridge lights and I could not yet see the man's face. He saw me coming toward him and pressed his hat on his head and turned away.

How I wanted to stand there with him, whoever he was. Perhaps it was the drug in my blood that forgave all sins, or made all men seem equally guilty. If he was here on the bridge then he had lost her too. He had lost her and was on the bridge seeking her memory. The drug killed all my jealousy, all my hate. With opiate in your blood you looked at hate, at whatever thing has caused you pain, as you would look at a stuffed tiger, appreciating its form, the size and strength of its teeth and claws, yet it has no power to harm you.

‘Wait!' I called. I called three times to him, but he slammed his car door and drove off and I stood in the rain on the bridge alone.

I went back to my room where rain spattered the roof. At least when the storm had emptied the night would become cool.

At three my phone buzzed on the desk. A text message in English flashed on the screen. I did not recognise the number.

I am Thuy. I am in a car go north out Saigon. The man who

22

‘They will be taking her back to the Chinese border.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘No.'

Why not Cambodia?' said Zhuan, still wrenching himself from his lounge and from sleep.

It was strange to catch him sleeping at this hour.

‘The north is where the people who brought her here have done their business before. Thuy spoke of being taken to Lao Cai, right on the northern border, opposite He Kou. You know it.'

He Kou lay on the Chinese side and was less than a day's drive from the borders of Laos and Burma, another day to Thailand. A town full of prostitutes and pushers.

Zhuan nodded.

‘And there have been floods in the north,' I said. ‘Now is the time. Now the people are poor and desperate and the market in girls will be open. Once she's beyond the border she will be lost. Plus, you've seen her. There's not another girl like her in Vietnam. Even if a Cambodian had the money to pay for a girl like that up front, he would never earn it back in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. It would be bad business. Whoever has her will want the highest price possible, and that is in China.'

‘Or America.'

‘For God's sake, Zhuan, leave me some hope.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘And the message I got said she was being driven north overland.'

‘Whatever you do, don't message back to that phone number.'

‘I'm not a fool.'

‘Forgive me. But let me come with you. There are a dozen border crossings and bad towns between here and He Kou that a trafficker might stop at. I can help you.'

‘Thank you. But I'm taking Minh Quy. Perhaps you can stay here and keep your ear to the ground, in case I'm wrong and you hear of her being taken south. Like you say, Zhuan, you know people. Find out who runs Club 49. Something has happened there in the last few days, something serious enough to close the doors, but I have no time to find out what.'

‘Alright. But let me arrange a driver for you.'

Even in Saigon there were districts where to leave your car alone was to have it carjacked – let alone the northern provinces. It would be an added danger to be on motorbikes alone in the provinces.

‘That would be good.'

Zhuan nodded.

‘It's done.'

‘Listen, Zhuan. If you hear who took her, or how or why or where they are going or anything about this, you must call me.'

‘I will. Be very careful, Joe.'

That night a tiny, perpetually smoking, sunken-cheeked man in a badly cut suit presented himself and said his name was Thu and that he was Zhuan's driver.

‘Có một đàn ông khác ha?
… There is another man, yes?'

‘Yes.'

So he, Minh Quy and I drove out of the city through the night with ‘north' our only sure directive, scanning the roadside for trucks with closed decks and buses with girls or blackened windows, hoping for a sign and another phone message, armed with my .45 revolver and a photo of her.