The Darkest Little Room (15 page)

The sun rose on the Central Highlands and the air was cool and white flowers had bloomed on the coffee plants. Rubber trees leaked sap into tins wired beneath knife gouges and stands of the trees abutted ramshackle villages of tin and wood. The people in the villages drove wartime motorbikes and ox carts over dirt roads. No one in the villages or towns had seen what we were looking for and there was no trace yet on the road and Zhuan's driver said in so many words that Quy and I were fools and me especially. Already I hated him and we did not speak. I only pointed to a map, to villages and towns, and said:
‘Đi lại đây!
… Go here!

Late in the night we came to Hue City where an effeminate boy leaning rakishly in a hotel doorway pulled me by the arm. He had been smoking a cigarette and twirling his fringe in his fingers before he jumped at me. The boy looked like a Saigon brothel tout and I did not want to stay at his hotel but the place looked clean and cheap. The driver slept in his car as he refused to pay for a room.

‘I can't stand him,' I said to Quy as we took the stairs and the driver huddled into his coat and walked back outside with a superior grin on his face, as though there was something feminine or weak about staying in a hotel when there was a perfectly good tobacco-drenched car to sleep in.

‘I've noticed.'

‘I assume Zhuan's paid him, though I never asked. You'd swear he was doing us a favour. I wish I was paying him. I'd sack the bastard tonight. I might anyway.'

‘We may have a long way to go. Be patient.'

I took beer from the minibar in Quy's room and looked down onto the road. I could see where the driver had parked the car on the Perfume River esplanade. The ‘green river' was said to take this colour from the limestone it ran through in the north; I supposed it may once have been green – but it was earth-brown in the daylight, and tonight, a great dark swathe that cut the city in half. I watched my phone where it sat on the coffee table. I gave up and watched the door of the hotel and hoped that by some miraculous chance men with a girl in their custody would come in and take a room. But we were the last ones to check in and there seemed to be no other guests but a young Korean couple and a pair of elderly American women.

Quy said he was tired and I left him. I spent the night on my balcony leaning on an iron balustrade that trellised wisteria, drinking Hanoi Beer and watching the movements of a brothel across the way where the bored girls sat out front of the bar and touted any foreign man who walked by and if at last he did walk on then they returned to their seats with heads in hands and boredom instantly upon them again.

I went to the fridge to get a beer and when I came back my phone was lit up.

Still drive. I am cold. One city was Dong Hoi.

She was cold. I thought of He Kou. It was nearing autumn now in China. But surely she was still in Vietnam. Then, I thought, if you were wet and tired and sick and there was wind enough you could be cold anywhere at night. I thought of the long and porous border with Laos. You could get to the Laotian border in hours from Dong Hoi. Surely the men who had her would not sell her into Vientiane or some other Laotian city, but Thailand was a stone's throw from some of those Laotian border crossings. And then there was Bangkok. But if she was in Dong Hoi tonight then I was only a day behind her.

23

‘What road would someone take if they wanted to get here quickly?' I said to our driver and pointed to Dong Hoi on the map.

‘This one.'

‘And if they wanted to go unseen?'

‘There is no other road.'

We drove into Quang Tri province and the Demilitarised Zone where sunburnt fields and tumbledown villages were cut by muddy lanes and tube houses sat hard against the highway and the villages became ever poorer. When we came to La Vang the sky was an ash grey blanket and a cold wind had risen in the north. The facade of the French Catholic church stood at the edge of town, riddled with bullet holes, chipped by mortar shells, the narthex and transept destroyed by American bombs. The place was full of sickly orphans and grim-faced middle-aged cripples who had lost limbs standing on buried ordnance. There was barely anyone here in the prime of life. Anyone who could get out of this country did so. A daughter wheeled a mother with no legs in a cart along the road. I showed them my photographs of Thuy. We walked through the desperate shanty town of wood, thatch and tin beside the church, showing everyone the photograph. It was in places like this rather than the cities men with girls would stop. There may even be girls to pick up. But no one recognised Thuy.

We drove three hours and covered less than fifty kilometres to Lao Bao town on the Laotian border. At midday farmers slept on the ground and women with scarves and rosy wind-burnt cheeks walked the shoulders of the roads, coming back from fields to hovels to cook. The checkpoint was not more than one hundred kilometres from Thailand and beyond the muddy Sepon River was Laotian jungle. We walked to the border post and sat watching beer, snakes and ivory come in through the jungle on trucks but there was no evidence and no talk of what I thought might be there. And there were no new messages on my phone.

‘Further north!' I said.

The driver grinned superiorly at me through his cigarette and started the car.

We drove on into the Red River Delta, into limestone highlands headed for the northern mountains. We climbed to the Nam Phao border crossing, where the peaks were shrouded in mist and trucks and buffalo carts moved on dirt roads in clouds of dust. A woman wearing a veil to keep dust from her eyes stood by the grey broken blasted and denuded bank of a river. I paid her what for her people was an enormous bribe, that I hoped would overcome any fears she had for her safety, and I showed her a photograph and described what she might be looking for: men and young girls, perhaps in a truck, who did not seem on good terms.

‘Có
thể chỉ có một cô gái
… It may just be the one girl. She would be valuable enough by herself to warrant the trouble of a journey.'

But the woman said she had seen nothing. She told me she would call her husband who worked on the border crossing.

‘Men with a girl,' I said to him, or many girls, as many as a dozen, may have been here yesterday.'

He nodded.

I paid him the same amount I had paid his wife. He felt he may have seen something like this – maybe a truck – the day before.

‘But I will get my brother. My brother–'

‘No.'

‘Please, Sir, my brother is a police–'

‘Alright, get him.'

The brother was a forty-year-old man the size of a ten-year-old child wearing military fatigues and dog tags and was obviously not a policeman. The first man spoke in his ear.

‘
Vâng
… Yes, I think I saw those girls.'

‘Or was it just one girl, with two men.'

‘'
vâng, vâng, tôi nhớ rồi, chỉ một cô gái và hai người đàn ông
… I remember now, just the one girl and the two men.'

‘How did she look?'

He furrowed his brow.

‘Like a Vietnamese girl.'

‘Was she ugly?'

‘Yes.'

‘The girl I am looking for is very beautiful.'

‘Nhưng, tôi nhìn thấy không được
… But I did not see her face very clearly. Perhaps she was beautiful.'

‘She is very beautiful. There could be no mistake. How old was she?'

He stared into my eyes.

‘A small girl,' he said vaguely, ‘young. But please, sir, I should be at work, to stay here and talk to you …'

‘Damn it,' I said under my breath and took out a 100 000đ note.

‘How old was she?'

‘Mưới hai tuổi
… Twelve.'

He stared at me to gauge my response, and I thought of Peter Pan back in Saigon and the way he would feel me out and make vague stories firmer according to my desire.

I spat.

‘That is not the girl I am looking for.'

‘
Chờ một chút!
… But wait, I have a cousin who–'

‘No bloody cousins,' I said in English. I was furious. ‘Go to hell, the lot of you.'

I walked back to the car where Minh Quy sat with the driver. I pointed to a place on the map, hardly knowing where, only that it was north of here, and I got in and slammed the door.

‘Go there and don't say a fucking word.'

That night we slept in the car between towns.

24

If the men I pursued were truly going to the Chinese border they had come through Thanh Hoa.

The men of that province sat in the cold dusk smoking bamboo pipes on the edges of the roads in coats against a biting wind from the north and when we got out of the car to piss they stared at us like men from another world who could neither threaten nor aid them.

I had the car stop at the top of a dirt road in Yen Hoa Village.

‘Why are we here?' said Minh Quy.

I hardly knew how to answer. I did not walk down the road alone tonight. Only stood at the top of it and stared into the dark.

There had been floods. And yesterday a wind had put what rice there was on the ground before harvest. In the mountains in the northern distance there was fire. From the south came faint strains of song that seemed to have no source: a girl singing beneath a banana-leaf roof, keeping out of the cold, else a jukebox in some back-road bar.

‘We must keep on,' said Minh Quy from the car.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘We are losing time.'

‘Yes.'

I stood up and wiped my eyes.

‘Đi … We go.'

25

We ate a dinner of soup with stale bread in a city whose name I have forgotten at a hovel of an eatery surrounded by communist tenements. Now I had to choose between borders. There were four towns the kidnappers could be heading toward to cross into China. Three major crossings, two out of the way, and then the unofficial ones across rivers and streams, some that you took high up in the woods, else must be crossed at night. The three were Mong Cai–Dong Hung and Dong Dang–Ping Xian in the far east, and Lao Cai–He Kou straight up into central Yunnan. The lesser used crossings were at Puzhai and Xui Kou.

Where they would try to cross depended on where they intended to do their business. The wild South West China border towns of He Kou and Ruili, or straight up to Shanghai, in which case I should go to Xui Kou. I prayed it would be to a small town first. I prayed for the existence of that Vietnamese trading floor I had imagined when I was back in Saigon. I knew the way to He Kou. I had done a story up there on a hill tribe rebel some months ago. The road to there went up through the wilds of Sa Pa. The highland tribes of that country remember ancient and modern grudges, battles with the French, the Chinese, the Americans, even the Khmer and older nations that history has forgotten. The back roads and the fields are strewn with landmines and the forests conceal wolves and Indochinese tigers, but the country's wildness and obscurity meant safe passage for traffickers of girls, drugs and guns. So let it be that. At He Kou a trafficker could move amidst the most corrupt officials in China, and even if no bribes had been paid, I was sure they could cross the Hong He in the night out of view of the checkpoint.

Beyond He Kou, beyond the mountains of Yunnan, she would be lost to the cities of the plains of greater China.

In Sa Pa the morning mist was all about us on the rice terraces and girls with rainbow coloured coats and scarves and red wind-burnt cheeks appeared out of the mist carrying cords of firewood on their backs. There were bandits up here in the high passes, and rumours of snipers who took out tyres from vantages in the forest then came down to rob and kill, so we did not stop on the road.

The mist held all the way to the dusty He Kou crossing.

I made our driver stay in Lao Cai town and Minh Quy and I walked to the checkpoint on the Red River. A pockmarked sentry with a military helmet and the face of a peasant – sunken hollows under sharp cheekbones – asked us what we were doing and made a cursory glance at our documents. We were tourists. We were attempting to walk across northern Vietnam into China. He spoke broken Mandarin and better Vietnamese.

‘Bạn không có những tài liệu vệ Trung quỏc
… You have no papers for China.'

‘Lấy giấy tờ, chung tôi co tiền
… So get us papers,' I said. ‘We have money.'

‘Một triêu
đồng … One million he said. But you must come back tomorrow. You are too late. The border is closed.'

‘Nó không thể
… It cannot be,' said Minh Quy. ‘Perhaps a little “grease”?'

The border guard looked down at the wad of notes – near 200 000đ – and pocketed them.

‘Có một đại tá
… There is a colonel who will come later tonight. Perhaps he can do something.'

‘When does he come?'

‘Later.'

There was a small concrete shelter next to the sentry box and I said we might sit there a while.

‘While we wait for the colonel.'

The border guard laughed.

I sat on a plastic stool looking at the muddy road and down the bank to the red water that divided China and Vietnam. A couple of trucks came to the checkpoint with timber chained onto their decks so there was no room to hide girls. The border guard turned them back. We could get papers in Lao Cai, but, if the men who had Thuy were here I did not know which side of the border they did their business and I wanted to interview this guard and to see how things worked at this checkpoint.

In time the guard came and sat with us. I offered him a cigarette and asked him his name.

‘Hung.'

‘Bạn đã làm việc ở đây được bao lâu rồi?
… How long have you worked here?'

‘Ở đây ha?
… Here, at this border? Six months. But in the police, twelve years.'