The Darkest Little Room (18 page)

I did not want to hear any more of that story.

‘What do you get for a baby? What do the sellers get?'

He shrugged.

‘Prices vary. For a boy – maybe a million dong. A pretty girl, a little less. For an ugly girl, men take what they can get.'

‘And for a grown-up girl?'

‘More than eight years old?'

This was the dividing line for the three uses a girl might have: daughter or slave on the near side of it, whore on the far.

‘Yes.'

‘It varies.'

‘It might be important. What can they make?'

‘A pretty virgin, ten to fifteen years old – I have heard of prices up to five hundred million dong. Do not look at me like that! I do not create the trade. I move people across a river that was here before the national borders. If I refused they would kill me and then find someone else to do it.'

‘You poor man.'

‘You fake saint! Do you want to know who the customers for the girls are? Chinese businessmen and foreigners like you.'

‘Where are the markets in which the girls are sold?'

‘Truly, you do not know this country. I would hate to be chasing the kind of men you are chasing and know so little. Listen, these mountains are run by a cadre – many mountains in this country are the same. Before, they traded drugs and guns, and now they trade girls. Drugs and guns you sell once and then the money is no more; a girl can make money for years. And a kilo of heroin cannot be made to look like a kilo of tobacco, an assault rifle cannot to be made to look like a rake, but you can make a stolen girl look like a daughter. And yet if the men who do these things are caught there are great punishments – even death. The stakes are very high. Such men would not think twice before cutting your throat and leaving you for the wild dogs if they thought you were a danger to them.'

‘What is waiting in He Kou for the girls you ferried last night?'

‘I told you. A house in the outskirts.'

‘What makes you certain?'

‘I am not certain. But I am not deaf. I hear men talk.'

‘“Outskirts” means nothing to me. Give me a street name.'

‘How do I know the street names? What street names?'

I raised my revolver.

‘I could row myself from here. Help me remember what use you are to me.'

The man eyed me, eyed my gun, then looked away into the distance.

‘I don't know the fucking street names! Go to a karaoke bar called Shang … the Mountain Bar. That's the one name I've heard.'

‘But it is not the place in the outskirts.'

‘No. But I heard that name spoken.'

The sampan struck the bank.

‘Follow that road,' said the man pointing at a stony track uphill to the west. ‘That road will take you to the main road.'

28

I go bac he

There the message stopped. It flashed on my phone's screen when we met the main road on Chinese soil and I had reception again. This was from a different number. I wondered what risks she took to send this message and the others, if she had stolen a phone from a kidnapper's pocket, if she had been caught in the middle of sending.

I showed Minh Quy.

‘It must be He Kou. She has been further and for some reason they are returning. Maybe the weather. The roads.'

‘Yes. The roads are bad here in bad weather.'

A sour-faced Chinese woman booked us into a central hotel. I went out on the street and asked a boy for directions to the Shang Bar.

‘A place with girls.'

He shook his head.

I went outside and asked a genial taxi driver who apologised and said there was no such place.

‘But many other good place. Pretty girl. I show you.'

We scoured the outskirts and satellite villages on rented motorbikes. Then I posted Minh Quy at the bus depot and train station, and I went to the brothels on Vietnam Street. The pushers and pimps prowled like cats as the street lights came on and the faces of the girls were all like her, all utterly unlike her in the dusk. Then the dusk was gone and I was alone in the dark on the side of some empty road where even the brothels had run thin and where a cold wind blew rubbish across the asphalt and a pair of girls put their heads into their coats. The wind threw sparks from my cigarette into the dark and if the dark concealed her it gave no sign of it and I did not know any more places to look in the town but I could not bear the thought of the white walls of the cheap hotel room so I took a drink and then another and stood sentry on the streets long after I even remembered what signs I was meant to be watching for …

‘Where are we?' said Quy late that night in a filthy bar drinking watered-down French cognac and trying to stay awake to watch the girls come and go. ‘What are we doing?'

‘But the phone message– '

‘Might
have meant “back to He Kou”. But might just as well have meant something else. Can you decipher it? And anyway, it was sent this morning.'

‘She could be anywhere in Asia by now. We've lost her, Joe.'

I took out my phone but there was nothing more.

The truth was I could no longer pay him. I had not said so, but he knew it. And suddenly this work without pay was also hopeless.

‘I must go back to Saigon,' he said.

‘I know.'

I walked the maze of ugly streets alone. I read a sign that said
No 1 City He Kou, Living is Glorious
and then was taken by the arm and led into a contraband shop at the back of a grey little Chinaman's house on Vietnam Street. I wondered what ‘contraband' meant to him; perhaps I would be very lucky. But it meant hundreds of pirated pornographic DVDs that sat in crates on tables while his grotesquely made-up wife sat watching the stock to make sure nothing was thieved.

I walked back onto the road where pasty-faced Vietnamese girls hid their natural colour behind foundation and paraded in lycra in front of the bars and salons. A squat middle-aged Chinese woman approached me with a photograph.

‘You want girl my daughter?'

I took her photo and then gave it back to her.

‘No.'

‘True my daughter. Very clean. No sick. No drug. Very beauti– '

‘Get away from me.'

‘You want bar?'

Why not try?

‘Yes. Shang Bar. The Mountain Bar.'

I was already walking past her.

‘You don't want go there.'

‘Wait. You know it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Take me.'

The woman frowned.

‘Ok. But I don't know anyone there. You give me money?'

‘Yes.'

‘Fifty yuan.'

‘Here.'

She stared at the note, surprised at how easy it had come. Some of the pretty girls in He Kou made serious money, but it was slim pickings for the middle-aged touts.

‘And another fifty whe–'

‘We go now.'

‘Ok, ok. You wait me I get motorbike.'

I huddled into my coat.

We turned down a hutong of salons and bars and came to a karaoke joint marked out from the dark by a single pink neon sign. Beside the bar was a decrepit hotel where a dim light shone from behind plastic curtains.

‘This dangerous place,' said the woman. ‘Police not even come here. You still want?'

I eyed a man in a leather coat who was eyeing me from the stairs.

‘Yes.'

Inside was lit by one dim unshaded lamp. A man smoked in the shadows. Then my eyes adjusted and three girls appeared at a low table, sitting with a man who drank Chinese whisky. When I glanced at them the man stood up and told me to sit down.

‘
You xin de nu hai ma?
… Any new girls?'

The man furrowed his brow.

‘
Wo mei kan guo ni zai zhe li
… I have not seen you here before.'

Damn it, I thought. What a fool thing to say. I was so tired.

‘Dui bu qi
… Sorry, I meant young girls.'

‘Zuo ba
… Sit down.'

So I sat at the cigarette scarred table with three dead – eyed girls who did not even smile at me. I ordered a beer – if anything serious goes down in a bad brothel you will likely have no time to draw a knife or revolver, if you are fool enough to carry a revolver into such a place, and the end of a beer bottle can be smashed on the edge of a table and become a weapon in an instant.

‘Ni cong na li lai de?
… Where are you from?' I asked the girl next to me who had put her hand on my thigh.

‘Zhong guo
… China.'

‘Where are the new girls?'

‘I only working two weeks,' the girl said.

‘Yes, of course. But the new girls.The very new girls.'

‘Many of the new girls are hired out to another town tonight,' came a disembodied male voice. I turned and saw it belonged to the cigarette smoking chiaroscuro in the corner. Then that half-face hissed something to the girls that I did not catch. The girls whispered to each other and a girl with Vietnamese features came from the dark of the bar to the table. The girl was perhaps sixteen and had not drunk, inhaled or injected enough of the brothel's available painkillers to extinguish the look of fear from her eyes.

She led me to a corner. Here there was none of the brothel chic you found in Saigon; instead pornographic pictures cut from magazines hid bare concrete walls and hot water pipes contested the cold.

I spoke in low tones, so no one but the girl would hear.

‘Em là một cô gái mới ở đây
… You are new here?'

She nodded.

‘
Có cô gái mới nào khác không
… Are there other new girls?'

She was very new. I think she did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved that I had asked after other girls.

She nodded again. She made to stand up but I grabbed her arm and had her sit back down. I took the photograph of Thuy out of my jacket.

‘This girl?'

She looked at me like a man rather than a client. The hint of a smile played briefly on her face.

‘Anh chỉ tìm kiếm một cô gái ha?
… You seek only one girl?' she said.

‘Yes.'

Perhaps it gave her the idea that someone might be looking for her too. And I wondered then why it should not be me. This girl's tragedy must be akin to Thuy's – even if she was not stolen by men on motorbikes, she was stolen to here by something: a young husband who had run off and left her with a child; dead parents. And at last what difference did it make – the precise device with which life forced you into a corner? I would not ask her about it.

The girl stared at the picture and shook her head and sighed. She spoke English.

‘I am sorry. This girl is not here.'

‘You have never seen her?'

‘No.'

The girl was sad that she had disappointed me. What a lovely creature, I thought as I watched the shallow light bounce off her fine dark hair and pearly shoulders.

‘What is your name?'

‘Phuong Trinh.'

‘It is the name of a film star.'

‘Yes,' she smiled faintly.

But perhaps the name was false. Perhaps the owner of this place was Vietnamese and thought the girl bore some resemblance to the Saigon celebrity. I told her my own name.

Her manner changed.

‘Please stay with me tonight, Joseph.'

‘Forgive me. I cannot. I must look for this girl.'

‘Please,' she whispered. ‘Please stay. Else I must go from here to sleep on a filthy floor with nine other girls.'

‘How do you speak English so well?'

‘I studied before my parents were killed.'

So that was it. How predictable.

I did not ask what other privations her bondage here meant besides the living arrangements. I doubted she would tell me anyway. I knew from my nights with Thuy that to give names to such things as these girls endured only made them more real.

I looked up and saw the doorman eyeing me. He had tucked an army knife into his belt to allow me to see it. I thought I should be more careful about flashing photographs around. I signalled to a prostitute-cum-waitress and ordered two drinks.

‘But if I do not find this girl … You know that even in a night–'

‘Yes. Even in one night it is possible to suffer all horror of hell.'

‘How long have you been here – truly?'

‘Tonight is my third night.'

‘Truly?'

‘Truly.'

‘And did you come through the forest outside Lao Cai and then across the river by ferry?'

‘Yes. How do you know?'

‘And you do not know this girl in the picture?'

She shook her head.

‘I do not think so. Perhaps I have seen her. It is hard to say.'

‘What place did you get papers for China?'

‘I do not know. I was very sick. Somewhere in …
ở ngoai.'

‘Yes. The outskirts of a town. Was it this side of the border or the other?'

‘I don't know.'

I sighed.

‘Damn it all.'

I put my head in my hands.

‘I must go.'

‘No, please. You have found me. Stay with me. I do not care what you do to me. You speak nicely. You can have me any way you want. I will only lie there and you can do as you want to me and then I will sleep and we can rest together.'

What hideous phrases she let fall from her pretty lips. I thought of her making the same offer later in the night to a drunk Chinese soldier.

I stood up and went to the bar.

‘How much to take the girl out?'

The half-lit smoking face tilted toward the incandescent light.

‘Bu keyi
… No. The girl does not go out.'

‘I am paying for her to come out.
Bie gan wo
… Do not fuck with me,' I said. ‘I do not have a great amount of money.'

‘
Wu bai
… Five hundred yuan.'

‘Bullshit. Two hundred.'

I put the note on the table.