The Darkest Little Room (2 page)

Close up now I saw that needle punctures were not the only wounds on the girl's body beside bullet holes. Her ankles bore strange red welts. I lifted up her shirt. There were stripes, as though she had lashed by a cane. But I could not be certain. Perhaps she had slipped and cut herself on the rocks.

‘Are you getting this?' I said to the officer.

‘Ðung
… Yes,' he grunted. ‘Who the hell is this?' he said to Minh Quy.

‘Ban của Tôi
… A friend. Come here, Joe.'

A junior lieutenant placed a sheet of plastic very gently over the girl's body.

‘Funny how precious we get about people after they are dead,' said Minh Quy when we walked back to the top of the bank. He lit one of his bitter Vietnamese cigarettes and the dank river wind blew sparks into the dark. ‘You should have seen the fat old major fishing her out when you were getting your camera, careful not to bump her head on the rocks. When she was alive she would have been as welcome on his doorstep as a rat, though he may have stood at the door where she worked once or twice. I suppose people are more likeable in the abstract,' he said.

‘Yes. And there is no greater abstraction than death.'

I looked around and wondered what the scene that lay before us meant.

There was nothing here but the girl. A single street light flickered thirty yards down the road and an old woman who stood beneath it to no apparent purpose. In the northern distance was the gaudy neon cross of one of those French-Vietnamese churches. Across the water to the south you could see the Bitexco financial tower and the hotel boardwalks, ethereal and unreachable, and I thought I had never been in a place so close to a city and so far from it. Here there were no clubs. No bars. I took a photograph and penned notes that I would send to one of my papers when I got back to my apartment.

We rode back into town on Quy's Honda. I shouted into the wind.

‘Say the girl was a prostitute – why would someone want to kill her?'

‘You can't think of any reasons?'

‘Many. But I want to hear yours.'

‘Perhaps her pimp ran out of use for her,' Quy shouted. ‘Also she may have gotten sick.'

‘So he shot her?'

‘Why not? If she threatened to leave on bad terms? Girls like that can know enough to get powerful men put in jail. Or perhaps it was a guilty customer, someone the girl was trying to extort – perhaps threatened to inform on him to his wife. Or perhaps she was killed by an evil thrill seeker.'

‘Yes. I thought that.'

The bright lights of the city were beginning to cluster again and I thought how the night was beautiful and cool on the back of a motorbike at speed through the radiant locales of inner Saigon, and I thought how awful and strange this place was and how I did not ever want to leave.

We parked the bike at Quy's house and walked through alleys that were threads of a labyrinth you could walk all night and not come to its end, the attributes shuffling like cards: lanternlit children inside Chinese doors became children behind French doors in the next block; a shrine to Buddha became a shrine to St Maria that became a shrine to a dead father; men playing checkers on one corner were replaced by the same drunken trio playing chess on another …

We took a beer at the Cafe Hoang on Bui Vien.

I pushed a 50 000đ note across the table. Minh Quy waved his hand.

‘Take it,' I said, ‘for calling me tonight.' I signalled to a waitress to bring us two Saigon Reds.

‘But you know what's truly strange?' said Quy.

‘How far she was from the tourist centres and brothel districts.'

‘And nothing floats upstream.'

We drank in silence, contemplating this.

‘I'll talk to Zhuan about the girl tomorrow,' I said. ‘There's not much goes on in the city that he doesn't know about. He has connections in the Interior Ministry. There might be a story.'

‘I don't know how you tolerate that vulture.'

‘Zhuan? He's a businessman like any other.'

‘Yes, he's a crook. You know as well as I do that he earned that suburban redevelopment contract last year by blackmail.'

‘There is often a fine line between blackmail and negotiation.'

‘Is that what Zhuan says?'

‘Isn't it true?'

‘The line is very fine in Zhuan's case.'

‘The man fitted bathtubs and shower heads in buildings where people used to have to hose themselves in their doorways. Now you Vietnamese are better washed than ever before. It hurts you, perhaps, that it took a Chinaman to do it – and that he had to get dirt on a government man before he was allowed to clean you.'

Minh Quy smiled.

‘How witty. But if you continue this way we will not be friends.'

I finished my beer and stood up. ‘Goodnight, Quy.'

Minh Quy raised his glass and I walked out into the stream of people coursing along the street.

3

I walked to my room in an alley off Bui Vien. This was the gaudy tourist district, but it was a place of many conveniences, with decent restaurants and cafes, and the streets were always well lit and pleasant to walk at night when you met the characters of the locale: the sixty-year-old French woman who sat in the sports bars dressed in pants and business shirt picking up girls; the limping little girl with Agent Orange poisoning who sold photocopied novels and spoke better English than the city's university students; the shirtless boy who sold playing cards, crackers and dope out of a fold-out backgammon board; the pimps, the touts, the hustlers, the sex tourists, the awful and lovely prostitutes.

The young man who owned my guesthouse was very Catholic and very homosexual. I walked through the narrow lobby where his sister sat night and day watching Korean soap operas. I stood on the stairs beneath a large brass crucifix and saw Phong and his friends through the open door of his room applying eye shadow and zipping Western-cut dresses up over their accommodating shoulders. He must have forgotten to latch the door. I felt like calling out to embarrass him. Three times he had refused to let me bring a girl into my room after dark. After the third time, when he had called his mother out to moralise to me on the street and woken the alley, I stopped trying. There were hotels where nothing was easier, but they were beyond my budget. Phong feared the police who took a dim view of unmarried girls and foreign men, and it was true that the police might very occasionally pick on the small guesthouses as they would not the fancier hotels.

I asked Phong's sister if the clean towels I had asked for this morning were in the room. Without taking her eyes from her soap opera she yelled at the housemaid who scuttled up the stairs with them.

‘Take long time dry this weather.'

I nodded.

She looked up from the television and grinned at me.

‘You know, Mr Josep, you talk in your sleep. You talk in sleep last night.'

‘I was on the phone.'

‘No. You leave door open. Sometime you leave door open.'

That was true. I did it to channel the breeze.

‘You talk in sleep when you bin drink.'

‘How do you know when I have been drinking?'

‘Who you think clean your rubbish bin?'

Not you, I thought. She must pump the maid for gossip. Get her to count the bottles.

‘And what do I say?'

‘I don know. Maybe I learn English good and know every ting bout you.'

‘There is nothing to know, all the same it is nice to feel spied on.'

‘Wa dat?'

‘Nothing. Goodnight.'

I walked up three flights of stairs. The housemaid had left the door unlocked and turned on the ceiling fan. She stood on the stairs above me smiling. I tipped her 20 000đ and she vanished.

A woman was committing karaoke in a room down the alley. I sat on the end of the bed. Out the window a boy in a corrugated-iron loft was praying before a shrine to his father. I looked down through a mesh of electrical cables to the brothel across the street. Sitting at the street-side tables was one very pretty girl, though dark-skinned and so undesirable by the local standard, two plain girls, one girl who had not been a girl until her last trip to Thailand, and a boy in a glitter shirt and a wig whom the others teased remorselessly and made fetch the drinks. Two of the prostitutes sat with a pair of old and impotent Caucasian regulars to whom they paid no attention. Neither did they pay attention to the ten-year-old girl who came in selling roses by the hour until three in the morning and sat at the table with the clients to drink Coke.

The sound of a bell at a pagoda pierced the trance music at the brothel and woke me to what I should be doing and I tried to settle into my report on the murdered girl. I wrote that the girl ‘was drowned under suspicious circumstances'. Tomorrow I would reveal that she had been shot; the next day, that she was a prostitute; the next, that she was a junkie, so perhaps the thing was drug related. I knew I could get away with this drip-feeding of the story as no Australian papers would be running it. If neither of the two papers I wrote for wanted it then I would tie it all together and sell it to a magazine for a neat thousand dollars. I might do that regardless.

I plugged my phone into my laptop and brought up a photograph I had taken of the secretary to the Minister for Culture at a notorious brothel on Hai Ba Trung. A man called Bao. This was worth three thousand dollars – perhaps more. I wrote these speculative figures, the magazine money and the extortion money, in pencil in my notebook and added it to what I had in the bank already for the month and was pleased.

There was a knock and I shut the laptop screen. Phong stood at the door in a loose men's coat but with eye shadow and mascara visible in the light that came into the stairwell.

‘Your boy is here to see you,' Phong said.

‘Thank you.'

Phong grinned. He suspected he had something on me with ‘my boy'. He did not know the exact nature of our relationship, but he had seen enough to know there was an element of secrecy in it.

‘I'll come down,' I said.

4

‘Peter Pan?' I called on the street.

The dirty-faced eleven-year-old boy leapt up from the gutter in the white shirt and grey pants I had bought him.

‘I got good news!' said Peter Pan.

He had christened himself after the eternal boy. I wondered if he even knew his real name. He had no family to remind him of it now. I found him a year ago living under a staircase near the train station. I bought him a new set of clothes, enrolled him in a school and introduced him to
a pho
restaurant down an alley off Pham Ngu Lao. Since then he spent his nights walking up and down the street banging a porcelain bowl with a chopstick and guiding people to the restaurant. When he was not doing that he worked for me.

‘Your clothes are dirty,' I said to him when he stood up. ‘Let me get them washed for you.'

He shook his head. He insisted on speaking the English he learnt at school.

‘What I wear when they wash?'

‘What happened to your old clothes?'

‘I throw out already.'

‘You should have kept them,' I said. ‘When you become a rich businessman you could have shown your children those clothes to prove how far you have come.'

He looked at me blankly.

People in Indochina are not sentimental about poverty. They do not read about it in books written by middle-class men and women who make safe dreams about poverty from a far far distance. So the romantic light in which we cast the condition does not shine, say, on the man at the top of the alley whose legs were blown off in the American War, now sleeping in the shopping trolley that his relatives push him about in; nor on the old woman with cancer, wet and filthy in a steaming house where her sons will not pay for the doctor and the doctor will not work without money and the morphine sits unused in a cupboard at the clinic a street away. All traces of poverty must be banished in Vietnam.

‘I find you another girl,' said Peter Pan.

I smiled and lit a cigarette.

‘Not a bargirl?'

‘She waitress.'

‘Where?'

‘At restaurant in Cholon.'

‘Chinatown?'

‘Yes.'

‘Chinese?'

‘No. Vietnami.'

‘A waitress,' I said to myself. I supposed she might have moved up in the world. It was rare, but it did happen. Very occasionally. Though in Saigon there were waitresses and waitresses. The service of food, say, at Tram Chim, One Hundred Birds, was a very secondary duty for the girls working there. But there were straight restaurants too.

‘What did you say to her?'

‘I say her same-same like before. I say I know handsome foreign writer want to meet her. I say you already fall love wit her. Watch cross the street or same-same like that.'

‘I'm not handsome,' I smiled.

‘Yes, yes. Very handsome! Maybe just shave beard and no drink so much beer. Look bit old compare man Vietnami. But still handsome.'

‘We will meet tonight?'

‘Yes. Probably this one her I think. Look very same-same like photo.'

I no longer expected it to be her. I think Peter Pan did not expect the girl he found to be her either. I am sure he had come to think he was not looking for a real girl at all, only a type. I had given him a colour copy of the one photograph I had of her, standing under an arc light on a dirt road in provincial Thanh Hoa amidst rice paddies, in her hair a small jade butterfly clip glinting in the shallow light.

I looked over my shoulder to see if Phong was watching me from the doorway. I took out my wallet and gave Peter Pan 100 000đ. He placed the note in his top pocket at the back of a bunch of tattered lesser notes.

‘You go this address.' He handed me a scrap of notepaper. ‘She finish work leven clock.'

Peter Pan took his bowl and chopstick and hurried back down the alley that had suddenly filled with the smoke of joss sticks and the shouting and clashing of Vietnamese funerary music, meant to convince the dead man who passed now in a gold-painted hearse that the living were happy, so he might leave the world without regret.