The Darkest Little Room (25 page)

‘I should not have said what I said about you being owned. I am sorry.'

‘But you are right to think I am terrible.'

‘No.' I shook my head. ‘On the day God opens the gates of heaven even the saints must step aside to let you pass.'

She shook her head.

‘That is true of Thuy. But I am a monster.'

I told her I did not want to hear it, that she did not know what she said.

She stared at me blankly.

‘You once said you were willing to follow me to the gates of hell.'

‘I have.'

‘Chưa
… Not yet. Here is the key.'

She went to her coat pocket and produced a small brass key without a ring and put it in my hand.

‘What is this?'

‘The key to Hell. The key to the darkest little room.'

‘You told me that was just a figure of speech.'

‘The darkest little room is not just another name for Club 49, or for anything else. It is a real place. A house over the river in Binh Thanh. Motorbike taxis take you. You enter it from an alley and this is the key.'

‘You stole it?'

‘Yes.'

‘The place is on the road to Vung Tau?'

‘Yes.'

She held my waist and the wind was cool at speed beside the water and it blew the tears back into my eyes and I wiped my face with my sleeve. We rode along the Saigon River esplanade where pleasure boats and tankers were moored for the night, then onto the Thu Thiem Bridge and into the dark of Binh Thanh. In the distance was the nascent Sky City modelled after Chinese urban development projects. Inchoate towers and the ethereal arms of cranes hung over it. Then came the church and its plaster saints and the neon cross. A girl on the edge of the traffic refused to get on her boyfriend's bike and he rode along behind her. She pushed him away and swore but still he crawled after her and she threw her helmet across the road and walked down a dark lane. We came to houses and rode down a narrow alley amidst a labyrinth of concrete walls and French doors lit by festoons of red lanterns. We walked to a set of darkened doors. There were pot plants on the steps. A child played with a water tap across the lane.

‘Put the key in the lock.'

‘What will I find?'

‘The room where she was hurt.'

I looked again at the pot plants. In a window across the way a teenage boy was doing homework and his father lolled in the heat of the night watching a large-screen television.

‘It is a normal house.'

She nodded.

‘This is the place.'

I entered. It looked like a hastily prepared karaoke room. I do not know what I expected to see. Perhaps razor wire. Chains. What instruments the human heart could conceive to indulge its passion for destruction.

‘Can you see the bar?' Phuong pointed. ‘The bar on the wall was where they chained her. They chained her there naked so she would be cold. Then they whipped her. There was one other girl, but she–'

‘Was killed. I know. I saw her on the river bank back along the road, weeks ago now.'

‘Yes. That was her.'

But tonight the chains and whips were gone and the floors were clean. There was, I thought, a little dried blood on the skirting boards, but perhaps it was cooking grease. The police could not make any kind of case based on this house, even had they wanted to.

‘You knew this was happening to Thuy?'

‘Yes.' She broke down.

‘How could you–'

‘Fear. The manager favoured me. In every brothel there is one selected girl. A favoured one who reports on the others, who keeps secrets. I courted his favour.'

‘Why?'

‘Because he was powerful and I was not. Such is survival. And I survived. But Thuy refused. She kept refusing. She refused the manager when he came to her at night.'

‘Tan?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why was Thuy here?'

‘She tried to flee with clients. I warned her we must plan if we were to escape. Do such a thing properly. But she tried twice to flee with clients. After that the manager had this
special
job for her. For a special clientele. You are horrified? But I brought her rice and water when I could. Sometimes a blanket. I borrowed things from the woman next door. Disinfectant. Bandages. Finally she would not give them because she was afraid so I stole them from others. I did this at great risk,' she whispered. ‘I threatened suicide and made the manager free her and send her back to the club for we were worth much more to a man together, both for a night or for good. And then Thuy would anger him again and … But I cannot be forgiven. There were nights I went to sleep knowing she was down here in this room. If I had gone to the police – run away – rebelled, it would have been worse. At least, I told myself that. But now I think it could not have been worse. Perhaps I would have died, but that is not worse. Finally all I did was pray. I prayed that somehow she could be delivered out of here, and I prayed I might take her place. But somehow she knew my prayer. Do you remember that first night she vanished from your room? I had promised her I would meet her in the coming weeks, when you had taken her away. It was foolish to believe she would not know what I planned to do while she was with you; perhaps she had even heard me praying. She could hear things that were spoken in silence. But,' Phuong smiled, ‘at last I did take her place. When I ran away from Zhuan Li.'

She showed me her ankles and wrists: faint healed wounds that were the mirrors of her sister's. That last time she went to you I came here with the old woman's help and the help of a motorbike-taxi driver … to give you time to get away … I was chained, but no one came to hurt me.'

‘You see, I had prayed for her freedom. And then you came into Club 49 claiming to recognise me. I do not know what poor girl you knew in the north. But it was neither Thuy nor I. And you spoke about rescuing me. I saw the chance I had been given. And I told you I was her. I could see that you wanted this girl so badly your desire would defeat your memory.'

‘But your eyes?'

‘I have eyes like this because I am the daughter of a whore who was the daughter of a French soldier. Though her mother was the daughter of a princess.'

‘Thuy knew the places. She knew the country around her house. She even answered to her true name “Ny”.'

‘It is true, we were from Thanh Hoa. But you talk in your sleep, Joseph. Especially when you have been drinking. Has no one ever told you this?'

I remembered Phong's sister spying on my dreams at night.

‘I have many bad memories. But the hairclip – you had it with you the first time we talked.'

‘Your boy … the one you sent the first night.'

‘Peter Pan.'

‘What could not be learned from you yourself could be learned from him.'

I almost laughed. At last Peter Pan had wearied of the search and gone out and brought my ghost to life. He probably thought it would do me good. His lying, however much trouble it caused, was always meant as a kindness. His lying, however much trouble it caused, was always meant as a kindness.

‘One night,' said Phuong, I went back to Club 49 and it was closed. I rode out here on a motorbike taxi and Thuy was gone. I asked at your guesthouse and you too were gone. I was happy. And then tonight I met you.'

I stared across the dark street to that lonely child who was crying now.

‘How do you come to have this key?'

‘I stole it. The motorbike-taxi driver helped me: the same who brought clients here.'

‘The scarecrow in the yellow shirt? The one who loitered outside Club 49.'

‘Yes.'

God, I thought. That first night I went looking for her I had brushed him aside.

‘And he would have brought me here?'

‘If you had come to the club two or three times and made no trouble. If it was late enough at night. That was his way.'

‘Why didn't you tell me how to find this place?'

‘Because before it was guarded. You would have come in and been killed. And I could not let you know there were two of us. I wanted you to believe you had found the girl you were so desperate for – perhaps then your love would be sufficient to take Thuy away.'

‘Sufficient? God, how I loved her.'

‘Perhaps you would believe,' Phuong said quietly, without accusation, ‘how many men fall in love with a prostitute only to think better of it at last. They imagine her in their own country with their own people … and they wonder how they will explain her.'

A tear ran down her cheek and I thought my heart would break.

We walked back out of the house. At the top of a lane was a man whose shape I almost recognised. He was standing at the door of a taxi beneath a stuttering mercury lamp on the empty street, but when I kick-started the bike he got in the taxi and was gone. Surely I was paranoid. Zhuan would not have given my name to anyone. He had said so and I believed him.

We rode back through the city.

On the bridge to District Four Phuong asked me to stop. We stood and stared at the water.

‘You will not believe me,' she said, ‘but I knew Thuy had died. A week ago, I dreamt I was wet and freezing cold, lying in the bottom of the river, looking up through water. But in truth I did not know if it was she or I and it did not matter.'

‘That is how she ended.'

‘She does not end.'

I thought of Zhuan.

‘And now–'

‘Now leave me here,' she said.

I did not know what to say.

A man in a grey suit beneath an umbrella leaned on the bridge further down. My God, I thought when I saw Zhuan. How alike we were, as though, like figures in a dream, we took turns watching for Thuy's memory in the water when the city was asleep. What strange and hopeless sentries.

He turned.

I did not need to call out for he saw us. A look of anguished joy came to his face. I think he held onto the bridge rail to keep from falling. I had forgotten what seeing us would mean, forgotten he did not know about Phuong, and in that moment he must have thought all my talk of the miraculous whore and saint I had discovered in his bar were true. No, I wanted to say, seeing the rapture on his face, you have misunderstood. But the moment did not last, or perhaps I should say those moments were to be eternal, as they would never be replaced, for another man had gotten out of a taxi and was on the bridge with us. I turned and saw the ragged desperate middle-aged face, the thin hair blowing clownishly off his scalp in the storm-wind, and I knew who he was and that he had followed me on Bui Vien a night ago and out to Binh Thanh tonight.

‘Hönicke!'

‘I told you not to go the police,' he shouted.

Some moments passed before I realised what he meant.

‘I never did.'

‘I know you did. And here you are – with her and … him.' He waved the gun at Zhuan. At the black Citroën. ‘A detective!' he shouted. His paranoia led him step by logical step into absurd fallacy.

‘Him. He's no one. I don't know who he is,' I said, at once seeing my lie did not help.

‘Liar. I have seen you two speaking. And now you are here – with her!' he sobbed. ‘I have a wife and children. I have a job in a bank in Cologne. I have habits. A cafe,' he said bizarrely, reciting the litany that been revolving in his mind for who knows how long – certainly since his return to Saigon – the litany of material comforts his crimes might see him lose. ‘I sit in the cafe in the afternoon,' he shouted. ‘I sit in the cafe and watch the birds on the windowsill.'

‘And you will again. Put the gun down.'

So Hönicke was a client. A guilt-ridden regular of the evil place that was now abandoned. Perhaps he had been following us, or perhaps he had returned there tonight hoping for the usual service. And now, when he saw this girl whom he thought must recognise him and the ‘detective' she and I were about to testify to, his panic became hysteria. He shook his pistol wildly in our direction.

He could not have known how completely he had gotten away with his crimes in the darkest little room. The place and the bar that led to it were closed, the men who ran it disbanded and dead, and any day Zhuan might be visited by an avenger paid to settle accounts for good. One other name, my own, could be discovered eventually from police and criminals comparing notes, but I posed no threat to the man waving a gun at the end of the bridge. I had all but forgotten him and had no clue where he stayed in Vietnam. No one but Thuy and Hönicke knew what it was he had done, and she was dead. Even if Phuong could guess, she had no more standing in the world than a domestic animal, certainly less than the household dog of a middle-class Vietnamese family. All Hönicke had to do was walk away. Walk into an airport and take a plane back to Cologne, and by tomorrow afternoon he could be sitting in his cafe taking coffee again and watching the birds on the windowsill in a gentle breeze.

But guilt had brought him here and had him pull the hammer of his pistol. He stared at Phuong. She must have seemed the vessel and symbol of all his guilt. Here, so far as he guessed, she stood, at the point of giving names and descriptions of the clientele of the house of criminality we had closed. And now he had revealed himself and saved anyone the trouble of finding him.

‘They'll hang me!' he shouted. ‘They won't believe how I hated it. Hated what I did. How I hated myself. You saw me,' he said to me, ‘you saw me when I was good. What I did. What risks I took!'

I remembered the very minimal risks he had taken to expiate his guilt after what I knew now were nights at the darkest little room. He was always going to be safe – safe from anyone except some vindictive or bored thug. But even back then it was the police that struck real terror into him. The police alone seemed to have the power to remove him from his cafe. The thugs might only have shot him while he sat there.

‘They'll hang me. They'll hang me and I'll lose my job!' he said absurdly.