‘What do you mean by telling me this?’
‘Only that every man’s heart is black at its core. Certain men, like you and I, who make the civilisation of ourselves our goal in life, are able – not to escape that truth …’ He looked out the window onto the street. I looked in the same direction and saw a filthy and sweating woman hustling tourists out of money for cheap cigarettes … ‘but to put some distance between it and ourselves. The pleasures of conversation, of Bach, books, coffee and cognac and opium, the promise of a girl … if one has these, then one has everything that it is possible to have. Now you, if you keep on your present path, may find yourself reducing the necessary distance considerably. And as they say in this country, when one lives with pigs one collects dirt.’
‘Thanks for your concern.’
He waved his cigarette at me and poured ice water into two glasses.
‘The truth may be far simpler than you wish to believe. Your girl may have simply been lured by the bright lights of the city and the promise of money and, forgive me, a foreign goldfish who may be easily fooled. Your girl may have a family in the provinces that she intends to support by her chair in whatever bar she works.’
‘She is not a whore.’
‘You say the word so bitterly. Remember Vietnam is very different from the country you were raised in. May I quote the great Vietnamese poem? What does it matter if the flower falls so long as the tree stays green? The sacrificial whore is queen in Vietnam, near a divinity.’
‘She has no family. She was two weeks here and did not even know she was in Saigon.’
‘And you believed that?’
‘She’s not even on a contract, Zhuan. She has not even been given the commonplace lie about a debt-bond. She’s another man’s property.’
‘In which case, do you ever wonder what keeps her going? What keeps her from throwing herself into the river?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what have you concluded?’
‘I haven’t. Perhaps it’s heroin. Perhaps it’s fear of cold water. I can’t imagine it is fear of death.’
Zhuan nodded and dripped ice water into the Pernod that arrived and stared at the clouds drifting through the amber and nodded.
‘Bloody hell, Zhuan! You talk about her like a term in a philosophical problem. She’s a real person.’
‘Please don’t be angry that I have a different point of view. I only mean to make you aware of certain realities. I care what happens to you.’
I slapped Hönicke’s photograph on the table. Zhuan’s eyes opened wide.
‘What in God’s name is this?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
Zhuan leant closer to the picture.
‘You know many international businessmen who live and work in Saigon, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thuy said some of the girls sold along with her were twelve years old. Deflowering a virgin is meant to be rejuvenating for elderly Chinese men, isn’t it?’
He looked up from the photograph.
‘That dates back to Shi Huang Di. Latterly Mao. It’s an unmentionable dogma of Taoism. A kind of mysticism of blood, no? Similar to what you see over at the Cathedral Notre Dame on Sundays. The blood of the innocent purifies the guilty. That formula seems universal. Poor Jesu.’ Zhuan drew on his cigarette and closed his eyes. ‘But I think you are being unfair to suggest the problem is Chinese. It seems to operate in a variety of places around the world besides my father’s nation. Amidst salarymen in Japan and soldiers in Eastern Europe … I am told there are even the mysterious and perverse English-speaking men who for no reason they could name wish to lie down with a child?’
‘I’m sorry, Zhuan. I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m only assaying possible avenues of investigation.’
He nodded.
‘So where did you find this girl?’
‘Apparently the place she was abused – if it is true she has been abused – is called the “darkest little room”.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘But it seems to be linked somehow to Club 49 in District Four.’
‘Club 49?’
‘I know. I’ve been there myself before now. Not often. But it’s strange’
‘Club 49?’ he said again. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. You know the place?’
‘Well, like you, I’ve walked in there once or twice.’
‘And it isn’t an evil place.’
‘No,’ Zhuan whispered. ‘Well, no … I hardly think so.’
‘And yet, I think this club may have links with slave traders on the Chinese border. I want to bring the owner of this club down. And I must protect Thuy. What should I do?’
He lowered his voice.
‘Forget bringing anyone down for the time being. It’s too dangerous. We must figure this out together. From now on check your moves with me.’
‘Perhaps I should.’
‘You must.’
14
I walked out of the cafe and out of the tourist locales. Evening came and a hot wet wind blew down the alley I walked where black fish slithered in plastic boxes and toads tied up with string glinted under floodlights. I walked through a cool French arcade that led to the Cathedral Notre Dame where lovers sat together on motorbikes and the devout knelt praying before the statue of Maria. I took a beer at the roadside and knew it was no use trying to walk it off or drink it away and that even if I was a fool and in terrible danger I must see her and disprove the photograph I had been given at the cafe.
I rode my Minsk to the bridge to District Four and waited at the foot of it as Thuy had asked. I sat under a shop awning and watched the first spits of evening rain fall upon the street and settle the dust that had been rising with the heat. The water began to flood the shallow gutters and I saw a man run across two lanes of motorbikes covering his head with a newspaper. Then I turned and saw her. She ran as though something pursued her. She slipped and fell to her knees. I ran and caught her before she had reached the bridge’s end and my heart stuck in my chest for she was wounded like the girl in the photograph. Yesterday’s white ao dai was torn and exposed the marks on her shoulders and legs.
‘What happened?’
But she did not answer. Did not speak a word.
I wrapped her in my coat and put her on my bike and we rode back to Bui Vien and my room.
Phong protested.
‘She is sick,’ I yelled over the rain.
‘She should be to a doctor.’
‘She is sick and she is coming up with me. Else tomorrow I leave. No more rent.’
He swore and stood aside while his mother eyeballed me from her living quarters beside the kitchen.
I opened my door and led Thuy to the shower but when I tried to help her out of her dress she turned around with terrified eyes.
I pacified her and locked the door and went downstairs. I walked to a Bui Vien boutique and bought her a simple green frock and bamboo sandals.
She was sitting on my bed in a towel when I returned. I took her by the shoulders, but this time, when I expected her to launch into hysterics, she crumbled in my arms.
‘What on earth has happened to you?’
She shook her head as though she meant me never to ask
She was silent too when we drove to the French medical centre next to the Cathedral Notre Dame.
I woke François.
‘She is a prostitute?’ he asked.
‘She was.’
He took a bottle of iodine from a cupboard.
I sat on the bed beside Thuy in the surgery and watched François tend what looked like whip wounds on her back, and one slash behind her ear. He gave her shots of penicillin and electrolytes. I took her hand and spoke her name and her eyes lit up, as though only now she really recognised me. She smiled and reached for my hand.
François took me aside.
‘Those are the only wounds that need stitching. Despite how she looks, the others are superficial. I have disi
nfected them along with the wounds on her ankles and wrists – those are from struggling against shackles – trying to pull her feet out of them. Whoever wounded her did not mean the wounds to be severe. They meant for the wounds to heal. Though whoever shackled her meant for her to stay.’
He gave her morphine and soon she slept. He lit a cigarette that he took from his top pocket and took me outside where we leant on the wall of the clinic looking across the road to the cathedral.
‘Why doesn’t she speak?’ I asked.
‘She did before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shock, I think. It is common enough. I have known it to last months. Even years.’
‘Years?’
‘Once I treated a girl in the provinces who had been raped by an uncle. She had not spoken in three.’
I nodded.
‘Will you take her to the police?’ asked François
‘I don’t know.’
‘Be careful.’
‘Of course.’
‘You know better than me which are the good ones.’
‘I wonder.’
‘Well then, Colonel Tan is a possibility. Tell him I suggested him. I cured his …’ François smiled. ‘I did a job for him last week.’
‘How good is good?’
François shrugged.
‘As good as they come.’
I looked into the doctor’s tired eyes and imagined the girl returned to the place she had come from today. If I reported her to the wrong policeman it would be a matter of days. I did know police, but I knew more reformed criminals and trusted them better.
Crowds were gathering at the cathedral for evening mass. I helped Thuy onto my bike. She leant on my back with her arms around my waist and we glided through Saigon’s light and dark and despite her wounds – perhaps because of them – I was joyous that she was safe with me now and would not ever leave and I dreamt of riding with her forever on a motorbike at speed through a neon-lit city that unravelled and unravelled and never arrived at an end …
She lay down to sleep in my coat. I turned on the ceiling fan and poured a Scotch and watched her eyes close on the day. Her blue-black hair fell across the pillow onto the floor and touched the boards. Her face was more beautiful to me now that her body was wounded. The beauty more affecting. Though the marks on her ankles and wrists did not look so severe anymore. Like François said, she would heal. She had not been punched or kicked … no bones of the sacrificial lamb will be broken … Was that Isaiah, or the Psalms? I could not remember. A beating that was so careful possessed its own horror. I wondered who could have done this to her – what monster? And I remembered she had called herself that. I thought again of Hönicke and how the prophesy of his evil photograph had come to pass.
I watched the rain fall outside on the street and watched her reflection in the window as the lights in the city flashed and the darkness deepened in the north-east and I knew that I loved her. I loved this girl, silent and wounded, in a way I had not loved the girl of yesterday. Perhaps I was mad. But in the grip of madness or magic, whichever it was, the world had become simple like a hat boi opera and I loved the wounded girl who slept in my room. Nothing beyond this room or this hour mattered. We were all alone on one side of the door and the devil on the other. So long as I stood guard watching the door I thought I could keep the devil out.
But the devil had already entered and Thuy rose in the night.
She held my hand like a small child.
I stroked her cheek and a scimitar of hair fell across her eyes. She was shivering and her forehead was hot.
She did not speak. She took my notebook and wrote.
Em can một cái gì do … Little sister needs something.
I was still half-asleep.
‘There’s water in the fridge. And tonic water.’
She shook her head. She wrote again.
Thuỏc phiện.
‘Where must I go?’
This time she pointed to a place on the Saigon City map I kept above my writing desk. Dealers sat late at night on the bridge at the end of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. I realised then I had seen them myself: women sitting by the bridge heads who looked like they had been prostitutes twenty years ago, heavily made up beneath broad hats that obscured their faces, squatting with large vinyl handbags between their knees.
‘Or else you must leave?’
She nodded.
I stood up and got dressed.
With her eyes she thanked me.
You will see what you have done to me
She wrote …Cái gì vậy anh? … What is it, brother?
‘Nothing.’
I locked the door behind me and walked down the stairs.
I gave a 50 000đ bribe to the maid who kept vigil in the lobby.
‘I will be back in half an hour.’
I took my motorbike to the bridge and found a middle-aged woman wearing the uniform of a dealer.
On a dark little esplanade a gangster stood guard over the night’s operations. He was silhouetted by the moonlit river while the woman shuffled through her bag. I stared at the gangster by the water and wondered why rivers always seem to run faster and fuller at night.
The woman took the equivalent of twenty dollars for three dime bags of the powdered death she sold; I do not believe it is melodramatic to say this. I had seen that death up close: the death doled out to growers, mules, dealers and junkies indiscriminately. Every deal, every movement of the drug, from hand to hand, from needle to bloodstream, contributed to the world’s stock of death, though it arrive in the gallows by legal decree or by a gunshot on an unlit road in the provinces …
I kept an eye on the gangster all the while I made my purchase, frightened he would try to shake me down. But the woman had paid her fees and he only stared while I put the bag in my coat’s inside pocket and kick-started my bike.
Thuy prayed before a small icon card she had taken from some hiding place and placed on the floor in front of her.
She put the icon away and smiled up at me.
She was like a child taking camphor treatment for a cold. In China we called what she did ‘chasing the dragon’, inhaling the vapours of powder heated from beneath the slip of cigarette-box foil paper.
She took up my notebook and asked me what I wanted in return.
I lay down.
‘Nothing.’
She stood at the window and I watched the dim and flickering Bui Vien streetlights play on her bare shoulders. Then she lay down on the bed and there was no more desire, no grief, no trouble writ in her face. She looked at me with loving eyes as she treaded the marches of oblivion. I spoke to her but now she could not even answer me with a nod.
She fell asleep with her hand in mine while I stared at the ceiling.
15
I wonder how long you would last if you did take her in?’ said Minh Quy at the cafe the next afternoon.
‘You think I’d be killed?’
‘Why not? If she is as pretty as you say then she will be worth thirty thousand dollars to the house. Maybe more.’
I looked down at the people passing on the street.
‘She’s the most beaut–’
‘Yes, you told me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘On other matters, when are we going north to visit the Montagnards again?’
‘When did we schedule?’
‘End of next week.’
‘Something’s come up.’
Quy nodded.
‘You know, there’s a rumour that General Phan has started hiring thugs to go after the dissident leaders instead of using police. But I’m starting to think the J’rai would tell any kind of lie if it drew sympathy their way.’
‘I think one of Thuy’s forebears must have come from that country. The hazel eyes.’
Minh Quy sighed.
‘Poor girl.’
‘It is not so bad there, for all its poverty. A lot better than things are for her here.’
‘I d
idn’t mean that. I called her “poor girl” because you’re in love with her.’
‘Don’t be a fool.’
‘Alright.’
Minh Quy wrote something in his notebook. I stared at him.
‘Why did you say it?’
‘Only because like a lover you speak the beloved name in every conversation. I bring up the central mountains and you even draw her out of those.’
‘She’s sending me mad, Quy.’
‘It is a terrible idea, however big-hearted you are.’
‘What is?’
‘Trying to rescue a prostitute. The only man I ever heard of successfully pulling it off was Christ.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘Very nearly. And they caught up with Him in the end.
‘The case is not as simple as it was. It’s Hönicke and his photograph.’
Quy laughed.
‘The mysterious photograph. I thought you’d got to the bottom of that fraud.’
‘Is this a fraud?’
I threw the photograph on the table. He picked it up and said nothing.
‘That was taken days ago. But even if it wasn’t – even it was taken a year ago. Some of those scars would remain.’
‘And her skin …’
‘Was unblemished … until last night.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
Quy shook his head and handed me back the photograph.
‘She might be a witch.’
‘Why do you use that word?’
‘Coming from the country you said she comes from it is possible. They have witches up there. I knew a woman from Thanh Hoa who could charm a fish bone out of a child’s throat by singing. I saw it done. Another in Sa Pa looks over bones in old battlefields, touches them and can tell you the soldier’s name. It’s verifiable.’
‘Don’t joke with me, Quy.’
‘I’m sorry. But you know I only half joke. That is wild country she claims to come from. Has been for centuries – no government or army has ever truly held it for any length of time.’
‘Why is that?’
‘There’s little money in it. What doesn’t flood is high and inaccessible. It’s difficult terrain even to walk. But there are other reasons. The people up there are harder to tame than tigers, and very …’ he searched for an English word – I imagined he might say, religious or mystical … ‘haunted. Do not think your English-speaking rationality works everywhere and all the time. You come from a people determined to see the world through the glass that it is comfortable with. There are more things in heaven and–’
The Darkest Little Room Page 7
