‘Yes I know how that goes.’
He sighed.
‘Why do you love her?’
‘I don’t know. Because she is weak. Because she speaks a language I do not always understand, and with her I can speak it too and forget who I am. Because she is beautiful and in danger. Because she is so very strange … why does anyone love anything?’
‘I understand. But I wonder …’
‘Wonder what?’
‘Witch or no, I think you are being lied to, but by who and for what purpose, I am not sure. Take Hönicke.’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you ever wonder how he got that photograph?’
‘He told me he carried his camera for business purposes.’
Quy shrugged.
‘Maybe. But what man keeps it with him when he goes to a brothel?’
‘A few perhaps.’
‘Alright. But who has it ready to shoot when he goes for a piss? And who gets so lost looking for a toilet he ends up out on the street?’
‘It’s possible if you’re drunk enough.’
‘Then who, being so drunk he could not find the toilet, has the presence of mind to ready and shoot the camera that just happens to be in his pocket? Who then, having lost that photo of a girl he saw for only a few seconds in a half-lit alley, could be sure that her eyes were hazel?’
‘What are you driving at?’
‘He has spent more time with that girl than he says.’
‘You’re right.’
‘And am I right to think that you only saw this photograph after the girl without wounds left you?’
‘Damn it, Quy! He’s gone and done it. The photo came after. Only talk of it came before. And I was fool enough to almost believe in some kind of … I hardly know what to call it.’
‘A miracle?’
I shook my head at my stupidity.
‘You don’t recognise this man from anywhere?’ Quy asked. ‘From some other country you’ve worked in?’
‘No. And he can’t be Vietnamese government.’
I sat fuming and thinking of how I would go to Zhuan that evening and buy a revolver and dig out Hönicke and demand answers, else shoot the bastard dead.
‘Could he be the owner of the club, Quy? That would give him the opportunity to photograph the girl; and only then could he know so much about a place that not even you or Zhuan had known existed.’
‘Maybe. But don’t rule out his working for someone else, a Vietnamese. Even a CPV man.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘Is it possible you’ve made enemies in this country?’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Do you have to ask that?’
‘Perhaps we should scale down our … operations.’
‘Good idea.’
‘But if he’s the owner, then could he have come to me out of some secret guilt, the want to have his sins confessed?’
‘Maybe. It’s very Catholic of you to think this way. But I think it is more likely he has been using the girl to entrap you. Having her beaten to the end of his scheme.’
‘Damn it!’
‘Which begs the question how much does your girl kn–’
‘Don’t even say it. She has nothing to do with it. She knows nothing.’
‘Only–’
‘You didn’t see her last night, Quy. All cut up and tormented. You did not see her.’
I took back the photograph.
‘Alright.’ He stared at me for a time and then lit a cigarette. ‘Now, about the alleged guerrillas in the north …’
But I lost the thread of Quy’s talk. I do not know how long I sat in silence staring at a Felix the Cat cartoon on the wall of the cafe.
‘… how about it, Joe?’
‘I’m sorry. What was that?’
‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘She’s staying with me, Quy.’
‘You fool. Are you really so sick of living?’
I told him what I had told Zhuan about my suspicions of a northern slave market.
‘Find out more about her old boss for me, Quy – see if you can get a name, and a link between him and Hönicke. Here!’ I remembered my camera phone, the picture I had snapped of Hönicke. ‘Do you know him?’
Quy squinted at the image.
‘No.’
‘Do you want me to send it to you?
‘How could I forget a head that ugly?’
‘It might be a useful one to remember. I’m going to bring down whoever’s involved.’
‘It’s probably your only hope now – at least to make enough trouble so the owner’s killing you would look suspicious. But look at it from his angle – if this girl isn’t in on a plot against you, then you’ve stolen his property.’
‘He doesn’t know that.’
‘Maybe not yet. But let’s pretend you survive a trip north and rescue some girls, maybe bring down a trader or two, you cannot bring them all down, and the cadres always collect their debts. From in or out of jail. You will still be in danger – and she in worse danger. What will you do with her then?’
‘Get her out.’
‘Is that what you’ve told her?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘We’ll just get in a car and go. I know a priest in Da Lat who–’
‘No good. The kind of people you are dealing with can find her in Da Lat. If you are truly convinced she is not deceiving you, then the one and only thing you can do to save her is forget this “darkest room” and northern slave trade business and marry her – get her a fake Australian passport and leave as soon as possible. I can arrange the documents.’
I nodded and stared at the people flowing along the street in a stream of fading sunlight.
‘And yet,’ Minh Quy drew on his cigarette, ‘on this you are silent. Everything else, despite the risks, you are willing to do at once.’
‘I do love her, Quy.’
‘But you need more time to think? To get to know her? To wonder if you really want to leave Vietnam forever, so full of pretty adventures and pretty girls. You have little time now. We know she’s a prostitute, and possibly a witch. I wouldn’t worry that she’s hiding some disagreeable part of herself from you. And perhaps all her mysteries will vanish when she lands on your English-speaking shores. That seems to be the way of things there. She’ll get a job in a cafe and you can teach writing in a college and mow your lawn on the weekend and argue with her about whose turn it is to drive the boys to cricket.’
‘She takes heroin. But she did not try to hide it. Last night I bought her a hit.’
‘Well there you go – she’s honest as well. But heroin has a way of making people very sincere, when it’s not making them desperate liars.’
‘Alright, Quy.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In my room. Locked in my room.’
‘How old is she?’
‘I never asked. Apparently old enough to be raped and beaten nightly. What does it matter?’
‘It matters because you are about to make a very serious enemy who has you cornered. You have a girl who may or may not be legal age locked in your room, battered and bloody, and you’re buying heroin for her in order to keep her there.’
‘I’ll leave it off my résumé.’
Quy lit a cigarette.
‘If you are serious about this girl then forget the north, Joe.’
The pragmatic conversation with Quy lent reality to the events of the previous nights, and so long as I stayed with him that reality lasted. But back in my room Thuy was just as I had left her and the evil enchantment returned. She watched Bui Vien as though waiting for someone to appear out of the crowd on the street.
I forced my suspicion away.
I was her rescuer, so she must be watching for an enemy. I looked at her wounded ankles.
Quy is wrong. God, he must be wrong.
I put my hand on the back of her head, ran it down over the cut behind her
ear that had already begun to heal.
It is child’s skin.
I carried half a dime bag of heroin in the inside pocket of my coat – plenty for the night. She chased her first dragon and I poured a glass of Scotch and put a recording of Pärt on my stereo and listened to the slow resonant final movement of Lamentate.
I lay awake while she slept. I do not know if it was the drink or mental fatigue and the onset of a dream but I began to believe it was I who had abused her, though my hands had not fastened those shackles myself, even so I had done it. Hönicke was some evil angel, arrived in the city to show me how my sin of years ago had flowered. And now my evil had come home to roost. I remembered Zhuan saying something about it being only a trick of time that made us believe guilt was caused by sin; instead the sin was in us from the beginning in the shape of guilt, only waiting to be borne out. So this girl bore miraculous wounds my hands had not yet made. And I wondered had I gone out and made the darkest little room: was it right here where I kept my wounded girl trapped behind a locked door and brought her the gift of death she inhaled through the night? My duty was to send her away, to send her to a clinic somewhere. But I loved her, and I did not ever want to let her out of my sight.
I woke at midnight and the light of the city seeped in through the window and the back of her sleeping head was haloed by streetlight. The pretty little bones in her striped back were visible and I thought how poorly made she was for this world. But looks were deceiving: these Vietnamese girls are tough, I reminded myself, they are tougher than any self-satisfied Westerner or Japanese or wealthy Chinese right off the bat, as hard as rock when they must be, and this one must be tougher than them all.
She slept so silently. I could not even hear her breathe. I wondered that she did not stir with bad dreams. But I guessed the drug killed all that. I got up and opened the window for the breeze and only when the cool hit my face did I realise I was crying. I had never known any kind of happiness, only desire and pain, but here was peace. I had never felt so much a stranger as I did that hour when I woke beside her. Yet, should the God Thuy believed in ask me to choose one hour to occupy eternity, it would be this one; in a strange house with a strange girl in a city and a country that I hardly knew but that felt like the memory of some long-lost home …
But she woke and the spell was broken, she took my coat and went to the pocket for the dime bag and a notion I had been keeping at bay all night came suddenly and clearly to me without warning: my God, you are deceiving me. I leant out the window and smoked in the twilight. I must be rid of the thought.
I handed her my notebook.
‘Tell me how you were captured that first time.’
She wrote.
Em đến từ một ngôi làng nhỏ bao quanh những cánh đồng lúa … Sister was from a village surrounded by rice paddies cut by dirt roads. And in the far distance were mountains. We lived in a farmhouse. A floorless, thatch-roofed house on a road beside the rice. I was taken on a motorbike from there – maybe two hours – to a white-walled house.
‘A motorbike? From a place of rice paddies in Thanh Hoa?’
She nodded.
I looked across the lit-concrete skyline and remembered a girl sitting on a bed of wooden slats with no sheets to protect her against the cold, wearing the butterfly clip and gold bracelets that had belonged to her great-great grandmother, that slipped down over her hand to prove the slenderness of her wrist, and she was singing. I remembered her uncle who drove the van the Reuters news crew had hired that trip. The girl had no father – just the uncle and a sickly mother who fought cancer with little treatment. And I remembered how the uncle watched me watching her and smiled and said that he liked me very well and his niece liked me very well also. Did I understand? Yes, I understood. He assured me he did not say this only because they were poor and these were evil times. Many men and boys of the district came asking after his niece. Every week. I believed it. I told him, truly there has never been such a girl. And I promised him that in six months I would return. What a fool length of time. I did return, but when I did the house was desolate and the neighbours told me about the women on motorbikes who had come selling cheap dry rice after the flood when rice was un-buyable, for the province’s feudal lords had given logging leases to the Chinese up in the mountains so the floods came down faster and heavier than ever and scoured the flats and tore the rice from the ground and flooded even the houses and what rice there was was dearer per kilo than beef. The girl I sought – they called her Thuy after The Tale of Kieu as she was so beautiful, though her true name was Ny – she had had to sleep some nights on a writing desk under the stars in the cold with the floodwater running beneath her and when the waters were gone those women came selling rice, but they were truly scouting and watching her and when she went out onto the road in the night the neighbours heard a motorbike kick-starting and a scream and shrill women’s voices and the girl was gone and no one had seen her since. I had not given the uncle a gift of money the first time I was there because it had felt like a down payment and I had wanted everything to be good and right by the moral standards of my own country, but now I wished to God I had given that gift or payment or whatever any moralist wanted to call it so the uncle would not have had to let those women into his house. But now, said the neighbours, the man was gone. And the girl was truly gone, perhaps to China. Not Cambodia? Maybe Cambodia, the distances meant less and less these days. But probably China … or Laos … And in that bleak northern evening I had walked down the same road she was taken from, the same we had walked that first night hand in hand and I sat down in the dirt and wept …
‘Nhưng thế nào … How could you let someone carry you on a bike, damn it? You are not a child. Wouldn’t it have required a car?’
Thuy furrowed her brow. She wrote.
Em mới mưới lăm tuổi … Young sister was only fifteen. The women overpowered me, and I did not want to make an accident on the bike. But when we stopped there was a man with a gun. He took us to a house with other men.
‘What kinds of men?’
Người đàn ông tàn bạo … Brutal men. We walked through woods in the night. There was a house in the forest. In the house they took our clothes. Without clothes we could not flee.
The slave traders took paths through forest and jungle that were cut during the American war and Chinese invasions, when men and militia were forced to turn to obscure dealers to supply them with food and weaponry.
‘Họ đã nói tiếng gì? … What language did the men speak there?’
Tiếng Việt … Vietnamese. The next night we were walked over a border and it was no longer Vietnam. We went by ferry over a river, then in a truck. There were strange-shaped mountains on a dark horizon, like old paintings. We were given ID cards.
‘Where were you given papers? It may be very important.’
A town.
‘What was the name?’
Lao Cai.
‘What language did the people speak where you were given papers?’
Tiếng Việt.
‘What then?’
Làm việc … work.
‘And the first place you worked–’
Truong Quoc … China.
‘Is sister sure?’
She nodded.
‘Where in China?’
Many places. Many cities.
‘Who were the clients?’
Canh sat … Policemen and businessmen and soldiers.
‘Tourists?’
She nodded.
‘Does young sister remember the uniforms the police wore?’
She shook her head.
‘The epaulets?’
She shook her head and wrote that the police did not wear uniforms.
‘And the soldiers?’
Không có … Neither did they wear them. We were told the men were soldiers and police.
‘And you were sold from China to here?’
Sau đo, she wrote, After a time.
&nb
sp; I nodded.
‘And your wounds?’
She stared into my eyes. Then down at her feet. She wrote:
Phep la … It is a miracle.
At a glance now the wounds looked like a minor motorbike accident, else one of those medicinal treatments with burning glass bulbs the Vietnamese submit themselves to.
I nodded and took back the notebook.
I thought how easy it would be for Thuy’s present owner to find me. Even if he did not have the means himself, he need only hire some unscrupulous private investigator – and in my experience – Minh Quy aside – they were all unscrupulous, making their living by reporting the whereabouts of wives fleeing violent husbands and breaking up marriages. And if he found me? I wondered how much my invisible enemy had paid for the girl beside me. I knew the average price. But he could not have paid an average price.
Thuy sat on the end of the bed staring out the window. I watched the door and listened for footsteps on the stairs but no one entered the building.
‘What are you watching for? You look worried. Are we in danger?’
I thought of the girl on the riverbank those nights ago.
‘Is one of your friends in danger?’
She took a deep breath and put her hands together to pray.
Truly it is her. Truly she is not a whore but an angel.
‘Ny.’
She turned and then a tear described her cheek.
Her eyes answered me.
‘Anh xin lỗi,’ I said. ‘I am sorry.’
She nodded and looked down. I took the map off the wall and lay down beside her.
‘Tell me where the darkest little room is, Thuy. Point to it.’
She stared at the map then looked into my eyes then shook her head. I did not know whether she meant she did not know how to find it, or would not tell me.
‘Does the place exist?’
She put her fingers on my eyelids to close them.
‘Sleep, brother.’
The Darkest Little Room Page 8
