The Darkest Little Room

by Patrick Holland

  And I did. But I woke in the night and put my hand out to touch her and she was gone.

  16

  I walked along the river bank, biding my time till the brothel opened and wondering how I might get to Hönicke, though no one had seen him at the cafe and there seemed no trace of him anymore in Saigon. In the afternoon I bought a .45 service revolver from a retired policeman and when night fell I put the revolver in my jacket and rode over Thu Thiem Bridge and into the dark across the river and stood on empty roads of huts of tin and wood and neglected tube houses. An old woman stood beneath a floodlight. I asked her if she knew a place called the darkest little room. She squinted at me as though I was crazy, threw her hands up and said to get off the street or else I would end up robbed or knifed out here. Then she walked down a lane into the dark. Some boys on bikes cordoned off an end of the road, the way to the bridge. I sped past them and one made a swipe at my back pocket but I skidded away from him. I rode to Club 49, paid a boy in the alley to watch my bike, and walked in with the revolver in my motorcycle coat. I looked for that friend of Thuy’s whom I had given the 100 000đ note to but I could not find her.

  ‘Where is Thuy?’ I shouted across the room. I went to the bar and asked the boy who served drinks the same question but he ignored me and then I reached over and grabbed him by the collar. He pulled away and swore.

  ‘Thuy là ai,’ he said, ‘Who is Thuy?’

  ‘You know. Now tell me!’

  But I had not seen that snake-faced manager come up behind me, and now he had me in a headlock while one of his thugs blindsided me and landed a fist in my ribs and they dragged me out the door and threw me onto the road.

  When I stood up I hit the thug in the mouth and he hit me back and then I pulled my revolver. Snake-face had been on the stairs but now he hurried inside.

  ‘Where is Thuy?’ I yelled.

  All the girls of the club were on the street.

  The thug spat blood.

  ‘What are you talking about, you cunt?’

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ I said. ‘You son of a whore, I’ll kill you both. You and the manager.’

  The thug pulled a knife.

  I heard the panicked voices of the girls telling me to get off the road and that the manager had gone to get a gun and then a girl screamed at me to run.

  The thug picked up a bottle and threw it at me and it smashed at me feet.

  ‘Đi, đi! … Go!’ the girl screamed from the steps of the club.

  ‘Damn it!’

  But I could not stand there and wait for the police or snake-face and his gun to arrive.

  I spat and spoke to the thug.

  ‘The next time you see me I will kill you and him both if that girl isn’t found.’

  I ran to the alley and kick-started my bike.

  I rode back toward District One, but I did not have to ride any further than the river. She was standing at the foot of the bridge watching the water rush beneath her and my sanity was destroyed, for there was not a mark on her body. I pulled up beside her and stood and stared. I looked at her ankles. I touched the side of her face.

  ‘What are you doing to me?’

  She only stared with fierce eyes that accused me.

  ‘Did someone steal you from me last night or did you run?’

  Her eyes returned to the river. The night’s rain came in spits.

  ‘Anh phai giữ đến buổi cầu nguyện … You had only to keep vigil.’

  ‘What do you mean? I almost got myself killed looking for you tonight. Why are you here? To find me? If they stole you back, how did you get away?’

  Suddenly she was near tears. I shook my head.

  ‘Were you punished for having left?’

  ‘Vâng … Yes I was punished.’

  ‘And yet …?’ I ran the back of my hand along her immaculate arms. I shook my head. ‘Did you lie with me in my room last night or am I mad?’

  ‘Không phải … You are not mad.’

  ‘Em la ai? … Who are you?’

  ‘Em tồi tệ … I am evil.’

  ‘You are not evil.’

  ‘Aren’t I? You poor fool, brother. And now I will do something truly evil. But you must agree to it before the thing is done.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Will you take me in again?’

  ‘Yes. I told you before–’

  ‘Nhưng nếu anh đưa em bây giờ … But if you take me in now,’ she paused and brushed a blade of damp hair from her eyes. She looked frightened. The rain splashed her cheeks. ‘If you take me in now … nguy hiem lam … You will be in great danger. You may be asked to kill. I think someone may die. No – someone must die for what has been done, myself or another, or even you.’

  ‘I am not frightened.’

  ‘Anh nói thêm một lần nữa anh sẽ theo em xuyên qua những của ở địa ngục … Brother once said he would follow sister through the gates of hell.’

  I nodded. She looked away to the north.

  ‘That is where you may have to go.’

  ‘Will you be with me?’

  She raised her eyes and stared at me, with hope or sadness I did not know. She looked back to the river.

  ‘Hell is vast. There are many people there.’

  I took her hand. She huddled close.

  ‘Do you intend to take me to your country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have tickets? Air tickets? And documents?’

  ‘I can get them.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Now take me to your room.’

  As we walked a black Citroën came onto the street and rolled slowly toward us in spite of the fast-moving traffic.

  ‘I know that car,’ I said. ‘I have seen it outside Club 49.’

  She nodded absently.

  ‘Why would someone want to watch you? Someone who would not also shoot me dead where I stand and take you back.’

  ‘Không biet … I do not know,’ she said. ‘Truly I do not know. Quickly!’ She grabbed my arm and we got on my bike and I pulled down on the throttle so the car disappeared into traffic behind us.

  Phong and his mother were away at a wedding in the provinces. The sister was home watching her soap operas and she stopped me in the lobby. I gave her two 500 000đ notes, two weeks working wages, and she smiled.

  When we got inside Thuy told me she felt very sick.

  ‘Brother, you must–’

  ‘I know. I have done it already.’

  I met Zhuan’s courier earlier in the day in the perverse hope that I might make Thuy a present of the drugs tonight. But the joy of the gift vanished the moment I gave it. I opened my coat and threw the packet on the bed and she sighed and her eyes became glassy with gratitude and relief and at once I resented her. Last night and the night before, I had not allowed her to get very high. It had been like giving a sick child medicine. It made her sleep. But tonight she smoked half the bag. She claimed she had to.

  ‘It is unbearable without it,’ she apologised before she lay down. And I nodded. Gentleness only came back to me when I turned off the main lamp and the delicacy of her features was revealed by the streetlights and I remembered how a year in the life of prostitute counts for three spent any other way. How quickly she would age. Even in ten years of this life there would be no beauty left. There would not be ten years. I watched her break and sift brown rocks with a razor blade on a crisp 100 000đ note, upon Ho Chi Minh’s face – the note must be new so the powder does not stick or get caught in the creases – and her amber hands were the hands of a child handling a butterfly. I watched her take another hundred note and rolled it up like a cigarette and wrapped it five times around with a rubber band to hold it. Then she scraped the powder with the razor blade onto foil and lit the foil from underneath and smoked the fumes through the rolled-up note.

  ‘When did you start this?’

  ‘I am only working one month,’ she giggled in English.

  I heard Zhuan call her
a liar in my mind.

  Already she had forgotten where she was and who she was with. Did she realise what risks she had me take for the easy smile she gave me now? I opened a can of beer and sat down at my desk and did not speak to her. ‘Why didn’t you get yourself into the habit of being paid in cash?’ I whispered to myself. ‘Do you know what I am becoming?’

  But they spike their drinks when they first work in the bars, I thought. It is the bosses that make the girls this way. Surely it is not her fault.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  She was thanking me for the heroin – not for taking her in at the risk of my life; not for loving her. I wanted the wounded girl. Now, I thought, she is a junkie. A whore and a junkie.

  ‘God, Thuy, when you were captured could you not have asked someone for help? A customer? A tourist?’

  She sat up.

  ‘Anh nen biet … You should know,’ she said, ‘when I first started work, there was a very big problem. I could not speak. Not for three months after the women put me on their motorbike. I could speak to no one. And when men touched me I would be sick … Even after many months this was so. The first time a man touched me I was sick. I tried not to be. I was beaten for it. They showed me photographs of the last girl who had disappointed them. Rất tre, rất trang, rất đep … Very young, very pale, very pretty, with her throat cut. Her female parts destroyed. But that only made me sick more. I think they must have paid a lot for us as they did not kill me.’

  I told her that I had witnessed her hysterical muteness only the last time she was here.

  She sighed and looked down and nodded.

  ‘Anh là bạn trai tỏt nhạt của em … You’re my best boyfriend,’ she giggled. ‘Do you understand? My best boyfriend. I’m so lucky.’

  ‘Lucky’ was her favourite word. She could say it in a half-dozen languages. She used it with a terrible irony that, tonight and in her own mind at least, the heroin destroyed.

  I said, ‘I wish you’d eat something.’

  ‘I will,’ she lied. ‘Once I have slept.’

  ‘Em chỉ yêu anh … I only love you, brother. And you will love sister without conditions.’

  ‘Is there any other kind of love?’

  And I thought, perhaps the pain she gives me now will redeem me for the things I have done.

  ‘Who inflicts your wounds upon you,’ I asked. ‘And who washes them away?’

  But she was already too ecstatic to answer. She fell backwards onto the bed.

  I could have taken anything from her then for her gratitude, but I lay down beside her and stared at the ceiling. Shortly I would have drunk too much to do anything even had I wanted to. But I did not want to. I lay with my hand on her shoulder without sleeping, listening to the dull roar of Saigon’s traffic and watching the ethereal skyglow above the city’s high-rises and tube houses. I messaged Minh Quy while she slept and told him to arrange tickets and a fake passport.

  She woke in the night. She did not creep. Like that first night that she moved around me in a strange hotel, her movements were swift. She swung the bathroom door quickly to avoid having it sing on its hinges. She swung it so you thought it would slam but then caught it in her fingers.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  She was surprised. But she had not woken me, I had not yet slept.

  I realised what a mistake it was to keep an oversupply of drugs in the room.

  ‘You have had enough,’ I said.

  ‘Em phải đi … Then sister will leave. I will go back to the park and wait on the bridge. Someone will come.’

  ‘I will not let you out the door.’

  ‘Không the … You cannot stand at the door forever.’

  That was true. Sooner or later my eyes would close with fatigue, for any more than a day of life, any kind of life, is more than a man can bear. I could not watch the door, and the evil inside her was as sleepless and patient as stone. She could spend the night with me, else at the brothel and then a hotel with a policeman or travelling Chinese businessman or drunk Australian tourist or, I suddenly thought, whoever it was who had been watching us from inside the black car.

  I took out my phone and scrolled to a photograph I had taken for just this purpose. The thought of the Citroën had put me in mind of it.

  ‘Thuy, the owner of the club?’

  ‘Ông hiếm khi có … He is rarely there. I have seen him only once. Maybe twice..’

  I showed her the picture I had snapped of Hönicke at the cafe.

  ‘Is this him?’

  She held the phone and studied it.

  ‘Yes. That is him.’

  ‘Good. Thank you.’

  I was so happy to have that confirmed I let her have what remained in the dime bag.

  And so I lay down with a seventeen-year-old girl whom I had paid in Laotian heroin to keep her beside me.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

  I sighed and stared out the window and wondered if there was one holy and lucid hour, between the need and the ecstasy, when she was capable of speaking the truth.

  She laughed.

  ‘But you do not love me. You love my wounds. That is good.’

  I said nothing. She breathed deeply.

  I loved a memory. A soul. But what is a soul without a body.

  ‘I will bear the wounds again.’

  17

  I waited for an hour in the morning but no one came to the cafe. I watched the street. Perhaps Zhuan’s boy had had an accident. I rode to Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. I rode the avenues of plane trees and tamarinds past the Reunification Palace and crossed the river and went down a narrow and winding alley and came out on the boulevard where Zhuan lived. I waited in his anteroom watching his maid weave golden thread into a red silk ao dai.

  ‘Is Zhuan getting married?’ I smiled.

  ‘Humph … Không the! This is for my niece.’

  Zhuan called down the stairs and I went up. He was smoking a cigarette and riffling through papers when I found him. He seemed distracted, as though he had lost something.

  ‘I don’t know much about heroin purity,’ I said, ‘but what you last gave me barely lasted one night.’

  He furrowed his brow.

  ‘It had better have,’ he said through his cigarette, ‘the price I paid for it! I wonder if your girl does not have a worse problem than we thought. In which case, so do you.’

  ‘Why do you have so little confidence in me?’

  He pointed to a chair and we sat down.

  ‘I would believe in the morality of the English-speaking races if it was less picturesque. For instance, why don’t you take in one of the ageing whores who walk the bridges? Your good deeds are always so romantic, like in a film.’

  ‘I love her,’ I said, with only a little less faith than I had the first time I confessed this to Minh Quy.

  ‘Yes. Because, if what you tell me is true, she is young and beautiful. As I say, you don’t crusade on the part of the old whores and junkies.’

  ‘What can I do for them?’

  ‘Exactly the same that you can do for this girl of yours. No more or less.’

  ‘She was not a prostitute by divine decree. She was kidnapped.’

  ‘You mean is not a prostitute,’ said Zhuan. ‘And a prostitute who is paid in heroin. You will find out exactly what she is soon enough, regardless of how she got the job.’

  I did not wish to satisfy him and say that only last night she threatened to leave and go walking the bridges.

  ‘But please,’ he said, ‘sit down.’ He put his papers aside. ‘I would hate for us not to be friends. I am only thinking of your wellbeing. This is an old and cynical country, there is much you don’t understand and there are people here who will prey on your goodwill. Leave the girl alone, Joe.’

  I stared at him in silence. He put out his cigarette.

  ‘Yet again there is something you are not telling me.’

  ‘You would not believe me if
I said it.’

  ‘Tell me anyway. I want to know everything about this girl.’

  ‘She has been abused. Deliberately whipped–’

  ‘Yes, you told me that and showed me the picture, only–’

  ‘But she comes to me some nights and her wounds are clean. Like the wounds of some Catholic saint in an old book of fables.’ It took some effort to tell Zhuan this and I was happy that he did not laugh or even smile. ‘But you do not believe me, do you?’

  ‘Joe, how could I? How could anyone believe such a story? But for your own sake, keep away from her.’

  ‘I can’t, Zhuan. I love her.’ Perhaps now I was trying to convince myself. I was already so committed the thing was necessary.

  Zhuan’s face twisted with frustration.

  ‘You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nominally.’

  ‘Get your girls from Church. They do all the same things, just not with everybody.’

  ‘Too late for that.’

  ‘Damn it, Joe! For your own sake why not send her to me so I can fix things for you? I could protect her much better than you.’

  ‘I love her,’ I repeated stupidly. ‘I’m in too deep, Zhuan. In every way.’

  He turned his back to me and stared out onto the street. ‘You damn fool. Do you have any idea what a Vietnamese prison is like, or a grave for that matter? And for a bar girl!’

  ‘Zhuan, I–’

  ‘Then take her. For God’s sake, do what she says and take her away from here quickly. If Minh Quy can’t arrange it for you then I can.’

  ‘Zhuan–’

  ‘No. Please leave me now, Joseph. I am very …’ He stopped mid-thought. ‘Very busy. Be sure to call me before you leave the country.’

  ‘But Zhuan, about the– ’

  ‘About what?’

  I lowered my voice.

  ‘The delivery – this morning at the cafe.’

  ‘The boy did not come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wonder why. Let me see to it.’

  But I waited in the cafe again the next day, and again Zhuan’s boy did not appear.

  18

  The rain had come and gone for the night and I rode with her on my bike to the crest of Thu Thiem Bridge. I was not crossing tonight. Only stopping to eat baked rice sweets and stare across the water with the other pairs of lovers. She held my arm. At such moments I did not believe the warnings of Zhuan and Minh Quy.