The girl’s mascara had smudged on the pillow and she looked sick when she left the next morning.
29
I walked down the main street to a tin shed cafe. A civil guard slung a rifle from his shoulder and sat down to read a newspaper. He eyed me across the tables. Shortly a plump girl came in to meet him. I reading a Vietnamese New Testament that someone had left at the whores’ hotel. A girl came out of the kitchen and leant against the wall with a bunch of white flowers. She must have come in via the back alley. A man stood up from a table and walked past her and she followed him, extending a flower in her hand before he shooed her away. I called her over.
‘Would you like to buy a flower, sir?’
‘How much are they?’ I fished through my pockets for change and pulled out my photograph of Thuy along with the notes.
‘Have you seen this girl?’
She palmed the photograph.
‘No.’
Rain began falling.
I paid for a daisy and the girl walked out onto the street.
I checked my phone.
The trail was cold. I looked to the northern mountains fading into the impossible eastern night and knew I must return to Saigon.
I went to the transit and tried to arrange papers, for I had none for China, but anyway it was Sunday and what few buses there were had been stopped by flooded roads.
A middle-aged lieutenant general from the Vietnamese Border Defense pulled up in a civilian car. He said he was going all the way to Saigon overnight and for a fee he would take me.
Rain fell hard and there was ice under the windscreen wipers. The landscape turned white. We crossed the border from China into Vietnam. I thought there would be trouble, seeing as my papers would not have stood up to scrutiny. But the general made sure there was none.
How very easy, I thought as I fell asleep on my arm on the window. And I laughed thinking of how difficult it had been for me to cross days ago. How difficult it would have been with the girl last night.
Out of the grey came headlights and the dark shapes of soldiers and police in trench coats moving against a spotlight.
The lieutenant general wound down his window. A private leant into the car.
‘Cầu đóng … The bridge is down.’
‘Cầu nào? … What bridge?’
‘Ngoc Minh.’
‘Thề nào? … How?’
‘Nước lớn … Flood. You must go back.’
‘Back to where?’
‘Bac Ha,’ he said.
‘We have not come from there.’
‘Bac Ha is the nearest city you can reach.’
‘Are there other roads?’ I asked.
‘Not in this weather,’ said the private.
Another car’s headlights appeared out of the mist behind us and the private made a gesture with his hand to turn around.
We had no choice but to drive back.
30
The lieutenant general found a hostel in town and retired. I did not fancy a night at the hostel with him and the other military men he had met up with. We agreed we would meet back here at six in the morning if the rain cleared. If the weather was good overnight and remained good in the morning we could take back roads and resume the highway after the bridge.
I checked into a mock-Swiss chateaux hotel and went next door to a concrete cafe to drink. The cafe was sterile but well heated by a stove. Wind blew down the narrow road from the direction of an empty church and blew rain against the window and banked rubbish against the wall of the hotel. A pair of Hmong women in pink hemp skirts and tartan scarves pushed up the road against the wind carrying kindling tied to their backs and I put my arm on the windowsill and my hand against the glass to feel the cold outside. A man came into the cafe and ate a bowl of beef noodle soup and sipped the bitter tea that sat lukewarm in jugs on the tables and then left.
The proprietor was a middle-aged woman who had perhaps once been pretty but whose heavily made-up face was now a garish mask. She came in and out of the room, taking my glass once in a while and needlessly pouring from the cans I bought. Three young soldiers with green Border Defense epaulets sat down. The woman’s juvenile daughter came in to wait at the tables. A dull electric light came on and properly revealed the place’s state of neglect. There was only me and the three soldiers and the little girl who came and poured my beer. She had dirty hair and a flat nose. Strange that a girl so young should be pouring drinks, though I supposed it did her no great harm. Still it did not feel right sitting watching a little girl pour beer for tourists and soldiers and I told her I would pour my own. She nodded and left.
Then it was very late. I lit a cigarette and stared hopelessly out the window down the empty Bac Ha street watching the town’s ugly buildings overcome by the dark and the girl had returned and put her hand on my arm. I stared at the small, greasy fingers barely able to grip the width of my wrist. I looked into her eyes that held my gaze through a minute of silence.
I pulled my arm away.
She furrowed her brow with apparent confusion. She seemed offended.
She spoke English. ‘Would you like something?’
‘I have beer.’
‘Something else.’
‘No.’
She took a bundle of postcards from her pocket. The postcards had windows cut into them and in the windows were glued cloth pictures of North Vietnamese landscapes.
‘You speak English?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you learn at school?’
‘No. From tourist and soldier. I speak Chinese, too.’
‘I remember.’
She smiled dimly and nodded.
‘You are very clever. How much are the postcards?’
She showed me an icon card of Saint Joseph.
‘Twenty thousand dong for three. I made them myself,’ she lied, for I had seen the cards in other towns.
‘I only want one.’
‘You must have someone to send them to.’
‘Of course. I must.’
I put the notes into the girl’s hand. She walked away. The three soldiers called her over to their table and she went and showed them her postcards. She stood with her hand on a soldier’s thigh. After a few minutes the soldiers shooed her away. She returned to the proprietor.
I heard her call the woman ‘mama’.
I felt awful and it seemed the more I drank, the more sober I became.
The girl walked outside and gave a note to a beggar that the tourists and soldiers had been walking past for hours. The next time the girl came to my table to collect a can I invited her to sit with me. Her name, she said, was Kin.
‘That is an unusual name.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is it from?’
‘Sa Pa.’
I looked out the window. The rain had eased to a mist.
‘I want to walk,’ I said.
I stood up and left the girl and walked to the bridge. I lit a cigarette from a pack Minh Quy had left in my bag and leant over the railings and watched water rush beneath my feet. When I returned I looked in and the child was sleeping by the cafe stove on a fox skin. The woman tapped her awake with the toe of her shoe. There was another child there too now. The other girl sat staring into the embers of the stove.
‘Your friend?’ I said to Kin.
‘Yes,’ she smiled.
‘If you need anything, just come down to my door and ask,’ said the woman. ‘Bất cứ điều gì … Anything.’
I nodded and went to the hotel and the woman followed me.
A man came in shaking rain off his coat and stamping his boots. He seemed to be familiar to everyone. He greeted the concierge and the woman of the cafe with a brief nod. I slipped behind a wall when I saw it was my former driver.
The window in my room looked onto the street. I stood at the window before I lay down for the night and saw a police car pull up in front of the hotel. A policeman got out of the driver’s side and left the mot
or running. He went into the cafe and stayed only a few minutes and then walked out with our former driver before getting back into the police car and driving to a house one hundred yards south on the other side of the road.
I fell onto a coarse grey pillow and slept badly.
31
I had forgotten to set my alarm and the lieutenant general had been gone two hours when I woke. I took a breakfast of beef noodle soup at the cafe next to the hotel. The girl Kin was not there. The woman was.
I found Kin in the afternoon. She was leaning against the railings of the bridge. I almost walked over her in the dimming copper light and rain mist.
‘Hello.’ She strained to smile.
She was not in school uniform, but the children do not always wear uniforms. Her face was red, her eyes swollen. She looked sick. She sat with a rat-like dog, wrapped up in layers of cheap flannel and felt.
‘Kin, I heard you call the woman at the cafe “mama” last night. Is she your mother?’
‘Yes.’
She stared off into the distance as she spoke.
‘How long have you been there at the house with your mother?’
She furrowed her brow.
‘About two weeks.’
‘Two weeks with your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is your old mother?’ I said, realising that for her the word signified nothing permanent; she used it in the same way a man would refer to his coffee.
‘Somewhere else. But I cannot misbehave with this mother or they will send me back to the border.’
I asked if she was going home to the cafe tonight. She said she was.
‘We will go together.’
I sat by the window and ordered whisky.
Kin sat on a plastic chair watching cartoons on a television with poor reception.
The woman came to my table.
‘Đêm qua cô hỏi tôi nếu tôi muốn bất cừ điều gì … Last night, you asked me if there was anything else I wanted. I want it now.’
‘Xin lỗi … Excuse me?’
I was reducing my chances by being so forthright but I was tired and angry and I had no time left.
‘Send me a girl tonight. A very young girl.’
The woman stared into my eyes for some time before she spoke.
‘Do you mean my daughter?’
‘We will drop that deceit.’
‘What?’
‘Kin. She’s not your daughter. Unless your husband was a Hmong man I don’t see how she could be. It is a weak pretence.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘In Bac Ha? I am waiting for a bus.’
‘There are buses every day. You have been here now two days.’
‘There are not even private cars in this weather. But the girl is not your daughter.’
‘You insult me, and I do not tolerate being insulted. I will have you thrown out.’
‘How old is she?’
‘My daughter’s age is of no concern to you. And now,’ she said, capping the bottle of whisky I had paid for, ‘all of a sudden, I do not like you. You will eat somewhere else tonight. Buoi!’ she called.
A middle-aged man stood up and came to the table.
‘This man must leave,’ said the woman.
He opened his coat to reveal a hunting knife tucked into his belt.
I laughed.
‘You think I will not use this?’ he said.
The blankness in his eyes said he would.
I walked into the hotel intending to ask the clerk to recommend another place to stay and a tall man in a clean well-cut suit brushed rain off his hat and came inside. Our eyes met.
‘Zhuan?’
‘Joe!’ He smiled. ‘What a coincidence.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Going north on business. At least, I was before the rain set in. Still, could be worse. Did you hear about the southern bridge?’
‘I tried to cross it a day ago. How did you–’
‘It opened for about an hour this morning. I was very lucky. And now I discover the road north has closed also. So you’re still out here. Still searching for Thuy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You poor man. But where is Minh Quy?’
‘Saigon I suppose. I had no money to pay him.’
‘And my driver?’
‘He is here, Zhuan. But he doesn’t know I know.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He deserted us, wouldn’t answer his phone. And now he shows up here. And he seems very much at home. He knows people.’
‘That bastard.’
‘How well did you know him?’
‘Hardly at all. He was recommended by a friend. Have you eaten?’
‘I was just about to.’
‘I know this town a little. I was going to get the hotel to cook me something, but now that I have company there’s a little hot pot restaurant around the corner from here that won’t poison us.’
He checked into the hotel, put his coat back on and took me by the arm and we walked out into the cold.
We came to a small cafe with a wooden facade. The waiter came to the table with tea.
Zhuan wiped two glasses.
‘So you have had no luck at all finding your girl?’
‘A woman directed us to a track in the woods on which girls are moved in and out of China. Then we met an interesting ferryman who admitted to being in the pay of the gangsters who run the operation.’
‘Did he give you a lead?’
‘Yes. To He Kou. But it ran cold.’
‘He was probably lying. Trying to make out he was – how do the Americans say it? – a big shot. There are a lot of men like that around here. They puff themselves up in front of strangers. Sadly gangsterhood is something they aspire to.’
‘I can imagine. Yet this one did not lie.’
‘You know, there is a mountainous border with Laos that runs a thousand miles.’
‘I know. I’ve been along it.’
‘No one can follow what goes on out here.’
I shook my head.
‘This is the place alright. I’m sure of it. But no one will talk to me. We got close that one day in the mountains. We were a few hours from surprising a camp of traffickers.’
‘Thuy’s captors?’
‘Perhaps. But I have no way to tell.’
‘Anyway, you should thank God that you didn’t surprise them.’
‘Well, now they’re gone, and I feel like any day I’m going to be shot by some low-tier gangster for asking questions.’
Zhuan raised his eyebrows and lit a cigarette.
My phone rang and my heart pounded in my chest but it was Minh Quy.
‘Have you discovered something?’
‘Not the girl,’ said Quy, ‘But I found a man who has heard of a place he called "the darkest little room in Saigon.”’
‘Is he trustworthy?’
‘Perhaps, though he is a criminal. He said that any man who walks into this ‘darkest room’ becomes the owner’s puppet. The customer is made to know he has been identified, and after that the consequences of anyone taking anyone else to task are too terrible … so all parties remain silent, and the place continues without any police trouble. No one sees anything there.’
‘Hence the “darkness”.’
‘Clever, no?’
‘Is that all?’
‘No. I have something else of great interest to tell you. Something I have just thought of.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is Zhuan with you? Don’t say his name – just say yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard he had gone north. He is following someone.’
‘Who?’
‘A foreigner. He was asking questions about you at Tuoi Tre. Seeing if you’d checked in with anyone.’
‘Maybe it’s an act of kindness?’ I said, trying to speak cryptically yet still give my meaning.
Quy was silent.
‘Maybe. But
just tonight I thought of something. That photo you showed Thuy, the one of Hönicke at the cafe in Saigon. You said she identified him as the owner of the darkest little room.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did she point?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Did she point to him in the photograph or just confirm what you said?’
‘She did not point.’
‘There were three men in that photograph, Joe. I remember now. Hönicke, a waiter and one other. Do you remember who? You know, the Vietnamese say that three people in a photo is bad luck. A man I played cards with tonight reminded me of the superstition. And then I thought of that picture.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Am I? Perhaps. But I would love to get that girl and that photograph together again and ask her to point out the owner of Club 49. And I re-investigated your man Hönicke.’
‘Yes?’
‘He remains a spare-parts dealer from Cologne.’
‘You are too suspicious.’
‘Perhaps. I am sorry. I have been drinking. But I thought I should let you know. Just in case …’
‘In case of what?’
‘In case you are in danger.’
‘Goodnight, Minh Quy.’
‘I’m sorry. I have been drinking. Goodnight.’
I put the phone in my pocket.
‘Who was that?’ asked Zhuan.
‘Minh Quy. He has a lead on a job.’
‘Frightening politicians?’
‘That’s it.’
‘I told you to quit that.’
‘I know. But this one will not come to much anyway. I told him so.’
Shortly Zhuan asked me to excuse him as he was very tired. I saw him back to his room.
‘You’re not staying here?’
‘I was. I’ve fallen out with the people at the cafe next door and I think they and the management here are close knit.’
‘Fallen out how?’
‘A man pulled a knife on me.’
‘Hell, Joe. What over?’
‘I told you before. Asking questions.’
‘So where will you go tonight?’
‘I don’t know yet I’ll find somewhere. Keep an eye out for your driver.’
I checked into a room down a narrow alley off the east-west road. I stood on a small balcony beside vases of flowers wired to the balustrade. I looked down to the orange light that marked the entrance to Kin’s cafe and I brought Thuy’s last message to my phone screen: I go bac he. Could it have been a mistake? Could she have meant to write ‘Bac Ha’?
The Darkest Little Room Page 15
