The Darkest Little Room

by Patrick Holland

  If the roads out of this town had been blocked to me, then they had been blocked to everyone. It might be that whoever had taken Thuy was not far away; that if there was to be an auction or handing over of girls then it had been postponed, and there might be one or two more nights before she left this Chinese border country.

  32

  I walked back out onto the street and stood on the corner of my former hotel, watching the door. I meant to run into that former driver.

  He appeared a little after nine o’clock.

  I stepped toward him. He stood still and stared at me with malevolence.

  ‘Xin lỗi … I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t call me. I thought you’d deserted me.’

  ‘Nói xao … That is a lie.’

  ‘Do you wish to provoke me?’

  ‘I want to buy you a drink. I think there has been a misunderstanding.’ I played a card then that I knew might play out very badly. It depended on how ambitious the man was, or how bitter – how melancholy and misunderstood he felt. But he was middle-aged and I thought he might have gotten to the point where a man becomes reflective, perhaps even regretful. I held up a 500 000đ note. ‘Come talk with me.’

  He glared at me. I smiled.

  ‘Nơi nào bạn muốn uống? … Where do you like to drink?’

  We turned down an alley to a concrete box lit by a gaslight and sat down. A waiter poured two thimbles of rice wine.

  ‘Bạn muốn biết tại sao không có ai sẽ nói chuyện vời bạn? … You wonder why no one will talk to you? You speak Vietnamese. You are in a tourist town and never visit the markets or the hill villages, only stay in town asking questions. People assume you are some kind of a policeman or government. Even what you are – a reporter. That is bad enough. Whatever they guess, you seem more trouble than you’re worth. You should be drunker. Fall in with a crowd of older men. Then you will be taken seriously at the kind of brothel I think you are interested to see.’

  ‘I didn’t have to go far to find one in Bac Ha.’

  ‘You mean the cafe? That is not a brothel. You mean the girl, Kin? That is simply paying expenses.’

  ‘So you do have connections up here?’

  ‘As you see. But many restaurants have a girl or two. Do not be very shocked. She is small but she is more than thirteen. Old enough to bleed. I have seen much worse situations.’

  ‘And if she fell pregnant, who would pay her expenses?’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘The pregnancy would be cancelled. There are doctors here. Anyway, she is a hill tribe girl. A good thing is done when those girls fall pregnant to clients. Thus we purify the blood of the country. The Hmong are people of low intelligence. It has been proven by biologists. But if you are thinking of trying to rescue her too, I would cease in that thinking.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let me tell you something. A few months ago a soldier fell in love with a little girl at a brothel in He Kou, say fourteen years old. He had an attack of conscience, and he stole her out of the brothel and sent her home to her village on a bus. Her parents were horrified to see her standing in their doorway. You see, they had sold her for a television set, and sold her to a very bad man. A week later they came home to the house and the girl’s head was sitting on their kitchen table. The rest of her body was in a ditch on the side of the highway.’

  I clenched my teeth.

  ‘What do you have to do with the business of girls in this country? Are you a courier?’

  The bottle between us emptied and the driver’s slits of eyes narrowed.

  ‘I travel around the area to find … what I can find.’

  ‘You are a kidnapper?’

  He shook his head and looked like he might spit venom.

  ‘How should I call you?’

  ‘A recruiter. I was a policeman.’

  I refilled his thimble.

  ‘How does a man become a … recruiter.’

  He was near drunk and his eyes were almost closed now, even after four thimbles of rice wine. But I guessed like most alcoholics he could stay on a level now for another two bottles.

  I slid another 500 000đ under his thimble.

  ‘Tell me what you did – exactly what you did – before you became a courier.’

  He sighed and put out his cigarette.

  ‘Now I am not involved. But before, I took girls from Sa Pa to the Laotian and Chinese borders. The border was controlled by a gang. Hundreds of girls each year. Then the gang drove them on foot through forests.’ He sneered. ‘You see how bad it can get!’

  ‘I’ve seen that already.’

  ‘The girl Kin came to Bac Ha in a comfortable car. She is a relative of the woman who owns the hotel. The woman does not let her go with more than one soldier at a time and no more than three in a night. Call the police if you like. But if you do, they’ll put her in a state home and on the day she turns sixteen, which is not so far away, she’ll be out on the street doing the same work in a much worse place.’

  ‘Does Kin keep any of the money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘One hundred and fifty thousand a night.’

  ‘That’s less than ten dollars.’

  ‘And more than five. Like I say, there are worse places. More people than you might think have to be paid from the earnings.’

  ‘I know not all restaurants in this country keep a girl.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how does a customer go about finding one?’

  ‘Seek and you will find – this is the devil’s order as well as God’s.’

  I stared out the window at the first spits of cold night rain and felt as though my soul was withering. The man’s eyes squinted and wrinkles spread across his face in the gaslight that hung above us.

  ‘How much did you make out of the trade when you were in it?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Thirty thousand dollars. This seems small to you, no? But it is a lot of money in Vietnam.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘And there are men here who make much more … Like him.’

  ‘Who?’

  He stared into his rice wine and was silent. Just a little further, I thought.

  ‘Why did you desert?’

  His slits of eyes looked up at me.

  ‘Because I know the man you are hunting. And I do not wish to find him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. I know who took your girl, and where they are going.’

  You bastard, I thought. You filthy bastard. I wanted to strike him down off the chair where he sat. A bottle of poisonous wine and a cash bribe, and now he talks. The bastard.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Very bad. I told you before about the man who put a girl’s head on a mother’s dinner table. The same man has your girl. His name is Trong.’

  ‘How does he go about his work here?’

  The driver tapped his fingers on the table and I poured again.

  ‘He befriends girls in villages. Invites them to parties. Offers them jobs, locally at first, real jobs, then false ones abroad and in farther cities. But sometimes he buys girls from kidnappers. I have met him. Two or three years ago when he was selling good-looking girls to Chinese brothels. Back then he also operated beggar syndicates into which deformed and crippled children were sold. Sometimes he bought children who had been turned from healthy children to deformed and crippled ones. Sometimes he took girls for the brothels by force. He would make threats to the families.’

  ‘And would he carry out the threats?’

  ‘Did you not hear the story I told before. Always. He would always carry them out.’

  I felt the stock of my gun again and made a terrible prayer that I would be given the chance to use it.

  ‘What if the girl had no family? Had no one?’

  ‘Everyone has someone that they love. Love is often the means by which a girl is trapped. You tell them they are honouring their famil
y, else tell them a mother or sister will die if they don’t behave. Love gets them the same place it got the God of the Christians. Alone, despised and then dead. And everyone loves someone.’

  I looked out the door into the ragged night and sighed.

  ‘There are some who have no one.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘She has someone.’

  And I remembered her returning to me late in the night in Bui Vien in tears and falling into my arms and wondered if, after all, the sallow-cheeked bastard I drank with spoke the truth.

  ‘Take me to him.’

  ‘As I say he is a very dangerous men. I would need much incentive. Much more than a million dong.’

  ‘A thousand dollars.’

  He stared at me without answering. His eyes narrowed. And I saw by those eyes he had agreed.

  ‘Where must we go?’

  ‘If you have lived in Vietnam very long then you have likely seen a girl sold.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where is the best place to hide a leaf?’

  ‘I know how that goes, but I do not know any forests of girls for sale.’

  ‘No. But there are places where young girls and men are inconspicuous – a father and daughter at a railway station who are met by an uncle; two girls and two young men at a restaurant … These scenarios could be nothing, or they could be business transactions. Girls are traded everywhere. Over phones, in hotels, in airports and on the street. Everywhere. The markets may last a day, hours even, and they vanish as quickly as they form. Tomorrow I believe I can take you to the one you seek. We should meet tomorrow at dawn on the bridge into the centre of town.’

  ‘That is good.’

  I left the man in the bar with a 100 000đ note and a double shot of whisky that I bought him instead of the rice wine. I did not mind him drunk but the rice wine that came here from across the border made men sick and I wanted him well the next day. I turned back when I was halfway out the door.

  ‘Tell me one more thing.’

  ‘I am tired.’

  ‘One more.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This taking me north – this was not the first job you have done for Zhuan Li, is it?’

  He smiled.

  ‘No.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  The wind sang in the power lines and tapped light bulbs against the concrete wall I walked beside back to my room.

  33

  I woke at half-past four. I stood on the bridge in the dark and listened to the water I could not see rushing beneath my feet. A wind rose in the north and began scattering mist. I looked down at a rat crawling through grass on the bank. I looked up and saw a man in a dark coat coming toward me with a gun raised. Before I could move he had fired an entire magazine into the mist and another man fell dead at the opposite end of the bridge. The driver. I had not heard him come for the sound of the water and the wind. The dark-coated figure ran toward me and I took out my revolver. I yelled ‘Freeze!’ in English, then ‘Đung lại … Stop!’

  ‘Joe, don’t shoot!’

  ‘Zhuan?’

  ‘Joe, good God!’

  ‘Zhuan, did you shoot this man?’

  ‘He was going to kill you. Last night I couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs to ask the lobby for a drink and heard him …’ Zhuan’s breath was short and heavy. He indicated the graceless bulk that lay between us with the barrel of his pistol. ‘He had come in to collect money. He said he meant to do away with a journalist who had compromised him. I guessed it must be you after what you told me yesterday. I couldn’t warn you. I didn’t know where you were staying and everywhere was closed. I’ve waited on the street since four this morning. Then I saw you standing on the bridge.’

  I looked again at the dead man. Blood from the exit wound in the back of his head pooled and ran into the rills in the stone and trickled into the river. I fought for my breath.

  ‘I got him drunk last night and bribed him.’

  ‘Joe, for the love of God, these are dangerous men!’

  ‘He was your driver.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry, but as I said, I hardly knew him.’

  ‘He knew you. He said he had worked for you before?’

  ‘Yes. Twice.’

  ‘What the hell do we do now?’ I said. ‘Should we run?’

  ‘No. Wait for the police.’

  ‘Damn it!’ My voice shook. My hand shook too when I put my own gun in my coat, shook so I could not find the pocket.

  ‘Give me that,’ said Zhuan.

  I hardly knew where I was.

  ‘Thank you.’

  A police car arrived. A lieutenant who looked barely out of his teens cuffed us both while an older sergeant, indignant at being woken, questioned us in a harsh Vietnamese dialect that I did not understand but that Zhuan fielded.

  I called the consulate. No one came to the station in person, but I was released before lunch.

  I was calling everyone of any significance I knew in Saigon when I saw ‘Zhuan walk out onto the street.

  ‘They let you go?’

  ‘Yes. The man I shot was a known criminal. No one is sorry he is dead. The chief of police told me a terrible story about him. He was a man who had sold his daughter and wife. He was just what you were talking about last night, a low-tier gangster. Do you know why he wanted to kill you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must have found something out.’

  ‘Nothing that he didn’t tell me himself. He said he was going to take me to the men who run things around here.’

  ‘Well, he was sorry about it once the drink wore off. He was taking you to the bottom of the river.’

  ‘Again, thank you.’

  ‘Go home, Joe! Go back to Saigon. I am in the north for another week, maybe more. I will look for your girl. I know this country and these people much better than you do. I have friends here and if she is here I can find her.’

  ‘Friends like the local sergeant,’ I said, thinking of how quickly Zhuan had walked free after gunning a man down. I wondered how much the morning had cost him.

  ‘Yes.’ Zhuan smiled. ‘Like the local sergeant.’

  ‘I should go,’ I said. ‘I have no idea where Thuy is now. I fear she’s across the border and gone. And it seems that all I’m getting closer to each day is death.’

  ‘Let me find her.’

  ‘You alone?’

  ‘It is better that way.’

  ‘Is that why you are really out here, Zhuan?’

  ‘I have many reasons to be here. I work best alone, Joe. Please go back to Saigon. Tomorrow I will be in He Kou and I will ask my contacts there about Thuy. The next day I will be in Shanghai, then Hanoi.’

  I was near tears.

  ‘Then take this.’ I gave him the photograph I kept in my coat beside my revolver and my heart. ‘It’s her. It may help you.’

  Zhuan stared at the photo and looked back at me with glassy eyes.

  ‘Thank you, Joe.’ He hugged me. ‘This means so much to me.’

  34

  Ngoc Minh Bridge and the highway south had reopened. Zhuan said he was leaving in the morning. I told him I was going on the three o’clock bus, but from the window of my hotel I watched the bus drive out of town and into the sleet. I thought again how these roads that were blocked to me were blocked to everyone. She is still here, I said to myself.

  I stood on the corner watching the street.

  Zhuan came out of the hotel and I followed him. I followed him to the transit centre where buses came and went from three countries. He met an old man with grey hair, owlish glasses and expensive tracksuit that made him look like an accountant on holiday. He spoke for a few minutes with the man then got in a car and drove off. I ran back onto the road and tried to hire a motorbike but by the time I did Zhuan was gone.

  I went back into the station and sat down beside the old man.

  ‘Rất lạnh! … Bitter cold!’ I said.

  ‘Đun
g roi … Yes,’ he smiled.

  ‘Who are you waiting for?’

  ‘My daughters.’

  He offered me a cigarette and lit it.

  A bus came in and a handsome man in a leather jacket got off with two young girls.

  The old man went to sit with the man and the girls on a bench outside the ticket office.

  The girls did not seem particularly happy to see their father. They were very young to be his daughters. If the man in the leather jacket was family, surely they should go straight to the old man’s house? And if he wasn’t, what did they discuss? Then the old man gave the younger a roll of notes and the man re-boarded and rode away on the bus.

  The old man glanced at me and walked with his girls to the exit.

  I followed.

  Mist had gathered again and lay upon the town and the car park. I hurried and caught the old man’s open door and pulled my gun from my jacket. I opened the back door and sat down behind the driver’s seat and kept the gun at his temple.

  ‘Cac co ay la ai? … Who are the girls?’

  ‘Những đừa con gái của tôi … My daughters.’

  I looked at the girls whose faces were blanker than the sky above. I asked them a question in Vietnamese and then in Chinese and it was plain they did not understand either.

  ‘Nói sạo … You lie,’ I said. ‘Where are you taking them?’

  ‘They’re my daughters, you son of a whore.’

  ‘And yet they do not speak your language?’

  ‘I’m Laotian.’

  ‘Ask them in Lao whether or not they think I should shoot you.’

  The man stared at me with hatred. The girls did not speak a word nor make a move in his defence.

  ‘I knew it,’ I said. ‘Where are you taking them?’

  He did not answer. I pulled back the hammer.

  ‘Tell me where you’re taking them and you can drive away.’

  ‘If I tell you what good will it do you?’

  ‘Let me worry about that.’