The Darkest Little Room

by Patrick Holland

  ‘Ta shi wo de … She’s mine,’ the man hissed.

  Then Trong stood in the doorway. He came at me with a hunting knife and I pulled back the hammer and levelled and shot him through the head. Zhuan pressed his gun into the Chinaman’s neck and I aimed at both the thugs in the doorway in turn.

  Zhuan took the Chinaman’s revolver from where it sat beside his pillow and we backed out the door with Thuy.

  The woman at the hotel desk sat silently, watching us go with hatred in her eyes for messing up her hotel.

  We took Thuy out to the road and ran. Two shots ricocheted off a concrete wall over our heads. We ran behind the derelict service station and got into Zhuan’s car. He turned the engine over and we sped along an unsealed road with gunfire cracking behind us. A shot broke the back windscreen. Then we were out of range.

  Thuy had not spoken a word since she’d been flung into the auction room. But then, I thought, when she is wounded she is silent. She was tired and sick and she was sleeping now in the back seat. I covered her with one of Zhuan’s coats and gave her a drink from a water bottle I found under the seat and I saw I had started bleeding again but I did not care. The seat soaked up the blood and I sat with my head against Thuy’s shoulder and she turned and smiled faintly at me out of sleep and I closed my eyes and truly did not care if I died. She still had the jade hair clip in her hair. I smiled. I took it from her and held it.

  ‘Don’t think you understand me,’ Zhuan said.

  ‘I don’t want to understand you.’

  ‘I–’

  ‘Don’t pretend you were buying her for me, Zhuan. I’m not so sick I couldn’t hear what was going on back there. You own Club 49.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t need to talk to you. Just drive.’

  ‘I was going to say–’

  ‘That you only oversaw her beatings? That you didn’t administer them?’

  ‘I oversaw nothing.’

  ‘You own the bar.’

  ‘And I have only been in there a half-dozen times in my life.’

  ‘You liar.’

  ‘Ask her.’

  But Thuy was leaning on her coat against the door. I reckoned she was exhausted and I let her rest.

  ‘She would say anything right now. She’s sick and exhausted. You presided over her torture, Zhuan. If that is your name.’

  ‘Of course it is. With you I am honest. You’re the only decent foreigner I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Very touching. And you’re the nicest slave trader I’ve ever met. By far the nicest torturer.’

  ‘I’ve never laid a hand on that girl, nor allowed anyone else to. You do not–’

  ‘Yes, I know. I don’t understand. I understand nothing about this country. And yet, there are some things I do understand about human dignity.’

  ‘I love her, Joe.’

  ‘How dare you? You bastard!’

  ‘Why do you think I am here if not for love? Do you know what I have done to myself tonight? What I did back in Saigon? I have little idea what goes on under the roofs I own. I bought that bar two years ago. Back then, not a one of my bars had girls. But you employ managers whom you can never wholly trust, you employ them because they are tough and can handle trouble, and then they invite their pretty cousins and the working girls find their way in. Then police and government men come and the thing is legitimised because they have something on you and you on them, and then there is no stopping it. Believe me.’

  ‘And yet everyone back in that trading house knew you.’

  ‘Before I walked in there I knew one of those men only. But it is true that I have bought girls. I sometimes come up here looking …’ he breathed deeply. ‘I do not know what for. I bought girls who looked a certain way, spoke a certain way … Northern girls. It’s my home, you see. They say once you have loved a Northern Vietnamese girl you can never break the spell. I took the girls back to Saigon and put them in apartments, but finally, I confess, I lost interest. I paid them annuities. But I stopped seeing them, and what a girl I do not love does with her own time in a bar is beyond my control. Though I kept up the annuities. Everyone one of them was cared for. And it was so much better that I bought them and not some other. There was one other man I knew up here who was not in the room tonight. He had two Laotian girls I meant to set free.’

  ‘Was he a slave trader?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I thanked God and looked out the window at the monotonous dark broken by spare lights of barber shops and drinking houses on the edges of the asphalt in the ragged villages that formed and disolved.

  ‘So you admit you are a brothel owner?’

  ‘A man cannot set up a restaurant or a hairdresser’s in Saigon without inadvertently becoming a kind of brothel owner. God, Joe, have you never taken a girl?’

  I ran my thumb along the windowsill and sat silent in anger.

  ‘But listen to me, Joseph. There are girls who think it preferable to be paid in a bar than be abused for half pay by police who take them from the bridges.’ He sighed. ‘This is the way of things when the first and third worlds meet. This has been the way of things for all time. And you know this is true, but you do not accept it because you are not of this soil and however long you stay here you are on holiday. So yes I allowed touts to bring girls into my bars – girls who had no intention but prostitution. I was repelled, I assure you. So repelled I stayed away altogether.’

  ‘And you kept the profits of the bar.’

  ‘Yes. For that there is no excuse. But my sister and my mother died of poverty, Joseph. Can you begin to understand that?’

  Thuy seemed asleep. I spoke quietly so as not to wake her.

  ‘What is the darkest little room in Saigon?’

  He sighed and was silent for a time. His voice shook.

  ‘I don’t know. Till that day you came to me I had never heard the name spoken. The manager, Tan, brought Thuy to Club 49. Bought her from the same man he sold her to: the one you shot back there at the hotel. I think she was Tan’s favourite. He hid her from me. I did not know the true purpose he kept her for. I swear to you. I did not even know of the girl’s existence until after you came to me. Can you believe how shocked I was at what you said about the bar. My people found her in the custody of that pig, though she bore no wounds. I had her rescued. She was with me for a night, and then she was gone. I did not know where to. Then I heard Tan had tried to capture her from you. She was the most valuable asset he had ever possessed and I knew he meant to sell her and run. I forced him to give me the name of that man you shot tonight and then I shot him, for strangely he admitted to hurting her. But I never saw the room you spoke of. It was I who got her out, Joe. I who kept you and her safe. I loved her, but I loved you too and I allowed her to go to you. True, when you could not get drugs for her I let her come to me, come to me and sing the old poetry, always knowing that eventually I would send her back to you … but then you sent her away, and I took her.’

  I remembered telling him I had left her to walk the bridge.

  ‘No, Zhuan. I took her back. She was stolen from out of my arms.’

  ‘I had my best men find out where Trong was and to where he intended selling the girl. Without me she would be gone now, Joseph. Dead or gone. Remember, you gave her to me. That day at the Hotel Continental you told me you had given her up.’

  ‘I lied.’

  I wound down the window a little and cold wind bit my face. ‘Where are we going now, Zhuan? To Saigon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I looked over his shoulder at the fuel gauge.

  ‘What will be waiting for us there?’

  He was silent for a time.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And the driver, the man you shot, was that just to spare me this revelation.’

  ‘No. I spoke the truth, Joseph. He was going to kill you. Were it not for me you would be lying cold in the Red River tonight.

  We drove through a black landscape and met a highway on t
he red delta floodplain.

  ‘She reminded me of her,’ Zhuan said at last.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mother. My mother was flogged by my dog of a father, and as a boy I stood by and did nothing. She died in the war when our village was bombed, for she was too poor to stay a day in the shelters and she was out in mountain foraging when an American napalm bomb fell … Then I saw your picture of Thuy, and I recalled at once the marks a man’s belt makes in a woman’s skin, but when I was with her the wounds were gone and in my house she sang …’ I thought Zhuan was near to crying. ‘She sang a song I had not heard in thirty years.’

  ‘And your courier,’ I remembered, ‘the boy with the heroin who did not come – you stopped him on purpose?’

  ‘I loved her,’ he said again.

  This girl was mine and his redemption both. And I knew then that he was planning to take her from me. I had two bullets left in my revolver and I thought I should put the barrel to his head and kick him out of the car.

  My back was wet and I thought the car roof was leaking but when I reached down and touched the fluid I knew it was blood. I packed the wound with a handkerchief – I had no more energy to make a better dressing and I thought I might be lucky and die out here for I had no place to go and perhaps this was the place, the one I had sought all my life, in a car on a dark road in Indochina riding into the night knowing nothing but the feel of her hand in mine.

  But on another unlit dirt road I woke. I think we must have hit a ditch and lost a hubcap. We slowed to a stop.

  Zhuan got out. I did too.

  ‘I have a gun pointed at your head,’ I said.

  He turned and though I could not properly see his face I could feel his wounded eyes staring at me and then I heard a hammer click.

  I expected a shot, expected a thud in my chest and to be kicked down into the wet earth, and I hoped I could bring myself to fire before that happened. My finger shook in the trigger housing and I told myself to fire. He’ll kill you. He’ll kill you first and for a terrible moment I did not care and it did not matter who fired. But what came then shocked me. Not a bullet, but a plaintive voice, desperate with sadness.

  His arm dropped.

  ‘Don’t leave me here.’ There were tears in the voice that called to me from across the dark. ‘Don’t go,’ he whimpered once more. ‘You’re my only friend,’ he said. ‘And I love that girl.’

  He fell to his knees and I heard his Walther splash into a pool. I looked up and down the road. If we were being chased we could not afford to stop anywhere long.

  I picked him up and I thought the pain in my head would send me unconscious.

  ‘We have to go,’ I said. ‘In an hour it will be dawn. You must drive. I can’t.’

  I put my jacket under Thuy’s head on the window and she turned and smiled faintly at me. I leant forward and turned up the heater fan in the car and felt a sickening pain that had moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck.

  We crossed a bridge and water rushed beneath us and I turned and Thuy’s head bounced off the window. I took her hand.

  ‘See the river,’ I whispered and smiled, and I saw then that her head hung limp like a doll’s. I put my hand on her forehead but she did not wake.

  ‘Thuy.’ I shook her gently and she fell back in the seat and her head hit the window. ‘Thuy!’

  Zhuan pulled the car onto the side of the road and ran to the backseat door. I felt her hands and forehead and took her out onto the bank of the river but the warmth had gone out of her body. The blood that I thought was mine had come from her back. She had been hit by one of the bullets fired at us back at the hotel in the outskirts of Bac Ha – the one that broke the windshield. She had been so weak, so shocked, so hungry and sick and so wounded already that she had not known. And for blood loss or failure of the heart she had died.

  I stared at Zhuan over her body. He held her left hand and I her right.

  ‘We must keep on.’

  Zhuan nodded.

  I carried her in my arms to the water.

  ‘Let me carry her too,’ said Zhuan. He put his hand under her waist and in doing so grasped my hand and I looked into his eyes.

  We set her body down in the stony shallows. Her hair played about her beautiful face as in a wind. Once more she was exquisitely beautiful. The water would rise through the day with the rain fallen in the mountains. Then we both knelt beside her and I wet my face.

  Zhuan looked back along the road.

  ‘We cannot stay.’

  ‘No.’

  We walked back to the car.

  I stared at the blood soaked into the passenger seat, thick and wet.

  ‘You will have to get your shoulder seen to,’ said Zhuan, staring out the window at the blank sky.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, closing my hand around the butterfly hair clip that was greasy with blood.

  ‘I know a good doctor in Saigon.’ I put the hairclip to my lips and tears burst from my eyes before I could help it. ‘Oh, God.’

  36

  I saw Zhuan a half-dozen more times in Saigon. Christmas was coming and festoons of lights hung above Le Loi and Dong Khoi Roads and the city was beautiful. Zhuan would sit in Bui Vien cafes for hours. He made no attempt to hide from what was coming to him. We stared at each other once as I walked past on my way to a travel agent to book a ticket to Singapore where I had got a job at a paper. I think he thought I was going to sit down and talk with him. He lowered his eyes when he saw I was not.

  We met a week later at the Victory Hotel swimming pool, where we often met by design in happier times. He was sitting in a deckchair with a beer.

  I was about to walk straight back out of the hotel but he sat up and grabbed the sleeve of my shirt.

  ‘Let go of me.’

  ‘Please sit down. I may not have long to live.’

  ‘Are you sick?’ It was a cruel joke and I should not have made it. The guilt I felt then made me pull out the chair opposite him.

  ‘If only you knew how much you have to thank me for – what is coming for me could be coming for you if I had not protected you. I could have given your name at any time.’

  We sat in a long silence. I looked down at one of those grandiose faux restaurants without customers that government men build to launder their wealth.

  Zhuan held up an MP3 player. I had wondered what the earphones were for. I thought they might be attached to a mobile phone, but I could not imagine there were many people left for him to call – perhaps a policeman somewhere in China or Thailand who owed him a favour. Someone who could get him an ID or passport. But he was not going to run. He smiled.

  ‘These are wonderful things. Do you have one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve been sitting here listening to Górecki’s Miserere. The sound is just as though you have a choir before you.’ I nodded and looked away at a pretty girl in a one-piece swimming costume.

  ‘How long do you think girls have been sold in this country?’ Zhuan asked.

  ‘Forever, no doubt.’

  ‘Yes. Thousands of years.’ I had the feeling he was talking to himself – as though he were engaged in some personal battle that had been waging since long before I sat down. Since the day he first saw Thuy and perhaps longer. ‘We are none of us at home here,’ Zhuan said. ‘That is what causes all our trouble. We are in exile, just like the girl who died. The difference was she could never forget it. That is what has caused my trouble.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You’re very self-righteous, Joe? I wonder what you would do if a high ranking officer offered money for a girl who had taken up a permanent seat in a bar you owned?’

  ‘Throw him out.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But you are imagining an enemy. Much more difficult when the man is supposed to be your friend and all his friends are the present rulers of the land.’ He sighed again.

  That resigned sigh was beginning to annoy me. I was regretting sitting down with Zhuan now. He was destroying the pe
ace I felt in despair. I had only wanted to swim and let exhaustion blank my mind.

  ‘Do you think those wounds of hers were miraculous, Joe?’

  ‘You never saw them?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Not in person. Were you lying?’

  ‘No. She bore wounds that I could touch.’

  ‘I forgot to look that last night in the car … but then she was in coats.’

  ‘Well,’ said Zhuan, ‘she will not recover from that bullet wound in her back. That I saw. That I touched and it did not vanish. Yet there may be a miracle after all. We both loved her, and do you not feel that somehow through that love we may be redeemed, and somehow she survives?

  ‘The warlords and professors shout and blast their way through the centuries and they come and go. But those who love stand like beacons in the ocean of time. Why? Why do you think the materialists spend so much time and money in the attempt to drown out a man who wrote but one sign in the sand that was blown away by the wind? I’ll tell you why – because people loved him, and where there is love there is continuation, there is life. He knew his words were immortal because people loved them. People love that man still – love him unto death. Everything we do is blown away by the wind, even the ancient law that Christ unwrote then. But not love. Love alone is immortal.’

  ‘The slave boss becomes a saint.’

  ‘Boss? Do you know who I think the bosses are? The thugs. Tan and Trong. The men standing at the doors with guns and knives. The ones without love or morals or even real money. The men of coldness and stupidity and violence. In an evil business who should be highest ranked but the most evil men. I think we all finally answer to them. And they answer to no one. No law of man can harm them because their ignorance, their dullness, is nearly as immortal as love. And all the Devil asks of the rest of us is to sit quietly by and accept them, so he destroys our souls by inches at a time. How poorly medieval Europe imagined the Devil. If they were cleverer they would have dressed him modestly, had him staring blankly at the wall in an afternoon cafe.’

  ‘Something like you right now, perhaps.’

  I could not bear any more of Zhuan’s sermon.