The Darkest Little Room
Page 20
‘Hönicke!’
‘I told you not to go the police,’ he shouted.
Some moments passed before I realised what he meant.
‘I never did.’
‘I know you did. And here you are – with her and … him.’ He waved the gun at Zhuan. At the black Citroën. ‘A detective!’ he shouted. His paranoia led him step by logical step into absurd fallacy.
‘Him. He’s no one. I don’t know who he is,’ I said, at once seeing my lie did not help.
‘Liar. I have seen you two speaking. And now you are here – with her!’ he sobbed. ‘I have a wife and children. I have a job in a bank in Cologne. I have habits. A cafe,’ he said bizarrely, reciting the litany that been revolving in his mind for who knows how long – certainly since his return to Saigon – the litany of material comforts his crimes might see him lose. ‘I sit in the cafe in the afternoon,’ he shouted. ‘I sit in the cafe and watch the birds on the windowsill.’
‘And you will again. Put the gun down.’
So Hönicke was a client. A guilt-ridden regular of the evil place that was now abandoned. Perhaps he had been following us, or perhaps he had returned there tonight hoping for the usual service. And now, when he saw this girl whom he thought must recognise him and the ‘detective’ she and I were about to testify to, his panic became hysteria. He shook his pistol wildly in our direction.
He could not have known how completely he had gotten away with his crimes in the darkest little room. The place and the bar that led to it were closed, the men who ran it disbanded and dead, and any day Zhuan might be visited by an avenger paid to settle accounts for good. One other name, my own, could be discovered eventually from police and criminals comparing notes, but I posed no threat to the man waving a gun at the end of the bridge. I had all but forgotten him and had no clue where he stayed in Vietnam. No one but Thuy and Hönicke knew what it was he had done, and she was dead. Even if Phuong could guess, she had no more standing in the world than a domestic animal, certainly less than the household dog of a middle-class Vietnamese family. All Hönicke had to do was walk away. Walk into an airport and take a plane back to Cologne, and by tomorrow afternoon he could be sitting in his cafe taking coffee again and watching the birds on the windowsill in a gentle breeze.
But guilt had brought him here and had him pull the hammer of his pistol. He stared at Phuong. She must have seemed the vessel and symbol of all his guilt. Here, so far as he guessed, she stood, at the point of giving names and descriptions of the clientele of the house of criminality we had closed. And now he had revealed himself and saved anyone the trouble of finding him.
‘They’ll hang me!’ he shouted. ‘They won’t believe how I hated it. Hated what I did. How I hated myself. You saw me,’ he said to me, ‘you saw me when I was good. What I did. What risks I took!’
I remembered the very minimal risks he had taken to expiate his guilt after what I knew now were nights at the darkest little room. He was always going to be safe – safe from anyone except some vindictive or bored thug. But even back then it was the police that struck real terror into him. The police alone seemed to have the power to remove him from his cafe. The thugs might only have shot him while he sat there.
‘They’ll hang me. They’ll hang me and I’ll lose my job!’ he said absurdly.
There was no chance to answer. I believe he aimed at Phuong, but his hand shook so wildly the shot went wide. It cut through the wind, whistling passed my ear and Zhuan fell dead on the bridge, his eyes still wide and weeping, a look of infinite hope imprinted upon his face, for the last thing he saw was Phuong, was Thuy. His girl redeemed, healed, immaculate.
Hönicke did not lower his revolver but glared into the notch with eyes blank and insane. I went for the gun in my coat but I had only put my hand on the stock when he fired a second shot at Phuong. He fired a third shot into his own temple.
I crawled to Phuong.
It seemed she was hit in the heart. I put my hand over the blood on her breast.
‘Stay awake!’ I shouted but was not sure she heard me.
I looked across at Zhuan, the wicked shepherd who had left all his sheep to find the one that he had lost. It was this that had brought about his downfall. But tonight, at last, he believed he had found her. Once he had thought he would save the lamb, but I knew by the ecstatic look that remained on his face that the lamb had saved him. And somewhere in the night were those who would kill him, they too risking much to find the one who had strayed from them. They could not know their work was already done by a guilty madman on a bridge in the middle of the night in Saigon.
38
It was mid-morning when I was released from the station. The sun was the same late afternoon sun that shines on Saigon no matter the hour of the day. Then came an unseasonal rain and the city’s electric lights came on through the haze despite the hour. I went to the Cathedral Notre Dame and Christmas prayers were being chanted in the wet before the statue of St Maria and a woman shielded a candle above an Agent Orange–poisoned child.
I went in and sat down in a pew and prayed to the wounded and dying figure in plaster that hung above the sacrificial table. Dying for love.
We were all of us safer without love. Even Zhuan, steeped in crime, was safe until he had loved a girl. I stood up and lit a candle before the same Mother of God Elousa icon Thuy had prayed before in my room. She had died on a lonely road between bondage and where she did not know, driving in the dark, and I wondered if perhaps, if only for a moment, she was happy and thought she was going home.
I lit a candle for Phuong. Then a candle for Zhuan. Then I fought and then I lit a candle for myself. Forgive me, I whispered.
I walked across Han Thuyen Road to the French clinic where I had had Phuong transferred. I shook François’s hand and walked past a pair of nurses to the bed where she lay sleeping with her shoulder bandaged.
‘We have removed the bullet,’ said François when he came in to give her morphine.
I smiled.
‘Very good. And she is doing well?’
‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘Very well.’
I brushed her hair from her forehead and she woke.
‘Don’t leave me,’ she said.
I shook my head.
‘Never.’
François came back in an hour.
‘She will sleep through the night now. Go home and rest.’
‘She said not to leave her.’
‘You know what she meant.’
I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I smiled. I kissed her forehead.
I walked out into hazy polluted sunlight that had begun breaking in shafts through the cloud. On my bike I sped over the bridges of Saigon and over the great brown river. I drank Saigon Beer in a bar without women. At some hour that night I returned to my guesthouse and slept and dreamt that I was in a room without light and, though it bore no resemblance to where I had been two nights ago on the road to Vung Tau, I knew it was the darkest little room, that it was called that and that it had always existed, even before time, though it had been called different names and been built in different places. I was there and I could not see anything for the room did not possess anything even as solid as a shadow. I was in the dark and was looking for Thuy. I searched for an hour, but there was no way to measure time in that place so perhaps I searched forever and at last I was searching by the candle I had lit for her at the Cathedral, but it burnt with a blood-red flame that had been born out of the darkness itself and then there was a crack in the door and a link in a chain broke and the sound of it breaking shattered the stars.
Patrick Holland grew up in outback Queensland, where he worked as a horseman, before moving to Brisbane. He has worked and studied in China and Vietnam and is the author of the travel book, Riding the Trains in Japan (Transit Lounge); a collection of short stories, The Source of the Sound (Salt, UK / Hunter, AUS), which won the Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award; and the novel, The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge), whi
ch was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year.