The Darkest Little Room (10 page)

‘You think I'd be killed?'

‘Why not? If she is as pretty as you say then she will be worth thirty thousand dollars to the house. Maybe more.'

I looked down at the people passing on the street.

‘She's the most beaut–'

‘Yes, you told me.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘On other matters, when are we going north to visit the Montagnards again?'

‘When did we schedule?'

‘End of next week.'

‘Something's come up.'

Quy nodded.

‘You know, there's a rumour that General Phan has started hiring thugs to go after the dissident leaders instead of using police. But I'm starting to think the J'rai would tell any kind of lie if it drew sympathy their way.'

‘I think one of Thuy's forebears must have come from that country. The hazel eyes.'

Minh Quy sighed.

‘Poor girl.'

‘It is not so bad there, for all its poverty. A lot better than things are for her here.'

‘I didn't mean that. I called her “poor girl” because you're in love with her.'

‘Don't be a fool.'

‘Alright.'

Minh Quy wrote something in his notebook. I stared at him.

‘Why did you say it?'

‘Only because like a lover you speak the beloved name in every conversation. I bring up the central mountains and you even draw her out of those.'

‘She's sending me mad, Quy.'

‘It is a terrible idea, however big-hearted you are.'

‘What is?'

‘Trying to rescue a prostitute. The only man I ever heard of successfully pulling it off was Christ.'

‘That isn't true.'

‘Very nearly. And they caught up with Him in the end.

‘The case is not as simple as it was. It's Hönicke and his photograph.'

Quy laughed.

‘The mysterious photograph. I thought you'd got to the bottom of that fraud.'

‘Is this a fraud?'

I threw the photograph on the table. He picked it up and said nothing.

‘That was taken days ago. But even if it wasn't – even it was taken a year ago. Some of those scars would remain.'

‘And her skin …'

‘Was unblemished … until last night.'

‘What?'

‘You heard me.'

Quy shook his head and handed me back the photograph.

‘She might be a witch.'

‘Why do you use that word?'

‘Coming from the country you said she comes from it is possible. They have witches up there. I knew a woman from Thanh Hoa who could charm a fish bone out of a child's throat by singing. I saw it done. Another in Sa Pa looks over bones in old battlefields, touches them and can tell you the soldier's name. It's verifiable.'

‘Don't joke with me, Quy.'

‘I'm sorry. But you know I only half joke. That is wild country she claims to come from. Has been for centuries – no government or army has ever truly held it for any length of time.'

‘Why is that?'

‘There's little money in it. What doesn't flood is high and inaccessible. It's difficult terrain even to walk. But there are other reasons. The people up there are harder to tame than tigers, and very …' he searched for an English word – I imagined he might say, religious or mystical … ‘haunted. Do not think your English-speaking rationality works everywhere and all the time. You come from a people determined to see the world through the glass that it is comfortable with. There are more things in heaven and–'

‘Yes I know how that goes.'

He sighed.

‘Why do you love her?'

‘I don't know. Because she is weak. Because she speaks a language I do not always understand, and with her I can speak it too and forget who I am. Because she is beautiful and in danger. Because she is so very strange … why does anyone love anything?'

‘I understand. But I wonder …'

‘Wonder what?'

‘Witch or no, I think you are being lied to, but by who and for what purpose, I am not sure. Take Hönicke.'

‘Go on.'

‘Do you ever wonder how he got that photograph?'

‘He told me he carried his camera for business purposes.'

Quy shrugged.

‘Maybe. But what man keeps it with him when he goes to a brothel?'

‘A few perhaps.'

‘Alright. But who has it ready to shoot when he goes for a piss? And who gets so lost looking for a toilet he ends up out on the street?'

‘It's possible if you're drunk enough.'

‘Then who, being so drunk he could not find the toilet, has the presence of mind to ready and shoot the camera that just happens to be in his pocket? Who then, having lost that photo of a girl he saw for only a few seconds in a half-lit alley, could be sure that her eyes were hazel?'

‘What are you driving at?'

‘He has spent more time with that girl than he says.'

‘You're right.'

‘And am I right to think that you only saw this photograph after the girl without wounds left you?'

‘Damn it, Quy! He's gone and done it. The photo came after. Only talk of it came before. And I was fool enough to almost believe in some kind of … I hardly know what to call it.'

‘A miracle?'

I shook my head at my stupidity.

‘You don't recognise this man from anywhere?' Quy asked. ‘From some other country you've worked in?'

‘No. And he can't be Vietnamese government.'

I sat fuming and thinking of how I would go to Zhuan that evening and buy a revolver and dig out Hönicke and demand answers, else shoot the bastard dead.

‘Could he be the owner of the club, Quy? That would give him the opportunity to photograph the girl; and only then could he know so much about a place that not even you or Zhuan had known existed.'

‘Maybe. But don't rule out his working for someone else, a Vietnamese. Even a CPV man.'

‘I suppose you're right.'

‘Is it possible you've made enemies in this country?'

I raised my eyebrows.

‘Do you have to ask that?'

‘Perhaps we should scale down our … operations.'

‘Good idea.'

‘But if he's the owner, then could he have come to me out of some secret guilt, the want to have his sins confessed?'

‘Maybe. It's very Catholic of you to think this way. But I think it is more likely he has been using the girl to entrap you. Having her beaten to the end of his scheme.'

‘Damn it!'

‘Which begs the question how much does your girl kn–'

‘Don't even say it. She has nothing to do with it. She knows nothing.'

‘Only–'

‘You didn't see her last night, Quy. All cut up and tormented. You did not see her.'

I took back the photograph.

‘Alright.' He stared at me for a time and then lit a cigarette. ‘Now, about the alleged guerrillas in the north …'

But I lost the thread of Quy's talk. I do not know how long I sat in silence staring at a Felix the Cat cartoon on the wall of the cafe.

‘… how about it, Joe?'

‘I'm sorry. What was that?'

‘What aren't you telling me?'

‘She's staying with me, Quy.'

‘You fool. Are you really so sick of living?'

I told him what I had told Zhuan about my suspicions of a northern slave market.

‘Find out more about her old boss for me, Quy – see if you can get a name, and a link between him and Hönicke. Here!' I remembered my camera phone, the picture I had snapped of Hönicke. ‘Do you know him?'

Quy squinted at the image.

‘No.'

‘Do you want me to send it to you?

‘How could I forget a head that ugly?'

‘It might be a useful one to remember. I'm going to bring down whoever's involved.'

‘It's probably your only hope now – at least to make enough trouble so the owner's killing you would look suspicious. But look at it from his angle – if this girl isn't in on a plot against you, then you've stolen his property.'

‘He doesn't know that.'

‘Maybe not yet. But let's pretend you survive a trip north and rescue some girls, maybe bring down a trader or two, you cannot bring them all down, and the cadres always collect their debts. From in or out of jail. You will still be in danger – and she in worse danger. What will you do with her then?'

‘Get her out.'

‘Is that what you've told her?'

‘Yes.'

‘How?'

‘We'll just get in a car and go. I know a priest in Da Lat who–'

‘No good. The kind of people you are dealing with can find her in Da Lat. If you are truly convinced she is not deceiving you, then the one and only thing you can do to save her is forget this “darkest room” and northern slave trade business and marry her – get her a fake Australian passport and leave as soon as possible. I can arrange the documents.'

I nodded and stared at the people flowing along the street in a stream of fading sunlight.

‘And yet,' Minh Quy drew on his cigarette, ‘on this you are silent. Everything else, despite the risks, you are willing to do at once.'

‘I do love her, Quy.'

‘But you need more time to think? To get to know her? To wonder if you really want to leave Vietnam forever, so full of pretty adventures and pretty girls. You have little time now. We know she's a prostitute, and possibly a witch. I wouldn't worry that she's hiding some disagreeable part of herself from you. And perhaps all her mysteries will vanish when she lands on your English-speaking shores. That seems to be the way of things there. She'll get a job in a cafe and you can teach writing in a college and mow your lawn on the weekend and argue with her about whose turn it is to drive the boys to cricket.'

‘She takes heroin. But she did not try to hide it. Last night I bought her a hit.'

‘Well there you go – she's honest as well. But heroin has a way of making people very sincere, when it's not making them desperate liars.'

‘Alright, Quy.'

‘Where is she now?'

‘In my room. Locked in my room.'

‘How old is she?'

‘I never asked. Apparently old enough to be raped and beaten nightly. What does it matter?'

‘It matters because you are about to make a very serious enemy who has you cornered. You have a girl who may or may not be legal age locked in your room, battered and bloody, and you're buying heroin for her in order to keep her there.'

‘I'll leave it off my résumé.'

Quy lit a cigarette.

‘If you are serious about this girl then forget the north, Joe.'

The pragmatic conversation with Quy lent reality to the events of the previous nights, and so long as I stayed with him that reality lasted. But back in my room Thuy was just as I had left her and the evil enchantment returned. She watched Bui Vien as though waiting for someone to appear out of the crowd on the street.

I forced my suspicion away.

I was her rescuer, so she must be watching for an enemy. I looked at her wounded ankles.

Quy is wrong. God, he must be wrong.

I put my hand on the back of her head, ran it down over the cut behind her ear that had already begun to heal.

It is child's skin.

I carried half a dime bag of heroin in the inside pocket of my coat – plenty for the night. She chased her first dragon and I poured a glass of Scotch and put a recording of Pärt on my stereo and listened to the slow resonant final movement of
Lamentate.

I lay awake while she slept. I do not know if it was the drink or mental fatigue and the onset of a dream but I began to believe it was I who had abused her, though my hands had not fastened those shackles myself, even so I had done it. Hönicke was some evil angel, arrived in the city to show me how my sin of years ago had flowered. And now my evil had come home to roost. I remembered Zhuan saying something about it being only a trick of time that made us believe guilt was caused by sin; instead the sin was in us from the beginning in the shape of guilt, only waiting to be borne out. So this girl bore miraculous wounds my hands had not yet made. And I wondered had I gone out and made the darkest little room: was it right here where I kept my wounded girl trapped behind a locked door and brought her the gift of death she inhaled through the night? My duty was to send her away, to send her to a clinic somewhere. But I loved her, and I did not ever want to let her out of my sight.

I woke at midnight and the light of the city seeped in through the window and the back of her sleeping head was haloed by streetlight. The pretty little bones in her striped back were visible and I thought how poorly made she was for this world. But looks were deceiving: these Vietnamese girls are tough, I reminded myself, they are tougher than any self-satisfied Westerner or Japanese or wealthy Chinese right off the bat, as hard as rock when they must be, and this one must be tougher than them all.

She slept so silently. I could not even hear her breathe. I wondered that she did not stir with bad dreams. But I guessed the drug killed all that. I got up and opened the window for the breeze and only when the cool hit my face did I realise I was crying. I had never known any kind of happiness, only desire and pain, but here was peace. I had never felt so much a stranger as I did that hour when I woke beside her. Yet, should the God Thuy believed in ask me to choose one hour to occupy eternity, it would be this one; in a strange house with a strange girl in a city and a country that I hardly knew but that felt like the memory of some long-lost home …

But she woke and the spell was broken, she took my coat and went to the pocket for the dime bag and a notion I had been keeping at bay all night came suddenly and clearly to me without warning: my God, you are deceiving me. I leant out the window and smoked in the twilight. I must be rid of the thought.

I handed her my notebook.