The Darkest Little Room (23 page)

‘And I trust you like everyone in my line of work trusts his colleagues, but I only take cash. How easy for some friend you have in the police to find me when I start drawing on that card. I know about you Li, Tan told me.

‘To hell with you all.'

The auction was over and I put my hand inside my coat and Zhuan grabbed my wrist.

‘Wait,' he whispered.

And we did, for an hour in the car Zhuan had hired in Bac Ha in which time we did not speak, only listened to the rain, and I hardly knew if I was dreaming or awake and Zhuan watched the lights go on and off in the hotel and watched both entrances for the Chinaman and Thuy.

I was asleep when Zhuan touched my arm that ached like hell now it was rested and had stiffened.

‘Come on!'

We walked back inside the hotel and Zhuan walked smiling to the desk and asked the woman to show him where the girls were kept and when she hesitated he pulled his revolver and put his fingers to his lips to hush her and we walked behind her.

There was rubbish all through this lower part of the house; the stairs and floors were slippery with urine. There were no lights in what must once have been dorm rooms. I did not know if we were about to be jumped on by a dog or a man. By the light of Zhuan's torch we made out the shape of a child in filthy bedclothes. We shook her gently awake. She whimpered in fear at the sight of yet another stranger with a torch. Zhuan questioned her but could not get a coherent answer because she was doped and we had frightened her. But Thuy was not here. The Chinaman was asleep upstairs with his $50 000 girl awaiting the morning. He had to wait with the roads away from here all wet and flooded and dark.

Zhuan got the key from the woman and I took out my gun.

Zhuan opened the door and we stepped back and looked in. The Chinaman slept. I aimed at his bald head that shone in the light of an unhinged bulb that hung loose outside his window. Thuy stirred and the Chinaman woke. I rushed and pressed the barrel into his temple He did not move.

‘
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 the 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.