The Darkest Little Room Read online

  A woman was committing karaoke in a room down the alley. I sat on the end of the bed. Out the window a boy in a corrugated-iron loft was praying before a shrine to his father. I looked down through a mesh of electrical cables to the brothel across the street. Sitting at the street-side tables was one very pretty girl, though dark-skinned and so undesirable by the local standard, two plain girls, one girl who had not been a girl until her last trip to Thailand, and a boy in a glitter shirt and a wig whom the others teased remorselessly and made fetch the drinks. Two of the prostitutes sat with a pair of old and impotent Caucasian regulars to whom they paid no attention. Neither did they pay attention to the ten-year-old girl who came in selling roses by the hour until three in the morning and sat at the table with the clients to drink Coke.

  The sound of a bell at a pagoda pierced the trance music at the brothel and woke me to what I should be doing and I tried to settle into my report on the murdered girl. I wrote that the girl ‘was drowned under suspicious circumstances’. Tomorrow I would reveal that she had been shot; the next day, that she was a prostitute; the next, that she was a junkie, so perhaps the thing was drug related. I knew I could get away with this drip-feeding of the story as no Australian papers would be running it. If neither of the two papers I wrote for wanted it then I would tie it all together and sell it to a magazine for a neat thousand dollars. I might do that regardless.

  I plugged my phone into my laptop and brought up a photograph I had taken of the secretary to the Minister for Culture at a notorious brothel on Hai Ba Trung. A man called Bao. This was worth three thousand dollars – perhaps more. I wrote these speculative figures, the magazine money and the extortion money, in pencil in my notebook and added it to what I had in the bank already for the month and was pleased.

  There was a knock and I shut the laptop screen. Phong stood at the door in a loose men’s coat but with eye shadow and mascara visible in the light that came into the stairwell.

  ‘Your boy is here to see you,’ Phong said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Phong grinned. He suspected he had something on me with ‘my boy’. He did not know the exact nature of our relationship, but he had seen enough to know there was an element of secrecy in it.

  ‘I’ll come down,’ I said.

  4

  ‘Peter Pan?’ I called on the street.

  The dirty-faced eleven-year-old boy leapt up from the gutter in the white shirt and grey pants I had bought him.

  ‘I got good news!’ said Peter Pan.

  He had christened himself after the eternal boy. I wondered if he even knew his real name. He had no family to remind him of it now. I found him a year ago living under a staircase near the train station. I bought him a new set of clothes, enrolled him in a school and introduced him to a pho restaurant down an alley off Pham Ngu Lao. Since then he spent his nights walking up and down the street banging a porcelain bowl with a chopstick and guiding people to the restaurant. When he was not doing that he worked for me.

  ‘Your clothes are dirty,’ I said to him when he stood up. ‘Let me get them washed for you.’

  He shook his head. He insisted on speaking the English he learnt at school.

  ‘What I wear when they wash?’

  ‘What happened to your old clothes?’

  ‘I throw out already.’

  ‘You should have kept them,’ I said. ‘When you become a rich businessman you could have shown your children those clothes to prove how far you have come.’

  He looked at me blankly.

  People in Indochina are not sentimental about poverty. They do not read about it in books written by middle-class men and women who make safe dreams about poverty from a far far distance. So the romantic light in which we cast the condition does not shine, say, on the man at the top of the alley whose legs were blown off in the American War, now sleeping in the shopping trolley that his relatives push him about in; nor on the old woman with cancer, wet and filthy in a steaming house where her sons will not pay for the doctor and the doctor will not work without money and the morphine sits unused in a cupboard at the clinic a street away. All traces of poverty must be banished in Vietnam.

  ‘I find you another girl,’ said Peter Pan.

  I smiled and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Not a bargirl?’

  ‘She waitress.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At restaurant in Cholon.’

  ‘Chinatown?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Chinese?’

  ‘No. Vietnami.’

  ‘A waitress,’ I said to myself. I supposed she might have moved up in the world. It was rare, but it did happen. Very occasionally. Though in Saigon there were waitresses and waitresses. The service of food, say, at Tram Chim, One Hundred Birds, was a very secondary duty for the girls working there. But there were straight restaurants too.

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I say her same-same like before. I say I know handsome foreign writer want to meet her. I say you already fall love wit her. Watch cross the street or same-same like that.’

  ‘I’m not handsome,’ I smiled.

  ‘Yes, yes. Very handsome! Maybe just shave beard and no drink so much beer. Look bit old compare man Vietnami. But still handsome.’

  ‘We will meet tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Probably this one her I think. Look very same-same like photo.’

  I no longer expected it to be her. I think Peter Pan did not expect the girl he found to be her either. I am sure he had come to think he was not looking for a real girl at all, only a type. I had given him a colour copy of the one photograph I had of her, standing under an arc light on a dirt road in provincial Thanh Hoa amidst rice paddies, in her hair a small jade butterfly clip glinting in the shallow light.

  I looked over my shoulder to see if Phong was watching me from the doorway. I took out my wallet and gave Peter Pan 100 000đ. He placed the note in his top pocket at the back of a bunch of tattered lesser notes.

  ‘You go this address.’ He handed me a scrap of notepaper. ‘She finish work leven clock.’

  Peter Pan took his bowl and chopstick and hurried back down the alley that had suddenly filled with the smoke of joss sticks and the shouting and clashing of Vietnamese funerary music, meant to convince the dead man who passed now in a gold-painted hearse that the living were happy, so he might leave the world without regret.

  5

  It was just after nine. I did not want to spend two hours waiting alone for the girl. I decided to visit Zhuan tonight instead of tomorrow. My 125cc Minsk was getting its fuel pump repaired so I walked out to the road and caught a taxi to Binh Thanh District. The taxi took me across a bridge over the Rac Thi Nghe tributary of Saigon River. The water here divided wealthy and comfortable District One from the much poorer and cluttered eastern part of Binh Thanh where year by year the wood and rusted-corrugated-iron houses slipped into the river. An enormous rat jumped at finches under a light on the bank. A barge glided along the filthy black water beneath me carrying brown young men, shirtless in the heat. They drank rice wine and played cards on the deck in the light of a kerosene lamp. Entire families rode by my window on the backs of motorbikes. Girls leant on the railings in tight-fitting jeans holding varicoloured motorcycle helmets in the hope of being picked up. Butterflies of the night, the Vietnamese call these bridge girls. Some evenings I walked to Zhuan’s along this bridge and I would look for her face along the row of girls. On other bridges too, till the girls began to think I was teasing them and all I received were sneers and turned faces. But I knew she would not be a bridge girl. And I was no longer certain I would recognise her, even had she walked up to me and caught my arm.

  Zhuan lived in the only French colonial villa in the district. I imagined it made him feel like a mandarin of the century gone. The gold-framed portraits on his walls were French, the scrolls of calligraphy, Vietnamese, and finely carved jade ornaments and polished Ming-dynasty hardwood furniture sat in every room. The fur
niture, which at first I believed was made at one of the city’s outskirts knock-off sheds, was very real and any piece of it – the chair with dragon armrests that eyed you in the living room – was worth as much as any of his neighbours’ houses. Zhuan was a part-time dealer in classical Vietnamese art – his buyers were expatriate Vietnamese opening restaurants and hotels in Saigon and Hanoi – he would call himself an art dealer wherever he could get away with it – though I knew he made his real money in tiles and bathroom fittings for the bland middle-class tenements designed by the government and regarded as symbols of progress.

  He was just forty when I met him. He dressed immaculately – which is not difficult in Saigon given the surfeit of good tailors willing to make precise replicas of recent European fashions from pattern books. But anyway, he had to have his clothes made for him as he was five inches taller than any man I ever met in Saigon. He was well-built and youthfully handsome, though beyond an occasional game of tennis at our sports club and a few laps at the Victory Hotel swimming pool where we often began a Saturday night, I had never heard of him exercising. The friendship began strangely enough. I saved his life. At least, that’s how he saw it. I was walking Bui Vien one morning and saw him standing on the road buying cumquat juice and saw a boy on a motorbike screaming towards him with head down sending a text message. I grabbed his shirt and pulled him on top of me onto the side of the road. The look on his face when he picked me up was touching. He wanted to buy me a drink. I told him it was too early and I had work to do. He insisted we swap phone numbers and I thought that was the last I would hear of him, but he called me that night and treated me to a hundred dollar seafood meal at Ngoc Suong – in Saigon that is a decadent price. He pledged eternal gratitude throughout the night. It was such a simple thing. He did not seem to think what a monster I would have to have been to have let him get hit. But we liked the same books and composers, and then, when I mentioned an article I had read in Time on South East Asia’s richest men under forty, he had waved a hand at me and said, ‘Men make money, money never makes men.’ I had few wealthy friends and fewer of those were tolerable and I found him fascinating.

  His maid was dressed permanently in silk pyjamas. She unlocked the street-level door for me and I walked up the stairs and Zhuan greeted me holding a Walther PP pistol. He claimed he bought the gun to protect himself from highway bandits on his journeys into Laos and southern China, but he was an admirer and collector of firearms; had been ever since he learnt to fire an American assault rifle as a boy in the last days of the American War. He was, he assured me, a great marksman. That skill aside, the war had left him with nothing but the stigma of being regarded as a traitor.

  Visiting him was like entering a time capsule from the city of the 1950s. He was a throwback to the era of brilliantine hair, opium dens, chiffon and silk and bicycles flowing beneath paper lanterns. He seemed not to belong to the tremendous metropolis of Euclidian high-rises and roaring backfiring scooters that sounded on the street outside. He was born in 65, so I supposed some vestiges of that lost era might have remained in his memory, and certainly his parents had lived in old Saigon. His nostalgia was the reason Zhuan rarely left his villa. Here he could dream he was in another, more graceful city. I knew that he occasionally had a girl sent up here, never in jeans or a skirt but rather in the white silk ao dai that became a rarer sight in the city with each passing year.

  We went to a balcony that overlooked the river and a ragged concrete esplanade. Here he would wave his pistol above people’s heads while he spoke, occasionally training the sight on a light or a dried fish hanging in a vendor’s cart.

  ‘I have found a place where we can see hat boi.’ he said. ‘Very authentic by the account I received.’

  With the Walther PP he pointed to the chair I was to sit in. I laughed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I forget myself. You told me last time that the Walther makes you nervous.’

  ‘A little. Perhaps if you did not keep it loaded.’

  ‘I will put it away.’

  He placed the pistol on the soil of a potted jade tree.

  ‘But about the hat boi,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not even sure what that is.’

  ‘It’s a stylised Vietnamese opera that reached its classic form around the beginning of the fifteenth century and never left. That’s the wonderful thing!’

  We had gone to an open-air theatre to see a performance of Cai Luong the week before. The form was a mix of traditional Vietnamese and French theatre with concessions to modernity such as an electric guitar. I thought it was amusing. Zhuan found it crass. He was determined we should see something ‘proper’ next time round.

  ‘Hat boi,’ he said, ‘has an appealing simplicity. A man with a curly black beard is given to violence. A man with a blue face is arrogant. A red-faced man is hot tempered. The theatre is a cyclo ride away. We will go tonight!’

  I felt a fool riding in cyclos with Zhuan while motorised traffic hurtled by. I was surprised he did not. But anyway I was busy tonight.

  ‘I have work,’ I lied.

  Zhuan shook his head. ‘Taking compromising photos of high CPV men is not a way to make money. It is a way to get killed.’

  Following our Cai Luong night and a half-dozen Saigon Reds I had mentioned my last paid job. Perhaps I had wanted to run it by him to gauge his reaction – to make sure it was no more dangerous than I had accounted for.

  ‘That was a one-off,’ I lied again. ‘Anyway, Mr Le was a low government man. Those worried about promotion are manageable. The men who have nowhere to go but down are the dangerous ones … So I’m told.’

  Zhuan furrowed his brow. ‘You are very young to be so cynical. Are you thirty?’

  ‘Thirty-three. And I look every day of it.’

  Zhuan smiled. Then he went to his minibar and opened a bottle of French pinot gris.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’

  ‘My friend, a wine like this is an occasion in itself.’ He smiled, recited a proverb and translated it: ‘Va ruou ngon phải có ban hien … and a good wine requires a good friend.’ He poured and sniffed the wine. ‘I think the bouquet would be lovely were it not commingled with the air of this filthy city. Rất thỏi!’ he said. ‘Very stinking!’ He filled my glass. ‘I read the article you wrote on the hill tribes of the central highlands for the Melbourne Times.’

  ‘The Age.’

  ‘Yes, that one. Has your phone been tapped yet?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Do you realise that that is political sore spot number one in this country? Really you are careless. You could at least have used a fake byline. You think every place is as forgiving and polite as the country you are from. Very careless.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He sighed.

  ‘But you have a nice turn of phrase. You could have been a novelist.’

  ‘I have no special love of poverty.’

  ‘No, nor do I. But for that, I think I might have tried my hand as a composer.’

  Zhuan uttered a few sharp words of Vietnamese and his maid brought out two ebony pipes and the silver canister in which he kept his opium peas.

  ‘Will you smoke?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  He told the maid to prepare the one pipe. The little woman kneaded three peas and cooked the first over the lamp and Zhuan reclined in his chair and took his pipe to his lips.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about a news story,’ I said.

  Zhuan smiled and nodded.

  ‘A young girl with bullets in her back was found washed up on the river bank today. It seems she was dumped in the water out there.’

  Zhuan nodded again.

  Even in the middle of his first pipe an abstracted glow came into his face, as though he were dreaming while awake. He held the opium smoke deep in his lungs. I should keep him going while he was still with me.

  ‘I wondered–’

  He exhaled.

  ‘Which do you think i
s the real world, Joseph? The one seen through opium smoke or the other?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I know which I prefer.’

  ‘But the girl in the river–’

  ‘I don’t mind telling you, Joe, I’ve been very low lately. Sometimes a strange mood, a dark cloud, descends upon me. I believe it was the war that did this to me.’

  ‘The war?’

  ‘Surely there was a war! Perhaps it was in a past life. No, but I was a soldier in another century. And you would not believe the things they made me do. The depravity, the privations, the humiliations. It stays with you. It is so very necessary to lift the cloud once in a while, don’t you think?’

  ‘What cloud is that exactly?’

  ‘The cloud. Surely you know.’

  I did not answer. Zhuan inhaled. The air in the room became sweet with opium and there was that entrancing gurgle of the pipe. Zhuan was drifting very far away now – from the room, from this conversation that could not contain his thoughts.

  ‘You know, my mother was Vietnamese, Joe. I remember her as a girl in wartime. We were so very poor. As a child she had one pair of shoes that she shared with her sister. She had one pair of pants but no zipper, and the other girls laughed at her. Even when they were young my father was ashamed of her, you see she could not write. He had gotten her pregnant and then blamed her for it. The pig. She could not write because she had had so few days schooling, she had to walk up into the mountains in the morning and forage for sticks for kindling that she would sell by the roadside in the evenings for less than one dollar, so there was no time for class. She took to that work again when my father left, and with the money she made we ate cassava leaves and fish oil. But before my father left he beat her. Beat her terribly. Whipped her like an animal, Joe.’ I thought he was about to weep. ‘And to think, I could protect her so well now. So easily.’ He drew on his pipe and his sad eyes glimmered and then he smiled, perhaps at all the valuable objects in the room glimmering brighter now through the opium haze. ‘She used to sing to me,’ he said. ‘So very beautifully.’ A tear described his cheek.