The Darkest Little Room Read online

  Zhuan was the only true hedonist I knew. He did not care about money, only for the things it could buy him, because as a boy he had had none of them and there had been no reason to believe he ever would. He was that rare thing in Asia, the truly self-made and well-polished aristocrat – and like the mandarins and aristocrats of ages gone by he had all of their complacency: he appeared to forget that money had to be made as well as spent. I confess I admired him for that. He was capable of enormous sentimental generosity; I had seen him give the equivalent of five hundred dollars to an armless beggar on Pham Ngu Lao who had the same name as a boy from his village. The man held his begging hat in his teeth and Zhuan presented him with so many notes that he could no longer carry the hat and we had to put the notes in the man’s pockets for him and then follow him home so no one would rob him.

  Zhuan stared lovingly at the ebony pipe he laid down on the whisky bitten cedar table between us.

  ‘But I’m sorry,’ he coughed, ‘the girl in the river. I did hear about it – half an hour ago. I dare say I know what you know. You must remember that criminality is a way of life here. You live here for any time, you will, at some level, end up a criminal. One could argue that you–’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Zhuan smiled.

  ‘What I mean is that sin is unavoidable. You believe you are not already guilty in your heart, but you are. The sins you possess are just waiting to be borne out. And then you must pay the piper.’

  He sighed and it seemed the tendrils of his black cloud had momentarily crawled back in through the opium. His maid was watching soap operas on the downstairs television. He hated the sound and rolled his eyes. ‘Anjing yixia!’ he called out. I doubted she understood Chinese. He placed a pea in his bowl himself and held it over the lamp.

  ‘You are beginning to talk like the priest at Notre Dame,’ I said.

  ‘Am I? Well, I am Catholic, you know. I told you that. Nominally Catholic. I suppose the faith rubs off on you when you have lived in this city all your life – just like crime. But I will tell you what I truly believe: there are two human states, suffering and pleasure. The first must be avoided, the second expanded.’

  He lay down and took up his pipe and smoked for a quarter of an hour without speaking. I put a record on his player: Till Fellner performing Bach’s preludes. I put the wine aside and poured a Pernod and stood at the window watching a tour boat festooned with lights glide along the dark waters of the Saigon and the river and the music seemed very beautiful.

  ‘But the girl,’ Zhuan said, just when I thought talk had died for the night. ‘It is an open-and-shut case as they say in films. You will be reading about it in the next day or so. She was shot by a low-level gangster. They have already picked him up.’

  ‘How strange.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I met the investigating officer at the crime scene and I doubted his ability to find his way home by himself let alone find the killer.’

  ‘Well, you know how it is,’ said Zhuan. ‘Someone must have been offered as a sacrifice.’

  ‘But why was the girl shot?’

  ‘That remains unknown of course, but I imagine extortion, a gambling debt, or else she was trying to escape a brothel.’

  ‘Extortion.’

  ‘My friend, why do you think I warn you against your current habits? You know I am not given to melodrama.’ I smiled and looked to where an army-issue pistol sat in a pot plant next to a box of opium peas and a 1955 record player. Had he only been wearing his silk robe tonight, Zhuan might have been a poster boy for melodrama. ‘If I were you I would turn to those novels,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could give you a little artistic grant.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Thank you but that would be tantamount to theft on my part.’

  ‘Suit yourself. Let me take one last pipe and we will go to the theatre.’

  ‘Really, I can’t.’

  ‘It isn’t the same going by yourself.’

  ‘You should get a wife.’

  ‘I would, but I fall in love too easily. I almost proposed to a woman once, and when I went to buy the ring I fell in love with the girl at the counter.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Goodnight, Zhuan.’

  6

  I gave Peter Pan’s scrap of paper to a motorbike-taxi driver and rode to the restaurant in a narrow, cluttered alley lit by neon Chinese script. The girl was waiting for me at the door with a middle-aged chef on a cigarette break. I introduced myself to both of them.

  The girl greeted me in French. I wondered why.

  ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle,’ I answered.

  I had little notion of how poor my pronunciation was and I guessed the girl did not either.

  At this point, as always, I fought hard not to show disappointment. I knew very well I would be disappointed each and every time this scenario was played out, but I was addicted to hope. The pleasure was in the hour I spent at Zhuan’s, imagining that the next hour might really bring her to me.

  This girl’s name was Lien. I took her to a nearby cafe and we spent an hour drinking cheap Australian chardonnay and watching tropical fish swimming in a wall-length aquarium.

  I apologised to the girl for taking her out so late. She said she was often still working at one. Sometimes later. There was a bed behind the kitchen back at the restaurant where she could sleep. In the mornings she studied business at a District One college. She told me she did not care about money but she preferred her husband to be rich.

  ‘A fine policy,’ I said. ‘I would not care about money then either.’

  ‘Comment?’

  I gathered Peter Pan had told her I was French. Or rather, she had an ideal foreign man who might be romantically watching her from afar who was also a Frenchman. I smiled, imagining Peter Pan listening to the girl’s description of the man she hoped for and nodding yes to every item in the list to please her, as he did for me. Not worrying how difficult it would make things later. Well, I had asked for this. What a sad bastard child of memory and desire these dates were.

  I gave the girl 100 000đ for a taxi and walked home in order to be tired enough to sleep. On the esplanade rows of young women were burning paper money for the ghosts of unloved dead and sweeping the ash into the river, and in my mind’s eye I followed this Saigon road to a road in the far far distance, a darkening road of mud in a far northern province where floodwaters and cartwheels had cut deep gouges into the earth and I walked with a girl who had eyes the colour I had seen in the people of the central mountains, and when we reached her house she leant against the wall and sang a song from her home that was like song from another world and a dank wind blew across the rice paddies as the sun flared and then died and the wind was cold and blew her hair across the strange hazel eyes that I could only dimly see now in the dusk and I had known her just twelve hours and I would know her only twelve more and yet I knew then that I loved her …

  A motorbike-taxi driver grabbed me and forced me to look at a picture of a topless girl with fake eyelashes on his mobile phone.

  I shook my head and pulled my arm from his grip.

  ‘Nam phut! … Five minutes!’ he said, grabbing my sleeve again. ‘Five minutes and I can get you any girl you want.’

  ‘But you can’t.’

  7

  It was late afternoon and a stereo blasted a tango to people ballroom dancing in the concreted park across Pham Ngu Lao. The dancing men wore suit pants and long-sleeved shirts despite the heat and the women wore shorts and stilettos and the dancers’ long shadows arced across the concrete. The neon lights across the way were beginning to glow in dark pools that the afternoon rain had made. I watched this from the balcony of Cafe Hoang and ordered a beer and glanced every once in a while at a book of short stories by Maugham that were far less interesting than the park across the way.

  A man entered and sat down at the table beside me. I suppose he was fifty years old. He had neat greying hair and tired blue eyes. To this day I d
o not know how he found me. I never had an office, not in Saigon. I suppose he must have seen me walking out of the offices of Tuoi Tre, where I occasionally checked copy and did translations. He had the eyes of a man approaching a priest for confession. In English and with a thin German accent he told me his name was Hönicke.

  ‘And you are a foreign reporter?’

  I did not confirm or deny. He continued regardless.

  ‘I have a story for you.’

  I feared he was about to launch into a claim, no doubt legitimate, against the government for unfairly cutting his electricity or refusing to see to the plumbing. There is no such thing as a plumber in Saigon.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Take a drink.’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Then have a coffee. I insist.’

  I called for a waitress.

  This was a trick I picked up from The Sun Also Rises. It is easy to get rid of someone once you have bought them a drink. You can just get up and leave when the drink is finished and there is no impoliteness.

  The man took a black coffee. I looked out the window. The dancing had finished now and a group of shirtless boys kicked a football.

  ‘So what’s your story?’

  ‘A girl is being held against her will. And she is being tortured.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here in Saigon.’

  ‘Is she a prostitute?’

  ‘Well … She is a bar girl.’

  ‘She was in a brothel?’

  ‘Of a type. But this is a terrible case.’ The man winced.

  I put the book of Maugham stories in an ashtray.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I do not live here. I am from Cologne. I am a travelling businessman. It can be so lonely and–’

  I told him his reasons for patronising a brothel were his own. And anyway, at the end of it, all men have the same completely justifiable and dishonourable reason. The nights I have spent with prostitutes have been some of the saddest nights of my life. If you ever wonder just how lonely lonely can get, then take a pretty young prostitute from the East – only in countries east of Trieste are the girls so beautiful and so brutalised that their very presence and every word they speak is tragic. After she has endured you, and all the pretences of having enjoyed the night are over, take note of her looking at her wristwatch and wondering how soon she might get away; and if she is staying the night, watch yourself watching the place where you put down your wallet when you get up to go to the toilet, then see the deep unfeeling blankness on her face as she tidies her things the next morning and no longer believes it is worth her while to smile at you, and the pain that made you walk into the bar last night has not gone away but has changed, blackened and hardened in your stomach like a stone …

  The man called Hönicke apologised.

  ‘This girl,’ he said. ‘I only saw her pass through a corridor. From one door to another. I caught her out the corner of my eye. She was dressed in white, but … Oh, Holy Mother …’

  His voice faded to a whisper.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘She had been flogged.’

  I did not recognise the word at first.

  He simulated the action with his hand.

  ‘You mean with a belt?’

  ‘I mean like Christ on the scourging block before the Crucifixion. She bled. Her dress was torn to shreds like her skin. I had been looking for the toilet when I saw her. I followed her outside into the alley where she was emptying a slop bucket. She was … She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She cannot have been more than seventeen, if she was even so old. She was five foot five and waif thin. Her hair was as black as night – none of this red dye the girls use these days – and she had hazel eyes. Almost green. Like the Ma River.’

  For a time I said nothing. I looked back across the park.

  ‘You have been to Thanh Hoa?’

  ‘I have just come from there.’

  Then I thought how many of the bar girls these days wore blue and green contacts. It was the latest fashion. Even then there were genuine hazel-eyed girls from the highlands who were not her. I had photographed one for a travel magazine only a month or so ago.

  ‘But her shoulders bled,’ said Hönicke. ‘And her ankles … I think she had been chained. She could barely stand. But she did stand. She just stood there shaking in the alley, shaking and staring back at me. She said nothing. Did not ask for anything. Did not plead or cry. She just stood there staring into my eyes. Then the manager opened the door behind me and grabbed me by the back of the neck.’

  At this Hönicke pulled open his collar and showed me a bright-red friction mark.

  ‘He nearly choked me. He started making terrible accusations. Lies, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘He threatened to kill me if I ever came back to his house again. Men like that do not make idle threats. I did not dare walk back down the outside alley.’

  ‘Why not go to the police?’

  ‘The police?’ he said, as though the absurdity of the thing was self-evident. ‘You must not go to the police. I mean, what good would that do?’

  I sighed. He was right.

  ‘This happened last night?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Did anyone else see the girl? Any other customers?’

  ‘I do not know. But I have proof. I have a photograph. You see, I must take my camera everywhere for work – taking pictures of potential sites that the development company I work for might be interested in. The camera was in my pocket when I got up from the table. Before the manager saw me I took a photograph of the girl. I do not know why. I suppose it was instinct. So someone like you would believe me.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  Hönicke shook his head.

  ‘That is the problem. I have lost it. Lost the whole camera. I hope to God I didn’t drop it when the manager grabbed me. But I am sure I put it back in my pocket. And besides, I would have heard it hit the ground. I woke up this morning and checked a map and tried to write down how I got to the place. Then I went for my camera and it was gone.’

  He handed me a piece of paper where he had sketched roads and written a couple of names.

  ‘You do not have the exact address?’

  ‘No.’

  I recognised the streets. District Four – the river end of Hai Ba Trung. There were a dozen ‘billiard parlours’ in the vicinity. It was very little to go on.

  ‘You must look for Club 49.’

  ‘Club 49?’

  ‘Yes. The place is across a big river,’ he said. ‘You drive twenty minutes at least. You cross a giant bridge and then there is nothing. Only darkness and hovels along a dirt road. But you can see the city all around you. That big tower. You know the one – it is shaped like a sabre. But the road to the place is right near an empty part of the river. No boats. Maybe the same river I crossed. Maybe the Saigon. I don’t know. Then comes a church with neon-lit plaster saints in the yard. Then the place.’

  I furrowed my brow and looked back at the sketch map and the street names.

  ‘You know the place?’

  ‘No.’ I looked up. ‘You are certain of this location?’

  ‘Yes. But you must ask for something particular.’

  ‘Particular?’

  ‘You must ask for the “darkest little room”. That is the place you will find the girl.’

  ‘How long will you stay in Saigon?’

  ‘Two more days. At a hotel near the cathedral. I do not remember the name.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll go back to the bar with you?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I cannot go back to that place. The manager will kill me. And I will not talk to the police. If you go to the police I can have nothing to do with it. I cannot afford to. I am married. I have not long started at my job. But you can help her. There is something terrible going on there at that place. Something godless and beyond everything.’

  ‘I’ll
look into it. But give me a phone number.’

  ‘I don’t have one in this country. Give me yours.’

  I wrote it down on the back of a card.

  Hönicke stood up. The panic in his eyes had eased a little. He left without shaking my hand. I folded his map into my pocket and ordered another beer and leant back on the wall and watched him disappear into the river of people passing on the street, passing quicker now in the cool breeze of an approaching storm. Then there was wind. The wind rattled the windows of the cafe and blew flags and canvas awnings and the clothes hanging from tube house balconies and the rain came.

  I could not investigate anything that night as I had promised to meet a director to check English copy for the Vietnamese Government tourist agency. I walked to the 15th of May School and found Peter Pan. I took him out of class and gave him 50 000đ to buy chewing gum to sell at Club 49 that night.

  ‘If they don’t let you in then take this,’ I held a 200 000đ note up separately, ‘and grease the man out front. If they still won’t let you in then just sit across the road and watch the door. Tonight you are watching for a girl who has been beaten. Marks on her ankles, shoulders or back.’

  ‘Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I took out an extra 50 000đ

  ‘And this is for you.’

  He grinned up at me.

  ‘Now back to class!’

  I was still at the agency when I got a call from a number I did not recognise.

  ‘Mr Joe?’

  ‘Peter Pan?’

  He had my number to give to any girls who resembled the girl of my Thanh Hoa photograph.

  ‘But where did you get a phone?’

  ‘Friend give me.’

  I smiled. I hoped it was not stolen.

  ‘Did you get into the Club?’

  ‘Easy.’

  The middle-aged director was paying me by the hour and he eyed me and then looked down at his brochure copy.

  ‘And did you find what I asked for?’

  ‘No girl like you say. No evil or bad trouble.’

  ‘Ok. Goodnight, Peter–’

  ‘Wait, Mr Joe!’