The Darkest Little Room Read online

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I find other.’

  ‘Other what?’

  ‘I find girl like same you look for.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Nói thật! ‘This one really her I think.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you, Peter.’

  ‘You don’t want meet with her?’

  ‘Yes, I want.’ Why not? I looked up again at the scowling director and nodded and put my hand up to say I was coming. ‘I’ll talk with you tomorrow, Peter.’

  8

  The next day Minh Quy and I sat on an upper deck of his home in District Ten looking across the glinting aerials, water cisterns and roof-top gardens of the tube houses. I put Hönicke’s map onto the table. Minh Quy tilted his head and blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Club 49. A billiard room much like any other. Black doors. Pretty girls. Touts out front and muscle behind the bar.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been there.’

  ‘Really?’ he smirked.

  I forced a smile.

  ‘Something illegal may be going on at this place – I mean properly illegal.’

  ‘Joe, if you see three Saigonese together there is something illegal going on. The Vietnamese do not view the law so much as a code to live by as a problem of circumvention.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Truly, Joe. Crime is a mode of survival here. See that restaurant across the street!’ He pointed with his cigarette. ‘You can be certain something illegal is happening there right now. A bribe being paid to someone to extend a lease; illegal importation of cigarettes or meat; a waitress looking for a man to take care of her tonight. I hope you don’t think you are going to surprise anyone by reporting that Vietnamese brothels are not completely wholesome places.’

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He took up a glass of dark bittersweet iced coffee.

  I told him what Hönicke had told me of the girl and the darkest little room.

  ‘It’s troubling,’ he said. ‘But the place in your man’s story doesn’t sound like Club 49.’

  ‘Not to me either. And then he described the way to get there.’

  ‘That’s simple enough.’

  ‘It should be shouldn’t it?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘He spoke of a giant bridge that landed in dark outskirts. Hovels and dirt roads where you could see the city across the river?’

  ‘The road to Vung Tau. The girl on the river bank …’

  ‘The wounds he described were nearly the same.’

  ‘But why does he say Club 49?’

  ‘Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he began at Club 49 and was so drunk by the time of his next taxi ride he did not know where he was, only remembered some landmarks along the way.’

  ‘How would you go about this?’ I asked.

  ‘How well do you like being alive?’

  ‘I have nothing to compare it to.’

  ‘You know how dangerous this kind of thing is. To persuade the police to raid a place, you would have to have concrete proof. The kind that is more persuasive than the protection money the brothel is paying the authorities. To get proof you would have to make your own investigation – you know that no policeman will go renegade and back you. If you survive that, you can be certain that the man who owns the place will have been made suspicious by something you’ve done or something you’ve said to one of the girls. After that, he might close up operations for a while. Move the girl. And it would all be for nothing. That is one of the better scenarios.’

  ‘Who owns Club 49?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘Men like that don’t appear in the business sections of newspapers.’

  ‘This is why I hire you.’

  ‘I’ll try to find out. But you must realise that the brothel and nightclub owners are often nameless; some are known but are untouchable.’

  ‘In the meantime, I’ll go to 49 posing as a customer and try to see some sign of what Hönicke saw.’

  ‘What else can you do?’

  ‘And I’ll talk to Zhuan again.’

  Quy rolled his eyes. I should not have mentioned Zhuan.

  ‘Hönicke claimed the girl was less than seventeen.’

  ‘Probably kept for the Chinese. Don’t they believe deflowering a virgin will keep them young?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘Fine place to find a virgin too, a brothel. And would a madam lie about such a thing? No wonder they believe they are intellectually superior to we poor Viets.’

  I smiled. I guess Quy took offence to the fact that Zhuan provided me with information at no cost.

  Quy’s wife was visiting her mother and he suggested we go out for dinner.

  ‘To that new bamboo barbecue place off Nguyen Dinh Chiểu.’

  I had arranged to meet Peter Pan about his girl. But that could wait. The boy would stand a half hour outside my guesthouse and then leave. I would make it up to him next time.

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said to Minh Quy.

  But shortly I felt ashamed sitting at a squat alfresco table enjoying the evening with barbecued shrimp and Japanese beer while somewhere in the night a girl might be enduring hell.

  I left early.

  9

  The taxi turned down a street lit by a pair of copper lights that fell upon the doorway of Club 49. At the door was an evil-looking scarecrow of a man in a yellow shirt: a motorbike-taxi tout. He slithered up to me but I brushed him away.

  Beyond the pink neon ‘49’ and the black doors was a dimlit bar and pool room and small dance floor, all clean and well appointed so as to distract the clientele from the squalor that surrounded the room and threatened to leak in, especially from the door at the back left just ajar into the girls’ bathroom that was wet and atrocious. But you did not notice these things at first. The first thing you noticed were the girls slinking in and out of the dark in sprayed-on dresses to get drinks or change the track of the trance music that saturated the room. One girl in a tight black singlet and denim shorts was green enough not to know how to walk in high heels. She rocked from one table to another as though on stilts. I supposed she was eighteen, only she was used to walking in flat shoes in the provinces. Three girls were with customers. One girl lolled on a lounge chair with the stupid bliss of a junkie after a hit.

  A snake-eyed man with a scrappy beard, bloated face and tattoos on his forearms eyed me from behind the bar. The club shared a wet tiled room that was used as a kitchen by the next-door restaurant and in the doorway of it were about two dozen brown pups stuffed into a cage that might have uncomfortably housed one. These were sold in the restaurant under the billing of a northern rodent considered a delicacy. Snake-face saw me scowling at the cage and kicked it to make the pups yelp and then grinned at me. I held my tongue and tried to ignore him. The bartender brought me a Scotch and dry. A girl arrived before the drink. She sat down on the barstool beside me and our knees touched. She had pretty eyes and bad teeth. I told her that I was only here for a drink, and I wondered who would walk this corner of District Four in search of a drink at ten minutes after midnight. The girl nodded. She spoke to me in broken brothel English.

  ‘No problem. I also only here drink. We drink and talk, yes?’

  The accent was strange.

  I asked the girl her name and scanned the room. I did not hear the name, nor did I see the girl I had come to see. But if she was abused like Hönicke said then I supposed she would not be on show. I thought if I asked the right questions very gently I might find out if she was kept here or what other place the girls lived or worked – perhaps the place Hönicke claimed he ended up in.

  It is an advantage when making investigations in a foreign country for the locals to believe you are ignorant of the language, so I mispronounced a couple of ungrammatical phrases. But the girl barely understood the words I spoke properly. I switched to English.

  ‘Sorry
, what was your name again?’

  ‘Jo.’

  ‘Zhou?’

  I traced the Chinese character on the bar with my finger.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are Chinese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A Chinese bar girl was a great rarity in Saigon. A girl got up from a far table and I stared over Zhou’s shoulder.

  ‘You want other girl?’ she said without a hint of wounded pride.

  ‘No. But you can invite your friends to talk.’

  She signalled to a pair of girls sitting nearby. They wore red and pink spandex suits with slits at the ribs like fish gills that told how the girls would look naked.

  I asked the girls the absurd question that invites a lie.

  ‘Do you like working here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said one of them. ‘It is very easy for working here. Very clean.’

  I nodded.

  I stumbled off my stool. I had taken only two drinks, but no one knew I had not been drinking before I arrived. People are not as careful around you when you appear drunk, and then, in a malicious brothel, you may get different offers. Though such offers rarely came on the first visit: another reason Hönicke’s story troubled me. To investigate this place properly I should return at least twice more, never asking explicitly for anything, only dropping hints to the girls and the barman that my tastes varied. Tonight I would wander around the back rooms pretending to be looking for the toilet. More than that would raise suspicion that I was a policeman, and so I would never find out anything. And I was looking for signs of corruption – of evil. Evil is something you sense as much as see. You can sense it behind a closed door; in a girl’s eyes; in the very air of a place. I had once sat at cards with an ex-military man in an outskirts Siem Reap bar where the sense of evil was so thick and close it was nauseating and no matter how much I drank I could not get drunk and on walking out of there I felt like I had been holding my breath for an hour. But I did not sense evil at Club 49 tonight.

  With my third drink in my hand I stood up and walked toward the toilet. I glanced at a table of girls in the dark beneath the stairs. I came to a small black door and walked into a dingy laundry. A path from the laundry led to a derelict outhouse where a trio of girls were applying make-up before a portable mirror. I walked upstairs to the private rooms. Through a window I saw Korean businessmen with girls and beer and a stack of 500 000đ notes that the men were throwing at the girls like playing cards. But as awful as this place was, there was no trace of Hönicke’s story. I walked out into the hem, the narrow alleyway lit by strings of red lanterns. Behind paint-stripped French doors was an old woman burning incense at a tabernacle and a shirtless and pot-bellied men lying drunk on the floor and watching television. A boy sat at a farther doorway in pyjamas with the light of a red lantern on his face …

  I walked back inside the bar and bumped into a girl who had stood up from the table beneath the staircase. My Scotch spilled and the glass broke. The girl knelt to help me collect the shards and she brushed her hair aside and the blue light in the club struck her eyes.

  I grabbed her arm.

  She scowled.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘You!’

  She reefed her arm from me.

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ny?’

  ‘You want me get security?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for you for more than a year.’

  ‘You have the wrong girl.’

  I scanned her face, her neck. I ran my hand over her shoulders.

  She jumped away. Now she looked truly frightened.

  ‘What you do?’

  There were no marks. Not a scratch. I looked down at her ankles.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I said ridiculously, believing Hönicke’s story in spite of my eyes.

  She shook her head.

  ‘No.’

  I stood staring at her, wondering what that meant. She turned and walked. I followed her. When I grabbed her she slapped me and walked into a dark corner. A girl stood up out of the shadows.

  ‘If she no want talk wit you then go!’

  The bloated, snake-faced manager jumped the bar and put his arm around my throat.

  ‘Cut đi!’

  ‘I’m going, alright. Get the fuck off me!’

  He pushed me to the door and let me go.

  I walked away down the street. I looked back and she was on the steps watching me.

  I waved down a motorbike to take me back to Bui Vien.

  10

  ‘Silence surrounds him, which I’m guessing makes him high CPV, else big business. The reports I got were conflicting. One man said he was a politician, another that he was ex-special forces. As yet I cannot get a name. He is probably an old Party man.’

  This Minh Quy said of the owner of Club 49.

  I took a draught of beer.

  ‘Do you think he would kill me if he knew I was coming after him?’

  ‘Not in person.’

  ‘That seems discourteous.’

  ‘You’re not paying me to lie to you. In fact, you’re not paying me at all?’

  ‘Your money’s coming.’

  Minh Quy’s wife and ten-year-old daughter had gone to the kitchen to wash up after the evening meal of ga chien, Vietnamese barbecued chicken, so we drank and smoked with the pleasant sound of the ladies chirping like birds and making fun of me – of the difficulty I had sitting cross-legged – coming from behind the wall.

  ‘They don’t believe you can understand.’

  I smiled.

  ‘I went to Club 49.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘The girl. Perhaps the girl.’

  Minh Quy raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Was she as bad as the German said?’

  ‘She didn’t look as maltreated as I do. She looked fine for a prostitute.’

  ‘They do tend to look fine. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sick. You know what they say: pick the prettiest, cleanest, freshest-looking kid in a brothel and she’s the one with the really evil diseases.’

  ‘I know. I can’t say what this girl did or didn’t have. Probably the lot by your rule. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. But she was not abused. At least not the way Hönicke said.’

  ‘Buy her a necklace. If the silver goes black on her neck it means she’s sick.’

  ‘You Viets,’ I smiled. Quy did not say such things all in jest; he was a man of the twenty-first century, but like so many of his countrymen his mind straddled earlier ages. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I never got that close to her. She had me kicked out.’

  ‘Are you sure it was the girl?’

  ‘Her eyes were as Hönicke described: green and wet like the Perfume River.’

  ‘I thought he said the Ma?’

  ‘Yes. You’re right. Like that river. But I have never seen eyes like that in a Saigon brothel before – when bar girls wear contacts they are more garish. And this was the club he named.’

  I told Quy my theory on why Hönicke had lied. I had formulated it last night half-drunk in bed. I decided his story was part of an elaborate fantasy – as childish as it was sinister – the fantasy of a man who is excited by the idea of beating a beautiful young girl yet lacks the courage to actually ask for it or do it; but if he can get someone to believe his story then it confirms the fantasy just a little further into reality …

  ‘That might be true.’

  ‘There is another thing, Quy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew a girl who looked exactly like her.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘I know.’ I looked down onto the street, the shadows lengthening along it. ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Maybe I’m going mad.’

  ‘Joe, you are just–’

  ‘I’m not joking, Quy. Maybe I am.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘You should take a few days off. Get a boat down t
o Thailand and sit on a beach for a few days.’

  ‘Maybe. But in the meantime keep your ear to the ground,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  I thanked Quy’s wife and walked home.

  I stopped in at the Cafe Hoang for a Pernod and watched the amber clouds that the ice water made drift about my glass. Out the window I watched the park crumble into the dusk and then the dark was relieved by electric light. I was about to get up when Hönicke walked in.

  ‘I was hoping to find you here,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve missed me. I’m leaving.’

  ‘No, wait! What about the girl?’

  ‘I’m too tired for your bullshit, Hönicke. If that is your name. What the hell are you playing at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you have to do with that girl?’

  ‘What? Me? Nothing, I swear!’

  He looked angry and frightened.

  ‘Nothing! My God I–’

  ‘Alright, alright. Don’t get hysterical.

  ‘But did you find her?’

  ‘Do I look like a fool to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Play your morbid games with someone else.’

  ‘You did not find her?’

  ‘I found her. And you need never worry about her or your darkest little room anymore. She was fine.’

  ‘No, she cannot be. In the photograph–’

  ‘Yes. Now that you mention it, where is that photograph?’

  ‘I have not found it.’

  ‘And you truly don’t know a thing more about the girl than you’ve told me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One way or another you’re a lying bastard.’

  ‘No, wait. I–’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  I got up from the table

  ‘You will see,’ he called out the door after me.

  ‘I did see. The girl you spoke about was fine and the place you said she worked did not exist.’

  I went home and lay down in the air conditioning and watched a storm roll over the tops of the buildings outside my window and the lights atop the buildings flash in the deep Saigon dark. I could not sleep and I knew I must go to her.

  11

  I sat with a Heineken at a roadside cafe opposite the club. I followed her when she came onto the street.