The Darkest Little Room (13 page)

In the room I gave her near all that was left in the packet I kept in my coat – the last that I had bought myself on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. It was perhaps a little more than a tenth of a gram. She went to the bathroom so I would not see. She had come to know how it upset me to watch her. I sat in a chair beside my new window, looking across the way to my former guesthouse. I watched the darkened window of my old room. I watched a vehicle pull up before the front door of the hotel and two men in collared shirts ascend the stairs. In a few minutes the lights went on in my bedroom. I wondered if they were thugs, and who they worked for: the manager at Club 49, Hönicke, or the man in the black Citroen, if they were not all the same man. Then I looked at the traces of powder on my coat sleeve, enough to put me in jail forever, and I wondered if the men across the road were police. Thuy had come in and was standing beside me. I pointed across the way.

She nodded.

‘Do you know them?'

‘Không
… No. But we must be very careful now.'

She went to the bed and lay down with her phone and dialled buttons as though sending a text.

‘Who are you writing to?'

‘Không ai cả
… No one.'

I watched the men come back down to the lobby and speak to Phong's sister. Then I watched them leave.

Thuy rolled over in her narcotic haze and put her hands together and her knees up to her chest like an infant.

‘Em yêu anh
… I love you,' she said. ‘Sister loves brother.'

Now, I thought, there is no difference between a lie and the truth.

She thanked me for protecting her and called me
thiên thần,
an angel, and asked me to lie down and I knew that in a few minutes it would not matter whether it was me or an angel or the devil himself lying beside her.

I was bitter and suspicious again. I slid her phone toward me along the bedside table and checked her messages but everything had been erased.

I checked my own phone and saw I had missed a call from Minh Quy. I hit call.

‘Why aren't you asleep?'

‘Cards.'

I heard men laughing in the background. Probably he was at some alleyway table drinking poisonous rice wine and losing the auxiliary money I paid him.

‘Go home to your wife.'

‘Where have you been tonight?'

‘Out.'

‘Indeed. But I wanted to tell you something. I have successfully investigated your man Hönicke.'

I sat up.

‘And?'

‘He's a spare-parts dealer from Cologne.'

‘Does that mean anything?'

‘It isn't even his shop. He earns nothing. And what's more, he owns nothing. Nothing listed and nothing I can discover that's undisclosed. He had no business at all in Vietnam. He can't be the owner of Club 49 or anything else here.'

‘But Thuy identified him in the picture.'

‘With respect for your girlfriend, I doubt this.'

‘Is that all?'

‘Yes, that's all.'

I showered then went to bed and lay awake staring at the revolutions of the ceiling fan.

The heroin was not sufficient and Thuy woke in the night.

‘I cannot go,' I said. ‘This street may be being watched. If they get me now, the police or gangsters or whoever, then there is no hope for either of us! Do you understand?'

She whimpered and nodded. She sat at the end of my bed staring up at the sky. I thought she looked like a spoilt child, but there were no histrionics through the night. She scratched a little and vomited once. That was all.

She vomited again at dawn. After she had showered I took her photograph against a wall and cut it to passport size on my laptop. She smiled when that afternoon she saw it set in the documents Minh Quy had arranged.

‘You're Australian,' I said.

I showed her the half-dozen photographs I always carried in the sleeve of my notebook to show people the place I came from. One of the pier at Shorncliffe at night; a flat plain at dusk in western Queensland; the pastel-coloured Brisbane workers' cottages beneath a deep blue sky and pearl clouds …

Thuy put her hand to her mouth and laughed.

‘Nó trông giống như truyện cổ tích
… It looks like a fairy tale.'

She began to cry.
‘Anh yêu
… Dear brother.'

‘What is it?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Tell me.'

‘
Cảm ơn, anh
… Thank you, brother'

Tears streamed down her face and ruined her mascara. I supposed Vietnam was her home, and it too was beautiful in its way. How I hated to leave it.

‘Nhưng, bây giờ
… But now …'

‘Now what?'

‘Em bệnh rầt nặng
… I feel very sick.'

‘You have lasted one night already. Though you do not feel it now you are getting better. Already you are better.'

‘Không. Anh phải
… No, you must–'

‘Must what? I must take care of you. That is what I must do. I must make you into a girl who can live in the daylight and meet my work friends in an English-speaking city.' I tried not to sound bitter.

‘But you can go to the bridge on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai.'

‘Too hell with that, Thuy. I have told you already, it is too dangerous. I am afraid for my life. For both our lives. Do you understand? If a policeman catches me down there all I can do is run and hope and pray he shoots me in the back rather than take me into custody, and then where will you be? Do you understand?'

Anger gathered in lines across her face.

‘Hiểu!'

‘Good.'

‘Nhưng anh có thể mua cho em nước đen
… But brother can buy sister some blackwater. There is a place I know in District Four that is very safe.'

Blackwater was the residue of opium. You bought it for less than fifty cents and backed it up with diazepam.

‘Later. I will ask my friend what effect that will have on you while you are getting better. You feel sick, Thuy, but truly you are getting better. You have lasted half a night and a whole day without it. In three days you will feel very well. Just three days.'

‘
Có thể
… Perhaps,' she said through clenched teeth.

‘Nói thật
… I speak truly.'

She nodded.

‘Bởi vì em sẽ là vợ của anh tại Úc
… Because I am to be your wife in Australia.'

‘Yes.'

She nodded again and forced a smile and said we must celebrate. We drank a bottle of French cognac Zhuan had given me. Or rather, I drank it. I became drunk, though not as drunk as I pretended. She led me to bed.

She rose without a sound; a breeze would have disturbed the room more. She dressed and as I had to keep my eyes half-closed I knew she was there only by the bright white of her dress that caught the scraps of street light that came in the window. Through half-closed eyes I watched her pull her red vinyl coat over her shoulders despite the night's heat.

She stepped out of the room and swung the door in that way she had so the hinges did not sing and the only sound she made was the unavoidable click of the bolt in the lock housing.

I stood up and watched the street. She walked out of the building and along Bui Vien. I pulled on my pants and jacket and made sure the revolver was still in the inside pocket and stood in my shoes and ran down the stairs. I followed her fifty yards behind. She turned right at the end of the street and I let some distance stretch between us as the people thinned out and we walked up onto the bridge to District Four and for a moment I lost her in the bridge lights and in a spray of motorbikes and then there she was leaning against the railings at the crest of the bridge. It seemed she was waiting for clients like a common whore. I thought she must be trying to get money to go to that shooting gallery she mentioned over the river. But it began to rain and I saw the black Citroën draw along the bridge and my heart pounded. She walked toward the car. For a fool moment I thought she was in danger. I almost called out to her. Despite everything that had happened tonight I wanted her to turn and run toward me. Then I would take her by the hand and we would hide from whatever pursued her on the bridges and streets of Saigon. But she leant inside the window and then sat down in the passenger seat and I knew that she knew the driver.

Perhaps she had done to me what she had done with many men – played on their sentimentality until their nerve or money ran out. Perhaps she was doing it now with the man in the black car. Or was he the profiteer? I hurried along the bridge. I wanted to see the face of my enemy.

Her new lover – I wondered if he thought of himself in those terms – could afford to leave her to walk the bridges at night. Perhaps in her heart she was trying to escape him – I hoped this. But he knew she would return. At some depth of night, when the cold and hot flushes and the palpitations and nausea and the pain of living became too much she would return to him. I wondered if, like me, he imagined he cared enough not to give her too much of what she needed: only, when he was made desperate by her absence, he allowed her to admit death into her body in the safety of his own room.

I put my hand inside my jacket and drew the revolver and ran toward the car. Thuy got back out and came toward me. I stepped past her and aimed the gun at the driver's side above the dashboard though I could not see behind the tinted windscreen. I did not shoot, only stood there threatening. I expected a shot from the car; the kick of a bullet to send me to the ground, or, at least, the car should skid away. But nothing happened.

Thuy was pulling on my jacket and crying. I had barely noticed until then. I turned to her.

‘What makes him so sure I won't kill him?'

She pleaded with me to put the gun away.

‘Let's go home,' I said. ‘You belong to me.'

‘Please, not yet, Joseph.'

‘What do you mean, not yet?'

‘Em sẽ trở lại trước ngày mai
… I will be back tomorrow.'

‘No you won't. You come with me now,' my voice shook, ‘or never come to me again.'

‘Joseph–'

‘You choose now!' I shouted into the teeth of the hot storm wind that blew rain into my face so I could barely see. She was shaking. She looked at me with infinite apology writ in her face and I knew that the thing in the world that truly claimed her devotion could only be reached by sitting down in the black car.

Perhaps she was crying. I could not tell in the rain.

‘Xin lỗi
… But you will take me back, Joseph. I know you will. When I come to you again you will take me in.'

‘Where are you going?' I cried.

‘Now … I do not know. But later, Đia Nguc … Hell.'

She turned from me and walked. I lowered my revolver. She got back into the black car and was gone.

I went back to my apartment and drank half a bottle of Scotch and messaged Quy to cancel my ticket home.

19

Zhuan sat at a table outside the Hotel Continental with an American newspaperman and the Lieutenant General of police looking like a Mandarin French collaborator of the 50s. I sat down at an opposite table. He broke off with his friends and ordered a bottle of champagne.

‘Why do you order such absurd drinks?' I said. ‘And why meet people in such an absurd place?'

He smiled.

In the 1950s the Hotel Continental charged a pittance for a room, was more elegant than the Ritz, and you could meet anyone in the lobby bar from Pulitzer and Londres winning journalists to heads of state to the young daughters of the last emperor. Now it was four hundred dollars a night and all you met were wealthy American and French tourists and nostalgic expatriate Vietnamese, and the beautiful building sat in the middle of town like a white elephant that served as a reminder of what was gone and was not coming back.

‘I am well.' Zhuan answered the question I did not ask. ‘And you?'

I shrugged.

He looked genuinely concerned.

‘The miraculous girl?'

‘You don't believe in my wounded girl, do you?'

‘It is very hot this season. And you drink too much. All you foreigners do.'

‘Aren't you a foreigner?'

He smiled.

‘When it suits me.' The champagne arrived. ‘Not really.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I'm not in the habit of hallucinating, no matter how hot or drunk I get.'

Zhuan nodded and tapped cigarette ash into a tray. ‘Do you ever wonder why you are still alive, Joe?'

‘It's possible the boss of Club 49, and the darkest little room is keeping a low profile – that he became nervous after the police found that girl dead in the river. I believe she was from there – the latter place.'

‘If such a place exists.'

‘Yes.'

‘Perhaps you are right. But no arrest has been made. And there are no suspects in that case. Trust me, there are no suspects at all. Why would he be nervous?'

And I thought of the black Citroën on the bridge. Zhuan refilled his glass.

‘And by now you can be sure he knows you have taken what he believes is his. I'll tell you why you're alive: because someone with influence says that's how it should be.' He smiled. ‘What have you got on General Ho?'

‘Nothing. Well, nothing that anyone couldn't get.'

‘I wonder who that Hönicke man was. Truly, I have never heard a thing about this man.'

‘Minh Quy says he is nothing,' I sighed and sipped my champagne and looked across the street. ‘I've thrown her out, Zhuan.' That was how I saw it after coffee and a half a glass of champagne this morning in the Saigon sunlight that banished all shadows. ‘I refused to buy her heroin. It was getting harder and harder to do it. Sooner or later I was going to get caught. She had me going to the bridge on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai.'

‘I am sorry about that. You understand it's not the simplest business. But I had no idea you were buying it from the bridge. If I had known– '