The Darkest Little Room (21 page)

‘How much did you make out of the trade when you were in it?'

He shrugged.

‘Thirty thousand dollars. This seems small to you, no? But it is a lot of money in Vietnam.' He drew on his cigarette. ‘And there are men here who make much more … Like him.'

‘Who?'

He stared into his rice wine and was silent. Just a little further, I thought.

‘Why did you desert?'

His slits of eyes looked up at me.

‘Because I know the man you are hunting. And I do not wish to find him.'

‘What?'

‘You heard me. I know who took your girl, and where they are going.'

You bastard, I thought. You filthy bastard. I wanted to strike him down off the chair where he sat. A bottle of poisonous wine and a cash bribe, and now he talks. The bastard.

‘Who is he?'

‘Very bad. I told you before about the man who put a girl's head on a mother's dinner table. The same man has your girl. His name is Trong.'

‘How does he go about his work here?'

The driver tapped his fingers on the table and I poured again.

‘He befriends girls in villages. Invites them to parties. Offers them jobs, locally at first, real jobs, then false ones abroad and in farther cities. But sometimes he buys girls from kidnappers. I have met him. Two or three years ago when he was selling good-looking girls to Chinese brothels. Back then he also operated beggar syndicates into which deformed and crippled children were sold. Sometimes he bought children who had been turned from healthy children to deformed and crippled ones. Sometimes he took girls for the brothels by force. He would make threats to the families.'

‘And would he carry out the threats?'

‘Did you not hear the story I told before. Always. He would always carry them out.'

I felt the stock of my gun again and made a terrible prayer that I would be given the chance to use it.

‘What if the girl had no family? Had no one?'

‘Everyone has someone that they love. Love is often the means by which a girl is trapped. You tell them they are honouring their family, else tell them a mother or sister will die if they don't behave. Love gets them the same place it got the God of the Christians. Alone, despised and then dead. And everyone loves someone.'

I looked out the door into the ragged night and sighed.

‘There are some who have no one.'

He stared at me.

‘She has someone.'

And I remembered her returning to me late in the night in Bui Vien in tears and falling into my arms and wondered if, after all, the sallow-cheeked bastard I drank with spoke the truth.

‘Take me to him.'

‘As I say he is a very dangerous men. I would need much incentive. Much more than a million dong.'

‘A thousand dollars.'

He stared at me without answering. His eyes narrowed. And I saw by those eyes he had agreed.

‘Where must we go?'

‘If you have lived in Vietnam very long then you have likely seen a girl sold.'

‘Where?'

‘Where is the best place to hide a leaf?'

‘I know how that goes, but I do not know any forests of girls for sale.'

‘No. But there are places where young girls and men are inconspicuous – a father and daughter at a railway station who are met by an uncle; two girls and two young men at a restaurant … These scenarios could be nothing, or they could be business transactions. Girls are traded everywhere. Over phones, in hotels, in airports and on the street. Everywhere. The markets may last a day, hours even, and they vanish as quickly as they form. Tomorrow I believe I can take you to the one you seek. We should meet tomorrow at dawn on the bridge into the centre of town.'

‘That is good.'

I left the man in the bar with a 100 000đ note and a double shot of whisky that I bought him instead of the rice wine. I did not mind him drunk but the rice wine that came here from across the border made men sick and I wanted him well the next day. I turned back when I was halfway out the door.

‘Tell me one more thing.'

‘I am tired.'

‘One more.'

‘Yes.'

‘This taking me north – this was not the first job you have done for Zhuan Li, is it?'

He smiled.

‘No.'

I nodded.

‘Goodnight.'

The wind sang in the power lines and tapped light bulbs against the concrete wall I walked beside back to my room.

33

I woke at half-past four. I stood on the bridge in the dark and listened to the water I could not see rushing beneath my feet. A wind rose in the north and began scattering mist. I looked down at a rat crawling through grass on the bank. I looked up and saw a man in a dark coat coming toward me with a gun raised. Before I could move he had fired an entire magazine into the mist and another man fell dead at the opposite end of the bridge. The driver. I had not heard him come for the sound of the water and the wind. The dark-coated figure ran toward me and I took out my revolver. I yelled ‘Freeze!' in English, then
‘Đung lại
… Stop!'

‘Joe, don't shoot!'

‘Zhuan?'

‘Joe, good God!'

‘Zhuan, did you shoot this man?'

‘He was going to kill you. Last night I couldn't sleep. I went downstairs to ask the lobby for a drink and heard him …' Zhuan's breath was short and heavy. He indicated the graceless bulk that lay between us with the barrel of his pistol. ‘He had come in to collect money. He said he meant to do away with a journalist who had compromised him. I guessed it must be you after what you told me yesterday. I couldn't warn you. I didn't know where you were staying and everywhere was closed. I've waited on the street since four this morning. Then I saw you standing on the bridge.'

I looked again at the dead man. Blood from the exit wound in the back of his head pooled and ran into the rills in the stone and trickled into the river. I fought for my breath.

‘I got him drunk last night and bribed him.'

‘Joe, for the love of God, these are dangerous men!'

‘He was your driver.'

‘I know. I'm sorry, but as I said, I hardly knew him.'

‘He knew you. He said he had worked for you before?'

‘Yes. Twice.'

‘What the hell do we do now?' I said. ‘Should we run?'

‘No. Wait for the police.'

‘Damn it!' My voice shook. My hand shook too when I put my own gun in my coat, shook so I could not find the pocket.

‘Give me that,' said Zhuan.

I hardly knew where I was.

‘Thank you.'

A police car arrived. A lieutenant who looked barely out of his teens cuffed us both while an older sergeant, indignant at being woken, questioned us in a harsh Vietnamese dialect that I did not understand but that Zhuan fielded.

I called the consulate. No one came to the station in person, but I was released before lunch.

I was calling everyone of any significance I knew in Saigon when I saw ‘Zhuan walk out onto the street.

‘They let you go?'

‘Yes. The man I shot was a known criminal. No one is sorry he is dead. The chief of police told me a terrible story about him. He was a man who had sold his daughter and wife. He was just what you were talking about last night, a low-tier gangster. Do you know why he wanted to kill you?'

‘No.'

‘You must have found something out.'

‘Nothing that he didn't tell me himself. He said he was going to take me to the men who run things around here.'

‘Well, he was sorry about it once the drink wore off. He was taking you to the bottom of the river.'

‘Again, thank you.'

‘Go home, Joe! Go back to Saigon. I am in the north for another week, maybe more. I will look for your girl. I know this country and these people much better than you do. I have friends here and if she is here I can find her.'

‘Friends like the local sergeant,' I said, thinking of how quickly Zhuan had walked free after gunning a man down. I wondered how much the morning had cost him.

‘Yes.' Zhuan smiled. ‘Like the local sergeant.'

‘I should go,' I said. ‘I have no idea where Thuy is now. I fear she's across the border and gone. And it seems that all I'm getting closer to each day is death.'

‘Let me find her.'

‘You alone?'

‘It is better that way.'

‘Is that why you are really out here, Zhuan?'

‘I have many reasons to be here. I work best alone, Joe. Please go back to Saigon. Tomorrow I will be in He Kou and I will ask my contacts there about Thuy. The next day I will be in Shanghai, then Hanoi.'

I was near tears.

‘Then take this.' I gave him the photograph I kept in my coat beside my revolver and my heart. ‘It's her. It may help you.'

Zhuan stared at the photo and looked back at me with glassy eyes.

‘Thank you, Joe.' He hugged me. ‘This means so much to me.'

34

Ngoc Minh Bridge and the highway south had reopened. Zhuan said he was leaving in the morning. I told him I was going on the three o'clock bus, but from the window of my hotel I watched the bus drive out of town and into the sleet. I thought again how these roads that were blocked to me were blocked to everyone. She is still here, I said to myself.

I stood on the corner watching the street.

Zhuan came out of the hotel and I followed him. I followed him to the transit centre where buses came and went from three countries. He met an old man with grey hair, owlish glasses and expensive tracksuit that made him look like an accountant on holiday. He spoke for a few minutes with the man then got in a car and drove off. I ran back onto the road and tried to hire a motorbike but by the time I did Zhuan was gone.

I went back into the station and sat down beside the old man.

‘Rất lạnh!
… Bitter cold!' I said.

‘Đung roi
… Yes,' he smiled.

‘Who are you waiting for?'

‘My daughters.'

He offered me a cigarette and lit it.

A bus came in and a handsome man in a leather jacket got off with two young girls.

The old man went to sit with the man and the girls on a bench outside the ticket office.

The girls did not seem particularly happy to see their father. They were very young to be his daughters. If the man in the leather jacket was family, surely they should go straight to the old man's house? And if he wasn't, what did they discuss? Then the old man gave the younger a roll of notes and the man re-boarded and rode away on the bus.

The old man glanced at me and walked with his girls to the exit.

I followed.

Mist had gathered again and lay upon the town and the car park. I hurried and caught the old man's open door and pulled my gun from my jacket. I opened the back door and sat down behind the driver's seat and kept the gun at his temple.

‘Cac co ay la ai?
… Who are the girls?'

‘Những đừa con gái của tôi
… My daughters.'

I looked at the girls whose faces were blanker than the sky above. I asked them a question in Vietnamese and then in Chinese and it was plain they did not understand either.

‘Nói sạo
… You lie,' I said. ‘Where are you taking them?'

‘They're my daughters, you son of a whore.'

‘And yet they do not speak your language?'

‘I'm Laotian.'

‘Ask them in Lao whether or not they think I should shoot you.'

The man stared at me with hatred. The girls did not speak a word nor make a move in his defence.

‘I knew it,' I said. ‘Where are you taking them?'

He did not answer. I pulled back the hammer.

‘Tell me where you're taking them and you can drive away.'

‘If I tell you what good will it do you?'

‘Let me worry about that.'

‘Even if I tell, I can phone someone who will be waiting to kill you when you get there.'

‘But you won't.'

He snarled and swore and took a pen and paper from the glovebox.

‘Both our lives are over,' he spat. He wrote an address on a road east to the border. ‘I will have you and the girls killed, you understand? I will have their heads cut off and posted back to their families. You understand? I am not lying.'

‘Sừ thật, không nói xạo chừ?
… Truly you are not lying?'

‘Thật!'

‘Truly you will do this?'

‘Yes.'

‘Truly?'

‘Yes.'

I shot him through the heart and then threw him by the collar out into the car park. The girls shrieked. I wiped blood from their faces and clothes with a raincoat that was inside the car then threw the coat over the dead man's body.

‘Where are you from? Laos?'

They could not answer me in any language I knew.

I got out of the car and took the wallet and papers of the man I had killed. He carried 1000 yuan and 5 000 000đ cash.

‘Here,' I said. I gave the girls the bundle of notes. ‘Take this and get out of here. As quickly as you can. Find the church in the town. Stay away from the police. Church is
nhà thờ.'
I repeated the word. ‘Ask for the priest …
Thầy.
Ask for
nhà thờ và thầy.
'

I made them repeat it. They nodded doubtfully and fixed their dresses and disappeared into the mist. I drove away from them. They looked utterly lost, walking through the mist of the carpark as though walking through that insubstantial empire of shadows Thuy had warned me I must come to …

I read the man's driver's licence: Hung Le was his name.

I drove to a service station and washed blood from my hands. I drove past wretched houses of wood and tin on a road where floodwater had cut great brown gouges in the country. Then came a flat flood plain where faraway lights on the western horizon were all that broke the dark that the limestone mountains trapped here. I came to an evil-looking concrete hotel that stood alone in a street of wire hoarding, weeds and brick stacks with a lonely bus station gleaming coldly in the north. Directly behind the hotel was a cemetery amid ruined rice fields that flood water had turned to mud. I drove past the building and pulled the car around a corner out of sight and walked back.