The Darkest Little Room Read Online Free PDF

and I can get you any girl you want.’
    â€˜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 do 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.
    â€˜And you are a foreign reporter?’
    I did not confirm or deny. He continued regardless.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Sit down,’ I said. ‘Take a drink.’
    The man shook his head.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜So what’s your story?’
    â€˜A girl is being held against her will. And she is being tortured.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜Here in Saigon.’
    â€˜Is she a prostitute?’
    â€˜Well … She is a bar girl.’
    â€˜She was in a brothel?’
    â€˜Of a type. But this is a terrible case.’ The man winced.
    I put the book of Maugham stories in an ashtray.
    â€˜Tell me about it.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What was it?’
    â€˜She had been flogged.’
    I