Broken Hallelujah

Broken Hallelujah

John Helden

It’s Saturday night outside The French Bar, just off Bui Vien, in the heart of the backpacker District of Saigon. Eight o’clock at night and even the geckos are sweating. At one of the tables sits Bich, a year shy of fifty, short suede skirt, cowboy boots and a plain black t-shirt. Her friend, Loc, is ten years younger and is wearing a yellow, flowery dress and high heels, the pox marks on her face buried under a couple of pounds of foundation.

“I’ll miss you, you know. When are you going?” asks Loc, in her native Vietnamese.

“Ronnie says as soon as he sells the pills. We can’t hang around because the guys he took them off are gonna be looking for him.”

A worried look takes over Bich’s face.

“Thing is, he hasn’t mentioned Kampuchea for days. He hasn’t changed his mind, has he?”

Loc leans over to touch her friend’s arm.

“You always worry. Of course he hasn’t, he told you he loves you.”

“Yeah” Bich replies, finishing off her Jameson in one gulp, “And if I had a dollar for every guy that had told me that we’d be drinking this in the penthouse suite of the Park Hyatt Hotel.”

The two are quiet for a moment.

“How is Klaus doing?”

Loc looks from side to side to side like a worried rat.

“The truth?” she says, “I know it sounds awful, but I wish he’d just hurry up and go. I must be terrible but every time he goes for tests, I hope the doctor gives him three months. Instead, it’s always “Good news My Klaus.” I don’t think I can take much more good news. I mean, I still love him, of course, but just die already, you know.”

Bich bursts into laughter but a hint of bitterness remains in her eyes A clap of thunder shocks the sky, quickly followed by huge drops of rain that bully the crowds on to their destinations. Bich notices one of the herd break ranks and cut through the crowd, heading in her direction. He is six foot two and it looks like most of it is muscle. Late forties, pale skin, the foreigner has a thin, handsome face and cold blue eyes. Loc notices him, nudges her friend on the arm.

“Oh look,” she says, “I wonder if Klaus’s’ shirts would fit him. He looks like he knows how to treat a lady.”

Bich fires the stranger a smile, he greets her with a nod of his head. She gestures to the chair next to her. He sits down, wipes the rain off his hairless head and orders a Tiger beer from the already hovering waitress.

Loc hears a ‘ping,’ checks her phone, whispers something in Bich’s ear, and she is gone. A couple of hours of alcohol and bullshit later, Bich and Jason agree on a price for the night. By now the sky is clear, the puddles in the road almost dry. Jason pays the bill.

As they make their way towards Bui Vien Street, Bich reaches for his hand but he flinches. He hails a taxi. They climb into the back and Jason reaches forward to hand the driver the address of the Victory Hotel.

When they get out of the taxi Bich reaches for his arm this time but he draws it away. She gives him a hurt look, like he has forgotten to buy her flowers on their twentieth wedding anniversary. He stands with his back to the hotel, lights up a Marlboro, while Bich goes to the front desk to sign in for the night. The young clerk at the desk drags his eyes from Facebook and takes Bich’s ID card without a word. He writes her name down in the guest book and returns it with a look that, she assumes, he reserves for beggars and whores.

“Thanks so much and do me a favor would you. Tell your daddy Bich said hello and he needs to get himself checked at the hospital before he fucks your mummy again. It’s been a bit itchy down there this week. That’s room 17, sweetie.”

He hands her the key, his mouth looking like it was never going to close again.

Jason’s room was what you would expect for thirty USD: twin bed, TV, tiny fridge, wardrobe, bedside table, in-suite bathroom. After sex, he picks up a towel, goes into the bathroom, closes the door behind him. Bich falls into a light sleep but it is deep enough to trigger one of her nightmares.

She’s under a bridge, waist deep in muddy water and then a pair of soft, clammy hands wrap themselves around her ankles and drag her down into the thick, grey sludge at the bottom. Then she’s a child again lying on her bed and she can feel a man’s vast weight on top of her. He puts his tongue into her mouth, like a giant worm wriggling away, his fingers like rats tails dragging slime across her chest, then one of the tails is inside her, soon followed by a bigger one, so she tries to lose herself in the stars she can see through the crack in the roof of her shack until he’s finished.

The weight of Jason returning to the bed jerks her awake but she pretends to be asleep while she puts her head back together. He lights a cigarette, taps her on the shoulder, offers it to her. She blinks her eyes open and waves him away with her hand.

“You know dangerous, cigarette,” she says in a little girls voice “Get cancer. Why cigarette?”

Jason looks at her then looks away again followed by a few minutes silence.

“You quiet. You no like sex?”

“The sex was good, Bich, thanks. I’m just shy, you know, shy. Quiet.”

She snuggles up to him.

“Ok, lover. I like quiet. Quiet is OK.”

But quiet was as welcome to her as a rare steak to a vegan. So she talks and talks, Jason adding just enough to keep the conversation going. After a while he brings the chat around to an old friend of his that he thinks might be in town.

“He like girl? What his name, I know many foreigner like girl.”

“Ronnie, Ronnie McCray. He’s a small guy. From England. A big tattoo, here on his chest. A big bird, and the wings go all the way to here. Like a giant bird.” He points to his shoulders.

Bich leans over Jason to take one of his cigarettes. Her hand is shaking so he holds it, helps her light the cigarette. She avoids his eyes as she tells him she has never seen his friend. About an hour later Jason tells Bich he has to sleep.

A few miles away, in the CoCo hotel near the Grand Opera House, at four in the morning, Bich knocks on a door on the second floor. Ronnie McCray, all five foot ten of him, asks who is there then opens the door with a baseball bat in his right hand. He is skinny, bordering on gaunt, with a balding head, a small goatee and greedy, nervous eyes. Bich touches his cheek as she passes then she turns to see him scan the empty corridor before closing the door.

“How you, darling?” she says.

“Good, good.”

She hugs him without reply then he kisses her on the mouth. She tastes beer and mouthwash, smells the strawberry shampoo in his hair.

“Ok, I shower then bed.”

When she has finished, she grabs the towel, wipes the steam off the mirror, and looks at her reflection with a mixture of disappointment and anger. Over the last few years mirrors have changed from being mean to downright vindictive. Now even their occasional compliments come across like sarcasm. This one’s parting blow is to plant the thought that, as far as happiness goes, the foreigner in the next room is probably Bich’s last shot.

As she comes back into the bedroom, she feels a rush of affection for Ronnie as strong as anything she has ever felt. He is lying on the bed in his shorts watching a TV show on National Geographic about wild dogs. The pack are in the final stages of bringing down an exhausted wildebeest. One of them manages to trip the creature and down it goes. Bich wraps the towel around her and snuggles up next to him just as the dogs start their feast. She knows he doesn’t like to be disturbed when he is watching TV.

“Darling, what the animal? Why dogs kill?”

“It’s a wildebeest. The dogs are hunting, Bich,” he says impatiently, “They’re hungry, eating.”

“But why no kill first. Why eat and animal still moving?”

“I don’t know, darling. Maybe I’ll ask them the next time I see them.”

She senses he is getting angry, but she just can’t stop herself,

“Darling, how many dollar when we sell pill?”

“I told you, thirty thousand USD.”

“And we live in Kampuchea, me and you?”

“Christ, Bich, yes, how many fuckin times. We move to Cambodia, we get a little bar with a few girls and we live happily ever after. Now can I watch the TV in peace?”

One of the dogs pushes its snout past the others, deep into the wildebeest, and emerges with what looks like a piece of its heart. Ronnie reaches for the remote with an angry look on his face and turns up the volume. Bich’s head starts to spin. She desperately wants to go back to a few minutes ago, lying on the bed with darling Ronnie, but it’s too late. Before she can steady herself, the twisted parade kicks off in her head again. A grotesque pantomime of the men who have crawled all over her body then left her there, alone, in this bed or that bed or the other. From those she had slept with back in the village when the family needed money for rice, to the tourists she graduated to when she came to the city, to the police men who used to take it for free when she was still young enough to tempt them. And why had she been stupid enough to believe that Ronnie was any different?

As soon as he goes to the bathroom she races to his rucksack looking for a straw to clutch. Wrapped up inside a towel, there are three, snap together bags of small, blue pills and underneath them, at the bottom of the rucksack, his passport, but inside it she finds a solitary one way ticket to Phnom Penh. An hour later, when Ronnie starts to snore, she creeps out of bed and goes into the corridor to phone Jason, her head feeling like she has been hit with a lump hammer. He agrees to meet her at eleven thirty that morning at the Crazy Buffalo on the corner of Bui Vien Street and De Tham.

When she gets there, he is already sat outside sipping a coffee. She sits opposite, her back to the traffic, takes one of his cigarettes. She wonders if he can tell that she hasn’t slept all night then realizes that she couldn’t care less. A waiter comes over and she dismisses him with a slap from her eyes and gets straight down to business.

“Why you look Ronnie?”

“You know where he is?”

“Why you look him?”

Jason is silent for a moment.

“He stole something from a friend of mine.”

“You want pills, yes?”

“No, it’s not about the pills. I just want to talk to Ronnie.”

She can see in his eyes that a nice little chat isn’t what he wants.

“One thousand USD,” he says, “and you keep the pills.”

Before Bich could reply Jason takes out his wallet and counts out ten new one hundred dollar bills and puts them under the ashtray.

“And the pills” he repeats.

“Why you no want pills?”

“Sweetheart, I saw you looking at my passport last night when I went to the bathroom. You know I flew in from Bangkok, and I’m sure you know cops who’d pay plenty to bust a foreigner with a bag of pills so I sure as hell aren’t flying back with them in my bag,”

She looks at him suspiciously but takes the deal. She rummages in her handbag a moment and emerges with a business card.

“CoCo hotel,” she says, and hands him the card. “You hurry. He sell drug tonight then he go."

When she reaches for the money he takes her wrist and squeezes it.

‘If you’re lying, or anything goes wrong, me or my friends will find you. Understand?”

She wrenches her arm free from his grip, counts the money, counts it again and she disappears down De Tham without a word.

At six o’clock that evening Jason starts his vigil a few doors down from the CoCo hotel. He is on his third coffee when the face that matches the photo that his boss, Jack, had given him in Bangkok emerges from the hotel. Ronnie is wearing a baggy white shirt and a pair of black jeans with a small rucksack slung over his shoulder. Jason leaves one hundred and fifty thousand dong on the table and sets off, keeping a distance of about twenty feet between him and his prey. When Jason is far enough down the street, Bich emerges from an alley like a hungry rat and follows. As they get nearer to the Opera House the first evidence appears that it’s Halloween night. A mother is comforting her young daughter who has been scared out of her wits by a boy in a scream mask. Jason follows along Ngo Duk Ke, around Bitexco Tower and onto Le Loi. By the time Ronnie reaches the intersection of De Tham and Bui Vien the motorbikes are wheel to wheel. Ronnie forces his way through the crowds, t-shirt stuck to his back with sweat, Jason close behind. All around them are vampires in tiny red skirts and zombies with the flesh dripping off their faces. In front of the Sunflower Spa Freddie Kruger is holding the hand of his skeleton girlfriend and a few steps ahead of them stands Pinhead, cigarette in one hand and a bull whip in the other.

About forty yards into Bui Vien, the crowds start to thin and Jason sees his chance. He heads off to the right and hurries along until he is about a hundred feet ahead of Ronnie then he turns. He walks back through the crowd until he is a few feet from his quarry. He homes in on Ronnie like a snake on a rat and hugs him like a brother.

“Hey, mate, Jack says hello. You might want to get that checked out at the hospital. It looks a bit nasty to me.”

Jason vanishes into the crowd leaving Ronnie to work out what has just happened when his hand strays onto a damp patch on his shirt. There is a small pool of blood spreading slowly from somewhere near his stomach. Some of the crowd notices what they think is a pretty cool trick, take out their phones and start taking pictures. Ronnie sinks to the ground just as group of drunken Koreans turn up. Two of them grab him, one under each shoulder, and haul him back upon his feet and start dancing with him while one of their friends films the scene on his phone. They wish him Happy Halloween and lay him back on the floor propped up against the wall of Babas Kitchen to sleep it off. A few moments later Bich swoops down to snatch up the dead man’s backpack, her eyes as dry and forbidding as a desert. The video that the Korean took is on YouTube for two days before the news filters through about what happened and then it is deleted.

It’s Saturday night once again at the French Bar. Bich is sitting with her friend Loc spending the last of her windfall. By the time she has paid off her gambling debts and a few other bills, and bought a new motorbike, this night out is all that is left, but the pair of them are celebrating.

“So how long has Klaus got?” asks Bich.

“Doctor said about six months, poor dear. He’s a good man.”

“Yeah,” agrees Bich. “He doesn’t thump you around like that Chinese guy, I’ll say that for him.”

“Of course, that fucking son of his will be around looking for his dollars. Well, over my dead body, I earned that money, and it’s me that’s got to wipe Klaus’s’ arse for the next few months.”

“You should have a word with Jonny Kim.” says Bich.

“Oh, I have. He can sort out a new will and a solicitor to sign it for a few thousand USD. The rest of the money’s mine.”

Out of the crowd steps a woman, early twenties, short yellow skirt, heels, tight black t-shirt revealing a plastic diamond in her belly button.

“You know the foreigner that got killed,” she says, like an accusation.

Bich pinned her accent down to the North of Vietnam, maybe one of the impoverished villages that surround the capital.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says and turns away.

“Look,” says the girl, “I don’t care either way, but they found a box under his bed in the CoCo. Here.” She puts a shoe box on the table. “If you don’t want it, throw it in the garbage.”

The girl walks back into the crowd. Bich looks at the box in silence, her stomach turning, head beginning to throb. She remembers a foreign movie she had watched with Ronnie. Two old women in America. One of them served her sister a plate covered with a silver cloche. The other one, who was in a wheelchair, took off the cloche and there on the plate was a dead rat.

Loc touched her arm.

“Well, you might as well open it. It might be …” Her voice trails away. Bich takes off the lid, puts it on the table. She takes out some photos, flicks through them. They are all of her and Ronnie. One on the beach in Nha Trang, three in a flower garden in Dalat, half a dozen of them taken with the two of them on the endless mountain terraces of Sapa, mountains trailing off into the sky. About twenty pictures, smiles in every one of them. There is one other thing in the box. A one-way ticket to Cambodia with Bich’s name on it. She looks at the ticket for a few moments, feels the moisture gathering in her eyes. She puts the photos and the ticket into her bag, takes out her purse and leaves a few notes on the table under the ashtray. She turns to Loc, kisses her on the cheek, followed by a hug, then picks up her bag and says, “Sorry, I forgot, I have to meet someone tonight,” and without another word she walks away, onto Pham Nhu Lao, and turns left in the direction of the Saigon River.