The Headmaster’s Wager. Vincent Lam

have a serious problem.”

      “Hmm …” Mak said. “If we can at least find out if he is safe, where he is …”

      “There are two main possibilities,” Mei said. “There is Paulo Condor, an island prison on the southern coast where the French used to send the Vietnamese who displeased them.” He spoke the same way that Mak had, as if what he was explaining was not known to everyone at the table, as if he were talking to some American newly arrived in Vietnam. Mei smirked. “Now, it has both Vietnamese jailers and prisoners. There is also the National Police Headquarters, which is well known because—”

      “Yes, I am familiar with its reputation,” interrupted Percival, not wishing to hear whatever euphemisms Mei might use for that house of cruelties.

      “Of course.”

      Percival knew there was a third possible fate that his son might have already met, but pushed that fear back.

      Mak said, “Brother Mei, what can be done?”

      “You should have come to me earlier.” Mei shook his head, looked at Percival, and then turned his eyes back to the table. “It would have been easier to prevent his arrest. Now, to free him?”

      “Big brother,” said Mak, undeterred, “can’t your fellow policemen in Saigon help? You are a district chief. They will do you a favour.” It was not necessary to say that Percival would, in turn, owe Chief Mei any favour he thought to ask.

      “They let us Chinese police control Cholon as long as we don’t cross them … on sensitive matters.”

      “And this is sensitive?” Percival asked.

      Mei shrugged. “What do you think?”

      “But you will try,” said Percival, sliding forward a plump red envelope. He had to pay, even for this useless encounter. He could not afford to dismiss the possibility of Mei’s help.

      Mei slipped the envelope into the ammunition pouch on his belt. It contained no bullets, but was full of cash. “Of course, friend. I will see what I can do.”

      Each morning, Percival pressed Mak on the situation and the progress of his inquiries. A week after the lunch with Chief Mei, Mak informed Percival that the usual Saigon channels were exhausted. He would have to begin making other contacts. It would require nighttime queries. Could he take the car? Percival gave Mak both the car and driver, and often Mak took it in the evening, brought it back spattered with mud in the morning. Percival did not ask where Mak was going to look for help, because it didn’t matter.

      Cecilia probed her American business connections, but they were of no use. They could get dollars, francs, and change piastres for U.S. Army scrip. But this was Saigon politics, they said, meaning either that it was too deep for them to see what was happening, or they did not wish to look there.

      Chen Hap Sing was bearable during the day, when school was in session and the old rice storerooms were full of students and teachers, bustling with English dictation and reading exercises. The nights were more difficult. Percival wandered the familiar high-ceilinged halls and fastidiously tended the ancestral altar. He found himself pacing the rooms and talking, not to himself, but saying to his father, “If you are here, lurking in this house that you built, rescue your grandson. Keep him safe.”

      Dai Jai’s fish tanks became dirty. Percival didn’t have the patience to clean them, but continued to feed the fish. Dai Jai would be happy to see them still alive when he returned. Unable to sleep, Percival ventured out to Le Paradis, sometimes Le Grand Monde, anywhere noisy and filled with light. He played small sums to pass the time. He did not bring any girls home, had no taste for it. Several times, he chanced upon Chief Mei, and let him win a sum of money. Each time, Mei took the money, looked into his drink, and told Percival that he had learned nothing about Dai Jai, as embarrassed as Percival was angry.

      Twice daily, Percival burned joss sticks and prayed to all the departed spirits of the Chen family, asking them to please keep Dai Jai safe, and to return him home. On the new moon day, then on the full moon, Percival arranged a roast duck, oranges, and kowtowed before the altar of the ancestors with these offerings. Percival implored them to save his son. In the midst of this, he caught himself cursing his father for leaving Shantou and drawing them to the land of the Annamese, but he hurried to push this thought beneath the surface and replace it with prayers to the spirit of Chen Kai. Somehow, as much as he tried to make the feeling go away, being faced with the loss of his son made him angry at his father. Why had Chen Kai left their home in China and led them to this country? Wasn’t it better to be poor farmers there than rich foreigners here? Then, in 1944, Chen Kai had suddenly insisted upon travelling overland to China while there was still heavy fighting between the Chinese and the Japanese in northern Indochina. Percival never heard from him again. Couldn’t he have waited for the war to end, after being away from home for so many years? Why had he insisted, at the most dangerous possible moment in that war, that he needed to return to Shantou?

      In the first years after his father’s disappearance, Percival had been tortured by indecision—whether to include his father in his prayers to the ancestors. After all, if he was not dead, it might be disrespectful. Finally, he concluded that it would be worse if Chen Kai was dead and not included in ancestral prayers, for then it would be the ultimate neglect. Gradually, he came to assume that his father must have been killed. Did one pray to dead children, Percival wondered? Quickly, he begged forgiveness of the ancestors’ spirits for wondering such a thing, and pleaded with them that the bad luck of thinking it would not make it true.

      Two weeks after Dai Jai’s disappearance, as Percival sat before a bowl of untouched rice congee one morning, Mak burst onto the balcony. “I have found a contact—someone who knows where Dai Jai is and can bring him out.”

      Percival whispered thanks to the ancestral spirits and the golden family charm around Dai Jai’s neck. He said to Mak, “What is the price?”

      “He won’t name it until you meet him.”

      “Who is it?”

      “It is not one of our usual friends,” said Mak.

      “Anyone who can help is my friend.” Percival would not ask more. Some of Mak’s contacts preferred to move within shadows rather than Saigon offices. Discretion must be respected, for it was also part of the friendship and trust between the headmaster and the teacher.

      “You must go alone,” said Mak. He gave Percival a scrap of paper, written directions.

      Percival read it. “He wants to meet at a graveyard?”

      “Today. Don’t be superstitious. It’s just a secluded place.”

      “How much money should I bring?”

      “He wants to talk first.”

      After a few forced mouthfuls, Percival set out in the Peugeot. He drove up to Saigon, past the National Police Headquarters, where Mak had told him Dai Jai was being held. He continued through the city, and then northeast. Since he did not often drive, he concentrated on manipulating the pedals and turning the wheel. At a checkpoint on the city’s outskirts, two South Vietnamese soldiers held up their palms, and Percival stopped the car. The leaves shimmered in the heat, and the clatter of cicadas surrounded him. A faded French sign pointed the way to Cap St. Jacques, though the Vietnamese had renamed it Vung Tau a decade ago. Percival always thought of the beach town by its French name. The soldiers began a half-hearted search of the car. Percival waved them over and gave them each a hundred piastres. They smiled, nodded, and he drove away, directing the car through the low hills.

      This road to the sea wound its way through the methodically planted avenues of the Michelin rubber plantation, and the trees flashed past in perfectly spaced rhythm. Before the divorce, Percival and Cecilia had often taken Dai Jai this way for holidays at the beach. Today, however, Percival would not go all the way out to the coast. After an hour of driving, he saw the first of the landmarks Mak had described—an old French stone bridge near a road marker which indicated fifty kilometres to Cap St. Jacques. He fished the paper from his shirt pocket, just to be sure, and watched