The Headmaster’s Wager

CHAPTER 5

FROM BEFORE SCHOOL STARTED UNTIL AFTER the last students were gone, Percival sat in his office with the door shut and lights off, sweltering by the telephone. Each time it rang, he seized the phone with fear and hope. But it was never Dai Jai. Nor was it the morgue.

It took a few days for Mak to arrange a lunch with Cholon District Police Chief Mei, who was usually eager for a good meal and a red packet but for some reason was now slow to make himself available. On the day of their meeting, Percival and Mak joined the chief in a private room within a quiet restaurant that specialized in Northern Chinese dumplings, Mei’s favourite. Percival ordered dumplings filled with beef and young garlic, chicken and bird’s nest, scallops and prawns. Mak and the chief made awkward small talk about the new Spanish racehorses at the track—no good in this climate; about mah-jong—a friend had lost a villa in Dalat in a big game; and about where to get the best black market exchange rates for the U.S. dollar. Percival bad-mouthed Cecilia’s rates, but otherwise said little, restrained himself. All he wanted to talk about was whether Mei could help. Mak had advised Percival to keep quiet and let him do the talking. They drank beer, dipped dumplings in vinegar, and Mak laughed heartily at Mei’s jokes.

When they loosened their belts and put down their chopsticks, the serving plates were still half full. Mei pushed himself back from the table, belched, and said, “It has been good to see you.” He glanced at his watch. “So late already.”

Percival started to rise, irate that Mei was going to play it this way, as if he did not know the purpose of this lunch. Mak shot Percival a glance, and he sat down, fuming. Mak asked if Mei could spare a further moment and calmly, slowly explained what had happened to Dai Jai. He explained it exactly as if Mei did not know, as if it were not a subject of heated gossip in Cholon.

Mei shook his head. “You 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 his odometer. Three kilometres later, he saw the stand of bamboo on a hill, then, at the top of the hill, an abandoned graveyard pavilion barely visible from the road. He turned the car onto the red dirt path that twisted through the bamboo, flanking the graves. The path became too narrow to drive. Percival stopped the car and continued on foot until he found the shack of cinder blocks and galvanized roofing set within the bamboo. As described, it was well back from the road.

There was no knocker or bell. He rapped his knuckles on the low steel door. The only reply was the rasp of cicadas. He tried to shift it. The heat of the corrugated metal stung his palms, and the door rattled but did not move—it was fastened from within. His shouts were answered by the bamboo chattering in the slight breeze. Standing in the sliver of shade provided by the short overhang of the roof, leaned against the prickly hot blocks, Percival scrutinized the scrap of paper. This must be the place. Through the bamboo, he could see the shape of his car parked near the pavilion. It glowed like a smooth, bright stone. Untended graves were being swallowed by the earth and vegetation. Had the nearby village been emptied during the partition? When General Giap’s 1954 victory over the French army at Dien Bien Phu had led to the division between north and south, people were swept in both directions, as jarring a rearrangement of the country as the military victory itself. Many had thought their dislocation temporary, that they would be home in a year, once the promised national election took place. Now, thought Percival, enough time had passed that small children who had been relocated might not remember the villages from which they came. Travel between north and south was impossible, now that they were at war. That must be the reason for the overgrown tombs. Why else would the dead have been so neglected? A strange place for a hut, he thought. Bad luck to build anything so close to a graveyard. Somewhere nearby, a stream gurgled, hidden in the bamboo. He heard the clanking of some inner latch undone, a scraping noise behind him, and then the steel door was dragged open. From inside, a voice invited him to enter.

The shack was stifling. A thick smell of tamped earth, a distinct odour of urine, and another scent mingled in, which Percival couldn’t quite place. Percival thought of the inside of a crypt, and he told himself to force down his rising fear. No lamp or window. A stingy rectangle of light entered from the door. At first, Percival saw nothing else. He advanced into the darkness, stumbled and fell to his hands and knees, a sudden panic, and stood up again. The ground was uneven.

“You are Mak’s friend?” said Percival.

“What is friendship, in these difficult times?” said the voice who had called him in. “You are Headmaster Chen, I suppose.” Percival could barely see the man. He was just a shift in the gloom, a voice, now a sing-song lilt that said, “Chen Pie Sou, Percival Chen, Headmaster Chen. These are all you?”

Percival tried to muster cool defiance but the constriction of his voice betrayed him. “Who are you?”

“Don’t worry about that. You have enough to worry about, yes?”

“I hope I have found the person who can help.”

“You must think so if you came to meet me. Or, you simply have no alternative.”

As Percival’s eyes adjusted, he began to see dark shapes within the shadows—suggesting storage crates, a rough bench, an oil drum, and the dark outline of a man pacing. A stocky frame, a restless way of moving and speaking. He could navigate this shack with ease, Percival realized, for he knew where everything was. Think of the mah-jong table, Percival told himself. When the odds delivered by the tiles weighed heavily against him, he knew to draw his opponent out, gain some feel for the situation, and be attentive for any small advantage. He would hold his words and wait for a clue. He would not be the next to speak. The silence grew, filled the room. He would win. Force the man to give away the next word.

The man stopped and stood directly before Percival. His breath stank of betel, his voice was flat. “I hope you did not come here to play the silence game. I know every game—better than you.”

“My son played a prank. That’s all.” Percival couldn’t keep his words from tumbling out, from sounding like an apology.

“A political gesture by a dissident.”

“Ridiculous. Arrested for a childish joke.”

“A protest.”

“The boy has no politics.”

“Everyone does. Or perhaps better to say, everyone’s actions have political meaning, whether or not they have political intentions.”

“A small misunderstanding.”

“Some acquire their politics by accident,” said the man.

“That’s right, it’s not his fault.”

“Or for some frivolous reason, perhaps to impress a father.” He let the words settle. Percival realized that the man already had the upper hand—knowledge—while Percival had nothing, no leverage. “In Saigon, it is always politics somehow. But what shall we talk about today—the reasons for your son’s arrest, or the prospects for his future? It’s amusing, but useless that you try to defend your son’s actions to me. It’s irrelevant, don’t you agree? You are afraid, and not thinking clearly.”

Percival hated having been read, and then the insult of it being displayed. “I will do what is needed to address this problem.” Percival was aware of the man circling him.

“You will.” The man nudged Percival lightly. Just to see what would happen? “I am a simple man,” he said. “Are you?”

“What do you mean?”

He pushed Percival hard, nearly knocked him over, set his heart pounding. “Since I love simplicity, I think the best approach to any particular situation is to know exactly what the issues are. I dislike ambiguity. Do you share my simple view?”

“If that is best,” said Percival, fists clenched.

“It is. Today, the issue is your son.”

“Yes.”

“Who does not wish to learn Vietnamese and has been arrested for his political theatre.”

“But my son was born here. He speaks Vietnamese better than I do,” said Percival. Why was he once again justifying? Because the man in the shadows was in control.

“True. He speaks like a native Vietnamese,” said the man. “Your own use of our language is clumsy. Like a child’s.”

“Dai Jai is a child.” Had this man seen Dai Jai? How else could he know the boy spoke well? Was the boy alright? Had he been given enough to eat? Did he still have his lucky amulet? But Percival did not ask. He did not wish to reveal anything more of his desperation.