The Headmaster's Wager

by Vincent Lam

  Percival looked down at his blood-crusted wounds, felt the throbbing of his arm, his screaming leg. They drove past the National Police Headquarters. Percival asked, “Were you involved in Dai Jai’s arrest?”

  “No. I was as surprised as you were.”

  So Dai Jai had indeed brought that upon himself, he thought. Or Percival had done it. “But once he was arrested, it was a chance to profit. You were involved in the ransom.”

  “Cho insisted we use the opportunity. In Saigon, he directs an interrogator at the National Police Headquarters, a low-ranked civil servant in Saigon, a comrade of ours.”

  “I see, a government jailer, in reality Viet Cong, to extract confessions from the innocent, free the guilty.”

  “But who is innocent and who is guilty? No one can say …” said Mak. His words trailed off, as if he were very tired. Then he perked up, as if shown his script once more. “North and South should be united. This is one country. Anyhow, you are right—Dai Jai’s ransom was just a way to get gold, which we needed very badly for our operations. Nothing more.”

  “Except that Cho took some for his own enjoyment.”

  Mak looked uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t have told you that. Don’t repeat it.”

  “Then why did they beat Dai Jai, if that sum of gold was just a … profitable opportunity?” The words stuck in Percival’s throat.

  “Dai Jai could not simply have been released without being touched—someone would have been suspicious. Our man was very easy on him, you know. He marked him up, but I impressed upon him that Dai Jai must not be seriously hurt.”

  “They did not cripple his body. But his spirit … they told him he would be killed.” Percival thought about his first visit to the hut with Cho, about Dai Jai’s nights of screaming back at Chen Hap Sing. The torture had continued, even after the boy was released.

  “A way to make him disappear without the other jailers suspecting anything. They beat people daily in the political section. That is the routine. They kill people from time to time, when ordered. It is also Cho’s way of rescuing our own spies if they happen to be arrested. A good show of torture is followed by a jungle execution.”

  Percival thought of the fresh bruises, the scars, on his son that had taken so long to heal. He wished he had found the thousand taels faster. Did it matter that he had prayed to the ancestral spirits to save the boy, when Dai Jai was already a pawn in a larger game? Percival tried to recall if he had consulted the ghosts before sending Dai Jai back to the motherland. He felt his anger towards Mak leaching out of him, replaced by his disgust with himself. “And now this is happening in China. The prisons, the interrogation. People have whispered about it in Cholon for a few years now. I didn’t want to believe it, until this letter came from Dai Jai.” Words from Dai Jai’s true letter came to him, “forced to crawl like a dog over broken glass.”

  “I—I’m surprised,” said Mak. “The new society is supposed to be for everyone’s good. I suppose there are … class enemies. Enemies of the people, after all, must be re-educated …”

  “Like Dai Jai?”

  “I don’t know what to say, hou jeung. I sent him to China because …”

  “As a favour to me.”

  “Yes.” Mak kept his hands firmly on the wheel. “Mistakes happen. Some innocents suffer … we will get him back. That’s what we’ve ensured today.” Both men were quiet. Mak parked outside the night-time entrance of the Gral Hospital. He went around to help Percival out of the car. As Mak heaved him up, Percival felt all the wounds in his body cry out. Percival dragged his right leg along, barely able to put weight on it. He raised his hand, gasping, gestured that they must stop.

  “We are almost there, hou jeung.”

  When he was able to speak, Percival said, “Mak, please don’t call me hou jeung anymore.”

  MAK HALF-CARRIED PERCIVAL THROUGH THE HOSPITAL doors. When the young night duty doctor saw them, he sighed. Both of them were filthy, their eyes bloodshot in the stark electric light. They looked like wild men. The duty doctor called a nurse. Mak and the nurse gingerly helped Percival to strip and laid him down on a stretcher.

  “Is Dr. Hua on call, by some chance?” asked Mak.

  “That rich bastard? Long gone. A private practice in San Diego.”

  The doctor asked the nurse to open a suture tray, and to send the porter out to fetch him an iced coffee. He pulled up a stool, sat alongside the stretcher, and first began to repair Percival’s split-open scalp, soaking gauze pads with thick blood as he worked. He sewed impatiently, like a harried seamstress. The doctor did not use any freezing, so Percival felt each jab of the needle, but it was nothing—an irritant compared to the blows that had already damaged him. Then the doctor began to close the other wounds. The porter came in from the night with iced coffee, and the doctor stopped from time to time to sip it as he went from one gash to another. His fingers left delicate bloodstains, like flower petals, on the tall coffee glass, and he complained that the hospital was out of gloves. Finally he closed the lacerations on Percival’s face, and the jagged tear in his ear. It took the doctor over an hour, and when he was done, he shouted for the porter to take Percival for some X-rays.

  When those had been done, the doctor emerged from the X-ray reading room and told Percival that his left arm was broken, that several ribs were fractured on the other side, that his right collarbone was snapped, but his skull had not cracked. The X-ray could not prove it, but the doctor suspected a liver laceration beneath the broken ribs. A fragment of metal was lodged in the right femur. The end of the coat hanger must have broken deep within him. “You will need surgeries for both your arm and leg,” the doctor said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  Mak looked stunned to hear this catalogue of injuries. He took out his wallet, gave the doctor twenty thousand piastres, and said, “Thank you so much, Doctor. Can you please arrange a quiet room for my friend?” The doctor looked at the money, both surprised and pleased. He pocketed it. Mak said, “He needs to be alone to recuperate.”

  The doctor cleared his throat, his hand caressing the money in his pocket. “We are under orders to reserve the private rooms for government officials and army officers—you understand, if they are injured by the Viet Cong. Ah, those scoundrels continue to fight, even though we are at peace.”

  “I’ll bring you another twenty thousand tomorrow.”

  The doctor smiled. He and the porter wheeled Percival to a small but pleasant room that looked onto the hospital grounds, and the nurse opened the windows to allow the cool night breeze.

  “The pain is severe, isn’t it?” asked the doctor.

  Percival’s whole body was a territory of pain—here sharp, there burning. He nodded.

  “I will give you some relief,” said the doctor, and produced a vial and syringe from his lab coat pocket. “I still need to put a cast on your arm, a temporary splint before your surgery, and I need to move your bones into a better position.” He withdrew some drug from the glass vial with the syringe and tapped out the bubbles. “It is better that you don’t feel me moving them.” He injected some of the fluid into the intravenous. Percival felt the warm comfort seep through him. The soft hands of exhaustion and narcotic laid him back in the bed. The world became dull, and then he just managed to turn to the side, to vomit on the floor. He spat blood. The nausea gave way to a soothing, dull cloud of euphoria, and he drifted away on it.

  —

  PERCIVAL WOKE INTO A FRESH MORNING and surveyed his own body as if it were a wrecked foreign landscape. The bandages were caked with blood. A cast hung on his left arm like a stone, and the wound in his right leg throbbed. Mak was sprawled on the floor, snoring. In the new day, the wounds were freshly whetted knives. To lift his arm, or shift his torso, was agony. When he lay completely still, there was momentary relief. To take breath caused stabbing jabs in his chest.

  He must continue to breathe, he told himself. He wanted to see Jacqueline and Laing Jai. And Dai Jai. He did not want them to see him l
ike this, he thought at first, but could not get Jacqueline out of his thoughts. She had seen Dai Jai when he returned from his imprisonment, and now she would see his father. Did he look worse than Dai Jai had upon returning from the National Police Headquarters? he wondered. Yes, he thought. His injuries were more severe. If Mak had not been pulling his punches, he would likely be dead. But this penance eased none of his guilt. And how did Dai Jai look now, suffering in China, his motherland? If Jacqueline could see Dai Jai today, would she go to him, comfort him? She would—she should. And then he could not keep out the thought—when she touched Percival for the first time, did she imagine Dai Jai?

  An urgent desperation filled him. He must see Jacqueline. Mak must fetch her. Yes, Mak must bring her. Percival called Mak, who startled awake. “Hou jeung? What can I get you?”

  “Jacqueline.” Percival touched his face lightly, traced the ridges of sutures and the hills of swollen deformity. “Bring her here.”

  Mak stood up. He appeared shocked to see Percival’s condition and looked down at his own hands. “Wait until you heal,” he suggested. “I will get you the best doctors, the best food. It will be like this never happened. Then, you can see Jacqueline.”

  “Please, fetch her. I need to see her, Mak.”

  “Why don’t you think about things a bit, regain your strength, and then—”

  “Mak!” he shouted.

  “You remember …”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “Mr. Cho … feels very strongly that—”

  “Everything with the school must remain the same. It will. But bring Jacqueline to me. Not Laing Jai, a boy shouldn’t see his … I couldn’t bear him to see me like this.”

  “Nor should she,” said Mak. “It would be better for her to see you once you are healed. Why don’t I just tell her that you are safe, in case she is worried?” It was strange to see Mak unsure of himself.

  Percival said, “I will remember what Mr. Cho wanted. For our friendship, please bring her.”

  “Cho would tell me not to, to wait for you to calm down, but I am still your friend, hou jeung. Do you really want me to bring her?”

  “Yes.”

  After Mak left, the doctor came, took Percival’s temperature, and found that he had a fever. He examined the right leg, poked and pressed around the wound where the fragment of coat hanger was embedded. Every touch was excruciating. It was more red than the day before, and the flesh was swollen tight.

  “It is becoming infected. You need surgery to open your leg, clean it out properly and remove the metal.”

  “Will you operate this afternoon?”

  “There may be some delay. On account of supplies.”

  “My friend can bring piastres.”

  “Yes, of course he will have to,” said the doctor. “But even so, we have a shortage of the drugs we need. Are you in pain? Would you like some medicine, some relief? ”

  Percival nodded like a compliant child. The doctor fished out the vial and needle from the pocket of his white coat and prepared a dose. He injected the liquid into the intravenous. The warmth in Percival’s arm was an expanding presence. When it reached his centre, Percival vomited dark, coagulated blood into a small basin before being gathered into the drug’s rising balloon. Percival thought of his father, desperate for his opium pipe. Chen Kai had been angry with him for withholding it. Now, Percival understood. He accepted the high feeling along with the relief of pain, and closed his eyes.

  When Percival woke, he was not alone. She had come. He peered through the slow light of the morphine, at her face streaked with tears. He wanted to reach up, to embrace and to be held. He shifted towards her, agony stabbed through his leg, and he stopped himself. How long had she stood there at his bedside, waiting for him to wake? Now he remembered about Dai Jai, and envied his drugged, sleeping self, attended by his lover in oblivion. Jacqueline bent down to kiss him, her mouth more perfect than ever on his bruised skin.

  He wished to forget everything except the present, to ignore the knowledge that wounded him more than his injuries. Percival inhaled her scent, held it in, wondered if he could stop breathing now. Jacqueline traced her fingertips over his chest, stroked his limbs. He was compelled to exhale. She whispered, “My love. What has happened?”

  Mak answered quickly. “He was kidnapped yesterday morning. Chinese bandits. For ransom.” He had his hands clasped behind his back. “It has been paid.”

  “I thought you had gone gambling and maybe went with some other woman. I was suspicious.” She stroked Percival’s hair, and he closed his eyes. The hospital air smelled of antiseptics and chemicals. “Now I feel so sorry for thinking that.” He thought of his first glimpse of her at the Sun Wah Hotel. She had gone out to find a man of means who might be convinced that Dai Jai’s child was his own. She had seemed hesitant, uncertain, when he looked at her at first. By the time she was in his car, she had been determined. Why had fate led Jacqueline to him? Or him to her? He regretted his blindness, but Laing Jai felt like his own. That feeling was indelible. Even if it could have, he realised he did not want it to go away.

  She stroked his hands. Percival tried to think how he might have offended the ancestral spirits, for them to inflict this. In the early days, whenever she had crept into his room at Chen Hap Sing in the afternoon, he had feigned surprise. Would it be so difficult to feign ignorance now?

  Percival spoke at last. “I learned something …”

  “They came to me for the ransom,” Mak jumped in. “They came to me rather than you, Madame Jacqueline, because they knew the money was at the school.” He had never addressed her as madame before.

  “But why? Why did they do this?” Jacqueline looked from Mak to her wounded lover. “If they got their price, why did they have to hurt you?”

  “We … we are in cruel times. It is nothing, to beat a man. Don’t think of it anymore,” said Mak. “The bandits have their price, and the headmaster is safe.” He looked to Percival now. “What is done, is done.”

  “Yes, you are safe now.” Jacqueline knelt next to the bed and brought her lips to his damaged face again. “You are here. You will heal.”

  Percival forced himself to speak, made himself do it. “Before I met my kidnappers, I was blind.”

  “Shh …” she said.

  “I thought that everything about you was genuine and true. I loved that.”

  She drew back a little. “I don’t understand.”

  “They hurt me with blows, but also with the truth.”

  Mak jumped in, “He is confused, the drugs, maybe you should go, madame.”

  “Shh … You need to rest,” said Jacqueline, and stroked Percival’s forehead, kissed it tenderly.

  Mak put his hand on Jacqueline’s shoulder to urge her away, but she shook him off. He spoke to Percival. “Ah, Chen Pie Sou, you don’t make sense. You must be in pain. Should I get the doctor to give you some morphine?”

  Percival whispered, “Tell me … on the night you went to look for a father for your baby, did you hope to find a man who would love you and keep you, or one who would pay you to go away?”

  Jacqueline stiffened and took her hand from his head. He craved her touch, hated her for it. His eyes flooded. “And what did it mean to you that we chanced upon each other? Were you happy to seduce your lover’s father?”

  “Oh …” she said. Her mouth and eyes were frozen open.

  “Weren’t you angry with me for sending him away?” Percival thought of Jacqueline curled up that night, secretly reading the one true letter from Dai Jai.

  After what felt like a long time, she said, “I was, at first. But what could I do about it? You sent Dai Jai away, so I was alone. You won me, so I went to your bed. I didn’t have time to find another man. Then, once we began to know each other, I saw that you missed Dai Jai too, that you had sent him away for his safety, because you loved him, and that you worried about him in China. So, I was able to forgive you.”

  “Did Dai Jai know you
carried his baby?”

  She shook her head with a very small motion. “By the time I knew I was pregnant, and that I would need a man, he was in China.” Jacqueline spoke in a soft voice. “My life felt strange at first, but I grew accustomed to it. You reminded me of Dai Jai, which was a consolation. And then when Laing Jai came, I saw that you loved him. We are happy together, aren’t we?” She squeezed Percival’s arm, causing him excruciating pain.

  Mak fumbled to say something about drugs, and the confusion of illness, and how he must speak to Jacqueline alone. He implored Percival to rest quietly, to say no more.

  “Were we happy?” Percival ignored his friend and spoke to Jacqueline, anger seeping in now. “Dai Jai is returning to Vietnam. Mak is arranging it. I have promised Mak that I will keep it a secret, so you must not tell anyone either. I’m sure Mak is very distressed that I have just told you.”

  Percival saw her face fall, and said to her, “Maybe you would like your first lover back?”

  “Hou jeung,” she said, a form of address she never used. “We can, we can, surely there will be a way to—”

  “A way to do what? A way for you to get out of here! To disappear from my life!” All his emotions—tenderness and fury, betrayal and desire—were at the surface, equally available. He did not know which ones to choose, felt love and hatred all within reach.

  “I had to find someone,” she said, tears on her cheeks. “It was confusing for me at first, when chance brought us together, but in the end I was happy it was you. Maybe with a little time, you will—”

  “This is over. We are done!” As he said this, Percival longed to see Laing Jai, longed to embrace him. Meanwhile, his eyes were dry as he shouted, “Get out of my sight!”

  Hurried footsteps approached, attracted by the commotion. A nurse burst in, and Percival was aware of her mouth moving, words emerging, the patient must rest. There were more feet, urgent voices in the hallway. Mak hovered to the side.

  “You see, I was surprised …” Jacqueline clung to his hand, petted it. Her hair lay over his arm. She whispered, “Hou jeung, what I didn’t expect is that I would fall in love with you.”