Loulou had never married nor produced offspring. She had nobody to share her wealth with. Somewhere along the line she got it into her head that she was on her way to hell: a belief loudly supported by the wives of the officers she serviced. A Catholic priest in Saigon—also a customer—suggested she might readjust her trajectory by saving poor orphans. And, in the shell of a nut, that’s what led her to me and twenty other young boys. I still look for her in the back alleyways of the Other World, but I never see my darling Madam Loulou. And that, omitting several years of struggles and humiliations, of poverty, of retaking high school courses and accepting disgusting jobs to keep myself alive in France, explains why I was sitting in front of the Café de la Paix that chilly May morning. I was in my third year of medicine at Ancienne and doing moderately well, “for an Asian.” But I’d run into a bad patch of my own doing and I needed counsel.

“Anybody sitting here?” came a voice.

The young fellow leaning over me was dark-skinned with a fine head of black hair greased back. He was dressed like half the men there at the café, and he grasped a tennis racket in his left hand. His right hand he held out to me. I grabbed it, laughed, and shook the hell out of it.

“Sit down, you fool,” I said, “before someone challenges you to a game.”

Civilai pulled out the chair and apologized in charming French to the three ladies behind him who needed to shuffle slightly to allow him to sit. They smiled. He gestured to the waiter, pointed to my cognac and held up three fingers.

“What makes you think I couldn’t beat them?” he said.

“I doubt that racket’s ever kissed a ball,” I said.

“You’re right. But see how impressed everyone looks. A Chinaman trained in the fine art of tennis. They’ll go home and tell all their friends we can count to forty.”