Dzung had nodded, pocketing the money, his warm brown eyes showing how deeply Condley’s generosity had moved him. “We go tomorrow?”

“You’re my main man, Dzung.” Condley had patted him on a narrow shoulder. Even the mood had seemed to be a memory. “You’re my limo driver. Wait for me every day, I pay you ten dollars.”

And so it had been, every time Condley had returned to Sai Gon from wherever his job had taken him. He no longer stayed at the Rex Hotel, having found a smaller, cheaper, and more relaxed hotel several blocks away. So when he needed Dzung he would walk over to the Rex and claim him.

While Condley chatted with the others, Dzung had run across the street and fetched his cyclo. He now pushed it before him, dodging an arriving limousine as he made his way back to Condley. He climbed onto his seat, tested the pedals, and patted the chair in front of him, indicating that Condley should get in.

“Where we go now, Cong Ly?”

“You know the Kieu Hoa restaurant?”

Dzung began pedaling, fitting quickly into the flow of traffic. “Off Dien Bien Phu, I think. In District Three.”

“I’ve never been there. They say it’s owned by Nguyen Manh Khoa. You remember him from before, Dzung?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dzung, growing quiet. In Sai Gon, “before” always meant before 1975, and when one talked about before 1975 it paid to be careful, even among friends. Condley looked over his shoulder and caught Dzung’s knowing smile as he pedaled along Le Loi Street, looking for the right crossing street that would take them up to District Three.

“Nguyen Manh Khoa. He’s a very famous man.”

“A very famous man,” agreed Dzung somewhat evasively. “I think.”

“He used to be the Bob Dylan of South Viet Nam.”

“I don’t know Bob Dylan,” chuckled Dzung, as always pretending innocence when Condley became too overtly political.

“You don’t remember? I remember. He wrote and sang a lot of antiwar songs. He was against the old Sai Gon government. He sang about what he called ‘the cultural genocide’ committed against the Vietnamese people by the French and the Americans.”

“I don’t know, Cong Ly,” grinned Dzung, weaving his way in and out of an unending swarm of bicycles and motorbikes and taxis. “Long time ago.”

“The old government threw him into jail.”

“I was only a soldier.” In the midst of this thick traffic Condley had gone too far, and Dzung was going to say no more. Anyone listening to them could take down the license number on Dzung’s cyclo and report their conversation to the authorities, even the smiling young schoolgirl coasting just next to them on her bicycle. Probably not, but the prospect was never certain, and that was how they kept control.