Shortly after this encounter I did my first job for Donovan. He picked me up close to the end of the working day in a Ford Pinto and we drove to a restaurant called La Porte Bleue that was on the waterfront and which sat in a row dominated by closed-down clubs given sexy names and lurid drawings to attract GIs, uninviting bars and other small restaurants claiming to sell food from various parts of the world. As he drove I looked at the river that was a disappointing colour of days-old coffee, and the shadowy craft that plied its length had little elegance but seemed mostly to consist of hulking rust buckets, or smoking barges loaded with what seemed like cargoes of piled pottery. The river’s dark skin was patched with eddies and in time I would come to know that it only assumed a mystery when glazed by the city’s lights. Donovan didn’t say much and when I tried small talk to avoid the embarrassment of silence he made little response.

La Porte Bleue didn’t have a blue door and, apart from the few tables outside that hosted some card-playing smokers, didn’t conform much to any of the impressions I held of a Parisian café. There was a faded mural along one wall with what might have been the artist’s imagined vision of a lavender-drenched landscape but was more Italian than French in feel. The tables had blue chequered cloths and stubs of candles in ceramic bowls. Inside there were about a dozen customers, including two Americans with two Vietnamese women. Donovan exchanged a handshake with someone I assumed was the owner and introduced me to him as ‘Mikey Boy’. I followed him through the restaurant and into a back room that looked as if it was reserved for special functions or private parties. There was a door at the end that opened into a darkened corridor and which might have led into living quarters. When Donovan sat at a table I took a seat also but he pointed me to the adjoining table, saying, ‘Need a little space, don’t want to crowd anyone.’ A woman entered with two bottles of beer on a tray and Donovan stood to greet her politely, then as an afterthought introduced me. She was probably in her mid-forties, with her hair pinned up and held in place with what looked like a silver clasp and elegantly dressed in a cream-coloured ao dai. Her name was Quyen and she bowed her head to me in greeting and smiled, then she was gone.

‘She owns the place with Vien. It’s passed down through the family since the French. A good spot to eat,’ Donovan said, taking his first sip of beer.

But we hadn’t come to eat and a few minutes later a Vietnamese man entered and sat at the same table as Donovan, then proceeded to stare at me until he was told not to worry, that I was an assistant.

‘Get our friend a beer,’ Donovan told me and I went back out into the restaurant where Quyen served me from the bar. The two Americans were having their photographs taken by Vien, their heavy, gold-braceleted arms resting like yokes across the shoulders of their companions. I saw Quyen looking at them as she poured the beer, but her face revealed nothing of her thoughts and when she smiled for me it was tired and never reached her eyes. When I returned to the back room Donovan was in some kind of bargain-making with the man.