‘Yes, whole family out. Sure, no problem on that but not yet. I need more, I need you here for more, just for a little while longer. There’ll be visas for every last one. No problem. You understand?’

The man nodded unenthusiastically and placed both hands palm downwards on the table in a gesture that seemed to say he had no more cards to play.

‘Mikey, take notes,’ Donovan said, and when I told him I didn’t have a notebook he looked at me with scorn then took a small black book and pen out of his jacket pocket and threw them to me. For the next thirty minutes I recorded information about military build-ups in specific locations, the supposed morale and intentions of particular ARVN generals and the infiltration into Saigon of Vietcong cadres and agents. But towards the end of the interview Donovan pressed his source on information being relayed to someone called Bloomfield and it was in those moments that he became most animated, often dissatisfied by the given responses and shaking his head in disbelief. Then, as the interview wound to an end, he resumed his former ebullient manner and, with a final slap on the back, sent his informant into the night, his ears ringing with more promises of future benevolence.

‘The skill, Mikey, now is deciding which parts were bullshit and which worth pinning your name to,’ he said as he took the notebook from me and perused its contents.

‘Who’s Bloomfield?’ I asked.

‘One slippery son of a bitch, that’s who he is.’

There was no further elaboration and, when Vien appeared in the doorway and asked if we wanted to eat, Donovan declined. But just before we were about to leave, a young woman I assumed was the owners’ daughter emerged from the private quarters and Donovan greeted her with the same politeness he had reserved for her mother. She was called Tuyen and she had inherited her mother’s looks and then some.

At this point in a Saigon story I fall hopelessly in love, willing to throw over everything if it brings me her hand. That’s not in fact my story, although perhaps in another telling it could well have been, and on that first meeting I did nothing but try not to look longer than was polite. She had a self-contained sense of detachment about her that both attracted and discouraged. You knew she wasn’t ever going to appear on the arm of some contractor, whatever the size of his wallet. And as we walked back through the restaurant I heard Donovan say, ‘Put your eyeballs back in, Mikey. You’d be pitching far out of your league.’

In the car he told me that the family had worked for the French, that Quyen herself was mixed race and Tuyen had been educated in a French school in Saigon. Then, after a silence settled and we were approaching my apartment block, for some reason – perhaps in an attempt to assert a sense of my independent thought – I asked him again who Bloomfield was and, with wordless exasperation, he stopped the car and parked up alongside a tattoo parlour, and all these years later I may have misremembered the permutations he sought to educate me in.