Then we sat in silence for a few seconds more as we contemplated the meaning of his father’s words, until he broke the spell by slapping the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. Before I got out of the car he handed me a document he wanted translated from French and asked me, ‘Has Madame Binh told your fortune yet?’ As he put the engine in gear he started to laugh and his final words were, ‘She got mine all wrong.’ Then he was gone, the car’s lights fading rapidly into the dusk.

Within a relatively short time I began to understand that Donovan’s war was in some part a deeply personal one and he waged it mostly against George Bloomfield, who I had never met but came to feel as if I had. And when Donovan spoke of him he invariably did so in pyrotechnic language that involved such assertions as he was going to light a fire under that son of a bitch’s ass, tie a firecracker to his tail or smoke him out once and for all. Why he hated Bloomfield so intensely was never revealed to me, but from different sources I heard a range of suggestions, everything from Donovan holding the other responsible for the betrayal and subsequent death of one of his most valued agents, to a protracted and bitter dispute over a woman. There was even talk of a fist fight in the bar of the Caravelle Hotel. But whatever the reason behind their enmity, it conspired to dominate much of his thinking and I came to believe that Donovan’s most pressing motivations were to put one over his nemesis and to ensure that his analyses were the primary influences on Polgar’s and the station’s current thinking.

Despite Donovan warning me that Tuyen was off limits, opportunities arose for me to at least get to know her a little better. One Sunday afternoon when I was playing tennis with Corley at Le Cercle Sportif, a complex that was to eventually assume the august title of the Ho Chi Minh City Labour Culture Palace, Tuyen appeared with a female friend – it transpired later that Donovan had secured their entry. And I know that with all the cinematic cultural reimagining of the war, the smell of napalm in the morning and full metal jackets et cetera, the idea of Sunday-afternoon tennis probably seems bizarre, but this was a part of my experience because I had arrived initially in that period when both sides were pretending peace was what they desired rather than victory. I had missed much of the worst attrition and would be gone soon after the storm finally broke.

When I saw Tuyen and her companion in immaculate whites, I was embarrassed by our makeshift tennis gear but she seemed friendly and, as she was playing on the court beside ours, there were lots of times when mishit shots ended on the wrong court. I probably hit more wayward shots than normal because I was distracted by her presence, and my constant glances revealed that she was a good player, deceptively languid in her movements but able to serve with precision and pace, able to both drive and slice the ball elegantly on her backhand. After a while, when our change of ends coincided, she asked me if we wanted to play doubles and at first I thought she meant she and her partner would play against us but she gestured with her racquet that she would play with me. So we paired off, introductions were made, and while I knew Corley was impressed by my knowing her I was conscious that, if anything, he looked even scruffier than me in his canvas baseball shoes and cut-off denim shorts.