But the hand that held the gun belonged to Donovan and the voice shouting was his voice. The two men stared at him, and for a second I thought the one threatening me with the knife was about to take me as a shield, but on Donovan’s order I moved quickly away and took my place at his side. He gestured them to drop their weapons and again on his instruction I picked up the knife.

‘Where’s Vien and Quyen? And Tuyen – where are they?’ he asked, not taking his eyes off the two men.

‘They’re not here. I don’t know where they are.’

‘Are you sure? Have you looked in the back?’

I told him I had, but knew it wasn’t good enough for him, and then after he had signalled both of the intruders to lie face down with their hands behind their backs he handed me the gun.

‘Shoot the first son of a bitch that moves.’

The butt of the gun bore the sticky warmth of his hand, and I tried to hold it steady as if it was a natural extension of my arm while I listened to the sound of doors opening and banging shut, and I suddenly realised that, despite all my vacillating psychological profiles I had completed, I could shoot someone if I was as frightened as I was in that moment. He was only gone a couple of minutes, but it seemed too long, and when he returned he was shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe they had left. After he’d taken the gun off me we both walked to the door and he looked out into the street but signalled me to wait.

‘If you’d like your watch back, Mikey, now would be a good time to get it.’

‘It’s a piece of junk,’ I told him, wanting only to be gone.

‘When you get outside, turn left and walk to the car. I’ll be right behind you, and when you get in you’re riding shotgun, so reach for it under the blanket in the back seat and give it plenty of visibility until we’re well out of here.’

It was to be his last need for me to ‘stand up straight and true’. And as we made our way through the city’s streets I stumbled into a thanks, but he told me to ‘shut the fuck up’ because he had to think and he couldn’t do that if I was going to jabber on, so I never told him about what Quyen had wanted of me or offered any explanation as to why I was in La Porte Bleue, and he never asked. Perhaps we both already knew.

It was also the last time I was to see him because, just before dawn the following morning, the few of us remaining in the apartments were loaded on a bus that stopped briefly at other prearranged collection points across the city, then headed for Tan Son Nhut airbase where we sidestepped the mounting chaos of processing to take our seats on an Air America flight. But there was no flight out for Danh and Corrine, the badminton players, or any of my other colleagues. We left them standing in line on a stairwell, their worldly goods stuffed into single suitcases, some of them clutching young children in their arms and all of them waiting for the promised chopper that never came. And as I travelled through a city still opaque despite the first ingress of morning light, I saw my final image of that world slowly emerge – all along the side of the road little pyres of discarded uniforms, helmets and boots, their owners now joining the legions of ghost soldiers, before they too vanished forever.