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good portion of the night away in each others’ company, while we addressed each other as Egmond. And, for a little Viet, it turned out that he could toss back more than a few Meteor beer. He seemed to have a dozen zones of imbibing, plunging first into temporar y inebriation marked by a comment on dog meat, fol lowed by a retreat into clearly articulated thoughts on the state of the world, another drink, and a plunge into the next phase of his drunkenness. He’d developed some kind of sui generis style. Later, at a hole in the wall in the 9 th , there was a legionnaire, old guy, and he knew Tranh. There was no love lost bet ween them, so he could have been telling the truth. The legionnaire looked like he would know the answers to certain questions. As for the rest of the night, it was pretty vague. At one point, he mentioned something about his wife having MS. Those things are traded off with casual disinterest in certain establishments of the second arrondissement of the city of Paris. We agreed to meet a week later in a café called Le Tambour , which Tranh referred to as a “temple of absurdity”.
    Tranh had grown up in Cambodia and Laos in the seventies, and I had run a few scams Wanchai way after the Tiananmen fiasco, which was more than enough to keep us going, and we both wanted to kill time. Later in the evening, the owner of Le Tambour , a moustachioed hulk named Maurice, joined in on the conversation. Just prior to daybreak, he locked up the bistro, and ordered his chef to cook food for the three of us.
    There’s a point in the night in Paris, where if you’re with the right people and mix the right drinks, you start waking up again. Nothing really happened that evening, other than the fact that I decided to tell these rogue gentlemen my story. A David Byrne song, “I Love America,” playing over the speakers. Maurice had opened up another bottle of Gigondas Seigneurie de Fontanges , a few years old, and his cook had prepared a Navarin lamb stew, and Maurice was relating a few tales about his time in Algeria in the late fifties, and how sometimes you have to leave a man in a cell for three weeks without sleep, before you even began interrogating him.
    It turned out that all three of us had had contracts put out on us at various times, although mine was the only one still outstanding. We were discussing basically, when is the person serious and when are they not, that type of thing. There was no doubt that, sooner or later, if you wrote your own rule book, some people wouldn’t like it, and among those people, one or two might utter a few threats, and then there was the case of the person who had nothing better to do, and more or less set about making killing you a high priority item. So, of course, you had to deal with these people.
    And, the conclusion was, you’re never a hundred per cent sure, but there’s an equation, more or less, the less experience with firearms, the more the person had to be desperate. So somebody who killed people for a living, if there wasn’t money involved they wouldn’t do you in, unless there was a really good reason.
    â€œIn Algeria, we were not perfect. We broke rules. But, we knew what the rules were. We had codes of our own. Look, see this tattoo? 1er régiment de chasseurs paras . And, the other night, a couple of kids, sauvageons , tried to rob me at gunpoint. I put them both in the hospital.”
    He shook his head. “No respect.”
    That word, respect , obviously meant something to these people. It was a word with consequences.
    Tranh’s skin flushed red. He gained in exuberance as he drank. One of those alcoholics who have the gift of uttering truths during states of intoxication, then erasing it from their memories.
    â€œGentlemen, I am going to articulate the content of our agreement. Maurice, you only know me as a client. This Egmond comes from America, so his truths are not ours. But, I put to you the