The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

212 THOMAS A. BASS
a heavy teak desk and a cork board for Shaplen to pin his maps.
When An and Shaplen wanted to talk privately, they would
step outside onto the balcony and peer through the tamarind
trees which lined the street in front of the hotel. Cocktail hour
lasted until everyone went off to dinner at Augustin’s or Brodard’s
or another of Saigon’s pleasant French restaurants. The
evening ended with a late-night coffee at Givral’s or a round of
drinks on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel.
While he lived the public life of a boulevardier, An’s private
life was more abstemious. Tu Cang recalls that An’s house was
tiny, a mere ten meters by twenty. Living as simply as possible,
An says he was saving his money for the moment that he would
be unmasked, leaving his wife and four children to fend for
themselves. “I accepted that sooner or later I would be caught,
like a fish in a pond. Maybe a small fish can escape through the
net, but not a big fish. I was prepared to be tortured and killed.
This was my fate.”
Chin Chi and Tam Thao, An’s fellow spies, have drawn me
a map of where he used to live in the dense warren of houses
that lies between Saigon’s central market and Cholon, the city’s
Chinese district. An has added his address, 121/55 Le Thi Rieng.
A double-barreled address like this means that he lived not on
the main street but in an alleyway behind it. “Look out for the
water tower,” Tam Thao says. “When you see it, you’ll know
you’re close to An’s house.”
The day I set out to see where An lived while writing reports
in invisible ink and photographing secret documents, I
begin with a tour of his old haunts in central Saigon. From my
balcony at the Continental Hotel, I look down the old rue
Catinat toward the Saigon River. In French provincial fashion,
the trees have been gussied up with whitewashed trunks,
and below lies another colonial legacy, the municipal theater
which served for two decades as South Vietnam’s national
assembly.