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

The Spy Who Loved Us 233
Philippe as patron, and there is something about this unassuming
man, short and stout, but almost feline in the way he
glides down the street, that makes it appropriate to call him
“boss.” Franchini is a painter with glancing brown eyes and a
quick gaze that seems to take in the world around him with immediate
precision.
A great storyteller, Franchini can settle into a banquette and
nurse a glass of wine through an afternoon of conversation.
Pham Xuan An had the same talent and so too, apparently, did
Ho Chi Minh. Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National
Liberation Front, describes an afternoon he spent with Ho
when he was a student in Paris. “That afternoon was a short
course in the history of Vietnam, taught to us over tea by
Uncle Ho. He had done it all in the traditional Vietnamese
manner with which we felt so comfortable, with touches of light
humor, legends, anecdotes, and moral tales to amuse and instruct
at the same time.”
It was no accident that Pham Xuan An and Philippe Franchini
were friends. They loved telling jokes and laughing at
human foibles, their own included. Their judgments were keen,
their instincts finely honed. Other people sought them out as
wise men, but there was not an ounce of pretension in their wisdom.
They were humble, noble characters, who ruled over the
banquettes in whatever cafés they found themselves.
Alain Taieb in his movie about Franchini and An put them
together in the garden of the Continental Hotel, supposedly to
watch them reminisce about the old days, when Franchini
owned the place and An worked upstairs on the second floor in
Time’s two-room office overlooking café Givral. An and Franchini
skip the reminiscing and cut right to the chase. An wants
the world to know that Franchini is an honorable man. He inherited
from his father a grand hotel that was a sinkhole of
bad debts, and instead of walking away from these debts he paid
them off one by one over the course of a decade. Franchini lost
everything at the end of the war when the hotel was seized by