All of our various boat excursions in and around the Mekong Delta had aroused and engaged some dynamic, interesting, larger than life individuals. One of these was the owner of the Cabaret Club, small and slender, Mademoiselle Béatrice de Funès. Who, due to her high society connections and a working relationship with the Diem administration, had been recruited by the "Agency" in Saigon as an "Ear" for intelligence gathering. Being a natural linguist with a phenomenal eye for detail made her an invaluable addition to the intelligence agency. Béatrice de Funès was supposedly her first name, but it was never officially confirmed to me or anyone else. If the "Agency" knew this for sure, they would never have said so, this being standard practice on the part of the "Agency" in all cases. Known by the name of Aunt Bee's "Agency", she was, quite certainly, by birth a product of La Troisième République, the Third French Republic. She was the only daughter within the strata of an upper-middle-class, upper-middle-class family who lived on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and who loved to share the decadent Parisian style of the time. This bourgeois Parisian lifestyle could well have been golden for Béatrice, and perhaps would have remained so forever, if the Great War had not come to destroy it forever. Not only did that war violently take her beloved and devoted father from the family, it also removed her brothers and uncles from her young life in exactly the same cruel way. Grenades and other weapons of war have no particular class preferences when doing their job. Work. With the end of the Wars the entire male line, seven in all, of the de Funès who lived in the grand maison of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, the...... half of the paper......French Legion Foreign, and had supported their coup against the leadership of Algeria in 61. Every time a former legionnaire entered the club, he banged vigorously on the counter with a beer mallet to ask for silence, he climbed the short staircase that led to the stage of the cabaret and sing in their honor. For this he received a raucous and enthusiastic chorus of whistles and shouts, accompanied by deafening applause. If anyone in the early 1960s wanted to look for a late-life Edith Piaf lookalike, and in their search went to the backwaters of the Mekong Delta, the one and only fearsome Aunt Bee was available. As I have progressed in life, some of those who have befriended me have enriched it, but others have had the complete opposite effect. Aunt Bee, who was undoubtedly an immensely complicated person, is someone I would put at the top of my list of those who enriched.