Monkey on a Chain (5 page)

“Half to the parents, half to the sister.”

“Was April mentioned at all?”

“She was mentioned. She was specifically excluded. It wasn’t like she was cut out recently. This is an old will. But it was reviewed less than two months ago.”

The girl made a small noise deep in her throat, as though she had been cut inside.

“And no one else? No women? No friends?”

“No women. He had no friends.” But something in his eyes made me suspicious.

“There was nothing else?” I asked. “No codicil? No special bequest?”

He hesitated, then decided it wasn’t worth a lie, whatever it was. “One thing. I don’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t even in the will.”

“Tell me.”

“About a month and a half ago he brought me a letter. He told me I’d know who to give it to. There is a name on it, but no address. A rather strange name.”

April made another noise. She was looking at me. Pearson looked at me too. “Can you guess the name?” he asked softly.

I felt like I was back in April’s bedroom, looking at the grenade. “Rainbow,” I said.

The lawyer nodded slowly. “I guess it’s yours.” He touched a button on the phone and asked his secretary to bring the envelope from the Bow file in the safe.

When she came in, April stood abruptly and rushed out. Pearson took the envelope from the secretary’s hand and put it directly in mine. I stuck it in my breast pocket and started after April. Pearson stopped me. “Mister…ah, Rainbow!”

I looked at him.

“What happened here…the irregular aspects…I’m going to overlook them because of my feelings for April. About what Bow did, I mean.”

“You’ll overlook them because you don’t want to think about the alternative,” I told him coldly.

After a moment, he nodded. “Nevertheless, I do feel badly about this.”

I left the secretary looking back and forth from her employer to me with bright, curious eyes.

April was not in the reception area. I found her leaning against the wall by the elevator. I pushed the button and stood silently beside her. Her cheeks were still wet and her face was very white.

When the elevator arrived, she moved woodenly into it. Then she stumbled and fell against me. She threw an arm over my shoulder so that her face was against my chest, and her knees buckled. I held her and she began to sob, but by the time the door opened, she could stand again. A man waiting for the elevator glared at me as I led April off.

When we reached the parking lot, she leaned against the car. She didn’t want to get in. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

“I lost it. I just lost it all.”

I waited for her to continue. I thought I knew what she was talking about. Her self-control. I was wrong.

“I had a father, and I lost him. And now I lost him again. And it was all because of me, because I wasn’t satisfied. I had to try to find my real father. And then Dad…he cut me out. I hurt him.”

“You were never in,” I told her. “Get in the car.”

She nodded. I held the door for her.

When we had been on the road for five or ten minutes, she said, “The envelope. What was it?”

It had been burning my chest. I’d been ignoring it. I pulled into the parking lot at the next strip center and took it out. The writing on the envelope was in Bow’s hand, of course. I tore it open. It held a single sheet of yellow lined paper with just four sentences. I read them once, cursed, and read them again. Maybe my face was white. I didn’t feel like I had an ounce of blood in me.

“Well?”

I wasn’t sure it was the right thing, but I didn’t know what else to do. I read it to her: “Squall Line was broken. The accounts were short. Take care of April. I don’t know who else to trust and I can’t say any more.”

She stared at me. I stared out the window, watching the civilians. Men in short-sleeved shirts. Women in shorts and halter tops. Kids on skateboards. Some of them were even laughing. Civilians. I felt a thousand years old, six thousand miles removed from them.

“He said take care of April,” she said slowly. “Maybe he did care. About me.”

“I think he cared.”

“But the rest of it. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

She started crying again. “You do know, you lying son of a bitch. You’re the only one who knows and you won’t tell me.” She got out of the car and walked toward the shops. I let her go and stared out the window.

You can feel old and tired, and then you think if you get any older, if a thing lasts even one more minute, you’ll die. You’ll die and your body will turn to dust and blow away like you were a vampire in one of those stupid movies. A mass of corruption. But time passes and you get older. And you don’t die. Eventually you will die, you know that, but you don’t die yet. You just feel worse. And then you get hungry, or thirsty, or you get an itch. Something happens that reminds you you’re alive, that it isn’t time yet, and somehow you feel better and at the same time ashamed of feeling better. You take a couple of deep breaths and look around to see what has to be done. And you see someone else standing alone, maybe thinking about death.

April was under the awning, over by the shops. I pulled myself out of the car and walked over to her. “We should talk, I guess,” I said.

One of the places was a bar. I led her to a table in the rear. The bartender came over and I ordered a double scotch. She ordered a Coke. We said nothing until the drinks came. I took half of mine and patted my shirt for a cigarette, then remembered I’d thrown the damned things away again. I looked back at April. She was waiting patiently.

“It looks like it goes back to Vietnam,” I began. “I’d hoped that it wouldn’t, that it was something recent. But it isn’t.” I cleared my throat, gave myself a second’s respite before beginning.

“I told you I knew him over there, that he was a supply officer and I was with the Military Police. Well, Toker was involved in something. Along with some other people.” I took another sip of my drink. This was harder than I’d expected.

April decided to try to help. Or to hurry me up. “And you arrested them,” she suggested.

I shook my head. “I was in it too.”

“It was wrong?”

“It was illegal.”

“The black market? You were stealing things, selling them on the black market?”

“No. We were buying things and selling them on the black market. Nothing was stolen. Everything was paid for. The accounts were always in balance. We were very careful about that. But we bought a lot of things. Liquor. Cigarettes. Gasoline. Clothes. Everything. Let me tell you how it was.” I focused on the far wall.

“There were four kinds of valuables over there. The first was goods and services. We dealt in goods, not services. The other three things were money. There was Vietnamese money, called piasters or dong, that was number one. We called it pee or dong. Then there was MPC, or scrip. MPC stood for Military Payment Certificates. The soldiers were paid in scrip. And then there was American currency. The good old green-backed dollar. We just called that green. It was illegal for soldiers to have green or piasters. All we could have was scrip. But nobody gave a rat’s ass about the Vietnamese money because it was almost worthless.

“Anyway, the American government was propping up the Vietnamese government by creating an artificial value for the piaster. In order to keep the economy from inflating too rapidly, the exchange rate for scrip was set at a hundred eighteen to the dollar. But scrip could buy stuff from the PX, and that made it worth between two hundred fifty and four hundred pee to the dollar for the LNs who could find soldiers to buy for them.”

“So much? Three times?”

I nodded. “But even that was a gyp. Scrip was funny money. The real stuff was green, and you could get six hundred to one for a twenty-dollar bill, more for higher denominations, depending on how the last battle went or what the markets were short of. One time I watched a buddy sell a thousand green at twelve hundred to one. A week later he traded it for MPC at eighty to one when the word went out that the military was going to change the money. They did that sometimes to discourage currency speculation. All it did was screw the poor LNs one more time. Anyway, after trading the pee for scrip, he had turned one thou’ into fifteen. If he’d been caught with that much, he would have been in the stockade for sure.”

April looked confused. “What did he do?”

“He bought five thousand bottles of Courvoisier cognac. And after the currency-change excitement was over, they were worth twenty bucks apiece on the street if you were willing to take piasters. Which he was, of course, because even piasters could be used to buy some things, and goods varied in price too, depending on what you had to sell, what you were willing to buy, what currency you were holding, and what time it was.

“For instance, Vietnam is close to Thailand, and there are lots of stones in Thailand. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, jade. Gold and silver bullion came in from India. And there was art. Ivory and porcelain and drawings from China. Some European stuff when the upper classes fell on hard times. Lots of things were available for piasters you could buy at eight hundred to one. And those things could be sold stateside, or in Japan or Hong Kong or the P.I., for a decent price. Especially if they didn’t have to pass through customs.”

I gave her a quick glance. “Military transport went all those places. And customs was rarely a problem, because so much war material was moving around.”

She was impassive. “So that’s what you did. What my father did.” Her voice was stone cold.

It wasn’t all we did. Some of us died, too. And they were paid cheaply. I didn’t know how to explain that, but I felt I had to say something, so I said yes.

She said nothing for a long while. Then she cleared her throat. “You used some words I didn’t understand. P.I., for instance.”

“P.I. is the Philippine Islands.”

“LN.”

“Local nationals. The Vietnamese.”

“The gooks, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Like me.”

I shrugged. “Gooks. Slopes. Honkies. Niggers. Kikes. Spicks. Polacks. Gringos. There’s a name for everyone.”

“Names can hurt.”

“They don’t kill.”

She looked at me as if I were from another planet. I was. “I want you to go. Leave me alone.”

“I want to help.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Think about it.” I stood up. The bartender watched me leave, then headed toward her booth as I reached the door. He looked about twenty-five. Also too young to understand.

I found a phone booth at the drugstore next door and looked up the address of James Bow, Sr., then bought a pack of cigarettes and took them to the car. When April came out an hour and a half later, she was walking very carefully. She climbed in beside me. I could smell her breath. I said nothing just put the car in gear.

When we’d driven half an hour, she asked where we were going. I told her to see Bow’s parents. She made a face. “Why?”

“I want to know how they feel about Toker’s will. If there’s anything for you here.”

“That’s up to me, isn’t it?”

“Yes. When you can make the decision.”

Bow’s parents had a nice split-level in Westwood, just a few miles from where their son had lived with the girl who wasn’t a granddaughter. His mother led me into the living room. She looked somber. Her husband sat quietly in a chair by the window, looking out. I wondered if he could see April waiting in the car. She had refused to come in.

I explained to them that I was a friend of April’s. They looked unfriendly.

“What does she want?” the mother asked.

“To understand,” I told them. “Your son took her home. He told her he had adopted her. He treated her like a daughter. He acted like he loved her. He let her trust him, even love him. And now this. There was apparently no adoption. He has left her nothing. He owes her. At least an explanation.”

The old man started to say something, but his wife cut him off. “He’s given her a fortune. Too much. More than she deserved.”

“Other people might not think so. A judge might think he owed her more.”

The woman glared at me. “He gave her a car,” she said. “She can keep that. She won’t get another dime. Tell her we said so. Not another dime.”

“He had a sister. Does she feel the same way?”

“She does.”

I looked at the husband. He nodded.

“But why? What did April do to you?”

“She’s a goddamn gook,” the husband said.

His wife silenced him with a sharp look. “Let me tell you something,” she said. “Before the war, we were a close family. We were happy. Jimmy did very well in school. And then he was drafted, and he went for OCS and became a lieutenant. Then he went to Vietnam and he came back changed. The war changed him. It was fought for those people. I mean, he went over there for them. Nobody appreciated it, what he gave up. Not my neighbors, and not those people in Vietnam.”

She pursed her lips. “It didn’t bother Jimmy, what he gave up, but it bothered us. Our family. We were close before he left. Loving. When he came back, he wasn’t loving anymore. And it was their fault. Those people’s. He lost the ability to be close, to be loving. And it was for nothing. For a bunch of lousy…gooks!”

I stared at her. Her hatred pinched her face white. I understood what she felt, but it left me cold. “April didn’t do it,” I said. “She was just a little baby.”

“They should all be dead. They killed the best part of my baby.”

I looked at her husband. “Do you feel the same way?”

He just turned his head a little farther away from me and said nothing.

There was no way I could see to move either one of them. I didn’t think April would even want to try, but that was her decision. “I’ll tell her what you said. She may want to talk to a lawyer. It will be up to her.”

“Tell her she can keep the car he gave her. I wouldn’t have it now. But she won’t get another cent. Not if I have to spend every dime fighting her. I’ll waste it before she’ll have it.”

I stood and said goodbye. The mother saw me to the door. She wouldn’t look at my car. On the step, I turned and asked her when the funeral would be. She told me it had been yesterday, and I left her standing there.