Free Monkey on a Chain by Harlen Campbell

found a telephone book and carried it and my coffee out to the pool area.
    The boys were still splashing. The woman and her daughter had rolled over and put on dark glasses. They lay with their arms beside them, palms up, and their legs slightly spread, about twenty feet away. The similarity between them was more pronounced from the front. I watched them for a few minutes, thinking about April. About April and death.
    Four of us had survived the operation in Saigon. Lieutenant James Bow, nicknamed Toker, died in Los Angeles six days ago. Captain William Rodgers, nicknamed Roy, was somewhere in the El Paso area. Staff Sergeant John Coleman, nicknamed Johnny Walker, had settled in Phoenix.
    Toker had been the last of us to leave the republic, as we called the Republic of Vietnam. He had closed the operation down in 1971 and knew about the end of it. And he’d left a message. Two messages, really. First, that the books had been off. Second, that Squall Line was broken. I didn’t want to think about the second unless I had to, so the first had brought me to Phoenix. Just as Toker had seen the end of our operation, Johnny Walker saw the beginning.
    Actually, the operation hadn’t ended in ’seventy-one. Only the active phase of it stopped then. Roy and Walker had decided at the beginning that if they were going to do it, they would do it right. They would cover all tracks. There would be no large sums of money to explain when their war was over. Taxes would be paid on everything. They wanted to live the rest of their lives as though Vietnam had never happened, as though Saigon were just another city, a beautiful city in a land far away.
    The rest of us had to agree to that before we were brought in. At first we hadn’t seen exactly how it could be done, but a plan had evolved over the years, over countless bottles of whiskey and packs of cigarettes and all-night sessions at Miss Phoung’s house off Tu Do Street, while artillery fire from distant firebases drummed like muted thunder. It was a complicated plan. Corporations had to be set up in Panama, the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico, as well as in the states. Money had to be transferred frequently, becoming a little more legal, a little harder to trace, each time it was moved. But the plan had worked. For twenty years, anyway.
    And now Toker had implied that there had maybe been a second plan, that the accounting was off. I needed to know if Toker’s post mortem accusation was true, and if it was, when the second set of books was opened. And who had benefited. If Toker’s death was connected to an old treachery, the question of who had benefited was crucial. It would lead to his killer, to the resolution April needed and I wanted.
    The problem was that twenty years had gone by. Actually, the problem was that they had gone by peacefully. Even supposing a hidden agenda had existed, it was buried deep in the past. Everyone had been happy for a long time. We had each taken a little over six hundred thousand home, after taxes. I had been the candyman, the delivery boy. I knew how the funds were transferred, how they had been invested. Toker hadn’t needed money before his death. No one should have needed anything. And yet Toker was dead. Things were falling apart. What had happened?
    I sighed and spent a couple of minutes dredging up sixteen-year-old names from my memory, then opened the phone book. Only two of the companies were still listed. I memorized their numbers and carried the book back into the room.
    April had stirred her food around a bit. She may have eaten a couple of bites. She had finished her coffee and was watching a television evangelist threaten his flock with the hereafter. She looked up dully when I entered. I dug out the bikini I’d picked out, tossed it to her, and told her to get dressed.
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a beautiful day. Because I asked you to.”
    After a long pause, she sighed and told me to turn around. I turned around and watched her