Monkey on a Chain (31 page)

She had tweezers in her purse and was delighted to help. I stripped down, very painfully, and lay on my stomach on the floor while she dug the needles out of my hide. I think I dozed off toward the end. That’s hard to do. Try it sometime.

Sissy woke me early in the afternoon. He wanted to send his son home, to let Anna know he was alive. I told him to let the boy and the others go. After they left, he and April and I went over the ranch as carefully as we could. Roy had kept an office in the bedroom wing. His records were complete enough that I could identify most of his assets. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to convert the majority of them. They would have to be abandoned. I kept the records on those I thought could be salvaged and burned the rest. I supposed that the Mexican government would wind up with everything the lawyers and bureaucrats didn’t steal.

We did find a safe. It took me two hours to open it. There was nothing inside but cash and two kilos of cocaine. Two hundred forty thousand and change in green, just over a hundred thousand in Pesos. I pocketed that. I’m no fonder of leaving money on the table than Roy was.

We scattered the cocaine in the sand outside the house.

There was no sign of the principal object of our search, the bag that Sissy had given Toker ten years before. Eventually, we gave up and drove to Juarez. I handed the two mercenaries ten dollars apiece for their trouble. We dropped them off in front of a bar a couple of blocks south of the bridge and drove back to the land of opportunity.

Chapter 10

PLACITAS

April had got the most sleep after the shooting stopped, so she was elected to drive the first shift. She took us as far as Truth or Consequences before she pulled over and shook me awake. I made it to Santa Fe before I rousted Sissy. He took us on to Tierra Amarilla. I was awakened by Anna’s cries of joy. She hugged Sissy and babbled in Spanish for five minutes before she thought of us. I didn’t mind. Watching her fuss over him felt good.

Juanito stood awkwardly to the side. He looked proud of his father, and at the same time like he thought somebody should be fussing over him, too. I stretched myself awake and went over and shook his hand. I told him he’d done a good job, that I’d think of him next time I needed a shooter. He smiled nervously and told me he’d rather I didn’t.

Anna hurried over as soon as she saw me with her son. Her smile looked forced, but it was there. Sometimes they aren’t.

“I don’t know how to thank you for taking care of my men, Mr. Porter,” she said. “Juanito has told me about…about what you did. I am very grateful to have them back alive.”

I smiled at her. “My pleasure,” I said.

She wasn’t happy meeting my eyes. “Nevertheless, I’m very grateful. If there’s ever anything I can do…”

I decided to take her off the hook. “Chorizo and eggs and the use of the guest room are all the thanks I need. And call me Rainbow, please.”

“Of course.” She turned away quickly. “Of course. I should have thought…” She headed for the kitchen. Sissy followed her. April followed him. I followed her. Juanito followed me. We were a parade.

The chairs in the kitchen were padded, but I sat down gingerly. The long drive up had worked a couple more spines loose. April noticed and borrowed some rubbing alcohol from Anna, then grabbed her purse and pulled me back to the guest room. I wasn’t tired enough to sleep through that session. She finished with me about the time Juanito knocked on the door to announce supper.

There were the eggs with chorizo I’d requested, but Anna had also fried up some venison steak and potatoes with onions and green chiles. I took a second helping while Sissy and April told their story again. In a way, they had had the worst of it that night. They had sat in the dark and listened to the shooting, the grenades, the bullets ricocheting around the canyon, and fought their imaginations. That’s the toughest fight there is.

When they got to the end, their description became very confused. It took a little while to straighten out what had happened. I was standing between them when Roy died. Each of them had fired and heard a shot from my direction, and each of them thought I was the other one shooting. They each assumed that they had missed and that I was the one who got him. I thought about it for a few minutes while they told their stories, and in the end I let them believe what they obviously wanted. There was no good to come from telling them that I hadn’t finished squeezing my trigger. Either one of them would have a harder time handling the guilt than I would. And what the hell. In this particular affair, I was practically an innocent.

Anna had more difficulty understanding why it had all happened than she did with what had happened. We talked that out for an hour or more and eventually decided there were some things we would never know. The biggest question mark of all, at least for Anna, was Miss Phoung.

I thought I understood. “She did it because Sissy came back to her after that short tour in Manila,” I said. “When he left, she just assumed Roy was going to inherit her. But when Sissy came back she realized he loved her. That was when she let herself love him. The sex didn’t matter. It was just sex. But love was something hard to find in Saigon, something rare. And for Miss Phoung, it was precious. When she lost Sissy, she asked herself who had taken him, who was responsible. And she had two easy answers.”

“Max and Roy,” Sissy said.

I nodded. “Corvin had set up the operation and forced it on us. Roy sent Sissy on the last delivery instead of Johnny Walker. He needed Walker in Saigon to show the new guy, Toker, how the supply end of the operation worked. If it hadn’t been for Corvin and Roy, Sissy would have been alive. So Miss Phoung decided to get even with them, to hit them where they’d hurt the most. She went after their money. Corvin paid up because he didn’t have a choice. As long as Sissy was in the background, ready to blow the whistle on his part of the Luzon deal, the skimming and the double cross, he had to pay. He probably thought that Roy was behind it.”

“What double cross?” Juanito interrupted.

Sissy answered that. “We were ambushed when we were making the second delivery. By one of the American security agencies. Corvin betrayed us to them, told them where and when we would be landing.”

“Why did he do that?”

“It was his idea of a final payoff,” I explained. “We had agreed not to tell anyone about the operation, so Corvin assumed we would all be on the beach at Luzon. He arranged for someone to hit us while we were making the delivery. The idea was that we would all die and some of the Huks would get killed. Marcos would be grateful. A bunch of Filipino soldiers would go to ’Nam. The Communist threat to the Philippines would be broken, at least until we needed them again. And best of all, Max would keep the full payment for the arms delivery. In fact, Max would get another bonus. Everyone who knew about his extortion game would be killed at the same time. It was really a sweet deal. You’ve got to admire him, in a way.”

Anna shuddered. “He was a despicable man,” she said. “He can’t be admired. But it sounds like that woman, that Phoung, thought Roy was just the same as Corvin.”

“She might have thought he was,” I told her. “She knew Roy better than any of the rest of us, at least as a woman knows a man. But Roy was a different matter. There was nobody to keep him in line the way Sissy kept Max in line. Roy paid for a while. I don’t know why. Sentiment maybe. Maybe he was trying to honor the promise he’d made Sissy, to look after Miss Phoung. But something happened. For some reason or other, his feelings changed. He lost his temper when they met, and he killed her. Maybe he took back the money. Maybe it went to her sister. Maybe the money bought April’s passage to Hong Kong.”

April had a strange expression on her face. Something like pity. “You don’t know what changed him? You haven’t figured it out?”

I felt a chill. “You have? Tell me.”

She looked away. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said.

“Tell me!” I took her arm in my hand and squeezed.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Tell me!”

She stared into my eyes with a peculiar mixture of hostility and sorrow. “You said Corvin was with my mother when you saw her the last time,” she said.

I let go of her arm. “What of it?”

“Did you ever tell Roy about that?”

“I may have mentioned it.” I didn’t like this. At all.

“When?”

“I was discharged in July 1971. I saw him a couple of months later. Maybe September.”

She didn’t have to say anything else, but she did. “My mother was killed at the end of September 1971.”

They all stared at me. I stood up and walked away from them and leaned over the sink. My stomach hurt. And there were some more barbs in my back. I held my eyes wide open until I could blink without shaming myself.

“You couldn’t have known,” April said behind me.

“It was Roy who did it,” Sissy said. “It wasn’t your fault, my friend.”

“No. But that explains it.” I turned back and faced them. “He decided that she was working with Max. Just as Max thought she was working with Roy.”

Sissy nodded slowly. “Poor Phoung,” he said.

“Yes. She never had chance.” I rubbed my face. “It’s getting late, and I want to go home first thing. I’m going to sleep now. Unless anyone else has an insight to share…?”

Nobody said anything. I left them.

Sleep did not come easily. I spent hours staring at Sissy’s white ceiling and seeing Phoung standing in the golden sunlight on her deserted veranda that last day in Saigon, the skirt of her ao dai drifting with the breeze, white, the color of mourning for a man who hadn’t died. I had asked her where she was going. She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the countryside and said, “Home.” Now I thought, as I remembered the conversation, that her expression had been sad or wistful, but it hadn’t seemed so at the time. When she spoke then, I had thought she was angry, angry at me, or perhaps just at the war and what it had done.

“You don’t have to,” I had said. “You can stay here. With me. You know that.”

“I can’t stay,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Then let me tell you something. Something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”

She had laughed then, whether from nervousness or tension, I couldn’t tell. She put her hand over her mouth and ducked her head and laughed and it sounded, as it always did, like the chiming of silver bells. I had thought she was laughing at me. I know better now, but then I thought she was laughing at me and so I left. I did kiss her goodbye. It was like kissing a porcelain figurine.

I relived that last hour a dozen times before April came in and lay down with me and I put my arms around her and pulled her tightly against me and slept.

It was still dark when I woke. My watch said five-thirty. I dressed and went outside and sat on the fence at the corral. The sun rose over the ridge behind me. The shadows that pooled in the valley slowly retreated back to the east, toward me. Juanito came out and saddled a horse and took off. He looked at me often, perhaps wondering if he should offer to cut out a mare for me, but I ignored him and he finally left without saying anything.

Later, Sissy limped over and climbed on the fence beside me. “How are you feeling, Rainbow?” he asked.

“I’m all right.”

“It’s hard, no?”

“It is what it is,” I told him.

“Yeah.”

We sat for a long time without speaking, and then I opened the only subject that still was closed. “Your bullet,” I said. “Back there on Luzon. Where did you take it?”

He didn’t look at me. He just slapped his thigh.

“But it was a little higher than that, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Just a little.”

I looked over at him. He sat on the rail like he’d been there a thousand years. There was a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. I pulled it out, took one, lit it, and handed the pack to him. He lit one for himself and went back to watching the horizon. We smoked together until Anna came out and called us to breakfast.

April was up and had packed our things. We ate quickly and said our good-byes and I carried the stuff to the car. I shook hands with Sissy and with Anna when she offered her hand. She did not offer to shake hands with April. When April went to say goodbye to Sissy, he surprised her with a long and powerful hug. “You take care of yourself, you hear me?” He told her. Anna watched them expressionlessly, then went into the house.

We made good time on the trip back, but a stop in Bernalillo for hamburgers and groceries took forty-five minutes, and it was after two when we pulled into Placitas. It felt good to come home without any fear of an explosive surprise. We put the food away and wandered around the house a bit. I tried to talk to April, but she had been in a strange mood ever since Tierra Amarilla. Maybe since Las Colonias.

In truth, we had been so tired after the firefight in the canyon that she hadn’t really had a chance to show what mood she was in, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed if she had. I was kind of numb myself, though that stemmed more from what April had made me see than from the action down south. In any case, we didn’t find much to say to each other. Eventually, I decided to take my afternoon run. April thought an afternoon nap made more sense, so I told her she knew where the bed was and pulled on a pair of shorts and my jogging shoes.

After so long, the run was like meeting an old enemy. Less than half a mile up the road, I realized that I had done fairly well without exercise for the last few weeks. There was really no point in resuming the torture. I kept running. A little later, I decided that it made no sense to just jump into the routine. Far better to ease into it gradually. Stop now, walk back. Walking’s good exercise. Add a couple of hundred yards tomorrow. Or the day after. I ran on. Sometimes you have to use your head, and sometimes you have to ignore the damned thing.

By the time I reached the overlook I had pretty much gotten my liter and an half of gray matter reconciled to the pain. Actually, it wasn’t reconciled. It had decided to go somewhere else, think about things, let the stupid muscles have their way if they were going to be so stubborn. What it decided to think about was money. Specifically, how much to charge Johnny Walker for avoiding the nastiness at Las Colonias.

There were a couple of points. Corvin had brought eleven men in with him and two had survived. That meant nine dead. Count Roy and you’ve got ten, an easy number to work with, if I charged him by the head. A thousand bucks a pop would make it ten grand. Of course, a thousand was either too little or way too much. What’s a life worth? In a situation like we’d had down there, the best valuation was the cost of taking it. Cost of the ammo plus a couple of grenades would be maybe thirty dollars a head. Of course I hadn’t had to pay for the grenades or most of the ammo, so I would be overcharging him at that rate, even if I factored in my time at, say, minimum wage.

On the other hand, I really hadn’t done the job for him alone. I had an interest in it myself, and Sissy as well. Even Toker, though he was dead, should bear part of the obligation. I couldn’t include April because this came out of the old operation. She was more of a bystander. So whatever the final number was, I could only charge Walker a fourth of it. As near as I could figure it, the bill would be in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty dollars, plus tax. It didn’t seem worth the time it would take to explain it to the IRS.

I killed another five minutes with fruitless speculation and my body began to get impatient to be on the move again. I listened to it. After all, I already knew what the bill would be. My standard rate. One dollar and all found. As usual, I’d found enough to make the venture worthwhile. More than I’d hoped for, and less.