The Curious Monkey had been founded by a Frenchman before 1940, purchased by an American expat sometime around 1970, handed down in his family for some generations, and moved by royal order to the Royal Saigon Hotel when it was established. It was now owned by a wealthy family in Japan which had the good sense to run it with a staff of expats.
No one seemed to know anymore why it had been named the Curious Monkey; the one American expat who was descended from the old owner said that family legend had it that the Frenchman himself did not recall, had named it when he was drunk with friends and had never been able to bring himself to ask if they knew why he had done that.
Since at least the 2020s, when a number of spy movies and romances were filmed there, the Curious Monkey had been one of the world’s best-known restaurants. Because it was well known, all sorts of celebrities the world over had dined there— the Himmler family maintained a permanent table, as did His Most Catholic Majesty. The Crown Prince had been known to fly there from Tokyo just for the lemongrass soup, and half the world’s actors seemed to hang out in the bar, desperately hoping some trillionaire would take them to dinner.
For all that, the Curious Monkey also remained a place where you could get a superior meal for a very high, but not ridiculous, price. They could easily have doubled their prices and never had an empty seat, but apparently the Curious Monkey was under a mandate to stay as affordable as it could manage (which was of course not very affordable for anyone like me, as a usual thing— but it was also not at a level intended for people to show off how much they could afford to waste, as so many places in Saigon, Bangkok, Rangoon, and Tokyo were).
I phoned downstairs and got a reservation. As always it required negotiating to get the staff at the Curious Monkey to admit they had a table that I might reserve for that night, and that in fact it would be available reasonably soon.
The phone rang as I was tying my cravat. I picked it up and was surprised to find Geoffrey Iphwin on the other end of the line. “Hello,” he said. “Just wanted you to know that I’ve called the Curious Monkey and dinner is on me for tonight. Partly in apology for our security having slipped up and let the obnoxious Miss Beard get at you, and partly as an engagement present for my two new employees.”
“Two new employees?”
“Didn’t Helen tell you? I hired her this afternoon after a phone interview, while she was waiting for you.”
I covered the phone with my hand and said, “Are you working for Iphwin now too?”
Helen was struggling into a long black dress that clung to her in a very flattering way. “Yes, silly, didn’t I tell you? He hired me to be your administrative assistant. I said I didn’t know anything about statistics or abductive math, and he said then I’d have to concentrate on administering and assisting. I thought I told you when I phoned you while you were inbound into Saigon. Didn’t I tell you?”
She hadn’t.
“Um, no.” I turned back to Iphwin on the phone. “Well, I guess she is hired at that. And, uh, er, thank you, and it really isn’t necessary—”
“Of course it’s not. Gifts are never necessary, that’s what makes them gifts. But it gives me great pleasure to do this for you. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind a bit,” I said, very sincerely, trying to cover up for my beginning to feel very meddled-with. “But I do feel bewildered.”
“Well, that’s a feeling you’re going to have for quite a while, I think,” Iphwin said. “Something else I should let you know is that in my continuing disagreements with the Political Offenses cops, I have reserved a special spot for making the life of Billie Beard unhappy. Her behavior is the sort of thing that I really cannot allow. I have already given Mort orders that one way or another she is to be kept away—away from you, away from Helen, away from ConTech, and far from the realm of any possible human happiness.”
“I agree with the sentiment,” I said, and this time it was no effort at all to sound sincere.
“Enjoy your evening, then. And your left cuff link is behind your right foot.”
I looked back and saw that it was.
He went right on. “Anyway, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Plenty of work ahead, so you might as well enjoy yourself now. Bye!”
“Bye ...” I said, and bent to pick up the cuff link as I heard the click of the breaking phone connection.
I held it in my hand a long time. Did Iphwin have hidden cameras in here? Had he watched Helen and me making love? Why was one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists so interested in two obscure faculty members from a backwater college?
And if he didn’t have hidden cameras, or if there was something that interesting about us—I didn’t want to think about either possibility, so I threaded my cuff link in and fastened it, resolving not to think for any reason for the rest of the night.
“Iphwin called me just after you dropped me off,” Helen said. “Really, no one is doing anything behind your back—I just forgot to tell you in all the excitement. You needn’t look so troubled.”
It was the cuff link, and not her job, that was troubling me, but I wasn’t about to spoil the evening with worry. “You look terrific,” I said, in a complete non sequitur that almost always worked.
From the way she smiled, I judged that it had worked again, and now I had only to finish dressing and try not to let myself worry to excess.
Our reservation was not for an hour and a half yet, so we sat down in chairs on opposite sides of my computer, plugged into our VR helmets and gloves, and went off to announce our engagement to our chat room friends, setting an alarm so that we would leave ourselves plenty of time to get to the Curious Monkey.
Both Helen and I had been frequenting this chat room for a couple of years, long enough and often enough so that each of us thought we had introduced the other to it. It wasn’t the liveliest chat room either of us had ever found, just a place where a few expats scattered all over the globe liked to get together. Around seven PM Enzy time, almost every day, our little group logged on and met, just as if there were things we particularly needed to talk about or real business to be done.
A few weeks ago everyone had gotten bored with the old Roman Forum setting that we’d had for the better part of a year, so to give it a drastic change we had reset it as Casablanca—not the city, but the film. That movie was still nearly the expatriate’s Bible—it had everything—a real American of African descent, a free and tough American, defiance of the Germans. Using that movie also made our chat group, which was a tight one, less likely to have visitors, since the movie was banned everywhere except the free countries (and even there was really only permitted in unadvertised private showings—local German consuls tended to regard it as something other than a purely internal matter).
Helen and I had gotten lucky—I was wearing the Paul Henreid body, and looked smashing in a white suit; she had gotten the Ingrid Bergman.
We went over to join our friends at the table. All of them had gotten there before we had, and were wearing the red rose on a lapel, or as a brooch, that indicated that they were present in real time, and not just an artificial personality recording the events for later. “Hello, everyone,” I said. “We have some real news this evening.”
The Colonel—I had just learned that afternoon that his real name was Roger Sykes—was wearing the body of Sidney Greenstreet tonight; sometimes he wore the Bogart body instead. He leaned way back in his chair and said, “Well, then, share it.”
At his right, Kelly Willen, wearing a dignified older lady from one of the crowd scenes, nodded and smiled. Terri Teal, dressed as a demimonde to no one’s surprise, nodded at us. She flicked some ash from her extremely long and decadent-looking cigarette holder and said, “Do tell.”