The Blonde (30 page)

Her eyes were bleary with hope, but he only stared at her impassively. “Tell me his name, at least.”

“William,” Alexei said. “Your father was born William Summers.”

William Summers
, she thought to herself.
William Summers, who are you?
It sounded just like the kind of man who would father a girl like her. If she were writing a novel about her life, that’s what she would call the character who disappeared before she spoke a word. What she mostly noticed, through the one-sided window, were the features that were hers. The tip of the nose, the lantern jaw. But those were the parts of her face that had been improved a long time ago. And the way he smiled—it was as if he’d learned to smile from watching her in the movies. He was a fiction, which they had used to control her, and she was cold with the realization that he had never existed, and she was, as ever, the only one who could look after herself.

She clasped her hands together, to show Alexei how moved she was. “Don’t hurt him, please.”

“It all depends on you.”

“Okay.” She nodded, swallowed. Summoned that old determination, a little girl refusing to die. “Just let me out of here. Give me some time, a good pair of high heels. I’ll find a way. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way.”

“Good.” Alexei took hold of the doorknob. He inclined forward in a courtly bow, and she was suddenly afraid of being left alone, locked in a room, maybe forever.

“But you’ve got to get me out of here!”

“We have done so much for you. It’s time you help yourself,” he said, pointing toward a telephone on the far side of the chairs. “The nurse will be here in a few moments, and if you are good, perhaps they will put you in a room with a window next. Don’t forget that we are watching.”

When he was gone she sat down, tried to forget the days she had spent in the cell, the poor state of her skin and hair, the indignity of the hospital gown. Alexei had killed Clark, there was no reason he wouldn’t kill her, or lock her up again. She would have to seem to go along with him, for a little while. Until she got her wits together, until she had her strength back. What had Kennedy ever done for her, anyway? She reminded herself of that girl saying
Fuck me, Jack, fuck me
. She told herself:
Honey, don’t trust a soul
. Then she dialed the number that she used only when she was in real trouble.

“It’s Marilyn,” she told the housekeeper at the DiMaggio residence. “Can I talk to Joe, please?”

She felt a little better, knowing that in a few seconds she’d hear her ex-husband’s voice and that soon afterward he’d come to her rescue. What a rage he would be in when he heard how they’d confined and humiliated her, the hell he’d give her captors. Or those who remained on the scene, anyway. If only she had been a little smarter or a little dumber, she would have stayed with him and been safe forever. But the anger always came for you, too, eventually, and you had to make yourself small to stay out of its path. You had to numb yourself pretty good to be a woman who belongs to that kind of man, and numbing agents only worked on her so long. As she clutched the phone and waited for the housekeeper to locate him, she began to cry, softly at first, and then with the sorrow of all her years.

TWENTY-SIX

Los Angeles, March 1961

NEITHER father nor son had spoken in a while. It was a cool, moist morning, the world sunshiny and shockingly green, and they stood in adjacent stalls at the driving range, careful not to observe each other’s swing. They let the whoosh of the clubs, the hard thwack of iron against ball, the crisp whistle of white arcing through the atmosphere, talk for them. In fact, they hadn’t spoken in years, and it was just occurring to Walls that they might have forgotten how, that they might never manage it again, when his father observed, “You know, I’ve always hated golf.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Ah.” Whoosh, thwack, whistle. “But I do enjoy
hitting
things.”

Walls swallowed as he watched the ball soar over the markers, beyond the fence, disappearing against the backdrop of the hills. The elder Walls struck a match and exhaled smoke into the clean air.

“Cigarette?”

“Thanks.” Since last May, when in the line of duty he had found it necessary to smoke, Walls had learned a lesson about habits, which is that even when they begin in fakery they often become real soon enough. He would have accepted the cigarette even if that were not the case. He was a natural athlete, possessed of a powerful, precise swing, but he found himself childishly averse to the possibility that he might not be able to hit the next ball as far as his father had, and was grateful for the excuse of a break. He considered asking his father what had brought him west, how long he had been there, if this visit was the main reason or an afterthought, but instead took a silent drag.

“Mo’s husband has some fancy gear.” Jutting his jaw, the older man indicated the borrowed clubs.

“He never uses them.”

“Ah.” The elder Walls leaned against the concrete partition that separated the stalls, his strong shoulders covered in a collared shirt made from a thin, embroidered white fabric. The shirt seemed to indicate a life of travel, a penchant for taking it easy, but there was a twitching, unsettled quality in the veins of his neck. “Think there’s someplace to get a beer around here?”

The son, relieved, answered that indeed there was.

“So,” the father said, after the girl had delivered their second round, “how are things at the Bureau?”

That he had held this question until the first beer had time to hit the bloodstream made Walls believe that perhaps they might understand one another after all. “Not good,” he answered simply, having concluded that there was no manful way to evade the question.

“No?” His father sipped his beer and squinted. “Why is that?”

“I’m on some other agent’s case, and I just get in the way. He’d happily be rid of me; they all would. The case I was working before—I had the wrong idea about it, and I made a fool of myself.”

“How’s that?”

Walls sighed. “I got the Marilyn beat—”

“Marilyn Monroe?”

“Yes.” Walls tried not to cringe when he saw how his father took this. “The Director likes his Hollywood gossip, I guess, and there was the pretext that her last husband was a leftist. I thought it was pretty weak myself. But then once I’d listened to god knows how many hours of her phone conversations, observed the way she comes and goes, I started seeing patterns. Thought I figured something out, I guess. You’ll laugh, but my theory was she was working for the Russians. Spying.”

His father did not laugh. He took a pull of his beer, and glanced at the
waitress, who was across the room, flirting with the youth behind the bar. “What made you think that?”

“Little things at first—in hindsight, too little. She used a Russian diminutive for her makeup girl, and she sees a Marxist psychiatrist. But it was more than that. It was the way she talked about herself, like she was two people almost, one of them steering the other. Anyway, she was having an affair with Kennedy, and the way she described the affair, it was like a military campaign. That much calculation, that much precision.”

“She talked about the affair with her friends?”

“Just one—a man I call the Gent.”

“What’s his real name?”

“No idea. I saw him once in New York and again in a men’s room in Tahoe. They were together, in a heated discussion, and he kept talking about how important she was to ‘the people.’ ”

“Do you have a picture of him?”

Walls regarded his father a few moments before shaking his head.

“You should try to get one.”

“But it was all just a lunatic theory I had. She’s not a spy, she couldn’t be. She’s insane.”

“What makes you think that?”

Walls swallowed some beer before relating a story that he still found inexplicably painful. “She was committed—just spent twenty-three days in a psych ward in New York. Had to call Joltin’ Joe to spring her. She just likes talking nonsense. Or talking about herself. Which is the same thing. And I was just the unlucky man who tried to piece it together.”

During the ensuing silence, Walls had time to contemplate his father’s success at cards and with women; even his pauses were only blank invitations to second-guess oneself. Eventually he said, “Is she still seeing Kennedy?”

Walls shrugged. “Hard to tell—I don’t have any evidence that the affair continued after the election.”

“If you were Kennedy, would you still want to see her?”

Walls stared into his beer, considering the many ways this question might be answered, wanting to be professional, and instead saying, “Yes.”

The elder Walls sighed, as if this somehow solved the riddle, drained his beer, and waggled it at the waitress. “You always liked secrets, you know.”

“Me?”

“Who else would I be talking to? When you were little, I mean. You used to collect things—do you remember that trip we took to Montana? To hunt elk.”

“I was ten.”

“Yes, you were too young. I see that now. In any case, Claudette, who was my lady friend that year, she met us at the lodge, and her things kept disappearing. Old theater tickets, lipsticks, panty hose, that kind of thing. For a while, I was afraid you were queer.”

“I am not—”

“Oh, I know.” His father chuckled, looking at him significantly while the waitress arranged their fresh beers on the table and removed the old glasses. “You just wanted to know what other people did behind closed doors,” he went on, when they were alone again. “You might have gotten that from me. Or from your mother. It occurs to me that you were not born to particularly loving parents,” he went on, irrelevantly. He said this without apology, as though informing his son that he had not been born to parents who were particularly mathematical. “D.W., I’ve been pondering something.”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you join the Bureau?”

Walls could have spoken, not dishonestly, of the desire to keep innocent people safe, or the wanting to belong to a fraternity of able-bodied men of purpose, but that sort of talk did not seem to belong in their afternoon, so he shrugged and gave his father a sly smile. “Well, Dad, I do enjoy hitting things.”

“Oh, sure. Sure. But what made you choose the Bureau? Rather than the Company, I mean.”

Walls tried to shift his gaze to his father without moving his head. Men of his upbringing with a mind for clandestine doings did usually end up at the CIA, and he liked to tell himself that this was why he had been attracted to the Bureau. “Well, to begin with I wasn’t recruited,” he said instead.

“Ah.” His father lit another cigarette, and stretched his legs out on an adjacent chair. “Have you read the James Bond novels?”

“Lou has them all.”

“Roguish Brit agent jets to exotic locales, does battle with the unspeakably evil, has much fun, beds many beauties.”

“I skimmed them,” Walls conceded.

“Yes.” The elder Walls knocked the ash from his cigarette. “Then you are no doubt aware the author, Mr. Ian Fleming, knows a little of what he writes. Worked for British Naval Intelligence during the war, et cetera, et cetera. As it happens, your new president is a fan.” Walls wasn’t sure why Kennedy should be his president and not his father’s, but he could see the old man was waxing into the warm timbre of expertise, so he only nodded subtly for him to go on. “Such a fan that he invited him to one of his swanky Georgetown dinner parties. Fidel Castro was in the news at the time, and Senator Kennedy—this wasn’t long ago, but he was still Senator Kennedy—was fascinated by the rebel leader, wanted to know everything about him. Asked what Fleming would do to depose him. Well, Fleming was rather drunk, and never passes up a challenge, and he floated several highly literary ideas, ideas quite worthy of his Bond character, in fact. Operation Ridicule, he called it—they’d slip him an explosive cigar, for instance, or convince his mistress to rub depilatory lotion in his beard so that it would fall out, revealing to the Cuban populace what a boy he was, and thus undermining their faith in him. The Georgetown set enjoyed the show quite a bit. The next day, when Fleming was packing for his flight to Jamaica, he got a call from one of
the guests—a crony of Kennedy’s, one of those Skull and Bones types who came up through OSS—who wondered if Fleming wouldn’t come out to Langley and go over the details of some of those plans with him.”

“How do you know all this exactly?” Walls asked, breaking the unspoken contract that he listen to his father’s tales without drawing attention to their more elliptical points.

“Ah, well.” Walls’s father got another cigarette going with the butt of his last one. “Fleming and I have known each other a long time, from here and around. He’s quite a card player, as it happens. But you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

The beer was making Walls feel good finally, and the shame over his bold failure with the Marilyn file was ebbing. What he had once regarded as his father’s elegant reticence was, in light of day, just overblown romanticism. “What
are
you saying?”

His father waved his hand, as though the people they had been discussing were arrayed before them on the golf course, and were only awaiting his cue to begin acting out the scene he had described. “The mechanism by which nations hold and exert power is more bizarre than you could possibly imagine, and at the same time simpler, smaller, stupider. It would not surprise me in the least if Marilyn Monroe were a spy. For one thing, it would explain how she manages to be so famous while making so many fewer movies than all the other voluptuous blondes in Hollywood. The Nazis tried something similar, you know, and with the same man—sent over one of Hitler’s girlfriends on the hunt for naval information, and guess who she goes to bed with?”