The Blonde (40 page)
He indicated it with his fat finger, and she hurried in that direction, trying to conceal her distress as she made her way through the big men in their dark suits. Alone again with her reflection she was neither impressed nor astonished. She leaned heavily against the marble sink, and stared into a stranger’s face. It would be easy—Alexei had said only the whole flask would kill him. Surely that much would kill her quickly, end the game. She could escape, tonight, not just the impossible situation her relations with Jack had become, but the awful maze of her self. To die sounded sweet almost—a reprieve from wanting.
The door opened and closed in an instant. Jack did not look at the knob as he turned the lock. She couldn’t smile as she watched him advance across the room in the mirror, couldn’t change her horrified expression. But he wasn’t smiling, either. In fact she had never seen him so serious. He jerked the fur down from her shoulders, apparently not noticing the clanking of the flask
on the bathroom tile when the coat hit the floor. He tugged on her wrist, spinning her around so that she felt the heat of his breath on the tip of her nose.
“At the Garden,” he said. “When Peter took your coat. There was a moment—I was convinced you were nude underneath.”
The corners of her lips darted unhappily.
“I was so angry. Not because of the potential embarrassment. It didn’t even cross my mind what a clusterfuck that would have been. But because they’d all see you. And I was so relieved when I knew I was wrong.”
Her mouth softened open. When he heaved her onto the sink her dress split across the thighs, and he did not hesitate putting his fingers through the rift, tearing it completely. Rhinestones popped from the fabric, scattered on the floor, as he parted the legs that had been pressed together all evening, and wrapped them around his torso.
“They’ll hear …,” she protested, not forcefully, as she leaned against the mirror.
“I don’t care.” He was trying to undo the buttons of his shirt while burying his face in the skin below her ear. “I love you.”
The whole evening seemed imagined, and she almost couldn’t believe he’d said those words she’d thought so often while in his presence. He had. He must have. It was her only chance. He was saying it now with every gesture. So as she helped him with his shirt she arched her back, encouraging his mouth to move down along the neckline of her ruined dress, and said the phrase back.
Brentwood, June 1962
MAYBE, just maybe, she had been born under a lucky star after all. Maybe the decades of struggling and confusion were necessary pieces of a grand scheme. So she tried to tell herself, in the final weeks of her thirty-fifth year, when the words
I love you
recurred in her thoughts every quarter hour. When her anxiety became too great, she’d close her eyes and conjure the ruination of that sparkling, skin-colored dress, and for a moment be flush with emotion. She began to think of the age she was about to become not as old but auspicious, so sweetly square and divisible by two. And she was lucky also to have work, which filled her days and blocked out fear and left her tired at night, without the energy to wonder what Jack was doing, or whether he’d really meant what he’d said to her in that penthouse bathroom.
Not that it was easy to be back on set. She hadn’t worked like this in a year and a half, and the script was flimsy, and she had no idea how she was going to make many of the lines sound the least bit natural. But she was looking good, everybody said so, and on Friday afternoon they had Dom Perignon, and the crew toasted her thirty-sixth birthday. Driving home, in the limousine the studio had hired for her during filming, she felt jittery with hope. If Jack loved her, then maybe she’d be saved after all. It was miracle enough to make her believe in more miracles. Anyway, Alexei had told her that the poison could be administered over several weeks, so there was time. She had a little time; maybe there was a way out.
“Rudy, will you wait until I lock the gate behind me?” She leaned in the window, smiling but with the gleam of fear in her eyes, too. Because she
could not tell him what she was really afraid of—and because he would not believe her if she did—she added: “Never know what fan has gone bananas, you know?”
“Sure thing, Miss Monroe.” He grinned back at her and kept the limo idling in the cul-de-sac while she walked up the drive, and she rocked her hips extra, to reward him for protecting her in this way.
“See you Monday morning!” she called out, before locking the gate behind her.
The palms swayed in greeting, their shadows long across the grass at dusk, the smell of jasmine on the evening breeze, the flora thick and fortress-like around the property. The low, fat sun blazed on the windows of the small hacienda-style house, with its white brick walls and red tiled roof. It was the first house she’d ever owned by herself. That it was charming without being ostentatious, and that it had a fireplace, pleased her immeasurably, and she wondered at herself for having thought she needed more, or less, than this. She put her handbag down on the table by the door, and felt for the light switch.
“Hello, N.J.” He was leaning against the wall next to the fireplace. His arms were crossed tensely across his torso, and his eyes had that waiting quality.
“I was wondering when you’d show up,” she replied, evenly as she could manage. His eyes followed her as she made her way across the terra-cotta tiled floor. She affected a sedate, unhurried manner, and when she reached the far side of the room, leaned her hip against the small, polished teak desk where she kept the telephone. “What can I do for you?”
“You haven’t been following orders,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The formula you were to give Hal—you haven’t done with it as I instructed.”
“What makes you think that?” She tipped her head back, showed him
the point of her chin. “You said a few drops over several weeks. Nothing should’ve happened yet, right?”
For the first time since entering the room, Alexei took his eyes off her. His gaze fixed on the Moroccan carpet that spread out from the hearth, but his attention seemed to be on some long-ago event. He shook his head and cursed in a foreign language. “Why are you so useless?” he demanded with sudden rage.
“I know how you know I didn’t give him anything out of that flask,” she replied, stringing the words together with frightened precision. “If I’d done as you asked, he’d be dead. That was all a story—a few drops, the rotting teeth. Wasn’t it?”
She knew already Alexei was not shy of violence, that he had no scruples about the murders carried out on his orders. But she hadn’t witnessed it in him until he stepped away from the wall and his arms dropped from his torso so his hands could form fists. His shoulders seemed to grow and spread, and his mouth twitched with fury. “Why couldn’t you just do as you were told?” he barked.
The telephone was inches from her hand—she had been trying to get close without his noticing, and now wrapped her fingers around the receiver. Her movement was quiet, but her voice was loud: “But you’re the liar,” she shrieked. “I
told
you I couldn’t kill him.”
“You wouldn’t have killed him!” He advanced across the room with patient menace. “You would only have been following orders, nothing more.”
She plucked the phone from its cradle, her fingers trembling but strong as she dialed the police. A whole epoch of terror passed as she listened to the ringing, but the operator answered before Alexei reached her. “Hello, this is Marilyn Monroe,” she said quickly. “I’m at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. There’s an intruder in my house.”
The operator sounded giddy with the notion that a movie star was on the line—a movie star in distress!—but she did her job, said a patrol car was on its way.
“Now why did you go and do that?” Alexei’s aspect had changed again. His voice was lower, but that only made him more frightening. The fact that she’d called the police didn’t seem to worry him—his posture suggested that he had already decided her fate.
Fear had her now—she wasn’t sure she’d be able to move, if indeed that was advisable. “I thought you might hurt me.” She managed to step away from him, and the realization that he still might, that he could kill her easily before the police arrived, sent a fresh dose of terror through her veins. She tried to back away as quickly as he was now advancing, get up the three steps into the next room, but instead stumbled on an umbrella stand, lurched haplessly, and cried out in shock and pain.
Then he was on her. He had her by the throat, pinned her against the wall, her head knocked against the plaster, his elbows shoved against her ribs. “You idiot!” he hissed. “You dumb fucking bitch.”
She couldn’t breathe. His hands gripped her neck, squeezing the air out, and her eyeballs bulged. Desperately she tried to get air into her lungs, kicking at his shins with the pointed toes of her high heels.
“It’s not as though you’ve changed anything. There will always be another pretty girl who can whore her way into state secrets. They’ll kill him anyway. Your replacement is already on his way. But now you’ll have to die, too. And I could have protected you! I, who was so proud of you. I’d have made sure you had a long life. But
you
—you had to be an idiot sentimentalist. You had to fall in
love
.” His words seemed to deplete him, and when his hold on her throat loosened they slumped against each other, he enfeebled with the apprehension of a great loss, she gasping for air. “Goddamn you,” he said, with profound regret. “Goddamn you.”
A distant siren rose over their noisy breathing, and she watched him, never believing in her safety, as he backed away, withdrew into the solarium. She heard him open the door onto the rear patio and followed, apprehensively at first, and then with greater urgency. She was still afraid of him, but more
than that she wanted to know why he’d left her alive. What he meant by “her replacement.” The door stood open, but in the evening light she couldn’t see much. What she did make out seemed to be a figure skirting the swimming pool and pulling his weight up over the wall at the edge of the property. Then he merged with the gloaming.
Los Angeles, June 1962
TWILIGHT played its usual trick of reminding Walls that he would like a cigarette; it was at the intersection of day’s expectations and night’s anxieties that he most wanted to singe the delicate tissue of his lungs. He smoked one after another as he drove through the clotted streets of Los Angeles toward her house. The tie he’d worn for the flight from D.C. was thrown across the passenger seat, and he felt jittery and roguish. No one else in the world knew what he knew, nor could they do what he was about to do, and he felt justified in taking matters into his own hands, and about six foot ten. Only a man keeping his own hours, acting on his own instincts, and answering to his own conscience could take down as cleverly disguised a plant as Marilyn Monroe, and he found, in the event, that he was rather looking forward to forcing her confession.
This despite the dismissive parting observation his father’s friend from the Agency had made last night. “That is one hell of a story,” the man—who called himself Hollis—said, not admiringly, as he stood to leave the bar off Connecticut Avenue where they had met. Walls had understood immediately why Hollis chose the bar—it was not a place where he could imagine encountering anyone he knew. “If it was me staking my name on that theory, I’d want to have all my ducks in a row before I told it to any of the big boys.” Hollis—Walls reflected, while waiting another twenty minutes so they would not be seen leaving together—simply lacked vision. But vision was not required for the favor Hollis had done him, which was to use the picture Walls had snapped of Marilyn and the Gent backstage at Madison
Square Garden, deep in conversation, to match her handler to the file of “Bill” Fitin.
“Can’t let you keep it,” his father’s friend had informed him as he ordered a rum and Coca-Cola and eyed the working girls. “I’m seeing the secretary who guards that cabinet, but I’m not dating her, if you know what I mean.”
Then he’d leaned against the jukebox and let a girl who looked about sixteen rub lethargically against him for the next hour while Walls committed to memory the CIA’s file on William Vladimirovich Fitin (known aliases Aleksei Swift, Billy Sumners, and Felix Markin). Born out of wedlock, Paris, 1905, to a former Irish lady’s maid and a dilettantish revolutionary descended from a line of minor St. Petersburg nobility, who after the dissolution of the affair ran guns for the Bolsheviks and was executed in 1917. Fluent in Russian, French, German, English. Fled Europe at onset of First World War with his mother for New York, where she briefly attempted to get by as a mother-son vaudeville act but ended up working in a munitions factory and marrying her foreman. Young William ran away to Europe at fifteen, where he worked as a pimp and petty criminal, leading a wild, impoverished, international youth before proving himself with the Soviet secret police by luring prominent anti-communists into Russia, and to their deaths. Active in Berlin, 1930s. Instrumental in counterintelligence schemes in the Soviet occupation zone, founding of Stasi. Thought to have run an espionage cell in New York in the 1950s with the intention of stealing nuclear secrets while using Markin alias. Currently believed to have retired from fieldwork, holding high post in Moscow, running operations from an office in the Lubyanka, perhaps including the recruitment, brainwashing, and attempted repatriation of members of the United States Marine Corps, along with their new Russian brides. An addendum noted that most of the file was based on the information of an OSS man with whom he’d been on drinking terms during the war, and that even he allowed much of Fitin’s biography might be fabricated.