An hour later she emerged perfectly made up, her skin powdered, her lips frosted red, her hair blown out and covered with a kerchief, wearing a black seal coat and no stockings, so that she could really feel the cold, channel that discomfort as distress. When she saw the photographers, she let her mouth open and she clutched her coat self-protectively with one hand, and with the other she feigned covering her face. But she didn’t try too hard. The face was what she had come down to show them, and the whole newspaper-reading world, which, if she were lucky, tomorrow would include Jack. Once she knew they had their shot, she pushed through the clutch of reporters, flexing her brow and telling them, in a barely audible voice: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” That low mumble forced the hubbub down, and then she added, “I am sorry—but I have nothing to say about my personal life.”
There were so many of them, and they were so frenzied in their attempts to record anything else she might say, to capture any shed tears, that she had to force her way through, and on the other side she was grateful to see a taxicab idling.
“I hope you don’t have anywhere to be for the next two hours,” she said as the driver pulled away from the curb. “I just want you to drive.”
But when she returned, in the middle afternoon, the crowd of reporters had only grown. There were maybe thirty of them clustered just beyond the awning. When they saw her approaching they began shouting questions, and she put her hands over her ears and ran past them into the building. The doorman held the door for her, and she made it halfway across the lobby before she saw the red lacquer vase full of what appeared to be two dozen black roses on the marble front desk. “Those are peculiar,” she said, pausing by the elevators, to the doorman stationed behind the desk.
“They are for you, Mrs. Miller.” He stood and lifted them in her direction. “A man dropped them off an hour ago. I am afraid I didn’t get his name … there was a commotion outside at the same time—one of the photographers was pushed, and his camera fell and broke, and it seemed likely to come to blows, so I went out to defuse the situation. In the confusion, I didn’t see the gentleman leave. But they came with a card.”
The envelope was ominous black, and her fingers trembled as she ripped it open. The sense of dread had already spread through her belly by the time she saw the simple ivory card stock with the thick black border of a mourning card. In elegant cursive—she did not recognize it as the handwriting of anyone she knew—was scrawled the message: I am deeply sorry for your loss. Her eyes were shiny with terror, her feet lacked sensation, as she turned from the desk and walked resolutely back to the front door, allowing the man in the dark green livery to hold it open.
“Miss Monroe! Miss Monroe!” they all shouted.
“Who brought the flowers?” she demanded. When nobody answered she shouted, “Who’s dead? Who died?”
“Miss Monroe, will you give a statement about Mr. Gable?”
“What?” She had to grab one of the reporters by his jacket for balance, and she saw in his face that she had gone pale. “Not Clark.”
The reporter related the news quietly. “He died this morning, in the hospital, of a heart attack.”
“But they said it was just a little one,” she protested, as though this were some trick that she could fix simply by pointing out its unfairness. She had heard about the heart attack from the studio, and had sent Clark flowers and a card telling him that he had better get well soon, because she expected him to take her dancing when she was back in California, but those had been the heady days before the election, when she had floated on thoughts of Jack, and the message that it was minor, and that he would make a full recovery, had been her excuse not to think much of it. But she could no longer pretend that those excuses justified her not calling immediately. “They said he’d be all right.”
“I’m sorry,” said the reporter whose lapel she was clinging to.
She leaned more heavily on him, and put her mouth close to his tape recorder so that it would have a chance of picking up her statement. “He was an excellent guy to work with and one of the few really decent human beings I have known. He was my friend.” She would have said more, but she was afraid she might begin to sob, and she had to cover the gaping of her mouth with her hand.
The incessant clicking had ceased, although she couldn’t be certain whether it was out of respect for her or Clark. Then a disembodied voice, somewhere deep in the crowd, cried out: “What do you say to those who believe his heart was strained by the prolonged shooting schedule of The Misfits, and that he might still be alive had he not been forced to endure long hours in the desert heat, waiting for that film’s leading lady….”
“Oh, god,” she muttered and, fearing she might be sick on the sidewalk, rushed back into the lobby, grabbing the vase as she went, and jamming her finger against the button for the thirteenth floor until the elevator began, mercifully, to rise.
“Ah. There you are, my dear.”
The vase slipped through her already unreliable fingers and smashed on the floor, shiny red shards scattering across the parquet, the necks of the black roses snapped pathetically, their water splashing her naked calves. She thought of demanding how he got in, but that would have been wasted breath—he had watched for Lena to leave, instigated a ruckus, slipped up the stairs, picked the lock.
“Oh, no—your flowers,” Alexei said. There was nothing ironic in his tone, or anything to suggest that his concern was not real, but in the past he would have come to her aid immediately. Instead he remained in her wingback chair, his legs crossed, his hands calmly folded in his lap. “Now look what you’ve done,” he went on, and though he spoke in the same level manner, she sensed the subterranean implications.
But the world, at that moment, was too meager and nasty a place for her to heed threats that did not possess the simple decency of making themselves obvious. She pushed the door closed behind her, and let a silent sob heave through her chest. “He’s gone,” she said. “Clark Gable’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“They think it’s my fault.”
“But N.J.,” Alexei said, leaning forward now and summoning the old, soothing way, “it is your fault.”
“Why? Because I was late to set? Because I was off chasing Kennedy for you, and missed shooting days? Believe me, he was happy to be out of the house a little and stretch his legs before …” And then she realized that there was going to be another baby born without a father, and she couldn’t hold back her tears. They came fast and salty, streaming unprettily over her ruddy cheeks.
Alexei smiled, but there was malice in his eyes, and a kind of satisfaction when he said, “You really liked one another, didn’t you?”
“Oh, god,” she muttered, comprehending what that smile signified.
“He had a minor heart attack a week ago, and was taken into the hospital for monitoring. But you would be amazed how dangerous American hospitals can be. Practically anyone can get in, and they are so full of medicines that, in the wrong dosage, are quite fatal.”
“Oh, god.” It was lucky there was nothing in her stomach, because she wouldn’t have had a chance of keeping it down. “Oh, god, oh, god.”
“It is time to get back to work, N.J.”
“I can’t.” She was begging now, between the sobs. “I can’t.”
“I told you not to fall in love with Hal.”
“Even if I wanted to, I can’t spy on Jack anymore. There’s no way back in.”
Alexei scratched the skin behind his ear with a crooked index finger and regarded her, the way a teacher might regard a favorite pupil who has turned rebellious. “You will spy on him. You will find a way back in.”
For a while she thought he might be preparing to say something kind, but eventually he just stood and walked into her kitchen. He returned with the broom and dustpan and carefully began to push the broken pieces of the vase into a small pile. While he cleaned up the flowers she remained planted, shoulder blades against the wall, afraid that otherwise she might c
ollapse. Once the mess was put away he came toward her. She winced, her muscles frozen and her eyes clouded with fear, sure that a blow was finally coming.
But instead he scooped her into his arms and carried her to the bedroom, where he laid her down. He lifted her head to arrange the pillows, and then brushed the hair off her forehead. “N.J., my dear, you have no idea what you are capable of. Rest a while. You’ll get Jack back—for you it will be easy. Things are so much easier for you than you believe.”
She closed her eyes. Her mouth was dry, her throat constricted, and it required everything she had to say, “Why did you have to kill him?”
“Ah, my dear. To warn you. To teach you that your actions have consequences.”
A small sob escaped her lips. “It was me you should have killed. Oh, god, just kill me. Please. There’s nothing left for me now, anyway.”
“Don’t talk that way.” Finally she did hear the anger in his voice. She blinked at him as he picked up her hand with both of his. “You are too important for us to—harm you in any way. But you must see that we are serious. You see that now, yes? And you cannot go on behaving like a child any longer. This is the real world, and you must sometimes do things you do not like. It is for the greater good.”
She listened to the heels of his shoes as he left the room. Her eyelids sank shut—she was tired and stunned enough that she thought perhaps she would be able to sleep a little before the nightmares began. Then she heard him coming back, and though she told herself to rise, to summon some dignity, to at the very least sit up, none of her limbs obeyed.
When he returned he was wearing a long fur coat with a high collar, which somehow accentuated the dramatic curve of his nose, the cruelty of his lips, and she saw for the first time that he was a foreigner, that he came from a land of hail and wood smoke. They were not friends, even if he was carrying a fresh bottle of scotch. She could smell the liquor when he poured it into a low, round glass, within her reach on the nightstand. “If I leave this for you,” he asked with exquisite patience, “can I trust that you will not drink the bottle too quickly, that you will not harm yourself?”
She nodded mechanically.
“No, I did not think so. Despite what you have sometimes implied to your friends in the press, I do not believe you have that in you. Now, mourn your friend, and remember that he was not your real father. Get some rest. Soon you will be going back to work. You understand what is at stake now, yes? And you—we have only glimpsed what you are capable of. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything, my dear. You can certainly win Jack Kennedy back.”
TWENTY-THREE
Los Angeles, November 1960
AS yet Walls had resisted all his mother’s exhortations to “smoke grass” with her and her coterie of bored, gorgeously put-together women friends. He had in fact never done any kind of drug. But he thought that maybe he knew what it felt like already, as he drove to work, merging from one surreally broad freeway to another, everything very fast and somehow also very slow. He was high on an idea that had first occurred to him in a bar in New York last May but had since coalesced and hardened and was now as simple and complete and gleaming as the truth. Marilyn Monroe, whose likeness his prep school roommate had pinned to the wall upside down, so that her bare legs were spread toward the ceiling, and whom he had thus for many years associated with the Clorox-like odor of that young man’s side of the room, was an agent. She was an agent of the Soviet intelligence apparatus, and she was an intimate of the next president of the United States, and as far as Walls could ascertain, he was the only G-man who knew.
To think of himself as a G-man, even in the privacy of his own mind, had always seemed ridiculous and slightly embarrassing to Walls. It was an appellation of movieland. But, pulling into the Bureau parking lot on a cloudless November day that was just cool enough for him to comfortably wear the slim-fitting black wool suit and narrow black tie that his mother had given him for his birthday, he thought that it did have a certain hammy appropriateness. He strode across the asphalt, for once pleased by the sentry of palm trees, the convertibles in shades of yellow and sky blue, the Technicolor California-ness of it all. He had smiles for everyone. As he passed his own desk and proceeded, with two fresh cups of coffee in hand, toward Toll’s office, he even winked at his boss’s secretary, Susanna—whose legs were a frequent conversational topic, and whose eyes he had always found especially pretty—and decided that later he might ask her for a date. Then he would be remembered, at the Los Angeles field office, for two coups.
“Special Agent Walls.” Toll’s displeasure at this intrusion appeared to decrease when he saw the coffee in his subordinate’s outstretched hand. “Thank you. Although I must say Susie Q over there looks a whole lot better bringing my coffee.”
Walls glanced over his shoulder, showing his grin to the back of Susanna’s shellacked, mahogany bob. “I’ll bet.”
“Glad to see you, anyhow. I imagine you must be a little bored with nothing but Marilyn to do—I have a new job for you.”
“What?” Walls’s grip on the paper cup loosened, and he was lucky to catch it before he made a mess on the wide metal desk, which was also a burial ground of paperwork. The venetian blinds behind Toll cast bars of sunlight across this immense bureaucratic topography.
“You’ll be working for Special Agent Harvey. There’s some organizing down on the docks in Long Beach that smells wrong. Here.” He held out a folder for Walls, his eyes already shifting to whatever came next. “Your homework.”
“But sir, I—”
“Yes?”
“What about Marilyn?”
“Walls, don’t you read the paper?”
“Yes.” This was the moment he had been waiting for, and he didn’t hesitate in removing the folded New York Times from the crux of his armpit and placing it in front of Toll. “Do you see this?”
“See what?”
Walls leaned his hip against the desk, so that he could view the paper from the same angle as his superior. A story about Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur Miller, with a shot of her looking lovely and distressed, ran beside a big picture of Kennedy, en route to Palm Beach, making a stop in Washington to drop his wife and daughter at their Georgetown home. The picture was of Kennedy deboarding his plane, his daughter in his arms and his wife ahead of him wearing a cloth coat that revealed her advanced pregnancy. The presence of these two items on one page of newspaper had seemed, to Walls earlier that morning, all the proof he would ever need.
Toll appeared less impressed, but Walls persisted. “I’ll bet she’s going to Florida, too, only there’s no way for me to know that because I don’t have a tap on her New York phone—”
Toll was shaking his head slightly, as though trying to knock water out of his ear. “Listen, kid, the thing I was hoping you had noticed in the news is that Kennedy made some announcements this week regarding his administration. He’s keeping Hoover. So we don’t want to ruffle any feathers just now. The Director doesn’t need to apologize to the president if his girlfriend finds a wire in her chandelier, got that? We’re friends for the time being—who knows what will change, and you’ve done good work, and I’d appreciate a detailed report with everything you have on Miss Monroe and John Kennedy. But let’s just let this one rest awhile, you understand?”
“But sir, it’s so much more than an affair—” He was furious with himself, almost disbelieving, that he hadn’t managed to get the story out yet.
“Oh, yeah?” Toll had switched to heavy irony, never a good sign. “What are they—deeply, madly in love?”
“Toll, she’s a spy.”
“A what?”
“She’s a Soviet spy. Did you know her first agent in town, Johnny Hyde, was Russian? He discovered her, got her nose and chin fixed, made her first big deals, and then he died. Mysteriously.”
“And he was KGB?”
“I don’t have anything conclusive on that yet, but the Gent has mentioned him a few times, and the Gent is working fo
r them. Of that I’m certain.”
“The Gent?”
“Don’t know his real name yet, but he’s the one running her. I saw him in New York, at a distance, and closer in Tahoe, just for a minute. He was telling her how important she was to the people.”
“The people?”
“Yeah, you know, the people of Russia. The workers. The proletariats.”
“Maybe he just meant people who go to the movies?”
“No, no, I’m sure of it. If you had heard his tone, you’d be, too. And there’s more. The analyst she sees in New York, Marlene Kurtz, studied in Berlin before the war with a group of Freudian-Marxists, and to this day she’s on a list of analysts approved by the Communist Party. Marilyn met her through her husband’s analyst—also a Communist. And you should have heard this thing she said to Anna once: ‘A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.’ Don’t you understand? She’s leading a double life. That’s what the Gent told her, or maybe even Hyde. How she has to behave in order to do what she does with Kennedy …”
“Who is Anna?”
“Oh, this girl I went on a few dates with. She works as Miss Monroe’s makeup artist sometimes. Anna is her real name, but Marilyn calls her—get this—Anechka.”
“You dated her makeup girl?”
Walls—who during his morning drive had rehearsed a line of argument that was by turns exquisitely witty and daringly cogent—found his conviction badly eroded. He did manage an affirmative head bob.
“Agent Walls, this is the FBI,” Toll said, hitting every syllable with weary exasperation. “It is standard procedure, when you are working on an assignment, to check in every two hours, and if you are at a lady friend’s house, to leave her name and number with your supervisor. I saw no mention of any ‘Anechka’ while I was reviewing your file for Agent Harvey this morning. I am further alarmed—if what you are saying is to be believed—by your failure to file timely paperwork on the object of your surveillance, as much of what you are alleging does not appear in your weekly reports. But I am mostly alarmed by the fact that you might actually believe that Marilyn Monroe is capable of infiltrating the highest office in this country on behalf of a foreign enemy, when everybody in this town knows she is a bimbo who can’t memorize a simple page of dialogue.” Toll sighed and drained what was left of his coffee, before handing the cup over to Walls. “Throw this out for me. And don’t share any of that with anybody else, kid. I’ll just chalk it up to you losing sleep listening in on breathy nonsense, but others won’t be as kind, you understand?”