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 Intelligenc
e 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?”
Walls’s mouth was dry. “Kennedy.”
“Right—of course, he was only the second princeling in line for the throne then. Most spies are idealists, rogues, showmen, or some mixture of all three, their schemes far more outrageous than the stuff you find in novels. The outrageousness of an operation, in my experience, has nothing whatsoever to do with its success or failure.”
Both Wallses glanced up when a group of men fresh from a game came into the restaurant and began a flirtatious exchange with the waitress about which of the many unoccupied tables was the best. The son was thinking how little he knew about his father, and was trying to figure the best way to begin asking him where his information really came from; but the father drained his beer and stood to leave.
“I should be getting back,” he said, turning toward the waitress and motioning that he was ready to pay.
Get back where? Walls thought. But he said only, “This one’s on me.”
Wes Walls smiled and clapped his son on the back as they made their way to the parking lot. “Thanks, D.W. We’ll do it again soon.”
The sun was at its highest point, and they stood awkwardly for a moment on the asphalt, squinting. “It was good to see you, Dad.”
“You, too, D.W.”
Walls slung his stepfather’s clubs into the trunk, and turned to shake his father’s hand. They shook, smiled at each other, and then the older man began to amble back to his own car, his limp slowing him only slightly. The sky was an unyielding blue, the parkland spread around them, birds sang to their fledglings. At that moment it was hard to believe that somewhere out there in the vast unknown people were listening in while other people made adulterous love or agitated for social upheaval. “Thanks, Dad,” he called as he put the key in the ignition.
His father paused and glanced back at him. “Of course, son. Oh, and D.W.?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t be embarrassed to use your mother’s connections.” His mouth twitched mischievously, and he shrugged and opened his palms as though to say, who can blame me for being just as I am? “I never was.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
New York, April 1961
MARILYN sprawled across the couch in the Copacabana dressing room, the spaghetti straps of her black dress doing their best to contain her décolletage. She hadn’t bothered with a bra that evening, and she had a few drinks in her already, and she was feeling loose. Frank, seated at the dressing table mirror, his pockmarked skin forgiven by that row of sweet, soft bulbs, was being attended to by five or so hair and makeup people. He himself was wielding the comb, so fiercely that she feared for the rug he wore. No one was paying much attention to her, happily, and she surreptitiously refilled her champagne flute with the champagne-colored combination of bourbon and soda water. Tonight was a night to be well oiled.
An assistant rapped on the door and poked his head in. “Five minutes,” he said.
“Okay, sweetheart.” Frank met her eyes in the mirror. “Get out there where people can see you.”
A daffy, indistinct smile wavered on her lips as she draped her long white fur around her shoulders, plucked her champagne flute from the glass table, and brushed a few strands of peroxided plumage out of her eyes. “Play ‘Luck Be a Lady,’ for me, will you?” she asked as she moved to the door.
“You got it, baby,” he said, twirling in the chair to admire her and letting his hand land with a smack on her black-silk-encased ass.
She waggled her glass at him, and allowed his valet, George, to take her arm and guide her through the wallpapered corridors and into the main room of the nightclub. The table Frank had reserved for her was just under the lip of the stage—he’d planned that, so that people would see her, right in the middle of his swinging tableau, and wonder whether she slept in his bed. She knew she should oblige, especially since she had gone along with Alan Jacobs’s proposal while thus far managing not to put out. She had waited until Joe returned to San Francisco, but he must know by now with whom she was being seen around town, a lousy reality that she tried not to dwell on. These days she was only trying to survive, anyway—trying to get close enough to Jack again that Alexei wouldn’t lock her up—so who cared what anybody thought of her.
She knew George had been instructed to deposit her at the front and center table, but when she saw the crowd she tugged at his arm and gave him a shy, fearful face. This wasn’t difficult—she was afraid all the time, and she knew she was being watched by Alexei’s people, and so appeared always tentative, out of it, lost. She hoped that Alexei noticed that she was clearing a path back to the president, too, and that this would buy her time to figure out her next move. That he wouldn’t hurt her, or anybody else, as long as she was hanging around Jack’s people. “George,” she whispered, “sit me over there with the Lawfords, would you? I can’t stand being alone tonight.”
He hesitated a while, but she clung to his arm so desperately that he had no choice. “You better make him happy later, so he forgets to fire me.” He gave in, and led her to a less conspicuous table with a white tablecloth and a small lamp at its center. As she followed along, Marilyn dangled her fingertips at people she didn’t know, and smiled her red smile, giving them what Frank wanted, which was the illusion that a Sinatra concert meant entrée into a special realm of nicotine and liquor and midnight urges, where goddesses might show up unannounced.
“Mrs. Lawford—??
? George began.
The woman with the russet hair glanced up at the valet, revealing a face more handsome than pretty. At the party she had hosted—for her brother, after he won the nomination last summer—she had seemed only one of many sisters, but Marilyn had since singled her out as a likely friend, the best way back into his life. Just looking at her conjured Jack: the arrangement of her features, the aristocratic mouth and the short, unobstructed forehead, the easy way she had of hanging expensive clothes on a slim frame. Like Marilyn, Pat wore a black cocktail dress, although hers involved a great deal more fabric in the skirt and at the neckline. “George, must we continue with this rigmarole? I’ve told you a thousand times. Call me Pat, darling.”
“Pat, may I introduce you to Miss Marilyn Monroe? She’s Frank’s special guest this evening, and he was hoping you two would look after her.”
“Of course, George.” A scarlet, thin-lipped smile came and went from Pat’s face, seemingly without the effort of any other facial muscle, and then she shifted her attention. “What a pleasure to meet you! I can’t tell you how excited Peter and I are to see The Misfits. Please, won’t you join us?”
“Thank you,” Marilyn replied tentatively, lowering herself into the chair that George held out for her. On Pat’s other side sat Peter, his dark brows knit together, mouthing to himself, an anxious concentration freezing up his features, which was an expression Marilyn knew well. “Hello there, Peter,” she called, and he glanced over, as though surprised, and quickly grabbed her hand to kiss her knuckles.
“Stage fright.” Pat rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, he’ll be better company after he does his bit.”
“Oh, well …” A smile flickered at one corner of Marilyn’s mouth, and she exhaled a melancholy breath. “Salud, I guess.” She raised her champagne flute, and Pat met it with her old-fashioned, and they both drank. “Actually, you’ve hosted me before,” she went on, as though just remembering. “I should probably thank you for that, too. Last summer, out in Santa Monica, during the convention. What a party that was.”