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.
Surely the FBI had a similar file, which Toll would be able to summon once Walls brought Marilyn in. But first he wanted to interrogate her himself, fit together the basic elements, in what manner Fitin had recruited Marilyn, how many state secrets she had managed to pass on while sleeping with the president, their end game. Get all his ducks in a row, as Hollis said. Walls was not so brazen as to think that he could complete those maneuvers on his own. At that point, he’d go to Toll, and they could run the operation together—using Marilyn to locate and entrap the Gent. Afterward they’d turn him over to the Director for a lengthy interrogation at headquarters that would surely prove an unprecedented windfall of information on the Soviet intelligence apparatus. It was going to be a big case. Perhaps even someday—Walls permitted himself the vanity—a movie, in which a young special agent brings down the enemy using his own, unorthodox methods.
There was, additionally, the matter of the old-fashioned flask Marilyn had left in a wastebasket in her hotel room in New York, which Walls had managed to surreptitiously collect (in truth, he found it only because Nan said Marilyn was forgetful, and ordered him to check her room for important items left behind). He had noticed Marilyn putting a flask into the coat of her mink after she talked to the Gent, and he was sure there had been nothing in the pockets earlier, when he helped her into it before she sang “Happy Birthday.” On his way from the airport he had dropped the flask at the Bureau, with a lab technician he knew from his morning trips to the shooting range, and asked him to have the contents tested.
“I thought you’d taken a leave from the Bureau,” the technician had replied, looking uncomfortable.
Walls had slipped him a fifty and explained that he was doing some private dick work on the side. That he’d appreciate it if the results didn’t get around to anybody else. The technician claimed the lab was pretty backed up, and Walls, figuring the case would have progressed dramatically by tomorrow anyway, told him not to rush.
He parked his car on a stretch of Carmelina Avenue, off which budded several short streets called Helena—just south of Helena’s fifth namesake—and lit a final cigarette. The street was empty and almost dark, and he wanted to collect himself before he strode to her front door and showed her his badge. Instead his thoughts drifted, and before he could help it he was wondering what she was doing in the small house at 12305, how she was spending her final moments of freedom. Then he saw the studio’s limousine turn up the block, and ceased his manic speculation.
He stubbed out his cigarette and pulled his holster out of the glove compartment, fixed it in place, grabbed his black jacket from the backseat. He waited until the limousine departed, and proceeded up her driveway at a near run, pulled himself over the high wall that surrounded her property, and jumped to the brick patio. The grounds were quiet and the house mostly dark, and he moved stealthily along the wall toward the back, barely breathing. Surprise was crucial, he had decided—he wasn’t sure how much training she had, if she would resist him, what kind of weapons she might have hidden in the house. He’d have to get pretty close before he alerted her to his presence, and from outside, he couldn’t even determine what room she was in.
Minutes passed when he began to wonder whether she had come in at all, or if the limousine hadn’t been another one of her tricks. By then he was around the house, on the pool deck, and he finally glimpsed a sign of life within. A woman cried out—she was close, but inside, and the sound was muffled so that he wasn’t sure if it had been a cry of pleasure or pain. He moved hastily to a high window, climbing onto a piece of deck furniture to get a better view. What he saw shocked him—the room was dark, and they were halfway into a corridor, and the man embracing her, pressing her into the wall, was the same man he had glimpsed at the Garden. The Gent was not only her handler but her lover, and as Walls took in the full depravity of Marilyn Monroe, he felt rather disgusted and had to step down.
But he did so ungracefully, and the footstool slipped and clattered against the patio tile. They must have heard—he couldn’t really make out what they were saying, but it was rushed and urgent, like people who have just been found out. A siren wailed, somewhere nearby, further startling Walls, and then the Gent burst onto the patio and his silhouette emerged at the edge of the pool.
Walls gave chase. His breath was short, the light murky and the shadows long, but the Gent could be only a few lengths ahead of him, and the yard wasn’t big. Walls was a good runner, more powerfully built—it wasn’t even a contest—and he could scarcely believe that he was going to be able to arrest the infamous Fitin so quickly and easily. There was a wall at the rear of the property, and he hauled himself over. But when he landed on the other side there was no sign of the man he’d been chasing. Walls was at the edge of a vast lawn with no place to hide, and besides the burbling of a fountain in the middle of much statuary, there was no movement, no trembling of leaves, to indicate in which direction the Gent had gone. Walls ran through several yards, jumping over gates stealthily at first and then not trying to go unnoticed at all. But the Gent had evaporated into the night, and eventually Walls was left with no choice but to return to Marilyn’s from the front entrance.
A police vehicle was parked in front of her house by then, its red lights swirling hellishly against the white walls that encircled the houses at the
dead end of the street. Her gate stood open, and as he hurried across the lawn he saw the police officer in his black, short-sleeved uniform, standing in the open door and surveying the property.
“Is she all right?” Walls asked, hoping the urgency in his voice would be interpreted as concern. He ought to have been more careful—his first guess was that Marilyn and Fitin were simply using the police to their own purposes, to chase him away. But it was possible that they were impostors, and he was walking into an ambush.
“Whoa there.” The officer put out one hand as though to stop traffic, and showily rested the other on his holster.
Walls was glad he’d had the instinct to replace his own weapon under his jacket.
“I’m Douglass Walls, Miss Monroe’s public relations man. I just had some negatives that need her approval … and I saw your car out there. What’s going on?”
“You got any identification on you?” The cop looked about twenty-two, the baby fat still hiding his man’s face, and he appeared reluctant to give up his post. Either he really was a greenhorn cop, and American, or he was a better actor than most movie stars.
Wall paused long enough to remind himself which pocket held his FBI badge, and which held his civilian wallet, before producing his driver’s license. The cop examined the license and returned it. “Stay here a minute,” he said, before closing the door. Walls stepped away from the entry, to the picture window onto the front salon where she sat on a hassock, wearing a fitted skirt and high heels, her torso bent forward and contracting with sobs. There were two policemen, one of them crouching beside her and massaging her shoulder. The other cop said a few words, and then Marilyn glanced up. Her face was wet with tears, and her mouth hung open with an emotion he couldn’t identify. Idiotically, he lifted one hand and waved. After she looked away he realized that he was standing on a flower bed, crushing her begonias. She spoke a few, terse words to the baby-faced cop, who returned to the front door and took Walls’s arm to lead him from the property.
“There’s been an intruder, Mr. Walls. She’s awful shook up. Says she’d rather not see any ‘Hollywood vultures’ right now. Her words, not mine.”
“Listen, my boss will have my head if I leave when she’s in bad shape. Are you sure she has everything she needs? I mean, what if the intruder comes back?”
“We’ll stay with her and make sure. She’s called Joe DiMaggio, and he’s on his way here to make sure everything’s safe and sound.” The way the cop said her ex-husband’s name implied that he wouldn’t want to be an unwanted guest on Marilyn Monroe’s property when Joltin’ Joe showed up. “So you can tell your boss that she’s being well looked after.”
In the years to come, he would castigate himself for not driving to Toll’s house then and there. But as he lingered outside her gate, the cop car’s light oscillating on the neighbors’ homes, his pulse breakneck, he thought how she could only put him off with such tricks for so long. That he’d have her cornered soon enough.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Santa Monica, June 1962
“I guess my time must be up by now.” Marilyn shone the sad, brave smile for Dr. Greenson’s benefit and put her toes into the high-heeled pumps that she’d let slip from her feet during the session. She hadn’t slept last night, tormented by the memory of Alexei’s suffocating grip on her neck. Every creak of the house seemed to be one of his henchman coming after her, and she was in a hurry to fill her Nembutal prescription and go home. One of Joe’s boys was at the house—perhaps the combination of watchman and barbiturate would allow her a few hours’ rest. “Thanks for—”
“You’ve already told me that one.”
“Excuse me?”
“Twice.”
“Oh …” She had filled the last hour with memories of the orphanage she’d been sent to after her mother lost the house on Arbol Drive, how she’d bathed in water that had already been used by five or six other children, and how she knew it was wasteful and selfish to soak in baths perfumed with Chanel No. 5, but she couldn’t help indulging in such luxuries after the lean years. “I’m pretty forgetful these days, aren’t I?”
Dr. Greenson switched the cross of his legs and made a hut with his hands. For a while he was silent, regarding her with his hooded, ocean-deep eyes. “Are you?”
She cast her gaze out the window, at the jacaranda, which grew all over his property. She planted her palm against the leather couch and leaned her weight onto her extended limb. “I already told you I couldn’t sleep. I mean, doesn’t that usually make a person forgetful?”
“Marilyn.” He inclined his torso toward her, his eyebrows pulling together in sympathy and consternation, forcing her to return his gaze. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. But if I really were, don’t you think I’d be able to sleep through the night?”
“I’m here to help.”
“Oh, yeah?” Her smile became brilliant and ironical. “You got something stronger than that?” she asked, indicating the prescription that peeped from her handbag.
“It is 1962, my dear,” he replied gravely. “There are always stronger drugs. I could make you sleep like the dead for twenty-four hours, or stay up for three days straight.” He cleared his throat into his fist. “That was not what I meant by help.”
The sense of peril she experienced in the next moments, as his gaze grew fierce while revealing nothing, was impossible to pinpoint. She made sense of it only when he reached out and put his hand on her knee. This was not a touch of seduction, nor compassion—its intention was to control. She stood abruptly and thrust his hand away. “You’re one of them. Aren’t you?”
She had never seen Dr. Greenson perplexed before. “One of who?”
“You’re with Alexei. You’re in on the plot.”
“Plot?”
“You and Dr. Kurtz. Oh, fuck, this was all part of the plan, wasn’t it? Does that stuff you give me even help with sleep? Or is it designed to keep me up, keep me always off-kilter, make it easier to push me around, get me to do what you want?” She was shrieking now, and her eyes had dilated with rage. She took a forceful step toward the door, but he grabbed her wrist.
“Sit down,” he commanded.
Her gaze flashed to the place where his fingertips dug into her skin. “Or are you the one who kills me? Is this how it ends?”
He loosened his grip, giving her the chance to leave, or try at least. But something in the way he looked away from her, his posture slumping into the back of his leather chair, made her pause. “My god,” he muttered, removing his hand. “My god.”
“Oh, now don’t you go to pieces,” she said angrily. “I mean, I’m the one who’s going to be tortured—isn’t that right?”
“Dr. Kurtz, your previous analyst?” he went on, almost to himself, ignoring her dramatic line of inquiry. He couldn’t so much as glance in her direction. “She’s threatened you? Or made a proposition of some kind?”
“Yeah, you could fucking say that.”
“What did she propose? What exactly? You haven’t—conspired with her? Dear girl, tell me you haven’t.”
Dr. Greenson no longer appeared composed, but he was as tweedy as before—his frayed jacket rumpled on his soft body, the weariness in his eyes somehow enhancing their power of observation. He knew so many intimate details of her life—had vouched for her with the studio, which was paying his bills. And yet she’d never really needed to trust him until now. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”
He shook his head slightly, lifted his open palms to her. “You can’t. You’ll just have to make your own decision about that. Either I am—in which case, you are in no worse a situation than you were when you walked in today. Or I am not, and might actually be of assistance to you. If you are involved with the people I think you’re involved with, you are in bigger trouble than I ever imagined. You’ll be needing all the help you can get.”
“Fucking hell. Are you with the Russians, or aren’t you?”
“No. I am not.”<
br />
“Okay.” He was right—there was no way to be sure, but the way he was watching her, the urgency in his gaze, made her want to believe him. Right then, that and his word seemed enough to take a chance on. As she returned to the couch, she asked: “How do you know Dr. Kurtz? What she really is.”
“Ah, well. We have been in the same field a long time. And when I was a younger man I had what you might call socialist sympathies. That was how we grew up—my parents were Russian Jews, born under the tsars, so they saw firsthand the real horror of this world. Growing up in Brooklyn, Lenin was a hero in my family, and later I studied Marx as I studied Freud. It was a different time …” He trailed off. “I first met your Dr. Kurtz when I was studying in Vienna, and saw her at conferences and cocktail parties over the years. I had a vague sense of what she was involved in—it was generally known in psychoanalytic circles that the Party intelligence apparatus liked to have analysts as cell leaders, for the twin reasons that their training gave them insight into the psyches of the members under them, the ability to spot disloyalty and doubt, and that it provided perfect cover. They could meet in the privacy of their offices, receive information from their agents and give new instruction, all under the guise of an analytic session.”
“And you knew that Dr. Kurtz was a Soviet agent?”
“No. I couldn’t have imagined it. Most of us who leaned that way in our youth were disillusioned during the atrocities of the thirties.”
“Have you met Alexei?”
“Not that I know of. But I am sure that is not his real name. Why don’t you start from the beginning? Tell me who ‘Alexei’ is to you, everything that has happened.”