Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  “That some guy tried to kill you last night, but I saved your life and now you trust me.”

  “Is that what you think? That I trust you now?”

  “I don’t know, Zoe. You tell me.” He heaved a sigh, thrusting his fingers through his hair. “Look, we need to talk.”

  “I’d rather eat.”

  “We’ll talk, then we’ll eat. You need to sit down, though. You look dead on your feet.”

  Zoe could feel her anger and mistrust slipping away. She was almost too tired to care anymore, and besides, he was right about Anna Larina. Her mother was going to get suspicious if he didn’t call in.

  She went over to the chaise while he pulled up a chair whose arms were carved to look like serpents and sat down facing her.

  “Tell me about the altar of bones,” he said.

  Zoe said nothing, just looked at him. His face was tight with strain and fatigue, but then he’d been the one whipping the motorbike in and out through cutthroat traffic, flower markets, and shopping galleries, while she’d just been along for the ride. And he’d gotten even less sleep last night than she had. She remembered him talking about having to hold her propped up under hot water so she wouldn’t die from hypothermia.

  “I was thinking maybe we could arm wrestle to see who has to go first,” she said.

  He blinked, looked at her dumbfounded a moment, then laughed. “You are the wackiest woman I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Wacky? All the adjectives in the world you have to pick from and you go for wacky? What’s wrong with gorgeous, brilliant, charming, sexy?”

  “Vain?”

  He did that squinting thing with his eyes that was his version of a smile, and she couldn’t help smiling back at him. “Oh, all right. If you’re going to laugh at me and call me names, I guess I’ll go first.”

  She drew in a deep breath, shutting her eyes for a moment. She prayed she was not making a terrible mistake and plunged in. “It started with my grandmother getting murdered in Golden Gate Park.”

  She told him about Mackey coming to her because her grandmother had tried to swallow the piece of paper with her name and address before she died. About the photograph, and her grandmother’s dying words to the man in the park, and the whole nightmare scene with her mother.

  “The first I’d ever heard of the altar of bones was when Mackey brought it up. I mentioned it to my mother as kind of a parting shot, and she was so careful not to react that she gave herself away by not reacting. Do you think she also knows about the film?”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. What she wants is your icon. I didn’t tell you all of the truth before. Your mother did send me after you for your protection, because she thought you could be in danger. But she also told me that if you got hold of an icon, I was supposed to seduce you and steal it from you.”

  Zoe felt her face grow hot. “You weren’t really going to …”

  He leaned over and took her hands, and she hadn’t realized until then that she had them clenched into a fist in her lap. Or how cold to the bone they were.

  “I’m on your side in this, Zoe. I always have been.”

  His hands were big and hard, his palms calloused, yet their touch was gentle. She started to lean into him, then pulled away fast and reached for her tea.

  “I’m thinking we could use something stronger,” Ry said, getting up and going to the refrigerator.

  Zoe blew out a big breath. “Boy, could I ever…. So, anyway, after that typically aggravating conversation with Anna Larina, I went to the morgue to see my grandmother’s body. I had to see her, you know, to make her real to me. Then when I left, I got attacked the first time by the ponytailed man. He wants the altar-of-bones thing so bad, Ry, he was willing to cut out my eye to get it out of me.”

  While Ry poured them glasses of vodka from out of the bottle in the refrigerator, she told him about how she got away from her attacker, and then came home to find her grandmother’s package, with the key and the postcard, and a letter full of warning and mystery.

  She stopped to take a big swig of the vodka, shuddered hard as it burned all the way to her toes and made her eyes water. “And that’s how she led me to the old man in the griffin shop, where I picked up the film and the icon, and it’s been one damn thing after another since then, pardon my French.”

  “I didn’t see any letter when I went through your bag,” Ry said. “Sorry about that, by the way, but—”

  She waved a hand, slopping vodka onto her wrist, which she licked off not to be wasteful. “Bygones, as Yasmine Poole would say. You were after the Kennedy film, which is totally understandable, given … Well, we’ll go down that road later. The letter was in my pocket when I jumped into the Seine, and it ended up a soggy, illegible mess, but I’d read it so many times that a lot of it was carved into my brain cells. I wrote what I could remember down on the bank’s stationery.”

  She dug the notepaper out of her satchel and handed it to him. He read it through, sat in silence a moment, then said, “Okay, so you’re the Keeper of this altar of bones, but it’s so dangerous your grandmother didn’t want to risk giving you the details in the letter, in case it fell into the wrong hands, so she gave you a postcard with a riddle on it and a key—”

  “Which opened a chest that had the icon, the Marilyn Monroe photograph, and the film of your … the Kennedy film.”

  “You don’t need to keeping tiptoeing around the subject, Zoe. I’ve come to terms with the reality that there really was a second shooter on the grassy knoll and the son of a bitch was my father.”

  Not hardly, Zoe thought, since your face closes up tight as a fist every time we do tiptoe around the subject, but she said, “Right. Sorry.”

  She watched him prowl the small dressing room, then he startled her by whirling around. He looked hard and mean and deadly, and Zoe stiffened as he came at her.

  “Let me see the icon again.” Then he added, “Please,” no doubt because of the look on her face.

  Zoe took the sealskin case out of her satchel, unwrapped the icon carefully, then gave it to Ry. He sat back down in the serpent chair to study it, turning it over in his hands.

  Seeing it again, Zoe was struck by how exquisite and rare the icon was. The jewel colors of the oil paints looked as bright as if they had been applied only yesterday. And the facets of the real jewels twinkled in the lamplight like crystal tears.

  “It’s uncanny how much you look like her,” Ry said.

  “I’m not the expert my mother is, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least four hundred years old.”

  “Did they always paint them on blocks of wood this thick?”

  “Most of the time.”

  He hefted the icon in his hand. “It’s thick enough that it could be hollowed out on the inside.”

  Zoe jumped up and leaned over him for a better look. “Hollowed out to hide something else, you mean? Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, where one fits inside the other?”

  He shook the icon gently, but there was no rattle. He turned it over in his hands again, and they both searched for a seam or a hinge, first on the back and then on each side, but they found nothing. The wood looked and felt solid.

  Ry said, “Okay, so it was just a thought. But if this thing’s as old as it looks, and if these stones are real, it’s got to be worth some big bucks. Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than that—a valuable artifact some unscrupulous collectors are trying to get their hands on. Like your mother for one.”

  “But there’s also the riddle Katya wrote on the back of the postcard,” Zoe said, reaching back on the chaise for her satchel. “I thought at first it had something to do with The Lady and the Unicorn, but that whole tapestry thing was just a way to get me to the griffin shop. What if this riddle is a clue to the altar of bones? What the altar is maybe. Or where it is.”

  She gave the postcard to Ry, and he translated it into English he read out loud:

  Blood flows into the sea.

 
The sea meets the sky.

  From the sky falls the ice.

  Fire melts the ice.

  A storm drowns the fire

  And rages into the night,

  But the blood flows on into the sea

  Without end.

  “So what do you think it means?” she said.

  “I have no idea.”

  She studied his face, trying to read if he was telling the truth, but he was an expert at hiding his thoughts.

  “And on top of everything else,” she said, “somehow the Kennedy assassination has to fit into all of this. I refuse to believe my grandmother could be involved in two separate top-secret conspiracies that have nothing to do with each other. Nobody’s that unlucky.”

  This time some brutal emotion did cross Ry’s face, although still too quick for her to read. She opened her mouth to tell him it was now his turn to come clean, when he said, a little too casually, “Are you sure there wasn’t anything else in the chest?”

  Zoe shook her head, but she kept her eyes riveted onto his face. “After I found the Marilyn Monroe photograph tucked in the lining, I really checked it over carefully. There was nothing else. Why? You think there should’ve been something else in there? Like what?”

  Finally his eyes met hers, and she saw again the deep, black pain that had been there back in the apartment, after they’d looked at the film. “An amulet,” he said.

  “Wait a minute. The altar of bones is an amulet? How do you know? And what—?”

  He held up a hand. “I’ll tell you everything I know, Zoe. Like we agreed going in. But I need to start at the beginning. With my father’s confession and how my brother, Dom, was murdered.”

  ZOE WATCHED RY prowl the floor as he talked, but when he got to the part about seeing the chalk outline of his brother’s body on the floor of the church, she had to look away because she couldn’t bear what she saw on his face.

  He threw himself back down in the chair, braced his elbows on his spread knees, and looked down at his clasped hands. His voice sounded calm, but his knuckles were white. “Now you know why I didn’t let you shoot the bitch. Yeah, we need her alive until we can find out who she’s really working for, but mostly I wanted the privilege of killing her myself. That hour I spent at the bottom of the Gulf sucking air out of a tire—that’s all I could think about. That and getting over to Port Bolivar, so I could dig up what Dom had written down of Dad’s so-called confession.”

  He gave a harsh, bitter laugh. “I could’ve stayed down there at the bottom of the Gulf and thought about it for a hundred years and still never come up with anything close to the truth of what kind of man my father really was.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ry,” Zoe said softly. “I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your brother like that. And then to find out that your father …” Her voice trailed off. She had a hard time putting it into words herself.

  He was quiet for a moment, looking down at his fisted hands, then he said, “Growing up, it never occurs to you your dad might not be the man you think he is. He was supposed to have been born on a small ranch in east Texas, near the Louisiana border.” Ry breathed a hollow laugh, shook his head. “We even drove out there once to take a look at the old place, but now I’ve no idea whether any of that was true. I suppose that place could’ve belonged to anyone.”

  “Ry, you don’t have to—”

  “No, you really do need to know the rest of it.” Ry reached around for his jacket, which he’d slung over the back of the chair. He took a mud-splattered plastic envelope out of an inner pocket and handed it to her. “But I’ll let my father do the talking.”

  Zoe took a thick sheaf of papers out of the envelope. She unfolded them, looked up once at Ry’s white, tight face, and then began to read.

  29

  IT ALL started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones, but it ended with the kill. And not just any kill, but the kill. The big kill.

  You see, I was the man on the grassy knoll.

  Yeah, you heard me right. I’m the guy who shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Well, Lee Harvey Oswald shot at him, and maybe he hit him, or maybe his was the bullet that wounded the Texas governor. Christ, what was that guy’s name? Connors? Connelly? Something like that. Funny that I can’t remember it, considering … But then I never cared about him. What’s important to know is that mine was the head shot, and that’s what killed the President. Lee Oswald got the blame, of course, though most folks never believed he acted alone, and which goes to prove you really can’t fool all the people even some of the time. But good ol’ Oswald? He was just a Commie punk we set up to take the fall.

  The killing shot was all mine.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself here, because it really started one July night a year before the Kennedy killing, the night I first heard about the altar of bones. We were sitting in a red leather booth at the Hollywood Brown Derby, eating Cobb salads and drinking a passable but overpriced ‘59 St.-Émilion. We being myself, my bride, Katya, and Marilyn Monroe.

  Yeah, that Marilyn Monroe. The movie star.

  Funny how those two simple words both describe her to a T, yet fail to do her justice. Just like all the other millions of words written about her, before or since her passing, have failed her. Maybe that’s because we all keep looking at her through the screen of our own delusions and lies.

  I know I did.

  BEFORE THAT NIGHT, I’d been spying on Marilyn Monroe for the past seven months, and by that I mean official, sanctioned spying.

  I had a day job as a location scout for Twentieth Century–Fox, but that was just a cover set up by my employer, the Central Intelligence Agency. In spite of the McCarthy fiasco, the powers that be back in Langley were convinced Hollywood was a seething hotbed of anti-American activity. My mission was to make friends with the locals so we could separate the dangerous Communist wheat from the chaff.

  Personally, I thought the assignment was bush league from the getgo, and a waste of my time and talents. My previous posting had been the Congo, where I’d been sent to assassinate a couple of people who will have to remain nameless, so the L.A. gig felt really tame to me.

  Although things did get more interesting once the president of the United States began engaging in reckless national security pillow talk with an actress who ate barbiturates like cocktail peanuts. The powers that be really got their panties in a bunch when they found out about that, probably because Marilyn also happened to be the ex-wife of the playwright Arthur Miller, who’d once been denied a passport for “supporting the Communist movement.”

  So getting close to Marilyn’s good friend Katya Orlova, asking her out on a date, had been just part of the job, a way for me to get close to Marilyn herself. It was my own idea to marry the girl, and I still don’t know why I did. Maybe I was just bored, stuck out there in Tinseltown.

  But I think it was more complicated than that. In years I was still young, only twenty-six, but I’d been knocking about my whole life. I came into the world an orphan, so I never had a family, and I was too secretive to have any friends. My only women were either whores or one-night stands. Katya was the first person to tell me she loved me and mean it. She made me feel something I’d never felt before. I guess the word would be cherished.

  Anyway, the truth was I liked being married to Katya. We had fun together.

  She had this eight-year-old kid by another lover who was long out of the picture, and so we made up this little family together, just the three of us, which I kind of liked. Anna Larina—that was the kid’s name—had almost died when she was four, of leukemia, I think, but somehow she’d gone into remission, and Katya spoiled her some because of that. She wasn’t a bad kid, though. She was just tough to get to know.

  So Katya and her kid, and my “job” at the studio where I got to hobnob with glamorous movie stars—all those things were good. But that wasn’t the best part. The most interesting, the most deliciously ironic twist to the whole thing was that the CIA—so bu
sy seeing a commie behind every actress’s bush and under every director’s bed—didn’t have so much as a clue that Mike O’Malley, their dashing guy in Hollywood, was himself a mole for the KGB.

  Why? you ask. Why was I a mole who sold out his country’s secrets to the Communist enemy?

  Well, it started with a small thing. I overdid it betting on the ponies and got in deep with a loan shark who was threatening to shoot out my kneecaps if I didn’t pay up. And about the time I was starting to feel desperate, this guy comes along and offers me a thousand bucks for the name of a double agent down in Mexico City. And the thing you don’t realize at the time is that if you do it once, you got to keep on doing it, because you’re compromised then, you can’t go back. And after that, the hole you’ve dug for yourself just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

  I don’t think I was born with much of a conscience, though, because giving up that guy in Mexico City, knowing he’d be killed—it never really bothered me. And the things I did afterward? They didn’t bother me much either.

  And as long as I’m confessing, I’ll tell you something else. I loved the spy game—the disguises and the lies, and the double-dealing. I even loved the killing. It was all I game to me, and I loved to play it.

  SO WE WERE at the Brown Derby one night in the summer of ‘62. Katya, Marilyn, and me.

  Marilyn was in what she liked to call her “disguise,” and I’ll admit, it actually wasn’t a bad disguise at that. She had covered up her platinum hair with a scarf, hadn’t put on any makeup, and she didn’t look quite so luscious to me then, with her freckles and plain brown eyes. And she was wearing this dress, some cheap thing with little pink flowers on it. God knows where she’d gotten it—probably off the discount rack in Macy’s basement. Yet, even so, on her it still clung in places so sexy that in some states she would’ve been arrested for indecent exposure.

  But the best part of her disguise, the genius of it, I thought, was how she could change the way she walked. She’d lose her swivel—that hip-swaying, butt-undulating thing she could do that was pure, one hundred percent sex appeal. That was pure Marilyn Monroe. If the woman could have patented the move, it would have sold like the Hula-Hoop, and she’d have made a mint off of it too.