Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  “I have no regrets, Kat. None,” I heard Marilyn say, and the streetlamp caught the glint of tears on her face. “I know I say that all the time, but I mean it. It’s just, wouldn’t it have been nice if Jack and me could be together?”

  Katya’s eyes were wet as well. “It wasn’t meant to be, darling. He’s the President, his life is not his own. But you know you made him happy.”

  Marilyn drew in a deep breath, bit her lip. “It’s just … it’s lonely out here, isn’t it?”

  I watched her, and I have to say I was a little sad as well, because I liked her in that moment. I liked the core of courage I saw, but I wondered about the resiliency.

  My Impala rolled up to the curb, purring. A kid with big ears and freckles got out and opened the passenger-side door with a flourish, grinning shyly up at Marilyn. She gave him a brilliant smile in return and started to get in the car, then she straightened and looked up. She pointed up to the red tile roof, to the sign with the restaurant’s name written in neon, and to the moon, full and fat, that seemed to be sitting right on top of the hat’s crown.

  “Look at the moon,” she said. “So big and round and yellow. Just like you see in the movies. It’s almost too perfect, isn’t it? Like you should die right in this moment, because every moon you’ll ever see from here on out will never measure up to this one.”

  30

  AFTER OUR trip to the Brown Derby, I wrote out two separate reports. One was a banal and heavily edited account of that night, mostly having to do with what Marilyn said about the President and his brother, but nothing about any amulet called the altar of bones. This report I filed with my boss, the head of counterintelligence for the CIA’s Los Angeles field office, where it presumably would be read and duly digested. And then perhaps, depending on the current turf wars, forwarded on to Langley.

  The other report was much longer, more detailed, covering not only that night at the Brown Derby, but everything else I’d seen, done, and overheard in the last three months, including all the state secrets I’d been privy to. This report I put in a plain brown envelope. On the following Tuesday morning, at precisely ten minutes after ten, I was deep in the stacks of the Los Angeles public library, sliding that envelope between two dusty tomes—a history of the Roman legions and a lengthy dissertation on Cato’s works.

  After that I started reading the used-car ads in the Los Angeles Times, not really expecting much, because my report had been pretty thin, truth to tell, full more this time of innuendo and gossip than hard intelligence. But I read the ads anyway and then, lo and behold, a week later there it was: For sale, a ‘47 Ford Sportsman, $1,300. Followed by a phone number.

  It was a coded message from my cutout man, the KGB intermediary, who passed whatever intelligence I collected on to our superiors in Moscow. I was to meet him at the top of the Hollywood Bowl on August 4, at one in the afternoon.

  I GOT THERE early.

  The Hollywood Bowl is this enormous outdoor amphitheater, and that day the sun was beating down so hot I had to take off my suit coat and sling it over my shoulder. But sweat still drenched my shirt by the time I’d climbed the last set of the steps to the very top row.

  I sat down on a bleacher, huffing like a beached whale and thinking I ought to start hitting the gym more often. I took off my hat, mopped the wet off my forehead with my sleeve, and admired the view. This far up, I could see the HOLLYWOOD sign in the distance, those famous white letters stuck into a hill above the town, a siren call for so many Marilyn wannabes and never-would-bes.

  The rumble of a car’s engine reached my ears long before it came into view. You could see and hear for miles in the Hollywood Bowl, which was why, I knew, my KGB cutout had chosen this spot for our meet.

  I watched a man who looked no bigger than an ant get out of the car and begin the long, hot climb. In the two years I’d been working out there in la-la land, I’d only met with him twice face-to-face. He never gave me a name, but if he had, it wouldn’t be the one he was born with, so what would be the point?

  By the time he’d climbed all the way up to the next-to-the-last tier, though, I could see whoever this was, it wasn’t my cutout. This guy was taller, leaner. And he carried himself differently, like a soldier on a parade ground.

  I half stood up, then sat back down. It was too late to run, and there sure as hell was no place to hide. The stranger must have left his suit coat in the car, because he too was in shirtsleeves. He wasn’t wearing a gun belt or a shoulder holster, but I could see that he carried a good-size paper sack in one hand. If a pistol was inside that sack, then Mike O’Malley was a dead man.

  Then the stranger began to whistle the Russian song “Black Eyes,” and my breath left me in such a rush of relief I felt weak. I tried to whistle the next few bars, but I had trouble getting my dry mouth to pucker up enough.

  “Never mind. Myself, I’ve never been able to carry a tune,” the stranger said as he sat next to me on the bleacher. His English was so thick with Russian consonants and vowels it came out half-strangled. “It is all rather silly anyway, do you not think so? Grown men playing at spies.”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I don’t make up the rules.”

  “This is true.” The man’s lips twitched in a fleeting smile. He was extraordinarily good-looking, with indigo eyes and cheekbones sharp as stilettos. He had the “blood and milk” complexion you found in some Russians. Skin so pale you can see the veins beneath.

  And he must have a hell of workout routine, I thought, because he was barely breathing hard after climbing a couple hundred steps in the heat of an August-afternoon sun.

  He reached into his paper sack, and even though I was trying to play it cool, I might have stiffened up a little, because he gave me a mock wide-eyed look and said, “What? Do you think I would come six thousand miles just to shoot you?”

  Yeah, yeah, and everybody fancies himself another Bob Hope, I thought.

  The man took out a blue-and-white-checked napkin and spread it out on the bleacher seat between us, followed by pickled herring and black rye bread. “You won’t faint if I reach into my pocket? I assure you I have no gun in there.”

  “Very funny. You outta think about taking your show on the road.”

  The Russian took a silver flask out of his pocket. He unscrewed the fat cap that was also a cup and filled it with what was surely vodka. He handed me the cup and kept the flask for himself.

  “Na zdorovye,” he toasted, and took a long, healthy swig from the flask.

  “Cheers.” I took it more slowly and was glad I did. The vodka was loaded with pepper and other spices I didn’t know the names of except that they were hot as hellfire.

  I blinked the tears out of my eyes and said, “Now that I’ve drunk to your health, how about letting me in on who the fuck you are.”

  “My name is Nikolai Popov. I am Procurator General of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti in Moscow.”

  And I thought, Holy Christ, because this guy was like a KGB big cheese, big enchilada, and big kahuna all rolled into one. I seriously wondered if I was supposed to snap to attention and salute.

  I let a long, slow beat pass while I decided how to play this, then opted for my fallback position—the smart mouth. “You’re a long way from home and in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a cold war going on. Aren’t you afraid you’ll be picked up as a spy and shot?”

  “Hunh. Your country would not be so rude. I have papers proving I am a vintner from the Georgia Socialist Republic, here to tour the wonderful vineyards of California. It is part of the cultural exchange, an effort to ease the tensions between our two great nations.”

  He took another drink of vodka from the silver flask, and I noticed it was monogrammed with the Cyrillic equivalent of the letter P. For Popov, I supposed, but maybe not. Maybe he wasn’t really who he said he was at all. I’d heard the name Nikolai Popov before, usually spoken in tones of awe and fear, but this guy looked way too young to be in such an exalted an
d powerful position within the KGB hierarchy.

  The Russian had taken out a pack of Marlboros and lit up. He took a drag, then exhaled the smoke along with a deep sigh. “You have excellent cigarettes in your country. That is not a criticism of the direction the Revolution has taken back home with regard to tobacco production, mind you. Merely an observation.”

  He took another drag, then changed directions so fast, I nearly got whiplash. “I have read your reports, Mr. O’Malley.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “You ought to be. You are but a small, insignificant cog in the engine that propels the Revolution. Now I want to hear again from your own lips about this dinner you had with Miss Monroe at the Blue Derby.”

  “The Brown Derby.”

  “As you say.” He waved his cigarette through the air. “Please proceed.”

  It had been three weeks since that night, but I had an excellent memory. When I was done, I asked, “Are you going to expose the affair?”

  “Which affair? Or should I say, with which brother?” The Russian thought a moment, then shrugged. “We have other irons in that particular fire.”

  I’d heard about one of those irons, a young German socialite in Washington who had recently caught the President’s eye. She was also, like myself, a Soviet agent. Unlike with myself, however, the FBI had gotten wise and deported her.

  “And Miss Monroe?” the Russian said. “Is everything still coming up roses in her life?”

  “You could say that. And which I did, at length, in my report. The studio fired her last month from the set of Something’s Got to Give. For always being late and muffing her lines because she was stoned up to her eyeballs. Then they agreed to take her back, probably because Dean Martin, the film’s costar, insisted on it.”

  The Russian’s eyes lit up. “Ah. Dean Martin. He is one of the Rat Pack, no? Deano and Sammy and Mr. Blue Eyes.”

  I hid a smile. Hollywood. No one was immune to its magic.

  “And Miss Monroe, she attributes this good fortune to the magic amulet your wife gave her? The … what is it you called it?”

  I had a feeling the man knew damn well, but I said, “The altar of bones.”

  The Russian looked out at the vista for a long moment, then said, “What do you think, Mr. O’Malley?”

  The question floated out there just a little too casually for my peace of mind. A guy in Popov’s position wouldn’t travel all this way to hash over a routine report filed by a low-level operative like myself. Something weird was going on here, but I was damned if I could figure out what.

  “It’s bunk. Like I put in my report, my wife said she bought it off this old White Russian émigré who works in the corner deli. Scratch any of those babushkas and underneath you’ll find an old fool who fancies herself a witch. For a couple of bucks, she’ll tell you your fortune and give you something to cure your warts.”

  The Russian nodded pensively. “Tell me more about this new wife of yours. This Katya Orlova. Is she Russian?”

  “Her mother was, but she was born in Shanghai. On the day the Japanese took over the city. It’s kind of a remarkable story, actually. The woman walked all the way there from Siberia after escaping from one of those gulag camps—”

  “The gulag does not exist, has never existed. It is a piece of filthy propaganda spread by the West to discredit the Soviet empire.”

  Yeah, right, I thought, but I let it pass, because what was really interesting was the look I’d seen flash across Popov’s face. I would say I’d just given him the shock of his life.

  “So your Katya,” Popov said after a moment, “she gave the babushka’s magic amulet to Miss Monroe, and now Miss Monroe believes it has cured her of all of life’s ills.”

  “Miss Monroe has chronic insomnia, for which she pops Nembutal like it’s going out of style. After which the studio gives her amphetamines to counteract the effect of the barbiturates, and on top of that, she’s a lush. If you told her wearing a dead skunk around her neck would chase away all the bogeymen she’s got rattling around her closets, she’d do it.”

  “Then you do not believe she has given the amulet to your President?”

  I laughed at that, although I wasn’t sure why. “She hasn’t had the chance,” I said. “Not since the ‘Happy Birthday’ fiasco.”

  The Russian stood up. “Good. Then we will go and get it from her.”

  I felt like I’d suddenly been knocked on my ass by heatstroke, like I wasn’t hearing things right. I stared up at the tall Russian, blinking the sweat out of my eyes. I drew in a deep breath—

  “No, don’t bother to ask why, Mr. O’Malley. How do you say it in your CIA? It is on a need-to-know basis and you do not need to know.”

  “Okay, forget why. Let’s try for a how. Are you going to walk right up to her and rip it off her neck?”

  “If necessary.” The man who called himself Nikolai Popov smiled, but the cold in his eyes was cut right out of the snow-covered steppes of Siberia.

  He shot the cuff of his silk shirt to look at the time on a gold Rolex. A pretty damn expensive getup, I thought, for a Communist. “At nine o’clock tonight I will pick you up on the corner of … What is that famous place where all the sexy starlets hang out? Hollywood and …”

  “Vine,” I said, only it came out as a squeak.

  “Yes. Hollywood and Vine. Do not be late.”

  31

  SO HOW are we going to play this?” I asked later that night, as we turned off San Vicente with its huge coral trees and into the area of Brentwood known as the Helenas. Not la-di-da mansions by any means, but they’d still set you back a pretty penny.

  “It is not nuclear physics,” Nikolai Popov said. “We go in, we get the amulet, we leave.”

  The retro globe streetlamps cast intermittent pools of light on the eucalyptus trees, but the houses were shrouded behind high walls, and the streets and sidewalks were deserted. Nobody was out walking their dog or putting the garbage in the can.

  I expected Popov would drive by Marilyn’s cul-de-sac and park somewhere farther down on one of the other streets. Instead we turned down Fifth Helena Drive and headed right toward number 12305, with its bougainvillea-draped whitewashed walls. I was surprised to see the big, green front gates yawning wide-open, as if she’d been expecting us.

  Popov slammed the car door getting out, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. A dog started barking, somewhere out back, but no lights sprang on. The night air felt balmy, with just the barest breeze stirring the tops of the tall eucalyptus trees.

  “Here,” Popov said, as he pulled out of his pocket a wad of what turned out to be a couple pairs of a doctor’s rubber gloves. “Put these on.”

  It was funny, I thought, as I snapped the gloves on over my sweating hands. Not ha-ha funny, but ironic funny. Here I was a traitor, a double agent. I’d been stealing my country’s secrets for the Russians for years, yet tonight was the first time I’d ever felt like a thief.

  THE FRONT DOOR was locked, but Popov popped it open with a set of burglar picks.

  He clicked on a penlight as we stepped into a living room of thick white carpeting, textured alabaster walls, and dark-beamed ceilings. There was little furniture, just a wooden bench along one wall, a red couch along the other, a plain wooden coffee table flanked by four Mexican-style stools. But stacks of records sat in corners next to piles of magazines and cartons of books.

  “This does not look like the house of a movie star,” Popov said.

  “She bought a bunch of furniture in Mexico,” I said, for some strange reason feeling suddenly defensive of her, like I owned her in some way. Owned her sins and her foibles. “The stuff’s taking its own sweet time getting here from the land of mañana.”

  Through the window that opened out back, I could see moonlight glinting off the water in the pool she rarely swam in. A stuffed toy tiger lay, as if abandoned, alongside one of the patio chairs. It wasn’t the kind of thing Marilyn went in for, and I wondered what it was doing t
here.

  “She will most likely have it with her in the bedroom,” Popov said. “We will go there first.”

  THE BEDROOM DOOR was locked, but again the Russian picked it easily.

  It was pitch-dark inside, the air cloying and sweet with the scent of her Chanel No. 5 perfume. I heard the scratch of a needle circling around the end of a record, and the soughing sound of her drugged breathing.

  The beam of Popov’s flashlight played around the room, picking out a pair of black stilettos on the floor, a pile of dirty clothes, and more stacks of records, a brass wall sconce.

  Then, as if the Russian had been prolonging the moment, savoring it, the flashlight beam found Marilyn on the bed.

  Her white telephone lay beside her, dangling half off the hook. The light found it first, then moved over her body. She lay on her side, her arms and legs sprawled. She was drooling a little, and I felt embarrassed for her. She was nude except for a brassiere.

  She wasn’t wearing the amulet.

  The flashlight beam jumped over to a bedside table barely bigger than a dinner plate, overflowing with more stuff than I could make out. A lot of pill bottles. A stack of papers. Letters? A box of Kleenex.

  Popov started toward the table, tripped over a carton of books, and swore out loud in Russian. Marilyn didn’t even stir.

  He flicked on the lamp, and although it was a small lamp, light seemed to flood the room after the utter darkness of before.

  “There, that is better,” he said. “No sense groping around like blind men in a whorehouse.” He looked around the room, his lips curled in disgust. “What a pigsty.”

  “She gets bad bouts of depression sometimes,” I said, still whispering, and again feeling stupidly like I had to defend her.

  I went to the phonograph and turned it off—the scratching was grating on my already raw nerves. Frank Sinatra, I saw, from the label as the record spun slowly down and stopped.