Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  Popov pawed through the stuff on the table; he picked up the bottle of Nembutal and shook it. Nearly full, I thought, although I saw the corpses of several empty capsules sitting nearby. She often pulled open the pills and swallowed the powdered barbiturate neat, to speed up the effect.

  Popov was now flipping through the pages of what looked like a black leather diary, and I caught sight of her childish bubble handwriting.

  He tucked the diary under his arm. He picked up an earthen jug, tipped it over, and shook it, but no amulet fell out. I thought I should probably be joining in the search, but my legs and arms felt stiff, I couldn’t seem to move. A pounding in my ears sounded louder the Pacific surf.

  “Mike? What are you doing here?”

  I spun around so fast all the blood left my head.

  Marilyn was half-sitting up among the sprawl of white silk sheets, her eyes blinking against the light. Her platinum hair was tousled, her pale skin glowed with a fine sheen of sweat.

  She was the stuff wet dreams are made of.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I could think of no plausible way of explaining what the Russian and I were doing in her bedroom at ten o’clock at night.

  It didn’t matter. She was so out of it from the Nembutal, she was lucky she remembered her own name. She sat up a little straighter, but she moved as if underwater.

  “Tell Kat I’m okay now,” she said, and her voice whistled strangely. “I guess maybe when I called her earlier, I sounded like I might do something crazy, so she sent you over. But I’m all right now. Bobby came to see me this afternoon, and we got in this big fight. I told him I felt used and passed around, and then I told him to get out. It felt good to say that, Mike. So good. Only after he left, I got to feeling like I’d never sleep, so I took a few pills, but I’m okay now. I’m okay.”

  She didn’t look okay to me, but I wasn’t feeling so hot either at the moment. I still couldn’t seem to coordinate things between my head and my tongue.

  From beside me, Popov said, “Ask her where it is.”

  And this was the weirdest thing of all, but Marilyn didn’t look at the Russian or react to him in any way. It was almost as if she didn’t see him, or didn’t want to, or maybe she thought he was a figment left over from a nightmare that would dissolve if she just ignored it.

  I swallowed, wet my lips. “Marilyn, do you remember that night at the Brown Derby?”

  A childish, yet strangely sweet, smile lit her face. “The moon was soooo big.”

  “Yeah. You showed me the magic amulet. Remember? You called it the altar of bones.”

  She frowned, then combed the hair out of her eyes with her fingers, as if that would help her think better. “I told Bobby that I would never embarrass his brother, I just wanted to help him. Help the president. So I gave it to Bobby, to give to Jack.”

  “You gave the amulet to Bobby?”

  She nodded slowly. “I did it today, but don’t worry. Bobby knows it’s not for him, that it’s a present from me to Jack. A good-bye present. I told Bobby, I said, ‘It’s not for you, it’s for the commander in chief. Because he’s going to change the world.’ “

  And then in the next instant everything did change. My whole life, and Katya’s life, even Popov’s life, I suppose—it all changed. The Russian moved so fast, it was like there was a five-second delay while my brain caught up with what I was seeing. One moment, he was standing beside me, the diary in one hand, the other hanging loosely at his side. In the next, the diary was on the floor and he was on the bed, straddling Marilyn, and she was making this harsh panting sound.

  At some point she must have made a grab for the telephone because she had it in her hand and was flailing at the air with it.

  I think I might have shouted, “What are you doing?” Or something like that, although what I was thinking was that the Russian had really lost it, that he was going to rape her.

  “Why do you stand there like a poleaxed bear?” he said to me. “Hold her down.”

  I don’t know why I obeyed, but I did. She lay face forward on the bed now, no longer moving. But she was still breathing. I could hear it, that harsh panting louder now than the surf of blood that had been pounding in my ears.

  And then I watched with growing horror as the Russian reached slowly into his pocket and pulled out a small enema.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE us long, probably no more than five minutes, but it was an ugly thing to watch. I held her down while Popov thrust the enema tube up inside her, then he pumped her full of chloral hydrate.

  At least that’s what he told me it was, as my numb hands held her down. Only as the seconds passed there was less and less need, but still I held her down.

  When he was done, he got her Nembutal from the nightstand, dumped the pills into his pocket, then put the now empty bottle back where it was. He picked her diary up from off the floor and tucked it back under his arm.

  His gaze slowly swept the room, then stopped at me, and he smiled. “We are done here.”

  I realized I was still pressing into Marilyn’s shoulders and I flung up my hands as if they’d suddenly caught on fire. I stumbled away from the bed and followed Popov, who was already halfway out of the room.

  At the door, though, he paused, then he turned and went back to the bed. He unhooked her brassiere and rolled her over. He pulled off that pathetic bit of armor, just a few strips of cotton and elastic, and tossed it on the floor. He stared down at her a moment, then positioned her back the way she was before, lying facedown, with the phone tucked underneath her.

  Then he came strolling back to where I waited at the bedroom door, and moving so damn nonchalantly, too, as if we hadn’t just murdered Marilyn Monroe, that I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Popov shrugged. “I wanted to see her tits.”

  BACK IN THE car, Popov was quiet, not scared quiet, just focused. I felt like I’d just popped a half dozen uppers. I was so jittery, my leg was twitching.

  I kept seeing Marilyn the way we’d left her, sprawled naked on her white satin sheets, her hand clutching the telephone as if there were still time for her to make one last, desperate call for help. That poor, pathetic hand, with its cracked nails and chipped polish.

  She would’ve hated the thought of dying like that, not looking her best. And I thought then that I ought to be feeling worse about what we’d done to her, but I was beyond that now. All I cared about was getting away with it.

  I flicked on the radio, half-expecting for one insane moment that her death would already be all over the news, but it was Shelley Fabares singing “Johnny Angel.”

  I shut it off, twisting the knob so hard it snapped off in my hand.

  I could feel Popov’s eyes on me, but he said nothing, so I said nothing. All I had were questions, and he wouldn’t have answered them anyway.

  But then I couldn’t help myself. “What in hell did we just do back there? Why did we just kill Marilyn Monroe?”

  “She was much too famous, and she was not going to shut up. All this talk of hers about the altar of bones, giving it to the Kennedys—questions might be raised, and that would not be good. Not good at all. The altar belongs to Russia. And if your president does drink from it …” To my surprise he actually shuddered. “That could be a very bad thing for both our countries.”

  He paused a moment, then shrugged. “Also, she saw our faces.”

  When we were back on Santa Monica Boulevard, Popov heaved a very Russian-like sigh and said, “It doesn’t matter now. What is done is done. Now we must go and have ourselves a conversation with Katya Orlova.”

  KATYA AND I were renting a little Victorian bungalow on Bunker Hill, near Angel’s Flight, the inclined cable railway that had advertised itself as “The Shortest Paying Railway in the World,” when it opened back in 1901.

  Popov drove right to the place without any help from me, and that got me to wondering what else he had in those pockets of his baggy Russian
suit. A gun, probably. A knife? Another enema filled with chloral hydrate? He was like a fucking Boy Scout—always prepared.

  We didn’t have a garage and parking was tight in that neighborhood, even back then, so he pulled up next to a fire hydrant. The windows were dark, but then it was past midnight now, and I figured Katya and Anna Larina were probably asleep in bed. Only I didn’t see her car parked anywhere on the street, so maybe she wasn’t home after all.

  We got out of the car and started up the steps to the front door. There were a lot of them. Twenty-nine, to be exact, and they were too narrow for us to walk up side by side. So Popov went first and I followed. Katya had set out a few geranium pots, and I thought about picking one up and bashing him over the head with it, but I didn’t, and eventually we were on the stoop and he was waiting for me to fish out my key and let us in.

  “You won’t hurt her?” I said. Then I winced at how pathetic that had sounded, even to myself. And how useless. He’d just killed Marilyn Monroe, for Christ’s sakes, over this altar-of-bones thing. And she had gotten it in the first place from Katya.

  But I looked him straight in the eye and let him get away with the lie.

  “Of course we will not harm her,” he said. “She is your wife.”

  “HONEY, I’M HOME,” I called out just like they did on TV in those days, and, believe me, it sounded hokey even then, but I also figured Popov wouldn’t know any better.

  I needn’t have bothered, though. The house felt empty.

  We stood in the middle of the small living room that was all Katya, decorated with odd, whimsical pieces she’d picked up from flea markets and Chinatown.

  “Where is your bedroom?” Popov said.

  I pointed down the hall. “Ours is the one on the right.”

  While he went that way, I headed straight for the kitchen table, where she usually left a note for me propped up against the sugar bowl if she had to go out unexpectedly. But there wasn’t one.

  I went back into the living room and waited, and a couple of minutes later Popov rejoined me. “She is gone,” he said. “With the child. The closets are empty of their things.”

  I started down the hall to our bedroom, but Popov grabbed me by the shoulder and flung me up against the wall. I felt his grip all the way to the bone, and for a moment there I was seeing my own death in his eyes.

  “What did you tell her?” he said.

  “As far as she knows, I’m a location scout for the studio. She has no idea what else I am.”

  “Then why has she run?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. Then.

  I couldn’t have known it that night, of course, but Katya Orlova would come back to me because she couldn’t stay away, or so she said, and I believed her. Like I said, when she loved you, she loved unconditionally.

  She came only three times during that year between Marilyn’s murder and the other, bigger kill, appearing in our bedroom with no warning, in the dead of night, and she was always gone by dawn. She wouldn’t tell me who she was hiding from, or why, or where she and her kid were living now. And I was too deep in my own lies to force any sort of truth out of her. She came back three times, and that was one thing I made sure to leave out of my reports. I figured what Nikolai Popov didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  The last time she came it was a chilly November night in ‘63, and by then Popov had told me the KGB was going to assassinate the President, and that I was the lucky bastard he’d picked to do the job. “Your Jack Kennedy has to die,” he’d said, “because he drank from the altar of bones, and that makes him dangerous to the world.”

  At the time, I didn’t know what the hell any of it meant—what had been in that damn amulet, and why drinking from it meant Kennedy had to die—but that was the moment when I realized I would need Katya to film the kill for me if I wanted to keep my own sorry self alive. So when she came to me a few nights later, I took the chance. I laid it all out for her, the whole rotten, duplicitous tale, and when I was through, she told me a tale of her own.

  She told me what was in the amulet.

  “I LOVED MARILYN like the sister I never had,” Katya said that night. “I gave her the magic amulet to save her, because I thought it was her only hope. I should have known that in spite of her all her promises she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from talking about it.”

  She made a small sound in the back of her throat, like a caught sob, then went on, “That night at the Brown Derby, when I realized … I should have run then, but I couldn’t bear to leave you. So I watched and waited, and a week or so went by, and I began to think I was safe. But then a man in a red cap followed me home from the studio, and later, while I was fixing supper for Anna Larina, I saw out the kitchen window the same car pass by three times. And there was a man at the bus stop who sat reading a newspaper, and two buses came but he didn’t get on.”

  She shuddered in my arms, turned her face into my shoulder. “I didn’t know then who those men worked for, only that I had to take Anna Larina and run far away. But now you’ve told me his name. Nikolai Popov.” And she spat it out like a curse.

  I made soothing noises and stroked her hair, but I was thinking the surveillance techniques of Popov’s men left a lot to be desired. But then he must have arranged for it on the fly, right after our chat at the Hollywood Bowl.

  “There is another thing you should know,” Katya was saying. “Years ago, when my mother worked in the prison-camp infirmary, she fell in love with a man and he used that love to trick her into taking him to the altar of bones. She gave it to him to drink, and so he thought he knew all its secrets. He thought he would be able to find it again, but he was wrong, and he’s been searching for the altar ever since. Hungering for its power.”

  She sat up and gave me a look I couldn’t read. Her voice, though, was sad and serious. “The man who hunts me now, the man who will make you shoot the President—he’s the same man who seduced and betrayed my mother. Nikolai Popov is my father, Mike, the man who gave me life, and yet I know he would kill me in an instant himself if that meant he could possess the altar of bones.”

  I have to admit I was more surprised by this than I should have been. But then, while I was still digesting that bombshell, she dropped another one on me, and here’s the funny thing, or maybe it’s a tragedy…. She told me that President Kennedy could never have drunk from the altar of bones, because she got it back. She said the morning after our dinner at the Brown Derby, she brought a second amulet over to Marilyn’s house, one that was identical to the first except that it had toilet water in it instead of the altar of bones, and while Marilyn was taking a bath, she switched them out.

  So what Marilyn gave to Bobby the day we murdered her was not the real altar of bones, and, no, I never told Popov that inconvenient truth. I couldn’t think of a way to do it without betraying Katya.

  Over the next couple of weeks, while Popov mapped out the detail of the big kill, Katya and I figured out the best way to save both ourselves from Popov. And it all went according to plan.

  Until the end.

  She filmed the kill from a natural blind and with a zoom lens, so she not only got the killing, she got all our faces in some of the frames. Afterward, we made still prints off it, the shots with their faces in them, and I gave them the prints, so they’d know what I had. I told them as long as both Katya and I stayed fat and sassy and alive, the film would stay buried.

  We were home free then, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the altar of bones. I had to have it. I needed it. But she wouldn’t give it to me, damn her soul to hell. She’d given it to Marilyn, but she wouldn’t give it to me.

  After a while she began to suspect I wanted it bad enough to kill her for it, and God help me, but she was right.

  So she ran. And she took the altar of bones with her to protect herself from me.

  BUT ALL of that was still over a year in the future. At the moment I was more worried about talking Popov out of killing me in the
here and now.

  “If you are lying to me,” Popov said, “I will rip off your balls and make you eat them. Now, think. Is there a friend she could have gone to? A relative?”

  “I don’t know.” That was the truth. Her only real friend had been Marilyn.

  “I could destroy you.” I knew Popov would, too. Without breaking into a sweat, or without an instant’s regret.

  “I still don’t know anything. Hell, I don’t even get what this is all about.”

  I edged my way down the hall, back into the living room, Popov with me every step. Suddenly his gaze sharpened and focused, and I whirled, half-expecting to see Katya standing there.

  But there was no one, and then I realized he was looking at the framed photograph on the fireplace mantel, a larger copy of the one Katya always carried in her purse—of her and Anna Larina standing in front of the studio gates. He went to it and picked it up, stood looking at it for a long time.

  Then he said what I thought was the strangest thing at the time.

  He said, “I thought she’d died in the cave.”

  32

  He said, “I thought she died in the cave.”

  ZOE WIPED THE tears off her cheeks and closed her eyes. She felt a movement beside her: Ry wrapping a throw blanket around her shoulders.

  “You’re so cold your teeth are chattering,” he said.

  She looked down and saw that she held the pages of Mike O’Malley’s story clenched so tightly in her fist she was wrinkling them. She smoothed them out on her lap. “They shot Kennedy for no reason, Ry. My grandmother got the amulet back—we know that part is true, because she said so with her dying breath. So they shot him for no reason. And what they did to poor Marilyn. It’s the way she was killed that seems so awful, to be violated like that. And now they’ve killed your brother, too.”