The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “How did you know that was my name?”

  “Michelle kept saying it last night.” The corners of her mouth flickered mischievously. “The walls are thin here.”

  “Oh.” He took the hat and put it on his head.

  “I’m Gloria,” she told him.

  They both sensed the stirring in the next room, and glanced in that direction. Then Gloria looked back at Walls—she was still smiling, but more faintly now. She nudged the space between them with her chin, indicating the stairwell at the end of the hall.

  Thank you, Walls mouthed.

  Gloria held his gaze a moment, gave a nod of understanding, and closed the door to him.

  As he maneuvered his black Cadillac Eldorado—a low, lumbering shark of a car, previously owned by Uncle Edward—through the lettered streets he thought how he had always liked the name Gloria. He liked, too, the idea of living in the capital, its quaintness and intentional backwardness. The redbrick façades of Georgetown (which he imagined full of crackling fireplaces and children who still believed their mothers were the most beautiful women in the world) seemed, to Walls, moral and reassuring, especially at this hour, when only the servants were awake.

  He wondered, as he had before on such mornings, if driving through Washington at dawn wasn’t a little like waking up dead: the big gray obelisks, the reflecting pools, the weak blue sky, all quiet and peaceful, and there you were, speeding along a parkway, whistling to yourself, occasionally passing a fellow traveler entombed in his own hulking metal box, as you moved in an ominously tranquil circle.

  He stopped at the diner he liked on D Street, bought the Post from the box outside, ate two fried eggs and four pieces of bacon and drank as much coffee as the waitress could pour in the time it took to read the headlines. When he got back in the car, he removed his holster from the glove compartment and slipped it over his shoulders. Then he put his jacket back in place, checked his face for sufficient seriousness in the rearview mirror (he knew how much it set him back with the other special agents every time he showed the boyish smile), and drove to headquarters. It had become his habit to begin every day with target practice in the basement firing range, even on weekends and mornings when he woke up in strange beds. Perhaps especially on those mornings. He enjoyed the ritual, which made him feel disciplined, prepared for any assignment, and was surprised that so few of his fellow agents did the same.

  At that hour on a Sunday the range was mostly deserted, but he spotted Pete Amberson, his roommate from training, in a stall near the entrance. Pete’s jacket and fedora were hanging from the wall behind him, and the vision of a confederate in uniform for a moment made Walls a believer in the world’s logic and reason. The spareness further settled him—the peeling paint, much pockmarked with bullet holes—and he took a deep breath of the stale basement air, which had the odor of an old gym where fireworks have been set off. “Pete!” he said, raising his hand with an accidental enthusiasm he soon came to regret.

  “Walls,” Pete observed. The muscles of his face flexed as though he were happy to see Walls, in a not exactly friendly way. He opened the chamber to dump the spent cartridges, kicked them into the coppery pile that spread out from under his stall, and replaced his gun in its holster. They shook hands. “You’re here early.”

  “Yes.” Walls shrugged and hung his coat and hat on the hook next to Pete’s. “You, too.”

  “Got to keep sharp.” Pete winked, and changed the subject. “Hope you haven’t bought any furniture.” The meaning of that facial tautness became clear to Walls: Pete had something on him, fodder for the variety of joshing one-upmanship of which he had been the foremost practitioner at Quantico.

  “Some.” This was a lie. Walls lived in a furnished room, and he’d paid so little attention to its décor that he wasn’t sure if he could truthfully say what the color scheme was, or even whether he liked it. “Why?”

  “I hear you got a new assignment.”

  “Really?”

  Hope bloomed briefly in Walls. He was currently the most junior agent on a surveillance operation, the object of which was a group of supposed communists whose rhetoric seemed, to him, undergraduate in the extreme. They printed pamphlets, spoke only in the most abstract terms of any kind of violence, and though his superiors apparently regarded them as a threat, he felt sure their convictions would dissolve long before they did anything that justified arrest. Privately, Walls believed Uncle Edward to be behind this assignment—Uncle Edward was the type of man who, depending on the political climate, alternated between high government posts and big business, and who never sat through a meal without being called away to the telephone. He knew everybody, and though he never expressed any special fondness for Walls, it was in his nature to be gratified by the notion that he’d kept his baby sister’s only child out of the line of fire, far from anything interesting.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “From who?”

  “Saw Special Agent Hoffman this morning—he’s looking for you. That, and the last man on the job is a friend of mine.”

  “What happened to him?”

  The way Pete’s lips curled, Walls knew that the transfer wasn’t going to make him any more impressive than he currently was. “Got himself on an organized crime case up in New York. Big-time stuff.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Word is you’re the Director’s new peeping tom on Marilyn.”

  “Monroe?” The fact that the one name followed the other so automatically did not make its utterance in this locale any less outrageous.

  “And I must say I think you owe it to all of us to end up on Marilyn.”

  Ignoring the comment, Walls asked, “Why me?”

  “Maybe he thought it takes a blond to get inside the head of another blonde.” Pete snickered. “Maybe he thought you’d look good in a bathing suit, soaking up the California sun.”

  “California?”

  Though he would have liked an answer to this question, Walls was relieved when Pete shrugged noncommittally and went for his coat and hat. Once he was fully dressed it was clear the ribbing was over, and his features assumed a professional blockiness. He was Amberson again; the two men shook hands and agreed they’d see each other soon, disregarding how unlikely that future seemed now.

  “Lucky man,” said Hoffman, Walls’s immediate superior, when he arrived some minutes later.

  Walls was loading his weapon—the handgun he had been issued at the end of training—and was glad of the excuse not to be facing his boss. “Why the hell are we following a movie star anyway?”

  “You know how the Director likes his Hollywood gossip.” Hoffman leaned against the beige wall, arms crossed over his chest, shaking his head so that the cheeks of his fallen, gin-ruined face quivered; Walls had never seen him so happy. “She is married to a Red.”

  “That’s all intellectual posturing.” Walls turned away and lifted his gun, stared down the barrel at the target—the silhouette of a man in a hat, a mobster, maybe, which was as it should be. He’d seen the original production of Death of a Salesman on Broadway with his mother, and even as a teenager he’d recognized it as the work of an inveterate blowhard. “Are they really sending me to California?”

  “Yes.”

  “But doesn’t she live in New York?” he asked, not sure exactly how he’d come by the information.

  “Seems the man currently on Marilyn”—Hoffman’s tone indicated that he found this pun just as amusing as Pete had—“thinks her marriage is about to implode, and his sources indicate she’s going to California to get away from it all.”

  “Why me?” Walls asked again. He kept his voice even, let the gun speak his displeasure. A boom in the ears, heat in the hand, and he watched the bullet rip through the target’s forehead as though it were more than paper, as though the shot really had splintered bone, splattered brain. Smashed the target’s head open, like a pumpkin against a concrete wall.

  Hoffman was kinder than Pete. “Can�
��t have a married man listening to all that late-night pillow talk” was his obviously fallacious explanation.

  “You’re not married.”

  This was cruel of Walls, and he knew it—Hoffman’s wife had left him for good the last time he fell off the wagon. Hoffman knew it, too. “Guess it’s probably because your mother’s Mosey Moses,” he said, in a voice that meant the conversation was about to be over.

  Of course the minute Amberson said California, Walls had known why he would be given such a silly, dead-end assignment. His mother: Maureen “Mosey” Douglass, a.k.a. Mo Walls, a.k.a. Mosey Moses, lean and fair, wild and elegant, a hothouse flower with razor-edged cheekbones, she of the Long Island Douglasses, whose family fortune had been more or less wiped out in the crash only to be resurrected by her older brother, Edward; who had run off during the Depression with a well-connected gambler named Wes Walls; who had been socially ostracized for her excesses, and all but abandoned upon her divorce, only to triumph as the third wife of a studio head named Lou Moses. Of course her old friends who had left her for dead relished this final point of ignominy—that she had married a Jew. But that was before she started throwing famous parties at her Holmby Hills mansion (in fact, it was three conjoined properties), to which actors and actresses and foreign royals were invited, but none of the people she’d gone to boarding school with or known socially during the years she’d tried to be a Greenwich housewife. Walls did not care that his stepfather was a Jew; this was, for him, the least of his mother’s transgressions.

  “Good luck, kid,” Hoffman said, dropping the file on the floor before walking out. The papers hitting the cement sounded to Walls like an indifferent farewell to his entire career.

  There were five bullets left in the chamber, and he shot them off one after another as fast he could, tearing the target at both knees, groin, stomach, heart. But his accuracy only increased his sense of futility. His ears rang as he shook the cartridges on the ground, jerked his things from their hooks, and left.

  FOUR

  Chicago, March 1959

  IT had taken three Seconal just to stitch together a few hours sleep last night, and she asked for a second Bloody Mary when she realized that the descent into Midway wasn’t going to be smooth. The plane was small, and she could hear every thrum of the engine and the wind through its walls, and that was before they hit the weather over Lake Michigan. For the first time in some years her fear of flying rose beyond a hazily pleasant fatalism, and she put her palm against the little oval window and let her eyes scan the blue surface below to the place where it met land. She wanted to make it there. If she had a father, somewhere in the world, then there was a reason to land safely after all.

  The airport was coming up now, and she wondered what was in Chicago. Alexei had only said that it would be better for her to know less, and to be free to arrive at her hotel as she would for any junket. Mostly she disliked being told what to do, but in times of trouble she could on occasion enjoy surrendering to a task, especially when the promised reward was great. And Alexei had made the biggest promise of all. That the thing she was to do here would finally reunite her with her father was the most recurrent thought in the circle of her mind, and she didn’t really snap-to until the steps were down and she saw that the publicity people had done their groundwork. A crowd of well-wishers were gathered under a gray sky, and they shrieked when they saw her descending to the tarmac. She took a moment, on the last step, to turn herself up a notch. I’m Marilyn Monroe, she thought, and reviewed a few of the particulars: the clinging, camel-colored turtleneck sweater dress, a long fur, high white pumps, her hair curling flamboyantly toward and away from the line of her jaw. She was glad that she had fixed her lipstick before disembarking. Her shoulders drew back as she moved into the waiting crowd, and she met the eye of as many well-wishers as possible to let them know she appreciated the welcome.

  By the time her car pulled away from the airport she was feeling quite alive. Why did she always bitch and balk at these trips? It was invigorating, really, to arrive in some town where you didn’t know anybody and have a lot of good people cheer for you. She saw that she had been afraid to leave New York, where her days were structured around visits with her analyst and acting classes. Perhaps all she’d really needed was a change of scenery. Arthur would be halfway up the Saw Mill by now, and she didn’t miss him.

  A light rain was falling when they arrived at the Ambassador East, but she kept her sunglasses on as she followed her public relations man across the sidewalk. Without so much as raising her chin, she took her key from Daniel (or David?), her publicity minder, and left him at the desk to sort out the practicalities of luggage and a room for her to get dressed in. There would be a luncheon with the local press in a few hours, and she had been firm that she would need time alone before that.

  When she turned away from the reception desk the same thing happened that always happened when she walked across a room. A subtle combination of conversations breaking off and chairs creaking as people turned to look and a low murmur (the meaning of which she might read as hostile, depending on her mood). But the sense of freedom her early morning departure from New York had given her was still strong, and she breathed in the rare, reverent atmosphere. That hit lasted until she passed the final column and saw the row of brass elevators, and experienced a presentiment of danger. The old tells—a tingling along the skin of her ears and a tightening of her throat—and she knew she was being watched. Not in the way she wanted to be watched, but with predacious, hungry eyes.

  Even so, she kept her shoulders relaxed and smiled brilliantly at the young man who was manning the elevators. He looked at her shyly and then looked away. As she waited for the brass doors to open she focused all her good will on him, letting her fur slip off her shoulders and down to her elbows. She remembered that David (or Daniel) was there to take care of her; that Alexei, too, was alert to any threats to her safety; that she had traveled far from the sorrowful, helpless feeling that had sent her out walking late last night; and that she was on the verge of solving the great riddle of her life. But the sensation of being followed persisted until the bell dinged and the doors opened.

  “Tenth floor,” she said with a wink.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, only half raising his eyes to her as she glided past him into the elevator. She leaned against the mirrored wall, relieved to be alone, and closed her eyes. The mechanism of the doors groaned as they reached for each other, and a man came in after her quite suddenly like an unexpected gust of weather.

  “Going up,” he told the boy brashly.

  The veins in her wrists constricted, but she kept her body in a smooth curve against the mirror. The floor underneath sank a little before it lifted. Without any hurry she let her eyes open, lazily and only halfway.

  “I’m Jack.” He spoke in a fast, confident way, like a talent agent might.

  His sport coat was dark brown and he didn’t wear a tie and he was leaning against the wall opposite her with one ankle crossed over the other, in a posture of total ease. The loafers he wore were expensive mahogany leather, and the neat trim of his hair did not obscure its virile thickness. She could see her own face reflected on the mirror just behind him, as though they were some kind of two-headed astrological beast. There was a striking contrast between their faces—the skin of hers was pale, and his was so tan—and the opposing mirrors repeated them over and over and over. Of course she recognized him—he was one of the Kennedy clan the press so loved to fawn over, one of Joe’s boys (“that old Nazi,” Arthur used to call him)—but she wasn’t about to pass up the satisfaction of acting like he was nobody to her.

  “Jack.” She half whispered the name, but the tentativeness was for him, not her. Her full lips trembled toward each other without meeting, and she went on, in a voice she might have used to tell some fellow he was her king: “You’re awfully impressed with yourself, aren’t you, Jack?” The sound was sweet, but she meant it mean.

  “I’m aw
fully impressed with you,” he answered, unfazed. “That’s no crime, is it?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t really alleging any kind of crime. But I don’t care much for pretty boys.”

  “Lucky me.” His gaze shifted slightly, so that he was meeting his own eyes in the mirror behind her. The jauntiness of his grin and the intensity of his look remained the same, and she was briefly sorry they weren’t focused on her anymore. “There’s no way anybody would call me pretty when I’m standing next to you.”

  His eyes were focused on her again, almost blindingly, and she returned his gaze long enough to let him know she could take it. The thing he wanted to do was plain on his face: He wanted to shove her against the elevator’s wall and lift her skirt. She turned, very slowly, and showed him her profile. “You’re a real womanizer, aren’t you, Jack?”

  It wasn’t a question, and before he had time to attempt an answer the bell dinged and the brass arrow overhead pointed to the number ten. Languorously she stepped away from the wall. Jack moved faster, already ahead of her, and for a moment she thought that he was going to block her way, but he didn’t—he just straddled the entry, one foot in the elevator and one in the hallway, holding the doors for her. Slowly, exquisitely, she advanced onto the thick golden carpet of the hallway and rotated to face him. Perhaps two feet of air separated their bodies, all of it electric. Just the hint of a smile as she paused, daring him to come up with a line worthy of her.

  His grin held steady. “Going to the Pump Room later?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, trying not to show her disappointment that he hadn’t tried harder. “The studio always has something planned.”

  “Hope you disregard them, and show at the Pump Room.” His tone was practical, staccato, with nothing of her feathery suggestion. He stepped back inside and didn’t meet her eyes again until the doors were closing. Then he lifted his chin slightly, and put his gaze on her. “You’re even better looking in the flesh,” he said, and though he was still grinning, his voice had grown grave.