Altar of Bones (38 page)

I
T 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.

B
EFORE 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 busy 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.

S
O 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.

And the funny thing was, she could’ve used the money. She was only getting a hundred K for starring in
Something’s Got to Give
, which might seem like a lot for those days, but when you figure Liz Taylor was paid a million for
Cleopatra
, and when you’re a movie star, you got to live like a movie star …

So, anyway, Marilyn was in her “disguise” that night, but she had the maître d’ seat us close to her place on the “Wall of Fame”—these framed caricatures of famous and maybe not-so-famous movie stars and other Hollywood big shots that went all the way back to 1929. And she made sure it was a booth with a phone jack, so the waiter could bring a telephone over should an important call come in. Also, no sooner do we sit down then some girl with a cigarette tray and a camera comes along and offers to take our picture for a buck, and Marilyn says, “Sure, honey. Why not?”

I didn’t get the logic of this, going incognito to a place where everyone was sure to recognize you anyway. All that time I spent around the woman, and I never understood the first thing about her. But then I’d probably never seen her when she wasn’t acting.

“You look at her and see a world-famous movie star,” Katya told me once. “But inside she’s feeling like a scared little girl, afraid that if you stripped away her blond hair and breasts, she’d just be a nobody. She wants to be loved for herself, unconditionally, and not as a sex object.”

Unconditional love. Yeah, it sounded good all right, but I’d discovered long ago that there were conditions attached to just about everything. Still, maybe that explained how a world-famous movie star ended up being best friends with a cameraman’s gofer.

Because when Katya Orlova loved you, she did so unconditionally.

S
O THAT NIGHT
at the Brown Derby, over our Cobb salads, Marilyn started talking about sex in that breathy bedroom voice of hers.

“If they gave out Oscars for faking it,” she said, “I’d have so many on my mantelpiece it would crack right in two. I’ve done some of my best acting convincing my lovers I was in the throes of ecstasy.”

“I doubt they took all that much convincing,” I said, thinking that all the guys she’d slept with probably hadn’t given a rat’s ass if she came or sang the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

She made a face at me, but her eyes were fairly dancing with delight because she liked being teased, and she liked the idea that right at this very moment I was probably imagining what a romp in the sheets with her would be like, and, yeah, I was. I’m not dead.

But then the smile turned brittle, and an awkward silence fell over the table. So Katya, ever Marilyn’s rescuer, said, “You haven’t eaten much of your salad tonight, darling. Only rearranged it on your plate. You need to eat. You’re getting too skinny.”

This pleased Marilyn so much she held out her forearm, gave her flesh a good squeeze, then laughed again. “Jack likes me skinny. He never came out and said it, but I think he thought I was too fat there for a while. He likes me to pose in front of him wearing nothing but a fur coat, and then I do this thing with my shoulders and the coat slides off …”

Katya and I exchanged a look, but neither of us said anything. To Marilyn, it was as if we weren’t there, or she was just too dense to realize how really bizarre it was for her to talk so nonchalantly about screwing the president of the United States.

“To tell you the truth, Jack makes love like a boy,” she went on, “but it’s still kind of sweet, and it never matters because he actually talks to
me about politics and things. He treats me like I have a mind, that I’m not just all tits and ass.”

I blinked at that, couldn’t help it. I held a forkful of salad halfway to my mouth while my mind tried to process this remarkable piece of self-delusion. I thought of the secret files I’d read on the President’s sexual exploits. The orgies in the White House swimming pool, countless one-night stands, or rather more like thirty-minute stands, a near endless stream of women, both classy and low, and the way he talked about them. He called them “poontang.” Tits and ass.

Yet here was Miss Sex Appeal Personified thinking the man valued her for the wonders of her mind.

“James Joyce could really penetrate the human soul, don’t you think?” Marilyn was now saying, and don’t ask me how she got from fucking the President to English Lit 101. “I’ve been reading Molly Bloom’s mental meanderings—see, I can be clever with words just like you, Mike…. Now, here is Joyce, a man, writing about what a woman thinks to herself, but he got it, didn’t he? All our pain and insecurities. And I’ve been reading Shakespeare too, memorizing whole chunks, because I’ve been thinking I could produce and act in the Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Film Festival. I’ll approach all his major plays from the female point of view.”