The Blonde (47 page)

FORTY-TWO

Dallas, November 1963

THE diner on the corner of Maple and Winchester had big windows and two exits, a good view of the street. She’d been there once before—maybe two months ago, maybe four. As Mrs. Ivan Lancer she often went to diners. In her old life, breakfast had not been her bag, except occasionally in liquid form. The meal itself had seemed utilitarian, and the timing conflicted with the hours that were her best bet for sleep. But now she woke with first light, and had come to like the atmosphere in places that served chicken-fried steak and pecan pie with vanilla ice cream and flapjacks under brilliant lighting. Of course, as Mrs. Ivan Lancer she rarely used a name (Mary, if politeness required) and always paid cash, and made eye contact only long enough not to appear evasive. The waitress behind the counter was having a bad morning, and she waved Marilyn to a stool without a second glance.

“What’ll you have, honey?” the waitress drawled while wiping down the Formica to Marilyn’s left, her head tilted away as she surveyed coffee levels in the mugs of the customers lined up against the counter.

“Eggs over easy. Rye toast, no butter. Coffee, black.”

“You got it, hon.”

“Thanks.”

She went to bars, too, although she no longer drank much. Only when it would draw attention not to, and on those occasions she found she had lost her taste for alcohol. But like diners they were good places to overhear things, encounter people when their guard was down, and it was in a bar that she located Hank Foley. The first time he chatted her up it was at a
joint called Florence’s Hotsy-Totsy, and he’d implied that he was an oil-and-gas man, but the working girls said that when he was drunk he sometimes boasted of CIA connections. They warned her to watch out for him, said he hit with a closed fist. For a while she demurred, rattling her wedding and engagement rings at him with a coy smile. Holding out did its neat trick. He became more persistent, almost desperate, tried to impress her by hinting at insider knowledge of government intrigue. Finally she let him rub against her one night while Sinatra was on the jukebox; the next week, she told him her husband was out of town. They’d walked into the parking lot, and his alcoholic breath stung her eyes right before he shoved her against his car.

In the morning, as they lay together in the motel bed (Hank also claimed to be married), he’d observed, “You know, if you dyed your hair, gained ten pounds, and stayed out of the sun, you’d look just like Marilyn Monroe.” He wasn’t the first person to say this to her, although it happened less frequently than she would have imagined.

“But I like the sun,” she had replied cutely. “And I’d be all wrong blonde. Anyway, we all know what happened to her.”

“Yeah, that was a damn shame.” He had shaken his head and lit a cigarette. “Beautiful girl like that.”

Her understanding of the events of August 5, 1962, was mainly patched together from this variety of interaction. She skirted discussions of the presumed suicide of Marilyn Monroe, but especially in the beginning it had been a big story, and she’d been unable to avoid it entirely. Later she guessed that people recognized her unconsciously, and were moved to express their true feelings about the deceased movie star. She herself only knew that she said good-bye to her house, and to Dr. Greenson, and swallowed the drugs he’d promised her. The ones that would make her sleep like the dead for twenty-four hours. When she’d come out of it, in a broom closet in the morgue, the coroner, Dr. Noguchi, had been chain-smoking, and appeared deeply relieved to feel her pulse growing stronger. “I’ve never heard of anybody your
weight taking that stuff and coming out of it,” he’d said. Then she’d given him what she had promised, on her back on the autopsy table. That was the deal they had struck, the night she killed Alexei, when she had wandered into his office barefoot and distraught. After he’d smuggled her out of the police station in the trunk of his car, she had reminded him that if he ever told anybody she was alive he would lose his job and his medical license, everyone would call him crazy, that he might be institutionalized, and that she personally would not rest until she had taught him the true meaning of pain. He assured her that he had an unidentified body—five-six, a hundred and sixteen, bottle blonde—already picked out to autopsy and cremate for the burial, and she flinched, and tried not to think what befell that poor honey. Then she removed the contents of Alexei’s suitcase—transferred to a lady-like tote—from the bus station locker where she’d stored it, and disappeared.

“Thanks,” he had said, with what she could only comprehend as sincere gratitude.

In her youth, trading sex in this way hadn’t seemed to cost her much. She’d traded shrewdly, and that had made all the difference. Later, after she’d realized that Arthur wasn’t going to become everything she hoped, she’d given it away vengefully, to almost anyone. But that was a long time ago. With the coroner, she had to set her teeth and tell herself that she was doing it for Jack, to keep Jack safe. Luckily she’d still been groggy and had managed to hold the retching for when she was alone. By the night she was first treated to Hank Foley’s labored breathing and copious perspiration, she’d come to think of herself as a kind of Joan of Arc, beyond the needs or denigrations of the flesh. Her skin was brown, her hair was an unremarkable shade of bark, and she had more or less forgotten the lure of her own glory.

It was not until recently that she understood how Hank fit in. They had left the Hotsy-Totsy together, not trying to hide it, and he was already cock-eyed. “Hey, gorgeous, mind if we take a detour? I need to do a quick check on one of my people.”

This was maybe their fifth assignation, and she had steered clear of him for the previous two weeks. She figured if she gave him the runaround he’d become stupid, try to show her how important he was. “All right,” she’d said indifferently, gazing into her compact. “But I’ve got to be home by midnight in case my husband calls from the road. He was suspicious last time; if it happens again he’ll load his shotgun, come looking for you.”

Hank emitted a low, macho chortle and said something like “If it came to that,
he’s
the one I’d be worried about,” and then, “Why don’t you leave that joker? We can go to Reno for the divorce, and Vegas for the wedding.”

As they drove he went on trying to impress her that way, and she had continued to blow smoke out the passenger window of his Ford Galaxie. She was glad that her face was averted when they pulled up at a tiny clapboard house on West Neely where she finally glimpsed the man she’d come to Dallas in search of. Oswald was in the living room. She saw him clearly through the window, and the wife had her back to Lee trying to stop the baby from crying.

“Who were they?” Marilyn asked, a few minutes after they drove on.

“He’s a pain in my ass. She’s his pain-in-the-ass Russian wife.”

“You mean they’re commies?” She couldn’t risk doing the doe-eyes that had worked so well for her as Marilyn, but with Hank, a skeptical tone had the same tongue-loosening effect.

“Sort of. We sent him over around the time of the U-2 debacle. We sent a bunch like him—U.S. Marines posing as socialist sympathizers. Marines are catnip for the KGB; they go nuts when they get their hands on those boys. We figured they’d pick them up, some of them would succeed in infiltrating, and some of them they’d sniff out and send back, but either way we win. The ones they send back give us a picture of their operation, how they handle defectors. But they knew right away with this guy. Locked him in a mental hospital, made it look like he’d attempted suicide, interrogated him, sent him to the boonies, got him to knock up one of theirs. Waited for him to get sick of Russian winters. Easy as pie.”

“So he’s a traitor? And she’s controlling him with her bedroom wiles, something tawdry like that.”

“Lord no. She’s just a kid, and he’s a nutcase. Unstable. Can’t believe the Marines ever took him in the first place. Fancies himself some kind of boy-genius double agent. She might have some training, but she’s low level, if she’s anything. We’ve been trying to use the situation with Marina—that’s the wife—get him to infiltrate communist groups here, but so far he just keeps fucking up. Like I said, pain in my ass.”

Oh, Hank, you goddamn idiot
, she thought.

But it was the final piece she’d needed to make sense of the jumble of coded messages and notes she had discovered in Alexei’s bungalow. Dallas had already been her destination, almost as soon as her death was publicized, because that was where Alexei had been headed. Or anyway where his final airplane ticket would have taken him. The month that followed had been agony for so many reasons, but mostly what she remembered was the confusion over who she ought to be looking for, and how frustrated she’d been trying to make sense of the numerical messages from Moscow. She’d never known humidity like that, and had smoked cigarettes out the motel window, and watched how the elms wept with summer rain. She had tried not to cry too much, and tanned by her motel swimming pool once the storms passed, and went to the movies at night to quiet her mind.

The theater near her third motel had been playing old war movies, and one night she watched a Nazi melodrama that involved a book cipher, and realized what those numbers were for. It had taken her some months to find an antiquarian shop (she’d had to drive all the way to New Orleans) that had the same edition of the complete Shakespeare that lay on Alexei’s unmade bed the day she’d gone to his Hell’s Kitchen apartment. She had always suspected that he chose Hal as their code name for Jack to stroke her literary pretensions, but now she saw that it fit into the larger system, too. Perhaps everything in this life has at least two reasons, she’d thought as she began
running her fingers over the pages of Alexei’s diary once again. The codes had her thumbing to
Lear
and
The Tempest
, until she understood that a mariner named Oswald had been of interest to Alexei for a long time, and that he had returned to the country in June of 1962.

Lonely, imaginative, delusions of historical destiny
, Alexei had written in November 1958. That might have been an observation about her, but in November of 1958 they hadn’t spoken in almost ten years.

Likes publicity about self
, Alexei had jotted in November of 1959.

This, too, might have been about her, but in the fall of 1959 she had been in New York avoiding the press, and her contact with Alexei was minimal. Once she had decided it was in reference to another publicity hound, this phrase had led her to the library, and an article that ran in the
Dallas Morning News
on November 1, 1959, about a local Marine named Oswald defecting to the Soviet Union. According to Alexei’s coded messages, his mariner returned to the new world in June 1962, which was about when Alexei had tried to strangle her—the night he had told her that her replacement was already on his way. This time the newspapers didn’t care—there was no mention of a Marine named Oswald in June 1962—but she was beginning to understand the scheme by then. She had the code, so she knew that Oswald had notified Alexei that he was living at his mother’s in Fort Worth, but suggested his handler put off traveling to Texas a few months, as he was being monitored by a man named Hank Foley.

But she had not known, until Hank Foley had driven her down Neely Street at eleven miles an hour, where to find him. Or why Alexei, in his communications with Moscow, had begun, in the spring of 1961, to reference Oswald’s twin.

“Some double agent,” Hank had muttered, and clapped a hand on her knee as he sped off. But once he said it she knew it was true, and not in the way he meant.

There was Oswald, and there was Oswald’s twin. Oswald was a lonely
and imaginative Marine whom Alexei had encountered in California, probably while he was on leave, sometime in late 1958. Oswald’s twin was a highly trained Soviet agent who had been groomed his entire life for a single, elite mission. Oswald was a troubled romantic, who believed his intelligence ought to mean something. It would have been easy for Alexei to manipulate him, as it had been easy for Alexei to manipulate her, and with the courtly, erudite Russian’s encouragement, Oswald had returned to the base in Japan where he was stationed, and made himself conspicuous to CIA recruiters, who in turn had sent him off to renounce his citizenship at the American embassy in Moscow, prompting the newspaper mentions of which he was apparently proud. Oswald’s twin was a skilled sniper, a master of accents, a perfect mimic, and, she presumed, indifferent to fame. In the summer of 1962, the CIA had made it easy for their agent Oswald, along with his new Russian wife, to return to the United States. But they had gotten Oswald’s twin instead.

Maybe, like the “father” she had seen through a false mirror in Payne Whitney, the face of Oswald’s twin had been reconstructed. He had been given the face of a former Marine with intelligence connections and a family to go home to in Texas. Of course, Alexei knew every detail of that connection, his habits of speech and the way he thought, and would have passed the information on to Oswald’s twin, so that he could better play the part. With a shudder, Marilyn realized that the slight, dark-haired man she had been trying to locate in Dallas was not American at all. Was that twitchy, resentful gaze his own, or was it an exquisitely honed impression? The real Lee Harvey Oswald was still in Russia, if he was anywhere, and whether his fate was a labor camp or a grand apartment and a new girl from the provinces every month, she would never know. Apparently Alexei had not cared what had happened to him, or had not needed to be told.

She might have shared her theory with Hank, but she knew nobody truly important would need to brag and strut the way he did. He had no real power, and would only get in her way. She had continued their affair long enough
to collect some tidbits about what he had been up to, Oswald’s movements over the summer and early fall, when he had made trips to New Orleans and Mexico City. Hank had sent him on the first trip to try and infiltrate Castro supporters, and the second to try and get into Cuba itself (with the ultimate goal of assassinating El Comandante, Hank implied, although she doubted it), but both missions had failed. Hank chalked this up to incompetence, but Marilyn was becoming ever more convinced that the man he was calling Oswald had been born in another world and had failed on purpose. He might even, in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, have been able to communicate with Moscow without the usual subterfuge.