Altar of Bones (42 page)

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.”

B
ACK 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.”

K
ATYA 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.”

“H
ONEY
, 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
M
ARILYN
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.