Altar of Bones (41 page)

“Then you do not believe she has given the amulet to your President?”

I laughed at that, although I wasn’t sure why. “She hasn’t had the chance,” I said. “Not since the ‘Happy Birthday’ fiasco.”

The Russian stood up. “Good. Then we will go and get it from her.”

I felt like I’d suddenly been knocked on my ass by heatstroke, like I wasn’t hearing things right. I stared up at the tall Russian, blinking the sweat out of my eyes. I drew in a deep breath—

“No, don’t bother to ask why, Mr. O’Malley. How do you say it in your CIA? It is on a need-to-know basis and you do not need to know.”

“Okay, forget why. Let’s try for a how. Are you going to walk right up to her and rip it off her neck?”

“If necessary.” The man who called himself Nikolai Popov smiled, but the cold in his eyes was cut right out of the snow-covered steppes of Siberia.

He shot the cuff of his silk shirt to look at the time on a gold Rolex. A pretty damn expensive getup, I thought, for a Communist. “At nine o’clock tonight I will pick you up on the corner of … What is that famous place where all the sexy starlets hang out? Hollywood and …”

“Vine,” I said, only it came out as a squeak.

“Yes. Hollywood and Vine. Do not be late.”

S
O HOW
are we going to play this?” I asked later that night, as we turned off San Vicente with its huge coral trees and into the area of Brentwood known as the Helenas. Not la-di-da mansions by any means, but they’d still set you back a pretty penny.

“It is not nuclear physics,” Nikolai Popov said. “We go in, we get the amulet, we leave.”

The retro globe streetlamps cast intermittent pools of light on the eucalyptus trees, but the houses were shrouded behind high walls, and the streets and sidewalks were deserted. Nobody was out walking their dog or putting the garbage in the can.

I expected Popov would drive by Marilyn’s cul-de-sac and park somewhere farther down on one of the other streets. Instead we turned down Fifth Helena Drive and headed right toward number 12305, with its bougainvillea-draped whitewashed walls. I was surprised to see the big, green front gates yawning wide-open, as if she’d been expecting us.

Popov slammed the car door getting out, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. A dog started barking, somewhere out back, but no lights sprang on. The night air felt balmy, with just the barest breeze stirring the tops of the tall eucalyptus trees.

“Here,” Popov said, as he pulled out of his pocket a wad of what turned out to be a couple pairs of a doctor’s rubber gloves. “Put these on.”

It was funny, I thought, as I snapped the gloves on over my sweating hands. Not ha-ha funny, but ironic funny. Here I was a traitor, a double agent. I’d been stealing my country’s secrets for the Russians for years, yet tonight was the first time I’d ever felt like a thief.

T
HE FRONT DOOR
was locked, but Popov popped it open with a set of burglar picks.

He clicked on a penlight as we stepped into a living room of thick white carpeting, textured alabaster walls, and dark-beamed ceilings. There was little furniture, just a wooden bench along one wall, a red couch along the other, a plain wooden coffee table flanked by four Mexican-style stools. But stacks of records sat in corners next to piles of magazines and cartons of books.

“This does not look like the house of a movie star,” Popov said.

“She bought a bunch of furniture in Mexico,” I said, for some strange reason feeling suddenly defensive of her, like I owned her in some way. Owned her sins and her foibles. “The stuff’s taking its own sweet time getting here from the land of mañana.”

Through the window that opened out back, I could see moonlight glinting off the water in the pool she rarely swam in. A stuffed toy tiger lay, as if abandoned, alongside one of the patio chairs. It wasn’t the kind of thing Marilyn went in for, and I wondered what it was doing there.

“She will most likely have it with her in the bedroom,” Popov said. “We will go there first.”

T
HE BEDROOM DOOR
was locked, but again the Russian picked it easily.

It was pitch-dark inside, the air cloying and sweet with the scent of her Chanel No. 5 perfume. I heard the scratch of a needle circling around the end of a record, and the soughing sound of her drugged breathing.

The beam of Popov’s flashlight played around the room, picking out a pair of black stilettos on the floor, a pile of dirty clothes, and more stacks of records, a brass wall sconce.

Then, as if the Russian had been prolonging the moment, savoring it, the flashlight beam found Marilyn on the bed.

Her white telephone lay beside her, dangling half off the hook. The light found it first, then moved over her body. She lay on her side, her
arms and legs sprawled. She was drooling a little, and I felt embarrassed for her. She was nude except for a brassiere.

She wasn’t wearing the amulet.

The flashlight beam jumped over to a bedside table barely bigger than a dinner plate, overflowing with more stuff than I could make out. A lot of pill bottles. A stack of papers. Letters? A box of Kleenex.

Popov started toward the table, tripped over a carton of books, and swore out loud in Russian. Marilyn didn’t even stir.

He flicked on the lamp, and although it was a small lamp, light seemed to flood the room after the utter darkness of before.

“There, that is better,” he said. “No sense groping around like blind men in a whorehouse.” He looked around the room, his lips curled in disgust. “What a pigsty.”

“She gets bad bouts of depression sometimes,” I said, still whispering, and again feeling stupidly like I had to defend her.

I went to the phonograph and turned it off—the scratching was grating on my already raw nerves. Frank Sinatra, I saw, from the label as the record spun slowly down and stopped.

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.

I
T 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.