“Please,” he said, pulling away with dignity, holding up one hand. “You must allow me to get pants.”
“All right — but shake a leg!”
Having no idea how shaking a leg would quicken the act of putting on pants, Nikita rose from the window. Should he believe her? He gazed down at her sweet, earnest face. Yes — of course he should.
This instinctive belief in Marilyn — along with other gut instincts that had saved his life more than once over many a harrowing year — now urged him to flee.
He snatched his tan trousers from a nearby chair, pulled them quickly over his pajama bottoms, then plucked up his brown shoes. He closed the straight razor and slipped it in his pants pocket.
“Hurry, hurry!” Marilyn cried from the window.
No time for socks, and for a shirt the pajama top would have to do. Shoes in hand, Nikita climbed through the window, and swiftly, agilely, followed Marilyn down the fire escape, even as behind him he heard the splintering of the door to his locked room…
…then the unmistakable snick, snick, snick of a sound-suppressed automatic pistol, as bullets chewed up the bed where fortunately — thanks to Marilyn Monroe — he was no longer at rest… though had she not come, sleep would finally have come to him.
Nikita and Marilyn were halfway down the fire escape when a bullet zinged off the railing just behind them, barely missing the premier.
Marilyn shrieked and froze.
Nikita grabbed her hand and pulled the trembling woman along, and they raced down the fire escape, feet clattering and clanging on the metal, and above them other feet were doing the same; then they jumped the last few steps as another bullet from the silenced gun smacked into the hotel’s wall with a poof!, spraying them with pink plaster.
Together they ran around the back of the building, and along the deserted swimming pool, the moon placid and unimpressed as it shimmered off the still water. Then the couple burst through the foliage at the pool’s end.
“This way!” Marilyn cried, taking the lead, pulling Nikita across the hotel grounds by one hand, his shoes clutched in his other, as the two went winding around and through the lavishly flower-arrayed and shrub-flung landscape. They did not hear anyone in pursuit, and maybe they’d eluded the assassin… Nikita sensed it was only one person…
As they rounded a bush, Marilyn stumbled, nearly falling over a body sprawled on the grass. She stifled a scream with her hands.
Nikita, breathing heavily, looked down at one of his Okhrana guards, lying face up, a small black hole in the forehead of his pockmarked face.
“This is guard on fire escape,” he said flatly.
Her voice was breathy, an out-of-wind whisper. “But… he was one of the men in the bathroom!”
“A traitor betrayed. Forget him.” Nikita looked at her urgently. “Where is car?”
“Over there!” Marilyn pointed to a blue vehicle parked in front of one of the hotel’s little houses. Then she dug in a pocket of her jeans and pulled out some keys.
“I’ll drive,” she said.
“It is your city,” he said.
Hand in hand, they ran to the car and climbed in, Marilyn behind the wheel, Nikita next to her.
She started the engine and drove quickly out of the hotel grounds. At the street, she turned left, the car making a protesting squeal, and sped away down a wide, all-but-deserted street bordered by palms. The famous Sunset Boulevard, a street sign
told him.
“Where are we going?” Nikita asked Marilyn, as the city
streaked by. “Police?”
“No! I don’t trust anybody right now… except you.” Bright lights in the darkness flashed around them, as he
managed a smile; he began to put on his shoes. “You are smart woman.”
“I thought of somewhere safe,” she said, her face wet with tears; but she was smiling — she seemed proud of herself. “The one place no one… no American, no Russian… will ever think to look for you… not in a million years.”
He frowned at the pretty thing. “Where is this place?”
Her eyes were a little wild as she beamed at him. “It’s called Disneyland. Didn’t you want to go there?”
Chapter Ten
Nightmare in Red
In his dream, Jack Harrigan was no longer working for the State Department; he was with the CIA, its director, Allen Dulles, having personally asked for Harrigan’s transfer, dispatching him on a dangerous foreign assignment.
Right now Harrigan was in Hungary — or a dreamscape version of it anyway, in black-and-white and splashed with shadows like an old crime movie, the sound of a zither plunking, as the spy walked along — a Luger in a hand stuffed deep in a trenchcoat pocket — cutting down narrow, strangely-angled, rubble-littered streets, the perspective all wrong. He was in a hurry to meet his contact, who had valuable information that could save the world; but the CIA man couldn’t remember who that contact was, or where in this Caligari world he was to meet that informant.
Then, out of the dark recess of a bombed-out doorway, stepped a beautiful blonde — Marilyn Monroe!
Her dress was skin tight and blood-red; it looked painted on, but the paint wasn’t dry, the effect liquid, like blood, and her full lips were damp too, painted the same startling color in a world otherwise black and white. Her high heels were black and her flesh creamy white, making a startling contrast against the gray, decayed, bullet-pocked wall behind her.
Suddenly Harrigan remembered: she was his informant!
He leaned into the recess of the doorway, as if to kiss her; instead, he asked, “What do you have for me?”
Her forehead tensing with concern, the movie star spoke, or anyway her blood-red lipsticked mouth was moving… but no sound came out.
Harrigan leaned closer still. “What are you saying?” he demanded.
Lovely eyes tightened in fear. And the moist red, luscious lips moved again… silently.
Frustrated, the spy shook his head, saying, “I’m not hearing you…”
Suddenly Marilyn reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him — shook him with unusual strength. As her lips moved again, Harrigan finally could make out what she was saying, but she sounded… strange.
“Wake up!” she demanded, her voice deep and husky.
Harrigan — the slumbering State Department agent, not the fantasy CIA spy — now realized he was dreaming, and fought to wake up, to climb out of the dream world, but Marilyn would not let go of him, and it was as if his eyelids were glued shut.
After what seemed an eternity, Harrigan forced his sleep-crusted eyes open, and Sam Krueger’s round face floated over him like a moon with features stuck on, Mr. Potato Head-style.
“Wake the fuck up!” Krueger was shouting, shaking Harrigan by the shoulders. “K is gone!”
“Gone?” The groggy, disoriented Harrigan tried to make sense of the words. “Gone how? Gone where?”
The normally affable Krueger was scowling. “Khrushchev has gone missing, Sleeping Beauty! And our asses are grass.”
All these words Harrigan understood, and — as awake now as if he’d just dived into an icy lake — he bolted upright in bed. The clock on the nightstand reported 2:06 a.m. — and immediately reminded him of Marilyn’s prediction…
…and a promise that had been forgotten in the aftermath of the Hungarian’s assassination attempt at the Ambassador.
But the dream — still vivid in his mind, not fading as so many of his dreams immediately did — indicated that somewhere in his subconscious mind he had taken her seriously. Harrigan only wished his conscious mind had done the same.