As the tape began to play, Harrigan leaned closer to the machine, but for a few agonizingly long minutes, nothing but hum, mere room tone, could be made out.
Then, finally, came a faint murmur.
“He’s talking to himself,” Munson whispered.
Harrigan’s eyes had heard it too — the premier was talking, all right…
“The fat bastard knows English,” Harrigan said through tight teeth. “That son of a bitch!”
“He is a cute one,” Munson admitted, then held a “shush” finger to his lips, though another humming minute of silence followed. Then Munson cocked an ear.
“Now he’s getting out of bed,” Munson asserted. “He’s going to the window… opening the window… getting some air, perhaps…”
Harrigan leaned in further, straining ears that had long since paid the price of his firing handguns.
“Sounds like two people talking,” Harrigan commented.
“That’s what we thought,” Munson said, nodding, “but we couldn’t be sure… Who would he be talking to, and in English? It’s not a bodyguard.”
As the tape played on, the voices diminished. Then suddenly a crack! and snick! snick! snick!
The remaining tape returned to room tone.
The chubby technician stopped the tape, and returned to his sandwich.
Harrigan was silent for a moment. “I want to hear it again,” he said. He plucked the sandwich from the technician’s thick fingers. “And crank it up, this time. Starving kids in Korea don’t have headphones, you know.”
The chubby tech frowned, but — after a nod from Munson — complied.
As the tape replayed Harrigan’s heart began to race.
“Is that a woman’s voice?” Munson asked.
“Goddamn,” Harrigan said.
“We had no reports of K being any kind of letch. No women, before. What do you make of—”
Harrigan was grinning. “I’ll be goddamned if that scatterbrained blonde didn’t save all our asses!”
Munson gave Harrigan a puzzled look; even the chubby guy seemed interested.
“What scatterbrained blonde?” Munson asked.
“The one in bungalow seven,” Harrigan said without glancing back — he was already halfway out the door, praying a Chinese assassin hadn’t beaten them to the punch.
That K wasn’t already dead, with Marilyn Monroe another casualty on the floor of that comfy bungalow, her brains truly scattered.
Chapter Eleven
Mad Tea Party
Washed in the ivory glow of a full moon on this clear starry night, the homely portly man and the lovely young woman — looking a bit like father and daughter, or perhaps uncle and niece — sat in a large teacup.
The pair had the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party attraction to themselves, that whirling ride of colorful Volkswagen-sized cups-on-saucers, which was motionless at the moment, and… like everything else in the vast amusement park around them… shrouded in darkness but for the occasional security light. Across the way, its garishly painted movie-flat-style façade muted in the wee hours, stood Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, free of laughter and screams, draped in an eerie stillness, while the turrets of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle loomed starkly over all, its fairy-tale majesty turned ominous and medieval by night.
In her jeans and knotted-at-the-navel plaid blouse, Marilyn Monroe — sitting close to Nikita Khrushchev — shivered, and not merely from the cool night breeze. Beyond them, a gentle wind sang in a ghostly voice as it swirled the dust of the hard-dirt floor of the midway, carrying off candy wrappers like captives. A crushed Mouseketeer cap, one of its ears ripped askew, lay discarded on the ground.
Evidence that people had once been there.
It was as if the bomb had dropped, Marilyn thought, and she and Khrushchev were the only ones left alive in a city whose buildings still stood, but where life had been snuffed out by radiation. It was as if, beyond the vast orange groves, Los Angeles had vanished, destroyed in one horrific second, leveled in a white flash, leaving only piles of ashes on bare bones…
“You’ll think me silly,” she whispered to her gnome-like companion, “but I’m… frightened.”
With a smile of surprising warmth, Khrushchev took her hand; his hand was warm too, and firm, giving her comfort.
“I also am frightened,” he admitted, without shame, his voice as strong as his face was placid. He might have been a suitor, holding his sweetheart’s hand, under a moonlit sky.
They had been mostly silent during the twenty-five-minute drive from Beverly Hills, taking the all-but-deserted Santa Monica Freeway south, to the Disneyland exit. Khrushchev did not question her idea to hide him at the amusement park, but she’d explained her thinking, nonetheless.
“We need to get you out of the city,” she said, “and then in the morning, when there are crowds at the park… do you know our expression, ‘safety in numbers’?”
“No,” he said, “but it is good one.”
“It is,” she nodded. “In the morning, we’ll contact the authorities… and the press… and you’ll be safe, from whoever it is that’s after you.”
Khrushchev did not share his thinking with the actress, but he agreed with her strategy — right now he could not know who was involved in this conspiracy. Was it a coup? Or had his “loyal” KGB men been bribed by an enemy, the Nationalist Chinese perhaps? By morning his own troops would rally, and that agent Harrigan — about the only American he trusted right now — would have sorted much of it out, the surface at least, though the twisting undercurrent of a conspiracy might remain concealed. Certainly the premier was not about to go to the local police, who were the minions of Mayor Poulson, who himself could have put the assassination attempt in motion, out of some misguided sense of patriotism.
“Will your family be all right?” the actress asked with touching concern, looking over at him as she drove.
“I believe so. They are not targets. Only I… Will we hide among the people at Disneyland?”
“Oh, there’s no one there now — it’s closed.”
“And how will we get in?”
She smiled a little. “We’ll sneak in.”
“Won’t there be guards?”
“No. Not even a night watchman. The local police keep an eye on it, but there’s no security staff or anything.”
“Los Angeles police?”
“No — Anaheim.”
“Anna who?”
“Anaheim… it’s a city. Not a city really — a little town. That’s where Disneyland is close to.”
Marilyn had been a guest at the amusement park — built on one hundred and sixty acres surrounded by orange groves — when it had opened just four years ago near tiny Anaheim. She’d been given an after-hours tour by Walt Disney himself — Mr. Disney had great affection for her, ever since she’d posed gratis for his artists who were designing Tinker Bell for his movie Peter Pan — and had left the park when things were closing up and the security people were leaving. Mr. Disney had mentioned to her that the Anaheim police kept an eye on Disneyland for him, after dark.
She hoped things hadn’t changed since then.
As she had exited the freeway and onto an asphalt road that led to the park, Khrushchev leaned forward, peering through the windshield, straining to get a first glimpse of the extraordinary American landmark.
Marilyn had been going over and over the assassination attempt in her mind, and assumed her companion had been doing the same. But right now — as they approached the train-station front entry to the park, the immense empty asphalt parking lot at left — the premier seemed unconcerned with the threat on his life, and more like just another impatient kid, anxious to get to Disneyland.