Card Sharks

"Cursum Perficio"

It's kind of hard for me to talk about the past. I mean, I know it's the past, that it's 1993, not 1962, but it's hard to come to grips with, you know? Like being dead. And waking up in a woman's body. And knowing the woman who killed you is out there, somewhere, with your son.

But let me tell you my story. It all took place so far away from here and now, you might as well think of it as an old movie. Fade in. Superimpose title: Hollywood, California. February 15, 1962. Orson Welles's office, the Fox lot.

I slipped inside, shutting the door behind me, and took off my fedora. The one I'm wearing right now, though it was new then. But even in '62, it was still the only thing about me that looked the part of the private investigator. The rest looked like central casting had got mixed up and sent out for a hero for some Viking flick: six-three, blond hair, blue eyes and a California tan. A Malibu Seigfried, and since it's bad luck to speak ill of the dead, I'll say I was pretty darn good looking, not that it matters now. It would have been a liability any other place than Hollywood, but snooping around the studios, everybody took me for just another nowhere actor and didn't give me a second glance.

Welles sat behind his desk, trying to grow a beard over his baby fat. He leaned over and stabbed the intercom with a pudgy finger: "Hold all calls, Agnes." His face had the same jaded and disturbed look he'd worn in Citizen Kane.

There was one of those nasal voices you only hear in movies: "Right-O, Mr. Welles." Central casting had done their job with the receptionist at least.

"Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Williams. This should take a while." He gestured to an overstuffed leather armchair and I sat down, perching my fedora on one knee. "Nice hat," he added. "Makes you look the part. Cigar?"

"Cigarette, thanks." I took one from the box he proffered and accepted a light, though passed on the burgundy he held up next. If I got tipsy, I'd start glowing with St. Elmo's fire; I said I preferred not to drink on the job.

I guess I can safely admit it now that I'm dead. I was one of those "hidden aces" McCarthy was talking about. Had been since my sophomore year in college when I stepped out of the pool and into the high voltage cord for the floodlights. I got electrified. It wasn't fatal, just permanent. Two days later, I found I could toss around balls of lightning and light myself up like a Christmas tree. I did my best not to, grounded my excess, and went on with my life, which led roundabout to detective work, though that's another story.

Welles took a swallow of burgundy and a long pull on his cigar. "You know Wally Fisk, Nick?"

I shrugged. "Not much. Good detective."

"Bit of a bastard too," Welles finished my unspoken thought. "He was working for me."

"Was?"

He flicked his cigar ash to indicate the past tense. "He went mad."

I didn't bother to echo him this time, just waited until he filled in the rest. He was paying, after all.

"Stark, raving mad," Welles said finally. "Torched his apartment, burned his files and ran around screaming that everyone was out to get him. They got him before he could top it off with a suicide. He's in the lockdown ward at County General.

"Yesterday he was sitting in the exact same chair you are now, saner than most people in this town." Welles took a long pull on his cigar and let it out slowly.

He watched the smoke as it drifted toward the ceiling. "Will you take over?"

"Depends on the case."

Welles smiled. "Smart man. Wally was hired to protect my film. If he'd turned up dead, I'd at least have some of my suspicions confirmed. This … I don't know. I've never had a detective go mad on me before."

"I'm sure it wasn't anything he'd planned." I took a puff on my cigarette. "Did he find anything that would make him snap?"

Welles shrugged. "Who knows? He torched everything he hadn't turned into me already."

"What was he protecting?"

"Blythe." Welles said it more like he was invoking a goddess than saying the name of a woman or a film.

I just took a drag and waited until he continued.

"I got the script from Dalton Trumbo." Welles took a long sip of burgundy. "It's the story of the Four Aces, focusing on the House Committee on Un-American Affairs. Picture it in all its sordid glory." His voice was the showman's now, ringing through the office as he sketched pictures in the air with his cigar. "Dr. Tachyon as the Lost Prince. Black Eagle as Othello. Jack Braun as Judas and Senator Joseph McCarthy as Torquemada. And Blythe Van Renssaeler as the beautiful, doomed madwoman."

I knew about as much as any wild card about the Four Aces. They'd been the few lucky ones the first Wild Card Day, and Archibald Holmes had got them together as the Exotics For Democracy. Black Eagle, who could fly. David Harstein, the Envoy, sort of a Shylock with a conscience, who could get you to agree to anything, no matter how bizarre. Blythe Van Renssaeler, Brain Trust, who had the world's greatest intellects all within her own mind.

And then there was Golden Boy, the strongest man in the world, who'd told everyone's secrets to the Committee on Un-American Affairs in exchange for a thank you and thirty pieces of silver. Black Eagle flew away, Tachyon was deported, Holmes and Harstein were sent to prison, and Blythe Van Renssaeler went mad and died in an insane asylum a few years later.

And Jack Braun got to go on being an indifferent actor, in between busting heads for the government.

Welles swirled the burgundy in his glass, contemplating the color. "You come recommended as someone both thorough and discreet, and not overly worried about danger, so long as you receive adequate compensation."

It was a leading statement. "Who did you hear that from?"

"Kim Wolfe."

I know I blushed, and I was hard pressed to keep from topping it off with St. Elmo's fire. A detective does a lot of questionable things in his profession, and I think the worst thing I ever did was take pictures of Jack Braun with his wife's pretty girl dermatologist. It got her a divorce and me a down-payment on my house. In celebration, Kim Wolfe tried to get me into bed.

They should have stayed married. They deserved each other.

I didn't feel so bad about that case — believe what you will, it's standard for a P.I. — as I did about what came after. I got into the habit of taking similar photos and selling them to Braun's successive wives. There were enough for an erotic pin-up calendar and another brace of divorce suits. I told myself I was doing it to give the Judas ace a taste of his own medicine, but with 20/20 hindsight, I can say I did it for the money.

But back then, I was doing it for the money. "What sort of pay are we talking here?"

Welles named a figure that you'd never find anywhere outside the budget of a major motion picture.

I know I paused too long. "I need to know all of my duties before I accept anything."

"Smart man," Welles said again. "You'll be doing anything and everything to protect Blythe. If someone tries something, you'll stop it, and if possible get evidence we can use for P.R." He tapped the ash off his cigar with a final gesture. I watched it fall. "And of course you won't breath a word of this to Hedda or Louella."

Now there's something you ought to know about Hollywood, or at least the Hollywood I knew: The gossip columnists ran the town. And the two biggest harpies in Hollywood were Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

Louella, or "Lollipop" as she liked to be called, invented the business. She was a neurotic old biddy with a bald spot and a voice like a crow, but at least she could be reasoned with. She didn't have an axe to grind, only papers to sell.

Hedda was another matter. Hedda was a failed actress who found that all the venom she'd built up over the years actually sold papers and radio spots. She was also a weird old lady who went around in these giant hats and hated everything outside of Middle America prewar, pre-wild card. She hated Reds, she hated Pinks. She hated lavender boys and foreigners and Charlie Chaplin and just about everyone else. But more than anything, she hated wild cards.

Her files must have pinned about half the people on the Black List. And if you were an ace-in-hiding, you didn't forget that she was thick as the Forty Thieves with J. Edgar Hoover.

She was also tight-knit with Willie Hearst, whose papers owned Louella, and the animosity between them and Welles was public knowledge. If anyone was to get the scoop, it wasn't going to be Hedda Hopper or the Hearst empire.

"Let me tell you something, Nick," Welles said. "Blythe is going to be big and it's going to piss off more people than Citizen Kane. But unlike Kane, I'm not keeping it under wraps."

I paused and took a drag on my cigarette. "You've done a pretty good job so far."

Welles poured himself another glass of wine. "That, Nick, is the problem. It isn't a secret, but short of taking out adds in Variety, no one knows what's being produced. And with the number of spies and rumor-mongers in this town, it doesn't take a genius to recognize a conspiracy of silence when he hears one.

"I hired Wally to see just how deep it went. This is what he found before he went nuts."

He gave me a sheaf of documents: letters, bills, newspaper clippings, insurance claims, unproduced scripts like The Bowery Boys in "Jokers' Town," and scenes cut from 30 Minutes Over Broadway.

What it added up to was that someone had it out for wild cards, and scenes that made aces a little too heroic had gotten the axe. And movies that showed jokers as anything but monsters terrorizing teenage beach parties invariably had set fires or other accidents.

Welles swirled his burgundy. "I was over at MGM when they were doing Golden Boy. From what I saw of the dailies, it looked to be a reasonably good film. What happened in the cutting room was criminal, probably in every sense of the word.

"Someone doesn't like wild cards, Nick," Welles said. "I want you to find out who. Blythe is going to go ahead and it's going to be the best damn picture I've done."

He gave me a copy of the script and filled me in. They hadn't contracted all of the players yet, and Trumbo was still doing a polish, but Zanuck had lent him Marilyn Monroe for the title. After her performance in Cleopatra, they'd have lines down the block.

I believed it. Blond Marilyn was nothing compared to raven-haired Marilyn. I was one of ten thousand men wanting to have been that asp.

I stubbed out my cigarette and Welles offered another before I had to ask. "Marilyn," he said, giving me a light, "is the risky bit. She's on the bottle, and that wouldn't be half so bad if it weren't for Paula Strasberg, her acting coach, and her new psychiatrist, Dr. Rudo. Between the two of them they've got her loaded down with more pills than any woman should be able to swallow." Welles scrunched down, mimicking the posture and accent of a New York matron: "Marilyn, darling, take one of your tranquilizers." He straightened up then, affecting a haughty look and an aristocratic German accent: "Miss Monroe, I prescribe a Damn-It-All. Take two, they're small."

I bit my cigarette to keep from laughing. "So you want me to pry Marilyn away from her bottle and pills?"

Welles was back to himself, trimming another cigar. "I don't care," he said, lighting up and sucking smoke like some sort of directorial dragon. "I don't care if she takes twice as many or goes cold turkey, just so long as she can act. The money for Blythe comes from people who're willing to bet on the combination of Monroe / Trumbo / Welles, not a bunch of philanthropists who'll pay for any actress to play a diseased schizophrenic the government's glad is dead."

He paused, leaning back in his chair, tapping the cigar with finality. "If Marilyn goes, Blythe is dead too. And whoever doesn't like wild cards gets what they want."

I may have been a hidden ace, but I was still a wild card. There was no way I was letting this one go. "I'll take it."

"Deal," Welles said and we shook.

The next day, I showed up at the lot, bright and early. I'd gone through the papers the night before and read Trumbo's script. It was still rough in places, but genuinely moving, with the mark of Hollywood: It may not have been exactly what did happen, but it was the way things ought to have happened.

I think someone once said that art wasn't truth, but a lie that made you realize the truth. That was the beauty of Hollywood, and Blythe was beautiful.

I'd asked Welles if there was some part he could make up that would give me an excuse to be on the lot, preferably near Marilyn. After giving me a director's once-over, he asked if I'd like to be stand-in for Golden Boy. I gave him my best Jack Braun Aw-shucks, — I-can't-act, — Colonel grin and saluted, saying I'd be happy to stand wherever the committee wanted me to.

My name was at the front gate: Nick Williams, nowhere actor and Golden Boy stand-in.

I got to meet the cast. Costuming wasn't quite finished, but james Dean had a hat from one of the old Robin Hood flicks. Add a red wig and he'd be Dr. Tachyon. Sydney Poitier, of course, was Black Eagle.

They hadn't contracted for Harstein yet, but Welles had another stand-in, name of Josh Davidson from New York. He was a little chubby and didn't have a Jewish nose, but otherwise looked even closer to the Envoy than I did to Golden Rat. Everybody liked him, but Welles was looking for a name actor.

And then there was Marilyn. I know everyone has seen her pictures, but none of that compares to the reality. She was beautiful. The iron butterfly they sometimes called her. Small and delicate, but with this underlying strength, something that told you that yes, this woman could be crushed, but not as easily as you might think.

Her skin was pale white and her eyes were blue. But her hair … In Cleopatra, most of the time she'd worn a wig, her real hair too damaged by the bleach. But now it had grown out, and it was dyed a rich, sable black. Ebony on snow.

It was Cleopatra all over again. Blythe Van Renssaeler had been a beauty, but nothing compared to this. Marilyn was Blythe Van Renssaeler, the way Blythe should have been. It was like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. A beautiful, fragile thing, destined to float briefly, then die.

Costuming had gone full stop. Her dress was sheer black silk with a silver fox wrap thrown over her shoulders, like the princess from a Russian fairytale. And around her neck she had a triple string of pearls, clasped with an onyx square set with a diamond. It was the necklace Blythe Van Rennssaeler had worn during the trial.

She read her lines haltingly, almost childlike, while Paula Strasberg, her acting coach, watched from offstage, along with what could only be her new Svengali, Dr. Rudo. They observed her like butterfly hunters after some prized new specimen, but then, God, she was beautiful.

They were practicing the scene where Blythe comes to Tachyon's apartment after her husband throws her out. Marilyn was curled up against James Dean's chest, weeping, and those were real tears, not glycerin. And her words: "I don't know what's to become of me. What man could ever love a woman who knows all his secrets?"

"I would," Dean said, and I know I mouthed the line as he said it. That moment was magic. Marilyn stood there, the silver fox wrap sliding softly off her shoulders, like a chrysalis off a butterfly. And one by one her tears hit the floor.

That was the moment I truly fell in love with her.

Then there were people swarming around her, Paula Strasberg shrieking like some Jewish grandmother from Hell, alternately congratulating her and asking if she wanted one of her tranquilizers, Dean hugging her, then Welles swept through them, pulling Marilyn free of the knot. He gave her directorly compliments and she started to laugh and dried her tears, then Welles steered her and her admirers over in my direction and introduced me to the crew.

I don't know what my first words were to her. Probably something stupid and obvious like "That was wonderful" or "I've been a fan for a long time." It didn't matter. That was Marilyn's moment, and I think there's no way to do it justice. She was brilliant.

Then the tension was broken by Josh Davidson going, "How did you do that?"

Marilyn suddenly calmed down and started giving him a whole explanation of method acting, and Paula took them off into the corner.

And I found myself face to face with another hero from a Wagnerian opera.

The joke was, the voice matched. "She is very complex, yes?"

I think I sort of vaguely nodded as I looked at the owner, trying not to laugh: Welles' impersonation had been spot-on. Like I said, he was another blond-haired, blue-eyed type, and even had the same little Kirghiz fold to the corner of the eye as I did. He looked like my uncle Fritz.

The German extended his hand. "Miss Monroe's psychiatrist, Dr. Pan Rudo. You were very moved."

I suddenly noticed that a tear had escaped down my cheek. I brushed it aside and shook hands, saying something about how any actor would have been moved by that performance, but I know it didn't sound believable. I was scared. If I'd let go any more, I would have lit up like a ship in a rainstorm.

Rudo laughed and offered me a cigarette. I accepted and lit up in the more conventional sense. After all, without alcohol, I had to have some vice. Cigarettes were as good as any.

Dr. Rudo's cigarettes were expensive and French. So, I think, was his suit, and as I learned later, his tastes in wine.

We talked a while and I learned that he'd come to the States before the war, from Dresden. A Prussian aristocrat most likely, or maybe the air of fallen nobility just worked to his advantage as psychiatrist to the stars.

As soon as the rumors worked themselves free, I wanted to question him about Wally Fisk and just exactly what might have happened to him. But I wasn't going to broach the subject until I heard it from someone else, so I just made small talk.

Everything else was the usual pre-production wrangle, and somewhere in there I managed to link up with Flattop.

Flattop was an old friend, or at least friendly informant. He was a joker ace. That's A-C-E, as in American Cinema Editors, not ace P.I. or ace wild card like I was. He was also a joker and an almost-deuce: You never noticed him except when you were looking right at him. But when you did, you wondered how you could have missed the guy, since his irises were candy-striped orange, yellow and green, one inside the other, like a photographer's test pattern, his fingers were twice the length they should have been and his toes were almost as long, and he had a six-ounce Coca-Cola bottle screwed into a socket in his left arm, right inside the elbow.

But he was a good looking guy for all that, with a nice even smile, clean-cut, straight-arrow looks, a cross around his neck, and dark brown hair cut in a conservative flattop.

Like most jokers, he was also pathetically happy to have anyone just treat him like a human being. I'll admit I used him shamelessly, but you could find out half of what was going down on any lot for the price of just fifteen minutes with Flattop.

"Ooh, Marilyn is pissed off, man," Flattop said as he fiddled with some editing equipment. I tried to ignore the fact that he used his prehensile toes for half the job. "Zanuck stuck her on this pic for the last spot on her contract, and I don't know what deal Welles made to get him to do it. She'd walk if she could."

"What's the problem?"

"Didn't you know, man? This is a wild cards pic and that old witch Hopper's declared War. She's been flying around the set trying to twist Marilyn's arm. I Wouldn't be surprised if she hired a stunt plane and had it write 'Surrender Marilyn!' over the studio."

It sounded like standard tactics for Hopper. First she gave you a friendly warning, then she blasted you in her column. Welles's "conspiracy of silence" might end quite soon.

It was getting late in the day, and there was a lot more information I wanted to pump Flattop for. I asked if he'd like to go out for beer after he finished up.

"But you don't drink, Nick," he pointed out. Like I said, Flattop was perceptive.

I shrugged.

"There's a party out in Malibu tonight. They actually invited me." He smiled and there was the strangest mixture of pain and happiness in his weird eyes. "This is the first one I've been asked to since …"

I clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't sweat it, Pete." That was his name, actually. Peter Le Fleur. Sometimes I was jealous of him. His wild card was out for everyone to see, so he didn't have to lie to anyone about who or what he was, including himself.

Then again, I didn't get the joker treatment.

He folded his elongated fingers over my hand and I made sure I didn't flinch. It wasn't as if there was anything I could catch from him. "Thanks, Nick. If you want to tag along …"

I thought of Marilyn. "Wouldn't miss it."

The party was at Peter Lawford's beach house in Malibu. It was pretty exclusive: cast and crew favorites, along with Rudo and Strasberg and some others. Poitier was absent, but that was to be expected. And Davidson had talked his way in, so I wasn't the only stand-in.

Lawford was there, of course, three sheets to the wind, riding on the fame of his wife's brothers, one of whom was actually present. Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, was in the pool, flirting with Marilyn, as was James Dean.

It was a moment to make an entrance, and I took it. I did a three-sixty off the board and the water cleft perfectly. I'd had an athletics scholarship to USC and Olympic hopes, but I had to give them up when they started testing for wild cards, not that being an electric eel shaved any time off me in the fifty meter.

Once I came up, there was some gratifying applause and I managed to insinuate myself into the conversation with Marilyn. It was light politics, Dean going on about getting Tachyon back into the country, but the pauses let me discover what I'd heard rumored: Marilyn and Bobby were having an affair.

It wasn't any part of my ace. A detective just gets a sixth sense for that sort of thing. It's a matter of ordinary animal magnetism and body language. Bobby Kennedy wanted Marilyn and acted like he'd had her before.

Marilyn's reactions were more subtle, with a note of anguish underlying the laughter, but I could tell that she wanted Bobby in more of a primal way, more like a little girl wants her father than a woman wants a man.

Dean was attentive, but didn't desire Marilyn in any manner beyond the general. He had a long scar down one leg, visible even through the ripples of the pool. I'd never seen it before, but I knew it was a legacy of the car crash that had killed Liz Taylor and nearly claimed him, back at the end of Giant.

He didn't drive quite so fast anymore.

Marilyn hadn't given Dean a second glance, but she looked straight at me.

There was chemistry there, and it wasn't the sort you got with the wild card. I made a total fool of myself, but then that was the general idea. Once or twice I felt Welles giving me a look, but dammit, I was more than just being paid to stick around Marilyn. I wanted to be with her.

The party went all night and I ran into a number of other hangers-on, the youngest of whom was Tom Quincey, a freshman from USC who looked younger and kept babbling on about Aldous Huxley and his book, Destiny and the Doors of Perception. It seemed Huxley had been at the party, but had left early, though Tom was more than happy to tell me all about him and showed off some white tablets he'd left behind. "They're LSD!" he said. "From the Swiss pharmacy. See — They're stamped with the Sandoz mark!"

I'd never seen LSD tablets, but Rudo came over and explained that they were perfectly legal, non-prescription. "Similar to mescaline," he said. "They expand perceptions."

To demonstrate their harmlessness, Rudo and Tommy both popped a couple. I chose not to indulge, not wanting to see What they did with my Wild card, but Marilyn and the Lawfords tried some, and so did another Tom, Douglas I think, a musician friend of Quincey's. Flattop amused everybody by taking the half-empty Coke bottle from his arm and filling it up the rest of the way with the Lawford's rum and a couple of Tommy's tablets before plugging it back in.

Flattop, of course, got the first effects and started staring at the pool lights, with the Toms joining in soon after. Rudo didn't say or do much out of the ordinary, so I concluded that it was just like fraternity brothers getting drunk for the first time and Flattop and Tommy and Tom were playing it up. There was something about Tom Quincey that set me on edge, though I couldn't quite say what.

Marilyn, however, thought him amusing. She said he'd followed her here from New York and had refused to go away ever since. I knew they had a relationship too.

Welles and Trumbo were at loggerheads over the direction of the script — pretty much whether it would be "Orson Welles's Blythe" or "Dalton Trumbo's Blythe" — and Trumbo went into a paranoid jag about capitalist interests wanting to subvert the proletarian heart of his story. Welles told him to get stuffed and that the heart of the story was the romance between a New York blue-stocking and an alien prince, and it would be hard enough getting it to play in Peoria without holding out for Moscow too.

Everyone at the party seemed generally enthused for the project with the exception of Paula Strasberg, and even she loosened up after Josh went on about the evils of the HUAC and how brave it was for Bobby and the President to end the Blacklist by going to see Spartacus.

Paula got drunk then and started to demand McCarthy's head on a stick, but people had to remind her that he was already dead and his head would be a bit mouldy.

After the requisite head-butting, Welles and Trumbo tried to figure out who to get for Golden Boy and Harstein. Pat Lawford then mentioned that jack Braun lived down the street.

I should have remembered that. After the eight-by-tens I'd taken, that's all he had left.

Marilyn, very drunk by this point, and stoned on an interesting mixture of Paula Strasberg's tranquilizers and Tommy's LSD, suggested that everyone invite him to the party. Who better to play Golden Boy than Golden Boy? He'd already done it in one movie.

This notion was entertained in varying levels of seriousness, but Trumbo thought it could be useful to at least get Braun's input in on the script, he being the only one of the Four Aces both easily accessible and living.

Marilyn and Tommy, bearing bottles of champagne and wearing nothing more than bathing suits, elected to be the ones to go be neighborly and invite him over. I, being the only sober person left, volunteered to shepherd them down the street.

I can't forget Jack Braun's expression. He had a bottle of cheap scotch in one hand and the door in the other and I knew he must think he was hallucinating. I mean, if you open your door at ten o'clock in the evening, you don't expect to see Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit, accompanied by a teenager and the detective who'd taken pictures of you en flagrante delecti.

Of course, I'd made sure Braun never saw my face — I'm not suicidal, no matter what you might think — and you don't take candid pictures of the strongest man in the world if you expect him to know who you are. All he must have thought looking at me was that I was another Malibu Siegfried, even if I was half Irish.

I don't know of any man who'd say no to an invitation from Marilyn Monroe. That man was certainly not Jack Braun. He and his scotch joined the party at the Lawfords's, and everyone was still there except Paula and Josh.

Braun got a lot of attention, but didn't want to talk about the Four Aces, or the script. He said he'd had enough of playing Golden Boy and wouldn't take the part. That was probably a relief — I don't recall Welles ever offering it. "I'm not a hero," Braun said between drinks. "I just get paid to swing on vines and talk to chimps. I don't even do my own stunts — They've found it's cheaper to get an actor who doesn't glow when he slams into trees than to retouch all the negatives."

To demonstrate, he stood up and pounded his chest, flashing gold like a strobe light, then gave a yell as he jumped into the pool in his clothes. It may not have been part of the mystery I was paid to solve, but I at least knew why Tarzan always used the same closeup of Braun beating his chest.

The rest of the evening went by in a blur. I wasn't drunk or stoned, but everybody else was, and that helped. I played the sober gallant and drove everyone home who didn't crash at the Lawfords's.

Marilyn didn't do either. The next day I discovered that she'd spent the night at Jack Braun's.

Braun followed her to the set, as under her spell as any man, though he'd joined the circle who'd actually gotten to touch her. I hated him for it, but then there was a peculiar scene that made me wonder just what I had to hate.

Braun was drunk, as usual, and stumbled out of Dalton's trailer. He was shouting back at Trumbo: "No, you're right, I'm a scum and I betrayed my friends. Everything should stay except the last scene — I never got a chance to say goodbye to anyone."

Braun walked down the street, kicking rocks into Sherman Oaks, and a cloud of French cigarette smoke materialized next to me. "A very troubled man, don't you think? He is haunted by his past. He does not think himself a hero."

I looked over to see Dr. Rudo, smoking one of his trademark cigarettes. He offered me one and his lighter.

I lit up, figuratively, and passed the lighter back. "He's not a hero."

"He could be, Mr. Williams. That is his great lie. He cannot ever be close to another for fear of hurting them."

I wasn't sure whether he'd said that to gauge my reaction, or if he just got off on summing up people's lives in a couple of lines. I think it was a little of both.

That was the last I saw of Braun, but I saw a good bit more of Dr. Rudo.

Marilyn ran round the studio in a daze of alcohol and Paula Strasberg's tranquilizers. I knew, though not from experience, that if you mixed the two you got a feeling of euphoria.

If what Marilyn was going through was euphoria, you can have it.

In the next few days, they contracted Ron Ely for Golden Boy and Jeff Chandler for Harstein. I never saw much of either, Ely for the obvious reason, Chandler because what few scenes he had with Golden Boy, he practiced with Ron. Jim Bacchus, the eternal father figure, came on as Archibald Holmes and kept making Rebel Without A Cause jokes to Dean: "Well, I see you've gotten into trouble again. Now we've had to move across the galaxy. I hope you're satisfied."

I did a quick prowl around Wally Fisk's apartment, but his fire had been thorough, and I didn't find anything not already included in the notes I'd gotten from Welles. The only thing I'll say about Fisks's detective work is that he'd constructed an impressive case that someone was sabotaging pro-wild-card films. The question of who was left open. And the question of how Blythe was going to be killed was up in the air as well.

And the only man who might have a clue had gone mad.

However, the scuttlebutt had worked its way around and I heard about Wally from Flattop and about six others. Now that it was safe, I sought out Dr. Rudo.

He said he'd had one or two conversations with Fisk, but could hazard a guess as to what happened.

"Conscience, Mr. Williams," he said, flicking his cigarette. "Conscience can be a terrible thing. A private detective must bury his very deeply, or else it may rise up and destroy him. I suspect that is what happened to the unfortunate Mr. Fisk."

He asked if I knew what case Wally had been working on, but I said I didn't know. I didn't say how close he'd come to my own reservations about my profession.

That done, I called up a contact in the press. Now, I know I was supposed to keep my investigation secret, but let me explain: A major Hollywood detective had gone mad, and if I wanted an interview for a case I was not officially working on, I'd need an alibi for a case I was officially working on. Bit actors wear a lot of hats, and it's hardly unusual for one to pick up a bit of extra money as a spy or journalist. I slipped my Press Pass into the band of my fedora and headed down to County General.

Hospitals were places I'd always hated, and the lockdown ward was always the worst. It stank of urine and pain and sedatives. The set designers for Blythe had tried to convey the dismal inadequacy of a state hospital, but none of that could compare with the reality.

I talked briefly with the doctors and asked about the blood panels, but they didn't show any sort of drug or poison. Wally was as clean as the next man.

He was also completely insane. They had him in a straight jacket and I don't think he even recognized me. In the movies, the madman sputters some sort of cryptic clue or shouts a warning at the investigator. Wally only stared at the wall and drooled.

The doctors were slightly more helpful, but not very. They only confirmed Dr. Rudo's diagnosis: acute attack of conscience. Wallace Fisk was being tormented by his own personal demons and so far no therapy had helped.

I asked to have a little time with him alone, playing the role of grieving friend, though I was really just shocked former colleague. But I knew a bit about shocks, including that the electrical sort could sometimes knock people like Wally back into some form of sanity.

As soon as the nurse had left, I popped one of my little lightning balls into my hand. Will-o'-wisps I called them, 'cause they just sort of floated and bobbed unless I kept a grip with my mind.

This one was only three inches across, just a shocker, not even enough to knock someone out. I let it ground on one of the buckles of his straightjacket.

He jolted, but didn't change expression. I tried a couple more, a little larger, then bobbed one in front of his eyes kind of like a hypnotist's pendulum. I'd usually never risk something like that, but even if Wally remembered, I could explain it away as the hallucinations of a madman.

I called his name several times until he blinked and I saw his eyes focus on the will-o'-wisp, then I let it slip back inside me and waved my hand in front of his face. "Wally," I said, "what do you remember? What's the last thing you remember?"

His voice was hoarse from not having spoken, but I got him to describe a relatively ordinary day snooping around the Fox lot, checking for anything that might look like sabotage, but not turning up any more than I had. He'd blacked out everything since then, which was good.

Then I made a mistake and asked him if he remembered me.

He turned and took one look at my face and started screaming and raving, well, like a madman. It was just like the stuff in the movies, lots of "Stay away from me!" and "No!" and "I didn't mean to!", thrashing around enough to make the bed lift off the floor.

I didn't know whether I should shock him again or just get away, but before I could do anything the nurses rushed in. They listened long enough to realize he wasn't making any sense, then got out the sedatives. A minute later, the doctors cornered me and asked what had happened.

I told them everything except my attempt at electroshock therapy, and they let me go, not much wiser, and a little less sane.

I went back to the studio and watched throughout the week. The mystery, however, was not much closer to being solved. Wally had discovered evidence of a conspiracy against wild cards, then had gone insane, imagining that everyone he'd ever lied to or investigated was coming to get him.

It explained why he'd burned his apartment — destroy it and destroy his files. But Fisk's reaction to my face … I don't think I looked very demonic, and only knew Fisk vaguely from past cases.

However, there was another face very similar to mine … belonging to Dr. Pan Rudo. Did Fisk have Rudo on his conscience?

Of course, Wally might have started screaming if I'd shown him a hand puppet, but I wasn't about to investigate Kulda, Fran and Ollie. Dr. Rudo, however, gave me the beginnings of an idea. A psychologist with a knowledge of drugs, especially psychoactive ones, might be able to brew a potion that would drive a man mad, but that would be undetectable with the standard blood panels.

Motive, however, was a problem. Dr. Rudo was Marilyn's psychiatrist, and if he wanted to kill the film, he had enough influence to make her quit and let it collapse on its own. And so far as hating wild cards went, Rudo showed no more disdain for Flattop than he did for anyone, and was actually kinder to Jack Braun than anybody should be.

Then again, maybe he was just currying favor with a potential client. If there was ever a man in need of a shrink, it was Braun.

As for the movie, Blythe was proceeding without a hitch. Trumbo had polished the script with Braun's input, the filming had begun, and I was becoming closer to Marilyn.

Maybe I wasn't quite honest about why I was around her — Welles was paying me, after all — but it hurt to see her with men who just wanted her for their own status. Bobby Kennedy wanted her because his brother had had her, Jack Kennedy wanted her because he was the President and could have anything, and Tom Quincey wanted Marilyn because he was a randy little bastard and wanted everything.

After one of the Lawford parties, he even propositioned me.

I didn't know what to make of it. I'd met boys who liked boys before, but I'd never met one who liked both boys and girls. To make things worse, I double-checked his school records and found that while he was a freshman at USC, he was also sixteen, not eighteen.

I didn't know if Marilyn knew. I hoped no one else did, or it could have been used to blackmail her.

And in addition to the boy genius with the non-preferential dating habits, there was Dr. Rudo. When I asked about him, Marilyn, in a more drunk than usual moment, confided that she'd slept with him as part of her therapy.

I'd seen the signs, but I'd refused to believe them. Rudo went to the top of my list of all-time bastards. I had half a mind to sic the AMA on him and get his credential revoked, but I knew the scandal would wreck Marilyn and wreck Blythe.

I also didn't want to betray any confidences. I may have been a spy, but if someone entrusted me with a secret, I'd take it with me to the grave.

I think I would have even kept it beyond that, if it weren't for the way things turned out.

But right then, things were turning out great. Now that main filming had begun, we stand-ins weren't quite as much in demand and I had more time to myself. Flattop held court in the cutting room, showing everyone the best of the dailies. They were the most powerful pieces of film I'd ever seen. Blythe would be amazing once she was complete.

I remember one day I was there with Josh Davidson, watching the scene where David Harstein was locked in HUAC's soundproof glass booth. In the flickery light of the projector, Jeff Chandler beat against the glass: "Alright, you Nazis! When are you going to turn on the gas? That's what you did before, isn't it?"

Josh's lips moved silently as he watched and there were actual tears on his face. "That's just the way it happened. It's just the same."

I gave him a pat on the back. "I know. They cut out the Envoy's silver tongue, clipped the eagle's wings, and shattered the mind of the woman who knew too much. They couldn't stand for anyone to be different from them."

Josh sighed. "And they put pressure on the strong man until he bent."

Flattop nodded as the clip came to an end, the impassive faces of Nixon and his cronies taken straight from the newsreels. "This is going to do great things for wild cards. People are finally going to get a chance to see who the enemy really is."

The lights came on and Josh stood up slowly, looking a little pale and shaken. "I don't know about you two, but I could use a drink right now. Anyone want to join me?"

Flattop smiled a bit shyly and held up his foot-long fingers. "Not many places take jokers."

Josh smiled. "Then we go wherever you go. My treat."

The Santa Monica pier was the closest thing L.A. had to a Jokertown. Everything was so spread out, and there were so few wild cards overall, it wasn't something that would come about. The few aces and jokers the city had to offer before the McCarthy witch hunts had set up in the old carnival booths and freak shows along the pier, though the mind readers and crystal gazers had long since been snapped up by J. Edgar, at least the real ones.

The jokers were the ones left, and after a day of entertaining the tourists, they mostly kicked back at the Menagerie, L.A.'s single joker bar. It was on the pier, next to the merry-go-round, and the few nats in the place were the fuzzy sweater set. That made me nervous more than anything else. The only things I liked Greek were the letters on my fraternity pin.

Flattop introduced Josh and me around, and I smiled and tried my best not to stare. The two I remember in particular were Richie, who the wild card had turned into a sort of human aquarium, and Panda Bear, who spoke bad pidgin like she was auditioning for a Charlie Chan movie. Her accent was Mexican underneath, not that I'd point it out to a lady, especially one with fangs and claws.

Josh and Flattop seemed to enjoy the beer, and I got by with soda water like I usually did. The conversation mostly went around Blythe — Flattop had told his friends about the project and they were all excited, especially with the prospect of being extras — and Hedda's latest column, where she'd called the Menagerie a "cess pit of freakishness" and said the city fathers should clear it and "all the other rubbish" off the public pier.

This went over like you'd expect it would, but you had to give it to Hedda, she was at least consistent — she'd never voiced approval for the Exotics For Democracy, even when they'd been making the cover of LIFE. And as she always pointed out, she'd disapproved of Hitler long before the war.

Sometimes I wondered whether I would have been as well disposed to wild cards if I hadn't been one. Somehow I don't think so.

Everyone swapped Hedda jokes and threw darts at her picture in the corner and there was a big laugh when Josh put on Panda's hat and got up on the table to imitate Hopper doing her "This is my town!" speech from her television show.

I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. Something had been itching me all the time I'd been in the Menagerie. How should I put this? I needed solid ground under my feet. My ace made me sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum, and I could sense where things were: people, electrical wiring, metal, the ground. It wasn't anything really clear, not like sight or hearing. More of a prickling in the back of my neck and the hair on my arms. I was used to feeling the ground beneath me, both as a barrier and a sap to my power. It was gone, along with the clutter of metal struts and power lines, and I'd gone hypersensitive. The free ions were soaking into me like heroin into an addict.

And for the past hour, I'd felt something moving underneath me, under the pier. It moved too regularly for it to be coincidence, and it left metal behind, where there hadn't been any before.

Call me drunk or paranoid, it was probably some guys out crabbing, but I'd been twitchy around the studio with absolutely nothing happening that wasn't supposed to, and I couldn't figure out why crabbers would be hanging traps six feet above the waterline.

I dodged the few candy wrappers scudding around in the sea breeze and found a ladder leading down the side of the pier. I hesitated, wondering if I shouldn't just mind my own business, but then Flattop and Josh showed up.

"You okay, Nick?" Josh asked. "Anything bothering you?"

I had a sudden urge to tell him everything — and I mean everything — but I took a deep breath of the wind coming in off the ocean and the impulse passed. "I dunno," I said. "Just twitchy, I guess. I heard something funny under the pier."

"Probably sea lions," Flattop said. "They sleep on the crossbeams."

I knew it wasn't sea lions suspending crab traps above the water line. "Anyone care to play detective?" I didn't wait for an answer, just swung around onto the ladder and led the way down.

Josh was a little tipsy, and so was Flattop, but I was so hyped and paranoid that I didn't question the wisdom of taking a couple of drunks on a jaunt through the underpilings of a pier. As it turned out, I shouldn't have worried about Flattop anyway, since those overstretched digits of his let him climb like a monkey. Josh got by by holding onto his belt.

I don't know if you've ever been under a pier, but halfway down there's a whole network of beams and crossjoists, sturdy enough to support almost anything, though it's generally just used by the sea lions who hop up at high tide. It was low tide now, a good twelve foot drop to the water below.

I followed the prickling in my skin, avoiding the occasional sea lion, and soon heard the sound of an outboard motor. That was the main source of electricity. On one of the nearby pilings, a metallic circle gleamed in the reflected light of the water.

A boat had tied up to the pilings, and three men were busy affixing another to the tar-soaked wood with duct tape. From the size and shape, I knew exactly what it was — a film cannister.

Maybe I should remind you, since it's generally only known in Hollywood, but film used to be made with nitrocellulose. That's half of what you make dynamite with, and any blast you see in a motion picture generally comes from a few old reels and a match.

I probably don't need to tell you that, but from what happened next, all I can say is that they don't breed for brains in New York. The outboard engine had covered the sound of our arrival and the men in the boat hadn't noticed us yet, but then Josh called out as loud as he could, "Excuse me! You don't want to be doing that, do you?"

They turned around and next thing there were guns out. Flattop pulled Josh to the planks, which was lucky for him since a moment later a bullet whistled through in the space where he'd been.

That was all the time I needed. My St. Elmo's fire was up and my will-o'-wisps were out. They went straight for the guns.

Honestly, I'd only thrown shockers, not enough to kill a person, just enough to zap them unconscious, but electricity has a mind of its own and it likes metal. You run a couple hundred volts through a loaded gun, well, all I can say is you don't have a gun anymore.

You don't have a hand either, not that it mattered, since there were a couple strays, one of which went for the engine, the other for the stuff in the bottom of the boat.

The explosion would have looked good on film, if you like things like that. Bodies flew everywhere and I fell to the planks next to Josh and Flattop, struggling to pull my St. Elmo's back inside before I killed them too. Saltwater splashed over me and I felt the energy arc and sizzle.

Then there was a gurgling sound as the boat went under. In the distance, I could hear the barking and splashing as frightened sea lions jumped back into the ocean.

A moment later, everything was back to normal except for a few bubbles and bits of flaming debris on the surface of the water.

Josh was babbling something about there being too much wind, then Flattop looked at me and I almost gagged at the hero-worship in his weird eyes. "You're Will-o'-Wisp…."

I looked away. "Yeah, I guess so." The film spool taped to the piling glinted evilly, a white envelope stuck to its face, water dripping from the corners.

"Who's Will-o'-Wisp?" Josh asked.

I gritted my teeth, wishing Pete would take that note out of his voice. "Will-o'-Wisp's a hero. He's saved the lives of a lot of jokers. He's about the only one who protects us out here … but no one knows who he is."

I looked over at Flattop, now being supported by Josh. I shrugged. "I got an ace. I shocked a few people I saw beating up jokers, and no one seems to remember your face if you've got glowing eyes." I lit them up with a little foxfire for demonstration. Yd done it a few times in the mirror, and I knew that under the shadow of hat it could make you look pretty scary. More than that, it kept people from remembering my face, which is important if you're up the sleeve.

"'Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men….'" Josh intoned.

"Beats me, but it sure as hell isn't the police." I took out a cigarette and used a tiny will-o'-wisp as a lighter.

I didn't even have time to take a puff before the bomb's envelope went up in a flash of blinding white fire. We hit the planks just as a second explosion blew, louder than the first without the water to cushion it.

Once my eyes cleared from the dazzle, I saw what was left behind: the piling, cracked through and bent sideways. Small flames licked at the tar-soaked wood.

"Oh shit," Josh said.

Oh shit was right. I totally lost it and my St. Elmo's went up like a beacon. I got to my feet, bristling with energy, and moved away from Josh and Flattop so I wouldn't run the risk of killing them too. My mind went into overdrive as the pieces clicked together. The dripping envelope. The magnesium flare. The blast.

"The tide's the timer," I said. "We've got to disarm the suckers before the water gets high enough to finish the job." One of the things I'd learned was that bombs got a lot more powerful the greater the resistance around them. Anything that could crack a piling on the surface could shear right through underwater.

I could feel where the other cannisters were taped to the pilings, but they were too far down for me to reach. But Flattop — I swear, the man could literally hang upside-down by his toes. His Exacto knife made short work of the duct tape, and he came back up with a bomb, the envelope-fuse thankfully dry.

It was hard, but I pulled the St. Elmo's fire back inside myself, then gingerly pried the envelope loose from the tape. Underneath was a strip of grey metal, the end leading to a hole drilled in the upper edge of the canister. The seam where the halves fit together was carefully tarred shut, waterproofing the ensemble until the tide did its work.

I slit the envelope with my penknife. Inside was some glittery powder. I dropped it into the water and it went up in a flash of white fire.

Pete touched the metal strip. "Magnesium."

I nodded. "In the powder too." I carefully pulled out the wire, then got out my penknife and pried apart the halves of the canister.

Black and grey flecks drifted free, dancing in the ocean breeze. Just like I thought, someone had run film through a coffee grinder. Messily, since there were a few larger chunks and snippets mixed in.

I took out one of the largest and held it up to the moon. The film was scratched, but the image was still clear: Jane Russell and her bosom got up in a western outfit. I slipped it in my pocket and closed the canister.

The fuse was simple stuff with a formula out of any chemistry textbook: three parts ammonium chloride, three parts ammonium nitrate, and three parts powdered magnesium. Stuff you could get at any hardware store, nursery, or chemical supply company. The same with the magnesium strip. Or the whole ensemble could be found in the special effects department of a movie studio. It was the Jekyll and Hyde formula: The mad scientist pours a vial of tap water into a beaker with a dusting of the powder in the bottom and a photogenic flare goes up. Add magnesium wire and some cannisters of nitrocellulose and you could kiss the entire Santa Monica pier goodbye.

Flattop collected the remaining film bombs and we took them back to the trunk of my car. While we did that, Josh used his jacket to beat out the flames on the one demolished piling. Do you find it suspicious that the police never came to investigate the explosion? So did I, which is why we didn't call them.

"Jesus, Nick," Flattop said as I locked up the trunk, bombs carefully defused. "I never knew you were an ace. And man, not just any ace … you're Will-o'-Wisp."

"Shut up," I snapped. "You don't know what you're talking about. You got rid of the bombs, and you didn't have to kill three people to do it."

"But, Nick — "

"Let him be," Josh said and Flattop shut up.

I was really rattled. I'd only killed once in my life — before I'd figured out how to measure my charges — and I'd sworn I'd never do it again. Guns and explosives were something I'd never really taken into account. A private detective doesn't make his living by getting in fire fights, and the bastards I'd dealt with before had been into baseball bats and nailed boards.

And I'd just blown my cover. There were now two people who knew I was Will-o'-Wisp. And one of them was a nat and the stupidest blabbermouth I'd ever met. Josh's speech under the pier should have won the Oscar for idiocy.

"Josh, please. You can't tell anyone this." I fumbled with my keys, not making eye contact. "You've got my life in your hands."

"Don't worry." He patted me on the shoulder and helped me into the car. Ironic, isn't it? The drunk helping the sober man. "I was in New York the first Wild Card Day. I had friends infected with the virus. And I know what can happen to aces who get found out. Believe me, I know."

I don't know why I believed him, but somehow I did. And I didn't worry about it anymore. Maybe when you reach the breaking point, you find it's either that or go mad.

This is going to sound like the craziest thing, but it's what honestly happened next. Josh suggested we go to a party, never mind the load of bombs in the trunk, and Flattop and I thought it was the greatest idea in the world.

I don't know if we'd been invited to the Lawfords's that evening. It didn't matter — Josh talked our way in, we borrowed swimsuits, and it was like a dozen other parties. Marilyn and I flirted shamelessly.

Finally it got so late that everyone had to call it a night. Flattop and Josh hitched a ride with Trumbo, but someone needed to drive Tommy back to the dorms. I volunteered, being sober as usual, and Marilyn came along for the ride.

As soon as we left the party, my conscience and worry started back up, eating at my brain. I'd killed three men. Two people knew my secret. I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway with the Goddess in the seat beside me and enough nitrocellulose in the trunk to blow up a pier. And to top it off, there was a sixteen-year-old sex maniac in my back seat giving a discourse on surrealism, metaphysics, and the need to break through mental barriers.

I think the effort it took to stifle my wild card was the only thing that let me keep my sanity.

Once we'd dropped off the boy genius, Marilyn said she wanted to go for a swim. Like I said, I'd gone to USC and had been on the swim team. I also had a key I'd never turned in and went and swam laps whenever I got stressed.

I'd kept myself in good shape.

The pool was in the basement of the athletics hall. It was like something from a De Mille epic, an old Twenties aquatic gymnasium with green tile around the edges and heraldic dolphins at the corners.

The ceiling was high above the pool, with windows along the sides covered with Wire grates, but the effect was more like stained glass than an athletics hall. And the light shone up through the water and reflected off the enamel, the patterns shifting and changing as you swam.

We were alone, and the pool was silent except for the echoes.

Marilyn took off her dark glasses and scarf and lay them on one of the chairs. I caught a whiff of her perfume — Scandal, I think — then she put an arm around my shoulders and I could smell the champagne on her breath. "Oh, Nickie," she laughed. "This is so silly. I forgot my swimsuit back at Peter and Pat's.

"Oh well," she said, "it's not as if we weren't born with swimsuits." Before I could stop her, she slipped away and stripped down to her bra and panties.

"Marilyn, no, you're drunk." I grabbed for her as she stepped back towards the pool.

I didn't get Marilyn. I got her bra.

She fell backwards with a splash, then came back up, her famous breasts bare in the water. "You're wicked, Nickie."

"Marilyn …" I leaned over, holding out the bra, but next thing I knew she pulled me over into the pool on top of her.

I came up sputtering, and she dunked me a second time, then swam away, laughing. But it's a mistake to turn your back on a would-be Olympic swimmer. I kicked off my shoes and followed.

Marilyn got to the edge of the pool and started to pull herself up on one of the dolphins, but I pulled her back in. We wrestled, and somewhere in there her panties slipped off.

"Ooh, Nickie, you are wicked …" Marilyn screamed with laughter and pounced on me. The panties Went flying out of my hand.

I let her get her revenge and we played strip water polo, my shirt and socks and the rest drifting down to the bottom of the pool. It was one of the craziest and most wonderful moments of my life. We played tag, ducking and bobbing under the water, then came close, our arms around each other. Marilyn gave me a long, slow kiss.

"Nickie," she said, drawing back. "You're always so tense. Dr. Rudo says you're keeping secrets. Lots of them."

It was that obvious then.

"Tell me a secret," Marilyn said.

I was tempted to tell her then and there. I mean, she'd slept with Jack Braun. She wouldn't care if I were an ace or a joker or whatever I was.

But it was my life, and it was all I had. And no woman could ever love a murderer.

I gave her the old line: "If I told, then it wouldn't be a secret."

"You're crying, Nickie," she said. "Dr. Rudo says that tears are secrets trying to come out."

It was just the chlorine, but I held her then, her skin against mine, naked in the pool. I could feel the electricity flowing inside her body, and the tight core of energy coiled inside mine, wanting to come out. I knew if I said anything more, I'd lose control, so I kissed her.

She was the first woman I'd kissed in years, and I think I really did start to cry. I never let myself open to another person. Secrets are like that. Lies are like that.

And a relationship built on lies would never last. I knew that from experience.

And I knew it would be the same with her, and I think that was most of why I cried, but God she was beautiful. I wanted her so much, but the energy was boiling up inside me and I knew if I gave off a pulse too close, I would shock her to death.

I broke away and swam off, fast as I could, to the other end of the pool. I let my entire charge flow out and forced it through the bolts of the underwater light to ground itself in the wiring. The bulb popped like a strobe and all the lights in the hall went dark, but the charge was gone and I was safe and drained and crying like a baby.

Marilyn swam up beside me in the dark pool as I babbled something about faulty wiring and electrical danger.

"Shh, Nickie," she said. "Sometimes you've just got to let things happen. I want you, and if you want me, I'm here."

She floated there like some water nymph from an old tale, Lorelie or Calypso or Nimue. I reached out to touch her breasts and she drew back, then laughed and grabbed my arms, drawing me towards her. We fit together, mouth to mouth and body to body, and her legs folded around me as my arms went around her.

We did it right there, in the pool, in the dark, with the shadows dancing off the ceiling and the echoes calling back to us from the corners of the gymnasium.

If there was anyone who saw, they never interrupted.

When it was over, we were both giggling with nervous laughter, Marilyn's intoxicated, mine drunk on fear and sobriety. And love.

She'd wanted me for me. And she knew I kept secrets and didn't care.

I think I could have loved her just for that.

I was in love, for the first time, really, and so, I think … at least I'd like to think … was Marilyn.

I was like a giddy teenager. It was like nothing I'd ever had, even before the wild card.

But you're probably wanting to know what happened with bombs and all that. The next day Flattop and I went through the larger snippets, but had trouble placing them. The breakthrough came from Marilyn.

Marilyn had been friends with Jane Russell ever since Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she identified the first clip I'd found. "Oh sure, Nickie," she said. "That's from The Outlaw Jane did for Howard Hughes. But don't show Jane. The film was an absolute bomb."

I gave Marilyn a kiss and she forgot about it, but I didn't. The rest of the snippets came from The Outlaw and other bad adventure flicks, all from RKO, owned and operated by one Howard Hughes. Hughes' paranoia about disease was legendary, so it was likely he'd been behind the bomb attempt, not that there was anything you could prove.

The Hearst papers carried an article about a Japanese mine from World War II drifting into the Santa Monica pier. How it managed to hit six feet above the water line was never explained.

The pier was closed for "structural damage" and the Menagerie was shut down, though in a much less bloody fashion than was no doubt planned. A check of public records showed the long arms of Howard Hughes and Willie Hearst pulling the strings. Hopper's column raved about the planned renovation, during which no doubt the Menagerie would lose its liquor license.

In an unrelated piece, the bodies of three men were found Washed up on the beach. The corpses were identified the next day as belonging to three of RKO's special effects men. The obituary listed the cause of death as a "boating accident." Their names correlated with Wally's suspects for several sabotaged pics.

I had evidence, but nothing I could present to anyone, Welles included. And it was just more conspiracy work for the files — nothing about any particular plot against Blythe.

But Marilyn was the key to the whole house of cards. If she fell, the whole thing would collapse. I stayed close by her during the day, and at her house at night. There really wasn't anything else I could do.

She had a small place in Brentwood, with an inscription above the portico that read Cursum Perficio, "My journey ends here." Sometimes we dallied in the house, and sometimes in the pool in the back yard, memories of our first time together.

I felt like I had come home at last.

During the day, I escorted Marilyn around the set and played stand-in what little time I had to. And at night, back at her place, Marilyn told me her nightmares.

Sometimes she woke up from them screaming like a little girl and begged me to hold her until they went away.

Her nightmares … How can I describe them? In one she was Mary Shelley, talking to her husband about the baby she'd lost. Then he'd console her, and say that she was the mother of far more, since hadn't she created Frankenstein and given her nightmares to a thousand people?

And then there was the one where she was Cleopatra, and it was like the last scene of the movie, except the asp talked, and it said, "You are the Goddess. You are the Queen. And I am all men and I will have you. And I will kill you."

And then, trapped in the motions of the story, she dropped the asp down the front of her dress. But instead of biting her, it crawled inside her.

And she knew her body was not her own.

Then she was Guenevere from Camelot, singing "The Simple Joys Of Maidenhood" just like Julie Andrews on Broadway. And as she did, the bodies of her admirers piled up around her feet, one after the other.

There were a dozen others, sometimes as many as three a night. Sometimes I did nothing but hold her, and sometimes we did nothing but make love until the nightmares went away. And sometimes, during all that, I wondered if it were the LSD that had caused the nightmares, or perhaps something else.

And every afternoon, she had a session with Dr. Rudo. I didn't like to think of what they did together, or the trysts she had every week or so with either of the Kennedy brothers, but whenever I raised the subject, she just laughed. "Nickie, you're so old-fashioned," she'd say. "We're all sexual creatures. If I make love to another man, it doesn't mean I don't love you. And anyway, it's part of the treatment."

Dauerschlaf, that's what Rudo called it: The Long Sleep. Marilyn had first come to him for her insomnia, and then for her other problems. Sometimes she said she felt like a thousand women packed into one. Blythe was almost autobiographical.

Schizophrenia ran in her family. It had claimed both her mother and grandmother. She didn't want it to claim her.

Whatever the problem, I didn't believe that sex was a necessary part of any therapy. What did Dr. Rudo do with boys? But somehow, bastard that he was, Rudo's cure seemed to be working. Marilyn got better for all the bad dreams. She drank less, and slept more without tranquilizers.

And her acting became hearthreakingly beautiful. I wasn't the only one to cry when I saw her do Blythe's final scene. And her last coherent words:

"Tisianne, hold me. I can't bear them any longer."

Seeing her in the straightjacket as she descended into Blythe Van Renssaeler's madness, I was reminded of Wally Fisk. While Marilyn and I had made love, he'd swallowed his tongue and died in the hospital.

"A brilliant performance, no?" Pan Rudo stood next to me and lit another cigarette. The smoke curled lazily from his fingers. "You find it very beautiful, but very disturbing as well. Some personal meaning, perhaps?"

He shook forward a cigarette from his case, but I got out one of my own and used my own lighter. "Do you always state the obvious, Dr. Rudo?"

He tapped his unlit smokes back into line and snapped the case shut, slipping it into an inside pocket. "Frequently." He took a lazy pull from his cigarette as the scene broke down and Welles called it a wrap. "There are so many lies and self-deceits abounding, it's often useful to remind oneself of the facts. 'To thine own self be true,' as Shakespeare put it. Wouldn't you agree?"

I blew some of my own smoke his direction. "I've always been more of a 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' man myself."

He laughed. "I never cease to be amazed by you, Mr. Williams. I always keep thinking I've found your heart, but all I get is another matrushka doll. What's inside the last would you say? Pins and sawdust? Clockwork springs? Or is there really a lion's heart of flesh and blood?"

I looked into his eyes, cold blue mirrors of my own. "Being that I don't wear it on my sleeve, Dr. Rudo, I don't think you'll ever have a chance to find out."

He leaned back on one heel, regarding me. "Perhaps, Mr. Williams. Perhaps."

He broke off the look abruptly. The witch had arrived, hat and all.

Hedda was wearing a salmon pink linen skirt and jacket, with a matching hat: salmon felt decorated with silver applique waves and, I kid you not, an honest-to-God, life-size gold-lame fish lunging after the fly that dangled from the miniature rod stuck through the crown.

"Pan, darling!" Hedda oooed. "And dearest Nicholas! What luck to find you both here!"

Rudo paused and looked to me. "You know Hedda, Mr. Williams?"

It was the first time I'd ever seen him taken off guard. Hedda breezed right in between us.

"Oh pish, darling," Hedda said, "you know I have my little spies everywhere." She reached up and pinched his cheek, then linked arms with me and patted the back of my hand. "Nicholas and I go back a long way."

Rudo took a long drag on his cigarette. "I should never be surprised by anything you know, Hedda."

Hedda laughed and led me a ways off into the set. "So, Nick, what you got for me?"

How should I put this? Hedda owned a lot of people in Hollywood. One of the ones she owned was me. She'd given me a couple breaks early in my career — back when I was nothing more than a frightened young actor — and she made sure I knew I owed her. I was part of her spy network, and that, more than anything, was what got me to turn pro at it.

That press contact I'd phoned in the Wally Fisk story to? That was Hedda. The job for Welles had been a conflict of interests since the beginning.

I wondered what Flattop would think. His hero, the ace Will-o'-Wisp, was a spy for Hedda the Hat.

I sighed, recalling the list I'd prepared for her. "Well, Jeff Chandler has a new girlfriend. And I told you about Wally Fisk … he died this morning."

"Old news, dearest," she said, patting my hand. "I put it in this morning's column. Now, tell mother what she wants to know: What's the job you're doing for Orson? Wally's old case.

"Now don't look so shocked, dearest," Hedda said as I struggled to keep my St. Elmo's from springing up and killing the old hag. "Mother knows lots of things, and who do you think it was who got you this lovely job? The moment I heard about poor Wally, all I had to do was have dearest Kimberly drop a word in Orson's pudgy pink ear and voila! Here you are.

"So now, my little Nicholas, tell mother the dirt."

Have you ever been caught so off guard you can't speak? That was me. I was so good at deceptions, I'm surprised I didn't come up with one immediately.

"And no lies, Nicholas," Hedda said. "Mother can tell. And," she said significantly, "since I know Kimberly, if I find out you've lied to me, I'll be forced to tell the truth to Jack Braun. You know him — the glowing freak with the photogenic bottom and the hands that can punch through walls? You're considerably thinner than a wall, Nicholas, and I'm sure he'd have no trouble at all getting through you. And wouldn't that be a horrid scandal."

She smiled, as if relishing the possibility, and I swallowed. Electric ace or not, there was no way I could stand up to Golden Boy.

I wish I'd had the stomach for cold blooded murder. Hedda had her arm around mine, and all it would take was one jolt to send the old harpy to Hell. But I knew the nature of the beast I was dealing with — upon her death, Hedda's lawyers would send packets to various addresses, and there was no way of knowing whether a sheaf of photographs would be her bequest to Jack Braun.

I settled for the simple truth and told Hedda the gist of Wally's investigation. All I said about my own work was that it had been fruitless — nothing about the little altercation under the pier, or the unprovable connections to Howard Hughes and Willie Hearst.

Hedda clicked her tongue. "My, my, how very interesting. You've done well, my little Nicholas. But isn't there something you're not telling mother?"

I shook my head, smiling. It was hard, but I told myself that even if Hedda found out, I could hide behind J. Edgar. Golden Rat may have been the strongest man in the world, but the one thing he was frightened of was the Feds.

Hedda pinched me on the cheek. "Oh come now, Nicholas, don't be so shy. I've heard the rumors. You've been seeing Marilyn, haven't you?"

I blushed, feeling the strangest mixture of fear and relief. There was a reason why Hedda called her home "The House that Fear Built."

She crowed with laughter. "You're so wonderfully ingenous, Nick. I think that's why you've always been one of my favorites." Hedda extended her hand to be kissed.

I did it carefully, holding down my gorge and my ace.

"Thanks, Nicholas," she said. "You're a dear. But as they say at Disney, TTFN, ta-ta for now!"

Hedda left, the fishing fly on her hat bobbing like some Satanic sound boom, and I slumped back against a piece of scenery. My life was swiftly becoming a nightmare.

But there's never bad without some good. That evening I lay in bed with Marilyn, just holding on. There was so much I wanted to tell her, but couldn't.

"Shh, Nickie," she said, stroking my hair. "Shh. You can tell me when you feel its time. But I have something to tell you."

"What, Marilyn?"

"I talked with Dr. Rudo this afternoon. He's interpreted my nightmares, and says I have a choice: I can be all women to all men, or one woman to one man." She paused and I looked up into her blue eyes. "Will you be my one man, Nickie?"

I began to cry, hugging her, holding her. "Yes."

She kissed me and we made love.

"There's one other thing, Nickie," she said once we were done. "I'll never be whole until I have a child. I hope you like children."

"I love children, Marilyn."

A few days later, she told me she thought she was pregnant.

"And it has to be yours, Nickie," Marilyn said. "I've counted, and Jack and Bobby always use condoms, and Pan's had a vasectomy."

That satyr had an appropriate name, at least. I asked about Jack Braun and Tom Quincey.

Marilyn shook her head. "I gave Jack a blowjob and he passed out. And Tommy's sweet, but we were through months ago. It has to be you."

It was then that I realized that with all the pills she'd been taking, none of them had been birth control. And I'd never used a condom.

She begged me to keep it a secret. With as many as I had, one more wasn't any trouble.

But, oh God, what a dilemma. If Marilyn had a child conceived out of wedlock, the controversy would wreck the movie. Possibly her career.

"It's my career, Nickie. I can wreck it if I like, she told me. "I can do anything I want."

But I'd heard Marilyn's nightmares and her whispered confidences. She'd had abortions before, and I knew one more would destroy her.

There's an old legend that will-o'-wisps are the souls of unbaptized children. In Marilyn s dream, they were the souls of her abortions. They haunted her night by night, saying, "We are the dead and we are secrets and you will never know who we are. That is our vengeance and that is how we will haunt you."

She loved me, she said, but she could never marry a man who couldn't tell her his secrets. One more secret and she would die.

I didn't tell her any of mine, let alone my nickname for my little ball lightning charges. But I held her in my arms all that night and told her that the ghosts would go away if she would just name them. And one by one Marilyn named them, all seven, until she fell asleep in my arms.

I didn't sleep well at all, knowing all that. But we all make sacrifices for our careers, and Marilyn's had been her children. I know that the law makes her a murderess, but I couldn't bring myself to hate her for that. Maybe it sounds crazy, but as she fell asleep against my chest, I think I loved her all the more.

The weeks flew by and March passed to April. Marilyn was Blythe as she had never been and I was alternately stand-in or spy, but my heart wasn't in either. It was with Marilyn. Welles had hired me to save his movie, but I knew the greatest threat to Blythe was our love, and I wouldn't kill our child or destroy the woman I loved to save a strip of cellulose. It was none of his business anyway.

Hedda wasn't even a consideration. She'd discover everything in due time through her other spies. I'd even give her a refund if she complained.

Otherwise, everything was perfect. The conspiracy of silence had broken down of its own accord and there was some grudging press and commentary, spiced with Hedda's venom and Louella Parson's treacle.

And then there was another party at the Lawfords's, grander than the rest since it had a theme: Walpurgis Night.

It was the brainchild of Rudo and Quincey, a dress rehearsal for the May Day celebration they planned to hold on May second, a day late, when both Bobby and Jack Kennedy would be in town. Marilyn planned to spend the night with them. I wasn't pleased, but I knew that if you tried to hold a butterfly, you'd crush it.

Marilyn said it was one last fling, and I had to take that on faith. I tried to be open-minded.

But April Thirtieth, Rudo explained, was a traditional time for the opening of the gateways of perception, and beyond that, a good excuse for a masked ball.

Nobody took it seriously aside from a few domino masks, with the exception of Tom Quincey. He'd got himself up in drag as Guenevere from Camelot and did an a cappella version of "The Lusty Month of May" as the Lawfords' grandfather clock struck midnight. Everyone thought it was amusing except Marilyn and myself.

Tommy danced around handing out Sandoz tablets like candy and Dr. Rudo had brewed up an Indian punch using peyote buttons. Marilyn wanted me to take some, but vomiting until you hallucinate wasn't my idea of fun, even if I weren't an ace.

She got me a Coke instead, and I nursed it along as everyone around me drank every variety of alcohol along with Rudo's mescaline punch. I hadn't gotten drunk since college. You don't know what it's like being a teetotaler in a fraternity.

The pool lights sparkled as they came on, and it was then that I noticed that I was glowing. My St. Elmo'S fire was out, a crackling blue aura around me, sparking and making the lights flicker as I fed on the power.

I tried to damp it. I really did, but then I saw everyone looking at me.

No one said anything for a long while, then finally Tom Quincey went, "Wow, man! Colors!"

I ran off down the beach, trying to get away. My whole world had suddenly fallen apart. I had suppressed the power for so long, it had finally struck back. The wild card had played its cruelest trick on me and I knew I was going to die, I was getting so dizzy, and I fell down on the shoreline.

Then all my nightmares were around me. Everything I'd always feared would happen. Iack Braun standing over me, glowing gold to my blue: "You bastard. You think you're so much better than me. I only hurt people because I was scared and stupid. You did it out of spite. nothing else. Traitor ace." Then Hedda Hopper: "I always knew you were a joker, Nicholas darling. But now that you know I know, I own you — unless you want everyone else to know." And I saw her smile. Then there was the Olympic committee taking away medals I'd never won, and J. Edgar Hoover with draft papers, a choice between prison or disappearing somewhere where I'd never see anyone I loved again.

And Marilyn: "Sony, Nickie. I could never love a sparking electrical freak, so you might as well go anyway."

Then she was slapping my face and shaking me. "Nickie! Nickie! What's wrong?"

"I'm an ace." I'd finally said it, admitted it to her, to myself, to everyone. "I was glowing. Everybody saw."

She splashed some water over me and I came to a bit more. "Nickie, nobody saw anything except you screaming and running off down the beach. Pan said you needed to loosen up, so I slipped some of Tommy's pills in your drink. I'm sorry. I didn't think you would have a bad trip." She paused and a look passed through her eyes. I still don't know how to describe it. "What do mean about being an ace?"

I broke down then and I really did start to glow, and Marilyn did notice this time. Tears poured out of my eyes, glowing with foxfire, and I forced the charge out of myself and down the wet sand and into the ocean. For a moment, I think the sea glowed, though that may have just been my imagination.

Then I told it all to Marilyn. Everything I've just told you and more. All my nightmares and my tears.

I must have passed out at the end, since I didn't know where I was until I woke up on somebody's couch the next morning.

Marilyn was there. She said that after I'd passed out, I was still sparking, so she couldn't touch me. She'd run and got Jack Braun and he'd carried me up to his house, and his glow had probably covered mine, so she didn't think anyone else would know. Know that I was an ace.

Nobody but Marilyn and the greatest betrayer in the history of wild cards.

She was crying. I could never stand it when she did that. I think her tears were why I first fell in love with her. She said she was sorry she'd given me the pills, but she hadn't known I was an ace, and she said she never would tell. She said Jack promised not to either.

Marilyn called in sick to the studio for both of us. I was so raw with nerves I could hardly move, so she drove me back to her house.

She left me by the pool while she went to fix lunch. But I had the beginnings of an idea, the product of nightmares and panic: LSD, whatever the stuff was, caused nightmares. I knew it. Mine had been living and waking. Marilyn's came at night.

And Wally Fisk? His had driven him mad.

But doctors know ways to determine the effects of drugs. Marilyn, though it was awful, was slowly getting over her problems. Maybe I would have too if they hadn't been so big, or if the LSD hadn't made me lose control of my ace. But Rudo, I was convinced, could make a far nastier mixture if he had a mind to. The connection was firm, if circumstantial.

And the motive? Rudo may not have hated wild cards, but there was someone who did. And there was Rudo's comment: "You know Hedda?"

You didn't know Hedda. You feared her, then either avoided her or worked for her. If I had to suspect someone in Hollywood of masterminding a conspiracy against wild cards, there was only one name that would be at the top of my list.

She was just so obvious, I'd never suspected her.

Rudo was the perfect pawn — he could be anywhere on the set, spy out anything she wanted him to, and at the end of production, one of his cigarettes in the film locker and Blythe would be as dead as the original, with no shame to Marilyn or her career, or Rudo's finances or reputation.

I kissed Marilyn and rousted her out of the house and off to work, telling her not to tell anything to anyone, especially Dr. Rudo. I then got on the phone to Hedda, dropped enough hints to leave her drooling, and said I'd be in late to give her the full stories.

She was interested. She'd wait up.

I spent the afternoon back at my place constructing a careful stash of rumors, then set out for Hedda's.

It was near midnight, but she was still there, alone in the office after everyone had left. In some perverse way, I always admired the woman. She worked harder than anyone I knew. It was what she worked at that I had problems with.

Hedda had composed herself for my entrance. That was one of the ways you could tell that she liked you. She had on a blue wool skirt and jacket and this huge hat with ostrich plumes and stuffed doves and ropes of faux pearls. I'd heard that the one time they'd met, Dr. Tachyon had kept after her to tell him the name of her milliner. She'd used that to pillory him in her column for months. The lavender boy from outer space — that's what she called him — and I guess that's the other thing I agreed with her on. People were dying of his virus and he was concerned about hats.

"Nicholas, darling," she said, smiling. "Let's see what you have for me." I gave it to her and she typed for a few minutes, then got on the phone and called in last minute changes.

"Thanks, dearest. That was very useful. So, what favor would you like?"

I hadn't counted on her being that pleased, but as she'd said, I was one of her favorites. "You guess."

Hedda dimpled, cocking her head. "You'd like your little tryst with Marilyn to stay silent until you're both in … less embarrassing circumstances."

I nodded.

Hedda clucked her tongue. "Nicholas, dearest, you're going to ruin your career if you aren't wiser with your choice of jobs. And," she said, "you may tell Marilyn that associating with these wild card freaks won't do her any good either. My husband had blue skin and not a hair on his body, and the only thing I can say is that it's a good thing for Wolfie that he died before this virus ever showed up. No good can ever come of it, no matter what anyone says."

I'd heard her stories about De Wolfe Hopper and knew that an overdose of silver nitrate and a bout of rheumatoid fever could make a joker out of anyone. I think bad memories of Hopper left her ill-disposed to any other "freak."

Hedda showed me out and locked up behind her, and then I played the next card in the game: I drained my own battery.

It Wasn't hard. I was a good enough actor to fake my car not turning over, then once I'd flipped up the hood and put my hand on the negative terminal, the battery was well and truly dead. The trick was keeping the charge from making me glow.

Hedda came over and tried to start my car, but of course she didn't have any luck either. She also didn't carry jumper cables and I'd made sure to leave mine at home.

In the end, I got what I wanted: Hedda let me into the office to use the phone to try to find an all-night towing service, and told me to lock up when I left.

Once she'd gone, I got out my camera and into her private files. Hedda kept great records and I'd taken impressions of the keys back when I'd worked for her.

Hedda really couldn't blame me. She'd taught me the trade.

There was the file: Rudo, Dr. Pan. I flipped it open and was immediately struck by the swastika stationery, but after I parsed through a bit and looked at the comments in Hedda's handwriting on the attached page, the reason for the hooked cross and the size of the sword over Rudo's head became clear: In 1938, Dr. Pan Rudo was in Vienna, experimenting on mental patients with his dauenschlaf technique under the auspices of the Nazi party. Five died before the Nazis felt it best for Dr. Rudo to leave for Switzerland. He'd gone to New York afterwards, perfecting his technique all the while.

I thought of Wally in the hospital. The easiest thing to repeat is a mistake.

I took pictures of everything in the file, reading through occasional bits and glancing into related files.

Hedda seemed to have a whole clique of agents called the Card Sharks. Dr. Rudo was one, helping her in her crusade against wild cards, not that I would expect a Nazi to have any compunctions about genocide.

Hedda's partner, or perhaps just contact with other sharks, was J. Edgar Hoover. The files were stuffed with F.B.I. transcripts, courtesy of same. Likewise, money came from Howie Hughes and Willie Hearst, and they were responsible for some jobs. There was a copy of a letter from Hedda to Howie, blistering him for having bungled the job on the Santa Monica pier.

There was also a file on Will-o'-Wisp, the ace vigilante. Hedda had got my height and build right, but the rest was wild speculation and frothing. I was a major priority for the sharks, either termination or conscription.

Then I got to Marilyn's file, sticking a little out from the others. There had been a recent addition.

It was an obituary. It isn't unusual to find obituaries in the files of celebrities. What is unusual is to find them postdated, describing the manner of death. It was scheduled for May Third.

I remember that column as if I'd read it last Week. It was last week, for me.

The headline read: BRILLIANT CAREER CUT SHORT.

Hedda had written below that: Marilyn Monroe — brilliant life, tragic death. What happened? Ask Jack and Bobby! Pretty Marilyn was due to Wish Jack 'Happy Birthday' at his big fundraising bash in New York come the nineteenth, but evidently Jack wanted to have his present early. But he and Bobby played too rough and the pretty toy broke.

"Hedda told Marilyn never to go near that Lawford house. Marilyn paid the price for not listening to Mother, but let's see the Kennedy boys weasel out of this one! The Kennedys, the most famous crime family in America!"

It went on from there. The plot was simple: Tomorrow John and Robert Kennedy would be staying the night at Peter Lawford's. So would Marilyn, as I already knew.

Dr. Rudo would slip Marilyn just a few too many of Paula Strasberg's trademark tranquilizers, so the Kennedys would be sure to wake up with the corpse of Hollywood's greatest star.

The President and the Attorney General would be politically ruined. Paula Strasberg would be implicated for manslaughter. And Marilyn would be dead before the filming of Blythe was complete.

I got it all, then carefully put the files back in order, my hands shaking all the while and I know I was sparking from the stress.

I went out into the outer office, made sure to move the phone book and the telephone slightly out of line, locked up, then went and recharged my battery.

It was four A.M. by the time I got home. I put the film in the developer first thing. I wanted to call Marilyn but for all I knew, J. Edgar had the phone bugged. Hedda had her spies everywhere. I should know.

But oh my God, I didn't know where to turn. I could tell Welles, but what would he do? Make a film of it? Likewise with Trumbo and the rest. And Flattop? I could trust him, but there are some things people are better off not knowing. It would be like telling Poitier about the KKK.

The police were out of the question. Even the ones I knew I could trust would have to hand it up, and J. Edgar would know about it before the day was out. Hoover had been Hedda's conspirator since before HUAC.

There was only one possibility: Marilyn. Maarilyn Monroe was one of the worlds greatest actresses, no matter what the critics said. If she could just elude the Card Sharks' snare without arousing their suspicions, she could live to deliver the negatives to the President.

I knew just the time: Jack Kennedy's "Happy Birthday" bash at Madison Square Garden. On a stage in front of a million people with a thousand flashbulbs popping, Hedda's Card Sharks wouldn't dare try anything. Marilyn could deliver the evidence into the President's hands without anyone the wiser and the sharks would all fry for treason.

I got the negatives and a double set of prints into an envelope and got to Marilyn's house just before seven. Her housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, let me in, and I surprised Marilyn in the middle of putting on her mascara.

I take it as a measure of her trust for me that she didn't do anything other than grab her makeup case after I got the overnight travel bag she always kept packed. My expression must have spoken worlds.

I don't know what Mrs. Murray thought. Maybe that we were eloping, I don't know.

I got Marilyn into the car. She took one look at my face, then silently paged through the stack of photographs I handed her. I headed west and we hit the Pacific Coast Highway.

It was either Northern California or Mexico. I headed north. I wasn't sure where we were going, but it had to be far away if we wanted to miss Dr. Rudo's May Day celebration.

At last, Marilyn put the photographs back in the envelope. "These are Hedda's, aren't they?" I think she said.

I nodded, then I couldn't take it anymore. I pulled off the side of the road by one of the beaches and poured it all out to her.

She just listened silently, then asked for the keys. She said she knew a place up the coast, the Brookdale Lodge, an old inn up in the Santa Cruz mountains. It had bungalows in back and the folks who ran it were very discreet about who was staying there, at least until after they left.

The iron butterfly. It was such an appropriate name. I'd just revealed a plot against her life, and she calmly went about finding a place to hide until the storm was over. Marilyn made me take one of her tranquilizers, and I slept in the car on the way up.

It was then that I realized I had told Marilyn my secrets, my fears, my lies, all of them. And she still loved me. It was the most wonderful day of my life. It was also the most frightening.

Marilyn took charge of the espionage game as if she'd been born to it. She got us a room, then went to the local bank, rented a safe deposit box and secreted one set of photographs.

Then we went back to our hotel room and she called Welles, laughing and apologizing about having stolen his Golden Boy stand-in for a quick jaunt. She asked him to convey her apologies to the Lawfords and the Kennedys, but she just couldn't stand the pressure. But she'd make sure not to miss the "Happy Birthday" bash later that month.

I was seeing a great actress at work: Pretend you've run away for a short fling, then call and apologize to everyone you've let down. The Strasbergs' Method served her well.

At the hotel gift shop, she bought a toy tiger. She ripped a seam in its neck and slipped the negatives inside, then stitched it back together with her sewing kit. It was the perfect thing to give the President as a present in front of a million people. I hid the last set of photographs under the catpeting in the trunk of my car.

The getaway was mad and beautiful. Marilyn took me out to dinner at the inn, which had a creek running through the old Victorian dining room. She said there was supposed to be the ghost of a priest or a drowned girl who walked through every once in a while, but we never saw it.

Funny, isn't it; a dead man telling ghost stories.

And then came the hardest thing I've ever done. We drove back down the next day, the day Hedda's column was supposed to run, and pretended that nothing had happened. Marilyn went on with her role, and Welles called me into his office and chewed me out. He'd hired me to protect his movie, dammit, not run off with the star, make them run a day over budget, and piss off the President and the Attorney General in the process.

I tried Marilyn's Method, doing Lovestruck Swain Grovels Before Boss. I managed not to get fired, but mostly, I think, because Welles didn't want to upset Marilyn. If I'd become her pet, well, he'd dealt with bigger expenses, and at least she'd lightened up on the pills.

Marilyn had gone off them all cold turkey, in fact. She couldn't swallow even one, knowing that they were the intended murder weapon had the Card Sharks plans for her succeeded. She drank more, though, and two days later fired Dr. Rudo. I got to watch the scene as she tore into him, calling him the most overpriced gigolo in Hollywood, and underendowed to boot. She threatened to tell the AMA and Louella Parsons how many times they'd had sex on his psychiatrist's couch.

It was a spout of venom worthy of Hedda. Budo glared at me the Whole time, but I didn't say a word.

That evening I got a call from Marilyn. She wondered if I could come home a bit early. I didn't even question the reason; I knew how much pressure she was under. I think the only thing that held us together that week was holding each other in our arms at night. I hadn't gone to my own place except to pick up clothes.

I slipped into Marilyn's house, under the portico with its strange little inscription: My journey ends here. I never thought of it as an epitaph. It sort of fits, you know.

I went inside the house and called Marilyn's name. Then I heard her voice from the back yard, stuttering like she always did when she was scared "N-Nickie, could you come out here?"

I didn't suspect anything. I really didn't. When your nerves are that raw, it's either suspect nothing at all, or suspect everything and go mad. And I'd already seen enough of madness.

I Stepped outside the house, and in the late afternoon light I saw the impossibly high hat stacked with a florist's shop of silk begonias, Hedda and a chromed pistol resting in the shade beneath. She sat in the deck chair as if she were a countess holding court, one leg crossed over the other.

Marilyn sat to one side in another chair, clutching the toy tiger, while Dr. Rudo sat a bit behind and kept a businesslike Luger pointed at her back.

"You see," Marilyn said then. "There's n-nothing to be shocked about. He'll do whatever I want."

I came closer, taking Marilyn's signal, and put my hands in the air where both Hedda and Rudo could see them and where I could throw my will-o'-wisps.

"Hello, Nick," Hedda said as if it were nothing more important than one of her afternoon teas. "You've always been practical, so please don't play the hero. You'll just get both yourselves killed."

She pulled back the hammer of her gun. "Stand by the edge of the pool please."

"Your scheme's ruined, you know," Marilyn said.

Hedda bowed her impossible hat slightly. I know, darling. You've really fucked things to a turn."

"I'm pregnant," Marilyn said.

There was a moment of dead silence. At last Hedda licked her lips. "Could you repeat what you just Said, dearest?"

"I'm Pregnant," Marilyn said it with the exact same tone and inflection. "Do you W-want to know who the father is?"

Hedda paused, the nature of her profession plain on her face. "Does it have any bearing on the present situation?"

"Most l-l-likely, since the father is either J-Jack or Bobby Kennedy. I f-found out last week."

"Are you considering an abortion, dearest?"

"No." Marilyn said it definitely, with force. "I'd decided I was going to h-have it, both for myself, and to spite all the m-men who've u-used me."

There was a look on Rudo's face I couldn't quite make out "Which men, Marilyn?"

"Jack. Bobby," she said, and her voice became harder, clearer. "Zanuck. It would serve them all right. It was going to be the one thing I was going to do for myself. Darryl Zanuck stuck me on this lousy jokers pic for the last spot on my contract and there was nothing I could do about it. Except this."

She gripped the toy tiger in her lap, her knuckles turning white on the plush fur. "If I puff up without a husband, the protests will wreck any pic I work on. It'd serve Zanuck right to have to swallow the entire budget for gyping me on my contract. And the scandal would toss Jack and Bobby out on the street with the jokers they love so much. I planned to sink this filthy jokers pic myself."

Marilyn turned towards Hedda, slowly. "You don't believe me. But there's a lot about me you don't know, Mrs. Hopper. You want the exclusive? When I was nine, I was raped. By a joker." Her face contorted and tears began to run down her cheeks, smearing her mascara. "It was at my foster parents' house. One of them — you know I had four different sets. These ones rented out rooms, and one of their boarders was a joker. He had these furry green eyebrows that moved when you talked to him, but I'd been told he was a nice man, and I was too young to know what sort of monsters jokers were. So I went into his room and he took out his penis and it was all spiky. Sharp, green spikes, curving backwards, like a foxtail, and he … he … stuck it into me."

She let go of the tiger and her head collapsed into her hands. "He r-raped me," she blubbered between her fingers, her voice quaking like a little girl's. "I bled for days. And I was so ashamed I never told anyone.

"It was years before I learned that normal men weren't like that. All green and spiky." She shook with sobs. "You know some of it, Dr. Rudo. I told you about Flattop following me around. I'm afraid of him. His penis is probably as stretched out and spiky as the rest of him. His diseased body makes me sick."

Hedda and Rudo looked as if they didn't know if they were hearing the truth or a method actress giving the performance of her life. But I knew from Hedda's expression that Marilyn was offering a scandal that would both kill the movie and hang the Kennedys with rope to spare.

"Darling," said Hedda, testing, "I know you've spent the night with Jack Braun."

Marilyn shrugged, straightening back up and wiping some of the tears from her cheeks. "That was business. I've done a lot worse on the casting couch than just give a joker a blowjob to get help with a script. His dick's normal enough. And," she said, "a girl does what she has to."

I was the only wrinkle in the plan, but Marilyn was working to take that out.

"N-Nickie always wore a condom," she said "I m-may be a little tramp, but I'm not going to have a love child by a nobody." Marilyn looked at me. "Sorry, Nickie," she said, "but you're nobody special."

I think that was a signal for me to use my ace, but God, I don't know. Hedda and Rudo had guns. And I knew from the encounter under the pier what happened when you ran a charge through one of those. The shrapnel from Rudo's Luger would kill Marilyn if the bullet didn't first.

But Marilyn looked at me, the tears running down her face. I never could bear to see her cry.

I focused my ace as hard as I could, large charges, killers, but tightly bound so they'd go straight for Hedda and Rudo's heads and avoid the guns. I hoped, I prayed.

My will-o'-wisps may have been lightning springing from my hands, but they didn't move that fast.

And Hedda's trigger finger was faster.

The shot hit me in the chest and the pain made me lose control as I fell back into the water. My will-o'-wisps lost cohesion, dissipating harmlessly. And the blood flowed out of me along with the electricity, my ace sparking around me, grounding into the pool.

I struggled to keep my head above water and then I saw Hedda and Marilyn and Rudo standing there, looking at me.

"Oh my God," Marilyn breathed then in the most horror-struck voice I've ever heard, "he's a j-joker."

"Didn't you know, my dear?" Hedda asked.

Marilyn slowly shook her head, dropping the toy tiger. "N-no."

"Well," said Hedda, "then you shouldn't have any trouble killing him."

Hedda passed Marilyn the pistol. She looked at it for a second as if she didn't know what it was, but then she seemed to reach some sort of decision and slipped her fingers around it. I know Rudo must have had his Luger pressed into the small of her back, but I couldn't see, and Cod, she did it so fast and so easily.

Marilyn raised the gun, and one by one her tears fell into the pool. But I don't know whether they were tears of pain or hatred.

I can still hear her last Words to me: "Goodbye, Nickie."

And then … there was an explosion and I felt the water close around me. And then I don't remember anything until I woke up here, with Ellen.

And I don't know. Don't you understand, I don't know. Ellen says Marilyn had our child, a son, but I don't know him, and I don't know if he knows about me.

And I don't know if his mother still loves me, or even if she ever loved me at all. She said she didn't care that I was an ace, but she never did like jokers, and then there was that story from her childhood. She made things up and you could never tell the truth from the fiction. You just had to trust her. She was so many women. You never knew who was the real one.

She killed me, you know. It kind of makes you wonder.