Blood's a rover

93

(Los Angeles, 1/9/71)

Chez Marsh: cultured and non-militant.

He got in with tungsten bolt-tappers. Infrared shades induced night sight. Leave the lights off to de-saturate.

Baldwin Hills. A one-level ranch off Stocker. Black bourgeoisie. Tubular furnishings. A coooooool-school aesthetic.

Dwight moseyed through. It was 9:49 p.m. Marsh had a keynote-speech engagement. GOP heavies dug him. He was up-by-his-bootstraps. Governor Reagan got him the gigs.

It’s a first walk-through. Let’s learn the spread.

Dwight snapped pictures. His Minox shot bright-light flashless. The fallback had a darkroom. Joan could develop film there.

Rauschenberg and Rothko in brushed-steel frames. A severe space, overall. A metal womb.

He tapped wall panels. He went through shelves and file drawers. He saw art books, tax records and blank stationery. Marsh was a paper-hoarder. He thought that. Joan called him a “clandestine diarist.”

Dwight walked through the bedroom. The tube motif extended. Marsh loved brushed metal. It was functional and harsh. It exuded male odor and excluded feminine scent. Marsh was all refined obduracy.

Marsh was the all-new malcontent assassin. This was his psychopath’s lair. It was cold and prim. It must go to horrifying from there.

Dwight examined the nightstand drawers. He went through Marsh’s address book and snapped every page. He saw first-name-only men listed. He saw numbers for the Klondike, the 4-Star, the Tradesman, the Spike. Marsh felt safe now. His ops pad was Actors Studio. This pad was fag reference-rich.

They needed plant spaces. Marsh, the queer pack rat with the chaste art-school taste. The house was a beautiful picture. Let’s supply an eroding frame.

Plant fruit-bar matchbooks here. Plant sodomy pix there. Semen-streak the sheets pre-hit day. Hide shit-caked dildos in the bathroom.

The house would attract astounding scrutiny. The faЗade had to crumble slowly. The terror had to slowly accrete.

Dwight tapped wall panels. No telltale thunks perked yet. Plant spaces. Subversive lit and poli-sci porno. Joan’s instinct: he keeps a diary, locate it, we’ll pull it and insert ours pre-hit.

An Underwood electric. Typewriter paper stacked beside it.

Dwight rolled in a sheet and typed out all the letters, numbers and symbols. They looked naked eye-correct. He photo-snapped the keyboard and the strike pads. There might be strike-pad flaws. They would have to tool mark-duplicate them. Forensic teams would examine the machine. They had to create a sound verisimilitude.

He tapped more wall panels. He got no hollow sounds. It was a first prowl. He didn’t trust his ears yet.

Hiding spots. The forensic teams would tear up the place. Marsh must be pungently revealed postmortem. He was wildly ingenious and resourceful. The pad should explode with late-breaking finds.

Plant paper here. Plant paper there. It’s his life refracted. He hoards paper for Mr. Hoover. He looks for paper-plant slots on the job.

He was a month in. Mr. Hoover gave him a pay-level raise. The file section was all scandal skank. Most of it was L.A.-based. Marsh was an L.A. native. Every L.A. Office file would be combed for mention after his death.

He skimmed files and looked for data-insert points. It was operational subtext. You hide age-yellowed data. It implies an emerging political imbalance and closet-queer pathology. The FBI’s file mania indicts Marshall Bowen. Non sequitur files are combed diligently. Mr. Hoover is postmortem-indicted. The file compilation is prissy tedium and officially sanctioned scatology. Moral horror and titillation will war in the public arena. Special Agent D. C. Holly will state what it all means.

He spent hours in the file-storage unit. Jack Leahy found it odd. He found Jack odd. Jack was always cracking wise about the old girl’s health. Jack didn’t know that she was still more lucid than not.

Files:

Joan disdained the Records Center raid in Pennsylvania. She thought it would exposit file mania too soon. She thought he was exploiting Karen. She was making a Quaker pacifist a death accessory.

They stopped discussing it. It just sat there, unsaid.

Dwight went through hall closets. He saw Marsh’s pressed uniforms and a gun belt rolled up on a shelf.

Find some actors. Cop-dress one up. Grab a patrol car. Rig a Griffith Park backdrop. There’s a fake Marsh in uniform. His head is averted. A handcuffed suspect is blowing him. Marsh has a gun to his head.

Age-fade the snapshot. Drop it in a frayed uniform. It’s a forgotten knickknack.

Score some street uppers. Tuck them behind his underwear. Marsh is jacked-up on duty and cruising for sport.

Dwight walked out the back door. Marsh had a lovely view. The location was sweet. Marsh was twenty-six. He had a year to live, tops.

Room service brought New York steaks and a too-fat Bordeaux. He was drinking less. Joan was drinking more. Their sleep stints had reversed.

They ate in their robes. Fat rain drummed the windows. They burned a synthetic log in the fireplace.

Joan said, “I don’t like the break-in. It’s precipitous.”

“You’re worried about the convergence.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s the one thing we can’t force.”

“They have to be voluntarily in the same place at the same time.”

Dwight slouched in his chair. “The same city, with the perch pre-established. It should be in L.A. He’s stayed at the Beverly Wilshire the last six times he’s been here. He always requests a suite with a north-window view. You’ve got seven two- and three-story buildings directly across the street. Two have office-rental signs up. The other buildings are boutiques and restaurants. They have second- and third-floor storage rooms facing the hotel.”

Joan lit a cigarette. “Keep going. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking we should find a black kid about Marsh’s age. A close resemblance is crucial. He should rent an office and we should decorate it. It’s where he goes to fuck boys, use drugs and hoard guns. I’ll steal semen tubes from a hospital. We’ll lay in the fluids gradually. Marsh is cracking up. His drug use is escalating. I’ll have the shooter skin-pop him full of coke on his way out. I’ll show him how to boot toxins into his liver to approximate long-term drug abuse.”

Joan blew a smoke ring. “You are so astonishingly gifted, comrade.”

Dwight took her hands. “You’re worried about Celia.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. She’s always understood the risks.”

“I could make a few phone calls.”

“I don’t want you to.”

Dwight smiled. “When I connected you to Tommy Narduno, I thought you were coming after me.”

Joan smiled. “I considered it. Tommy thought he could reveal the Grapevine aspect of your operation and create a media ruckus. He was always naive that way. He was a muckraking journalist at heart. He was wearing a wire on the night you killed him.”

Dwight trembled. Joan pointed to the wine. Dwight shook his head.

“What convinced you to pass on it?”

“Karen convinced me. She implied that you were ready. She quoted Goethe at one point. The phrase she used was ‘the fall upward.’ ”

Dwight opened a window. Hailstones brushed his face.

“Jomo and the thing with Marsh. What was your reasoning?”

A gust shook the panes. Joan turned her chair and let the wet hit her.

“There were your ends and my ends. They were both synchronous and inimical. I knew that Marsh had to be your plant. Your pathology showed itself in your choice. It was bold, grandiose and self-destructive. I spent time with Marsh and found him to be weak and almost fawningly self-serving. He cruised men when he thought I wasn’t looking, which was true actor’s faux pas, dramatically unsound and narcissistic. So, I called Scotty Bennett and revealed his inclination. So, I called Scotty again and mediated Marsh’s betrayal of Jomo Clarkson. It was a two-fold strategy. I wanted to put Marsh in jeopardy and force him into allegiance with the BTA. I considered Jomo to be evil, and I was fairly sure that Scotty wouldn’t be able to resist killing him.”

Wind tossed the tablecloth and dumped the Bordeaux. Dwight pulled Joan out of her chair.

Puckett, Mississippi. Six trailer parks and nine Klan kampgrounds.

Bob Relyea ran the Exalted Knights Klavern. He pandered to the local cops and snitched to ATF. He sold magic mushrooms and hate tracts. He robbed gas stations. Bob was ex-Tiger Krew. He pushed heroin in Saigon and worked with Wayne Tedrow. He shot Martin Luther King.

It was kool and klear. The kampground konsisted of a korrugated bunkhouse and a K-9 kennel. Four fucks stood around the shooting range. The targets were department-store dummies. They wore Eldridge Cleaver masks.

Bob saw the car pull up. Dwight braked and stopped short of the kampground. Bob jogged the rest of the way.

Dwight popped the passenger door and the glove box. A C-note roll rolled out. Bob caught it and tucked it under his sheet.

“And that’s just for talking?”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t tell me. If I shoot somebody, there’s lots more where that came from.”

Dwight said, “That’s right.”

Bob said, “Wooo, boy.”

Dwight lit a cigarette. “You get fifty thousand. You take out the target and the fall guy right there. It’s two easy shots. That part doesn’t worry me at all. It’s bringing the two together. I’ll abduct the fall guy and position him if I have to, but I’d rather not.”

Bob picked his nose. “The target guy’s a big deal?”

Dwight winked. Bob said, “Talk’s gonna bubble.”

“I want it to. There’s a subtext here.”

“Who’s the target?”

Dwight laughed. “You’ll know him when you see him.”

DOCUMENT INSERT: 2/6/71. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,

February 6, 1971

I’m going through with it, whatever it abuts, facilitates or foreshadows on Joan’s and Dwlght’s end. I am taking the risk of implementing violence. I feel loyal to Joan and am grateful to her for the change she has created in Dwight. We have traveled a long road together. It would not be bragging for me to assert that my pacifism has mitigated Joan’s violent actions over the years. It is surely true that her brash being has sporadically brought me closer to God and non-violent confrontation. She is of me and I am of her and Dwight is of both of us. There is deep alchemy in where we connect and where we diverge. I continue to trust in our dialogue as much as I fear potential outcomes. My horrible fight with Dwight has forced me to admit the arrogance and speciousness at the core of my moral logic. The fire of his conversion has convinced me of the necessity of this risk.

Dwight now knows the length and breadth of my relationship with Joan, if not the specific details. Joan has laid hints, or has revealed the friendship in looks and asides that the brilliant and brilliantly paranoic Dwight has seized upon and brought to mental certainty. I have lied to Dwight by omission; I am now certain that Joan used me in order to get to him; now Dwight and Joan lie to me by withholding the details of their “Operation.” I am fully culpable for the creation of the Dwight-Joan bond. I should have told Dwight that Joan has deployed fake identities and that they have cloaked much of her subversion. I should have told Dwight that Joan had planned a series of armed robberies back east. I should have told him that we were in Algeria together and that I held a prayer vigil for the French paratroopers that Joan and her comrades ambushed outside Bйchar. I should have told him that I was part of the 6/14 invasion, in a non-violent planning role. I did not tell him these things, because I ghoulishly desired the conflagration of Them, because I wanted to unleash Them to fulfill some buried rage in Me, to inflict Them on the circumspect, ideologically compromised, radically chic and ever-so-careful world I live in with the unique fury I knew They would evolve.

Now I must live out my creator’s role in this, play my supporting part, damn the vicissitudes of radical lifestyle as I pray for peace. I will break and enter, steal files, explicate the file-hoarding practices of an oppressive bureaucracy and hope that a much-anticipated boxing match between two gifted black fighters does not push my actions to back-page status. Irony: Dwight has called the break-in a “media event.” The Records Center is in Media, Pennsylvania.

The fight with Dwight took place here in my home; Dina and Ella heard the flare-up and storming-out conclusion. It was an altercation I spawned from my own hubris. I overestimated my influence on Dwight and belittled Joan’s influence. I was shrill, petty, jealous and philosophically unsound. Dwight came at me with a convert’s and converted lover’s fury. “You blow up things, you destroy symbols, you attack sympathetic portrayals of institutions forty fucking times removed,” he said to me. “It allows you to feel smug while people suffer and die, you’ll continue to do it until a chunk of exploding plaster from a Confederate monument puts out a black kid’s eye, then you’ll come back here and mope and pray and figure out something spectacular and Quaker-correct to do to put yourself back in the game you so dearly love, which is violent by its own basic nature.”

And he was right.

And then he said, “And do not ever patronize Joan Rosen Klein, because you gave her to me.”

And he was right. And so I will go forth with the task that he and Joan have assigned.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 2/21/71. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

En route to Boston,