15

Tokyo

August 15, 1962

Dear Rick,

It’s been too long since I have written to you, but I’ve held off, waiting for good things to tell. I’m afraid, however, that I am living through one upsetting death after another, and you can throw in a couple of FBI visits to spice the gloom. I must say I am fairly good by now at wearing Special Agents out, and, of course, the Far East version of the Buddha Gang is composed of reasonably civilized fellows, who realize that in the Far East, they are just serving as liaison. So they respect my feelings.

Another of my old friends, however, has become an intruder in the dust. William Faulkner died early last month. While I can’t claim the pleasure of having seen much of him lately, I do remember one glorious evening back in 1946 right after the war when Dashiell Hammett and Faulkner and myself were drinking at Twenty-One. Do you know, for two hours Faulkner didn’t say a word. I’m not even sure he was listening. Once in a while, we would nudge him, and he would raise his head and say, “The secret, gentlemen, is that I am just a farmer.” Well, Dash would rarely give you more than a smile, but even he had to roar over this, as if Faulkner had made the wisest, most humorous remark in the world. I was feeling so sad Bill had died that I made the mistake of telling Mary.

“Oh, Cal, come off it,” she said, “you can’t claim that you’ve lost a bosom pal. Why, you haven’t even had a letter from the man in fifteen years.”

“Yes,” I said, “but he was a great writer.”

“You know,” said Mary in that voice she gets when the question is already decided for her, “he was a great writer, I suppose, but I simply cannot read him. He is one of those people who pack everything up so tightly inside themselves, that, oh, my dear, they do nothing but make strange noises.”

Thank God, I don’t strike women. I would have laid hands on a man for less than that remark. I am frankly worried about my temper. You see, those words of Mary’s went around in my head until I decided she was not really talking about Faulkner but trying to tell me something about her Japanese businessman whom I have sent back to the woodwork, or the bamboo mats, or wherever he is skulking, but to speak of people like Bill Faulkner as all packed up inside and making strange noises when she was obviously thinking of her Japanese mooey-mooey had me sweating my palms.

Maybe it is all these deaths. Too many friends have bought the last look. Do you know that what deranges the mind most in the hours after combat is remembering the expression that comes to men’s faces as they die. Often that expression never belonged to them before. So I brood over the demise of people I care about. I confess to wondering what their last expression might have been.

Now it is Marilyn Monroe. Her suicide on August 5, yes, just ten days ago, has preoccupied me. Did you know that Allen Dulles proposed sending me to visit Miss Monroe in Hollywood in 1955? Wanted me to talk her into starting a romance with Sukarno. Allen may have been bewitched by a conversation he had once with Marlene Dietrich. She confided to our Great White Case Officer that she regretted not meeting Hitler in the thirties because she was certain she could have “humanized” him and thereby saved tens of millions of lives. Well, I would have vulcanized Hitler in preference to humanizing him, but Marlene doubtless knows a thing or two I don’t. Allen, in any event, put the thought in his special kit bag and was ready to let Sukarno have a little go with Marilyn Monroe. I believe I did mention this to you once in passing. Allen, I hope you realize, was serious, and so, soon enough, was I. What a treat of an assignment! You get something like that once every ten years. I didn’t give a damn about Sukarno. It was the thought of meeting Marilyn. I would have had to convince the lady of the patriotic importance of the job, and that might have entailed capturing her heart. I studied her movies, I can tell you. I saw Gentlemen Prefer Blondes three times, and once in a while, Allen would say, “I haven’t forgotten about you and Miss Monroe.”

Well, by the time he got around to it, we were in 1956, and it was too late. Marilyn was not in Hollywood but New York, and was having the love affair of the year with Arthur Miller. What a waste. I always thought I could have been her sweet daddy dynamite. Now she’s dead.

The next is upsetting. I am keeping tight rein on my imagination, but I am not in the least certain that she was not murdered. We have a case officer here who is on good terms with Forensics in the Tokyo Police—since the coroner in Los Angeles, Thomas Noguchi, is also Japanese, Forensics was able to obtain a copy for me.

Now, Rick, I am not a ghoul. You know that much about your booze-ridden father—yes, I am drinking at this moment, love to drink while composing a letter to you, oldest son—and I don’t feel the need to defend myself. I will tell you that I had to get ahold of that coroner’s report. Call it instinct, call it the product of close to twenty years in Intelligence, but I felt a gut-ache about it.

Rick, I have perused it, and it is a time bomb. Coroner’s report shows that Marilyn had enough barbiturates in her bloodstream to kill two healthy women, yet nothing in her stomach. One tablespoon of a “brown mucoid liquid.” That’s not nearly enough. You cannot take the forty-plus pills necessary to raise the barbiturate in your blood to such a level and show no more than one tablespoon in the stomach. She was injected.

Now, you know she was having an affair with Jack Kennedy. Conceivably with Bobby as well. I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that if she was threatening to blow the whistle on one or both of those boys, they might have come to an executive decision.

Did they pack her in? I hate the very thought of it. The average President of the United States often commits what history will later judge to be serious human error. After all, presidents are loose in the high energy of world events. To kill an individual woman, however. That is anathema. I reject the idea. But it comes back to keep me awake. I hate the Kennedy brothers. Indecisiveness at the Bay of Pigs was one thing, but cutting off a lovely lady’s life—no! I try to reason it through. Did they? I am in doubt. I think they could have done it. Am I off on a mental bender? If so, it may be due to the climate of opinion among Agency folk out here. Down in South Vietnam (where Rough and Tough are now serving) they take to Kennedy a little more because of his afición for the Green Berets, but not up here in General MacArthur land. Agency people in Tokyo do not see all that wide a distinction between Kennedy and Castro. (Pinko, pinko!) The Bay of Pigs has left an ineradicable bitter taste. So, yes, I’m not alone in walking around with this terrible suspicion. You can hear it all through the North Asia Command. Son, I now have the mental equivalent of a tumor in my head, and it won’t come out until I figure this one through. I am looking into Marilyn’s demise.

Your own Sherlock Halifax

POST SCRIPTUM: How fares Mongoose?