Bombshell Read online

  Other Titles

  by Barbara and Max Allan Collins:

  Too Many Tomcats and Other Feline Tales of Suspense

  Blue Christmas and Other Holiday Homicides

  Writing as Barbara Allan:

  Antiques Roadkill

  Antiques Maul

  Antiques Flee Market

  Antiques Bizarre

  Antiques Knock-Off

  Antiques Disposal

  Antiques Chop

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2004 by Barbara Allan

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  EAN-13: 9781612185279

  ISBN-10: 1612185274

  Dedicated to

  Stephen Borer …

  … that most dedicated of fans

  “I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He squeezed my hand so long and so hard that I thought he would break it.”

  —Marilyn Monroe, 1959

  “It is a question of war or peace between our countries, a question of life or death…”

  —Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

  “I have little respect for money…. Ideas excite me.”

  —Walt Disney, 1959

  Contents

  Authors’ Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  A TIP OF THE COONSKIN CAP

  THE AUTHORS ARE…

  Authors’ Note

  The events described in this book occurred on the weekend of September 19, 1959. Some of what you are about to read is in the public record; some of it derives from recently declassified material—from both Russian and American sources—made available to the authors from various quarters, in part due to the Freedom of Information Act. Other information was culled from unpublished memoirs of various participants, including a State Department official, herein called “Jack Harrigan.” Dialogue, whenever possible, is from these sources; other times the authors have taken the liberty of exercising their imaginations in what we are presenting as a novel.

  Prologue

  A BLINDING FLASH

  THE STROBE OF light—brighter than the simultaneous popping of one hundred million flash-camera bulbs—preceded the thunderous roar by seconds.

  A young boy—clad in a plaid short-sleeved shirt and dark blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs, his blond hair sheared in a near-bald butch, his freckled face flushed from riding his bicycle in the hot sun—dove off the bike onto the green lake of a nearby lawn, where he belly-flopped, and frantically buried his face in the grass, covering the back of his head with his interlaced hands, protecting himself as best he could.

  At the same time, across the street, a mother in a blue cotton housedress—she had been pushing a brown baby-buggy down the sidewalk past a row of neatly-kept clapboard houses with lawns cut as short as the bike-rider’s butch—threw herself across the front of the open buggy, making a human shield for her baby, wailing within.

  The deafening roar turned down its own volume, becoming a low growling rumble…

  … and a mushroom cloud rose in grotesque grandeur, blooming beneath an awaiting heaven, life-choking smoke and debris shooting outward with insidious speed in every direction, a storm of rubble and rubbish, a manmade tornado fragmenting other harmless manmade objects into deadly projectiles, a rain of death that filled the little movie screen.

  “Remember,” a helpful if ominous male voice intoned, managing to be heard above the conflagration, as well as the rattle and hum of the movie projector, “in the event of atomic attack… duck and cover!”

  Tiny eyes narrowed in young faces in the darkened classroom, heads nodding, filing away this priceless information.

  “This action,” the stern yet friendly voice informed them, “can save your life.”

  Light, ebullient music bounced along as if this were the end of the latest episode of “Ozzie and Harriet,” and then swelled absurdly to greet the letters spelling out THE END, which forebodingly filled the screen, only to fade. The monster movie many of these children had seen at a recent Saturday matinee had ended similarly… only with a question mark tagged onto those final chilling two words.

  Now the end-of-the-world cacophony was over, the only sound in the classroom the whipcrack of the celluloid film—snap, snap, snap—whirling around as the reel ran out. There was something scolding about the sound….

  Mrs. Violet Hahn—seventh-grade social studies teacher at Emerson Junior High in West Los Angeles—shut off the machine with a sharp click, making a few children jump, and the rotating film slowed, its snapping turning to soft, rather pathetic slaps, like a winded old man running out of energy. The teacher, looking matronly beyond her years in a drab tan cotton dress and brown oxford shoes, took a few steps over to a wall switch and turned on the lights with another spine-stiffening click.

  Mrs. Hahn couldn’t remember a single time during her twelve years at Emerson when her pupils had been so pin-drop quiet after the showing of an educational film, the usual likes of which admittedly included risible do’s-and-don’ts—such classics as Friendship Begins at Home, Are Manners Important?, and Alcohol is Dynamite.

  Even so, she demanded complete silence during all the showings (anyone who broke this rule got sent to the principal’s office), and so—afterwards—the youngsters usually unleashed their pent-up energy by poking fun at the “stupid” movie, or hitting each other, or throwing spitballs.

  And this film—with its helmet-wearing cartoon turtle and Disney-like song—had been designed for decidedly younger audiences than junior high age….

  There was a turtle by the name of Bert

  And Bert the turtle was very alert

  When danger threatened him, he never got hurt

  He knew just what to do…

  He’d duck! And cov-er…

  Even so, the response to today’s film had been different. After all, it hadn’t just been Bert the Turtle; it had also featured that sonorous, portentous narrator warning students to: “Always remember—the flash from an atomic bomb can come at any time!”

  Mrs. Hahn crossed the polished wooden floor, its boards creaking with her every step, to the front of the classroom, where she turned to face her students.

  Four dozen wide eyes stared back at her.

  Perhaps the movie had been a little intense, she thought. It had certainly unsettled her. This wasn’t a normal film day, with students instructed on good hygiene, or healthy eating habits, or acceptable lunchroom behavior. Or even one of the more disturbing documentaries, such as those about the animals that lived in the wilds of Africa, or the many fish that swam in the sea, or the tiny turtles making their way across an endless D-Day-esque beach, very few surviving the predators along the way…. Life and death was the underlying theme of many such educational films.

  However, watching a panther track a gazelle, or a shark swallow a blowfish, was much more removed—a
nd, from an adolescent standpoint, far more entertaining—than seeing a boy dive for his life and a mother sacrifice hers.

  “Are there any questions?” Mrs. Hahn asked the class, making her voice sound matter-of-fact, hoping to take the onus out of the moment.

  When no one responded, she added, “Or comments?” For if any student was truly disturbed, better to deal with it now, rather than receive an angry phone call in the middle of the night from some parent whose child couldn’t sleep—or whose Johnny or Jane had awoken from a dream of a blinding atomic-bomb flash.

  “Yeah,” came a sullen voice from the back of the classroom. Harold Johnson, a dark-haired boy with piercing brown eyes in an acned pie-plate face, sat slouched at his wooden desk. He was bigger than the others—only because he’d been held back twice. “That ‘duck and cover’ is a bunch of junk,” he said.

  Mrs. Hahn raised her chin and looked down her nose at him. “What our film today tells us happens to be very good advice, Harold—lifesaving advice. So you’d be wise to remember it.”

  “Oh yeah?” he shot back. “If the Rooskies send one over, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left to duck and cover under!”

  A wave of nervous laughter rolled across the classroom.

  “Isn’t going to be anything left,” the teacher said, correcting him tersely.

  “There sure ain’t,” the boy replied with a nod.

  Why must this boy always be difficult? He refused to do any studying and yet was always there with a smart-aleck opinion. She was going to pass him this year, no matter what.

  “You know that flash of bright light?” he asked with a smirk, then went on before she could respond. “By the time you see it, you’re already dead! Fried to a crisp. Ain’t no time to duck and cover.”

  “Harold…”

  “Okay, so maybe you do have time. But then what happens after a kid ‘duck-and-covers,’ huh? How come the movie don’t go into that?”

  “Doesn’t go into that, Harold.”

  “Sure don’t! Everybody’s still lyin’ on the ground, when we see ’em last. That’s ’cause…” And Harold looked around at several girls seated near him, their eyes glued to him. With a delivery worthy of a Chiller Theater host, Harold finished his thought: “… they’re all corpses.”

  Laughter, squeals, and assorted sounds of dismay and delight rocked the room.

  “Harold!” Mrs. Hahn said sharply. “Everyone!” The classroom quieted. “That’s quite enough.”

  But the boy ignored her, and looked around at his classmates. “Hey, I oughta know,” he told them, jerking a thumb back at his chest. “My pop was at Nagasaki right after they dropped the big one—the A-bomb!”

  Another wave: this time ooo’s and aahh’s, rippled across the class.

  Squinting, leaning forward, like a kid telling a ghost story around a campfire, Harold said, “The lucky ones were the ones what got killed. The not lucky ones? All their hair fell out!”

  “Harold!”

  But Harold had that what-are-you-gonna-do, flunk-me? attitude. “It’ll happen to you, too! If the bomb drops… radiation sickness! Your skin peels off from the heat—just like a snake—then ya start pukin’ your guts up….”

  Seated across from the boy, Susan, a frail girl with red hair and homemade haphazardly-cut bangs, began to cry. And the rest of the children looked as frightened as school bus passengers after a sudden stop.

  “Harold, stop it!” Mrs. Hahn commanded, stomping one foot.

  “You asked for comments, Miz Hahn. I thought you wanted, uh, discussion.”

  She swallowed. “That’s true. I do… commend you for your class participation, Harold. But you seem to have forgotten the lessons of last week’s film—Manners in Public.”

  Harold just shrugged.

  Composing herself, Mrs. Hahn told the class as firmly as she could, “There are not going to be any Russian bombs.”

  Mary Ann Stein raised her hand; the perfect little brunette, a straight-A student, asked (when she had been recognized by her teacher, of course), “Then why did you show us this picture, Mrs. Hahn?”

  Mary Ann was not being a smart aleck—the girl was clearly shaken by the film and her classmate’s comments.

  “Even as unlikely as a Russian attack might be—” Mrs. Hahn began.

  But Harold burst back in: “Last week the Rooskies shot a rocket an’ hit the moon. Hey—don’t kid yourself… we’re next.” He paused, then added, “An’ now they got that fat boy, Krew-chef, comin’ to town to spy on us.”

  Mrs. Hahn angrily marched down the aisle to the boy, and pointed a trembling finger at him. “Report to the principal’s office,” she ordered, “at once!” She hoped her manner was authoritarian and did not reveal that the boy’s remarks had gotten to her, as well.

  Harold smirked and shrugged and got up from his desk and sauntered slowly to the closed wood-paneled door, where he looked back at the teacher. But the smirk had wiped itself from his face, to be replaced by something else…

  Fear.

  “‘We’ll bury you,’ that’s what that Rooskie fatso said,” the boy told her, and for all his bluster, Harold’s trembling lower lip and his teary eyes revealed his classroom behavior had been motivated not by orneriness but terror.

  Then—embarrassed—Harold pushed open the door and disappeared out into the hallway.

  The classroom fell deathly quiet again, punctuated by the sniffles of the red-haired girl, and one or two others. The cartoon with the cheerful “duck and cover” theme song and the cartoon turtle had scared the hell out of these seventh graders.

  And their teacher.

  Mrs. Hahn walked back up the aisle and planted herself in front of the chalkboard. “Class,” she said, forcing her voice to be calm, “don’t pay any attention to Harold. He’s… he’s just a prankster, trying to scare us.” She squared her shoulders, hands clasped under her bosom, and pronounced: “President Eisenhower would never allow an atomic war.”

  Then she moved to her desk, pulled out the oak chair with a fingernails-on-blackboard screech, and sat down. “Now, take out your social studies book,” she instructed coolly, “and turn to chapter four.”

  As the students rustled around in their desks, Mrs. Hahn glanced down at her notes on the forthcoming lesson; but her mind wasn’t on them.

  World War II had been the war to end all wars—hadn’t it? Her husband had fought in the Pacific, coming home with nightmares and recurring malaria. She had lost her brother in Italy. The war to end all wars. That’s what everyone said.

  Of course they’d said that about World War I, as well….

  Could it all have been for nothing? Could the world end in a heartbeat—always remember, the flash of an atomic bomb can come at any time!

  She gazed out the open window onto Selby Avenue, where on this beautiful Friday morning in September, in the entertainment capital of the world, cars and pedestrians bustled along in pursuit of the American dream.

  Sighing, shaking her head, she made herself smile—for her students, for herself. President Eisenhower would never allow an atomic war. Wasn’t that the reason he’d invited Nikita Khrushchev over? To sit down like human beings and reason together? To talk, to straighten all this silliness out?

  An atomic war could never, ever happen!

  Could it?

  Then she withdrew into the class lesson, like a turtle into its shell, and went about her business.

  Chapter One

  BLONDE AMBITION

  IN BUNGALOW NUMBER seven on the lavishly landscaped grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the bustle of Hollywood had been banished. A goddess was—with the help of others—preparing herself for an appearance before those who worshipped her.

  At just after nine a.m., Ralph Roberts—Marilyn Monroe’s personal masseur—had just finished giving the celebrated actress a rubdown in a bedroom decorated all in white (with the exception of heavy black-out curtains). The man—handsome, muscular, heterosexual—and the woman—beautiful, cu
rvaceous, blonde-all-over, naked—had exchanged only a few words, the massage all business, but for the pleasure the actress received from skilled hands.

  In a corner of the room, a portable hi-fi—fit for the most pampered teenage girl—perched on the white-carpeted floor, spinning the latest of a stack of Frank Sinatra 45s. Later in the day the swinging come-fly-with-me Sinatra might have been heard in this snowy chamber; but at this early hour, the singer was crooning, “September Song,” softly, lulling the actress into wakefulness.

  In a blue t-shirt and chinos, Roberts—as tall as he was muscular, with wide Apache cheekbones and a perpetual smile—began putting away his oils and lotions in a worn leather carrying case, as the nude Marilyn lay stretched out on her stomach on the bed, her translucent, pale skin now pink, glowing, from the vigorous rubdown.

  The two had known each other for only a few years, having met in 1956 at the Actor’s Studio in New York, where they’d quickly become good friends. Roberts’s gifts as a masseur kept him working when his acting talents did not, and his easygoing manner and discretion made him one of Marilyn’s closest confidants.

  Whenever she called him for a massage—which was often (sometimes in the middle of the night when the Seconal or Demerol or Nembutal pills refused to kick in)—he always took her lead: if she craved silence (as was the case this morning), he was quiet as he worked his magic on her tense muscles. But if she desired some gaiety, his devilish humor could always make her laugh.

  Sometimes, after a massage on the set of one of her movies, Roberts would help Marilyn with her lines, giving her the encouragement she always seemed to need, before she faced the camera.

  “You did well with that diet,” Roberts said, snapping shut his case.

  “You’re sweet,” she murmured. “A liar, but sweet.”

  He sat next to her on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were closed as he said, “No, you have your figure back.”

  “Little too much of it.”

  “Anyway, you’ll look fine for the shoot. Take it easy on the diet pills.”