To Kill the Duke

by Sam Moffie

  I would go to Europe a lot, if I had your money and time to enjoy it Dick thought. “No boss. I’m too busy running the studio for you.”

  “Good answer. But this Loren has it all. She’s going to be a big star. I ought to sign her up myself. She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. But those Italians are tough to negotiate with. I’ll send some information on her to you. What about Gina?”

  “She would be perfect. I like your idea of having a more foreign-looking woman. But Gina Lollobrigida is making Trapeze for Carol Reed. Lancaster and Curtis are in it, too,” Powell said.

  “I bet she looks great in tights,” Hughes said with a sigh.

  “Some people say Burt and Tony look better. Why don’t you go and watch it being filmed?” Powell asked… Powell hoped.

  “I don’t have the time. I have to go to Washington and have my ass kissed,” Hughes said.

  “Again? You sound depressed about that,” Dick said sarcastically.

  “I would rather do a lot of things than going to see politicians, who do nothing but kiss my ass for donations and then don’t do what I ask them to when I ask them to. Don’t ever go into politics when you’re done with Hollywood, Dick,” Hughes warned his employee.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I know some of the guys my age are thinking about it when their careers stall. It’s better to play a politician on screen than to be one in real life.”

  “Hey, that’s good. Can I use that? Now let’s talk about Hayward as Bortia,” Hughes said.

  “Why are you so against Susan?” Powell asked his boss.

  “She won’t sleep with me. I have heard rumors around town that she thinks I’m a sissy,” Hughes answered quietly. “But I have to trust you. After all, you delivered John Wayne as Genghis Khan and everyone else thought it should have been Marlon Brando.”

  “Looks like I get my gal,” Powell said under his breath as he discussed Hayward’s demands. Got to find out more about this ‘sissy’ stuff, he thought as he listened to Howard. Dick spoke for a long time to Howard about why Susan Hayward was the perfect Bortia to John Wayne’s Genghis. When Howard asked Dick about the cost of obtaining the raspberry lime rickey recipe… Howard laughed and told Dick to write a check and make it happen.

  Not only did Howard Hughes get the recipe for the raspberry lime rickey that Susan Hayward craved, Hughes also bought the entire drug store. That was one attempt at trying to seduce Susan. Another foray was having a dinner tray set up in front of her house with a pitcher of raspberry lime rickeys placed on it, along with the recipe and a signed contract to hire her to play Bortia.

  Neither worked. Hayward wouldn’t sleep with Hughes, thus Hughes once again went elsewhere for his sex.

  Powell was happy to have his leading lady and raspberry lime rickeys to boot.

  The thought of downing one of those raspberry lime rickeys was making Dick Powell smack his lips together as he pulled into the parking lot of the greasy spoon to cure his hangover.

  He knew he wasn’t going to get a raspberry lime rickey… not until Susan Hayward showed up on set with the recipe. He ordered his hangover cure… a breakfast of piping hot black coffee, pulpy, freshly squeezed orange juice, four pieces of toast with butter and grape jam on them, three sunny-side up eggs and six pieces of bacon. As his food and beverages were being brought out to him he thought about a few things.

  No more crazy drinking was the first thought, which made him think of Susan Hayward… not because she had played a lot of drunks in her career, but because of what she said to Dick Powell when she phoned him about signing the contract. Susan Hayward had told Dick Powell that no one will remember us after we die. It’s what we do now, in the present that is important.

  BOOK TWO

  chapter one

  WHEN IN HOLLYWOOD... DO AS THE

  PRODUCERS AND STARS DO

  (BUT NOT AS THE SCREENWRITERS

  TRY TO DO)

  “The face of tyranny is always mild at first.”

  — Jean Racine

  “We brought you to Hollywood for your individuality, but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.” As told to F. Scott Fitzgerald when he arrived in Hollywood to try his hand at writing movie scripts.

  — Found in ‘Thesaurus of Quotations’

  “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.”

  — John Wayne as Captain Nathan Brittles in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”

  Boris Gila was reading memos. It seemed reading memos had become his life since he had been promoted and had been at the new job for a few years. These were ordinary day-to-day memos about many topics. None of these memos dealt with the project to assassinate John Wayne; the Wayne memos were all in code. The memos on his desk, he hated like a meal that had gone bad. The memos he hated were short on ideas and very long on words. Boris didn’t write memos to his boss — Mr. Zavert. Boris created very short and precise reports and they had the immediate impact of creating more work for Boris, because Mr. Zavert had fallen in love with Boris Gila’s reports.

  Sometimes I wish I was still cooking Boris thought as he poured over Mr. Zavert’s responses to his own reports on how Alexi and Ivan were progressing in Hollywood. Boris glanced at the mountains of paperwork on his desk and made a mental note to cook himself a huge French dinner that would leave him oodles of leftovers and make his weekend less stressful. Boris needed less stress in his life — especially with all the stress he was putting on himself in regards to seeing John Wayne’s assassination carried out. After all, it had been a few years since the project had started and there had yet to be one bullet fired at Wayne, let alone a knife thrown at him, or a bomb thrown under his car or even a drop of poison placed in the Duke’s food.

  “I really wish I was just a local spy with being a cook as my smokescreen,” Boris muttered to himself all the time when he looked at the piles of paper on his desk. Sometimes he muttered ‘toughski shitski,’ because Alexei had filled him in on why Alex had invented that phrase before they left for Hollywood. Most of the time he thought about cooking before he attacked the piles of paperwork. He took another look at the paperwork and made a face as if he was looking at a woefully under-cooked meal.

  Not only was he trying to keep up with Alexi and Ivan, but also with all the other projects he had been put in charge of.

  Mr. Zavert and the people Mr. Zavert called his ‘superiors’ had bestowed other programs of importance upon Boris’ shoulders. In addition to seeing that John Wayne was assassinated, Boris was in charge of eliminating anyone who knew about the incident (and couldn’t be trusted) in which comrade Stalin had died in the saddle.

  The first such liquidation went very easily. Boris was told to kill the man that Alexei had knocked out that night in Stalin’s room. Boris went to this man’s apartment on an early Saturday morning and knocked on the door. When the man answered the knock — Boris shot him right between the eyes with a pistol that was equipped with an extra-large silencer that did a great job of keeping the noise down.

  The second assassination proved to be a lot tougher. The man who enjoyed anal sex was supposed to have killed the Dietrich look-a-like. That man did not carry out his orders. He wanted the girl for himself, so he killed a homeless woman and tried to pass her off as the girl who had been the last woman to have had sex with their former leader. The man thought this would be very easy, because he had bashed in the now-dead homeless woman’s face with a shovel and then set her body on fire. Everyone thought that the man had done his duty until his work started to suffer. This man’s name was Dmitri. Dmitri had become so smitten with the Marlene Dietrich look-a-like he started to take a lot of sick days.

  A lot of sick days.

  Dmitri’s work grew sloppy.

  When he did show up for work, he complained about being tired all the time.

  Dmitri also talked way too much about his sex life to fellow spies, soldiers and bodyguards.

  That is when Mr. Zavert asked Boris to inv
estigate.

  Dmitri had set up the Dietrich look-a-like, whose real name was Natasha, in an apartment in Moscow that was actually located in the same building where Ivan Viznapu thought he had learned all there was to know about being Stalin’s projectionist. All Dmitri wanted was sex, sex and more sex (and not all of it anal) from Natasha. All Natasha wanted to do was to please Dmitri; otherwise she would be dead.

  “Not much of an alternative,” Alexi said in a coded message back to Boris.

  Most would agree.

  “Once he had her, he couldn’t stop,” Boris told Mr. Zavert, after Mr. Zavert had congratulated Boris on a job well done.

  “I can never understand why some men can’t keep it in their pants, whether they are with one woman or a multitude of women,” Mr. Zavert said to Boris. “That’s why I stay in power,” he added.

  “Because you’re in control of everything,” Boris replied.

  “I have seen far too many men lose everything over pussy. Stalin used to tell me that pussy ruled the globe,” Mr. Zavert said.

  “But it doesn’t, if men can control their urges,” Boris said.

  “Power rules the world, for those men who know how to handle pussy,” Mr. Zavert said. “Never let the little head overrule the big head.”

  “Especially if you don’t want to end up like Dmitri,” Boris said.

  “People need to control their addictions better,” Mr. Zavert suddenly said to Boris.

  “I am not aware that I am addicted to anything, comrade,” responded Boris.

  “Silly! Not me. Not you. But the masses. If Russians get too addicted to the wrong things, we all might end up like Dmitri,” Mr. Zavert said.

  And how Dmitri ended up wasn’t pretty.

  Boris had been amazed at Dmitri’s toughness. It seemed the more Boris and his subordinates tortured Dmitri, the stronger he’d become. Boris had to find out where the girl was… vaporize her, and then do the same to Dmitri. Things were not going well, until one day when Boris took out his garbage.

  It had been a long, hot summer in Moscow and Boris had been away from his apartment for three weeks, attending to other matters. Unfortunately, his brain had been preoccupied and his garbage hadn’t been properly disposed of, so there was a lot of spoilage from the last meal he had cooked for himself before leaving home. It had been a major French meal and he’d prepared it to relieve the stress of all those damn memos. The leftovers had spoiled and along with the high humidity, it had all turned into a lot of maggots.

  Thousands of them.

  Boris hated maggots, and he cursed himself for not having found someone to watch his apartment and take out the garbage while he was on his mission(s). He made a note to find someone to watch his place the next time he was gone. He wasn’t allowed to hire a maid, because Mr. Zavert was afraid that maids would find something in spies’ homes that they weren’t supposed to. A subordinate would be the perfect person to watch his place, and that subordinate would eat quite well.

  “At least it wasn’t manure or animal dung that brought out these maggots,” he said aloud as walked to the store to purchase the bleach that would not only kill off the maggots, but clean his garbage can as well.

  Flies, when considering where to lay their eggs, loved manure and animal shit more than spoiled leftovers and rotten meat. Since Boris didn’t have a garden or an animal, he knew right away it was the spoiled leftovers — especially the meat — that had brought him the disgusting, creamy, white crawling maggots. As he was cleaning the trash bin and killing the maggots, he came up with the idea that would finally break Dmitri, which he put into action after he took a bath… a long bath.

  After his body and both his garbage cans were clean, Boris went to the prison where Dmitri was being held. It wasn’t a standard prison or even a dungeon. Just a simple brick building in a nondescript part of Moscow that sat on a large parking lot with no neighbors. Anyone who walked or took public transportation by the building would think it was nothing more than a mid-size warehouse with offices in it. There were a few trucks parked on the sides of the building that didn’t work. They were there for show.

  Once one entered the building, it was a totally different atmosphere.

  “I always liked the cliché that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” Mr. Zavert had told Boris when Mr. Zavert first showed Boris the prison.

  “I thought you liked puns,” Boris said to his boss.

  “What’s a pun, comrade?” Mr. Zavert responded as he wiped his dark glasses without taking them off.

  Boris said nothing and marveled at the state-of-the-art prison.

  Security was everywhere. Large cameras where everywhere. Locked doors and heavy bullet-proof windows dominated every room. And the room where the prisoners were kept was right out of a Victor Hugo novel. Dark, cold, wet, and the prisoners were chained to the walls and were forced to sit near their own excrement and urine, if they were lucky enough to have been fed some food and water and could hold it in their bladders. Once a day, a very large guard would hose the prisoners down after throwing a bucket of lukewarm soapy water on them. There were a few side rooms where the real abuse took place. It was into one of those rooms that Boris now stepped.

  He turned his key and opened the door and stared at his prey, who was sitting tied up to the lone chair in the room. Dmitri was only clothed in shorts and sandals. A hood with a small hole in the nose area for breathing was moving slightly. Boris walked around the chair twice and out of the corner of his eyes watched Dmitri’s hooded head turn to the sound of his footsteps.

  Boris had decided to give the man one last try at telling him where Natasha was hiding.

  “Comrade, if you do not tell me where your girlfriend is, I cannot stop what’s going to happen to you,” Boris said.

  “You can’t kill me or you will never find her and what she knows,” a defiant Dmitri said.

  “I know that you know that, because there have been plenty of times where you have been on my side interrogating others in your current position,” Boris said.

  Dmitri nodded and Boris knew he was smiling under his hood.

  So, Boris removed the hood. Dmitri blinked his eyes to regain focus and he was smiling, just as Boris had figured.

  “Comrade, this isn’t going to be pretty,” Boris announced.

  “Give it your best shot,” Dmitri yelled.

  So Boris did. He used his experience with the maggots from his own garbage to get Dmitri to talk.

  Boris exited the room and returned with a bucket of creamy white maggots that he had ordered one of his subordinates to get for him. (Boris was also having the entire maggot episode filmed for Mr. Zavert.)

  The bucket was roughly a quarter filled with the crawling creamy white maggots. Boris told Dmitri what was in it. Dmitri scoffed thinking it nothing more than a bluff.

  Boris tossed the bucket’s contents on Dmitri, who screamed maniacally once he realized that Boris Gila wasn’t bluffing.

  “Know what maggots like more than rotting food, comrade?” Boris asked.

  Dmitri couldn’t answer because he was screaming.

  “Wounded flesh, comrade,” Boris said as he pulled out a very big and sharp knife and held it flat against Dmitri’s right arm.

  Boris couldn’t believe how fast and furious Dmitri’s body was flopping in the chair in a valiant attempt to toss the maggots off.

  “I’ll cut you and throw more maggots on you if you don’t talk comrade. If you talk, you get a shower… and you live,” Boris lied.

  “I can’t. I can’t!” Dmitri screamed.

  “Can’t do what?” Boris asked as he slid the blade’s dull side up and down Dmitri’s right arm.

  “Tell you!” Dmitri screamed.

  “In that case… I have to act quickly,” Boris said as he cut Dmitri’s right elbow. Dmitri winced, but didn’t scream. Boris noticed that all of Dmitri’s flopping around had tossed a lot of the maggots off his body. Boris exited the room to refill the bucket he was carry
ing, this time up to the brim.

  He actually returned with two buckets. One was empty and the other was filled with the creamy creatures. He said nothing as he circled his victim in waiting. He watched Dmitri squirm and wiggle in the chair, just like the few maggots that hadn’t been bucked off Dmitri’s mid-section when Dmitri was flopping his body around like a fish out of water. He put the full bucket of maggots down and pretended to strain holding onto the bucket that was empty. Boris wanted Dmitri to think that the empty bucket was full.

  “For your information comrade, the maggots in the bucket I am holding in front of you are going to feed in and on your open wound. Not only that, they will lay eggs in that same wound. Imagine the possibilities!” Boris yelled out as he started to slowly swing the bucket back and forth. Dmitri started to scream and Boris put the bucket on the floor; all the time pretending to strain at how heavy the bucket was.

  “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you,” whimpered Dmitri.

  “Good,” said Boris with a big sigh.

  And Dmitri told him everything, even things Boris never knew of or cared to know of. That is why this form of torture was so effective.

  After Dmitri told him where Natasha was and calmed down, despite the fact he still had an open wound and a few maggots crawling on his mid-section, Boris took his knife out of his waist band and flicked off the creamy white creatures. This had a relaxing effect on Dmitri, whose body muscles weren’t as tense now, and, that is when Boris went in for the kill.

  He picked up the empty bucket and showed Dmitri. Dmitri’s body just slumped. Boris later told Mr. Zavert, that if Dmitri hadn’t been tied up so well in the chair, he would have slid to the ground like a rag doll.

  “How appropriate that you used maggots on that maggot Dmitri,” Mr. Zavert wrote to Boris in a memo, shortly after Mr. Zavert had read Boris’s report and reviewed the film.

  “I meant what I said comrade. If you wouldn’t have told me, I would have dumped this bucket on you,” Boris said quietly as he held the full bucket of maggots up to Dmitri’s face. “Be glad you told me.”