To Kill the Duke (33 page)

Boris’ happy thoughts of giving the little old lady his American toilet paper were jolted back into reality when his secretary came bursting through his office doors.

“Comrade Gila, a message with a pun has just come over the wire!” she yelled out.

Boris leaped to his feet and ran to the wire machine hoping it was
the
pun.

It had been Ivan’s idea to communicate by puns between Hollywood and Moscow. Mr. Zavert loved the idea.

“No American spy will ever crack the code, because American government at all levels has no imagination,” Mr. Zavert said.

“And no sense of humor, either,” Boris added.

“True, comrade. Any democracy that has a committee to meet in public to investigate its own people is devoid of humor. Furthermore, the government takes Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy seriously.”

Boris took a deep breath and read what had just been received. It read: ‘At first I hated my haircut. Now, it’s growing on me.’

“Damn it,” Boris muttered to himself. The pun he had just read translated to nothing more than many other puns had — plans are in the making and we are close.

Boris fired off the reply pun: ‘Amenities, the Greek goddess of luxury.’ This really meant that the two of them were running out of the luxury of time, money and patience.

How Boris longed for the pun that would tell him that Alexei and Ivan had killed John Wayne: ‘Time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies love bananas.’

Boris decided to show Mr. Zavert the pun he had received, instead of writing him a memo. He hoped that Mr. Zavert would see that this plan to kill John Wayne was too difficult to pull off and scrap the entire plan.

Mr. Zavert read the pun and wiped his dark glasses with a cloth without taking them off his face. “I suppose you want me to recall our agents.”

“Yes,” Boris stammered.

“Your honesty is refreshing, comrade Gila. Your impatience is not. You have been a success at everything I have given you. This will be your greatest success. Trust me like I trust the plot to kill Wayne and your ability to carry it out. Alexei and Ivan are the perfect men to get this done. It’s a great plan, made greater because it was Stalin’s last wish,” Mr. Zavert noted.

“Yes comrade. I’m just afraid that others might be bitching about how long it is taking,” Boris said weakly.

“People who bitch disgust me, especially men,” Mr. Zavert said as he waved off Boris, who slowly walked back to his office, with the big thoughts of Mr. Zavert echoing in his mind.

I really hope those two guys are as close as their pun says they are
, he thought as he arrived in his office and started to stare once again at the paperwork that awaited him.

It was March of 1953 when Alexei and Ivan had received their orders to kill John Wayne. The two men took almost two years before they got
their first attempt off the ground. It would be many more years before John Wayne felt threatened.

Their first attempt to kill John Wayne only happened after they had become semi-successful movie producers themselves, and had received a tip about John Wayne’s penchant for playing practical jokes. This was something they had learned about Wayne in their studies before leaving Russia for Hollywood. Alexei and Ivan took this tip seriously. They also knew they had to make it in the movie business to get close enough to Wayne.

“After all, Moscow gave us the money… a lot of money,” Alexei had told Ivan when the two decided to become producers.

They named their company
Seven Zeros Productions,
because they thought that the number 1,000,000 had seven zeros in it, instead of seven digits. They both thought it was clever until their phones rang. Their secretary would answer ‘Seven Zeros, may I help you?’ And it appeared that everyone who was on the other end would reply ‘is that how many losers are working there?’

In America, a zero was a loser. But being practical and careful with their fellow Russian’s money, they kept the name.

“Do you think we should change the name to
Seven Digits Productions
?” Ivan asked Alexei.

“No. All our stationary, envelopes, business cards and legal papers have the name on it already. Why throw away money?” Alexei told Ivan.

“How come the Americans focus on our company name and not on our accents?” Ivan once asked Alexei.

“Because they’re Americans,” Alexei replied. “They have very strange priorities.”

“They trust everyone way too much,” Ivan said.

“They think we’re Eastern European immigrants with money,” Alexei said.

“Everyone is an immigrant in this country,” Ivan said.

“But we have money,” and that is what Americans truly crave.

And money, a lot of money, is what they spent on their offices at 33 Lancaster Terrace, in Hollywood.

Lancaster Terrace wasn’t the best known address in Hollywood, but it had a lot of charm and many talented neighboring professionals that came in handy to two upstarts in the movie business.

“It’s a long way from my apartment,” Ivan said to Alexei.

“Toughski shitski,” joked Alexei.

It had been a former real estate developer’s office. The place had been left in immaculate shape and the owner of the building threw in some extra parking spaces, because Ivan and Alexei paid six months’ rent up front.

There were, however, two problems.

First off, the walls had no pictures. Alexei and Ivan decided that this wasn’t really a problem. They decided to hang tapestries over all the walls, so when people left their offices, they would remember them for their uniqueness. They spent a lot of the Russian people’s money on finding tapestries that would ‘wow’ visitors.

“These tapestries would keep the entire old government office building where I once worked, warm in the dead of a bad winter,” Ivan remarked quietly to Alexei after the decorator had finished having the tapestries hung.

“Just like being back in mother Russia,” Alexei whispered to Ivan. “Almost,” he added with a laugh.

The second problem was also a potential third problem, because the main office had a small side bedroom.

“Who gets to be the big shot?” They both said at the same time after they had signed the lease and given the down payment of six months’ rent to the landlord.

Being men who had always followed orders, neither one was comfortable in bossing the other around. Neither Boris nor Mr. Zavert had put one in charge of the other. Everyone assumed that they would work together as a team, and each one’s skills would determine who might be in charge at a given time. But this was supposed to be a movie production company in Hollywood. The epitome of capitalism. There had to be a ‘big shot’ or their cover would not be taken seriously…
they
wouldn’t be taken seriously.

“You play the role, Ivan. You deserve it,” Alexei said.

“No comrade. You are better at the tougher things in our business. It’s my pleasure to be your subordinate,” Ivan responded.

“It will be better if the tough guy is working for you, Ivan,” Alexei said. “Besides you’re a better talker than I am. This business seems to be heavy on the talking and light on the actual work.”

“What is that, a new recipe for Boris?” Ivan joked, as they both broke into a laugh.

“That bedroom off the main office should remind you of the time in the projection room in Stalin’s bedroom. Just don’t repeat history comrade,” Alexei warned his partner.

“What is the most important part of a boss’ job?” Ivan asked Alexei.

“Turn a profit?” Alexei guessed.

“Final say,” Ivan said.

“Mr. Zavert has the final say.” “Remember that, comrade.”

And so the two would-be movie makers of
Seven Zeros Production
went into action.

But before they could actually go about the business of trying to make a movie and find out how they could, or where they could, kill Wayne, they had to pull off a very delicate feat.

“If we were not spies,” this could have been our first movie,” Ivan said to his partner.

“I read somewhere on the train from New York City to Los Angeles that ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’” Alexei said. “But I think how we smuggled the former Trotsky Number Seven out of Russia would make for a better film.”

Both Alexei and Ivan had decided to steal Trotsky Number Seven out of the country and set him up with a new life in America. Alexei had tracked him down while he was supposed to be learning about the movie business and eliminating his accent. With Boris and the others consumed with chasing down Dmitri and any others who might have remembered too much about Joe Stalin’s last night on earth, Alexei was able to find Trotsky Number Seven in between classes on ‘Identifying a Bona-Fide Screenplay’ and learning to annunciate the vowels of the English language.

Trotsky Number Seven was hiding in a cave in the Ural Mountains, where many Nazi refugees had hidden during World War II.

“Where else would he go?” Ivan later told Alexei. “After all, he is Jewish and the Jews all fled the Nazis and hid in many places for long periods during the last war. I arranged his transport on a Greek freighter with a man whom I met through comrade Gila, when Boris was trying to teach me the joys of Greek cuisine. By the way, how are your classes coming?”

“I’m doing better at losing my Russian accent than learning about movie making,” Alexei said.

“We’ll be okay. Remember I have been in film school and worked as a projectionist for most of my adult life. My one teacher on financing a film said I have had a head start in the movie business, because I started at the bottom,” Ivan said.

“So Trotsky Number Seven will be in America when we arrive?” Alexei asked.

“Right.”

“Then what?”

“He stays in America with us,” Ivan said.

And Alexei agreed.