Marzine flees Shanghai

The edges of the badge burned bright in her eyes, as underneath a pile of wool coats she fingered the cold ridges of the embossing and peered out into the streets.

She would be leaving in a matter of hours, and she caught the red splotches of two of her posters as the cart wiggled its way to the outskirts of the city, towards the airport.

Dissolving the party wasn’t easy, and took place indirectly over the passed few weeks. The meetings were held in the rear of the betting shop, in the back room, while excited boys threw paper bills into the air, screaming and yelling at which rooster would peck the others eyes out. She had never heard it and found all of this mess a little disgusting. She never lasted long in these meetings, and she’d end up in her basement with Robert, after they snuck away and into each other’s arms as she contemplated the love that could have existed if she hadn’t found the badge that day in the rear pants pocket. He’d left it, Robert had, in a daring sort of way, as a challenge, having felt too guilty about this affair for too long, he needed a way out, either from Hoover or from Marzine herself.

She found his badge late one night, eyeing the fog from the lone barred window in her basement. It shocked her how quickly her disappointment turned into bloodlust. For it was through this that shed finally be able to exorcise Ed from her life for good.

It hadn’t been easy plotting the murder, which took place over the 12 afternoons and evenings that Robert and Marzine spent together, lying in the ephemeral fog of their relationship. She had fallen for so many men, felt and needed weakness and fed off of it, she’d always been that way, taking in the love and storing it away, savoring the temporary void they filled. For it struck her then how odd it was that retribution and the violence of sex was intertwined to the level that it was. She had waited until Robert had let his guard down and would allow his throat to be slit as he haphazardly lay on the bed while Marzine fiddled with the ivory chopsticks in her hair, digging through the bureau drawer, looking for her dagger.

She could tell he was torn, that he really did love her, but was somehow still inclined to report back to headquarters from time to time. Still She felt sorry for him, and wondered that maybe if things had been different, if Ed had not been killed by the organization; if things would have wandered down a different path, if she would be here, crying at the foot of the bed, wondering how to get out and get back to the US, to find herself all over again, and find another career, having botched and left behind the radical period.

The meetings took too much out of her, and shed hit the Opium pipe with great delight upon returning home to the basement with all four walls staring back at her. With Ed and Hershel long gone it was just her and the visions that haunted her, too distressed to write, she contacted the syndicate whom had managed to not only let her in the country for refuge, but also to maintain the idea that she was killed by the local authorities, even going so far as staging a fake murder, which she saw little of, Marzine deciding instead to burn the silkscreen press, smoking her Chesterfields, smudging the charcoal leftover from the fire and replaying the whole murder scene through her mind.

The Syndicate had arranged for the local police to arrive at the apartment, in response to a domestic disturbance, a lover’s spat between Robert and Marzine. Nina Fawilde had portrayed a frenzied Marzine, who ran screaming until Robert (played exceptionally well by Syndicate member Charlie Garbles, a retired CIA agent who had been a double agent for years.) flew up the stairwell in a rage, scraping a sword against the wet pavement, turning up his arms and the sword which sailed through the bloodpack on Nina’s chest, whereby sirens could be heard, syndicate members who had parked two streets down, in the garage of a government transportation authority, where two men hopped out, dragging both into the subterranean caverns of the syndicate.

And as the wool cart head down through the streets of Shanghai, the news of her and Robert’s passing no doubt reaching Washington by now, most likely by a large red phone dialed from somewhere in the bowels of city into Washington, crisscrossing way stations from across the pacific and beyond. Through translators, telegraph operators and curt agents, who breathed heavily and spit largely into the receivers, they slammed them down sometimes, creating the nervous air that Hoover thrived on.