An armed intruder enters Marilyn Monroe’s home and injects a drug into her heart

A masked intruder enters Marilyn Monroe’s secluded home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive and, after searching it for evidence, injects liquid Nembutal into her heart. The scene presents the act as both a covert operation and an intimate violation: the intruder treats Monroe as a target to be processed, while the narration’s sudden turn toward her childhood cinema memories unsettles his claim to control the scene. The passage records the injection, but does not itself confirm what follows it.

Entry and Mission

Dressed in dark clothes and wearing a mask, the intruder slips into the house through the rear entrance. He has a key supplied by his informant, R.F. The details make the operation feel prepared rather than improvised, yet its purpose remains uncertain even to the man carrying it out. He follows orders and concerns himself with tangible evidence, not with examining the reasons behind his actions.

He cannot tell whether the Agenzia has sent him to protect the President from Monroe because she has threatened him, or to prevent damaging information about the President’s connection to her from becoming public. The passage distinguishes the Presidency, an impermanent power, from the Agenzia, a permanent one; their interests are not necessarily aligned. The intruder has been told of Monroe’s alleged associations with organizations considered subversive, her marriage to a Jewish dissident, her sexual relationship with the Indonesian communist Sukarno, and her public defense of leaders such as Castro. He also knows of petitions she signed against the country to which he has devoted his life. These claims furnish his operation with a political rationale, but he does not investigate them or settle which rationale explains his orders.

His assigned task is narrower: collect material, put it in his pack, and turn it over to superiors. He expects the Agenzia to assess and then destroy what he gathers. He insists, in effect, on a division of responsibility: he will collect the evidence, not destroy it, and will know nothing of the documents, diary passages, or potential blackmail material after handing them over. The operation’s bureaucratic language turns concealment into procedure and distances the agent from the consequences of what he does.

The Search for Evidence

The first suspicious object he finds is a dust-covered tin-foil rose in a vase in the living room. He puts it in his pack. The delicate keepsake is treated as an item in a case file, its personal meaning subordinated to the intruder’s instructions. Nearby, on a table crowded with books, magazines, scripts, dirty dishes, glasses, and cups, he finds a diary with many extra pages inserted. He flips through it quickly, recognizing it as material to be confiscated. Its schoolgirl handwriting and verse-like arrangement contrast with the official suspicion he projects onto it.

He also discovers a list of words in the same handwriting, apparently coded and written to look harmless. He packs it carefully for experts to decode and analyze. The imagined next step is a brief, cryptic dossier, intelligible even to few agents, followed by destruction in the Agenzia’s industrial shredders or incinerators. The rose, diary, and coded list thus enter the same institutional process: private objects become evidence, and evidence is destined to disappear. The intruder’s careful handling of them does not amount to curiosity; he refuses to investigate what they mean.

The Bedroom and the Injection

The intruder continues to a dark bedroom at the back of the house. Monroe lies on the bed, apparently asleep. From her irregular, labored breathing, he judges that she is nearly unconscious. R.F. has told him that massive doses of tranquilizers account for her sleep and that she will not wake easily. On the bedside table are pill bottles, vials, and a glass half full of opaque liquid. A small window air conditioner hums without masking the strong odor in the room.

The intruder’s attention turns the sleeping woman into prey. He treats her unconsciousness as confirmation of R.F.’s account and thinks of her celebrity as part of what makes her a target. The narration exposes the violence in this reduction: the famous actress is rendered not as a person but as a body presumed unable to resist. Monroe lies naked beneath a single white sheet, damp with sweat. The intruder registers the contours of her body and her platinum-blond hair, measuring what he sees against the beauty celebrated by the public. His gaze makes the contrast between a famous image and a vulnerable, sedated person brutally concrete.

He takes a syringe of liquid Nembutal from his pack. A doctor working for the Agenzia prepared it for him, and he wears thin surgical gloves. He changes position several times, searching for the best angle to strike quickly and accurately as ordered. Although mounting the bed would offer the ideal position, he decides it risks waking her. He settles at her left side, bends over as a deeper sigh lifts her chest, and drives the fifteen-centimeter needle into her heart. The methodical preparation culminates in a sudden bodily act; the passage does not narrate a medical outcome or establish, in this moment, that Monroe has died.

Childhood Cinema and Narrative Reversal

Immediately after the injection, the narration shifts to Monroe’s recollection of a dark cinema and the happiness she associated with the Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. As a child, she went there during afternoons when her mother was at work, watched double features, and tried to memorize them so she could recount them afterward. Her mother seemed captivated by her stories of Principe Misterioso and La Principessa Buona, and sometimes encouraged her to continue. The memory recalls cinema as companionship: recounting the films gave the child a way to share an experience with her mother rather than feel alone.

The memory also holds a precise sense of safety. At the theatre, she knew not to sit near solitary men; seated close to two older women with their shopping bags, she felt she was in no danger. That childhood security is sharply set against the bedroom scene, where an intruder has entered her home and her apparent sleep leaves her exposed. The recollection then returns to the film’s ending: La Principessa Buona dies, her golden hair spread across a pillow, while Principe Misterioso bends over her in tears. When the lights came up, the two women and the child had all been crying. The cinema image of a beautiful dead princess briefly overlays the woman in the bedroom, turning a remembered screen death into an unsettling echo of the violence just enacted. The passage ends on that overlap, not on an account of the injection’s aftermath.