Tiratore Scelto

Tiratore Scelto is the masked operative who enters Marilyn Monroe’s secluded home on 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in August 1962 and injects her in the heart with liquid Nembutal. The novel presents him not as an investigator of the mission’s purpose but as its efficient instrument: he follows orders, gathers material for others to assess, and turns a sleeping woman into a target. His detachment is both his operating principle and the means by which the violence is carried out.

Identity and Method

Tiratore Scelto arrives dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask, entering through the back of the house with a key supplied by the informant R.F. The narration describes him as someone who executes orders grounded in concrete evidence and tangible facts, but does not probe their meaning. He does not investigate his own actions either. Passion and pity are absent from the portrait; he moves through the dim house as weightlessly as a bird of prey, leaving no trace in the mirrors.

His professional identity is measured against an earlier version of himself. By August 1962, he could regard himself as a polished operative rather than the crude boy who drove his father’s van with a .22-caliber rifle ready to fire. The contrast marks experience and discipline, but not moral development: the adult has become more capable of carrying out violence without becoming more curious about its purpose. His determined manner, like the narrow, steady beam of his flashlight, gives practical focus to a mission whose justification remains uncertain.

The Mission and Its Political Ambiguity

Tiratore Scelto does not know whether the Agenzia sent him to protect President Kennedy from Marilyn Monroe because she had threatened him and, by extension, national security, or to prevent her death from exposing a connection that could damage the President. The two possible explanations point in opposite directions: one casts the killing as protection of presidential power; the other as protection from scandal. He recognizes that the presidency and the Agenzia are not necessarily allied, describing the former as temporary power and the latter as permanent power, but he does not pursue what that conflict means for his assignment.

He has been told, or believes himself informed, that Marilyn Monroe is involved with organizations considered subversive in the United States and abroad. His account also includes her marriage to Arthur Miller, whom he regards as a subversive Jew; an alleged sexual relationship with the Indonesian communist Sukarno, including a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel in April 1956; her public defense of Castro; and petitions that challenge the nation to which he has dedicated his life. These details explain the political language surrounding the operation, not its truth or the operative’s independent verification of it. His refusal to investigate leaves accusation, evidence, and justification deliberately entangled.

The operative expects to collect suspicious material, put it in his pack, and deliver it to superiors for examination and destruction. He insists, in effect, on a division of responsibility: he will not destroy the evidence himself and will know nothing of documents, suspicious diary passages, or possible blackmail material. The Agenzia’s procedure makes that claimed distance part of the operation. Evidence entering the organization is destined for its enormous shredders or its incinerators; the record will be reduced to a brief, enigmatic file, difficult even for many of its own agents to decipher. The machinery of secrecy thus promises both an account of the mission and the erasure of what that account might disclose.

Evidence in the House

The first suspicious object he finds is a dust-covered tin-foil rose standing in a vase in the living room. He packs it. On a crowded table among books, magazines, scripts, dirty dishes, glasses, and cups, he finds a diary with numerous inserted pages. He flips through it quickly, treating it as evidence to confiscate. Its words are arranged like verse and written in a schoolgirl’s hand. One fragment presents a bird so high above an apple tree that it can no longer say whether what surrounds it is sky; another records an appeal for help as Life approaches. The diary’s vulnerable, poetic language sits uneasily beside his brisk classification of it as contraband.

He smiles at the appeal and touches the long Golden Eagle feather he keeps in a pocket over his heart. The gesture brings the bird imagery of the house and his own predatory self-image into the same moment. He then finds a list of words in the same apparently childish handwriting: terms that he judges to be clearly coded, including words associated with obscuring, resonance, abrasion, and rebirth or transmigration. He carefully adds the list to his pack for specialists to decode, analyze, and ultimately destroy. In his hands, even a private vocabulary becomes a future file whose interpretation and fate belong to the Agenzia.

The Attack and Narrative Role

Tiratore Scelto proceeds to the dark bedroom at the back of the house. Marilyn Monroe lies on the bed, apparently asleep. From her strained, irregular breathing, he concludes that she is nearly unconscious. R.F. has told him that massive doses of tranquilizers produce this sleep and that she will not wake easily. The operative is nevertheless excited by the presence of his prey, particularly because she is famous. His thinking reduces her to an unaware female target and repeats the impersonal rule that a target is never personal. The distance he claims from the mission’s politics does not prevent him from taking pleasure in its proximity to a famous woman.

Pill bottles and vials stand on the bedside table beside a glass half-full of opaque liquid. A small window air conditioner hums without overcoming the foul mixture of dirty sheets, powder, perfume, and chemicals. Her eyelids flutter; her mouth parts, a faint moan escapes, and her body shivers. These signs of physical presence do not make him hesitate. He takes out a syringe prepared by a doctor in the Agenzia’s service and filled with liquid Nembutal, then changes position several times to find the best angle for a swift, accurate strike. Rather than risk waking her by straddling the bed, he settles at her left side. When a deeper breath lifts her rib cage, he drives the fifteen-centimeter needle into her heart.

The scene makes his defining contradiction concrete: he gathers poems, private notes, and a rose as evidence while refusing to consider the person whose home contains them. His language of procedure and impersonal targets shields the operation from scrutiny without making it any less deliberate. The collected objects and the killing therefore belong to one continuous sequence: the Agenzia takes what can be interpreted, removes what can be used, and leaves the operative to perform the violence without asking what the evidence means or whose power it serves.