The Plot
Page 2
Presently, the five pages were read and finished. And so, too, the Bauernschmaus and Guglhupf mit Schlag were finished. And Jay Thomas Doyle, his dulled palate and distended stomach still ravenous, felt revived and almost ready to sit across from the all-important Sydney Ormsby at an elegant dinner table in the Hotel Sacher restaurant, awaiting the decision.
Belching softly, Doyle struggled to his feet and thumped across the lavender carpet to the divan where his mobile file, a scuffed brown briefcase, lay open against the throw pillows. He had meant to insert the manuscript in the handsome fiber folder in readiness for Ormsby, and then to dress for dinner, but his traveling clock on the chiffonier told him that there was an hour and twenty minutes until his appointment.
Although without further food to sustain him, it would be a distressing, nervous-making gap of time, he reminded himself that it could be a useful time. By concentrating, he might be able to review his entire book outline and detect trivial flaws that had escaped the critical scrutiny of so many previous publishers who had stupidly declined his earlier drafts. Also, he realized, a rereading of his revised chapter notes would refresh his memory and better arm him to turn aside any of Ormsby’s challenges.
Settling into the uncomfortable divan, spreading out on its resisting cushion, Doyle placed the manuscript beside him, turned to the briefcase, finally located and extracted a manila folder labeled CORRESPONDENCE.
Opening it, he found the carbon copy of his clever letter to Sydney Ormsby, written some weeks ago from Munich, introducing himself with modest but effective understatement (“Besides remembering me for my three topical books on conflicts around the world, you may remember me as the author of the daily column ‘Inside and Straight,’ which was syndicated to 509 newspapers in the United States and Great Britain, with a readership estimated at 16,000,000”). His letter then advised Ormsby that he had given up the column to return to books, especially one book, a sensational and factual exposé (“which I am at last ready to present to a publisher, a book requiring a publisher with the power and facilities to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible, and my friends in high places have assured me that Ormsby Press Enterprises, Ltd., is just such a publisher”). Then, in three hard-hitting, pithy paragraphs, Doyle had dangled the bait, and added that he would be pleased to meet with Ormsby in Vienna, his next stop, or was free to fly to London, if necessary, to submit his manuscript and discuss it.
Clipped to his carbon copy was Sydney Ormsby’s reply, typed on the finest rag paper, grandly embossed “Ormsby Press Enterprises, Ltd., Book Publishing Division, Red Lion Square, London, W.C.l” and “Office of the Managing Director.” Hopeful as Doyle had been, the promptness of Sydney Ormsby’s response, its unqualified enthusiasm and accommodation, had taken him by surprise.
Ormsby had written that he was fully aware of Doyle’s reputation as a journalist, and indeed he and his brother, Sir Austin Ormsby, were admirers of Doyle’s prose and followed his daily column avidly. (The last had disconcerted Doyle briefly, since for two years, he’d had no column to be followed “avidly,” but he attributed the inaccuracy to fervor and to the fact that his columns had been so memorable that they still seemed, to Constant Readers, quite current and alive.) Ormsby and his staff, Ormsby had written, were unanimous in their opinion that Doyle’s exposé on the Kennedy assassination, so long hoped for, so long needed after so many previous volumes of mere speculation, could become one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century. If Doyle was, as he had indicated, prepared to allow Ormsby to see the manuscript outline on an exclusive basis, Ormsby was prepared, upon reading the outline, to offer the best contract possible for worldwide rights, accompanied by a generous cash advance that would give Doyle the freedom needed to complete his opus. While Ormsby would not be in London in the next weeks—he was accompanying his brother, Sir Austin, to the Five-Power Summit Conference in Paris, to which his brother was a delegate, since he himself had business engagements in that city—he would be delighted to change his immediate plans and fly directly to Vienna to dine with Doyle the evening of Saturday, June 14, to discuss the project and conclude the formality of a contract. Would Doyle cable confirming date?
Optimism restored, almost manic with excitement, Doyle had cabled immediately, setting the dinner appointment for in the evening, on June 14, at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna.
Now, upon rereading it, Doyle could see that Ormsby’s letter was more than promising. It was, in effect, a contract, or as nearly a contract as a letter could be, and once the formal contract was signed tonight, and the advance payment put in his hands, Doyle’s future and inevitable success were guaranteed. For the first time, in all the years since he had undertaken his project, he would have sufficient funds to free himself of restrictive bread-and-butter hackwork, have the funds to go to Moscow and remain there as long as necessary (no matter how costly) to see Hazel Smith and win her favor once more, and if necessary pay her off, and then return to New York with the documentation that would enable him to complete his thunderous best seller.
In a warm glow, thinking of all this, Doyle allowed his fingers to riffle through the stack of letters beneath Ormsby’s letter, the buttered rejections from shortsighted American publishers who had not seen the potential of his project, or rather had not believed in it. All of them had been anesthetized by the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, and therefore regarded his outline as “farfetched” when, indeed, as he knew and as Hazel knew, it was the Warren Report that was the fable, a quick and easy sop to assuage the guilty conscience of an uneasy American citizenry.
Fortunately—oh, why had he not seen this before, and gone to an English publisher earlier?—Sydney Ormsby, steeped in British tradition, raised on the probability and logic that conspiracy figured in most assassinations of public figures (raised on the planned murders of Thomas a Becket, Edward V and his brother, Sir Thomas Overbury, Colonel Rainsborough, Lord Cavendish, educated in violent intrigues and intriguers like the Rye House Plot, the Gowrie Conspiracy, Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, Sir Roger Casement), would appreciate the likelihood that a conspiracy had arranged President Kennedy’s death.
Yes, the British publishers possessed the historical conditioning to accept his book, just as their European neighbors (whose heritage included the conspiratorial liquidations of Henri IV, Rasputin, King Alexander, Foreign Minister Bar-thou, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Chancellor Dollfuss, Trotsky, and whose knowledge included a familiarity with Balkan murder societies like IMRO and the Black Hand and the Croatian Ustaša, and political cabals as varied as the Soviet MKVD and KGB and the Nazi Gestapo, all their roots going deep into ancient times to the Ides of March) would accept his evidence and his book. Only in idiot America, milk-fed, hayseed America, would people point a finger at John Wilkes Booth and call him a loner, and forget that Arnold, O’Laughlin, Herold, Atzerodt, Payne, Spangler, Mudd, the Surratts were his conspirators. Only in America would they forget the motivation behind Collazo and Torresola, also conspirators, as they had tried to shoot their way into Blair House to cut down a President. Only in America would citizens close their eyes and ears to the Old World’s old-fashioned, ugly word, conspiracy, and quickly dispose of the assassination of President Kennedy, a national crime, their crime, by accepting the judgment of a seven-man commission: that the killer, who had played a lone hand, was neurotic, antisocial, and not externally motivated. Thank God, Doyle thought, that he had finally had the sense to approach someone in publishing with intelligence and wisdom.
These reflections continued to hearten Jay Thomas Doyle. In little more than an hour he would confront a publisher who was receptive to his thesis. As important, he would confront a publisher who was—or whose older brother was—A Croesus of communications, no hole-in-the-wall, frayed-cuff, pence-pinching printer in Grub Street or on the fringes of Fleet Street, but a publisher whose empire and largess could match those of Lord Beaverbrook, Cecil Harmsworth King, Lo
rd Kemsley, Roy Thomson, Lord Rothermere. Doyle wondered: Would the request for a $20,000 advance seem too niggardly, as if he were undervaluing his great exposé? Or would $30,000 and expenses sound better, just right? He would see, he would judge his man, and he would decide.
With a start, he realized that he still held the open CORRESPONDENCE file in his lap, and that the letters of rejection from American publishers had sent his mind wandering. There was, he saw, one sheaf of letters left, his own carbon copies, really, and these, too, were in a sense rejections.
There were forty or fifty in all, some letters consisting of many pages, some merely notes, and the first had been dated six years before the last one, and they were uniformly addressed to “My Dear Hazel.”
Skimming his letters to Hazel, Doyle squirmed, as he again recognized their change in tone. The early letters had been romantic, even loving. The middle letters had been hurt, aggrieved, and equated friendship with business. The last letters and notes—and Doyle reddened, as he scanned them—had been desperate, abject, pleading, begging, pitiful. Most had been addressed to “Miss Hazel Smith, c/o Atlas News Association” in Moscow. But when he had seen her by-line originate from other places, numerous letters had been addressed to Belgrade, Athens, Istanbul, Calcutta, Hong Kong, always places beyond his physical reach if not that of his pen. All of his letters, like a stuck needle in a phonograph record, played on two notes—their old relationship, and his need of irrefutable evidence proving her sketchy story about a Kennedy conspiracy, told him in Vienna so long ago.
The correspondence with Hazel was unique in only one respect. It was one-way. It contained copies of his letters to her. It contained not a single letter from Hazel to him, not one, not a letter, not a note, not a word. Nor, as he had complained in several of his letters, had she ever been in her office in Moscow when he had expended large sums to telephone her long-distance from New York, London, Paris. Nor had she ever acknowledged the messages that he had left with her associates in the Moscow news service bureau.
To a stranger, Doyle knew, it would appear that he had been addressing himself to a nonexistent person. But Hazel’s corporeal existence had been verified daily by the newspapers. Every morning, in these past years, the slug—“by Hazel Smith, ANA special correspondent”—had taunted him. Sometimes his bitterness and anger were directed at the woman who held the key to his future. More often his fury was directed at himself for his callow insensitivity in his handling of her in the past, and his neglect of her when it had most mattered to her. In his masochistic moods, a familiar fragment of poetic chastisement often floated across his mind. Once he had even troubled to look it up. It was from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, and the correct quotation, although he was no happier for knowing it, had been “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d,/Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.”
True, she had given herself to him, a compliant if bony virgin from Wisconsin. He had been her first love and lover. She had offered herself totally, without reservation, and for over two years he had taken her, and when he had had enough—or rather, when he had had better prospects (or so he had thought)—he had ruthlessly discarded her. The reasonable Doyle accepted her “rage” and “fury” afterwards, as reasonably normal and reasonably just. What he had never been able to understand was the stamina and endurance of her “rage” and “fury” toward him. Years had passed, and apparently, they had neither healed nor mellowed her anger. Years had altered their worldly positions, for, no denying it, she was now the success and the celebrity, and he was now the once-successful and the formerly celebrated Jay Thomas Doyle. Now that he needed her, and had gone to her stripped of pride, it amazed him that she had shown no pity.
Yet, he had never ceased to believe in the infallible magnetism of his presence. No letter, he had recently decided, no telephone call, could really touch her. Only a personal confrontation, face to face, might restore their old relationship. She had loved him once, and she would love him again. And even if time had so hardened her, there was another approach. For she had grown up in poverty, and struggled, and had always respected the fact that security was synonymous with money. Doyle’s openhandedness with money, his lavish spending, had always unnerved her in that other time. No matter what her success now, ANA could not pay her enough to make her invulnerable to a huge cash offer (thank you, Mr. Ormsby). In either case it would work. For love or money, he would have all of Hazel’s secret, the information that she had once tried to give him—but had never given him completely because he had ridiculed her—about President Kennedy’s assassination, some thirty months before it had actually taken place.
With a sigh that became another wheeze, Doyle closed the CORRESPONDENCE file and returned it to his briefcase.
Then, searching between the leather dividers, he found the handsome fiber folder, removed it, and snapped his manuscript into it.
He considered the manuscript lovingly. He was tempted to scan it one more time before turning it over to Ormsby’s judgment. It was an indulgence, he knew. He had read and reread it so often, rewritten it so many times, that it was practically committed to memory. Yet, with his last work on it, it was as polished as the Sancy diamond, and he was eager once more to enjoy the reflection from its riches. He looked at the clock. Fifty minutes. Time enough for a hasty perusal, and to change suits and be off with minutes to spare.
But then there was the persistent hollow in his stomach that had to be filled. Heaving himself off the divan, Doyle marched toward the bed and the bountiful tray, forgetting that Lucullus had already sacked it. Dismayed at its emptiness, he wondered if there was time to send down for two more orders of Guglhupf mit Schlag, but then knew that there was not. Frustrated, he began to tramp around the room in anguish, gnawed by hunger pangs, feeling feeble and gaunt, as his jiggling belly joined in his grief. Suddenly, he swerved and made an elephantine charge at his bulging leather suitcase, tore it open, and dug inside, beneath the pajamas, shorts, shirts, socks, for the emergency rations he kept against famine. His groping fingers found the carton of chocolate bars, and then the tin of cashew nuts. His hand encircled the tin and dragged it out through the hodge-podge of apparel.
Perspiring from the effort, Doyle mopped his brow and the top of his pate, then broke off the opener, and shakily unwound the metal strip around the can. Tossing the lid of the can and the oily circle of paper that covered the nuts into the wastebasket, he hurried back to the divan and dropped heavily beside his portfolio. Clawing into the cashews, he excavated a fistful and threw them into his mouth. Crunching and grinding and swallowing, he felt the muscles beneath the folds of his neck untensing at last. With his free hand, he brought the fiber folder to his lap, opened it, enjoyed the title page once more, quickly flipped through the first chapter with the five pages he had just retyped. Then, folder in one hand, another fistful of cashews in the other, he began to review hastily his dynamic yet classic prose, a narrative of high adventure and ultimate tragedy that exceeded in drama the best of Euripides.
Masticating the cashews, Doyle began to read his detailed outline for Chapter Two, trying to see it through the eyes of a British publisher like Sydney Ormsby:
This book had its beginnings, even though I did not know it at the time, in Vienna during early June of 1961. A new American President, a vigorous and exciting young Chief Executive, John F. Kennedy, was scheduled to arrive in Vienna for his first official meeting with Nikita S. Khrushchev, Premier of Soviet Russia. As a widely syndicated columnist, then, I naturally was on hand in Vienna, one of 1,400 journalists from every corner of the earth who had converged on the old-fashioned Austrian city of Lehár and Strauss and Franz Joseph, of the Blue Danube and the Ringstrasse and the Prater, to cover this electric Big Two conference, which was to last forty-eight hours. It was during the latter eighteen of those forty-eight hours that I stumbled upon an international conspiracy so daring and shocking in its purpose and implications as to defy credulity. It was in Vienna on June 3, 1
961, that I learned that there was a sinister plot, organized by a small group of Cominform conspirators (whether acting officially or unofficially, whether of Russian or Soviet satellite origin, I cannot say), a plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, either at the Schonbrunn Palace outside Vienna or en route to the Schwechat Airport outside Vienna.
It was late in the afternoon of President Kennedy’s first day in Vienna, after his initial conference with Premier Khrushchev in the suburban two-story villa that is the United States Embassy, and before Austrian President Adolf Schärf’s dinner for the two leaders in the Great Gallery of Maria Theresa’s Schonbrunn Palace, that I first heard of the conspiracy against President Kennedy’s life.
Correspondents assigned to cover the conference, and lesser delegates and ministers assigned to lay the groundwork for the meetings, Russians as well as Americans, had arrived in Vienna several days before the Big Two themselves had appeared. Since reporters respect no frontiers—the fourth estate is, in a sense, one world—the American and Russian journalists mixed freely and comfortably together, as did some of the American and Russian delegates, and the vodka and gin flowed, and brief friendships were quickly established in the days before President Kennedy arrived by jet plane from Washington, D.C., via Paris, and Premier Khrushchev arrived by train from Moscow.
It was after three or four days of this friendly mingling between Russian and American reporters and delegates that a longtime friend of mine—a little-known American writer, an attractive young lady whom I knew to be intensely accurate—breathlessly sought me out at the Hotel Imperial. She was in possession of what she called “the greatest news scoop in modern times.”