The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  The last evening, he escorted the magnificent, well-bred daughter of a wealthy French ambassador to dinner at Le Petit Bedon in the Rue Pergolèse. His eyes feasted on her more than on the cuisine. Her aristocratic young profile, her flashing diamond earrings setting off her brunette, bell-shaped coiffure, her smooth small breasts, her minute waist, her sleek flanks barely concealed by the translucent silk cocktail dress—all of this contradicted her Catholic Bourbon containment and poise. She brought out the best in Doyle, and he was happy. This was more like it. This was what he had wanted. He studied her heavy lids, pouting red lips, long fingers on the gold cigarette holder, and he wondered.

  But after dinner the suspense was brief. She invited him back to her Oriental apartment in the Avenue Foch. She offered him considerable champagne. Then she matter-of-factly offered him herself. The ease of it surprised him, but the promise of her giving stimulated him wildly. And finally, there she was, disrobed, and there he was, undressed, and then there they were together. And then it was over, and when it was over he knew that it had been disappointing. She had been as remote and ungiving as a piece of classical statuary in the Louvre. She had been more an Illusion than a Woman.

  Later, sauntering back to his suite in the Hotel George-V, Doyle realized that the high point of the evening had been the filet of sauteed veal, done with butter, mushrooms, shallots, sherry, Gruyère cheese, all wrapped in the folds of a thin crêpe, served as his dinner entrée. The French ambassador’s exquisite daughter, wrapped in the folds of a thin silk dress, had offered less sensual pleasure than the warm filet. In fact—and this disconcerted him—she had offered less than the inelegant daughter of Russian immigrant parents in Wisconsin, far less.

  Confused, he wondered about the other rewards of success that he might now possess. Was their promise illusory too? Well, he would find out. Anyway, there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that one had slept with a descendant of Bourbon royalty. The scented nude body might not linger long in memory. But the conquest of the Name would remain forever. There was something to be said for that. Yes, he decided, he had made the right decision about Hazel. If only she would leave him alone, here and in Vienna.

  To prevent becoming involved with Hazel, Doyle avoided the regular press plane and took a commercial jet to Vienna. Arriving at the Schwechat Airport several days before President Kennedy was expected, Doyle felt more relaxed than ever, as he was driven past the Danube, the water brackish and more brown than blue, past the baroque Gothic landmarks of the old town at the center of the inner Ring, until he was deposited before the Hotel Imperial at Kärntnerring 16.

  Ordering the uniformed doorman to take care of his bags, Doyle left the veiny blue marble pillars and marble-fronted canopy of the hotel entrance, and as usual found himself bowed through the modern glass doors onto the sweeping red carpet of the lobby, where the manager, assistant manager, and concierge awaited him. It was heady and pleasing, and more than ever Doyle was enchanted by the possibilities of his new freedom and future, which would begin in this gracious place.

  He had no desire to work. He was caught up in Vienna’s mood of Schlamperei—the mood of leaving things undone—and after granting a few interviews, contacting some local friends, he devoted himself to pleasure. Usually with a pretty girl or woman on his arm—always the daughter or flirtatious wife of an Austrian Hapsburg or an Austrian millionaire, including one vivacious Esterhazy in her thirties—he listened to Strauss waltzes in Stadtpark, rode the Riesenrad and the five-schilling Liliputbahn (the largest Ferris wheel and tiniest train he had ever ridden) in the Wurstelprater, and attended a football game which the Wonderteam lost. Above all, he ate, with discrimination and with good companions, in the candlelight of the Drei Husaren, in the lofty Hochhaus overlooking the city, in the charming relic that was Schöner’s and at the very table at which Lehár had once dined. This was the Vienna he loved, the Alt Wien of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, the Vienna that honored these but lacked the patience to name a street for or erect a monument to its own Sigmund Freud. In fact, Doyle bestirred himself to write an amusing column about this paradox.

  Then, suddenly, Vienna became the city of The Third Man, not “The Merry Widow Waltz.” For Nikita Khrushchev had arrived, and a day later, John F. Kennedy, and the Big Two conference was underway. Good-bye, Schlamperei. Things were getting done. The atmosphere became charged with talk about Laos, international control of nuclear testing, the continuing problem of Berlin, and the threat of Red China’s growing power. There was time for only one moment of levity, and that was when Kennedy touched two star-shaped medals adorning Khrushchev’s barrel chest and inquired what they signified. Khrushchev explained proudly that they were both Lenin Peace Medals, to which Kennedy remarked wryly, “I hope you keep them.”

  Before the conference had begun, Doyle was aware, from catching a single glimpse of her, that Hazel Smith was in the city. Beyond that, she did not cross his path. But once the Big Two meetings were underway, Doyle found Hazel more in evidence, always serious, always concentrating on her pencil and note pad, and always trying to be fiercely independent. Except an occasion when he saw her chatting easily with several Russian delegates, she was alone. He tried not to feel sorry for her, but he was. Several times, he caught her observing him, to her embarrassment, and he suspected that she was still pathetically hopeful that she would win him back. Twice he blessed her with hurried tidbits of information and advice, for which she was excessively appreciative. Otherwise, to remind her that nothing had changed, he firmly ignored her. And then, on their fifth or sixth day in Vienna, Kennedy’s last day, Doyle began to realize that Hazel was not around. He wondered about her absence and was briefly curious, and then he forgot about her.

  But suddenly, late in the afternoon of that day, out of the blue, as it were—quite astonishingly, all things considered—Hazel appeared at his Hotel Imperial suite, flushed and breathless and bursting with a tremendous secret. Although he was dressing for cocktails and the opera (it would be the Esterhazy countess tonight, and it would be easy), Doyle was forced to receive Hazel because he could not be rude to this lonely girl in this strange city and because, finally, she whispered that she had an earthshaking “scoop,” a word that made him wince and that he had not heard used since the era of early talking pictures.

  Shutting the door, he found her quivering in extreme agitation, in the middle of his drawing room. He did not ask her to sit down. In fact, as he would recollect long after, they had stood facing each other through the entire conversation.

  “Okay, Hazel, what is it?” he demanded.

  “Jay, I—I’ve never come across anything like this before. It’s the biggest story in our time. It’s tremendous. I had to tell you. You won’t mind my being here, once I tell you.”

  Since Doyle had always been skeptical of the sensitivity of her untrained nose for news, he was automatically wary of what Hazel might regard as “the biggest story in our time,” but he would be polite. “Okay, Hazel, get it off your chest. Who, what, why, when, and where?”

  “President Kennedy—they’re going to assassinate President Kennedy.”

  His eyebrows had gone up. His voice remained cool. “Who is they?”

  “A small group of Russian and satellite Communists. They’re going to kill him.”

  “Who says so—besides you?”

  “It’s—I—I can’t—” She faltered, and then composed herself. “An unimpeachable source.”

  “Not good enough. You know better, Hazel.”

  “I swear it’s true.”

  “Still not good enough, sweetie. I can get you big stories from the bartender downstairs or a waitress at Demel’s or some senile muttonchop-whiskered driver of a carriage in the Hauptallee—but who’ll believe it? Now you’re kicking off with a wild one, a Communist conspiracy against Kennedy—”

  “To murder him here. That’s the truth, Jay.”

  “All right, a plot to kill Kennedy right here. That’s big—agreed. Nothing
bigger would be possible for the wires and our Government. But you’re not writing blind items in a gossip column. You’re in the business of news, and news spells fact—fact, sweetie, nothing less. Now where’d you get your story? If you haven’t got a solid source, or can’t reveal it, you’ve got nothing. Who, Hazel?”

  She swallowed hard, and she burst forth: “A—a Russian official—a Soviet delegate—he—he told me—honest to God, he told me straight.”

  For a fleeting second, Doyle was impressed, curious, and then, recovering, skeptical once more. “Why in the hell should he tell you a thing like that? His head could be chopped off. Look, Hazel, I don’t—”

  “Jay, wait, listen to me, let me explain. I’d better explain the whole thing.”

  And then she began, and she went on and on, words tumbling over one another.

  She’d never been away from home, from her country, so far away, alone, she was saying. She did not know a single one of the other famous American foreign correspondents on the Presidential junket, and it was hard to become friends with them because they did not want to know her or did not take her seriously or were too occupied with their work and personal pleasures. Anyway, the first night in Vienna, about to return to her room in the Bristol Hotel, she had decided that she desperately wanted to be among people, and so she detoured into the hotel bar, where she found a couple of American correspondents drinking with their Russian counterparts, all men and all fairly intoxicated. One of the Americans, who had been standoffish on the plane and in Paris, but was in his cups and free of his earlier reserve, recognized her and beckoned her to his table. He invited her to join him and his friends, because they needed a live American woman around to prove to the Russians that American women were not, as the Russians contended, unfeminine and of the same gender as American men. Her host was too thick-tongued and bleary to remember her name, or the names of the Russians around him, and so Hazel introduced herself to the Russians and they, very well mannered, introduced themselves to her, and she accepted their challenge about the femininity of American women and sat down to drink and debate with them.

  Well, Hazel continued, after a while the Americans had had enough, and excused themselves and staggered off to bed. Hazel found herself alone with a half-dozen Russians, and she meant to leave, too, but when the Communist correspondents learned that she spoke fluent Russian, they were intrigued and wouldn’t let her go, insisting upon another round of drinks. During the next hour, one by one, the Russian correspondents excused themselves to get some sleep. When there were two left with her, and one started to leave, she came to her feet and said good night—but the one who remained asked her to stay for a last drink. He had been the quietest, the nicest, and he appeared so eager for her company that she consented. Without the others, with just the two of them, and their fourth vodkas before them, the talk became more personal. Hazel’s Soviet friend revealed that he was not a journalist but a diplomat, one of the lesser delegates with the Russian party, one of several assigned to help Premier Khrushchev’s press secretary, Mikhail Kharlamov, with background data so that he could properly brief the press at the Hofburg palace.

  Now, Hazel told Doyle, it was her turn to be intrigued. She had wanted to know more about her Russian companion and so they talked on, and the fourth drink became a fifth, and then when her new friend asked her to go out on the town with him, she agreed, and they drove in his dark-gray Moskvich compact from place to place—drinking in the Eden-Bar, the Kaiser-Bar, drinking and dancing in the Flaker-Bar—and they became very good friends, very good.

  Her Russian friend was busy the next day, and so was she, but when evening came, there he was with the Moskvich, waiting to take her out, and they’d driven outside the city, to an inn near the chapel of the Carmelite nuns that stood on the site of the bedroom where Archduke Rudolf of Hapsburg and his mistress, Maria Vetsera, had committed suicide. From the Mayerling inn they went on to a restaurant in a resort hotel, the Tulbinger Kogel Berghotel, in the Vienna Woods. It turned out that her Soviet delegate friend was as lonely as she was, and as desperate for companionship, so far from home, and although he spoke good English, it was wonderful for him to find a foreign female who could speak flawless Russian. And so they got on great, drinking, dancing, exchanging confidences.

  And it continued the third night, and part of yesterday, and all last night, and this morning, and he had become—well, quite attached to her—and they’d had some gay and crazy times together, always winding up—well—sort of plastered—well, not really, but pretty high with all that drinking.

  Anyway, said Hazel, the point was that her gentleman friend had become sort of dependent upon her—he trusted her as if she were one of his own people, in fact more, actually. And last night, well, he’d been sort of preoccupied and troubled, but after a whole night of drinking he’d got kind of foolishly sentimental about her—it wasn’t important to go into that—except somewhere along the way, being sentimental and his tongue loosened by liquor, he began to confide in her very intimately. Suddenly, she was hearing things she couldn’t believe she had heard, but he repeated them quite a few times. What he was telling her was why he had been so troubled the night before. He had been cautiously approached by an old school friend, now on the staff of a Russian newspaper—Izvestia or one of the Pravdas, she could not remember which—anyway, he had been approached about joining with a group of unnamed international Communist officials who were fanatic in their belief that Kennedy stood in their country’s way, and would be increasingly dangerous in the future, and that therefore Kennedy must be liquidated immediately, and if that were not possible, then the deed must be done in the near future.

  Unable to believe her ears, Hazel questioned her friend as best she could. He kept repeating what he had said, that there was this foolish conspiracy aimed at Kennedy, and he was against it and had refused to have any part of it, for he saw no gain from it. Anyway, the whole thing disturbed him, because the headstrong conspirators could create a real mess in the world by their act, and because he himself was endangered by having been given this knowledge of a conspiracy and having refused to participate. Containing her horror, wanting to know the details of the conspiracy, Hazel questioned her friend further, but by then, exhausted and drunk, he had fallen off to sleep.

  “Afterwards, when I saw him sober, I was afraid to bring it up again,” Hazel said. “In broad daylight he seemed to have forgotten what he’d told me, and I thought it wouldn’t be wise to remind him. I knew I was on to something tremendous, but I didn’t know what to do with it until I thought of you, Jay. I tried to get away from my friend all day, but I couldn’t. Luckily, an hour ago, he was called to the Russian Embassy, and the second I was free, I came right here to tell you. So there you have it, everything that I know, and much as I hate double-crossing a nice guy, a really sincere, decent guy, I decided it is more important to protect our President and future peace by announcing this horrible plot to the world. Don’t you agree, Jay?”

  Doyle had listened carefully, his head swarming with conflicting reactions, and now that she had finished her story, he knew that his final judgment would depend upon her answer to one question. “Hazel, you haven’t told me everything that you know. There is one thing missing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His name.”

  She seemed startled. “Oh—I—I can’t tell that.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then why won’t you tell it?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair—I mean, it wouldn’t be right.” She paused, bewildered. “A reporter doesn’t have to reveal her source.”

  “Not usually, but in this case you must.”

  “No, I can’t.” Her firmness surprised him. “It’s not important,” she added.

  “Hazel, it’s the only thing that is important.”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  And he did see. She’d been picked up by this drunke
n Russian bum, delegate or no, but a drunken phony or provocateur—she’d have been too simple to perceive that, too eager for any man since she had been dropped by him—and she had probably let this vodka swiller take her to bed, not once, but day and night, and she’d got this little fable from him, either as her two dollars on the table or for more sinister reasons. No, of course Hazel the Great wouldn’t give the name if the Russian Orlov or Potemkin had been or still was her lover.

  Or, on the other hand, maybe she couldn’t give the name because her Russian delegate friend was nonexistent. Quite possibly this crude fiction was a trick of hers, a warped means of wreaking vengeance on Doyle himself, by getting him to swallow it, spew it to the world, and thus be exposed for an unreliable fool and finally ruined. But then he doubted that, knowing Hazel as well as he did. Whether she had invented the embarrassing “scoop” or it had been planted on her, she was here with it now, using it to seduce him once more and win him back. Yes, he was sure that was it. She had picked up this nonsense, or created it, and had brought it to her former lover as a family cat brings a dead bird and drops it on the doormat, expecting the rewards of praise and love.

  “Hazel,” he found himself saying, “you’re a naive and gullible child to believe that garbage. Either you’ve been taken in or you’re trying to take me in.”

  She stared at him with disbelief. “What do you mean?”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I mean. Let’s say there is this Russian friend of yours and he is a delegate to the conference, which I doubt. Okay, so he has a little fun with you—you know what I mean—”