The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  At the climax of the scene she had broken down and had been half dragged, half carried past a crowd of fascinated bystanders to a private room, and there she had fallen into a fit of sobbing. The immigration officer who had stayed with her, and a bobby the airport had summoned, had both been kindly, and someone had brought smelling salts and someone else had brought tea, and a third someone had brought forms to fill out, and a short time later, she had been led to a plane about to take off for Paris. Weakened and defeated, she had pleaded with them to tell her what she should do, and she had been told to keep in regular touch with the British Embassy in Paris, or British Embassies wherever she might be, and word on the disposition of her case would reach her presently.

  “And here I am,” she said to the consular official.

  “Ummm, yes. Well, Miss Hart, let me see what more I can find out.”

  He stepped into an adjoining records room, rummaged through the file drawers, and eventually, he left for his superior’s office. She nervously smoked three cigarettes before he returned with a yellow sheet of paper.

  “Yes,” he said, “you are definitely on the list.”

  “What list?” she almost shouted.

  He looked up, as if surprised that she did not know. “Undesirable aliens,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s rather routine, you know. When an alien’s or a naturalized citizen’s name comes up, for any reason—crime, scandal, whatever it may be—his background is automatically investigated. This procedure was followed in your case, and a misstatement in your father’s naturalization certificate was discovered. This made you, well, technically, temporarily, an alien, worse luck. If you are declared a permanent alien, then under the latest revised code—well, we need to go into the definition—”

  “You go into it. I want to know.”

  “Yes. Well. Questionable moral character, that would be one thing that could bar an alien who wanted to apply for citizenship.”

  She sat stone still. Questionable moral character. Then that was it. Her suspicion, put down for hours, was now confirmed. This was not the wretched Home Office. This was Sir Austin Ormsby’s doing. He had packed her off not for three months but forever. No wonder that he had never been in touch with her. No wonder that he had not answered her letters, wires, telephone calls. For him, she had no more existence, she was—how did the French put it?—ci-devant. He was powerful. A brief phone call to the right ministry—all one club, you know, and we must keep Britain pure, you know, keep the young and our homes uncorrupted—one phone call and the machinery turned. A loophole was found. If there had been none, one would have been invented. Likely, this one had been invented. Now, she was out of his life. She would remain out of it for the rest of their days on earth. She would never be there, in England, a source of potential scandal to the Ormsby family. If only she could get to him, butcher knife in hand, the filthy, rotten bastard.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard the consular boy say, staring at her bust once more. “I’m afraid all you can do is keep in touch with me weekly. Often these matters take time.”

  “Time? How much time?”

  “They can drag along for weeks, months, sometimes even years.”

  She wanted to say—sometimes forever, this purgatory—but she felt weak again and remained silent.

  “Of course, I—I could try to expedite the decision. You know, a memorandum. I’d like to be of help.”

  She got up. “Thanks, I’d appreciate anything.”

  He caught up her handbag, and relinquished it to her reluctantly at the door. “—I’ve read about you, you know. Rather favorable press, I thought. All on your side.” He hesitated. “If you’re alone here, ever need company, a little cheering up, well, I’m alone, too, and I know my way around. Perhaps we could have an evening.”

  To shut the door, or leave it ajar? She detested the gauche young fool. She compromised. “I’ll be busy awhile, but I’ll keep in touch. I’ll let you know.”

  Bastards, all of them.

  She went back to the small hotel where she found that her room had not yet been occupied, and so she moved into it again. Throughout that night, she sat on the sofa in a comatose state, too beaten to think, too ill to eat, lost. After a few whiskies, and the coming of dawn, she went to sleep.

  She awakened in a rage against Sir Austin Ormsby, with only one crimson thought—to revenge herself upon him. She possessed a club, she knew: the truth about what had really happened to her, the truth about how the great Sir Austin had come crawling in the night to beg her to get out of the country, to subvert the law, making her an accessory to his crime in order to protect his brother and his bloody family name. Oh, now, wouldn’t that look pretty in big black newspaper headlines!

  Driven by the need for retribution, she plunged into the city of Paris on her holy crusade. A wild, uncontrolled, savage two weeks of making the rounds of the English and American press bureaus in Paris. She went to the assistant editor of the New York Herald Tribune, to the bureau chiefs of Reuters, Associated Press, United Press International, Atlas News Association, The Times of London, The New York Times, The Observer, a half-dozen others, and everywhere she was royally received as a celebrity and was heard out. She disclosed the truth about Sir Austin Ormsby to one and all, at first telling her story with cold factuality, in later versions coloring and exaggerating it more and more. And everywhere, she found great interest, and sincere sympathy—and, finally, rejection. The reactions were everywhere the same. Proof was needed, documentation was required. Did she have anything about this from Sir Austin in writing? She had nothing, nothing but what was in her own memory, and the value of her own word. How clever he had been to leave her with so little. Unfortunately, her word was not enough, anywhere. A revelation like this, without absolute proof, could bring on a libel suit, a defamation suit, from Sir Austin. No, it was impossible, although everywhere they were eager to do interviews with Medora, glossing over the Ormsby incident, of course. She had no patience for interviews. She wanted only to see the truth about Sir Austin in print.

  The rejections had not impaired her determination to continue the crusade. There were a dozen French newspapers, and she started after them. And once more she found the same initial interest, reduced finally to sympathy, rejection—and invitations to dinner. The crusade had failed. Again, she had lost. Sir Austin had won.

  Then, overnight, the desire for vengeance was pushed aside by a greater necessity, the need for survival. The Judas money from Sir Austin had long since been spent. Her jewels and furs have been sold, and the money from them had wasted away. Now she was naked to the world and afraid. Two choices were open to her: to commit suicide or become a whore. But suddenly, neither choice was necessary. One of the French dailies that she had visited decided that it would like to help her prepare her autobiography, a by-lined story of her lurid life—sans Sir Austin, of course—and it would pay her well for the serialization rights. She did not even pretend to consider it. She accepted the offer at once.

  Medora had hoped to save something from this money for a solicitor whom her mother might retain to investigate her banishment from England. But somehow, there was nothing to save. After paying her mother’s bills, and her own in Paris, there was hardly a franc left. By the time the third installment of her autobiography appeared, and was being discussed not only in France but in England and over the Continent as well, Medora was broke and living on credit. Her desperation was greater than ever. But the autobiography had revived her name, and she was constantly being invited to dinner parties in Paris. She detested these parties, because she knew that she was being invited only as a fortune-teller or a newly arrived musician might be invited, to amuse and entertain jaded guests by her novelty. Still, she accepted the invitations because they provided her with free meals. She never imagined that they might also provide her with a career, but, to her amazement, one such party at a private flat off the Place du Trocadéro did exactly that.

  A theatrical agent from Munich, who had repre
sentatives in cities throughout Europe, became intrigued by her at the dinner party. Her autobiography, he told her, was the talk of salons and cafés in every European capital. It was a pity, he said, to waste all that priceless publicity. She did not fully comprehend what he meant when he described the serialization of her life story as publicity. What he meant, he explained patiently, was if she were in the entertainment field, she could reap the rewards of such a buildup. But she was not an entertainer, she said, and then added she wished that she were. The agent seized upon this admission. Was she interested? Was she free? Would she consider performing in public? She responded with absolute candor. She would consider anything that would help her survive. She was broke.

  “But what could I possibly do?” she asked. “I’ve had no training as an actress or anything else.”

  “I could book you into a hundred nightclubs tomorrow.”

  “Doing what? Tell me that.”

  “Can you carry a tune?”

  “A little. I’ve never had a lesson, but I have an ear.”

  “Can you dance?”

  “Not really, not the way you mean.”

  He stepped back and studied her from head to toe. It was obvious to her that there was no lechery involved in his examination. His eyes, and his tone of voice, were clinical. “You’ve got a remarkable figure, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Would you mind using it?”

  “I’m not interested in that sort of thing,” she said sharply.

  “No, no—I mean, would you mind exposing it professionally? A song, a faked dance, a partial striptease?”

  “Who’d pay good money for that?”

  “For that alone? Not many. But for that, plus your greatest asset? Thousands would pay happily.”

  “My greatest asset?” she said warily. “What is that?”

  “The simple fact that you were the Jameson girl… There you have it, young lady. What do you say?”

  “I say—when do we begin?”

  They began a week later in that smoky cabaret on the Left Bank, and then he kept her moving and moving and moving, and in her three years of painful exile, she had never stopped. And what had started out so lonely, so long ago, the tortuous journey that had taken her not one centimeter closer to home, had now brought her once more, as it had every previous summer, to a burning afternoon on the sands of the Provençal beach in Juan-les-Pins.

  She lay quietly on her white pad, opening her eyes behind her tinted glasses to the present in an effort to obliterate the past, but knowing full well that the past was woven into the fabric of the present and that she must live with it every day of her life. Blinking through her sunglasses at the incandescent sun, she realized how scorched her midriff and thighs felt. Raising her arm, she squinted at her wristwatch. She realized that she had been replaying her song, the dirge, for fifty minutes. If she did not remove herself from the sun at once, she would be roasted alive.

  She lifted herself to her elbows, and remembering the wretched English tourists who had started the whole miserable playback, she peered ahead. They were gone, with their pasty white skins, thank the Lord. She sat up. The beach was still relatively empty, and as best she could make out, the terrace lunch crowd had also thinned or disappeared.

  The beach attendant was approaching. “The umbrella, I can move it now, Mademoiselle Hart? If not, you will perhaps suffer tonight.”

  She jumped to her feet. “No, thanks. I’ve had enough for today. I’d better have a spot of lunch.”

  Stretching, she became aware that a string of the bikini bottom had loosened, and hastily, she secured the knot. After checking to see if her bikini top was in place, she took the magazine supplement of the Sunday Times, returned to the locker, slipped her bare feet into the beach sandals, snatched up her handbag, and started for the outdoor terrace.

  Ascending the stone stairs to the walk above, she turned right, quickly went down a second set of stairs, past the glass showcases with their prepared desserts and salads, and onto the wooden deck that stretched over the water.

  She had meant to relax at a metal table, beneath the shade of an umbrella, and there eat and read, but as she started for a table, she slowed. At least three of the tables were occupied by numerous tourist-type hotel guests, mostly men, mainly American, English, German, and a few native French. Abruptly, she halted. Her entrance, as usual, had brought conversation to a stop at two of the tables; chairs were being wrenched around, and all male eyes were leering at her. That instant, she regretted the brevity of the bikini, and she prayed that she had knotted the string tightly. She felt their eyes on her nakedness, and she stared back at them, unsmiling, quickly pivoted away, and strode to the shaded outdoor bar.

  Propping herself on a stool, her back to the slobbering monsters, she determined to ignore them. But she could feel their bloodshot eyes on her bare shoulder blades, spine, buttocks.

  Her friend, the kindly, happily married French bartender, materialized at once, greeting her and waiting.

  “I’m not too hungry, Jean,” she said. “Tell you what. Make it salade niçoise. And a glass of wine. I think Tavel.”

  “Ah, Mademoiselle Hart, the prepared salade niçoise is depleted. The vultures descended and poof—gone. But if you will wait—five minutes, no more—Madame will mix a fresh one for you.”

  “Of course, Jean. But the Tavel anyway. I’m parched.”

  When the pink wine arrived, she tried it, and it was delicious. Spoiling it somewhat were the occasional lewd phrases that floated up from behind her, someone recounting a dirty joke about a nude woman, followed by an obscene chorus of laughter. Again, the silence, and the groping and touching of the eyes, and she was tempted to stand up, tear off her bikini and yell at them, All right, you bloody bastards, here it is, now what have you got?

  In truth, what would they have? What would they see that was different from what they had seen hundreds of times before? You could buy it from any streetwalker or from any five-franc art magazine. It was the same old thing, same nude breasts, torso, vaginal mound, thighs, legs, buttocks. Yet, what men went through to observe, and imagine possessing, these anatomical parts of hers, as if they would be different, the wonders of the world. Once, long ago, she had been proud of her individual parts, her naked body whole, because it had brought her favors and fun. But now she resented her body because it divested her of privacy and peace, and reduced most civilized men to packs of dirty animals, who came panting after the body, to see it, feel it, knead it, invade it. There they were behind her, violating her decency, all knowing her past and all so sure it could be done again. Secondhand goods, you know. Cheap. Easy. At least here, with some of their wives around, they couldn’t proposition her—but they had done so, and they would do so again, when their wives were out having their hair fixed in town or were off shopping in Cannes. With the exception of a scattered handful of older men, mature ones like Nardeau, there was not one with whom she could have a relationship that transcended bed and body.

  But then, sipping her Tavel, she decided that it was not her body that she should blame for her hellish existence, but primarily Sir Austin Ormsby. It was he who had decreed her exile, and it was her solitary exile that had exposed her to this unremitting insult and humiliation. No one on earth could fully realize what it was like to be publicly disgraced and forced into exile, except someone who had endured the experience.

  She remembered the time, late last summer, when she had been appearing in a small club on the Lido, across from Venice. An English film executive, who had come up from his office in Rome, had made her acquaintance and offered her the use of his cabana on the Excelsior beach. One afternoon, he had pointed out an attractive middle-aged man strolling along the water’s edge, a self-absorbed, aloof figure of an American in T-shirt and denim slacks. That man, her companion had told her, was none other than Matthew Brennan, the one who had been suspected some years before of being a traitor, and who had been forced to resign from the U.S. Departmen
t of State. “I wonder what it’s like,” her companion had mused, “being in exile like that?” Her own reaction had fascinated her, the flip-flop of it, and had remained with her ever since. The moment that she had heard Brennan characterized as “traitor,” she had regarded him unsympathetically, but the moment that she had heard the word “exile” applied to him, she had felt immediate sympathy. She had watched his slouching lonely figure recede along the Italian beach, and her heart had reached out in kinship toward another who, like herself, had been ill-used and driven off to a desert island. A loser, she had thought, and then she had thought, It takes one to know one.

  The salade niçoise was before her. She took up her fork and picked at it. She had no appetite, but eating was something to do. She buttered a crust of French bread, nibbled at it, nibbled again at her salad, then sighing, put down the bread, and pulled the Sunday Times magazine supplement from under her handbag.

  Slowly eating, she opened the smooth, thick rotogravure section and began to turn the pages, and to her dismay she saw that the entire issue was a special one devoted to the Five-Power Summit Conference in Paris. Politics was as mystifying and stultifying to her as were the allegory and language of The Faerie Queene—“When foggy mistes or cloudy tempests have/The faithfull light of that faire lampe yblent”—she had once tried to fathom that to please one of her men, some bearded creep bent on improving her—crikey!—and the layouts and captions given over to the United States President, to Russian Premier Talansky, to the Red Chinese Chairman Kuo Shu-tung, to meaningless words like “clean bomb” and “on-site inspections” and “demilitarization” were just as senseless.

  About to throw the disappointing supplement aside, she realized that she had reached a full-page picture of the British Prime Minister, flanked by members of his Cabinet, in the act of departing from No. 10 Downing Street, and there in the blurry photograph, behind the Prime Minister, was the Foreign Secretary, none other, the one she hated in her waking and sleeping dreams. The directions in the parentheses of the caption, after Sir Austin’s name, told her to turn to pages 36-44. She flipped the pages of the supplement to 36, and there a stylized heading read: AMONG GREAT BRITAIN’S BEST, SIR AUSTIN ORMSBY, ALL-IMPORTANT DELEGATE TO THE SUMMIT, HERE SEEN AT WORK AND AT PLAY.