“Yes, I’m expecting Mr. Doyle,” Earnshaw said into the telephone. “Send him up.”
ON THE SHEET of yellow foolscap, still curled in her portable typewriter, she had written two paragraphs and begun a third:
Paris, June 15 (ANA)—Night has fallen on Paris, and Paris sleeps, while a tense and anxious world awaits the coming of daylight, when its leaders awaken to join together in the hazardous ascent to the Summit.
With morning, the sharply etched faults and craggy pitfalls that stand between the international leaders and the highest goal on earth, the goal of peace, will be starkly revealed. At 10 o’clock in the morning, the common attempt to surmount what man has never before surmounted will be underway at last.
Yet, in this fretful night, not quite all of Paris sleeps…
Hazel Smith had written that much a half hour earlier, and since then she had written no more. First, she had been taken away from the typewriter by young Fowler’s brief visit, delivering to her both an advance edition of tomorrow morning’s international edition of the New York Herald Tribune, and the warning from ANA’s night editor that her copy had better be ready for the messenger who would call for it in an hour and a half. Second, there had been the distraction of the apartment itself.
Once having left her typewriter on the enamel kitchen table and wandered into the elaborately decorated sitting room, she had been loath to return to work. She had found the atmosphere of the sitting room seductive, the magnificent commode stamped with the mark of Jacob, the Baccarat astral lamps, the Louis XV bergère, the sofa upholstered in damask, and most of all the inviting vitrines lovingly filled with pieces of Limoges and Meissen, with Portuguese ceramics, Japanese ivories, and English snuffboxes. It had been so much more pleasant than sitting in any kitchen, where the functionalism would remind her of her dingy apartment in Moscow, with its loose floorboards, uncovered radiators, and exposed water pipes and electric wiring. Enjoying the sitting room, she had knocked wood at her luck in having become its tenant.
The two-level apartment—the bedrooms and dressing rooms were on the floor above and reached by a winding staircase—was located in the Rue de Téhéran, a half block off the Boulevard Haussmann, which was a choice location for Hazel. The apartment was owned by a successful French actress who, when considerably less successful and trying to make her way at a Moscow Film Festival, had been befriended by Hazel The actress, leaving for Athens to make a film, and learning that Hazel would be staying in Paris, had insisted that Hazel enjoy the comforts of the seven-room apartment and not waste money on a hotel. While she had taken her maid to Greece, the actress had left Hazel a ring of keys, a well-stocked larder, and a dozen bottles of fine champagne. Now the unaccustomed luxury of her surroundings interfered with Hazel’s work.
After Fowler’s departure, determined to enjoy the sitting room a few minutes more, Hazel had sat down on a fragile divan and opened the next morning’s Herald Tribune to see how her story was placed, and to count the typographical errors. When she came upon her story, she realized it was the one she had pounded out after leaving that poor Medora Hart, and then she remembered that she had promised to call Medora about where that bastard, Sir Austin Ormsby, could be reached.
Rightly, Hazel knew that she should finish what was in her typewriter before getting on the telephone. But then, Medora would be waiting by the telephone, and Hazel had a vivid memory of what that was like.
She had called Medora and told her to be sure to see the next day’s Herald Tribune, But since Medora could not wait, Hazel had read her the interview over the phone. The interview—no mention of the Jameson case, no mention of the beastly Ormsbys—had recounted the exciting life of an English girl abroad, her adventures and triumphs, culminating in her star appearance at the Club Lautrec. Medora had been embarrassingly grateful.
“Do you think,” Medora had asked, “that Sir Austin will see it?”
“You bet your life hell see it, honey. Not only will he see it, but his wife will, and so will Sydney. Did you know Sydney’s in town?”
“I couldn’t care less, Hazel. I’m only interested in Sir Austin’s knowing where I am.”
“Well, he knows. Now, step two—”
Step two had been to ferret out Sir Austin’s whereabouts. It had not been easy, but Hazel’s British sources were of the best. With pleasure, she had been able to tell Medora that since the Prime Minister and his staff were occupying the British Ambassador’s residence, his Ministers had been located in the Paris hostel most favored by the English. This was, Hazel had explained, the smart Hotel Bristol in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, near the Place Beauvau. Sir Austin and his wife, Fleur, as well as their own servants, shared a double suite on the third floor. Then, wishing Medora the best of luck, and asking her to phone tomorrow and report how she made out, Hazel Smith had hung up.
Now, rising from the divan, determined to force herself to finish her story before the deadline, Hazel knew that she had no intention of going back to the kitchen immediately, and she knew the reason. What was blocking her from her work—unusual in itself, for she was an uncomplicated and fast reporter—was not the interruption of young Fowler, nor the Herald Tribune, nor the comfort of the borrowed living room, nor the need to speak to Medora Hart. The major distraction was not one of these, or all of these, but the hateful fact that Jay Thomas Doyle had lodged in her mind and she was unable to kick him out.
Her present dreary situation had been glaringly irradiated by her accidental encounter with that accursed bastard, Doyle, and by a reminder of what might have been and what was. She had not been writing well tonight, any amateur psychologist could tell her, because she had not wished to finish what she was writing. If she finished too soon and gave her story over to be filed, she would be left with nothing to do. She would be left in these beautiful rooms to scrounge up a supper for herself, to eat the meal alone, to wash the dishes alone, to read the newspapers or watch television alone, to sleep alone—in Paris, festive Paris, with life teeming in the streets and bistros, and herself alone, without normal male companionship, condemned to perpetual intellectual onanism.
Of course, she did not have to be alone tonight. On some pretext, as always, she might have telephoned her friend (even after all these years it unnerved her to conjure up his name) and possibly, he might have dropped by for a while, a little while, but her demand would have been unfair, especially at this time. Jay Doyle had invited her to dinner, and that would have been another way out—but a worse alternative than the first, kowtowing to the bastard who had put her in this horrible situation, submitting to him because of her need. The loss of self-respect would not be worth it. And so here she was, an embittered thirty-four-year-old spinster, if not quite a virgin, all dressed up with love and no one around to take it.
The return of Doyle into her otherwise orderly existence was upsetting. Several years before, after obsessively reliving their old life together, she had made up her mind that he could have no more reality for her than her dead grandfather. Yet, persistently, in those lapses of time when she was unable to see her friend, Doyle would reappear in her memories and imaginings to disconcert her. And now he was here and she was here, and it was disturbing.
He’d had his chance once, the bastard, and treated her swinishly. The shameless effrontery of the fiend, at the café, pretending to forget all he had done to her, begging to take up with her again, as if nothing had happened between them a dozen years ago. And even worse, in the last years, harassing her with letters and long-distance calls simply so that he might use her for that idiotic book of his. Now again, this afternoon, pestering her. How dare he, the pitiful slob!
She thought of their encounter at the café this afternoon, and how he had looked. He looked awful! He looked like—like Falstaff—like a gross, self-indulgent, misshapen, and repulsive cretin child. What had she ever seen in him?
And then, nervously pacing the sitting room, she gradually began to recall the good times, the year and a half,
the two years, in New York, in his Park Avenue apartment, his attractiveness, his cleverness, their fun, their passion. It had been perfect, that first part of it, and there had never been anything like it since, with anyone, the feeling of belonging, the feeling of possessive pride in another. What had that Frenchman once written? La Bruyere, yes, she had underlined it. “You are only really in love once in your life, and that is the first time.”
But maybe, Hazel reflected, she was romanticizing the past, because it was so long ago, and because it was all she’d ever had that was entirely her own. Maybe his behavior before Vienna, and in Vienna, could be understood in the light of his eventual fall from popularity. Under pressure, trying to grasp everything from life while he was still exalted, he had sacrificed her in order to squeeze something more out of a precarious and receding success, but he had already been on the verge of a nervous breakdown or some kind of decline. The years since corroborated that view of him. He had slipped. She had heard the gossip in newspaper circles. He was down.
Suddenly, she did not hate him. How could you hate a person who deserved your sorrow and pity? Doyle had always needed someone like her, someone solid, someone who cared. With her beside him to steady him, he would not have fallen, the poor self-destructive child. He was proof that everyone on earth needed someone, some close human relationship that would serve as insurance against growing old alone. Nor was she, herself, any different from anyone else. She needed someone. She had her friend, of course, and that was a little, but it was not enough for what she had to give. Doyle had once been enough, if only he had appreciated it Perhaps he knew it now, at last, after all the harsh years. Perhaps he had been tempered into manhood by those mean years. Perhaps. Because if he had, if he had…
She ceased her pacing and considered the telephone, and suddenly, her heart told her, to hell with it, to hell with pride.
She dialed the Hotel George-V. She told the operator that she wanted to speak to Mr. Jay Thomas Doyle. She waited in suspense through all the ringing of his room, but there was no answer. Still waiting (maybe he was in the shower), she thought: The damn fool is out eating himself to death somewhere, but maybe he wouldn’t be if he had someone to talk to, if he wasn’t lonely.
When the operator confirmed that Mr. Doyle was not in his room, Hazel said that she would like to leave a message. ‘Tell Mr. Doyle that Miss Hazel Smith called. Tell him I’ll have dinner with him—do you have that?—I will have dinner with him tomorrow night Tell him to pick me up at 27C Rue de Téhéran at eight o’clock in the evening. Eight o’clock sharp… got it? Thank you.”
It was done. While she felt better for having done it, she did not feel exactly happy. Yet, somehow, she did feel less alone, and free to resume work on her story.
She returned to the kitchen table, stood bending over the portable typewriter, rereading the last line that she had written: “Yet, in this fretful night, not quite all of Paris sleeps.”
Quickly, she sat down and resumed typing:
The five great world leaders, those of the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, China—they sleep. The members of their teams—they also sleep. But elsewhere, in hidden recesses of the French capital, hundreds of lesser-known persons, the Sherpas of the Summit—they are the ones who remain wide-awake. These are the persons who, without fanfare, and often in secrecy, are engaged in tasks that will make tomorrow’s crucial and arduous climb to the Summit possible.
Among these little-known persons who are sleepless tonight, who will be burning midnight oil until the gray hours of dawn, none is more important, yet more unobtrusive, than Maurice Quarolli, a Divisional Superintendent of a security branch of the Préfecture of Police which is known as Direction de la Sécurité du President de la République et des Hautes Personnalités. On the shoulders of Quarolli and the crack force of 150 agents falls the responsibility of protecting visiting heads of state as well as their ministers and other eminent officials staying in Paris.
Superintendent Quarolli’s branch of the Préfecture of Police is rarely heard, seldom seen. Late this afternoon, by a stroke of good fortune, I was granted a one-hour interview with Maurice Quarolli. At the designated time, I appeared at an unnamed, unmarked, rather ordinary administrative building in the Quai de -Gesvres…
Hazel Smith ceased typing, picked up the note pad lying open beside her typewriter, and slowly began riffling through the scribbled pages to refresh her memory about what had occurred during the remarkable interview and what she was permitted to report of it.
Soon lost in deciphering her cryptic notes, she sat back to summon up what had been an unexpected audience and a truly amazing hour.
Being granted the interview had been sheer luck. Her contacts with certain officials in the Élysée palace had lent weight to her application. To her surprise, Quarolli had agreed to see her, with the understanding that their talk would be largely off the record. High-placed friends had told her that purely by an accident of politics, her application had been perfectly timed. The French Government, under constant criticism for its refusal to align itself outright with the United States, Great Britain, and Russia in the disarmament conference with China, for refusing to do more than walk the fence and play host, had been stung by the poor press it was receiving throughout much of the world. Now eager to win the favor of the press, to propagandize its active role in the forthcoming Summit talks, the command in the Élysée palace had sent down the order: Be cooperative with influential journalists, within the bounds of security. Obviously, Superintendent Quarolli had been apprised of the order. With reluctance, he had complied with it.
Hazel Smith replayed the interview from the beginning. In the beginning, she had breathlessly followed a uniformed agent de police, up the staircase. Then, with him, she entered an elevator, in which the push-button panel was masked by a small cloth drape. The policeman’s hand snaked beneath the cloth, and the elevator rose swiftly, releasing them on an unnumbered upper floor. The corridor through which they hurried was ostentatiously drab.
In a starkly furnished reception room she was turned over to an unsmiling plainclothesman, who in turn escorted her into a spacious office of restrained elegance. There she was left sitting in an oval-backed black leather armchair before a six-foot-long veneered desk, which held a rectangular gray blotter, a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, three telephones, and a miniature television set.
From a side door, a Frenchman entered quietly. He was slightly less than five feet nine. His thick hair, black and gray and wavy, was combed back in a high pompadour. His blunt face, with elongated nose and jaw, was tan, masculine, preoccupied. His thickset frame, which seemed vulcanized, filled his double-breasted conservative suit. He wore a red ribbon in his buttonhole. This was Maurice Quarolli.
There were no social ceremonies, no amenities. His demeanor was that of a public servant who had more pressing things to do; yet, once seated behind his desk, he was eager to please. Without waiting for Hazel’s questions, he began to speak, his voice low and authoritative. She must not quote him directly, he said, unless she received permission for each quotation she wished to use. She could summarize their conversation, no more.
The French police system, stemming out of the Préfecture of Police and the Prefect’s Cabinet, was too complex a network to be explained in a short time, he said. Their interview would be confined to those services which were in charge of safeguarding participants in the Summit.
When foreign leaders and delegates arrived in France, but were still technically outside Paris—such as at Orly Airport, or the new Paris-Nord Airport, or when they traveled outside the city limits of Paris to Chantilly or Versailles—their protection devolved mainly upon the agents of the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité, known as the CRS, and the ordinary police (incorrectly known as gendarmes, colloquially known as flics, properly known as agents de police), and the armed Garde Républicaine de Paris, he said. Also, whenever foreign leaders or delegates traveled outside Paris, a considerable burden o
f responsibility for their safety fell upon the plainclothesmen of the Service des Voyages Officiels and the detectives of the Sûreté Nationale.
As Hazel concentrated on her note-taking, Quarolli went on without pause. Once the foreign President, Prime Minister, Chairman, Premier, their Ministers, and their key advisers, were inside Paris, the responsibility for protection widened to include other branches of the French judiciary. His own highly trained agents of the Direction de la Sécurité—“How many? I suggest you name your own figure, Miss Smith. Let us say 150, yes?”—were the ones principally accountable for guarding Summit personnel. But many, many other branches collaborated with them. There were the agents of the Service de Documentation et de Contre-Espionnage, known as SDEC (“Like your CIA, Miss Smith”); there were the agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, known as DST; there were the agents of seven specialist squads and six investigating units under the senior Commissaire de Police; there were the agents of Renseignements généraux et jeux, who were intelligence officers and who investigated, as did Quarolli’s own department, all aliens visiting or resident in Paris.
Impatient with generalities, Hazel sought specific answers to specific questions. Cagily, Quarolli deflected some questions, replied to others. He explained that at any official meeting involving Summit guests, or even at an official reception, there might be a dozen members of the Garde Républicaine placed before all entrances, and twenty or more plainclothes agents of various French security branches scattered inside the buildings. Each foreign embassy would be surrounded by French agents. Every hotel in Paris which lodged foreign delegates would have two to six agents circulating inside and a number of agents stationed on the roof. When delegates rode from their embassies or hotels to the Palais Rose, or elsewhere, a motard—a motorcycle escort—would make an effort to precede or follow them.
The Plot Page 41
