The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  She and Doyle required time. There might be time, if there was not first the key in the lock of her door.

  She shuddered, and she drew her blanket higher, and finally, she was calm. Everyone, she told herself, must live with risk. As she had written in a story this afternoon, quoting Napoleon’s Minister of Police: “The air is full of poniards.”

  Hazel turned in bed, burying her head in the pillow, deep, deep into the pillow, hiding from poniards, and hoping for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

  IV

  THE SHRILL scream of air-raid and missile warnings had been part of his life for so long that his reflexes were attuned to immediate response.

  The instant that the shrieking alert drilled into his subconscious, Jay Thomas Doyle awakened, eyes opened wide in terror, confused only as to whether he was in Seoul, Saigon, Calcutta, Damascus, or Leopoldville, and frantic to remember where the shelter was located.

  With astonishment, he slowly became aware of the exquisite sitting room around him, the gold silk wallpaper, the curio cabinets filled with glassware and ivory, the fancy furniture, and gradually, he realized that he was nested in a quilted couch, legs stretched upon a footstool, and that he was attired in a wrinkled suit and not in fatigues, and that the persisting alarm was being issued by a ridiculous clock on a coffee table at his feet.

  Even as he sat up to muffle the clock, he recollected where he was and who had brought him here. Groping forward, he knocked over the clock and pressed down the alarm button, and suddenly, the apartment room was still.

  Casting the blanket aside, he slipped down to the ottoman and sat on it, wide-awake but dazed. Running his fingers through his sparse hair, he tried to recall what had happened the night before. Hazel. Tour d’Argent. Swilling food like a hog. Her Volkswagen. This apartment. Her softness, her forgiveness, her kiss. Her whisper, “Let me get into something comfortable. I’ll be right back, darling. Don’t you move.” The drinks. The bowls of nibbles. The lying back, so weary, so optimistic. The wondering what she would change into, and what it would mean, and if it could really mean a resumption of the past. The expectant waiting for her. The nothingness.

  He could recall no more, nor did he wish to imagine what she had found when she returned to him. Hot shame suffused him. A repulsive glutton, surfeited by food, he had gone to sleep on her. To a woman, the ultimate insult.

  His gaze fell on the clock, flat on its face. The alarm. He wondered why she had set it. Perhaps she was upstairs, expecting to be awakened by him. But no, she had mentioned something about an early interview. He picked up the clock and turned it over. It was nine forty-two. Too late for Hazel. She would be gone.

  About to set the clock back on the table, Doyle noticed for the first time the sheet of paper with its large scrawled salutation, “Good morning, Jay!” He snatched up the note and hastily read it:

  Hope you slept well. I’m setting the alarm because I have to be out by 8, and so won’t be able to wake you later. Jay, try to leave by 10, since I may be returning with guests and your presence would be hard to explain. Thanks for dinner. Let me treat next time.

  Always,

  Hazel

  P.S. Tear up this note and flush it.

  P.P.S. Put blanket out of sight.

  He reread the note, and reread it, as if it were a reprieve. His despair had dissipated. Despite a sour dryness in his mouth, a stiff neck, an itchiness from having slept in his clothes, he felt renewed and invigorated. She would see him again. She was a dream. Good, good Hazel. The day would be beautiful. He would phone and tell her so. He would phone her the minute that he had left her apartment, and apologize, and insist upon seeing her this evening.

  Staggering to his feet—God, he must have put on at least another three pounds last night—well, no more of that from now on, he pledged himself—he decided to comply first with Hazel’s instructions. He tore up her note and stuffed the scraps in his shirt pocket. He folded the blanket, sought a closet, and laid it on the upper shelf. Returning to the sofa, he pounded and kneaded it back into shape, puffed up the throw pillows and arranged them neatly.

  Putting on his shoes, he inspected the coffee table. It had been cleaned. Taking his tie and the clock, he found the downstairs bathroom, quickly flushed away the shreds of Hazel’s note, combed his hair, knotted his tie, and did what he could to smooth out his rumpled suit. There was one act that remained to be performed, and it was the most distasteful one of all. He opened his pillbox, constructed from two tarnished United States silver dollars, and he found the yellow tablet. With the enthusiasm of a house guest accepting a drink from Lucrezia Borgia, he washed the diet pill down his gullet. A fat man, a Welsh friend had once told him, has a thin soul. Well, Hazel deserved better of him, at least a thinner man with a fatter soul.

  At exactly four minutes before ten o’clock, pleased to have conformed to Hazel’s deadline, Jay Thomas Doyle left the apartment, confident but not positive that he would see it again.

  Coming out into the morning brightness of the Rue de Téhéran, intent on telephoning Hazel at the ANA bureau, he saw a neighborhood café about thirty yards off, just before the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann. As he approached the café, it occurred to him that any call to Hazel would be useless. She would not be in the office. She would either be out somewhere on a story or be on her way back to the apartment. In her note she had stated that she would be returning “with guests” sometime after ten. The next step, then, was clear. He would sit at a table inside the café, next to the glass window, and from there have a perfect view of Hazel’s entrance. After she went upstairs with her guests, he would telephone her briefly to apologize and make a date and a new beginning. Yes, this made sense and the café made sense because, as yet, the diet pill had not taken effect and he was famished without his breakfast.

  Luckily, there was an empty table in the row of tables flush against the glass siding that extended onto the sidewalk. It furnished him with an unobstructed sight of the entrance to Hazel’s building, and, at the same time, it kept him partially concealed. After snapping his fingers for the waiter, he tried to confine his breakfast order to a cup of tea, but his quarrelsome stomach (not yet quieted by the tardy pill) demanded more, and so he ordered one croissant, then made it two, then added a request for bacon and eggs (since a hearty breakfast would, after all, enable him to skip lunch).

  For a while, marking time until the dejeuner a la fourchette arrived, he kept glancing through the window for a glimpse of Hazel and her guests. By ten-fifteen she had not appeared, nor had his morning meal, and so he began to reflect on his opening performance at dinner last night.

  He had done rather well, he thought, considering how many opportunities there had been to bring up the subject of The Conspirators Who Killed Kennedy. Several times, he had almost succumbed to the temptation to discuss the book, but each time some intuitive signal had prevented him from plunging. Now hindsight told him that his strategy had been right. Hazel was no longer the unsophisticated, pliable cub of years ago. She was hardened, experienced, and suspicious of all men, especially of him since receiving his countless letters. Surely, she must have wondered whether he was pursuing her with an ulterior motive. If he had evinced such a motive at the outset, Doyle guessed, her feminine pride would have been affronted, and she would have stormed out and avoided him thereafter. But instead, cleverly drawing upon his knowledge of the opposite sex in general, and of Hazel in particular, he had treated her as an object of love rather than as a source of information. By so behaving, he had succeeded in denting her defenses. Once her defenses had been entirely brought down, he would not have to petition her for help. She would eagerly volunteer it.

  With self-congratulations, Doyle gave himself to the bacon and eggs and heated croissants that had been set before him. He had consumed no more than half his bacon and eggs, and but a single croissant, when he heard the humming charge of an automobile speeding into the Rue de Téhéran.

  Immediately, his he
ad swiveled. Through the café’s window he could see a medium-sized black sedan with a shining silver radiator grille slide up before Hazel’s apartment building and jar to a halt. His fork poised in midair, Doyle kept his attention riveted upon the car.

  On the driver’s side the door had opened, and a stocky man in a dark fedora and dark topcoat had begun to emerge. Almost simultaneously, the opposite door had opened, and a woman was stepping out. Doyle’s attention swung from the male driver to the female passenger, and then held on her, for the female passenger was Hazel Smith.

  She stood on the sidewalk, waiting for her companion, and what was unusual was her behavior. She was clutching her purse nervously, searching the street, looking furtive and worried, as if afraid to be seen. The stocky man with the springy step had come up beside her, his back to Doyle, momentarily obscuring her from view. The two exchanged words, and then he took her arm intimately and walked her the few strides to the building entrance. He stopped, she stopped. He dropped his hand from her arm to her hand, and held her hand, as he said something. She nodded. Suddenly, he kissed her quickly, very quickly, and she smiled and disappeared into the building.

  Doyle’s eyes went wide and his jaws clenched on his croissant, as he waited for the man to turn around.

  The man turned around. His brow, narrowed by the hat, his broad countenance, his square jaw, made him appear forbidding. Hands thrust into his topcoat pockets, he looked down the street in the direction of the café, pivoted casually on a heel to look behind him, and jauntily started back around the car to the driver’s seat. Opening the door slowly, he paused and threw his head back to squint up toward the sun. The pose was that of a peasant in the field before harvesting, a peasant enjoying his acres of sky above. His face was plainly visible now, and the moment before he ducked in behind the wheel, Doyle was convinced that he had seen that face before.

  The black sedan had started, jumped forward, made a sudden reckless U-turn, and was gone.

  The instant that the car was out of sight, the identity of the driver hit Doyle. The belated realization of who the man was struck him with redoubled force. He sat stunned, trying to overcome disbelief. Dropping his croissant to the plate, he twisted in his chair and stared back at the spot where, seconds before, Nikolai Rostov had stood.

  Nikolai Rostov.

  There was no mistaking it. Doyle had seen the Russian Minister’s grim kulak features in the newspapers. He had seen the face more than once yesterday, while examining the clippings on Rostov in the ANA files, when he had sought information for Matt Brennan. There could be absolutely no doubt about it. He had seen Nikolai Rostov. And then, in the afterwave of shock, he pinpointed precisely what had shocked him. It was not seeing Nikolai Rostov. It was seeing the unexpected pairing. It was seeing Nikolai Rostov and Hazel Smith together.

  Doyle’s mind reeled backward, ransacking through the past, stumbled forward into the present, ranged ahead, and suddenly, he had no interest in any food except for thought.

  Hazel and Rostov.

  But of course. Initial surprise was now modified by the logic of it. Hazel and Rostov. But naturally. How obvious this discovery made the events of the past, and how clear it made the present. Instantly, he saw the enormity and value of his discovery. At fast he had found the one who could supply the missing piece to the puzzle in his book. He need only reach the one, the one through the other, to obtain the missing piece, complete the puzzle of the Kennedy assassination, and his great work would be done and his comeback assured.

  He felt supreme, like a puppeteer controlling the strings. He knew everything about his marionettes now. There had been Hazel, in Vienna, so many years ago, speaking of her new friend, her “gentleman friend,” a Soviet diplomat, a “lesser” Soviet delegate assigned to assist Premier Khrushchev’s press secretary. This Russian friend had dated Hazel, danced with her, drunk with her, and babbled to her of being carefully approached by a former classmate, on the staff of a Russian newspaper, about joining with “a group of unnamed international Communist officials” who believed that “Kennedy must be liquidated.” When Hazel had come to Doyle with her “scoop,” she had adamantly refused to disclose the name of her new Russian friend and informant. Doyle had ridiculed her at the time, and not until Dallas had he believed her Russian friend even existed. The assassination had convinced Doyle that Hazel’s Russian friend had been very real indeed. And this morning, in Paris, Doyle finally knew who this Russian friend had been all along.

  His mind raced past Vienna. Hazel had moved on to Moscow, been stationed in Moscow, off and on, for years, and she had made her reputation with “inside” stories no other foreign correspondents were able to obtain. How had this been possible? Well, anything was possible for a round-heeled American girl who had a Russian diplomat for her lover. That bitch in heat, Doyle thought, thinking of her.

  That dirty bastard, Doyle thought, thinking of him. But determined not to be sidetracked by personal emotions, Doyle relentlessly turned his mind again to its tracking of the pair.

  Rostov had been riding high until the Zurich Parley. That conference had been a debacle for him, as it had been for Doyle’s friend, Matthew Brennan. After Zurich, Rostov had disappeared from the Moscow scene, presumably sent off to Siberia, and Hazel—Doyle tried to recollect the period—had also left Moscow around that time to become ANA’s correspondent in Budapest and Prague, as well as various cities of the Middle East. How coincidental, if his memory was exact. How very coincidental. And then—oh, he was almost sure of this—Hazel had suddenly been reassigned to Moscow last year, probably at her own request, probably because Rostov had been returned to the good graces of the Government in Moscow. The lovers reunited once more. The American trollop and her Russian friend. How nice. And now, just now, minutes ago, Hazel and her Rostov again, conveniently together in Paris, conveniently in front of her borrowed apartment. How very nice.

  Once more, Doyle tried to repress personal emotion, which could only lead to anger and would get him nowhere. In a world of untrustworthy, two-timing bitches, a man must look out for himself, just as Hazel had looked out for herself. Oh, she had, she had. Absolutely. She had used Doyle to learn her trade and become a correspondent. She had used Rostov to further her career and become a famous correspondent. Yet, he could not be certain of the last, any more than he was sure of the first. After all, he had thrown Hazel over; she had not thrown him over. And, after all, if Rostov had been her Russian “friend” from the start, and had the same relationship with her today, she would hardly have remained attached to one man so long without loving him.

  There was a doubt rising now in Doyle’s mind. Maybe Rostov had not been the other man all along. Maybe there had been someone else, a different Russian friend back in Vienna. Or maybe she had not traded herself to any Russian in Moscow to obtain her beats but had merely been a crack reporter. Maybe she had not actually been in Moscow when Rostov had been there, and had not been away when he had been away, and had not returned when he had returned. Maybe she and Rostov were no more than acquaintances, girl reporter and Russian subject, and she had interviewed him at his Embassy today and he had graciously dropped her off at her apartment on his way to the Palais Rose.

  But then, replaying the scene he had just witnessed in the Rue de Téhéran, he doubted his doubt and felt confident of his original deduction. Rostov had been Hazel’s Russian friend from the start in Vienna, until this day in Paris. Minutes ago, there had been nothing casual or platonic about their behavior. Rostov had taken her hand familiarly. Hazel had shown that she was worried about their being seen (Ah yes—Rostov was married). They had conversed intimately. He had kissed her good-bye. And before that, before all that, her note to Doyle instructing him to make her apartment chaste, and to be off the premises by ten o’clock. Why this, if she had not been expecting to return with Rostov, jealous lover?

  Doyle was more sure than ever. Rostov had been the one all along. He had been the one to know of the murder conspiracy against
President Kennedy when it had first been formed. He possessed the truth, and Hazel possessed him, and for the moment he, Doyle, possessed—or almost possessed—Hazel. Three was the number for the countdown. Three-two-one—and wham—he’d explode his story, and he’d be King of the Hill again.

  Disconcertingly, his elation was not satisfying. He wondered why. He had come here to charm old Hazel, use her, and go on his destined way. He had hunted her down not because he was interested in her but because he was interested in his book. And last night his hunt had begun successfully. And Hazel had proved a sweetheart. So, why was he exasperated with her now?

  Well, somehow she seemed to have cheated on their old pure love. Perhaps he had expected that anyone who had deeply cared for him could never care for another man. It surprised him how possessive he felt about her. She really was his girl, despite their spats and long separation. And he knew her inside out, he really did, and she was really a decent girl. It was wrong of her to submit to some uncouth foreign barbarian, not her kind at all, a Russian, a Communist, a married man even. It was no good for her. As for Rostov, he was an unscrupulous son of a bitch for taking advantage of Hazel’s innocence, although Doyle could not fault his rival’s good taste. At least Rostov’s good taste confirmed what Doyle had always known: that a plain and intelligent girl like Hazel—and she really wasn’t half bad-looking and she really was darn bright—was worth any number of beautiful and shallow young Muscovite ballet dancers. Well, to hell with all that mushy thinking. If he became sentimental and jealous, he’d never get where he was going. And right now, he was on his way.

  Leaving the café, he felt secure once more—the supreme puppeteer holding the strings—finally possessed of the knowledge needed to manipulate his marionettes at will.

  Starting for the Boulevard Haussmann, Doyle remembered that he had meant to telephone Hazel to apologize for his dozing off last night and to make a new dinner date with her. He decided that could wait until later. For now, something more important was on his mind. He wanted absolute and final confirmation of the relationship between Hazel and Rostov. Once positive, meaning absolutely positive, that it had been Rostov from the beginning in Vienna, he would have the sensational ending to his book about the assassination in Dallas.