The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  Through interminable hours of heavy drinking, she had become very close to a minor Russian delegate, yet one important enough to be on Premier Khrushchev’s advisory staff, and she had become his confidante, and endless glasses of vodka had loosened his tongue. He had hinted to her that he had been approached by a certain group of his Communist colleagues to join them in the liquidation of the one they thought was obstructing Russia’s future, to join in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy either that evening or the following day in Vienna. He had backed away from the conspiracy. But it was clear to him that the assassination would take place, if not in Vienna, then elsewhere in the near future, and he deplored it.

  My friend felt that she did not possess the journalistic stature to file such a story, but she felt that I did possess such stature, and that if the story came from me it would be accepted and published—and not only would it be a momentous newsbeat, but it would certainly prevent the conspirators from making their assassination attempt.

  Because I was loath to file so sensational a story without stronger evidence, because I suspected the story had been leaked to my friend as a trick to discredit our democratic journalist corps, I declined to accept the story as true and refused to write and file it.

  When President Kennedy attended the Schonbrunn Palace dinner and left unharmed, when he went to Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral the following day and met with Khrushchev at the three-story Soviet Embassy shortly after, and emerged from both places unharmed, when he left by jet for London the next morning still unharmed, I felt that my skepticism had been well founded. Obviously, my innocent female friend had been taken in by a transparent Russian trick. I dismissed this nonsense from my mind.

  That was June of 1961.

  And then, it was November of 1963—and at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, President Kennedy, a bullet hole in his throat, a great gaping wound in the right rear of his skull, lay dying, and shortly afterwards the White House assistant press secretary announced his death by an assassin’s bullets to the entire stunned world.

  The Dallas police, the FBI, and eventually, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, with Chief Justice Earl Warren as chairman, announced that the killing had been done by one man, unaffiliated with any political group. That man, they stated, was Lee Harvey Oswald. But my memory went back to a late afternoon in Vienna, thirty months before Dallas, and then I knew that the assassination had not been committed by Oswald. I knew that it had been committed not merely by another, but by others, by a company of international conspirators. And so I undertook my long, difficult, hazardous hunt, my search for the missing half of the story that had been partially revealed to me in Vienna in 1961…

  Jay Thomas Doyle lowered the manuscript to his lap, as he reflected on the candor and veracity of his written words, so disarmingly simple and so filled with good purpose, when the real truth of it, or rather the whole truth of it—so inexplicably complex and so cluttered by his personal selfishness and vanity still lay hidden deep in his mind and conscience, unrevealed in the surface words.

  Remembering the whole truth, the secret, private truth most men cannot face seeing in themselves or, facing it, cannot divulge to others—he gradually reconstructed (as a reality of the present that he must live with) what had actually happened in the Vienna of 1961.

  Reliving it, he remembered that he was received in the Austrian capital with the ceremony and respect once accorded Hapsburg princes. He was a Big Name then, really big, and he was treated as one with absolute authority. He perceived that among his journalistic contemporaries there were those more erudite, more clever, more wise than himself, yet they were merely philosophers of the fourth estate while he was an emperor, because he had legions to support him. His legions were formed by his vast and loyal reading public, the millions who followed his column and believed every word. When Doyle issued his daily edicts, lively, dramatic, firsthand reports and opinions on the world’s trouble spots—Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, India, Communist China Mississippi—his followers believed him, hailed him, and their massive plebeian chorus was heard in high places in Washington, D.C., as well as abroad. As a result, the private-key elevator to the sacrosanct seventh floor of the Department of States, and the guarded doors to the Oval Office of the White House, were always wide-open to him. Every President from Eisenhower to Earnshaw had been his friend.

  Until that time in Vienna of 1961, and, well, perhaps for a little more than two years after, Doyle had worked alone. Rival news bureaus sent teams of reporters to cover an event. Doyle was a team unto himself. So much in favor was he that he often did not deign to seek information. Story leads came to him, and were transformed by his mediocre but showman’s intelligence into daily columns under the standing head “Inside and Straight,” and thereafter they became mass opinion and sometimes national policy.

  As emperor, he needed diversions, rewards beyond money. He wanted the best of food, the most venerable wine, the most sought-after women. The food and wine were always there, but in those days he took them in relative moderation, took them as a gastronome not as a glutton. And the women were there, too, only the most choice, the ones who met his high standards, and although he desired them all, he took them sparingly. Because of his exalted station he was wary of the glittering, easy women. He did not want to be dragged from eminence to a common bed, another “name” conquered by breasty amoral gossips, a vulnerable bedmate trapped in the pillows by so many dangerous Clytemnestras.

  Yet, that was not his dominant fear of the glittering, easy women. His dominant fear, the one that inhibited him from enjoying the final pleasure he needed, was that he did not want to be used. Instead, he wanted to use. He did not want to be invaded, to be forced to compromise with another, to be made to surrender a portion of his sovereignty to any single overpowering spoiled female. In short, he did not want a royal equal. He wanted a devoted subject. He did not wish a relationship. He wished an accommodating vassal.

  And so, for the final diversion, he peered down from his position of eminence, and what he found was Miss Hazel Smith, of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a cub reporter on the staff of the Atlas News Association and freshly arrived in New York.

  Recollecting their early months, Doyle saw Hazel as naive, pliable, sweet, unformed, and ambitious only at the minimum self-preservation level. Lonely for male companionship, for male warmth, for belonging to someone, she was struck dumb with reverence for, and instantly overwhelmed by, the attention of an emperor. With her submission, Doyle had found his perfect female vassal.

  She was anything but beautiful. Her nest of unchic, carroty hair, her close-set eyes and lantern jaw, her flat breasts and splayed hips, her straight legs, were anything but a decorative delight. Certainly, with her shiny face devoid of makeup, her unpolished nails, her masculine gait, and practical shoes, she was not a choice hostess to showcase at gatherings of the great. Doyle’s devotion to her often surprised him, he who would reject a plush restaurant for its unesthetic lighting, a dinner jacket for a single seam wrinkle, a Bearnaise sauce for its slight excess of vinegar. Yet, he liked her, because she was comfortable, because she was undemanding, because she was whatever he wanted her to be, because she was there. These were the virtues, and there were others. Hazel gave him attentiveness undivided, respect unqualified, and, above all, sexual love uncomplicated by previous experience and undiluted by conflicting interests.

  But then, after a year and a half, hardly aware that it was happening, Doyle began to resent her and became ashamed of his affair. He had risen higher and higher, and she had not risen at all, and he was not concerned with the possibility that his own overbearing personality and neurotic boundaries might have arrested her potential growth. He was tiring of her, he began to realize, not because she did not please him in private but because she had become a faint embarrassment to him in their infrequent appearances in public. Her shopgirl plainness lessened his esteem of himself and his good taste when he returned to her a
fter some society ball or exclusive reception at which he had been a star among guest lists culled from the Social Régister.

  At such times, he found himself examining her and reevaluating her with hard, spoiled eyes. Returning to his Park Avenue apartment, after a penthouse or town house dinner party, where well-bred young women with glossy upswept hair, décolleté beaded gowns, finishing-school accents, the latest flowering of old family trees, had fawned upon him, it became increasingly difficult to desire or feel amorous toward a mistress who did her own hair in plastic curlers, whose stubby fingers were forever stained from changing typewriter ribbons, who wore bargain-basement housecoats, whose accent was harsh Midwestern, and who was too serious about the eleven o’clock news broadcast ever to be gay and frivolous and flirtatious in the late evening.

  Comparisons were odious, he knew, yet he could not put them aside. Also, he knew that making a comparison between those who were to the manor born and one who had never had their advantages was unfair, snobbish, and somehow demeaned him, who had grown to fame out of the muck and blood and lice of Korea and who had become the Voice of the People. Looking for an answer to his problem, he even reread Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in paperback, remembering that although Dreiser’s hero, Clyde Griffiths, yearned for social position—which Doyle already possessed—his involvement with his mistress, a factory employee, created for him the same conflict that Doyle was enduring and suffering because of Hazel. Dreiser had resolved his hero’s problem by having him murder his poor mistress. Doyle decided that this melodrama could hardly be applied to his own life. Dreiser had merely succeeded in making him feel guilty about his attitude toward Hazel, so Doyle threw the book away and put it out of his mind.

  But he could not put his determination to be free of Hazel out of his mind. Or rather, his mind, with a will of its own, a life of its own, prejudices of its own, constantly oppressed and dominated his soft and sentimental heart.

  His shrewd mind said: Doyle, enjoy those other women, your equals, while you can. They are your kind of women and you deserve them. They are lovely, gracious women in whom you can take pride, the products of the oldest American and English families, of stately mansions, of debutante balls, of Vassar, of the Sorbonne; the products of exacting tutors who have schooled them in manners, in art appreciation, in conversation, in riding to the hounds, in dance, in flawless French, in the ability to wear clothes from Dior and Balenciaga.

  His relentless mind said: Doyle, you have had enough of Hazel Smith, your inferior; drop her while you can. She is not your kind, and you have done enough for her, been good enough to her, shown her worlds she would otherwise never have known. Let her be. She will make her way, find herself a proper husband who is the manager of a shoe store, or an accountant, or a dentist, and she will live in Far Rockaway or Jersey City with four runny-nosed children who take piano lessons, and she will have the bridge club every Wednesday and be the happier for it. Don’t weaken, Doyle. Sentimentality is fine for your column, but don’t let it ruin your life. Look at her, look at Hazel—“poor Hazel”—a shallow, plain, gauche creature unprepared to share your future, an average girl with no potential, a familiar product of scared and clumpy Russian immigrant parents (“greenhorns”), who came to Wisconsin from Narevka and Vilna early in the century by way of Ellis Island; Gary, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; the product of a rundown and peeling wooden house with a broken plank in the porch floor and weeds and dandelions in the front lawn; the product of family reunions attended by aunts always named Yetta or Gertrude or Rose, of American Legion fund-raising carnivals and hayrides and the high school in Baraboo (where she changed her name to the easily spelled Smith), of two years in a teachers college near Oshkosh and a year as a Hearst stringer in Racine; the product of an unfortunate environment that limited her table manners to raising her pinky when spooning soup, her linguistic range to Russian acquired from her immigrant parents (no, no, Doyle, that kind of Russian will never do, never), her wardrobe to shiny black (black, Doyle) underthings and rayon-crêpe dresses purchased by mail order from Sears, Roebuck and Co. (and more lately, Doyle, from Klein’s and, big step, Ohrbach’s).

  His teasing mind said: Really, Doyle, listen to your mind—unless you’re out of it.

  And so, after two years, he listened.

  Just before the Vienna conference, he had decided that she was an impossible mate for him. The price he paid for her dependency upon him, her undemanding companionship, was too high, considering his social loss due to her presence. His news syndicate wanted him to cover President Kennedy’s visits with de Gaulle in Paris, with Khrushchev in Vienna, with Macmillan in London, and he seized upon this journey abroad as the perfect opportunity to break away from Hazel. Because he hated finality, he rationalized that after the break, if ever he needed her, she would be around somewhere. He simply did not want her around when he did not need her.

  He had already, for some months, shown his annoyance and irritation with her fawning oppressive love. Now he converted his bad temper from transient erratic moods to permanent domestic policy. He was always difficult in her presence, mean and difficult, surly and neglectful, raking her with criticism, being contradictory and sarcastic, allowing her no area of right and good, constantly parading before her his encounters with beautiful, witty, sophisticated women, and even disappearing from the apartment for days on end with no explanation upon his return. Deliberately, too, he “forgot” her birthday and their ridiculous anniversaries.

  And yet she took it and did not fight back. Except for occasionally biting her lip, or brushing a hand over her eyes, she betrayed no emotion. It was as if some maiden aunt had once told her that men were that way and you had to endure it, ride it out, and all would eventually be well. She deflected his provocation and absorbed his punishment without offering retaliation. She would give him no cue for a climactic scene. She was steadfast in her stoicism, and it maddened him, and he knew that he would finally have to do what he abhorred most. He would have to tell her it was over.

  Three days before leaving for Vienna, reinforced by four Scotches and a mental review of their incompatibility, he provoked the showdown in their apartment kitchen.

  “Hazel, listen, there’s something important—we’ve got to talk—we can’t go on like this.”

  They did not talk, but he did, a half hour of monologue filled with pseudo-psychoanalytic cant, egocentricity, self-pity, inflated grievances, phony unselfish concern, and the sum total of it, his decision: “It’s not just me I’m thinking of, Hazel, it’s you, too. For your sake, as well as mine, let’s take a little rest from one another. While I’m gone, you’ll have more time for your job, and—new friends. You can find a place of your own. I’ll lend you some money if you need it, don’t worry about that. But you’ve got to start thinking ahead. This being on your own, it’ll give you a different perspective, revitalize you, believe me. You’ll thank me one day, you can bet. Okay, that’s it. All right?”

  She had not interrupted, had not spoken once. And she did not speak when he was done. His question hung there between them, the trap for an answer that would lead to a fight and a clean angry honest break. But she did not answer. No fight. No scene. Yet, she was hurt. No hiding that either. She showed her hurt in her moist eyes, quivering lips, pale disbelief. She started past him toward the bedroom, but he followed her with his unanswered question. “All right?” She paused, stared at him. “If you say so,” she said, and she went into the bedroom. And that was that.

  She had moved out of the apartment, leaving it neat and clean, by the time he returned from his office the following afternoon. The day after that he joined the White House press corps on the jet plane for Paris, feeling liberated and carefree and with only the slightest residue of shame and guilt (which drinks, poker, French food, and the assignment would soon wash away, he was certain). He found his seat on the plane, cast about for familiar faces, and suddenly, his heart seemed to stop and he gasped audibly. Across the aisle, one row back, calml
y reading a magazine, was Hazel Smith.

  His shock turned to fury. She was shadowing him like a bad conscience. She was badgering him. She was—she was—this was an invasion of privacy. He fell upon her. What in the hell was she doing here? She was wide-eyed and ingenuous. What was he doing here? She was here for the very same reason that he was here. She was on an assignment to cover the Kennedys abroad. ANA needed someone to handle the woman’s angle, and their regular female correspondent was down with a virus infection, and so they’d given her this wonderful opportunity, her first foreign assignment. What was he so upset about? She had no intention of haunting him. There was bigger game for her now, a chance to prove herself. Hadn’t he told her that she would have the time to devote to her career? Well, that’s what she was doing, just what he thought she should be doing. She had expected he would be pleased for her, congratulate her, wish her well. They were friends still, weren’t they?

  With mounting irritation, he conceded that they were friends still, of course, and what she did was her own damn business, and, yes, good luck. But he just wanted to remind her that he would be busy, very busy, in Paris, Vienna, and London.

  The smile never left her face. Oh, she of all people knew how important he was, the demands made on him. She could promise him she’d be occupied enough on her own and would not get in his hair. She arched her eyebrows at him, and said almost mockingly, “All right?”

  He remembered. “Yeah,” he said, “as long as you say so.” Exactly what troubled him, when he returned to his seat, he could not define. It was only after their takeoff that he knew. Three days ago, he had broken off with a girl. And now, by what magic he could not understand, he had just encountered a woman. It was reason enough to distrust her, and fear her, even more.

  During the three days in Paris, Doyle saw Hazel Smith only twice, once at a press briefing in the theater inside Annex C of the United States Embassy in the Faubourg St.-Honoré, and again at the Quai d’Orsay where she was awaiting Mrs. Kennedy’s descent from the royal suite. He was grimly pleased that she was not tagging after him, bothering him, playing on his pity. Yet, unaccountably, he was annoyed by her self-sufficiency. It pleased him to work so hard in Paris—he got off several excellent columns comparing Kennedy and de Gaulle—and it pleased him to find elegant Frenchwomen so impressed by his reputation and so accessible.