The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  Her lips were quivering. “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Never mind. So he realizes he’s got this simple little girl reporter, who doesn’t know a damn thing about politics or Russian methods, and he knows she’ll believe anything, and she’s from this great big American news service in great big dumb America. So he puts on the lonely and sincere act, the nice and cozy act, so that she trusts him. Then, pretending to be a little loaded, he lets slip this fat and fancy top secret. And then he sits back and waits for her to run wildly off and write it hysterically and send it out, flash, stop presses, and the minute the sensational mythical story is out, he has the Soviet press secretary challenge us for proof, and charge us, once again, with warmongering, troublemaking, and hit out at the irresponsibility of the capitalistic, imperialistic press.”

  “Oh, Jay, no—”

  “Let me finish. Little Hazel has her big beat. And since she believes it, she can get a lot of credit, a lot of success mileage out of it, but she figures there is something better she can get. She can bring it to Jay Doyle and give it to him, to prove she’s the best girl in the world for him, because look what she’s done for him—greater love hath no woman—and with this she’s shown she still loves him and he should be indebted to her. Or maybe little Hazel has something else in mind. Maybe she knows the silly story is a lie, maybe she even invented it, but she brings it to good old Jay, knowing he can’t use it without the source, but thus proving to him she is still true-blue and he’d better not forget it. Or—no, hold it, sweetie, you just hear me out—maybe little Hazel is more devious than I think, and she tells herself she’s going to invent this story, and invent a source, and bring it to good old Jay, get him to jump, get him to go whooping out on a limb in print, and then the limb’ll be cut and good old Jay, the bastard who let little Hazel down, will have a great big fall, and Hazel will have her revenge. I don’t know which or what, but whatever your motive, love or revenge, your whole childish ruse is so transparent as to be laughable. Now, that’s what I think.”

  Her face was immobile and ashen, and only her lips moved. “Is that what you think?”

  “Yes, because if it were true and such a hot story, why didn’t you file it with ANA under your by-line and become a great big heroine?”

  “Because I’m ‘little Hazel,’” she said quietly. “Because I’m nobody, and even ANA would be nervous about a big one like this coming from me my first time out. I came here to—to give it to you because it’s true and your name would assure its credence and veracity—and, knowing the CIA wouldn’t treat me seriously right now, I wanted to have it exposed in public—to save our President. And, all right, I came to you because you were the only one I knew and because when I walked through that door, I thought I still loved you—”

  Doyle threw back his head with a laugh of triumph. “At last,” he said, grinning. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? So that’s what your little fairy tale comes to, a cute piece of fiction to bring us back together? That’s it, isn’t it, sweetie? Well, listen to me, honey—no, thanks, I’m not buying, not that way. Now I’ve had just about enough, so why don’t we call it quits, and thanks for the memory, and you take off and go back to your Russian Hans Christian Andersen—and just let me change for the opera, because I’ve got somebody coming by any minute—an authentic Esterhazy countess, if you want to know—and it could be embarrassing. Okay, baby? I think we understand each other now.”

  She stood, very straight, rigid, staring steadily at him, and finally, she spoke. “I’m just looking at you this way because it’s like seeing you clearly for the first time. You know what I’m seeing? I’m seeing what you really are. You’re an ignorant, conceited, stupid fathead. And worse, you’re a goddam son of a bitch. I never want to see you again in my life—never again, never!”

  With that, she spun away, ran to the door, and slammed out of his suite—and he never saw her again, not once in all the years from that day in Vienna to the present.

  And now, sitting here in Vienna once more, so long after, in a single room and not a suite, looking back on what had happened and what had been, he conceded that Hazel had been right all down the line. He had been an ignorant, conceited fathead. He had been a goddam son of a bitch. Worst of all, he had been monumentally stupid.

  On the late night of November 22, 1963, while he was turning off bis television set, the full impact of Hazel’s rightness and his wrongness had hit him. But not until nine months later, after the appearance of the Warren Commission Report, had his obsession to right the wrong been born.

  With a wrench and a wheeze, rattling the almost empty can of cashews and pouring the last few nuts into his hand, he escaped unhappy memory and returned to the more hopeful reality of the present moment.

  Chewing the cashews, he stared down at the glorious manuscript open on his capacious lap. These beautiful pages would serve to rectify his past asininity, his blindness in not appreciating Hazel’s old love, his blindness in not accepting her gift of love that might have prevented the assassination of Kennedy, his blindness in laughing away what would have been the greatest story of his career. But he had labored hard to make up for his blunder. There was hope now. As long as his manuscript was alive, there was hope. And a triumph tonight would halt his steadily sliding decline from eminence into anonymity.

  Mindful of the approaching meeting with Sydney Ormsby, he quickly lifted the manuscript from his lap and hastily resumed reading the outline of the remaining chapters. It was all there, he could see, and it was powerful and sound. Many men, in many lands, after the appearance of the Warren Report, had attempted to discredit it and had been branded crackpots for their dissent. This, he perceived, was because governments and the public preferred the peace of crimes solved and cases closed, which made them feel safer, easier, and permitted them to go on with the immediate business of life. And where the disturbers of peace had failed was in their ability to produce any incontrovertible proof beyond circumstantial evidence and theory. But the manuscript in Doyle’s hands, once completed, could not be turned aside. It would not be theory constructed on flimsy conjecture but solid proof, a concrete edifice based on newly discovered fact—and it would offer governments and the public an alternate solution, which they could accept and substitute for the Warren Commission’s erroneous one.

  To clear away the underbrush of myth, so that truth might be seen plainly by everyone, Doyle had summarized the findings of the Warren Commission, and then gone on to show the weaknesses in the Commission’s report, the unlikeliness of Lee Harvey Oswald as lone assassin, and the available evidence that dramatically built to a totally different version of the murder and conclusively pointed to a conspiracy.

  Now, Doyle began to reread his concise and fair summary of the Warren Commission Report, the straw man he would quickly topple. The Commission had said that President Kennedy had been killed, and Governor Connally wounded, by three shots fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, Model 91/38, caliber 6.5 mm., bearing the identifying number C2766 and the legend MADE ITALY, and equipped with a cheap telescopic sight. All three shots had been fired from the sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository. There were the empty cartridge cases on the sixth floor to prove the shots had been three, there were witnesses who had seen a rifle in the sixth-floor window, there were physicians and experts to verify that the shots had been fired from behind the President.

  The Commission had then decided that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin. He had been on the sixth floor at the time of the killing. He had owned a Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 rifle, later found hidden between cartons on the sixth floor. He had carried a paper bag, large enough to hold a rifle, into the Depository the morning of the assassination. “Based on testimony of the experts….the Commission has concluded that a rifleman of Lee Harvey Oswald’s capabilities could have fired the shots from the rifle used in the assassination within the elapsed time of the shooting.” Seven months earlie
r Oswald had tried to shoot down Major General Walker, “thereby demonstrating his disposition to take human life.” Shortly after the assassination, Oswald, confronted by police officer Tippit, had killed the policeman with a revolver, and then resisted arrest. Once captured, Oswald had not been subjected to physical coercion by police. He had been offered legal assistance and had rejected it at the time.

  A little more than two days after Oswald’s arrest, while being transferred to the county jail, Oswald had been murdered by Jack Ruby. There was no evidence to back up the rumor that Ruby had been assisted by the Dallas Police Department in eliminating Oswald. There was no evidence that Oswald and Ruby had known one another. Despite the fact that Oswald had ended his two-and-a-half-year stay in the Soviet Union in 1962 and brought home to Texas a Russian bride, Marina, despite his visits to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in 1963, despite his affiliations with left-wing political groups, there had been no factual evidence that Oswald was employed, persuaded, or encouraged by a foreign government to assassinate President Kennedy.

  Doyle studied his quotation from the Warren Commission Report on the possibility of an American conspiracy. “In its entire investigation the Commission has found no evidence of conspiracy, subversion, or disloyalty to the U.S. Government by any Federal, State, or local official.”

  Since the Commission had concluded that Oswald had committed the crime on his own, it tried to explain his motivation for the assassination. Oswald had been unstable. He was hostile to all authority. He was unable to enter into meaningful relationships with people. He was committed to his own versions of Marxism and Communism, and he was antagonistic toward the United States. Having consistently failed in his many undertakings, he was determined to find a place in history. Ergo: He had achieved his first success, no matter how infamous, by killing a President of the United States.

  Wetting his dry lips, Doyle hastily skimmed through his ringing challenge to the Warren Commission and its acceptance of Oswald’s guilt. Hastily turning his manuscript pages, as he reread his case, Doyle’s satisfaction with his part-time labor of years grew.

  Despite the Warren Commission’s desperate dredging for a motive for Oswald’s alleged crime, Doyle made it clear that Oswald had no known motive at all for killing Kennedy. Oswald had told a public gathering he was not a Communist. He had told the American Civil Liberties Union he resented the anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic remarks made at an ultra-rightist meeting headed by General Walker. And just before the assassination he had stated that the United States was more progressive than Russia in the area of civil rights, and he had warmly praised President Kennedy for his championing of civil rights.

  Then Doyle went on to stress that Oswald could not have planned to assassinate Kennedy from the Depository window, because when Oswald obtained the job in the Depository, the President’s route had not been announced, and the motorcade’s final route past the Depository was a detour Oswald could hardly have known about. As to carrying a rifle into the Depository, a witness, Mrs. Linnie Mae Randle, had said that Oswald’s bag was less than two feet long, whereas the rifle measured over three feet. Shortly after, police officer Weitzman—who sold rifles in his spare time—found the assassin’s rifle on the sixth floor, he had sworn that it was a 7.65 Mauser, and described it in detail, and District Attorney Wade also announced that the assassin’s weapon was a German Mauser. Yet, at the moment the Dallas police learned that Oswald owned an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 rifle, they switched their story and suddenly a clearly marked German Mauser became a clearly marked Italian carbine. And, as Doyle wrote, there were no legible fingerprints or palm prints belonging to Oswald on his Italian rifle, and no powder burns on his face.

  The question of Oswald’s marksmanship, Doyle had known from the start, was a crucial one, and he made the most of it in his manuscript. The Commission had concluded that Oswald was using a twenty-three-year-old inferior Italian weapon with a cheap scope, which he had purchased secondhand for a little less than twenty dollars (and with which he had never practiced, according to his landlady). Yet, he had been enough of a crack shot to fire three bullets in five seconds at a moving target from about 100 yards’ distance, and of the six persons in the target vehicle, he had hit only the two persons of interest to an assassin. However, an Olympic rifle champion using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle could not duplicate Oswald’s alleged feat, finding a bolt-action too slow. And to add to that, there was evidence that Oswald was anything but an outstanding marksman, that he had in fact been a poor marksman. After three years in the Marines, where the minimum acceptable score was 190, he had been able to score only 212, whereas 95 per cent of the trainees did better early in their first year.

  Much of the case for Oswald’s guilt was built on the presumption that three shots, and only three, had been fired into the Presidential limousine, and all from one direction—from behind the President. Yet, Governor Connally had insisted that he had not been hit by a bullet that had first passed through the President, although he must have been wounded by one of the bullets that hit Kennedy, if there was only one assassin. Furthermore, Dr. Perry of Parkland Hospital had stated that the bullet in question had been of “low velocity,” thereby supporting Governor Connally’s contention that it could not have had the power to penetrate his body also.

  The truth was that originally most persons at the scene of the assassination, Governor Connally among them, thought there had been as many as a half-dozen shots fired. But the police, perhaps because they realized the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle’s limitations, had firmly settled for three shots, insisting that they had come from the Depository. Still, numerous creditable witnesses persisted in the belief that they had heard from four to six shots, and some of these witnesses, including a Secret Service agent, said that there were enough shots so that some were bunched together.

  Doyle had pointed out that this was of great significance. For, if there were four to six shots, and some were bunched together, the volley could not have been fired by one man using a relatively slow bolt-action rifle. Such a series of rapid-fire shots would have required at least two assassins. Based on this evidence, Doyle had concluded that there was a total of five shots, fired by two assassins working in tandem. One was shooting from the Depository behind Kennedy, the other shooting from the grassy knoll or from the wooden fence above the knoll or from the concrete wall along the railroad bridge atop the Triple Underpass, all of which were situated in front of Kennedy. Two bullets smashed into Kennedy, two hit Connally, and a fifth missed and was found by a police officer in the grass nearby.

  Yes, Doyle charged in his manuscript, there had been two assassins, although the Warren Commission had curiously ignored most of this impressive evidence. According to the original statement of three of the physicians at the Parkland Hospital, the President’s throat wound was an entry wound. This meant that someone in front of Kennedy, aiming toward the approaching limousine, had fired straight at him from the grassy knoll or the overpass. Only Kennedy’s fatal skull wound had come from behind him, from the Depository building. There were a great number of on-the-spot witnesses to attest to a second assassin firing head-on at the President. There was Mary Woodward, who heard the actual rifle shots from the grassy knoll; there was S. M. Holland, who heard four shots and then saw puffs of smoke from the knoll; there was Lee E. Bowers, Jr., and also a Washington, D.C., reporter, who saw a motorcycle policeman plunge purposefully toward the knoll and quickly scramble up the embankment, until diverted by the other shots from the Depository behind; there was the eyewitness who observed someone running down the knoll to the Triple Underpass beneath; there was Mrs. Jean Hill, who saw a man in a hat and long brown overcoat racing for the train tracks; there was the railroad yardman who told police that he believed the shots had come from near the wooden fence atop the incline, and who saw somebody throw something into the bushes; there was James Tague, a spectator to the motorcade, who was wounded in the cheek by the fragment of a bullet that had
been fired from the knoll north of Elm Street and which had ricocheted off the street pavement. There were all of these to support the theory of an accomplice for the assassin in the Depository.

  Jay Doyle, absorbed in contemplating his manuscript, nodded in contented agreement with himself. His case, demolishing the overeager, superficial prejudgment of the Warren Commission, slowly, inexorably, cleared the way for public acceptance of his evidence of an international conspiracy. Smiling with grim satisfaction, Doyle felt the consolidation of his confidence in the power of his argument, one that would overwhelm Sydney Ormsby. Then, scanning the remainder of his outline, Doyle realized that if Ormsby was not convinced by what had already been written, he would be convinced by the summing up, the relentless, accusing question marks that peppered the closing chapters. These questions, Doyle was positive, would make Ormsby see that the assassination had been, until now, a modern historical mystery unsolved, and that Doyle was deserving of an enormous cash advance, which would enable him to proceed to the final solution, to which Hazel Smith in Moscow held the key.

  With nervous pleasure, his chubby fingers drumming on the empty cashew tin, Jay Doyle reviewed his telling questions about the assassination. Why did Lee Harvey Oswald get his visa to enter the Soviet Union so quickly—why, when most applicants had to wait a week or two, did Oswald receive his visa in a single day? Why was Oswald given special privileges inside Russia? Why was he able to take a Russian wife out of the Soviet Union and to the United States (ordinarily very difficult) with such ease? Why did Oswald receive money, from a source not known, while he was unemployed in the United States? Why was Oswald said to have tried out an automobile on a Dallas car lot when he did not know how to drive? Why did a gunsmith in Irving, Texas, claim that for a customer who called himself Oswald he had mounted a telescopic lens on a rifle, using three screws to mount the scope, when the scope on Oswald’s actual rifle had been mounted with only two screws? Why was Oswald, so well known to the FBI, not watched the day before and the day of the assassination? Why did Oswald, who the police and FBI insisted was a crack marksman well able to murder a victim who was 100 yards away and a moving target, fail to shoot down General Walker, who was a stationary target only a few yards away from him? Why were the Dallas police not interested in the empty cigarette package found in the sixth-floor stock room of the Depository, especially since the accused Oswald did not smoke? Why did Oswald’s wife, Marina, confirm that her husband’s rifle was missing, and then later, claim that she had never known he owned a rifle? Why did Oswald, immediately following the assassination, bother to go home and pick up a jacket, if he was really guilty and eager to escape the police? Why, when Oswald reached his boardinghouse after the assassination, did a police car pull up before his house and honk for him, but then drive off without him? Why did Oswald seem to be heading for Jack Ruby’s apartment after the killing? Why were authorities so certain that Oswald and Ruby had never met when they lived within two blocks of one another and had post-office boxes almost next to each other? Why did police officer Tippit, before leaving his squad car to confront Oswald, chat with him so casually and easily?