The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  Relaxed, more hopeful about her quest, Medora kicked off her beach shoes, brought her bare legs up off the floor and hugged her knees, snugly watching him.

  Apparently, the sound of her shoes plopping to the floor had distracted him. Pausing with his wet brush in midair, he slowly turned in the direction of the sound, and then he saw her and the wide mouth curled into a great grin of pleasure.

  “Maydor!” he boomed, instantly setting his brush down, wiping his hands on his jeans, and springing to his feet. “Maydor, poupoule! Why did that Nordic bitch not say it was you?”

  Nardeau rushed to her before she could untangle and rise, and his powerful arms encircled her, lifting her into the air, swinging her around. Then, kissing her cheeks, he lowered her back onto the sofa.

  “Poupoule,” he rasped with genuine delight, “I have missed you, always meaning to telephone, but always busy.” He sank down into the sofa, pointing his finger at the easel. “Damn tyrant, that one. I do not know why I fuss so over that Retrospective Exhibit. What do I care? I am Nardeau, no more, no less, and another show is meaningless.”

  “But it’s your anniversary show, Nardeau. That is important.”

  “Not important, but the commercial celebrants force one to look backward, explore the past. You know that canvas up there. I’ve retouched it a dozen times in the year. It is the exterior of the bateau lavoir at 13 Rue Ravignan up in Montmartre. It is like a piece of my younger heart torn out and put on canvas. You are too young to know of it. Even the street address is now changed to Place Emile-Goudeau. But long ago, all the rising artists, Picasso for one, and the poets, and street peddlers, bums, laundresses lived in that crazy room. I came to it later, and was a boy and stimulated, and somehow I try to find those months once more in oil, for my exhibit… Enough. You are still at that club in Juan showing your pretty breasts, making old men young for an hour?”

  “I finished my engagement last night. I have four weeks off.”

  He was studying her narrowly, and she felt uneasy under his penetrating gaze. Impulsively, he reached for her hand and took it. “Maydor,” he said gruffly, “quelle mouche t’a piqué?” Whenever he spoke intimately to a dear one, Medora knew, he lapsed into the argot of street French.

  “Actually, nothing’s eating me, Nardeau, except the usual.”

  “You keep trying? You have no luck?”

  She suddenly squeezed his hand hard and sat up straight. “No luck, no hope, nothing—until today,” she said intently. “Today, everything is possible—it depends—it depends on—on how much you can help me.”

  “Maydor, poupoule, for you I will do anything, you know that is true.”

  “Oh, I pray you can help. Let me show you.” She brought her handbag to her lap, tugged free the Sunday supplement still folded to the layout of Fleur Ormsby in her youth, and—opened it, flattened it, and handed it to the mystified artist. She pointed to the picture in the supplement. “That’s Sir Austin Ormsby’s recent bride shown as she looked when she was much younger. Read what it says. It says she was traveling around France and she met you. Look at her face again, Nardeau. Does it mean anything? Do you recognize her?”

  He blinked at the photograph, held the supplement up high, then sideways, then directly before him again. Slowly, he shook his head. “I am afraid not, Maydor.”

  “Think hard, please. She’s twenty-nine years old now. She was nineteen then. That’s only ten years ago.”

  “No, the face is not familiar.” He lifted his shoulders in apology. “Ten years, Maydor. There have been many women.” Medora’s disappointment was so complete that Nardeau, forehead wrinkled, immediately inquired, “Why is it of importance that I recognize this one?”

  “I’ll tell you, and maybe I’m just crazy mad and bothering you, but you know how I snatch at anything. I’ve never had a chance against Sir Austin Ormsby. He’s been too big, and today he’s even bigger, in the Cabinet, and arriving in Paris tomorrow with the British Prime Minister for the Summit conference.”

  “Yes, I was reading of it in Le Figaro at breakfast. I saw his name and thought of you.”

  “Sir Austin was always a bachelor, but less than a year ago, he married this society girl. A real lady, it says here, all the graces, manners, wealthy background, a perfect Cabinet Minister’s wife. Well, what chance has a nobody like me got against them, those spotless people, those perfect ones? But I’ve never forgotten Sir Austin’s big weakness. That’s his worry about the family name. Not just his name, but the family name. Look how he hustled me out of England before the trial, to protect his idiot brother, only because his brother has his name. Look how he’s kept me in exile, still to protect the family name. All right. Now he’s got himself a wife, someone even closer than his brother, and his family name has become her name. Now, what if her name, what she is or was, proved not to be as spotless as he thought? What if there were a bad thing in her past that would cast doubts on her lily-white reputation and reflect on him, embarrass him? And what if I found it out? For the first time, I’d have a weapon, and he would be vulnerable to it, wouldn’t he? I could force him to deal with me, withdraw that immigration ruling against me, force him to let me go home again—in return for preserving his perfect wife’s perfect reputation.”

  “Maydor, this is clear. But you speak in circles. Be direct. Where am I in your plot?”

  “Three years ago, when I was modeling for you—one afternoon, when we finished early—I wanted to see the other nudes you had painted, the ones of young women. Remember?”

  “I think so—voilà, exact, I remember! I brought them out, and we had wine, and made up amusing titles for each oil.”

  “Yes, Nardeau, that was the time,” she said excitedly. “Now listen,” she went on feverishly, “because apparently, the faces of some of those nude models remained stuck in my mind. A couple of hours ago, I remembered one. A full-length nude of a young English girl who’d posed for you—on some kind of furry rug on the floor, if I remember—on her back—all of her stark naked—with a sort of bower of flowers around her. I asked you—I think I did at the time—who she was, because she was quite something, and the pose was rather daring, and you said she was a wild English kid who came around pestering you—worshiped you—a strange, reckless girl from some rich family—and to get rid of her you’d slept with her, so she could put that in her diary maybe, and you painted several pictures of her—two or three heads, I think you said, and this nude as a present, only she was afraid to take it home, the nude, so she left it.” Medora caught her breath. “Well, when I saw that picture layout of Fleur Ormsby in the supplement today, and read that as a young girl she’d called on you, click—crikey, it went click—something clicked, Nardeau. Then I knew, I felt sure of it. The face in the supplement, Fleur Ormsby’s face, was the face of that nude you’d once showed me, the nude of the wild English girl you’d slept with. One and the same, I could swear. So I dashed right up here to be sure I was right.” She halted, searching Nardeau’s thoughtful face, then begging, “Oh, darling, you do remember, don’t you? Try to remember, please try!”

  He had closed his eyes and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, lost in thought.

  Suddenly, his eyes opened, and he was smiling. “I remember, Maydor.” He nodded. “I remember the nude you speak of, and how I characterized the model, yes. But, in honesty, I do not remember if the nude is the same as your Fleur Ormsby in the supplement.”

  Medora grabbed his bare arm. “Let’s find out. Do you still have that nude, Nardeau?”

  He laughed. “If I had it three years ago, I have it still.” He stood up. “You know how I hoard my girls. Come, poupoule, let us see, once and for all.”

  Anxiously, she trailed after him, as he crossed the studio, went through the kitchenette, the office, through the first small storage room into the larger rear room. He had turned on the yellow overhead light, making visible open wooden compartments on each of the four walls.

  “My wife has them classified by perio
ds,” he muttered, “so I can never find what I want. Ten years ago, you say?” Crouching, he began pulling out unframed canvases, glancing at them, returning them to their places. Crablike, he moved to the next compartment, again withdrawing and returning paintings. At the third compartment he dragged out two canvases, pushed them back, sorted through several more, then suddenly yanked forth an oil, perhaps two feet high, four feet long, and exclaimed, “Voilà!”

  Medora held her breath, as he brought it to her, angling it toward the yellow bulb overhead and blowing at the thin film of dust.

  Medora stared at the reclining nude, so like Manet’s Olympia except that the inbred haughty English face was younger and bolder, the breasts smaller, the hips narrower, the legs longer, the whole of it more shameless and wanton than Olympia .

  “That’s it,” Medora gasped. She placed the Sunday supplement up alongside it. “Look, Nardeau—”

  He cocked his head to see what she saw, and at last his sparkling eyes met her own. “The same girl,” he said.

  Medora’s eyes were directed to the canvas again. She was smiling wickedly. “The lady is a tramp—like any of us,” she said softly. “Or perhaps I should say—Her Ladyship was a tramp.”

  Nardeau studied the figure on the canvas with admiration. “I remember it all now. Not tramp, Maydor, but—what is your word—trollop, yes? It was her best position, the only time she was not affected or tiresome, and from my experience of women, this one was, in those days, rarely affected or tiresome.”

  “Oh, Nardeau, I can’t tell you—”

  “Wait. We must be certain.” Returning the Sunday supplement to Medora, carrying the canvas, he hastened on stumpy legs out of the storage room, through the next, to his messy acajou Directoire writing table in the office. There he turned the canvas around, examined the back of it, and found what he wanted. “I date everything,” he said, and propping the canvas against the table, he reached up to the shelf overhead and ran his forefinger across the spines of a series of worn logbooks that were kept clamped together by bookends on the unpainted wooden shelf. He jerked one free, brought it down, and moved to the chair at his desk before leafing through it.

  “What is that?” Medora wanted to know.

  “My record of paintings—each with the date of completion, a description of the subject or model… attends, Maydor.” His finger traveled down the page, stopped, and he looked up. “It is here. See. ‘Mlle. Fleur Grearson—London, England—Sorbonne—oil titled Nude in the Garden.’” He appeared puzzled. “Fleur, yes. But Grearson?”

  “Her maiden name!” Medora exclaimed. “She was a Grearson, it’s in all the papers, and after she married Sir Austin, she became an Ormsby.”

  “Bien, you are right, and now all is verified. It is what you wanted.” His brow contracted once more. “But what is it you really hope for from this?”

  “Nardeau, I was trying to explain before—can’t you see?—it’s my weapon, the one chance to use something to force Sir Austin to lift the ban against me and let me go home to Mum.”

  “Yes, I see. How do you propose to do this?”

  She was standing over him, trembling with the urgency of her need and opportunity. “Please, Nardeau, you mus—end this nude of Fleur to me, for only a week, no more. Just let me use it. I’d thought of asking you for a photograph of it, but that wouldn’t be real, not half as effective. The actual oil is what’s needed. I’ll go to Paris with it, and I’ll somehow arrange for Sir Austin to learn that I have it so hell come to see me—and the painting. Once he sees it, sees this, he’ll give me anything on earth I want.”

  “Maydor, what if he denies that this is his wife?”

  “How can he? It is his wife, and if I threaten him that I’ll have it reproduced in the papers, everyone’ll know it is his wife. Besides, there’s your logbook—”

  Nardeau was on his feet. “No, that I cannot do, my pet. You know I am unafraid of the Ormsbys or anyone alive. But I could never reveal a model, identify her, under such circumstances. It would not be ethical.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean that—all I need is the painting, really. Sir Austin’ll know. He’ll be so scared of a scandal in the same newspapers that ruined me that he’ll give in right away. I’m absolutely certain of it. I’ll show it to him, and once I have my entry permit from him, I’ll guarantee him it’ll never be shown in public again, and I’ll return it to you.”

  Nardeau smiled. “He’ll want the painting, Maydor.”

  She was suddenly dismayed. “You think so?”

  “When you barter, you must give in order to get. When he hands you your entry permit, you will have to hand him the nude, so that he can destroy it forever.”

  “Oh, damn, I never thought of that. Maybe it’ll have to be a photograph, after all, except if I handed him a photograph to destroy, he’d know it wasn’t enough, because copies might exist… Nardeau, it’s simply got to be the original oil! Let me buy it from you. Any price. I’ll pay you out of my salary, every week I’ll pay you on it, I promise.”

  He was frowning, and he seemed angry. “You think so little of me, young lady? You value our friendship so cheaply that you think you can buy my part of it? I am disappointed.”

  Her face had fallen, and tears were welling. “I’m sorry, I really am. I meant no—” She stopped abruptly, bewildered, as she saw that his leathery countenance had crinkled into a broad smile.

  He laughed, shaking his head. “Foolish, foolish baby, you do not know yet when Nardeau teases you. Of course, you can have the stupid oil. But not to buy. It is yours as a gift, all yours, not a gift of friendship but a gift of a weapon to fight the evil ones. Understand? Now take it and go.”

  With a sob of relief, Medora fell upon him, embracing him, kissing his forehead and cheeks and lips. “I can’t tell you what you’ve done for me—”

  Grunting, he freed himself of her. “I can tell you what you’re doing to me.” He eyed her with mock lust. “I should have taken you to bed when I had the chance.”

  “Anytime, you sweet dear lecher,” she sang out, picking up the painting. “But it’ll have to be in London, because that’s where I intend to be.”

  He walked with her into the studio, where she recovered her shoes, and then he said, “But first, Paris. When do you go?”

  “Tonight. I’ve got to phone a nightclub there that wants me to appear. I’ll do their show while waiting for Sir Austin to come crawling. And he’ll come crawling, believe me.” She lifted the painting up high. “This is one chippy that’ll open his eyes.”

  At the door she felt Nardeau’s grip on her arm. She was surprised at the concern in his features.

  “Maydor,” he said slowly, “I am a man of the world, and of many years, so heed my warning. You must be careful, very careful. Your little white blackmail the Lord will shut one eye to, but I will not shut my eyes without reminding you that it is a dangerous game you will play. You are baiting and taunting supreme omnipotent people, and omnipotent people do not live by the same laws the world has. They are not used to losing, to surrendering to one little girl who is alone. You will think of this?”

  She laughed gayly and kissed his grizzled cheek. “I am not one little girl alone,” she said, patting the top of the canvas oil. “I have an ally now, an ally more deadly than the whole Ormsby family put together. How many big powers were to be at the Summit? Five?” She opened the door. “Now there will be six!”

  THEY HAD SLEPT LATE this Saturday morning, and now he lay alone, fully awake at last, listening to the sounds of Venice.

  The sounds, muffled by the rusty metal shutters latched over double windows to keep his bedroom darkened and cool, were blended into one harmonious echo, yet from his experience of three years of listening, he was able to distinguish and sort out each individual chord.

  Hands behind his head on the pillow, Matthew Brennan listened. There was the constant tread of women’s low-heeled pumps and men’s heavier walking shoes, tapping and shuffling across the
worn stone arch, from which one could see the Bridge of Sighs through the shadows of the narrow canal. There was the coughing of the powerful engine of the CIGA motoscafo as it waited in the water at the side entrance of the Danieli Royal Excelsior Hotel, the launch about to ferry two dozen hotel guests to the sibling Excelsior Palace Hotel on the Lido island beach twelve minutes away across the open stretch of water. There were the business shouts of the eccentric and proud gondoliers grouped before their graceful, high-prowed gondolas in front of the ducal palace on the Ponte della Paglia. There was the bumping of an incoming vaporetto, as the water taxi’s wooden beams hit the floating platform of the crowded San Zaccaria station. There was the steady lapping of the water in the lagoon of the Grand Canal, artificial waves born of the milling and churning of gondolas, motorboats, passenger ferries (or natural waves produced by a long-desired breeze), against the stone pavement of the Riva degli Schiavoni, the thoroughfare that separated the ground-floor entrance and lobby of the Danieli Hotel from the lagoon beyond.

  In short, there was Venice alive beneath his late-morning bedroom.

  Matt Brennan’s attention had isolated one sound, held to it. The slapping and sloshing of water. Gradually, the one sound became two, and involuntarily, idiotically (since he was, for the time, alone), he found himself smiling. For the second sound, more lovely even than the first, came from beyond the opposite side of his bed, from his bathroom where Lisa (incredibly once, correctly and formally, Elizabeth) had gone ten or fifteen minutes earlier to take her hand shower in the bathtub.