The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  “Yeah?”

  “I watched you and the commissaire. What was he showing you in the handkerchief?”

  “Handkerchief? Oh, yes. Nothing much. He’d just picked up a couple of the victim’s personal effects. A pair of sunglasses he’d been wearing.”

  “I saw that.”

  “And the poor guy’s pipe. That was in the handkerchief, too… I’m driving back to town. Want a lift?”

  “No, thanks,” said Brennan. “I’ll hang around awhile.”

  “Can’t say’s I blame you. I love it here. Most peaceful spot on earth. Well, glad to have met you. So long.”

  “Thanks again,” said Brennan.

  Briefly, he stood alone in the clearing, and then he turned and walked through the trees to the edge of the woods. He stopped before the regular boule courts. They were still abandoned. On the lake beyond, there were swans and several boats.

  He held up his wristwatch. It was twenty minutes to six. He considered waiting. But he knew that no one would come. He knew no one would come, because he knew that someone had already been here.

  It seemed inconceivable, what was in his mind, yet he had conceived it and he had begun to believe it. His brief glimpse of the victim’s face was vivid in his memory. There had been the strange familiarity about the face. He understood the familiarity. It had been a face not quite like his own, not one that might be mistaken for his own by anyone who knew him, but it had been a face that, in its gauntness and thinness, was generally similar to his own. It had been a face that vaguely resembled the way he, Brennan, had looked some years ago. And it occurred to him now that if someone had been shown a photograph of him, it would have been a photograph taken no more recently than four years ago, during the Congressional hearings, when he had appeared younger, more like that poor Englishman. For no recent photograph of him existed. He had not permitted his picture to be taken again in four years.

  He had seen the bloodstains on the victim’s gray jacket. It had been a sport jacket. He had seen the smashed sunglasses. He had been told of the victim’s pipe. And more—more—the Englishman, here watching a boule game, had been approached by someone carrying boule balls, someone inviting him to join a new game. That had been five o’clock. Or shortly after. And he—no, not himself, but the Englishman mistaken for him—had gone into the woods, and been found dead minutes later, an accident.

  All at once Brennan was unsure of himself. His recent flights of fancy, his recent tendency to overdramatize everything, had been doubted and ridiculed by Earnshaw and Hazel Smith. Perhaps the French police were right. An accident. Perhaps—that he was conjuring up now was explained by coincidence. There were countless foreigners like him who came to the Bois, who wore sport jackets, slacks, invariably used sunglasses and often smoked pipes, and who watched boule games and were invited to participate in them. Perhaps Simmons had been one of these, and had been killed by a freak accident. And as for himself, no one had come for him because he had not kept his appointment on time. He had been dreadfully late. Perhaps he was wrong and unduly alarmed.

  But he doubted it.

  He could not endure the Bois a moment longer. Hastily, he retraced his steps to find a taxi.

  Later, riding back to his hotel, Brennan realized that he was shivering in the mild air. It was, he supposed, the after reaction to the potential of danger. A passage from a popular book he had read and reread in prep school entered his head: “He was not, as he knew well from experience, one of those persons who love danger for its own sake. There was an aspect of it which he sometimes enjoyed, an excitement, a purgative effect upon sluggish emotions, but he was far from fond of risking his life… and since the war, whenever there had been danger again, he had faced it with an increasing lack of relish unless it promised extravagant dividends in thrills.” That had been Glory Conway, a fictional hero of his youth, the hero of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. That had also been Brennan as a man.

  He was, essentially, an intellectual, an observer, a bystander of life. He had taken risks, especially when he had attended international conferences in distant places for the Department of State, and he had taken blows and fallen into traps and been afraid of his daring, but those had been the risks and dangers of a purely cerebral combat. Physical danger had always been foreign to him. Not since prep school—when he had got into an argument with a rival shot-putter during a track tryout, and they had lashed out at one another with bare fists, bloodying each other until the coach had come between them—had he been a party to actual physical violence. It was not fear of loss, or of hurt or impairment to his body, that had made him avoid violence, but his belief that man abdicated his role as man for that of animal if he stooped to settle differences physically rather than through the power of reason. It was because of this opposition to senseless violence that he had abhorred the sacrifice of his brother, Elia, on the battlefield. It was why he fought against wars, and why he had so long devoted himself to the cause of an effective disarmament that would guarantee peace.

  He had simply no understanding of premeditated murder.

  Yet, today, in the Bois, he had been violently struck at He had been missed, by wild chance, but he had been struck at, and there was no enemy to be seen, no enemy with whom to reason or compromise. Nor, oddly, did he wish to reason or compromise with such an enemy. Some sudden inner anger made him wish only to strike back, exact an eye for an eye. Passionately—for the real victim, Simmons, for the intended victim, himself—he wanted to strike back, to punish, to dispense justice on his own terms, and to hell with rationality.

  But there was no one to hit Who was the enemy?

  He could think of no person on earth who would risk murder to be rid of him. Nor could he think of a solitary motive for any individual or group, in Paris, in the world, to wish him liquidated by violence. Not Rostov, certainly. The voice on the telephone had merely used Rostov as the lure to bring Brennan to the ambush. Not any Russian, or any Chinese, or any American, Frenchman, Englishman, or German. There simply was no identifiable enemy. There was only the brush of death. And now, unknown danger.

  Not until Brennan entered his hotel did one aspect of the game of boule come to his mind. In boule, when you were closer to your target than was your opponent, but your opponent still had a chance, he would try to smash at your ball with his own, try to knock you aside, deflect you from the target and put you out of play, so that the target could be safely his own. And the opponent who did this was called, by the French, “l’assassin.”

  The assassin.

  And not until Brennan entered his hotel suite, hardly aware of Lisa’s humming, as she dressed for dinner in her room next door, did something else, more chilling, occur to him. Shaken by what had transpired, he had become conscious of the empty pipe clenched between his teeth. He had wanted a smoke, and so he began to cast about for his tobacco pouch, and then he realized that there was no tobacco pouch and there was no tobacco. Nor had there been either for almost four years. The last time he had smoked a pipe had been in Zurich. At the time of his return to America, for his unjust trial, he had lost patience with the pipe, with its slow mellowness, and had forsworn its use, taking up cigarettes in its place. He had always carried a pipe in his luggage, meaning to go back to it and recapture the repose of better times, but he had never used it, only used cigarettes, until four-thirty this afternoon, when a soft girl’s voice on the telephone had sent him to the Bois with the reminder and order, “You will smoke your pipe.”

  It hit him now, these moments, with the force of an assassin’s blow.

  Your pipe.

  The voice on the telephone had believed that he still smoked a pipe, as he had until after Zurich. Someone was totally unaware that he had given it up soon after Zurich, four years ago.

  Who would have known of the pipe in Zurich and in the years before, and who among those who had known him then was in Paris this very day?

  He read off to himself the roster of possibilities. Earnshaw. Doyle. Neely.
They might have known, could have known, but they had all seen him without a pipe since. They formed a roster of impossibilities.

  He read off one more name, and his mind trembled over the possibility of it. One more had known of his pipe-smoking habit in Zurich, and that one was now in Paris but had not seen him lately and could not know of his change of habit. There was one who might think that he was today as he had been four years ago. To himself, he mouthed the name.

  Nikolai Rostov.

  Logical.

  Also, illogical.

  Nothing made sense except one fact. Somewhere in this vast city there were hunters. And he, Matt Brennan, by the grace of Simmons, was still the quarry.

  Absently, he rotated the nicked old briar pipe in his hand. Perhaps the day hadn’t been lost at all. True, he had not seen Rostov. But he had seen death. Until he learned whether they were one and the same, or were a person and a specter quite apart, he would not quit Paris.

  Just one more number before the intermission,” said Jay Doyle, putting down his program. “‘Sing, You Sinners,’ featuring Medora Hart and The Troupe.” He turned his head toward Hazel Smith, who was drinking champagne beside him, and his expansive features were contracted with concern. “Wonder what’s keeping Matt Brennan and his lady friend. It’s not like him to be this late. Neely says he invited everyone for eight o’clock sharp. Now it’s—let me see—almost nine-thirty. Dinner nearly finished. The first act practically over. I wonder what’s happened.”

  “Easy,” said Hazel, finishing her champagne. “Your brilliant friend’s probably locked up with Premier Talansky and Chairman Kuo Shu-tung, warning them that he knows the truth, and they’d better stay enemies, or else.”

  “Aw, come on, Hazel, he means well. Even Neely’s worried. He just went to call Matt’s hotel. He could be sick or something.”

  “Jay, quit hogging the champagne.” She held out her glass, and eagerly Doyle refilled it. Thus reinforced, she shifted in her chair, half turning her back on Doyle’s concern. She had no patience with any petty concerns tonight, and she gave her attention to her surroundings.

  She was enjoying the Club Lautrec enormously, especially after the tensions of the last few days. Coming here had been like entering a gaudy cavern of hedonism. Surrendering your ticket at the entrance, you surrendered also your cares and intellect, and submitted yourself to the mindless pleasures of food and drink and silly talk and naked, acrobatic entertainers. Before her, jammed elbow to elbow at crowded tables, were at least a thousand convivial celebrators of life, who could be heard above the music but could not be seen through the hazy screen of smoke and dim lighting.

  She was glad Herb Neely and his wife had invited them for this festive evening. There were two other tables of Neely guests besides their own—all three tables beautifully situated below the runway of the stage—but the other two tables were occupied exclusively by American correspondents here for the Summit. Hazel guessed that Neely was performing as personal host rather than as United States Embassy press attaché. She was pleased to be at Neely’s own table. She supposed she was at this table because Doyle was Brennan’s friend, and Brennan was Neely’s friend. Anyway, friends, and as a result the atmosphere was cozy and warm rather than freeloading-professional and public-relations cold. It was a good evening because it was like playing house, playing married. It was as if she were truly Doyle’s wife and they were out on the town with his business cronies and his cronies’ wives. It was fun belonging.

  Suddenly, the cavern darkened completely. Only the blaze of floodlights on the stage and runway remained. From overhead, from every side, came the sound of the raucous orchestra playing the raucous “Sing, You Sinners.” Expectantly, Hazel turned back toward the stage, staring up over Frances Neely’s head.

  The long-legged girls of The Troupe had burst onto the stage, half from one wing, half from the other, until they were linked arm in arm in a long single line. Attired in buttoned raccoon coats, exaggeratedly short, they were a French version of the American flapper girls of the twenties. They swayed. They undulated. They did a modified Charleston and broke into high kicks, and then the line of The Troupe parted, as did the curtain behind them. Down a center staircase, resembling an American football stadium staircase, came Medora Hart, wearing a short fur coat cut in the style of those worn by the members of The Troupe, except Medora’s coat was mink, not raccoon.

  Grinding and bumping at each step, Medora descended to the stage and The Troupe closed ranks behind her. All of them came prancing forward, frenziedly shaking, like possessed participants in a religious revival meeting. They were whirling dervishes now, and as they spun round and round, the bright white illumination gave way to varicolored spotlights, catching and distorting the dancers in red, in green, in purple. Abruptly, the colored spotlights were gone, the flat white illumination returned, and there they were, Medora and The Troupe, divested of their furs, wearing straight-cut, spangled flapper dresses of America’s Roaring Twenties, but with the hemlines not merely above the knees but six inches above the knees.

  Holding a hand microphone, Medora came swinging forward as The Troupe fell into a short-kicking, V-formation behind her. Head shaking from side to side, her loose flaxen hair flying, her shoulders and hips rolling with abandon, Medora began to shout forth the lyrics of “Sing, You Sinners.”

  From her seat below, Hazel sat hypnotized by the performance. She tried to see Medora through the two thousand other eyes in the nightclub. If one thousand of the other eyes were those of males, believing only what they saw, wanting to know nothing but what could be seen, investing the hallelujahing girl, her head thrown back, her pelvis thrust forward, with their own desires and fantasies, then Hazel could imagine that to them Medora Hart was the sexiest bitch alive.

  Quickly, Hazel abandoned this second sight, and allowed her own eyes to view Medora plainly. And suddenly what she was seeing was not only Medora’s hoax but every woman’s hoax. Medora as Everywoman, only Medora more so than others, offered every man fake promises. There was the outer woman, with her wild or sleek hair, her shy or frank eye, her parted mouth and painted red lips, her teasing bosom and flashing silken leg. There was the outer woman with her artificial fragrance, her studied smile, her practiced mode of speech. There was the outer woman with her hundred movements of eyelids, mouth, hands, hips, legs. There was her façade, there were the hints to her secret, there were the reassurances of an offering of unimaginable transport and rapture, of a giving single-purposed, devoted, concentrated.

  This, thought Hazel, was the Big Lie, the Lie that hid the inner woman, the real woman, with her inhibitions, her fears, her timidity, her illnesses, her problems, her selfishness, her confusion, her recurrent hostility, her mother, her father, her flawed human-beingness.

  Let the buyer beware, thought Hazel. He bought, on the basis of the wrappings, sex and love. He opened the package, and to his amazement, sex was the smallest part of the contents, love was not quite the right size, and the rest of the contents had not been bargained for and could not be disposed of.

  Perhaps, thought Hazel, her view of her own half of the human race was prejudiced by her own years of frustration, by her disenchantments, by her cynicism. Yet, no, because her Exhibit A was up on the stage, performing vertically what women ordinarily perform horizontally, disrupting the libido of every male in the club (even Doyle, she was sure, pitiful fool), as the blue smoke rose to the ceiling ever more thickly.

  There was Medora of the stage, of the night, the perfect package, being bought without question by every male dreamer in the audience. Yet, there was the same Medora of the lonely rooms, of the empty days, the Medora that Hazel knew intimately, who had never once spoken of love, who obviously hated men and hated sex, who was obsessed with insecurity, with revenge, with Mum and Sis, with returning to the womb of home. The Big, Big Lie. Poor Medora, Hazel thought, and poor Everyman everywhere-Only truth can set you free, she thought, but you shall remain slaves to the Lie for all eternit
y. Else civilized Christian life on earth should cease to exist.

  Hazel’s attention was returned to the stage by another change of lighting. Medora’s song had finished, and now she and the girls of The Troupe were caught up and lost in the changing colors from the spotlights, revolving like so many bright bits and pieces of glass in an ornate kaleidoscope. Again, the changing colors stopped, the stage was bathed in white, and the audience emitted a united gasp.

  For Medora and the girls of The Troupe had shed their spangled flapper dresses and stood revealed in a semi-nudity more naked than total nudity. Except for abbreviated copies of flapper step-ins, the chorines of The Troupe wore nothing. And Medora, their star, wore less. Like the others, her naked breasts were exposed, but unlike the others, her breasts were perfectly formed, and unlike the others, she wore a flesh-colored, sequined G-string in place of step-ins.

  Fascinated, Hazel watched the frenzied finish of the first act. The orchestra screamed, and the girls screamed their final reprise. There was female flesh everywhere, Medora, her dancers, all wriggling their arms to the heavens, shaking their unconfined breasts, arcing their torsos round and round. Sing, Sing, Sing, You Sinners!

  And then there was momentary darkness before the lights came up and the music went down, and the waiters were on the run, and the Club Lautrec was a Tower of Babel once more.

  Hazel sank back. She looked at Doyle. He was sitting as straight as a pasha counting his harem, glassy eyes still fixed on the empty stage. He felt her gaze, for he turned, grinning sheepishly. “Guess it’s okay if you like girls,” he said. “I happen to like just one. She goes by the name of Hazel Smith.”

  She had never felt lumpier or more unattractive. “Oh, sure,” she said. But it was nice of him to be so nice. “What do you think of our Medora?”

  “Same as I said the first time around, Hazel. Seeing her up there, you’d never imagine in a million years what she’s really like or what she’s going through.”