The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  He chuckled. “Maybe they do… I was nobody then. Adviser to Premier Khrushchev’s press secretary.”

  “Well, you were somebody to me. I was barely more than a cub reporter on my first foreign assignment. It was crazy that night, tearing around with you in Vienna, in that small gray Moskvich. I felt like a princess in a chariot. There was that place called the Flaker-Bar. I think we danced half the night. I was afraid you’d never want to see me again. I was drunk, and such a miserable dancer.”

  “Not to me, milochka”

  “I’m glad you didn’t give up on me. Look what we’d have missed. Remember that place we registered as man and wife?”

  He nodded sleepily. “Vienna Woods.” He finished his vodka and with an unsteady hand set the empty glass down. “Vienna Woods,” he repeated.

  “The Tulbinger Kogel Berghotel. Women don’t forget those moments. I know men have other things on their minds.”

  “No, I remember, too.”

  She buried her head deeper into her hair and his chest. Here we go, Jay, she thought, the death-defying leap.

  “Well, I don’t mind your not remembering everything,” she said. “We were drinking a lot, and you had every right to, because you had so much on your mind. I even remember—was it that night or one of the next?—when you were so upset, poor dear, because some friend you’d gone to school with—he was representing one of the Pravdas in Vienna—tried to get you to join in with him on that plot. It was so hard for you, with all the other things you had on your mind.” She lifted her eyes. “Remember, Niki?”

  His glazed eyes met hers blankly. “Plot?”

  “Oh, you remember, Niki,” she said lightly, “that sort of rattle-brained plan to assassinate our leader, and they, whoever they were, wanted you in it.”

  “Assassinate?” He squeezed his eyes to focus them. “What are you talking about?”

  Very dangerous ground, she thought. “Well, maybe you don’t remember it,” she said quickly. “Just as I was saying, you had so much on your mind organizing the Kennedy-Khrushchev meetings, and this was just one of those other things that came up, and I was so sorry for you, poor dear. I suppose, also, the fact that it was an old school friend who tried to suck you into it made it worse. I don’t blame you for the way you drank that night, and even though you passed out on me, Niki, I loved you more than ever. I felt I was sharing your problems.”

  His face was troubled, and when he spoke, his voice was thick. “No, I recall nothing of that,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “Perhaps, as you say, I was too drunk. There are times—” His voice drifted off, and then he looked down at Hazel. “What kind of plot in Vienna?”

  She came off his chest and propped herself on an elbow. “You never really went into it, but I won’t forget that night, the very idea—it made you seem so exciting and adventurous in my little-girl eyes.”

  “What kind of plot in Vienna?” he repeated.

  “You told me this old school chum approached you about joining in with some dissident group of international Communists who felt our boss stood in Russia’s way, and that he’d be more dangerous to your aspirations in the future, and that he must be liquidated right there in Vienna, or if that was impossible, someplace else soon afterward. You told them flatly you were against the whole project because you saw nothing to gain by it. You refused to participate. I was so proud of you. But anyway, the whole experience upset you.”

  Rostov looked off, past Hazel, his eyes narrowing to snare memory, and then flickering. “Yes?” he said, but it was not really a question.

  “Oh, well, it was one of those things,” she said, “and you’ve had worse times since. I’ve seen it, but I’ve learned to understand your life, Niki, and learned to treat your problems and confidences as if I were your real wife. And I have tried, as you know. I really have. But you also know how my imagination runs riot, and once or twice I’ve wondered to myself—I’ve wondered why those conspirators, the ones you rejected, why they didn’t really kill him in Vienna as they had planned. It would have been so easy there. Why did they wait—I mean, assuming they were the same ones—why did they wait for Dallas? I always—”

  “Dallas?” Rostov echoed incredulously. He came forward from the headboard. “, what in the devil are you talking about?”

  Worriedly, she hesitated. Then she said, “That group, if it was the same, I’ve sometimes wondered why they didn’t just kill President Kennedy in Vienna instead of waiting until two years later to get him in Dallas. That’s all I—”

  “Kennedy!” Rostov burst out. “Kennedy?” Suddenly, he was totally awake, his broad visage broken by a wide grin, and he threw back his head and gave out a roar of laughter, and continued to laugh, his shoulders shaking with delight, as he looked down at Hazel, wagging his head, his eyes tearing with amusement.

  Frightened and confused, she drew back and tried to sit up on the bed, but his hand caught her behind her head, and he brought her face close. Still convulsed with laughter, he kissed her forehead.

  With indignation, she pulled away. “What’s so damn funny, Niki?”

  “You, my little ,” he said, trying to control his amusement. “You, my little American innocent abroad.”

  “Maybe you’ll let me in on the joke,” she said coldly.

  “Oh, come now, come now,” teased Rostov, tickling her under the chin. “I do not mean to hurt your vanity. Do not be so serious. But it is funny to me that you have thought this long time that any Russians or Communists from anywhere would even dream of assassinating Kennedy or any American President. Why should they? You get rid of one, you have another. They are of the same stripe and color. It is silly—”

  Hazel sat up straight, covering her nakedness with her pillow. “Niki, are you trying to make me out some kind of scatterbrain? Next thing, you’ll be denying you ever told me there was a plot in Vienna.”

  “I am not denying it—it is all brought back to my mind—”

  “Or you’ll be telling me there was no intention to assassinate Kennedy?”

  Rostov’s smile remained. He cocked his head indulgently, regarding Hazel as he might some overimaginative child. “If you will be calm, and carefully think back to that night in Vienna, I will ask you to remember exactly, the precise words, I spoke to you. Do you believe you can recall them?”

  “I can,” said Hazel with pique. “Can you? You were plenty drunk—”

  “You were drunk, too,” he said nicely.

  “But I remember clearly.”

  “Let us see. Tell me exactly what you remember about what the—the so-called conspirators planned to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what you told me.”

  “Yes?”

  “We were sitting on a bed in some hotel, like here, except we were dressed, and you told me how you’d been approached—”

  “Go on, .”

  “—and you said, you said, “Those madmen, they want to get rid of K, they want to liquidate him because they think him an enemy of Russia.’ That’s what you said.”

  “Exactly. To get rid of K.’” He shook his finger at her, treating her as if she were a child. “Think, . In Vienna, in 1961, there were two who were K, not one but two. To your mind, naturally, your American mind, there was only one K, your Kennedy. But to Russians, there was another K, the only one with such an initial, and this was Khrushchev, Premier Khrushchev.”

  Hazel’s head spun. “But you said they were getting rid of the one who was an enemy of Russia, the one who stood in Russia’s way, who would be dangerous to them in the future. That could only mean the American President, not your own.”

  “It meant our own, it was our own,” said Rostov, flatly. “There were always those who fanatically believed that Khrushchev was the enemy of Russia, one who stood in the way of Russia’s future well-being and progress. They were concerned with Russia’s leadership, not yours, which your capitalists pretend to change every four or eight years anyway. There were those who opposed Khrushchev’s anti-Chi
na course, his desire to divorce Russia from China’s then secret Cominform, and his efforts to bring Russia closer to the Western democracies. Those were the ones who felt he was his own country’s worst enemy, leading us down the road to disaster. I refused to enlist with them, because I believed they were wrong and our Premier K was right. In fact, I don’t mind confessing, I was one of those who tried to hint to our K of the opposition within his Government My loyalty, as you know, was well rewarded. I was promoted. I was sent to Zurich to rap the knuckles of the Chinese. But when that softheaded Brennan let Varney defect to China and strengthen China’s hand against us, I was made to suffer for Brennan’s stupidity. You remember how I was suspected of playing both sides, of having been intimate with the pro-China conspirators in Vienna and exposing some of them merely to advance myself further in the Government until I could sabotage the Government in Zurich. You and I both knew that was untrue, but I had to suffer much before the Government would trust me and bring me back into its good graces.” Rostov shrugged. “But that is all by the way. I digress. To get back to your simple, but perhaps understandable, assumption that it was your J.F.K., your K, that the Vienna group was after. No. They wanted only to get rid of Khrushchev—get rid of, not assassinate—and as you know, ultimately, they succeeded. They did dispose of him, remove him from office. But actually, in the long run, they failed, too, for they have never supplanted him with a Premier who agreed with them to bring Russia away from the democracies and back to an alliance with China. Every Premier since, our present Talansky also, has sided with your country against China, to bring China into line. This remains our policy at the Summit.” He paused, and offered Hazel a kindly smile. “I am sorry to spoil your little melodrama, . But see the good side. It has given you much pleasure of speculation through the years. That is something, is it not?”

  “Yes,” she said dully.

  He reached down and began to pull the blanket over them. “But we have talked enough about fantasies. In the end, what is real is best. What we had in Vienna, and since, and tonight—yes, tonight—that is real and that is what matters.” He slid under the blanket and lowered his head to the pillow. “I am dizzy with fatigue. Sleep, , let us sleep.”

  “Yes,” she said, but she remained inert, seated beside him in a state of shock.

  Because of a fragment of bed talk in Vienna long ago, Jay Thomas Doyle had given years of his life to building a mosaic that would earn him immortality. And here, now, in Paris, another bed talk had shattered her loved one’s magnificent mosaic, and with it his dreams, and perhaps her own dreams, too.

  She sat there, sickened by the realization of how the truth would not only shatter the mosaic of Doyle’s great work, rendering it worthless rubbish, but would also break his heart. She wanted to weep for him and for herself.

  She heard Rostov’s fuzzy voice from his pillow. “, the light, put out the light and sleep.”

  “I will, Niki.”

  With effort, she crawled off the bed, picked up her nightgown, and started for the lamp. She had taken no more than two steps when the telephone’s ring brought her to a frightened halt.

  “Answer,” she heard Rostov command.

  She dashed around the bed, clutching her nightgown in front of her, and grabbed up the receiver on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Miss Smith?” The accent was Russian. “Marshal Zabbin. Is the Minister still there?”

  “Yes—” She turned. Rostov had swung to the edge of the bed and was reaching for the telephone. She gave it to him.

  Shakily, she pushed her head and arms into the nightgown, as she heard Rostov say, “Yes, Marshal… Of course, sir… I shall be there in twenty minutes.”

  He hung up, massaged his closed eyes, and stood up, stretching. Opening his eyes, he saw her and considered her affectionately.

  “I am sorry, Hazel. I must dress and leave at once.”

  “I—I’m sorry, too.”

  She allowed herself to be embraced by him. Pinned against his hard frame by his muscular arms, she went limp and laid her head against his naked chest. She so desperately wanted Doyle to have his book, his manhood, that she was like a young war bride crying inside herself to have her mutilated soldier-husband’s limbs, his masculinity, restored. She wanted Doyle not to give up, not to destroy himself through self-grief and self-pity.

  “I will try to see you again before we are at last together,” he was saying.

  She heard his distant words only faintly.

  “Oh, please—please—please—” she whispered to Doyle, pleading for him to survive what she must tell him, so that they might both survive.

  She was surprised that it was Rostov’s voice replying. “Have no fears, . Your Niki will look after you. Forever.”

  She had heard him, and she shivered. For the words had sounded like a sentence to purgatory.

  VII

  IT HAD RAINED briefly before daybreak, a thin, steady shower, but by the middle of Friday morning, the city of Paris was dry and clean and bright.

  It was the kind of French morning that Matt Brennan had always enjoyed, when the warming air was fresh and the green trees along the grands boulevards were crisp and when even the sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées sparkled back at the sun.

  Yet, now, striding toward the Arc de Triomphe and the breakfast date at Le Drug Store, Matt Brennan derived little pleasure from the attractiveness of the new day.

  For one thing, he had slept poorly, his head teeming with the unfinished handiwork of tiny demons—the Denise fiasco that had so provoked Lisa Collins, the personal meaning of the long vigil at the American Hospital, the continuing mystery of Joe Peet, as well as the maddening vacuum left by one phantom, the elusive Nikolai Rostov.

  For another thing, Brennan had been awakened too early. To his surprise, it had been a telephone call from Hazel Smith that had roused him from fitful slumber. With agitation, she had summarized the results of an interview held last night with the Russian who had first hinted to her, in Vienna, of the conspiracy against President Kennedy’s life. It had all been a grievous error, the conclusions that she and Doyle, mainly Doyle, had drawn from the sketchy allusions the Russian official had let fall so long ago. The disastrous truth must be passed on to Doyle at once, Hazel had felt, so as not to allow him to add another wasted day to so many squandered years. She had already made a breakfast engagement with Doyle, but suddenly Hazel the Strong had been reduced to weakness. She had found herself unable to face Doyle, with her black news, alone. She had thought of Brennan, Jay’s best friend here, and she had wanted Brennan’s presence and moral support. And Brennan, reluctantly because of all that was on his own mind and his aversion to funerals, had consented to attend. With uncharacteristic gratefulness, Hazel had told him that she and Doyle would be waiting for him at Le Drug Store around ten o’clock.

  After trying to gain admission to Lisa’s adjoining bedroom, and failing, Brennan had learned from a chambermaid who was sweeping the corridor that Lisa had left the hotel early. Wondering how Medora would ever reach her to present his defense, Brennan had washed, dressed, and remembered to stick the key to Joe Peet’s room in his pocket, and then he had hastened down to the Champs-Élysées.

  Now, at last, beneath the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, he had reached that exotic and improbable modern hangout of the young French set—and of older tourists, who preferred it to the zoo—known as Le Drug Store.

  Brennan opened the first heavy glass door, then the second, and he was transported into the tumultuous and raucous world of Le Drug Store. He went between the counter dispensing Dior stockings and the gaudy booth selling Chinese dolls, past the showcase displaying wristwatches imported from Leningrad, and he halted before the glassed-in pharmacy section. He looked about for Hazel and Doyle. There were four Germans, seeking succor for their hangovers, lined up before the coin-operated oxygen machine. Off to the left, dozens of morning customers were browsing at the semicircular international newsstand. Off to
the right, a Frenchman was buying a bottle of Rémy-Martin cognac, an Italian couple was considering a Fath necktie, a beautiful Spanish girl was selecting several Jacqueline Francois phonograph records. Neither Hazel nor Doyle was to be seen.

  Brennan proceeded into the snack bar and restaurant. As ever, despite the early hour, it was overcrowded. The black leather-upholstered booths and the tables, enclosed by cedar-paneled walls hung with California Gold Rush posters and formal Currier and Ives prints, were filled with customers, while unseated newcomers hovered over the soon-to-be-vacated places. Noisy waiters balancing trays of hamburger sandwiches, chocolate malted milks, Burgundy wine, and vanilla mousse pushed through the crowd. As always, the room was a bedlam of conversation and amplified French recording of New Orleans jazz.

  Distressed by the swarm of humanity, the clamor, the lack of privacy, Brennan wondered why Hazel Smith had selected Le Drug Store as the background for the dirge she must sing to Doyle. But then, seeing both Hazel’s and Doyle’s upraised arms beckoning to him, Brennan thought that he understood. She had wanted a public arena, with the atmosphere of a boisterous and racketing Irish wake, as a counterpoint to alleviate Doyle’s mourning.

  As he joined them, Brennan could see Hazel’s visible relief at his appearance. Doyle, on the other hand, gave Brennan only the briefest acknowledgment. Doyle was eager to hear out the report that Hazel had apparently already begun. But Hazel seemed to have no heart to hurry Doyle’s agony. Stalling, she devoted herself to Brennan.

  “I figured you’d be famished,” she said to Brennan. “That’s your orange juice. Fresh. And I ordered you bacon and eggs.”

  “Excellent, Hazel.”

  “I didn’t know what you drink,” she went on, “but you can have Jay’s coffeepot and toast. He had only a sip of coffee and one slice of—”

  “I’m dieting,” interjected Doyle, adding with pride, “and without an appetite-depressant pill today. I think I’ve got it made.” He took the coffeepot and poured for Brennan. “Hope this is what you want.”