The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  “I think someone wants it to happen—starting tonight”

  “Matt, can you prove any of this?”

  “That’s exactly what Earnshaw asked me last night.”

  “But can you?”

  “I intend to prove it—by the time the state dinner starts in the Palace of Versailles tonight.”

  “How, Matt? How can you possibly prove there’s a plot?”

  “By doing one thing.”

  “What?”

  “By seeing Nikolai Rostov, at last.”

  THE PLACE WAS so calm and quiet, so isolated, that she felt as if she had been dropped on an uninhabited planet.

  Hazel Smith had traversed the classical arch of the Pont de la Tournelle from the Left Bank, and now, at twenty minutes after nine of this Sunday morning, she stood at the dip of the bridge, on the stones of the Quai d’Orleans at the southern embankment of the Île St.-Louis and she regretted the meeting that was soon to take place.

  She was mellowed by her surroundings and unable to face harsh decisions, if indeed any were expected of her.

  Everything in sight moved her this morning. In the distance were the spiritual towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Along the Quai d’Orleans the sun shimmered through the poplar leaves, and the reflections danced in the rippling waters of the Seine below. Nearby rose the statue of Ste. Genevieve, whose prayer to God once stayed Attila the Hun and saved Paris, and who was immortalized in stone, virginal, and eternally warm and comforting. Behind her, still hidden in the seventeenth century, were the mansions, gardens, high walls, narrow streets of the lie, and the rock ramp sloping down to the river (where fishermen dozed), and somewhere the Sunday bird market.

  Hazel’s gaze held on a barge creeping down the Seine, and then her attention shifted to a French family—father, mother, three youngsters all fishing from the Paris side—and at once her frame of mind was transformed from calm into fear. She could not define exactly how this peculiar change in feeling came about. Perhaps from envy of that family across the water. Or perhaps it was the isolation of the Île St.-Louis itself that had finally betrayed her. The island, Balzac once wrote, affected its visitors with tristesse nerveuse, a malady suffered when one was separated from life and was suddenly lonely and insecure.

  It was both, Hazel decided, both the sight of that tightly knit French family on the riverbank and the realization of her own isolated position that had altered her mood.

  It was also brought on, this graying mood, by a sudden remembrance of last night, when she had seen all there was left of hope in her life, and it now seemed so pitifully little. For last night, before the business of the interview in the Eiffel Tower restaurant, she had seen Nikolai Rostov, fleetingly, and after the interview, hours after, she had seen Jay Doyle, unsatisfactorily.

  From the first, she had meant to avoid the cocktail party—not cocktail party, since that was an American custom the Russians had never adopted, but reception, really—for the Soviet and foreign press given at the Russian Embassy. She had not wanted to go because she had been afraid that Rostov might be there, but she had finally gone because she hoped that he would be there.

  It was a bad period for her, this time in Paris, a period of racking and painful indecision. She had wanted to look at Niki again. Just look at him. Just to see what reassurance her past would give her, in order to divine whether it deserved her future as well.

  It had been an early evening reception, and she had arrived promptly, leaving her car off the Boulevard St.-Germain and walking to the Russian Embassy at 79 Rue de Grenelle, a street which, after the first burst of shops, had become haughty and forbidding. But the Embassy itself, a whitewashed three-story mansion constructed in 1713 by the French architect who had designed the building that now housed the Banque de France, was friendlier than its surroundings. Displaying her invitation to French police and Russian plainclothesmen, Hazel had been met in the unfurnished entry hall by a young Russian press officer she had known in Moscow. She had been shown up a staircase, and been impressed by the waxed wooden railing on the wrought-iron balustrade and the antique sconces bracketed to the wall.

  Upstairs, the three dozen journalists who had already arrived—more than half of them foreign and many of whom she had met before—were mingling with Russian press personnel and minor Soviet delegates. On a buffet, caviar, smoked salmon, fruit, and sweets had attracted a pack of correspondents. From a portable bar the champagne and vodka had seemed to flow continuously. She had ordered champagne, and had pretended great interest in the room. She had examined the heavy brocade curtains and the red-covered Regency-style chairs, and she had admired the marble fireplace with its display of Russian dolls, and the rich Armenian rug. And all the while, she had watched for Nikolai Rostov and had not seen him.

  After a half hour of drink and gossip, when the reception had swelled to fifty or sixty correspondents, and when Hazel had been about to leave, the side door to an adjacent salon had swung open. Premier Talansky and Marshal Zabbin had entered to pay their respects, and they had been followed by a half-dozen advisers, and one of these had been Rostov.

  As the Russian leaders had crossed the room, and members of the press began gathering around them, Hazel had hung back, and she noticed that Rostov had hung back, too. He had nodded to her and indicated the room behind him and sidled into it. Unobtrusively as possible, she had followed him. When she entered what turned out to be a conference room—red brocade covering the wall panels, a maroon felt cloth shrouding an oval table, red upholstered Louis XIV chairs lined up in classroom rows before the table—Rostov had come up behind her. He had kissed her fully, quickly, on the lips, hugged her, and whispered in her ear, “ mine, I have missed you. I am busy, very, very busy, important work, and I have no more than this second now. And next week, busier, but the week after, Moscow—and we are together. Our vacation, remember? You remember?” She had nodded dumbly. He had kissed her again. “My wife will be gone, and we will have our time. Now go to your friends.”

  She had returned to the busy public room, and she had not looked back. She had simply kept going, until she had left the Russian Embassy.

  After that, she had not permitted herself to think of Rostov, of Rostov and herself, of their future. She had hurried to her appointment in the Eiffel Tower restaurant for her interview. But then, in the midst of the interview, Matt Brennan had appeared from nowhere to inquire where he might locate Jay Doyle. He had been mysterious, and she had been troubled through the rest of the dinner.

  Later, in her apartment, as midnight had come and gone without Doyle, she had begun to worry seriously about him and wonder whether Matt Brennan had got him into some kind of trouble. She had invited Doyle to stay the night with her. She had wanted to comfort him and to know that he was close to her, so she could in some way reassure herself that what remained of her life belonged to him. She had almost dozed off when, at some ungodly hour, he thumped in.

  Their night, what was left of it, had been a disappointment. She had wanted to speak of love and of their tomorrows. Doyle, maniacally, could speak only of Brennan’s Little Summit and Brennan’s unsettling prediction. Only once had Doyle referred to Hazel and himself. Just before dawn, just after they had got into bed, he had mentioned that Brennan wanted to see her in the morning about something terribly important. Doyle had hoped that she would agree to meet Brennan, try to assist him in any way possible. For if Brennan should be proved right, even partially right, it would mean everything to Doyle. “It would mean I’d be back up there on top, Hazel, alongside you, and this time, sweetie, I wouldn’t be a fool. I wouldn’t let you get away from me, not if I could help it.”

  It hadn’t been much, that, a crumb, a morsel. But still, the promise of marriage had been implied. The promise of a full life with someone who meant something had been suggested, and for Hazel that meant very much.

  She had slept on this, slept fast, hard, deep in a vacuum of insensibility. And when she had awakened this morning to all of her p
artner’s eagerness, she had reluctantly agreed to see Brennan only so that she might have Doyle.

  But now, as she waited for Brennan at the foot of the Pont de la Tournelle on the lie St-Louis, it suddenly seemed a bad bargain.

  She had committed herself to a meeting that might deplete her pitiful savings in return for—for what?—for dross.

  In the distance, the bourgeois French family, people with people, people belonging, continued to upset her. And behind, the gaping silence of the isolated island, foreshadowing the cemetery for the worst dead of all, the alienated, the rootless, the lonely who were the living dead.

  Hazel thought of Rostov, his goodness proved but his offering limited. Rostov could never give her the normal background of a family, the security of a home, the position of a wife, because his own family, his legal home, his official status in the puritan party, were too important to endanger merely for love. Niki could give her everything, except that which she desired most.

  And she thought of Doyle, who had once had the opportunity to fulfill her needs and had refused to do so. Doyle was still free to give her his name, their family, their home. Yet, even if he did, she doubted its rewards. Doyle was, in defeat, so self-centered and self-obsessed that he could be no more than their only child.

  This morning, she was frightened by her situation. She had created a patched-up, rickety, precarious shelter for her life, a shelter made up of two-thirds career and one-third lover on loan, and she could occupy this to the end. Once you had this much, you thought twice, a hundred times twice, about trading it for the flimsy blueprints of an unbuilt shelter of unproved design and quality.

  She suspected why Doyle and Brennan had collaborated to bring her to this meeting. She anticipated what Brennan would require of her. She found it frightening. Her instinct was to avoid this meeting, to flee, to run as far as possible from it.

  Her wristwatch told her that Brennan was ten minutes late. They had agreed on nine-thirty sharp, and the hands of her timepiece were at nine-forty. Now she had an acceptable explanation for Doyle as to why she had not kept the appointment. She looked up the rise of the bridge, her safe escape route, and she saw Matt Brennan striding down it toward her, and flight was no longer possible.

  “Good morning, Hazel,” he called out. “Sorry to be late. I drove my car and completely forgot they don’t allow cars on the quays. So I had to find a place to leave it.”

  She nodded.

  Brennan glanced around him. “Where can we talk?”

  Hazel stared at him. He had the look of the attractive fanatic. One amenity, and time for no more. This was business.

  “Well,” she said, “if you prefer, there are a half-dozen bars and restaurants. Quasimodo, on the other side, might be open for breakfast. Or the Franc Pinot, if you like caves. Or if it’s a café you’d like, then the Brasserie le Lutetia—”

  “I don’t care where we talk. What do you prefer?”

  “I’d be satisfied just to walk along the river.”

  “That’s fine,” said Brennan.

  They started up the Quai d’Orleans toward the Passerelle St.-Louis, the footbridge made up of cagelike steel girders and wooden planks that connected this island to the Île de la Cité next to it.

  Hazel fished nervously for a cigarette. The moment that she had it, Brennan had his lighter ready.

  Brennan watched her inhale. “Jay says he told you all about the Little Summit I called together last night. Did he tell you about it in detail?”

  “I think so. He stayed over, you know. He kept me up half the night.”

  ‘Then you’re briefed on my whole case, my conclusion about what it adds up to? Do you have any questions, Hazel?”

  “None. I’m sure Jay covered your case completely. He has a blotter instead of a brain, I sometimes think. Yes, he reviewed your clues, pro and con, but mostly pro. He’s all for you now. He’s convinced you are the Messiah, come down to save us all, but particularly him. He’s in a fever about your theory. As far as I can make out, if there is anything to your—to what you believe—you’ve assigned him the exclusive story rights—”

  “Jay and you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, not certain if he would detect the irony in her tone. “Anyway, Jay’s walking on the ceiling over the possibilities of a beat and his dreams of glory. I’m not sure whether he’s excited because he actually believes what you believe, or just because he’s insanely eager to believe in something, anything, that might give him a substitute to replace his poor Kennedy book. Anyway, he rattled on and on last night, as rigorous in his Tightness, and yours, as Savonarola.”

  “And you, Hazel—did he convert you?”

  They were Strolling past the Passerelle St.-Louis, and the flat-bottomed pedestrian bridge was as ugly as the cause to which Doyle had tried to convert her. She took a long pull on her cigarette, watched the smoke she had released drift between them and trail away. “Convert me? To what, Matt? You say it. I want to hear you speak the unspeakable aloud.”

  “Gladly.” He was rubbing a thumb across the bowl of the pipe held in his palm, apparently trying to formulate the unspeakable. “My guess—by now an educated guess—is this. First, though, remember I can’t speak about the Chinese—only about the Russians. There’s a split in the Russian delegation, I truly believe. They’ve chosen sides, or maybe some have chosen a side. I can’t name the players yet. I don’t know who is for what. But as I see it,—one side are the revisionists, the ones who believe Russia’s future security and prosperity are forever linked with the democracies, if they are to be guaranteed permanent coexistence within a grand alliance of all nations. On the other side are the ones who have rediscovered Marx, Lenin, Stalin, who now feel the Summit, nuclear disarmament, a grand world alliance, may make Russia a secondary power subservient to the democracies, and may weaken Communism and finally allow it to be destroyed. These are the ones who want to revive the international Comintern, turn their backs on the West and on Summitry, develop bilateral agreements with China, and then, with China as partner, continue building nuclear stockpiles and spreading their Idea around the globe. These are the ones who want to keep the world on constant red alert and trembling, who want to impoverish capitalism, recolor the map, redirect the course of history.” He paused. “That is what I preached last night. I don’t know if you’re convinced.”

  “I don’t know, either. Several days ago, I thought your suspicions fanciful. Now, well, now I’m less sure. What you are preaching may possibly, just possibly, be true.”

  “May possibly, you concede.” Brennan studied her as they continued their slow walk. “I’m pleased you’re even giving my theory serious consideration. May I ask, Hazel, what brought you over this far?”

  “Because the Russians have tried to get rid of you twice, after you got too nosy.”

  “Well, I certainly know they tried to kill me once. Yesterday. I’ve never been sure about the first time in the Bois. I’m still not sure.”

  “I am,” said Hazel, and she looked at him.

  Astonished, Brennan halted beneath the blue street plaque reading QUAI DE BOURBON. “You’re sure they tried to kill me the first time, too?”

  She nodded. “That’s right. That’s when I started to take you seriously.” She resumed walking, and then she continued. “One day, before we knew each other well, Jay spoke of your findings in front of me. Remember? Later, the same day, I happened to be with—with Nikolai Rostov—and he wanted to know how I was spending my time in Paris. I told him of all the zany, mad people I’d been meeting, including you, and—just gossiping, looking for laughs—I told him about some of your findings and suspicions. He was amused, but maybe a little annoyed. A few hours after that, you received your call that Rostov would meet you in the Bois de Boulogne. There was a murder, and I suppose the intended victim was you. I don’t say Rostov was personally involved. But most likely, as a dutiful party member, he repeated my gossip about your meddling to the KGB. And they acted on their own.”


  She took one last puff on her cigarette and flipped the butt over the stone embankment wall. “I’m convinced they tried to put you away twice. I’ve asked myself why. I’ve answered myself that there must be some validity to your findings and suspicions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be afraid of you. Knowing Russians as I do, I am certain they’re never afraid, unless someone is getting in their way or endangering their plans. So, while I’m not Jay’s kind of convert, I am taking you seriously. There may be something in the air.”

  “Something that has to do with the President of France’s banquet in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles tonight. You know, Hazel, that’s the sum total of what I believe.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “But you can’t accept that part of it?”

  She looked past him at a boat on the Seine. She said, “I honestly don’t know what I believe about your final conclusion. Don’t forget, by now I’m the product of two worlds, theirs and ours, and I’m confused by experience and emotion. Assassination? Versailles? Tonight? It’s hard to imagine, Matt. I know the Russians extremely well. I’ve been part of their life for much of my life. They’re decent people. Most of them are like most of us. In fact, like most of the Chinese, too. The Russians have law and order, they have Mom and little children, they have laughter and tears, they celebrate birth and mourn death. They abhor violence. They want to live in peace. Just like you and me, just like every American.”

  “I know that,” said Brennan, “but we’ve also had Americans who’ve been named Joseph McCarthy or Lee Harvey Oswald, assassins of character or of fellow human beings.”

  “Well, yes, Russia has its share of those, also. Only, from what I know of the attitude of Russia today, I can’t see them assassinating anyone, except in defense of the motherland or in the national interest.”

  “Someone might conceive the present situation as one requiring a liquidation in the national interest.”

  “Of course. But nevertheless—”