by D. W. Buffa
Burdick’s hand was flying across the page, taking everything down in a shorthand scrawl of his own devising. His hand stopped moving. He looked up at Morris.
“But you never did that, made that kind of deal. What changed? Why did you do what you did?”
Morris shrugged and looked away. He fell into a long silence, as if he was not sure even now what had led him to do the things he had.
“Maybe I was greedier than the others; maybe when there wasn’t much money involved I was too afraid of getting caught. It isn’t that difficult to turn down a bribe when they’re counting in thousands; but millions, and all of it safe, money that will get paid in the form of salaries and stock options after you retire from Congress and become a board member for some international financial consortium? That’s something else again. With that kind of money it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re not doing anything fundamentally wrong, and that, in any case, you deserve it. Not really convince yourself, you understand,” added Morris as he sat down again, “but think that a legitimate argument could be made for doing what you might have done anyway, make certain changes that make it easier for certain companies to compete in the new global economy we keep talking about. All that needed to be done was to add certain specific requirements to some major defense procurement contracts, requirements that could only be met by firms owned and controlled by the same investment house.”
“The Four Sisters,” said Burdick, just to be sure.
“Yes, of course. But you need to understand that the money, the serious money, wasn’t in the value of the contract itself. It was in the advance knowledge that the contract was going to them.”
Quentin Burdick knew a thing or two about Wall Street and the way serious money was made.
“The jump in the price of the stock, inside information—they could buy before anyone else knew.”
“Right. And then with the money they made, they bought other companies; or rather had companies they controlled do it for them, because The Four Sisters does not exist. They moved money all around the world. Some of the money they moved here came from places we supposedly don’t do business with. Do you understand what I’m telling you? The Four Sisters is a shell game, a way for companies, and countries, to acquire influence that, if we knew about it, we would never permit. They’re into everything: television, movies, the whole entertainment industry; newspapers, magazines, book publishing. That’s when I started to question what they were doing, when I threatened to go public and bring it all to a stop. And that’s why I’m here—because they would not let that happen.”
Burdick pushed aside the notebook and sat back. He did not have a doubt that Morris was telling the truth.
“What about Constable? Was the president involved?”
A look of cynicism and contempt shot across Morris’s tired face.
“He was never about anything except himself. I went to him when I found out what I just told you. You know what he told me?—That none of it mattered, that there was nothing to worry about, that we had not done anything wrong, that no one would ever find out.” Morris could still not quite believe it. “You imagine? In the same breath: we haven’t done anything wrong, and no one will ever find out! Well, someone found out, didn’t they? Someone found out because my good friend Robert Constable, the guy I helped elect president, had to tell his friends, and his friends made sure there was enough evidence that when someone tipped off the FBI that I had taken a bribe they could find the money—money, by the way, in an account in the Cayman Islands I didn’t know I had.”
Instead of cynicism, there was a look of something harsher, and more unforgiving, on Frank Morris’s face, a sense of retribution that Burdick did not understand.
“They had to shut me up,” Morris continued, the look bitter and aggrieved. “The way to do that was to discredit me, make me out to be a liar and a thief, someone no one could believe. And they succeeded. But they must have had a different problem with our good friend the president, something they could only solve with more drastic measures.”
“What are you saying?” cried Burdick, wondering if in his bitterness and rage, Morris had lost his senses. “Constable died of a heart attack the night before I was supposed to see him.”
“To talk to him about The Four Sisters?” asked Morris with a quick, eager movement of his eyes that said he was certain he was right.
“That’s what I told him, but—”
“Do you really think that was just a coincidence? You don’t know what you’re dealing with. The Four Sisters isn’t just a bank that moves money around in ways it shouldn’t. Do you know anything about it? Do you know who the head of it is?”
“I didn’t even know what The Four Sisters was until you told me,” admitted Burdick.
The door suddenly opened and the guard appeared. Burdick had been there an hour. It was time to leave.
“Come back tomorrow,” said Morris with new urgency. “There are things you need to know.”
Chapter Seven
Checking into the first motel he found, Burdick went back through his notes, making sure, while everything was fresh in his mind, that it was all there, that he had not forgotten to make a record of the most important parts of what Frank Morris had said. Then, when he was finished, he went back to the beginning and from those fragmentary shorthand notes, wrote out in longhand a full account of what he had been told. He had learned in his years of reporting that even the best memory failed after a fairly short time to recall in all its nuanced specificity the language of a conversation. This was likely to be the biggest story of his career, and he could not afford to make a mistake.
Burdick worked straight through until he had it all down on paper, not just what Frank Morris had said, but how the once all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had looked and sounded, the changes that had made him seem at times a pale imitation of his former self. When he was finally finished, Burdick started to turn on the television to see what news he had missed, but then decided he was too tired to care. He was asleep almost the moment his head hit the pillow.
When he went back to the prison late the next morning, he found Frank Morris more energized, more combative, as if now that he had made his first confession, told Burdick what really had happened, he could not wait to tell him everything. There was something else, another, darker aspect, to the change. Beneath the apparent eagerness to get on with it, to tell Burdick what he knew, there was now a strange, lingering fatalism in his eyes, a belief—no, more than that, a certainty—that what Burdick was going to write would be the last thing that would be written about him, that after this there was nothing.
“Cancer,” he explained with a shrug, a show of indifference he expected from himself. “Six months, maybe less.” Then, flashing a crooked, modest smile meant to put his visitor at his ease, he added, “Unless that fucking Frenchman gets me first.”
“That—?”
“What we talked about yesterday, The Four Sisters. A Frenchman owns it, ‘de la’ something. I’ll remember later. I only met him once, and we didn’t exactly have a conversation. There were a dozen of us, members of Congress on a fact-finding trip in Europe, looking at ways to improve trade, that kind of thing—mainly an excuse to travel at taxpayer expense. There was a reception in Paris, hosted by their foreign ministry. The room was full of bankers and industrialists, but it quickly became apparent that they all deferred to him. And I have to tell you, he was one impressive son-of-a-bitch. He spoke perfect English—no accent—like someone who had gone to an Ivy League college, though I don’t think he did. I remember someone saying that he was from one of France’s oldest families, but I’m not even sure about that. All I know for certain is that he knew more about American history than anyone I’ve ever met. He told us things about our history I didn’t know, and he did it in the course of one of those short welcoming speeches that usually don’t say anything. He may have memorized it, it may have been just off the cuff—he didn’t have
any notes, he didn’t read it—but he stood there, and without a false start or a word out of place summarized two hundred years of French-American relations. Maybe that was the reason I didn’t like him: it was all too perfect.”
Morris looked down at his hands. His eyes seemed to draw back on themselves. A shrewd smile cut across his mouth, a sign that he now understood something he should have known before.
“It’s always smart to make a mistake, trip over a word now and then, show the people you’re talking to that you’re human, just like them. Make a mistake, and then laugh at yourself; no one wants to vote against you if you do that. But this guy, I think he’d kill himself before he’d make a mistake, or admit it if he did. He wasn’t arrogant, not the way we usually mean. It went deeper than that. It was almost the opposite of arrogance, someone embarrassed because what he was doing was so easy. Look, I’m no scholar, but I read to all my kids when they were little. That’s what it was like, a grown-up talking to a bunch of children. That isn’t arrogance; that’s someone operating on a different plane, someone who knows how to do something, and someone just starting to learn.”
Burdick had stopped making notes. He was too intent on catching the changing expression on Morris’s face, the added meaning it gave to what he said. Morris had always had a native shrewdness about the character of other people, a way of gauging what, despite their various levels of self-deceit, they really wanted, but Burdick had never heard him describe anyone quite like this, someone who did not seem to fit any of the normal categories by which vanity and ambition were measured. And there was something more. He was not sure what it was, but he was certain that Morris had left out a crucial part of the equation.
“That isn’t the only reason you didn’t like him, is it?”
Morris nodded in agreement.
“You don’t notice it at first. He smiles when he talks to you—he smiled when he shook my hand—but his eyes… they look right through you in a way that makes you feel invisible. But then, when someone has as much money as he’s supposed to have, most people probably are only too glad if he looks at them at all. I noticed, though, which, when you think about it, only makes me worse. I was as eager as anyone else to get what I could from him, or rather from the organization he controls, because, of course, I never did any business directly with him. He left that sort of thing to other people, Americans mainly, who worked for one of his subsidiaries.”
Burdick started making notes again.
“Americans. Can you give me names?”
“Sure, but it won’t do much good. They didn’t do anything criminal, they didn’t break any laws. They acted just like any other interest that has business before the Congress. They made their case for legislation, and I listened. They didn’t come with envelopes stuffed with cash. It isn’t what any one of them did; it’s the connections that exist among them all, the way that all these supposedly separate entities are held together at the top: like puppets on a string, and the string held by one man, but the string all tangled up, twisted in a dozen different directions. Here, let me show you what I mean.”
Morris took Burdick’s notebook and quickly drew a parallel set of boxes connected by two different lines.
“You have a company operating in the United States. It’s a subsidiary of another company with headquarters in Great Britain, which in turn is a subsidiary of a company owned, or apparently owned, by a company in Bahrain, a company in which a controlling interest is owned by—you guessed it—a certain French investment firm. Then another American company, controlled by another company based overseas, and that company in turn is…. You get the idea. Add to that the ability to move money from one company to the next, from one country to another, and to do it endlessly, back and forth, move it electronically at the speed of light.—No one can trace it, no one can keep up. No one can measure how much influence it is buying and what the people who control it are going to do next. All you can know is that whoever sits on top of all this, whoever is in control, can do damn near anything he wants—bring an economy to its knees if that serves his purposes.”
Morris was breathing hard. Beads of perspiration had started to form on his forehead. He leaned back and shook his head, his eyes full of regret at what he had done.
“Jean de la Valette, that’s the Frenchman’s name. Maybe the most powerful man in the world and there aren’t six people in this country who even know he exists. Even the people who head the companies he controls don’t know anything about him. They report to other people, who don’t know much more themselves. A European financial consortium, that’s the phrase you’ll hear; a group of institutions that contribute to the efficiency of the financial markets. What could be less threatening than something that sounds as dull as that? The country is being sold right in front of us, and we’re too damn blind to see it. And I get to go to my grave knowing I helped.”
Morris scratched the back of his head. A look of discouragement swept over his eyes.
“I’m not sure there’s a difference, but I didn’t think I was selling out my country. I thought I was doing myself a favor, and while I didn’t kid myself and think what I was doing was honest, I didn’t think it was going to hurt anyone else. Some people were going to make a lot of money; some people always do. And this time I was going to be one of them. And then, when I found out what they were really up to, it was too late. But Constable—he knew what was going on and it didn’t stop him.”
Morris rolled his shoulders forward until he was hunched over the table. His jaw moved slowly side to side as he reconsidered the judgment which just the moment before he had uttered with such certainty.
“Maybe he had to do it. Maybe he had to buy her off.” Morris leaned back again, stroking his chin. “The one thing you always knew about those two was that whatever kept them together, it wasn’t love.”
Burdick put down his pen. There was a question he still had to ask, a question he would not have thought of had Morris not already seemed to answer it the day before.
“How serious were you when you suggested that Constable did not die of a heart attack, that he was murdered? All the reports say—”
“Screw the reports. That stuff is all rigged. They’d never let out that he was murdered. That’s all the country would be talking about: Who murdered Robert Constable and why? You think the Kennedy assassination led to conspiracy theories? What do you think would happen with something like this? I read the papers, I see what’s on television. There are already hints—rumors, according to the cable tabloid networks—that someone might have been there with him the night he died. Died of a heart attack while getting laid, that’s what they keep insinuating.”
“But you don’t know that he didn’t die of a heart attack, whether or not he was alone. He had a history.”
Morris gave him a caustic, laughing glance.
“He had a history for a lot of things. Did he die of a heart attack, like they say? Yeah, maybe—but did that just happen because his time was up, or he got a little too excited in bed? Or was it caused by something else? You ask me if I know for certain if he was murdered. No, but that’s what I believe. He knew too much, and he wasn’t someone you could trust. That’s what Constable was always too damn stupid to understand. Once he betrayed me, once he told them what I was going to do, they knew what he was like, that he’d sell his mother if he had to, which meant he’d sell them too. You were going to see him; he knew why you were coming. What makes you think that someone who works for them wasn’t listening in on your call? What makes you think that one of the people that worked for him, someone who kept track of his schedule, wasn’t working for them? Let me tell you something, for all the obvious disadvantages, I have more privacy here in prison than you have out there.”
“If you’re right,” said Burdick, “if he was murdered—how do I find out? Who is going to tell me?”
Morris sunk his chin on his chest. He tapped two fingers on the table and stared straight ahead.
“Star
t with who feels the worst about what happened,” he said after thinking about it. “The agent in charge, the Secret Service agent who was there that night, if you can find him—Ask him about the woman, the one that, according to all the rumors you’ve heard, was in the room with Constable when he died. Listen, figure it out. The guy is there to protect the president. The president dies. It looks like a heart attack. The girl—if there was a girl, and if there wasn’t there had to be someone else—is in the room. The agent had to know she was there. Christ, you couldn’t guard Constable for ten minutes and not know what he was like. The girl is there. The first question the agent had to deal with was what to do with her. The president is dead. What is your next obligation—what do you do? If you do things by the book, you hold her there and make a full report, but this is a president we’re talking about. What would you do, what would we both do? Protect his reputation, save his family—whatever you might think about his wife—the shame and embarrassment of a useless scandal. That’s my guess, anyway, about what he might have done.”
Morris moved his head like a boxer, anticipating an opponent’s next move. His eyes narrowed into a look of intense concentration.
“He gets rid of her, gets her out of the way, makes sure no one knows she was ever there. But then what happens, if it turns out it wasn’t a simple heart attack, if it turns out it was murder? Was the girl involved, the girl he let go? If that’s what happened, this guy is now a mess, damned both for what he did and what he did not do.”
Morris nodded in agreement with his own conjecture. He looked at Burdick.
“If you can find him, if you can get him to talk to you, he might just spill his guts, tell you what he knows. He’s probably dying to clear his conscience, to make things right. Remember, if it was a murder, in addition to everything else, he’s now being forced to play a part in a cover-up. Do you think he wants to spend the rest of his life worrying about what’s going to happen when someone finds out what he did? Would you?”