by D. W. Buffa
Allen liked Charlie Finnegan, liked him a lot. There was not any false posturing with him; you always knew where you stood.
“Would I have to become a Republican?”
“What the hell for? Most people don’t think I’m one.” He turned to Hart. “Though it’s hard to see why I’d still claim to be one if I wasn’t. Not much advantage in it these days, is there?”
They left David Allen to get back to his numbers and went into Hart’s private office, a large, well-appointed room, with two tall windows and a gray marble fireplace. Oriental carpets were scattered over the floor. A white sofa and two easy chairs were arranged below the windows, while, at the other end of the room, in the corner opposite the fireplace, sat Hart’s desk, with a gray leather chair, worn to his dimensions, and two straight back chairs in front of it. This was where he met with anyone who had come to make a formal case for something they wanted from the senator; it was not where he had a conversation with a friend like Charlie Finnegan. Hart dropped into one of the easy chairs near the windows, while Finnegan settled onto the sofa. Finnegan nodded toward the door they had just closed behind them.
“Does David know?”
“No one knows, except Laura, and now you.”
Hart’s gaze rolled from one window toward the other one. He waved his hand in a listless gesture and then shook his head and, after that, scratched his chin.
“That’s not true,” he said finally. “Everyone knows. That’s not true, either,” he added quickly. “Quentin Burdick knows. He knew already; I confirmed it. I didn’t tell him how I knew, only that I did. Austin Pearce knows, too. I didn’t tell him how I knew, but like you, he guessed.” Still curious how quickly they had both jumped to that particular conclusion, Hart looked at Finnegan. “Not really a guess, though, was it? As soon as you heard it, you knew—both of you. She always had a reputation for having the real power in that marriage, even in that presidency.”
For the next half hour, Hart described everything that had happened, everything he had learned, from the day Hillary Constable asked him to find out what he could to the night, just the day before yesterday, when he met with Clarence Atwood of the Secret Service.
“How long is Burdick going to sit on the story?” asked Finnegan when Hart was finished.
“I talked to him yesterday on the phone. He’s got an interview with Austin Pearce tomorrow. Assuming Austin tells him what he told me, not long at all. He knows Constable was murdered. He was convinced of it after what Morris told him out in Lompoc, after what happened to Morris. I confirmed it, but I wouldn’t tell him how I knew it. He won’t use that; he won’t attribute it to me—not yet, anyway. After he talks to Austin, my guess is that he’ll want to find out more about this Jean de la Valette and The Four Sisters, but you’re right, we’re looking at most at a few days, maybe a week, before this thing breaks wide open. Which means I don’t have any time at all. I have to go to France.”
“To France? To see Valette? Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I’m not sure of anything. But after all I’ve heard I’d like to see for myself what he’s really like, whether it’s even possible he could have arranged to have Constable murdered.”
“When are you leaving?”
“As soon as I can; a day or two at the latest.”
Finnegan got to his feet, ready to leave, but then he thought of something, and wondered why he had not thought of it before.
“What about the president?”
“Constable?”
“No, our new one: Irwin Russell. How do you think he’s going to react when he finds out Constable was murdered and that the Secret Service knew it and did not bother to tell him? Or do you think they did?” That thought led to another. “And what do you think the real reason was that Hillary Constable asked you to look into this? If she’s as ambitious as we all think she is—everyone knows she thought she was going to be her husband’s successor—doesn’t she want this kept quiet long enough to figure out how to handle it with the least cost to herself?”
“I know the rumors,” replied Hart, “the deal that was supposedly made. Russell goes on the ticket, but with the understanding that he wouldn’t try for the nomination—he didn’t have the kind of support on his own that would let him try for the nomination—at the end of Constable’s second term.”
“But now things have changed,” said Finnegan. “Dull and uninspiring as he may be, Irwin Russell is president, with every right, if he wants to, to run on his own.” Finnegan began to pace, his eyes moving quickly from one thing to another. “Everything has changed.” He stopped abruptly, wheeled around, and looked straight at Bobby Hart, who had turned at an angle in his chair as Finnegan had moved away. “Think about the difference it makes whether you’ve become president because your predecessor died of something as common as a heart attack, or your predecessor was killed in office, struck down by an assassin. It’s the difference between, in the one case, filling in the time, and, in the other, having the chance to pull the country together, take charge, and unleash the full power of the government in the hunt for whoever had the temerity to murder an American president. If he does that, he becomes unbeatable. If he doesn’t do that, if something happens and he does not have the chance, then, assuming she is still interested, Hillary Constable can claim that she should be allowed to continue the work her husband was not allowed to finish.”
There was a brief knock on the door and then David Allen stuck his head in.
“Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a call I thought you’d want to take. Hillary Constable is on the line.”
Chapter Twelve
The house was all lit up, that was the first thing that struck Bobby Hart when he got out of his car. It seemed oddly out of place, jarring in a way, that the house where little more than a week ago Hillary Constable had stood in a receiving line to accept condolences on the death of her husband should now look so alive. When he knocked on the white lacquered door he half expected to be welcomed into another crowded reception, not to mourn a death, but to celebrate a completely different kind of occasion: a birthday, an anniversary, or, because this was Washington after all, the election returns in a race the outcome of which had been decided long before the polls had closed.
He was not far wrong. The house was full of people, dozens of them, some busy arranging stacks of files, organizing them into the right categories, others busy on the telephones that had been set up on two long tables in the same living room where Hart had watched Hillary Constable go through her widow’s ritual. At yet another table, six young women sorted through the contents of several canvas mail bags, cards sent by people from across the country and around the world expressing their sorrow on the death of the president. There were thousands of them and every one of them was going to be answered with a short note, a few words, and then signed by a machine, but no one who received them would ever know they had been signed that way. They would have instead the double pleasure of believing that the president’s widow had not only read what they had sent, but had been so moved—that was the phrase that had been chosen after consultation with several of her advisors—that though she could not answer all of the wonderful cards and letters she had received, she had to answer theirs. It was what in an older political tradition might have been called a boiler room for grief.
Watching it, Hart marveled at the slow precision of the work, the methodical organization, the way each name to whom a response was addressed was made part of a list, a list that, from what Hart had been told, the Constables had started back when they were still in college, a list that had expanded with the years, people whom if they had only met them once, or even if they had never met them in person at all, would receive a card every Christmas and a request for money at the start of every campaign. By the time Robert Constable ran for a second term there were literally millions of people to whom he could write that one of his greatest satisfactions was knowing that he had such a good friend on whom he could always count
when things were difficult and he needed help. And they believed it, the grateful eager recipients of those yearly smiling photographs of “Bob and Hillary” standing in front of another White House Christmas tree. Robert Constable might be dead, but the list that he and his wife had built up with such enterprise and effort was still growing, part of the inheritance, if you will, left to his wife.
“Hello Bobby, thank you for coming.”
Hillary Constable was suddenly standing right next to him. She was dressed casually in a blouse and skirt. A soft blue cashmere cardigan that brought out the color of her eyes was thrown over her shoulders. Her ash blonde hair was pulled back and she had on her reading glasses. It might have given her a shy, reserved, and bookish look, a woman who taught literature in the shade tree environment of a small liberal arts college, but her eyes were too immediate, too much in the present, the eyes of a woman on the verge of impatience, a woman who was used to being the standard, the only standard, for what was important.
“Don’t mind all this,” she remarked, nodding toward the organized chaos. “We always had a rule that anyone who wrote to us got answered.”
She said this without nostalgia, as if she were simply reporting a principle of modern management, one of those learned from a book of sound practices, a proven method of achieving success. Her eyes made a quick circuit of the room. It would have been easy to miss the brief, decisive nod, the closed judgment on what she observed. Hart had the feeling that she did this fairly often, come to see whether in her absence everyone was still hard at work. She started to turn her attention back to him when she noticed something that was not quite right. A stack of envelopes, addressed and ready to be mailed, was too tall and had begun to lean. Dividing it in half, she carefully set the two shorter stacks next to one another. Without a word, just a look, but a look that behind its apparent kindness suggested consequences for failure, she let the young woman sitting at the table know that even the smallest things had to be done right.
“It’s amazing how much time I’ve had to waste teaching people the obvious,” she remarked as she took Hart by the arm. She looked back over her shoulder and flashed a smile of encouragement at the young woman she had just corrected. “Everything is important,” she explained to Hart. “That’s what no one seems to understand: everything. Now, let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”
She led him through the living room, past the marble pillar where he had stood talking to Austin Pearce, the marble pillar that curiously had reminded him of her, across the hallway toward a door that, as he now realized, was the entrance to the elevator that went to the private suite of rooms directly overhead.
“Scotch all right?” she asked, as she walked over to the mahogany shelves crowded with books seldom opened and never read.
Handing Hart a glass, she took a drink, seemed to enjoy it, and took another. She invited Hart to sit down, but she continued to stand next to the desk and the photographs of what had been her private life. There was an odd, pensive expression on her face as if she were in some doubt about how to begin.
“You said it was important,” Hart reminded her. “You said you had to see me right away.”
It was almost indistinguishable, the way the muscles around her jaw tightened, and then swallowed without taking a drink. She seemed to have to force herself to look right at him and not to look away.
“What have you found out?” she asked finally.
Hart had the feeling that she did not really want to know, that for some reason she was almost afraid of the answer. But then why, suddenly, had she wanted to see him, insisted that it had to be right now, tonight? Or did that explain it: the fear that had been building up inside her had become intolerable and she could not wait to hear what she was not sure she wanted to learn? Or was it something else, something that Hart had not quite been able to put his finger on, but that was palpable, real, somewhere below the surface that he had not yet been able to penetrate?
“Have you found out anything—what we talked about before?” she repeated when he did not answer.
Hart sat on the edge of the chair, trying to read the meaning in her nervous eyes. His relentless gaze seemed to make her uncomfortable. She took another drink and then, biting her lip, stared down at the floor. A moment later she looked up.
“You have, haven’t you?—learned something, I mean.”
“What can you tell me about The Four Sisters?”
She seemed puzzled, then annoyed.
“The Four…? What does that have to do with—?”
“The Four Sisters, the investment firm your husband was taking money from; the firm that was helping foreign interests buy control of certain American companies; the firm that was using government money—our government’s money—to finance a war we didn’t know anything about. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t know anything about it, that you never heard of The Four Sisters, that you never met Jean de la Valette, that—”
“Of course I’ve met Jean de la Valette! He’s a very prominent man in financial circles. And the—what is it again?—The Four Sisters. Yes, that’s the name of the firm he runs. But what about it? Those other things you said—I wouldn’t know anything about what he does with his money. And as for Robert taking money from…. That’s a fairly serious accusation. Are you suggesting he was being paid to do something, that he was taking bribes?” Her eyes became distant, remote. “What proof do you have of that?”
“It’s what Quentin Burdick was working on, what he was scheduled to see the president about the morning after the night the president was killed.”
Hillary Constable walked across to the window and stared into the enveloping night. When she spoke her voice was dry, flat, the rich emotion gone.
“You talked to Burdick?”
“Yes.”
“And he told you that?” she asked, her gaze still fixed on the black, starless sky.
“He had been trying to get an interview for months. When the president found out that he knew about The Four Sisters, he called Burdick and set up the appointment himself.”
“And cancelled everything else he had that week,” said Hillary Constable as if she were reminding herself of what had happened, the sequence of events that starting with this had led to his death.
She turned and faced Hart, but did not move away from the window. She had reacquired something of her old composure. The slight smile was there again, as well as the look of self-assurance in her eyes.
“Burdick thought something was going on, that The Four Sisters was involved in something, and that Robert was involved as well?”
Hart tried to be diplomatic. “There were certain questions….” He gestured toward the rich interior of the room and by implication to all the other things that the two of them, the president and his wife, had acquired. “…about the sources of the president’s wealth.”
She shook her head, disparaging the kind of rumors that had always followed them, rumors she had so often been forced to deny; rumors, as she had never tired of repeating, that their political enemies tried to use against them because they could never win an argument, or an election, on the merits.
“We have a lot of friends,” she said, lifting her eyebrows just a shade to convey the deeper meaning. “People who understood that there were certain things we needed—yes, including this house—things we would have ample means to pay for as soon as we left office.”
It was curious how easy it was for her, even now, after her husband’s death, to step into the first-person plural when she talked about the presidency of Robert Constable. She had done it to what some thought an embarrassing degree when he was alive, an assumption of an influence that was unsettling to those who liked to think of their presidents as men of independent judgment, and an erroneous suggestion of equality to those who were in a position to know how often Robert Constable had been forced to yield to what she wanted.
“And we will—I mean pay back the loans that were made, the personal loans made
by friends of ours.”
Hart remembered now why he had not liked the Constables, why he had never trusted them: this sense of entitlement, this belief that whatever they wanted, they should have; this grating certainty that whatever they needed to do to get it, whatever means they had to employ, was justified because they knew what was best for everyone.
“And was one of those friends Jean de la Valette?”
Her eyes flashed with a moment’s heated anger; and then, as quick as that, they changed, became reasonable, willing to forgive an easily understood mistake.
“He might have been, had we asked. But no, the friends I’m talking about are people we had known for a long time, before we ever ran for the presidency. We understood what it would look like if….” She smiled in a way that suggested that what she had been about to say was not important, and then quickly changed the subject. “But you were telling me about Quentin Burdick and the story he was working on. He thought Robert was involved in something that would have gotten him in trouble?”
She asked this in what seemed to Hart a strangely neutral tone, as if she were doing it purely for the sake of form rather than out of any concern with whether it was true or not. He got up and stood next to her desk. Drumming his fingers on the edge of it, he glimpsed a picture hidden behind the others, a photograph of Hillary Constable, taken when she was years younger, splashing in the surf of some South Seas island. She was still a good-looking woman, but at the time that picture was taken she had been nothing short of gorgeous.
A thin, furtive smile, the smile of a woman who, understanding the source of the power she has over men, has come to despise them because of it, was there waiting when Hart looked back. It told him something that before that moment he had not really known for sure. He had been given a hint of it that first time they had been in this room, when she had suddenly and quite without warning confided that she had once been in love, not with the man she had married, but with a boy—some “gorgeous boy” was how she had put it—that she had known in college. That was what the look of disdain had meant: the knowledge when she was young that she could have any man she wanted had been, as it were, her fatal flaw. The power to attract, to make men submit, could never last, and she had been a fool to ever think it could.