by D. W. Buffa
“Some of that money came from foreign interests that weren’t supposed to be doing any business in the United States,” added Hart with a sharp, accusatory glance. “And in exchange, because of what you did, some of those same interests were able to get control of companies that have a direct effect on what Americans think.”
“It’s a global economy, Mr. Hart. The point is that Robert Constable had taken millions—forced us to give him that money—and so had several others.”
“Frank Morris, who changed his mind and got sent to prison because of it, and then, after he talked to Quentin Burdick and told him what he knew, got killed,” said Hart, growing more agitated by the minute.
“Yes, I’ve heard this,” said Jean Valette, who seemed almost amused. “That would have been something Constable would have arranged.”
“Constable was already dead!” Hart reminded him forcefully.
“Exactly.”
“Exactly?”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? Who other than Constable could have set the wheels in motion? Who else could have had the congressman charged with a crime, turned out of office, and sent to prison? Do you think he wouldn’t have given orders that if it became necessary, if Morris started talking about what he knew, he should be eliminated? But if Morris was killed to protect the secret, why wouldn’t Constable have been killed for the same reason? This gets us back to the same two people, doesn’t it?”
Carlyle slammed the ballpoint pen on the notebook and let out an expletive.
“Russell was one of those taking money?” His eyes brightened with a new intensity. “Morris, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; Russell, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Constable had to be able to use them both.” He looked sharply at Jean Valette. “You—The Four Sisters—would have needed the help of both, if—”
“If we had played an active part in this. But we only did what Constable said we should, what, as he explained, was the only reasonable way to obtain the changes that would be good for everyone.”
“Changes that made you a great deal of money!”
Jean Valette almost laughed.
“It depends, doesn’t it, on what you consider a great deal of money?”
Hart bent forward, following intently everything that was said, and, in the case of Jean Valette, the meaning of every look and every gesture. A picture was beginning to form, but there were still a few blank spaces that needed to be filled in.
“Russell was taking money, too. He shared the secret; he knew what Constable was doing. But he didn’t change his mind, like Frank Morris. He was not concerned with what any of this might do to the country. He became vice president, instead. Is that what you were trying to say, that it was not what Constable wanted; it’s what Russell decided was the price of his silence?”
With slow precision, Jean Valette lifted an eyebrow, his face fixed again in the attitude of someone playing at a game, or rather, watching one, measuring with an expert’s practiced judgment the feeble attempt of amateurs.
“Perhaps that is to give your new president too much credit. It may be that it was Constable’s idea instead, a way to ensure himself that Russell would not be tempted by a suddenly resurrected conscience into such an inconvenient confession.”
“And Hillary Constable—what motive…? Oh, I see,” said Carlyle, nodding his head. He picked up his pen and scrawled a few short, abbreviated sentences. “Quentin Burdick. He was onto the story. He had an appointment with…. She would not be able to run for anything, much less the presidency, if all of this came out.” With a puzzled glance, he turned quickly to Hart. “She asked you to look into it, see what you could find out about—?”
“The murder, and The Four Sisters,” said Inspector Dumont, who had been sitting, almost forgotten, for the last half hour. “That way she finds out what someone might find out about the secret they share, and because, by putting you, Mr. Hart, in direct connection with everything that has happened, the accusation against you acquires the credibility of proximity. Why else would you be so close to all of this, if it weren’t because you were trying to cover your own tracks? And then, whatever you may have uncovered about the murder and The Four Sisters, no one will believe it. Especially,” he added with a humorous glint in his eye, “if you were to wind up dead.”
Hart did not entirely agree.
“I don’t believe she’s behind this. I wouldn’t have believed it about Irwin Russell, either; but I didn’t know he was a crook, as big a crook as Constable. So they both had a motive, but he’s the one who ends up being president, at least for a while. She can still beat him, and the election is only a year away.” Suddenly, he remembered. He looked at Carlyle. “Neither one of them will be running for anything, will they?”
Carlyle folded his notebook.
“If those documents prove that Constable and Russell were taking money, tens of millions, then I imagine the only thing either one of them will be thinking about is how to stay out of prison. It does explain what just happened, though. Everyone thought what you thought, Senator: that Hillary Constable would run against Russell for the nomination.”
“It seems like I’ve been gone for years, even though it’s only been a couple of days. What happened? Did she announce that she was not going to run after all?”
“No. Russell announced that she had agreed to become vice president. He’s sending her nomination to the Hill this week. They’re going to run for reelection as a team.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
That evening at dinner, alone, just the two of them, at the table with eighteen vacant places, Hart expressed his gratitude for what Jean Valette had done.
“I was certain you were behind everything: that you had Constable killed to protect the secret of what The Four Sisters had done. I thought you had hired the assassin, and instead you’ve done everything you can to help prove my innocence.”
Jean Valette had changed again from a business suit to a radically different kind of costume. With Hart on his left, he sat at the head of the dining room table wearing a long flowing white silk robe over a loose-fitting white silk shirt. Had he worn a beard and had darker skin, had he seemed less ascetic, he might have passed for a wealthy Arab dining in the luxury of his palace.
“It’s perhaps not quite as simple as that,” he replied. A slight, thoughtful smile crossed his mouth. “It would not be true to say that I bear no responsibility for what happened, that I was not, in some way, involved in what Robert Constable did to others, and what others did to him.”
Shoving his plate aside, Hart pushed back from the table. With folded arms, he studied Jean Valette, wondering what he meant.
“I don’t mean that I knew that Constable would do what he did—have Congressman Morris locked up somewhere with orders to have him killed if he talked—or that I knew that someone would have him killed,” said Jean Valette who seemed to consider quite carefully what he wanted to say. “That isn’t the same thing as saying that I didn’t know it would happen, or, rather, that something like that might happen. Only a fool could have failed to foresee it. Once you let people like those become involved in something illicit, something they could not resist—and, if you will forgive me, how many Americans could resist tens of millions of dollars with the promise of tens of millions more, money that could never be traced back to its real source, money that did not require you to do anything except what you wanted to do anyway—As I say, only a fool could fail to see that evil only follows evil. Once someone commits a crime, he will do anything, even murder, to keep the truth from coming out.”
Hart had seen enough of Jean Valette to know something of his intellect and the subtlety of his judgment. Only a fool—he had used that word several times—would have failed to foresee what might happen next, and whatever else he might be, Jean Valette was certainly not that.
“So you knew—at the time you were first approached by Constable, when he told you in so many words that if your companies were going
to do business in the United States, you were going to have to pay millions for the privilege—you knew how this all might end? Then why didn’t you—?”
“Stop him from destroying himself?” laughed Jean Valette. “It would seem to me that he got precisely what he deserved. There is a parallel to this—more than one, I should imagine—but the one I’m thinking of I used in that speech of mine you heard the other day at Mont Saint-Michel.”
Hart thought a moment and then remembered.
“You don’t mean about what happened after the King of France, Philip the Fair, destroyed the Templars to get their money?”
“Very good, Mr. Hart! Your memory is quite excellent. Yes, exactly. Consider the questions it raises. Did God punish Pope Clement and King Philip the way Jacque de Molay, the Grand Master, swore He would? Or did the Grand Master simply foresee what the two of them, the pope and the king, had unleashed upon themselves, with their ruthless disregard for their own honor and all that they had sworn to protect: the Throne and the Church?” Jean Valette’s gaze deepened, became more profound. “Or did he, in those last few moments of an agonizing death, see the future with a clairvoyance that we, the living, cannot understand, see with utter certainty that someone listening, or someone who only later heard, what they would take as a promise from God, and, determined to be God’s own messenger, would arrange to hasten the deaths of two men who had been cursed? Or that it might be done by someone who did not care what God intended, but for whom the deaths of one or the other would advance their own worldly ambition? And, finally, what did he have to lose, the Grand Master, if nothing happened as he said it would, when there was always the chance that just enough would happen that someone would remember, and remembering, interpret things as if they had?”
“Those are interesting questions,” agreed Hart. “But how do they apply here?”
“Because however you choose to answer the questions, they all point to a lesson no one seems to understand: the one who seems the victim is often the one in charge. The Grand Master seemed to have lost everything: his Order, the Order’s money, and, finally, his life. But the future—that, as it turned out, he still controlled.”
“You mean, could still foresee.”
“Control the future, foresee the future: it all comes to the same thing, if you think it through.”
Jean Valette hesitated as if he was not sure whether he should stop there or try to explain. It was easier to let the matter rest, easier to let his visitor try to figure out what he meant. That is what he would have done with nearly anyone else. There was too much danger that he would be misunderstood: most men only learned what they thought they already knew.
“Rousseau, the French philosopher, the one who is famous for talking about the rights of man, foresaw the future. Thirty years before it happened in France, he wrote that the world was entering the age of revolution. The problem was that Rousseau was a genius while the people who read him were not. They distorted his teachings and through those distortions helped bring about the revolution he said would happen. The same thing happened later, at the end of the nineteenth century, with that other genius, Nietzsche. He foresaw a future of terrible wars and the need to rescue humanity from the leveling effects of mediocrity. He spoke of the need for a higher order of humanity; the Nazis read into that their own delusions of themselves as a master race and everyone else a slave.
“Rousseau, Nietzsche: both saw what was coming and became the text on which stupid, evil people could write their own interpretation. They bear some responsibility for what happened; they were too intelligent not to have seen the danger in how they would be misunderstood. And yet, on a deeper level, they offer to anyone willing to spend the time, willing to learn how to read carefully, that is to say slowly and with an open mind, the only real understanding of the world in which, for better or worse, we live. Rousseau wrote about the coming age of democratic revolution; Nietzsche about the reaction to that, that other kind of mass movement in which one man, the leader, imposes his will on everyone else. Now someone needs to write about what is going to happen in the next hundred years and what can be done about it. I tried.”
Hart, who had followed as closely as he could, was not slow to see the implications.
“Yes, you’re right, Mr. Hart,” said Jean Valette before Hart had opened his mouth. “If I tried—if I’m still trying—to write about the future, and if to foresee it is in some sense to control it, then…? Come with me. If we’re going to have a serious conversation, there is a better place to have it.”
They started down a long hallway that ran parallel to the one Hart had taken earlier to the Hall of the Four Sisters and his meeting with the American reporter. This one, like the other, was paved in polished white tile, the walls hung with rich tapestries and countless paintings by old masters. The chateau was ancient, but far from a crumbling wreck. A makeshift project of never finished restoration, it was to all outward appearances perfect in every detail, as good, or better than, that day it was finished, nearly a thousand years ago. More than once in the short time he had been here, Hart had found himself pretending, and pretending, for a few moments, believing, that he had gone back in time, perhaps not so far back as the beginning, but hundreds of years, when the old masters were the new masters and the French Revolution was still far off in the distant future. He had wondered, he wondered now, what it must have been like to have been born here, raised here, and lived here all his life, remote from other people and everything they believed. It might not be the whole explanation, but it was surely a part of what had made Jean Valette what he had become: an exile from the very world that through the power of the very thing he seemed to hold in contempt, money and an endless supply of it, he had come to influence, if not dominate. Passing a vaulted window, Hart glanced into the moonlit darkness and in the stillness of the night felt a little of the aching loneliness of someone who had himself become a stranger far from where he wanted to be.
“I need to leave tomorrow,” he said as they walked together toward an open set of doors.
“That’s not possible,” replied Jean Valette. He said this decisively, as if the matter were entirely up to him. Hart was stunned. He stopped and looked straight at him.
“Are you telling me that I’m a prisoner here?”
“Not to me, to necessity. Where would you go? What chance would you have?” he asked with an impatience which, when he realized how it must sound, changed into a look of sympathy.
“I can’t stay here forever,” protested Hart. “I have to do something to clear my name.”
“We’ve taken a major step in that direction,” Jean Valette assured him. “You just need to give it a few days. Carlyle will be back in New York tomorrow. He’ll write his story. With the proof I supplied, Russell will have to leave office and Hillary Constable’s political career will be over. But as to your other point,” he continued with a smile that seemed to carry a challenge, a dare he was fairly certain his guest would never take, “you could stay here forever, or as long as you like. I would enjoy the company: someone interested in serious things, someone with whom I could actually carry on a conversation without having to hide the meaning of everything I say. And of course you would not be alone. It would not be difficult to make arrangements to have your beautiful wife come to join you.” With an expansive gesture, he invited Hart to consider the possibility of life in the chateau. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’m not sure I’ve seen every part of it. The two of you can use however much of it you wish.”
Beneath the haughty exterior, the studied condescension of his manner, the attempt to make an extraordinary offer seem a matter of no importance, Hart thought he could detect a strange hope that he would take him up on it. It was a hope Jean Valette would never express. He had too much pride to admit he had any need he could not satisfy without the help of others.
“Carlyle’s story will help clear me, but if I don’t go back and find out who was behind the assassination—whether it
was Russell or Constable’s wife—a lot of people will still think that what they’re saying is true: that I murdered him because he was sleeping with my wife.”
“What does it matter what others think?” asked Jean Valette with a sharp turn of his head. “You know the truth. You’re not responsible for the ignorance of people who believe you capable of murder.” As he lifted his chin, his eyes became cold, distant, and defiant. “I learned contempt at an early age. It was a gift, if you will, from my father, when he played the part of a collaborator for the French resistance. I was with him, a young boy, one day in the street when there were no Germans around, no one the crowd had to be afraid of. These people, none of whom, you understand, had the courage to be in the resistance themselves, surrounded my father, pushed him, kicked him, spat in his face, called him a traitor, a coward, a rich bastard who had sold out his country for money. And the whole time they were doing that, trying to humiliate him, he was looking at me, his only son, only four years old, trying to tell me with his eyes that none of it was true, that he was not what that mob said he was. But I was a boy, a child, and all I heard were the words, and the look of hatred in their eyes. Later, my father told me that it was not true, that he was not any of the things they had called him. But of course he could not tell me the real truth, that he was in the resistance, and so I thought—and you can see how awful this is to admit—that my father had lied to me, that he was the collaborator all those mindless people thought and said he was. So, no, Mr. Hart, I’m not much persuaded by what the crowd might think, and, frankly, after what you have now learned about how easily the crowd can turn, neither should you.”