Grand Master (11 page)

CHAPTER NINE

Stepping out of the cab, Hart looked up at
the skyscraper towering high above him at the corner of the park.
It seemed to him out of place, a strange mismatch in which money,
New York money, had won; a losing contest in which taste, and the
desire to preserve the old values, had been all but forgotten in
the thoughtless desire to find something bigger, and more opulent,
to build. The property that bordered Central Park, the gray stone
buildings that ran along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, most
of them built before the war, had always been the most sought after
real estate in the city, and among the most expensive in the world.
It had all seemed to fit, to be as much a part of the park as the
Metropolitan Museum of Art or the zoo, a picture postcard of life,
rich and elegant, in the middle of Manhattan. But money formed a
democracy of its own, and the majority, those who had the most of
it, wanted a view. And so now, a block from the Plaza and the St.
Regis, you could buy an apartment, or rent space for an office, in
the kind of glass and steel high rise monstrosity that critics, and
not just critics, thought better suited for Singapore or some oil
rich place in the desert.

An unrepentant liberal, Hart was, when it
came to places he liked, something of a traditionalist. He often
explained to his California friends that the dismal stifling summer
weather he had to endure in Washington was a minor price to pay to
live and work in a city full of history. His favorite fact, which
he thought had saved Washington from going the way of every other
American city, was the law passed shortly after the Capitol had
been built banning forever the construction of any other building
that tall. No one was to be allowed to look down on the Capitol of
the United States. In New York, the main thing seemed to be to have
enough money to look down on everyone else.

That was a judgment, but it was also an
abstraction; a generalization that had nothing to do with
individuals, except as it explained, or helped to explain,
something about the conditions under which they lived, the set of
assumptions, the ingrained and largely unconscious way they
expected everyone to behave. Austin Pearce had made the move to an
office on the highest floor allowed for commercial use as a matter
of convenience, and because, as he explained when Hart commented on
the view, they had been in the other place for years.

“This was new, and available, and they said
we needed more space. I’m not sure we didn’t have too much before,
but that’s another story.” He saw the look of confusion on Hart’s
face. “Bigger isn’t always better; better is knowing what your
limits are.”

He looked at Hart as if this last remark
carried a lesson, the importance of which he was sure both of them
understood. He looked away, and then immediately looked back,
searching Hart’s eyes again. “I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly
embarrassed. “Please, sit down.”

He gestured toward the chair in front of an
antique desk, purchased at a Sotheby’s auction some years earlier.
The desk was not just his prize possession; he had, as he was quick
to admit, an almost sensual attachment to it.

“Touch it,” he said, smiling with his eyes
like a parent with a child. “Touch it; it’s all right. Feel it, how
cold it is. Now touch it just a little longer. Feel the warmth? The
first owner, so the story goes, the woman it was made for, was an
Italian princess who had several husbands and many lovers, some of
whom she seduced into helping her get rid of a husband she no
longer wanted or needed. Maybe that’s what explains it, the way the
wood feels when you touch it long enough: the warm blood of a
cold-hearted woman. After I left the administration, I took to
calling it ‘Madelaine.’”

There was an impish quality to Austin
Pearce’s patient smile that Hart found irresistible. “You like my
story - good! I’ll tell you something even stranger: It’s true. I
did exactly that, started talking to the desk, calling it all sorts
of names, when I first got back from those four years in
Washington.” He threw up his small, smooth hands in the nostalgia
of a past frustration. “There was no one else I could talk to, no
one I could tell the truth! No one would have believed me if I
had.”

“The truth about what?” asked Hart, more
curious now than ever about why Austin Pearce had been so eager to
see him.

“About what the President did, the
arrangement he entered into with that organization I told you
about, The Four Sisters. That was the reason I left at the end of
his first term. I would have stayed; I thought I could do some good
at Treasury, help put the country’s finances on a better footing,
bring a little sanity to the way we raise and spend the public’s
money. Then I discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars, more
than a billion by the time I uncovered what was going on, had been
moved through various accounts, money appropriated for various
foreign aid projects, into a bank in Europe and from there into the
hands of certain clandestine organizations in the Middle East. The
bank was the French investment firm, The Four Sisters. The money
was being used to finance a war, a secret war against some of the
governments in the region we did not like. This wasn’t using the
CIA to work behind the scenes to try to take down a government;
this wasn’t giving covert assistance to some group within a country
trying to overthrow an oppressive regime. This was something
different. I did not understand it at first, though I thought I
did.”

“You thought you did?” asked Hart, following
every word.

“Yes; at first I thought - I assumed - that
the bank was acting alone, that someone there was diverting the
funds for some purpose of his own. I thought the bank might be
working with someone in the French government, and that, with or
without the knowledge of the government, they were trying to
exercise some influence in the Middle East. The French are like
that, always willing to cooperate, but jealous of our power. I have
friends there, some of whom I trust. I made inquiries, but no one
knew a thing. I couldn’t do anything more on my own, so I went to
the President and told him what I had discovered.”

The intensity seemed to fade from Pearce’s
expression as he remembered back to what had happened. The angry
bitterness he had felt at the time was now, when he began to talk
about it, more a sense of regret, as of a possibility, a chance to
achieve something permanent and important, lost forever.

“We were in the oval office, just the two of
us. It was eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, two weeks after he
had won election to a second term. He was always at extremes, and
that morning proved it. When I walked in, he looked like he owned
the world. He greeted me like I was his best friend and - you know
the way he had - for a few moments I felt like I really was. He
started telling me about all the great things, now that he had a
second term, we were going to do; things he could not do in his
first term, when he still had to worry about an election. Then he
noticed that I did not seem to share in his excitement, that I had
something on my mind. He never liked it when someone did that, held
back, even if just a little, from his own enthusiasm. He asked me
what the trouble was.”

Pearce had a look that seemed to accuse
himself of negligence, of failing to grasp what he should have
understood, that what he had uncovered was too big, too important,
for the President not to have known.

“When I told him what I’d found out, that all
the money that was supposed to go for one purpose was being used
for another, and that this French investment firm was responsible,
he went into a rage. And I mean that literally. He jumped out of
his chair, his face all red, started pounded on the desk, swearing
at me, telling me I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was going
to jeopardize everything he had been trying to do. I didn’t know
what he was talking about. I just sat there, my mouth open,
dumbfounded by what was going on. He was so angry, for a moment I
thought he might hit me. He told me it was none of my business,
that I was supposed to run things at Treasury, that this was State
Department business, that how was he supposed to trust me if I was
not interested in doing my own job. That’s when he did it,” said
Pearce, shaking his head over what had happened next. “He became
quite calm again. The anger was still there - I could see it in his
eyes - but now it was something more permanent, something, I swear,
close to hatred, the kind that doesn’t go away. I had come to save
his presidency; I left with instructions to submit my
resignation.”

Hart could not believe it. Austin Pearce had
been the one member of Constable’s cabinet that almost everyone
thought irreplaceable, a judgment that nothing done by his
successor at Treasury had changed.

“He fired you? But, wait - He told you that
what you discovered about this missing money was something the
State Department knew about, that it was something they were
doing?”

A look of cold disdain crossed Pearce’s face.
“He lied. No one over at State knew anything about it.”

“You checked?”

“I made a few discreet inquiries.”

Hart remembered what Pearce had said to him
at the reception after Constable’s funeral. “What about The Four
Sisters? What about your friend…?”

“Jean de la Valette? It would be going a
little too far to say we were friends. ‘Distant colleagues’ might
be more accurate. We inhabit different parts of the same world: the
international finance system, such as it is.” There was a long,
thoughtful silence. Furrowing his brow, Pearce rubbed his hands
together, as he struggled to find the best way to explain what he
was still not quite sure he understood.

“We’ve spent time together, attended some of
the same conferences; we’ve even had dinner. But know him, the way
I think I know you - have a sense of what he might do in a given
circumstance, whether, when the chips were down, he was someone I
could trust? No; though I suppose I could say that - we both could
say that, couldn’t we? - about a lot of people we’ve met; maybe
even most of the people we know.” He looked at Hart, not with a
cynic’s grin, but with the gentle smile of a man who had learned to
appreciate the few people he knew were his friends.

“It’s impossible to get more than a fleeting
impression of who he really is,” continued Pearce. “He has a
different frame of reference, a different sense of proportion about
things. We think in terms of how what happened in the last election
changed things, and how different things might be after the next
one. He thinks in terms of the way things were changed by the
French Revolution. I said something about this to you before, how
that family of his goes back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years,
and the kind of perspective that must give.”

Hart studied him closely, searching his eyes
for a deeper sense of what he meant. “But despite that, you liked
him? You said he was charming, urbane; you said he was one of the
most fascinating men you had met.”

Pearce tilted his head, an amused, slightly
puzzled expression in his eyes. “Liked him? Yes, I suppose,” he
replied, though he sounded none too sure about it. “Fascinated by
him? - Who wouldn’t be fascinated by someone with a history like
that?” Pearce made an idle, backward movement with his hand. It was
a gesture meant to underscore the obvious meaning of his
surroundings, the level of success that most other men would have
given anything to have achieved.

“I do this for a living: watch and try to
calibrate the movements of the financial markets, and I’ve become
reasonably good at it, but I don’t find it particularly
interesting. What I really love is history, European history
mainly, but almost anything about the past. So it isn’t too
difficult to understand that I would find Jean de la Valette
infinitely more fascinating that most of the Wall Street types who
can’t remember what happened yesterday, much less last year. So,
yes, I was fascinated. It was only later, when I discovered what
The Four Sisters was doing, that I began to realize it was
precisely because of the way Jean de la Valette thought about the
past that he was dangerous.”

“But what is the connection?” asked Hart,
growing more urgent. “The money you talked about, the money that
was routed through his bank - You said it was used to finance a
private war. What is the reason Jean de la Valette would be willing
to do something like that?”

Pearce’s thinning eyebrows shot up. He
reached for a pencil and tapped it hard against his favored antique
desk. His small mouth quivered, his eyes danced with suppressed
excitement. He began to laugh, but immediately stopped. “It’s the
sort of thing that would get you committed if you told too many
people.”

Whatever he was about to tell him, Hart was
certain that, far from crazy, it was probably the only thing that
made sense. Austin Pearce was just about the most rational man he
knew.

“Jean de la Valette wants to lead a new
Crusade, a war of Christianity against Islam.”

“I’ll believe that if you say it’s true,”
replied Hart. “But why would he think that was even a possibility?
It sounds like he’s the one who should be committed.”

“But what after all is insanity but intense
belief?” asked Pearce with a strange, knowing look in his eyes.
“It’s what the present usually says about the past. It’s what we
say today about the Crusades, the ones that started more than nine
hundred years ago, the ones that made the name Jean de la Valette
not just famous, but for a long time the glory of Christendom and
of France.

“You’ve heard of the Knights Templar? Ever
since Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the Templars have been used
to pack the pages of novelists with tales of secret societies that
have kept alive down through the centuries something no one else
was supposed to know. It’s all nonsense of course. The Templars
weren’t formed to keep secret some esoteric knowledge; they were
formed to be what someone called ‘the sword arm of the Church in
defense of the Holy Land.’ What we forget, what most of us still
don’t know, is that the Crusades were at first a great success.
Jerusalem was conquered, recaptured from the Muslims who had taken
it from the Christians.