Grand Master (2 page)

Bobby Hart wondered how he would have felt
if, like so many of the others in the front rows of the church, he
had found his own ambitions defeated, his own dreams denied, by
someone who, it was said, never remembered the name of anyone he
had either hurt or could no longer use. He had barely known
Constable. Most of what he knew about him, beyond the things
everyone knew from reading the papers, he had learned from some of
the other members of the Senate who had their own stories to tell,
none of them very flattering, and always accompanied by a request
that what they were about to tell him be kept in confidence. For
all the President’s talk of hope and optimism, the main emotion he
inspired among those who knew him best was fear.

The memorial service droned on. Crowded to
capacity, with no room to move, the National Cathedral felt almost
as breathlessly humid as the August heat outside. Hart tried to
listen as one speaker followed another, but the eulogies seemed
forced and artificial, what people are supposed to say, rather than
what they really think or feel. He was there because, as a member
of the senate, he was expected to be. It was an obligation that
went with the office, something you did to keep alive the long
traditions of the place.

Hart’s gaze drifted away from the secretary
of state, recounting the foreign achievements of the Constable
administration, and began to run along the line of dignitaries in
the first few rows. It stopped at the sight of Madelaine Constable,
the President’s widow, sitting in the first row on the aisle. Her
face was resigned, respectful, but without any trace of grief.
Perhaps it had always been a marriage of convenience; but, he
reminded himself, it had lasted nearly thirty years. She must have
known what he was like, this need that bordered on compulsion for
the company of other women. Or did she? Perhaps she had known at
the beginning, one of the first times he was unfaithful, and then,
because he would have been forced to admit what he could not deny,
taken that confession as a promise that he would never stray
again.

As Hart looked at her, still attractive with
her light blue eyes that when she looked at you seemed to tease you
with some secret knowledge, and the ash blonde hair that was always
cut so perfectly, he changed his mind; or rather, for the first
time glimpsed a different possibility: that she knew, or could have
known, everything, and not much cared. Even wearing widow’s weeds,
Madelaine Constable had the look of someone very much her own
person. Whatever her husband might have been doing with other
women, she could just as easily, and with no doubt greater taste
and discretion, have been doing with other men.

The service finally came to an end. The
President’s widow led the procession back up the aisle, stopping
every few steps to touch the hand of someone and thank them for all
they had done. Some thought she was quite brave, the way she seemed
to be more concerned with the feelings of others than with her own;
others had a different impression.

“Still beautiful, and now single and quite
rich,” a familiar voice whispered just behind him. Hart turned
around to find his only close friend in the Senate, Charles Ryan of
Michigan, raising his eyes in a way that suggested, more than
irreverence, the knowledge of things best left unsaid. “You think
it’s just accidental?”

Ryan had reddish brown hair and a slightly
freckled face, eyes full of laughter and the quickest smile Hart
had ever seen. Always in a state of motion, never able quite to sit
still, when Ryan took a chair it seemed it was just to have a place
from which to suddenly jump up. Caught up in an argument, which
sometimes seemed the main preoccupation of his life, he spoke in
half-sentences, eager to start the next one before he had finished
the last; and if he did that to sentences, a paragraph was even
worse, collapsing in a rush of incoherence like the drunken revel
of a half-mad poet. But now, moving in solemn order in the middle
of the crowd, he spoke slowly, quietly, and to the point.

Hart did not respond. There were too many
people around, too great a chance to be overheard. With a faint
half-smile, he nodded, and because they knew each other so well, it
was enough to tell Ryan that they would talk outside.

As many as had gathered inside the cathedral,
a hundred times that number were standing behind the barricades
erected on the street, come to pay a final tribute to a president
some of them had admired and to see the famous faces of those who
had been invited to his funeral. The air was thick, heavy with the
humid scent of summer smoke, every movement made uncomfortable, an
effort that required strength; things seemed to pass in slow
motion, the world become a crawl. Hart blinked into the dusty,
reddish sun and felt a sudden disability, a sense of slow
paralysis, a loss of all ambition beyond a cool dark place to sit
and something cold to press against his lips.

“Remind me to die in winter,” he remarked. He
stood next to the entrance of the cathedral, as the crowd surged
past.

Ryan slipped on dark glasses and loosened his
solid gray tie. A slight, caustic grin curled around the edges of
his mouth. “What difference the season, if you die in the bought
luxury of a Manhattan hotel in the arms of a high-priced
hooker?”

“I’ve heard the rumors,” replied Hart,
watching the pall bearers load the casket into the waiting hearse.
Madelaine Constable stood just off to the side, remote,
unapproachable, her black gloved hands held neatly in front, her
eyes distant and impenetrable. She had not yet shed a tear, neither
inside the cathedral, nor here outside, as if she knew better than
to overplay her part. It kept the mystery alive, the mystery born
of the suspicion that she had never really loved him; or rather,
that she had, but had understood that with a man like that she
could never count on anything.

“But they’re just rumors,” continued Hart,
looking back at Ryan. “Everyone thinks he slept with other woman
all the time; no one wants to believe he could have died
alone.”

“He has Air Force One at his disposal, but he
spends the night in a Manhattan hotel. And he did it all the time.
Why do you think he did that, because he thought he could get a
better night’s sleep there than upstairs in the White House?”

“You’ve become such a cynic.”

Ryan tilted his head to the side, a sense of
doubt in his eyes, wondering, as it seemed, if it were true. “I
didn’t want to be; and I wasn’t, when I first came to Washington,
but then….” Ryan’s voice trailed off, and Hart, who knew exactly
what he meant, patted him on the shoulder and they both laughed
softly at how much in each of them had changed.

“Did Quentin Burdick get hold of you?” asked
Ryan as they started walking away from the cathedral and the
crowd.

“No. Why?”

“He’s working on a story, some investigative
piece. He told me he had an appointment with Constable, an
interview he had finally gotten him to agree to, but it never took
place. He was supposed to meet him at the hotel, the one where
Constable died, the next morning.”

CHAPTER THREE

“What’s Burdick working on?” asked Hart after
he put down the cold beer. His eyes moved from one side of the
dark, dingy bar to the other. It was a hole in the wall, a place
where this time of day, the middle of the afternoon, you half
expected to see someone bent over, his head on his arms, snoring in
his inebriated sleep. Hart ran his finger around the frosted edge
of the glass. A thin smile edged its way across his mouth. “And
what the hell are we doing here, anyway? Why did you want to come
to a place like this?”

A smile that mirrored Hart’s own broke across
Ryan’s weathered, freckled face. He leaned against the back of the
torn leather booth and tapped two fingers on a scratched up wooden
table that, from the look of it, had not been cleaned in years.
“Look around. What do you see?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“What else do you want to know?”

Hart rolled his eyes with a weary, almost
helpless, disregard at the various obscurities with which Ryan
answered questions. He took another drink. The cold beer felt good
against his throat.

“You don’t see anything,” Ryan went on,
undeterred. “Nobody you know; nobody who knows you. Any more
questions?”

Now Hart understood. No one who did business
with the Senate, no one who worked on the Hill, certainly no
reporter looking for a lead on tomorrow’s story, would come looking
in a place like this.

“But why did you want to come to a bar, even
one as elegant as this?”

“To get drunk - why do you think?” Ryan threw
down what was left in his glass, caught the eye of the bartender
and signaled for another. “We’re both Irish,” he explained, his
eyes alive with the triumph of a well-told tale. “That’s what we’re
supposed to do after we’ve gone and buried someone: get drunk as
hell and tell all the lies we can about what a great good friend he
was and how much we’re going to miss him.” Ryan hesitated, shook
his head in seeming frustration, and looked at Hart with an impish
grin. “I forget, you’re from California where everyone is all mixed
up about what they are. You’ve probably never been to an Irish
wake, have you? Let me explain. If you were really Irish, and
didn’t just have an Irish name, you’d be depressed at all sorts of
things. You wouldn’t need anyone to tell you that every so often -
at least once a week or so - you needed to get drunk enough to
start feeling better about all the unhappiness in the world.”

The bartender, stooped and unshaven, with
thin gray hair and glasses thick as bottles, shuffled over with
Ryan’s second beer. He mumbled something that sounded like a far
off greeting, but which only someone who had known him for half a
lifetime could possibly have deciphered. Ryan looked at him as if
he had understood

“Thank you, I will,” he replied.

The old man’s rheumy eyes brightened and for
a moment seemed to clear. He nodded, mumbled something else to
himself, and then, sure that he was right, nodded once again,
turned toward the bar, and slowly moved away. Hart and Ryan
exchanged a glance, reminded of the frailty of things and how
difficult some times were the lives of others.

“Quentin Burdick,” said Hart, drawing Ryan
back to what they had started to talk about.

“It’s something about the money.”

“Constable’s money? How he got it? Is that
what he’s working on? You said he was supposed to meet with
Constable the next day, but Constable died the night before.”

Ryan shrugged. He was puzzled. Burdick, as he
proceeded to explain, had come to see him, asked him a few
questions, but had not really told him more than that he was
working on something that involved money and the President. “He
asked me if I knew anything about something called ‘The Four
Sisters.’”

“‘The Four Sisters’? What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I asked Burdick what it meant.
He just said it was something he was looking into and that the more
he got into it, the more complicated it seemed to be. One thing he
said got my attention. The amount of money involved - whatever that
means - was ‘amazing.’ That was his word, ‘amazing.’”

Bending forward on his elbows, Hart stared
into his glass. The long service, with no room to move around, the
oppressive summer heat, and now this dark, lonely place, had left
him feeling tired and even a little depressed. “So now we’re going
to learn that the ‘great man’ we just buried was not just a liar
but a thief as well? I guess there isn’t really a difference, is
there? Don’t you steal something every time you tell a lie, steal
some part of the truth from those who deserve to know it?”

“Careful, don’t get that philosophic,” said
Ryan, his eyes eager and alive. “With that definition, you’ll make
thieves and liars of us all. But you’re right,” he added quickly,
“I never knew anyone who could lie right to your face and do it
with such complete conviction. There was a sense in which, I
suppose, it was not really lying at all. He always lied first to
himself. He could convince himself of anything, once he decided
there was something he had to have, whether it was the presidency
or another woman. He was a hustler, someone who knows in an instant
what you want to hear. His whole identity was in the eyes of
others. Women loved him. They could not help themselves. They knew
he must have said the same thing he was saying to them a thousand
times before; the difference was - and this is the measure of what
a great fraud he really was - that this time he meant it, this time
he was saying what he really felt.” Shaking his head in reluctant
admiration, Charlie Ryan picked up his glass and took a long, slow
drink.

“They weren’t alone, those women: the guy was
such an engaging fraud, I sort of liked him, too. But he wasn’t
worth a damn. He wasn’t serious about anything; he didn’t believe
in anything, except his own importance. I’m not even sure about
that. He had to be the center of attention; he could not stand to
be upstaged. There wasn’t any central core. He was like a lot of
people I meet these days. His idea of hell was to be somewhere all
alone.”

A broad grin cut sharply across Ryan’s face.
He took another long drink, shoved the glass aside, and laughed at
himself. “I can’t understand why they didn’t ask me to deliver one
of the eulogies.” He paused, scratched the side of his face and,
growing serious again, furrowed his brow. “There’s more to this -
Burdick’s story - than the money. You know Burdick better than I
do; you know what he covers.”

Bobby Hart had known Quentin Burdick from his
first term in Congress when he felt honored, and a little
surprised, when the famous New York Times reporter asked if he
might talk to him. Burdick knew a generation worth of foreign
leaders and every president since Richard Nixon.