Grand Master (27 page)

He felt safer now, free from his own identity
and less noticeable in a crowd. It was nearly six, and with gray
skies pregnant with a summer storm, almost as dark as winter. The
cars on the streets had their lights on and all the shop windows
were lit up, but Hart wore dark glasses and stayed off the main
avenues. He was not sure what time he should go to Aaron Wolfe’s
apartment. If he got there too early, before Wolfe came home,
someone might notice him, someone might recognize him, someone
might call the police. He decided to wait until eight. Wolfe was
sure to be there by then, and if by chance he was not, it would be
dark enough, whatever the weather decided to do, to stay out of
sight.

He fell into a small café, took a table in
the back corner and picked at dinner. He had a glass of wine, and
then had another, and he tried not to think too much about what had
happened or what he was going to do. To get his mind off the
immediate danger, he calculated the time difference between Paris
and California, and then what time, his time, Paris time, Helen
would make the long drive from the airport in Los Angeles to their
home in the hills of Santa Barbara.

Even before the second glass of wine, he had
begun to feel tired, very tired, as tired as he thought he had ever
felt; weary with fear and frustration, fear of what he could not
control and frustration over what he did not yet know: who was
doing this and why they had decided that the best way to protect
themselves was to make him a scapegoat, a fall-guy, an assassin.
His eyes felt heavy, his legs thick with fatigue. The only sleep he
had gotten was the two fretful hours on the plane, a flight that
now seemed like it must have happened weeks ago.

He started to order another glass, but
glanced at his watch and thought better of it. He could not afford
to be tired: there was too much to do to think about sleep. He
caught a taxi outside the café and gave the driver Aaron Wolfe’s
address in the 18th Arrondisement.

The head of the American Embassy’s political
section lived three blocks from the Seine at the end of a short
narrow street in a four story building that had been there from
sometime in the 18th century. Wolfe had one of the two apartments
on the third floor. Hart pushed the button next to Wolfe’s name.
When there was no response, he stepped back onto the sidewalk and
looked up. The lights from Wolfe’s apartment were on. Hart tried
the buzzer again, but again there was no answer. A woman carrying a
bag of groceries was just coming home.

“Mr. Wolfe?” asked Hart. “Do you know if he’s
home? He’s expecting me, and I saw the lights on from the
street.”

She was a middle-aged woman who walked slowly
and with a limp. A single bag of groceries seemed the limit of her
strength. But she had a pleasant face and kind, if rather tired,
eyes. She started to open the door with her key and found that it
was not locked. She turned to Hart as if she was sure he would be
as surprised at this as was she. “It’s always locked, you know.
Well, perhaps he left it that way so that you -”

There was a sudden violent noise: a burst of
gunfire, two shots - or was it three? - in rapid succession, and
behind it, shouted cries for help. Hart dashed past the woman who
was staring helpless at the landing overhead, and took the stairs
three at a time. “Call the police!” he screamed down at the
woman.

The door to Wolfe’s apartment was wide open.
Wolfe was lying on the living room floor, his eyes gaping in now
dead wonder at what had happened, a hole in his forehead where the
bullet that killed him had flown to his brain. Someone, a man Hart
did not recognize but who looked like one of the men who had been
chasing him earlier, was lying face down on the floor, his arms
spread apart, a gun - the gun he must have used to murder Aaron
Wolfe - lying just beyond his outstretched hand. Hart picked it up,
and then he heard a voice, a voice he did not want to hear. It was
Austin Pearce, sunk back in an overstuffed chair, his shirt front
oozing blood.

With the last strength he had, Pearce raised
his hand and pointed. On his knees next to the body of the unknown
intruder, Hart wheeled around and, without even a moment’s
hesitation, fired the gun he had just picked up. Crying out in
pain, a second assailant, a second killer, dropped his gun and
clutched his right shoulder. He started to go for the gun again,
but he knew, he could see it in Hart’s eyes, that he would be dead
if he tried. But he also seemed to know that he could still get
away, that Hart would not shoot him in the back. He turned on his
heel and vanished down the hallway.

“Austin,” said Hart, rushing over to him;
“what happened?”

“We had only just got here. There was a knock
on the door. Wolfe kept a gun. He managed to shoot the first one,
but the other one was right behind him, and….”

“Save your strength. An ambulance will be
here any minute.”

Pearce grasped Hart’s hand and held it tight.
“In my pocket - an address…a time….”

His grip grew tighter, and then, slowly,
Austin Pearce let go.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Hart could hear the wail of sirens in the
distance. The French police were on their way. The man he had shot
- the one he had let get away - was probably already calling for
help, telling his confederates that he had just missed killing
Bobby Hart and that if they hurried they could still find him
there. Perhaps the wounded assassin did not have to call them;
perhaps they were waiting just outside in a car. Hart could not
stay there another second.

He was halfway to the door when he
remembered. With his last breathe, Austin Pearce had told him that
there was something in his pocket: a time, a place, something Hart
had to know. He bent down and began to search, the second time in
two days that he had to look in the lifeless eyes of someone he had
liked and respected, both of them, Quentin Burdick, and now Austin
Pearce, willing to risk everything to get at the truth. And both of
them murdered because they knew him, knew what he had been asked to
do, knew enough about what had happened to cut to pieces any claim
that Hart had been part of a conspiracy to murder Robert
Constable.

Hart thought he was going to be sick,
watching, and not wanting to watch, the glass-eyed stare that each
time he forced himself to look away seemed to force him back, to
make him look again at death’s final work. There was nothing in the
outside pockets; he slipped his hand inside the blood soaked
jacket, and there, next to Pearce’s black leather wallet, he found
a single half-sheet of blue paper, folded twice. Despite the blood,
it was still possible to make out the words.

‘Tomorrow. Mont Saint Michel. Four p.m. Jean
Valette.’

What did it mean? Had Austin Pearce arranged
a meeting, made an appointment, with the head of The Four Sisters,
the man behind everything that had happened? The police sirens were
louder, closer, almost here. Hart stuffed the half sheet of paper
in his pocket and stood up. Then he saw it, on the table next to
the chair where he had placed it, the gun, the gun he had picked up
from just beyond the outstretched hand of the first assailant, the
gun that, with Austin Pearce’s warning, had saved his life. He
hesitated, not sure whether to leave it behind, or take it with
him. He looked one last time at Austin Pearce, laying dead in the
chair, and then grabbed the gun and headed down the stairs.

The woman he had left at the front entrance,
just inside, the woman he had told to call the police, was cowering
in fear. The grocery bag lay on the floor, a mess of broken eggs
and coffee. She looked up at Hart with a sigh of relief. “Mon Dieu!
You’re safe! When I heard the other shot, when I heard someone
running away, down the hallway and out the back, I thought you must
be killed.” She opened her hands as if to pray forgiveness. “I
should have come up, seen if you needed help; but I couldn’t - I
couldn’t make myself move. I called the police, but after that, I
couldn’t….”

Hart touched her shoulder and told her that
he understood. The sirens were deafening, the street outside
echoing with their noise. He had no time left. “You did fine,
better than I could have done. Tell the police the truth: that I
was here, with you, when we heard the shots. My name is Robert
Hart,” he said. “Robert Hart. Can you remember that? Tell the
police that the men who came here were looking for me, that they
came to kill me; they did not come to take me back.”

Hart was on the street, walking fast. The
police raced past him. They did not see him, or if they did, paid
no attention. He thought about turning back, going to the French
police, to show them that instead of a fugitive trying to get away,
he was the victim of a conspiracy meant to have him murdered. But
they might simply hand him over to the Americans, the same ones who
wanted him dead. He hurried on, wondering how he was going to get
to Mont Saint Michel and what he was going to do when he got there
and was finally face to face with the infamous Jean Valette.

He had been there, to Mont Saint Michel, on
the border of Normandy and Brittany, once, years ago, when he and
Helen had spent a long, blissful month traveling through France. It
was one of the best times he had ever had, moving from one place to
the next, never in a hurry because there was never any place they
had to go. They had wandered through and around Notre Dame, taking
note of what it looked like inside, what it must have felt like to
a Christian of the Middle Ages, listening to Mass, and then, after
Mass, what it looked like from the different vantage points from
which it could be seen on a bright, sunlit afternoon. From Paris,
they had gone, not immediately, and not by the direct routes
followed by tourists grimly determined to see as many things as
possible, to the cathedral at Chartres; and, as if they knew that
the best would be last, only after that to Mont Saint Michel and
the cathedral that had stood for a thousand years, as close to
heaven as anything human hands could build.

They had rented a car and driven all over
France. If he tried to rent one, he would have to provide
identification, information that would almost surely be traced. His
own government was after him, and the French had no reason not to
help. He took a taxi to the train station and tried to buy a
ticket. The clerk only shrugged. “There is no train to Mont Saint
Michel.”

“No train tonight, or no train?’ asked Hart
patiently.

“No train, tonight, tomorrow, anytime,
monsieur. Perhaps you would prefer to go somewhere else?” he asked
with a look of bored indifference.

“All right,” agreed Hart without hesitation.
“I’ll go there instead.”

With a balding head and a small, hawk-like
nose, the clerk’s round face seemed in danger of slipping past his
chin. Despite himself, he was starting to like the manner of this
American who seemed inclined to let the conversation, such as it
was, go where it would. “I’m not sure how much that particular
ticket would cost, monsieur. As you might imagine, ‘somewhere else’
is not one of our most requested destinations.”

“Perhaps if you had a special train…?”

The clerk’s eyebrows shot half way up his
vacant skull. “Then you could of course go anywhere - wherever
there were tracks - but the cost! - Nothing short of astronomical.”
His eyes tightened, became confidential. “But perhaps that is
something you can afford. Still, it would take time to arrange,
and, if I am not mistaken, you are in something of a hurry. A
special train is out, and we have no train to Mont Saint Michel.
How do we solve this dilemma? Ah, perhaps I have the solution. We
have a train - it leaves in an hour - to a station ten kilometers
away from where you want to go. From there, you can take a taxi, or
even walk, if you prefer.”

Hart appeared to think about it. “Well, if
that’s the closest you can get.”

Though recently refurbished, and spotlessly
clean, the train station had the gas light atmosphere of the late
19th century, dimly lit, with intricate, iron lattice work columns
and shiny marble floors. The only thing missing was the rush of
steam from a heaving locomotive. The new high-speed trains that
shot across the country, and the continent, in less than half the
time it had taken before, ran quieter and cleaner than that. Hart
tried to imagine what Helen would say, the quick, easy commentary
on the things she saw, the sudden insights that made so much sense
to him perhaps precisely because he had never had the same thought
himself. Helen always looked at things through different eyes. She
was never much impressed with the urgent demands of the present.
Others thought her odd, eccentric, for that, and even a symptom of
the instability that had brought her close to a breakdown; Bobby
was convinced that it was the source of the strength that had saved
her sanity. He was desperate to talk to her, to hear her voice; but
afraid that after he had called her once, left that message for her
to hear when she got home, the next attempt would be traced.

Staying in the shadows, he wandered around
the train station, passing the time. With trains coming and going,
departures and arrivals every few minutes, the crowd was always
changing, no one there long enough to notice anyone twice. Even if
someone thought for a moment that his was a face they recognized,
they were in too much of a hurry to remember where they might have
seen him before. He felt safe enough to buy a paper.

As soon as he saw the front page, he wished
he had not. His picture was plastered all over it; his picture, and
that of Robert Constable, the President that, according to the
lurid headline, had been murdered at the direction of a conspiracy
led by Robert Hart. Alone on a bench next to the track on which his
train was scheduled to arrive, Hart read with growing anger a
blatant fiction in which he had been cast, not as the victim of a
colossal ambition, a senator who wanted to be president, but as a
husband driven to murder by his wife’s infidelity. This was evil
multiplied by itself: blame the murder on a man who did not do it,
and pin the motive on his wife. His stomach twisted into a knot,
tearing at him until he did not know if he could breathe. He
crumpled the paper in his hand and spread his feet apart, bent
forward over his knees and threw up.