Grand Master (30 page)

“Now we face that same threat again, a new
war of religion, a war between Islam and the West; only this time,
while Islam still believes in its own importance, the West no
longer believes in anything, except the equal right of everyone to
believe anything they like. We cannot win that fight. The question
is: what should we do? What can we do?”

Valette had been speaking without a text,
without notes of any kind. His eyes never strayed from his audience
and, more than that, never felt the need. Hart had the feeling that
he could go on like this for hours, never repeating the same
thought twice, speaking solely from memory and the stunning clarity
of his mind, as much at home in the history of things dead and
buried for a thousand years as in the events of his own,
contemporary, world. But, for the first time, Valette reached
inside his suit coat pocket and pulled out what looked like a
standard three by five card.

“Some of you may have heard of Jacob
Burckhardt, the great historian who died early in the last century.
He wrote something about the Jesuits, how they were able to acquire
so much influence in the world, which seems to me to suggest what
we need to do now. Let me read it to you. I’ve written it down so I
won’t make a mistake.”

He glanced at the card, too quickly to have
read anything on it, and then looked back at his audience and did
not look at it again. “‘It is not so hard for firmly united, clever
and courageous men to do great things in the world.’ - Remember
that. ‘Ten such men affect 100,000, because the great mass of the
people have only acquisition, enjoyment, vanity, and the like in
their heads, while those ten men always work together.’”

Valette put the card back in his pocket, the
card he had not needed, and began a long disquisition on the truth
of Burckhardt’s observation. He recalled, one after another,
examples, almost all of them from French history, of the way a few
men, or even, in the case of Napoleon, a single individual had done
things no one had thought possible. There was no doubt that his
intention was to show that things that had been done in the past
could be done again, that anything was possible with the proper
will; and yet, unless Hart was deceiving himself, there was a tone
of the deepest irony in what he said, as if he did not believe it,
or, and the possibility was fascinating to Hart, he wanted you to
think that he did not believe it. That was inescapable, the thought
that he could so easily have a double meaning, and maybe more than
that; that everything he said, no matter how straightforward he
made it seem, was really an enigma wrapped inside a doubt. He
seemed proof of the ancient dictum, if anyone was proof of it, that
only someone who knows how to lie has any knowledge of the
truth.

What was he really trying to do, wondered
Hart, as he sat there, in the back, watching the performance of a
man who seemed capable of anything except, strangely enough, the
very thing that had caused Hart to seek him out. There seemed to be
too much intelligence, too much - call it arrogance, call it pride
- to demean himself with something as sordid, as commonplace, as
murder. But all the evidence, everything Hart had learned, had
pointed him to Valette and brought him here to Mont Saint Michel.
The Four Sisters had been involved in everything. He was not wrong
about that. He warned himself against the easy seduction of
intelligence and charm; warned himself against mistaking talk of
ancient history and the grand sweep of time with the absence of all
ambition. No one became one of the richest men in the world without
some degree of self-absorption. And what was his concern with
history and the origins of France if not an expanded, not to say
delusional, sense of self-importance, a way to make himself the
embodiment of far more than the experience of his own generation.
Still, for all that his conscious mind could tell him, he could not
rid himself of the feeling that with Jean Valette something else
was at work, something deeper and more profound than the kind of
motive that would result in simple murder. But what? That, he did
not know.

“The difficulty of course,” Valette was
saying, “is to know how to find men like those, how to establish in
advance the conditions which make such men possible, the ‘ten men
who can do great things in the world,’ a task especially difficult
in this barbarous age in which we live, when we have forgotten the
past and what it means, and, as someone once remarked, unable to
think back any farther than our grandfathers we ‘drown all time in
shallow waters.’ This is the challenge of our generation: to think
back to what we might again become, and raise the next generation
to understand the crisis of the West and what can be done about
it.

That is the reason for the school we founded
five years ago, the academy that, with your continuing support, has
already begun to broaden the horizons and deepen the understanding
of the young men and women that each year are sent to us. The
Academy of St. John is, I believe, unique among contemporary
educational institutions in that we think it more important that
our students learn how to live, rather than how to work; to learn
about the world, rather than how to make a living. As you can
imagine,” he remarked to general laughter, “we are the best kept
secret in France. But then, we don’t need a hundred thousand; we
need only ten.”

Jean Valette looked out over his audience one
last time; then, with a silent bow, he lifted his arm in the air
and quickly sat down. The applause was immediate, sustained, but
more an acknowledgement of respect for the man than any great
enthusiasm for anything he had said. That, at least, was Hart’s
impression. Though he did not know any of them, they seemed for the
most part serious, sober-minded people; too prosperous to be
anything but conventional in their thinking. They were the kind
willing to listen to new ideas, especially those firmly rooted in
the past, so long as there was not any real chance anyone would try
to put them into practice. This business about a school, whatever
innovations might be involved, could not possibly be a threat to
anything: it was too small to do anything except give a few perhaps
gifted students an education in the useless curriculum of another
age. If some of them, most of them perhaps, were willing to give
financial assistance to this new academy, it was because they had
always given money to museums and other places connected with the
arts when they were asked to do so by people to whom they could not
afford to say no.

The applause faded into silence and the
audience took their seats again. It must have been announced at the
beginning that after Valette spoke he would take questions. As soon
as everyone was settled, a man sitting not far from Hart was back
on his feet and Valette was again at the podium.

The questions came one after another, and
with each one Valette seemed more eager to take the next. Hart
could not count the times he had had the same experience, taking
questions from an audience, reluctantly at first, but then becoming
more comfortable, grasping by some instinct how to meet the inquiry
on its own terms, respond directly but always within the limits of
the questioner’s knowledge and experience. But, as he understood at
once, there was something more than that, a completely different
dimension, with Jean Valette.

As soon as someone asked a question -
sometimes even before they finished asking it - Valette’s eyes
would flash with the answer. Not just the answer, but the precise
way he wanted to phrase it, the exact wording, came immediately to
his mind. He thrived on it, questions from people who, as was
sometimes plain, had barely understood anything he had said and had
perhaps agreed with even less than that; thrived on it - and this
was what Hart finally understood - not because he learned anything
from what they said, from the questions they asked, but because he
learned so much listening to what those questions forced him to
say. He knew the answer; it had been there, buried in his
subconscious mind, but he did not know he knew it until someone
asked a question and he took possession, conscious possession, of
it for himself. At the end, when the last question had been asked,
he seemed genuinely grateful for the chance he had been given to
learn from the best, the only, teacher he had.

There were no more questions and no more
speeches. The invited guests began to talk among themselves as they
waited for the chairs to be rearranged and food brought to their
tables. Hart watched as Jean Valette stood at his place next to the
podium exchanging brief greetings with the men and women who came
up to express their appreciation for his remarks, or to ask a
question they had not wanted to ask in front of an audience.
Valette had just finished talking to someone and was about to turn
to another when, suddenly, he looked the length of the room
straight at Hart. He nodded, and then broke into a smile, as if he
were greeting an old friend, or someone who might become a new
one.

Hart had come to Monte Saint Michel believing
Jean Valette to be the head, the Grand Master, of a world-wide
organization for which murder and political assassination were just
other ways of doing business, only to discover that, if he was
telling the truth in the speech he had just given, the main, the
only, ambition he had was to be the master of a school that would
teach a handful of students to see the future through the eyes of a
very distant past. Hart felt helpless and confused, without any
idea what he should do next, whether he should confront Jean
Valette or just get away. Nothing made sense, and the more he tried
to understand, the less he understood.

Still, he was there, and given what would
happen if he did not find some answers, there was nothing to lose.
He started toward the front of the Refectory and Jean Valette.
Someone took him by the arm and held him back. The heavy-set, plain
clothes security guard who had tried to stop him from getting in,
was insisting that he leave. Hart tried to free his arm, but the
guard’s grip only grew tighter. “Jean Valette wishes to see you,”
said the guard as he turned Hart around and marched him toward the
door. “He’s not someone you want to keep waiting.”

As soon as they were out into the hall, he
reached inside Hart’s jacket and removed the gun that Hart had
forgotten he had. A smile full of cruelty and knowledge curled over
his large, misshapen mouth, and then, as if at some private joke,
he began to laugh, and he kept laughing as he dragged Hart down the
hall and out the back to an open courtyard and a waiting car, a
black limousine with dark tinted windows. He let go of Hart’s arm,
and to Hart’s astonishment, gave him back the gun.

“No one goes armed to a cathedral, Mr. Hart.
Even an American should know that.”

The back door of the limousine swung open and
in the shadows on the other side sat Jean Valette.

“Please get in, Mr. Hart. Bring the gun, if
you think you need it; but I can promise that, while you might kill
yourself with it accidentally, no harm will come to you from me. I
have been waiting too long to talk to you to let anyone hurt
you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hart was not sure whether to take Jean
Valette at his word or error on the side of caution. Valette caught
the look of indecision. “Perhaps it would be better if you kept it.
After everything that has happened, I can understand why you might
feel reluctant to trust me.” He turned to the plain clothes guard,
waiting with his hand on the door as Hart got in. “Come with us,
Marcel. We’ll give you a lift to your car. It’s too far to walk,
and besides, there are a few things we need to discuss.”

The limousine started down a winding, narrow
street, around the back of the cathedral to the village in front
and, beyond it, to the causeway across the river. There were
tourists everywhere, crowding onto the steps up to the famous place
where kings and queens had come to worship, pushing into the shops
that sold souvenirs to remind them later of where they had been.
For a few, brief moments, Jean Valette viewed the scene with grim
amusement, as if, like someone come to honor a long dead relative,
he had discovered the cemetery taken over by a visiting troupe of
puppeteers, come to give a children’s show. With a distant smile,
he turned to guest.

“If I had known for certain you were going to
be here, Mr. Hart, I would have tried to speak with more
intelligence. As it was, with this audience….” The thought finished
itself. Then he tried to explain. “And I only do it, you
understand, because of this strange obligation I feel to try to
keep certain things alive. But enough of that! I’m very glad you
came and we finally have the chance to - . But you must be
exhausted, and - how thoughtless of me - terrified, after what
happened last night. No, that is the wrong word, the wrong emotion.
You don’t strike me, Mr. Hart, as someone who would ever be
terrified of anything. Still, after what you’ve been through…. Poor
Austin Pearce! He was remarkable, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell
you; one of the most - one of the few, really intelligent men I’ve
met. I can’t believe he’s gone, and murdered like that!
Incredible!”

Valette shook his head in disgust. He leaned
back in the corner of the seat and lit a cigarette and for a short
while watched the thin trail of smoke spiral into the air. And
then, cracking open the window to let the smoke out, shook his head
again, but this time with an air of resolution. “What do we know so
far, Marcel?” With a sudden, helpless shrug, he looked at Hart.
“Where are my manners? This is Marcel Dumont, Mr. Hart: Inspector
Dumont, chief detective of the Surete Generale.” He had anticipated
Hart’s surprise. “You thought he was there to provide security, a
private guard? You could probably do that, couldn’t you, Marcel?”
He turned back to Hart. “Marcel was on our Olympic boxing
team.”