Grand Master (4 page)

“That looked interesting.” Charlie Ryan was
standing right in front of him, but Hart had been so lost in
thought he had not seen him approach. “You and Austin Pearce seemed
to be having quite a conversation. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“I’m not sure what it was about. He wants to
see me about something. Maybe I’ll find out then,” replied Hart,
glancing at Ryan in a way that told him that was all he could say.
“Have you done the honors?”

“Yeah, I went through, mumbled a few words
about what a great man he was. I don’t envy her, having to stand
there like that, forced to turn private grief into a public
ceremony. She called me by my first name. They were always good at
that, weren’t they? - making you feel you were someone they
especially liked.”

Ryan checked his watch. He looked around the
room in case he had missed someone he wanted to see or needed to
speak to. “A few more minutes,” he said to Hart, “then I’ve got to
go.” He nodded toward the receiving line. It was shorter than it
had been. “You haven’t yet, have you?”

“No, but I guess I better. I’ll catch up with
you later. We’re on for dinner tomorrow, right?”

Hart took another glass from a passing waiter
and made his way to the back of the line. He tried to think of what
he was going to say, but all he could think about was the great
inconsequence, at times like this, of saying anything. He had never
yet found words that did not sound empty and false when he tried to
express sympathy and support to someone who had lost a husband or a
wife, a parent or a child. He was too honest to imagine that
anything could make much of a difference to someone who was
suffering the unspeakable agonies that come with the knowledge that
someone you loved, someone who loved you, was now gone forever.
Forever, that was the point. The journey had come to an end and
there was no starting over, no chance to make amends for the things
you wish you had not said or done, no chance to do what you had
always planned to do once you had the time, because time was over,
time had died.

The line kept moving forward, and then,
suddenly, he was standing in front of her, and he still did not
know what to say. The words came automatically. “I’m very sorry,”
he heard himself saying as he held her hand for a brief moment in
his own. “If there is anything….”

She stopped him with a look, a slight,
enigmatic smile that seemed to acknowledge the awkward futility of
saying anything with words. She bent toward him. “Stay. Don’t go. I
have to see you.”

She whispered an instruction to a young man
standing just behind her, and looked again at Hart to let him know
that, whatever she wanted to see him about, it was important. Then
she was taking the hand of someone else, and, in that way she had,
making them feel that they were the one she had been waiting all
the while to see.

“This way, Senator,” said the aide as he led
Hart out of the room and down a long corridor. The house was a
labyrinth, hallways that seemed to turn left and turn right,
hallways that seemed to turn back on themselves; stairways that
spiraled somewhere out of sight and that, from the look of them,
had seldom been used in the hundred years since the house was first
built. They passed a dozen white varnished doors, all of them shut
and probably locked, like the vacant rooms in some grand decayed
hotel that were only opened when someone ventured in to clean and
air them out. After making at least three different turns, they
climbed a narrow back staircase to the second floor. Hart was shown
to a suite of rooms where, he was told, Mrs. Constable would join
him as soon as she could.

“She asked me to tell you,” said her aide,
“that it’s a matter of some urgency.” He paused as if he wanted to
be absolutely certain he did not forget even the smallest part of
what he was supposed to do. “She wouldn’t ask you to wait like this
if it wasn’t.”

It seemed odd, once he was left alone and had
time to think about it, that he had been asked to wait here, this
far away from the main part of the house. He was in a sitting room,
richly furnished with a sofa and two easy chairs arranged in front
of a marble fireplace. Through an open doorway, he could see a
large bedroom with heavy drapes drawn across the windows. A second
doorway led to a book lined study. Restless, and with nothing else
to do, Hart pulled a leather bound volume off a shelf. The pages
had not been cut. He pulled down another and discovered the same
thing. Hundreds of burnished leather bound books, the pride of any
collector, some of the books hundreds of years old, and none of
them ever read. They were like the furniture in a roped off room,
there to be seen and never used. Hart wanted to laugh. It was
Robert Constable all over again, life as a magician’s trick, the
illusion of things that never were.

The drapes were closed in this room as well,
and Hart, who did not like dark places, pulled them open. To his
astonishment, he found himself staring down onto the backyard lawn
and the circling crowd that had left the house and gathered
outside. For all the twists and turnings that he had been made to
follow, Hart was just one floor above where he had started.
Whatever Madelaine Constable wanted with him, she seemed strangely
intent on making certain no one else knew about it.

A few minutes went by, and then a few more.
Hart paced back and forth, wondering how much longer he would have
to wait. He looked at the long rows of priceless, unread books and
the desk on which, instead of pen and paper, were a number of
framed photographs, each of them a different size. He walked over
to get a closer look. All of the pictures were of Madelaine
Constable, but never alone, always with someone else: a friend, a
relative; photographs taken at ski resorts and tropical islands,
photographs taken at different periods of her life; a history, as
it were, of life outside of Washington and the usual corridors of
power, and not one of the pictures a picture of her with her
husband. It was as if Robert Constable had never existed; or,
rather, that her time with him had been a public property, an
exploitable advantage, something she had not allowed to intrude
into what she had had of a private, personal life.

There was a soft, whirring sound from the
sitting room. A door slid open and closed. It was an elevator, the
means by which Madelaine Constable could move quickly and easily
from whatever commotion was taking place in the first floor public
rooms to what, Hart had now determined, was her own private
sanctuary. The books that lined the shelves in all their unread
splendor, those books belonged to her.

“Damn,” she muttered with what seemed like
quiet desperation. Holding her arms straight down at her sides, she
clenched both fists. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” she cried. She
shook her head, quickly, abruptly, as if to force herself to stop,
to get control again. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath.
Then, suddenly, she opened them with a look of consternation. She
had forgotten that Bobby Hart was there. She started to pretend
that he had not noticed what she had done, and then she gave it up.
“Yes, that’s how I feel.” Her eyes glistened with defiance. “Do you
think I wanted to stand there, spend two hours acting the grieving
widow, so that they can all talk about how brave I am, how much I
am to be admired for the way I’ve conducted myself, holding back my
emotions, holding back the tears? The truth of it is that the
hardest part has been pretending that I care at all that he’s
dead.”

She walked across to the open doorway to the
study where Hart stood watching her. “You always knew he was a
fraud, didn’t you? Don’t bother denying it. If there is anybody in
this town who can cut through all the cheap lying, all the stupid
hypocrisy, it’s you.”

She touched him on the arm and then moved
past him to an open cubicle in the book lined shelves where three
crystal class decanters sat on a silver tray. “Scotch?” she asked,
as she poured two glasses. She handed him a half-filled glass and
then touched hers to his. “Cheers,” she said in a voice tinged with
weary cynicism.

She stood at the window, looking down at the
crowd. “You think any of them are talking about what a great
president he was?” She looked away, took a drink as if she were
trying to steady her nerves, and then sank into an easy chair. She
took another drink, longer, slower this time, and appeared to lose
herself in thought. A moment later, she looked up at Hart and
gestured toward the chair next to her. “I’m in some trouble, Bobby,
and you’re the only one I can think of who might be able to
help.”

Hart barely knew her. He had never before
this had a private conversation with her. He could not think of
anything that would have made her think of him. She read his
mind.

“You’re too modest. Or, perhaps,” she added
with a shrewd glance that made Hart cautious and a little
uncomfortable, “you’re not modest enough. You know perfectly well
that you can do a good deal more than most people around here. You
have great influence; everyone - or nearly everyone, because there
are always a certain number of idiots and fools - respects you. The
point is you know how to get things done, and, that rarest of
qualities, you have a sense of what is important and what is not.
Look out that window; look down at that crowd of well-wishers who
only wish well for themselves. Think they care anything about the
great Robert Constable now; think they cared anything about him
when he was alive, except what he might do for them? They’re all
free now, whatever they might have owed him. I’ve got the burden of
the great man’s reputation, the obligation to make sure that no one
ever finds out the truth, the whole truth, of what he really
was.”

Hart had seen too much of politics and what
it did to people to be shocked very easily, but this was stunning,
the harsh bitterness with which she described her husband and what
his death meant for her. He was almost afraid to ask what she
wanted him to do. “You said you were in some kind of trouble. I’m
not sure I understand what you mean.”

Madelaine Constable stared into the middle
distance, her mood changing in the flick of an eyelash from angry
defiance into a dark depression. One moment she was all energy, her
eyes eager and electric; the next she seemed to have lost the
capacity to move, and even the will to live. Suddenly she was on
her feet and at the window, shaking her head not just at the vanity
of the world but, from the look in her now anguished eyes,
something much more personal to herself.

“He died in a hotel, a hotel in Manhattan, of
a heart attack,” she said, leaning against the window casement. She
kept watching the crowd below, fascinated, as it seemed, by the
familiar strangers that for so many years had made up the world she
had first wanted to conquer and then, having conquered, had begun
to despise. “I was in love once, a long time ago, when I was still
in college.” She turned to face Hart directly. “He was a gorgeous
looking boy. He wanted to be…well, I don’t know what he wanted to
be, except to be with me. But that wasn’t the kind of ambition I
thought I needed. I wanted to be something, be someone everyone
knew, someone - the someone I became.”

She tapped her foot, stopped, and then, a
moment later, threw her head back and laughed. “I became what I
always was - a fool. I married Robert and I got what I deserved, a
husband who thought he was being faithful if he went through a
weekend without sleeping with another woman. I got what I deserved,
Bobby; I got to wear black and sit in the first pew at his funeral,
and then stand in that receiving line and listen to everyone tell
me how much they sympathized with my loss while they wondering
whether the rumor was true: that he died of a heart attack while he
was screwing one of the many other women he often took to bed.”

Hart tried to object. “I don’t think -”

“It’s not a rumor, Bobby: It’s true. He was
with someone that night. That isn’t the problem.”

“The problem?”

“The problem: what I meant when I said I’m in
some trouble. Robert didn’t die of a heart attack, he was
murdered.”

“Murdered! What makes you think…?” A dozen
different thoughts raced through Hart’s brain; or rather, only two:
her husband had been murdered and she was in trouble. There seemed
to be only one conclusion, but it was impossible, it could not have
happened. But he had to ask.

“They think you…?”

“Not that I didn’t have good reason; but no,
that’s not the kind of trouble I meant. It isn’t that simple.” She
came back to her chair, picked up the half finished glass of scotch
and drank some more. “Do you know Clarence Atwood, head of the
Secret Service?”

“Not very well; we’ve met.”

“I’d like you to see him.”

But Hart was still stunned by what she had
said. “He was murdered?”

“He came to see me. Clarence Atwood,” she
explained. “What I’m going to tell you now, no one else knows. No
one else can know. Do you understand what I’m saying? No, of course
you don’t.” Her eyes full of a new vulnerability, she shook her
head in frustration. “You have to forgive me. After everything
that’s happened, things get jumbled up and I’m not always as
coherent as I should be.”

Hart tried to help. “Atwood came to see you.
He told you that your husband had been murdered?”

“Clarence was the head of the detail when we
- I mean when Robert was first elected. We had a certain
understanding.” She rose from the chair and, as if drawn by the
crowd, the need to know that what she had helped accomplish could
still dominate the time and attention of other people, went back to
the window. “He didn’t have to tell me everything - I didn’t need
to know every time Robert was falling into bed with someone - only
when he did something that might become a public
embarrassment.”