Grand Master (42 page)

“You’re guessing. You could never prove
anything like that.”

“You didn’t have your husband killed?

“No, I swear; I -”

“Then Russell did.”

“I can’t believe that he would -”

“More likely, you were both in it together.
Atwood arranged everything, didn’t he? And, as you told me
yourself, Atwood always did what you asked him to do. He tried to
frame me for it. He tried to have me killed. He had Austin Pearce
murdered. Which one of you asked him to do that?”

She did not answer, and Hart became more
agitated and impatient. His eyes were cold, determined, and
lethal.

“When did you decide to do this? When did you
decide to set me up?”

“I didn’t!” she protested.

His hand moved toward the gun.

“All right, it’s true: I wanted you to find
out how much of what Robert had done with The Four Sisters could be
traced back, how much I might have to explain. And there is
something else. I was afraid. I thought Robert was killed to stop
him from talking to Burdick. I thought someone connected with The
Four Sisters must have done it.” With a plaintive glance she asked,
“Isn’t that what you thought: that The Four Sisters was behind
everything?”

“It’s what you wanted me to believe, part of
the way you used me. And it almost worked. I was going to kill Jean
Valette if I had to. But you made a mistake when you had Atwood try
to implicate me. Atwood works for you.”

“Atwood works for Russell!” she shot back.
“Russell is now the President, or have you forgotten that little
fact?”

“He won’t be for too much longer,” said Hart,
subjecting her to a scrutiny so close she felt a shudder run up her
spine. “And you won’t be taking his place.”

“Why do you say that? What is it you think
you know?”

He just looked at her, a grim smile on his
face.

“You were staying at Jean Valette’s?” she
asked, trying to draw him out. “When everyone was looking for you,
when you were supposedly on the run somewhere in Paris, that’s
where you were, at the chateau?”

“He said you both had visited. Yes, I was
there for a while, and so was the chief of detectives of the
Surete. We were joined by that New York reporter, Philip Carlyle,
and things got quite interesting. You should have been there. I
would have liked to have seen your reaction when Jean Valette began
to tell him about how the President of the United States extorted
tens of millions of dollars from companies he owned, and how both
you and Irwin Russell knew all about it. But that was just the
beginning. Before Carlyle left, Jean Valette gave him all the
documentation needed to prove every charge: bank records, wire
transfers, numbered accounts - every penny The Four Sisters was
forced to give you and your husband. That’s why Carlyle asked you
what he did this afternoon: so that when his story runs on the
front page of this morning’s paper he can print your categorical
denial, or rather, given all the evidence he has, your categorical
lie! You’re not going to be confirmed as vice-president and you’re
not going to run for president. You’re going to be indicted as a
co-conspirator for fraud and, unless I miss my guess, for
murder.”

There was a sharp knock on the door. “Are you
all right, Mrs. Constable?” asked a Secret Service agent. “We
thought we heard voices.”

Hart warned her with his eyes. She went to
the door and opened it just a crack. “No, I’m fine. I had the radio
on.”

She turned around, but Hart was gone.
Breathing hard, she braced herself against the desk. Then she
picked up the telephone and called the White House. “I need to
speak to the President!” The voice at the other end told her that
the President had retired for the night and left instructions not
to be disturbed. She slammed her hand hard on the desk and shouted:
“I don’t care about his instructions! Wake him up, goddamn it! Tell
him it’s urgent!”

While Madelaine Constable waited impatiently
for Irwin Russell to come to the phone, Bobby Hart made his way
through the shadows of the leafy back yard and out to the end of
the street where Charlie Ryan was waiting in his car. “What did she
say?” asked Ryan as they drove down the block.

“Just what you’d expect: that she didn’t do
it, that she thought I did, that she had thought at first that The
Four Sisters was behind it. She did admit that she knew something
about what Constable had been doing and that she was worried about
how much she might have to explain. That’s why she asked me to look
into it. What she can’t explain is Atwood. She tried to blame it on
Russell, said Atwood works for him.”

Folding his arms, Hart leaned against the
passenger side door and shook his head, discouraged, as it seemed,
by what had happened. “I’m such a fool sometimes. I thought that
the shock of seeing me would be enough, that she’d just confess,
that she’d tell me everything. She’s probably never told the truth
about anything in her life, and I thought she’d tell the truth to
me!”

“You didn’t really think that,” protested
Ryan with a cynical laugh. “You might have hoped she would, but you
knew better than that. If she went to trial and got convicted,
she’d insist with her dying breath that she was innocent. Her life
means nothing if she ever admitted to what they really were. And as
long as she doesn’t admit it, or even if she admits some of it and
explains the rest away, there will always be people who believe in
her, who believe in them. So long as there is a mystery about who
really had her husband killed, she’ll always be remembered, she’ll
always be important. Isn’t that the reason everyone wants to become
famous, so they’ll never be forgotten?”

Hart was not listening. He was too caught up
in what he knew he had to do. “She did it, she and Russell both.
I’m certain of it. The only problem is I can’t prove it.”

“You may not have to. Atwood may prove it for
us. In just a few hours, all the pressure is going to be on him.”
He nodded toward the lights of the White House looming in the
distance. “You know she had to be on the phone the moment you were
gone, telling Russell what you told her, trying to figure out what
they can do to save themselves. I don’t imagine either one of them
is going to be getting any sleep tonight.”

They drove to Ryan’s apartment just off
DuPont Circle. A pre-war building in which most of the tenants
worked for various foreign missions, it gave Ryan a place to get
away from people who worked on the Hill, a place where he could
pass almost unnoticed among the others who lived there. He had
insisted Hart stay with him until it was safe for him to go
home.

“Helen okay?” he asked. He tossed his jacket
on a chair in the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and looked over
his shoulder. “Beer?”

“Sure. Thanks. And yes, Helen is okay, though
a little angry with me right now.”

Ryan snapped the caps off both bottles and
put one on the table in front of Hart. “She wanted to stay, didn’t
she?” Ryan plopped down on the chair opposite. “Good thing she
didn’t. God knows what’s going to happen now. She’s home in Santa
Barbara? Good. You’ll see her in a few days.”

A bright, fearless smile cut across Ryan’s
mouth. “The Senate is full of guys married to women more qualified
than they are to hold the office. But you and I, my friend, are the
only two ready to admit it.” He laughed quietly and took a drink.
“Now, tell me something more about what happened over there. I know
about Austin; I know about the rest of it. Tell me about Jean
Valette.”

Hart leaned his elbow on the table and bent
his head forward. He was not sure where to begin, or whether there
was anything he could say to describe what Jean Valette was like.
He was not even sure he could describe the effect Jean Valette had
had on him. “He’s either the most intelligent, the most profoundly
intelligent, man I’ve ever met or the craziest. When you’re with
him, everything he says makes sense. He held me, for hours at a
time, mesmerized by the astonishing things he said. He seemed to
have all of history in his mind. Not just dates and places,
battles, wars, things like that, but how they were all connected to
each other and what they meant. When we look at history, we look
back; he starts at some point in the past and looks forward. That’s
the difference, I think: he seems to put himself back in time, to
see things they way they were seen at the time. It was not like
anything I’ve ever heard; but then, later, when I was alone and
thought about what he had said, when I was not under the force of
the magnetism he has - eyes that I swear could make you believe
anything - then I was not so certain that it was not all lunacy, a
madman’s description of the world.”

Ryan pushed back until the front legs of the
chair were off the floor. With his tousled reddish hair, he looked
more like a graduate student having a beer late at night at some
Ann Arbor tavern than a member of the United States Senate. But for
all his youthful appearance, there was a serious dedication, an
intense earnestness, a power of concentration that few others in
the Senate, whatever their age, could duplicate. Others could talk
endlessly on the Senate floor, their colleagues half asleep; Ryan,
with an instinct for the heart of the matter, never spoke to
anything but the point. “He said he knew all this would happen? Not
that Constable would be murdered, but that Constable, and the
others, would one way or the other all be destroyed?”

With so many other things on his mind Hart
had forgotten that he had mentioned this.

“You told me yesterday, on the ride from the
airport. But there’s a question, isn’t there?” The two front legs
of the chair hit the linoleum floor with a clatter as he bounced
forward. “If he knew that, if he was so certain that once
Constable, and poor Frank Morris, and that fool Russell, became
involved, grabbed millions for themselves, they would end up
killing one another, why did he do it? It’s no answer to say
because it was the only way some of the companies he controls -
that The Four Sisters control - could do business here. He knows
this will destroy them. He doesn’t really need more business, does
he? He’s one of the world’s richest men.” Ryan’s eyebrows shot up.
“And from the way you describe him…well, would you say he was
someone driven by the need for money, this strange recluse with
that diminishing library of his? There’s only one conclusion you
can draw from this, isn’t there? For whatever reason, Jean Valette
wanted them to destroy themselves. Listen, if someone tells you
they’re suicidal and then asks if they can borrow your gun….Well,
you get the idea.”

Hart remembered the remarkable expression on
the face of Jean Valette, when they sat together, surrounded by
towering banks of empty shelves, and the sense of something
electric in the air as he began to tell him about the book he had
written, and how, if he was not careful, what he had learned about
the future might truly drive him mad. “Jean Valette isn’t much
interested in what happens to individuals. He thinks there is too
much at stake for that. And there is something else,” said Hart
with a deeply troubled expression. “The fact that no one else seems
to think there is any crisis only makes him more certain that there
is.”

Ryan glanced at his watch. “It’s late. Better
try to get a few hours sleep. We’ve got a lot to do in the
morning.”

Nodding in agreement, Hart started to get up,
but then stopped and shot a quizzical glance at Ryan. “What about
the Secret Service agent, the one who was there the night Constable
was murdered, the one I met when I had that meeting with Atwood at
the Watergate? Richard Bauman - What were you able to find
out?”

Ryan pushed his chair close against the table
and emptied what was left of his beer into the sink. “All anyone
knows is that he quit, and then disappeared. No one has seen him;
no one knows where he went. No one knows for sure if he is still
alive.”

“I thought he might know something,” said
Hart. “When I met him that night he seemed genuinely distraught,
kept blaming himself for what happened, for helping the killer get
away.”

“Get some sleep,” said Ryan as he walked him
to the door of the second bedroom. “In a couple of hours the papers
hit the streets and this whole town is going to blow up.”

It was a figure of speech, of course, not
meant to be taken literally, but in places like the White House and
the various offices on Capitol Hill it was a fair description of
the reaction to the story Philip Carlyle had written under the kind
of banner headline used only for a domestic crisis or war. Carlyle
had everything: dates and places where meetings had taken place,
records of each transaction by which the Constables, along with
Irwin Russell and the late Frank Morris had enriched themselves and
violated the public trust. It was all there, every seedy detail in
an epic tawdry tale of narrow minded greed and corruption. But that
was only half the story. Bribery and extortion had been the prelude
to murder.

Instead of starting with the murder of Robert
Constable in a New York hotel room, Carlyle started with the two
murders in France. Why were Austin Pearce, the former secretary of
the treasury, and Aaron Wolfe, head of the political section at the
embassy in Paris, killed by two American intelligence agents
stationed at that same embassy? Carlyle reported that the chief of
detectives of the Surete was convinced that it was to stop them
from revealing what they had learned from Bobby Hart about who was
really responsible for the assassination of Robert Constable:

“’It clearly was not Senator Hart,’ insists
inspector Dumont. ‘He came here looking for the connection with The
Four Sisters. The two killers were not working for him. He was
downstairs talking to the landlady when the shooting started. He
ran upstairs, tried to save Mr. Pearce, and was almost killed
himself. He shot the assailant, wounded him in the shoulder and
forced him to flee. Hart did not kill anyone, but someone in your
government is trying to kill him.’”