Grand Master (7 page)

Burdick sat on the bench, listening in the
hush of evening to the vanished voice of Robert Constable, that
raucous, roguish voice that had given him a boyish charm well past
middle age; the voice that, after the first few times he had had
the chance to ask a reporter’s question, he had learned it was
never safe to trust.

“It’s about The Four Sisters, Mr. President,”
he had replied to Constable’s invitation. “I’d like to talk to you
about your involvement.”

He had tried to make it seem a fair warning,
a preview of what the President could expect. It was of course both
more, and less, than that. More, because if half of what he had
learned was true, the presidency of Robert Constable would be
destroyed; less, because in terms of hard evidence, the kind you
needed for a story like this, again, he did not have a thing.

“I’ll be glad to talk to you about anything
you want; but involvement - that wouldn’t be correct. I’ve heard of
them, I’m not denying that; and last year, I think it was, I gave a
speech at some conference in Switzerland, and, if I’m not mistaken,
they were one of the sponsors. But, other than that, I don’t know
how much I can tell you.”

There was a long pause, and Burdick thought
the President was waiting for him to say something - anything -
that would give him an idea of how much Burdick knew. The silence
became strained, uncomfortable, a confession that the President was
worried and, more than that, alarmed.

“Why?” he had asked finally. “Have you heard
something different?”

The Four Sisters, the name alone, the fact
that he knew it, had put the President in a state of something
close to panic. Burdick now knew that the story was bigger, far
bigger, than he had thought. He was on to something, though he
still did not know exactly what it was, except that it involved the
President and a great deal of money. If he had been able to talk to
him, if Robert Constable had not died, he was almost certain he
could have discovered the truth. Constable would have tried to put
the best face on things he could, but Constable had been scared -
Burdick was certain of that. He might have tried to make a deal,
trade what he knew, or some of it, for the chance to minimize his
own involvement. But now Constable was dead, and, depending on what
happened tomorrow, the story might be dead as well.

Quentin Burdick sat on the beachside bench,
listening in the cool night air to voices from the past, the
different politicians he had known, some of them decent and
honorable, determined to do the right thing, but, especially in
recent years, more and more of them driven only by their own
ambition, willing to do or say anything to get the next thing they
wanted.

There were still exceptions: Charlie Ryan,
for one. The junior senator from Michigan was always willing to
talk openly and honestly about what was going on, and, if there was
something he could not talk about, tell you that as well. Ryan was
as well informed as anyone in Washington. When he said he had not
heard of The Four Sisters and did not know what it was, Burdick
understood at once that the story he was after involved a closely
guarded secret known only to an unknown few. The President had been
one of them, and what Burdick had heard in his voice had told him
that none of the others who knew about it were likely to talk, even
if he found out who they were. Tomorrow was going to be the last
chance he had.

The sun had disappeared. The oil drilling
platforms far out at sea became smaller, less obtrusive, in the
purple shadowed night. When Burdick got up and started back to the
motel, the hillside above the city was alive with a thousand
flickering lights. He remembered that somewhere up there, on a
winding street with a view that took your breath away, Bobby Hart
lived with his wife when the Senate was not in session and he could
get away. He had not talked to Hart yet, but he intended to. the
Senator had sources no one else had: his father had been with the
CIA and there were still people in the agency who told him things
they told no one else. If anyone could find out about The Four
Sisters, Hart could. Burdick shoved his hands into the pockets of
his windbreaker and, suddenly hungry, headed down the street to a
quiet looking restaurant where he could get dinner.

A little before noon the next morning,
Burdick was back on the road, heading north along the coast, past
Santa Barbara, out onto a long flat stretch between the ocean and
the empty sun-bleached hills. The road cut inland and a hard wind
knocked the car sideways, forcing Burdick, who liked to drive fast
when he had the chance, to slow down. A few miles later, he turned
off the highway and, resuming speed, followed a county road through
the coastal range, where the only signs of civilization among the
wind bent spreading oaks were a few weathered barns that had stood
there for fifty years or more. The sense of loneliness, of mystic
solitude, made Burdick feel that he had stepped back in time,
before the age of highways and automobiles, when life moved at a
slower pace and there was more time to think. He wanted to pull off
to the side of the road, get out of the car and look around at the
endless skyline and the rugged terrain, but he glanced at the
dashboard clock and knew he had to hurry or be late.

He came through a small coastal town, and ten
minutes later passed a sign to Vandenberg Air Force Base and was on
his way to the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. It did not look like
most prisons. There was none of the stark sense of isolation you
felt in a place like Alcatraz, that barren rock in the middle of
the San Francisco bay; there were none of the high fortress walls,
none of the glass enclosed guard towers, of Attica or San Quentin.
It had more the aspect of a camp, a series of flat top single story
wooden buildings that could have been the barracks for an army, or
the classrooms of a school. Clumps of eucalyptus trees towered
along the side of the road, and, stretching out in the distance,
large well-tilled fields in which some of the prison’s food was
grown. Then Burdick saw it, a large blank building with scarcely
any windows, surrounded by a cage of metal fencing with double
rolls of razor sharp concertina wire on top.

Burdick signed in at the visitor’s entrance.
After he was searched and passed through a metal detector, he was
taken, not, as he had expected, to a small narrow room where a
visitor sat on one side of a plate of thick glass and the prisoner
on the other, but to a large, empty cafeteria. The man he was there
to see was waiting for him at a round table next to a window that,
looking out onto an inner courtyard, let in the outside light.

“Quentin Burdick of the Times!” said the
prisoner with a huge grin.

He lumbered to his feet, placed one large
hand on Burdick’s shoulder and looked him straight in the eye as
they shook hands. For a moment, Burdick almost forgot they were in
a federal prison and not back in the committee room of the House
Ways and Means Committee.

“How are you Congressman?” he asked with an
unexpected catch in his throat.

Frank Morris had been one of his favorites,
colorful, profane, with an almost perfect judgment about the
strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues, and an equally sharp
instinct for just how far he could push them when he was reaching
for the kind of compromise by which, as chairman of the committee,
he could craft a budget.

“It’s maybe not quite what I had in mind for
my retirement,” replied Morris, as the heavy lines around his aging
eyes wrinkled deeper. “But I shouldn’t complain. The food isn’t too
bad and the nights are quiet, although you should have been here
last week. Vandenberg is just a mile away. Three o’clock in the
morning, they put up a rocket, and not just any rocket, a moon
shot. You ever been that close to a launch? The goddamn place
starts to rumble, you think you’re the one going up. Amazing, how
much power those things have. I wonder if they know that the guy
that made sure they always had the money they needed is living
here, right next door.”

Morris had represented the same New York
district for nearly forty years, and if he had become a master of
Washington and its ways, he had lost none of his native city
shrewdness. Heavyset, with broad shoulders and the hands of a
mechanic, he had the garrulous manner of a seasoned, back-slapping
politician; but even when he was regaling a small crowd of whiskey
drinking cronies with some deal making story, there was always
something distant, a little held back, about the way he looked at
you. Burdick had noticed it early on, one of the first times he had
talked to the Chairman in his spacious and ornate committee office,
the way that whatever Morris was saying, he was always thinking
something else; watching you, sizing you up, putting you in a
category that would help him decide how far he could go, whether he
could trust you, and, if he could, what use you could be to
him.

Morris looked down at his gnarled, spotted
hands, folded together on the table. A sly grin inched across his
face. “You didn’t come all the way cross country to hear me talk
about all the good I tried to do.” He raised his eyes to Burdick’s
waiting gaze. “And I’ve known you long enough to know that you
didn’t come to hear me tell you that I’m innocent and should never
have been convicted of something I didn’t do.”

Burdick leaned back in the plastic chair and
studied Morris with a sad, friendly smile. He liked him, he always
had. Frank Morris had not always told him everything, but he had
never lied. “Were you innocent, Frank? Were you convicted of
something you didn’t do?”

Morris looked past him, out the window to the
courtyard and the shining blue sky above. His mouth twisted down at
the corners. He blinked his eyes. “No, I wasn’t innocent. I did
what they said I did.” His eyes moved back to Burdick, but there
was now a sense of urgency in them, as if the question of his own
guilt was not the end, but only the beginning, of the story. “The
interesting thing isn’t that I did it - took money that I shouldn’t
have taken; the interesting thing is that someone found out. That
wasn’t an accident, Quentin; I was being taught a lesson, a lesson
they wanted others to learn. They wanted me, and certain others, to
know that they could destroy anyone who got out of line.”

That same shrewd grin, but more serious this
time, creased his mouth. He scratched his chin with the tips of two
thick fingers and then, as if dismissing what he had started to
say, waved his hand to the side. “But maybe that’s the reason
you’re here. You found out something. What do you want to
know?”

Burdick did not change expression. He looked
straight at Morris. “The Four Sisters - Is that who we’re talking
about, the people you say wanted to teach you a lesson.”

“It’s the reason for all my trouble, and I’m
going to be the reason for theirs.”

Burdick took out a notebook. He wrote Morris’
name across the top of the page, and then the words, ‘The Four
Sisters.’ While he was doing this, Morris stood up, stretched his
arms and then folded them across his chest. Even dressed in prison
garb, blue denim trousers and a blue denim shirt, he looked
impressive, someone in charge. When he was younger, the first time
he ran for Congress, they said he could mesmerize an audience; that
with his curly black hair and piercing blue eyes, once he started
talking no one looked away, no one thought about anything except
what they heard. From the very beginning, he had been a force to be
reckoned with, and now, forty years later, supposedly a broken man,
locked away in prison, he still had some of the same electricity,
the same ability to make you want to listen, and believe.

“Remember that old line about how all
politics is local? It used to be true; it isn’t anymore. Politics
aren’t local; they’re global. No one has yet quite figured that
out. It’s the movement of money. Look, when I was a kid, we
understood the way things worked. If you had trouble, if your
garbage wasn’t being picked up, if you needed some help, if you
needed a job, you went to someone, the ward boss, the city
councilman - maybe someone in the mayor’s office - and they did
what they could. And then, at election time, you returned the
favor. We knew something else, too; we knew that these guys we
elected to office lived a lot better than they could have lived on
the salaries they were paid. We knew the way money changed hands,
the way that if you were a contractor and wanted to do business
with the city - build the new schoolhouse or repair the potholes in
the streets - you made sure some of the profit wound up in the
pockets of your friends at city hall. All politics was local,
because that was where you could make a deal.”

Burdick’s hand was flying across the page,
taking everything down in a shorthand scrawl of his own devising.
His hand stopped moving. He looked up at Morris. “But you never did
that, made that kind of deal. What changed? Why did you do what you
did?”

Morris shrugged and looked away. He fell into
a long silence, as if he was not sure even now what had led him to
do the things he had. “Maybe I was greedier than the others; maybe
when there wasn’t much money involved I was too afraid of getting
caught. It isn’t that difficult to turn down a bribe when they’re
counting in thousands; but millions, and all of it safe, money that
will get paid in the form of salaries and stock options after you
retire from Congress and become a board member for some
international financial consortium? That’s something else again.
With that kind of money it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re
not doing anything fundamentally wrong, and that, in any case, you
deserve it.

“Not really convince yourself, you
understand,” added Morris as he sat down again; “but think that a
legitimate argument could be made for doing what you might have
done anyway, make certain changes that make it easier for certain
companies to compete in the new global economy we keep talking
about.