Grand Master (10 page)

Burdick’s eyes lighted with surprise. He had
been tense, nervous, not quite sure why he had asked Bobby Hart if
he could see him, not quite sure what he was going to say when he
saw him; but now that Hart was here, now that he heard him start to
talk about something that none of the other politicians he knew
would ever think to talk about, he began to feel a little more
comfortable. “I didn’t know you liked jazz that much. I guess I
didn’t even know you liked music. It’s easy to forget sometimes
that someone in Washington might actually have a life outside
politics.”

A young, clean shaven waiter, an aspiring
actor from some Midwestern college, if Hart had had to guess, took
their order. Neither of them wanted anything to eat. Burdick, who
had already had one cup of coffee while he waited, ordered another.
Hart, after a moment’s hesitation, asked for a beer.

“You didn’t have to come, Bobby. When I asked
if I could see you, I meant I’d come there.”

The waiter brought Hart a beer and Burdick a
second cup of coffee. Hart took a long drink, held the cold bottle
in both hands, leaned back and looked at Burdick. “You didn’t tell
me.”

“Didn’t tell you what?”

“Errol Garner.”

“No, I never saw him play. I saw Oscar
Peterson, though.” The memory relaxed him, and in some degree
diminished the sense of urgency that had not really left him since
the night before. “Twice, both times right here, late at night when
guys would come in after some other show they had just done,
something they had been paid for, and just play for themselves and
whoever wanted to listen.”

Bobby Hart was watching closely, measuring
almost without knowing he was doing it the meaning of each small
change of expression on Burdick’s narrow, mobile face. It was one
of the reasons, the main one perhaps, that so many people felt so
comfortable talking to Hart: the way he knew how to listen, to ask
the kind of questions that made them want to tell him more.

“There are certain advantages in living in a
city like New York, aren’t there? I would have given anything to
see Oscar Peterson play.” Hart paused and took another drink, and
then, as if that was all he was going to have, put the bottle on
the table and shoved it off to the side. “What is it, Quentin?
What’s going on? When you called last night….Even if I didn’t have
to be here anyway, I would have come up. You sounded terrible.”

“Frank Morris died. He was killed, stabbed to
death in prison.”

“I know. It was on the news last night; it’s
in all the papers today. Too bad. I knew him, liked him; he was
always straight with me. But what does that have to do with -?”

“I was there, at the prison, just before it
happened. That was the reason he was killed, the reason he was
murdered - because he talked to me!”

Hart planted both feet on the floor and bent
forward on his elbows. He searched Burdick’s eyes. “Because he
talked to you? Why? What makes you so sure? Things like that
happen, you know. They don’t always happen for a reason. People get
killed in prison.”

“He told me he was dying of cancer, that he
had maybe six months, unless ‘that fucking Frenchman gets me
first.’ That’s what he said, and he meant it, too. He knew what he
was talking about. The Four Sisters - Have you heard that name
before?”

Hart drew back and tapped his fingers on the
table. “It’s the story you’ve been working on now for months.”

A puzzled smile darted along Burdick’s thin
lips. He began to fidget with the bowtie that had become something
of a trademark for him. “How did you know that I was working on
that?” Then he remembered. “Of course! I talked to Senator Ryan,
and he must have….”

“Charlie asked me if I had heard about it. I
hadn’t; but then, when they buried Constable, after the service, at
the reception at his house, I heard the name again. Austin Pearce
started talking about it. He said he wanted to see me. That’s why I
had to be in New York.”

“That means Pearce must have known, or must
have learned about it. He’s certainly smart enough to have figured
it out.”

“Figured it out? What did Frank Morris tell
you? What did he know that would make someone want to murder him?”
But before Burdick could respond, a startled expression flashed
across Hart’s eyes. “Morris said he was going to die of cancer if
‘that fucking Frenchman’ did not get him first? When I was there,
at the Constables’ house, talking to Pearce, he gestured toward a
Frenchman he said was the head of The Four Sisters. I’ve forgotten
the name. He was just going through the receiving line when Pearce
pointed him out.”

“Jean de la Valette,” said Burdick, with a
quick nod. “Morris only met him once, said he was impressive, but
that he didn’t much like him, and that was before he found out what
was going on.”

“What was going on, Quentin? What did Morris
tell you?”

“You won’t believe it; I didn’t believe it,
not at first anyway. I went out there to see him on nothing more
than a hunch, and because, quite frankly, I didn’t know what else
to do. I had been working on The Four Sisters story for a long
time, but I didn’t really have anything I could use. I knew - I
couldn’t prove, but I knew - that a lot of money had changed hands
and that Robert Constable had gotten most of it, millions of
dollars over a period of several years.”

“It was only when I stumbled on the name, The
Four Sisters, that things started to break. I had been trying to
get an interview with Constable, but I could not even get close;
and then I had the name.” Burdick looked at Hart and shook his head
at how simple things had then become. “It was like a password. As
soon as I said it, things began to happen. Instead of being put
off, told by one of his assistants that they would see what they
could do, Constable himself called me. You remember how he
operated. We were suddenly old friends. He could not wait to see
me, could not wait to talk; but I could tell he was worried.”
Burdick hesitated, reconsidering what he had said. “No, not worried
- scared -, though I was not sure of what. Exposure, I thought;
fear of what might happen if the truth of what he had been doing,
taking millions for things he did while he was in office, should
ever come out. But now I think that it might have been more than
that; that he wasn’t worried about the potential scandal - Good
God, if there was ever anyone who was not afraid of what a scandal
could do, it was Robert Constable - he was worried about what
someone might do to him.”

Hart was cautious. He had made a promise to
Madelaine Constable. He looked at Burdick with a blank expression.
“What someone might do to him?”

Burdick shot him a questioning glance. The
mask behind which Hart had tried to hide had not worked. “Is that
what Austin Pearce wanted to talk to you about? - What someone
might have done, the possibility that Constable did not die of
natural causes?”

“He did not say anything like that to me,”
answered Hart truthfully. “Is that what Frank Morris told you?”

Burdick hesitated, but only for a moment. “He
didn’t know that, but that’s what he thought: that Constable didn’t
die of a heart attack, that he was murdered instead. Look, Bobby,
I’ve been doing this a long time. I covered Constable the first
time he ran for president; I covered him when he was in the White
House. He didn’t have a principled bone in his body; there wasn’t
anything he wouldn’t say or do to win. But this! - What Frank
Morris told me - I wouldn’t have believed it possible for anyone
who was president, not even Constable. I would have thought he had,
not too much integrity - I knew him too well for that - but too
much sense.

“That was my mistake. I had forgotten that
part of his attraction, the reason why people who did not know him,
who had never met him, who had never even seen him except on
television liked him as much as they did, was this bigger than life
quality he had, this feeling that nothing could touch him, that
whatever happened, whatever kind of hole he dug for himself, he
could always get out of it and end up back in control, stronger,
more popular, than ever. The stupid son-of-a-bitch believed it,
thought he was too smart, too important, to ever get caught.

“I think maybe that’s why Morris did it, took
money he knew he shouldn’t. It was the whole atmosphere Constable
brought with him, the sense that there weren’t any limits; that you
could do whatever you wanted and take whatever you needed. Morris
told me everything. It wasn’t bribery.”

Narrowing his eyes into a hard, relentless
stare, Burdick lapsed into a long silence, as he conjured up the
double vision of what Frank Morris had been like when he was one of
the most powerful men on the Hill, someone everyone wanted to know,
and the last time, barely twenty four hours ago, when he had become
just another numbered inmate in federal prison. Burdick looked up,
slightly embarrassed.

“It wasn’t bribery,” he continued, “the way
they said it was at his trial. It was bigger than that, hundreds of
millions of dollars were involved, and The Four Sisters was right
in the middle of it. In the beginning, Morris thought it was a
scheme to get certain government contracts for some of the
companies, American companies, The Four Sisters controlled; but
eventually he discovered that it was more than that.”

“More than that?” asked Hart, intensely
interested. “The Four Sisters is a private investment firm; though,
from what I hear, it may be - that phrase you just used - ‘more
than that.’”

Burdick’s eyebrows rose up like a pair of
open umbrellas. There was grim, rueful quality in his expression,
the look of someone who had been forced to face, if not an awful
truth, an awful possibility. “It may be Murder Incorporated on a
global scale.”

“You think they killed Constable, and then
killed Morris?”

Burdick’s bookish mouth twitched nervously at
the corner. He blinked several times in rapid, thoughtful,
succession. “After what happened to Morris, after what happened to
me - yes, I do.”

“After what happened to you?” For the first
time, Hart felt a sense of alarm. “What happened? When, last
night?”

Burdick dismissed, or tried to dismiss, the
significance of what he had just said. There was something he
wanted to talk about first, something important he thought Hart
should know.

“Morris discovered that The Four Sisters had
created a kind of parallel financial universe, a system that
allowed it to move money from one place to another, one country to
another, without anyone knowing anything about it. Think what that
means. A company in this country needs capital; a bank in Europe is
willing to arrange it. The money comes from another country, a
country willing to pay for the chance to obtain some degree of
influence over what happens here. Think of what you could do, if
you have the billions of dollars necessary to gain a controlling
interest in just a handful of the corporations that among them
decide what we read and what we watch. Frank Morris knew what it
meant. He was willing to take money - he admitted that - but not
for something like this.

“Constable was involved. He was the one who
first suggested that Morris meet with some people who were
interested in making it easier for foreign investors to do business
here. Morris went to Constable - the President of the United
States, for Christ sake! - and told him what he’d discovered, told
him that even though he had taken money he would go to the FBI
himself if that was the only way to stop it. Constable told him to
forget it, that everything would be all right, that they had not
done anything wrong, and that no one would find out. Yes, that’s
exactly what he said, according to Morris: that they hadn’t done
anything wrong and that no one would find out!

“When Constable said everything would be all
right, he meant all right for him. The next thing Morris knew, he
was framed for bribery and sent to prison to make sure he didn’t
tell anyone beside Constable what he knew. But he told me, and
before I get back to New York, he’s murdered, and now they may try
to murder me. They know I talked to him; they can guess what he
told me. Last night, after I called you from the airport, I went
home. Someone had broken in, torn the place apart, stolen my
computer. They were looking for whatever files I’d been keeping on
The Four Sisters, the story I was planning to write. They didn’t
get much. I keep everything at my office at the paper. I don’t
think they’ll try anything there.”

“Where did you stay last night?”

“At a hotel, here in the village, just up the
street.”

“You better stay there. What Morris told you,
that Constable did not die of natural causes, that he was murdered
- He was right. I can’t tell you how I know Constable was murdered,
only that I do. But I don’t know why he was killed, whether it had
to do with this Four Sisters business, or was for some other
reason.

Burdick wanted to be sure. “You know for
certain that he was murdered? You know that as a fact?”

“That’s what I was told.”

They left the dark seclusion of the bar and
restaurant and went outside. The heat was shimmering off the dirty
gray sidewalk and the air had the thick dull taste of red brick
dust. They lingered for a moment in the choking haze, remembering,
each of them, what it had been like, when they were young and
single and their only thought on a hot sticky summer day had been
for the night, and the girl, and the jazz that when you heard it
told you that nothing would ever again be as good as this.

“I better go,” said Hart, as he started
toward the street. “I meant what I said,” he shouted over his
shoulder. “Don’t go back. Stay at the hotel until its safe.”

Burdick, feeling better, laughed as he
shouted back, “That might never happen.”