Grand Master (16 page)

For the next half hour, Hart described
everything that had happened, everything he had learned, from the
day Madelaine Constable asked him to find out what he could to the
night, just the day before yesterday, when he met with Clarence
Atwood of the Secret Service.

“How long is Burdick going to sit on the
story?” asked Ryan when Hart was finished.

“I talked to him yesterday on the phone. He’s
got an interview with Austin Pearce tomorrow. Assuming Austin tells
him what he told me, not long at all. He knows Constable was
murdered. He was convinced of it after what Morris told him out in
Lompoc, after what happened to Morris. I confirmed it, but I
wouldn’t tell him how I knew it. He won’t use that; he won’t
attribute it to me - not yet, anyway. After he talks to Austin, my
guess is that he’ll want to find out more about this Jean de la
Valette and The Four Sisters; but you’re right, we’re looking at
most at a few days, maybe a week, before this thing breaks wide
open. Which means I don’t have any time at all. I have to go to
France.”

“To France? To see Valette? Are you sure
that’s wise?”

“I’m not sure of anything. But after all I’ve
heard I’d like to see for myself what he’s really like, whether
it’s even possible he could have arranged to have Constable
murdered.”

“When are you leaving?”

“As soon as I can; a day or two at the
latest.”

Ryan got to his feet, ready to leave; but
then he thought of something, and wondered why he had not thought
of it before. “What about the President?”

“Constable?”

“No, our new one: Irwin Russell. How do you
think he’s going to react when he finds out Constable was murdered
and that the Secret Service knew it and did not bother to tell him?
Or do you think they did?” That thought led to another. “And what
do you think the real reason was that Madelaine Constable asked you
to look into this? If she’s as ambitious as we all think she is -
everyone knows she thought she was going to be her husband’s
successor - doesn’t she want this kept quiet long enough to figure
out how to handle it with the least cost to herself?”

“I know the rumors,” replied Hart; “the deal
that was supposedly made. Russell goes on the ticket, but with the
understanding that he wouldn’t try for the nomination - he didn’t
have the kind of support on his own that would let him try for the
nomination - at the end of Constable’s second term.”

“But now things have changed,” said Ryan.
“Dull and uninspiring as he may be, Irwin Russell is president,
with every right, if he wants to, to run on his own.” Ryan began to
pace, his eyes moving quickly from one thing to another.
“Everything has changed.” He stopped abruptly, wheeled around and
looked straight at Bobby Hart who had turned at an angle in his
chair as Ryan had moved away. “Think about the difference it makes
whether you’ve become president because your predecessor died of
something as common as a heart attack, or your predecessor was
killed in office, struck down by an assassin. It’s the difference
between, in the one case, filling in the time, and, in the other,
having the chance to pull the country together, take charge, and
unleash the full power of the government in the hunt for whoever
had the temerity to murder an American president. If he does that,
he becomes unbeatable; if he doesn’t do that, if something happens
and he does not have the chance, then, assuming she is still
interested, Madelaine Constable can claim that she should be
allowed to continue the work her husband was not allowed to
finish.”

There was brief knock on the door and then
David Allen stuck his head in. “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a
call I thought you’d want to take. Madelaine Constable is on the
line.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The house was all lit up, that was the first
thing that struck Bobby Hart when he got out of his car. It seemed
oddly out of place, jarring in a way, that the house where little
more than a week ago Madelaine Constable had stood in a receiving
line to accept condolences on the death of her husband should now
look so alive. When he knocked on the white lacquered door he half
expected to be welcomed into another crowded reception, not to
mourn a death, but to celebrate a completely different kind of
occasion: a birthday, an anniversary, or, because this was
Washington after all, the election returns in a race the outcome of
which had been decided long before the polls had closed.

He was not far wrong. The house was full of
people, dozens of them, some busy arranging stacks of files,
organizing them into the right categories, others busy on the
telephones that had been set up on two long tables in the same
living room where Hart had watched Madelaine Constable go through
her widow’s ritual. At yet another table, six young women sorted
through the contents of several canvas mail bags, cards sent by
people from across the country and around the world expressing
their sorrow on the death of the President. There were thousands of
them and every one of them was going to be answered with a short
note, a few words, and then signed by a machine, but no one who
received them would ever know they had been signed that way. They
would have instead the double pleasure of believing that the
President’s widow had not only read what they had sent, but had
been so moved - that was the phrase that had been chosen after
consultation with several of her advisors - that though she could
not answer all of the wonderful cards and letters she had received,
she had to answer theirs. It was what in an older political
tradition might have been called a boiler room for grief.

Watching it, Hart marveled at the slow
precision of the work, the methodical organization, the way each
name to whom a response was addressed was made part of a list, a
list that, from what Hart had been told, the Constables had started
back when they were still in college, a list that had expanded with
the years, people whom if they had only met them once, or even if
they had never met them in person at all, would receive a card
every Christmas and a request for money at the start of every
campaign. By the time Robert Constable ran for a second term there
were literally millions of people to whom he could write that one
of his greatest satisfactions was knowing that he had such a good
friend on whom he could always count when things were difficult and
he needed help. And they believed it, the grateful eager recipients
of those yearly smiling photographs of ‘Bob and Madelaine’ standing
in front of another White House Christmas tree. Robert Constable
might be dead, but the list that he and his wife had built up with
such enterprise and effort was still growing, part of the
inheritance, if you will, left to his wife.

“Hello Bobby; thank you for coming.”
Madelaine Constable was suddenly standing right next to him. She
was dressed casually in a blouse and skirt. A soft blue cashmere
cardigan that brought out the color of her eyes was thrown over her
shoulders. Her ash blonde hair was pulled back and she had on her
reading glasses. It might have given her a shy, reserved and
bookish look, a woman who taught literature in the shade tree
environment of a small liberal arts college, but her eyes were too
immediate, too much in the present, the eyes of a woman on the
verge of impatience, a woman who was used to being the standard,
the only standard, for what was important.

“Don’t mind all this,” she remarked, nodding
toward the organized chaos. “We always had a rule that anyone who
wrote to us got answered.” She said this without nostalgia, as if
she were simply reporting a principle of modern management, one of
those learned from a book of sound practices, a proven method of
achieving success. Her eyes made a quick circuit of the room. It
would have been easy to miss the brief, decisive nod, the closed
judgment on what she observed. Hart had the feeling that she did
this fairly often, come to see whether in her absence everyone was
still hard at work. She started to turn her attention back to him
when she noticed something that was not quite right. A stack of
envelopes, addressed and ready to be mailed, was too tall and had
begun to lean. Dividing it in half, she carefully set the two
shorter stacks next to one another. Without a word, just a look,
but a look that behind its apparent kindness suggested consequences
for failure, she let the young woman sitting at the table know that
even the smallest things had to be done right.

“It’s amazing how much time I’ve had to waste
teaching people the obvious,” she remarked as she took Hart by the
arm. She looked back over her shoulder and flashed a smile of
encouragement at the young woman she had just corrected.
“Everything is important,” she explained to Hart. “That’s what no
one seems to understand: everything. Now, let’s go somewhere where
we can talk.”

She led him through the living room, past the
marble pillar where he had stood talking to Austin Pearce, the
marble pillar that curiously had reminded him of her, across the
hallway toward a door that, as he now realized, was the entrance to
the elevator that went to the private suite of rooms directly
overhead.

“Scotch all right?” she asked, as she walked
over to the mahogany shelves crowded with books seldom opened and
never read. Handing Hart a glass, she took a drink, seemed to enjoy
it, and took another. She invited Hart to sit down, but she
continued to stand next to the desk and the photographs of what had
been her private life. There was an odd, pensive expression on her
face as if she were in some doubt about how to begin.

“You said it was important,” Hart reminded
her. “You said you had to see me right away.”

It was almost indistinguishable, the way the
muscles around her jaw tightened, and then swallowed without taking
a drink. She seemed to have to force herself to look right at him
and not to look away. “What have you found out?” she asked
finally.

Hart had the feeling that she did not really
want to know, that for some reason she was almost afraid of the
answer. But then why, suddenly, had she wanted to see him, insisted
that it had to be right now, tonight? Or did that explain it: the
fear that had been building up inside her had become intolerable
and she could not wait to hear what she was not sure she wanted to
learn? Or was it something else, something that Hart had not quite
been able to put his finger on, but that was palpable, real,
somewhere below the surface that he had not yet been able to
penetrate?

“Have you found out anything - what we talked
about before?” she repeated when he did not answer.

Hart sat on the edge of the chair, trying to
read the meaning in her nervous eyes. His relentless gaze seemed to
make her uncomfortable. She took another drink and then, biting her
lip, stared down at the floor. A moment later she looked up.

“You have, haven’t you? - learned something,
I mean.”

“What can you tell me about The Four
Sisters?”

She seemed puzzled, then annoyed. “The Four…?
What does that have to do with -?”

“The Four Sisters, the investment firm you
husband was taking money from; the firm that was helping foreign
interests buy control of certain American companies; the firm that
was using government money - our government’s money - to finance a
war we didn’t know anything about. Are you going to tell me that
you didn’t know anything about it, that you never heard of The Four
Sisters, that you never met Jean de la Valette, that -”

“Of course I’ve met Jean de la Valette! He’s
a very prominent man in financial circles. And the - what is it
again? - The Four Sisters. Yes, that’s the name of the firm he
runs. But what about it? Those other things you said - I wouldn’t
know anything about what he does with his money. And as for Robert
taking money from….that’s a fairly serious accusation. Are you
suggesting he was being paid to do something, that he was taking
bribes?” Her eyes became distant, remote. “What proof do you have
of that?”

“It’s what Quentin Burdick was working on,
what he was scheduled to see the President about the morning after
the night the President was killed.”

Madelaine Constable walked across to the
window and stared into the enveloping night. When she spoke her
voice was dry, flat, the rich emotion gone. “You talked to
Burdick?”

“Yes.”

“And he told you that?” she asked, her gaze
still fixed on the black, starless sky.

“He had been trying to get an interview for
months. When the President found out that he knew about The Four
Sisters, he called Burdick and set up the appointment himself.”

“And cancelled everything else he had that
week,” said Madelaine Constable as if she were reminding herself of
what had happened, the sequence of events that starting with this
had led to his death. She turned and faced Hart, but did not move
away from the window. She had reacquired something of her old
composure; the slight smile was there again, as well as the look of
self-assurance in her eyes. “Burdick thought something was going
on, that The Four Sisters was involved in something, and that
Robert was involved as well?”

Hart tried to be diplomatic. “There were
certain questions….” He gestured toward the rich interior of the
room and by implication to all the other things that the two of
them, the President and his wife, had acquired, “…about the sources
of the President’s wealth.”

She shook her head, disparaging the kind of
rumors that had always followed them, rumors she had so often been
forced to deny; rumors, as she had never tired of repeating, that
their political enemies tried to use against them because they
could never win an argument, or an election, on the merits. "We
have a lot of friends,” she said, lifting her eyebrows just a shade
to convey the deeper meaning. “People who understood that there
were certain things we needed - yes, including this house - things
we would have ample means to pay for as soon as we left
office.”