Grand Master (24 page)

“We’re here because the President of the
United States didn’t die of a heart attack, the way it has been
reported. The President was murdered, and there have been two
murders since, and both of the men who were killed knew something
about it. There are only a few people who know about this, Mr.
Wolfe, and if you so much as mention it to anyone - if you breathe
a word of this to the ambassador - I’ll make sure that instead of
Paris, you’re next assignment will be somewhere in the sub-Sahara
in the middle of a civil war. Now, what can you tell us about The
Four Sisters and Jean de la Valette?”

Aaron Wolfe no longer felt ancient, but
suddenly young and out of his depth. He fumbled with the papers
stacked in front of him, the copious notes he had prepared, no
longer certain quite what to say or what to do. “But what does The
Four Sisters..., what does Jean Valette, have to do with that?” he
asked without thinking. The only response was a blank stare. He
started to mumble an apology.

“Just tell us what you know. Then we can
figure out what it means.”

Removing his glasses, Wolfe pushed the notes
he had written off to the side. He did not need them to remind him
of the facts.

“The Four Sisters - the name itself tells you
something about the French and their history, the price they
sometimes had to pay for survival. The grandfather of Jean Valette
was the only son of a banker. He was only twenty-five when he died,
a soldier killed at the famous Battle of the Marne, when the German
army was stopped just outside Paris in the first great battle of
the First World War, the battle in which Marshall Petain saved
France. He had a son, just a boy at the time of his death, a boy,
moreover who had lost his mother in childbirth, but he had four
sisters. They took on the management of the bank and, in addition,
the education of their nephew. By any measure, they did a
remarkable job of both.”

Aaron Wolfe drank from a glass of water.
There was a troubled expression in his dark blue eyes. As much as
he tried to concentrate on the task at hand - the brief chronology,
the history of the last hundred years, of the family of Jean
Valette - he kept coming back to the awful secret he had just
learned.

“It’s true,” said Hart, not without sympathy
for the shock he knew the other man must have felt. “Hard to
believe, I know; but it’s true. There’s reason to believe that The
Four Sisters is involved.”

Wolfe thought for a moment, trying to gauge
the possibilities. “Valette is a very strange man in some way,
remarkable - more remarkable than perhaps anyone in France; more
remarkable, perhaps, than anyone anywhere, so far as that goes -
but involved in something like that? It doesn’t seem possible.”

Austin Pearce brought him back to the point
where he had broken off his narrative. “You were about to tell us
something more about the sisters and what they did with the
bank.”

“Yes, sorry. Where was I? - The Depression.
Half the banks in Paris, half the banks in France, suffered losses
or went under, but the four sisters not only kept their bank
afloat, but, bankers to the core, had the foresight, and the nerve,
to buy up everything they could get - other businesses, other
banks, - at fire sale prices. They were able to do this, not just
because they were smart and, to call things by their names, utterly
ruthless in their dealings, but because they were extremely
well-connected, as connected as you could get. The Valettes had for
generations been one of the leading families of France. It isn’t
widely understood, other than by the French themselves, that there
are two hundred families in this country that through every change
of government - and there isn’t any place you can think of that has
gone through more changes of government than France - make sure
nothing really changes, that they continue to have all the wealth
and all the power. The Valettes have always been one of them, and
at times one of the two or three most important of them. One of the
sisters - the youngest one, if I remember right - was married to a
Rothschild.”

Austin Pearce was not as interested in what
the four sisters had done to improve the position of the bank as he
was in their dead brother’s son. “Jean Valette’s father, the boy
the sisters raised - What can you tell us about him?”

Aaron Wolfe had sharp, quick moving eyes, but
at the mention of Valette’s father he stared straight ahead in an
attitude of puzzled respect. It reminded Austin Pearce of the way
he felt when he came upon some surprising fact in a history he was
reading, a fact that made him see a famous figure in a new and
surprising light, better and more complicated than he had thought
before.

“You’re fascinated by him, I take it; there’s
something about him that astonishes you, correct?”

Wolfe turned and looked at Pearce with that
same look, admiration for the older man’s insight and intelligence.
“He did something that took more than just courage, something
extraordinary. You wouldn’t have thought that about him early on,
when he became one of the most prominent bankers in Europe. France,
in the l930s, was rotten to the core, determined not to fight
another war with Germany, more afraid of Communism at home than of
any threat beyond its borders. You know all that, I’m sure. Like a
great many others in financial circles, Paul Valette was convinced
that democracy, and particularly French democracy with all its
different parties, none of them willing to compromise long enough
to fashion a working majority capable of governing for more than a
few months at a time, was doomed. A lot of people thought that
then. What set him apart was his belief that what Hitler was doing
in Germany was the wave of the future; that if France was to
survive, it had to follow his example: find someone strong enough
to impose a discipline, a unity on the country; someone who could
keep France from destroying itself.”

Wolfe raised his eyebrows, a silent
commentary on the inadequacy of words, the way he had, quite
without meaning to, misled them at the beginning. “The wave of the
future - I should have said that he saw in Germany a way to restore
something of what he thought the glory of the past. That was really
what fascism was about: a rejection of the modern world, democracy
and a market economy, the whole concern with the rights of the
individual, as opposed to the supposed greatness of the nation.
This had a powerful appeal for someone like Paul Valette who came
from a family that could trace its origins in the origins of
France. He became one of the leading figures in Action Francaise, a
fascist organization headed by Charles Maurras, a classicist who,
it was said, loathed the modern world and everything it stood for.
It is important to know this about Paul Valette, but what makes him
interesting is that once the war began, once the German occupation
started, he did not support the collaborationist government of
Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval. No, that same Paul Valette who
thought France should follow German’s example, joined the French
resistance.”

Wolfe fell into a long silence as he
considered the strange futility of even trying to guess what might
have driven Paul Valette, or anyone, to do something not just
brave, but completely unexpected. History was full of examples, but
while history could remind you that the exceptional case was
possible, it could only tell you what had happened, not that it
would happen again. Psychology sought to paint a broader picture,
to find a pattern in human behavior, but psychology looked at
things in terms of averages, and if there was anything that
characterized every, even the most disparate, form of courage, it
was that none of them were average.

“He was incredibly effective, the work he did
in the French resistance. He was, in the eyes of the world, a
notorious collaborator. The bank, his bank, the bank that had been
in his family for years, handled most of the financial transactions
the Third Reich made in occupied France. He was, to all
appearances, as much a friend to the Nazis as they could want; and
the whole time he was giving the information he gathered about what
the Germans were doing to his contacts in the resistance and,
through them, to the allies. Someone betrayed him, one of the
people he worked with, probably forced to betray him under torture
- everyone has a breaking point. Valette was arrested by the
Gestapo in the last days of the war and put in front of a firing
squad. It was one of the last executions the Germans did in
Paris.”

Watching Aaron Wolfe, Hart was struck by the
way he made it seem that he was talking about someone he had known
- a friend, or a relative, he had respected and admired - rather
than telling a story torn from a long forgotten page of history. It
was unusual to come across anyone, especially someone still
relatively young, who had the capacity to grasp in all its
anguished uncertainty the moral dilemmas of the past.

“No one knew that he had been a hero of the
war, a hero of the French resistance; no one, except a few men in
the French underground, not all of whom survived. All that the
public knew was that this rich banker from one of France’s oldest
families had been only too eager to take Germany money and, while
others suffered, live as well, or even better, during the
occupation than he had before the war began. When he was shot,
lined up against a wall and executed, most people thought it was
just another act of German barbarism and that, unlike most other
German executions, Paul Valette had gotten exactly what he
deserved.”

The head of the political section tapped his
fingers together. A smile of something close to vindication, a
shared sense of triumph, the decent human feeling for the kind of
bravery we all wish we had, ran clean and straight across his
mouth.

“It was only several years later, several
years after the war ended, that the truth finally came out: that
far from being the traitor everyone had imagined, Paul Valette had
been one of the great French patriots. The effect was to cast his
heroism, his sacrifice, in tragic colors. More than honored, the
Valette name was almost worshipped in France.”

Austin Pearce was sitting on the edge of his
seat, his hands clasped together on the gleaming hard finished
table. “He must have known, during the years he acted the part of a
collaborator,” he said in a quiet, solemn voice, “that the truth
might never be known, that he might be killed, taken out somewhere
and shot in the back of the head, and that his family would go down
in history tainted with what everyone would believe had been a
crime.” Glancing across at Hart, he added: “Everyone likes to think
they would be a hero, willing to die for what they believe. The
world will know, and honor, what we did. But this? -” he asked,
looking back at Wolfe as if to draw him into the conversation, “-
Give your life for your country, knowing that there is every chance
that you will be known forever as a traitor! How many of us would
be willing to do that, I wonder? It is heroism of a different order
than what we are used to.”

“What about his son, Jean Valette - the one
we need to know about?” asked Hart.

“If you’re asking, what effect this had on
him, what his father did, the way he died - I can only speculate,
but it must have taken on an aura of epic proportions. Jean Valette
was a small boy when his father was murdered by the Germans.
Curious, isn’t it? - That both of them, father and son, lost their
fathers in a world war; but then, millions died in those wars and
millions of children were lucky to still have a mother. Jean
Valette did not have a father, but he had the lesson of his
father’s example that the only life worth living is to believe in
something for which you would gladly die. Jean Valette became what
by even French standards is eccentric, not to say extreme.”

Austin Pearce thought he knew what Wolfe was
referring to. “You mean the way he talks about the need for a new
Crusade, a war between Islam and the West?”

Wolfe nodded vigorously. Then, abruptly, he
changed his mind. “He doesn’t mean it quite in the literal sense.
When he talks about a crusade, he means it more by way of analogy,
reminding people of what, historically, the crusades were - what
they were meant to be and what they actually achieved, or failed to
achieve. I don’t think he means - I certainly haven’t found
anything in his writings to suggest that he means - an armed
invasion of the Middle East by the Western powers. He isn’t talking
about that ‘war of civilizations’ that people who know nothing
about history sometimes talk about. He has something else in mind,
but I’m not sure I could tell you exactly what it is.”

“But he has written about this kind of thing
- politics, history; he isn’t just a banker, the head of an
investment house?” asked Hart.

“Given his father’s example, I should think
that for him the two things are intertwined.” Wolfe’s gaze became
more intense, more determined. There was something he wanted Hart
to understand. “The Four Sisters, ever since Jean Valette took
control of it, seems less interested in making money - though it’s
made a great deal of it - than broadening its influence. Have you
read anything about Florence in the time of the Medici? The Medici
made a fortune in banking, but the money was a means, a means to
power, and a means, also, to start the Renaissance. Whatever
Valette wants - whether it is to do something like the Medici and
change the way Europe thinks, or gain power for himself - The Four
Sisters has gone from a bank that only did business in Paris to a
financial institution that is active all around the world. One
thing has not changed, however: Almost everything it does is
cloaked in secrecy. The joke in Paris is that when a Swiss banker
has money he wants to hide, he opens an account with The Four
Sisters.”