Grand Master (28 page)

Wiping the vomit from his mouth, he
straightened out the paper. Whatever they were saying, no matter
how distorted, he had to know what he was up against. A photograph
of Robert Constable beaming at the beautiful wife of the senator,
taken at a fund-raising dinner during Bobby Hart’s last campaign,
was enough to establish an interest, which, given the President’s
reputation with women, meant something close to confirmation for
whatever prurient minded people were willing to imagine. There was
a genius in simplicity. Robert Constable never looked at a
beautiful woman without wanting her. Helen Hart was as beautiful as
any woman anyone had ever seen. Did the President have an affair
with the wife of a senator of his own party - what other reason
would Bobby Hart have had to hire someone to murder him?

That at least was the venomous logic of the
unnamed source, identified only as someone close to the
investigation: Hart was guilty, and this is the reason he did it.
Infidelity, betrayal, and anger - more than justified at what
Robert Constable had done - would have been decent motives for
revenge; but, more importantly, what evidence had been fabricated
to convince people that he was guilty of the crime? His eyes moved
swiftly down the endless column inches. He read to the end of the
page and then followed the story to the next page after that.

He stopped at another photograph, half way
down the page: a woman, young and attractive, lay sprawled on the
pavement outside her tenth floor apartment on Manhattan’s West
Side. Her name was Sophie Jardin, a French citizen, and the hired
assassin who had killed the President. According to the report, she
had fallen from her balcony while trying to get away a little past
midnight - an hour, as Hart calculated, after Quentin Burdick had
been murdered. The evidence against Robert Hart had been found in
her apartment: records of a series of payments made to a bank in
Switzerland. Richard Bauman, the Secret Service agent who had been
with the President the night he died, had given the FBI a
description of what she looked like; an anonymous source had told
them where she lived. “An anonymous source!” muttered Hart in
frustration.

The woman, the assassin they had hired, had
been dead from the moment she agreed to take the job. She had
always been the one essential, and completely expendable, part of
the real conspiracy, the one that had gotten rid of the President
and wanted to get rid of him. Killing her removed a potential
threat, someone who could lead an investigation back to them; but
more than that, it made her a witness against Hart, an accomplice,
if you will, in the very conspiracy that had resulted in her death:
There was no one left to question whether the records found in her
apartment were really hers.

A noose was closing around his neck, and he
had the awful, empty feeling that there was nothing he could do to
stop it. He had the strange, dark sensation of falling through a
trap door, knowing he had only a second left to live. He got up
from the bench and started pacing back and forth, growing more
determined, and more desperate, to get to Mont Saint Michel and, if
he had to, force Jean Valette to tell the truth.

The train seemed to stop every few minutes as
it wound its way through the rolling Norman countryside. Hart sank
low in a seat next to the window, grateful that the car was nearly
empty and no one had to sit beside him; grateful, also, that the
few passengers who got on and off were too busy with their own
affairs to pay him any notice. The train rolled on through the
endless night, lost in the darkness between the frequent towns and
villages, until, finally, three hours later, it arrived in the
village of ___, where sometime the next afternoon, Hart could take
a taxi the rest of the way. He woke the porter at the only hotel,
paid cash in advance for a room with a window in the back and
collapsed on the soft, down-filled mattress like a soldier just
come back from the front.

He did not wake up until almost noon, and
when he did, was not sure where he was. Nothing seemed real,
nothing seemed quite right. People had been murdered! He had tried
to do something about it, and now he was the one being blamed.
People had been murdered, including anyone who could have helped
prove that he had not been involved. His teeth ached, his head
hurt; his eyes felt like the ashen embers of last night’s fire. The
only clothes he had were the ones he had been wearing. In a cloudy
mirror over a scratched up wooden dresser, he saw a face older than
the one he remembered, a face lined with fatigue and worry, and
with eyes uncertain and confused. Splashing water on his face, he
looked again, but the only change was that he now felt somewhat
more awake.

He wanted to go outside and get some air,
forget for a while what had happened and what he had to do, lose
himself in whatever caught his eye; he wanted to remember, to feel
again, what it was like to have a life that was not under constant
threat of death and scandal. A few more hours, he told himself;
that was all he had to wait. Better not to take a chance that he
might be seen by someone who remembered who he was. He lay on the
narrow bed with four iron posts, listening in the silence to the
dresser clock bring the past closer to the future. Ten minutes,
fifteen, then twenty; he could not stand it any longer. He threw on
his clothes and stumbled down the stairs and out the door into the
bright sunshine of a windless summer afternoon.

He fairly sprinted down the empty street,
swinging his arms to match his stride, filling his lungs with air,
forcing himself to feel alive. Passing a bakery, he turned back,
bought a coffee and a roll, enough to keep him going, and began to
look for a taxi, a car and driver, to take him the last few miles
to Mont Saint Michel and his meeting with Jean Valette. He was not
sure that he had a meeting. He did not know what Austin Pearce had
arranged, or if he had arranged anything; all he had was that
fragmentary and enigmatic note: a name, a place, a time.

Mont Saint Michel at four o’clock and it was
now past two. Plenty of time, but Mont Saint Michel was not a small
place, and it was not even clear whether Valette would be inside
the cathedral or somewhere in the near vicinity. A million people
visited every year, and today, in the middle of summer, tourists
from all over would be tramping through it. How would he find him,
how would he find anyone, among all those people? Would Valette be
looking for him? If there was a meeting, if Austin Pearce had set
up an appointment, what was the reason Valette had agreed to it?
Why would Valette, who had organized everything, murders without
number, want to meet him, unless it was to have him killed, to hand
him over to the same people who had just the night before arranged
to have Austin Pearce and Aaron Wolfe both murdered?

It did not matter what Jean Valette wanted,
Hart reminded himself; what mattered was that this was his chance,
his only chance to get to Jean Valette; the only chance to save
himself, and stop whoever was involved in this from getting away
with murder.

He found a driver sitting idly in his cab,
studying with nostalgia the smoke from what was left of his
cigarette. With a flick of two tobacco stained fingers, he sent the
stub flying into the cobblestone street.

“Mont Saint Michel,” said Hart as he climbed
into the dust covered back seat.

The driver gave him a blank look in the
rearview mirror. Hart started to repeat it, to give it more of a
French accent. The driver winced in apprehension. “I understood;
but it wasn’t necessary.” Starting the engine, he threw the car
into gear and pulled away from the curb. “From here, no one goes
anywhere else. From here,” he added with a shrug, “there is no
other place to go; unless you live here, of course. But then, if
you live here, you don’t need a taxi, do you?”

A few minutes later, with the village already
out of sight, he asked, with the same casual interest he inquired
of most of his fares, “Have you been to Mont Saint Michel
before?”

Hart sat forward on the cracked, leather
seat, suddenly eager for the opportunity to talk to someone who did
not know who he was. “Yes, some years ago; I was here with my wife.
We spent a month in France, and -”

“It hasn’t changed.”

“France hasn’t -?”

“Mont Saint Michel,” corrected the driver.
His eyes sparkled with pleasure, the way they did every time he had
the chance to make this remark to some returning tourist, someone
coming back for a subsequent visit; usually, if not always, many
years after the first, the ones who had come as students and then
come back again at that point in middle age when they wanted as
much to remember how things had been with them than for what they
wanted to see of the ancient cathedral. “Mont Saint Michel hasn’t
changed,” he continued with greater interest. “That is not to say
that is has not changed since it was built a thousand years ago, in
the 11th century, but it has not changed since you were here. The
changes that have happened take much longer than something so short
as a lifetime.”

The road banked to the right and then ran
slightly uphill for perhaps half a mile, and then, at the crest, it
was there, Mont Saint Michel, towering high above the sea.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” said the driver.
“Imagine doing something like today, and on a rock that sticks two
hundred forty feet up in the air: build a cathedral, a monument to
God hundreds of feet high on top of it, and know, when you start,
that it is going to take a hundred years. I said a monument to God,
but more than that, it is a tribute to the Archangel, Michael, who
conquered Satan. When they became Christians, the Normans put
themselves under his protection. He was, for a while, the patron
saint of France.” The driver glanced in the mirror. “You’re an
American - yes? I read something written by an American - though I
have forgotten who it was - someone who wrote a long time ago. He
said - and I liked it so much I’ve never forgotten it - that, ‘The
Archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the tower that
crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil
crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance,
perched on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own
in heaven and on earth….The Archangel stands for Church and State,
and both militant.’”

The driver’s eyes brightened with the
knowledge that he could still recall the passage, remember every
word, and then, content with what he had done, lapsed into a
silence. “You don’t remember who wrote that?”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t; but he wrote a whole
book about our cathedrals. If I remember right, he came from a
famous family.” They were almost there. The mouth of the Coueson
River could be seen in the distance, along with the causeway that
leads across it to the entrance, fortified against English attacks
in the Hundred Years’ War by a series of heavy stone towers and
heavy thick walls.

“You’ve been here before; you know how to get
to the top: follow the old pilgrim’s route, past all the shops that
sell souvenirs, past the Eglise St. Pierre, all the way up to the
abbey gates.” Pulling the car off to the side, he got out to open
the door for his passenger. He had developed a temporary fondness
for him because of the way he had listened so attentively. He
looked at him with the sympathy of a well-meaning stranger. “You
said you came here before with your wife. But this time you come
alone?”

“I hadn’t really planned this trip. I only
just found out I’m supposed to meet someone here, and I’m not even
quite sure where.” He made it sound as if his confusion were a
simple mistake, a misunderstanding that would not have any serious
result. “Perhaps you know the man I’m here to see - Jean de la
Valette?”

The driver looked at him as if he must be
kidding, as if it were some kind of American prank, like saying, in
an earlier time, that he was there to meet Charles de Gaul. Then he
seemed to reconsider. With his feet on the sidewalk, he sat down on
the front seat of the taxi and glanced up at Hart, standing in
front of him. He seemed particularly intrigued by the way Hart was
dressed. “Are you sure you want to go like that?”

Hart turned up the palms of his hands, and
with a puzzled glance asked him what he meant.

“The way you’re dressed - I would have
thought…, I mean everyone else is - how shall I say? - More formal:
suits and ties; and the women, of course, also quite properly.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Hart,
growing more perplexed.

“You said you were meeting Jean Valette. I
assume you mean Jean Valette, the famous financier.”

“Yes, now if you know where I can find him,
I’ll -”

“Doesn’t it say, on your invitation?”

“I don’t have that kind of invitation. The
meeting was arranged by someone else, and, as I said, I was just
informed of it late yesterday. I barely had time to get here.”

“Four o’clock,” said the driver, to Hart’s
astonishment.

“Yes, but how did you know…?”

The driver got out of the car. There were
people passing by, and he did not want to be overheard. Placing his
hands on the small of his back, he stretched up on the balls of his
feet and then took a deep breath. He would try again. “It always
starts at four o’clock; every year as far back as I can remember. I
drive a number of them over myself, usually the night before,
sometimes in the morning. Some of them, of course, stay here, in
the abbey; some of them for as much as a week. They like to get the
feel of what it was like, a thousand years ago, when it first
happened.”

Despite his attempt at resistance, Hart was
running out of patience. As politely as he could, he asked, “When
what first happened?”

“The Crusade, of course. They come here, the
same time every year, to commemorate the first one to happen,
sometimes a hundred people, sometimes more; and every year, late in
the afternoon, the head of it gives a speech. That’s the reason
you’re here, isn’t it, to hear Jean Valette?”