Grand Master (3 page)

“You’re right,” agreed Hart. “There has to be
a link to something overseas.” He gave Ryan a searching glance.
“You think Constable was doing business, the kind he should not
have been doing, with foreign governments?”

“That would be shocking, wouldn’t it?”
replied Ryan dryly. “That the Artful Dodger didn’t make
distinctions among those from whom he was willing to steal? But,
no; I doubt Burdick has found any direct connection like that.
Whatever Constable lacked in discipline, he was much too shrewd to
be that stupid. He never would have made that kind of mistake.”

Suddenly, Hart thought he knew. He remembered
now that he had wondered about it at the time, when the first
reports were published and the scandals started.

“One of the private equity firms, one of
those that collapsed; he was involved in that; one of the
investors, as I remember. That was before he became president, but
maybe something like it happened again, something that no one knew
about; probably something global, if Burdick has been pursuing
it.”

Hart glanced at his watch. There was a
reception for those who had been invited to the service. “It won’t
be so bad,” he said, as much to encourage himself as anything. “We
don’t have to stay long.”

“Trust me,” said Ryan, as they got up from
the table. “Ten minutes after we get there, you’ll begin to miss
this place.” He looked around with a kind of nostalgia at the bare,
near empty room, full of the cloying smell of dead air and stale
liquor. “You never know how good things are until you have to leave
them.”

They stood on the sidewalk, just outside the
bar, blinking like a pair of drunks who have lost all sense of time
or place. The sun hung low on the horizon, a pale yellow disk in a
sky that was now seven shades of gray. A deep, hard rumble shook
somewhere in the distance, threatening a storm. A wind kicked up,
stopped, and then, a moment later, hit them from the other side.
Hart looked one way up the street, Ryan looked the other.

“There!” cried Hart, waving wildly for a cab.
They just made into the taxi before the rain began to fall. By the
time they reached the Georgian mansion that, with the generous help
of some of their friends, the Constables had purchased to live in
after the President left office, the guests had left the spacious
rolling lawn in back and hurried inside. They stood in clusters,
talking in the solemn tones of men and women afraid of making a
mistake. Waiters in tuxedos drifted through the crowd bearing
glasses of champagne on shiny, silver platters.

Bobby Hart had at least a nodding
acquaintance with most of the people there. Some, like Frederick
Gallagher, who had served as secretary of state during the first
term of the Constable administration, he had known, if never quite
liked, or fully trusted, for years. Standing among a half dozen
other, former officials, Gallagher still had the same, teeming
self-assurance in his hooded, half-closed eyes, the same look of
forbearance on his slightly smiling mouth, as if he were doing you
a favor just to listen to what you had to say. On those few
occasions when their paths had crossed - committee hearings at
which the secretary testified - nothing had happened to make Hart
change his mind that the secretary was full of his own importance
and would not give a straight answer if his life depended on
it.

But certain things had changed in the years
since Frederick Gallagher held office. Bobby Hart had become one of
the best known names in the Senate and a national figure, while
Gallagher had become another former office holder, part of the
Washington establishment, one of those men who with each passing
year become more and more convinced that what they had done in
office was not only right, but brilliant and courageous, and that
their return to a position of great influence in the government is
the best thing that could happen to the country. Bobby Hart, who
had meant nothing to him in the past, was now someone he was always
delighted to see. Gallagher caught Hart’s eye and insisted the
Senator join them in a drink.

“It’s the end of an era,” said Austin Pearce,
picking up the thread of what he and the others had been talking
about. Short, with slumping shoulders and slightly overweight,
Austin Pearce had the smooth unwrinkled face of a man who had
seemed middle aged when he was young and would seem that way when
he was old. After serving as treasury secretary during Constable’s
first term, he had gone back to Wall Street because, he was
reported to have said, he preferred the company of the kind of
sharks who did not try to pretend they were doing you a favor while
they were eating you alive. He had explained his departure in a
somewhat different manner in a private conversation he had later
with Bobby Hart. “Greed is a more honest form of corruption than
what goes on here, if you get my meaning.” Hart liked him
enormously. He made the company of Frederick Gallagher almost
tolerable.

“Does the era have a name, Austin?” asked one
of the others, Eldridge Baker, who had held several different posts
in the administration before leaving to get himself elected
governor of a small western state. Baker had a talent for teasing
others in a way that seemed to bring out something he liked about
them. “As I remember, you had a name for just about everything we
did, or tried to do - and everyone who tried to do it,” he added
with a generous twinkle in his large, dark eyes.

Even Frederick Gallagher fell captive to the
change of mood. A thin smile stretched tight across his harsh,
angular mouth; but then his eyes narrowed and he quickly shook his
head as if to remind himself that a smile in the same room as a
grieving widow might be misinterpreted.

“Lady McDeath,” he whispered, darting a
glance beyond their small circle to make sure he would not be
overheard. “Isn’t that what you once called her, after she kept
insisting that we ought to be more aggressive in places like the
Middle East?”

“We say a lot of things that only make sense
at the moment,” said Pearce, looking straight at Gallagher; “things
that sound a lot different now.” He turned to Bobby Hart and with a
slight shrug remarked in his pleasant, understated voice that if he
had to give a name to the era that had ended with the President’s
death, it would probably have to be something like “the ‘era of
great illusions,’ the belief that there is no price to be paid for
anything, that we can do anything we like, fight any battle, win
any war, and do it all without any need to sacrifice; in other
words, that America is the exception to all the laws of history and
economics.”

“That’s rather glib, isn’t it?” said
Frederick Gallagher dismissively. The look in his eyes, however,
suggested that fundamentally he did not disagree.

“I was asked what name I would give it,”
replied Pearce calmly and without irritation. “What would you
suggest?”

Gallagher was not interested in taking up the
challenge. The conversation started to drift to other things.
Gallagher noticed someone else he knew and wanted to know
better.

“Let’s get together soon,” he said to Hart
with the quiet urgency of a man of importance. “There are a number
of things I think we might discuss.”

Hart watched as Gallagher moved across the
crowded room, never looking to the side, always straight ahead,
certain that he was being noticed by everyone he passed. “Hopeless,
isn’t he?” asked Austin Pearce, not without a kind of sympathy.
“He’s one of the smartest people I know,” he added when Hart turned
to him; “and one of the dumbest. Sort of like poor Robert
Constable, when you think about it: afraid that if he ever stopped
being the center of attention no one would know who he was.”

“I think you just described half of
Washington.”

“Only half? You seriously underestimate the
vanity, and the insecurity, of the American politician.” Pearce
reached for a glass from a passing waiter. The rain had stopped,
and the sound of thunder had become a distant fading echo in the
yellow, sultry sky. Some of the guests started to make their way
back outdoors. Searching for a place that would provide more
privacy, Pearce took Hart by the arm and led him across the room,
next to a white marble pillar.

While Pearce sipped from his glass, Hart
gazed across at Madelaine Constable, watching her repeat with the
same look of gratitude and sympathy the words with which she
returned each mumbled expression of encouragement and loss. His
hand was on the pillar, and he suddenly realized she was just like
it: beautiful, and cold, as near as anything, and as distant as
twenty centuries, a woman who would never break, a woman who would
break instead any hammer that tried to break her, unless of course
she shattered.

“She is, isn’t she?”

Hart turned to find Austin Pearce watching
him with friendly interest. Hart waited for Pearce to explain, but
instead Pearce shoved his hands deep in his pockets and rose up on
the balls of his feet. Staring down at the glowing white marble
floor, he did the same thing twice more before he shrugged his
shoulders and seemed to give up entirely. “I guess I don’t really
know - what she is, I mean. I knew her - I knew them both -
starting years ago; but even then, she was - they both were - a
kind of mystery. Bright, ambitious….” He paused long enough to give
Hart a meaningful look. “Everyone in Washington is ambitious, but
their ambition - it was of a different kind altogether. I wouldn’t
tell anyone else this, but it always seemed to me that they weren’t
constrained by anything; that, to put it bluntly, there wasn’t
anything they wouldn’t have done to get what they wanted.”

He hesitated; he wanted to make sure he got
it right, the thing that he had always known and yet had never been
able really to explain or even describe. “That makes them sound
ruthless, without principles, willing to use any means. They were
all of that, all right; but there was something more. There wasn’t
anything they didn’t want. Yes, I think that’s it. They didn’t stop
when they got what they wanted; as soon as they got it, they had to
have more.”

Bobby Hart tapped his finger against the hard
white marble column. “Like this?”

“Yes, exactly - a house the size of an
embassy, as if from being president the next step was to become a
country of his own. You think they could at least have waited until
his second term was over. That was the reason I left, when I began
to understand the outsized needs he had, his gargantuan appetites,
this absence of all restraint, and then this thing he did….” His
voice trailed off and for a moment he said nothing. “Can you come
up to New York?” he asked suddenly.

With anyone else, Hart would have started to
make excuses, but this was Austin Pearce and Austin Pearce was
different. There were not ten people in the country who knew
anything about financial markets and the global economy, maybe not
ten people in the world, who would not have dropped everything and
flown any distance to spend an hour alone with him.

“You see that man over there?” he asked,
nodding toward the head of the receiving line. “Recognize him?”

There was something vaguely familiar about
the distinguished looking stranger who had just taken Madelaine
Constable’s hand and bent close to whisper his own condolences.
There was a cultured, foreign aspect to his features, and Hart
thought he might be someone with the diplomatic corps, or a member
of a European government, there in his official capacity.

“I don’t think so. Who is he?”

A strange smile, full of caution, made a
furtive appearance on Austin Pearce’s fine, intelligent mouth. “The
head of one of the oldest families in France, and what you might
call the managing partner of one of the world’s most powerful, and
most secret, private firms. It is called The Four Sisters.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Four Sisters. Charlie Ryan had mentioned
it just a few hours earlier. It was the story Quentin Burdick was
working on, the story that involved the President. "It’s a private
equity group, an investment house, correct?”

Austin Pearce searched Hart’s eyes, looking
for reassurance, as it seemed, a sense that he could still trust
him and rely on his discretion. “The Four Sisters an investment
house? - I have a feeling it’s a good deal more than that.”

Hart glanced back to where Madelaine
Constable had just let go of the hand of the man they had been
talking about. “Who is he?” he asked.

“One of the most fascinating men I’ve ever
met: Jean de la Valette, charming, intelligent, well read- I don’t
mean the kind of contemporary things we read to stay current, his
horizon is rather different than that. I suppose that is
inevitable, when your family goes back, not just a few generations,
but five hundred years or more.” Pearce’s gaze became solemn,
profound, and full of troubled calculation. “I meant what I said
earlier,” he said finally. “Come to New York, as soon as possible -
this week, if you can. I have to talk to you about something.” He
made a quick, abrupt movement of his head toward Jean de la Valette
who was just then on his way outside. “It’s about The Four
Sisters.”

He patted Hart on his sleeve and told him he
had to go. He had not taken three steps when he turned back. “I
don’t trust many people, Bobby; not anymore. What I told you about
The Four Sisters - Don’t tell that to anyone, not even that you
know the name.”

Hart watched as the former treasury secretary
made his way through the crowd. Pearce was a small, average looking
man easily confused for an accountant’s assistant, someone brought
into a meeting of government officials to take notes or
double-check figures, until he began to talk and off the top of his
head analyze a budgetary problem or a financial question with the
same cogent ease as someone reading from the printed page. Pearce
had never been short for an answer, never baffled by a problem,
always calm and collected, never irritated or impatient, never for
any reason disturbed - until now. He had not admitted it, not in so
many words, but he had seemed almost frightened of this thing
called The Four Sisters, whatever it really was: an investment
house or, as he had put it, something more than that. Who was Jean
de la Valette, wondered Bobby Hart, and what was his connection to
Robert Constable?