Grand Master (33 page)

“If these aren’t suitable; if you would
prefer to see some other things…?”

“No, I’m sure these will be fine. But how did
you know that I’d be here, or that I would need something to
wear?”

“Things are always kept on hand for
unexpected guests,” explained the servant with a cursory nod. He
left the room while Hart got dressed and then, the very moment Hart
finished tying his shoes, there was a brief knock on the door and
he reappeared. Dinner would be served in half an hour, and, to his
regret, Jean Valette would not be able to join him. He had pressing
business, work that would occupy him until very late. They would
meet again in the morning and, until then, if there was anything
Mr. Hart wanted, all he had to do was make his wishes known.

Hart dined alone at a table with nineteen
vacant places, and ate next to nothing. His mind was too entangled
in the labyrinth of trickery and deceit in which he found himself
to think about food. Back in his room, he kicked off his shoes,
propped his head on two enormous pillows and tried to find answers
to the questions that would not stop screaming in his brain,
taunting him with his own incompetence. He needed to get home, back
to the United States, back to Washington. There was one person left
alive who had to know something: Clarence Atwood, the head of the
Secret Service. He could see him, sitting awkwardly in the chair in
that Watergate apartment that was not his, explaining that the
President had been murdered and that the investigation had already
begun, but only after he had first tried to question Hart about how
much he knew. Atwood had been close to everyone: Constable,
Constable’s wife, and now, still head of the Secret Service, close
to Irwin Russell, the new president he was sworn to protect. Who
was he really protecting? What did he really know?

Every question had a dozen different possible
answers, and every answer raised a dozen new questions. The only
thing that seemed certain in Hart’s angry and bewildered state was
that he had to do something, anything, whatever the risk might be.
He could not wait for someone else to solve the mystery of what had
happened; he could not just stay here and do nothing. He had to
act.

“Do something, damn it!” he cried in the
silence of the room as he sprang from the bed and started pacing
back and forth. “Do something, for God’s sake - anything!” He
stopped dead in his tracks, wheeled around as if he were facing an
accuser, beat his fists against his head, and swore out loud in
desperation. Then, suddenly, his shoulders slumped and all the fire
and defiance left his eyes. He was tired, used up, and not just
discouraged, depressed. What he had felt before, false bravado, an
embarrassment to his now empty, sober mind. He had no chance of
winning, no chance at all; probably no chance of coming out of this
alive. He knew that now, but he knew something else as well, that
he could not give up; that if he was going to die, he had to die
trying. He owed that much to Helen.

He tried to sleep, but the faces of those he
had known, ghosts of those who had died, kept marching through his
mind. If he did not die, if he lived a hundred years, he would
never forget the look in Austin Pearce’s eyes, the sad certainty
with which Austin had in those last few moments faced his death,
the absence of all complaint, the last thing he did, the last thing
he tried to do, telling Hart that there was something for him in
his pocket. And that, after he had with that warning gesture saved
his life. Austin had warned him once before, about what Madelaine
Constable was after when she asked him to find out what he could,
whether what her husband had done with The Four Sisters could be
traced, whether there was anything that could threaten her own
ambition. There was something else Austin had said, a small thing,
it had seemed at the time, but that now, when Hart remembered it,
took on a larger significance. The Order of St. John, the order
that Jean Valette had spoken to that day - Austin had said that
Irwin Russell, the President, was a member. What did that mean? Did
all of them - Constable, his wife, Irwin Russell - have some
connection with Jean Valette, with The Four Sisters? Hart had never
thought about Russell.

Finally, fitfully, Hart drifted off to sleep;
but then, a little after three in the morning, he was awakened by
the sound of a plane passing low overhead. He went to the window
and in the distance saw the parallel lights of a landing strip and
the fast descent of a private jet. It was too far away to see who
got off or got on, or what might be happening. Hart wondered if it
had anything to do with him, or whether this was part of the
pressing business that had forced Jean Valette to miss dinner.

Ten minutes after the plane landed, it took
off, and the headlights of a single car wove through the darkness
toward the chateau. It was the same limousine in which Hart had
ridden on the journey from Mont Saint Michel, but this time Jean
Valette was not in it. He was waiting at the steps, tapping his
foot, as the driver and another man helped out of the back seat a
man wearing a blindfold with his hands tied behind his back.
Valette stood there, watching, as his newest guest was helped up
the steps, and did not say a word when he passed in front of him
and was led inside.

Someone had been brought a prisoner to the
chateau. What did that mean for him? For all Jean Valette’s
protestations of sympathy and good will, what did he really have in
mind to do? Hart threw on his clothes, determined to find out. But
the door was locked, he could not get out! He pounded on the thick
wooden door, shouting for help, demanding that someone come at
once. But nothing happened, no one came. He was a prisoner, and
there was nothing he could do, except wait to see the next move in
a game he did not understand and did not want to play. He went back
to bed and, staring at the ceiling, wondered how much longer he
would be alive.

When he woke up, a little after dawn, he
found the door again unlocked. He looked outside, but there was no
one there, no one standing guard, no one to stop him going where he
would. He dressed quickly and started down the long corridor and
down a flight of stairs. He stopped at an open doorway, the
entrance to a gallery he estimated to be at least two hundred feet
in length, a room with a high, arched ceiling and, at discreet
intervals, tall peaked windows to let in the light. Along the
entire length of both facing walls were painted portraits, most,
though not all of them, life size or even larger. Hart stepped
inside to look closer at the first one in the series, a knight in
full armor, a white tunic emblazoned with a red cross, holding a
shiny plumed helmet in his hand, standing next to a white charger.
In the background, at the crest of a shadowed hill, lay the smoking
ruins of a tan colored stone fortress.

“The First Crusade,” said a voice just behind
him.

Hart turned around to find Jean Valette
sitting on a backless wooden bench. Instead of a business suit of
the sort he had worn yesterday, he was dressed in a fashion that,
if not nearly as old as the chateau, was still years out of date.
He looked like something pained by one of the Impressionists, or
one of the painters themselves, in flowing green corduroy trousers
and a loose fitting yellow linen jacket, a lavender shirt, brown
calf-leather shoes and blue socks. He was lounging on the bench,
half-reclining on his elbow. There was a drowsy, languid expression
in his eyes, and, as if to serve as a counter-point, a mocking
smile on his lips. With an idle gesture of his hand, he motioned
toward a portrait that, from the long angle of his perspective,
looked like a single portrait, a single person, seen in the
infinitely receding image of a double set of mirrors.

“Doesn’t everyone greet their family at the
beginning of a new day?” he asked with a slight tip of his head
that signaled the double meaning of a private joke. With surprising
agility, he sprang to his feet. “Come, I’ll introduce you.”

Hart did not move. “Someone locked me in last
night. Am I being kept a prisoner?”

“No, of course not. The door wasn’t locked
this morning, was it? You’re free to go wherever you like, to do
whatever you please. Yes, it was locked last night, but there was a
reason. Had you come downstairs in the middle of the night, it
might have been - what shall I say? - awkward.”

“Because I might have tried to do something
about what was going on: that man you brought here, blindfolded and
tied up. I may not be a prisoner, but he certainly is!”

Jean Valette seemed faintly amused at the
suggestion. Placing his hands in the oversize pockets of his
jacket, he lowered his eyes. His head moved side to side in the
rhythm of someone used to being misunderstood. He looked up and
shrugged. “He would have come if we had invited him, but, as I
think you’ll agree after you meet him, it’s better all around if
his coming here is a surprise.”

Apparently, it was to be as much a surprise
for Hart as for this mysterious, unwilling guest. Valette pointed
to the portrait that had first caught Hart’s attention, and began a
long disquisition on his ancestor and the founder of his house.

“We don’t know these things for sure, but it
would be reasonable to suppose that he must have been one of the
close confederates of William the Conqueror. He was certainly one
of the leaders of the Normans when William conquered England, a man
who would have been where we were yesterday, Mont Saint Michel,
when it was first constructed and all the Norman nobility would
gather there to make their plans and say their prayers before
embarking on that first crusade to return to Christendom the
birthplace of Christ.”

Moving slowly from portrait to portrait, Jean
Valette offered a few insightful remarks about each of his once
famous ancestors, but none of that was as interesting to Hart as
the way he described each life, each heroic achievement, as links
in a chain that bound them all together, points on a line drawn by
a hand none of them could see. “Step back,” he advised Hart. “Let
your eye run down the wall, then turn around and do the same thing
the other way. Don’t study their faces, don’t look at them as
individuals; look instead at the changes in the long sweep of time.
What do you notice?” he asked as Hart turned and looked. “What is
the first thing you see?”

Jean Valette led him down the gallery, moving
past each portrait, but not stopping in front of any of them.
“Notice the way the armor changes. It starts with a whole suit of
it, every part of the body covered in steel; then, gradually, there
is less of it, until, finally, when we reach the 17th century and
the reign of Louis XIV, there isn’t any armor at all. We are no
longer warriors, ready to die for our religion; we are courtiers -
Look there! See how that one is dressed - velvet, silk, and satin;
his fingers full of rings. Look at the difference! In those earlier
portraits you could almost feel the sense of adventure, the
strength, the courage, the lack of any hesitation. They knew what
they believed in - they did not have any doubt about it. They were
willing, eager, to die for it. When they listened to the Song of
Roland, they were listening to a story about themselves: men for
whom the only real sin was not to fight when war was needed. And
this courtier, this preening favorite of the court? Do those look
like the eyes of someone you would follow into battle? They are too
full of cunning, too full of contempt for all the people he looks
down on. He never rides a horse; he sits in a carriage. He doesn’t
fight with a sword; he uses words to wound. Still,” added Jean
Valette with a wry glance, “though only with words, he at least
sometimes fought face to face. When we get to the 19th century, he
does not fight at all; he only makes money. Look over there,” he
said, turning toward the wall behind them and a long line of
portraits of men dressed in black. “We became bankers, financiers;
we didn’t believe in anything enough to go to war about it. We only
believed in profit.”

Jean Valette had begun to get nervous,
agitated, as he spoke. He held his hands behind his back as if it
were the only way to keep them under control. He became conscious
of what he was doing and began to laugh without embarrassment at
what he seemed prepared to concede were his own peculiarities. One
hand on his hip, he scratched his head with the other. “I’m being
very unfair, of course; many of them were men of decency and
courage, generous and kind: my father, for example.”

“I’ve heard what he did in the war.”

Jean Valette seemed surprised. He looked at
Hart with gratitude. “Later, perhaps, I’ll tell you something about
him.”

He was silent for a moment, pondering, as it
seemed, what his father had done. Then his eyes brightened and he
motioned Hart to follow him back to the other side and the portrait
of that other Jean Valette. “Painted, as you might expect, to show
him at the forefront in the Battle of Malta. Look at the way he
stands there, the flag with the cross in one hand, the sword held
high in the other. He looks like Saint Michael himself, Jean
Valette, Grand Master of the Order of St. John!”

“Five hundred years ago,” said Hart, turning
away from the portrait to Jean Valette; “and the order still
exists. You spoke to them yesterday, at Mont Saint Michel. You do
every year, I gather. But the people who were there - they aren’t
the only members of the Order, are they?”

Jean Valette was at first confused, but then
he understood that the confusion was not his. “Five hundred years
ago, yes; but even more than that, back to the early part of the
14th century, when the Templars were all executed and their order
dissolved. But you think…? Yes, I see: an ancient order, full of
mystic secrets; always existing, never gone away; kept alive
through passwords and special codes, down through the generations,
waiting for the day when it can spring back to life and take its
proper, leading part and save the world!” exclaimed Jean Valette,
his eyes now bold, cheerful, and defiant. “I wish it were so; I
wish the Order of St. John was what it was at the beginning, when
it replaced the Templars as the militant arm of the church, when
the church still believed there were things worth fighting for. I
wish it were almost anything, but what it has actually become: a
church auxiliary for the idle rich, people who give money so they
can call each other knights and think they can buy a place in
heaven!”