Grand Master (38 page)

His eyes darted first one way then the other,
moving in short, explosive bursts. He seemed nervous, full of
energy, anxious to get to what he wanted to say, and yet still not
quite certain how to begin. He had turned his head to the side,
casting a long glance at the empty shelves, seeing in his mind the
exact titled sequence of each volume they had once contained.
Suddenly he jerked backward and studied Hart with what seemed a new
interest.

“How old are you? - Never mind! In your
forties; you still have the excuse of your youth.” He pushed the
manuscript across to Hart. “I don’t know if you will understand it;
I don’t care if you believe it. But take it, read it, study it,
think about it, let it settle in your mind, then work your way
through it again.”

Jean Valette sat as if frozen to the spot,
and then, an instant later, laughed out loud. He jumped out of the
chair and threw up his hands. “No one understands, no one has any
idea what I’m talking about! No one has seen the things I’ve seen,
things that have not happened yet, but that I know as well as
anything I know about the past!”

He began to talk faster and faster, trying to
explain, and then, without so much as a moment’s pause, lapsing
into a long flight of French, and he was not talking to Hart
anymore, he was talking to himself, taunting himself with knowing
things he could not explain, not if he had a hundred years to try.
The world was mad, or he was: there was no middle ground. His eyes
grew wide - whether with wonder at what he saw, or rage at what he
could not make anyone see - and then, as his eyes rolled higher in
his head, his jaw tightened and began to tremble, and he pounded
both fists so hard on the desk that the lamp would have fallen over
if Hart had not caught it and put it back.

“Read it!” he implored. “Whenever you can,
whenever you want,” he went on, quickly coming back to himself.
“You might be - No, I’m certain of it: You’ll understand enough of
it, the broad outline, to grasp the main intention.” Wrapping his
arms around himself, he began to pace back and forth. There was a
slightly puzzled expression on his face and a kind of laughing
awareness of it in his eyes. From a sideways angle, he glimpsed
Hart, who wore a puzzled expression of a different kind.

“I need to be careful. It’s a curious change
of phrase, don’t you think, to say on the one hand that someone is
out of his mind, and to say on the other that someone has lost his
mind. Lost it, out of it - the real danger is to live too much
inside it.” He stopped pacing and as if he had just remembered
something of great importance, faced Hart directly. “I need to be
careful that I don’t end up like him.”

Hart had no idea whom he was talking
about.

“There is a marvelous description that when I
first read it thought might one day, if I worked hard enough, be
written about me. I do not, you understand, put myself in the same
category, but precisely for that reason the danger is perhaps even
greater.

“’Nietzsche sought, by a new beginning, to
retrieve antiquity from the emptiness of modernity and, with this
experiment, vanished in the darkness of insanity.’ He saw what
would happen in the 20th century and it drove him mad. I see what
is going to happen in the 21st century, and perhaps with the same
result. Read what I have written. You may think I’ve already gone
mad. But I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.”

Jean Valette sat down, took a deep breath,
and, as it seemed, caught his balance. “’God is dead.’ You’ve heard
that phrase. Do you know what it means? It isn’t simply a denial of
the existence of the Christian God: it is the greatest event in the
life of man, the ultimate crisis in human history. The death of God
means the death of belief in anything worth looking up to. It means
the ‘last man,’ the man who has ceased to aspire, the man who no
longer knows anything heroic, any dedication, any reverence. The
last man: everyone wills the same thing, everyone is the same,
everyone is equal, the perfect conformity of perfect mediocrity in
which everyone is satisfied; worse because no one knows, no one
remembers that there is anything else, that there is a difference
between better and worse. It is the world in which we live now, the
only acceptable, the only legitimate objective, comfortable
self-preservation in which all anxieties are removed, or at least
treated, by pharmaceuticals and therapy.”

“You paint a fairly bleak picture. Most
people aren’t quite that pessimistic,” replied Hart. Even as he
said it, he felt a tinge of embarrassment, a sense that he was
repeating something that he did not quite believe.

“The people in the picture never see
themselves, do they? Only someone outside it knows what they are
really like, and how much better they could be. That’s what I’m
trying to tell you - what I tried to write: the West is in a crisis
and it doesn’t know it. The West has forgotten what it stands for,
has forgotten what it believes, or used to believe, because of
course now it does not believe in anything, except its own
superiority to everything that preceded it, every age that believed
in something worth dying for. The situation is very simple: The
West does not believe in anything and Islam, like Christianity and
even modern science, believes in something that is not true: that
the world came into being and must therefore have an end. Isn’t
that what both Christianity and evolution teach: that, whether it
happened in six days or millions of years, human beings were
created by something that was not human, and that nothing we do
here on earth has any great importance?

“This isn’t what we used to think, before
Christianity and the other revealed religions taught us to despise
the notion that the work of humanity was to achieve, try to
achieve, the perfection, the excellence, intended by nature. Read
Plato, read Aristotle, read more than a thousand years later
Maimonides: discover the ancient guarded secret that everything
that comes into being, including all human individuals, pass out of
being, but that the world itself is eternal. But start with
Aristotle, read in the Metaphysics the passage where at the
conclusion of several hundred tightly reasoned pages he concludes
that change has ‘always been. And so with time….Accordingly, change
is as continuous as time; for time is either the same as change or
is in the same way bound up with it. But there is no continuous
change except locomotion, and no continuous locomotion except
cyclical.’ I think I remember that right.

“It is the only hope we have: to go all the
way back to the beginning if we are going to see our way clearly
ahead. That’s why I wrote what I did, what I hope you will read;
that’s why I started the school, the academy, so that sometime in
the next generation there might be a few men and women who
understand the fallacies of the modern age, and the need for a new
religion. That’s why I did what I did with Constable and the
others, so there might be someone in a position of authority and
power who could at least start to change directions. That’s why I
chose you, Mr. Hart: because there is more to you than
ambition.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

David Allen had barely slept in three days.
He tried to relax, he tried to tell himself that every crisis had
an end, he even tried sleeping pills, but nothing worked; nothing
could stop the frenzied, thousand thoughts a minute movement of his
mind, the compulsion to try to find answers to questions he did not
know how to ask. His blood pressure, always high, was off the
charts; the thumping in his chest was loud enough to hear. He began
to have a nervous tic at the corner of his mouth. Without warning,
a quick incessant blinking would suddenly take possession of his
tired eyes. Like the world around him, everything was going to
extremes.

For three days, Bobby Hart’s administrative
assistant had been forced to answer accusations, each one more
damaging than the last, about the Senator’s part in the conspiracy
to murder the President. Allen had started with an angry denial,
outraged that anyone would suggest such a thing was even possible,
but then, as more and more evidence was produced, when documents
were discovered proving Hart had paid the assassin, he found
himself on the defensive, arguing that despite what all this seemed
to prove, it was not true. Then, when Hart escaped arrest at the
embassy and disappeared somewhere in France, even that became
impossible and he was reduced to mumbling the obligatory ‘no
comment’ each time he had to pass through a phalanx of shouting
reporters in the hallway outside the Senate office.

By this time, there were not more than a
dozen people in Washington who did not believe what everyone else
believed, that Bobby Hart was behind the murder of Robert
Constable, and probably less than half that number who were still
willing to say so. David Allen was one of them; Charlie Ryan was
another. Both of them knew Hart too well, knew too much about what
he had gone through with his wife, to think that the case against
him was anything other than a deliberate fabrication, part of a
conspiracy that had started with the murder of the President and
had perhaps always been intended to end with the blame fixed on
someone else. In the hours after Hart had gone missing in Paris,
Charlie Ryan met secretly with David Allen to decide what they
should do.

An unmarked door just off one of the main
corridors in the Capitol opened on to a narrow hallway in which
certain members of the Senate had private rooms where they could
spend time alone, or sometimes not alone, away from the prying eyes
of reporters and the constant demands of staff, a place where they
could, if they wanted, actually think.

“Atwood is lying through his teeth!”
exclaimed Ryan, shaking his head in angry disbelief. He gestured
toward a brown sofa which, along with a matching leather chair and
a coffee table, made up the furnishings of the room. Allen sat
down, but Ryan was too agitated even to stand still. He kept
moving, a few slow, hesitant steps in one direction, a few steps
back, an awkward, sliding motion in which he would suddenly dip his
shoulder and turn to the side, stop, stare down at the carpet, and
then, shaking his head again at the enormity of what had happened,
start off in another short, distracted journey.

“It’s that goddamn Atwood! He’s at the center
of this. He’s lied about everything. When Bobby went to see him -
did he tell you this? He said that he had told the FBI, that they
had started an investigation, and that the CIA was aware of it as
well. Then we have the Director of the CIA in front of the
committee and Bobby asks him and he doesn’t know anything about it!
And now this - announces that Constable was murdered and that the
Secret Service - the Secret Service, for Christ sake! - was
investigating, and they find the assassin, the woman who was in the
room with him that night, and she died trying to escape, but they
found all the evidence they needed in her apartment. In her
apartment, for Christ sake!”

Ryan took one more step and wheeled around.
“Her apartment! This professional killer, so good at what she does
she gets Constable to take her to bed so she can put a needle in
him; so good at what she does that she gets that poor bastard, the
agent who was supposed to be guarding Constable, to help her get
away; so good at what she does that no one seems to know who the
hell she is - keeps records in her apartment like she was some tax
accountant afraid of losing even one receipt? Notice, by the way,
that the only records they found were about this one job; not a
shred of evidence about any of the other murders she must have
done! It’s Atwood. He’s in the middle of this. The only question is
who he is working for. He wouldn’t have had any reason to do this,
go to these lengths, get rid of this many people and then frame
Bobby for it, on his own.”

While he listened, Allen thought back to the
last time he talked to Hart, when Hart was in New York meeting with
Austin Pearce. He remembered the reason why he had tried to reach
him.

“Quentin Burdick came to see Bobby the same
day he died, that afternoon. Bobby was in New York. He had gone up
to see Austin Pearce. I’m not sure why Burdick was here, but he
must have come to see someone. He said he had to talk to Bobby. It
seemed quite urgent. He said Bobby would know what it was about,
but then he said that he wouldn’t, that he would think he did, but
he wouldn’t. It was all very mysterious. He said to tell Bobby that
it was what they talked about before - The Four Sisters - only that
there was a lot more to it than what he had thought then.”

“Bobby told me about that - Burdick had asked
me about it once - The Four Sisters.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“He couldn’t. He only told me because he
thought I might be able to help. Did Burdick say anything
else?”

“Not really. He had a package with him. I
don’t know what was in it, but it must have been important the way
he held onto it.”

“He didn’t talk about anything else?
Nothing?”

“We just talked about the rumors going
around: what Russell was going to do: whether he would try for the
nomination, and whether he would have any chance against Madelaine
Constable if he did.” Allen narrowed his eyes and tried to
remember. “There was something. It was odd. Burdick wanted to talk
about the reasons why Russell had gone on the ticket with
Constable, why he didn’t stay chairman of Senate Finance instead.
He went through all the things that had been said at the time, but
then he said that the real reason was because Russell did not have
a choice.”

“Didn’t have a choice?”

“I don’t know what he meant. I asked, but all
he would say was that he couldn’t tell me yet. Whatever it was, he
seemed pretty damn certain of what he knew.”

“Didn’t have a choice,” repeated Ryan in a
pensive voice. “Constable would have done that, used something he
had, something he knew about Russell, to force him to do what he
wanted, run for vice-president. If that’s true, you could see why
Russell might decide that…. And now Constable is dead, and Russell
does not have to worry about whatever Constable had on him and he
becomes president in the bargain.”