Grand Master (5 page)

The vulnerability vanished from her eyes,
replaced by a cold, and even ruthless, calculation, as she
remembered the sacrifices, and the bargains, she had been forced to
make. “I never promised Clarence anything for his help, for his
discretion; but when the head of the secret service retired, I made
sure he got the job. He’s remained a loyal friend. He knows how to
keep this quiet.”

“Keep it quiet?” Hart jumped to his feet.
“The President was murdered, and you want to keep it quiet? You
can’t!”

“Hear me out! Listen before you rush to
judgment. It has to be kept quiet. No one can ever know. He was not
murdered by some jealous husband; he wasn’t killed by someone in a
moment of rage! It was an assassination. He was killed by lethal
injection, a drug that stopped his heart almost instantly.”

Hart stared at her, not certain what to
believe.

“I spent most of my time while he was alive
doing what I had to do to protect his reputation,” she went on. “I
have to do the same thing now that he’s dead. He was in a hotel
room, having sex with a woman who turned out to have been a hired
killer. The agent who was with him helped her get away. He didn’t
know that’s what he was doing. The great irony is that he thought
he was protecting me. Isn’t that just too funny for words? He
didn’t want anyone to find out that the former leader of the
western world was screwing his brains out when he died, so he
cleaned up everything and got rid of the girl, told her to get out
of the hotel and made sure she was gone before he called for
help.”

“Then who found out that he’d been
murdered?”

“There was an autopsy, private, controlled;
the Secret Service arranged it. There was a puncture mark in his
armpit. That’s what made them think they had better take a closer
look at the cause of death. When they discovered the drug, Clarence
called in the agent and told him what they had found. Then Clarence
came to me.”

“What about the FBI? Who’s investigating
this?”

“There isn’t going to be an investigation;
not yet, anyway. Not until you find the answer to the only question
that matters.”

“Me? What question? What matters?’

“You know everything about the intelligence
community; you know who you can trust. The question is who was
behind his murder and what was the reason they wanted him killed.
That’s what is important: the reason. Robert had connections all
over the world. Everyone wanted something from him, and of course,”
she added in a curious undertone, “there were people willing to do
almost anything for him. But something happened, he got involved in
something - I’m not quite sure what - and he started to worry,
become even more secretive than usual and then, for no reason at
all, fly into a rage. It was like he found himself inside a circle
and the circle was starting to close. I have to know what was going
on, what he was afraid of. I have to know why he was killed, if it
was because of something he knew, something he was covering up.
That’s why this has to be kept quiet. Do you have any idea what a
scandal like that would do, not just to his reputation, but to the
country? - The idea that a President of the United States was
murdered to keep him from talking about some criminal enterprise in
which he might have been involved. You don’t think I’m serious?
When did you ever know Robert Constable to think that the rules
that ordinary people have to live by applied to him?”

The question seemed to answer itself in the
silence that followed as Madelaine Constable crossed over to the
desk and removed a black date book from the middle drawer. “This is
his calendar. I took it from his study downstairs.” She opened to a
place already marked by a ribbon. “That next week, the week after
he was killed, like almost every week, was filled up with
appointments, places he had to go, speeches he had to give; but
then all of them were crossed out, all except one, an appointment
he had for the next morning with Quentin Burdick of the New York
Times. Why did Burdick want to see him? And why did Robert cancel
everything else? Was it because he knew what Burdick was going to
ask him, and that it was a story that, once it was published, was
going to change everything?”

CHAPTER FIVE

Unlike Robert Constable, who had made a
mockery of his marriage by frequent acts of infidelity, Bobby Hart
had never once betrayed his wife. He was young and good-looking
and, if that were not enough, a United States senator who was not
only widely respected but, in the phrase so often used, destined
for higher things. In a city in which power, and not money, was the
leading aphrodisiac, Bobby Hart did not lack for opportunities;
and, except perhaps in the minds of rigid moralists, would not have
lacked excuse.

Bobby Hart had been in love with Helen almost
literally from the first moment he saw her. If she had not been
quite so quick to come to a conclusion, it was not because she did
not have the same feeling, but because she was had been too shy to
trust her instincts and a little too scared of what she felt. It
was only later, after they were married, after the collapse, that
Bobby fully realized how fragile, how vulnerable, she had always
been. Helen was beautiful in a way that at times seemed almost
otherworldly. She moved entirely in her own orbit, indifferent to
what others might think, or what others might say, interested only
in what she knew and loved, which was Bobby Hart and Bobby Hart
alone. She would have lived a life of perfect bliss if they could
have lived, just the two of them, a life of solitude.

Helen Hart had tried to live instead the life
that her husband thought important. She had helped in his first
campaign for congress; appeared smiling at his side in front of
crowds that terrified her, and, acting with a bravery that passed
unnoticed, even gave short speeches of her own. Then they moved to
Washington and she discovered that she was not just expected to
share her husband with the world, but that they were not to have in
any real sense any life at all. Other people seemed to thrive on
it, the constant movement, the constant rush, the sense that the
next thing they were doing, the next party, the next event, was the
pinnacle of their achievement, the mark of their success.

Washington was the center of the universe,
the only place that mattered, a place where everyone was always
busy, where everything was important, a thousand details to keep
straight: bills introduced, bills amended, bills taken up in
committee, bills debated, bills voted on, bills passed or rejected
or put over for another day - and everyone certain what was going
to happen next, and everyone almost always wrong.

It was a madhouse, a charnel house of
incoherent voices, and after a while all she could hear inside her
head was the constant, crazy noise. There was just enough of her
left, just enough of that place of quiet strength deep inside her,
to tell her that if she did not leave she would quickly lose her
mind. Had she been more experienced, or more worldly, she might
have decided she was the only sane one there, and become
ironic.

No one, including especially her husband, had
seen the inner turmoil beneath the smiling surface of Helen’s
gentle, lovely face; no one had even guessed at how much effort it
had taken just to keep herself together, to show the world what the
world wanted, and expected, to see. It was, finally, more than she
could do. She began to make excuses, invent reasons why Bobby
should go to some event alone; and when, rebelling against what she
thought her own failings, she forced herself to go, her behavior
became erratic, falling into sudden silences or, at the other
extreme, chattering aimlessly about something that had nothing to
do with the conversation. She was slipping away, but it was
gradual, like a slowly changing mood, the way boredom takes the
place of excitement when the novelty wears off. That was what Bobby
at first thought was going on, that the endless whirl of Georgetown
parties and official gatherings had lost their freshness, become a
tired routine - until the night she told him with a lonely smile
that she had to go away.

“I can’t live here, I just can’t - I’ve
tried. I’d do anything for you, Bobby, but I can’t do this. I have
to go home, our home, Bobby; the one we bought together, where we
said we’d always live. I’m not leaving you; I don’t want you to
leave me. I’ll be there, at home, waiting every night.”

It was only then that he realized what he had
done to her, and from that day forward his ambition lived, so to
speak, on borrowed time. He promised himself, and he promised her,
that as soon as he finished the more important things he had
started, he would quit the Senate, resign his seat, and come home
to Santa Barbara. This was what he thought he owed her, and it was
what he wanted for himself. He was still in love with her - he
would always be in love with her - and he could not stand the
thought that, for however short time, they would live apart.

Helen moved back to Santa Barbara and Bobby
started spending weekends there as often as he could, and then, two
years later, at almost the same time, Bobby said it was time to
quit and Helen told him that instead of that she wanted a second
chance. She insisted she was stronger, that she had now quite
recovered, and that she loved him too much to let him stop what he
was doing because of her. And so she came back to Washington, and
Bobby for his part made sure that things were different. They
rarely went to Georgetown parties and they seldom saw anyone who
was not an old friend. They spent a lot of time with Charlie Ryan
and, when she was not at home in Ann Arbor where she had her
medical practice, his wife, Clare. Bobby did everything he could to
protect her, which meant, among other things, that he never, or
almost never, told her what he learned on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, no matter how angry and depressed he might have become
listening to more tales of wanton violence and every form of evil.
He tried always to be cheerful and eager, as if the only thing he
had had on his mind all day was getting home to her. But Helen had
acquired an almost mathematically precise ability, a kind of
calculus of false exuberance, to measure the degree of his
well-intentioned duplicity. She knew what he was doing and loved
him even more because of it.

Their life soon settled into a comfortable
routine. And if it was not everything she had wanted, it was good
enough. She knew for certain that she would rather live with him in
the apartment they had taken in Washington’s northwest corner, she
would rather live with him anywhere, than live anywhere else, even
Santa Barbara, without him. Sometimes, if he was traveling
overseas, or had to give a speech somewhere out of town, she would
fly back to California where he would join her on the weekend. The
week the President died, when all of Washington gathered for the
funeral, Bobby told her no one would notice if she was not there,
and that he would not be going himself if he did not have to.

“I never quite understood what people saw in
him,” she remarked when Bobby drove her to the airport for the
flight home to Santa Barbara. The Potomac glistened in the morning
sun as they passed the Jefferson Memorial and started across the
bridge. “I’m not sure I liked her any better,” she added as she
reached in her purse for her dark glasses. “You wonder what goes on
in private between people like that.” A smile full of puzzled
affection broke suddenly across her face. “I suppose there are
people who wonder that about us, aren’t there? Wonder what we’re
really like - whether we make love or you just give speeches.”

Bobby kept his eyes on the road, but she
could see - he wanted her to see - the teasing sparkle in his eyes.
“Did I speak too much last night?”

“I like it when you speak like that,” she
said in the silky voice that he never tired of hearing. “You can
speak like that every night to me.”

When they reached the airport, he parked at
the curb and got her suitcase out of the car. She put her arms
around his neck and laughed softly into his ear. “Come home, to
Santa Barbara; we’ll talk some more.”

He stood on the sidewalk and watched her walk
away, and then, when she was safe inside the terminal and he could
not see her anymore, he got back in the car and drove off and felt
the sudden aching emptiness and wished she had not gone. It was
now, at times like this, that he realized not just how much he
loved her but how, through his own unthinking ambition, he had come
so close to losing her. The doctors and psychologists might say
that she suffered from depression, but, so far as he was concerned,
the madness had been his. The choice between spending all his time
with the most beautiful women he had ever seen, holding hands on a
beach in Santa Barbara and making love in a moonlit bedroom with a
long view of the sea, or wrangling with a pack of penny politicians
over cuts in someone’s budget was not a choice at all, except to
someone quite demented. And he had not even had the problem most
men in Washington had to face: the strong suspicion that no one
loved them for who they were. Helen loved him despite the fact that
he happened to be a member of the United States Senate and one of
the most powerful men in town.

The three days away from her seemed like
three years, and what he had learned at the President’s funeral
made the separation seem even worse. The secret he had been told by
Madelaine Constable, the secret about the President’s death, was
something he was going to have to share. This was of a different
order, a different magnitude, than the things he had in the past
thought best to keep to himself. It was a secret that he had known
immediately would change not just his life, but the lives of a
great many others. Helen would know immediately that something was
wrong. He had to tell her, if not for her, than for himself: he
always had a better sense of things after he talked with her.