Grand Master (15 page)

But that meant, as Hart immediately
understood, that if what he had been told by Clarence Atwood was
true, that the head of the Secret Service had told the Director of
the FBI and the FBI had started an investigation, no one had yet
told the CIA.

“So then, as far you know, no one in the
government, no one in the FBI, is looking into the possibility that
President Constable, instead of dying of natural causes, was
killed?”

The question, the simple stated possibility,
seemed to give the Director pause. He stroked his chin for a moment
before he replied. “No; not that I know of.”

Hart pressed the point. “And if they were,
would you expect to be informed?”

Griswald did not hesitate. “On a matter of
that importance: yes, absolutely.”

“’Yes, absolutely.’ Very good. Thank
you.”

The Chairman started to ask if anyone else
had a question, but Hart interrupted. “There is something else I
would like to ask. There have been other rumors - not about the
President’s death, but about certain dealings he may have had with
foreign interests. Have you - has the CIA - any information, any
intelligence, on any dealings President Constable may have had in
which he received payment from sources overseas?”

The committee, almost equally divided between
the two parties, started buzzing. The Chairman quickly called them
to order. “Mr. Hart, do you have something specific in mind? That
is a fairly broad allegation you’re making, and I would think that
-”

“I’m not making an allegation, broad or
otherwise, Mr. Chairman. I’m simply asking if the Director knows of
anything that would support the kind of rumors I’ve been hearing;
the questions that I know for certain have become the subject of an
investigation.”

“An investigation, Mr. Hart? I haven’t heard
of anything like that.”

“Not a criminal investigation, Mr. Chairman;
not an investigation by the Justice Department; an investigation by
reporters, one which, from what I understand, might be published in
the papers anytime now.”

The Chairman pressed his hands against his
head. There was a bleak expression on his face. “Even in death…,”
he muttered, a reference to the character of the late Robert
Constable that did not need to be explained. “Yes, yes; all right,”
he added quickly, anxious to move on. “Go ahead; ask the Director
what you were going to ask.”

“Have you, Mr. Griswald, learned of any
improper dealings with foreign interests, whether these were
foreign government or foreign nationals?”

The Director had begun to sense that there
was more going on than a routine attempt to run down a rumor. Hart
knew something, and that meant it was not safe to answer until he
had a better idea exactly what it was. He took refuge in a
bureaucratic excuse. “I’m not prepared to answer that at the
moment.”

“You’re not prepared to…?” Hart warned him
with a look. “Are you sure that’s the answer you want to leave with
this committee?”

“I can’t answer the question, Senator,” he
replied, turning up the palms of his hands to show that it was out
of his control. “What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have any
personal knowledge of what you’re asking about, but the agency
keeps track of a fairly large volume of financial transactions, so
it’s possible that someone -”

“I didn’t say anything about financial
transactions, the kind the agency tries to follow. I asked whether
you had any intelligence about the possibility that the President
of the United States had been bribed, bribed to do certain things
that benefited certain foreign interests. I’ll ask you again, Mr.
Griswald: Do you know anything about this?”

“As I said, I have no personal knowledge
-”

“Does the agency have any intelligence on a
French investment firm, The Four Sisters?”

“The Four Sisters? No, I don’t recall that
name.”

“Would you mind checking into it and getting
back to us?’

“Yes, of course; as soon as I can.”

“Immediately, if you don’t mind,” said Hart
with an icy stare.

“Yes, Senator; right away.”

When the session ended, Charlie Ryan caught
up with Hart in the hallway outside. “What’s going on, Bobby?”

Hart kept walking. He did not look at Ryan.
Their footsteps echoed in the empty marble corridor. Ryan did not
press the issue until they were outside the Capitol and starting
down the steps. “Something happened in that hotel room. You said
‘died of an apparent heart attack.’ Apparent? You think he was
murdered, don’t you?”

Hart stopped on the first landing. The summer
heat was still intolerable. Dark clouds marched in a long unbroken
line across a broken, yellow sky. His mood, prisoner to the
weather, became somber and almost fatalistic, a sense that things,
however bad, would soon get worse. He turned to Ryan, the closest
friend he had, and with a rueful expression in his deep-set eyes
confessed that it was not a question of suspicion. “This is between
us: the President was murdered. The woman who was with him was a
hired killer, an assassin. The Secret Service thought she was just
another one of the women he took to bed; the agent actually helped
her get away. The poor bastard thought he was doing the right
thing, what he had to do to protect the President’s
reputation.”

Ryan whistled between his teeth. Shoving his
hands deep in his pockets, he kicked at the stone step. The
questions Hart asked Griswald, the answers Griswald gave, took on a
new and different meaning, a meaning Ryan was not slow to grasp.
“Constable was murdered; but if Griswald was telling the truth, the
CIA doesn’t know anything about it; and from what he said, neither
does the FBI?”

“I was led to believe they did,” replied
Hart. “Which means that, if Griswald is telling the truth, either
the FBI has lied to him, or someone has lied to me.”

“Someone?”

Hart did not hesitate. He trusted Ryan and he
was getting nowhere on his own. He needed help. “The Secret
Service. Clarence Atwood told me two nights ago that he had kept
the FBI informed and that the bureau had begun its own
investigation.”

“An investigation? - Constable was murdered,
and no one is talking about it? What in the world…?”

A group of schoolchildren, taken on a tour of
the Capitol, were coming down the steps. Eager to get away from
their dull history lesson and out into the open air, they drowned
out everything with their cheerful, triumphant voices. Ryan waited
until they passed. “Someone has put you in a box, haven’t they?” He
searched Hart’s eyes, certain he was right. “Constable was
murdered. You know it, but you can’t talk about it - can’t even ask
about it except in this oblique way, raising every question with
Griswald except the one that counts. But who, why would anyone…?
She told you, didn’t she? She asked you to find out what you
could.”

It was a point of some interest, how quickly
those who knew something about her thought that whatever was going
on Madelaine Constable must be at the center of it. Hart, as he had
gradually come to recognize, had been like everyone else in this
regard. He had not been at all surprised, the day she had asked him
for his help, to learn that the Secret Service had reported to her
what had happened and then, for all intents and purposes, left it
to her to decide what to do next.

“When did she do it - last week, after the
funeral?”

“I said I would see what I could find out: if
there were any rumors, any intelligence, about who might have
wanted to do it. The concern is what happens when this goes public,
when everyone finds out that it wasn’t a heart attack, it was
murder.”

“It’s been a week,” objected Ryan. “How long
do you think you can keep something like this secret? And, for
God’s sake, how long do you think you should? It’s going to come
out, you know.” Ryan kicked at the step again, harder this time,
more emphatically. He swung his head up, not all the way, just far
enough to search Hart’s waiting eyes. “It’s coming out soon, isn’t
it? Quentin Burdick is on it, isn’t he? You asked Griswald about
The Four Sisters; what Burdick was asking me. That’s the
connection, isn’t it? What are they - The Four Sisters? What have
you found out?”

Hart glanced back up the steps. More
schoolchildren were coming, and groups of sweaty, red-faced
tourists, dressed in shirts and shorts, cameras slung over their
shoulders, heading for the relief of air conditioned buses that
would take them to other famous landmarks or back to their hotels.
A few of them, catching sight of Bobby Hart, began to wave. “Let’s
get out of here,” said Hart under his breath as he smiled and waved
back.

They moved in the lazy rhythm of a burning
southern summer, a slow, unhurried procession, through the leafy
park like grounds of the Capitol. The heat was all around them,
each step a dim reminder of something distant, far away, as if
instead of moving forward they were destined never to move at all,
held in one place by the thick molasses air. They walked in silence
until they crossed the street and passed through the side entrance
of the Russell Senate Office Building. Speech required effort.

Hart’s office, or rather his suite of
offices, was on the second floor. His staff, overworked and
underpaid and all of them glad for the opportunity, were crammed
into cubicles so small that if one of them stretched her arms there
was the danger she might hit both her neighbors at once. They
worked from early in the morning until late at night, and weekends
they worked just as hard at home. It was not a job; it was a
calling, and they thought themselves far more fortunate than
friends of theirs who had gone to work in hot pursuit of money and
the things it could buy. Most of them were in their thirties, still
too young for disillusionment; some were younger, just out of law
school, with long distance dreams of one day winning a Senate seat
of their own; a few, like Hart’s administrative assistant, David
Allen, a rumpled veteran of the political wars both at home in
California and here on Capitol Hill, were older than the relatively
young senator and more devoted to him than anyone other than his
wife.

Allen did his best to conceal it. He seldom
praised anything Hart had done and did not hesitate to let him know
in no uncertain terms when he thought the Senator had made a
mistake. They both understood what Allen was there to do.
Practically everyone in Washington, from the most senior member of
the Senate to a first term congressman elected in a fluke, was so
often called great that in no time at all they came to believe it,
and, believing it, to need it, the constant echo of their own
achievement. It made every small thing they did major; every
routine vote they cast an act of unexampled courage. Hart hated the
self-importance of it, the sense of entitlement, the emptiness of a
life bound up in other people’s adjectives. Part of David Allen’s
job was to make sure he remembered that and did not become what he
despised. It was one of the things Allen liked best.

The door to Allen’s small, cubbyhole office
was open as Hart passed down the narrow windowless hallway. Sitting
at his cluttered desk, pouring over the latest budget numbers,
Allen did not look up. “Nice of you to drop by,” he remarked in a
dry, caustic voice. “I’d get up, but I’ve aged a lot since the last
time we saw you and….” He had just caught a glimpse of Charlie
Ryan. He sprang to his feet and started to straighten his sleeves.
“Sorry, Senator; I didn’t realize…,” he sputtered.

Ryan came into his office and with a huge
grin shook his hand. “It’s me, David - Charlie. I wouldn’t want you
to treat me any different than this fraud you work for.” He looked
over his shoulder at Hart, standing in the doorway laughing, and
then looked back. “Why don’t you come and work for me. I lead a
pretty dull life, compared to Bobby here. I’m always in the
office.”

Allen liked Charlie Ryan, liked him a lot.
There was not any false posturing with him; you always knew where
you stood. “Would I have to become a Republican?”

“What the hell for? Most people don’t think
I’m one.” He turned to Hart. “Though it’s hard to see why I’d still
claim to be one if I wasn’t. Not much advantage in it these days,
is there?”

They left David Allen to get back to his
numbers and went into Hart’s private office, a large,
well-appointed room, with two tall windows and a gray marble
fireplace. Oriental carpets were scattered over the floor. A white
sofa and two easy chairs were arranged below the windows, while, at
the other end of the room, in the corner opposite the fireplace,
sat Hart’s desk, with a gray leather chair, worn to his dimensions,
and two straight back chairs in front of it. This was where he met
with anyone who had come to make a formal case for something they
wanted from the senator; it was not where he had a conversation
with a friend like Charlie Ryan. Hart dropped into one of the easy
chairs near the windows, while Ryan settled onto the sofa. Ryan
nodded toward the door they had just closed behind them. “Does
David know?”

“No one knows, except Helen, and now you.”
Hart’s gaze rolled from one window toward the other one. He waved
his hand in a listless gesture, and then shook his head and, after
that, scratched his chin. “That’s not true,” he said finally.
“Everyone knows. That’s not true, either,” he added quickly.
“Quentin Burdick knows. He knew already; I confirmed it. I didn’t
tell him how I knew, only that I did. Austin Pearce knows, too. I
didn’t tell him how I knew, but like you, he guessed.” Still
curious how quickly they had both jumped to that particular
conclusion, Hart looked at Ryan. “Not really a guess, though, was
it? As soon as you heard it, you knew - both of you. She always had
a reputation for having the real power in that marriage, even in
that presidency.”