Grand Master (18 page)

“I was distraught, out of my mind with grief;
and yes, I admit it, with anger, too. He dies in bed with some
whore, one of those women he always had to have; and worse than
that, everyone knows it, everyone is talking about it! The pressure
I was under, all the things I had to do - I overreacted,
misinterpreted what I was told. Clarence Atwood didn’t tell me that
-”

“You’re going to tell me that Atwood didn’t
tell you your husband was murdered? Atwood told me that himself.
And you can trust me: I didn’t misinterpret what he said!”

Her chin came up a defiant half inch. “You
may find he’s changed his mind.” Her eyes were hot and full of
warning; but then, an instant later, they changed, became, if not
quite friendly, accommodating, willing to discuss their
differences. “It doesn’t really matter how he died, does it? He’s
dead. Why tarnish his reputation with more allegations, more rumors
about things he might have done that he should not have done? He
did some good things, some great things, as president. It seems to
me we have some duty to protect that, the legacy, the public
record, of what he did.”

“Protect it with a lie?” cried Hart as angry
as he had ever been. “Lie about the fact that he didn’t die of
natural causes, that he was assassinated? Lie about the fact that
in the years he held office he was part of a criminal conspiracy?
Lie, so you can run to take his place, the widow of our beloved
president, and not the widow of a charlatan, a fraud?”

“I’m going to run, and I’m going to win! I
need your help, Bobby,” she said with a savage look. “Don’t let me
down. There’s more at issue here than you think.”

Hart did not answer. He turned on his heel
and started out of the room.

“Think about it, Bobby!” she shouted after
him. “I’ll deny I ever said anything about the way my husband died.
And don’t think that Clarence Atwood will back you up. He’ll say
whatever I tell him to say.”

Hart wheeled back around. “Don’t you care
anything about the fact that your husband was murdered, that
someone assassinated the President of the United States?”

“Of course I care about that. But there’s
nothing can be done about it that won’t make things worse.”

“That’s the difference between the truth and
the lie: whether it makes things better or worse for you?”

“Not for me,” she insisted; “for the
country.”

“What kind of country do you think this is: a
country too stupid to deal with the truth?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ten minutes after Bobby Hart left Madelaine
Constable, ten minutes after he stalked out of her lit up house, he
was not quite sure what had happened, why she had changed her mind.
She had told him that contrary to all the published reports her
husband had been murdered and asked him to find out what he could,
impressed upon him the urgency and the need for discretion, the
concern that they find out who was behind it before it became
public knowledge that the President had been murdered and all the
rumors started. And now for some reason she had changed her mind,
decided that it had not been murder after all; or rather that it
was simply better, more advantageous, to ignore what had happened,
ignore the fact that her husband had been murdered, because she had
political ambitions of her own. Austin Pearce thought Hart had
missed the point.

“She always means what she says, when she
says it.”

He clasped his hands behind his neck and
leaned back. They were sitting in the living room of his townhouse
on Washington Square. Austin Pearce was in his favorite chair, next
to the open French doors where almost every evening and nearly
every Sunday afternoon, he could, depending on his mood, look up
from the book he was reading and gaze across the street at the
moving crowd in the tree-lined park, the young women who brought
their children to play, the old men who sat in silence on the
benches reading the newspapers, or glance instead at the
bookshelves that towered fifteen feet up to the gold inlaid ceiling
of a building that, he was almost certain, had been the one Henry
James had in mind when he wrote his story about a long vanished
family that had lived here more than a hundred years ago. Even if
it was not true, Austin Pearce liked the thought of it, the way it
seemed, like his own attachment to the past, to give a greater
sense of permanence to things.

“I don’t think she changed her mind at all,”
he said. Sitting up, he looked at Hart, slouching in another easy
chair the other side of the French doors. “She asked you to find
out what you could about who might have murdered the President, and
you did, didn’t you?”

Hart heard what Austin Pearce said, but he
did not quite understand it. He was still angry about what had
happened the night before, frustrated by his inability to see what
he suspected must be right in front of him, something that he
thought might be obvious to Austin Pearce, who not only had the
most penetrating intelligence of anyone he knew but had known both
of the Constables for years. It was the reason he had flown up to
New York.

“Consider what you’ve done for her, what she
knows now that she didn’t know before, and probably wouldn’t have
known, if you had not helped.”

“The Four Sisters?”

“Yes, of course. She knows that was the story
Burdick was working on; she knows that was the reason that the
President was meeting with him.” Pearce spread his fingers and
tapped them together. He seemed to concentrate on a thought, a
question that was taking shape in his mind. “Did she seem
surprised?”

“She didn’t deny that she knew Jean de la
Valette, and she knew the name of the firm. She resented the
suggested that any money might have changed hands; insisted that
the money they had came from friends of theirs who would have been
paid back from what they expected to make after Constable left
office. But, no, now that you ask, she didn’t seem surprised. She
never does, though, does she? Seem surprised, I mean.”

“She’s hard to read, I’ll give you that; but
the point is that, thanks to you, she knows the story is out there,
that Burdick is onto it. She knows about Frank Morris, that Morris
implicated the President and that Morris believed that The Four
Sisters had the President killed. She knows something else, too:
she knows that there isn’t any way to prove any of this without her
or the Secret Service.” The brown eyes of Austin Pearce seemed to
take on a deeper shade as he tried to grasp her intentions. “Has it
occurred to you that maybe Robert Constable wasn’t murdered after
all?”

“What are you talking about? She told me he
was murdered, and Atwood confirmed it.”

“Would you have gone looking for his killer,
would you have discovered anything about The Four Sisters - would
you have been all that interested in what Burdick told you - if she
hadn’t told you that? Don’t misunderstand, I think she told you the
truth when she told you he had been murdered, but I don’t think
that’s the reason she wanted you to find out what you could. I
think she wanted to know what was out there, what someone with your
connections could discover. She wanted to know what she had to
worry about. She was lying when she told you that a few close
friends gave them the money they needed. That was a cover story
they fabricated together. What was it she said to you? - that Jean
de la Valette is someone they could have asked if they had wanted
to; could have asked, but didn’t, because they knew what it would
look like. You see, she understood exactly what the position was,
what they had to do to protect themselves against too close an
inquiry. They had friends who would help them, and a lot of them
did, but not the kind of money - tens of millions, if not more -
that The Four Sisters moved into various accounts for them.”

This was news to Hart. Pearce explained.

“I’ve made some inquires,” he said with a
cryptic glance. “What Morris told Burdick is true, although Morris
didn’t know the full extent of it. The scheme is complicated in the
details, but extremely simple in principle. Several foundations
were established, charitable enterprises to do various good works;
but, and this is the key to everything, none of them do the work
themselves. They give out grants to applicants who want to start a
literacy program in the inner city, or a public health program in a
third world country - that kind of thing. Each of the foundations
has a paid staff, overhead, buildings in Manhattan and in several
capitols overseas, buildings that were rented, and buildings that
were bought and paid for. The house in Washington is owned by one
of them. Everything gets paid for by the foundation: the people who
work for you, the planes you lease, the cars you drive, the hotels
you stay in, the expensive restaurants you go to eat - everything!
It was all there, waiting for the President, the day he left
office.”

Austin Pearce rose from his comfortable chair
and stood in front of the open French doors, listening to the soft
muted sounds of Manhattan that, for someone who lived there, had a
music of their own. The rhythm of it, the way it had for so much of
his life been a part of who he was, the raucous, endless beat that
faded in and out, the sense of romance that came every night in
Manhattan, especially when you were alone, made the past, his past,
what he had lived through, what he had seen, what he remembered
about what had happened, as real as anything that was happening
now.

“I saw the Kennedy’s, Jack when he was
president, and then Bobby, later than that; saw them here in New
York, heard both of them speak. I didn’t know them of course,” he
added, still staring into the square; “I was too young for that.
They were heroes to me, people you could look up to, people you
could respect. They were both of course quite ruthless, when it
came to getting what they wanted, but not in the way we mean it
now.” He turned a knowing eye on Hart who was leaning forward in
his chair. “There were things they wouldn’t do; things - and this,
it seems to me, makes all the difference - they wouldn’t think of
doing. They didn’t think they were more important than the country.
The other difference,” he remarked with a quick, dismissive laugh,
“is that they both had read something; serious things, I mean.
Bobby used to quote Aeschylus, and no one thought it strange that
he did.”

With a wistful smile, Pearce shook his head
at how much had changed. He fell silent for a moment,
concentrating, as it seemed, on the long vanished voices that at
times still echoed briefly in his mind.

“By the way, have you talked to Burdick?” he
asked, engaged again with the present.

“We’ve traded phone calls. I tried him again,
just before I got here - but we haven’t talked. But you talked to
him, didn’t you? He has the story.”

“I wonder if he does,” said Pearce with a
distant, slightly abstracted gaze. “I wonder if anyone ever will;
all of it, I mean: the whole story of what really happened. But
yes, Quentin Burdick came to see me. I told him what I knew. He’s
quite persuasive. There is something about that manner of his that
makes you want to talk, the way he makes you feel that he’s
grateful just to have a few minutes of your time, and then, before
you know it, you’re telling him things you thought you would never
tell anyone.” Pearce shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Damned if
I didn’t tell him about that day in the Oval Office when I
confronted Constable with what I knew, the day he went off into
that obscenity-laced tirade and told me I was fired.”

Austin Pearce clasped his hands behind his
back and with his head bowed thought hard for a moment.

“We’re in a fairly difficult position. If
Madelaine Constable insists on lying about the murder, if Atwood
goes along with her, there isn’t any way to confirm any of this.
The President died of a heart attack and that’s all there is to it.
The Four Sisters is just a story about a complicated financial
arrangement that can easily be denied and that, in any case, won’t
make sense to anyone.”

“But Quentin Burdick has the story,” objected
Hart. “He has what Morris told him, and -”

“Frank Morris, disgraced member of Congress,
convicted of bribery, a liar, a thief, and now dead, murdered in
prison.”

“Murdered after he talked to Burdick!”

“Murdered in prison, no provable link to
anything, much less that he happened to talk to a reporter.” Pearce
waved his hand, dismissing in advance, as it were, the next
objection. “And as for what Morris said about the President’s death
- the bitter speculation of a convicted felon.”

Pearce paced back and forth, like a lawyer in
the middle of his summation, except that the audience he was
playing to, the jury he was trying to persuade, was a jury of only
one.

“Burdick can write all he wants about the
financial dealings that went on between the companies controlled by
The Four Sisters and the late, lamented Robert Constable, but he
can’t say anything about a murder. The only people who know about
it have, for reasons of their own, decided not to talk about
it.”

“But they did talk,” said Hart. “They talked
to me. I told Burdick that Constable had been killed; I confirmed
what Morris had suspected. I told him I couldn’t tell him how I
knew, but I can tell him now,” continued Hart with some heat. “I
told Madelaine Constable that this couldn’t be kept secret, that I
wouldn’t be part of some cover-up. I told her that I’d look into
it, see what I could find out, but only for a few days, and that
after that there was going to have to be an investigation.”

Pearce seemed worried, concerned about the
implications, about what might happen.

“Are you sure you want to do that? If you
become the source, if you’re the one who claims that the President
was murdered and that his wife knew it and has been covering it up
- What do you think happens to you? Remember who you’re dealing
with. The basic rule of the Constables has always been to
attack.”