Grand Master (29 page)

“At four o’clock,” said Hart, just to be
sure. “But where?”

“In the Refectory, of course. Where else
would they gather for a meal?”

“The Refectory, at four o’clock,” said Hart,
as he began to move away. That was what Austin Pearce had learned:
that Jean Valette was here, that he came here every year. There was
not any meeting, there was no appointment. Neither Jean Valette,
nor anyone else, knew Hart was coming. The advantage was all
his.

“You won’t have any trouble finding it,” the
driver called after him. “There should be signs all around.”

Hart stopped and turned back. “Signs? About
what?”

The driver threw up his hands. “The annual
meeting of the Knights of St. John - What else?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Crusades, the 11th century, the Knights
of St. John, what did this ancient history have to do with anything
that mattered? Hart was wanted for a murder he did not commit, and
the only way he could think to prove his innocence was to climb up
the well- worn stone steps of a thousand year old cathedral perched
high above the raging waters of the Atlantic and listen to a man he
had never met give a speech about something no one in his right
mind would care about! It was ludicrous, he told himself as he
pushed through the crowd; worse than ludicrous, stupid, because
what could he do when he got there? - Put a gun to Jean Valette’s
head in front of the audience that had come to hear him speak,
force him to confess the intricate and deadly conspiracy he had set
into motion for reasons that Hart could even now not begin to
guess!

Slowly, and with a kind of fatal
inevitability, the thought came to him that, if he had to, he
would; if it were the only way to stop this thing from going any
farther, the only way to end the this vicious string of murders, he
would use the gun, not just to bluff Jean Valette into a
confession, but kill him. The thought grew on him, became clearer
and more certain of itself, the closer he got to the cathedral. The
spire was now directly overhead, Michael the Archangel, sword
lifted up to heaven, symbol of the eternal vigilance of God.

He was inside the cathedral, searching
through the crowds for the way to the Refectory and Jean Valette.
Twice he went off in the wrong direction before a friendly tour
guide pointed him toward what appeared to be a passage between one
set of buildings and another, but was instead the place where the
monks had lived and the visiting nobility had taken their meals.
Passing the entrance to the dormitory, Hart found the staircase
that led down to the Refectory below. The doors were shut and, as a
woman at a table just to the side made clear, would not be opened.
Even someone with an invitation would not now be admitted.

Hart started for the door anyway, but a guard
in plainclothes quickly stepped in front. The woman reached for the
telephone to call more security.

“I was asked to be here at four o’clock!”
insisted Hart. “Told to be here by one of Mr. Valette’s closest
friends, and you say I can’t go in because I’m late by two
minutes?”

The woman was a study in precision. Her only
response was to raise an eyebrow and look down her nose. Four
o’clock was four o’clock, she seemed to say with that glance of
silent disapproval; nothing could be simpler, more
self-explanatory, than that. She had no sympathy for those who had
yet to learn the lessons of punctuality. From behind the closed
doors came the muted sound of applause. They were just getting
started.

“Here,” said Hart, as he quickly pulled out
his wallet and removed his card. “Take this in there, give it to
Jean Valette.” Bending slightly forward, he pulled his jacket open
so she could see the gun. “And tell him,” he shouted as she got up
and hurried toward the door, “that Austin Pearce told me to come
here, last night, just before he died!”

The guard took a step forward; the woman
stopped him with a look. She slipped inside, and they stood there,
Hart and the burly, square-shouldered guard, eyeing each other with
suspicion, until, a few moments later, the door swung open and the
woman motioned for Hart to enter.

He was at the back of a long, narrow, room,
lit almost as bright as day by the light that streamed through the
windows high above in the walls. Two hundred people could dine
together in the Refectory, and there were nearly that many here
now. Almost as if he had been expected to arrive late and somehow
force himself in, there was an empty chair just inside the door. At
the opposite end of the hall, perhaps a hundred feet away, an
elderly gentleman with stooped shoulders and a substantial nose,
wearing around his neck a three-colored ribbon with a large gold
medal in the shape of a five pointed star, was nearing the end of
what even to Hart’s somewhat limited ear for French seemed a
dazzling display of wit and good humor.

The audience was clearly captivated by the
old man who was obviously well-known and used to their praises.
With the impeccable timing of a paid performer - which in some
sense he must have been: an actor, a lawyer, or perhaps a retired
politician; someone who had lived a long life on one sort of stage
or another - he brought each well-turned phrase to a dramatic stop,
pausing to let the audience share in common delight what, with just
those few words, he had been able to achieve. Hart began to lose
all sense of himself as he listened, fascinated, to a talent that,
for all the speeches he had heard in Washington, he could only
envy. Though his French, once again, was far from perfect, he could
follow well enough, once he caught the flow. He understood, almost
word for word, the few sentences in which, flushed with triumph,
the old man moved from his own, brief, remarks, to the introduction
of Jean Valette.

“The head of one of the nation’s most
important institutions, head of one of the most illustrious
families in France, a family that at every stage in our history has
played a leading, and sometimes a decisive, part.” With a dramatic
flourish, he stretched out his arm to the man sitting in the chair
on the left side of the podium. “The head - the honorary head - of
the Order of St. John, the order through which, and by which, his
namesake, his ancestor, five hundred years ago at the Battle of
Malta saved Christendom and, saving Christendom, saved France!”

Everyone, men and women alike, were on their
feet, applauding with an intensity that if Hart had just wandered
in, without any knowledge of the reason they were there, he would
have thought that Jean Valette had either just won an election, or
just won a war. Then, as he stood there clapping with the others,
he realized that these people were really applauding themselves,
their history, and, more than what they had become as a people and
a nation, what they had been. That was the key to it: what they
remembered, or wanted to remember, about what they, or really,
their distant relations, the men and women whose own lives had
been, in every sense, the necessary precursors of their own, had
done in that time made even more glorious by everything that had
been forgotten.

Jean Valette said nothing about what had been
said about him, and apart from a bare nod of his head, did not
acknowledge the audience. He stood at the podium, waiting, while
the applause of the crowd gradually played itself out. Though of
only medium height, if that, he seemed, with his shoulders held
straight and his head erect, much taller. His eye was bold,
unflinching; it was impossible to think of him ever looking away;
it was impossible to think of him, even as a child, trying to avoid
the gaze of someone, even a father, who had doubts about something
he had done. He would not have allowed anyone, except perhaps a
father - and later in life, perhaps not even him - to be so
familiar as to even think to do that. And yet, at the same time,
despite what could easily have seemed an astonishing conceit, there
was nothing that made you feel irritated, much less angry, at the
way he looked at you with those dark, penetrating eyes of his. The
slight smile that danced along his lip, told you in the politest
way possible, that he frankly did not care enough about your
opinion to have any great interest in hearing you express it. Even
if you agreed with him, you would have been wrong, because, in the
nature of things, what you thought you knew had really only been a
lucky guess. He was that arrogant, if you call arrogance what
someone of unusual ability considers his own worth.

Then he began to speak, and the sense of
distance began to disappear. His face became alive with expression
as he described what he called the dilemma in which they lived,
divided between two traditions in conflict with one another. “We
are on the one hand, as witnessed by our presence here today, the
inheritors of the ancient glories of Europe and of France. While
other, smaller, peoples were still forming nations, we led a cause;
while they formed petty states and principalities with all their
endless bickering, we marshaled the forces of Christendom and
protected civilization, defeated Islam and saved the West. But
then, barely two hundred years ago - the blink of an eye in the
long history of humanity - we gave birth, through the greed and
ambition of a corrupt and frivolous aristocracy, to the French
Revolution, and produced the modern world of democracy and mass
movements. This ended all established order, destroyed even the
notion of a hierarchy of values and began the abolition of the
fundamental difference between better and worse. We produced, in
other words, the modern belief in equality and the diminishment of
man.”

This would have been unsettling, a remark
like this - there is, after all, nothing quite so insulting in the
age of equality as to be told that you are only average -, but with
a near perfect grasp of just how far he could challenge convention,
Valette flashed a smile, and quickly added, “We wish we could have
done what our ancestors did who went off on the great adventure to
save Jerusalem from the infidels; and we would have, too, if only
we had lived back then, when such things were still possible.”

Hart could almost feel the collective sigh of
approval and relief, and, more than that, could almost see in their
eyes the past recaptured in the safe privacy of a dream. They would
have been warriors - they did not have any doubt of that -, but now
they wanted to hear something more about their former greatness as
a nation, and then they wanted dinner.

“The things that were possible then, do not
seem possible now. But is that because we no longer face that kind
of danger, or because, if I can be so bold, we no longer take
things as seriously as we once did? Let me tell you a story of how
the world used to be, when men believed in God and never thought to
doubt either hell or heaven. You all know how the Order of St. John
was changed from an order that took care of the sick and wounded
into an order trained to fight and die; how the Knights Templar
were first destroyed by the King of France, Philip the Fair, and
how the Pope, Clement I, gave the king permission to dissolve the
order. How many of us know what happened to them because of
it?”

The eyes of Jean Valette glittered with the
remembered malice of a strange, and to an audience trained in the
secular disciplines of modern science, unbelievable, act of
revenge. “The head of the order, the Grand Master, had been
tortured into a confession of blasphemy and lies. Burned with hot
irons, his skin torn from his body, his bones broken on the rack,
he admitted that he had given up Christ to worship the devil, that
he had engaged in every imaginable sin and, worse yet, had not
regretted any of them. But then, a few months later, in March of
1314, brought forward for his trial, the Grand Master, Jacques de
Molay, who had been not only the king’s close friend, but godfather
to his daughter, recanted his confession, an act of courage and
honesty that led almost immediately to his being burned at the
stake.”

There appeared at the edges of Jean Valette’s
mouth the first hint of a secret, one he was about to share, that
made of the prospect of this scene of awful terror and burning
flesh, a triumphant reversal of all normal expectation. For a
moment, but just for a moment, he let that unknown possibility,
that promise of something without parallel, hang heavy in the
air.

“The fire had been started, the flames leaped
from the faggots piled around his legs, the smoke was rising up to
his rope bound chest, when Jacques de Molay called to the crowd to
witness his word that God Himself would soon begin to exact a price
for the sacrilege committed by Pope Clement and Philip the Fair,
that God in his greatness would carry out the curse that with his
dying breath he was calling down upon the king and his descendants
through the thirteenth generation. He died insisting that before
the year was out, both the king and the pope would be summoned to
meet him before the judgment seat of God.”

There was another pause, as Jean Valette,
contemplating the mysterious workings of providence, invited his
audience to wonder at the power of an age in which such things had
been possible. “Pope Clement died within a month; Philip the Fair
died seven months later. The king was only forty-six; and if you
are wondering at the cause of his death, the only thing we know
with any certainty is that he was not ill and that he did not die
in an accident. He just died.” Valette raised his hand, dismissing
the matter as one better left to others to solve. He had another,
more important, point to make.

“That happened, again, in 1324, more than two
hundred years after the First Crusade, and more than two hundred
years before the Battle of Malta; almost five hundred years between
the recapture of Jerusalem and the fight on an island to save the
West from the resurgent Muslim invader. We need to understand that,
to remember that; to remember that Europe, the West, once
understood the threat it faced and was willing to do whatever was
necessary, and for however long it took, to save itself.