Grand Master (32 page)

Jean Valette looked out the window at the
rolling hills in their patchwork colors and the river that ran not
far from the road, out to the dark green forest that marked the
beginning of where he lived; the forest that, if he could not yet
see it with his naked eye, would be there, in full view, in just
another few minutes. There was a certain satisfaction, a sense of
possession, in seeing things that others could not yet see. “You
knew Robert Constable, of course,” he remarked after a long
silence. “But how well did you know him?”

Hart thought about it, wondering how to
answer the question that, in the last few weeks, he had often asked
himself. He gave the one answer he was sure about. “My wife did not
know him at all.”

Valette’s head snapped up. His eyes
brightened with approval. “That’s exactly what Austin told me. He
had seen the papers, read the story, said that no one who knew you
both would believe a word of it. Good for you, Mr. Hart; good for
you. A man who doesn’t doubt his wife! I once had that privilege.
But never mind. How well did you know him, Robert Constable?”

“I never thought I really knew him,” confided
Hart. “He was too elusive, always calculating what he wanted and
how he was going to get it - and how you were going to help him -
to be someone you could really get to know. And now, after what
I’ve learned - after what I’ve learned about his connection with
you, with The Four Sisters - I’m not sure I knew him at all.”

The line across the bridge of Valette’s
prominent nose deepened and became more pronounced as he drew his
eyes together into an attitude of the utmost concentration. He
scratched the side of his face with the back of three fingers. A
smile that barely broke the line of his full mouth seemed to
reflect a considered judgment that nothing could now change. “Then
you knew him as well as anyone did; better, really, because you
knew him for what he really was: a man who, when dealing with
others, thinks only of himself; a man who, when he tries to
understand himself - if he ever does that - thinks only of what
others believe.

"He was an actor, someone who always played a
role; the only important thing being that everyone else believe he
was important, so that they would always want to see and hear him.
That’s why he wanted money: so he could continue to occupy center
stage. And that, of course, is why he came to me.”

“He came to you? You - The Four Sisters, the
companies you control - didn’t go to him, didn’t offer him millions
in exchange for making it easier for you to do business in the
United States?”

“When you want money, Mr. Hart - when you ran
for re-election the last time - did you wait for people to come to
you, or did you ask them for their support? Yes, I understand there
is a difference: that you weren’t offering to do anything specific
in exchange. I understand the difference, Mr. Hart; we both do. But
Robert Constable did not. The truth is that Robert Constable did
not really understand much of anything.”

Valette stared down at his manicured hands,
folded neatly in his lap, troubled, as it seemed, by this last
remark, not so much for what had been said as by what had been left
out. He closed his eyes and shook his head as if there were no
point going on with it: that nothing he could say would explain
what he meant. But then, because he thought it important, he turned
and searched Hart’s waiting eyes. “Though obviously from a
distance, I have watched your career with some interest. You seem -
how shall I say this? - more grounded than the rest of them, the
ones like Constable who only run for office because they would not
know what to do with themselves without the attention of the crowd.
You were going to quit a few years ago, I understand; go back to
California and live a private life - something having to do with
your wife, if I am not mistaken. I understand you have even been
known to read a serious book. It’s no wonder you don’t seem to have
many friends. We have at least that much in common.”

It seemed at first a strange remark, but
then, a moment later, Hart thought he knew exactly what he had
meant: reading anything, but especially about the past, took you
away from what people in the present thought important. He tried to
use that thought to penetrate deeper into what for him was still
the mystery of Jean Valette.

“You must have read a great deal to be able
to do what you did back there, at Mont Saint Michel: speak without
notes for nearly an hour and then answer questions.”

Valette’s eyes filled with irony. “The best
thing that happened to me as a boy was to have a tutor who would
scarcely let me read anything until I was nearly sixteen. Among the
other interesting results, my memory was much improved.”

Hart did not try to hide his astonishment.
“You didn’t read anything until…?”

“One book: Robinson Crusoe. My tutor was very
strange. He had read Rousseau’s Emile - and believed it! Rousseau
said Robinson Crusoe was the only book a boy should read because it
teaches the lessons of necessity and the advantages of freedom;
teaches you to see things with your own eyes and not the eyes of
others. Perhaps that is the reason that I have always liked it here
so much,” he added with a look of mischief, “cut off from the
outside world like Crusoe’s island, and yet less than half an hour
from all the luxury and madness of Paris.”

They had come out of the forest and were
approaching a massive iron gate. Behind it, stretching through a
double row of poplars, was a driveway, a two-lane road that went on
as far as the eye could see.

“It’s only a few miles to the house,” said
Valette, explaining a fact without importance. He pointed to a rock
outcropping on the right. “There is a path that leads to a small
lake the other side. I used to swim there as a boy. They say that
buried somewhere at the bottom is a chest full of gold and silver,
precious jewels, brought back from the Crusades. But I searched all
over one summer and never found it. ‘St. John’s Treasure,’ is what
they called it, whoever started the legend after that other Jean
Valette, my long dead ancestor, came back from Malta.” Folding his
arms across his chest, he smiled to himself, and then looked
closely at Hart. “The Order of St. John. Some of what I told that
audience today is actually true.”

“But not all of it?”

This produced a look of vast amusement in
Jean Valette. “That’s one sin of which I think I can claim never to
have been guilty. Although, I’m not sure it really makes any
difference,” he said as the smile on his face faded into obscurity
and his gaze became more thoughtful. “I try to be careful, not go
too far, in what I say; but I sometimes wonder why I bother. Those
people I just spoke to - members of the Order of St. John - I could
tell them exactly what I thought and they still would not
understand it, and even if they did, they would think I was being
ironic. They think I’m too intelligent not to believe exactly what
they believe.”

Hart remembered his own reaction, his sense
that Valette kept his real meaning hidden, sometimes by putting it
out in plain view. “The suggestion that great things can be done
again, that what was done in the past can be repeated, that there
could even be another Napoleon? You don’t think anyone believes you
really mean it, and that is the reason you can say it? Everyone
thinks you’re only talking about some remote possibility, something
that, if it were ever to happen, is not going to happen any time
soon: this war between Islam and the West, to take another
example.”

Valette nodded in agreement with what Hart
was saying, but stopped abruptly at this last remark. “That war
never stopped! If Robert Constable had only understood that, he’d
probably still be alive!” he exclaimed in apparent frustration.

Hart stared at him in disbelief. “What do you
mean - he’d still be alive? What does this war you keep talking
about have to do with his murder?”

“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “And
everything. If he had understood what was at stake, the whole
future of the West, he might have decided to do something
important, something that history would remember, instead of just
trying to become what he thought other people - the great,
anonymous crowd - wanted him to be.”

Hart wanted to laugh out loud. It was crazy,
insane; he was trying to find out who was behind the murder of the
President, trying now to clear his own name, and he was being told
that Constable had brought it on himself by not being sufficiently
serious. He did not laugh out loud, but he might as well have done.
Valette had understood at once Hart’s reaction. “You think I don’t
know what I’m talking about. Well, consider this: All this money he
got from The Four Sisters, all those millions - Do you think that
would have happened if I had not thought that it would, one way or
the other, bring about his destruction?”

Hart did not know what to think. He was about
to demand that Valette explain what he meant when the driver
suddenly hit the brakes and Hart was thrown forward onto the floor.
Valette helped him back onto the seat. “There,” he said, pointing
to an enormous stag standing in the middle of the drive. “Isn’t he
magnificent?” With proud indifference the stag stood there, daring
anyone to try to move him, and then bounded off the road and into
the dense forest. “The park is full of animals now, wild boar and
deer, that used to be hunted. I put a stop to it. I never
understood this desire some people have to kill things that cannot
fight back.”

He leaned forward and rapped gently on the
glass, a signal to the driver to move forward again. The road, this
endless driveway from the iron gates miles behind them, began a
steep ascent, winding through one hairpin turn after another,
climbing high above the valley floor and the river that in the
distance glowed blood red and orange under the soft, dying light of
the twilight sun. They reached a clearing several miles square,
bordered on the other side by another forest and another, taller
range of hills, and passed through yet another iron gate, smaller,
and more ornate, than the first. They were now on a great stone
paved circle that led past a series of spouting fountains and close
cropped lawns and hedges to what Hart could only think was a much
older, if slightly smaller, Versailles.

“It was built about the same time as Mont
Saint Michel, a thousand years ago,” explained Jean Valette. “Like
the cathedral, it has been rebuilt and restored who knows how many
times. They burned it to the ground, or tried to, those great
believers in equality, in the early days of the Revolution, and
murdered - cut the living hearts out of some of them - the people
who lived here. The wonder, I suppose, is that we ever got it back.
We wouldn’t have, if we had not learned the secret of this new
world of ours.”

“The secret?” asked Hart as they got out of
the car.

Jean Valette stood in front of the ancient
stone chateau that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction,
inhaling the sweet, clean air. His eyes glittered with the
remembered knowledge of something perhaps taught to him as a child,
or learned later, somehow on his own. “The secret of the age of
equality: the more equality there is, the more desperate people are
for something that seems to set them apart, makes them different,
better, than the rest. That’s why money has become the only thing
anyone believes in anymore. It isn’t because of what it can buy;
it’s because of what it tells everyone about you. Want to see a
completely miserable human being? Introduce someone worth a hundred
million to someone worth twice that. Every age has its own form of
insanity, Mr. Hart. Money is ours. That’s what got Robert Constable
killed, and, directly or indirectly, it’s what is likely to get you
killed as well. But let’s go inside now. You must be famished.”

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Unable to sleep, Hart lay awake, seeing
ghosts, fleeting fragments of faces he had known, murdered, every
one of them, by some lethal, hidden hand. If Jean Valette had not
ordered the assassination of Robert Constable - if this strange,
erratic, and ultimately enigmatic character was telling the truth -
then he was back at the beginning, knowing less than he had known
before about who was behind a conspiracy that had thus far been so
successful that the only one under suspicion was him. Who had
reason to want Robert Constable dead, and, more importantly, was in
a position to arrange the murder of a president and then eliminate
anyone who might learn what they had done?

Jean Valette may not have been involved, but
everything still led back to him. He was the one who had known the
secrets that, had they been discovered, would have destroyed
Constable and his presidency. Was that what Valette had meant by
that astonishing remark: that he had given Constable all those
millions precisely to help bring about his destruction? But why,
what motive could he have had, to do something as Machiavellian as
that? Hart had hoped to sound him out that evening, to see if any
of it made sense, or was only the fantasy of a disordered mind. But
Jean Valette had disappeared.

As soon as they arrived, Hart had been taken
upstairs to his room, or rather a suite of rooms as large as any
apartment. The chateau, a castle by any other name, might be as old
as the Crusades, but in this part of it at least there was nothing
missing to provide for the comfort of a guest. Soft, oriental
carpets were scattered over stone floors polished so smooth that
when the light was just right you could see your own reflection;
and instead of the dancing shadows of ancient chandeliers with
tiered layers of wax dripping candles, modern, recessed lighting
cast a steady, even brightness in the room. The furniture was
modern, comfortable, with well-upholstered chairs and a bed stacked
waist high with mattresses. Exhausted, frustrated, and confused,
Hart had taken a long, hot shower only to discover that someone had
taken his clothes. He slipped on a robe that he did not remember
seeing on the hook behind the door and, when he went back into the
bedroom, found a liveried servant waiting to show him his new
wardrobe: Slacks, two sport jackets, a dark suit, a half dozen
shirts and several ties, socks, clean underwear, and three pair of
shoes.