Grand Master (36 page)

“Changes that made you a great deal of
money!”

Jean Valette almost laughed. “It depends,
doesn’t it, on what you consider a great deal of money?”

Hart bent forward, following intently
everything that was said, and, in the case of Jean Valette, the
meaning of every look and every gesture. A picture was beginning to
form, but there were still a few blank spaces that needed to be
filled in. “Russell was taking money, too. He shared the secret; he
knew what Constable was doing. But he didn’t change his mind, like
Frank Morris; he was not concerned with what any of this might do
to the country. He became vice-president, instead. Is that what you
were trying to say, that it was not what Constable wanted; it’s
what Russell decided was the price of his silence?”

With slow precision, Jean Valette lifted an
eyebrow, his face fixed again in the attitude of someone playing at
a game, or rather, watching one, measuring with an expert’s
practiced judgment the feeble attempt of amateurs. “Perhaps that is
to give your new president too much credit. It may be that it was
Constable’s idea instead, a way to ensure himself that Russell
would not be tempted by a suddenly resurrected conscience into such
an inconvenient confession.”

“And Madelaine Constable - what motive…? Oh,
I see,” said Carlyle, nodding his head. He picked up his pen and
scrawled a few short, abbreviated sentences. “Quentin Burdick. He
was onto the story; he had an appointment with…. She would not be
able to run for anything, much less the presidency, if all of this
came out.” With a puzzled glance, he turned quickly to Hart. “She
asked you to look into it, see what you could find out about
-?”

“The murder, and The Four Sisters,” said
Inspector Dumont, who had been sitting, almost forgotten, for the
last half hour. “That way she finds out what someone might find out
about the secret they share, and because, by putting you, Mr. Hart,
in direct connection with everything that has happened, the
accusation against you acquires the credibility of proximity. Why
else would you be so close to all of this, if it weren’t because
you were trying to cover your own tracks? And then, whatever you
may have uncovered about the murder and The Four Sisters, no one
will believe it. Especially,” he added with a humorous glint in his
eye, “if you were to wind up dead.”

Hart did not entirely agree. “I don’t believe
she’s behind this. I wouldn’t have believed it about Irwin Russell,
either; but I didn’t know he was a crook, as big a crook as
Constable. So they both had a motive, but he’s the one who ends up
being president, at least for a while. She can still beat him, and
the election is only a year away.” Suddenly, he remembered. He
looked at Carlyle. “Neither one of them will be running for
anything, will they?”

Carlyle folded his notebook. “If those
documents prove that Constable and Russell were taking money, tens
of millions, then I imagine the only thing either one of them will
be thinking about is how to stay out of prison. It does explain
what just happened, though. Everyone thought what you thought,
Senator: that Madelaine Constable would run against Russell for the
nomination.”

“It seems like I’ve been gone for years, even
though it’s only been a couple of days. What happened? Did she
announce that she was not going to run after all?”

“No. Russell announced that she had agreed to
become vice-president. He’s sending her nomination to the Hill this
week. They’re going to run for re-election as a team.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

That evening at dinner, alone, just the two
of them, at the table with eighteen vacant places, Hart expressed
his gratitude for what Jean Valette had done. “I was certain you
were behind everything: that you had Constable killed to protect
the secret of what The Four Sisters had done. I thought you had
hired the assassin, and instead you’ve done everything you can to
help prove my innocence.”

Jean Valette had changed again from a
business suit to a radically different kind of costume. With Hart
on his left, he sat at the head of the dining room table wearing a
long flowing white silk robe over a loose fitting white silk shirt.
Had he worn a beard and had darker skin, had he seemed less
ascetic, he might have passed for a wealthy Arab dining in the
luxury of his palace.

“It’s perhaps not quite as simple as that,”
he replied. A slight, thoughtful smile crossed his mouth. “It would
not be true to say that I bear no responsibility for what happened,
that I was not, in some way, involved in what Robert Constable did
to others, and what others did to him.”

Shoving his plate aside, Hart pushed back
from the table. With folded arms, he studied Jean Valette,
wondering what he meant.

“I don’t mean that I knew that Constable
would do what he did - have Congressman Morris locked up somewhere
with orders to have him killed if he talked - or that I knew that
someone would have him killed,” said Jean Valette who seemed to
consider quite carefully what he wanted to say. “That isn’t the
same thing as saying that I didn’t know it would happen, or,
rather, that something like that might happen. Only a fool could
have failed to foresee it. Once you let people like those become
involved in something illicit, something they could not resist -
and, if you will forgive me, how many Americans could resist tens
of millions of dollars with the promise of tens of millions more,
money that could never be traced back to its real source, money
that did not require you to do anything except what you wanted to
do anyway - As I say, only a fool could fail to see that evil only
follows evil. Once someone commits a crime, he will do anything,
even murder, to keep the truth from coming out.”

Hart had seen enough of Jean Valette to know
something of his intellect and the subtlety of his judgment. Only a
fool - he had used that word several times - would have failed to
foresee what might happen next, and whatever else he might be, Jean
Valette was certainly not that.

“So you knew - at the time you were first
approached by Constable, when he told you in so many words that if
your companies were going to do business in the United States, you
were going to have to pay millions for the privilege - you knew how
this all might end? Then why didn’t you -?”

“Stop him from destroying himself?” laughed
Jean Valette. “It would seem to me that he got precisely what he
deserved. There is a parallel to this - more than one, I should
imagine - but the one I’m thinking of I used in that speech of mine
you heard the other day at Mont Saint Michel.”

Hart thought a moment and then remembered.
“You don’t mean about what happened after the King of France,
Philip the Fair, destroyed the Templars to get their money?”

“Very good, Mr. Hart! Your memory is quite
excellent. Yes, exactly. Consider the questions it raises. Did God
punish Pope Clement and King Philip the way Jacque de Molay, the
Grand Master, swore He would? Or did the Grand Master simply
foresee what the two of them, the pope and the king had unleashed
upon themselves, with their ruthless disregard for their own honor
and all that they had sworn to protect: the Throne and the Church?”
Jean Valette’s gaze deepened, became more profound. “Or did he, in
those last few moments of an agonizing death, see the future with a
clairvoyance that we, the living, cannot understand, see with utter
certainty that someone listening, or someone who only later heard,
what they would take as a promise from God, and, determined to be
God’s own messenger, would arrange to hasten the deaths of two men
who had been cursed? Or that it might be done by someone who did
not care what God intended, but for whom the deaths of one or the
other would advance their own, worldly, ambition? And, finally,
what did he have to lose, the Grand Master, if nothing happened as
he said it would, when there was always the chance that just enough
would happen that someone would remember, and remembering,
interpret things as if they had?”

“Those are interesting questions,” agreed
Hart. “But how do they apply here?”

“Because however you choose to answer the
questions, they all point to a lesson no one seems to understand:
the one who seems the victim is often the one in charge. The Grand
Master seemed to have lost everything: his Order, the Order’s
money, and, finally, his life. But the future - that, as it turned
out, he still controlled.”

“You mean, could still foresee.”

“Control the future, foresee the future: it
all comes to the same thing, if you think it through.” Jean Valette
hesitated as if he was not sure whether he should stop there or try
to explain. It was easier to let the matter rest, easier to let his
visitor try to figure out what he meant. That is what he would have
done with nearly anyone else. There was too much danger that he
would be misunderstood: most men only learned what they thought
they already knew.

“Rousseau, the French philosopher, the one
who is famous for talking about the rights of man, foresaw the
future. Thirty years before it happened in France, he wrote that
the world was entering the age of revolution. The problem was that
Rousseau was a genius while the people who read him were not. They
distorted his teaching and through those distortions helped bring
about the revolution he said would happen. The same thing happened
later, at the end of the 19th century, with that other genius,
Nietzsche. He foresaw a future of terrible wars and the need to
rescue humanity from the leveling effects of mediocrity. He spoke
of the need for a higher order of humanity; the Nazis read into
that their own delusions of themselves as a master race and
everyone else a slave.

“Rousseau, Nietzsche: both saw what was
coming and became the text on which stupid, evil people could write
their own interpretation. They bear some responsibility for what
happened: they were too intelligent not to have seen the danger in
how they would be misunderstood. And yet, on a deeper level, they
offer to anyone willing to spend the time, willing to learn how to
read carefully, that is to say slowly and with an open mind, the
only real understanding of the world in which, for better or worse,
we live. Rousseau wrote about the coming age of democratic
revolution; Nietzsche about the reaction to that, that other kind
of mass movement in which one man, the leader, imposes his will on
everyone else. Now someone needs to write about what is going to
happen in the next hundred years and what can be done about it. I
tried.”

Hart, who had followed as closely as he
could, was not slow to see the implications.

“Yes, you’re right, Mr. Hart,” said Jean
Valette before Hart had opened his mouth. “If I tried - if I’m
still trying - to write about the future, and if to foresee it is
in some sense to control it, then…? Come with me. If we’re going to
have a serious conversation, there is a better place to have
it.”

They started down a long hallway that ran
parallel to the one Hart had taken earlier to the Hall of the Four
Sisters and his meeting with the American reporter. This one, like
the other, was paved in polished white tile, the walls hung with
rich tapestries and countless paintings by old masters. The chateau
was ancient, but far from a crumbling wreck, a makeshift project of
never finished restoration; it was to all outward appearances
perfect in every detail…as good, or better than, the day it was
finished, nearly a thousand years ago. More than once in the short
time he had been here, Hart found himself pretending, and for a few
moments, believing, that he had gone back in time; perhaps not so
far back as the beginning, but hundreds of years, when the old
masters were the new masters and the French Revolution was still
far off in the distant future. He had wondered, and he wondered
now, what it must have been like to have been born here, raised
here, and lived here all his life, remote from other people and
everything they believed. It might not be the whole explanation,
but it was surely a part of what had made Jean Valette what he had
become: an exile from the very world that through the power of the
very thing he seemed to hold in contempt, money and an endless
supply of it, he had come to influence, if not dominate.

Passing a vaulted window, Hart glanced into
the moonlit darkness and in the stillness of the night felt a
little of the aching loneliness of someone who had himself become a
stranger far from where he wanted to be. “I need to leave
tomorrow,” he said as they walked together toward an open set of
doors.

“That’s not possible,” replied Jean Valette.
He said this decisively, as if the matter were entirely up to
him.

Hart was stunned. He stopped and looked
straight at him. “Are you telling me that I’m a prisoner here?”

“Not to me, to necessity. Where would you go?
What chance would you have?” he asked with an impatience which,
when he realized how it must sound, changed into a look of
sympathy.

“I can’t stay here forever,” protested Hart.
“I have to do something to clear my name.”

“We’ve taken a major step in that direction,”
Jean Valette assured him. “You just need to give it a few days.
Carlyle will be back in New York tomorrow. He’ll write his story.
With the proof I supplied, Russell will have to leave office and
Madelaine Constable’s political career will be over. But as to your
other point,” he continued with a smile that seemed to carry a
challenge, a dare he was fairly certain his guest would never take,
“you could stay here forever, or as long as you like. I would enjoy
the company: someone interested in serious things, someone with
whom I could actually carry on a conversation without having to
hide the meaning of everything I say. And of course you would not
be alone. It would not be difficult to make arrangements to have
your beautiful wife come to join you.” With an expansive gesture,
he invited Hart to consider the possibility of life in the chateau.
“I’ve lived here all my life and I’m not sure I’ve seen every part
of it. The two of you can use however much of it you wish.”