Grand Master (37 page)

Beneath the haughty exterior, the studied
condescension of his manner, the attempt to make an extraordinary
offer seem a matter of no importance, Hart thought he could detect
a strange hope that he would take him up on it. It was a hope Jean
Valette would never express. He had too much pride to admit he had
any need he could not satisfy without the help of others.

“Carlyle’s story will help clear me, but if I
don’t go back and find out who was behind the assassination -
whether it was Russell or Constable’s wife - a lot of people will
still think that what they’re saying is true: that I murdered him
because he was sleeping with my wife.”

“What does it matter what others think?”
asked Jean Valette with a sharp turn of his head. “You know the
truth. You’re not responsible for the ignorance of people who
believe you capable of murder.” Lifting his chin, his eyes became
cold, distant, and defiant. “I learned contempt at an early age. It
was a gift, if you will, from my father, when he played the part of
a collaborator for the French resistance. I was with him, a young
boy, one day in the street when there were no Germans around, no
one the crowd had to be afraid of. These people, none of whom, you
understand, had the courage to be in the resistance themselves,
surrounded my father, pushed him, kicked him, spat in his face,
called him a traitor, a coward, a rich bastard who had sold out his
country for money. And the whole time they were doing that, trying
to humiliate him, he was looking at me, his only son, only four
years old, trying to tell me with his eyes that none of it was
true, that he was not what that mob said he was. But I was a boy, a
child, and all I heard were the words, and the look of hatred in
their eyes. Later, my father told me that it was not true, that he
was not any of the things they had called him; but of course he
could not tell me the real truth, that he was in the resistance,
and so I thought - and you can see how awful this is to admit -
that my father had lied to me, that he was the collaborator all
those mindless people thought and said he was. So, no, Mr. Hart,
I’m not much persuaded by what the crowd might think; and, frankly,
after what you have now learned about how easily the crowd can
turn, neither should you.”

He paused, and with a confidence so complete
as to leave no room for disagreement, made a remark that caused
Hart to wonder whether Jean Valette’s claim to see the broad
outlines of the future was less the result of study and
intelligence than the madness of a completely disordered mind.
“That will be especially important for you to understand when the
same people who are now condemning you give you their support, when
Russell is gone and Madelaine Constable can’t become president,
when both of them are facing criminal charges and the country turns
to you. You’re going to be the next president, Mr. Hart. There
really isn’t any doubt about it.” He seemed to laugh in silence at
some private joke. “I don’t imagine you would believe me if I told
you that I saw that this would happen the day I discovered that
Robert Constable believed in nothing but his own importance. But
enough of this,” he said, turning on his heel. “We have more
serious matters to discuss.”

The long silk robes worn by Jean Valette
swept across the floor as he led Hart through the entrance into an
enormous square room with a ceiling at least three stories tall and
book shelves covering all four walls. A double landing, connected
to each other by staircases in two different places, gave access to
the higher regions of a library that could easily have held twenty,
or even thirty, thousand volumes. The shelves, however, were almost
all of them empty; the only books, three or four dozen volumes,
some of them tattered and torn, threadbare with frequent use, sat
an ungainly medley on a few shelves directly behind a desk that not
only caught Hart’s eye, but held it there. Like so much else in the
chateau, it was obviously hundreds of years old, an ancient,
hand-carved piece of furniture, constructed by the finest craftsmen
at no doubt prohibitive expense, but still looked new.

“A gift,” explained Jean Valette. “From Louis
XIV. He said it was in return for the hospitality of his trusted
friend, Monsieur de la Valette, and it may have been, if you
include in that description the willing eagerness of the young and
ravishing Madame de la Valette to exchange the bed of her husband
for that of their sovereign.” Jean Valette scratched the side of
his face, an idle gesture of wistful curiosity. “In those days, no
one could be too sure of their fathers, and as someone - I think it
was Tocqueville - pointed out, they enjoyed themselves in ways we
can no longer imagine or appreciate. It isn’t the kind of desk I
would have chosen, but by some miracle the library and everything
in it escaped the flames when the chateau was put to the torch in
the early days of the Revolution, and so, like my father before me,
I use it now whenever I am here, when I get away from work, and sit
up all night reading, studying, what I should.”

Hart could not stop looking at all the vacant
shelves, hundreds of them, towering high above and circling all
around, not a bit of dust on them, polished to a deep luster as if
they had just been built and were waiting for the next morning
when, one by one, each of them first catalogued, each priceless
volume would be added until all the shelves were filled. “Nothing
in the library was burned, not the books?” he asked, puzzled by
their absence.

Jean Valette dropped into a yellow,
upholstered chair and motioned for Hart to take the one the other
side of the desk. Throwing one leg over the other, he sat sideways
on his hip and gestured toward the empty shelves. “I read them all.
I kept only the ones worth reading.”

Hart was not sure he understood. His eyes
wandered again to the vacant shelves that climbed three stories to
the ceiling. It would have been impossible to read all the books
they must have once contained.

“I read them all,” repeated Jean Valette,
amused at Hart’s incredulity. “I didn’t finish very many of them,
and with some of them I read only the first few pages, enough to
assure me that I was wasting my time, that the author was only
repeating, and usually not very well, what someone else had said
before. Most things written, whether the author knows it or not,
are purely derivative.

“And these are all you kept?” asked Hart,
nodding toward the few dozen on the shelves behind where Jean
Valette was half-reclining in his chair.

“Yes, but as you can imagine, it took years
to get to this point, years spent night after night in this library
of diminishing volumes, before I finally got rid of everything that
is not necessary.”

Hart observed the glowing confidence in his
eyes, the proud sense of accomplishment. He had seen something of
that look before, mainly on the faces of winning candidates on the
night of their election. He had seen it on full display the first
time Robert Constable won the presidency. But that paled in
comparison to what he now was witnessing. The look on the face of
Jean Valette had nothing to do with ego, with triumph over someone
else. It was the pride of his own achievement, one that owed
nothing to what anyone else might think about it.

“The other books, the ones you didn’t want to
keep: some of them, I imagine, quite old; many of them, perhaps,
first editions - you didn’t…?”

“Burn them? I should have, burned them for
all the error they contain; but no, I gave them to universities
mainly, and other repositories of useless learning. Did you ever
read Rousseau?” he asked suddenly. “You should. You’ll learn more
about the foundation of the modern world, the one in which we live,
than all the other things written since. And then, after that, if
you read Nietzsche, you will have the beginnings of an
understanding of the crisis which for the most part we don’t even
know we’re in.”

Jean Valette’s eye was drawn, almost
reluctantly, as it seemed, to the only photograph, indeed the only
object, other than a reader’s lamp, on the desk. It was a picture,
a very old picture, of a young woman. “My wife,” he explained with
a sad, distant look as he struggled with his emotions. Embarrassed,
he sat up straight, took a deep breath and emitted a gentle, almost
shy, laugh.

“More than forty years now, and every time I
look at her, the same thing. Worse, really, as I get older; worse
with each year I know I’ve missed. I had a feeling - I hope you
don’t mind my saying this - that we had this in common, that you
would know what this feeling is like. When I started following your
career, I was struck by how beautiful your wife was. I was certain
that you must have fallen in love with her the first time you saw
her.”

The look in Jean Valette’s eyes, the deep
sympathy in his voice: Hart felt a bond, an attachment that he had
seldom felt with anyone. He remembered, as if it were yesterday,
the moment he first saw Helen, and the utter certainty, the
strange, miraculous certainty, that if never saw her again he would
never forget her face, that if they never exchanged a word, she
would always be a part of him. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened,”
he confessed. “The very moment.”

“There are things we know instantly, or never
know at all. I was young, and very rich, and from one of the oldest
families in France. If I was not the most handsome of men, there
were those who thought that, even leaving the money aside, I was
not without charm. I was, in other words, quite full of myself. And
then I saw her, and I forgot about my own existence. I did not
exist without her. I saw her. That was all it took: one look, a
smile, a slight, shy hesitation in her eyes, and then the
certainty, that feeling you can never know again. I was in love,
and so was she. It was perfect; more than perfect: enchanting. We
were married, and we had two years, two years that passed like two
days, and then we were to have a child, and just like that, she was
gone, died in childbirth along with the child.”

Jean Valette tightened his left hand into a
fist as a shudder passed through him, and then stared straight
ahead until he had himself under control. His gaze softened,
became, as it were, more forgiving of what he thought a failure in
himself. “My life was over and I was only twenty-four. For two
years, I did nothing, nothing at all, except stare at her picture
and wonder how long I would have to wait to die. It took a long
time, but I kept hearing her voice - there are times I still hear
it now - telling me she wanted me to live, to do something of
importance with whatever life I had left. I knew that whatever I
did, I would never again by interrupted by happiness. That’s when I
went back and resumed my study of serious things. That’s when I
decided I would try to write something - not right away, but when I
was ready, which I knew would not be for many years - that might be
worth reading.”

More than what Jean Valette said, the manner
in which he said it, the smooth cadence, the deep resonance of his
voice, gave Hart the feeling that what he was going to hear this
evening he would never hear from anyone again. Among the other
strange eccentricities of Jean Valette, there was nothing
conventional in the way he saw the world. That was what more than
anything else held Hart’s attention, what he could not get over:
the way that Jean Valette seemed to see everything from a distance,
a stranger in his own time.

“And I finally did, just a few years ago,
after endless years of study, after years of dealing with all these
supposedly important people in the world of politics and finance. I
wrote the book I wanted to write, the one in which something of
what will happen - must happen - in the future is foretold.”

He reached inside one of the three drawers
just below the top of the desk, that gift for infidelity in all the
joy of life, and pulled out a thick, four hundred page manuscript.
“Of course no one would publish it.” A wry grin cut a jagged line
across his mouth. “One publisher told me that probably only ten
people in the world would understand it. If he included himself,
the number should be nine. It was my fault, really: I had not yet
learned how to lie, to tell the truth in a way that everyone who
would be offended by it would not be able to discover it.” He
tapped two fingers on the manuscript. “And now, after I don’t know
how many revisions, it is finally finished.”

“Will you take it back to that same
publisher?”

“Last I heard, he was in an asylum. Driven
mad, they say, by his fear about the future. That’s my fault as
well, I suppose,” he said with what, if it was not satisfaction,
was at the very least cruel indifference.

“You’re fault? I don’t understand.”

“He turned down the manuscript, rejected what
I had written.”

“Yes, but that still doesn’t explain why he
went mad. Publishers reject things all the time.”

“He did not know that The Four Sisters owned
the company that owned his company. I did not think it fair to tell
him that when I asked if he would like to publish what I had
written. I did not want to do anything that would affect his
unbiased judgment. He made his decision,” he said with a shrug,
“and I made mine. I could have had him fired, but instead I just
made sure he knew that from that point forward his future was in my
hands. The strain of worrying whether each day might be his last
seems to have been more than he could handle.” A thin smile floated
over his mouth. “You look shocked. Do you think he would have felt
in any way responsible if I had suffered a breakdown because of his
rejection of what I had done? I know the man. He would not have
given it a second thought. Why should I? Remember, I did not do
anything, except acquaint him with the reality of his situation. In
a way, it’s no different than what happened with Robert Constable,
or for that matter, what is about to happen to his wife and to
Irwin Russell. They were all the prisoners of their own ambitions,
and their own fears.”