by D. W. Buffa
“You see that man over there?” he asked, nodding toward the head of the receiving line. “Recognize him?”
There was something vaguely familiar about the distinguished-looking stranger who had just taken Hillary Constable’s hand and bent close to whisper his own condolences. There was a cultured, foreign aspect to his features, and Hart thought he might be someone with the diplomatic corps, or a member of a European government, there in his official capacity.
“I don’t think so. Who is he?”
A strange smile, full of caution, made a furtive appearance on Austin Pearce’s fine, intelligent mouth.
“The head of one of the oldest families in France, and what you might call the managing partner of one of the world’s most powerful, and most secret, private firms. It is called The Four Sisters.”
Chapter Four
The Four Sisters. Charlie Finnegan had mentioned it just a few hours earlier. It was the story Quentin Burdick was working on, the story that involved the president.
“It’s a private equity group, an investment house, correct?”
Austin Pearce searched Hart’s eyes, looking for reassurance, as it seemed, a sense that he could still trust him and rely on his discretion.
“The Four Sisters an investment house?—I have a feeling it’s a good deal more than that.”
Hart glanced back to where Hillary Constable had just let go of the hand of the man they had been talking about.
“Who is he?” he asked.
“One of the most fascinating men I’ve ever met: Jean de la Valette, charming, intelligent, well read—I don’t mean the kind of contemporary things we read to stay current, his horizon is rather different than that. I suppose that is inevitable, when your family goes back, not just a few generations, but five hundred years or more.” Pearce’s gaze became solemn, profound, and full of troubled calculation. “I meant what I said earlier,” he said finally. “Come to New York, as soon as possible—this week, if you can. I have to talk to you about something.” He made a quick, abrupt movement of his head toward Jean de la Valette, who was just then on his way outside. “It’s about The Four Sisters.”
He patted Hart on his sleeve and told him he had to go. He had not taken three steps when he turned back.
“I don’t trust many people, Bobby; not anymore. What I told you about The Four Sisters—don’t tell that to anyone, not even that you know the name.”
Hart watched as the former treasury secretary made his way through the crowd. Pearce was a small, average-looking man easily confused for an accountant’s assistant, someone brought into a meeting of government officials to take notes or double-check figures, until he began to talk and off the top of his head analyze a budgetary problem or a financial question with the same cogent ease as someone reading from the printed page. Pearce had never been short for an answer, never baffled by a problem, always calm and collected, never irritated or impatient, never for any reason disturbed—until now. He had not admitted it, not in so many words, but he had seemed almost frightened of this thing called The Four Sisters, whatever it really was: an investment house or, as he had put it, something more than that. Who was Jean de la Valette, wondered Bobby Hart, and what was his connection to Robert Constable?
“That looked interesting.”
Charlie Finnegan was standing right in front of him, but Hart had been so lost in thought he had not seen him approach.
“You and Austin Pearce seemed to be having quite a conversation. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“I’m not sure what it was about. He wants to see me about something. Maybe I’ll find out then,” replied Hart, glancing at Finnegan in a way that told him that was all he could say. “Have you done the honors?”
“Yeah, I went through, mumbled a few words about what a great man he was. I don’t envy her, having to stand there like that, forced to turn private grief into a public ceremony. She called me by my first name. They were always good at that, weren’t they?—making you feel you were someone they especially liked.”
Finnegan checked his watch. He looked around the room in case he had missed someone he wanted to see or needed to speak to.
“A few more minutes,” he said to Hart, “then I’ve got to go.” He nodded toward the receiving line. It was shorter than it had been. “You haven’t yet, have you?”
“No, but I guess I better. I’ll catch up with you later. We’re on for dinner tomorrow, right?”
Hart took another glass from a passing waiter and made his way to the back of the line. He tried to think of what he was going to say, but all he could think about was the great inconsequence, at times like this, of saying anything. He had never yet found words that did not sound empty and false when he tried to express sympathy and support to someone who had lost a husband or a wife, a parent or a child. He was too honest to imagine that anything could make much of a difference to someone who was suffering the unspeakable agonies that come with the knowledge that someone you loved, someone who loved you, was now gone forever. Forever, that was the point. The journey had come to an end and there was no starting over, no chance to make amends for the things you wish you had not said or done, no chance to do what you had always planned to do once you had the time, because time was over, time had died.
The line kept moving forward, and then, suddenly, he was standing in front of her, and he still did not know what to say. The words came automatically.
“I’m very sorry,” he heard himself saying as he held her hand for a brief moment in his own. “If there is anything—”
She stopped him with a look, a slight, enigmatic smile that seemed to acknowledge the awkward futility of saying anything with words. She bent toward him.
“Stay. Don’t go. I have to see you.”
She whispered an instruction to a young man standing just behind her, and looked again at Hart to let him know that, whatever she wanted to see him about, it was important. Then she was taking the hand of someone else, and, in that way she had, making them feel that they were the one she had been waiting all the while to see.
“This way, Senator,” said the aide as he led Hart out of the room and down a long corridor.
The house was a labyrinth, hallways that seemed to turn left and turn right, hallways that seemed to turn back on themselves; stairways that spiraled somewhere out of sight and that, from the look of them, had seldom been used in the hundred years since the house was first built. They passed a dozen white varnished doors, all of them shut and probably locked, like the vacant rooms in some grand decayed hotel that were only opened when someone ventured in to clean and air them out. After making at least three different turns, they climbed a narrow back staircase to the second floor. Hart was shown to a suite of rooms where, he was told, Mrs. Constable would join him as soon as she could.
“She asked me to tell you,” said her aide, “that it’s a matter of some urgency.” He paused as if he wanted to be absolutely certain he did not forget even the smallest part of what he was supposed to do. “She wouldn’t ask you to wait like this if it wasn’t.”
It seemed odd, once he was left alone and had time to think about it, that he had been asked to wait here, this far away from the main part of the house. He was in a sitting room, richly furnished with a sofa and two easy chairs arranged in front of a marble fireplace. Through an open doorway, he could see a large bedroom with heavy drapes drawn across the windows. A second doorway led to a book-lined study. Restless, and with nothing else to do, Hart pulled a leather-bound volume off a shelf. The pages had not been cut. He pulled down another and discovered the same thing. Hundreds of burnished leather–bound books, the pride of any collector, some of the books hundreds of years old, and none of them ever read. They were like the furniture in a roped-off room, there to be seen and never used. Hart wanted to laugh. It was Robert Constable all over again, life as a magician’s trick, the illusion of things that never were.
The drapes were closed in this room as well, and Hart, who d
id not like dark places, pulled them open. To his astonishment, he found himself staring down onto the backyard lawn and the circling crowd that had left the house and gathered outside. For all the twists and turnings that he had been made to follow, Hart was just one floor above where he had started. Whatever Hillary Constable wanted with him, she seemed strangely intent on making certain no one else knew about it.
A few minutes went by, and then a few more. Hart paced back and forth, wondering how much longer he would have to wait. He looked at the long rows of priceless, unread books and the desk on which, instead of pen and paper, were a number of framed photographs, each of them a different size. He walked over to get a closer look. All of the pictures were of Hillary Constable, but never alone, always with someone else: a friend, a relative; photographs taken at ski resorts and tropical islands, photographs taken at different periods of her life; a history, as it were, of life outside of Washington and the usual corridors of power, and not one of the pictures a picture of her with her husband. It was as if Robert Constable had never existed; or, rather, that her time with him had been a public property, an exploitable advantage, something she had not allowed to intrude into what she had had of a private, personal life.
There was a soft whirring sound from the sitting room. A door slid open and closed. It was an elevator, the means by which Hillary Constable could move quickly and easily from whatever commotion was taking place in the first floor public rooms to what, Hart had now determined, was her own private sanctuary. The books that lined the shelves in all their unread splendor, those books belonged to her.
“Damn,” she muttered with what seemed like quiet desperation. Holding her arms straight down at her sides, she clenched both fists. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” she cried. She shook her head, quickly, abruptly, as if to force herself to stop, to get control again. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Then, suddenly, she opened them with a look of consternation. She had forgotten that Bobby Hart was there. She started to pretend that he had not noticed what she had done, and then she gave it up.
“Yes, that’s how I feel.” Her eyes glistened with defiance. “Do you think I wanted to stand there, spend two hours acting the grieving widow, so that they can all talk about how brave I am, how much I am to be admired for the way I’ve conducted myself, holding back my emotions, holding back the tears? The truth of it is that the hardest part has been pretending that I care at all that he’s dead.”
She walked across to the open doorway to the study where Hart stood watching her.
“You always knew he was a fraud, didn’t you? Don’t bother denying it. If there is anybody in this town who can cut through all the cheap lying, all the stupid hypocrisy, it’s you.”
She touched him on the arm and then moved past him to an open cubicle in the book-lined shelves where three crystal class decanters sat on a silver tray.
“Scotch?” she asked, as she poured two glasses. She handed him a half-filled glass and then touched hers to his. “Cheers,” she said in a voice tinged with weary cynicism. She stood at the window, looking down at the crowd. “You think any of them are talking about what a great president he was?”
She looked away, took a drink as if she were trying to steady her nerves, and then sank into an easy chair. She took another drink, longer, slower this time, and appeared to lose herself in thought. A moment later, she looked up at Hart and gestured toward the chair next to her.
“I’m in some trouble, Bobby, and you’re the only one I can think of who might be able to help.”
Hart barely knew her. He had never before this had a private conversation with her. He could not think of anything that would have made her think of him. She read his mind.
“You’re too modest. Or, perhaps,” she added with a shrewd glance that made Hart cautious and a little uncomfortable, “you’re not modest enough. You know perfectly well that you can do a good deal more than most people around here. You have great influence; everyone—or nearly everyone, because there are always a certain number of idiots and fools—respects you. The point is you know how to get things done, and, that rarest of qualities, you have a sense of what is important and what is not. Look out that window; look down at that crowd of well-wishers who only wish well for themselves. Think they care anything about the great Robert Constable now? Think they cared anything about him when he was alive, except what he might do for them? They’re all free now, whatever they might have owed him. I’ve got the burden of the great man’s reputation, the obligation to make sure that no one ever finds out the truth, the whole truth, of what he really was.”
Hart had seen too much of politics and what it did to people to be shocked very easily, but this was stunning, the harsh bitterness with which she described her husband and what his death meant for her. He was almost afraid to ask what she wanted him to do.
“You said you were in some kind of trouble. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
Hillary Constable stared into the middle distance, her mood changing in the flick of an eyelash from angry defiance into a dark depression. One moment she was all energy, her eyes eager and electric; the next she seemed to have lost the capacity to move, and even the will to live. Suddenly she was on her feet and at the window, shaking her head not just at the vanity of the world but, from the look in her now anguished eyes, something much more personal to herself.
“He died in a hotel, a hotel in Manhattan, of a heart attack,” she said, leaning against the window casement. She kept watching the crowd below, fascinated, as it seemed, by the familiar strangers that for so many years had made up the world she had first wanted to conquer and then, having conquered, had begun to despise. “I was in love once, a long time ago, when I was still in college.” She turned to face Hart directly. “He was a gorgeous-looking boy. He wanted to be…well, I don’t know what he wanted to be, except to be with me. But that wasn’t the kind of ambition I thought I needed. I wanted to be something, be someone everyone knew, someone—the someone I became.” She tapped her foot, stopped, and then, a moment later, threw her head back and laughed. “I became what I always was—a fool. I married Robert and I got what I deserved, a husband who thought he was being faithful if he went through a weekend without sleeping with another woman. I got what I deserved, Bobby; I got to wear black and sit in the first pew at his funeral, and then stand in that receiving line and listen to everyone tell me how much they sympathized with my loss while they’re wondering whether the rumor was true: that he died of a heart attack while he was screwing one of the many other women he often took to bed.”
Hart tried to object. “I don’t think—”
“It’s not a rumor, Bobby: It’s true. He was with someone that night. That isn’t the problem.”
“The problem?”
“The problem: what I meant when I said I’m in some trouble. Robert didn’t die of a heart attack, he was murdered.”
“Murdered! What makes you think…?”
A dozen different thoughts raced through Hart’s brain; or rather, only two: her husband had been murdered and she was in trouble. There seemed to be only one conclusion, but it was impossible, it could not have happened. But he had to ask.
“They think you…?”
“Not that I didn’t have good reason, but no, that’s not the kind of trouble I meant. It isn’t that simple.”
She came back to her chair, picked up the half finished glass of scotch, and drank some more.
“Do you know Clarence Atwood, head of the Secret Service?”
“Not very well; we’ve met.”
“I’d like you to see him.”
But Hart was still stunned by what she had said.
“He was murdered?”
“He came to see me. Clarence Atwood,” she explained. “What I’m going to tell you now, no one else knows. No one else can know. Do you understand what I’m saying? No, of course you don’t.” Her eyes full of a new vulnerability, she shook her head in frustration. “You have to
forgive me. After everything that’s happened, things get jumbled up and I’m not always as coherent as I should be.”
Hart tried to help.
“Atwood came to see you. He told you that your husband had been murdered?”
“Clarence was the head of the detail when we—I mean when Robert was first elected. We had a certain understanding.” She rose from the chair and, as if drawn by the crowd, the need to know that what she had helped accomplish could still dominate the time and attention of other people, went back to the window. “He didn’t have to tell me everything—I didn’t need to know every time Robert was falling into bed with someone—only when he did something that might become a public embarrassment.”
The vulnerability vanished from her eyes, replaced by a cold, and even ruthless, calculation, as she remembered the sacrifices, and the bargains, she had been forced to make.
“I never promised Clarence anything for his help, for his discretion; but when the head of the Secret Service retired, I made sure he got the job. He’s remained a loyal friend. He knows how to keep this quiet.”
“Keep it quiet?” Hart jumped to his feet. “The president was murdered, and you want to keep it quiet? You can’t!”
“Hear me out! Listen before you rush to judgment. It has to be kept quiet. No one can ever know. He was not murdered by some jealous husband; he wasn’t killed by someone in a moment of rage! It was an assassination. He was killed by lethal injection, a drug that stopped his heart almost instantly.”
Hart stared at her, not certain what to believe.
“I spent most of my time while he was alive doing what I had to do to protect his reputation,” she went on. “I have to do the same thing now that he’s dead. He was in a hotel room, having sex with a woman who turned out to have been a hired killer. The agent who was with him helped her get away. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing. The great irony is that he thought he was protecting me. Isn’t that just too funny for words? He didn’t want anyone to find out that the former leader of the western world was screwing his brains out when he died, so he cleaned up everything and got rid of the girl, told her to get out of the hotel and made sure she was gone before he called for help.”
