by D. W. Buffa
Narrowing his eyes into a hard, relentless stare, Burdick lapsed into a long silence, as he conjured up the double vision of what Frank Morris had been like when he was one of the most powerful men on the Hill, someone everyone wanted to know, and the last time, barely twenty-four hours ago, when he had become just another numbered inmate in federal prison. Burdick looked up, slightly embarrassed.
“It wasn’t bribery,” he continued, “the way they said it was at his trial. It was bigger than that, hundreds of millions of dollars were involved, and The Four Sisters was right in the middle of it. In the beginning, Morris thought it was a scheme to get certain government contracts for some of the companies, American companies The Four Sisters controlled. But eventually he discovered that it was more than that.”
“More than that?” asked Hart, intensely interested. “The Four Sisters is a private investment firm, though from what I hear, it may be—that phrase you just used—‘more than that.’”
Burdick’s eyebrows rose up like a pair of open umbrellas. There was a grim, rueful quality in his expression, the look of someone who had been forced to face, if not an awful truth, an awful possibility.
“It may be Murder Incorporated on a global scale.”
“You think they killed Constable, and then killed Morris?”
Burdick’s bookish mouth twitched nervously at the corner. He blinked several times in rapid, thoughtful succession.
“After what happened to Morris, after what happened to me—yes, I do.”
“After what happened to you?” For the first time, Hart felt a sense of alarm. “What happened? When, last night?”
Burdick dismissed, or tried to dismiss, the significance of what he had just said. There was something he wanted to talk about first, something important he thought Hart should know.
“Morris discovered that The Four Sisters had created a kind of parallel financial universe, a system that allowed it to move money from one place to another, one country to another, without anyone knowing anything about it. Think what that means. A company in this country needs capital; a bank in Europe is willing to arrange it. The money comes from another country, a country willing to pay for the chance to obtain some degree of influence over what happens here. Think of what you could do, if you have the billions of dollars necessary to gain a controlling interest in just a handful of the corporations that among them decide what we read and what we watch. Frank Morris knew what it meant. He was willing to take money—he admitted that—but not for something like this.
“Constable was involved. He was the one who first suggested that Morris meet with some people who were interested in making it easier for foreign investors to do business here. Morris went to Constable—the president of the United States, for Christ sake!—and told him what he’d discovered, told him that even though he had taken money he would go to the FBI himself if that was the only way to stop it. Constable told him to forget it, that everything would be all right, that they had not done anything wrong, and that no one would find out. Yes, that’s exactly what he said, according to Morris: that they hadn’t done anything wrong and that no one would find out!
“When Constable said everything would be all right, he meant all right for him. The next thing Morris knew, he was framed for bribery and sent to prison to make sure he didn’t tell anyone besides Constable what he knew. But he told me, and before I get back to New York, he’s murdered, and now they may try to murder me. They know I talked to him; they can guess what he told me. Last night, after I called you from the airport, I went home. Someone had broken in, torn the place apart, stolen my computer. They were looking for whatever files I’d been keeping on The Four Sisters, the story I was planning to write. They didn’t get much. I keep everything at my office at the paper. I don’t think they’ll try anything there.”
“Where did you stay last night?”
“At a hotel here in the Village, just up the street.”
“You better stay there. What Morris told you, that Constable did not die of natural causes, that he was murdered—he was right. I can’t tell you how I know Constable was murdered, only that I do. But I don’t know why he was killed, whether it had to do with this Four Sisters business, or was for some other reason.”
Burdick wanted to be sure.
“You know for certain that he was murdered? You know that as a fact?”
“That’s what I was told.”
They left the dark seclusion of the bar and restaurant and went outside. The heat was shimmering off the dirty gray sidewalk and the air had the thick dull taste of red brick dust. They lingered for a moment in the choking haze, remembering, each of them, what it had been like when they were young and single and their only thought on a hot sticky summer day had been for the night, and the girl, and the jazz that when you heard it told you that nothing would ever be as good as this again.
“I better go,” said Hart, as he started toward the street. “I meant what I said,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Don’t go back. Stay at the hotel until it’s safe.”
Burdick, feeling better, laughed as he shouted back, “That might never happen.”
Chapter Nine
Stepping out of the cab, Hart looked up at the skyscraper towering high above him at the corner of the park. It seemed to him out of place, a strange mismatch in which money, New York money, had won; a losing contest in which taste, and the desire to preserve the old values, had been all but forgotten in the thoughtless desire to find something bigger and more opulent to build. The property that bordered Central Park, the gray stone buildings that ran along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, most of them built before the war, had always been the most sought after real estate in the city, and among the most expensive in the world. It had all seemed to fit, to be as much a part of the park as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the zoo, a picture postcard of life, rich and elegant, in the middle of Manhattan. But money formed a democracy of its own, and the majority, those who had the most of it, wanted a view. And so now, a block from the Plaza and the St. Regis, you could buy an apartment, or rent space for an office, in the kind of glass and steel high-rise monstrosity that critics, and not just critics, thought better suited for Singapore or some oil-rich place in the desert.
An unrepentant liberal, Hart was, when it came to places he liked, something of a traditionalist. He often explained to his California friends that the dismal stifling summer weather he had to endure in Washington was a minor price to pay to live and work in a city full of history. His favorite fact, which he thought had saved Washington from going the way of every other American city, was the law passed shortly after the Capitol had been built banning forever the construction of any other building that tall. No one was to be allowed to look down on the Capitol of the United States. In New York, the main thing seemed to be to have enough money to look down on everyone else.
That was a judgment, but it was also an abstraction; a generalization that had nothing to do with individuals, except as it explained, or helped to explain, something about the conditions under which they lived, the set of assumptions, the ingrained and largely unconscious way they expected everyone to behave. Austin Pearce had made the move to an office on the highest floor allowed for commercial use as a matter of convenience, and because, as he explained when Hart commented on the view, they had been in the other place for years.
“This was new, and available, and they said we needed more space. I’m not sure we didn’t have too much before, but that’s another story.” He saw the look of confusion on Hart’s face. “Bigger isn’t always better; better is knowing what your limits are.”
He looked at Hart as if this last remark carried a lesson, the importance of which he was sure both of them understood. He looked away, and then immediately looked back, searching Hart’s eyes again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “Please, sit down.”
He gestured toward the chair in front of an antique desk, purchased at a Sotheby’s auct
ion some years earlier. The desk was not just his prize possession; he had, as he was quick to admit, an almost sensual attachment to it.
“Touch it,” he said, smiling with his eyes like a parent with a child. “Touch it; it’s all right. Feel it, how cold it is. Now touch it just a little longer. Feel the warmth? The first owner, so the story goes, the woman it was made for, was an Italian princess who had several husbands and many lovers, some of whom she seduced into helping her get rid of a husband she no longer wanted or needed. Maybe that’s what explains it; the way the wood feels when you touch it long enough: the warm blood of a cold-hearted woman. After I left the administration, I took to calling it ‘Hillary.’”
There was an impish quality to Austin Pearce’s patient smile that Hart found irresistible.
“You like my story—good! I’ll tell you something even stranger: It’s true. I did exactly that, started talking to the desk, calling it all sorts of names, when I first got back from those four years in Washington.” He threw up his small, smooth hands in the nostalgia of a past frustration. “There was no one else I could talk to, no one I could tell the truth! No one would have believed me if I had.”
“The truth about what?” asked Hart, more curious now than ever about why Austin Pearce had been so eager to see him.
“About what the president did, the arrangement he entered into with that organization I told you about, The Four Sisters. That was the reason I left at the end of his first term. I would have stayed. I thought I could do some good at Treasury, help put the country’s finances on a better footing, bring a little sanity to the way we raise and spend the public’s money. Then I discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars, more than a billion by the time I uncovered what was going on, had been moved through various accounts, money appropriated for various foreign aid projects, into a bank in Europe and from there into the hands of certain clandestine organizations in the Middle East. The bank was the French investment firm, The Four Sisters. The money was being used to finance a war, a secret war against some of the governments in the region we did not like. This wasn’t using the CIA to work behind the scenes to try to take down a government; this wasn’t giving covert assistance to some group within a country trying to overthrow an oppressive regime. This was something different. I did not understand it at first, though I thought I did.”
“You thought you did?” asked Hart, following every word.
“Yes. At first I thought—I assumed—that the bank was acting alone, that someone there was diverting the funds for some purpose of his own. I thought the bank might be working with someone in the French government, and that, with or without the knowledge of the government, they were trying to exercise some influence in the Middle East. The French are like that, always willing to cooperate, but jealous of our power. I have friends there, some of whom I trust. I made inquiries, but no one knew a thing. I couldn’t do anything more on my own, so I went to the president and told him what I had discovered.”
The intensity seemed to fade from Pearce’s expression as he remembered back to what had happened. The angry bitterness he had felt at the time was now, when he began to talk about it, more a sense of regret, as of a possibility, a chance to achieve something permanent and important, lost forever.
“We were in the Oval Office, just the two of us. It was eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, two weeks after he had won election to a second term. He was always at extremes, and that morning proved it. When I walked in, he looked like he owned the world. He greeted me like I was his best friend and—you know the way he had—for a few moments I felt like I really was. He started telling me about all the great things, now that he had a second term, we were going to do; things he could not do in his first term, when he still had to worry about an election. Then he noticed that I did not seem to share in his excitement, that I had something on my mind. He never liked it when someone did that, held back, even if just a little, from his own enthusiasm. He asked me what the trouble was.”
Pearce had a look that seemed to accuse himself of negligence, of failing to grasp what he should have understood, that what he had uncovered was too big, too important, for the president not to have known.
“When I told him what I’d found out, that all the money that was supposed to go for one purpose was being used for another, and that this French investment firm was responsible, he went into a rage. And I mean that literally. He jumped out of his chair, his face all red, started pounding on the desk, swearing at me, telling me I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was going to jeopardize everything he had been trying to do. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just sat there, my mouth open, dumbfounded by what was going on. He was so angry, for a moment I thought he might hit me. He told me it was none of my business, that I was supposed to run things at Treasury, that this was State Department business, that how was he supposed to trust me if I was not interested in doing my own job. That’s when he did it,” said Pearce, shaking his head over what had happened next. “He became quite calm again. The anger was still there—I could see it in his eyes—but now it was something more permanent, something, I swear, close to hatred, the kind that doesn’t go away. I had come to save his presidency; I left with instructions to submit my resignation.”
Hart could not believe it. Austin Pearce had been the one member of Constable’s cabinet that almost everyone thought irreplaceable, a judgment that nothing done by his successor at Treasury had changed.
“He fired you? But wait—he told you that what you discovered about this missing money was something the State Department knew about, that it was something they were doing?”
A look of cold disdain crossed Pearce’s face.
“He lied. No one over at State knew anything about it.”
“You checked?”
“I made a few discreet inquiries.”
Hart remembered what Pearce had said to him at the reception after Constable’s funeral.
“What about The Four Sisters? What about your friend…?”
“Jean de la Valette? It would be going a little too far to say we were friends. ‘Distant colleagues’ might be more accurate. We inhabit different parts of the same world: the international finance system, such as it is.”
There was a long, thoughtful silence. Furrowing his brow, Pearce rubbed his hands together, as he struggled to find the best way to explain what he was still not quite sure he understood.
“We’ve spent time together, attended some of the same conferences; we’ve even had dinner. But know him, the way I think I know you—have a sense of what he might do in a given circumstance, whether, when the chips were down, he was someone I could trust? No. Though I suppose I could say that—we both could say that, couldn’t we?—about a lot of people we’ve met; maybe even most of the people we know.”
He looked at Hart, not with a cynic’s grin, but with the gentle smile of a man who had learned to appreciate the few people he knew were his friends.
“It’s impossible to get more than a fleeting impression of who he really is,” continued Pearce. “He has a different frame of reference, a different sense of proportion about things. We think in terms of how what happened in the last election changed things, and how different things might be after the next one. He thinks in terms of the way things were changed by the French Revolution. I said something about this to you before, how that family of his goes back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years, and the kind of perspective that must give.”
Hart studied him closely, searching his eyes for a deeper sense of what he meant.
“But despite that, you liked him? You said he was charming, urbane. You said he was one of the most fascinating men you had met.”
Pearce tilted his head, an amused, slightly puzzled expression in his eyes.
“Liked him? Yes, I suppose,” he replied, though he sounded none too sure about it. “Fascinated by him?—Who wouldn’t be fascinated by someone with a history like that?”
Pearce made an
idle, backward movement with his hand. It was a gesture meant to underscore the obvious meaning of his surroundings, the level of success that most other men would have given anything to have achieved.
“I do this for a living—watch and try to calibrate the movements of the financial markets—and I’ve become reasonably good at it, but I don’t find it particularly interesting. What I really love is history, European history mainly, but almost anything about the past. So it isn’t too difficult to understand that I would find Jean de la Valette infinitely more fascinating that most of the Wall Street types who can’t remember what happened yesterday, much less last year. So, yes, I was fascinated. It was only later, when I discovered what The Four Sisters was doing, that I began to realize it was precisely because of the way Jean de la Valette thought about the past that he was dangerous.”
“But what is the connection?” asked Hart, growing more urgent. “The money you talked about, the money that was routed through his bank—you said it was used to finance a private war. What is the reason Jean de la Valette would be willing to do something like that?”
Pearce’s thinning eyebrows shot up. He reached for a pencil and tapped it hard against his favored antique desk. His small mouth quivered, his eyes danced with suppressed excitement. He began to laugh, but immediately stopped.
“It’s the sort of thing that would get you committed if you told too many people.”
Whatever he was about to tell him, Hart was certain that, far from crazy, it was probably the only thing that made sense. Austin Pearce was just about the most rational man he knew.
“Jean de la Valette wants to lead a new Crusade, a war of Christianity against Islam.”
“I’ll believe that if you say it’s true,” replied Hart. “But why would he think that was even a possibility? It sounds like he’s the one who should be committed.”
“But what after all is insanity but intense belief?” asked Pearce with a strange, knowing look in his eyes. “It’s what the present usually says about the past. It’s what we say today about the Crusades, the ones that started more than nine hundred years ago, the ones that made the name Jean de la Valette not just famous, but for a long time the glory of Christendom and of France.
