by D. W. Buffa
This was news to Hart. Pearce explained.
“I’ve made some inquires,” he said with a cryptic glance. “What Morris told Burdick is true, although Morris didn’t know the full extent of it. The scheme is complicated in the details, but extremely simple in principle. Several foundations were established, charitable enterprises to do various good works; but, and this is the key to everything, none of them do the work themselves. They give out grants to applicants who want to start a literacy program in the inner city, or a public health program in a third world country—that kind of thing. Each of the foundations has a paid staff, overhead, buildings in Manhattan and in several capitals overseas, buildings that were rented, and buildings that were bought and paid for. The house in Washington is owned by one of them. Everything gets paid for by the foundation: the people who work for you, the planes you lease, the cars you drive, the hotels you stay in, the expensive restaurants you go to eat—everything! It was all there, waiting for the president, the day he left office.”
Austin Pearce rose from his comfortable chair and stood in front of the open French doors, listening to the soft muted sounds of Manhattan that, for someone who lived there, had a music of its own. The rhythm of it, the way it had for so much of his life been a part of who he was, the raucous, endless beat that faded in and out, the sense of romance that came every night in Manhattan, especially when you were alone, made the past, his past, what he had lived through, what he had seen, what he remembered about what had happened, as real as anything that was happening now.
“I saw the Kennedys, Jack when he was president, and then Bobby, later than that; saw them here in New York, heard both of them speak. I didn’t know them of course,” he added, still staring into the square. “I was too young for that. They were heroes to me, people you could look up to, people you could respect. They were both of course quite ruthless when it came to getting what they wanted, but not in the way we mean it now.” He turned a knowing eye on Hart, who was leaning forward in his chair. “There were things they wouldn’t do; things—and this, it seems to me, makes all the difference—they wouldn’t think of doing. They didn’t think they were more important than the country. The other difference,” he remarked with a quick, dismissive laugh, “is that they both had read something; serious things, I mean. Bobby used to quote Aeschylus, and no one thought it strange that he did.”
With a wistful smile, Pearce shook his head at how much had changed. He fell silent for a moment, concentrating, as it seemed, on the long vanished voices that at times still echoed briefly in his mind.
“By the way, have you talked to Burdick?” he asked, engaged again with the present.
“We’ve traded phone calls. I tried him again, just before I got here—but we haven’t talked. But you talked to him, didn’t you? He has the story.”
“I wonder if he does,” said Pearce with a distant, slightly abstracted gaze. “I wonder if anyone ever will. All of it, I mean: the whole story of what really happened. But yes, Quentin Burdick came to see me. I told him what I knew. He’s quite persuasive. There is something about that manner of his that makes you want to talk, the way he makes you feel that he’s grateful just to have a few minutes of your time, and then, before you know it, you’re telling him things you thought you would never tell anyone.” Pearce shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Damned if I didn’t tell him about that day in the Oval Office when I confronted Constable with what I knew, the day he went off into that obscenity-laced tirade and told me I was fired.”
Austin Pearce clasped his hands behind his back and with his head bowed thought hard for a moment.
“We’re in a fairly difficult position. If Hillary Constable insists on lying about the murder, if Atwood goes along with her, there isn’t any way to confirm any of this. The president died of a heart attack and that’s all there is to it. The Four Sisters is just a story about a complicated financial arrangement that can easily be denied and that, in any case, won’t make sense to anyone.”
“But Quentin Burdick has the story,” objected Hart. “He has what Morris told him, and—”
“Frank Morris, disgraced member of Congress, convicted of bribery, a liar, a thief, and now dead, murdered in prison.”
“Murdered after he talked to Burdick!”
“Murdered in prison, no provable link to anything, much less that he happened to talk to a reporter.” Pearce waved his hand, dismissing in advance, as it were, the next objection. “And as for what Morris said about the president’s death—the bitter speculation of a convicted felon.”
Pearce paced back and forth, like a lawyer in the middle of his summation, except that the audience he was playing to, the jury he was trying to persuade, was a jury of only one.
“Burdick can write all he wants about the financial dealings that went on between the companies controlled by The Four Sisters and the late, lamented Robert Constable, but he can’t say anything about a murder. The only people who know about it have, for reasons of their own, decided not to talk about it.”
“But they did talk,” said Hart. “They talked to me. I told Burdick that Constable had been killed. I confirmed what Morris had suspected. I told him I couldn’t tell him how I knew, but I can tell him now,” continued Hart with some heat. “I told Hillary Constable that this couldn’t be kept secret, that I wouldn’t be part of some cover-up. I told her that I’d look into it, see what I could find out, but only for a few days, and that after that there was going to have to be an investigation.”
Pearce seemed worried, concerned about the implications, about what might happen.
“Are you sure you want to do that? If you become the source, if you’re the one who claims that the president was murdered and that his wife knew it and has been covering it up—what do you think happens to you? Remember who you’re dealing with. The basic rule of the Constables has always been to attack.”
Pearce’s visage darkened. His eyes seemed to register astonishment at the catalogue of cruelties that marched through his mind, the parade of half-truths and lies that had become the regular, and expected, method of political warfare practiced by the Constables against not just their opponents, but anyone who got in their way.
“And the second rule has always been to make it appear that they’re only defending themselves against an attack, an outrageously unfair attack, by the other side. Are you sure you want to expose yourself to that?”
A shrewd grin full of false confidence flashed across Bobby Hart’s fine, straight mouth.
“At least I won’t be alone.”
Pearce had anticipated the point.
“Because of course I can confirm that you told me almost immediately what you had learned, and that this isn’t some recent fabrication on your part. All right: I agree we can’t afford to wait. This has to come out; the country has to know. The president was murdered and we damn well have to go after the people who did it.”
“She must have suspected what had happened, that it had something to do with The Four Sisters,” said Hart with all the force of a sudden realization. “If she knew what was going on, if she knew about the money, if she knew—or even if she only suspected—what her husband was going to talk to Burdick about—that’s why she wanted it kept secret, why she wanted me to find out what I could: so she could know for certain if The Four Sisters—if Jean de la Valette—was behind it. She’s afraid of the scandal, for what it would do to his reputation—with all that means for her own ambition. The president is on the take and gets killed when he’s about to talk! It’s the end of everything for her if that comes out.”
Austin Pearce sat down. He beat two fingers hard against the arms of the chair, and then leaned back and, as if he were seeing it for the first time, a visitor in someone else’s home, made an idle inspection of the room. He seemed to approve of what he saw, the rows of well-read books all neatly arranged, the pair of portraits of men he had never known, Italian noblemen from three centuries ago, painted by an artist whose nam
e was now, like theirs, buried in the vast obscurity of time.
“She’s going to run,” he said presently. “I’m almost certain of it. Russell as president!—It’s a caretaker government. That’s certainly the way she sees it, at least. This isn’t just the best chance she’ll ever have; it’s better than the chance she had before, when Robert was alive. There would have been resistance then, serious resistance to what everyone would have seen as a third term for the Constables. But now that he’s dead, now that she is the brave and grieving widow, no one looks at it like that. She can run to finish what he started, what he would have done himself if he had not died. The sympathy for her in the country right now is overwhelming. Even if Irwin Russell wanted to run, get elected in his own right, I’m afraid he wouldn’t have much chance. Strange the way things change. She used to be seen as someone trying to take advantage of what her husband had achieved; now she is seen as the only one who can complete his work.” Pearce slapped his hands on his knees and stood up. “You’re going to tell Burdick everything?”
“What choice is there—help cover up a murder?”
“He’ll have to contact her to ask her response, ask whether she can confirm that her husband was killed.”
“Maybe that will force her to tell the truth,” replied Hart, unconvinced. “Maybe when she knows he’s going with the story, that there isn’t anything she can do to stop it, she’ll decide she can’t afford to lie.”
“I wouldn’t bet too much on it. She has another problem to worry about,” said Pearce. His eyes darted all around before settling on a point just beyond where Hart sat waiting. “If they killed her husband because of what he knew, why couldn’t the same thing happen to her? It may not just be the scandal she’s worried about—what would happen if the world learns about her husband’s involvement with The Four Sisters—she may be worried about her life.”
Hart did not feel sympathetic.
“Even if she won’t talk about what she knows, there are other people, people who don’t have the same fear, or the same ambition. Clarence Atwood—”
“Will do exactly what she wants him to do, just like she said,” interjected Pearce. “As long as he thinks she might become president. Look what kind of leverage this gives him, knowing what he knows, if she pulls it off. She’ll have to give him anything he wants.”
“There’s the agent,” insisted Hart, “the one who was there that night. I gave his name to Burdick. He didn’t strike me as the type that could be convinced to cover up something like this, not the way he feels about what he did with the woman, the hired assassin he helped get away.”
“If they haven’t already shipped him out to some place in South America,” said Pearce with a skeptical glance. “The important thing is that we tell Burdick what we know. Once he has the story, once that happens, everything changes.” Pearce suddenly remembered. “Jean de la Valette. There’s still no proof he was involved. We don’t have what the lawyers call circumstantial evidence. Well, after Burdick runs his story, no one will be able to stop an investigation getting started.”
Pearce was thinking fast, trying to put everything together.
“I have to make a call.” He started toward his study, thought of something else, and turned around. “Why don’t you call Burdick? Try to see him right away; tonight, if possible.” He smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you what to do. Actually, don’t call Burdick just yet. Let me make this call first.” He glanced at the antique clock on the mantel. “It’s only five in the morning in Paris, but he’s always bragging about how early he gets up.”
When Austin Pearce came back ten minutes later he was shaking his head.
“He was up, all right—in the middle of his French lesson, he had to tell me right away.” Pearce dropped into his favorite chair, spread his legs out in front of him, and with a look of helpless astonishment shook his head again. “Five years he’s been there, the American ambassador to France, and almost every time I talk to him he has to tell me how his stupid French lessons are coming!”
Hart began to share in the astonishment.
“He doesn’t speak French?”
“No, even after five years—well, that’s not fair: it overstates the effort. He is a man of frequent enthusiasms, always eager to start something new, never quite able to finish anything he’s started. He starts French lessons every year.” Pearce folded his arms across his chest. He seemed to ponder the point, search for some deeper significance, and then gave up on it. “He has the short attention span of the rich. That’s how he became ambassador, of course: raised a lot of money for Constable in his first campaign and then, after Constable won, thought he would like to live in Paris. Nothing complicated about it. When I asked him if he spoke French, he assured me that it didn’t matter because every Frenchman he had ever known spoke English. And we wonder why the French don’t like us!”
Hart had been trying to remember the name. Pearce reminded him.
“Andrew Malreaux.”
“At least the name is French.”
“That’s the reason he thought he was qualified,” replied Pearce, rolling his eyes. “But I shouldn’t be so hard on him. He’s always been helpful.” There was a glint of mischief in his eyes, and more than a little irony as well. “We used to be enemies, when we both were here in New York, but then, after I was in Washington he didn’t remember that anymore, and by the time he became ambassador and I told him what a good job he was doing, he was quite certain that we had always been friends. It’s good when someone doesn’t hold a grudge; in his case it’s because he can’t remember it.”
Austin Pearce spent so much time reading histories that he sometime started composing them himself when he talked about other people. Hart, as politely as he could, steered him back to what was immediately important.
“There was a reason you called the ambassador.”
Pearce looked at him as if he did not understand. Then, an instant later, realizing that he had gone off on a long digression, he denied it.
“You need to know that about Malreaux; you need to know his limitations. He’ll get us what we need, put us in touch with the right people, but he’s not someone you want to talk to about something as sensitive as this. I asked him to have someone in the embassy’s political section prepare a dossier on Jean de la Valette. Malreaux did not ask why. It was enough that I said that a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee would be there tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I’ll need to make a reservation, I’ll need….”
Pearce slowly got to his feet.
“No, we’ll take a private plane. It’s better that no one knows we’re going.”
“You’re coming, too?”
“Of course! Don’t you remember?—I know Jean de la Valette; you’ve never met him. It won’t seem unusual if the two of us happen to be in Paris, consulting about the mutual interests of France and the United States.”
“But tomorrow—?”
“I don’t see how we can wait—do you? We don’t know what he’s planning, and this business about the president’s death….”
That reminded Hart that he had to talk to Burdick. It was late, but Burdick answered on the first ring.
“What did he say?” asked Pearce after Hart ended the call.
“He was down in Washington. He’s just gotten back. He asked me if I could meet him right away. He said he discovered something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, only that—and he sounded worried when he said it—it ‘changed everything.’”
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Chapter Fourteen
Quentin Burdick was not sure what to do. He felt a little like a fool, waiting for someone who was already half an hour late, someone who had probably changed his mind and was not coming at all. It would have been bad enough if he was meeting him in New York, but he had come all the way to Washington to talk to the agent who had been in charge the night Robert Constable died. Richard Bauman had been reluctant even to talk to him on the phone
and was on the verge of hanging up when Burdick told him that Senator Hart—“Bobby Hart”—had given him his name and suggested he ought to give him the chance to tell his side of the story before he published his account of what had happened that night in the hotel. There had been a long pause, and Burdick had the sense that Bauman wanted to talk, but that something, or someone, was holding him back.
“I trusted him,” said Bauman finally. There was another, shorter, pause, tentative and full of meaning. “Do you?”
Burdick immediately understood that something had happened, and that it was not what had taken place in that hotel room; it was something that had happened after that. Burdick told him the truth: that the senator had never lied to him and that he would trust Bobby Hart with his life.
“Talk to me,” Burdick urged him. “I’ll come to D.C.; we can talk there, wherever you like. I won’t use your name, I’ll protect your identity. But we both know what happened, and we both know that it’s going to come out.”
Bauman then said something that made Burdick sit up and take notice, something that made him wonder if somewhere along the line he had made a mistake, failed to understand the story he thought he knew inside and out.
“Are you sure you know what happened?” There was a bitter, cynical edge to Bauman’s voice, as if he knew something that Burdick did not, something that would change everything if only Burdick knew it too.
