by D. W. Buffa
Nodding his satisfaction at the prospect, he opened the door to the conference room and introduced his two guests to the head of the embassy’s political section. Then, begging other pressing commitments, he left them alone and, full of news, hurried off to his next appointment.
Aaron Wolfe was all business. The head of the embassy’s political section through several changes of administration, he had seen ambassadors come and go. A career foreign service officer, he kept his opinions to himself and offered advice only when he was asked to do so. Though it might seem a paradox to others, he preferred serving under an ambassador like Andrew Malreaux to one who came to the position thinking that he knew something about the French. Malreaux had no choice but to depend upon him; certain others, like Malreaux’s immediate predecessor, thought that because they had lived in Paris for a few months in their twenties, or read a few French novels in their forties, knew everything there was to know and could decide things on their own. Wolfe was only thirty-eight, but intellectually, especially compared to the ambassador, he felt ancient.
“The ambassador asked me to tell you what we know about The Four Sisters,” he said, folding his hands in front of him.
He was sitting at the head of an oblong conference table, a map of France on the wall behind him. Hart and Austin Pearce had been directed to chairs on opposite sides. The windows behind Hart looked out on the interior courtyard of the embassy.
“This isn’t usually the sort of thing we share,” continued Wolfe. “Senator Hart, of course, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have access to everything we have—through the normal State Department channels; and as secretary of treasury, you, Mr. Pearce, would have been entitled to the same information, and by means of the same process. I mention this only because—”
“Because you’re not sure the ambassador hasn’t made a mistake, and you don’t want to find yourself being hung out to dry,” said Hart, with a friendly, earnest look that took Wolfe off guard. Hart bent forward on his elbows. “I can’t tell you why we’re here, I can’t….”
He seemed to change his mind, to wonder why he was continuing the pretense, why he did not just tell him the truth and impress upon him the urgency of what they needed to know. He glanced across at Austin Pearce to make certain Pearce would not object.
“We’re here because the president of the United States didn’t die of a heart attack, the way it has been reported. The president was murdered, and there have been two murders since, and both of the men who were killed knew something about it. There are only a few people who know about this, Mr. Wolfe, and if you so much as mention it to anyone—if you breathe a word of this to the ambassador—I’ll make sure that instead of Paris, your next assignment will be somewhere in the sub-Sahara in the middle of a civil war. Now, what can you tell us about The Four Sisters and Jean de la Valette?”
Aaron Wolfe no longer felt ancient, but suddenly young and out of his depth. He fumbled with the papers stacked in front of him, the copious notes he had prepared, no longer certain quite what to say or what to do.
“But what does The Four Sisters…what does Jean Valette have to do with that?” he asked without thinking. The only response was a blank stare. He started to mumble an apology.
“Just tell us what you know. Then we can figure out what it means.”
Removing his glasses, Wolfe pushed the notes he had written off to the side. He did not need them to remind him of the facts.
“The Four Sisters—the name itself tells you something about the French and their history, the price they sometimes had to pay for survival. The grandfather of Jean Valette was the only son of a banker. He was only twenty-five when he died, a soldier killed at the famous Battle of the Marne, when the German army was stopped just outside Paris in the first great battle of the First World War, the battle in which Marshal Petain saved France. He had a son, just a boy at the time of his death, a boy, moreover, who had lost his mother in childbirth, but he had four sisters. They took on the management of the bank and, in addition, the education of their nephew. By any measure, they did a remarkable job of both.”
Aaron Wolfe drank from a glass of water. There was a troubled expression in his dark blue eyes. As much as he tried to concentrate on the task at hand—the brief chronology, the history of the last hundred years, of the family of Jean Valette—he kept coming back to the awful secret he had just learned.
“It’s true,” said Hart, not without sympathy for the shock he knew the other man must have felt. “Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. There’s reason to believe that The Four Sisters is involved.”
Wolfe thought for a moment, trying to gauge the possibilities.
“Valette is a very strange man in some ways, remarkable—more remarkable than perhaps anyone in France; more remarkable, perhaps, than anyone anywhere, so far as that goes—but involved in something like that? It doesn’t seem possible.”
Austin Pearce brought him back to the point where he had broken off his narrative.
“You were about to tell us something more about the sisters and what they did with the bank.”
“Yes, sorry. Where was I?—The Depression. Half the banks in Paris, half the banks in France, suffered losses or went under, but the four sisters not only kept their bank afloat, but, bankers to the core, had the foresight, and the nerve, to buy up everything they could get—other businesses, other banks,—at fire sale prices. They were able to do this, not just because they were smart and, to call things by their names, utterly ruthless in their dealings, but because they were extremely well-connected, as connected as you could get. The Valettes had for generations been one of the leading families of France. It isn’t widely understood, other than by the French themselves, that there are two hundred families in this country that through every change of government—and there isn’t any place you can think of that has gone through more changes of government than France—make sure nothing really changes, that they continue to have all the wealth and all the power. The Valettes have always been one of them, and at times one of the two or three most important of them. One of the sisters—the youngest one, if I remember right—was married to a Rothschild.”
Austin Pearce was not as interested in what the four sisters had done to improve the position of the bank as he was in their dead brother’s son.
“Jean Valette’s father, the boy the sisters raised—what can you tell us about him?”
Aaron Wolfe had sharp, quick-moving eyes, but at the mention of Valette’s father he stared straight ahead in an attitude of puzzled respect. It reminded Austin Pearce of the way he felt when he came upon some surprising fact in a history he was reading, a fact that made him see a famous figure in a new and surprising light, better and more complicated than he had thought before.
“You’re fascinated by him, I take it; there’s something about him that astonishes you, correct?”
Wolfe turned and looked at Pearce with that same look, admiration for the older man’s insight and intelligence.
“He did something that took more than just courage, something extraordinary. You wouldn’t have thought that about him early on, when he became one of the most prominent bankers in Europe. France, in the 1930s, was rotten to the core, determined not to fight another war with Germany, more afraid of Communism at home than of any threat beyond its borders. You know all that, I’m sure. Like a great many others in financial circles, Paul Valette was convinced that democracy, and particularly French democracy with all its different parties, none of them willing to compromise long enough to fashion a working majority capable of governing for more than a few months at a time, was doomed. A lot of people thought that then. What set him apart was his belief that what Hitler was doing in Germany was the wave of the future; that if France was to survive, it had to follow his example: find someone strong enough to impose a discipline, a unity on the country; someone who could keep France from destroying itself.”
Wolfe raised his eyebrows, a silent commen
tary on the inadequacy of words, the way he had, quite without meaning to, misled them at the beginning.
“The wave of the future—I should have said that he saw in Germany a way to restore something of what he thought the glory of the past. That was really what fascism was about: a rejection of the modern world, democracy, and a market economy, the whole concern with the rights of the individual, as opposed to the supposed greatness of the nation. This had a powerful appeal for someone like Paul Valette, who came from a family that could trace its origins in the origins of France. He became one of the leading figures in Action Francaise, a fascist organization headed by Charles Maurras, a classicist who, it was said, loathed the modern world and everything it stood for. It is important to know this about Paul Valette, but what makes him interesting is that once the war began, once the German occupation started, he did not support the collaborationist government of Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval. No, that same Paul Valette who thought France should follow Germany’s example, joined the French resistance.”
Wolfe fell into a long silence as he considered the strange futility of even trying to guess what might have driven Paul Valette, or anyone, to do something not just brave, but completely unexpected. History was full of examples, but while history could remind you that the exceptional case was possible, it could only tell you what had happened, not that it would happen again. Psychology sought to paint a broader picture, to find a pattern in human behavior, but psychology looked at things in terms of averages, and if there was anything that characterized every, even the most disparate, form of courage, it was that none of them were average.
“He was incredibly effective, the work he did in the French resistance. He was, in the eyes of the world, a notorious collaborator. The bank, his bank, the bank that had been in his family for years, handled most of the financial transactions the Third Reich made in occupied France. He was, to all appearances, as much a friend to the Nazis as they could want; and the whole time he was giving the information he gathered about what the Germans were doing to his contacts in the resistance and, through them, to the allies. Someone betrayed him, one of the people he worked with, probably forced to betray him under torture—everyone has a breaking point. Valette was arrested by the Gestapo in the last days of the war and put in front of a firing squad. It was one of the last executions the Germans did in Paris.”
Watching Aaron Wolfe, Hart was struck by the way he made it seem that he was talking about someone he had known—a friend or a relative he had respected and admired—rather than telling a story torn from a long forgotten page of history. It was unusual to come across anyone, especially someone still relatively young, who had the capacity to grasp in all its anguished uncertainty the moral dilemmas of the past.
“No one knew that he had been a hero of the war, a hero of the French resistance; no one except a few men in the French underground, not all of whom survived. All that the public knew was that this rich banker from one of France’s oldest families had been only too eager to take German money and, while others suffered, live as well, or even better, during the occupation than he had before the war began. When he was shot, lined up against a wall and executed, most people thought it was just another act of German barbarism and that, unlike most other German executions, Paul Valette had gotten exactly what he deserved.”
The head of the political section tapped his fingers together. A smile of something close to vindication, a shared sense of triumph, the decent human feeling for the kind of bravery we all wish we had, ran clean and straight across his mouth.
“It was only several years later, several years after the war ended, that the truth finally came out: that far from being the traitor everyone had imagined, Paul Valette had been one of the great French patriots. The effect was to cast his heroism, his sacrifice, in tragic colors. More than honored, the Valette name was almost worshipped in France.”
Austin Pearce was sitting on the edge of his seat, his hands clasped together on the gleaming hard finished table.
“He must have known, during the years he acted the part of a collaborator,” he said in a quiet, solemn voice, “that the truth might never be known, that he might be killed, taken out somewhere and shot in the back of the head, and that his family would go down in history tainted with what everyone would believe had been a crime.” Glancing across at Hart, he added: “Everyone likes to think they would be a hero, willing to die for what they believe. The world will know, and honor, what we did. But this?—” he asked, looking back at Wolfe as if to draw him into the conversation, “—Give your life for your country, knowing that there is every chance that you will be known forever as a traitor? How many of us would be willing to do that, I wonder? It is heroism of a different order than what we are used to.”
“What about his son, Jean Valette—the one we need to know about?” asked Hart.
“If you’re asking what effect this had on him, what his father did, the way he died—I can only speculate, but it must have taken on an aura of epic proportions. Jean Valette was a small boy when his father was murdered by the Germans. Curious, isn’t it?—That both of them, father and son, lost their fathers in a world war; but then, millions died in those wars and millions of children were lucky to still have a mother. Jean Valette did not have a father, but he had the lesson of his father’s example that the only life worth living is to believe in something for which you would gladly die. Jean Valette became what by even French standards is eccentric, not to say extreme.”
Austin Pearce thought he knew what Wolfe was referring to.
“You mean the way he talks about the need for a new Crusade, a war between Islam and the West?”
Wolfe nodded vigorously. Then, abruptly, he changed his mind.
“He doesn’t mean it quite in the literal sense. When he talks about a crusade, he means it more by way of analogy, reminding people of what, historically, the Crusades were—what they were meant to be and what they actually achieved, or failed to achieve. I don’t think he means—I certainly haven’t found anything in his writings to suggest that he means—an armed invasion of the Middle East by the Western powers. He isn’t talking about that ‘war of civilizations’ that people who know nothing about history sometimes talk about. He has something else in mind, but I’m not sure I could tell you exactly what it is.”
“But he has written about this kind of thing—politics, history? He isn’t just a banker, the head of an investment house?” asked Hart.
“Given his father’s example, I should think that for him the two things are intertwined.”
Wolfe’s gaze became more intense, more determined. There was something he wanted Hart to understand.
“The Four Sisters, ever since Jean Valette took control of it, seems less interested in making money—though it’s made a great deal of it—than in broadening its influence. Have you read anything about Florence in the time of the Medici? The Medici made a fortune in banking, but the money was a means, a means to power, and a means, also, to start the Renaissance. Whatever Valette wants—whether it is to do something like the Medici and change the way Europe thinks, or gain power for himself—The Four Sisters has gone from a bank that only did business in Paris to a financial institution that is active all around the world. One thing has not changed, however: Almost everything it does is cloaked in secrecy. The joke in Paris is that when a Swiss banker has money he wants to hide, he opens an account with The Four Sisters.”
“What about Valette himself?” asked Hart, anxious to learn more about the man. “Apart from what he believes, apart from the long historical view he takes of things—what is he like? You know the reason we’re here.” He bent toward Wolfe. “When I told you that the president had been murdered, and that we had reason to believe that The Four Sisters is involved, what was your honest reaction? Were you surprised? Was your first thought that it was impossible, that we must be making a mistake?”
“Honest reaction? I didn’t have time to have a reaction. I’ve been t
oo damn numb—sorry, forgive me for that,” he said, embarrassed by his candor in front of two men he respected but did not know. “The president was murdered? I still can’t believe it. And no one knows? Why is it being kept a secret? I don’t understand. It’s almost two weeks since he died.” Despite his confusion, Wolfe was too quick, and too experienced, not to see the implications. “Someone doesn’t want…?”
“It’s complicated,” replied Hart. “I can’t tell you everything, but if we’re right The Four Sisters is the key to everything: the murder of the president and the reason why certain people don’t seem to want there to be an investigation. Now, whatever you can tell us about Jean Valette, anything that would have given him a motive, a reason, to want the president dead.”
Wolfe scratched his head as he tried to think. His eyes lit up; he sat forward in the chair with an air of certainty that vanished as suddenly as it had come.
“No, that’s absurd. It makes no sense,” he said, lecturing himself.
“What makes no sense?” asked Austin Pearce, who did not think anything at this point beyond the realm of possibility.
“The Knights of St. John,” explained Wolfe with a dismissive glance. “There’s a connection, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
“A connection—how?” asked Pearce, intrigued.
“Valette’s ancestor was—”
“Also named Jean de la Valette, the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John,” interjected Pearce. “He fought, and won, the battle of Malta in the year fifteen—”
“You know about that? Yes, exactly. The Knights of St. John, or as they are sometimes called, the Knights of Malta, still exist. Irwin Russell, our new president, is a member. And of course Jean Valette is—”
Astonished, Hart bolted forward.
“You’re suggesting that the president of the United States is a member of some bizarre ancient order, some secret society, and that Robert Constable was murdered so that someone who owes his loyalty to this organization that Valette controls could become president?”
