by D. W. Buffa
Staying in the shadows, he wandered around the train station, passing the time. With trains coming and going, departures and arrivals every few minutes, the crowd was always changing, no one there long enough to notice anyone twice. Even if someone thought for a moment that his was a face they recognized, they were in too much of a hurry to remember where they might have seen him before. He felt safe enough to buy a paper.
As soon as he saw the front page, he wished he had not. His picture was plastered all over it; his picture, and that of Robert Constable, the president that, according to the lurid headline, had been murdered at the direction of a conspiracy led by Robert Hart. Alone on a bench next to the track on which his train was scheduled to arrive, Hart read with growing anger a blatant fiction in which he had been cast, not as the victim of a colossal ambition, a senator who wanted to be president, but as a husband driven to murder by his wife’s infidelity. This was evil multiplied by itself: blame the murder on a man who did not do it, and pin the motive on his wife. His stomach twisted into a knot, tearing at him until he did not know if he could breathe. He crumpled the paper in his hand and spread his feet apart, bent forward over his knees, and threw up.
Wiping the vomit from his mouth, he straightened out the paper. Whatever they were saying, no matter how distorted, he had to know what he was up against. A photograph of Robert Constable beaming at the beautiful wife of the senator, taken at a fund-raising dinner during Bobby Hart’s last campaign, was enough to establish an interest, which, given the president’s reputation with women, meant something close to confirmation for whatever prurient-minded people were willing to imagine. There was a genius in simplicity. Robert Constable never looked at a beautiful woman without wanting her. Laura Hart was as beautiful as any woman anyone had ever seen. Did the president have an affair with the wife of a senator of his own party—what other reason would Bobby Hart have had to hire someone to murder him?
That at least was the venomous logic of the unnamed source, identified only as someone close to the investigation: Hart was guilty, and this is the reason he did it. Infidelity, betrayal, and anger—more than justified at what Robert Constable had done—would have been decent motives for revenge; but, more importantly, what evidence had been fabricated to convince people that he was guilty of the crime? His eyes moved swiftly down the endless column inches. He read to the end of the page and then followed the story to the next page after that.
He stopped at another photograph, halfway down the page: a woman, young and attractive, lay sprawled on the pavement outside her tenth-floor apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. Her name was Sophie Jardin, a French citizen, and the hired assassin who had killed the president. According to the report, she had fallen from her balcony while trying to get away a little past midnight—an hour, as Hart calculated, after Quentin Burdick had been murdered. The evidence against Robert Hart had been found in her apartment: records of a series of payments made to a bank in Switzerland. Richard Bauman, the Secret Service agent who had been with the president the night he died, had given the FBI a description of what she looked like; an anonymous source had told them where she lived.
“An anonymous source!” muttered Hart in frustration.
The woman, the assassin they had hired, had been dead from the moment she agreed to take the job. She had always been the one essential, and completely expendable, part of the real conspiracy, the one that had gotten rid of the president and wanted to get rid of him. Killing her removed a potential threat, someone who could lead an investigation back to them; but more than that, it made her a witness against Hart, an accomplice, if you will, in the very conspiracy that had resulted in her death: There was no one left to question whether the records found in her apartment were really hers.
A noose was closing around his neck, and he had the awful, empty feeling that there was nothing he could do to stop it. He had the strange, dark sensation of falling through a trap door, knowing he had only a second left to live. He got up from the bench and started pacing back and forth, growing more determined, and more desperate, to get to Mont Saint-Michel and, if he had to, force Jean Valette to tell the truth.
The train seemed to stop every few minutes as it wound its way through the rolling Norman countryside. Hart sank low in a seat next to the window, grateful that the car was nearly empty and no one had to sit beside him; grateful, also, that the few passengers who got on and off were too busy with their own affairs to pay him any notice. The train rolled on through the endless night, lost in the darkness until, finally, three hours later, it arrived at the village where, sometime the next afternoon, Hart could take a taxi the rest of the way. He woke the porter at the only hotel, paid cash in advance for a room with a window in the back, and collapsed on the soft, down-filled mattress like a soldier just come back from the front.
He did not wake up until almost noon, and when he did, was not sure where he was. Nothing seemed real, nothing seemed quite right. People had been murdered! He had tried to do something about it, and now he was the one being blamed. People had been murdered, including anyone who could have helped prove that he had not been involved. His teeth ached, his head hurt, his eyes felt like the ashen embers of last night’s fire. The only clothes he had were the ones he had been wearing. In a cloudy mirror over a scratched up wooden dresser, he saw a face older than the one he remembered, a face lined with fatigue and worry, and with eyes uncertain and confused. Splashing water on his face, he looked again, but the only change was that he now felt somewhat more awake.
He wanted to go outside and get some air, forget for a while what had happened and what he had to do, lose himself in whatever caught his eye. He wanted to remember, to feel again, what it was like to have a life that was not under constant threat of death and scandal. A few more hours, he told himself, that was all he had to wait. Better not to take a chance that he might be seen by someone who remembered who he was. He lay on the narrow bed with four iron posts, listening in the silence to the dresser clock bring the past closer to the future. Ten minutes, fifteen, then twenty; he could not stand it any longer. He threw on his clothes and stumbled down the stairs and out the door into the bright sunshine of a windless summer afternoon.
He fairly sprinted down the empty street, swinging his arms to match his stride, filling his lungs with air, forcing himself to feel alive. Passing a bakery, he turned back, bought a coffee and a roll, enough to keep him going, and began to look for a taxi, a car and driver, to take him the last few miles to Mont Saint-Michel and his meeting with Jean Valette. He was not sure that he had a meeting. He did not know what Austin Pearce had arranged, or if he had arranged anything. All he had was that fragmentary and enigmatic note: a name, a place, a time.
Mont Saint-Michel at four o’clock and it was now past two. Plenty of time, but Mont Saint-Michel was not a small place, and it was not even clear whether Valette would be inside the cathedral or somewhere in the near vicinity. A million people visited every year, and today, in the middle of summer, tourists from all over would be tramping through it. How would he find him, how would he find anyone, among all those people? Would Valette be looking for him? If there was a meeting, if Austin Pearce had set up an appointment, what was the reason Valette had agreed to it? Why would Valette, who had organized everything, murders without number, want to meet him, unless it was to have him killed, to hand him over to the same people who had just the night before arranged to have Austin Pearce and Aaron Wolfe both murdered?
It did not matter what Jean Valette wanted, Hart reminded himself. What mattered was that this was his chance, his only chance, to get to Jean Valette; the only chance to save himself, and stop whoever was involved in this from getting away with murder.
He found a driver sitting idly in his cab, studying with nostalgia the smoke from what was left of his cigarette. With a flick of two tobacco-stained fingers, he sent the stub flying into the cobblestone street.
“Mont Saint-Michel,” said Hart as he climbed into the dust-co
vered back seat.
The driver gave him a blank look in the rearview mirror. Hart started to repeat it, to give it more of a French accent. The driver winced in apprehension.
“I understood; but it wasn’t necessary.” Starting the engine, he threw the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “From here, no one goes anywhere else. From here,” he added with a shrug, “there is no other place to go, unless you live here, of course. But then, if you live here, you don’t need a taxi, do you?”
A few minutes later, with the village already out of sight, he asked, with the same casual interest he inquired of most of his fares, “Have you been to Mont Saint-Michel before?”
Hart sat forward on the cracked leather seat, suddenly eager for the opportunity to talk to someone who did not know who he was.
“Yes, some years ago. I was here with my wife. We spent a month in France, and—”
“It hasn’t changed.”
“France hasn’t—?”
“Mont Saint-Michel,” corrected the driver. His eyes sparkled with pleasure, the way they did every time he had the chance to make this remark to some returning tourist, someone coming back for a subsequent visit; usually, if not always, many years after the first, the ones who had come as students and then come back again at that point in middle age when they wanted as much to remember how things had been with them than for what they wanted to see of the ancient cathedral. “Mont Saint-Michel hasn’t changed,” he continued with greater interest. “That is not to say that it has not changed since it was built a thousand years ago, in the eleventh century, but it has not changed since you were here. The changes that have happened take much longer than something so short as a lifetime.”
The road banked to the right and then ran slightly uphill for perhaps half a mile, and then, at the crest, it was there, Mont Saint-Michel, towering high above the sea.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” said the driver. “Imagine doing something like today, and on a rock that sticks two hundred forty feet up in the air: build a cathedral, a monument to God hundreds of feet high on top of it, and know, when you start, that it is going to take a hundred years. I said a monument to God, but more than that, it is a tribute to the Archangel, Michael, who conquered Satan. When they became Christians, the Normans put themselves under his protection. He was, for a while, the patron saint of France.” The driver glanced in the mirror. “You’re an American—yes? I read something written by an American—though I have forgotten who it was—someone who wrote a long time ago. He said—and I liked it so much I’ve never forgotten it—that ‘the Archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven and on earth…. The Archangel stands for Church and State, and both militant.’”
The driver’s eyes brightened with the knowledge that he could still recall the passage, remember every word, and then, content with what he had done, lapsed into a silence.
“You don’t remember who wrote that?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t, but he wrote a whole book about our cathedrals. If I remember right, he came from a famous family.”
They were almost there. The mouth of the Couesnon River could be seen in the distance, along with the causeway that leads across it to the entrance, fortified against English attacks in the Hundred Years’ War by a series of heavy stone towers and heavy thick walls.
“You’ve been here before, you know how to get to the top: follow the old pilgrim’s route, past all the shops that sell souvenirs, past the Eglise Saint-Pierre, all the way up to the abbey gates.”
Pulling the car off to the side, he got out to open the door for his passenger. He had developed a temporary fondness for him because of the way he had listened so attentively. He looked at him with the sympathy of a well-meaning stranger.
“You said you came here before with your wife. But this time you come alone?”
“I hadn’t really planned this trip. I only just found out I’m supposed to meet someone here, and I’m not even quite sure where.” He made it sound as if his confusion were a simple mistake, a misunderstanding that would not have any serious result. “Perhaps you know the man I’m here to see—Jean Valette?”
The driver looked at him as if he must be kidding, as if it were some kind of American prank, like saying, in an earlier time, that he was there to meet Charles de Gaulle. Then he seemed to reconsider. With his feet on the sidewalk, he sat down on the front seat of the taxi and glanced up at Hart, standing in front of him. He seemed particularly intrigued by the way Hart was dressed.
“Are you sure you want to go like that?”
Hart turned up the palms of his hands, and with a puzzled glance asked him what he meant.
“The way you’re dressed—I would have thought…I mean everyone else is—how shall I say?—More formal: suits and ties, and the women, of course, also quite properly.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Hart, growing more perplexed.
“You said you were meeting Jean Valette. I assume you mean Jean Valette, the famous financier.”
“Yes, now if you know where I can find him, I’ll—”
“Doesn’t it say, on your invitation?”
“I don’t have that kind of invitation. The meeting was arranged by someone else, and, as I said, I was just informed of it late yesterday. I barely had time to get here.”
“Four o’clock,” said the driver, to Hart’s astonishment.
“Yes, but how did you know…?”
The driver got out of the car. There were people passing by, and he did not want to be overheard. Placing his hands on the small of his back, he stretched up on the balls of his feet and then took a deep breath. He would try again.
“It always starts at four o’clock; every year as far back as I can remember. I drive a number of them over myself, usually the night before, sometimes in the morning. Some of them, of course, stay here, in the abbey; some of them for as much as a week. They like to get the feel of what it was like a thousand years ago, when it first happened.”
Despite his attempt at resistance, Hart was running out of patience. As politely as he could, he asked, “When what first happened?”
“The Crusade, of course. They come here, the same time every year, to commemorate the first one to happen, sometimes a hundred people, sometimes more; and every year, late in the afternoon, the head of it gives a speech. That’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it, to hear Jean Valette?”
“At four o’clock,” said Hart, just to be sure. “But where?”
“In the Refectory, of course. Where else would they gather for a meal?”
“The Refectory, at four o’clock,” said Hart, as he began to move away.
That was what Austin Pearce had learned: that Jean Valette was here, that he came here every year. There was not any meeting, there was no appointment. Neither Jean Valette, nor anyone else, knew Hart was coming. The advantage was all his.
“You won’t have any trouble finding it,” the driver called after him. “There should be signs all around.”
Hart stopped and turned back.
“Signs? About what?”
The driver threw up his hands.
“The annual meeting of the Knights of St. John—what else?”
Chapter Nineteen
The Crusades, the eleventh century, the Knights of St. John, what did this ancient history have to do with anything that mattered? Hart was wanted for a murder he did not commit, and the only way he could think to prove his innocence was to climb up the well-worn stone steps of a thousand-year-old cathedral perched high above the raging waters of the Atlantic and listen to a man he had never met give a speech about something no one in his right mind would care about! It was ludicrous, he told himself as he pushed through the crowd; worse than ludicrous, stupid, because what could he do when he got there?—
Put a gun to Jean Valette’s head in front of the audience that had come to hear him speak, force him to confess the intricate and deadly conspiracy he had set into motion for reasons that Hart could even now not begin to guess?
Slowly, and with a kind of fatal inevitability, the thought came to him that if he had to, he would. If it were the only way to stop this thing from going any further, the only way to end the this vicious string of murders, he would use the gun, not just to bluff Jean Valette into a confession, but kill him. The thought grew on him, became clearer and more certain of itself, the closer he got to the cathedral. The spire was now directly overhead, Michael the Archangel, sword lifted up to heaven, symbol of the eternal vigilance of God.
He was inside the cathedral, searching through the crowds for the way to the Refectory and Jean Valette. Twice he went off in the wrong direction before a friendly tour guide pointed him toward what appeared to be a passage between one set of buildings and another, but was instead the place where the monks had lived and the visiting nobility had taken their meals. Passing the entrance to the dormitory, Hart found the staircase that led down to the Refectory below. The doors were shut and, as a woman at a table just to the side made clear, would not be opened. Even someone with an invitation would not now be admitted.
