Hillary

by D. W. Buffa

  Hart started for the door anyway, but a guard in plainclothes quickly stepped in front. The woman reached for the telephone to call more security.

  “I was asked to be here at four o’clock!” insisted Hart. “Told to be here by one of Mr. Valette’s closest friends, and you say I can’t go in because I’m late by two minutes?”

  The woman was a study in precision. Her only response was to raise an eyebrow and look down her nose. Four o’clock was four o’clock, she seemed to say with that glance of silent disapproval; nothing could be simpler, more self-explanatory, than that. She had no sympathy for those who had yet to learn the lessons of punctuality. From behind the closed doors came the muted sound of applause. They were just getting started.

  “Here,” said Hart, as he quickly pulled out his wallet and removed his card. “Take this in there, give it to Jean Valette.” Bending slightly forward, he pulled his jacket open so she could see the gun. “And tell him,” he shouted as she got up and hurried toward the door, “that Austin Pearce told me to come here, last night, just before he died!”

  The guard took a step forward; the woman stopped him with a look. She slipped inside, and they stood there, Hart and the burly, square-shouldered guard, eyeing each other with suspicion, until, a few moments later, the door swung open and the woman motioned for Hart to enter.

  He was at the back of a long, narrow room, lit almost as bright as day by the light that streamed through the windows high above in the walls. Two hundred people could dine together in the Refectory, and there were nearly that many here now. Almost as if he had been expected to arrive late and somehow force himself in, there was an empty chair just inside the door. At the opposite end of the hall, perhaps a hundred feet away, an elderly gentleman with stooped shoulders and a substantial nose, wearing around his neck a three-colored ribbon with a large gold medal in the shape of a five-pointed star, was nearing the end of what even to Hart’s somewhat limited ear for French seemed a dazzling display of wit and good humor.

  The audience was clearly captivated by the old man who was obviously well-known and used to their praises. With the impeccable timing of a paid performer—which in some sense he must have been—an actor, a lawyer, or perhaps a retired politician, someone who had lived a long life on one sort of stage or another—he brought each well-turned phrase to a dramatic stop, pausing to let the audience share in common delight what, with just those few words, he had been able to achieve. Hart began to lose all sense of himself as he listened, fascinated, to a talent that, for all the speeches he had heard in Washington, he could only envy. Though his French, once again, was far from perfect, he could follow well enough, once he caught the flow. He understood, almost word for word, the few sentences in which, flushed with triumph, the old man moved from his own brief remarks to the introduction of Jean Valette.

  “The head of one of the nation’s most important institutions, head of one of the most illustrious families in France, a family that at every stage in our history has played a leading, and sometimes a decisive, part.” With a dramatic flourish, he stretched out his arm to the man sitting in the chair on the left side of the podium. “The head—the honorary head—of the Order of St. John, the order through which, and by which, his namesake, his ancestor, five hundreds years ago at the Battle of Malta saved Christendom and, saving Christendom, saved France!”

  Everyone, men and women alike, were on their feet, applauding with an intensity that if Hart had just wandered in, without any knowledge of the reason they were there, he would have thought that Jean Valette had either just won an election, or just won a war. Then, as he stood there clapping with the others, he realized that these people were really applauding themselves, their history, and, more than what they had become as a people and a nation, what they had been. That was the key to it: what they remembered, or wanted to remember, about what they, or really, their distant relations, the men and women whose own lives had been, in every sense, the necessary precursors of their own, had done in that time made even more glorious by everything that had been forgotten.

  Jean Valette said nothing about what had been said about him, and apart from a bare nod of his head, did not acknowledge the audience. He stood at the podium, waiting, while the applause of the crowd gradually played itself out. Though of only medium height, if that, he seemed, with his shoulders held straight and his head erect, much taller. His eye was bold, unflinching. It was impossible to think of him ever looking away; it was impossible to think of him, even as a child, trying to avoid the gaze of someone, even a father, who had doubts about something he had done. He would not have allowed anyone, except perhaps a father—and later in life, perhaps not even him—to be so familiar as to even think to do that. And yet, at the same time, despite what could easily have seemed an astonishing conceit, there was nothing that made you feel irritated, much less angry, at the way he looked at you with those dark, penetrating eyes of his. The slight smile that danced along his lip told you in the politest way possible that he frankly did not care enough about your opinion to have any great interest in hearing you express it. Even if you agreed with him, you would have been wrong, because, in the nature of things, what you thought you knew had really been nothing more than a lucky guess. He was that arrogant, if you call arrogance what someone of unusual ability considers his own worth.

  Then he began to speak, and the sense of distance began to disappear. His face became alive with expression as he described what he called the dilemma in which they lived, divided between two traditions in conflict with one another.

  “We are on the one hand, as witnessed by our presence here today, the inheritors of the ancient glories of Europe and of France. While other, smaller, peoples were still forming nations, we led a cause; while they formed petty states and principalities with all their endless bickering, we marshaled the forces of Christendom and protected civilization, defeated Islam, and saved the West. But then, barely two hundred years ago—the blink of an eye in the long history of humanity—we gave birth, through the greed and ambition of a corrupt and frivolous aristocracy, to the French Revolution, and produced the modern world of democracy and mass movements. This ended all established order, destroyed even the notion of a hierarchy of values, and began the abolition of the fundamental difference between better and worse. We produced, in other words, the modern belief in equality and the diminishment of man.”

  This would have been unsettling, a remark like this—there is, after all, nothing quite so insulting in the age of equality as to be told that you are only average—but with a near perfect grasp of just how far he could challenge convention, Valette flashed a smile and quickly added:

  “We wish we could have done what our ancestors did who went off on the great adventure to save Jerusalem from the infidels; and we would have, too, if only we had lived back then, when such things were still possible.”

  Hart could almost feel the collective sigh of approval and relief, and, more than that, could almost see in their eyes the past recaptured in the safe privacy of a dream. They would have been warriors—they did not have any doubt of that—but now they wanted to hear something more about their former greatness as a nation, and then they wanted dinner.

  “The things that were possible then do not seem possible now. But is that because we no longer face that kind of danger, or because, if I can be so bold, we no longer take things as seriously as we once did? Let me tell you a story of how the world used to be, when men believed in God and never thought to doubt either hell or heaven. You all know how the Order of St. John was changed from an order that took care of the sick and wounded into an order trained to fight and die; how the Knights Templar were first destroyed by the King of France, Philip the Fair, and how the Pope, Clement I, gave the king permission to dissolve the order. How many of us know what happened to them because of it?”

  The eyes of Jean Valette glittered with the remembered malice of a strange, and to an audience trained in the secular disciplines of modern sc
ience, unbelievable, act of revenge.

  “The head of the order, the Grand Master, had been tortured into a confession of blasphemy and lies. Burned with hot irons, his skin torn from his body, his bones broken on the rack, he admitted that he had given up Christ to worship the devil, that he had engaged in every imaginable sin and, worse yet, had not regretted any of them. But then, a few months later, in March of 1314, brought forward for his trial, the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, who had been not only the king’s close friend, but godfather to his daughter, recanted his confession, an act of courage and honesty that led almost immediately to his being burned at the stake.”

  There appeared at the edges of Jean Valette’s mouth the first hint of a secret, one he was about to share, that made of the prospect of this scene of awful terror and burning flesh, a triumphant reversal of all normal expectation. For a moment, but just for a moment, he let that unknown possibility, that promise of something without parallel, hang heavy in the air.

  “The fire had been started, the flames leaped from the faggots piled around his legs, the smoke was rising up to his rope-bound chest, when Jacques de Molay called to the crowd to witness his word that God Himself would soon begin to exact a price for the sacrilege committed by Pope Clement and Philip the Fair, that God in his greatness would carry out the curse that with his dying breath he was calling down upon the king and his descendants through the thirteenth generation. He died insisting that before the year was out, both the king and the pope would be summoned to meet him before the judgment seat of God.”

  There was another pause, as Jean Valette, contemplating the mysterious workings of providence, invited his audience to wonder at the power of an age in which such things had been possible.

  “Pope Clement died within a month; Philip the Fair died seven months later. The king was only forty-six, and if you are wondering at the cause of his death, the only thing we know with any certainty is that he was not ill and that he did not die in an accident. He just died.”

  Valette raised his hand, dismissing the matter as one better left to others to solve. He had another, more important, point to make.

  “That happened again in 1324, more than two hundred years after the First Crusade, and more than two hundred years before the Battle of Malta, almost five hundred years between the recapture of Jerusalem and the fight on an island to save the West from the resurgent Muslim invader. We need to understand that, to remember that; to remember that Europe, the West, once understood the threat it faced and was willing to do whatever was necessary, and for however long it took, to save itself.

  “Now we face that same threat again, a new war of religion, a war between Islam and the West. Only this time, while Islam still believes in its own importance, the West no longer believes in anything, except the equal right of everyone to believe anything they like. We cannot win that fight. The question is: what should we do? What can we do?”

  Valette had been speaking without a text, without notes of any kind. His eyes never strayed from his audience and, more than that, never felt the need. Hart had the feeling that he could go on like this for hours, never repeating the same thought twice, speaking solely from memory and the stunning clarity of his mind, as much at home in the history of things dead and buried for a thousand years as in the events of his own, contemporary, world. But, for the first time, Valette reached inside his suit coat pocket and pulled out what looked like a standard three-by-five card.

  “Some of you may have heard of Jacob Burckhardt, the great historian who died early in the last century. He wrote something about the Jesuits, how they were able to acquire so much influence in the world, which seems to me to suggest what we need to do now. Let me read it to you. I’ve written it down so I won’t make a mistake.”

  He glanced at the card, too quickly to have read anything on it, and then looked back at his audience and did not look at it again.

  “‘It is not so hard for firmly united, clever and courageous men to do great things in the world.’—Remember that. ‘Ten such men affect a hundred thousand, because the great mass of the people have only acquisition, enjoyment, vanity, and the like in their heads, while those ten men always work together.’”

  Valette put the card back in his pocket, the card he had not needed, and began a long disquisition on the truth of Burckhardt’s observation. He recalled, one after another, examples, almost all of them from French history, of the way a few men, or even, in the case of Napoleon, a single individual had done things no one had thought possible. There was no doubt that his intention was to show that things that had been done in the past could be done again, that anything was possible with the proper will; and yet, unless Hart was deceiving himself, there was a tone of the deepest irony in what he said, as if he did not believe it, or, and the possibility was fascinating to Hart, he wanted you to think that he did not believe it. That was inescapable, the thought that he could so easily have a double meaning, and maybe more than that; that everything he said, no matter how straightforward he made it seem, was really an enigma wrapped inside a doubt. He seemed proof of the ancient dictum, if anyone was proof of it, that only someone who knows how to lie has any knowledge of the truth.

  What was he really trying to do, wondered Hart, as he sat there in the back, watching the performance of a man who seemed capable of anything except, strangely enough, the very thing that had caused Hart to seek him out. There seemed to be too much intelligence, too much—call it arrogance, call it pride—to demean himself with something as sordid, as commonplace, as murder. But all the evidence, everything Hart had learned, had pointed him to Valette and brought him here to Mont Saint-Michel. The Four Sisters had been involved in everything. He was not wrong about that. He warned himself against the easy seduction of intelligence and charm; warned himself against mistaking talk of ancient history and the grand sweep of time with the absence of all ambition. No one became one of the richest men in the world without some degree of self-absorption. And what was his concern with history and the origins of France if not an expanded, not to say delusional, sense of self-importance, a way to make himself the embodiment of far more than the experience of his own generation? Still, for all that his conscious mind could tell him, he could not rid himself of the feeling that with Jean Valette something else was at work, something deeper and more profound than the kind of motive that would result in simple murder. But what? That, he did not know.

  “The difficulty, of course,” Valette was saying, “is to know how to find men like those, how to establish in advance the conditions which make such men possible, the ‘ten men who can do great things in the world,’ a task especially difficult in this barbarous age in which we live, when we have forgotten the past and what it means, and, as someone once remarked, unable to think back any further than our grandfathers we ‘drown all time in shallow waters.’ This is the challenge of our generation: to think back to what we might again become, and raise the next generation to understand the crisis of the West and what can be done about it.

  “That is the reason for the school we founded five years ago, the academy that, with your continuing support, has already begun to broaden the horizons and deepen the understanding of the young men and women that each year are sent to us. The Academy of St. John is, I believe, unique among contemporary educational institutions in that we think it more important that our students learn how to live, rather than how to work; to learn about the world, rather than how to make a living. As you can imagine,” he remarked to general laughter, “we are the best kept secret in France. But then, we don’t need a hundred thousand; we need only ten.”

  Jean Valette looked out over his audience one last time. Then, with a silent bow, he lifted his arm in the air and quickly sat down. The applause was immediate, sustained, but more an acknowledgment of respect for the man than any great enthusiasm for anything he had said. That, at least, was Hart’s impression. Though he did not know any of them, they seemed for the most part serious, sober-minded peopl
e, too prosperous to be anything but conventional in their thinking. They were the kind willing to listen to new ideas, especially those firmly rooted in the past, so long as there was not any real chance anyone would try to put them into practice. This business about a school, whatever innovations might be involved, could not possibly be a threat to anything; it was too small to do anything except give a few perhaps gifted students an education in the useless curriculum of another age. If some of them, most of them perhaps, were willing to give financial assistance to this new academy, it was because they had always given money to museums and other places connected with the arts when they were asked to do so by people to whom they could not afford to say no.

  The applause faded into silence and the audience took their seats again. It must have been announced at the beginning that after Valette spoke he would take questions. As soon as everyone was settled, a man sitting not far from Hart was back on his feet and Valette was again at the podium.

  The questions came one after another, and with each one Valette seemed more eager to take the next. Hart could not count the times he had had the same experience, taking questions from an audience, reluctantly at first, but then becoming more comfortable, grasping by some instinct how to meet the inquiry on its own terms, respond directly but always within the limits of the questioner’s knowledge and experience. But, as he understood at once, there was something more than that, a completely different dimension, with Jean Valette.

  As soon as someone asked a question—sometimes even before they finished asking it—Valette’s eyes would flash with the answer. Not just the answer, but the precise way he wanted to phrase it, the exact wording, came immediately to his mind. He thrived on it, questions from people who, as was sometimes plain, had barely understood anything he had said and had perhaps agreed with even less than that; thrived on it—and this was what Hart finally understood—not because he learned anything from what they said, from the questions they asked, but because he learned so much listening to what those questions forced him to say. He knew the answer; it had been there, buried in his subconscious mind, but he did not know he knew it until someone asked a question and he took possession, conscious possession, of it for himself. At the end, when the last question had been asked, he seemed genuinely grateful for the chance he had been given to learn from the best, the only, teacher he had.