by D. W. Buffa
The look in his eyes changed. Contempt vanished; something more hidden, more enigmatic, took its place.
“Though I could have told you that what happened to Constable, and what is happening now, was all but inevitable; perhaps not in that form—murder—but in some other. We can discuss that later. Let me finish what I was telling you about what Austin said to me, let me—”
“You’re not concerned with individuals—you’re only interested in what might happen a hundred years from now!” exclaimed Hart as he leaned forward and jabbed his finger in the air. “Austin Pearce was murdered! He died looking into my eyes, and you don’t care what happened to him? I’m supposed to believe you—Austin was supposed to believe you—when you insist you weren’t involved in any of this?” His gaze sharpened and became more intense. “Did Austin tell you where he was going? Did he tell you he was going to be at Wolfe’s apartment?”
“You think I sent those people—? If I had done that, why would you be riding in my car? Why wouldn’t I have just let Marcel take you away, turn you over to the Americans and let them dispose of you? By this time tomorrow, I can almost guarantee that you would be dead.”
“Why didn’t you—let your friend, the chief inspector, arrest me?”
“Austin Pearce, of course.”
“What did Austin do that made you—?”
“He asked me—after I gave him my word that I didn’t know anything about what had happened, that I did not even know Constable had been murdered until he accused me of being involved—he asked me, or rather he insisted, that I do whatever I could to help you get to the bottom of this.”
Jean Valette looked out the window at the rolling hills in their patchwork colors and the river that ran not far from the road, out to the dark green forest that marked the beginning of where he lived; the forest that, if he could not yet see it with his naked eye, would be there, in full view, in just another few minutes. There was a certain satisfaction, a sense of possession, in seeing things that others could not yet see.
“You knew Robert Constable, of course,” he remarked after a long silence. “But how well did you know him?”
Hart thought about it, wondering how to answer the question that, in the last few weeks, he had often asked himself. He gave the one answer he was sure about.
“My wife did not know him at all.”
Valette’s head snapped up. His eyes brightened with approval.
“That’s exactly what Austin told me. He had seen the papers, read the story, said that no one who knew you both would believe a word of it. Good for you, Mr. Hart; good for you. A man who doesn’t doubt his wife! I once had that privilege. But never mind. How well did you know him, Robert Constable?”
“I never thought I really knew him,” confided Hart. “He was too elusive, always calculating what he wanted and how he was going to get it—and how you were going to help him—to be someone you could really get to know. And now, after what I’ve learned—after what I’ve learned about his connection with you, with The Four Sisters—I’m not sure I knew him at all.”
The line across the bridge of Valette’s prominent nose deepened and became more pronounced as he drew his eyes together into an attitude of the utmost concentration. He scratched the side of his face with the back of three fingers. A smile that barely broke the line of his full mouth seemed to reflect a considered judgment that nothing could now change.
“Then you knew him as well as anyone did; better, really, because you knew him for what he really was: a man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself; a man who, when he tries to understand himself—if he ever does that—thinks only of what others believe. He was an actor, someone who always played a role—the only thing important that everyone else believe he was important, so that they would always want to see and hear him. That’s why he wanted money: so he could continue to occupy center stage. And that, of course, is why he came to me.”
“He came to you? You—The Four Sisters, the companies you control—didn’t go to him, didn’t offer him millions in exchange for making it easier for you to do business in the United States?”
“When you want money, Mr. Hart—when you ran for reelection the last time—did you wait for people to come to you, or did you ask them for their support? Yes, I understand there is a difference: that you weren’t offering to do anything specific in exchange. I understand the difference, Mr. Hart; we both do. But Robert Constable did not. The truth is that Robert Constable did not really understand much of anything.”
Valette stared down at his manicured hands, folded neatly in his lap, troubled, as it seemed, by this last remark, not so much for what had been said as by what had been left out. He closed his eyes and shook his head as if there were no point going on with it: that nothing he could say would explain what he meant. But then, because he thought it important, he turned and searched Hart’s waiting eyes.
“Though obviously from a distance, I have watched your career with some interest. You seem—how shall I say this?—more grounded than the rest of them, the ones like Constable who only run for office because they would not know what to do with themselves without the attention of the crowd. You were going to quit a few years ago, I understand; go back to California and live a private life—something having to do with your wife, if I am not mistaken. I understand you have even been known to read a serious book. It’s no wonder you don’t seem to have many friends. We have at least that much in common.”
It seemed at first a strange remark, but then, a moment later, Hart thought he knew exactly what he had meant: reading anything, but especially about the past, took you away from what people in the present thought important. He tried to use that thought to penetrate deeper into what for him was still the mystery of Jean Valette.
“You must have read a great deal to be able to do what you did back there, at Mont Saint-Michel: speak without notes for nearly an hour and then answer questions.”
Valette’s eyes filled with irony.
“The best thing that happened to me as a boy was to have a tutor who would scarcely let me read anything until I was nearly sixteen. Among the other interesting results, my memory was much improved.”
Hart did not try to hide his astonishment.
“You didn’t read anything until…?”
“One book: Robinson Crusoe. My tutor was very strange. He had read Rousseau’s Emile—and believed it! Rousseau said Robinson Crusoe was the only book a boy should read because it teaches the lessons of necessity and the advantages of freedom; teaches you to see things with your own eyes and not the eyes of others. Perhaps that is the reason that I have always liked it here so much,” he added with a look of mischief, “cut off from the outside world like Crusoe’s island, and yet less than half an hour from all the luxury and madness of Paris.”
They had come out of the forest and were approaching a massive iron gate. Behind it, stretching through a double row of poplars, was a driveway, a two-lane road that went on as far as the eye could see.
“It’s only a few miles to the house,” said Valette, explaining a fact without importance. He pointed to a rock outcropping on the right. “There is a path that leads to a small lake on the other side. I used to swim there as a boy. They say that buried somewhere at the bottom is a chest full of gold and silver, precious jewels, brought back from the Crusades. But I searched all over one summer and never found it. ‘St. John’s Treasure,’ is what they called it, whoever started the legend after that other Jean Valette, my long dead ancestor, came back from Malta.”
Folding his arms across his chest, he smiled to himself, and then looked closely at Hart.
“The Order of St. John. Some of what I told that audience today is actually true.”
“But not all of it?”
This produced a look of vast amusement in Jean Valette.
“That’s one sin of which I think I can claim never to have been guilty. Although I’m not sure it really makes any difference,” he said as the smile
on his face faded into obscurity and his gaze became more thoughtful. “I try to be careful, not go too far, in what I say, but I sometimes wonder why I bother. Those people I just spoke to—members of the Order of St. John—I could tell them exactly what I thought and they still would not understand it, and even if they did, they would think I was being ironic. They think I’m too intelligent not to believe exactly what they believe.”
Hart remembered his own reaction, his sense that Valette kept his real meaning hidden, sometimes by putting it out in plain view.
“The suggestion that great things can be done again, that what was done in the past can be repeated, that there could even be another Napoleon? You don’t think anyone believes you really mean it, and that is the reason you can say it? Everyone thinks you’re only talking about some remote possibility, something that, if it were ever to happen, is not going to happen any time soon: this war between Islam and the West, to take another example.”
Valette nodded in agreement with what Hart was saying, but stopped abruptly at this last remark.
“That war never stopped! If Robert Constable had only understood that, he’d probably still be alive!” he exclaimed in apparent frustration.
Hart stared at him in disbelief.
“What do you mean—he’d still be alive? What does this war you keep talking about have to do with his murder?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “And everything. If he had understood what was at stake, the whole future of the West, he might have decided to do something important, something that history would remember, instead of just trying to become what he thought other people—the great, anonymous crowd—wanted him to be.”
Hart wanted to laugh out loud. It was crazy, insane; he was trying to find out who was behind the murder of the president, trying now to clear his own name, and he was being told that Constable had brought it on himself by not being sufficiently serious. He did not laugh out loud, but he might as well have done. Valette had understood at once Hart’s reaction.
“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, consider this: All this money he got from The Four Sisters, all those millions—do you think that would have happened if I had not thought that it would, one way or the other, bring about his destruction?”
Hart did not know what to think. He was about to demand that Valette explain what he meant when the driver suddenly hit the brakes and Hart was thrown forward onto the floor. Valette helped him back onto the seat.
“There,” he said, pointing to an enormous stag standing in the middle of the drive. “Isn’t he magnificent?” With proud indifference the stag stood there, daring anyone to try to move him, and then bounded off the road and into the dense forest. “The park is full of animals now, wild boar and deer that used to be hunted. I put a stop to it. I never understood this desire some people have to kill things that cannot fight back.”
He leaned forward and rapped gently on the glass, a signal to the driver to move forward again. The road, this endless driveway from the iron gates miles behind them, began a steep ascent, winding through one hairpin turn after another, climbing high above the valley floor and the river that in the distance glowed blood red and orange under the soft, dying light of the twilight sun. They reached a clearing several miles square, bordered on the other side by another forest and another, taller range of hills, and passed through yet another iron gate, smaller and more ornate than the first. They were now on a great stone paved circle that led past a series of spouting fountains and close-cropped lawns and hedges to what Hart could only think was a much older, if slightly smaller, Versailles.
“It was built about the same time as Mont Saint-Michel, a thousand years ago,” explained Jean Valette. “Like the cathedral, it has been rebuilt and restored who knows how many times. They burned it to the ground, or tried to, those great believers in equality, in the early days of the Revolution, and murdered—cut the living hearts out of some of them—the people who lived here. The wonder, I suppose, is that we ever got it back. We wouldn’t have, if we had not learned the secret of this new world of ours.”
“The secret?” asked Hart as they got out of the car.
Jean Valette stood in front of the ancient stone chateau that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction, inhaling the sweet, clean air. His eyes glittered with the remembered knowledge of something perhaps taught to him as a child, or learned later, somehow on his own.
“The secret of the age of equality: the more equality there is, the more desperate people are for something that seems to set them apart, makes them different, better, than the rest. That’s why money has become the only thing anyone believes in anymore. It isn’t because of what it can buy; it’s because of what it tells everyone about you. Want to see a completely miserable human being? Introduce someone worth a hundred million to someone worth twice that amount. Every age has its own form of insanity, Mr. Hart. Money is ours. That’s what got Robert Constable killed, and, directly or indirectly, it’s what is likely to get you killed as well. But let’s go inside now. You must be famished.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Unable to sleep, Hart lay awake, seeing ghosts, fleeting fragments of faces he had known, murdered, every one of them, by some lethal, hidden hand. If Jean Valette had not ordered the assassination of Robert Constable—if this strange, erratic, and ultimately enigmatic character was telling the truth—then he was back at the beginning, knowing less than he had known before about who was behind a conspiracy that had thus far been so successful that the only one under suspicion was him. Who had reason to want Robert Constable dead, and, more importantly, was in a position to arrange the murder of a president and then eliminate anyone who might learn what they had done?
Jean Valette may not have been involved, but everything still led back to him. He was the one who had known the secrets that, had they been discovered, would have destroyed Constable and his presidency. Was that what Valette had meant by that astonishing remark: that he had given Constable all those millions precisely to help bring about his destruction? But why, what motive could he have had, to do something as Machiavellian as that? Hart had hoped to sound him out that evening, to see if any of it made sense, or was only the fantasy of a disordered mind. But Jean Valette had disappeared.
As soon as they arrived, Hart had been taken upstairs to his room, or rather a suite of rooms as large as any apartment. The chateau, a castle by any other name, might be as old as the Crusades, but in this part of it at least there was nothing missing to provide for the comfort of a guest. Soft, oriental carpets were scattered over stone floors polished so smooth that when the light was just right you could see your own reflection; and instead of the dancing shadows of ancient chandeliers with tiered layers of wax-dripping candles, modern, recessed lighting cast a steady, even brightness in the room. The furniture was modern, comfortable, with well-upholstered chairs and a bed stacked waist high with mattresses. Exhausted, frustrated, and confused, Hart had taken a long, hot shower only to discover that someone had taken his clothes. He slipped on a robe that he did not remember seeing on the hook behind the door and, when he went back into the bedroom, found a liveried servant waiting to show him his new wardrobe: slacks, two sport jackets, a dark suit, a half dozen shirts and several ties, socks, clean underwear, and three pairs of shoes.
“If these aren’t suitable, if you would prefer to see some other things…?”
“No, I’m sure these will be fine. But how did you know that I’d be here, or that I would need something to wear?”
“Things are always kept on hand for unexpected guests,” explained the servant with a cursory nod.
He left the room while Hart got dressed and then, the very moment Hart finished tying his shoes, there was a brief knock on the door and he reappeared. Dinner would be served in half an hour, and, to his regret, Jean Valette would not be able to join him. He had pressing business, work that would occupy him until very late. They would meet again in the morning and, u
ntil then, if there was anything Mr. Hart wanted, all he had to do was make his wishes known.
Hart dined alone at a table with nineteen vacant places, and ate next to nothing. His mind was too entangled in the labyrinth of trickery and deceit in which he found himself to think about food. Back in his room, he kicked off his shoes, propped his head on two enormous pillows, and tried to find answers to the questions that would not stop screaming in his brain, taunting him with his own incompetence. He needed to get home, back to the United States, back to Washington. There was one person left alive who had to know something: Clarence Atwood, the head of the Secret Service. He could see him, sitting awkwardly in the chair in that Watergate apartment that was not his, explaining that the president had been murdered and that the investigation had already begun, but only after he had first tried to question Hart about how much he knew. Atwood had been close to everyone: Constable, Constable’s wife, and now, still head of the Secret Service, close to Irwin Russell, the new president he was sworn to protect. Who was he really protecting? What did he really know?
Every question had a dozen different possible answers, and every answer raised a dozen new questions. The only thing that seemed certain in Hart’s angry and bewildered state was that he had to do something, anything, whatever the risk might be. He could not wait for someone else to solve the mystery of what had happened; he could not just stay here and do nothing. He had to act.
“Do something, damn it!” he cried in the silence of the room as he sprang from the bed and started pacing back and forth. “Do something, for God’s sake—anything!” He stopped dead in his tracks, wheeled around as if he were facing an accuser, beat his fists against his head, and swore out loud in desperation. Then, suddenly, his shoulders slumped and all the fire and defiance left his eyes. He was tired, used up, and not just discouraged, depressed. What he had felt before, false bravado, an embarrassment to his now empty, sober mind. He had no chance of winning, no chance at all; probably no chance of coming out of this alive. He knew that now, but he knew something else as well, that he could not give up—that if he was going to die, he had to die trying. He owed that much to Laura.
