by D. W. Buffa
He tried to sleep, but the faces of those he had known, ghosts of those who had died, kept marching through his mind. If he did not die, if he lived a hundred years, he would never forget the look in Austin Pearce’s eyes, the sad certainty with which Austin had in those last few moments faced his death, the absence of all complaint, the last thing he did, the last thing he tried to do, telling Hart that there was something for him in his pocket. And that, after he had with that warning gesture saved his life. Austin had warned him once before, about what Hillary Constable was after when she asked him to find out what he could, whether what her husband had done with The Four Sisters could be traced, whether there was anything that could threaten her own ambition. There was something else Austin had said, a small thing, it had seemed at the time, but that now, when Hart remembered it, took on a larger significance. The Order of St. John, the order that Jean Valette had spoken to that day—Austin had said that Irwin Russell, the president, was a member. What did that mean? Did all of them—Constable, his wife, Irwin Russell—have some connection with Jean Valette, with The Four Sisters? Hart had never thought about Russell.
Finally, fitfully, Hart drifted off to sleep, but then, a little after three in the morning, he was awakened by the sound of a plane passing low overhead. He went to the window and in the distance saw the parallel lights of a landing strip and the fast descent of a private jet. It was too far away to see who got off or got on, or what might be happening. Hart wondered if it had anything to do with him, or whether this was part of the pressing business that had forced Jean Valette to miss dinner.
Ten minutes after the plane landed, it took off, and the headlights of a single car wove through the darkness toward the chateau. It was the same limousine in which Hart had ridden on the journey from Mont Saint-Michel, but this time Jean Valette was not in it. He was waiting at the steps, tapping his foot, as the driver and another man helped out of the back seat a man wearing a blindfold with his hands tied behind his back. Valette stood there, watching, as his newest guest was helped up the steps, and did not say a word when he passed in front of him and was led inside.
Someone had been brought a prisoner to the chateau. What did that mean for him? For all Jean Valette’s protestations of sympathy and good will, what did he really have in mind to do? Hart threw on his clothes, determined to find out. But the door was locked, he could not get out! He pounded on the thick wooden door, shouting for help, demanding that someone come at once. But nothing happened, no one came. He was a prisoner, and there was nothing he could do except wait to see the next move in a game he did not understand and did not want to play. He went back to bed and, staring at the ceiling, wondered how much longer he would be alive.
When he woke up, a little after dawn, he found the door again unlocked. He looked outside, but there was no one there, no one standing guard, no one to stop him going where he would. He dressed quickly and started down the long corridor and down a flight of stairs. He stopped at an open doorway, the entrance to a gallery he estimated to be at least two hundred feet in length, a room with a high, arched ceiling and, at discreet intervals, tall peaked windows to let in the light. Along the entire length of both facing walls were painted portraits, most, though not all of them, life size or even larger. Hart stepped inside to look closer at the first one in the series, a knight in full armor, a white tunic emblazoned with a red cross, holding a shiny plumed helmet in his hand, standing next to a white charger. In the background, at the crest of a shadowed hill, lay the smoking ruins of a tan-colored stone fortress.
“The First Crusade,” said a voice just behind him.
Hart turned around to find Jean Valette sitting on a backless wooden bench. Instead of a business suit of the sort he had worn yesterday, he was dressed in a fashion that, if not nearly as old as the chateau, was still years out of date. He looked like something painted by one of the Impressionists, or one of the painters themselves, in flowing green corduroy trousers and a loose-fitting yellow linen jacket, a lavender shirt, brown calf-leather shoes, and blue socks. He was lounging on the bench, half-reclining on his elbow. There was a drowsy, languid expression in his eyes, and, as if to serve as a counterpoint, a mocking smile on his lips. With an idle gesture of his hand, he motioned toward a portrait that, from the long angle of his perspective, looked like a single portrait, a single person, seen in the infinitely receding image of a double set of mirrors.
“Doesn’t everyone greet their family at the beginning of a new day?” he asked with a slight tip of his head that signaled the double meaning of a private joke. With surprising agility, he sprang to his feet. “Come, I’ll introduce you.”
Hart did not move.
“Someone locked me in last night. Am I being kept a prisoner?”
“No, of course not. The door wasn’t locked this morning, was it? You’re free to go wherever you like, to do whatever you please. Yes, it was locked last night, but there was a reason. Had you come downstairs in the middle of the night, it might have been—what shall I say?—awkward.”
“Because I might have tried to do something about what was going on: that man you brought here, blindfolded and tied up. I may not be a prisoner, but he certainly is!”
Jean Valette seemed faintly amused at the suggestion. Placing his hands in the oversize pockets of his jacket, he lowered his eyes. His head moved side to side in the rhythm of someone used to being misunderstood. He looked up and shrugged.
“He would have come if we had invited him, but, as I think you’ll agree after you meet him, it’s better all around if his coming here is a surprise.”
Apparently, it was to be as much a surprise for Hart as for this mysterious, unwilling guest. Valette pointed to the portrait that had first caught Hart’s attention, and began a long disquisition on his ancestor and the founder of his house.
“We don’t know these things for sure, but it would be reasonable to suppose that he must have been one of the close confederates of William the Conqueror. He was certainly one of the leaders of the Normans when William conquered England, a man who would have been where we were yesterday, Mont Saint-Michel, when it was first constructed and all the Norman nobility would gather there to make their plans and say their prayers before embarking on that first crusade to return to Christendom the birthplace of Christ.”
Moving slowly from portrait to portrait, Jean Valette offered a few insightful remarks about each of his once famous ancestors, but none of that was as interesting to Hart as the way he described each life, each heroic achievement, as links in a chain that bound them all together, points on a line drawn by a hand none of them could see.
“Step back,” he advised Hart. “Let your eye run down the wall, then turn around and do the same thing the other way. Don’t study their faces, don’t look at them as individuals; look instead at the changes in the long sweep of time. What do you notice?” he asked as Hart turned and looked. “What is the first thing you see?”
Jean Valette led him down the gallery, moving past each portrait, but not stopping in front of any of them.
“Notice the way the armor changes. It starts with a whole suit of it, every part of the body covered in steel; then, gradually, there is less of it, until, finally, when we reach the seventeenth century and the reign of Louis XIV, there isn’t any armor at all. We are no longer warriors, ready to die for our religion; we are courtiers—Look there! See how that one is dressed—velvet, silk, and satin; his fingers full of rings. Look at the difference! In those earlier portraits you could almost feel the sense of adventure, the strength, the courage, the lack of any hesitation. They knew what they believed in—they did not have any doubt about it. They were willing, eager, to die for it. When they listened to the Song of Roland, they were listening to a story about themselves: men for whom the only real sin was not to fight when war was needed. And this courtier, this preening favorite of the court? Do those look like the eyes of someone you would follow into battle? They are too full of cunning, too full of conte
mpt for all the people he looks down on. He never rides a horse; he sits in a carriage. He doesn’t fight with a sword; he uses words to wound. Still,” added Jean Valette with a wry glance, “though only with words, he at least sometimes fought face to face. When we get to the nineteenth century, he does not fight at all; he only makes money. Look over there,” he said, turning toward the wall behind them and a long line of portraits of men dressed in black. “We became bankers, financiers. We didn’t believe in anything enough to go to war about it. We only believed in profit.”
Jean Valette had begun to get nervous, agitated, as he spoke. He held his hands behind his back as if it were the only way to keep them under control. He became conscious of what he was doing and began to laugh without embarrassment at what he seemed prepared to concede were his own peculiarities. One hand on his hip, he scratched his head with the other.
“I’m being very unfair, of course. Many of them were men of decency and courage, generous and kind: my father, for example.”
“I’ve heard what he did in the war.”
Jean Valette seemed surprised. He looked at Hart with gratitude.
“Later, perhaps, I’ll tell you something about him.”
He was silent for a moment, pondering, as it seemed, what his father had done. Then his eyes brightened and he motioned Hart to follow him back to the other side and the portrait of that other Jean Valette.
“Painted, as you might expect, to show him at the forefront in the Battle of Malta. Look at the way he stands there, the flag with the cross in one hand, the sword held high in the other. He looks like Saint Michael himself, Jean Valette, Grand Master of the Order of St. John!”
“Five hundred years ago,” said Hart, turning away from the portrait to Jean Valette, “and the order still exists. You spoke to them yesterday, at Mont Saint-Michel. You do every year, I gather. But the people who were there—they aren’t the only members of the Order, are they?”
Jean Valette was at first confused, but then he understood that the confusion was not his.
“Five hundred years ago, yes, but even more than that, back to the early part of the fourteenth century, when the Templars were all executed and their order dissolved. But you think…? Yes, I see: an ancient order, full of mystic secrets—always existing, never gone away; kept alive through passwords and special codes, down through the generations, waiting for the day when it can spring back to life and take its proper, leading part and save the world!” exclaimed Jean Valette, his eyes now bold, cheerful, and defiant. “I wish it were so. I wish the Order of St. John was what it was at the beginning, when it replaced the Templars as the militant arm of the church, when the church still believed there were things worth fighting for. I wish it were almost anything but what it has actually become: a church auxiliary for the idle rich, people who give money so they can call each other knights and think they can buy a place in heaven!”
He cast another long look at the portrait of his same named ancestor, and laughed at the thought that there could be any comparison between the Grand Master and what the Order he had led in battle had become.
“Names stay the same; their meaning changes. It was always a struggle between Christianity and the truth, the need to take care of things here on earth. The Order of St. John, the Knights of Malta, did not take an oath to turn the other cheek, to forswear violence; they swore to conquer for the church or die. But then, later, the church went through another one of its frequent periods of insanity and became Christian again. Instead of fighting for what it believed, it taught, as someone once put it, that it was ‘evil to speak evil of evil.’ Those people yesterday, part of some secret society? Impossible!”
“Then why do you go there every year, why go speak about the past? Is it just to raise money for that school of you mentioned, the one named after the Order?”
A shrewd smile stole across Jean Valette’s face.
“You don’t have to ask me that question. You already know the answer.”
“You don’t need their money; you need their approval, their consent. Some of them send their children there,” said Hart, certain he was right.
“As I say, the names of things stay the same, and sometimes—not often, but once in a while—the meaning that has changed can change again. Perhaps one day there will be a new Order of St. John like the old one, and another Grand Master. To most of us, the future remains impenetrable.”
They continued their brief journey through the portrait gallery and the chronology of Jean Valette, the time it had taken to pass through all the generations that had ended, finally, with him. When they reached the end of the facing wall, they were back to where they had begun.
“There,” he said, “one last, vacant place; room, should anyone ever want it, for a portrait of me.” He stared at that blank space on the wall like someone staring into a grave. “There won’t be anyone after me. I am the last.”
Immediately, a look of contempt shot through his eyes. He disliked pity in any form; he hated it for himself.
“There is another picture, or rather I should say, pictures, that I think you might want to see,” his eyes again bright and eager. “You may have noticed—you did notice—that all those portraits are of the male descendants in my line. There are no women, and women in my family have been very important.”
“You mean the four sisters who raised your father and ran the bank?”
“You are very well informed, Mr. Hart. Though I must say, I am not surprised. Yes, they raised my father and made us rich, turned a small banking establishment into a center of international commerce. They started with certain advantages. They were all four of them quite brilliant, but two of them were quite beautiful and became the willing mistresses of more than a few wealthy men and their money. Come with me and judge for yourself.”
Hart was led down a wide marble floored corridor, past several large rooms, to a pair of double doors at the end. They opened onto a room with windows facing west. Hart looked around, but there were no pictures on the walls. Jean Valette said nothing for a moment, and then raised his eyes to a domed ceiling where, from each of four quadrants, the faces of his father’s four aunts looked down with painted elegance and grace. They must have been in middle age, or even older, when the decision was made to make this, as Jean Valette explained, the Hall of the Four Sisters, but the artist had captured them forever in the bloom of youth. Far from exaggerating, it had been something of an understatement to say that two of them had been quite beautiful. One of them seemed to Hart to bear an uncanny resemblance to his own wife, Laura. His host noticed how it had drawn Hart’s particular attention.
“I was not sure until I saw your reaction, but I was struck by that, too: the resemblance to your wife. I’m certain, however,” he said quietly, “that the resemblance ends there. My great aunt, as I suggested, was not the kind of woman any husband could trust.” He checked his watch and frowned. “It’s later than I thought. But I wanted you to see this room. We’ll meet here again this afternoon, shortly after lunch, you and I and our other guest.”
“What does this have to do with me? Who is this person and why have you brought him here? I can’t sit around waiting for something to happen. I’ve lost enough time as it is.”
“Patience, Mr. Hart. You’ll understand everything soon. I agree with you, by the way, that there isn’t any time to lose, but I’m afraid we don’t for the moment have much choice. We can’t do anything without the inspector.”
“Dumont, the chief inspector, is coming here? But why? I told him everything I know. You said yesterday he wanted to arrest me. Is that why he’s coming—to take me back to Paris and turn me over to the people who want to kill me?”
Jean Valette had already started walking to the door.
“As I said, we’ll meet here again this afternoon. In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. There are a thousand things I need to do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
When Hart was summoned back to th
e Hall of the Four Sisters that afternoon, Jean Valette was sitting at a long table, directly across from Marcel Dumont. Valette had changed out of the flamboyant costume he had been wearing earlier in the day into a dark business suit. Like his clothing, his mood was decidedly more subdued.
“This goes too far,” protested the inspector, shaking his head in disagreement. “If I had known you were going to do this….”
Seeing Hart in the doorway, he stopped in mid-sentence, got up, and walked to the window. He stood there, deciding what to do about a situation that was getting out of hand. Tall and overweight, on the downside of middle age, and with all the cautious instincts of the policeman, he had still the confidence of the boxer he had been in his youth. He might get beaten, but he would never be intimidated, not even by the famous and formidable Jean Valette.
“First you make me an accomplice in hiding an international fugitive! Now you want to make me party to a kidnapping! Incredible!” Holding his hands behind his back, he began to pace, and with each step his face became more animated until, finally, a broad smile broke hard and clean across his face. “Yes, well, why not? I’ve gone this far against my better judgment; might as well see just how big a fool I really am!” Waving his hand in the air, a signal that he had given up, he came back to the table and took his chair. “Let’s meet this other American of yours.”
Jean Valette picked up a telephone and issued instructions. A few minutes later, two men brought in the person Hart had seen from his window. His hands were now free, but his eyes were still covered. He was put in a chair across from the inspector and then the two men left.
“Can I take this off?” he asked, running his right hand along the blindfold.
