Hillary

Chapter Nine

Stepping out of the cab, Hart looked up at the skyscraper towering high above him at the corner of the park. It seemed to him out of place, a strange mismatch in which money, New York money, had won; a losing contest in which taste, and the desire to preserve the old values, had been all but forgotten in the thoughtless desire to find something bigger and more opulent to build. The property that bordered Central Park, the gray stone buildings that ran along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, most of them built before the war, had always been the most sought after real estate in the city, and among the most expensive in the world. It had all seemed to fit, to be as much a part of the park as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the zoo, a picture postcard of life, rich and elegant, in the middle of Manhattan. But money formed a democracy of its own, and the majority, those who had the most of it, wanted a view. And so now, a block from the Plaza and the St. Regis, you could buy an apartment, or rent space for an office, in the kind of glass and steel high-rise monstrosity that critics, and not just critics, thought better suited for Singapore or some oil-rich place in the desert.

An unrepentant liberal, Hart was, when it came to places he liked, something of a traditionalist. He often explained to his California friends that the dismal stifling summer weather he had to endure in Washington was a minor price to pay to live and work in a city full of history. His favorite fact, which he thought had saved Washington from going the way of every other American city, was the law passed shortly after the Capitol had been built banning forever the construction of any other building that tall. No one was to be allowed to look down on the Capitol of the United States. In New York, the main thing seemed to be to have enough money to look down on everyone else.

That was a judgment, but it was also an abstraction; a generalization that had nothing to do with individuals, except as it explained, or helped to explain, something about the conditions under which they lived, the set of assumptions, the ingrained and largely unconscious way they expected everyone to behave. Austin Pearce had made the move to an office on the highest floor allowed for commercial use as a matter of convenience, and because, as he explained when Hart commented on the view, they had been in the other place for years.

“This was new, and available, and they said we needed more space. I’m not sure we didn’t have too much before, but that’s another story.” He saw the look of confusion on Hart’s face. “Bigger isn’t always better; better is knowing what your limits are.”

He looked at Hart as if this last remark carried a lesson, the importance of which he was sure both of them understood. He looked away, and then immediately looked back, searching Hart’s eyes again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “Please, sit down.”

He gestured toward the chair in front of an antique desk, purchased at a Sotheby’s auction some years earlier. The desk was not just his prize possession; he had, as he was quick to admit, an almost sensual attachment to it.

“Touch it,” he said, smiling with his eyes like a parent with a child. “Touch it; it’s all right. Feel it, how cold it is. Now touch it just a little longer. Feel the warmth? The first owner, so the story goes, the woman it was made for, was an Italian princess who had several husbands and many lovers, some of whom she seduced into helping her get rid of a husband she no longer wanted or needed. Maybe that’s what explains it; the way the wood feels when you touch it long enough: the warm blood of a cold-hearted woman. After I left the administration, I took to calling it ‘Hillary.’”

There was an impish quality to Austin Pearce’s patient smile that Hart found irresistible.

“You like my story-good! I’ll tell you something even stranger: It’s true. I did exactly that, started talking to the desk, calling it all sorts of names, when I first got back from those four years in Washington.” He threw up his small, smooth hands in the nostalgia of a past frustration. “There was no one else I could talk to, no one I could tell the truth! No one would have believed me if I had.”

“The truth about what?” asked Hart, more curious now than ever about why Austin Pearce had been so eager to see him.

“About what the president did, the arrangement he entered into with that organization I told you about, The Four Sisters. That was the reason I left at the end of his first term. I would have stayed. I thought I could do some good at Treasury, help put the country’s finances on a better footing, bring a little sanity to the way we raise and spend the public’s money. Then I discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars, more than a billion by the time I uncovered what was going on, had been moved through various accounts, money appropriated for various foreign aid projects, into a bank in Europe and from there into the hands of certain clandestine organizations in the Middle East. The bank was the French investment firm, The Four Sisters. The money was being used to finance a war, a secret war against some of the governments in the region we did not like. This wasn’t using the CIA to work behind the scenes to try to take down a government; this wasn’t giving covert assistance to some group within a country trying to overthrow an oppressive regime. This was something different. I did not understand it at first, though I thought I did.”

“You thought you did?” asked Hart, following every word.

“Yes. At first I thought-I assumed-that the bank was acting alone, that someone there was diverting the funds for some purpose of his own. I thought the bank might be working with someone in the French government, and that, with or without the knowledge of the government, they were trying to exercise some influence in the Middle East. The French are like that, always willing to cooperate, but jealous of our power. I have friends there, some of whom I trust. I made inquiries, but no one knew a thing. I couldn’t do anything more on my own, so I went to the president and told him what I had discovered.”

The intensity seemed to fade from Pearce’s expression as he remembered back to what had happened. The angry bitterness he had felt at the time was now, when he began to talk about it, more a sense of regret, as of a possibility, a chance to achieve something permanent and important, lost forever.

“We were in the Oval Office, just the two of us. It was eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, two weeks after he had won election to a second term. He was always at extremes, and that morning proved it. When I walked in, he looked like he owned the world. He greeted me like I was his best friend and-you know the way he had-for a few moments I felt like I really was. He started telling me about all the great things, now that he had a second term, we were going to do; things he could not do in his first term, when he still had to worry about an election. Then he noticed that I did not seem to share in his excitement, that I had something on my mind. He never liked it when someone did that, held back, even if just a little, from his own enthusiasm. He asked me what the trouble was.”

Pearce had a look that seemed to accuse himself of negligence, of failing to grasp what he should have understood, that what he had uncovered was too big, too important, for the president not to have known.

“When I told him what I’d found out, that all the money that was supposed to go for one purpose was being used for another, and that this French investment firm was responsible, he went into a rage. And I mean that literally. He jumped out of his chair, his face all red, started pounding on the desk, swearing at me, telling me I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was going to jeopardize everything he had been trying to do. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just sat there, my mouth open, dumbfounded by what was going on. He was so angry, for a moment I thought he might hit me. He told me it was none of my business, that I was supposed to run things at Treasury, that this was State Department business, that how was he supposed to trust me if I was not interested in doing my own job. That’s when he did it,” said Pearce, shaking his head over what had happened next. “He became quite calm again. The anger was still there-I could see it in his eyes-but now it was something more permanent, something, I swear, close to hatred, the kind that doesn’t go away. I had come to save his presidency; I left with instructions to submit my resignation.”

Hart could not believe it. Austin Pearce had been the one member of Constable’s cabinet that almost everyone thought irreplaceable, a judgment that nothing done by his successor at Treasury had changed.

“He fired you? But wait-he told you that what you discovered about this missing money was something the State Department knew about, that it was something they were doing?”

A look of cold disdain crossed Pearce’s face.

“He lied. No one over at State knew anything about it.”

“You checked?”

“I made a few discreet inquiries.”

Hart remembered what Pearce had said to him at the reception after Constable’s funeral.

“What about The Four Sisters? What about your friend…?”

“Jean de la Valette? It would be going a little too far to say we were friends. ‘Distant colleagues’ might be more accurate. We inhabit different parts of the same world: the international finance system, such as it is.”

There was a long, thoughtful silence. Furrowing his brow, Pearce rubbed his hands together, as he struggled to find the best way to explain what he was still not quite sure he understood.

“We’ve spent time together, attended some of the same conferences; we’ve even had dinner. But know him, the way I think I know you-have a sense of what he might do in a given circumstance, whether, when the chips were down, he was someone I could trust? No. Though I suppose I could say that-we both could say that, couldn’t we?-about a lot of people we’ve met; maybe even most of the people we know.”

He looked at Hart, not with a cynic’s grin, but with the gentle smile of a man who had learned to appreciate the few people he knew were his friends.

“It’s impossible to get more than a fleeting impression of who he really is,” continued Pearce. “He has a different frame of reference, a different sense of proportion about things. We think in terms of how what happened in the last election changed things, and how different things might be after the next one. He thinks in terms of the way things were changed by the French Revolution. I said something about this to you before, how that family of his goes back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years, and the kind of perspective that must give.”

Hart studied him closely, searching his eyes for a deeper sense of what he meant.

“But despite that, you liked him? You said he was charming, urbane. You said he was one of the most fascinating men you had met.”

Pearce tilted his head, an amused, slightly puzzled expression in his eyes.

“Liked him? Yes, I suppose,” he replied, though he sounded none too sure about it. “Fascinated by him?-Who wouldn’t be fascinated by someone with a history like that?”

Pearce made an idle, backward movement with his hand. It was a gesture meant to underscore the obvious meaning of his surroundings, the level of success that most other men would have given anything to have achieved.

“I do this for a living-watch and try to calibrate the movements of the financial markets-and I’ve become reasonably good at it, but I don’t find it particularly interesting. What I really love is history, European history mainly, but almost anything about the past. So it isn’t too difficult to understand that I would find Jean de la Valette infinitely more fascinating that most of the Wall Street types who can’t remember what happened yesterday, much less last year. So, yes, I was fascinated. It was only later, when I discovered what The Four Sisters was doing, that I began to realize it was precisely because of the way Jean de la Valette thought about the past that he was dangerous.”

“But what is the connection?” asked Hart, growing more urgent. “The money you talked about, the money that was routed through his bank-you said it was used to finance a private war. What is the reason Jean de la Valette would be willing to do something like that?”

Pearce’s thinning eyebrows shot up. He reached for a pencil and tapped it hard against his favored antique desk. His small mouth quivered, his eyes danced with suppressed excitement. He began to laugh, but immediately stopped.

“It’s the sort of thing that would get you committed if you told too many people.”

Whatever he was about to tell him, Hart was certain that, far from crazy, it was probably the only thing that made sense. Austin Pearce was just about the most rational man he knew.

“Jean de la Valette wants to lead a new Crusade, a war of Christianity against Islam.”

“I’ll believe that if you say it’s true,” replied Hart. “But why would he think that was even a possibility? It sounds like he’s the one who should be committed.”

“But what after all is insanity but intense belief?” asked Pearce with a strange, knowing look in his eyes. “It’s what the present usually says about the past. It’s what we say today about the Crusades, the ones that started more than nine hundred years ago, the ones that made the name Jean de la Valette not just famous, but for a long time the glory of Christendom and of France.

“You’ve heard of the Knights Templar? Ever since Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the Templars have been used to pack the pages of novelists with tales of secret societies that have kept alive down through the centuries something no one else was supposed to know. It’s all nonsense, of course. The Templars weren’t formed to keep secret some esoteric knowledge; they were formed to be what someone called ‘the sword arm of the Church in defense of the Holy Land.’ What we forget, what most of us still don’t know, is that the Crusades were at first a great success. Jerusalem was conquered, recaptured from the Muslims who had taken it from the Christians.

“The Templars were motivated by what today we would call religious fanaticism. A Templar was part of a religious order. He took a vow of obedience, which meant that he obeyed without question, and without hesitation, any command he was given. He also took a vow of abstinence and poverty; he gave up both sexual intercourse and all his worldly belongings. These were men, all of them from the families of the aristocracy, who gave up everything for the chance to die for Christianity. Because they could not marry, could not have children, and could not keep any of their wealth for themselves, the Order of the Templars, like the Church itself, eventually became quite rich. They were formed to defend the Holy Land, but the headquarters of the two thousand Templars in France was a fortress in the middle of Paris, a fortress which at the start of the fourteenth century held the largest treasury in northern Europe. This was the beginning of their undoing, because, you see, the King of France, Philip the Fair, was at that time desperate for money.”

Pearce chuckled. His small eyes lit up with mischief. Suddenly, without warning, he slapped the top of his desk with the flat of his hand and sprang to his feet. For a moment he stared out through the glass wall, out beyond the park toward the far horizon and the dark orange sky and the falling red ball sun.

“Philip the Fair,” he repeated, the glow of amusement more pronounced on his cheek. “They had such wonderful names.” He turned back to Hart, sitting cross-legged in his chair. “My favorite was an English monarch of about that same era: Ethelred the Unready. Madison Avenue could work for years and never come up with something as devastating as that. What if we did that now, gave names like that to politicians?”

“We have,” Hart reminded him. “We called Lincoln ‘Honest Abe’; Coolidge was ‘Silent Cal.’”

With his hands clasped behind his back, Pearce stared down at the floor.

“No, we would have had to come up with things like ‘Abraham the Magnanimous,’ ‘Woodrow the Intransigent.’” He began to warm to the subject. His eyes darted all around. “‘Herbert the Helpless,’ for Hoover and the Depression. ‘Richard the Reckless,’ for Nixon and Watergate. And for Constable…?”

“Robert the Dishonest,” suggested Hart with a grim, satisfied smile.

“Yes, precisely,” agreed Pearce. “And if Constable had read any history-any serious history-if he had known anything about the Knights Templar and the Crusades, he would have secretly envied Philip the Fair and the ruthless way he went about his business. The difference, of course,” added Pearce as he came around the desk and settled back in his chair, “is that if he had lived then he would have lacked the courage to do anything that decisive. His wife, on the other hand…”

He let the possibility of what Hillary Constable would have done, how far she would have gone, linger unanswered in a way that left no doubt what the answer would have been. He went back to the story he had started to tell. Like most of the things that get passed down through the generations, most of what history deems it valuable to record, this was all about violence, but violence, that because it happened so long ago, could be viewed with all the detachment of inevitability.

“Philip the Fair needed money. It was as simple as that. His kingdom depended on it. The Templar fortress was seized and, on that same night, every one of the Templars in France, all two thousand of them, were arrested. Nearly all of them were executed. That was in 1307. Four years later, in 1311, Philip reached an agreement with the Church. At the Council of Vienne, the Templar’s Order was abolished and its property transferred to the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, an order originally created to provide care and sustenance to those injured in the Crusades but that now took on the same militant function as the Templars. They in turn paid over to Philip the debt he claimed he was owed from the Templars.

“Two hundred fifty years pass, an enormous period of time from our perspective, but only a brief interval in the chronology of a family that traces its origins back to the beginning of France: the Knights of St. John defeat the Muslim leader, Suleiman II, at the siege of Malta. The leader, the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John that day in 1565, was named Jean de la Valette. Now imagine that instead of an American who-and I think this is true of most of us-can’t name all his great-grandparents, you were the direct descendant of a family like that, raised in a country whose history is measured in thousands of years. What do you look up to, what are you taught to remember? What is it you use to measure success? A better job, a better house, a more distinguished career than that of your father and his father before him? Or something that will once again change history and the world?”

By nature shy and retiring, Austin Pearce spent his days poring over statistical charts and graphs, tracking the movements of the world’s markets, and his evenings reading the histories that fewer and fewer people seemed to care about. He could act with speed and decision when the occasion required it, and he could deliver a speech that was sharp and incisive, but in private conversation, when he wanted to speak nothing but the truth, he sometimes, like most of us, found it difficult to give adequate expression to what seemed so clear in his mind. He had been trying to explain to Bobby Hart, one of the few men he knew who could look past the usual time-worn categories and grasp the essence of things, why he believed Jean de la Valette was potentially a very dangerous man and all he had managed to do was describe a rich eccentric.

“He’s a dangerous man!” he blurted out in frustration, slamming his hands on the arms of his chair, and then laughing in bewilderment at what he had done.

“More dangerous than you know.” Hart said this with such a serious expression that Pearce’s laughter died in the air.

“What do you mean-more dangerous than I know?”

“You know about Frank Morris? You know what happened?”

“Yes, of course. He was killed yesterday in prison. Terrible thing. But what does that have to do with…?”

“Morris knew about The Four Sisters. He was taking money from them, but he didn’t know until much later what they were doing. The strange thing is that it wasn’t what you just told me. According to Burdick-”

“Quentin Burdick, the reporter? What did he know about this?”

“Damn near everything, as it turns out. He started working on a story about The Four Sisters months ago.”

Astonished, Pearce gave Hart a puzzled look.

“Burdick has a nose for things like this,” explained Hart. “He has a sense when something isn’t right. There were always rumors about Constable and money, where it came from, what Constable might have done to get it. That was the story, or the start of it, but Burdick didn’t have anything, nothing he could use. Then he stumbled on the name The Four Sisters, and as soon as he had that, Constable, who had been dodging him, suddenly wanted to talk. The night before they were supposed to meet was the night the president died. That’s why Burdick went to see Frank Morris, on the chance that Morris might know something and, because he had nothing left to lose, might be willing to talk. Morris was willing to talk, all right, but it wasn’t quite for the reason Burdick thought.”

Hart was still troubled by what he had learned from Burdick just hours earlier; troubled, also, by the new dimension that had now been added by Austin Pearce. The fading sun behind him cast the remnant of his own shadow across the glistening hard surface of the desk that had stories of its own to tell. Hart had the feeling as of time running out, of things happening beyond his grasp, of a danger he could not quite define. He had to tell Pearce about the president.

“Constable did not die of a heart attack, Austin. He was murdered.”

Pearce’s face turned ash gray.

“Murdered? How? By whom?”

Hart quickly shook his head. His eyes were immediate, determined.

“I need to tell you about Morris first. Burdick went to see him out in California, in prison, and Morris told him everything. He did not know about Constable, he didn’t know how he had died, but he was almost certain that he had been killed and that it was because of The Four Sisters. Morris had taken money, not the bribery that got him convicted-that was a set-up, a frame. No, the money Morris took involved a lot more than anything they said he had done. Then Morris found out that The Four Sisters was not just interested in getting rid of obstacles to foreign investment; it was a conduit by which foreign governments could acquire a controlling interest in certain American companies, governments that wanted to influence what, as Morris put it, what we read and what we watch-books, newspapers, television, movies, everything. Morris never said anything about what you just told me: that The Four Sisters was using money from our government to finance a private war.”

Pearce grasped immediately what had happened.

“We caught it at different ends, the thread that runs through everything. It makes perfect sense. The Four Sisters uses money from a foreign source, or a set of sources, to do certain things here-buy into a company, get a controlling interest. Then it uses money it gets here-from the government, but also, perhaps, sometimes from those same companies-to do something in the Middle East someone doesn’t want the world to know about.”

Pearce narrowed his eyes into a look of concentration that with each passing moment became more intense, until his expression had changed entirely, become bitter, bleak, the look of someone close to losing faith in everything.

“He was murdered? The president of the United States? Robert Constable managed to put himself-managed to put the country-into a position where a thing like this could happen? But how did Frank Morris know, how did he find out it was murder?”

“He didn’t,” replied Hart. “He guessed. It was the only thing that made sense. When Morris found out what The Four Sisters was doing, he went to the president. Constable was the one who had first suggested that he talk to some of their people. He told him that even if it meant the end of his career, he was going to stop it, go public with the story if he had to, but stop it any way he could. Constable told him not to worry, that everything was going to be all right, that-and this drove poor Morris crazy-they hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Why Morris trusted Constable, even Morris did not know. Maybe he just wanted to believe-maybe it was the only thing he had left to hang onto-that the president of the United States, even if it was Robert Constable, would not let anyone put the country at risk. But the next thing Morris knows, he’s under indictment and on his way to prison. He knew then that if he talked, the chances were that no one would believe him and that he might get killed. He talked to Burdick because he knew it was his last chance to set things straight, and because he knew he was dying of cancer and had only a few months left to live. They killed him just hours after Quentin Burdick’s second visit. That’s what convinced Burdick that Morris was correct in his suspicion that Constable did not die of a heart attack, that he was murdered instead. I told Burdick he was right.”

“You told Burdick that he was right? But how could you…?” There was a new interest and, more than that, a sudden intuition, in the Pearce’s eyes. “She told you, didn’t she?-Hillary Constable.” Pearce caught the slight movement, the subtle change of expression that revealed Hart’s dilemma: that he would not lie and could not tell the truth. “It’s all right,” Pearce assured him. “I understand. But she must have told you for a reason. She obviously doesn’t want anyone else to know. The whole country thinks he died of a heart attack; the only question whether he was in bed alone the night he died,” he added with a distinct look of disapproval. “The way he lived, a rumor like that had to spread.”

He started to say something more along that line: the conduct, notorious, flagrant, that would have barred someone like Constable from office in an earlier time, but which in the age of tabloid television had only added to his celebrity. The fact of what Hart had said suddenly came home to him in all its naked, twisted consequence. Like any second, delayed reaction, it hit with greater force.

“Murdered! My God, someone murdered the president of the United States and no one knows about it? No one is doing anything about it?” Then he realized what he had missed. He looked at Hart in a different light. “You’re doing something about it, aren’t you? That was the reason she told you. But how did she…? No, never mind. The Four Sisters…Burdick-you both think…?”

Pearce banged his hands down hard on the arms of the chair and leaped to his feet. He began to pace back and forth, three steps in one direction, three steps back, moving quicker with each step he took. He stopped abruptly, swung around, and faced Hart directly.

“It’s possible. If Morris was murdered because he talked to Burdick-and Morris was a prison inmate serving a sentence for bribery, someone it wouldn’t be too difficult to dismiss as a liar and a thief. But the president! If he talked-and he was scheduled to see Burdick the next day… But why would he talk? Yes, of course: because he thought Burdick knew more than he did, that he knew all about The Four Sisters and not just the name.”

Pearce was still not satisfied. Something did not add up. He stood at the corner of the desk, looking down at the deep shining surface as if the longer he looked the more hidden layers he would discover beneath it, each one changing the meaning of all the others.

“It wasn’t the money,” said Pearce with a certainty that to Hart was inexplicable. “If The Four Sisters-if Jean de la Valette-is involved in this, if he’s responsible for two murders, if he ordered the murder of the president of the United States, it was not because he was trying to keep Constable or Morris from talking about the money they might have been paid. Burdick said he didn’t have anything, nothing he could use, until he stumbled on the name-right? But it would have been almost impossible to trace whatever money was given to Constable back to Valette. With all those companies, all the various enterprises, all the ways money can be moved from one account to another-No, it wasn’t the money; it was something else, something that The Four Sisters, that Valette, could not afford to have known; something he was planning, and is probably still planning, to do. But kill the president? What could be worth that kind of risk?”