Hillary

Chapter Twelve

The house was all lit up, that was the first thing that struck Bobby Hart when he got out of his car. It seemed oddly out of place, jarring in a way, that the house where little more than a week ago Hillary Constable had stood in a receiving line to accept condolences on the death of her husband should now look so alive. When he knocked on the white lacquered door he half expected to be welcomed into another crowded reception, not to mourn a death, but to celebrate a completely different kind of occasion: a birthday, an anniversary, or, because this was Washington after all, the election returns in a race the outcome of which had been decided long before the polls had closed.

He was not far wrong. The house was full of people, dozens of them, some busy arranging stacks of files, organizing them into the right categories, others busy on the telephones that had been set up on two long tables in the same living room where Hart had watched Hillary Constable go through her widow’s ritual. At yet another table, six young women sorted through the contents of several canvas mail bags, cards sent by people from across the country and around the world expressing their sorrow on the death of the president. There were thousands of them and every one of them was going to be answered with a short note, a few words, and then signed by a machine, but no one who received them would ever know they had been signed that way. They would have instead the double pleasure of believing that the president’s widow had not only read what they had sent, but had been so moved-that was the phrase that had been chosen after consultation with several of her advisors-that though she could not answer all of the wonderful cards and letters she had received, she had to answer theirs. It was what in an older political tradition might have been called a boiler room for grief.

Watching it, Hart marveled at the slow precision of the work, the methodical organization, the way each name to whom a response was addressed was made part of a list, a list that, from what Hart had been told, the Constables had started back when they were still in college, a list that had expanded with the years, people whom if they had only met them once, or even if they had never met them in person at all, would receive a card every Christmas and a request for money at the start of every campaign. By the time Robert Constable ran for a second term there were literally millions of people to whom he could write that one of his greatest satisfactions was knowing that he had such a good friend on whom he could always count when things were difficult and he needed help. And they believed it, the grateful eager recipients of those yearly smiling photographs of “Bob and Hillary” standing in front of another White House Christmas tree. Robert Constable might be dead, but the list that he and his wife had built up with such enterprise and effort was still growing, part of the inheritance, if you will, left to his wife.

“Hello Bobby, thank you for coming.”

Hillary Constable was suddenly standing right next to him. She was dressed casually in a blouse and skirt. A soft blue cashmere cardigan that brought out the color of her eyes was thrown over her shoulders. Her ash blonde hair was pulled back and she had on her reading glasses. It might have given her a shy, reserved, and bookish look, a woman who taught literature in the shade tree environment of a small liberal arts college, but her eyes were too immediate, too much in the present, the eyes of a woman on the verge of impatience, a woman who was used to being the standard, the only standard, for what was important.

“Don’t mind all this,” she remarked, nodding toward the organized chaos. “We always had a rule that anyone who wrote to us got answered.”

She said this without nostalgia, as if she were simply reporting a principle of modern management, one of those learned from a book of sound practices, a proven method of achieving success. Her eyes made a quick circuit of the room. It would have been easy to miss the brief, decisive nod, the closed judgment on what she observed. Hart had the feeling that she did this fairly often, come to see whether in her absence everyone was still hard at work. She started to turn her attention back to him when she noticed something that was not quite right. A stack of envelopes, addressed and ready to be mailed, was too tall and had begun to lean. Dividing it in half, she carefully set the two shorter stacks next to one another. Without a word, just a look, but a look that behind its apparent kindness suggested consequences for failure, she let the young woman sitting at the table know that even the smallest things had to be done right.

“It’s amazing how much time I’ve had to waste teaching people the obvious,” she remarked as she took Hart by the arm. She looked back over her shoulder and flashed a smile of encouragement at the young woman she had just corrected. “Everything is important,” she explained to Hart. “That’s what no one seems to understand: everything. Now, let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”

She led him through the living room, past the marble pillar where he had stood talking to Austin Pearce, the marble pillar that curiously had reminded him of her, across the hallway toward a door that, as he now realized, was the entrance to the elevator that went to the private suite of rooms directly overhead.

“Scotch all right?” she asked, as she walked over to the mahogany shelves crowded with books seldom opened and never read.

Handing Hart a glass, she took a drink, seemed to enjoy it, and took another. She invited Hart to sit down, but she continued to stand next to the desk and the photographs of what had been her private life. There was an odd, pensive expression on her face as if she were in some doubt about how to begin.

“You said it was important,” Hart reminded her. “You said you had to see me right away.”

It was almost indistinguishable, the way the muscles around her jaw tightened, and then swallowed without taking a drink. She seemed to have to force herself to look right at him and not to look away.

“What have you found out?” she asked finally.

Hart had the feeling that she did not really want to know, that for some reason she was almost afraid of the answer. But then why, suddenly, had she wanted to see him, insisted that it had to be right now, tonight? Or did that explain it: the fear that had been building up inside her had become intolerable and she could not wait to hear what she was not sure she wanted to learn? Or was it something else, something that Hart had not quite been able to put his finger on, but that was palpable, real, somewhere below the surface that he had not yet been able to penetrate?

“Have you found out anything-what we talked about before?” she repeated when he did not answer.

Hart sat on the edge of the chair, trying to read the meaning in her nervous eyes. His relentless gaze seemed to make her uncomfortable. She took another drink and then, biting her lip, stared down at the floor. A moment later she looked up.

“You have, haven’t you?-learned something, I mean.”

“What can you tell me about The Four Sisters?”

She seemed puzzled, then annoyed.

“The Four…? What does that have to do with-?”

“The Four Sisters, the investment firm your husband was taking money from; the firm that was helping foreign interests buy control of certain American companies; the firm that was using government money-our government’s money-to finance a war we didn’t know anything about. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t know anything about it, that you never heard of The Four Sisters, that you never met Jean de la Valette, that-”

“Of course I’ve met Jean de la Valette! He’s a very prominent man in financial circles. And the-what is it again?-The Four Sisters. Yes, that’s the name of the firm he runs. But what about it? Those other things you said-I wouldn’t know anything about what he does with his money. And as for Robert taking money from… That’s a fairly serious accusation. Are you suggesting he was being paid to do something, that he was taking bribes?” Her eyes became distant, remote. “What proof do you have of that?”

“It’s what Quentin Burdick was working on, what he was scheduled to see the president about the morning after the night the president was killed.”

Hillary Constable walked across to the window and stared into the enveloping night. When she spoke her voice was dry, flat, the rich emotion gone.

“You talked to Burdick?”

“Yes.”

“And he told you that?” she asked, her gaze still fixed on the black, starless sky.

“He had been trying to get an interview for months. When the president found out that he knew about The Four Sisters, he called Burdick and set up the appointment himself.”

“And cancelled everything else he had that week,” said Hillary Constable as if she were reminding herself of what had happened, the sequence of events that starting with this had led to his death.

She turned and faced Hart, but did not move away from the window. She had reacquired something of her old composure. The slight smile was there again, as well as the look of self-assurance in her eyes.

“Burdick thought something was going on, that The Four Sisters was involved in something, and that Robert was involved as well?”

Hart tried to be diplomatic. “There were certain questions…” He gestured toward the rich interior of the room and by implication to all the other things that the two of them, the president and his wife, had acquired. “…about the sources of the president’s wealth.”

She shook her head, disparaging the kind of rumors that had always followed them, rumors she had so often been forced to deny; rumors, as she had never tired of repeating, that their political enemies tried to use against them because they could never win an argument, or an election, on the merits.

“We have a lot of friends,” she said, lifting her eyebrows just a shade to convey the deeper meaning. “People who understood that there were certain things we needed-yes, including this house-things we would have ample means to pay for as soon as we left office.”

It was curious how easy it was for her, even now, after her husband’s death, to step into the first-person plural when she talked about the presidency of Robert Constable. She had done it to what some thought an embarrassing degree when he was alive, an assumption of an influence that was unsettling to those who liked to think of their presidents as men of independent judgment, and an erroneous suggestion of equality to those who were in a position to know how often Robert Constable had been forced to yield to what she wanted.

“And we will-I mean pay back the loans that were made, the personal loans made by friends of ours.”

Hart remembered now why he had not liked the Constables, why he had never trusted them: this sense of entitlement, this belief that whatever they wanted, they should have; this grating certainty that whatever they needed to do to get it, whatever means they had to employ, was justified because they knew what was best for everyone.

“And was one of those friends Jean de la Valette?”

Her eyes flashed with a moment’s heated anger; and then, as quick as that, they changed, became reasonable, willing to forgive an easily understood mistake.

“He might have been, had we asked. But no, the friends I’m talking about are people we had known for a long time, before we ever ran for the presidency. We understood what it would look like if…” She smiled in a way that suggested that what she had been about to say was not important, and then quickly changed the subject. “But you were telling me about Quentin Burdick and the story he was working on. He thought Robert was involved in something that would have gotten him in trouble?”

She asked this in what seemed to Hart a strangely neutral tone, as if she were doing it purely for the sake of form rather than out of any concern with whether it was true or not. He got up and stood next to her desk. Drumming his fingers on the edge of it, he glimpsed a picture hidden behind the others, a photograph of Hillary Constable, taken when she was years younger, splashing in the surf of some South Seas island. She was still a good-looking woman, but at the time that picture was taken she had been nothing short of gorgeous.

A thin, furtive smile, the smile of a woman who, understanding the source of the power she has over men, has come to despise them because of it, was there waiting when Hart looked back. It told him something that before that moment he had not really known for sure. He had been given a hint of it that first time they had been in this room, when she had suddenly and quite without warning confided that she had once been in love, not with the man she had married, but with a boy-some “gorgeous boy” was how she had put it-that she had known in college. That was what the look of disdain had meant: the knowledge when she was young that she could have any man she wanted had been, as it were, her fatal flaw. The power to attract, to make men submit, could never last, and she had been a fool to ever think it could.

“Quentin Burdick,” she reminded him. “What is it he thinks he knows?”

“That millions of dollars ended up in your husband’s pockets; that it was routed through a number of different sources, but that all of it originated with The Four Sisters. This isn’t based on some vague suspicion he has; Frank Morris confirmed it.”

“Frank Morris, the congressman who was killed in prison? What does he have to do with any of this? Wasn’t he convicted of bribery?-He doesn’t sound like a very credible source.”

“Burdick thinks so. He went out to California, talked to him in prison. Morris was murdered right after that, the same day.”

“And Morris said…?”

“That he had been taking money from The Four Sisters, helping get defense contracts for some of the companies The Four Sisters controlled, but when he discovered what they were really up to-helping foreign interests acquire some of the major media companies in this country-he decided he had to stop it. He went to see the president and the next thing he knew he was on trial for bribery and sent to prison.”

“You’re suggesting the president had something to do with that?”

“Morris told Burdick that the president had been the one who first encouraged him to talk to the people connected with The Four Sisters, and that-”

“That doesn’t prove anything!” cried Hillary Constable, throwing up her hands. “Suggesting that someone talks to someone hardly constitutes a crime!”

“He knew all about it!” Hart shouted back. They glared at each other across the room. “He knew everything. He told Morris there was nothing to worry about. He told him that they-‘they!’-hadn’t done anything wrong. He-”

“They hadn’t done anything wrong-that’s what he said? You see, he hadn’t. Isn’t that what-?”

Hart looked straight at her, his eyes cold, immediate.

“He said no one would ever find out!”

Hillary Constable turned on her heel. Folding her arms in front of her, she stared out the window, too angry to say another word. She began to tap her foot.

“What have you found out about his…death?” she asked finally.

She would not turn around, would not look at him. Hart’s eyes were drawn back to the photograph of her on the beach. The thought flashed through his mind that she must have had a temper then as well, but had always gotten away with it: No one who wanted her would have risked telling her that she had misbehaved. How many times has the beauty of a woman taught cowardice to men?

“Your husband was involved with The Four Sisters. He was taking money, vast sums of it, in return for doing things he shouldn’t have done. He told someone what Morris told him. Morris was convinced that by doing that the president signed his own death warrant, that-”

Hillary Constable wheeled around. She seemed puzzled and confused.

“Signed his own death warrant? Even if all this is true, why would the fact he told someone that Morris had changed his mind about what he was doing mean that?”

“Because if the president was willing to betray Morris, there was no reason to think he would not betray the people he was doing business with.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. If you and I are in a conspiracy with someone else and you tell me that the other person is thinking about telling the police, I can understand getting rid of him, but why get rid of you?”

She said this as if instead of conspiracy and murder, she was discussing a problem in formal logic. If A equals B, and B equals C, then A…whatever follows, follows; there is nothing moral or immoral about it. Hart had a different understanding of things.

“Because it’s the only way to be absolutely safe, the only way to make sure, now that everything is starting to fall apart, that there isn’t anyone left who knows what you’ve done.”

“Yes, I suppose you have a point.”

Pursing her lips, she seemed to think about it. She went over to the bookshelves where she kept the liquor and poured herself another glass. She closed the bottle and then remembered.

“Would you like…?”

“No, I’m fine,” replied Hart, glancing at the drink he had barely touched. Instead of going back to the window, Hillary Constable took the easy chair next to his.

“What do you think of our new president?”

Though he tried not to show it, Hart was stunned. They were talking about the death of her husband, talking about who might be responsible for his murder, and all of sudden she wants to know his opinion of Irwin Russell? He searched her eyes, but he could see nothing beyond what appeared to be a genuine interest. That in itself revealed more about who she was than anything he might have discovered had he been able to penetrate the veneer of near perfect self-possession.

“What do I think of…? I’m afraid I’ve been a little too busy trying to find out who might have murdered your husband to have given much thought to his successor.”

“Interim successor might be the better description. Irwin was the perfect vice president: quiet, inoffensive, someone everyone liked because he was not a threat to what anyone wanted for themselves.” She gave Hart the knowing look of the consummate insider, someone who can size up a situation, take the measure of everyone involved, judge the play of forces with a physicist’s precision, and do it all in the blink of an eye. “That was the reason we chose him,” she added. “Unlike most of the people in Washington, he didn’t wake up every morning full of resentment because someone else was president.”

“And now he is,” said Hart in a way that suggested something more than the obvious fact. “I’m sure you’re right. I doubt he ever felt any resentment that someone else was sitting in the Oval Office, but are you sure he never thought about it, never wondered what it might be like, especially after he was put on the ticket and became vice president?”

That same knowing look was in her eyes.

“Oh, he thought about it, all right; rather I should say, worried about it; worried whether he could hold up under the strain, the pressure, the requirements of the office-if something ever happened. Do you know the first thing he wanted to know when Robert asked him to be his running mate?-Was his health as good as the published reports said it was. Was his heart condition really just a minor matter? Does that sound like someone who spends his time dreaming about what a great president he would be?”

The irony of course, as Hart quickly noted, was that was exactly the kind of question someone desperate for the office might ask; and exactly the way someone would have to ask it, as if his only concern was that nothing was likely to happen and that he would not have to serve. But she was right about Irwin Russell: he was that creature almost extinct in Washington, a politician without ambition for what he did not have.

“As I say, I really haven’t had any time, and it hasn’t yet been two weeks. But everyone seems to think he’s doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Why do you ask?”

She stood up and, holding her drink in her hand, crossed over to her desk. She seemed distracted, uncertain what to do next. Her eyes darted from one thing to another, until, finally, they came to rest on the same photograph that had caught Hart’s attention. For a moment it seemed to take her back, not just to the past, but to a different remembered future, to a time when she had lived her life in the expectation of things that had not happened. Her blue eyes brightened and the rigid discipline of her mouth gave way to something softer and more sincere.

“Have they always called you ‘Bobby’? They never called him that. It was always ‘Robert’ or ‘Bob.’ ‘Bobby’ is more endearing, isn’t it? There is a kind of intimacy in it-you know, the easy familiarity you have with someone you grew up with, someone who knows all the innocent secrets you had when you were kids. That’s the way people feel about you. But you know that, don’t you? You’re too smart not to know that. No one ever called him that,” she went on, caught in a recollection that was new to her. “He wouldn’t have let them; he wasn’t strong enough for that. He thought it sounded weak. ‘Bobby.’ I asked him once about it. I mentioned Bobby Kennedy; he started talking about Jack, and how it sounded better, more in charge, than ‘Johnny.’ He thought about things like that. Names-they don’t mean anything, really, do they? And then, again, they mean everything, don’t they? There are people who want me to run; people who think I should be the nominee. What do you think I should do?”

There was not so much as a pause between the one thing and the other; not so much as a second’s delay before she went from what seemed an idle reminiscence about her husband’s name and the announcement that she was thinking about running for president herself. Hart was beyond the point of being shocked, much less surprised, by anything she said. He was watching what he knew was a performance, but he still was not clear why she was giving it. He was sure she wanted something; he just was not sure what it was.

“You asked me to see what I could find out about your husband’s death. You told me that he had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered,” he reminded her in a firm tone of voice. “I’ve talked to Clarence Atwood, and I’ve talked to the agent who was in charge of the detail that night. They confirmed what you said. How could you even be thinking about running for president, how could you be thinking about anything, before we get to the bottom of this? And remember something else: I told you at the beginning that this couldn’t be kept secret for more than a very short time, that it was going to have to come out, that there would have to be an investigation.”

He was becoming angry as he spoke, angry with her, angry with himself. He should never have agreed to any of this. He should have turned her down and insisted that an investigation begin at once. He had made a mistake; he was not going to make another.

“The president was murdered! That’s the only thing you should be thinking about, the only thing that matters. I said I’d see what I could find out and I have. He was murdered because someone wanted to keep him quiet; murdered so he couldn’t tell anything to Quentin Burdick. And it seems pretty damn obvious that The Four Sisters-someone involved with The Four Sisters-is behind it. The president was murdered. And if you don’t tell what you know to the authorities, I will!”

“But he wasn’t murdered! That’s what I had to see you about, what I said was so urgent.”

Hart was on his feet, staring hard at her.

“What are you saying? You told me he was given a drug that caused his heart to stop. They found evidence of it at the autopsy. Atwood confirmed it.”

Hillary Constable stepped closer. She seemed almost contrite, as if she had bungled things and made his life difficult because of it.

“I was distraught, out of my mind with grief; and yes, I admit it, with anger, too. He dies in bed with some whore, one of those women he always had to have; and worse than that, everyone knows it, everyone is talking about it! The pressure I was under, all the things I had to do-I overreacted, misinterpreted what I was told. Clarence Atwood didn’t tell me that-”

“You’re going to tell me that Atwood didn’t tell you your husband was murdered? Atwood told me that himself. And you can trust me: I didn’t misinterpret what he said!”

Her chin came up a defiant half inch.

“You may find he’s changed his mind.”

Her eyes were hot and full of warning, but then, an instant later, they changed, became, if not quite friendly, accommodating, willing to discuss their differences.

“It doesn’t really matter how he died, does it? He’s dead. Why tarnish his reputation with more allegations, more rumors about things he might have done that he should not have done? He did some good things, some great things, as president. It seems to me we have some duty to protect that, the legacy, the public record, of what he did.”

“Protect it with a lie?” cried Hart, as angry as he had ever been. “Lie about the fact that he didn’t die of natural causes, that he was assassinated? Lie about the fact that in the years he held office he was part of a criminal conspiracy? Lie, so you can run to take his place, the widow of our beloved president, and not the widow of a charlatan, a fraud?”

“I’m going to run, and I’m going to win! I need your help, Bobby,” she said with a savage look. “Don’t let me down. There’s more at issue here than you think.”

Hart did not answer. He turned on his heel and started out of the room.

“Think about it, Bobby!” she shouted after him. “I’ll deny I ever said anything about the way my husband died. And don’t think that Clarence Atwood will back you up. He’ll say whatever I tell him to say.”

Hart wheeled back around.

“Don’t you care anything about the fact that your husband was murdered, that someone assassinated the President of the United States?”

“Of course I care about that. But there’s nothing can be done about it that won’t make things worse.”

“That’s the difference between the truth and the lie: whether it makes things better or worse for you?”

“Not for me,” she insisted. “For the country.”

“What kind of country do you think this is: a country too stupid to deal with the truth?”