Hillary

Chapter Twenty-Two

When Hart was summoned back to the 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.

“Yes, of course,” replied Jean Valette. “And I am sorry that you were subjected to this indignity. It was necessary to take certain precautions, Mr. Carlyle.”

“Like grabbing me off the street in Manhattan?” he said with rising anger as he removed the blindfold. He looked at Jean Valette, sitting next to him, and then shot a glance at Marcel Dumont. “Who the hell-?” But then he saw Hart, and his mouth dropped open. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What are you-? Where are we, anyway?”

“My name is Marcel Dumont, Mr. Carlyle: chief inspector of the Surete Generale. The gentleman on your left is-”

“My name does not matter,” interjected Jean Valette. “But I’m the one responsible for bringing you here. And again, I apologize for the way it was done. My only excuse is that I thought you would probably want to come and it was the only safe way to get you here.”

Jean Valette turned to Hart, who still did not know who this Mr. Carlyle was, except that he was an American in his early thirties who kept staring at him as if he had just discovered gold.

“Philip Carlyle, Mr. Hart, is a reporter: a colleague of your friend Quentin Burdick, if I am not mistaken.”

Carlyle looked across at Dumont.

“Chief inspector? The Surete? I’m in France, somewhere in Paris?”

“In France, but not in Paris,” replied Jean Valette. “You’ll go there next, with the inspector, if, after hearing what we have to say, you decide that is what you want to do.”

Carlyle was confused. He glanced at Hart, and then again at Dumont.

“The senator is wanted for murder, conspiracy to murder the president, but instead of placing him under arrest, you have me kidnapped and flown across the ocean?”

However much he might disagree with what Jean Valette had done, dealing with the accusations of this American was a different matter. Folding his arms across his chest, Dumont fixed him with a look of studied indifference.

“Would you like to leave now, flown back home? It can certainly be arranged.”

The young reporter could not keep his eyes off Hart who was sitting there, just a few feet away, the story that would make his career.

“Really,” persisted Dumont, rather enjoying it. “We can have you on a plane in an hour. And perhaps, after all, it’s for the best that you go.” He glanced at Jean Valette. “I told you this was not a good idea, forcing someone to come here against their will, just to give Mr. Hart, who despite the fact that we have reason to believe he is just a pawn in someone else’s game, is still wanted by the American authorities, a chance to tell his side of the story. You had no business doing this. It could put the French government in a very difficult position should Mr. Carlyle here decide to make a formal complaint.”

“Me? No, I’m not complaining about anything!”

“But you were kidnapped, ‘grabbed off the street in Manhattan,’ is the way I think you put it,” said Dumont, shaking his head in evident disapproval of the way the young man had been treated. “And tied up and blindfolded, besides. This is a very serious matter, Mr. Carlyle.”

Carlyle could not take his eyes off Hart.

“No, really, I’m sure there were good reasons,” he insisted.

Jean Valette took his cue.

“If anyone had known where he was going,” he explained to the inspector, “if anyone had known whom he was going to see, I doubt very much that Mr. Carlyle would still be alive.”

Dumont stroked his chin as he appeared to take this possibility under advisement.

“Yes, perhaps. But tell me, Mr. Carlyle: Other than the fact you were taken against your will, have you been otherwise ill-treated? Have you been fed properly?”

Carlyle’s blue eyes lit up at the memory of what he had been given, better than any restaurant, at least of the kind he could afford.

“And the room was terrific,” he added, eager to start asking questions of his own. “Everything has been great. And if I had been allowed to see anything except the room I was staying in, and now this one, I’d probably never want to leave.” His eyes shot back to Hart. “You didn’t do it-you weren’t involved? Then how in the hell did all this happen?”

“Did you really think I was?” Hart asked with a stern, caustic glance. “How well did you know Quentin Burdick? Did you know what he was working on when he was killed?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“I knew he was supposed to see Constable, but then Constable died-murdered, as it turns out-and I knew he went out to California to talk to Frank Morris and that Morris was killed. He told me that someone had broken into his apartment the night he got back. He told me he thought everything was connected to something called The Four Sisters.”

“And your Mr. Burdick was right,” said Jean Valette, exchanging a glance with Hart. “But put that aside for the moment. There was another murder, here, in Paris-”

“Austin Pearce,” said Carlyle, with a quick nod. “And the head of the political section of the embassy.” He reached inside his jacket for his notebook and then looked from face to face. “You don’t mind if I start making notes?”

“So long as you don’t use my name,” continued Jean Valette.

“I don’t know your name.”

“I insist on anonymity, and not just my identity, but where we are. No one can know where this conversation took place. Do you understand that?”

“But I don’t know where I am, except that it is somewhere in France.”

“Do you agree?” asked Jean Valette.

“Yes, I agree.”

“Then, my name is Jean Valette, and I am the head of investment house known as The Four Sisters.”

“The Four Sisters? Burdick said everything led back to-”

“And it does, as I just told you. But first, the murder of Austin Pearce. Marcel, perhaps you could explain.”

Placing both arms on the table, the inspector hunched forward and began to describe what had happened the night before last in the apartment of Aaron Wolfe in the 18th arrondissement.

“And so you see,” he said when he was finished, “Mr. Hart arrived only after the two killers were already there. He was downstairs talking to the landlady when the shooting stared. That means, as you can see, that they were sent there, the two Americans from the embassy-both of them with one of your intelligence agencies, unless I miss my guess-to kill Pearce and Wolfe. There could be only one reason for this: to keep them from telling what they knew about who killed your president.”

Carlyle scribbled furiously a moment longer and then looked at Hart.

“You didn’t have anything to do with this-I don’t mean the murder of Austin Pearce-the murder of the president?”

“Because he slept with my wife? It never happened. This whole thing is a set-up, a way for the real murderers-the real conspirators-to get away with what they did. I didn’t hire that woman, the one who supposedly died trying to get away. And all that evidence they found-bank transactions, money I paid into her account-do you really think a paid assassin would keep records like that, and keep them in a place where they could so easily be found?”

As Hart watched Carlyle, measuring his reaction, he was reminded of Quentin Burdick. There was the same focused attention on the matter immediately at hand, the same concentration on getting the basic structure of the story right. Carlyle did not yet have Burdick’s years of experience, but he had that deep curiosity about things that experience, by itself, could not teach.

“I told Quentin almost everything I knew. I’m the one who confirmed that the president had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered instead.”

The next question was out of Carlyle’s mouth before he even thought about it.

“And who told you, how did you know Constable had been murdered?”

“Constable’s widow, Hillary, the day her husband was buried.”

Carlyle did a double-take.

“She knew it then, that soon?”

“She wanted me to find out what I could about who might have done it, what reason they might have had. She thought-or at least she said-that if we didn’t know something before the story became public the rumors would never end. She may have had another reason.”

“Another reason?”

Hart hesitated, wondering how far he should go. Then he started to laugh, which produced a puzzled reaction, which made him explain.

“Half the country-more than that, for all I know-probably thinks I should be lynched, and I’m worried whether something I say might get someone else in trouble!” A grim, determined expression twisted slowly across his mouth. “I’m going to tell you everything I know, Philip Carlyle, but Quentin knew something and I still don’t know what it is. The night he died, we talked on the phone. It was late, but he wanted me to meet him at his place right away. He said he had discovered something-he had just gotten back from Washington, so it must have been there-and that it ‘changed everything.’ I don’t know what he meant.”

For the next hour, Hart described in detail everything that had happened, from that first conversation with Hillary Constable in her study at home, to the meeting in the embassy with Aaron Wolfe.

“It was probably a mistake, that I agreed to find out what I could, but then, when she told me that I should forget everything, that it was better if everyone was left to believe that her husband had died of a heart attack, I knew something dangerous was going on. I just was not smart enough to know what it was. But Austin was. He thought I had been sent to find out what could be discovered about the president’s death so that it could not be discovered again.”

Jean Valette had sat in silence listening intently to everything Hart said, but now he had a question.

“But why were you chosen, Mr. Hart? The head of the Secret Service, this Clarence Atwood, should have been able to conduct that kind of investigation. Instead of starting at the beginning, start at the end: start with what you know now. You’re being blamed for the murder. Isn’t it just possible that this was always the intention?”

“But why?” asked Carlyle, riveted by the possibility that Hart was the subject of an elaborate conspiracy, a plan that had been in place from the beginning. “What would be the point of doing this to you?”

Before Hart could answer, Jean Valette offered a suggestion.

“What other reason than to get rid of a competitor, someone who might take away the thing you most wanted in your life? The presidency, Mr. Carlyle. The White House. Isn’t that what it was about from the beginning?”

Jean Valette leaned back and with a pensive expression tapped his thin, tapered fingers together. His eyes grew hard and distant. A shrewd, death-like smile made a fugitive appearance at the corners of his mouth. He had no illusions about the dark side of human nature.

“The president is dead, and someone else takes his place. Fate, chance, the inscrutable workings of providence, God’s will? Is that what we believe, that someone murdered, someone planned the death, of Robert Constable, and it had nothing to do with-as you Americans would put it-the biggest prize of all?” Gesturing toward Hart, he challenged the reporter. “Don’t you think it more than strange-is it not a new record in mass stupidity-that an enormously popular United States senator-a man, from what I’m told, a great many people hoped would run for the presidency himself-is accused of murder because the man he murdered supposedly slept with his wife? These things happen. I don’t need to be told that. A crime of passion has a certain appeal. But hire a professional assassin? Where is the passion-where is the honor-in that? You feel so strongly about a wife’s infidelity that you want the man she slept with dead, but you don’t want to do anything about it yourself? Where is the passion in that, Mr. Carlyle? There isn’t any. This was no crime of passion; this was passion of a different kind: the passion for power, the desire to take control, to seize an office, in perhaps the only way you could ever have it.”

Jean Valette tapped his fingers together once more, and then dropped his hands onto the table and sat straight up.

“Tell me, Mr. Carlyle, you cover American politics-that is the reason we invited you-what were the chances, if Robert Constable was still alive, that Irwin Russell would ever become president?”

Carlyle’s eyes almost popped out of his head. He looked immediately at Hart, but Hart was still staring at Jean Valette, wondering what he was going to say next. Inspector Dumont, for his part, sat with folded arms, gently rocking back and forth, listening with the slightly bored expression of a man who had heard and seen too much to ever be very much surprised at anything.

“Everything leads to The Four Sisters,” said Carlyle. His eyes were cold, immediate. “You confirmed what Quentin Burdick said. How does this tie into that? What is the connection between The Four Sisters and the possibility that the president had something to do with Constable’s murder?”

His elbow on the arm of his chair, Jean Valette stretched two fingers along the side of his face and placed his thumb against his chin. He sat there, in that attitude of repose, moving his head side to side, keeping rhythm with his thoughts; debating, as it seemed, how best to answer.

“When you leave here today, Mr. Carlyle,” he said finally, “you will take with you a collection of documents assembled from some of the companies in which The Four Sisters has an interest. Copies of checks, bank transfers, financial transactions-some of them quite complex-that in some cases go back more than ten years.”

“What do they explain about the murder?” demanded Carlyle, who wanted a more immediate answer than a series of old bank statements. “Our president was murdered and you’re telling me that another president killed him?”

To Hart’s astonishment, Jean Valette denied it.

“That’s not what I said, Mr. Carlyle. I did not accuse Russell, or anyone else, of anything.”

He said this with a calm, almost playful gaze. He was enjoying it, this game of words; enjoying it as if the question who murdered the president, a political assassination, was nothing more than an intellectual exercise, a method by which to sharpen one’s wits.

“I only raised the question whether Irwin Russell could have become president in any other way. The same question could be asked about the president’s widow, couldn’t it? Would she have had any chance to become president if her husband had lived?”

“Good God!” cried Carlyle. “Now you’re suggesting… You really think she could have done it: arranged to have her husband murdered?”

He seemed more interested in this possibility than in the other, perhaps because it seemed to fit better the known facts of the former first lady’s ambition, not to mention the known facts of her husband’s rampant infidelity.

“The answer to your question,” said Hart, turning to Jean Valette, “is that you made a mistake in your assumption.”

Jean Valette cocked his head. A thin, knowing smile threaded its way across his mouth.

“A mistake?”

“Irwin Russell probably could not have become president if Constable had lived, but Hillary Constable could have. She would have run as her husband’s successor; the nomination would have been hers. It’s doubtful anyone could have beaten her; it’s doubtful anyone would have tried. That was one of the reasons he was picked to run with Constable in the last election: so there would not be a vice president who would try to run against her.”

The smile on the face of Jean Valette deepened and became more profound.

“Are you sure that was the reason they wanted Irwin Russell on the ticket, Mr. Hart? Are you sure it was really their decision?”

“Russell helped him carry Ohio,” insisted Carlyle. “With Constable, everything was a political calculation.”

But Hart and Jean Valette were still looking at each other, measuring, or trying to measure, what the other one knew, or thought he knew.

“It doesn’t really matter why he was chosen,” observed Hart. “It doesn’t affect the fact that Russell could not have won the presidency on his own and that Hillary Constable could have, and still might. What motive could she have had to want her husband dead? You seem to think she had one. Why don’t you just tell us what you think it was?”

Jean Valette looked across at Carlyle as if he were seeing for the first time how young he was, and how eager to get this story right, the story that any reporter would have killed to get. That was what struck Hart as he watched: how conscious Jean Valette was of the effect the story was going to have on everyone, not only those directly involved in the events, but those who were going to tell the story, and who would, immediately upon the telling, become the new subject of other people’s stories, the center of attention for everyone who wanted to know more about the secret interview with Bobby Hart and the anonymous and enigmatic source that somewhere in France had first revealed the involvement of The Four Sisters and provided the documentary evidence necessary to prove it. Hart could not quite rid himself of the feeling that everything that was happening, everything that had been said in that room, was exactly what Jean Valette had expected. It was a feeling that immediately became more pronounced.

“Mr. Hart already knows what it is,” said Jean Valette with perfect confidence. “And so, Mr. Carlyle, do you. You said it at the beginning, what your friend Quentin Burdick first told you: everything leads to The Four Sisters. That’s the secret they shared, the secret none of them could afford to have anyone learn: that millions, tens of millions of dollars, had passed into their hands, money provided through one means and another by companies in which my firm had an interest.”

Inspector Dumont got to his feet.

“Perhaps this would be a good time for me to leave. I don’t think I should-”

“No, it’s all right, Marcel. We weren’t involved in any criminal wrongdoing; certainly nothing that broke the laws of France. There is a difference, after all, between bribery and extortion. I didn’t-The Four Sisters didn’t-offer to give Constable or any of his friends and associates money in exchange for any help we needed. He came to us, explained that he wanted better trade relations, and that the only way to do that was to help elect people who wanted the same thing. He was really quite ingenious, when it came to working out a scheme for his own advantage, ingenious and quite corrupt. Everything with him was a maneuver, a way to get around whatever obstacles stood in his path. Foreigners could not contribute to American political campaigns? Give money for other things-a foundation, a library-or move money into an American company, a subsidiary, and get the money into the right hands that way.”

“Some of that money came from foreign interests that weren’t supposed to be doing any business in the United States,” added Hart with a sharp, accusatory glance. “And in exchange, because of what you did, some of those same interests were able to get control of companies that have a direct effect on what Americans think.”

“It’s a global economy, Mr. Hart. The point is that Robert Constable had taken millions-forced us to give him that money-and so had several others.”

“Frank Morris, who changed his mind and got sent to prison because of it, and then, after he talked to Quentin Burdick and told him what he knew, got killed,” said Hart, growing more agitated by the minute.

“Yes, I’ve heard this,” said Jean Valette, who seemed almost amused. “That would have been something Constable would have arranged.”

“Constable was already dead!” Hart reminded him forcefully.

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? Who other than Constable could have set the wheels in motion? Who else could have had the congressman charged with a crime, turned out of office, and sent to prison? Do you think he wouldn’t have given orders that if it became necessary, if Morris started talking about what he knew, he should be eliminated? But if Morris was killed to protect the secret, why wouldn’t Constable have been killed for the same reason? This gets us back to the same two people, doesn’t it?”

Carlyle slammed the ballpoint pen on the notebook and let out an expletive.

“Russell was one of those taking money?” His eyes brightened with a new intensity. “Morris, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; Russell, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Constable had to be able to use them both.” He looked sharply at Jean Valette. “You-The Four Sisters-would have needed the help of both, if-”

“If we had played an active part in this. But we only did what Constable said we should, what, as he explained, was the only reasonable way to obtain the changes that would be good for everyone.”

“Changes that made you a great deal of money!”

Jean Valette almost laughed.

“It depends, doesn’t it, on what you consider a great deal of money?”

Hart bent forward, following intently everything that was said, and, in the case of Jean Valette, the meaning of every look and every gesture. A picture was beginning to form, but there were still a few blank spaces that needed to be filled in.

“Russell was taking money, too. He shared the secret; he knew what Constable was doing. But he didn’t change his mind, like Frank Morris. He was not concerned with what any of this might do to the country. He became vice president, instead. Is that what you were trying to say, that it was not what Constable wanted; it’s what Russell decided was the price of his silence?”

With slow precision, Jean Valette lifted an eyebrow, his face fixed again in the attitude of someone playing at a game, or rather, watching one, measuring with an expert’s practiced judgment the feeble attempt of amateurs.

“Perhaps that is to give your new president too much credit. It may be that it was Constable’s idea instead, a way to ensure himself that Russell would not be tempted by a suddenly resurrected conscience into such an inconvenient confession.”

“And Hillary Constable-what motive…? Oh, I see,” said Carlyle, nodding his head. He picked up his pen and scrawled a few short, abbreviated sentences. “Quentin Burdick. He was onto the story. He had an appointment with… She would not be able to run for anything, much less the presidency, if all of this came out.” With a puzzled glance, he turned quickly to Hart. “She asked you to look into it, see what you could find out about-?”

“The murder, and The Four Sisters,” said Inspector Dumont, who had been sitting, almost forgotten, for the last half hour. “That way she finds out what someone might find out about the secret they share, and because, by putting you, Mr. Hart, in direct connection with everything that has happened, the accusation against you acquires the credibility of proximity. Why else would you be so close to all of this, if it weren’t because you were trying to cover your own tracks? And then, whatever you may have uncovered about the murder and The Four Sisters, no one will believe it. Especially,” he added with a humorous glint in his eye, “if you were to wind up dead.”

Hart did not entirely agree.

“I don’t believe she’s behind this. I wouldn’t have believed it about Irwin Russell, either; but I didn’t know he was a crook, as big a crook as Constable. So they both had a motive, but he’s the one who ends up being president, at least for a while. She can still beat him, and the election is only a year away.” Suddenly, he remembered. He looked at Carlyle. “Neither one of them will be running for anything, will they?”

Carlyle folded his notebook.

“If those documents prove that Constable and Russell were taking money, tens of millions, then I imagine the only thing either one of them will be thinking about is how to stay out of prison. It does explain what just happened, though. Everyone thought what you thought, Senator: that Hillary Constable would run against Russell for the nomination.”

“It seems like I’ve been gone for years, even though it’s only been a couple of days. What happened? Did she announce that she was not going to run after all?”

“No. Russell announced that she had agreed to become vice president. He’s sending her nomination to the Hill this week. They’re going to run for reelection as a team.”