Morris looked down at his gnarled, spotted hands, folded together on the table. A sly grin inched across his face.
“You didn’t come all the way cross country to hear me talk about all the good I tried to do.” He raised his eyes to Burdick’s waiting gaze. “And I’ve known you long enough to know that you didn’t come to hear me tell you that I’m innocent and should never have been convicted of something I didn’t do.”
Burdick leaned back in the plastic chair and studied Morris with a sad, friendly smile. He liked him, he always had. Frank Morris had not always told him everything, but he had never lied.
“Were you innocent, Frank? Were you convicted of something you didn’t do?”
Morris looked past him, out the window to the courtyard and the shining blue sky above. His mouth twisted down at the corners. He blinked his eyes.
“No, I wasn’t innocent. I did what they said I did.” His eyes moved back to Burdick, but there was now a sense of urgency in them, as if the question of his own guilt was not the end, but only the beginning, of the story. “The interesting thing isn’t that I did it-took money that I shouldn’t have taken-the interesting thing is that someone found out. That wasn’t an accident, Quentin. I was being taught a lesson, a lesson they wanted others to learn. They wanted me, and certain others, to know that they could destroy anyone who got out of line.”
That same shrewd grin, but more serious this time, creased his mouth. He scratched his chin with the tips of two thick fingers and then, as if dismissing what he had started to say, waved his hand to the side.
“But maybe that’s the reason you’re here. You found out something. What do you want to know?”
Burdick did not change expression. He looked straight at Morris.
“The Four Sisters-is that who we’re talking about, the people you say wanted to teach you a lesson?”
“It’s the reason for all my trouble, and I’m going to be the reason for theirs.”
Burdick took out a notebook. He wrote Morris’s name across the top of the page, and then the words “The Four Sisters.” While he was doing this, Morris stood up, stretched his arms, and then folded them across his chest. Even dressed in prison garb, blue denim trousers and a blue denim shirt, he looked impressive, someone in charge. When he was younger, the first time he ran for Congress, they said he could mesmerize an audience; that with his curly black hair and piercing blue eyes, once he started talking no one looked away, no one thought about anything except what they heard. From the very beginning, he had been a force to be reckoned with, and now, forty years later, supposedly a broken man, locked away in prison, he still had some of the same electricity, the same ability to make you want to listen, and believe.
“Remember that old line about how all politics is local? It used to be true; it isn’t anymore. Politics aren’t local; they’re global. No one has yet quite figured that out. It’s the movement of money. Look, when I was a kid, we understood the way things worked. If you had trouble, if your garbage wasn’t being picked up, if you needed some help, if you needed a job, you went to someone, the ward boss, the city councilman-maybe someone in the mayor’s office-and they did what they could. And then, at election time, you returned the favor. We knew something else, too. We knew that these guys we elected to office lived a lot better than they could have lived on the salaries they were paid. We knew the way money changed hands, the way that if you were a contractor and wanted to do business with the city-build the new schoolhouse or repair the potholes in the streets-you made sure some of the profit wound up in the pockets of your friends at city hall. All politics was local, because that was where you could make a deal.”
Burdick’s hand was flying across the page, taking everything down in a shorthand scrawl of his own devising. His hand stopped moving. He looked up at Morris.
“But you never did that, made that kind of deal. What changed? Why did you do what you did?”
Morris shrugged and looked away. He fell into a long silence, as if he was not sure even now what had led him to do the things he had.
“Maybe I was greedier than the others; maybe when there wasn’t much money involved I was too afraid of getting caught. It isn’t that difficult to turn down a bribe when they’re counting in thousands; but millions, and all of it safe, money that will get paid in the form of salaries and stock options after you retire from Congress and become a board member for some international financial consortium? That’s something else again. With that kind of money it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re not doing anything fundamentally wrong, and that, in any case, you deserve it. Not really convince yourself, you understand,” added Morris as he sat down again, “but think that a legitimate argument could be made for doing what you might have done anyway, make certain changes that make it easier for certain companies to compete in the new global economy we keep talking about. All that needed to be done was to add certain specific requirements to some major defense procurement contracts, requirements that could only be met by firms owned and controlled by the same investment house.”
“The Four Sisters,” said Burdick, just to be sure.
“Yes, of course. But you need to understand that the money, the serious money, wasn’t in the value of the contract itself. It was in the advance knowledge that the contract was going to them.”
Quentin Burdick knew a thing or two about Wall Street and the way serious money was made.
“The jump in the price of the stock, inside information-they could buy before anyone else knew.”
“Right. And then with the money they made, they bought other companies; or rather had companies they controlled do it for them, because The Four Sisters does not exist. They moved money all around the world. Some of the money they moved here came from places we supposedly don’t do business with. Do you understand what I’m telling you? The Four Sisters is a shell game, a way for companies, and countries, to acquire influence that, if we knew about it, we would never permit. They’re into everything: television, movies, the whole entertainment industry; newspapers, magazines, book publishing. That’s when I started to question what they were doing, when I threatened to go public and bring it all to a stop. And that’s why I’m here-because they would not let that happen.”
Burdick pushed aside the notebook and sat back. He did not have a doubt that Morris was telling the truth.
“What about Constable? Was the president involved?”
A look of cynicism and contempt shot across Morris’s tired face.
“He was never about anything except himself. I went to him when I found out what I just told you. You know what he told me?-That none of it mattered, that there was nothing to worry about, that we had not done anything wrong, that no one would ever find out.” Morris could still not quite believe it. “You imagine? In the same breath: we haven’t done anything wrong, and no one will ever find out! Well, someone found out, didn’t they? Someone found out because my good friend Robert Constable, the guy I helped elect president, had to tell his friends, and his friends made sure there was enough evidence that when someone tipped off the FBI that I had taken a bribe they could find the money-money, by the way, in an account in the Cayman Islands I didn’t know I had.”