“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-”