“What are you talking about? She told me he was murdered, and Atwood confirmed it.”
“Would you have gone looking for his killer, would you have discovered anything about The Four Sisters-would you have been all that interested in what Burdick told you-if she hadn’t told you that? Don’t misunderstand, I think she told you the truth when she told you he had been murdered, but I don’t think that’s the reason she wanted you to find out what you could. I think she wanted to know what was out there, what someone with your connections could discover. She wanted to know what she had to worry about. She was lying when she told you that a few close friends gave them the money they needed. That was a cover story they fabricated together. What was it she said to you?-that Jean de la Valette is someone they could have asked if they had wanted to; could have asked, but didn’t, because they knew what it would look like. You see, she understood exactly what the position was, what they had to do to protect themselves against too close an inquiry. They had friends who would help them, and a lot of them did, but not the kind of money-tens of millions, if not more-that The Four Sisters moved into various accounts for them.”
This was news to Hart. Pearce explained.
“I’ve made some inquires,” he said with a cryptic glance. “What Morris told Burdick is true, although Morris didn’t know the full extent of it. The scheme is complicated in the details, but extremely simple in principle. Several foundations were established, charitable enterprises to do various good works; but, and this is the key to everything, none of them do the work themselves. They give out grants to applicants who want to start a literacy program in the inner city, or a public health program in a third world country-that kind of thing. Each of the foundations has a paid staff, overhead, buildings in Manhattan and in several capitals overseas, buildings that were rented, and buildings that were bought and paid for. The house in Washington is owned by one of them. Everything gets paid for by the foundation: the people who work for you, the planes you lease, the cars you drive, the hotels you stay in, the expensive restaurants you go to eat-everything! It was all there, waiting for the president, the day he left office.”
Austin Pearce rose from his comfortable chair and stood in front of the open French doors, listening to the soft muted sounds of Manhattan that, for someone who lived there, had a music of its own. The rhythm of it, the way it had for so much of his life been a part of who he was, the raucous, endless beat that faded in and out, the sense of romance that came every night in Manhattan, especially when you were alone, made the past, his past, what he had lived through, what he had seen, what he remembered about what had happened, as real as anything that was happening now.
“I saw the Kennedys, Jack when he was president, and then Bobby, later than that; saw them here in New York, heard both of them speak. I didn’t know them of course,” he added, still staring into the square. “I was too young for that. They were heroes to me, people you could look up to, people you could respect. They were both of course quite ruthless when it came to getting what they wanted, but not in the way we mean it now.” He turned a knowing eye on Hart, who was leaning forward in his chair. “There were things they wouldn’t do; things-and this, it seems to me, makes all the difference-they wouldn’t think of doing. They didn’t think they were more important than the country. The other difference,” he remarked with a quick, dismissive laugh, “is that they both had read something; serious things, I mean. Bobby used to quote Aeschylus, and no one thought it strange that he did.”
With a wistful smile, Pearce shook his head at how much had changed. He fell silent for a moment, concentrating, as it seemed, on the long vanished voices that at times still echoed briefly in his mind.
“By the way, have you talked to Burdick?” he asked, engaged again with the present.
“We’ve traded phone calls. I tried him again, just before I got here-but we haven’t talked. But you talked to him, didn’t you? He has the story.”
“I wonder if he does,” said Pearce with a distant, slightly abstracted gaze. “I wonder if anyone ever will. All of it, I mean: the whole story of what really happened. But yes, Quentin Burdick came to see me. I told him what I knew. He’s quite persuasive. There is something about that manner of his that makes you want to talk, the way he makes you feel that he’s grateful just to have a few minutes of your time, and then, before you know it, you’re telling him things you thought you would never tell anyone.” Pearce shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Damned if I didn’t tell him about that day in the Oval Office when I confronted Constable with what I knew, the day he went off into that obscenity-laced tirade and told me I was fired.”
Austin Pearce clasped his hands behind his back and with his head bowed thought hard for a moment.
“We’re in a fairly difficult position. If Hillary Constable insists on lying about the murder, if Atwood goes along with her, there isn’t any way to confirm any of this. The president died of a heart attack and that’s all there is to it. The Four Sisters is just a story about a complicated financial arrangement that can easily be denied and that, in any case, won’t make sense to anyone.”
“But Quentin Burdick has the story,” objected Hart. “He has what Morris told him, and-”
“Frank Morris, disgraced member of Congress, convicted of bribery, a liar, a thief, and now dead, murdered in prison.”
“Murdered after he talked to Burdick!”
“Murdered in prison, no provable link to anything, much less that he happened to talk to a reporter.” Pearce waved his hand, dismissing in advance, as it were, the next objection. “And as for what Morris said about the president’s death-the bitter speculation of a convicted felon.”
Pearce paced back and forth, like a lawyer in the middle of his summation, except that the audience he was playing to, the jury he was trying to persuade, was a jury of only one.
“Burdick can write all he wants about the financial dealings that went on between the companies controlled by The Four Sisters and the late, lamented Robert Constable, but he can’t say anything about a murder. The only people who know about it have, for reasons of their own, decided not to talk about it.”
“But they did talk,” said Hart. “They talked to me. I told Burdick that Constable had been killed. I confirmed what Morris had suspected. I told him I couldn’t tell him how I knew, but I can tell him now,” continued Hart with some heat. “I told Hillary Constable that this couldn’t be kept secret, that I wouldn’t be part of some cover-up. I told her that I’d look into it, see what I could find out, but only for a few days, and that after that there was going to have to be an investigation.”
Pearce seemed worried, concerned about the implications, about what might happen.
“Are you sure you want to do that? If you become the source, if you’re the one who claims that the president was murdered and that his wife knew it and has been covering it up-what do you think happens to you? Remember who you’re dealing with. The basic rule of the Constables has always been to attack.”
Pearce’s visage darkened. His eyes seemed to register astonishment at the catalogue of cruelties that marched through his mind, the parade of half-truths and lies that had become the regular, and expected, method of political warfare practiced by the Constables against not just their opponents, but anyone who got in their way.
“And the second rule has always been to make it appear that they’re only defending themselves against an attack, an outrageously unfair attack, by the other side. Are you sure you want to expose yourself to that?”