“Angelique?” asked Pearce, rather surprised. Malreaux had only married her the year before.
“No, the one before-Alexis. Remember her? Not sure that was the only pass he ever made at her, either. Not sure, to tell the plain truth about it, that the son-of-a-bitch wasn’t successful.”
The memory of a former wife’s possible deceit was now just that-a memory-and if Malreaux knew how to do anything, it was how to forget. His former wife was gone, and now so was the president who might have taken more than just his money.
“What’s going to happen now, with Russell, I mean? Do you think he’ll run, or will she?”
Pearce seemed to ponder the question, to take seriously what the ambassador wanted to know. He put his hand on his shoulder and looked him straight in the eye.
“Chances are that one of them will.”
“Yes, I think you’re probably right,” said the ambassador, after thinking about it a moment. “In fact, I’m almost sure of it.”
Suddenly, he remembered who he was with. His face reddened slightly as he turned to Hart.
“I’m not sure I should tell you this, but I suppose it can’t do any harm now. The Constables thought you might run when his second term was over. They were worried about it. Those of us who had raised money for him were being asked to get ready to do the same thing for her. They thought that if she had all the money locked up, you’d have to think twice about getting into it.”
He said this with a look that suggested he did not think it would have worked, and that he would not have minded if it had not; a look that said his relationship with the Constables was as transitory, as dependent on immediate need, as any other type of investment. Malreaux may not have known anything of history or culture, or anything else of lasting importance, but he had, like other men of business, an instinct for his own advantage.
“Any chance you might do it, run this time?” he asked point blank. “She’ll beat Russell, if he tries to run, but you can beat her. You’re the only one who can.”
“I didn’t have any plans to run before,” replied Hart, an oblique reference to the calculation, bordering on paranoia, with which the Constables had planned their campaigns. “I certainly don’t have any now.”
It was exactly what someone who was planning to run would say. No one shut the door on the chance to be president.
“If things change,” said Malreaux with a knowing smile, “there may be some things I can do.”
Nodding his satisfaction at the prospect, he opened the door to the conference room and introduced his two guests to the head of the embassy’s political section. Then, begging other pressing commitments, he left them alone and, full of news, hurried off to his next appointment.
Aaron Wolfe was all business. The head of the embassy’s political section through several changes of administration, he had seen ambassadors come and go. A career foreign service officer, he kept his opinions to himself and offered advice only when he was asked to do so. Though it might seem a paradox to others, he preferred serving under an ambassador like Andrew Malreaux to one who came to the position thinking that he knew something about the French. Malreaux had no choice but to depend upon him; certain others, like Malreaux’s immediate predecessor, thought that because they had lived in Paris for a few months in their twenties, or read a few French novels in their forties, knew everything there was to know and could decide things on their own. Wolfe was only thirty-eight, but intellectually, especially compared to the ambassador, he felt ancient.
“The ambassador asked me to tell you what we know about The Four Sisters,” he said, folding his hands in front of him.
He was sitting at the head of an oblong conference table, a map of France on the wall behind him. Hart and Austin Pearce had been directed to chairs on opposite sides. The windows behind Hart looked out on the interior courtyard of the embassy.
“This isn’t usually the sort of thing we share,” continued Wolfe. “Senator Hart, of course, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have access to everything we have-through the normal State Department channels; and as secretary of treasury, you, Mr. Pearce, would have been entitled to the same information, and by means of the same process. I mention this only because-”
“Because you’re not sure the ambassador hasn’t made a mistake, and you don’t want to find yourself being hung out to dry,” said Hart, with a friendly, earnest look that took Wolfe off guard. Hart bent forward on his elbows. “I can’t tell you why we’re here, I can’t…”
He seemed to change his mind, to wonder why he was continuing the pretense, why he did not just tell him the truth and impress upon him the urgency of what they needed to know. He glanced across at Austin Pearce to make certain Pearce would not object.
“We’re here because the president of the United States didn’t die of a heart attack, the way it has been reported. The president was murdered, and there have been two murders since, and both of the men who were killed knew something about it. There are only a few people who know about this, Mr. Wolfe, and if you so much as mention it to anyone-if you breathe a word of this to the ambassador-I’ll make sure that instead of Paris, your next assignment will be somewhere in the sub-Sahara in the middle of a civil war. Now, what can you tell us about The Four Sisters and Jean de la Valette?”
Aaron Wolfe no longer felt ancient, but suddenly young and out of his depth. He fumbled with the papers stacked in front of him, the copious notes he had prepared, no longer certain quite what to say or what to do.
“But what does The Four Sisters…what does Jean Valette have to do with that?” he asked without thinking. The only response was a blank stare. He started to mumble an apology.
“Just tell us what you know. Then we can figure out what it means.”
Removing his glasses, Wolfe pushed the notes he had written off to the side. He did not need them to remind him of the facts.
“The Four Sisters-the name itself tells you something about the French and their history, the price they sometimes had to pay for survival. The grandfather of Jean Valette was the only son of a banker. He was only twenty-five when he died, a soldier killed at the famous Battle of the Marne, when the German army was stopped just outside Paris in the first great battle of the First World War, the battle in which Marshal Petain saved France. He had a son, just a boy at the time of his death, a boy, moreover, who had lost his mother in childbirth, but he had four sisters. They took on the management of the bank and, in addition, the education of their nephew. By any measure, they did a remarkable job of both.”
Aaron Wolfe drank from a glass of water. There was a troubled expression in his dark blue eyes. As much as he tried to concentrate on the task at hand-the brief chronology, the history of the last hundred years, of the family of Jean Valette-he kept coming back to the awful secret he had just learned.
“It’s true,” said Hart, not without sympathy for the shock he knew the other man must have felt. “Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. There’s reason to believe that The Four Sisters is involved.”
Wolfe thought for a moment, trying to gauge the possibilities.
“Valette is a very strange man in some ways, remarkable-more remarkable than perhaps anyone in France; more remarkable, perhaps, than anyone anywhere, so far as that goes-but involved in something like that? It doesn’t seem possible.”