They had rented a car and driven all over France. If he tried to rent one now, he would have to provide identification, information that would almost surely be traced. His own government was after him, and the French had no reason not to help. He took a taxi to the train station and tried to buy a ticket. The clerk only shrugged.
“There is no train to Mont Saint-Michel.”
“No train tonight, or no train?” asked Hart patiently.
“No train, tonight, tomorrow, anytime, monsieur. Perhaps you would prefer to go somewhere else?” he asked with a look of bored indifference.
“All right,” agreed Hart without hesitation. “I’ll go there instead.”
With a balding head and a small, hawk-like nose, the clerk’s round face seemed in danger of slipping past his chin. Despite himself, he was starting to like the manner of this American who seemed inclined to let the conversation, such as it was, go where it would.
“I’m not sure how much that particular ticket would cost, monsieur. As you might imagine, ‘somewhere else’ is not one of our most requested destinations.”
“Perhaps if you had a special train…?”
The clerk’s eyebrows shot halfway up his vacant skull.
“Then you could of course go anywhere-wherever there were tracks-but the cost!-Nothing short of astronomical.” His eyes tightened, became confidential. “But perhaps that is something you can afford. Still, it would take time to arrange, and, if I am not mistaken, you are in something of a hurry. A special train is out, and we have no train to Mont Saint-Michel. How do we solve this dilemma? Ah, perhaps I have the solution. We have a train-it leaves in an hour-to a station ten kilometers away from where you want to go. From there, you can take a taxi, or even walk, if you prefer.”
Hart appeared to think about it.
“Well, if that’s the closest you can get.”
Though recently refurbished, and spotlessly clean, the train station had the gaslight atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, dimly lit, with intricate, iron latticework columns and shiny marble floors. The only thing missing was the rush of steam from a heaving locomotive. The new high-speed trains that shot across the country, and the continent, in less than half the time it had taken before, ran quieter and cleaner than that. Hart tried to imagine what Laura would say, the quick, easy commentary on the things she saw, the sudden insights that made so much sense to him perhaps precisely because he had never had the same thought himself. Laura always looked at things through different eyes. She was never much impressed with the urgent demands of the present. Others thought her odd, eccentric, for that, and even a symptom of the instability that had brought her close to a breakdown; Bobby was convinced that it was the source of the strength that had saved her sanity. He was desperate to talk to her, to hear her voice, but afraid that after he had called her once, left that message for her to hear when she got home, the next attempt would be traced.
Staying in the shadows, he wandered around the train station, passing the time. With trains coming and going, departures and arrivals every few minutes, the crowd was always changing, no one there long enough to notice anyone twice. Even if someone thought for a moment that his was a face they recognized, they were in too much of a hurry to remember where they might have seen him before. He felt safe enough to buy a paper.
As soon as he saw the front page, he wished he had not. His picture was plastered all over it; his picture, and that of Robert Constable, the president that, according to the lurid headline, had been murdered at the direction of a conspiracy led by Robert Hart. Alone on a bench next to the track on which his train was scheduled to arrive, Hart read with growing anger a blatant fiction in which he had been cast, not as the victim of a colossal ambition, a senator who wanted to be president, but as a husband driven to murder by his wife’s infidelity. This was evil multiplied by itself: blame the murder on a man who did not do it, and pin the motive on his wife. His stomach twisted into a knot, tearing at him until he did not know if he could breathe. He crumpled the paper in his hand and spread his feet apart, bent forward over his knees, and threw up.
Wiping the vomit from his mouth, he straightened out the paper. Whatever they were saying, no matter how distorted, he had to know what he was up against. A photograph of Robert Constable beaming at the beautiful wife of the senator, taken at a fund-raising dinner during Bobby Hart’s last campaign, was enough to establish an interest, which, given the president’s reputation with women, meant something close to confirmation for whatever prurient-minded people were willing to imagine. There was a genius in simplicity. Robert Constable never looked at a beautiful woman without wanting her. Laura Hart was as beautiful as any woman anyone had ever seen. Did the president have an affair with the wife of a senator of his own party-what other reason would Bobby Hart have had to hire someone to murder him?
That at least was the venomous logic of the unnamed source, identified only as someone close to the investigation: Hart was guilty, and this is the reason he did it. Infidelity, betrayal, and anger-more than justified at what Robert Constable had done-would have been decent motives for revenge; but, more importantly, what evidence had been fabricated to convince people that he was guilty of the crime? His eyes moved swiftly down the endless column inches. He read to the end of the page and then followed the story to the next page after that.
He stopped at another photograph, halfway down the page: a woman, young and attractive, lay sprawled on the pavement outside her tenth-floor apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. Her name was Sophie Jardin, a French citizen, and the hired assassin who had killed the president. According to the report, she had fallen from her balcony while trying to get away a little past midnight-an hour, as Hart calculated, after Quentin Burdick had been murdered. The evidence against Robert Hart had been found in her apartment: records of a series of payments made to a bank in Switzerland. Richard Bauman, the Secret Service agent who had been with the president the night he died, had given the FBI a description of what she looked like; an anonymous source had told them where she lived.
“An anonymous source!” muttered Hart in frustration.
The woman, the assassin they had hired, had been dead from the moment she agreed to take the job. She had always been the one essential, and completely expendable, part of the real conspiracy, the one that had gotten rid of the president and wanted to get rid of him. Killing her removed a potential threat, someone who could lead an investigation back to them; but more than that, it made her a witness against Hart, an accomplice, if you will, in the very conspiracy that had resulted in her death: There was no one left to question whether the records found in her apartment were really hers.
A noose was closing around his neck, and he had the awful, empty feeling that there was nothing he could do to stop it. He had the strange, dark sensation of falling through a trap door, knowing he had only a second left to live. He got up from the bench and started pacing back and forth, growing more determined, and more desperate, to get to Mont Saint-Michel and, if he had to, force Jean Valette to tell the truth.
The train seemed to stop every few minutes as it wound its way through the rolling Norman countryside. Hart sank low in a seat next to the window, grateful that the car was nearly empty and no one had to sit beside him; grateful, also, that the few passengers who got on and off were too busy with their own affairs to pay him any notice. The train rolled on through the endless night, lost in the darkness until, finally, three hours later, it arrived at the village where, sometime the next afternoon, Hart could take a taxi the rest of the way. He woke the porter at the only hotel, paid cash in advance for a room with a window in the back, and collapsed on the soft, down-filled mattress like a soldier just come back from the front.