“You said you came here before with your wife. But this time you come alone?”
“I hadn’t really planned this trip. I only just found out I’m supposed to meet someone here, and I’m not even quite sure where.” He made it sound as if his confusion were a simple mistake, a misunderstanding that would not have any serious result. “Perhaps you know the man I’m here to see-Jean Valette?”
The driver looked at him as if he must be kidding, as if it were some kind of American prank, like saying, in an earlier time, that he was there to meet Charles de Gaulle. Then he seemed to reconsider. With his feet on the sidewalk, he sat down on the front seat of the taxi and glanced up at Hart, standing in front of him. He seemed particularly intrigued by the way Hart was dressed.
“Are you sure you want to go like that?”
Hart turned up the palms of his hands, and with a puzzled glance asked him what he meant.
“The way you’re dressed-I would have thought…I mean everyone else is-how shall I say?-More formaclass="underline" suits and ties, and the women, of course, also quite properly.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Hart, growing more perplexed.
“You said you were meeting Jean Valette. I assume you mean Jean Valette, the famous financier.”
“Yes, now if you know where I can find him, I’ll-”
“Doesn’t it say, on your invitation?”
“I don’t have that kind of invitation. The meeting was arranged by someone else, and, as I said, I was just informed of it late yesterday. I barely had time to get here.”
“Four o’clock,” said the driver, to Hart’s astonishment.
“Yes, but how did you know…?”
The driver got out of the car. There were people passing by, and he did not want to be overheard. Placing his hands on the small of his back, he stretched up on the balls of his feet and then took a deep breath. He would try again.
“It always starts at four o’clock; every year as far back as I can remember. I drive a number of them over myself, usually the night before, sometimes in the morning. Some of them, of course, stay here, in the abbey; some of them for as much as a week. They like to get the feel of what it was like a thousand years ago, when it first happened.”
Despite his attempt at resistance, Hart was running out of patience. As politely as he could, he asked, “When what first happened?”
“The Crusade, of course. They come here, the same time every year, to commemorate the first one to happen, sometimes a hundred people, sometimes more; and every year, late in the afternoon, the head of it gives a speech. That’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it, to hear Jean Valette?”
“At four o’clock,” said Hart, just to be sure. “But where?”
“In the Refectory, of course. Where else would they gather for a meal?”
“The Refectory, at four o’clock,” said Hart, as he began to move away.
That was what Austin Pearce had learned: that Jean Valette was here, that he came here every year. There was not any meeting, there was no appointment. Neither Jean Valette, nor anyone else, knew Hart was coming. The advantage was all his.
“You won’t have any trouble finding it,” the driver called after him. “There should be signs all around.”
Hart stopped and turned back.
“Signs? About what?”
The driver threw up his hands.
“The annual meeting of the Knights of St. John-what else?”
Chapter Nineteen
The Crusades, the eleventh century, the Knights of St. John, what did this ancient history have to do with anything that mattered? Hart was wanted for a murder he did not commit, and the only way he could think to prove his innocence was to climb up the well-worn stone steps of a thousand-year-old cathedral perched high above the raging waters of the Atlantic and listen to a man he had never met give a speech about something no one in his right mind would care about! It was ludicrous, he told himself as he pushed through the crowd; worse than ludicrous, stupid, because what could he do when he got there?-Put a gun to Jean Valette’s head in front of the audience that had come to hear him speak, force him to confess the intricate and deadly conspiracy he had set into motion for reasons that Hart could even now not begin to guess?
Slowly, and with a kind of fatal inevitability, the thought came to him that if he had to, he would. If it were the only way to stop this thing from going any further, the only way to end the this vicious string of murders, he would use the gun, not just to bluff Jean Valette into a confession, but kill him. The thought grew on him, became clearer and more certain of itself, the closer he got to the cathedral. The spire was now directly overhead, Michael the Archangel, sword lifted up to heaven, symbol of the eternal vigilance of God.
He was inside the cathedral, searching through the crowds for the way to the Refectory and Jean Valette. Twice he went off in the wrong direction before a friendly tour guide pointed him toward what appeared to be a passage between one set of buildings and another, but was instead the place where the monks had lived and the visiting nobility had taken their meals. Passing the entrance to the dormitory, Hart found the staircase that led down to the Refectory below. The doors were shut and, as a woman at a table just to the side made clear, would not be opened. Even someone with an invitation would not now be admitted.
Hart started for the door anyway, but a guard in plainclothes quickly stepped in front. The woman reached for the telephone to call more security.
“I was asked to be here at four o’clock!” insisted Hart. “Told to be here by one of Mr. Valette’s closest friends, and you say I can’t go in because I’m late by two minutes?”
The woman was a study in precision. Her only response was to raise an eyebrow and look down her nose. Four o’clock was four o’clock, she seemed to say with that glance of silent disapproval; nothing could be simpler, more self-explanatory, than that. She had no sympathy for those who had yet to learn the lessons of punctuality. From behind the closed doors came the muted sound of applause. They were just getting started.
“Here,” said Hart, as he quickly pulled out his wallet and removed his card. “Take this in there, give it to Jean Valette.” Bending slightly forward, he pulled his jacket open so she could see the gun. “And tell him,” he shouted as she got up and hurried toward the door, “that Austin Pearce told me to come here, last night, just before he died!”
The guard took a step forward; the woman stopped him with a look. She slipped inside, and they stood there, Hart and the burly, square-shouldered guard, eyeing each other with suspicion, until, a few moments later, the door swung open and the woman motioned for Hart to enter.
He was at the back of a long, narrow room, lit almost as bright as day by the light that streamed through the windows high above in the walls. Two hundred people could dine together in the Refectory, and there were nearly that many here now. Almost as if he had been expected to arrive late and somehow force himself in, there was an empty chair just inside the door. At the opposite end of the hall, perhaps a hundred feet away, an elderly gentleman with stooped shoulders and a substantial nose, wearing around his neck a three-colored ribbon with a large gold medal in the shape of a five-pointed star, was nearing the end of what even to Hart’s somewhat limited ear for French seemed a dazzling display of wit and good humor.
The audience was clearly captivated by the old man who was obviously well-known and used to their praises. With the impeccable timing of a paid performer-which in some sense he must have been-an actor, a lawyer, or perhaps a retired politician, someone who had lived a long life on one sort of stage or another-he brought each well-turned phrase to a dramatic stop, pausing to let the audience share in common delight what, with just those few words, he had been able to achieve. Hart began to lose all sense of himself as he listened, fascinated, to a talent that, for all the speeches he had heard in Washington, he could only envy. Though his French, once again, was far from perfect, he could follow well enough, once he caught the flow. He understood, almost word for word, the few sentences in which, flushed with triumph, the old man moved from his own brief remarks to the introduction of Jean Valette.