Instead of cynicism, there was a look of something harsher, and more unforgiving, on Frank Morris’s face, a sense of retribution that Burdick did not understand.
“They had to shut me up,” Morris continued, the look bitter and aggrieved. “The way to do that was to discredit me, make me out to be a liar and a thief, someone no one could believe. And they succeeded. But they must have had a different problem with our good friend the president, something they could only solve with more drastic measures.”
“What are you saying?” cried Burdick, wondering if in his bitterness and rage, Morris had lost his senses. “Constable died of a heart attack the night before I was supposed to see him.”
“To talk to him about The Four Sisters?” asked Morris with a quick, eager movement of his eyes that said he was certain he was right.
“That’s what I told him, but-”
“Do you really think that was just a coincidence? You don’t know what you’re dealing with. The Four Sisters isn’t just a bank that moves money around in ways it shouldn’t. Do you know anything about it? Do you know who the head of it is?”
“I didn’t even know what The Four Sisters was until you told me,” admitted Burdick.
The door suddenly opened and the guard appeared. Burdick had been there an hour. It was time to leave.
“Come back tomorrow,” said Morris with new urgency. “There are things you need to know.”
Chapter Seven
Checking into the first motel he found, Burdick went back through his notes, making sure, while everything was fresh in his mind, that it was all there, that he had not forgotten to make a record of the most important parts of what Frank Morris had said. Then, when he was finished, he went back to the beginning and from those fragmentary shorthand notes, wrote out in longhand a full account of what he had been told. He had learned in his years of reporting that even the best memory failed after a fairly short time to recall in all its nuanced specificity the language of a conversation. This was likely to be the biggest story of his career, and he could not afford to make a mistake.
Burdick worked straight through until he had it all down on paper, not just what Frank Morris had said, but how the once all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had looked and sounded, the changes that had made him seem at times a pale imitation of his former self. When he was finally finished, Burdick started to turn on the television to see what news he had missed, but then decided he was too tired to care. He was asleep almost the moment his head hit the pillow.
When he went back to the prison late the next morning, he found Frank Morris more energized, more combative, as if now that he had made his first confession, told Burdick what really had happened, he could not wait to tell him everything. There was something else, another, darker aspect, to the change. Beneath the apparent eagerness to get on with it, to tell Burdick what he knew, there was now a strange, lingering fatalism in his eyes, a belief-no, more than that, a certainty-that what Burdick was going to write would be the last thing that would be written about him, that after this there was nothing.
“Cancer,” he explained with a shrug, a show of indifference he expected from himself. “Six months, maybe less.” Then, flashing a crooked, modest smile meant to put his visitor at his ease, he added, “Unless that fucking Frenchman gets me first.”
“That-?”
“What we talked about yesterday, The Four Sisters. A Frenchman owns it, ‘de la’ something. I’ll remember later. I only met him once, and we didn’t exactly have a conversation. There were a dozen of us, members of Congress on a fact-finding trip in Europe, looking at ways to improve trade, that kind of thing-mainly an excuse to travel at taxpayer expense. There was a reception in Paris, hosted by their foreign ministry. The room was full of bankers and industrialists, but it quickly became apparent that they all deferred to him. And I have to tell you, he was one impressive son-of-a-bitch. He spoke perfect English-no accent-like someone who had gone to an Ivy League college, though I don’t think he did. I remember someone saying that he was from one of France’s oldest families, but I’m not even sure about that. All I know for certain is that he knew more about American history than anyone I’ve ever met. He told us things about our history I didn’t know, and he did it in the course of one of those short welcoming speeches that usually don’t say anything. He may have memorized it, it may have been just off the cuff-he didn’t have any notes, he didn’t read it-but he stood there, and without a false start or a word out of place summarized two hundred years of French-American relations. Maybe that was the reason I didn’t like him: it was all too perfect.”
Morris looked down at his hands. His eyes seemed to draw back on themselves. A shrewd smile cut across his mouth, a sign that he now understood something he should have known before.
“It’s always smart to make a mistake, trip over a word now and then, show the people you’re talking to that you’re human, just like them. Make a mistake, and then laugh at yourself; no one wants to vote against you if you do that. But this guy, I think he’d kill himself before he’d make a mistake, or admit it if he did. He wasn’t arrogant, not the way we usually mean. It went deeper than that. It was almost the opposite of arrogance, someone embarrassed because what he was doing was so easy. Look, I’m no scholar, but I read to all my kids when they were little. That’s what it was like, a grown-up talking to a bunch of children. That isn’t arrogance; that’s someone operating on a different plane, someone who knows how to do something, and someone just starting to learn.”
Burdick had stopped making notes. He was too intent on catching the changing expression on Morris’s face, the added meaning it gave to what he said. Morris had always had a native shrewdness about the character of other people, a way of gauging what, despite their various levels of self-deceit, they really wanted, but Burdick had never heard him describe anyone quite like this, someone who did not seem to fit any of the normal categories by which vanity and ambition were measured. And there was something more. He was not sure what it was, but he was certain that Morris had left out a crucial part of the equation.
“That isn’t the only reason you didn’t like him, is it?”
Morris nodded in agreement.
“You don’t notice it at first. He smiles when he talks to you-he smiled when he shook my hand-but his eyes… they look right through you in a way that makes you feel invisible. But then, when someone has as much money as he’s supposed to have, most people probably are only too glad if he looks at them at all. I noticed, though, which, when you think about it, only makes me worse. I was as eager as anyone else to get what I could from him, or rather from the organization he controls, because, of course, I never did any business directly with him. He left that sort of thing to other people, Americans mainly, who worked for one of his subsidiaries.”
Burdick started making notes again.
“Americans. Can you give me names?”
“Sure, but it won’t do much good. They didn’t do anything criminal, they didn’t break any laws. They acted just like any other interest that has business before the Congress. They made their case for legislation, and I listened. They didn’t come with envelopes stuffed with cash. It isn’t what any one of them did; it’s the connections that exist among them all, the way that all these supposedly separate entities are held together at the top: like puppets on a string, and the string held by one man, but the string all tangled up, twisted in a dozen different directions. Here, let me show you what I mean.”