Morris took Burdick’s notebook and quickly drew a parallel set of boxes connected by two different lines.
“You have a company operating in the United States. It’s a subsidiary of another company with headquarters in Great Britain, which in turn is a subsidiary of a company owned, or apparently owned, by a company in Bahrain, a company in which a controlling interest is owned by-you guessed it-a certain French investment firm. Then another American company, controlled by another company based overseas, and that company in turn is… You get the idea. Add to that the ability to move money from one company to the next, from one country to another, and to do it endlessly, back and forth, move it electronically at the speed of light.-No one can trace it, no one can keep up. No one can measure how much influence it is buying and what the people who control it are going to do next. All you can know is that whoever sits on top of all this, whoever is in control, can do damn near anything he wants-bring an economy to its knees if that serves his purposes.”
Morris was breathing hard. Beads of perspiration had started to form on his forehead. He leaned back and shook his head, his eyes full of regret at what he had done.
“Jean de la Valette, that’s the Frenchman’s name. Maybe the most powerful man in the world and there aren’t six people in this country who even know he exists. Even the people who head the companies he controls don’t know anything about him. They report to other people, who don’t know much more themselves. A European financial consortium, that’s the phrase you’ll hear; a group of institutions that contribute to the efficiency of the financial markets. What could be less threatening than something that sounds as dull as that? The country is being sold right in front of us, and we’re too damn blind to see it. And I get to go to my grave knowing I helped.”
Morris scratched the back of his head. A look of discouragement swept over his eyes.
“I’m not sure there’s a difference, but I didn’t think I was selling out my country. I thought I was doing myself a favor, and while I didn’t kid myself and think what I was doing was honest, I didn’t think it was going to hurt anyone else. Some people were going to make a lot of money; some people always do. And this time I was going to be one of them. And then, when I found out what they were really up to, it was too late. But Constable-he knew what was going on and it didn’t stop him.”
Morris rolled his shoulders forward until he was hunched over the table. His jaw moved slowly side to side as he reconsidered the judgment which just the moment before he had uttered with such certainty.
“Maybe he had to do it. Maybe he had to buy her off.” Morris leaned back again, stroking his chin. “The one thing you always knew about those two was that whatever kept them together, it wasn’t love.”
Burdick put down his pen. There was a question he still had to ask, a question he would not have thought of had Morris not already seemed to answer it the day before.
“How serious were you when you suggested that Constable did not die of a heart attack, that he was murdered? All the reports say-”
“Screw the reports. That stuff is all rigged. They’d never let out that he was murdered. That’s all the country would be talking about: Who murdered Robert Constable and why? You think the Kennedy assassination led to conspiracy theories? What do you think would happen with something like this? I read the papers, I see what’s on television. There are already hints-rumors, according to the cable tabloid networks-that someone might have been there with him the night he died. Died of a heart attack while getting laid, that’s what they keep insinuating.”
“But you don’t know that he didn’t die of a heart attack, whether or not he was alone. He had a history.”
Morris gave him a caustic, laughing glance.
“He had a history for a lot of things. Did he die of a heart attack, like they say? Yeah, maybe-but did that just happen because his time was up, or he got a little too excited in bed? Or was it caused by something else? You ask me if I know for certain if he was murdered. No, but that’s what I believe. He knew too much, and he wasn’t someone you could trust. That’s what Constable was always too damn stupid to understand. Once he betrayed me, once he told them what I was going to do, they knew what he was like, that he’d sell his mother if he had to, which meant he’d sell them too. You were going to see him; he knew why you were coming. What makes you think that someone who works for them wasn’t listening in on your call? What makes you think that one of the people that worked for him, someone who kept track of his schedule, wasn’t working for them? Let me tell you something, for all the obvious disadvantages, I have more privacy here in prison than you have out there.”
“If you’re right,” said Burdick, “if he was murdered-how do I find out? Who is going to tell me?”
Morris sunk his chin on his chest. He tapped two fingers on the table and stared straight ahead.
“Start with who feels the worst about what happened,” he said after thinking about it. “The agent in charge, the Secret Service agent who was there that night, if you can find him-Ask him about the woman, the one that, according to all the rumors you’ve heard, was in the room with Constable when he died. Listen, figure it out. The guy is there to protect the president. The president dies. It looks like a heart attack. The girl-if there was a girl, and if there wasn’t there had to be someone else-is in the room. The agent had to know she was there. Christ, you couldn’t guard Constable for ten minutes and not know what he was like. The girl is there. The first question the agent had to deal with was what to do with her. The president is dead. What is your next obligation-what do you do? If you do things by the book, you hold her there and make a full report, but this is a president we’re talking about. What would you do, what would we both do? Protect his reputation, save his family-whatever you might think about his wife-the shame and embarrassment of a useless scandal. That’s my guess, anyway, about what he might have done.”
Morris moved his head like a boxer, anticipating an opponent’s next move. His eyes narrowed into a look of intense concentration.
“He gets rid of her, gets her out of the way, makes sure no one knows she was ever there. But then what happens, if it turns out it wasn’t a simple heart attack, if it turns out it was murder? Was the girl involved, the girl he let go? If that’s what happened, this guy is now a mess, damned both for what he did and what he did not do.”
Morris nodded in agreement with his own conjecture. He looked at Burdick.
“If you can find him, if you can get him to talk to you, he might just spill his guts, tell you what he knows. He’s probably dying to clear his conscience, to make things right. Remember, if it was a murder, in addition to everything else, he’s now being forced to play a part in a cover-up. Do you think he wants to spend the rest of his life worrying about what’s going to happen when someone finds out what he did? Would you?”
Burdick glanced at his watch. If he stayed much longer he would miss his flight and have to stay another day. He folded up the notebook and tucked it back in his pocket. Morris did not want him to go.
“Not yet. There’s something you should see.”
Burdick watched with a sense of foreboding as Frank Morris stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.
“At the end of my trial, just after the judge sentenced me, when they took me back to jail, I got this.”
Pulling his shirt open, he pointed to a three-inch scar on his left side, just below his ribs.
“It was a warning. They were telling me to do my time and not talk to anyone. When I said I was going to die of cancer unless that fucking Frenchman killed me first, I wasn’t kidding. But listen to me: write the story, all of it, including what I did. If they come for me, at least I’ll die knowing that I got them back.”