“He did not say anything like that to me,” answered Hart truthfully. “Is that what Frank Morris told you?”
Burdick hesitated, but only for a moment.
“He didn’t know that, but that’s what he thought: that Constable didn’t die of a heart attack, that he was murdered instead. Look, Bobby, I’ve been doing this a long time. I covered Constable the first time he ran for president. I covered him when he was in the White House. He didn’t have a principled bone in his body; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t say or do to win. But this!-What Frank Morris told me-I wouldn’t have believed it possible for anyone who was president, not even Constable. I would have thought he had, not too much integrity-I knew him too well for that-but too much sense. That was my mistake. I had forgotten that part of his attraction, the reason why people who did not know him, who had never met him, who had never even seen him except on television liked him as much as they did, was this bigger than life quality he had, this feeling that nothing could touch him, that whatever happened, whatever kind of hole he dug for himself, he could always get out of it and end up back in control, stronger, more popular, than ever. The stupid son-of-a-bitch believed it, thought he was too smart, too important, to ever get caught.
“I think maybe that’s why Morris did it, took money he knew he shouldn’t. It was the whole atmosphere Constable brought with him, the sense that there weren’t any limits; that you could do whatever you wanted and take whatever you needed. Morris told me everything. It wasn’t bribery.”
Narrowing his eyes into a hard, relentless stare, Burdick lapsed into a long silence, as he conjured up the double vision of what Frank Morris had been like when he was one of the most powerful men on the Hill, someone everyone wanted to know, and the last time, barely twenty-four hours ago, when he had become just another numbered inmate in federal prison. Burdick looked up, slightly embarrassed.
“It wasn’t bribery,” he continued, “the way they said it was at his trial. It was bigger than that, hundreds of millions of dollars were involved, and The Four Sisters was right in the middle of it. In the beginning, Morris thought it was a scheme to get certain government contracts for some of the companies, American companies The Four Sisters controlled. But eventually he discovered that it was more than that.”
“More than that?” asked Hart, intensely interested. “The Four Sisters is a private investment firm, though from what I hear, it may be-that phrase you just used-‘more than that.’”
Burdick’s eyebrows rose up like a pair of open umbrellas. There was a grim, rueful quality in his expression, the look of someone who had been forced to face, if not an awful truth, an awful possibility.
“It may be Murder Incorporated on a global scale.”
“You think they killed Constable, and then killed Morris?”
Burdick’s bookish mouth twitched nervously at the corner. He blinked several times in rapid, thoughtful succession.
“After what happened to Morris, after what happened to me-yes, I do.”
“After what happened to you?” For the first time, Hart felt a sense of alarm. “What happened? When, last night?”
Burdick dismissed, or tried to dismiss, the significance of what he had just said. There was something he wanted to talk about first, something important he thought Hart should know.
“Morris discovered that The Four Sisters had created a kind of parallel financial universe, a system that allowed it to move money from one place to another, one country to another, without anyone knowing anything about it. Think what that means. A company in this country needs capital; a bank in Europe is willing to arrange it. The money comes from another country, a country willing to pay for the chance to obtain some degree of influence over what happens here. Think of what you could do, if you have the billions of dollars necessary to gain a controlling interest in just a handful of the corporations that among them decide what we read and what we watch. Frank Morris knew what it meant. He was willing to take money-he admitted that-but not for something like this.
“Constable was involved. He was the one who first suggested that Morris meet with some people who were interested in making it easier for foreign investors to do business here. Morris went to Constable-the president of the United States, for Christ sake!-and told him what he’d discovered, told him that even though he had taken money he would go to the FBI himself if that was the only way to stop it. Constable told him to forget it, that everything would be all right, that they had not done anything wrong, and that no one would find out. Yes, that’s exactly what he said, according to Morris: that they hadn’t done anything wrong and that no one would find out!
“When Constable said everything would be all right, he meant all right for him. The next thing Morris knew, he was framed for bribery and sent to prison to make sure he didn’t tell anyone besides Constable what he knew. But he told me, and before I get back to New York, he’s murdered, and now they may try to murder me. They know I talked to him; they can guess what he told me. Last night, after I called you from the airport, I went home. Someone had broken in, torn the place apart, stolen my computer. They were looking for whatever files I’d been keeping on The Four Sisters, the story I was planning to write. They didn’t get much. I keep everything at my office at the paper. I don’t think they’ll try anything there.”
“Where did you stay last night?”
“At a hotel here in the Village, just up the street.”
“You better stay there. What Morris told you, that Constable did not die of natural causes, that he was murdered-he was right. I can’t tell you how I know Constable was murdered, only that I do. But I don’t know why he was killed, whether it had to do with this Four Sisters business, or was for some other reason.”
Burdick wanted to be sure.
“You know for certain that he was murdered? You know that as a fact?”
“That’s what I was told.”
They left the dark seclusion of the bar and restaurant and went outside. The heat was shimmering off the dirty gray sidewalk and the air had the thick dull taste of red brick dust. They lingered for a moment in the choking haze, remembering, each of them, what it had been like when they were young and single and their only thought on a hot sticky summer day had been for the night, and the girl, and the jazz that when you heard it told you that nothing would ever be as good as this again.
“I better go,” said Hart, as he started toward the street. “I meant what I said,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Don’t go back. Stay at the hotel until it’s safe.”
Burdick, feeling better, laughed as he shouted back, “That might never happen.”
Chapter Nine
Stepping out of the cab, Hart looked up at the skyscraper towering high above him at the corner of the park. It seemed to him out of place, a strange mismatch in which money, New York money, had won; a losing contest in which taste, and the desire to preserve the old values, had been all but forgotten in the thoughtless desire to find something bigger and more opulent to build. The property that bordered Central Park, the gray stone buildings that ran along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, most of them built before the war, had always been the most sought after real estate in the city, and among the most expensive in the world. It had all seemed to fit, to be as much a part of the park as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the zoo, a picture postcard of life, rich and elegant, in the middle of Manhattan. But money formed a democracy of its own, and the majority, those who had the most of it, wanted a view. And so now, a block from the Plaza and the St. Regis, you could buy an apartment, or rent space for an office, in the kind of glass and steel high-rise monstrosity that critics, and not just critics, thought better suited for Singapore or some oil-rich place in the desert.