An unrepentant liberal, Hart was, when it came to places he liked, something of a traditionalist. He often explained to his California friends that the dismal stifling summer weather he had to endure in Washington was a minor price to pay to live and work in a city full of history. His favorite fact, which he thought had saved Washington from going the way of every other American city, was the law passed shortly after the Capitol had been built banning forever the construction of any other building that tall. No one was to be allowed to look down on the Capitol of the United States. In New York, the main thing seemed to be to have enough money to look down on everyone else.
That was a judgment, but it was also an abstraction; a generalization that had nothing to do with individuals, except as it explained, or helped to explain, something about the conditions under which they lived, the set of assumptions, the ingrained and largely unconscious way they expected everyone to behave. Austin Pearce had made the move to an office on the highest floor allowed for commercial use as a matter of convenience, and because, as he explained when Hart commented on the view, they had been in the other place for years.
“This was new, and available, and they said we needed more space. I’m not sure we didn’t have too much before, but that’s another story.” He saw the look of confusion on Hart’s face. “Bigger isn’t always better; better is knowing what your limits are.”
He looked at Hart as if this last remark carried a lesson, the importance of which he was sure both of them understood. He looked away, and then immediately looked back, searching Hart’s eyes again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “Please, sit down.”
He gestured toward the chair in front of an antique desk, purchased at a Sotheby’s auction some years earlier. The desk was not just his prize possession; he had, as he was quick to admit, an almost sensual attachment to it.
“Touch it,” he said, smiling with his eyes like a parent with a child. “Touch it; it’s all right. Feel it, how cold it is. Now touch it just a little longer. Feel the warmth? The first owner, so the story goes, the woman it was made for, was an Italian princess who had several husbands and many lovers, some of whom she seduced into helping her get rid of a husband she no longer wanted or needed. Maybe that’s what explains it; the way the wood feels when you touch it long enough: the warm blood of a cold-hearted woman. After I left the administration, I took to calling it ‘Hillary.’”
There was an impish quality to Austin Pearce’s patient smile that Hart found irresistible.
“You like my story-good! I’ll tell you something even stranger: It’s true. I did exactly that, started talking to the desk, calling it all sorts of names, when I first got back from those four years in Washington.” He threw up his small, smooth hands in the nostalgia of a past frustration. “There was no one else I could talk to, no one I could tell the truth! No one would have believed me if I had.”
“The truth about what?” asked Hart, more curious now than ever about why Austin Pearce had been so eager to see him.
“About what the president did, the arrangement he entered into with that organization I told you about, The Four Sisters. That was the reason I left at the end of his first term. I would have stayed. I thought I could do some good at Treasury, help put the country’s finances on a better footing, bring a little sanity to the way we raise and spend the public’s money. Then I discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars, more than a billion by the time I uncovered what was going on, had been moved through various accounts, money appropriated for various foreign aid projects, into a bank in Europe and from there into the hands of certain clandestine organizations in the Middle East. The bank was the French investment firm, The Four Sisters. The money was being used to finance a war, a secret war against some of the governments in the region we did not like. This wasn’t using the CIA to work behind the scenes to try to take down a government; this wasn’t giving covert assistance to some group within a country trying to overthrow an oppressive regime. This was something different. I did not understand it at first, though I thought I did.”
“You thought you did?” asked Hart, following every word.
“Yes. At first I thought-I assumed-that the bank was acting alone, that someone there was diverting the funds for some purpose of his own. I thought the bank might be working with someone in the French government, and that, with or without the knowledge of the government, they were trying to exercise some influence in the Middle East. The French are like that, always willing to cooperate, but jealous of our power. I have friends there, some of whom I trust. I made inquiries, but no one knew a thing. I couldn’t do anything more on my own, so I went to the president and told him what I had discovered.”
The intensity seemed to fade from Pearce’s expression as he remembered back to what had happened. The angry bitterness he had felt at the time was now, when he began to talk about it, more a sense of regret, as of a possibility, a chance to achieve something permanent and important, lost forever.
“We were in the Oval Office, just the two of us. It was eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, two weeks after he had won election to a second term. He was always at extremes, and that morning proved it. When I walked in, he looked like he owned the world. He greeted me like I was his best friend and-you know the way he had-for a few moments I felt like I really was. He started telling me about all the great things, now that he had a second term, we were going to do; things he could not do in his first term, when he still had to worry about an election. Then he noticed that I did not seem to share in his excitement, that I had something on my mind. He never liked it when someone did that, held back, even if just a little, from his own enthusiasm. He asked me what the trouble was.”
Pearce had a look that seemed to accuse himself of negligence, of failing to grasp what he should have understood, that what he had uncovered was too big, too important, for the president not to have known.
“When I told him what I’d found out, that all the money that was supposed to go for one purpose was being used for another, and that this French investment firm was responsible, he went into a rage. And I mean that literally. He jumped out of his chair, his face all red, started pounding on the desk, swearing at me, telling me I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was going to jeopardize everything he had been trying to do. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just sat there, my mouth open, dumbfounded by what was going on. He was so angry, for a moment I thought he might hit me. He told me it was none of my business, that I was supposed to run things at Treasury, that this was State Department business, that how was he supposed to trust me if I was not interested in doing my own job. That’s when he did it,” said Pearce, shaking his head over what had happened next. “He became quite calm again. The anger was still there-I could see it in his eyes-but now it was something more permanent, something, I swear, close to hatred, the kind that doesn’t go away. I had come to save his presidency; I left with instructions to submit my resignation.”
Hart could not believe it. Austin Pearce had been the one member of Constable’s cabinet that almost everyone thought irreplaceable, a judgment that nothing done by his successor at Treasury had changed.
“He fired you? But wait-he told you that what you discovered about this missing money was something the State Department knew about, that it was something they were doing?”
A look of cold disdain crossed Pearce’s face.
“He lied. No one over at State knew anything about it.”
“You checked?”
“I made a few discreet inquiries.”