Hart remembered what Pearce had said to him at the reception after Constable’s funeral.
“What about The Four Sisters? What about your friend…?”
“Jean de la Valette? It would be going a little too far to say we were friends. ‘Distant colleagues’ might be more accurate. We inhabit different parts of the same world: the international finance system, such as it is.”
There was a long, thoughtful silence. Furrowing his brow, Pearce rubbed his hands together, as he struggled to find the best way to explain what he was still not quite sure he understood.
“We’ve spent time together, attended some of the same conferences; we’ve even had dinner. But know him, the way I think I know you-have a sense of what he might do in a given circumstance, whether, when the chips were down, he was someone I could trust? No. Though I suppose I could say that-we both could say that, couldn’t we?-about a lot of people we’ve met; maybe even most of the people we know.”
He looked at Hart, not with a cynic’s grin, but with the gentle smile of a man who had learned to appreciate the few people he knew were his friends.
“It’s impossible to get more than a fleeting impression of who he really is,” continued Pearce. “He has a different frame of reference, a different sense of proportion about things. We think in terms of how what happened in the last election changed things, and how different things might be after the next one. He thinks in terms of the way things were changed by the French Revolution. I said something about this to you before, how that family of his goes back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years, and the kind of perspective that must give.”
Hart studied him closely, searching his eyes for a deeper sense of what he meant.
“But despite that, you liked him? You said he was charming, urbane. You said he was one of the most fascinating men you had met.”
Pearce tilted his head, an amused, slightly puzzled expression in his eyes.
“Liked him? Yes, I suppose,” he replied, though he sounded none too sure about it. “Fascinated by him?-Who wouldn’t be fascinated by someone with a history like that?”
Pearce made an idle, backward movement with his hand. It was a gesture meant to underscore the obvious meaning of his surroundings, the level of success that most other men would have given anything to have achieved.
“I do this for a living-watch and try to calibrate the movements of the financial markets-and I’ve become reasonably good at it, but I don’t find it particularly interesting. What I really love is history, European history mainly, but almost anything about the past. So it isn’t too difficult to understand that I would find Jean de la Valette infinitely more fascinating that most of the Wall Street types who can’t remember what happened yesterday, much less last year. So, yes, I was fascinated. It was only later, when I discovered what The Four Sisters was doing, that I began to realize it was precisely because of the way Jean de la Valette thought about the past that he was dangerous.”
“But what is the connection?” asked Hart, growing more urgent. “The money you talked about, the money that was routed through his bank-you said it was used to finance a private war. What is the reason Jean de la Valette would be willing to do something like that?”
Pearce’s thinning eyebrows shot up. He reached for a pencil and tapped it hard against his favored antique desk. His small mouth quivered, his eyes danced with suppressed excitement. He began to laugh, but immediately stopped.
“It’s the sort of thing that would get you committed if you told too many people.”
Whatever he was about to tell him, Hart was certain that, far from crazy, it was probably the only thing that made sense. Austin Pearce was just about the most rational man he knew.
“Jean de la Valette wants to lead a new Crusade, a war of Christianity against Islam.”
“I’ll believe that if you say it’s true,” replied Hart. “But why would he think that was even a possibility? It sounds like he’s the one who should be committed.”
“But what after all is insanity but intense belief?” asked Pearce with a strange, knowing look in his eyes. “It’s what the present usually says about the past. It’s what we say today about the Crusades, the ones that started more than nine hundred years ago, the ones that made the name Jean de la Valette not just famous, but for a long time the glory of Christendom and of France.
“You’ve heard of the Knights Templar? Ever since Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the Templars have been used to pack the pages of novelists with tales of secret societies that have kept alive down through the centuries something no one else was supposed to know. It’s all nonsense, of course. The Templars weren’t formed to keep secret some esoteric knowledge; they were formed to be what someone called ‘the sword arm of the Church in defense of the Holy Land.’ What we forget, what most of us still don’t know, is that the Crusades were at first a great success. Jerusalem was conquered, recaptured from the Muslims who had taken it from the Christians.
“The Templars were motivated by what today we would call religious fanaticism. A Templar was part of a religious order. He took a vow of obedience, which meant that he obeyed without question, and without hesitation, any command he was given. He also took a vow of abstinence and poverty; he gave up both sexual intercourse and all his worldly belongings. These were men, all of them from the families of the aristocracy, who gave up everything for the chance to die for Christianity. Because they could not marry, could not have children, and could not keep any of their wealth for themselves, the Order of the Templars, like the Church itself, eventually became quite rich. They were formed to defend the Holy Land, but the headquarters of the two thousand Templars in France was a fortress in the middle of Paris, a fortress which at the start of the fourteenth century held the largest treasury in northern Europe. This was the beginning of their undoing, because, you see, the King of France, Philip the Fair, was at that time desperate for money.”
Pearce chuckled. His small eyes lit up with mischief. Suddenly, without warning, he slapped the top of his desk with the flat of his hand and sprang to his feet. For a moment he stared out through the glass wall, out beyond the park toward the far horizon and the dark orange sky and the falling red ball sun.
“Philip the Fair,” he repeated, the glow of amusement more pronounced on his cheek. “They had such wonderful names.” He turned back to Hart, sitting cross-legged in his chair. “My favorite was an English monarch of about that same era: Ethelred the Unready. Madison Avenue could work for years and never come up with something as devastating as that. What if we did that now, gave names like that to politicians?”
“We have,” Hart reminded him. “We called Lincoln ‘Honest Abe’; Coolidge was ‘Silent Cal.’”
With his hands clasped behind his back, Pearce stared down at the floor.
“No, we would have had to come up with things like ‘Abraham the Magnanimous,’ ‘Woodrow the Intransigent.’” He began to warm to the subject. His eyes darted all around. “‘Herbert the Helpless,’ for Hoover and the Depression. ‘Richard the Reckless,’ for Nixon and Watergate. And for Constable…?”
“Robert the Dishonest,” suggested Hart with a grim, satisfied smile.
“Yes, precisely,” agreed Pearce. “And if Constable had read any history-any serious history-if he had known anything about the Knights Templar and the Crusades, he would have secretly envied Philip the Fair and the ruthless way he went about his business. The difference, of course,” added Pearce as he came around the desk and settled back in his chair, “is that if he had lived then he would have lacked the courage to do anything that decisive. His wife, on the other hand…”
He let the possibility of what Hillary Constable would have done, how far she would have gone, linger unanswered in a way that left no doubt what the answer would have been. He went back to the story he had started to tell. Like most of the things that get passed down through the generations, most of what history deems it valuable to record, this was all about violence, but violence, that because it happened so long ago, could be viewed with all the detachment of inevitability.