“No. Russell announced that she had agreed to become vice president. He’s sending her nomination to the Hill this week. They’re going to run for reelection as a team.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
That evening at dinner, alone, just the two of them, at the table with eighteen vacant places, Hart expressed his gratitude for what Jean Valette had done.
“I was certain you were behind everything: that you had Constable killed to protect the secret of what The Four Sisters had done. I thought you had hired the assassin, and instead you’ve done everything you can to help prove my innocence.”
Jean Valette had changed again from a business suit to a radically different kind of costume. With Hart on his left, he sat at the head of the dining room table wearing a long flowing white silk robe over a loose-fitting white silk shirt. Had he worn a beard and had darker skin, had he seemed less ascetic, he might have passed for a wealthy Arab dining in the luxury of his palace.
“It’s perhaps not quite as simple as that,” he replied. A slight, thoughtful smile crossed his mouth. “It would not be true to say that I bear no responsibility for what happened, that I was not, in some way, involved in what Robert Constable did to others, and what others did to him.”
Shoving his plate aside, Hart pushed back from the table. With folded arms, he studied Jean Valette, wondering what he meant.
“I don’t mean that I knew that Constable would do what he did-have Congressman Morris locked up somewhere with orders to have him killed if he talked-or that I knew that someone would have him killed,” said Jean Valette who seemed to consider quite carefully what he wanted to say. “That isn’t the same thing as saying that I didn’t know it would happen, or, rather, that something like that might happen. Only a fool could have failed to foresee it. Once you let people like those become involved in something illicit, something they could not resist-and, if you will forgive me, how many Americans could resist tens of millions of dollars with the promise of tens of millions more, money that could never be traced back to its real source, money that did not require you to do anything except what you wanted to do anyway-As I say, only a fool could fail to see that evil only follows evil. Once someone commits a crime, he will do anything, even murder, to keep the truth from coming out.”
Hart had seen enough of Jean Valette to know something of his intellect and the subtlety of his judgment. Only a fool-he had used that word several times-would have failed to foresee what might happen next, and whatever else he might be, Jean Valette was certainly not that.
“So you knew-at the time you were first approached by Constable, when he told you in so many words that if your companies were going to do business in the United States, you were going to have to pay millions for the privilege-you knew how this all might end? Then why didn’t you-?”
“Stop him from destroying himself?” laughed Jean Valette. “It would seem to me that he got precisely what he deserved. There is a parallel to this-more than one, I should imagine-but the one I’m thinking of I used in that speech of mine you heard the other day at Mont Saint-Michel.”
Hart thought a moment and then remembered.
“You don’t mean about what happened after the King of France, Philip the Fair, destroyed the Templars to get their money?”
“Very good, Mr. Hart! Your memory is quite excellent. Yes, exactly. Consider the questions it raises. Did God punish Pope Clement and King Philip the way Jacque de Molay, the Grand Master, swore He would? Or did the Grand Master simply foresee what the two of them, the pope and the king, had unleashed upon themselves, with their ruthless disregard for their own honor and all that they had sworn to protect: the Throne and the Church?” Jean Valette’s gaze deepened, became more profound. “Or did he, in those last few moments of an agonizing death, see the future with a clairvoyance that we, the living, cannot understand, see with utter certainty that someone listening, or someone who only later heard, what they would take as a promise from God, and, determined to be God’s own messenger, would arrange to hasten the deaths of two men who had been cursed? Or that it might be done by someone who did not care what God intended, but for whom the deaths of one or the other would advance their own worldly ambition? And, finally, what did he have to lose, the Grand Master, if nothing happened as he said it would, when there was always the chance that just enough would happen that someone would remember, and remembering, interpret things as if they had?”
“Those are interesting questions,” agreed Hart. “But how do they apply here?”
“Because however you choose to answer the questions, they all point to a lesson no one seems to understand: the one who seems the victim is often the one in charge. The Grand Master seemed to have lost everything: his Order, the Order’s money, and, finally, his life. But the future-that, as it turned out, he still controlled.”
“You mean, could still foresee.”
“Control the future, foresee the future: it all comes to the same thing, if you think it through.”
Jean Valette hesitated as if he was not sure whether he should stop there or try to explain. It was easier to let the matter rest, easier to let his visitor try to figure out what he meant. That is what he would have done with nearly anyone else. There was too much danger that he would be misunderstood: most men only learned what they thought they already knew.
“Rousseau, the French philosopher, the one who is famous for talking about the rights of man, foresaw the future. Thirty years before it happened in France, he wrote that the world was entering the age of revolution. The problem was that Rousseau was a genius while the people who read him were not. They distorted his teachings and through those distortions helped bring about the revolution he said would happen. The same thing happened later, at the end of the nineteenth century, with that other genius, Nietzsche. He foresaw a future of terrible wars and the need to rescue humanity from the leveling effects of mediocrity. He spoke of the need for a higher order of humanity; the Nazis read into that their own delusions of themselves as a master race and everyone else a slave.
“Rousseau, Nietzsche: both saw what was coming and became the text on which stupid, evil people could write their own interpretation. They bear some responsibility for what happened; they were too intelligent not to have seen the danger in how they would be misunderstood. And yet, on a deeper level, they offer to anyone willing to spend the time, willing to learn how to read carefully, that is to say slowly and with an open mind, the only real understanding of the world in which, for better or worse, we live. Rousseau wrote about the coming age of democratic revolution; Nietzsche about the reaction to that, that other kind of mass movement in which one man, the leader, imposes his will on everyone else. Now someone needs to write about what is going to happen in the next hundred years and what can be done about it. I tried.”
Hart, who had followed as closely as he could, was not slow to see the implications.
“Yes, you’re right, Mr. Hart,” said Jean Valette before Hart had opened his mouth. “If I tried-if I’m still trying-to write about the future, and if to foresee it is in some sense to control it, then…? Come with me. If we’re going to have a serious conversation, there is a better place to have it.”
They started down a long hallway that ran parallel to the one Hart had taken earlier to the Hall of the Four Sisters and his meeting with the American reporter. This one, like the other, was paved in polished white tile, the walls hung with rich tapestries and countless paintings by old masters. The chateau was ancient, but far from a crumbling wreck. A makeshift project of never finished restoration, it was to all outward appearances perfect in every detail, as good, or better than, that day it was finished, nearly a thousand years ago. More than once in the short time he had been here, Hart had found himself pretending, and pretending, for a few moments, believing, that he had gone back in time, perhaps not so far back as the beginning, but hundreds of years, when the old masters were the new masters and the French Revolution was still far off in the distant future. He had wondered, he wondered now, what it must have been like to have been born here, raised here, and lived here all his life, remote from other people and everything they believed. It might not be the whole explanation, but it was surely a part of what had made Jean Valette what he had become: an exile from the very world that through the power of the very thing he seemed to hold in contempt, money and an endless supply of it, he had come to influence, if not dominate. Passing a vaulted window, Hart glanced into the moonlit darkness and in the stillness of the night felt a little of the aching loneliness of someone who had himself become a stranger far from where he wanted to be.