Finnegan snapped the caps off both bottles and put one on the table in front of Hart.
“She wanted to stay, didn’t she?” Finnegan plopped down on the chair opposite. “Good thing she didn’t. God knows what’s going to happen now. She’s home in Santa Barbara? Good. You’ll see her in a few days.”
A bright, fearless smile cut across Finnegan’s mouth.
“The Senate is full of guys married to women more qualified than they are to hold the office. But you and I, my friend, are the only two ready to admit it.” He laughed quietly and took a drink. “Now, tell me something more about what happened over there. I know about Austin; I know about the rest of it. Tell me about Jean Valette.”
Hart leaned his elbow on the table and bent his head forward. He was not sure where to begin, or whether there was anything he could say to describe what Jean Valette was like. He was not even sure he could describe the effect Jean Valette had had on him.
“He’s either the most intelligent, the most profoundly intelligent, man I’ve ever met or the craziest. When you’re with him, everything he says makes sense. He held me, for hours at a time, mesmerized by the astonishing things he said. He seemed to have all of history in his mind. Not just dates and places, battles, wars, things like that, but how they were all connected to each other and what they meant. When we look at history, we look back; he starts at some point in the past and looks forward. That’s the difference, I think: he seems to put himself back in time, to see things the way they were seen at the time. It was not like anything I’ve ever heard. but then, later, when I was alone and thought about what he had said, when I was not under the force of the magnetism he has-eyes that I swear could make you believe anything-then I was not so certain that it was not all lunacy, a madman’s description of the world.”
Finnegan pushed back until the front legs of the chair were off the floor. With his tousled reddish hair, he looked more like a graduate student having a beer late at night at some Ann Arbor tavern than a member of the United States Senate. But for all his youthful appearance, there was a serious dedication, an intense earnestness, a power of concentration that few others in the Senate, whatever their age, could duplicate. Others could talk endlessly on the Senate floor, their colleagues half asleep; Finnegan, with an instinct for the heart of the matter, never spoke to anything but the point.
“He said he knew all this would happen? Not that Constable would be murdered, but that Constable, and the others, would one way or the other all be destroyed?”
With so many other things on his mind Hart had forgotten that he had mentioned this.
“You told me yesterday, on the ride from the airport. But there’s a question, isn’t there?” The two front legs of the chair hit the linoleum floor with a clatter as he bounced forward. “If he knew that, if he was so certain that once Constable, and poor Frank Morris, and that fool Russell, became involved, grabbed millions for themselves, they would end up killing one another, why did he do it? It’s no answer to say because it was the only way some of the companies he controls-that The Four Sisters controls-could do business here. He knows this will destroy them. He doesn’t really need more business, does he? He’s one of the world’s richest men.” Finnegan’s eyebrows shot up. “And from the way you describe him…well, would you say he was someone driven by the need for money, this strange recluse with that diminishing library of his? There’s only one conclusion you can draw from this, isn’t there? For whatever reason, Jean Valette wanted them to destroy themselves. Listen, if someone tells you they’re suicidal and then asks if they can borrow your gun…well, you get the idea.”
Hart remembered the remarkable expression on the face of Jean Valette as they sat together, surrounded by towering banks of empty shelves, and the sense of something electric in the air as he began to tell him about the book he had written, and how, if he was not careful, what he had learned about the future might truly drive him mad.
“Jean Valette isn’t much interested in what happens to individuals. He thinks there is too much at stake for that. And there is something else,” said Hart with a deeply troubled expression. “The fact that no one else seems to think there is any crisis only makes him more certain that there is.”
Finnegan glanced at his watch.
“It’s late. Better try to get a few hours sleep. We’ve got a lot to do in the morning.”
Nodding in agreement, Hart started to get up, but then stopped and shot a quizzical glance at Finnegan.
“What about the Secret Service agent, the one who was there the night Constable was murdered, the one I met when I had that meeting with Atwood at the Watergate? Richard Bauman-what were you able to find out?”
Finnegan pushed his chair close against the table and emptied what was left of his beer into the sink.
“All anyone knows is that he quit, and then disappeared. No one has seen him; no one knows where he went. No one knows for sure if he is still alive.”
“I thought he might know something,” said Hart. “When I met him that night he seemed genuinely distraught, kept blaming himself for what happened, for helping the killer get away.”
“Get some sleep,” said Finnegan as he walked him to the door of the second bedroom. “In a couple of hours the papers hit the streets and this whole town is going to blow up.”
It was a figure of speech, of course, not meant to be taken literally, but in places like the White House and the various offices on Capitol Hill it was a fair description of the reaction to the story Philip Carlyle had written under the kind of banner headline used only for a domestic crisis or war. Carlyle had everything: dates and places where meetings had taken place, records of each transaction by which the Constables, along with Irwin Russell and the late Frank Morris, had enriched themselves and violated the public trust. It was all there, every seedy detail in an epic tawdry tale of narrow-minded greed and corruption. But that was only half the story. Bribery and extortion had been the prelude to murder.
Instead of starting with the murder of Robert Constable in a New York hotel room, Carlyle started with the two murders in France. Why were Austin Pearce, the former secretary of the treasury, and Aaron Wolfe, head of the political section at the embassy in Paris, killed by two American intelligence agents stationed at that same embassy? Carlyle reported that the chief of detectives of the Surete was convinced that it was to stop them from revealing what they had learned from Bobby Hart about who was really responsible for the assassination of Robert Constable.
“‘It clearly was not Senator Hart,’ insists Inspector Dumont. ‘He came here looking for the connection with The Four Sisters. The two killers were not working for him. He was downstairs talking to the landlady when the shooting started. He ran upstairs, tried to save Mr. Pearce, and was almost killed himself. He shot the assailant, wounded him in the shoulder, and forced him to flee. Hart did not kill anyone, but someone in your government is trying to kill him.’”
By nine o’clock those who had not yet read the story were rushing out to buy a paper so they could. It was all anyone could talk about. Nothing got done. Everyone was on the phone, trying to find out what others thought, or huddled together in small groups in the corridors trying to figure out what was going to happen next, whether Russell would resign or be impeached. That was the only choice he seemed to have. The White House went silent. There was no comment from the president and no indication when there might be one. At Hillary Constable’s house, no one would answer the door. At eleven o’clock it was announced that Senator Finnegan of Michigan would hold a press conference at noon. He had new evidence about the murder of Robert Constable.
The hallway outside Finnegan’s office became impassable, cameras, television lights, and, as it seemed, every reporter in Washington, crowded together, waiting for Charlie Finnegan to step through the door and tell them what he knew. The air was thick with anxiety, suspense, and something close to panic. The country was at a crossroads and no one could know which direction it would take. One president had been murdered; his successor was about to be forced from office. The woman who was about to become vice president, the woman who would have succeeded Russell, was guilty of the same crimes as her husband. Charlie Finnegan took it all in stride. His opening remark was a bombshell.