Grand Master by D.W. Buffa Page B

dozen different shades of pink and purple, but this was
better, now that he was older, more comforting in a way, a sense of
dignity and peace and the permanence of things as the world slipped
gently into the night and the dreams you remembered danced once
again in your never aging mind.
    Burdick sat on the bench, listening in the
hush of evening to the vanished voice of Robert Constable, that
raucous, roguish voice that had given him a boyish charm well past
middle age; the voice that, after the first few times he had had
the chance to ask a reporter’s question, he had learned it was
never safe to trust.
    “It’s about The Four Sisters, Mr. President,”
he had replied to Constable’s invitation. “I’d like to talk to you
about your involvement.”
    He had tried to make it seem a fair warning,
a preview of what the President could expect. It was of course both
more, and less, than that. More, because if half of what he had
learned was true, the presidency of Robert Constable would be
destroyed; less, because in terms of hard evidence, the kind you
needed for a story like this, again, he did not have a thing.
    “I’ll be glad to talk to you about anything
you want; but involvement - that wouldn’t be correct. I’ve heard of
them, I’m not denying that; and last year, I think it was, I gave a
speech at some conference in Switzerland, and, if I’m not mistaken,
they were one of the sponsors. But, other than that, I don’t know
how much I can tell you.”
    There was a long pause, and Burdick thought
the President was waiting for him to say something - anything -
that would give him an idea of how much Burdick knew. The silence
became strained, uncomfortable, a confession that the President was
worried and, more than that, alarmed.
    “Why?” he had asked finally. “Have you heard
something different?”
    The Four Sisters, the name alone, the fact
that he knew it, had put the President in a state of something
close to panic. Burdick now knew that the story was bigger, far
bigger, than he had thought. He was on to something, though he
still did not know exactly what it was, except that it involved the
President and a great deal of money. If he had been able to talk to
him, if Robert Constable had not died, he was almost certain he
could have discovered the truth. Constable would have tried to put
the best face on things he could, but Constable had been scared -
Burdick was certain of that. He might have tried to make a deal,
trade what he knew, or some of it, for the chance to minimize his
own involvement. But now Constable was dead, and, depending on what
happened tomorrow, the story might be dead as well.
    Quentin Burdick sat on the beachside bench,
listening in the cool night air to voices from the past, the
different politicians he had known, some of them decent and
honorable, determined to do the right thing, but, especially in
recent years, more and more of them driven only by their own
ambition, willing to do or say anything to get the next thing they
wanted.
    There were still exceptions: Charlie Ryan,
for one. The junior senator from Michigan was always willing to
talk openly and honestly about what was going on, and, if there was
something he could not talk about, tell you that as well. Ryan was
as well informed as anyone in Washington. When he said he had not
heard of The Four Sisters and did not know what it was, Burdick
understood at once that the story he was after involved a closely
guarded secret known only to an unknown few. The President had been
one of them, and what Burdick had heard in his voice had told him
that none of the others who knew about it were likely to talk, even
if he found out who they were. Tomorrow was going to be the last
chance he had.
    The sun had disappeared. The oil drilling
platforms far out at sea became smaller, less obtrusive, in the
purple shadowed night. When Burdick got up and started back to the
motel, the hillside above the city was alive with a thousand
flickering