Free Grand Master by D.W. Buffa Page A

the apparent eagerness to get on with it, to tell Burdick
what he knew, there was now a strange, lingering fatalism in his
eyes, a belief - no, more than that, a certainty - that what
Burdick was going to write would be the last thing that would be
written about him, that after this there was nothing.
    “Cancer,” he explained with a shrug, a show
of indifference he expected from himself. “Six months, maybe less.”
Then, flashing a crooked, modest smile meant to put his visitor at
his ease, he added, “Unless that fucking Frenchman gets me
first.”
    “That -?”
    “What we talked about yesterday, The Four
Sisters. A Frenchman owns it, ‘de la’ something. I’ll remember
later. I only met him once, and we didn’t exactly have a
conversation. There were a dozen of us, members of Congress on a
fact-finding trip in Europe, looking at ways to improve trade, that
kind of thing - mainly an excuse to travel at taxpayer expense.
There was a reception in Paris, hosted by their foreign ministry.
The room was full of bankers and industrialists, but it quickly
became apparent that they all deferred to him. And I have to tell
you, he was one impressive son-of-a-bitch. He spoke perfect English
- no accent - like someone who had gone to an Ivy League college,
though I don’t think he did. I remember someone saying that he was
from one of France’s oldest families, but I’m not even sure about
that.
    “All I know for certain is that he knew more
about American history than anyone I’ve ever met. He told us things
about our history I didn’t know, and he did it in the course of one
of those short welcoming speeches that usually don’t say anything.
He may have memorized it, it may have been just off the cuff - he
didn’t have any notes, he didn’t read it - but he stood there, and
without a false start or a word out of place summarized two hundred
years of French-American relations. Maybe that was the reason I
didn’t like him: it was all too perfect.”
    Morris looked down at his hands. His eyes
seemed to draw back on themselves. A shrewd smile cut across his
mouth, a sign that he now understood something he should have known
before. “It’s always smart to make a mistake, trip over a word now
and then, show the people you’re talking to that you’re human, just
like them. Make a mistake, and then laugh at yourself; no one wants
to vote against you if you do that. But this guy, I think he’d kill
himself before he’d make a mistake, or admit it if he did. He
wasn’t arrogant, not the way we usually mean. It went deeper than
that. It was almost the opposite of arrogance, someone embarrassed
because what he was doing was so easy. Look, I’m no scholar, but I
read to all my kids when they were little. That’s what it was like,
a grown up talking to a bunch of children. That isn’t arrogance;
that’s someone operating on a different plane, someone who knows
how to do something, and someone just starting to learn.”
    Burdick had stopped making notes. He was too
intent on catching the changing expression on Morris’ face, the
added meaning it gave to what he said. Morris had always had a
native shrewdness about the character of other people, a way of
gauging what, despite their various levels of self-deceit, they
really wanted, but Burdick had never heard him describe anyone
quite like this, someone who did not seem to fit any of the normal
categories by which vanity and ambition were measured. And there
was something more. He was not sure what it was, but he was certain
that Morris had left out a crucial part of the equation.
    “That isn’t the only reason you didn’t like
him, is it?”
    Morris nodded in agreement. “You don’t notice
it at first. He smiles when he talks to you - he smiled when he
shook my hand - but his eyes… they look right through you in a way
that makes you feel invisible. But then, when someone has as much
money as he’s supposed to have, most people probably are only too
glad if he