The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  “Hello there, Charlie,” Kefauver said warmly.

  “Why, it’s Winston Marder’s boy!” Johnson said. “You cozying up to the Kennedys back there? Poor Jack hobbles around like an old nun with rickets.”

  “Now, Lyndon,” Kefauver tut-tutted.

  “It’s different from what the cameras catch, isn’t it?” Johnson said to Charlie, wrapping his arm around his shoulders as they reached the end of the tunnel. “You gotta play to the cameras, but don’t you believe what they show you.”

  “Speaking of cameras,” Charlie said, turning to Kefauver as they walked up the stairs to the first floor, “I’ve secured the Foley Square Courthouse for the hearing, Senator. I’m told there will be ample space and power for them to be televised.”

  “Good work,” Kefauver said. “Appreciate it.” He patted Charlie’s arm.

  “And one more thing,” Charlie said, looking around to make sure no one could overhear what he was about to tell Kefauver and Johnson. “You didn’t get this from me, but you might want to have your folks look into who is funding Sutton’s race against you. He told me about a helicopter some businessman was lending him, and there was a fishy reference to Chicago cash.”

  “Oh, really?” said Kefauver, beaming as if this were the best possible news. “That sounds quite interesting, Charlie. Thank you!”

  “You got yourself a regular Casino Royale secret agent!” Johnson remarked to Kefauver. “Sign me up for your services as well, young man!”

  The senators bade Charlie farewell and then rushed off, leaving him standing there, his task accomplished. He felt sullied; he needed to talk to Margaret. The list of his failures was only growing. He had been rolled on his crusade to stop Goodstone; he had failed to protect his friend from the Puerto Rican terrorists, and now he was an errand boy for the devil. And the worst of it, of course, chilled his soul throughout the day, whenever he contemplated that he had killed a girl in a drunken car accident and conspired to cover it up. Nothing was right and he didn’t know what to do or to whom he could turn.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Saturday, March 6, 1954

  Capitol Hill / Nanticoke Island, Maryland

  Charlie sat on Isaiah Street’s living-room sofa staring at a painting of a voodoo priest, his brown face smeared with reds and blues, spitting fire into a jubilant crowd.

  The picture hung above a fireplace. Congressman Street handed Charlie a brandy and sat down on a chair next to him. Renee Street’s family hailed from deep in a Louisiana bayou, and before that from Haiti, and the art in the Streets’ modest Capitol Hill apartment displayed her roots. Isaiah Street had been quick to correct Charlie when he’d praised the painting of the “witch doctor”; the correct term was houngan, and this one was Renee’s great-uncle, and Charlie wasn’t to use the other term anywhere near her unless he had an hour to listen to a lecture about Yankee arrogance and American imperialism.

  Not that Renee had heard Charlie’s gaffe; she’d been occupied with the twins, nursing and soothing. When one was being fed, the other was protesting, and vice versa.

  In need of a friend, Charlie had called Street earlier that day. Street’s schedule was jam-packed with committee hearings and meetings with civil rights groups—the pending Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision had everyone nervous and preparing for all possible outcomes—so he suggested Charlie come over for dinner. Isaiah had hinted that Renee was not particularly happy to hear of her husband’s generous offer, given that she would obviously end up doing all the work, but she’d believed her husband when he told her Charlie had sounded a bit distraught, so she’d made her standby dish for new guests, jambalaya, and divided her time at dinner between tending to the meal and tending to the twins.

  Charlie tried to act convivial, but the events of the past few days made it hard to think of anything beyond the morass into which he had fallen. Finally, after the twins had taken Renee away, the two men went into the living room, where Charlie had sunk into the couch with a sigh and then reached a bit too eagerly for the glass of brandy Isaiah had handed him. It took little more than Isaiah’s raised eyebrow for Charlie to begin unspooling his troubles.

  Charlie told him everything. Street winced when he heard about Charlie handing the Boschwitz dossier to Robert Kennedy. He was unsurprised to hear that Chairman Carlin had lied to them all about funding Goodstone, but he didn’t understand why Carlin bothered telling Charlie about it.

  “We were all drinking quite a bit,” Charlie explained. “Absinthe. It got wild. Everyone was clobbered. Truly out of control. In a bad way.”

  Street gave Charlie an impatient look, as if to say, Go ahead, spill it. “How out of control?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.

  “I blacked out and woke up in Rock Creek. I’d crashed in the water.” Each sentence was a confession, and a struggle. “I don’t even know whose car it was.” He stared at a floral pattern on the carpet, avoiding Street’s face. “There was…there was a body. Someone who’d apparently been in the car I was driving.”

  Street leaned back. “A dead body?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Good Christ.”

  Charlie nodded at that too. Then he added: “It was this girl who’d been at the party. A cocktail waitress.”

  “Holy hell,” said Street.

  “Yeah.”

  “So did you go to the police?”

  “No. LaMontagne was there. He’s the one who found the girl. He showed up after I woke up. He told me to help him carry her to the Studebaker.”

  “Why?”

  Charlie downed the rest of the brandy. “So he could put her in it and then set it all on fire. Destroy all evidence. As if it had never happened. LaMontagne was trying to help me. I know that what we did was wrong. God, what have I done?” He put his head in his hands then looked imploringly up at Street.

  Street sat back in his chair. “Did it even occur to you to go to the police?”

  Charlie slid a finger around his collar and shifted in his seat. The gravity of the situation and the choices he faced seemed to come into focus under the fierce beam of Street’s glare. “Yeah, maybe,” Charlie said. “But Davis seemed to know what he was doing…” His voice trailed off as he heard how weak and spineless he sounded. He was disgusted with himself.

  “Did you help him carry her to the car?” Street’s voice was cold, calm. They’d both seen men do bad things; each had faced down evil in his own way, but that was in Europe, in the war, which felt almost like another planet.

  “No,” Charlie said. “I didn’t do it.”

  “You told him no?”

  “Correct.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he got mad. Furious. But I wouldn’t move. He cursed but he wasn’t going to take the time to fight, I guess. He carried her to the car and wedged her into the driver’s seat.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he lit some papers on fire and put them in the gas tank, and we sped off before it blew.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Street said.

  Charlie’s time in Washington was teaching him that trusting anyone was a risky bet, but he’d decided he could trust Street. It wasn’t as if the history department at Columbia University had been Plato’s Republic, but Charlie had enjoyed friendships and alliances, and for the most part, everyone just tried to keep his head down and pursue scholarship. Washington, by contrast, seemed populated by pickpockets, grifters, and con artists. There were exceptions, however, and Street was one of them. Or so Charlie hoped.

  He was, truth be told, grateful to have him as a friend. Yesterday, after he’d battled his hangover to survive the day, he had arrived home to find the house empty and a note from Margaret on the kitchen counter—he wasn’t sure if it had been there before and he’d missed it—explaining that she was heading back to Nanticoke Island to try to solve the mystery of the Maryland ponies’ island-hopping. Remember La Galga that night back in the stacks? she wrote. Now I need to solve the puzz
le for once and for all. To Charlie it seemed a halfhearted attempt to make nice in the midst of an abrupt departure. Though to be fair to her, he realized that she knew nothing of his troubles, only that he had staggered into their bedroom drunk hours after she’d expected him.

  Street, however, was proving almost as tough a customer as Margaret would have been.

  “You realize, of course, that this was like the psychology test they give officers,” Street said. “You have a moral quandary, and you are picking the answer that ends up with you not getting a promotion.”

  “A test on paper is different from one in real life,” Charlie protested. “I get you on the should-haves. Of course. No argument. But let us abandon your world of the theoretical for one second. First of all, instead of being primed and ready for your officer’s test with six cups of joe in your gullet, imagine you’ve swigged a bottle of absinthe. Then here’s your choice: One path means you throw career, marriage, and any future with your children into the trash. You get defined by your worst moment ever for the rest of your life.” He paused. “My obit would read ‘Charles Marder, Fifty, Single, Unemployed, Disowned, Life Ruined by Fatal Car Crash.’ Do you have any more brandy?”

  Street stood and refilled his friend’s glass, concern radiating from his stern and silent face.

  From the bedroom, one baby stopped crying and the other one started.

  “Your babies,” Charlie said. “You would risk leaving them and Renee in the lurch for something you don’t remember doing, something almost no one else knows about?”

  Street stared at him.

  “I’m not talking about an answer on an officer’s test,” Charlie said. “This isn’t about the moral stance you can defend in Philosophy 101 at Morehouse. I mean right here, right now. In reality. You can walk away or you can risk it all. And not just your life—Renee’s and the twins’ and everyone who depends upon you. Anyone back in Chicago you want to help. Anyone in Mossville, Louisiana. Poof, gone. Forget your time as a Tuskegee Airman, forget your Distinguished Flying Cross. You’ll just be the sum total of your worst moment. You know how Washington works.”

  “I see your point,” Street said after a long silence.

  Charlie was surprised by the relief he felt at this grudging acknowledgment, as if Street had the power to absolve him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “So what now?” Street asked. “LaMontagne would seem to have you over a barrel.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Charlie said. “But you’re right; I’m under his thumb.”

  Street looked up at the painting of the voodoo priest and rubbed his chin.

  “Speaking of ‘under’, we still haven’t figured out who Jennifer is, much less what Mac was trying to say with ‘under Jennifer.’ All due respect to the dead, what the hell does that mean?”

  Charlie dropped his head in his hands. “Jesus. Mac. What a narcissistic bastard I’ve become.” He gulped down more brandy. “I don’t even know when the funeral is. That feels like a hundred years ago.”

  “We visited Mac in the hospital on Monday,” Street reminded him. “Five days ago.”

  At that very moment, Margaret, Louis Gwinnett, and two other researchers were sitting cross-legged around a campfire, drinking soup from thermos mugs. They had set up camp between the surf and a string of ponies, which had been within sight until sundown. The researchers on Susquehannock Island reported via walkie-talkie that no ponies had yet made the journey from Nanticoke to their location; Gwinnett’s team was determined to be awake and watching when they did.

  Nursing a flask of whiskey, Gwinnett talked campus politics with the two researchers from the University of Wisconsin, graduate students named Isaac Kessler and Matthew Cornelius. Margaret kept silent, fermenting in her marital angst. The moon was waxing crescent with only 3 percent visibility—Gwinnett hoped the cloak of darkness would help their mission in observing the ponies—so the stars shone particularly bright. Kessler, gazing at the constellations in the stars, misidentified Lupus, the eleven-starred wolf, as Lepus, the eight-starred hare. It was impossible for Margaret not to correct him.

  “I learned about the constellations from my uncle,” she explained after rectifying his astronomical error. “He was a park ranger, and he loved to take my sister and me outside late at night—he said he was ‘teaching us the sky,’” she said. “For Lupus, he told us a very dark story about a wolf.”

  “Children’s stories are always macabre,” Gwinnett observed. “I suppose it’s to prepare them for real life.”

  “Seriously,” said Cornelius. “I was traumatized by Bambi and Dumbo. What’s Walt Disney’s obsession with killing off moms?”

  “Dumbo’s mom wasn’t killed, she was just imprisoned,” corrected Kessler.

  “There does seem to be a common theme of losing a parent, or both parents,” said Margaret. “Snow White and Cinderella lost their moms, hence the wicked stepmothers. And wasn’t Peter Pan an orphan?”

  “What was the wolf story your uncle told you?” asked Gwinnett, nudging her and handing her his flask.

  “It’s a weird one,” she said, declining his offer. “Golden apples are being stolen from a tree and the king sends his three sons—the youngest is Ivan—to figure out who’s doing it. They set out on horseback and come upon a sign and three paths. One path will lead to cold and hunger. On the second, your horse will die. On the third, your horse will live but you will die—”

  “Oh, I know this story!” said Gwinnett. “It’s Ivan and the Gray Wolf! Does it end with the brothers chopping up Ivan but the Gray Wolf brings him back to life?”

  “Yes! So awful for a child to hear!”

  “That’s an old Soviet folktale,” Gwinnett said.

  “Huh,” said Margaret.

  “Watch out, Doc,” said Kessler. “Her husband’s a congressman. Talk too much about the Gray Wolf and next thing you know, you’ll be sitting before the House Un-American Activities Committee!”

  “What does your husband think of McCarthy, Margaret?” Gwinnett asked.

  “He hates McCarthy,” she said. “But he hates the Communists too.”

  “Is he Democrat or Republican?” asked Cornelius.

  “Registered Republican, but he kind of inherited that from his father, an admirer of TR. Truly not a particularly partisan man. He’s only been there a few months.” She paused and was surprised to find her eyes tearing up a bit while she thought about him. “He’s just Charlie.” She shook her head, glad the dim light made it hard for anyone to see her clearly.

  “But surely Charlie has an opinion on the madness that has infected Washington,” Gwinnett said. “Seeing Reds under every park bench, thinking people who merely want a more just and equitable society are trying to undermine America. People are fighting for a better world. They see the United States inflicting pain and suffering on places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico and Korea. They see our ideals falling by the wayside as the big corporations take over our politics and wrest control of our foreign policy. Americans who want racial justice and harmony aren’t to be ostracized. We’re to be listened to.”

  Margaret had met plenty of Communists at Columbia; they had once been common throughout the academic world. For many, joining the party had been dilettantism, a passing fad, a trendy and vaguely rebellious form of socializing. Some saw it as just the natural extension of idealistic, progressive activism—a way to support racial equality and labor unions and to oppose fascism. By the late 1940s, however, the barbarism of Stalin’s USSR was evident to all—even those who had previously tried to explain away his Great Purge as a mere internal matter. Upon Stalin’s death in 1953, even progressive editorialists who had heralded his efforts alongside FDR during World War II had to mention the millions of dead bodies upon which his kingdom had been built.

  The Cold War and the presence of Soviet spies in the United States made it Columbia University’s particular shame, however, that the Ivy League college counted a number of Soviet agents among
its alumni, including one who’d ultimately been sent to the Gulag and executed by Stalin, another who’d worked his way to a senior position in the FDR and Truman administrations, and, most infamously, Whittaker Chambers, who’d ultimately switched sides and been the key witness against accused Soviet agent Alger Hiss. The university’s leaders had become, a bit too late for Charlie and Margaret’s tastes, sensitive to their campus hosting so many fifth columnists; one outspoken history professor had been fired two weeks before he appeared in front of McCarthy’s committee.

  Margaret had been at parties and faculty mixers with the academics fired for Communist ties. They were tiresome; whatever bold truths they told about the United States were undermined by their blindness to the crimes of Stalin. Neither she nor Charlie cared for them. But she’d come to know how they talked and the terms in which they couched their beliefs, and right now Gwinnett sounded like one of them.

  “Margaret?” Gwinnett said, having received no response to his question about Charlie.

  “Hmm? Oh.” She’d been lost in thought. “Charlie isn’t a fan of either McCarthy or the Communists.”

  “With respect,” said Kessler, “how does that make any sense? It’s a battle between the two. One has to pick a side.”

  Shrouded by darkness, Margaret rolled her eyes at the graduate student and his insistence on seeing the world in stark simplicities.

  “I’m afraid I’m with the grad students here, Margaret,” Gwinnett said. “An ideology based on the equality of mankind positing an end to fascism and an end to war is being challenged by a drunk demagogue. If you don’t stand for—”

  An echo from the beach on the other side of the brush stopped Gwinnett midsentence, and all four turned toward the noise; above the low din of the tides came the distinct sound of splashing. Margaret, first to her feet, grabbed her flashlight and jogged to the beach, Kessler and Cornelius at her heels, their flashlights providing a jumping set of lights on either side of her. She looked back and saw that Gwinnett was well behind them, presumably having stopped by his tent to grab equipment of some sort.