The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  Margaret hadn’t run in years, and she almost surprised herself at how quickly she moved, even with child, racing through the brush of the forest and dunes. The strength of her desire to see the ponies making their curious journey—if that’s indeed what the splashing was—could not be measured. The mystery could never truly be solved, she knew, beyond the concept of instinct, but the possibility that she might be able to learn how the trek was made each year and prompt some scientific discussion about it made her heart pump faster.

  Switching from running on dirt to the soft sand slowed her, as did the incline of the dune, allowing Kessler and Cornelius to pass her. After cresting the top of the dune, she descended to the beach, but without any moonlight, the sound of the splashing was all they had to guide them. Their flashlights showed them where sand met surf, but that was it.

  “Shit,” said Kessler.

  “Can you tell at all where the sound is coming from?” Margaret asked, cupping her hand around her right ear.

  “Not really,” said Cornelius.

  Panting, Gwinnett appeared, holding his flashlight and something else. Margaret aimed her flashlight at him.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Your night-vision binoculars,” he said.

  “God bless you, Mr. and Mrs. Greenstein,” she said as Gwinnett handed her the heavy instrument. Margaret turned on the power switch and brought the eyepieces to her face. She squinted and tried to make sense of the images she was seeing—a black ocean, a dark green sky.

  Margaret scanned the horizon. She squinted and focused the device. “I see two…no, three. Three shapes, triangles.” She adjusted the lenses again. “They’re heads. They’re moving. Bobbing. They’re walking through the waves. They’re out deeper than I would have thought.”

  “Are they headed right for Susquehannock?” asked Kessler.

  “Directly,” she said. “Did anyone bring the walkie-talkie? We should let Quadrani and Hinman know.” Salvatore Quadrani and Ken Hinman were the researchers on Susquehannock Island, based there until Gwinnett moved his camp to Susquehannock in a couple of weeks.

  Keeping the lenses focused and aimed in the right direction, she invited Gwinnett to have a look.

  “Amazing,” he said. “Do you think they’re swimming? They’re out so far!”

  “I don’t know; one of them might be a foal,” she said. “Maybe there’s a sandbar.”

  Kessler and Cornelius soon got their turns as well. “Three ponies. Huh,” said Kessler.

  “Three colts? Three stallions? A mare and two foals? A family?” Cornelius asked.

  “That’s sure the question,” she replied.

  Margaret and Gwinnett took a few steps back and sat down on the dune. Gwinnett whipped out his flask, unscrewed it, took a swig, and passed it to her.

  “I’m so glad that you brought those glasses,” Gwinnett said.

  “It was kind of dumb luck that the shop owners wanted to unload them,” Margaret said.

  “I’ll take dumb luck over smart grad students any day of the week,” Gwinnett said.

  “Gaah,” she said, grimacing after taking a swig. “Usually you buy finer stuff.”

  “Cheaper is better than none,” he said. She smiled and wondered if that was true.

  After several brandies, Charlie opted to call a cab to take him the six miles from Street’s house on Capitol Hill to his own in Georgetown. It took several tries before one would agree to pick him up in Street’s segregated neighborhood, and even then Charlie had to agree to walk three blocks to a more commercial thoroughfare.

  He was halfway up the steps to his town house when he heard someone say, “Congressman Charlie Marder.” The gruff and famous voice stated his name matter-of-factly, as if narrating a live broadcast of individuals walking down the street. Charlie turned to see, across the street, a black Lincoln Continental with a driver and a passenger in the back. He walked to the car, and as he did, the driver jumped out and escorted Charlie to the other side of the car, adjacent to the sidewalk. He opened the door and Charlie climbed in the backseat.

  “Senator McCarthy,” Charlie said as he eased himself in and closed the door behind him. “Were you sitting here waiting for me?” The car smelled like Old Spice, Lucky Strikes, and whiskey.

  “How are preparations going for your comic-book hearing?” McCarthy asked, ignoring Charlie’s question. “You and Kefauver and Hendrickson all ready to fricassee Scrooge McDuck?”

  Charlie sighed. “Yes, it all looks good. Though I’m sure your hearings won’t lose any viewers to ours.”

  “Oh, I’m not concerned.” McCarthy chortled. They were sitting in the darkness, Charlie twisted at an angle to better see McCarthy, who was sprawled out and facing forward, though he occasionally turned his head to make eye contact with his guest and smile at him warmly. Once again Charlie was taken aback by how charming and avuncular McCarthy was. When he was being warm to you, the last thing you wanted to do was disappoint him. McCarthy reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a pint bottle, from which he took three gulps. He offered it to Charlie, who had learned in the army never to reject a swig.

  “That Fred Werthman…Werth…what’s his name?” McCarthy asked. “The headshrinker who’s your main witness?”

  “Fredric Wertham.”

  “Him. He consorts with some shady characters, like the Negro author Richard Wright, various other Communists. I’m not saying much about it because I have bigger fish to fry right now, but I wouldn’t associate with him outside of the hearings if I were you.”

  “I’ve only met him on official business relating to the juvenile delinquency hearings, sir.”

  McCarthy grunted, then took another drink, after which he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “You ever hear of a guy named Clinton Brewer? He was a convict. Wertham got him out of prison.”

  “No, never heard of him,” Charlie said, wondering where all this was headed.

  “So your boy Wertham wrote a book a few years ago, Dark Legend. It was about some dago, maybe seventeen, whose mom gets widowed and whores around a bunch, and then the dago kills her. Matricide. So Wertham’s book comes out, it offers the bleeding-heart sob story about why this greaser did what he did, how he was compelled to, blah-blah-blah, and Richard Wright gets all excited. He knows someone else who is guilty but not really guilty. A fellow murderer—and again it was society’s fault. Just like with the greaser.”

  “Someone else?”

  A noisy jalopy clanged by, distracting McCarthy. A street lamp revealed his face as he turned to the window to focus on the ruckus. By late morning, McCarthy had a five o’clock shadow, Charlie had noticed. Now, after midnight, he resembled Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man.

  “Yes, someone else,” McCarthy said. “Clinton Brewer. Colored boy, killed a woman for refusing to marry him. She had two kids, the victim. Brewer was sentenced to life. In prison in New Jersey, he developed musical skills—he had real talent, if you like that jungle music. Some musical folks hear about him, get Wright involved, a bunch of liberals and Commies get together and petition for Brewer to get out. And they succeed. In 1941, he gets paroled. Nineteen years of a life sentence under his belt, Wright hooks him up with Count Basie.”

  “That’s a nice story, I suppose,” Charlie said. “Redemption.”

  “That’s not the whole story,” McCarthy said. “Three months later Clinton Brewer kills another woman for refusing to marry him. And that’s the case Richard Wright is phoning Wertham about. The kid is headed to the chair; Wright wants Wertham to testify that Brewer’s a psychopath, doesn’t know right from wrong, can’t be guilty of murder. Wertham agrees, he testifies, and that’s what happened. Brewer’s doing life. Again.”

  “That’s awful,” Charlie said.

  “Those are your allies, Charlie,” McCarthy said, furrowing his thick caterpillar eyebrows. “This is your Commie star witness in your idiotic comic-book hearing. Bad company in a dubious cause. Whereas there are others in this town
, with other affiliations, who spend their time trying to defend this nation, rather than freeing murderers because they can carry a tune. We fight for America, Charlie. We don’t undermine it. We fight for it.”

  He sat back in his seat and stared straight ahead. The street was silent.

  “There’s something I need you to do for us, Charlie,” McCarthy finally said. “For us. For your team.”

  “Sir?”

  “Your father does work for NBC,” McCarthy said.

  “My father?”

  “Yes, Winston. You know he raised money for me for both Senate runs, right? Great American. I’ve been to your house, Charlie.”

  “Right. I know.”

  “So he does work for NBC.”

  “If you say so.”

  “People at NBC have told me that.”

  “People?”

  “I have a lot of friends.” McCarthy grinned. “Friends who share information with me. About Communists and all sorts of other indecent types.”

  “Okay.”

  The senator took a swig from his pint bottle and grimaced.

  “You know the show This Is Your Life, I assume?” he asked.

  “Of course. My friend Strongfellow is going to be on it.”

  “Exactly. So the show does a lot of research on the folks they celebrate. In the course of their preparation for Strongfellow’s episode, they found some unsavory information. Your dad is in possession of this research.”

  “Okay,” said Charlie, not liking where this was heading or the alarming extent of McCarthy’s insider knowledge.

  “I need you to get it for me. For us. For our team. Give Cohn a call when you have it. Need this tout de suite.” He patted Charlie on the knee twice, then gave his thigh a little squeeze.

  “Wait a sec, you’re asking me to steal something from my father? Your friend?”

  “I didn’t say anything about anyone stealing anything,” McCarthy said. “I don’t care how you get it. You can ask for it, you can obtain it any way you see fit. I just need the file. We need the file, Charlie. We do. Your father won’t miss that folder; he was just asked to hold on to it by NBC so they could claim plausible deniability.”

  “What is it? What’s in this file?”

  “You can read it if you want,” McCarthy said.

  And before Charlie knew what was happening, the driver had opened his car door, extricated him from the vehicle, returned to the driver’s seat, and zoomed off. Charlie was left standing in the pale light of the street lamp wondering if these demands on him would ever end.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Monday, March 8, 1954—Morning

  Washington, DC

  Charlie hadn’t left the house on Sunday, hoping that Margaret might call. She didn’t. He was in a pit and had no way to reach her.

  Not long after dawn on Monday morning, Charlie frantically read both the Washington Times-Herald and the Washington Post and found nothing in either paper about the car crash. The accident had been before dawn Friday, so it would have been discovered that day and been in the papers as soon as that afternoon. But there hadn’t been anything all weekend. He couldn’t believe only three days had passed since he’d woken up in Rock Creek.

  He then met Street for breakfast at a greasy spoon on Constitution Avenue, where they engaged in small talk over coffee and toast and more casually perused their newspapers: McCarthy was demanding equal television time to respond to a Saturday-night address by Adlai Stevenson in which the Democrat claimed that the GOP was becoming the party of deceit and demagoguery; Secretary of State Dulles was having a tough time rallying votes at the Inter-American Conference in Venezuela for the United States’ anti-Communist resolution; in a post-shooting crackdown, six Communists had been arrested in Puerto Rico with an estimated three hundred on the loose on the island.

  The New York Times business pages reported that an executive from Zenith named Ira Boschwitz had been fired amid rumors he would be called to testify before McCarthy’s committee. That was fast, Charlie thought. He’d only given the Boschwitz file to Kennedy on Friday. He showed the story to Street, who shook his head.

  “How much do you think the U.S. is actually under threat of Communist takeover?” Charlie asked as he soaked his white toast in the yolk of his sunny-side-up egg.

  “Not at all,” Street said. “The papers sure do a good job of scaring the crap out of everyone about it, though.”

  Charlie barely heard his answer; his initial relief that there was no mention of the car crash in the papers gave way to a sudden anxiety that the police were holding back information from the press as they gleaned more clues and investigated the matter.

  “Gentlemen!” came a friendly voice.

  Charlie looked up to see Congressman Pat Sutton approaching their table accompanied by Abner Lance, one of Chairman Carlin’s top aides. Lance had just returned from the Korean War, but he didn’t like talking about it. He didn’t much like talking about anything, as far as Charlie could tell. With hair so blond it almost looked white, a ruddy complexion, steely black eyes, and a catlike gift for the silent approach, Lance cut an imposing figure when he showed up at Republican conference meetings.

  “Y’all coming to poker tonight?” Sutton asked. “Should be a good time. At ten, we’re going to take a break to watch Strongfellow on This Is Your Life!”

  “That’s airing already?” asked Street. “I thought he just taped it a few weeks ago.”

  “It’s tonight,” Sutton said. “You gotta come. Strongfellow deserves to be honored! And razzed too, of course.” He grinned. Veterans often had mixed emotions when one of their own was recognized, Charlie had observed over the years, an odd combination of envy and pride leading to hazing and resentment.

  Street raised an eyebrow at Sutton, then turned to Charlie. “Shall we?”

  “I’ll try to be there,” said Charlie. “Sounds fun.”

  “Sutton’s an odd bird,” Street said as they walked from the diner to the U.S. Capitol for a morning vote. “And why the hell is he challenging Kefauver in a primary? Fool’s errand.”

  “Kefauver’s a little effete for Tennessee, maybe,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, bull,” said Street. “He plays good ol’ boy with the best of ’em.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Charlie said. “He’s not even my party.”

  They often compared notes on their colleagues, those they feared, those they respected, those they disdained. Sometimes they invented their own superlative awards. Charlie had privately identified the stupidest member of the U.S. House of Representatives; he had watched him walk into a broom closet during a hearing, then bashfully walk out, in full view of the packed room. Street was convinced that a certain committee chairman from the Northeast was the most corrupt; he had actually seen several hundred-dollar bills sticking out of the silver rim of his briefcase. There were the members of Congress who were not only old and infirm but also in the throes of dementia whose staff members and wives paraded them around from event to event, riding the train of their stature until the very end of the line, confident that constituents would never know and journalists would never tell. The incomprehensible mumblings these members made on the House floor would be “translated” by staffers for the official Congressional Record and for press releases to be read by the folks back home.

  “You know what they say,” Street said. “You spend your first six months in Congress wondering just how the hell you got here and the next six months wondering how the hell everyone else did.”

  Charlie chuckled, smiling for the first time in a while. “One of the best I’ve met was MacLachlan,” he said.

  “Agreed. He was a damn fine card player, he served honorably, and he seemed an eminently decent man.” He paused. “We never—”

  “Hello there, Congressmen!” Sheryl Ann Bernstein materialized by Charlie’s side as he and Street made their way up the stairs of the Capitol.

  “Bernstein!” said Charlie. “My best student! We
re you just outside pounding the erasers for me?”

  “No, but you should feel free to go pound sand,” she said with a grin.

  “That’s quite a student you have there,” Street said. “I’d hire a taster before partaking of any apples she brings you.”

  “She’s great,” said Charlie. “Don’t let the Lauren Bacall sass fool you; she’s brilliant.”

  “He just says that because I love his book,” Bernstein said as they began walking up the stairwell to the second floor of the Capitol.

  “Ah, you’ve cracked the Charlie code.” Street laughed. “Your brilliance is proven in your appreciation of his.”

  “You know, I’m right here,” Charlie reminded them mildly.

  “By the way, speaking of brilliance, or our lack thereof, we never did figure out who the hell Jennifer is,” Street said.

  “Jennifer?” asked Bernstein.

  “It was MacLachlan’s last words to us. He mentioned someone named Jennifer,” said Charlie. “Only we don’t know who he was talking about.”

  “Maybe he meant him?” Bernstein said, looking up at the wall.

  “What?” Charlie asked. “Him? Who?”

  Bernstein pointed at the painting of the signing of the U.S. Constitution that hung in the stairwell.

  Charlie stopped in his tracks and stared up at the painting of the forty attendees of the Philadelphia Constitutional convention. Fifth from the right, with his back to the viewer, stood an obscure Maryland delegate.

  “Who is it?” asked Street.

  “Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer,” Bernstein said. “Jenifer, one n.”

  “Jenifer,” said Charlie. “Holy cow, you’re brilliant.”

  “Do you think that’s what he meant?” Street asked.

  Charlie, staring up at the painting, shrugged thoughtfully. “I don’t know. But Mac and I did discuss this painting, and obscure Founding Fathers, and it’s the first Jennifer I’ve encountered since he said it.”