The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  “He said ‘under Jenifer,’” Street reminded him. They all peered more closely to see what was under Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer in the painting. The delegate stood with his hands held behind him adjacent to a chair cloaked by someone’s coat.

  “The chair?” asked Bernstein.

  Charlie’s gaze dropped below the frame, to a marble ledge maybe three feet above their heads. “What if by ‘under Jenifer,’ he meant under the painting?”

  Street walked up the stairs so his line of sight was parallel to the ledge. “There’s a vent there.”

  They looked around. At that moment, no one else appeared to be in the vicinity. The three of them looked at one another, then at the ledge. Charlie and Street were approximately the same height, but Street was much broader and more muscular. “Want to give me a boost?” Charlie asked.

  Street interlaced his fingers and bent over; Charlie used the step to pull himself up to the ledge and the vent. Through the slits he could see dust and steam pipes—and nothing else.

  “Anything?” Street said.

  “Nope.”

  Street lowered Charlie to the floor and let out a grunt.

  “I’m lighter.” Bernstein shrugged.

  Charlie rolled his eyes at her; obviously, he wasn’t going to hoist her up, particularly in such a setting, and Street certainly wouldn’t. She rolled her eyes back at Charlie exaggeratedly.

  “Don’t be silly, Bernstein,” he said.

  Two other members of Congress started walking up the stairs; the three of them continued walking and talking discreetly.

  “So what does ‘under Jenifer’ mean, then?” Street asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie. “Maybe Miss Bernstein here can learn more about Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer.”

  “Or maybe,” said Street, “Mac was just a grievously wounded man experiencing death’s delirium.”

  “Sometimes it’s stunning that a man as brave as Ike was fighting Hitler can be so weak when confronted with a drunk demagogue like McCarthy,” Kefauver told Charlie over lunch later that day.

  They’d been seated at the same table in the Senate Dining Room where a few weeks before—though it seemed like years—Charlie had lunched with Margaret Chase Smith.

  Kefauver poured more sugar into his iced tea. “Just last year, ol’ Ike was up at Dartmouth telling the students not to join the book-burners, that we all needed to understand the Communists in order to defeat them on the battleground of ideas. And now this: a bill to outlaw the Communist Party.”

  “But surely Ike wouldn’t enforce such a thing,” Charlie said as a waiter silently placed their lunches before them. “Just last night, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I hear he called for the army secretary to stand so everyone could applaud him. That seems like a clear rebuke.”

  “Really, Charlie? In the larger scheme of things, when you look at what McCarthy is doing to this country and how Ike could be responding, you think that one tepid gesture in a roomful of reporters is the red badge of courage?” The Tennessee senator began to slice his veal piccata with an angry zeal.

  Kefauver’s office had called Leopold to set up the lunch. As they were being shown to their table, Kefauver had leaned toward Charlie and said, “Winston’s worried about you, you know. I told him he had no reason to be.” Charlie tried to disguise his wince—everybody could use a helping hand but nobody wanted to have it quite so openly acknowledged. Kefauver didn’t inquire about the specifics and Charlie didn’t volunteer anything.

  “Afternoon, Charlie,” said Congressman Strongfellow, hobbling over on his crutches. “What a treat to see you with your eyes open!” He slugged Charlie playfully on the shoulder. “You were completely knocked out last time I saw you, on a couch!”

  Charlie coughed into his napkin and tried to calm his nerves as he stood to greet Strongfellow and introduce him to Kefauver. His throat was dry and his heart was racing at the memory of Conrad Hilton’s party; he hadn’t seen his colleague since that night and he had no memory of how he’d behaved in front of him after the absinthe made its appearance and no idea what Strongfellow might know of what had happened later. He scanned his colleague’s face to see if he could discern any trace of disapproval or judgment; he saw nothing.

  Strongfellow gave him a grin. “Now, what’s this I hear about you scrapping with Roy Cohn?”

  “Excuse me?” asked Kefauver.

  “Nothing,” said Charlie. “Cohn and I had a few words the other night. I was defending General Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, rather.”

  “They’re going after the generals now,” Kefauver said. “First McCarthy smeared General Marshall and now they’re going after the whole goddamned army.”

  “It’s madness,” said Charlie. “His whole tail-gunner mythos is a load. He couldn’t shine General Marshall’s army boots. And Cohn—”

  “Cohn’s a nasty cuss, Charlie,” the senator said. “You come at him, he’ll come back ten times harder. His boss has a framed quote in his office: ‘Oh, God, don’t let me weaken. And when I go down, let me go down like an oak tree felled by a woodsman’s ax.’”

  “In an ideal world, sure,” Charlie said.

  “But who’s going to wield the ax?” Kefauver asked. “I thought the army secretary’s acquiescence to McCarthy the other day was shameful. You two are the army men, not me. But McCarthy was in the Senate cloakroom joking about how Secretary Stevens got on his knees for him like a ‘double-dime Milwaukee whore.’ Just pathetic.”

  “The army’s going to fight back,” Strongfellow said. “I was just at the Pentagon. Expect details about all the ways Cohn has tried to get special privileges for his ‘friend’ on their staff, Private Schine.”

  “You boys weren’t here when McCarthy was literally defending Nazis,” Kefauver said. “Do you remember that?”

  Charlie and Strongfellow looked at him blankly.

  “I swear to God, nobody remembers anything that happened ten minutes ago,” Kefauver said. “Do you recall the massacre at Malmedy?”

  “Of course,” said Charlie. During Hitler’s last desperate push at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, the First SS Panzer Division captured and slaughtered eighty-four U.S. troops near Malmedy, Belgium.

  “Did you later hear about the allegations that after the war, the U.S. abused the storm troopers who were part of that massacre?”

  “Vaguely,” said Strongfellow.

  “That was Tail Gunner Joe, who just happens to have a lot of German-American constituents who might have been feeling a little guilty, postwar. McCarthy heard the charges that the interrogators had abused the Nazis, and he pushed and pushed and pushed. It all ended up before me and the Senate Armed Services Committee in ’49. I would note that it all took on a very anti-Semitic subtext, except there was nothing sub about it. All sorts of characters alleged that the U.S. interrogators were Jews out for vengeance. McCarthy was among them. And it was all fake. None of it was real. There was no systematic abuse of the Nazis. Just a smear campaign against Jews and against Americans trying to rebuild Germany postwar. Led by you-know-who.”

  “So he was defending Nazis?” Charlie asked. “This great defender of our republic?”

  “Holy smokes,” said Strongfellow. “You’d think Nazis would be one thing we can all agree on.”

  “No one remembers anything,” said Kefauver. “And now he’s taking on the Pentagon. And they’re scared.”

  “Charlie, before I forget, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Strongfellow said, “the Pentagon knows nothing about that University of Chicago study.”

  “Really?”

  “My Pentagon guy says they have no idea who—what were their names?”

  “Mitchell and Kraus.”

  “Right, no idea who Mitchell and Kraus are or what study you’re talking about,” Strongfellow said. He glanced toward a table where Carlin’s aide Abner Lance was shooting a cuff to look pointedly at his watch. “Anyway, see you on the floor. Last
vote before Easter recess.”

  Charlie stood on the floor of the House while his fellow members of Congress buzzed around him. Just a week before, the Puerto Rican terrorists had fired on them, killing MacLachlan and wounding five others. And here they all were, debating a military aid bill for the United Kingdom as if nothing had happened. In the real world, Charlie noted, people took time to grieve; institutions were shuttered for days in the wake of horrific events that involved friends, family, and colleagues. But in Washington, the cogs in the machines kept turning regardless of damage to other wheels. This wasn’t an oddity of the federal bureaucracy, he had come to realize; this was one of its purposes.

  Charlie took it all in. He could still see bloodstains on the carpet where MacLachlan had fallen, not unlike the spots on the marble stairs MacLachlan had shown him just minutes before he was shot. Meanwhile, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman was yielding the floor to his Democratic counterpart to debate how much the United States should cooperate with UK efforts to suppress a guerrilla rebellion in a Southeast Asia British colony most Americans had never heard of, the Malayan Union.

  Then again, Charlie thought to himself, was the House’s ability to move on any different than his own? He considered the accident, the dead young woman, the Studebaker that LaMontagne had set on fire. He was a mess inside but strong enough to fake it in front of hundreds of members of Congress, journalists, the public.

  “Bet you didn’t think you’d be focused on the Malayan emergency when you first got the call from Governor Dewey to join us here,” said Carlin, wrapping an arm around Charlie’s shoulders. Charlie’s heart rate suddenly increased. He wondered what Carlin knew. LaMontagne had to have told him everything.

  “Malaya? Ha. No, not really,” Charlie confessed, struggling to act normally, as if they were just two members of Congress chitchatting about world affairs, no subtext, scandals, or corpses. He willed himself back into the conversation. Malaya. Yes, Malaya. “I know after the Japs pulled out of the peninsula after the war, the economy tanked and the Commies jumped,” he said.

  “It’s the same old story,” Carlin said with a casual shrug. He seemed in a friendlier mood than usual. “Communists prey upon the peasants, feed them a load of crap about worker exploitation. Next thing you know, the workers are killing their bosses.”

  Carlin looked at Charlie, seeming to size him up.

  “Malaya’s a big source of rubber, you know,” Carlin said, his eyes locking briefly with Charlie’s, purposefully reminding him of Goodstone. Charlie said nothing. He was trying to determine what Carlin knew. Likely everything. Last time Charlie saw him, he was with LaMontagne. But maybe LaMontagne wanted to wield this power on his own. And it wasn’t as if LaMontagne weren’t complicit as well.

  Carlin gave his shoulder a hearty pat before withdrawing his arm. “Come sit with me, Charlie,” he said.

  Charlie, not eager for more of Carlin’s companionship but not seeing an easy exit, dutifully followed him to seats at the far end of the front row. He felt light-headed.

  “One of my friends on the Agriculture Committee came up with a good idea for our farm bill,” Carlin said. “We always have a hard time getting Yankees to support it. But what if you become an original co-sponsor of our bill?”

  Charlie knew better than to fall for Carlin’s casual come-on. The farm bill was a notorious gift of subsidies from Washington politicians to heartland voters. FDR had started the program in 1933 as part of the New Deal, paying farmers not to grow anything on portions of their land to prevent any surpluses; the government wanted to keep prices artificially high. It didn’t really work. Charlie and other urban congressmen thought the program corrupt and essentially graft.

  “Now, why would I do that?” Charlie tried to soften his response with what he hoped was a winning smile. “Aside from your asking so nicely, of course. I mean, how would I explain to the good people of Manhattan why they have to live according to the capitalist system but their cousins in Alabama get paid by the government not to grow things?”

  “Well,” Carlin said, his voice smooth and confident, “I just thought you and I could maybe start over here and try to get onto more solid footing. Our mutual friend Davis LaMontagne has been trying to convince me that I have you all wrong, that you want to be doing good here, that you just need some…guidance on how this town operates.”

  His mouth spread into an expression that almost resembled a smile but was more akin, Charlie thought, to the look of a fox that had picked up a scent. “Working together, compromises; that’s how things get done here.” He landed two patronizing taps on Charlie’s knee.

  Abner Lance, Carlin’s aide, appeared at his boss’s side and handed him a manila folder bulging with the farm bill. Carlin took it without looking at his assistant and gave it to Charlie. “Read it over when you can.” Again he offered something that might have been his version of a smile. “Now. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  Charlie decided to treat this as a sincere question, though he had his doubts. Seeing Street across the House Chamber, he had an idea.

  “I could use your help on something, yes,” Charlie said. “There’s a chemical plant for which General Kinetics is trying to get a permit in Harlem. A lot of local civil rights activists are after me to block it. Total headache. If you could kill it and handle Congressman Powell, that would be extremely helpful. I could try, but it would be nasty for me to get involved in any way, since Powell supports it.”

  “Why don’t you want it?” Carlin asked. “Actually, never mind, that’s your business. Let me see what I can do.” Carlin lifted himself up off the chair, nodded to Charlie, and walked away.

  The Pennsylvania Railroad’s Afternoon Congressional train departed DC’s Union Station at 4:30 p.m. sharp each weekday and made the 227-mile journey north to New York City’s Penn Station in three hours and thirty-five minutes.

  Following the vote to provide military aid to the UK for its crackdown against Malayan guerrillas, Charlie walked the mile from the Capitol to Union Station and bought a ticket, and he still had time for a shoeshine before he boarded the train to Manhattan.

  He had no overnight bag, hadn’t told his office where he was going, and had no way to leave a note for Margaret in case she came home and wondered where he was. In fact, he thought grimly as he sat waiting for his shoeshine, there was part of him that hoped that would happen, that wanted her to worry about him and even mildly panic. Why should I be the only one uneasy? he thought, disgusted with his marching orders from McCarthy and even more sickened by the fact that he was going to carry them out.

  He felt ill. His stomach churned, and the anxiety and loneliness he’d been trying to keep at bay began falling upon him like a dark cloak. Get it together, he said to himself. Take control. He stood and walked to his gate, showed his ticket, boarded, walked through the stainless-steel cars—coach, dining, observation car. He found a seat in the parlor car just as the locomotive jerked forward and the train began slowly chugging north on its journey, through the ghettos of Northeast Washington, past the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb on the right and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and Catholic University on the left.

  He picked up the afternoon Star from the empty seat beside him. The U.S. government had rounded up ninety-one Puerto Ricans in New York City and brought them to the Foley Square Courthouse, part of the investigation into the Capitol Hill shooting the previous week. The RNC had decided that Vice President Nixon would be better suited to respond to Adlai Stevenson than Senator McCarthy would. Once again, he could find nothing about the car crash.

  As the train crossed the border into Maryland, Charlie caught himself feeling as if he’d managed to escape from behind enemy lines. Though he knew, of course, he had freed himself from precisely nothing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Monday, March 8, 1954—Afternoon

  On the Train from Washington, DC, to New York C
ity

  “You look lost in thought” came a maternal voice as Charlie sat down in the club car of the train. Charlie turned around to see Senator Margaret Chase Smith standing at the tiny bar, holding a glass of ginger ale.

  He smiled.

  “Hello, Senator. Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

  “Oh, I love the train. I take it all the way up to Boston, then drive to Portland.” She raised her glass and took a sip.

  Charlie was too distracted to come up with any suitable small talk. Smith, the practiced politician, filled the silence easily as he made room for her to join him in the seat next to his.

  “You know, I have been meaning to tell you, after we had lunch, I read your book. It was marvelous. I found the section on Benjamin Franklin at the Hellfire Club especially fascinating. I wanted to know more!”

  Charlie caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a beer. “I did too, but that’s all I could find,” Charlie said. “And even that was pretty controversial. I received letters from a number of DAR and historical societies in Pennsylvania who were not happy to hear about ol’ Ben’s secret life.”

  “Why, if they knew anything at all about him, they must have known he was a libertine.”

  “One would think,” Charlie said.

  “You know what I wondered about Franklin’s time at the Hellfire Club?”

  Charlie raised an encouraging eyebrow.

  “Well, he seemed to think it quite useful—all these powerful men in one wanton association where they could do business and engage in revelry and whatnot.”

  “Especially the whatnot.” Charlie smiled. “But yes, they did a lot of business there, as you know.”

  “Indeed.” She grinned. “So—did he attempt to re-create anything like it upon returning to the colonies?”

  Charlie rubbed his chin. “There was nothing about that in the diaries and nothing in the Franklin papers at Yale.”