The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  Charlie glanced at Street, who looked angry, even sulky, about getting himself into this spot.

  “Care to call?” LaMontagne asked. “I’m sure Charlie can spot you a loan if you don’t have the dough on you.”

  Charlie nodded, but Street, stony-faced, said calmly, “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “A personal check will be acceptable, assuming it’s from a reputable bank,” LaMontagne said. But Street took the wad of cash in his pocket and proceeded to count it. Behind the ones were fives and tens, and quite quickly he plucked a hundred and twenty dollars from the pack, which left him with only two stray bills. He grudgingly threw them down on the table.

  “Call,” Street said.

  With exaggerated fastidiousness, his pinkie extended, LaMontagne carefully revealed the first of his hole cards: the ace of diamonds. Combined with the ten and the queen and king of diamonds, there was a chance he had a royal flush. Then he revealed the second of his holes: the jack of hearts.

  He had nothing.

  Street flipped his cards: two kings. He had three kings, three of a kind, which certainly beat garbage.

  Charlie looked at Street, who was allowing himself to smile. “Jesus, I didn’t see that coming,” Charlie said.

  “You’re not supposed to,” Street said.

  “Too bad about that jack of hearts, Davis,” Strongfellow said.

  “Fucking jack of hearts, the illegitimate son of the one true king,” said LaMontagne good-naturedly, watching Street pick up the cash from the pot.

  “The illegitimate son,” Charlie said to himself. Street shot him a questioning look.

  “Gentlemen, as delightful as this has been, I must bid you adieu.” LaMontagne stood, shook hands around the table, and made a beeline for the exit.

  “Nice bluffing, Isaiah,” said Strongfellow.

  “The angry Negro ruled by his emotions and unable to overcome his inferiority,” Street said, counting his winnings. “It’s a role white folk are always casting black people in.”

  “He sure left in a hurry,” Strongfellow observed.

  “Not enough of a hurry.” Street chuckled.

  Charlie stood up abruptly and turned to Strongfellow. “Can I use your office phone?”

  Charlie had phoned his new friend Sneed, the junior librarian, and wasn’t surprised to find him still at his desk after nine p.m. After placing two other calls, Charlie walked back to the library, where Sneed opened the door of the Thomas Jefferson Building to him, Margaret, and Sheryl Ann Bernstein.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Charlie said, offering the librarian ten bucks.

  “It’s fine, I’m usually here late anyway,” he said, rejecting the money.

  Led by the librarian’s flashlight, they made their way through the dark empty halls of the enormous building, their steps echoing on the marble. Sneed took them down to the basement so they could walk underground to the Adams Building, where the members-only room was.

  “Presumably you’re going to explain why we’re here, honey,” Margaret said.

  “I didn’t get much of an explanation either,” offered Bernstein.

  “We were playing poker and Davis LaMontagne referred to a wrong-suited jack as an illegitimate child of a king,” Charlie told them as they walked briskly through the library. “That reminded me that when Franklin went to England, he learned of the existence of Temple Franklin—his illegitimate son’s illegitimate son.”

  “That’s right, and he eventually took custody of him and brought him back to the colonies,” Bernstein added.

  “His illegitimate son had an illegitimate son?” asked Margaret.

  “Some of the Founding Fathers took the term quite literally,” Charlie said drily. They had reached the Special Collections room in the Adams Building, and now they stood aside while Sneed unlocked the door.

  “Some fascinating stuff in here, honey,” Charlie said to his wife as they made their way across the cavernous room. “The contents of Lincoln’s pockets the night of the assassination.”

  “Spooky,” Margaret said.

  “That’s what I said!” Bernstein told her.

  Sneed unlocked the door to the members-only collection and stood aside to let them pass. “We officially close at ten, but you can stay here until midnight,” he said. “I have to shut the whole library down then.”

  They waited for the door to close behind him. Bernstein thumbed through the photocopy she’d made of the collections binder, stopped, placed her finger on a page, and glanced up at Charlie. “So we’re looking for Temple Franklin?” He nodded. “Because there’s a file here under that name.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Friday, June 5, 1772

  West Wycombe, England

  Sir Francis Dashwood sent a special red gondola to collect Benjamin Franklin and other notables and whisk them up the Thames River to his estate in West Wycombe, thirty-three miles northwest of London. Franklin had no caretaker for his ten-year-old grandson, Temple, so he brought him along; others from the elite class—the Earl of Sandwich, the lord mayor of London, Prime Minister Frederick North, and the Prince of Wales—brought sons and entourages of their own.

  Later in life, Temple would seek to fill in the blanks of his memories of the events there. It was from this attempt at a narrative that Sheryl Ann Bernstein now read, a fifteen-page description Temple Franklin had written recounting the experience, a mini-memoir. Charlie listened with rapt attention and Margaret took notes.

  Benjamin Franklin, Temple’s grandfather, had first met Dashwood through letters, literally and figuratively. As postmaster of the colonies, Franklin corresponded regularly with Dashwood, the postmaster general in London. After a few formal exchanges, as each learned more about the other, they began letting their guards down. Dashwood knew that Franklin was a Renaissance man and a font of innovation; Franklin knew that Dashwood was a man of great influence and power. Moreover, rumors had made their way across the pond about Dashwood’s embrace of a life of debauchery and his secret club of the well-connected, where every desire was indulged. This was the group that Dashwood called the Friars of St. Francis Wycombe, or the Medmenham Monks—what some in the upper classes referred to in whispers as the Hellfire Club.

  Their friendship blossomed during Franklin’s visits to England, first in 1757, when he arrived as a diplomat representing the Pennsylvania General Assembly, then in 1764, when he came to petition the king to make Pennsylvania a royal commonwealth, though his stay stretched for years.

  Temple Franklin had memories of Dashwood greeting them all at the docks in June 1772 and informing them of the secret society’s password: “Do what thou wilt.” Afterward, Dashwood escorted him and his grandfather around the ornate grounds of what was once Medmenham Abbey but now had been converted into something quite ungodly. A meticulously maintained garden revealed itself to be, from the top of a tower, an enormous representation of a naked woman, with milky water spurting from the red flowers on the tips of two mounds, and water pouring from a shrub carved into a triangle. Ten-year-old Temple Franklin laughed heartily at that one, as did his grandfather, a brilliant man who nonetheless found humor in the ribald and scatological.

  Other areas on the grounds hovered in Temple’s fainter memories, ones that he later investigated as an adult. Dashwood had, in fact, had a cavern carved out of a hill; he jokingly called it the Cave of Trophonius, the architect of Apollo’s temple, whose legendary mythical grotto was a place of nightmares. The den and everything about the estate was designed to provide pleasure, lust, and laughter, not fear; the garden grounds were crowded with sculptures of gods such as Venus and Hermes, with exaggerated emphasis on their more private parts.

  Over the entrance of the former abbey, the Medmenham Monks—as they called themselves—carved their password in French: Fais ce que voudras. On one side of the entrance stood a stone statue of the Roman goddess of silence, Angerona, while the Egyptian god of silence, Harpocrates, stood on the other side. Both held their fingers
to their lips, urging visitors to keep all the secrets that they would soon witness and partake of.

  Inside the atrium hung twelve stained-glass windows depicting the apostles in various obscene poses; in the opulent living room, a pornographic fresco had been painted on the ceiling. Hospes negare, si potes, quod offerat, announced the carving above the entrance to the Roman Room: “Stranger, refuse, if you can, what we have to offer.” That room was crowded with silk-upholstered couches and decorated with paintings of naked fornicating couples, many of them kings of England disporting with notable contemporary prostitutes. Adjacent was a library devoted solely to books about either faith or copulation, from the Queen Anne Book of Common Prayer and Psalter to Fanny Hill, from the Koran to the Kama Sutra. Downstairs, a vast wine cellar abutted a pantry stocked with fine meats and freshly baked desserts.

  During his childhood visit, Temple Franklin was shipped off to the main Wyndham estate a few miles away with a teenage girl hired to mind him so he could be sheltered from the activities within the abbey. Only later in his personal investigations did he learn what his grandfather must have experienced.

  There were officially only twelve Friars of St. Francis Wycombe, plus Dashwood, who in their mock religion was the Christ to their Apostles. The abbot of the day selected the wines, arranged for the catering of the meals, and had first pick of the “nuns” available for coitus. As a guest, Franklin joined the fifty or so lesser members of the club who were permitted to participate in the revelry though not the ceremony.

  The night that Temple Franklin missed, he later learned from one monk, was particularly drunken and debauched—an evening of pure urge and indulgence without restraint—not to mention blasphemous: A chapel ceremony was a dark and obscene parody of a Latin Mass, with a toast to Satan and the powers of the world beneath. With incense burning and black candles casting a purplish light, cultists had approached the body of a lovely nude young woman spread out on the altar and drunk sacrificial wine from her abdomen.

  From there, everyone proceeded to the Roman Room, where Medmenham Monks and friars could have their pick of various masked women dressed in nuns’ habits. The women came from all over—there were prostitutes from London, of course, but friars and monks brought mistresses and girlfriends and even wives and sisters, and once a monk brought his stepmother. Local women would also join in the fun, enjoying the naughtiness under the cloak of anonymity and appreciating the opportunity to share intimacies with the elite and possibly even a member of the royal family. Couples or larger groups would use the couches, individual rooms, spots in the garden, and, of course, the Trophonius cave.

  The Hellfire Club was more than just a haven of depravity, Temple Franklin would write years later to his half brother; it had tremendous social and business benefits. The bond of the shared illicit and secret experience was one aspect, but more powerful was the knowledge that you could ruin an ally with these secrets—and that he could do the same to you. It meant that one member would do almost anything for the others because they would do the same for him; no one had a choice. Sir Francis Dashwood labored mightily to fund the colonies before the American Revolution, Temple noted. He did everything Ben Franklin wanted him to do. And Franklin was a great supporter of Dashwood’s in every conceivable way.

  The flip side must have been true as well, Charlie realized as he listened to Bernstein. Members of the club were prevented from retaliating against one another as they might have done otherwise, not unlike the modern geopolitical concept of mutually assured destruction. The men of the Hellfire Club were thus bound together forever. A member’s secrets were safe but only because everyone knew a betrayal would mean the indiscreet betrayer would soon see his secrets spilled as well.

  Which was not to say that the monks of the Hellfire Club of the eighteenth century all got along famously. Lord Mayor of London John Wilkes and John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, loathed each other. But they had to limit the damage they inflicted, since treading too far beyond an insult at a tavern might result in the full force and fury of the club striking them down. They were all to be protected. Temple Franklin mentioned pages who had disappeared after attempts at blackmail and prostitutes whose pregnancies were taken care of via mysterious means.

  “So the Hellfire Club was about much more than pleasures,” Margaret said. “It was about alliances.”

  “Oh my God,” Charlie said.

  “What?” asked Bernstein.

  Charlie gazed at Margaret and then at Bernstein. “There’s a Hellfire Club in Washington, DC—today. And I went to one of its parties.”

  He explained how many oddities he’d witnessed that night at Conrad Hilton’s penthouse that had to have been traditions handed down from Sir Francis Dashwood’s perverse clubhouse. From Strongfellow using the password “Do what thou wilt” to gain entrance to the library to the two small stone statues holding fingers to their lips outside its doors, there were far too many similarities for it to have been anything else. The engraving Hospes negare, si potes, quod offerat, the stained-glass portrayals of important men posed pornographically with naked women, the portraits of presidents and prostitutes—it was a twentieth-century version of what Temple Franklin described in West Wycombe, England.

  “Good Lord,” Margaret said.

  “I don’t know anything about this party,” Bernstein said.

  “It was last month, a wild affair,” Charlie said. “Everyone was there. McCarthy, Cohn, Carlin, the Kennedys, Strongfellow, Allen Dulles…”

  “So you’re saying they’re all members of this deviant club?” Bernstein asked.

  “Not necessarily,” said Margaret. “Because Charlie’s not a member and he was there.”

  “I assume most there weren’t actual members. Just as in England, Ben Franklin wasn’t a Medmenham Monk, though he enjoyed a lesser affiliation in the club, since he was trusted to keep his mouth shut. There were twelve monks plus the Christ figure, right? Maybe it’s the same here? I didn’t even know what I had walked into.”

  “Some of those guys must be monks, though,” Margaret suggested.

  Charlie massaged his temple, trying to recall details. “The room Strongfellow knew the password to get into, the library. Maybe that was where the monks were? Carlin was there, and McCarthy. Um…Whitney from General Kinetics. Dulles from Central Intelligence. Sam Zemurray from United Fruit was there. They had the stained-glass portraits and such, though I didn’t recognize everyone in them, and to tell you the truth, I was pretty drunk and didn’t really study them.”

  “That’s a lot of powerful people in that library,” Bernstein said.

  The three sat in silence, a ticking clock the only noise in the room.

  “Okay, this is now officially kind of scary,” Margaret said.

  “Why?” asked Bernstein.

  “Charlie’s getting a lot of pressure from this group to do whatever they want him to,” Margaret said. She squeezed the bridge of her nose and thought about the notes she’d made that night at Polly’s Lodging when Charlie had divulged everything. Pressure from a shadowy, powerful group. That was what Charlie was experiencing. And with what she knew about Van Waganan and MacLachlan, he likely was far from the first to have been so squeezed.

  “Well, it’s a good thing LaMontagne called the jack of hearts the illegitimate son of the one true king,” Bernstein said, always looking for bright sides. “You had your brainstorm and from there all I had to do was look under William!”

  “Under William?” asked Charlie.

  “Under William Temple Franklin,” she said. “First I looked under Temple but then I remembered that wasn’t his actual first name.”

  “Ah, right,” Charlie said.

  “Under William,” Margaret said.

  “Yes, under William,” Bernstein said.

  “Under William,” Margaret repeated, almost to herself.

  Charlie looked at her expectantly. “Yes?” he asked.

  “She said ‘under William.’”
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br />   “Right. What are you getting at?”

  “‘Under Jenifer,’” Margaret said. “Isn’t that what MacLachlan said to you? ‘Under Jenifer’?”

  Charlie and Bernstein registered what Margaret was suggesting, and then they sprang into action. Bernstein again opened the collection binder, found the listing for Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, and pointed Charlie toward a vintage wooden file cabinet in the corner. Charlie opened the first drawer and began rifling through the papers.

  “There’s one here under Daniel, but it’s just a deed for some land,” Charlie said, his voice sinking in disappointment. He checked in the drawer again, more thoroughly. “Nothing else.”

  “Look under Jenifer,” Margaret suggested. “‘Under Jenifer.’ Isn’t this collection in alphabetical order?”

  “This file cabinet appears to be,” Charlie said. In the second drawer he looked, he found James Madison; James Wilson; Jay, John; Jefferson, Thomas. “Weird filing system,” he muttered.

  And then he saw it, right after Jefferson, a crisp manila folder, unlike the mahogany-colored binders that held the rest of the collection. “Hold on,” he said. He removed a thick new folder from the drawer with MacLachlan’s name written on it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Wednesday, April 21, 1954—Morning

  Washington, DC / New York City

  Charcoal thunderclouds darkened the skies above Washington, DC, as Margaret pulled up to Union Station to drop off her husband. The MacLachlan dossier they’d discovered the previous night was tightly bound and tucked inside Charlie’s briefcase, which he gripped as if it contained the nuclear codes.

  After the discovery of the folder, Charlie convinced Sneed to once more let them use the brand-new Haloid Company photocopy prototype machine, the Copyflo, reserved for Library of Congress staff, and they made two photocopies of the ninety-eight-page dossier, a process that took two hours. Margaret took one photocopy to hide in the house, and Sheryl Ann Bernstein had the other one, along with instructions to get it to Congressman Street first thing that morning.