The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  New York City / Susquehannock Island, Maryland

  The White Horse Tavern stood at the corner of Hudson and Eleventh Streets in the West Village. Inside huddled beatniks and musicians, Columbia grad students and NYU coeds and self-styled working-class poets, all of them enveloped in a San Francisco fog of cigarette smoke. Each new arrival was announced by the ringing of a bell hanging above the door, followed by the sounds and winds of the thunderstorm barreling through Manhattan. The room reeked of soaking-wet clothing and hair. It was afternoon, but it might as well have been two a.m., given the carousing and degree of inebriation in the crowd. In the back, on a stage illuminated by one hanging lightbulb, a disheveled, hirsute young man in a corduroy jacket was reciting a poem he’d written; he paused to let the room appreciate his rhyme of ghetto and Geppetto.

  Charlie was at the White Horse for one simple reason, and it wasn’t its bohemian chic: the tavern was a place where he could sit and chat with a black friend without any hostile looks or comments.

  “Were you followed?” Charlie asked as Isaiah Street took off his wet hat and overcoat and hung them on a hook next to their corner booth.

  “Not sure,” Street said. “I might have had company on the train.”

  Charlie waved down the waitress, who promptly took their orders, two bourbons on the rocks, plus club sandwiches.

  “Listen, I have some great news for you,” Street said. “I mean, really great.”

  “What? God, I could use some great news. Or even mediocre news. Anything other than horrible would be welcome.”

  The waitress brought their drinks.

  “To Dylan Thomas,” Street said. “‘Death shall have no dominion.’”

  Charlie raised his glass. “Where better to toast him than in the place where he drank himself to death?”

  They allowed their first few sips to settle.

  “Did you get a chance to talk about the MacLachlan dossier at the hearings?” Street asked. “Bernstein told me that was your plan, but in the cab just now, on the radio, I didn’t hear anything on the hearings.”

  “And you won’t,” boomed a nasal voice. Abner Lance, Chairman Carlin’s right-hand man, loomed above them.

  “Jesus, it’s Count Orlok,” said Charlie.

  “There isn’t going to be any press coverage of your lies and innuendo, Congressman,” Lance told him.

  “At least take a seat, Lance,” said Street, “before you make a further spectacle of yourself.”

  Availing himself of an unoccupied chair at an adjacent table, Lance joined them. “Quite a stunt there, Congressman,” he said to Charlie.

  Charlie shrugged. “I was asked a question. I answered.”

  “With a stolen dossier of classified information,” said Lance.

  “With data about the manufacture of pesticides that cause nerve damage and cancer,” said Charlie. “To Americans.”

  “Why isn’t this on the news, Abner?” Street asked.

  “Because nobody wants it to be on the news. Not the Republicans. Not the Democrats. Not Wall Street. Not the unions. No one. And when no one wants a story to be on the news, it has a way of not being on the news.”

  “A lot of reporters wanted to talk to me,” Charlie said.

  “They did,” said Lance. “And now they don’t.” He reached down to the floor for his briefcase. He opened it and withdrew a folder. “Speaking of seeing print,” he said, dropping the folder on the table in front of Charlie.

  Charlie’s heart sank.

  “I assume you know what these are,” Lance said. “Photographs of you behind the wheel of a wrecked car. Apparently, a young woman was in your car with you, and she fell out as you recklessly and drunkenly careened the vehicle into a ditch.”

  Charlie felt as if his nerves had seized up, as if he were trapped in a body he couldn’t move. He remembered having this feeling once before, for just a moment, during the war, when he listened to reports of Companies A and B of the First Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment of the Twenty-Ninth Division, landing at Omaha Beach and getting mowed down by Germans, like wheat cut by a scythe. Charlie and his men would soon enough be sent right into that same spray of death, he’d realized, and he sat as still as a statue until his first lieutenant snapped his fingers in front of his face, bringing him back. Eleven years later, sitting in this smoky Greenwich Village tavern, Charlie snapped himself out of his shock.

  “Do you want to see the photographs?” Lance asked.

  Charlie eyed the folder apprehensively, formulating a response in his head. His mouth was as dry as a desert. He had chills; he wasn’t sure if anyone else could see him shaking. He kept his hands on his lap to hide any tremors.

  Before he could speak, Street produced a file of his own. He dropped it on the table dramatically, then leaned back in his chair and exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke.

  “Maybe you should take a gander at my photographs,” Street said. “I took these myself.”

  Lance scoffed and made a show of unconcern, but he moved quickly to snatch the folder out of Charlie’s reach, and as he shuffled through the photos inside, his face grew darker and the wrinkles in his scowl sank deeper, almost as if he were aging before Charlie’s eyes. Carlin’s top aide was already an odd-looking man on the best of days, with his red face and white-blond hair, a swollen bullfrog neck and fang-ish eyeteeth; his current shock exacerbated the ugliness.

  Charlie desperately wanted to know what had sent Lance into such a rage, but he looked on placidly, betraying no sign of a heart beating fast enough to give Gene Krupa a run for his money while a stifling heat built up inside his shirt collar. Charlie felt a heightened awareness of his surroundings. Somewhere, a waiter dropped a tray of dishes. The door opened, and the rain hitting the pavement sounded like a herd of porterhouses sizzling on the grill. The new customer passed their table, a peaty smell of wet wool wafting behind him. Charlie glanced at Street, who sat calmly, looking for all the world like a man holding a royal flush, waiting for his opponent to recognize defeat.

  Finally, Lance was finished with the photographs. He placed them gingerly on the table, facedown, and then covered them with the folder. Charlie looked at Street, who could barely contain his smile. Lance stood.

  “Very well, Congressman,” he said. “I hope you’ve given full consideration to what this might mean.”

  “What it might mean?” asked Street. “You can’t blackmail Charlie for something he didn’t do. And those photographs prove the whole thing was a setup. You and LaMontagne arranged it all.” He took a final gulp of his bourbon. “Good thing the Three Hundred Thirty-Second Fighter Group of the United States Army Air Forces taught me night photography.” He smiled benignly at Lance, whose face had turned a new shade of red.

  Charlie was stunned and starting to feel an ignition of fury. This whole time Street had known that Charlie was an innocent man, and he hadn’t bothered to tell him? But any resentment dissipated when Lance angrily sat back down.

  “You little shits have no idea what you’re doing or who you’re dealing with,” he said, his tone hushed and menacing. “You think it’s cute that Charlie just alerted the Reds about our defoliation program, which we will need to protect allies and our own troops in the coming decades? You think you’re heroes? You’re not heroes. You’re treasonous.”

  Charlie reached across the table to Street’s pack of Pall Malls. He shook the box, loosened a cigarette, and lit it with his German lighter. He exhaled into Lance’s face.

  “Your chemicals are killing Americans, you insufferable worm,” Charlie said. “Americans. In Utah and Appalachia and Mossville, Louisiana. They’re poor Americans, and colored Americans, so maybe you and Chairman Carlin and your friends at the club don’t care. But I care. Isaiah cares. The guys we fought with in Europe—they care.”

  “Spare me the sermon, Eugene Debs,” Lance spat. “If you want to go live in a socialist workers’ paradise, feel free to fly to Moscow right now—you’ll probably get a hero’s welco
me.”

  “You’re just sore because we figured it out,” Charlie continued. “And it was all right there in front of us.”

  He withdrew a piece of paper from his wallet and tossed it in front of Lance: U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops. “That was in my desk when I moved in. Or, I should say, in Van Waganan’s desk. And it took me a while to piece it all together, especially since the University of Chicago wouldn’t share the information about Mitchell and Kraus’s study. But as soon as we got hold of the General Kinetics dossier we figured it out. Two, four–D is a fairly common herbicide. It kills weeds around cereal grains. No real mystery there. Until you combine it with two, four, five–T—used to defoliate broadleaf plants—and the rest of what Van Waganan found.”

  Lance pointed his finger at Charlie as if it were a sword. “Destroying brush where Communist guerrillas hide will save lives,” he said.

  “And is that all the army had discovered in its testing at Fort Detrick? And Eglin Air Force Base?”

  Lance once again stood. “We’re done,” he said. “I hope you have a good lawyer. And I hope your wives aren’t home alone.”

  He left the table and the tavern with the speed and determination of a demon out of hell. Charlie and Street looked at each other, threw down money for the tab, and rushed to Pennsylvania Station to get to their wives as soon as possible.

  At the precise moment Lance was vaguely threatening Margaret, the rain, brutal and unrelenting, was beating down onto the tarp of Margaret’s tent, and she was wondering how long the canvas would be able to withstand the assault. When she’d driven to the tip of the Maryland isthmus, parked, and then crossed the bridge to Susquehannock Island by foot, she’d wondered if the weather would render the trip pointless. But she had no way of reaching Gwinnett, and she didn’t want to disappoint him yet again; almost five months into her pregnancy, this would be her last outing.

  Margaret had jogged across the bridge as quickly as she could with her slightly protruding abdomen, which meant she was soaking wet before she reached the halfway point, raincoat notwithstanding. She had guessed that by now Gwinett, Kessler, and Cornelius would have moved to this new island, and she was right. They’d even moved her tent here.

  She felt thoroughly alone, unconnected to the researchers in the other three tents who didn’t know yet that she had rejoined them, hundreds of miles away from her husband, with no way to reach him, isolated from the world. She could vanish right now, on this spot, and no one would realize it for hours, if not days. A few months ago she might have reveled in that independence, but now, newly aware of menacing forces, she felt vulnerable. Her internal voice told her not to be so melodramatic, but then she reminded herself that these men in the Hellfire Club had tried to frame Charlie by killing a young woman and were, at the very least, indifferent to the poisoning of Americans in the name of some greater struggle against the Communists. They might even have killed Congressman Van Waganan, for all she knew.

  She felt like Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible, which Charlie had taken her to see shortly after it opened on Broadway. It was as if the whole world had gone mad. People who were normal, even friends, could be revealed as enemies, even evil. What was that line she had so liked from the play? Remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

  She looked at her few belongings in the tent, transported over and tossed inside: a small suitcase, a sleeping bag, a journal, her night-vision binoculars. She was surprised to see the specialty binoculars in her tent, and she picked them up and held them. It felt like years since she’d left the Birder Emporium with them. Before this knowledge of everything Charlie was caught up in; a lifetime ago. Under the hiss of rain hitting the pines and the deeper-pitched sizzle of the spray pounding the ground, a faint murmur of conversation made its way to her ears. One of the voices—Gwinnett’s—was considerably louder than the others. She tried to focus, ignore the other noises, so she could make out what was being said, but to no avail.

  Without knowing exactly why she was being secretive, she walked stealthily, heel to toe, toward the sounds coming from Gwinnett’s tent. The soil, a combination of hard-packed sand and dirt, had largely absorbed the water for hours, but saturation was now setting in, and small streams began swirling and trickling throughout the campsite. Twice a sustained gust of wind was strong enough to require Margaret to push her body against it to proceed on her path.

  “No sign of her yet,” she heard Gwinnett say. “We’re frankly not sure if she’s coming back. Maybe not with this weather.”

  She heard a gravelly but fainter voice now, sounding as if it was coming over a telephone—the shortwave radio Margaret had heard Gwinnett mention he had in case of emergency. “That’s fine, just know that the mission has now changed. Get us that dossier.”

  “Understood. And where is he?”

  “Last seen in Manhattan.”

  “What about her?”

  “We were tailing him, not her, so we lost visibility after she dropped him at the train station.”

  The sharp crack of a bolt of lightning hitting somewhere on the island startled Margaret, though she was careful not to make a sound. Thunder growled deeply.

  “I can’t even believe I can hear you with this storm,” Gwinnett marveled. “Weather must be helping.”

  “Just get the girl…folder,” Margaret made out. The transmitter crackled with static and the next words she could make out were “now top priority.”

  “Of course,” Gwinnett said. The noise of the transmitter ended abruptly. Margaret strained to hear Gwinnett’s lowered voice. “Go to the bridge and keep an eye out for her.”

  “Got it,” said Cornelius.

  At the realization that Cornelius, too, was in the tent and any second would be coming to find her, Margaret turned and fled.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Wednesday, April 21, 1954—Evening

  Susquehannock Island, Maryland

  Margaret had trusted that Cornelius would follow orders and head right for the bridge, so she ran in the opposite direction. She knew it was a short-term solution; Cornelius would get to the bridge, cross it, and see her car parked nearby. As she’d anticipated, within three minutes of his leaving the tent, Cornelius returned from the bridge to the mainland and briskly walked right to Gwinnett and someone else—was it Kessler beneath that raincoat?—presumably to tell them that she might be on the island. The three began looking around; she guessed they were searching for her.

  That was four hours ago.

  Margaret lay on her side in a field of brush, sopping wet, watching the campsite, waiting for an idea or an opportunity. Gwinnett had returned to the campsite and now stood there with binoculars searching for Margaret in the distance. She heard him instruct Cornelius and Kessler to run in opposite directions around the island, which they did, though so loudly that it wasn’t difficult for Margaret to avoid them both. She was grateful the other two researchers, Quadrani and Hinman, were no longer there.

  At first Gwinnett and his assistants attempted to appeal to her as if nothing was wrong.

  “Margaret, where are you?” they shouted, as if she’d gotten lost.

  As hours passed, however, and their frustration grew and the raging winds turned raindrops into pinpricks, they abandoned the pretense.

  “Margaret, come out!” Cornelius yelled. “There’s nowhere for you to go! Kessler is at your car!”

  And then: “You’re going to die in this storm, Margaret! What worse could we do to you?”

  She had slowly and silently negotiated the marsh and the wetlands. Fierce winds pushed ashen, billowing thunderclouds across the sky without a break in sight. Night was coming, which complicated matters for both hunter and prey—they would not be able to see her, and she would not be able to see much beyond the lights of their camp.

  Every inch of her was wet, and she was knee-deep in the bog. She had never been so cold; her jaw started to tremble, her teeth hitting eac
h other. But it was too risky to move. Thank God she had been absentmindedly holding her night-vision binoculars when she walked to Gwinnett’s tent, she thought. They might save her life.

  Charlie and Street just made the train—the five-fifteen Evening Congressional from New York to DC—climbing aboard as it was starting to chug out of the station. Traffic had been especially bad in the rain, the line for tickets was long, and the salesclerk expressed skepticism that they’d make it. But they ran to and then alongside the slow-moving train until they found an open door and jumped on. Sweating, panting, they slowed their pace and found seats in the club car. After a waitress took their drink orders, Charlie finally asked the question.

  “So those were photographs of me? Of that night?”

  “Correct,” said Street.

  “What did they show?”

  “Lance driving you to Rock Creek. Some other guy had already purposely crashed the car and placed the dead body by the side. He and Lance carried you to the spot and left. You woke up and LaMontagne showed up—he was cued to do so, I’m sure. The photos make it clear you weren’t driving the car. That it was a setup.”

  The waitress returned with their drinks, and Street bought a pack of cigarettes. Charlie stared out the window at industrial sites and trash-filled vacant lots, trying to take in all that he’d just learned.

  Street lit a cigarette and exhaled loudly. New Jersey swampland rushed past the window, and Charlie could see his reflection; he felt as if he’d aged ten years in the past week, and he looked it too.

  “How long have you known this?” Charlie asked, irritated. “You said you took the pictures?”

  “I don’t know who took them,” Street replied. “I said I took them, but that was a lie. Your dad gave them to me just before I met you at the White Horse Tavern. He had—”

  “My dad?”

  “Yes,” Street said. “I don’t know where they came from, but thankfully someone was tailing you that night.” He lit another Pall Mall. “I don’t know who took the pictures. For all I know, the Hellfire Club did it so they’d have leverage over Abner Lance and LaMontagne if they needed it. This is a weird and screwy group. And there appears to be a struggle going on within the Hellfire Club. Hoover and McCarthy and Ambassador Kennedy are on one side, the Dulles brothers and some other Ike allies are on the other.”