The Hellfire Club(107)
Margaret was ten feet behind him, squirting two different containers at his neck and head; when the chemicals interacted, they formed a weapon that burned LaMontagne’s skin. Charlie was to his right, torching him with what felt like a flamethrower, spraying a furniture polish he ignited with his German lighter.
LaMontagne was in agony; his body was on fire. He couldn’t think past the pain.
Margaret opened their bedroom window and Charlie hoisted him out of it. LaMontagne fell three stories and landed on his head.
Charlie looked out the window and down onto the brick sidewalk where LaMontagne’s body lay, twisted and still and on fire.
Charlie leaned against the windowsill, his heart pounding. “Okay,” he finally said. “That worked well.”
After they’d called the police, they went to the kitchen and tried to calm down. Charlie boiled water to make them tea; he laid out a small plate of butter cookies, which Margaret began devouring.
“Where did you learn that?” she asked. “With the drain cleaners? How did you know that they would be so dangerous if you combined them? Or that the furniture polish was flammable?”
“The comic-book hearing!” Charlie laughed. “Good thing for us the nation’s comic-book publishers offer courses to America’s children on how to turn household products into horrific weapons. But it was your idea about the baby monitor that gave us the upper hand.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the baby,” she said, smiling and patting her stomach.
He put his hand on hers.
“It took us a little while, but I think we’re finally figuring out how to survive in the world of politics.”
Epilogue
Friday, April 30, 1954
Washington, DC
Washington was in mourning.
Five days before, a small plane had crashed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and taken the lives of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Franklin Harris Carlin, Republican of Oklahoma, as well as several others, including Charlie’s own office manager, Catherine Leopold, and two unknown men, presumably the pilot and copilot. Their plane had disappeared on the way to Oklahoma. After locating the wreckage, authorities said the bodies had been burned beyond recognition.
That was what everyone was told, at any rate.
The funeral aired live on local television in Washington, DC. A camera inside the National Cathedral panned across the faces of the more illustrious guests at the service: Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, and, in the pews behind the vice president, Senators Kennedy, McCarthy, and Kefauver. House Speaker Joseph Martin and Democratic leader Sam Rayburn had also been given prominent seats.
Charlie watched the proceedings on the television in the West Wing lobby foyer. Originally he’d planned to attend the funeral, as insincere as that might have been, but an early-morning phone call from Ann Whitman, President Eisenhower’s personal secretary, forced him to change plans.
The funeral made him uncomfortable, not because Charlie had killed Carlin, but because the oratories eulogized an evil and manipulative politician. Then again, Charlie knew, Carlin wouldn’t be the first or the last politician so falsely memorialized.
“Pretty creepy to hear all that praise,” Bernstein whispered to him. He had brought her for the company, because neither of them had ever been to the White House, and because her internship was soon going to end. In May, she would be heading back home to Los Angeles for a summer job at UCLA. In the fall, she would return to Georgetown for grad school, but it wasn’t yet clear if she wanted to continue working in Charlie’s office. Her experience had been quite a bit more than she’d expected, and a return to normalcy sounded enticing.
The West Wing lobby was filled with men and women darting in and out of offices for appointments with various officials, some sitting on leather chairs and sofas to be greeted, others with special badges, walking around determinedly as if this were Penn Station. Charlie’s eyes went everywhere but the television—to fellow visitors, to the black-and-white-checkered marble floor, to the paintings of American history. The work most clearly in his line of sight was the oddest and most disconcerting one in the room: President James Garfield, post–assassination attempt, suffering through his last miserable days on earth before the infection from the bullet took his life. Snatches of conversations of aides walking by urgently filled the room:
If Secretary Dulles doesn’t say Indochina is in the security interests of Southeast Asia, then France will know we ain’t sending even one soldier.
The networks should be paying McCarthy. I hear ratings are through the roof.
The veep gets one o’clock shadow. They don’t make enough makeup.
So Toscanini freezes. He forgets all the music or something. And the network panics. They cut away; they didn’t know what to do.
At least now no one has to pretend that Margaret Truman can sing.
He’d already read every article in the Washington Post on the coffee table in front of him, including the exposé on the front page, below the fold, “The Curious Case of Phil Strongfellow,” in which it was revealed that the U.S. government had no record of the Utah Republican having ever been in the OSS or any other clandestine service. A spokesman for Strongfellow stated that the congressman would be directly appealing to the Eisenhower administration for his war records to be released.