The Hellfire Club(30)



“Right. A good idea, but the ones in the stores right now are clunky and the reception is awful. The signal is sent through your own electrical wiring in your home, so signals get crossed and you might all of a sudden pick up the latest Senators game. Plus, they’re pricey, like twenty bucks each, so they’re not exactly flying off the shelves. But we have a good model that’s about to hit the stores. I’ll get you one.”

“No need, but forget the commercial application—you want Central Intelligence to buy this baby-monitor technology for what? Listening devices at the Soviet embassy?” He’d meant it as a joke, but as soon as he said it, he realized it actually made sense.

“Bingo,” said LaMontagne, and he landed an elegant forefinger on his nose in approval. “But we didn’t trust that the Communist-leaflet guy, Boschwitz—that’s his name, Ira Boschwitz—wasn’t going to tip off his ideological brethren at the embassy. Or, even worse, give them the blueprints. So we fired him.”

“And how can I help?”

“Well, believe it or not,” LaMontagne said, stubbing out his cigarette, “Zenith hired him.”

“And McCarthy’s holding hearings right now on the Army Signal Corps.”

“That’s why I’m in town, they’re going after Leo Kantrowitz today. Zenith fired him as soon as he got subpoenaed.” Charlie had read in the morning paper—indubitably leaked by McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—that prior to Zenith, Kantrowitz had done classified work for the Army Signal Corps while he was a member of the Communist Party. “But Kantrowitz is small potatoes,” LaMontagne said. “They’re missing the real problem.”

“Boschwitz?”

“Boschwitz.”

“Why haven’t you just gone right to the committee? I’m sure they’d be interested in hearing this.”

LaMontagne lit another Chesterfield. “Our in-house counsel advised us against direct coordination. We’ve attempted other avenues, but so far members of the committee have thought we were just bad-mouthing a competitor. Also we didn’t have any evidence other than anecdotal.”

He withdrew a manila folder from his briefcase and tossed it onto the coffee table in front of Charlie, who picked it up but didn’t open it.

“Are you just bad-mouthing a competitor? Is the fact that he went to Zenith a big part of this?”

LaMontagne stood. “Just open the folder. Anything you could do to pass it on to Cohn or Bob Kennedy would be very deeply appreciated.” He looked at his watch. “But I gotta run, have a thing with Dulles in an hour.”

“John Foster or Allen?” Charlie asked, as he had to wonder why a midlevel electronics executive would be meeting with either the secretary of state or the director of Central Intelligence, both of whom quietly wove their tentacles around anything and everything that could be construed as being in the national security interests of the United States.

“Does it matter?” LaMontagne asked. He grabbed his hat and jacket from the coatrack and nearly bumped into Sheryl Ann Bernstein on his way out the door. She smiled at him brightly—Charlie sometimes wondered if there was any encounter that wouldn’t prompt that cheerful Midwestern smile—and stood aside to let him pass.

Bernstein reminded Charlie of many of the Barnard students he’d taught: bright, eager, wide-eyed. And, though he’d be loath to make such an observation aloud, a touch flirtatious—very mildly, like a teenager permitted to apply only some modest lipstick, her coy glances almost like a risqué outfit she was trying on in the store just to see how it felt. Not that there was anything particularly sensual about the bond they were forming, which was rooted in intellectual pursuits more than anything else. But he would be lying if he pretended that being around a woman who seemed delighted to be talking to him wasn’t a welcome change. He knew this was the emotional equivalent of a Hershey Bar, but that didn’t make it taste any less sweet.

She held a folder aloft like a trophy she’d just won. “Do you remember that scrap of paper you told me to look into, Congressman? It’s taken me a few weeks, but I have some possible leads.”

Charlie motioned her to a seat and silently mourned the loss of the productive early morning he’d planned. He would have been inclined to forget about those cryptic scribbles: U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops.

She provided her update. After he’d handed her the weird note while they were getting off the Senate subway, she’d cold-called the University of Chicago’s Department of Botany, and the department librarian had said she’d look into it.

“She was so helpful when we first spoke, and she even said she had a good idea about where to look for more information. But since then—” Bernstein paused dramatically and Charlie stifled a small sigh of impatience while he glanced at his watch. “I’ve been calling and calling and she has not taken my call. For almost a month now!”

“Odd,” said Charlie, though he couldn’t help wondering if a departmental librarian had more pressing duties to attend to than chasing down a stranger’s out-of-left-field requests.

“I know!” Bernstein enthused, her excitement suddenly bubbling over. “But then I had another idea. My brother goes to Northwestern, so I asked him to stop by the department and see what he could find out.” She paused again. “He’s pretty handsome, and the librarian was very friendly to him until he revealed why he was there. He said she got really cold, really fast. Said the study he was asking about was subject to wartime secrecy laws and that there was nothing that could be shared with the public in any way. And she had campus security escort him out.”

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