The Hellfire Club(52)

Carlin pulled Charlie even closer. “I screwed you on Goodstone,” he said, a big beaming smile exploding on his face, a fat finger landing on Charlie’s lapel for emphasis.

Charlie blinked.

LaMontagne and Strongfellow chuckled, though it wasn’t clear if they were laughing at the news or the shocking way it had been delivered.

“But…I saw the bill,” Charlie said. “You struck out the provision.”

“That is true,” Carlin said, now wagging his finger in the air, granting the point. “But what you didn’t see was a provision we added in a separate part of the bill allocating the same amount for any subsidiaries of General Kinetics.”

“Which, as you may know, Charlie, Goodstone is about to become,” said LaMontagne, a smug look on his face.

Charlie rocked back slightly in his seat. He felt as if he’d just been punched in the stomach.

“Now, son,” said Carlin, giving him a patronizing pat on the back. “Don’t take it so hard. You’re not the first pretty young thing I’ve screwed this week, and you won’t be the last.”

Charlie felt a hand on his shoulder. Strongfellow was trying to console him.

“The larger point, Charlie, is you’re right—Goodstone fucked up,” added LaMontagne. “But these companies were rushing product for the war effort. No one was trying to kill anyone.”

“And the fight goes on, Charlie,” said Carlin.

“And the fight goes on,” Strongfellow repeated.

Charlie felt deflated. An expert in the deal making, debauchery, and duplicity of the Founding Fathers, he wasn’t naive about politics: it could be vicious. And it was ever thus. Charlie had written a well-received article about how the ferocious and cruel attacks by John Quincy Adams’s friends against Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, accusing her of bigamy, had all but certainly led to her death after the election of 1828. In a historical context, Carlin’s maneuver wouldn’t even be a footnote in an encyclopedia of chicanery. But no one had ever lied to Charlie’s face like that before, much less relished the revelation of the deception. It enraged and humiliated him.

The redheaded waitress appeared with her ubiquitous silver tray, this time bearing bottles and implements as if she were about to assist in a surgical procedure.

“Ah, Suzannah,” said Carlin. “Thank you.”

“Absinthe?” asked LaMontagne. “What’s the occasion?”

“It’s almost Friday,” joked Carlin.

Suzannah deposited the tray on a table and began an elaborate preparation. First she held up a silver slotted spoon, then, with some pageantry, she displayed a sugar cube as if it were a chunk of gold panned from a river. Then she delicately put the sugar cube on the spoon. She was joined by a second, waifish waitress who produced a delicate dark bottle and poured a green liquid into a glass, then put it in front of Charlie. Suzannah placed the spoon with its sugar cube on top of the glass and then used a syringe to slowly drip ice water onto the cube.

“What ratio are you going with?” Carlin asked her.

“One to four, I think,” she said.

“Better make it one to five,” Carlin said. “This is probably Charlie’s first absinthe. Right, Charlie?”

Charlie nodded. It was something that hadn’t interested him—or been readily available—during his time in France.

Clouds billowed in the glass as the drink took on a milky look, and Charlie began to smell its pungent licorice scent. He looked anxiously at Suzannah.

“This is how the French do it,” Carlin said, and Suzannah nodded.

“Carlin and I normally go for the Bohemian way of preparing it,” said LaMontagne.

Carlin reached into Suzannah’s pouch, snatched a sugar cube, and popped it in his mouth.

“The cubes are soaked in alcohol for Bohemian, then set on fire. It’s stronger that way.”

“But you don’t need it stronger for this first venture,” said LaMontagne.

Charlie raised his glass to them, wondering why he was toasting the man who had betrayed him. “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead,” he said.



It was all stumbles and swirls after that.

Singing and dancing. Something about abbots and friars, about the men in the stained glass being apostles.

Slices of succulent pork slid onto plates.

Much wine.

More singing.

More young women. Inebriated, willing.

A moment to himself. Thoughts about MacLachlan. Guilt about MacLachlan. Confusion about “under Jennifer.”

Then someone shook him out of it. Back to the revelry. You’re the top / You’re the breasts on Venus / You’re the top / You’re King Kong’s penis.

Dulles and Dulles and Sam the Banana Man and Cohn and Strongfellow and LaMontagne, and that redheaded waitress, Suzannah, on his lap, and…a whirlpool of images, blurry, hard to understand, as if he were underwater.

Stumbling onto the street.

Falling.

Laughing.

Getting up.

Then blackness.

Charlie awoke hours later, his head pounding, his face in the mud. Next to him lay a shiny black 1953 Studebaker Commander Starliner partly submerged in Rock Creek.





Chapter Fifteen