The Hellfire Club(55)



Charlie was tempted to tell his father this was no time for philosophical cutesiness but he stopped when he recalled that in a recent letter, his father had speculated that J. Edgar Hoover was tapping phones all over Manhattan and Washington without bothering with the nuisance of lawfully obtained warrants.

“I was just reading a fascinating story about J. Edgar Hoover and the magnificent job the FBI is doing these days to root out the Communist menace,” his father said, confirming Charlie’s suspicions. “I would love to talk to you about it, and your mother would love to see you and Margaret this weekend. And if not this weekend, then sometime soon. Congress is breaking for recess next week, isn’t it?”

“I’ll talk about it with her,” Charlie said. “It would be great to see you and catch up.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Winston replied.

Charlie hung up. With his father wary of speaking on the phone and Margaret AWOL, he had no one to talk to, no way to unburden himself. Not that he was sure he’d be able to divulge every detail about the previous night to his wife or father either.

Washing his face at the kitchen sink, he heard the honk of a car horn. The cab. He ran through the rain and had the driver take him to the Mayflower.



After Margaret left her town house that morning, she visited the Birder Emporium, a shop tucked into Waters Alley off the very busy Wisconsin Avenue. A large tabby cat curled up near a heating vent meowed, then returned to its nap. The store sold anything a bird-watcher would ever need: bookshelves of field guides organized by state, country, and continent; warm clothing and hiking shoes; insect repellent, chairs, blankets, thermoses, pocketknives, camping equipment, backpacks, and lanterns. The walls were lined with photographs of a couple on various excursions through the decades, interspersed with posters of John James Audubon’s paintings of rare birds: Attwater’s greater prairie chicken, Kirtland’s warbler, the San Clemente loggerhead shrike.

The owners, Sidney and Bernice Greenstein, emerged from the back of the store to welcome Margaret as warmly as if she were a guest they’d been expecting for lunch. They’d aged considerably since the last photograph had been taken, Margaret could see, but they were lively and cheerful. She told them the purpose of her visit and about her upcoming trip to research the ponies, her need for a new pair of binoculars to replace the ones she’d dropped into the marsh on Nanticoke Island.

Sidney Greenstein led Margaret to a file cabinet in the corner of the store and, with painstaking precision, showed her the many options available. Margaret early on decided that a pair of Ross binoculars would suffice, but the old man seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show off his expertise, so she patiently sat through the entire presentation. After its merciful conclusion, Bernice Greenstein reminded her husband that there was one box in the bottom drawer he hadn’t brought out. “Why don’t you show her that one as well, Sidney?” And so it was that Margaret emerged from the store with not only a new pair of Ross binoculars but also a short-lived product from RCA, night-vision binoculars, built using guided-missile technology but discontinued after consumers found them too expensive and too heavy. Eager to unload them, the Greensteins had offered Margaret a substantial discount, and Margaret was excited to show off the new toy to Gwinnett and the other researchers.

Under darkening, cloud-heavy skies, she made her way home through the rain, happily burdened by her new acquisitions, less happily by thoughts of Charlie; she knew he would not be pleased about this sudden trip. She would tell him as soon as possible, either in person, if he was still at the house nursing his hangover, or on the phone. As she walked, she prepared some rational counterarguments to any objections he might make.

But Charlie wasn’t home. Margaret phoned and found he was not yet at work. So she dashed off a quick note, collected her suitcase and coat, and called her ride to tell him that she was ready. As she waited, she fretted about Charlie. She didn’t know what was motivating him anymore. At first he’d seemed focused on stopping Goodstone, but now he seemed entirely preoccupied with other goals, ones he didn’t seem eager to share with her—likely because he knew she would disapprove. Who knew what backroom deals he was now part of?

The human soul isn’t sold once but rather slowly and methodically and piece by piece, she thought. They hadn’t even been in Washington for three months; how had things changed so quickly?

Margaret looked sternly at herself in the hallway mirror. She could almost hear her mother’s voice admonishing her to stiffen her spine and get on with things. Well, then, that’s what she was going to do. She heard the honking of a car horn, and she left the house, locking the door behind her.



Battling his raging hangover and the pouring rain, Charlie retrieved his car from the Mayflower and drove to Capitol Hill. Staring grimly out at the wet gray city, he fought the impulse to think about last night while also being unable to think of anything else. He’d felt remorse after Rodriguez was killed in France, but there were too many other villains—the Krauts, the Vichy French, Goodstone—for him to hold himself responsible in any real way. There were no alternative bad guys in the tale of his having killed a girl while driving in a drunken stupor. He chased away the remorse as best he could, focusing on all the unknowns and his inability to remember any of it, as if an alcoholic blackout provided some sort of cloak, a protection from sin.

For once, the alarming news on the radio served as a welcome distraction; more drama between the Eisenhower administration and McCarthy as the defense secretary called McCarthy’s charges that the U.S. Army was coddling Communists “just damn tommyrot.” But the administration had also just given McCarthy more ammunition; the latest tabulation of government employees who’d been fired or resigned after being deemed a “security risk” had just been updated, and the number now stood at 2,429, with 422 directly or indirectly tied to subversive activities. Moreover, in Caracas, Venezuela, Secretary of State Dulles warned his fellow foreign ministers that there wasn’t “a single country in this hemisphere which has not been penetrated by the apparatus of international communism acting under orders from Moscow.”

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