The Hellfire Club(59)
Street, however, was proving almost as tough a customer as Margaret would have been.
“You realize, of course, that this was like the psychology test they give officers,” Street said. “You have a moral quandary, and you are picking the answer that ends up with you not getting a promotion.”
“A test on paper is different from one in real life,” Charlie protested. “I get you on the should-haves. Of course. No argument. But let us abandon your world of the theoretical for one second. First of all, instead of being primed and ready for your officer’s test with six cups of joe in your gullet, imagine you’ve swigged a bottle of absinthe. Then here’s your choice: One path means you throw career, marriage, and any future with your children into the trash. You get defined by your worst moment ever for the rest of your life.” He paused. “My obit would read ‘Charles Marder, Fifty, Single, Unemployed, Disowned, Life Ruined by Fatal Car Crash.’ Do you have any more brandy?”
Street stood and refilled his friend’s glass, concern radiating from his stern and silent face.
From the bedroom, one baby stopped crying and the other one started.
“Your babies,” Charlie said. “You would risk leaving them and Renee in the lurch for something you don’t remember doing, something almost no one else knows about?”
Street stared at him.
“I’m not talking about an answer on an officer’s test,” Charlie said. “This isn’t about the moral stance you can defend in Philosophy 101 at Morehouse. I mean right here, right now. In reality. You can walk away or you can risk it all. And not just your life—Renee’s and the twins’ and everyone who depends upon you. Anyone back in Chicago you want to help. Anyone in Mossville, Louisiana. Poof, gone. Forget your time as a Tuskegee Airman, forget your Distinguished Flying Cross. You’ll just be the sum total of your worst moment. You know how Washington works.”
“I see your point,” Street said after a long silence.
Charlie was surprised by the relief he felt at this grudging acknowledgment, as if Street had the power to absolve him.
“Thank you,” he said.
“So what now?” Street asked. “LaMontagne would seem to have you over a barrel.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Charlie said. “But you’re right; I’m under his thumb.”
Street looked up at the painting of the voodoo priest and rubbed his chin.
“Speaking of ‘under’, we still haven’t figured out who Jennifer is, much less what Mac was trying to say with ‘under Jennifer.’ All due respect to the dead, what the hell does that mean?”
Charlie dropped his head in his hands. “Jesus. Mac. What a narcissistic bastard I’ve become.” He gulped down more brandy. “I don’t even know when the funeral is. That feels like a hundred years ago.”
“We visited Mac in the hospital on Monday,” Street reminded him. “Five days ago.”
At that very moment, Margaret, Louis Gwinnett, and two other researchers were sitting cross-legged around a campfire, drinking soup from thermos mugs. They had set up camp between the surf and a string of ponies, which had been within sight until sundown. The researchers on Susquehannock Island reported via walkie-talkie that no ponies had yet made the journey from Nanticoke to their location; Gwinnett’s team was determined to be awake and watching when they did.
Nursing a flask of whiskey, Gwinnett talked campus politics with the two researchers from the University of Wisconsin, graduate students named Isaac Kessler and Matthew Cornelius. Margaret kept silent, fermenting in her marital angst. The moon was waxing crescent with only 3 percent visibility—Gwinnett hoped the cloak of darkness would help their mission in observing the ponies—so the stars shone particularly bright. Kessler, gazing at the constellations in the stars, misidentified Lupus, the eleven-starred wolf, as Lepus, the eight-starred hare. It was impossible for Margaret not to correct him.
“I learned about the constellations from my uncle,” she explained after rectifying his astronomical error. “He was a park ranger, and he loved to take my sister and me outside late at night—he said he was ‘teaching us the sky,’” she said. “For Lupus, he told us a very dark story about a wolf.”
“Children’s stories are always macabre,” Gwinnett observed. “I suppose it’s to prepare them for real life.”
“Seriously,” said Cornelius. “I was traumatized by Bambi and Dumbo. What’s Walt Disney’s obsession with killing off moms?”
“Dumbo’s mom wasn’t killed, she was just imprisoned,” corrected Kessler.
“There does seem to be a common theme of losing a parent, or both parents,” said Margaret. “Snow White and Cinderella lost their moms, hence the wicked stepmothers. And wasn’t Peter Pan an orphan?”
“What was the wolf story your uncle told you?” asked Gwinnett, nudging her and handing her his flask.
“It’s a weird one,” she said, declining his offer. “Golden apples are being stolen from a tree and the king sends his three sons—the youngest is Ivan—to figure out who’s doing it. They set out on horseback and come upon a sign and three paths. One path will lead to cold and hunger. On the second, your horse will die. On the third, your horse will live but you will die—”