The Hellfire Club(61)

“Shit,” said Kessler.

“Can you tell at all where the sound is coming from?” Margaret asked, cupping her hand around her right ear.

“Not really,” said Cornelius.

Panting, Gwinnett appeared, holding his flashlight and something else. Margaret aimed her flashlight at him.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Your night-vision binoculars,” he said.

“God bless you, Mr. and Mrs. Greenstein,” she said as Gwinnett handed her the heavy instrument. Margaret turned on the power switch and brought the eyepieces to her face. She squinted and tried to make sense of the images she was seeing—a black ocean, a dark green sky.

Margaret scanned the horizon. She squinted and focused the device. “I see two…no, three. Three shapes, triangles.” She adjusted the lenses again. “They’re heads. They’re moving. Bobbing. They’re walking through the waves. They’re out deeper than I would have thought.”

“Are they headed right for Susquehannock?” asked Kessler.

“Directly,” she said. “Did anyone bring the walkie-talkie? We should let Quadrani and Hinman know.” Salvatore Quadrani and Ken Hinman were the researchers on Susquehannock Island, based there until Gwinnett moved his camp to Susquehannock in a couple of weeks.

Keeping the lenses focused and aimed in the right direction, she invited Gwinnett to have a look.

“Amazing,” he said. “Do you think they’re swimming? They’re out so far!”

“I don’t know; one of them might be a foal,” she said. “Maybe there’s a sandbar.”

Kessler and Cornelius soon got their turns as well. “Three ponies. Huh,” said Kessler.

“Three colts? Three stallions? A mare and two foals? A family?” Cornelius asked.

“That’s sure the question,” she replied.

Margaret and Gwinnett took a few steps back and sat down on the dune. Gwinnett whipped out his flask, unscrewed it, took a swig, and passed it to her.

“I’m so glad that you brought those glasses,” Gwinnett said.

“It was kind of dumb luck that the shop owners wanted to unload them,” Margaret said.

“I’ll take dumb luck over smart grad students any day of the week,” Gwinnett said.

“Gaah,” she said, grimacing after taking a swig. “Usually you buy finer stuff.”

“Cheaper is better than none,” he said. She smiled and wondered if that was true.



After several brandies, Charlie opted to call a cab to take him the six miles from Street’s house on Capitol Hill to his own in Georgetown. It took several tries before one would agree to pick him up in Street’s segregated neighborhood, and even then Charlie had to agree to walk three blocks to a more commercial thoroughfare.

He was halfway up the steps to his town house when he heard someone say, “Congressman Charlie Marder.” The gruff and famous voice stated his name matter-of-factly, as if narrating a live broadcast of individuals walking down the street. Charlie turned to see, across the street, a black Lincoln Continental with a driver and a passenger in the back. He walked to the car, and as he did, the driver jumped out and escorted Charlie to the other side of the car, adjacent to the sidewalk. He opened the door and Charlie climbed in the backseat.

“Senator McCarthy,” Charlie said as he eased himself in and closed the door behind him. “Were you sitting here waiting for me?” The car smelled like Old Spice, Lucky Strikes, and whiskey.

“How are preparations going for your comic-book hearing?” McCarthy asked, ignoring Charlie’s question. “You and Kefauver and Hendrickson all ready to fricassee Scrooge McDuck?”

Charlie sighed. “Yes, it all looks good. Though I’m sure your hearings won’t lose any viewers to ours.”

“Oh, I’m not concerned.” McCarthy chortled. They were sitting in the darkness, Charlie twisted at an angle to better see McCarthy, who was sprawled out and facing forward, though he occasionally turned his head to make eye contact with his guest and smile at him warmly. Once again Charlie was taken aback by how charming and avuncular McCarthy was. When he was being warm to you, the last thing you wanted to do was disappoint him. McCarthy reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a pint bottle, from which he took three gulps. He offered it to Charlie, who had learned in the army never to reject a swig.

“That Fred Werthman…Werth…what’s his name?” McCarthy asked. “The headshrinker who’s your main witness?”

“Fredric Wertham.”

“Him. He consorts with some shady characters, like the Negro author Richard Wright, various other Communists. I’m not saying much about it because I have bigger fish to fry right now, but I wouldn’t associate with him outside of the hearings if I were you.”

“I’ve only met him on official business relating to the juvenile delinquency hearings, sir.”

McCarthy grunted, then took another drink, after which he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “You ever hear of a guy named Clinton Brewer? He was a convict. Wertham got him out of prison.”

“No, never heard of him,” Charlie said, wondering where all this was headed.

“So your boy Wertham wrote a book a few years ago, Dark Legend. It was about some dago, maybe seventeen, whose mom gets widowed and whores around a bunch, and then the dago kills her. Matricide. So Wertham’s book comes out, it offers the bleeding-heart sob story about why this greaser did what he did, how he was compelled to, blah-blah-blah, and Richard Wright gets all excited. He knows someone else who is guilty but not really guilty. A fellow murderer—and again it was society’s fault. Just like with the greaser.”