The Hellfire Club(65)

“Excuse me?” asked Kefauver.

“Nothing,” said Charlie. “Cohn and I had a few words the other night. I was defending General Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, rather.”

“They’re going after the generals now,” Kefauver said. “First McCarthy smeared General Marshall and now they’re going after the whole goddamned army.”

“It’s madness,” said Charlie. “His whole tail-gunner mythos is a load. He couldn’t shine General Marshall’s army boots. And Cohn—”

“Cohn’s a nasty cuss, Charlie,” the senator said. “You come at him, he’ll come back ten times harder. His boss has a framed quote in his office: ‘Oh, God, don’t let me weaken. And when I go down, let me go down like an oak tree felled by a woodsman’s ax.’”

“In an ideal world, sure,” Charlie said.

“But who’s going to wield the ax?” Kefauver asked. “I thought the army secretary’s acquiescence to McCarthy the other day was shameful. You two are the army men, not me. But McCarthy was in the Senate cloakroom joking about how Secretary Stevens got on his knees for him like a ‘double-dime Milwaukee whore.’ Just pathetic.”

“The army’s going to fight back,” Strongfellow said. “I was just at the Pentagon. Expect details about all the ways Cohn has tried to get special privileges for his ‘friend’ on their staff, Private Schine.”

“You boys weren’t here when McCarthy was literally defending Nazis,” Kefauver said. “Do you remember that?”

Charlie and Strongfellow looked at him blankly.

“I swear to God, nobody remembers anything that happened ten minutes ago,” Kefauver said. “Do you recall the massacre at Malmedy?”

“Of course,” said Charlie. During Hitler’s last desperate push at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, the First SS Panzer Division captured and slaughtered eighty-four U.S. troops near Malmedy, Belgium.

“Did you later hear about the allegations that after the war, the U.S. abused the storm troopers who were part of that massacre?”

“Vaguely,” said Strongfellow.

“That was Tail Gunner Joe, who just happens to have a lot of German-American constituents who might have been feeling a little guilty, postwar. McCarthy heard the charges that the interrogators had abused the Nazis, and he pushed and pushed and pushed. It all ended up before me and the Senate Armed Services Committee in ’49. I would note that it all took on a very anti-Semitic subtext, except there was nothing sub about it. All sorts of characters alleged that the U.S. interrogators were Jews out for vengeance. McCarthy was among them. And it was all fake. None of it was real. There was no systematic abuse of the Nazis. Just a smear campaign against Jews and against Americans trying to rebuild Germany postwar. Led by you-know-who.”

“So he was defending Nazis?” Charlie asked. “This great defender of our republic?”

“Holy smokes,” said Strongfellow. “You’d think Nazis would be one thing we can all agree on.”

“No one remembers anything,” said Kefauver. “And now he’s taking on the Pentagon. And they’re scared.”

“Charlie, before I forget, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Strongfellow said, “the Pentagon knows nothing about that University of Chicago study.”

“Really?”

“My Pentagon guy says they have no idea who—what were their names?”

“Mitchell and Kraus.”

“Right, no idea who Mitchell and Kraus are or what study you’re talking about,” Strongfellow said. He glanced toward a table where Carlin’s aide Abner Lance was shooting a cuff to look pointedly at his watch. “Anyway, see you on the floor. Last vote before Easter recess.”



Charlie stood on the floor of the House while his fellow members of Congress buzzed around him. Just a week before, the Puerto Rican terrorists had fired on them, killing MacLachlan and wounding five others. And here they all were, debating a military aid bill for the United Kingdom as if nothing had happened. In the real world, Charlie noted, people took time to grieve; institutions were shuttered for days in the wake of horrific events that involved friends, family, and colleagues. But in Washington, the cogs in the machines kept turning regardless of damage to other wheels. This wasn’t an oddity of the federal bureaucracy, he had come to realize; this was one of its purposes.

Charlie took it all in. He could still see bloodstains on the carpet where MacLachlan had fallen, not unlike the spots on the marble stairs MacLachlan had shown him just minutes before he was shot. Meanwhile, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman was yielding the floor to his Democratic counterpart to debate how much the United States should cooperate with UK efforts to suppress a guerrilla rebellion in a Southeast Asia British colony most Americans had never heard of, the Malayan Union.

Then again, Charlie thought to himself, was the House’s ability to move on any different than his own? He considered the accident, the dead young woman, the Studebaker that LaMontagne had set on fire. He was a mess inside but strong enough to fake it in front of hundreds of members of Congress, journalists, the public.

“Bet you didn’t think you’d be focused on the Malayan emergency when you first got the call from Governor Dewey to join us here,” said Carlin, wrapping an arm around Charlie’s shoulders. Charlie’s heart rate suddenly increased. He wondered what Carlin knew. LaMontagne had to have told him everything.