The Hellfire Club(7)
“Yes, ma’am.” Charlie grinned, but with a slight wince. Political life seemed to require new levels of drinking, and lately liquor had become a slow-motion “Goodnight Irene” punch to the face, knocking him out for the night. Which, to be honest, he sometimes preferred to sober insomnia and nightmares about France, the hangover notwithstanding.
He kissed her good-bye and went downstairs to the foyer, where he bundled up in his heavy coat, put on his fedora, and descended the town-house stairs. As he stood outside on Dent Place, the cruel January chill felt like pins pricking his cheeks. Days-old snow and ice had turned the cobblestoned streets grimy, like mashed coal. Dodging ice puddles and frozen slush banks, he made his way around the corner to his new car, a silver Oldsmobile Super 88. Margaret had protested mildly when he chose it upon arriving in Washington—for a day or so she’d called him Hot Rod—but Charlie still had book royalties to spend. He felt a boyish thrill every time he saw its gleaming wraparound windshield, the chrome streak on each side creating the illusion of speed even when the car was standing still. It was his first car—as a New Yorker, he’d had no need for one—and despite his left-leaning wife’s occasional anti-consumerist gibes, he felt no guilt about his joy in the smell of the car’s interior leather and the satisfying hum of its 185-horsepower Rocket V-8 engine.
Even though it was chilly, he rolled down the windows and kept them open as he maneuvered through Georgetown. For Charlie, it was an aromatic tour as much as a visual one: garbage, brown sugar, cat urine, freshly baked bread. As he entered Rock Creek Parkway, he flipped on the radio. Playing defense against McCarthy, President Eisenhower was proposing to strip U.S. citizenship from Communists convicted of treason, but the broadcasters devoted much more time to the marriage of Yankee great Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe.
Charlie passed the Washington Monument on his left and the Jefferson Memorial, across the Tidal Basin, on his right. By nine a.m., he’d parked and begun his journey on foot to the very worst quarters in the House Office Building.
Three weeks after he’d first moved in, Charlie wondered if the novelty of walking into his office at the U.S. House of Representatives would ever wear off. This time last year, he’d been a rising academic star at Columbia, settling into the life he’d plotted for himself since he was a boy. But that all changed in December when Representative Martin Van Waganan, Democrat from New York’s Thirteenth Congressional District, was indicted for corruption and racketeering. Hours after the grand jury handed down its decision, Van Waganan’s dead body was found in a cheap motel in a blighted ghetto of Northeast Washington, DC. Police had no suspects; the crime scene was messy and inconclusive. The FBI had taken over, and the status of the investigation was uncertain. It was a grim business that had triggered Manhattan power broker Winston Marder’s quick phone call to Republican governor Tom Dewey to arrange for Charlie to fill the vacant seat for the remainder of the term.
The stated reasons for Charlie’s selection, the ones soon whispered to newspaper reporters by “the governor’s top aides,” were Charlie’s war record, his respected bestseller, his and his wife’s telegenic looks, and his GOP affiliation (important for Dewey at a time when his party controlled the House and White House). The subtext of Winston Marder’s pitch to Dewey went unstated: Dewey owed him. Charlie knew that his selection had been unusual, to put it mildly, and that there were plenty of congressmen and journalists who were waiting for him to fall flat on his face on Congress’s marble floors.
Charlie navigated the dim halls to find Catherine Leopold stationed in her usual position next to his congressional office’s open door, clipboard in hand, wearing the slightly disapproving expression she’d probably had since birth. “Good morning, Congressman,” she said crisply. “Today might be a good day to start emptying out those boxes in your office. The ones that you insisted you didn’t want me to unpack. The new intern will fetch you some coffee at the House Restaurant. Black, I presume?”
For all her attention to detail, Catherine Leopold seemed possessed by a peculiar determination to ignore Charlie’s stated preference; every day she asked him if he’d like his coffee black, and every day he said no. Black was how he’d had to take it in the trenches, black and like a mud puddle—if his platoon was lucky. Sometimes he had not been entirely certain the java wasn’t just sewage.
“I’d love cream and sugar,” he said, as he did every day.
He could have sworn he heard Leopold give a mild harrumph of disapproval. He wasn’t sure if this was a rebuke of his dietary habits or a comment on his lack of manliness, though he didn’t care. The notion of what any particular civilian might think about his masculinity meant little to Charlie after he had experienced and borne witness in the war to all its various and grisly manifestations.
In his personal office, he hung up his coat and hat and turned to face the boxes full of books and pictures he’d been avoiding, all of them neatly stacked along one side of the small room. He knew he should just buckle down and unpack, but he also took some small delight in aggravating the über-efficient Leopold with his procrastination, and he was enjoying this rare moment of calm before his day swung into gear.
After carrying one box of books to the mahogany desk that dwarfed the room, Charlie eased himself into the leather swivel chair whose headrest had been smoothed and darkened by countless predecessors and emitted a small sigh of satisfaction. He tipped the chair back tentatively and peeked outside to see if Leopold was nearby, then he propped his feet on the desk’s broad surface and reclined, surveying his tiny kingdom.