The Hellfire Club(70)



“Your father is expecting you at the club at noon,” she said. “He asked me to let you know he’s very interested in discussing the farm bill.”

“Okay, Mom, thanks.”

“He read the bill earlier. Took it from your briefcase.” Charlie couldn’t tell if she was irritated or proud. “I told him not to, I said that those papers belonged to a United States congressman and he couldn’t just open up your valise as if you were still a child, but he said you wanted to discuss it with him.” She shook her head in a gesture that was both familiar and familiarly inscrutable and then left, closing the door firmly behind her.

Charlie put his arm back down. His bedroom had remained untouched since he left for college in 1938, complete with 1927, 1929, 1932, 1936, 1937, and 1938 World Series Champions New York Yankees banners and a cache of photographs of Hollywood starlets in a folder buried in his bottom desk drawer. His mother would have frozen the room in amber—and Charlie with it—if she could have; she clearly preferred him as a boy, cuddly and curious. He felt a pang of nostalgia, not exactly for his youth but for a time when Babe Ruth’s salary demands were his most pressing concern. He swung his feet to the floor, reached beneath the mattress, and groped with mild panic for the This Is Your Life folder on Strongfellow before he found it, extracted it, and prepared to face his day.



The Harvard Club of New York was one of Winston Marder’s favorite places on earth and one of Charlie’s least favorite; the power broker made a point of visiting the club on West Forty-Fourth Street frequently so as to circulate among other powerful men on the squash court or at the bar or while sipping brandy from a snifter in front of a fireplace. He was frequently leaned on by fellow members for favors and deals; he had helped raise money for the recently added ladies’ annex and World War II memorial at the club and was currently lobbying for the New York Community Trust to recognize their building as an honorary landmark, though it had been around for only sixty years or so.

That Charlie hadn’t even applied to Harvard disappointed Winston, though he never admitted it to even his wife; if Charlie wanted to blaze his own path, that was fine, he said, but he knew that also might have meant that Charlie didn’t want to end up like him.

In the dark, mahogany-paneled room where a violinist walked table to table performing Vivaldi, Winston was two sips into his ice-cold martini and one bite into his shrimp cocktail when Charlie appeared and sat down. The waiters knew what Winston Marder expected to have prepared for him when he arrived, always exactly on time. Charlie sat and ordered coffee while he perused the menu. Winston looked up to see his son wearing a shirt and tie he’d taken from his father’s closet.

“Nice duds,” he said.

“You’re the one who picked a place with a dress code.”

His father chose to ignore this, and, dispensing with conversational niceties, he went straight to the point.

“I perused the farm bill in your briefcase and I thought I might help you decode some of the legislative-ese.”

“I think I can read a bill, Pop.”

“You missed the fine print when it came to the Goodstone earmark, did you not?” Winston asked, biting into a shrimp. He licked a dollop of cocktail sauce off his thumb. “Bottom line,” Winston continued, “amid the normal subsidies the federal government gives out, the price supports and whatnot, this bill also gives hundreds of millions of dollars to General Kinetics to build new pesticide plants all over the country, essentially however they see fit, with no government supervision.”

Charlie’s dad squeezed a lemon slice onto his three remaining shrimp, then wolfed down two of them in rapid succession. He gulped the rest of his martini and looked sternly over the tops of his glasses at Charlie. Charlie thought about his father’s crude eating habits, which he had always believed betrayed his outer-borough roots. In front of more refined company, he displayed more elegant manners, but if it was just family around—even at a restaurant—he returned to the practices of his youth in a modest tenement house, where, as the youngest of seven children, he had to grab food and scarf it down or he would go to bed hungry.

Winston peered at his son through his glasses. “I would co-sponsor it, were I you,” he said.

“That wasn’t where I thought you were going with this,” Charlie said.

“No, because I gave you the BLUF, the ‘bottom line up front,’ the stuff you’re going to worry about. Two reasons why you should co-sponsor: politics and policy. Which do you want first?”

“Politics is fine.”

“Jack Kennedy has been making enemies by voting against farm interests. It might stand in the way of his getting the veep slot in ’56. Why not make friends instead? It’s not as though anyone in your district gives a crap one way or the other.”

“All right,” Charlie said. “And policy?”

Winston drained the last of his martini. “Pesticides are not only a huge part of how we feed our own people, they’re vital to how we and our allies fight Communism. Right now, in Malaya, the Brits are using defoliation to destroy where the Communists hide.”

“We just voted on a bill to send aid to the Brits for that,” he said.

The waiter approached the table and asked Charlie’s father if he was going to have his usual; Winston nodded. Charlie requested the soup and sandwich of the day.

Jake Tapper's Books