The Hellfire Club(76)



She wrinkled her brow. “This is all just so bizarre.”

“It gets stranger. Because now Mac is dead,” Charlie said, “and on his deathbed, the last thing he said to me was ‘under Jennifer.’”

She scrunched up her face in confusion, and Charlie nodded. “We had no idea who Jennifer was, but then Sheryl Ann came up with a smart theory.” He started telling her about Maryland delegate Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, but Margaret held up her hand to stop him.

“I need to write all this down,” she said. She opened the drawer of the nightstand and withdrew a pad of paper and a sharpened pencil. Mac, she wrote at the top of the pad, followed by other reminders of related threads. This was how they had worked together while he was writing Sons of Liberty; he would research and share his discoveries, and then she would take notes and categorize every item until they could come up with coherent narratives.

“Congressman Street and this girl, Sheryl Ann—how much do they know about your predicament?” Margaret asked.

“Sheryl Ann knows a little, about the broadleaf-crops note and about Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, obviously,” Charlie said. “Isaiah knows everything.”

“Okay, what else?” she asked. “What ever happened with your main mission? To stop funding for Goodstone?”

Charlie shook his head. “I thought I’d achieved it. Carlin told me it was out of the bill, we voted, everyone was patting me on the back—”

“Did you read the bill?” she interrupted.

“I did,” he said. “There were no references to Goodstone. That section had been deleted. But then…well, Conrad Hilton was throwing a party—a celebration of the migrant bill passing. So we were all at the penthouse of the Mayflower and Carlin was there. The night got away from me a bit. Strongfellow and Bob Kennedy were there. Roy Cohn too. We got into it about Ike and patriotism, and I got hit with the Cohn crazy spray. But more to the point, eventually I ended up drinking absinthe with Carlin, Strongfellow, and some others. LaMontagne.”

“Oh…” Margaret tapped the pencil against her cheek thoughtfully. “This must have been the morning you came home reeking like a distillery rag.”

“Correct.”

“Boy, I hated you that morning.”

Charlie remained silent, knowing she had every right to resent him. And he hadn’t even gotten to the worst of it yet: the car accident. He told her about Carlin cackling when he said, “I screwed you on Goodstone,” and, to be fair, because he was nothing if not diligently so, about Carlin’s argument that businesses such as Goodstone and General Kinetics needed to thrive as much for national security as for national economic advancement.

“It’s so odd that he told you about it,” Margaret said. “Why not just do it and go on about his life?”

“Clearly he doesn’t like me,” said Charlie, who had given the matter some serious thought. “He didn’t appreciate my original protest of the funding. And, look, he’s a hardscrabble, pull-himself-up-by-his-own-bootstraps kind of guy from Snake Skull, Oklahoma, and to him I must seem like an entitled establishment New Yorker who breezed into Congress without any right to be there.”

Margaret kept writing. Underneath Carlin she added a note about the chairman’s request that Charlie co-sponsor the farm bill with him.

“This is all about controlling you,” Margaret observed. And it was difficult to argue with that, though Charlie told her that when he’d asked Carlin to block the General Kinetics plant from Harlem, Carlin had said he would.

“Carlin screwed you on Goodstone because it would hurt General Kinetics,” Margaret noted. “Do you assume he’s going to follow through with the Harlem plant?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, now that he thinks I’m playing ball?”

It was after two o’clock in the morning but neither wanted to stop talking, and the work was almost beside the point. On a page Margaret labeled Miscellaneous, a list of names and events grew long: Carlin, Strongfellow, Cohn, Kennedy, Kefauver, poker night, comic-book hearing. She designated the next page Odd, and that list included Margaret Chase Smith’s suggestion that Charlie use the special members-only collection at the Library of Congress to do more research on Ben Franklin and the Hellfire Club (“Why do you think she made such a point of recommending that?”). And although Charlie wasn’t sure if or how it related to his ongoing troubles, she insisted on adding his father’s drunken luncheon lecture and the unsettling revelation about the Coney Island incubators.

She came to the end of the page and looked at him expectantly. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

That she knew him so well was both perilous and the whole point. Charlie nodded grimly and took a deep breath.

“So LaMontagne gave me a file full of dirt against a guy at Zenith, Ira Boschwitz. A competitor. About him being a Commie. I went back and forth on it, but ultimately I did what LaMontagne told me to and gave it to Bob Kennedy for the McCarthy Committee. I saw in the paper three days later that he’d been called before the committee and that he’d been fired.”

She sat silently for a minute, her head tilted to one side. Were all these compromised decisions just part of adulthood? She knew of no such corruption of her martyred father, but was that only because she didn’t really know about his life? Or because he had been killed so young? Now that she thought about it, was his participation in that mission without blemish? The captain of the USS Shenandoah had seen that thunderstorms would be on the flight path and urged command to wait them out. He’d been overruled, and fourteen men, including her dad, had been killed. Surely they had all known of the bad weather, yet they went along with their orders. Was that so dissimilar from the difficult orders Charlie faced?

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