The Hellfire Club(79)
They were sitting below framed faded photographs of once-powerful legislators whose names might prove elusive to anyone but the most devoted student of congressional arcana. While Cohn read the NBC memo about Strongfellow, Charlie glanced idly at the men on the wall. He thought of the Howard Chandler Christy painting of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, about how only three or so of the delegates might be recognizable even to members of Congress. Will anyone know about me? he wondered. His congressional career to date would hardly merit a spot on even a monument to obscurity.
The waitress brought Cohn’s Manhattan and took Charlie’s drink order.
“You have no interest in what I’m reading?” Cohn asked without looking up, his eyes keenly focused on whatever incriminating information lay before him.
“Of course I’m interested,” said Charlie. “That doesn’t mean I think it’s my business. And Strongfellow’s a friend.”
“Friend?” Cohn said. “You’re a sweetie pie.”
“Why do you need dirt on Strongfellow?” Charlie asked.
Cohn closed the folder. “We need to know what’s out there about him so we can protect him,” he said. “If NBC Entertainment knows damaging information about a congressman, then NBC News might report it. They probably won’t, but still. Strongfellow’s on the team; we need to be prepared to protect him.”
“Protect him? He was in the OSS and can barely stand because of the injuries he sustained at the hands of the Nazis. If there’s a tougher son of a bitch in Congress, I have yet to meet him.”
Cohn barked a short laugh. “For a professional historian, you’re pretty gullible. I wouldn’t believe everything This Is Your Life tells you.”
“You think I’m a gullible historian?” Charlie attempted a smile. “Maybe it’s a good thing I’ve changed careers.”
“Funny you’d say so.” Cohn looked at him sternly. “There are some Democrats planning to run against you, as you might expect. Your father and I spoke about setting up a campaign committee. With your permission, of course.”
“You spoke with my father?”
“Sure,” Cohn responded, as if there were nothing odd about that. “Carlin asked me to. You have no reelect set up.”
Head down, Charlie told himself. Act like this is all fine with you. “That’s a flattering offer and I appreciate it. I haven’t even officially decided if I’m running for reelection.”
Cohn raised an eyebrow as the cocktail waitress deposited a glass of Jack Daniel’s in front of Charlie.
“Why wouldn’t you run?” Cohn asked. “Granted, a certain group of us are well aware that you have no idea what you’re doing, but to the wide world out there, including most of the morons in this town, you’re a comer.”
“I haven’t even discussed it with my wife yet.”
Cohn reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew his checkbook and a pen. “Allow me to make the first contribution, assuming you do run,” he said. He opened the checkbook, scribbled something, and then handed Charlie a check for five hundred dollars made out to him personally.
“Shouldn’t this be for the Vote for Charlie Marder Committee or something?”
“You can always transfer it to that committee after I have it set up for you. If you’d like me to take that step?”
Head down, Charlie thought. He nodded glumly then caught himself, smiled, and raised a glass to his new campaign treasurer as he felt his body sinking slowly into an imagined pit of ooze.
“The makers of Camel Cigarettes bring the world’s news events right into your own living room,” proclaimed the announcer before a black-and-white film montage of a prize fight, a battleship, the U.S. Capitol Building, and a bathing-beauty contest. “Sit back, light up a Camel, and be an eyewitness to the happenings that made history in the last twenty-four hours.”
Renee Street never missed an episode of NBC’s Camel News Caravan. She looked forward to her nightly reward after a long day spent tending to the twins, whose lives were interrupted five times a week by the sound of John Cameron Swayze’s opening line—“Let’s go hopscotching around the world for headlines”—a Pavlovian trigger for them to remain silent and out of trouble. With a flower in his lapel and a folksy, direct gaze, Swayze conveyed an air of charming authority.
Renee Street was such a fan, in fact, that she had been one of the first in line at the Woodward and Lothrop department store to purchase Swayze, a news-trivia board game from Milton Bradley. She might have been the wife of a congressman, but she never felt closer to the news and matters of importance than when she was playing Swayze. Which was how Charlie, Margaret, Isaiah, and Renee came to be sitting around a table at the Streets’ house two Thursdays after Street picked up Charlie and Margaret from Polly’s Lodging, rolling the dice and debating whether the answers to the news quiz were correct.
Isaiah was the first to raise an objection. Margaret had asked, “‘To which country did the U.S. send aid and manpower in the 1950s to help support democracy?’”
“I know the card is going to want me to say Korea,” Street said. “But there are really any number of countries that applies to—Albania, the Philippines, Germany.”
“Guatemala,” said Charlie.