The Hellfire Club(8)
The sound of Leopold’s voice outside his door brought him clattering to his feet; he knocked open the desk’s central drawer as he stood. He slid a pile of new pens and pencils that had been left for him on top of the desk into the drawer, and as he did, he felt something brush his fingertips. He pulled the drawer further open, looked down, and extricated a folded scrap of white memo paper. U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops, it read. An inscrutable relic, perhaps from the previous occupant. Leopold knocked from the open doorway and Charlie absentmindedly tucked the scrap into his pocket, not wanting to be seen wasting his time on such nonsense. He began removing books from the box on his desk just as Leopold entered. Why does she make me feel like an errant schoolboy? he wondered as he looked at her expectantly.
“There’s a regular poker game among some of the veterans,” she said. “Congressman Strongfellow holds it in his office. His secretary just called to ask if you’d like to join them. Are you free Monday? It will be a good chance for you to meet some of your colleagues.”
It made sense that other veterans would be flocking to Strongfellow, a former POW who’d escaped from behind enemy lines; his war heroism was legendary. “Yes, I’d love to go,” Charlie said, thinking he’d make a few friends and maybe even recruit some allies against Goodstone. Which reminded him: “Miss Leopold, if you have a minute, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this thing that happened at Appropriations yesterday.”
“Oh, I heard all about it.” She closed the office door behind her and stood almost at attention across from Charlie. “Quite a declaration of independence.”
“What have you heard?”
She frowned. “Mixed reviews, I would say.”
“I’m not giving a dime to that company,” Charlie said.
“Well, now, Congressman—” she said, then hesitated.
“Go ahead.”
“Sir,” she said, “do you want me to help you, the way I helped Congressman Van Waganan? Or would you prefer a yes-woman to just tell you your teeth are white and your shoes are shiny? Because I can do that, and it will be a lot easier. For me. Not for you. The opposite for you.”
Charlie smiled. “Okay,” he said, “you’re right. Tell me. What else are you hearing?”
“Nothing you wouldn’t expect,” she said in her charming Southern lilt. She was from Durham, North Carolina, and her voice conveyed warmth and a debutante’s coy wisdom. “You haven’t paid any dues and you weren’t even elected, so how dare you mouth off; you’re only here because of your father’s connections; and, of course, why on earth did you get Van Waganan’s seat on Appropriations?”
“Right,” said Charlie. “I would probably think that about me too. But that’s not really relevant to the point I was making, which seems more important than how I got here.”
He returned to the business of unpacking, and Leopold put down her clipboard to help. The next box contained books from his work library; Leopold handed him volumes to line his mahogany bookshelves. The Oxford English Dictionary, Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, The New Yorker Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album…
After a few minutes of companionable silence, Charlie asked Leopold: “Did you work for Congressman Van Waganan long?”
“I did,” she said. “He was here for fifteen years and I was by his side for all of them. I started as his secretary and worked my way up to office manager.”
“Impressive.” Charlie stacked and then strained to lift all six volumes of Winston Churchill’s series on the Second World War. Leopold stepped forward, took the top two volumes, and placed them alongside the others on the shelf.
Charlie cleared his throat. “Miss Leopold…I’m sorry about what happened with Van Waganan.” She looked up, and their sudden proximity seemed to make her uncomfortable; she took a couple of steps back.
“He was a good man,” she said. “And then he wasn’t.” She blinked and briefly looked away.
Awkwardly, Charlie busied himself straightening the Churchill volumes.
“Oh, well,” she said, immediately regaining her composure. “Do what thou wilt, I suppose.”
Charlie was about to ask what she meant by that cryptic remark when there was a knock at the door and a young woman peeked in. She was in her early twenties and attractively wholesome, with brown hair, a dusting of freckles, and a sweet smile. Handing a cup of coffee to Leopold to give to the congressman, she seemed to have trouble meeting Charlie’s direct gaze. He suspected it was shyness; he’d seen it before with some of his students at the beginning of a new semester. His bestselling book gave him a kind of celebrity that Charlie didn’t feel was particularly deserved.
“There’s a phone call,” the woman said to Leopold. “Senator Kefauver’s office. The senator would like the congressman to swing by today. After lunch.”
“Did he say what it was about?” Leopold asked.
The young woman’s face flushed. “I didn’t know I could ask!”
Leopold turned to Charlie. “Congressman, this is Sheryl Ann Bernstein, a senior at Georgetown, majoring in American history. She’s our new intern this semester, and as luck would have it, an admirer of your book.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Bernstein.”