The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  Gasps throughout the restaurant. Waiters stood frozen in place; diners stared at one another in disbelief.

  “This battle has been going on for nearly three hours,” the man continued. “One of the bombs dropped within fifty feet of KTU tower. It is no joke. It is a real war.”

  Mary Marder looked at her husband gravely and then at her son. Her eyes welled up and she reached across the table to grasp Charlie’s hand tightly. Winston pulled out his wallet and threw bills blindly on the table, then he pulled Mary to her feet and shepherded his reeling family outside.

  In their brownstone on the Upper East Side, Winston, Mary, and Charlie spent the rest of that Sunday the same way millions of Americans did, huddled around their radio, terrified that Japanese planes would soon be attacking the U.S. mainland.

  Charlie became filled with an emotion other than fear. He was furious. A sneak attack on Honolulu by the Japanese—he could think of nothing more cowardly.

  The moment had been inevitable. Anyone with basic cognitive skills had been able to see for months that sooner or later the United States was going to have to make a choice about whether it was going to enter the war or allow the Fascists to seize Europe.

  Charlie had long ago concluded that the United States needed to do the former. He had listened to all of Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts about the Nazi bombing of London the previous year, in September 1940. Since then, the Germans had started attacking American ships in the Atlantic Ocean; a U-boat had torpedoed the USS Kearny in October, killing eleven navy men. President Roosevelt had begun painting a dire picture of what the Western Hemisphere would look like under Nazi control; in a speech just a few weeks before Charlie’s birthday, the president had claimed that he’d obtained a secret map made by the Nazis showing how after they seized Europe, they intended to carve up Central and South America into five vassal states. Message: they’re headed to our hemisphere next.

  Neither Charlie nor his parents were fans of FDR, but that speech had affected him. The president had acknowledged how difficult it was for Americans to grasp what the Nazis were doing, “to adjust ourselves to the shocking realities of a world in which the principles of common humanity and common decency are being mowed down by the firing squads of the Gestapo.” FDR added that some critics thought perhaps the American people had grown so “fat, and flabby, and lazy” they would be “now no match for the regimented masses who have been trained in the Spartan ways of ruthless brutality.” But nothing could be further from the truth, he’d said, as if anticipating the Pearl Harbor attack: “We Americans have cleared our decks and taken our battle stations. We stand ready in the defense of our nation and the faith of our fathers to do what God has given us the power to see as our full duty.”

  Our duty, Charlie recalled. And our homeland is now directly under attack.

  His father was studying his face. “Don’t get any ideas, Charlie,” Winston said.

  The news got worse throughout the day. Wave after wave of Japanese aircraft had killed at least four hundred Americans, though accurate numbers were difficult to come by; it was possible that thousands had been killed. The governor of Hawaii revealed that it hadn’t just been sailors killed; civilians in Honolulu had been slaughtered as well. Unconfirmed reports suggested that the U.S. battleships Oklahoma and West Virginia had been sunk, along with up to seven U.S. destroyers. More than three hundred American airplanes were believed to have been obliterated.

  Later that night, after Mary had fallen asleep on the couch, Winston turned off the radio and guided his son into his study, where he poured eighteen-year-old scotch into two glasses. A single lamp illuminated the wood-paneled room, which was packed with books of law and history and held one small locked file cabinet where he kept papers too important to leave at his downtown office.

  Winston eased his bulky frame into his favorite leather chair and motioned Charlie to the sofa. They sat silently for a few minutes, the only sound a muted tick from the nearby desk clock. Charlie looked at his dad, a big bear of a man whose hair was beginning to thin up top. Winston looked at his son, his only child, the person he knew best in the world.

  “You have to graduate in May,” his father said.

  “Tomorrow, I’m going to register with Selective Service,” Charlie responded. “It’s the law. I’m twenty-one.”

  “I know that,” said Winston. The lamp sat to his left, silhouetting his face. “We anticipated this day. Your mother will push you to go to divinity school to escape the draft.”

  “Divinity school?” Charlie laughed.

  “Yes, divinity students get deferments,” Winston said. “Of course, she already asked me to look into getting you a job at the draft board. Another way to avoid shipping out.”

  Charlie was about to protest, but he decided to hold back and hear what else his father had to say. His mother was always after him for rushing-rushing-rushing in speech and not allowing conversation to breathe, not letting decisions and realizations happen naturally.

  “I’m not going to do that,” Winston finally said.

  “I’m not going to shirk this. I have a duty. I’m enlisting.”

  “I know,” said his dad. “But let’s…let’s do this wisely.”

  “I don’t want a desk job at the Pentagon,” Charlie said. “I want to do my part, just like everyone else has to, just like all the kids in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up. My life is worth no more than theirs.”

  His father looked at him gravely. Charlie didn’t know much about his dad’s time overseas after being drafted to fight the Germans in 1918, just that he had been there and he didn’t talk about it.

  “The Battle of the Argonne Forest…” His voice trailed off and he stared at the floor. He scratched his cheek with his right forefinger. Charlie held his breath. “This was before the Battle of Montfaucon, before Corporal York caught all those Krauts. It was a bad time. The Thirty-Fifth Division got shredded.” He took a sip of his drink. “I can’t even begin to describe how awful it was,” he said. “I would never wish it on you. If someone tried to draft you into it, I would do everything I could to prevent it.”

  “I know, Dad. But I don’t think I have a choice here. They attacked us.”

  His father stood and walked over to the small fireplace. The housekeeper had already prepared the kindling, so all Winston needed to do was light a match, but the box, perched near a small stack of wood, was empty. “Damn,” he said. Charlie got up and handed his father his Zippo lighter. Winston struck the spark wheel six times before a flame appeared.

  “Should have got you a new lighter for your twenty-first,” he said with a small smile. “Birthdays seem sort of stupid right now, don’t they?” He ignited the rolled-up newspapers tucked under the stack of wood in the fireplace. The kindling began to crackle.

  Charlie leaned his elbows on his knees and stared absently at the flames as they grew higher until at last his father broke the silence.

  “Charlie,” his father said, “you need to finish school. Graduate. After that, I know you might enlist. I’ll pull whatever strings you want for you to fight the Axis scum in whatever way you think best.”

  Charlie shook his head. “I don’t want special treatment.”

  “You’re not just any guy off the street in Brooklyn,” his father said. “You’re smarter. And you’re softer. We’ve been protecting you.”

  “Softer?” Charlie asked. “Dad, I’m not—”

  “Please, Charlie, I know exactly who you are,” Winston Marder said. “Maybe softer isn’t the right word, but you’re good. And even more than that, you believe in goodness.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, I don’t,” Winston said bluntly. And then he gave his son a tender smile. “It’s funny. You and I are motivated by diametrically opposed views of human nature. But we agree on the need to kill as many Nazis and Japs as possible.”

  They sat in silence, the fire warming but not comforting them.

  “You may prove to
be a great soldier,” Winston Marder said. “Not because you’re tough. Because you’re smart. But sacrifices are made in the field of battle, Charlie. Sacrifices will have to be made.”

  It was just about three weeks later, on December 27—the day after Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s address to a joint session of Congress—that Charlie met Margaret.

  Seeking refuge from all the war news, he was spelunking deep in the stacks of Columbia University’s Butler Library on West 114th Street in Manhattan. What had started as an effort to research a term paper had become, characteristically, a form of free-association scholarship wherein the hunt for one book became the discovery of another, leading to a fascinating trove of rare manuscripts and oddities having nothing to do with the original project.

  Margaret Elizabeth Anne McDowell was a freshman at Barnard, routinely referred to by her roommate as a grind in the body of a cover girl. That night, in addition to preparing for calculus and biology exams, she was looking for a container of maps and notebooks from the estate of Benjamin Carroll, a Revolutionary War–era member of the Maryland elite whose family had claimed the isthmus near Susquehannock and Nanticoke Islands. She hoped they might mention the ponies on the islands, Margaret’s lifelong obsession and the topic of a term paper she was writing for zoology.

  It was the Saturday night before New Year’s Eve. Most Columbia and Barnard students had fled campus for the winter break, and the library was exactly as Margaret preferred it: empty and hushed. Balancing four heavy textbooks, she staggered into her favorite spot, a quiet nook tucked under the staircase from the fourth to the fifth floors that nobody else seemed to have discovered. Tonight, however, she was unhappy to turn the corner and see her usual desk occupied: a young man wearing white cotton gloves was peering closely at a book so old and fragile it looked as though a sneeze might cause it to explode into dust. Her shoe squeaked on the floor and he looked up sharply.

  Caught in mutual surprise, Margaret and the interloper considered each other. He was broad-shouldered and bookish—not an uncommon breed on campus. The window rattled as the wind outside the library howled. The heater next to Charlie’s table began to clank and hum.

  “Hello,” she said finally.

  He seemed to shake himself out of a mild stupor and smiled.

  “Hello yourself.” He motioned, somewhat possessively, she thought, toward the official sign on the wall. “What brings you here to ‘Colonial Manuscripts and Letters Archives—Recent Acquisitions’?”

  Margaret shifted her arms to alleviate the strain of the books she was carrying. “I imagine the same thing as you—research? Homework?” She was accustomed to the men she met on campus assuming her studies were a token effort in her pursuit of an Mrs. degree.

  But Charlie actually blushed, something she was less accustomed to seeing. “Sorry, I meant what are you studying?”

  Margaret relaxed and deposited her books on the unoccupied corner of the desk with a small sigh of relief. She shook out her arms and began to unwind her heavy scarf. Charlie pulled out the other chair for her and she resisted informing him that he was playing host in a place she considered her own.

  “These books are for exams, but I’m also here looking for some ‘Recent Acquisitions’ having to do with these wild ponies in Maryland. No one knows where they came from,” she explained.

  “You’re a history major?”

  “Zoology,” she said. “There are these new journals the library obtained from the Colonial era from rural Maryland, from the estate of the Carroll family. Kind of a crapshoot, but I wanted to see if there was any mention of the ponies from around that time.”

  “Fascinating,” Charlie said.

  “Yes, they’re an amazing string,” she said.

  “String?”

  “That’s what you call a group of ponies,” she said. “Like a pride of lions or a flock of geese.”

  “Or a murder of crows.”

  “Precisely,” she said. “Or a congregation of alligators. Or…an obstinacy of buffalo. A crash of rhinoceroses. A gaze of raccoons.” She was showing off, but she enjoyed it.

  “I think you’ve got me beat.” He smiled. “But wait—something you were saying about your research. I think…”

  He paused and she looked at him expectantly.

  “I think I remember reading a diary of a doctor who’d been visiting that family—the Carrolls?—around that time. This was a few months ago. Let me check. Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be right back!”

  “Okay,” Margaret said. “But only because I have to study, and this is where I always do that.”

  Margaret watched him retreat into the darkness of the stacks and smiled. His eagerness to please was hard to resist. She turned to the shelves and began her hunt for items from the estate of Maryland delegate Benjamin Carroll, which had yet to be categorized and labeled.

  When she returned to the table, roughly forty-five minutes later, Charlie was back in his seat reading an old journal—one, he explained, that was kept by a physician, Dr. Solomon McClintock, who had been called to the Carroll estate during the Maryland smallpox epidemic of 1750. He was there to infect the Carrolls, Charlie explained. Margaret took a seat and wondered what this had to do with her research, but soon she was swept up in his enthusiastic account of the doctor’s discovery.

  “It was groundbreaking medicine at the time,” said Charlie, “the concept of inoculation. Infecting those who didn’t have smallpox with a small dose of the disease. Cotton Mather popularized it, after learning about it from—”

  “Mather from the Salem witch trials?” Margaret interrupted.

  Charlie nodded. “One and the same. Mather’s slave taught him about the concept of inoculation, and then Mather shared it with the rest of the colonies. McClintock learned about it from Mather, and he was summoned to the Carroll estate to save them after a cousin contracted smallpox in Baltimore and returned to rural Maryland and infected them all.”

  “And you just happened to have been reading this a few months ago? Is this your field of study? Are you premed?”

  “No, history. But this wasn’t part of that either. I was doing a favor for my dad, actually, during that smallpox outbreak in Queens earlier this year. He was working with the mayor and the commissioner of health on a mass inoculation.”

  “Oh, interesting,” said Margaret. “I lost money on a bet after the smallpox inoculation in April.”

  “Because Bevens got sick?” Charlie asked. The Yankee pitcher’s inoculation had temporarily put him on the disabled list.

  “It threw off the whole rotation,” Margaret said. “When he returned to the mound against the Sox, he was shaky.”

  “Great season, though,” Charlie said.

  “Can’t argue with the World Series.”

  “Anyway, he asked me to look into the history of public sentiment and vaccinations,” Charlie said. “I took a couple detours down some rabbit holes, and one of them was Cotton Mather.”

  “But what does that have to do with my ponies?” she finally asked.

  Charlie beamed with the satisfaction of someone about to deliver good news and raised a gloved finger. “I’ll show you.” Using tweezers, he carefully opened McClintock’s journal. He turned to Margaret. “When were the ponies first mentioned?”

  “The first reference to them anyone has been able to find was in 1752,” she recalled. “On Susquehannock Island, which is closest to the mainland.”

  Charlie nodded thoughtfully. “I have a vague memory of McClintock mentioning an island.”

  He turned the fragile journal pages. The doctor’s messy script and the eighteenth-century language made for slow going.

  “Here it is,” he finally said.

  “May I look?” Margaret asked. He glanced up and she smiled.

  “Sure, of course.” He stood, removed the white gloves, and handed them to her. She took his seat, put them on, and began delicately perusing the diary. Charlie lingered for a few seconds before he decided to resum
e his work at the next desk.

  The library was dead silent for several minutes until Margaret gasped. “I can’t believe this,” she said.

  “What?” said Charlie, rising and walking over to her. “What?”

  “So almost as an afterthought, the doctor writes of all these events that took place in the area before he arrived. One of them is a Spanish galleon that wrecked off the coast of Maryland earlier that year. After a hurricane. The wreck of La Galga.”

  “‘The Greyhound.’”

  “Indeed. And look right here,” she said, pointing at one passage. “The doctor notes that La Galga was believed to have been carrying ponies, because after the storm, a number of them were seen on both the mainland and Susquehannock.”

  “Let me see that.” He leaned in. “Incredible!”

  “This is going to be huge news among the, oh, at least ten people who care,” she said, but the excitement on her face was genuine.

  “By the way, a ship from that same fleet inspired Stevenson to write Treasure Island,” Charlie added. “Everything is connected.”

  Margaret looked at him and grinned.

  The wind outside the library whistled, and the radiator clanked, and that was that.

  Chapter Seven

  Wednesday, January 20, 1954

  Nanticoke Island, Maryland

  Margaret huddled in her coat as she lay on the damp grass, silently watching a string of five ponies wading into a marsh. The beasts bent their necks toward the saltwater cordgrass that grew thick on the west side of Nanticoke Island. The sun rising behind them began to brighten the silhouetted scene, the beach and water emerging like a pale blue and gray canvas behind the dark outlines of the animals. A ray of light landed on the forehead of one of the larger ponies, revealing a white teardrop-shaped spot. He repeatedly snorted and bared his teeth.