by Jake Tapper
“Another scotch and another bicarbonate of soda,” McCarthy said to a waitress fluttering by. “And bring me a stick of butter, if you can. With a fork.” Charlie shot him a confused look at that, and the senator explained: “It’s helpful on a night like this. You should try it.”
“You’re the young man whose platoon had a gas mask a soldier couldn’t operate properly,” said Whitney, who bore a strong resemblance to affable everyman actor Fred MacMurray: genial face, twinkling eyes.
“It wasn’t the soldier that was the problem, but yes, sir.”
“I’m sorry to hear about that. The folks at Goodstone said they fixed the problem, but after this acquisition goes through we’re going to make doubly sure that never happens again.”
“You’re Winston’s boy!” said McCarthy, as if it were just dawning on him. He held out his big meaty catcher’s mitt of a hand to shake Charlie’s. “So good to have you in Washington. I haven’t spoken to your father in some time; tell him I said hello.” The waitress brought him a glass of scotch and he downed it like a thirsty man at an oasis, emptying the tumbler in seconds. The waitress handed him the glass of bicarbonate of soda; he took a sip and handed it back to her.
“Anyway, where were we?” he asked Whitney, pounding on his armrest. “Oh! Murrow! Anyway, I don’t care what he does. If you want to be against McCarthy, you gotta be a Communist or a cocksucker!” He guffawed loudly, a deep, boisterous belly laugh that drew the attention of everyone in the room. “Boy,” he said to Charlie, “we’re on the most important skunk hunt ever. And look, I know my methods aren’t refined. But you don’t go skunk-hunting in striped trousers and a tall hat while waving a lace handkerchief!” He laughed hard at his own joke; Whitney tittered.
Charlie observed McCarthy—the charm, the menace, the glint in his eyes that seemed to suggest that you were in on it with him, and wasn’t this fun? There was something about McCarthy that instantly conveyed to people that he liked and cared about them, Charlie could see—and something inside Charlie, he recognized, sought McCarthy’s approval. It was a kind of twisted magic.
McCarthy smiled as the waitress came back with a stick of butter on a plate, a fork, and a napkin, and he motioned for her to put it on the table next to him.
“Charlie!” said Chairman Carlin from the corner of the room where he was sitting with Davis LaMontagne and Strongfellow. “Come join us!” McCarthy and Whitney had resumed their conversation as if Charlie were no longer standing there, so he walked over, greeted the men, and assumed a space being made for him on the couch, next to Carlin. LaMontagne’s smile was friendlier than Charlie would have expected.
“Nice to see you in the club,” he said.
Charlie gave what he hoped was a noncommittal expression, still reeling from the bizarreness of meeting McCarthy and Whitney and wondering again what he had unwittingly joined tonight. He gave a slight nod of his head toward two gentlemen seated in deep leather armchairs. One was Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence, the other a wrinkled old man with thick glasses and a face like a fist.
“Who’s the guy with Dulles?”
Strongfellow peered at the man over his whiskey glass and shrugged. “Got me.”
“You two sure are freshmen, aren’t you?” LaMontagne said teasingly.
“Strongfellow and Marder, you are embarrassing me!” exclaimed Carlin with mock outrage. “That’s Sam the Banana Man!”
Charlie and Strongfellow looked at each other blankly.
“C’mon, guys, Sam Zemurray!” LaMontagne said. “The president of United Fruit Company?”
“He’s only one of the most influential people in the world,” Carlin said. “United Fruit has banana plantations all over the Caribbean and Latin America. They helped fund our big push against the Commies in Guatemala last year.”
“Yeah, the Dulles brothers have worked with the Banana Man for decades,” added LaMontagne. “They were on the payroll for years. They still work for them, essentially. The company’s top lobbyist is married to Ike’s personal secretary. Ambassador Lodge is a stockholder. It’s all one giant fucking banana split.”
“Do what thou wilt,” muttered Carlin and the group laughed, even Charlie, whose fascination with the ways of Washington often edged out his disgust. He felt a bit woozy and realized he was heading well past bombed. He hadn’t been much of a drinker until they moved here, when he’d quickly adopted the habit, more out of circumstance than desire; there were always free drinks being offered to him in rooms packed with outwardly respectable elected officials slowly getting embarrassingly soused.
It wasn’t that his previous life in academia was teetotaling; indeed, the Columbia faculty had more than its share of drinkers. Rather, it was a matter of discretion. Boozing professors tended to keep their pre-sundown imbibing private, an occasional nip from a flask, wine during office hours. On and near Capitol Hill, however, fully stocked bars in professional workspaces were as common as any other pieces of furniture—they were right off the House Chamber, in the conference rooms of law firms, next to the teletype machines in the offices of newspaper editors.
“What the hell is this place?” Charlie asked. “Pornographic stained glass? And is that Senator MacKeever in that one over there?”
“Just some harmless fun,” LaMontagne said with a shrug.
“Hey, Charlie.” Carlin put a beefy arm around Charlie’s shoulder and leaned close to whisper in a boozy drawl, “Do you want to know a secret?”
“Sure.” Although at the moment what Charlie wanted most was to get upwind of Carlin’s 90-proof breath.
Carlin pulled Charlie even closer. “I screwed you on Goodstone,” he said, a big beaming smile exploding on his face, a fat finger landing on Charlie’s lapel for emphasis.
Charlie blinked.
LaMontagne and Strongfellow chuckled, though it wasn’t clear if they were laughing at the news or the shocking way it had been delivered.
“But…I saw the bill,” Charlie said. “You struck out the provision.”
“That is true,” Carlin said, now wagging his finger in the air, granting the point. “But what you didn’t see was a provision we added in a separate part of the bill allocating the same amount for any subsidiaries of General Kinetics.”
“Which, as you may know, Charlie, Goodstone is about to become,” said LaMontagne, a smug look on his face.
Charlie rocked back slightly in his seat. He felt as if he’d just been punched in the stomach.
“Now, son,” said Carlin, giving him a patronizing pat on the back. “Don’t take it so hard. You’re not the first pretty young thing I’ve screwed this week, and you won’t be the last.”
Charlie felt a hand on his shoulder. Strongfellow was trying to console him.
“The larger point, Charlie, is you’re right—Goodstone fucked up,” added LaMontagne. “But these companies were rushing product for the war effort. No one was trying to kill anyone.”
“And the fight goes on, Charlie,” said Carlin.
“And the fight goes on,” Strongfellow repeated.
Charlie felt deflated. An expert in the deal making, debauchery, and duplicity of the Founding Fathers, he wasn’t naive about politics: it could be vicious. And it was ever thus. Charlie had written a well-received article about how the ferocious and cruel attacks by John Quincy Adams’s friends against Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, accusing her of bigamy, had all but certainly led to her death after the election of 1828. In a historical context, Carlin’s maneuver wouldn’t even be a footnote in an encyclopedia of chicanery. But no one had ever lied to Charlie’s face like that before, much less relished the revelation of the deception. It enraged and humiliated him.
The redheaded waitress appeared with her ubiquitous silver tray, this time bearing bottles and implements as if she were about to assist in a surgical procedure.
“Ah, Suzannah,” said Carlin. “Thank you.”
“Absinthe?” asked LaMontagne. “What’s the occasion?”
Suzannah deposited the tray on a table and began an elaborate preparation. First she held up a silver slotted spoon, then, with some pageantry, she displayed a sugar cube as if it were a chunk of gold panned from a river. Then she delicately put the sugar cube on the spoon. She was joined by a second, waifish waitress who produced a delicate dark bottle and poured a green liquid into a glass, then put it in front of Charlie. Suzannah placed the spoon with its sugar cube on top of the glass and then used a syringe to slowly drip ice water onto the cube.
“What ratio are you going with?” Carlin asked her.
“One to four, I think,” she said.
“Better make it one to five,” Carlin said. “This is probably Charlie’s first absinthe. Right, Charlie?”
Charlie nodded. It was something that hadn’t interested him—or been readily available—during his time in France.
Clouds billowed in the glass as the drink took on a milky look, and Charlie began to smell its pungent licorice scent. He looked anxiously at Suzannah.
“This is how the French do it,” Carlin said, and Suzannah nodded.
“Carlin and I normally go for the Bohemian way of preparing it,” said LaMontagne.
Carlin reached into Suzannah’s pouch, snatched a sugar cube, and popped it in his mouth.
“The cubes are soaked in alcohol for Bohemian, then set on fire. It’s stronger that way.”
“But you don’t need it stronger for this first venture,” said LaMontagne.
Charlie raised his glass to them, wondering why he was toasting the man who had betrayed him. “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead,” he said.
It was all stumbles and swirls after that.
Singing and dancing. Something about abbots and friars, about the men in the stained glass being apostles.
Slices of succulent pork slid onto plates.
Much wine.
More singing.
More young women. Inebriated, willing.
A moment to himself. Thoughts about MacLachlan. Guilt about MacLachlan. Confusion about “under Jennifer.”
Then someone shook him out of it. Back to the revelry. You’re the top / You’re the breasts on Venus / You’re the top / You’re King Kong’s penis.
Dulles and Dulles and Sam the Banana Man and Cohn and Strongfellow and LaMontagne, and that redheaded waitress, Suzannah, on his lap, and…a whirlpool of images, blurry, hard to understand, as if he were underwater.
Stumbling onto the street.
Falling.
Laughing.
Getting up.
Then blackness.
Charlie awoke hours later, his head pounding, his face in the mud. Next to him lay a shiny black 1953 Studebaker Commander Starliner partly submerged in Rock Creek.
Chapter Fifteen
Friday, March 5, 1954
Georgetown, Washington, DC
Margaret slept restlessly that night, tossing fitfully until the sound of a car door slamming brought her fully awake. She turned on the lamp on her night table, reached for the clock by her bed, and drew it to her heavy-lidded eyes: 5:33 a.m.
In a state of sorrow, she’d gone to bed as soon as Charlie left last night. She couldn’t imagine what the night was like for Henrietta MacLachlan and her four children, the oldest only fourteen years old. And she was sorely disappointed in Charlie; how could he just head back into the night on the heels of such awful news? She realized that things got done in DC only because of who you knew and whose back you scratched, and she’d tried to be understanding about Charlie’s frequent nights out, but if this was going to be their new way of life, she wasn’t sure how long she would last. These troubled thoughts kept deep sleep at bay, and she had hovered unsatisfyingly between awareness and oblivion. It had been almost worse than if she had stayed up all night.
Echoes of the turning tumblers of the lock on the front door bounced up two flights of stairs to the bedroom, the deliberate movements of someone trying to be quiet and the sudden sharp sounds of that same someone having difficulty doing it.
She heard the creaks from the floorboards as Charlie crept carefully upstairs and then slowly opened the door to their bedroom. Margaret lay on her side, facing the door, her eyes narrow slits. In his left hand, Charlie held his shoes, and Margaret felt a surge of exasperation at his faux consideration at five thirty in the morning.
He tiptoed into their bathroom and reemerged in pajamas, then eased himself into bed as quickly as he could. One didn’t need Charlie’s superhuman sense of smell to detect the excess alcohol oozing from every pore, a sudden punch of stink that was not unlike approaching the Socony-Mobil oil refinery on the brand-new New Jersey Turnpike.
He sighed dramatically, an expression of weariness or worry, Margaret couldn’t tell. Then he cleared his throat, seemingly testing to see if she was awake. She stayed still.
“Margaret?” he whispered.
She didn’t know how to react. She was angry and he reeked and she didn’t want to deal with him and whatever piffle was troubling him. She lay there silently, wondering what was happening to him and to them.
Beyond how let down she felt about Charlie’s behavior last night and the mess he was this morning, Margaret had something to tell him, and she knew it wasn’t going to help matters. For whatever reason, perhaps the folly of holding on to a shred of power by maintaining control of this information, she had decided not to tell him the night before. Louis Gwinnett had telephoned the previous afternoon, before Charlie came home from work. He and his team were out at Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands again, and a researcher had dropped out at the last minute because of a death in the family.
“We really could use you. If you’re willing,” he had said.
Margaret hadn’t responded.
“Think of the ponies, Margaret. This is the time when they swim from Nanticoke to Susquehannock. Now. Any minute now!”
“It’s tempting.”
“You are actually going to make me beg,” Gwinnett said, and Margaret could practically hear his smile.
She was surprised that her heart had begun beating a little faster at the sound of his voice. They had not spoken in two months, since January. He had written her a glowing letter about her work on the previous expedition—one that walked right up to the line of inappropriate but did not cross it. They had communicated in letters about how to write up the research from their days in the field, but she kept everything professional.
But all the while she and Charlie were drifting, with forces pushing Charlie out to sea while she remained alone on the beach, each watching the other recede into the distance and neither doing much about it. And then: Dr. Louis Gwinnett had reared his head once again.
Margaret was secure enough in her emotional stability and her self-control, particularly in her current pregnant state, to trust that she would not say yes just because of her attraction to him. What pulled her most was the memory of how alive she felt in the field. It wasn’t that she was unhappy in her Georgetown home or even more generally in stuffy Washington, DC—though that surely played a part. But the sudden transition from their old life in New York to one here in which Charlie pursued a new career while she waited for their baby to arrive had made her feel as though she’d gone from being a scientist to being a laboratory.
She’d let a moment pass before she’d answered Gwinnett.
“I’d love to be there,” Margaret had finally told him. “I just need to check on a few things.”
Those few things were all contained in one drunken husband who was now lightly snoring beside her. It wasn’t a hard decision. Margaret got up and prepared to phone the research assistant who Gwinnett had said would give her a ride. As soon as the clock struck seven, she would call him and arrange to leave for the Maryland islands as soon as possible.
The phone woke Charlie at ten a.m. He was used to Margaret answering when someone called, but by the seventh ring he reali
zed she wasn’t going to do so. His head was throbbing and the inside of his mouth tasted even worse than when he’d woken up with it full of mud just hours before. His tongue felt as if it were coated with a paste made of absinthe and bile and cheap perfume. The phone ringing exacerbated the pounding in his skull, so he mustered the strength to roll over and reach for the phone on the night table on Margaret’s side of the bed.
“Hello?” he croaked.
“Congressman, it’s Catherine Leopold. Where are you? You have a very busy day today.”
Gripping his forehead as if pressure would make the pain go away, Charlie apologized and promised he’d be in as soon as possible. He hung up and then everything from the night before hit him like a wave: MacLachlan’s death, the drunken party at the club, Rock Creek, the dead girl.
Good Lord. The dead girl.
That gorgeous young redhead. What was her name?
Oh Christ, what have I done?
He sat frozen for one minute, then five. The phone rang again and he ignored all eight rings. Finally, as if on autopilot, he stood unsteadily and began to fumble his way to the bathroom. He tripped over the box containing the baby monitor, the gift from LaMontagne a lifetime ago. Charlie shaved and brushed his teeth. In a fog of sleep deprivation, booze, and trauma, he stepped into the steam of the shower.
The memories of the night before came back to him in glimpses, puzzle pieces he was in no condition to assemble. He didn’t remember leaving the Mayflower; all was black until he awoke facedown in the muck of Rock Creek. LaMontagne had arrived and attempted to whisk him away until he’d found the dead girl. Charlie had scurried to her side to try and find any signs of life. LaMontagne had then barked at him to help him carry her to the crashed Studebaker.
“No,” Charlie said.
“What?”
“I said no. I’m not going to carry her to the car.”
LaMontagne had bent down and grabbed Charlie by the shoulders. “Listen to me, you little shit. If you don’t do exactly as I say, your child will never see you anywhere other than inside a cell. Margaret will leave you and marry another man. You are throwing everything away for what? For fucking what?”