by Jake Tapper
“Duncan Whitney from General Kinetics,” Street said. “We don’t know them all. You got closer to the club, Charlie, than I ever could.”
“And what do they do?” Margaret asked.
“Control almost everything,” said Kefauver.
“Make a lot of money,” Street said.
“They all have networks of people who owe them favors or people they’ve compromised,” Winston said. “And yes, they’re getting rich but they’re also fighting Commies.”
“They contain multitudes,” Street said, smiling at Charlie.
“Charlie, after your run-in with McCarthy and Cohn at Connie Hilton’s party, we think you had an even bigger target on your back,” Winston said. “Carlin was already chomping at the bit to get you in line. But that was to control you, not kill you.”
“And that was the night Charlie was set up,” Margaret realized.
“Indeed,” said Winston. “Carlin got his henchmen to arrange that whole thing—the knockout drug, the staged accident. But we didn’t know any of that until just recently. I begged Allen Dulles for help. Turned out he’d had you tailed that night and had the photos that cleared you.”
“But we didn’t find out until yesterday,” Street said. “Right before I brought them to you.”
“Allen’s a cagey bastard and he wouldn’t just turn anything over. Now I owe him.”
“What do we need to do to make sure they don’t try to kill us again?” Margaret asked.
“That was just Carlin and his team,” Winston Marder said. “Not the whole club. But you need to drop the General Kinetics thing.”
“Drop it?” Charlie said, alarmed.
“We think the club is in factions right now,” Street said. “They’re being torn apart over McCarthy. Kennedy brought McCarthy into the club in ’forty-nine. He got McCarthy to agree not to campaign against Jack during his Senate run three years later. They’ve all been allies.”
“But McCarthy since then has gone nuts,” Kefauver added.
“There’s a struggle going on in the club,” Winston said. “They all see McCarthy is out of control and needs to be stopped before he takes on Ike in ’fifty-six. The Dulles brothers and some of the generals and CEOs are looking to end the problem. It may prove easier for him to be hoisted with his own petard.”
“We suspect a few defense-contractor CEOs are monks or second-tier abbots,” Street said. “They want the enormous defense contracts to proceed, and McCarthy’s focus on the army is causing them huge problems.”
“McCarthy smeared General Marshall back in 1950; they thought he was going to stop there?” Margaret asked.
“Gotta hit the rat on the head the moment he pokes his head out of the sewer,” Charlie agreed. “But that holds true for General Kinetics too, Dad.”
“That’s nonsense,” Winston said angrily. “The chemical weapons program is vital. The Hellfire Club isn’t wrong about that.”
“The Reds are a menace, Charlie,” Street said.
“Look at how they manipulated Margaret, sending that zoologist to get close to her with me and you as targets,” Winston said. “You need to stop being naive about the Reds. There are forces at play here that are much bigger than your ideals and the way you think the world should work.”
“But you’re playing by the same corrupt rules as the Hellfire Club,” Charlie said. “You agree with those rules?”
“That’s like asking if we agree or disagree with oxygen,” said Winston. “Or the tides.”
“This is how it works,” Street said. “I’m quite certain I like it even less than you do, but these are the realities.”
“General Kinetics is going to change the way they do business,” Winston said. “And you need to keep your mouth shut. That’s nonnegotiable.”
They sat in silence. Kefauver took a left onto Rock Creek Parkway. Margaret looked out her window at the circular Doric temple that stood just off the road, dedicated on Armistice Day 1931 by President Hoover as a tribute to the men and women of Washington, DC, who had given their lives in “the Great War.” As if there would never be another. Simpler times, Margaret thought.
“It’s just stunning that this whole time, you and my dad have been working together,” Charlie said.
“It’s even more stunning that he convinced Carlin that he was working for him,” Winston observed.
“That’s actually a good point,” Margaret said, turning to look at Street behind her. “How did you win the trust of…” She searched for the words.
“Of a bunch of old white bigots?” Street finished for her.
“It’s a smart question,” Winston said. “My daughter-in-law possesses much more intelligence than her husband.”
“I gave them just enough information to trust me,” Street said. “Intelligence comes from people of all colors; they might be bigots, but they know that much. Intel comes from Arabs, Africans, Jews, Chinese…”
“You realize, Charlie, Isaiah was working on trying to learn more about the club long before they set their sights on you,” Winston said.
“It was your dad’s idea originally,” Street said. “When I came here in January of ’fifty-three, I pretended to be a willing source for them. Given my background in the OSS, they were interested.”
“I brought it up to Dulles, who mentioned it to Hoover,” Winston said. “They wouldn’t have invited Isaiah over for supper, but they were happy to take his information. Or have him be a button man to kill you two.”
Kefauver sighed impatiently and turned on the radio. “Y’all talk too much,” he said to himself.
“…showdown between Senator McCarthy and the U.S. Army,” the announcer said. “McCarthy claims the army is behind a conspiracy to discredit him…”
“And he’s right!” Kefauver laughed. They fell silent, listening to the news. Kefauver left Rock Creek Parkway and worked his way to Dent Place in Georgetown, through tree-lined streets where young lawyers and secretaries briskly walked to bus stops.
“Here we are!” Winston said, clearly relieved to be pulling up to Charlie and Margaret’s town house.
Winston patted his son on the knee.
“Remember what Falstaff said, my son,” Winston said. “‘The better part of valor is discretion.’”
“But I still have a lot of questions,” Charlie said. “The other day we stumbled on these documents about the Hellfire Club in England in the eighteenth century. So Ben Franklin brought it to the U.S.?”
Street chuckled. “Charlie, we’re still trying to figure out everything going on in the club today; we don’t even know who all the members are now. We damn sure haven’t traced its genealogy.”
“Legend is that Franklin replicated the club once he returned to the colonies,” Winston said. “But we don’t really know. We’re only just now getting a handle on this, thanks to Ike.”
“Why thanks to Ike?” Charlie asked.
“You’ll see,” Winston said. “Now, please let us go so I can phone Dulles and we can clean this all up.”
Margaret opened the car door. “It was nice to see you again, Winston,” she said drily, as if they were coming from a mixer and not a fatal shoot-out. “And nice to see you again, Senator Kefauver. It has been way too long since you were kind enough to take us to see The Pajama Game—we need to repay the favor, have you over for dinner.” Kefauver laughed.
She stepped out of the car and straightened her blouse. A passerby would have no idea of the chaotic, bloody night she’d just survived. She leaned toward the passenger window.
“And Isaiah, you and Renee need to come over soon,” she continued, a caricature of a Georgetown hostess. “Tell her I’ll call her. Toodles!”
Street grinned. “Your wife is crazy,” he said to Charlie.
She stood on the sidewalk and looked expectantly at Charlie, who remained in the crowded backseat.
Charlie nodded at her but first turned to his father and said in a low voice so Margaret wouldn’t hear, “Are we safe?”
Winston hesitated. “I…I don’t know. I don’t know who wanted you gone other than Carlin. I assume Hoover and Dulles want this sorry chapter over. You will have to keep your mouth shut about General Kinetics. That’s not negotiable. You need to burn any copies of the Van Waganan dossier, the info on the chemical plants. You do that, and maybe we can put this all behind us. I’ll make some calls as soon as we get to Kefauver’s house.”
Street opened the back door and stepped out, followed by Charlie. They shook hands.
“We’ll talk soon,” Street said.
“I owe you,” said Charlie.
“I have a feeling I’m going to get a chance to collect,” Street said.
Charlie patted Street on the shoulder, then bent down and looked at his father and Kefauver. “Thank you,” he said.
“You don’t need to thank me,” Kefauver said. “All I did was give the son of an old friend a ride home from Capitol Hill.”
Charlie and Margaret walked up the stairs to their front door as Kefauver drove off. Down the street, they could see Senator Kennedy leaving his brownstone, with Jackie fixing the lapels on his sport jacket and kissing him on the cheek. The senator saw Charlie and Margaret, waved, and got into his car.
An hour before Charlie and Margaret returned home, LaMontagne was picking the lock of their town house, thinking about how much he didn’t like killing.
The act of ending a life was unpleasant. It was sometimes a physical chore requiring significant exertion and it was often messy, whether from blood or struggle or end-of-life bodily expulsions. It ticked him off that he’d had to kill the redheaded club cocktail waitress to set up Charlie. Why him? Hadn’t he paid his dues by now? Enough already. It made him even angrier when Carlin ordered him to murder Charlie after his stunt at the comic-book hearings. LaMontagne thought it beneath his station at this point in his career. Sure, he’d risen quickly in DC by being a Mr. Fix-It, but he expected to have graduated from this kind of task by now.
LaMontagne had no idea what had happened to Carlin and Leopold in the previous hours, and he was unaware of the saga on Susquehannock Island. All he knew was that the day before, Charlie had been on national television alluding to national security secrets that the Hellfire Club had already killed two congressmen to conceal.
Van Waganan had been easy. LaMontagne hid in the backseat of the congressman’s car, then as soon as he got behind the wheel, out came his Ruger Single-Six, bang, a shot to the head. With the help of Abner Lance they’d staged a murder-suicide with a local prostitute. The cops had been on the scene for only five minutes before Hoover’s agents arrived and guaranteed the crime would remain unsolved in perpetuity.
Offing MacLachlan had been more challenging, given Carlin’s scheme to blame it on the Puerto Ricans. One of Hoover’s Puerto Rican informants tipped off the Bureau about the attack, and the night before, LaMontagne had planted a rifle under a bench in the House gallery. During the House debate on Mexican migrants, Abner Lance had walked up to the gallery and waited. As soon as the “Viva Puerto Rico libre” chant started, Lance—a sniper in the Korean War—aimed at MacLachlan and fired. Amid the chaos, and with every eye focused on the Puerto Ricans on the other end of the gallery, no one saw.
The tumblers on the lock gave way. LaMontagne slowly turned the knob and stepped in.
Once inside Charlie and Margaret’s foyer, LaMontagne closed the door softly and reached to the small of his back to retrieve a pistol he used for these special occasions: a Welrod Mk IIA, developed by Station IX of the UK Special Operations Executive during the war specifically for assassinations; quiet, reliable, with no markings. Fewer than three thousand Welrods had been manufactured. LaMontagne had acquired his through a British friend, a fellow expert in wet work.
The house was silent and dim, the curtains still closed against the daylight. LaMontagne poked his head around the doorways of the downstairs rooms, confirming that they were empty, and then put a tentative foot on the bottom stair, wary of creaks. Cautiously he ascended, placing his weight on the balls of his feet, pausing on each step. He would need to look around the house for a place to hide.
Charlie unlocked the door and stepped back to let Margaret enter. Exhausted, they trudged up the two flights of stairs to their bedroom, where Margaret began taking off her flannel and chinos, which had gone from soaking wet to crusted and uncomfortable.
Charlie’s nostrils flared. Something was wrong. He quickly peered into the walk-in closet and then the bathroom. He dropped down and looked under the bed.
“Something wrong, honey?”
Charlie approached Margaret and whispered in her ear. “I think Davis LaMontagne is here.”
“How—”
“Shh. I smell his cologne.”
There was no other explanation for the faint whiff of Cuir de Russie in the air.
“He’s probably downstairs,” he whispered. “Act normal and let’s be ready.”
“It was good to see your father,” she finally said aloud.
“Yep,” Charlie said. “Hey, honey, I’m going to take a shower.” He walked into the bathroom and turned on the water.
She thought she heard something from the first floor. A step? The creak of a doorknob turning?
“Honey, don’t use all the shampoo,” she said, struggling to come up with small talk. She tiptoed into the bathroom and whispered to Charlie: “I have an idea.”
“So do I.”
Hiding in the basement, LaMontagne wondered if this had been Charlie’s fate from the moment he’d tried to organize the veterans in Congress to defy Carlin over the Goodstone funding. Powerful vectors crush obstructions; the laws of physics are not dissimilar from the rules of man.
He could hear Charlie and Margaret talking in their bedroom. LaMontagne began creeping upstairs. As he stepped lightly on the stairs from the ground floor to the second, the oak beneath his foot emitted a high-pitched creak. LaMontagne froze in place. No one upstairs said anything.
Had they heard him?
The clanging of pipes and the sound of the shower spray suggested they hadn’t. Margaret uttered something. LaMontagne continued his slow trek to the Marders’ bedroom.
The door to the bedroom was slightly ajar. He pressed himself against the hallway wall and peered carefully into the empty room. Slowly he nudged the door open with his foot and eased his way inside. In the adjoining bathroom to his right, the shower was running. To his immediate left was a door to a walk-in closet.
The bed was unmade. LaMontagne steeled himself to kill both Charlie and Margaret. He would make it look like a burglary gone wrong.
“Honey, what’s the dress at this luncheon?” Margaret’s voice suddenly bellowed from behind him, in the closet. She sounded odd, muffled. Maybe she was pulling a shirt over her head.
He would dispose of her first. LaMontagne turned around.
The door to the walk-in closet was partly closed. He pushed it open with his left hand, his right hand holding the pistol, ready to shoot Margaret where she stood.
But the closet was empty. And too late he realized the sound he’d heard was from the baby monitor he’d given them, placed inside the closet; he had been fooled, and that meant Charlie and Margaret—
Heat, intense heat. His head, his hair, and his skin were on fire.
He wheeled around and dropped the gun to grab his head with both hands, as if that could quell the pain.
Margaret was ten feet behind him, squirting two different containers at his neck and head; when the chemicals interacted, they formed a weapon that burned LaMontagne’s skin. Charlie was to his right, torching him with what felt like a flamethrower, spraying a furniture polish he ignited with his German lighter.
LaMontagne was in agony; his body was on fire. He couldn’t think past the pain.
Margaret opened their bedroom window and Charlie hoisted him out of it. LaMontagne fell three stories and landed on his head.
Charlie looked out the window and down onto the brick
sidewalk where LaMontagne’s body lay, twisted and still and on fire.
Charlie leaned against the windowsill, his heart pounding. “Okay,” he finally said. “That worked well.”
After they’d called the police, they went to the kitchen and tried to calm down. Charlie boiled water to make them tea; he laid out a small plate of butter cookies, which Margaret began devouring.
“Where did you learn that?” she asked. “With the drain cleaners? How did you know that they would be so dangerous if you combined them? Or that the furniture polish was flammable?”
“The comic-book hearing!” Charlie laughed. “Good thing for us the nation’s comic-book publishers offer courses to America’s children on how to turn household products into horrific weapons. But it was your idea about the baby monitor that gave us the upper hand.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the baby,” she said, smiling and patting her stomach.
He put his hand on hers.
“It took us a little while, but I think we’re finally figuring out how to survive in the world of politics.”
Epilogue
Friday, April 30, 1954
Washington, DC
Washington was in mourning.
Five days before, a small plane had crashed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and taken the lives of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Franklin Harris Carlin, Republican of Oklahoma, as well as several others, including Charlie’s own office manager, Catherine Leopold, and two unknown men, presumably the pilot and copilot. Their plane had disappeared on the way to Oklahoma. After locating the wreckage, authorities said the bodies had been burned beyond recognition.
That was what everyone was told, at any rate.
The funeral aired live on local television in Washington, DC. A camera inside the National Cathedral panned across the faces of the more illustrious guests at the service: Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, and, in the pews behind the vice president, Senators Kennedy, McCarthy, and Kefauver. House Speaker Joseph Martin and Democratic leader Sam Rayburn had also been given prominent seats.