by Ellen Crosby
I scarcely recognized Charles in the early black-and-white pictures: smooth-faced and dashing, reed slim, clear-eyed, with a pompadour of wavy dark hair and a slight grave smile befitting the seriousness of the moment. What hadn’t changed was that cocky self-confidence in his eyes, the lack of self-doubt. No wonder Juliette had fallen for him after living with a troll who beat her.
One picture that had particular prominence showed Charles shaking hands with the then president of France, Georges Pompidou, on what looked like the day he presented his diplomatic credentials as ambassador to France. Juliette, ethereal and as lovely as she’d been in the portrait in their library, stood behind him looking radiant. It was the only picture in the room in which she appeared. Behind me a door opened and closed with a quiet click and I spun around.
It appeared as though Charles materialized out of nowhere, until I noticed the door set into a wall that had been camouflaged to look like a bookcase. He was holding something partially obscured in his hand. For a wild moment I thought it might be a gun. Maybe I’d been right after all: He had come to have a man-to-man talk with Pépé about his wife’s infatuation with my grandfather. But when he raised his arm I saw that it was a wine bottle, dark like the color of old blood.
“I didn’t mean to startle you both. I went in through the cave to get the wine and came through the back door.” He opened and closed it again so we could see the neat trick of how it disappeared into the wall. “Clever, isn’t it?”
He crossed the room and flicked a switch next to an oil painting of a pair of foxhounds. Instantly a fire blazed to life in the stone fireplace.
My grandfather looked surprised and Charles grinned. “Gas,” he said. “I know it’s a lazy man’s way of getting out of building a real fire, but I enjoy it. No need to wait for it to burn down at the end of an evening.”
So this was the refuge he retreated to when he wanted to get away from … what? Or whom? I wondered if Juliette had even seen the inside of this place.
“Do you spend much time here?” I asked.
He gave me an indecipherable look and said, “Depends on your definition of ‘much.’ ”
I decided not to ask the obvious follow-up.
“Please, come and sit by the fire,” he said, “while I pour the wine. I had it opened about an hour ago. I’d like to see how it’s developing. It might need a little more time.”
He handed me a glass and I nearly dropped it. Silk-screened on the wineglass was the logo of the openmouthed alienlike figure that had been on the broken glass in Paul Noble’s studio. He handed Pépé a similar glass and took a third for himself.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked.
I looked into his eyes and saw a shadow pass behind them. What-ever his reason for bringing us here, now it seemed it had something to do with the death of Paul Noble. Somehow Charles had learned that I’d found Paul hanging in his studio and he knew about the wineglass, too. I wondered who had told him and when this game was going to end. I was tired of being played.
“I saw a wineglass with the same design on it the other day, but you know that already, don’t you?” I said in a curt voice. “Where did you get these? They look like old glasses, not the inexpensive ones we give out as souvenirs at the winery.”
“Lucie—” Pépé cautioned me.
“They are,” Charles said. “I haven’t used these glasses in more than forty years.”
“Why tonight? A celebration? Or is it in memoriam? And shouldn’t we be drinking Sauvignon Blanc?”
Charles’s mouth tightened. “You’re right,” he said. “The Margaux will have to do. It’s from the correct year.”
I looked at the bottle. “What happened in 1970?”
“I’ll get to that. Now, please, have a seat.”
He waited until Pépé took one of the leather chairs and I sat on the sofa before he sat down in the other wing chair. The fire flickered merrily.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” My grandfather indicated a large glass ashtray on the coffee table.
I’d noticed it earlier. The White House logo was etched into the glass, probably a souvenir from another era, in the days when nobody minded if the president lit up and dinners ended with brandy and cigars in one of the formal state rooms.
Charles pushed the ashtray over to Pépé. “Be my guest. Juliette doesn’t come here. She’s absolutely against tobacco, and don’t get her started on hunting.”
He smiled without amusement and raised his glass. “Thank you both for indulging me.”
Pépé and I raised our glasses in silence. The wine was out of this world.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and I’d appreciate it if you would let me tell it my way. I promise I’ll answer all your questions when I’m finished.”
Pépé snapped his lighter shut and it made a little metal clink. He slipped it in his pocket and took a drag on his cigarette, closing his eyes. I kicked off my sandals, tucking my feet under my long dress and laying my pashmina across my lap like a blanket. Pépé’s jacket was still around my shoulders and I pulled it close. Charles settled back into his chair and receded into the shadows.
“In 1970, Nixon was still in the White House,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be long before he got mired in Watergate and it brought him down. We were still in Vietnam, the ’68 riots had ended but they still left vivid scars on the national conscience, and the war, which had ended Johnson’s presidency, was more unpopular than ever. Nixon wanted to get us out of there and he did, calling it ‘peace with honor.’ Our worst enemies were the Sovs and it was the height of the Cold War.”
Pépé crossed one leg over the other and exhaled a stream of smoke. Like Charles, he’d lived through these years. The history lesson was clearly for my education.
“I was a history major in college,” I said. “So I did read about all this, you know.”
Charles made a small noise and Pépé chuckled.
“Ah.” Charles’s voice was dry. “Ancient history?”
“Prehistoric.”
“I see,” he said after a moment. “ ‘I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.’ Do you know who said that, history major?”
“You?”
“Patrick Henry.”
“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”
“The same. A Virginian. A Founding Father. The lesson applies now, too.”
“You’ll explain that?” I said. “I won’t need to.” He sipped his wine. “In 1970, I was the Deputy Director for OSPR.”
“English, please,” I said. “For the uninitiated?”
“The Office of Strategic Programming and Research. Later it went under the Pentagon’s umbrella, so it became DOSPR. D for ‘Defense.’ Dosper was one of the most nimble and competent agencies in the federal government. The jewel in the Defense Department’s crown. You wanted something done, that was the place to go. No bureaucratic red tape to snarl you, no congressional hearing to ask permission first. We had carte blanche to make it rain.”
“How convenient,” I said. “What exactly did this organization do?”
“Oh, remnants of it still exist. But the original program was started in the late fifties, when the Sovs caught us off guard with Sputnik. They beat us in the space race and we had no clue what was up their little Commie sleeves. You can’t imagine how devastating that was.”
Pépé nodded and I stared at both of them, wondering what it must have been like during the years when our former World War II ally had become the “Evil Empire” and people like Charles called the Russians “Commies” and “Sovs” like something out of an old spy movie.
Charles drank his wine. “So in order for us never to fall behind, and for that never to happen again, we set up a sort of freewheeling think tank of creative people who spent their days playing military what-if and then figuring out how to invent the technology. You’ve benefited from some of the results … advancements like global positioning systems, voice-recognition software, t
hings like that. It wasn’t just building things that went boom or the next James Bond–type toy to put in the arsenal. The sign on the door to my office was a quote from Einstein: ‘If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.’ ”
He shifted in his chair. No one laughed.
“The wine is really opening nicely, isn’t it?” He stared into his glass. “Still got some life in it after all these years.”
I nodded, wishing he’d get on with it. Charles was leading up to something important, but at this rate we’d still be here tomorrow morning.
“You were saying about your position with OSPR?” I asked. “Or DOSPR?”
Charles fixed his gaze on the fire. “I’m getting to that, what I did. R & D is the heart of playing what-if. You have conventional warfare—soldiers fighting each other on a battlefield—and then you have unconventional warfare,” he said. “Both are as old as time. People have been using some variant of biological and chemical weapons in wartime as far back as the ancient Greeks.”
Pépé sat up straighter in his chair. I’d been about to take a sip of my wine, but I stopped and uneasily waited for him to go on. Charles had changed the direction of this conversation with as much subtlety as shifting tectonic plates.
“Unconventional warfare took a different direction in the twentieth century, gassing troops in the trenches during the First World War to name one of the most graphic examples,” he said. “Then during World War II the use of airplanes to drop bombs that would cause widespread destruction took what-if to the next level. What if you could fill a bomb with some pathogen or crop agent and drop it over a city or farmland? You wouldn’t destroy buildings, but the damage would be incalculable. Think of how many people you could sicken or kill, wiping out food supplies for decades because you’d poisoned the soil, how paralyzing it would be to a country.”
He saw my eyes widen. “I’m not talking about the good guys, Lucie. Imagine the Nazis with that technology and you live in Paris or London in the 1940s knowing there’s a goddamn bull’s-eye painted on your back on a war room map in Berchtesgaden.”
“Go on, Charles,” Pépé said. “Lucie and I are listening.”
Charles sipped his wine. “Where was I? Oh, yes, the U.S. had its own programs—biological and chemical warfare—all conducted in the utmost secrecy. Then the war ended and things started to wind down. I’m going to fast-forward through some of this, but in the aftermath of the war there was a massive ethical and moral debate about whether to continue or abandon something so heinous, so reprehensible to the American psyche. That was what the politicians and civilian leaders wrestled with. So the military decided to move the program under its own tent, though by then we had field-tested the A-bomb and discovered that it worked.”
I was glad to hear the small note of irony in his voice.
“Weren’t plans for the atomic bomb drawn up at the Bohemian Grove?” Pépé asked.
“The Grove is rented out all the time to people who want to use it when the members aren’t there.” Charles sounded irritated and a little peevish. “It’s true there was a planning meeting held there for the Manhattan Project, which led, of course, to the A-bomb—but it wasn’t a plot concocted by the Bohemian Club, I can assure you.”
Pépé set his glass down on the table and reached for his cigarette pack. “I see.”
Charles shot him an inscrutable look. “Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where you stood, the Cold War ramped up and that breathed new life into BW and CW research, saved the programs. We couldn’t afford to fall behind again.”
“You mean biological weapons and chemical weapons?” I said.
He nodded. “Some of it was run out of a small installation—Fort Wilton—just down the road in Maryland. We built on what was accomplished during the war: germ warfare, chemical warfare, plant and animal toxins, it’s a long list. But with any kind of research comes field testing. To be blunt, testing on animals only goes so far.”
He paused and now I was starting to guess where this was going.
“The Japanese did the most experimenting on human subjects during the war, and in return for us not prosecuting them for war crimes, we got a peek at their results. It was a Faustian pact, but it happened.” He shrugged. “Hell, we did our own testing here at home—open-air tests using simulants and then monitoring the results. No one knew at the time, of course. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you sent out permission slips door-to-door.”
I choked on my wine. “You’re talking about our government testing biological and chemical weapons on its own citizens?”
“Lucie, there were hearings on this in the late seventies. It is ancient history,” he said with the weariness of someone who had been over this ad nauseam and was tired of defending it. “We only did what was absolutely essential, took no unnecessary risks. You may have studied all this in your history books, my dear, but you’re forgetting these were the Cold War years when kids hid under their school desks during drills to prepare for a nuclear attack. It’s a cheap shot to look back and condemn; it was different living through those times.”
He got up and poured the last of the Margaux into our glasses.
“Charles, you took none for yourself,” Pépé said.
“I’m switching to brandy. Care to join me, anyone?”
“Non, merci,” my grandfather said, and I shook my head.
He walked behind the bar, setting a bottle of Rémy-Martin on the counter. “In 1969, Nixon bowed to ethical and moral pressure to stop the program. He signed orders that all chemical and biological weapons development and testing was to cease. They dismantled the lab at Wilton, let people go, moved equipment, animals, everything elsewhere.”
He splashed cognac into a snifter. “You can probably guess what I’m going to say next. A small group of biochemists, brilliant young scientists who’d been hired as contractors, thought it was insane to shut down our program when other countries were forging ahead.”
He came back to his chair, swirling the burnished liquid in his glass with the practiced ease of habit. I wondered why he wasn’t drunk yet. My own head was spinning. Writhing figures, like the sinewy one on my glass, danced in the flames of the fire and waved their arms.
Charles resumed his talk as he sat down. “It was easy enough to keep them off the grid. Wilton was the perfect place to do it. Plenty of other stuff went on that no one talked about. They were a tight-knit group, all good friends. They hadn’t wanted to split up anyway.”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“Mostly the same thing they’d been doing before.”
“Including experimenting on humans?”
“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Don’t rush me.”
Pépé caught my eye and made the universal gesture with one hand that meant Calm down.
“Sorry.”
“First you need to know about these young people,” Charles said. “Who they were. It’s important.”
Pépé nodded and exhaled a stream of smoke. I settled deeper into the cushions of the sofa.
“They used to get together on weekends after work. One of the girls’ families had a beach house on Pontiac Island in Maryland. Beautiful place, that island. Only a few hundred inhabitants. A two-lane bridge from the mainland and then you’re transported to another time where life moved more slowly. In the beginning it was idyllic.” A ghost of a smile flickered across his face.
“You, also, went to the beach house?” I asked.
“Once, for a birthday party, and one other time, but I didn’t socialize with them. There was a lot of drinking, weekends got a bit wild.” He paused, a distasteful expression on his face. “It led to some rather casual and open sexual activities, not my thing at all. Besides, I was married to my first wife.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.
“One of the girls, Maggie Hilliard, decided their little group needed a name—you know how girls are.” He gave me a tolerant smile and I bi
t my tongue, resisting the urge to ask him for his own interpretation of how girls were. “Some folderol invented one night when everyone was in their cups at the cottage. But it stuck. They called themselves the Mandrake Society.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Mandrake was a plant that had been used as long ago as the ancient Greeks,” he said. “It’s a deliriant causing hallucinations. Used to induce sleep. It’s part of the nightshade family. The Greeks used mandrakes in war, scraping the bark and putting it in wine that they left for the enemy to discover. The foreign troops drank it and, once drugged, their captors easily overcame them. It was one of the earliest biological weapons. The name was sort of an inside joke among the five of them.”
“I’ve heard stories about mandrakes,” I said. “If you pull one out of the ground it starts screaming. Anyone who hears the sound will die.”
“I see you know your mythology,” Charles said.
“More like my Harry Potter.”
“How amusing,” he said in a dry voice. “There is another legend, a bit of folklore, that a mandrake will only grow where the semen of a hanged man has dripped to the ground.”
He steepled his fingers, and I shuddered.
“Do you mean Paul Noble?”
“I heard one of the stories about the possible cause of Paul’s death,” he said. “It is a bizarre coincidence, you must admit.”
Pépé pointed to the figure on his glass. “So this creature was the symbol of the Mandrake Society?”
Charles nodded. “Maggie had the wineglasses made for everyone. I used to have a set of six. These three are the only ones left.”
I set my glass on the coffee table with a sharp little clink. Charles stared at me.
“Do continue about this group,” Pépé said.