Standing with Lyndon Johnson against a wall, Bob Kennedy swiped his hair off his forehead and looked around the room, seemingly searching for an escape. Chairman Carlin was horsing around with Gene Tunney, pretending to box with him while a photographer captured the moment for posterity.
“Choose your poison,” said a bartender after Charlie finally settled on a bar, the one farthest from the masses.
“Have any hemlock?” Charlie asked.
The bartender smiled and shook his head.
“Two vodkas, one glass, then,” Charlie said.
“Rough day?” Congressman Chris MacLachlan appeared at his side.
“Just thirsty.” Charlie held up his glass. “Good to see you, Mac, even if you did clean my clock at poker.”
MacLachlan smiled and raised his glass. “May ye be in heaven half an hour afore the devil knows you’re dead.” He took a healthy swallow from a gin and tonic.
“Did you see Carlin?” Charlie asked.
“The old ham can’t resist a chance to pose for the cameras.”
“Well, that old ham knows about my suggestion that the veterans stick together and kill the Goodstone earmark,” Charlie said. “Kefauver told me he’s furious.”
MacLachlan sipped his drink, then exhaled. “Sweet baby Moses, we didn’t even decide to carry out that play.”
“People in this town can’t keep their mouths shut.”
“Keep fighting the good fight,” MacLachlan said. “You’re following the trail Van Waganan blazed.”
“If I’m doing that, it’s not on purpose,” Charlie said. “I don’t know much about him. Just that he was an aide on the Truman Committee and helped him take on Wright Aeronautical.”
“Yeah, the bastards. Shit engines, faked inspections, dead American pilots.” He paused and motioned to the bartender for a refill. “That’s what started him on his mission.”
“Yeah, I remember headlines about Van Waganan challenging various corporations. Malfeasance and such.”
“When he got going, he was like a dog with a goddamn bone,” MacLachlan said.
The din of the all-male crowd—deep, baritone, crescendos of laughter and shouts—highlighted the silence between Charlie and MacLachlan.
“He made a lot of enemies,” MacLachlan noted.
MacLachlan turned to get a better view of the crowd and those around him, then leaned closer to Charlie. “This postwar economic boom, the Long Boom, they’re calling it…it’s wonderful for our standing in the world and for our constituents’ standard of living, but there’s an accompanying madness. A recklessness. So much money being made—like nothing this country has ever seen before. And here in Washington, there are a lot of people working to stop anyone even asking questions about what is sometimes a clear…disregard…for our own people. Van Waganan may have been a victim—”
MacLachlan stopped himself as Chairman Carlin suddenly stepped into his line of sight, perhaps thirty feet away. “Oh, boy,” Charlie said as the chairman started walking toward him with the determination of a crocodile moving in on an oblivious gazelle.
“Don’t forget your oath,” MacLachlan said under his breath. “Protecting America from enemies foreign and domestic. Goodstone counts.” He patted Charlie’s shoulder and vanished into the crowd.
Charlie steeled himself, remembering that he had been through tougher stuff than the ire of a powerful congressman. He leaned into the encounter, throwing his handshake at the chairman like a Robin Roberts fastball and deploying every available ounce of charisma he had as aggressively as he could.
“Chairman Carlin, I owe you an apology,” Charlie said, looking into Carlin’s rheumy eyes, his irises the color of swamp algae. “I should never have spoken up at the committee markup, nor should I have engaged in any small talk about Goodstone with my fellow veterans. Of the former, I can only tell you that I am young and inexperienced—in other words, dumb. Of the latter, well, sir, you served in the Great War, and I’m certain you know what it’s like when veterans get around drink.”
Charlie had read that morning that Carlin had served as a U.S. Army officer from 1917 to 1919, though he had never left the continental United States, having worked in the Department of War procurement office. Still, service was service.
“Why, Charlie,” said Carlin, clearly taken aback after arriving loaded for bear. “That’s mighty white of you.”
“With your permission, sir, I would beg a moment of your time to try to explain myself.”
Carlin smiled. Charlie’s military deference seemed familiar to him, perhaps a nostalgic echo from his service at the Department of War. “Permission granted.”
So Charlie told a short version of the recapture of the town of Le Meaune: the French family, the stash of poison gas hidden in the barn, the errant mortar, the shoddy Goodstone gas masks, the deaths of Private First Class Rodriguez and the French father and his two small children.
Carlin listened impassively.
“So I got emotional, I suppose,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry about how I handled this and the last thing I want to do is be disrespectful. I have great admiration for you.”
Carlin paused, then said, “Well, thank you, Charlie. We will figure this out.” He put a paternal arm around Charlie’s shoulders; he reeked of Aqua Velva and anchovies. “A lot of things can happen in this town when people work together. I’m glad we had this talk.”
Relieved to see Carlin walk away but also slightly disgusted by his own obsequiousness, even though it was in the service of a larger goal, Charlie took a deep breath.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, please take your seats!” shouted Senator Harry Byrd, Democrat of Virginia, into the microphone.
Across the room, Kefauver was waving him toward their long table, and soon Charlie found himself seated between the senator and LaMontagne and across from Conrad Hilton.
“What are we to expect tonight?” LaMontagne asked Charlie. “I’m a virgin here.”
“I am too,” Charlie said. “I believe it’s a mock political convention. They nominate a faux presidential candidate, and he gives a silly speech.”
From the right side of the stage, the Marine Corps band began playing “Hail to the Chief,” and the five hundred or so attendees—Alfalfa Club members and guests—stood and applauded as President Eisenhower appeared onstage, beaming and waving. Some of the generals and admirals, wearing their dress uniforms, saluted as he approached the microphone.
“At ease, dogfaces,” he said, prompting laughter from the crowd, along with the clinking of glass and ice cubes. Eisenhower took his seat at one of the long tables, and Byrd resumed speaking, working through a number of self-congratulatory references to the club and the attendees. Charlie was lost in thoughts of his conversations with MacLachlan and Carlin. Was the Goodstone money going to be killed? He wasn’t sure what Carlin had meant when he said they would figure it all out.
“This is exactly what I hate about coming down here to DC for these rubber-chicken affairs,” LaMontagne whispered, his breath warm and minty. “A bunch of old guys balling each other off and a room of brownnosers laughing like their next performance review depended on it.”
Charlie noted the contrast between LaMontagne’s smooth, polished demeanor when they’d met earlier and his one-of-the-boys crudeness now that he was in different company. Social chameleons were a source of fascination to him; he envied their ability to fit into any situation, a talent he lacked. He’d felt its absence acutely since arriving in the capital.
Onstage, Byrd was “nominating” for president Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the Eisenhower administration’s ambassador to the United Nations. Lodge, a Republican, had been the U.S. senator from Massachusetts until Jack Kennedy defeated him two years before.