LaMontagne stood. “Just open the folder. Anything you could do to pass it on to Cohn or Bob Kennedy would be very deeply appreciated.” He looked at his watch. “But I gotta run, have a thing with Dulles in an hour.”
“John Foster or Allen?” Charlie asked, as he had to wonder why a midlevel electronics executive would be meeting with either the secretary of state or the director of Central Intelligence, both of whom quietly wove their tentacles around anything and everything that could be construed as being in the national security interests of the United States.
“Does it matter?” LaMontagne asked. He grabbed his hat and jacket from the coatrack and nearly bumped into Sheryl Ann Bernstein on his way out the door. She smiled at him brightly—Charlie sometimes wondered if there was any encounter that wouldn’t prompt that cheerful Midwestern smile—and stood aside to let him pass.
Bernstein reminded Charlie of many of the Barnard students he’d taught: bright, eager, wide-eyed. And, though he’d be loath to make such an observation aloud, a touch flirtatious—very mildly, like a teenager permitted to apply only some modest lipstick, her coy glances almost like a risqué outfit she was trying on in the store just to see how it felt. Not that there was anything particularly sensual about the bond they were forming, which was rooted in intellectual pursuits more than anything else. But he would be lying if he pretended that being around a woman who seemed delighted to be talking to him wasn’t a welcome change. He knew this was the emotional equivalent of a Hershey Bar, but that didn’t make it taste any less sweet.
She held a folder aloft like a trophy she’d just won. “Do you remember that scrap of paper you told me to look into, Congressman? It’s taken me a few weeks, but I have some possible leads.”
Charlie motioned her to a seat and silently mourned the loss of the productive early morning he’d planned. He would have been inclined to forget about those cryptic scribbles: U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops.
She provided her update. After he’d handed her the weird note while they were getting off the Senate subway, she’d cold-called the University of Chicago’s Department of Botany, and the department librarian had said she’d look into it.
“She was so helpful when we first spoke, and she even said she had a good idea about where to look for more information. But since then—” Bernstein paused dramatically and Charlie stifled a small sigh of impatience while he glanced at his watch. “I’ve been calling and calling and she has not taken my call. For almost a month now!”
“Odd,” said Charlie, though he couldn’t help wondering if a departmental librarian had more pressing duties to attend to than chasing down a stranger’s out-of-left-field requests.
“I know!” Bernstein enthused, her excitement suddenly bubbling over. “But then I had another idea. My brother goes to Northwestern, so I asked him to stop by the department and see what he could find out.” She paused again. “He’s pretty handsome, and the librarian was very friendly to him until he revealed why he was there. He said she got really cold, really fast. Said the study he was asking about was subject to wartime secrecy laws and that there was nothing that could be shared with the public in any way. And she had campus security escort him out.”
Charlie sat up a little straighter now. Maybe this wild-goose chase wasn’t so wild after all. “Were you able to get any information about the study? The name of the professors?”
“Yes,” Bernstein said, leafing through her steno pad. “Kraus. And Mitchell.”
“Okay,” Charlie said, writing down their names. “I guess the next step would be for me to ask about it at the Pentagon. Or to get someone on the Armed Services Committee to do so.”
“What about Strongfellow?”
“Perfect.”
Leopold poked her head into the office. “Sheryl Ann, you need to finish up that typing I gave you. And Congressman, you have just enough time to stop in and see Senator Kefauver before the morning vote if you leave right now.”
Charlie didn’t feel like taking the monorail to get to the Senate Office Building—the SOB, as everyone on the Hill called it—he wanted to stretch his legs. After making his way up to the second floor of the U.S. Capitol, he spotted Congressman Isaiah Street standing in National Statuary Hall, a semicircular room right off the House Chamber featuring statues of notable Americans. Each of the forty-eight states had contributed two of the immense likenesses, with thirty-six standing in the room like soldiers in formation, curving along the wall of the Statuary Hall chamber. Dozens of others were scattered throughout nearby rooms and halls.
Charlie had seen Street every poker night but seldom ran into him anywhere else. They had developed an easy rapport during the weekly games. Street stood glowering at one of the statues contributed by Georgia, the figure of former governor Alexander Stephens.
“Charlie,” he said, a smile stretching across his face. “I have good news. Congressman Powell is going to vote however you want today, depending on whether the Goodstone provision has been removed.” Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Democrat of New York, was a member of the House Appropriations Committee. Street had offered to lobby Powell on Charlie’s behalf to get his support on Goodstone.
“Thank you, but I’m not sure I need it. I’m told it’s gone.”
Street looked confused. “Really? I thought I just read that General Kinetics was making a play to buy Goodstone. Blacklisting them will be bad for both companies. And for the deal.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Charlie said, stunned by the news. Learning that General Kinetics was attempting to purchase Goodstone was like finding out the Chinese were sending troops in to defend North Korea.
Charlie pointed to a statue of Supreme Court chief justice Morrison “Mott” Waite, the image of regality, leaning on a cane. “See how his forefingers are crossed on the handle of the cane? That’s a sign he was a member of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones.”
Street shook his head. “Folks at home…voters would be amazed if they ever found out how many decisions are actually made by these secret societies and clubs.”
“Who else is there besides Skull and Bones?” Charlie asked. “The Masons? The Illuminati?”
“The Klan,” Street said. He motioned back toward the statue of Governor Stephens. “Quote: ‘Our new government’s cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man,’” he recited, “‘that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’ Unquote.”
Charlie looked down at the statue’s foundation, where the engraving read: I am afraid of nothing on the earth, above the earth, beneath the earth, except to do wrong.
Street shrugged. “He said what I said too. Vice president of the Confederacy. That’s all you need to know.”
“To be fair, how many white men in Georgia opposed slavery in the 1860s?” Charlie said. In his teaching days, he had always asked his students to consider the context of the era they studied.
“The British outlawed slavery in 1833,” Street countered.
“George Washington had slaves. Do you want to change the name of this city?”
Street pointed to a majestic bronze caped figure from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis. “President of the Confederacy,” Street said. “Why is it that almost a hundred years later, society still hasn’t labeled these men traitors?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. He was done playing devil’s advocate on an issue where he actually did think of the clients as devils.
“The good guys won. So to speak. So why are there statues of the bad guys? It’s not as though the French have statues of their traitors from the war, the Vichy French.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Charlie said. “Marshal Pétain died just a few years ago and they have a bunch of streets named after him in France.”