He was holding that dossier roughly an hour later as he made his way from his congressional office to the House Chamber, where he and his fellow members had been called for a vote on a bill allowing more Mexican migrant workers into the country. Stopping for a cup of coffee at the House Restaurant, Charlie ran into one of his poker buddies, Congressman Chris MacLachlan. The Indiana Republican was devouring a cruller while waiting in line for the cashier in the take-out section of the eatery. In his left hand, he held yet another pastry, this one with some sort of red and purple preserves.
“Hungry?” Charlie asked.
MacLachlan chewed until it was safe to speak. “A tad.”
The cashier rang them up and MacLachlan nodded his thanks as he patted his belly, which to Charlie’s eye had expanded in the previous month or so. He now looked like someone who had eaten the version of himself depicted in his most recent congressional portrait. MacLachlan seemed to be reading Charlie’s thoughts and a sheepish expression crept across his face. “I’ve got to stop,” he acknowledged. He indicated his half-eaten pastry to Charlie. “Want it?”
Charlie shook his head. “I’ve already had breakfast.”
They walked out of the restaurant. Members of Congress and their aides, journalists, and lobbyists filled the hallways. The two congressmen took a left and proceeded up a narrow staircase to the second floor. MacLachlan gestured to a step beneath their feet. “See those stains?” he asked, pointing out clusters of a dozen dark brown splotches on the seventh and eighth marble steps. “Congressman William Taulbee’s blood.”
“What?”
“A reporter killed Taulbee in 1890, shot him dead right here. Long and seedy story, but bottom line: The reporter wrote about an affair Taulbee had. Taulbee beat him up. And then one day the reporter brought a pistol to the Capitol and shot him.”
They began walking up the stairs again, MacLachlan breathing heavily, removing his pocket square to blot beads of perspiration starting to form on his upper lip.
“I definitely do not recall hearing about Taulbee being murdered right here during my high-school tour of the Capitol,” Charlie said. “But then again, they didn’t talk much about the ugly bits.”
“Ha, no, the tour guides don’t talk about it. I’ve been visiting the members-only collection at the Library of Congress. Fascinating stuff in there—as a scholar, you should really check it out. An incredible collection of history nobody seems to know about.”
“And there’s a section on Taulbee?”
“On him and others whose ghosts haunt these halls. Civil War soldiers and the like.” He lowered his voice dramatically. “Some people claim to have seen Taulbee’s ghost right on the stairway.”
“I never understood the whole ghost phenomenon,” Charlie mused. “People only claim to see historic figures or those killed under horrific conditions. But what about all the old people who died? If there’s a world with ghosts, shouldn’t we be constantly walking through hundreds of apparitions of just regular old people?”
“You raise a decent point,” said MacLachlan. “And it cannot be mere injustice that provokes a haunting—why, there have been people killed for unjust reasons all over this city; we’d all be haunted day and night. Perhaps it’s the specialness of the death that creates the need for a ghost to haunt. And this was odd, a journalist killing a congressman at the Capitol!”
“And we think today’s reporters are rough,” Charlie joked.
MacLachlan raised an eyebrow. “We do? I don’t. You’ve gotten some tough coverage?”
Charlie thought about it. There had been a few vicious jabs at him in tabloid political columns—mostly about his father’s role in his appointment and his privileged background—but as a married academic and war veteran with a shiny clean reputation, he had largely avoided bad ink. The same could not be said for his predecessor, Congressman Van Waganan, whose reputation was still being dragged through the grimiest mud imaginable, with no lurid rumor spared repetition.
“I suppose not, not me personally,” Charlie admitted as they continued their journey toward the second floor.
“Truth is, most of our so-called Fourth Estate is focused on nonsense. Even the ones fixated on McCarthy’s daily theater. Same so-called journalists he’s attacking as Commies today were only too happy to give McCarthy’s character-assassination campaign front-page attention a few years ago with nary a scintilla of editorial discretion or judgment that what he was peddling was pure balderdash. As if there does not exist such a thing as empirical fact!”
“You don’t think there are Reds in the government, Mac?” Charlie was surprised to hear MacLachlan’s skepticism about McCarthy, given his deep conservatism and loathing of the Godless Communists. He’d made a few comments over poker one night about how happy he was that Alger Hiss was in Lewisburg Federal Prison; he’d been imprisoned for perjury, since the statute of limitations had run out on his acts of espionage. “I don’t care if they get him for jaywalking as long as they get him,” he’d said.
“Of course there are Reds in the government,” MacLachlan replied. “They’re infesting it like termites. But McCarthy isn’t finding them. Hoover is. McCarthy hasn’t produced the name of one proven, clear, actual Communist agent. Not one! And that’s not even the point. It’s a distraction, or—what did Isaiah call it?—the old okey-doke. Look over here! Look over here! And meanwhile your pocket’s being picked.”
“Yeah, he said that about the comic-book hearings,” Charlie said, wincing a bit internally at the thought of an event he dreaded.
MacLachlan patted his shoulder and grinned. “Better you than me, my friend.” Charlie grimaced and followed MacLachlan down two hallways of the second floor to the door of the Speaker’s Lobby. “Talking about ghosts, Charlie, John Quincy Adams is said to haunt this room,” he said, opening one of the doors; Charlie peered inside. “In the middle of a debate over some fairly innocuous issue, he had a stroke on the House floor,” MacLachlan said, pointing at a sturdy couch with light green cushions. “The Adams box sofa, where he died. Awful way to go.”
“Can’t think of many good ones,” Charlie replied. “Hey, where are the Senate bathtubs, the place where Vice President Wilson fell asleep, nearly froze to death, and then died of a stroke?”
“In the basement somewhere,” MacLachlan said. “The basements here are confusing and they go on forever, like ancient caves.”
“I’ve heard that sometimes late at night, right outside the room where Vice President Wilson died, folks can catch a whiff of the soap they once used.”
“Yes, I’ve heard those tales as well,” said MacLachlan. “And some people claim they hear Wilson coughing. All very silly. Like the wails of agony from the ghost of the Union soldier who died in the Capitol Rotunda. The tales are nonsense. But the deaths are very real. And those are just the ones we know about. Think of all the…inconvenient people over the years who must have met their ends in this building or nearby and then vanished forever.”