“You’re Winston’s boy!” said McCarthy, as if it were just dawning on him. He held out his big meaty catcher’s mitt of a hand to shake Charlie’s. “So good to have you in Washington. I haven’t spoken to your father in some time; tell him I said hello.” The waitress brought him a glass of scotch and he downed it like a thirsty man at an oasis, emptying the tumbler in seconds. The waitress handed him the glass of bicarbonate of soda; he took a sip and handed it back to her.
“Anyway, where were we?” he asked Whitney, pounding on his armrest. “Oh! Murrow! Anyway, I don’t care what he does. If you want to be against McCarthy, you gotta be a Communist or a cocksucker!” He guffawed loudly, a deep, boisterous belly laugh that drew the attention of everyone in the room. “Boy,” he said to Charlie, “we’re on the most important skunk hunt ever. And look, I know my methods aren’t refined. But you don’t go skunk-hunting in striped trousers and a tall hat while waving a lace handkerchief!” He laughed hard at his own joke; Whitney tittered.
Charlie observed McCarthy—the charm, the menace, the glint in his eyes that seemed to suggest that you were in on it with him, and wasn’t this fun? There was something about McCarthy that instantly conveyed to people that he liked and cared about them, Charlie could see—and something inside Charlie, he recognized, sought McCarthy’s approval. It was a kind of twisted magic.
McCarthy smiled as the waitress came back with a stick of butter on a plate, a fork, and a napkin, and he motioned for her to put it on the table next to him.
“Charlie!” said Chairman Carlin from the corner of the room where he was sitting with Davis LaMontagne and Strongfellow. “Come join us!” McCarthy and Whitney had resumed their conversation as if Charlie were no longer standing there, so he walked over, greeted the men, and assumed a space being made for him on the couch, next to Carlin. LaMontagne’s smile was friendlier than Charlie would have expected.
“Nice to see you in the club,” he said.
Charlie gave what he hoped was a noncommittal expression, still reeling from the bizarreness of meeting McCarthy and Whitney and wondering again what he had unwittingly joined tonight. He gave a slight nod of his head toward two gentlemen seated in deep leather armchairs. One was Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence, the other a wrinkled old man with thick glasses and a face like a fist.
“Who’s the guy with Dulles?”
Strongfellow peered at the man over his whiskey glass and shrugged. “Got me.”
“You two sure are freshmen, aren’t you?” LaMontagne said teasingly.
“Strongfellow and Marder, you are embarrassing me!” exclaimed Carlin with mock outrage. “That’s Sam the Banana Man!”
Charlie and Strongfellow looked at each other blankly.
“C’mon, guys, Sam Zemurray!” LaMontagne said. “The president of United Fruit Company?”
“He’s only one of the most influential people in the world,” Carlin said. “United Fruit has banana plantations all over the Caribbean and Latin America. They helped fund our big push against the Commies in Guatemala last year.”
“Yeah, the Dulles brothers have worked with the Banana Man for decades,” added LaMontagne. “They were on the payroll for years. They still work for them, essentially. The company’s top lobbyist is married to Ike’s personal secretary. Ambassador Lodge is a stockholder. It’s all one giant fucking banana split.”
“Do what thou wilt,” muttered Carlin and the group laughed, even Charlie, whose fascination with the ways of Washington often edged out his disgust. He felt a bit woozy and realized he was heading well past bombed. He hadn’t been much of a drinker until they moved here, when he’d quickly adopted the habit, more out of circumstance than desire; there were always free drinks being offered to him in rooms packed with outwardly respectable elected officials slowly getting embarrassingly soused.
It wasn’t that his previous life in academia was teetotaling; indeed, the Columbia faculty had more than its share of drinkers. Rather, it was a matter of discretion. Boozing professors tended to keep their pre-sundown imbibing private, an occasional nip from a flask, wine during office hours. On and near Capitol Hill, however, fully stocked bars in professional workspaces were as common as any other pieces of furniture—they were right off the House Chamber, in the conference rooms of law firms, next to the teletype machines in the offices of newspaper editors.
“What the hell is this place?” Charlie asked. “Pornographic stained glass? And is that Senator MacKeever in that one over there?”
“Just some harmless fun,” LaMontagne said with a shrug.
“Hey, Charlie.” Carlin put a beefy arm around Charlie’s shoulder and leaned close to whisper in a boozy drawl, “Do you want to know a secret?”
“Sure.” Although at the moment what Charlie wanted most was to get upwind of Carlin’s 90-proof breath.
Carlin pulled Charlie even closer. “I screwed you on Goodstone,” he said, a big beaming smile exploding on his face, a fat finger landing on Charlie’s lapel for emphasis.
Charlie blinked.
LaMontagne and Strongfellow chuckled, though it wasn’t clear if they were laughing at the news or the shocking way it had been delivered.
“But…I saw the bill,” Charlie said. “You struck out the provision.”
“That is true,” Carlin said, now wagging his finger in the air, granting the point. “But what you didn’t see was a provision we added in a separate part of the bill allocating the same amount for any subsidiaries of General Kinetics.”
“Which, as you may know, Charlie, Goodstone is about to become,” said LaMontagne, a smug look on his face.
Charlie rocked back slightly in his seat. He felt as if he’d just been punched in the stomach.
“Now, son,” said Carlin, giving him a patronizing pat on the back. “Don’t take it so hard. You’re not the first pretty young thing I’ve screwed this week, and you won’t be the last.”
Charlie felt a hand on his shoulder. Strongfellow was trying to console him.
“The larger point, Charlie, is you’re right—Goodstone fucked up,” added LaMontagne. “But these companies were rushing product for the war effort. No one was trying to kill anyone.”
“And the fight goes on, Charlie,” said Carlin.
“And the fight goes on,” Strongfellow repeated.
Charlie felt deflated. An expert in the deal making, debauchery, and duplicity of the Founding Fathers, he wasn’t naive about politics: it could be vicious. And it was ever thus. Charlie had written a well-received article about how the ferocious and cruel attacks by John Quincy Adams’s friends against Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, accusing her of bigamy, had all but certainly led to her death after the election of 1828. In a historical context, Carlin’s maneuver wouldn’t even be a footnote in an encyclopedia of chicanery. But no one had ever lied to Charlie’s face like that before, much less relished the revelation of the deception. It enraged and humiliated him.
The redheaded waitress appeared with her ubiquitous silver tray, this time bearing bottles and implements as if she were about to assist in a surgical procedure.
“Ah, Suzannah,” said Carlin. “Thank you.”
“Absinthe?” asked LaMontagne. “What’s the occasion?”
“It’s almost Friday,” joked Carlin.
Suzannah deposited the tray on a table and began an elaborate preparation. First she held up a silver slotted spoon, then, with some pageantry, she displayed a sugar cube as if it were a chunk of gold panned from a river. Then she delicately put the sugar cube on the spoon. She was joined by a second, waifish waitress who produced a delicate dark bottle and poured a green liquid into a glass, then put it in front of Charlie. Suzannah placed the spoon with its sugar cube on top of the glass and then used a syringe to slowly drip ice water onto the cube.
“What ratio are you going with?” Carlin asked her.
“One to four, I think,” she said.
“Better make it one to five,” Carlin said. “This is probably Charlie’s first absinthe. Right, Charlie?”
Charlie nodded. It was something that hadn’t interested him—or been readily available—during his time in France.
Clouds billowed in the glass as the drink took on a milky look, and Charlie began to smell its pungent licorice scent. He looked anxiously at Suzannah.
“This is how the French do it,” Carlin said, and Suzannah nodded.