The Devil May Dance - Tapper, Jake (short novels in english .TXT) 📗

for lunch dates at the Harvard Club—something that would once have been as unthinkable as putting ice in his whiskey—and Charlie frequently paid unannounced visits to his home to check on him. His dad initially would seem as sharp as the knuckle-duster trench knife he’d brought back from the war, but after a few drinks he’d sometimes repeat himself or descend into non sequiturs. Now, looking at his father through a cloudy, scratched glass window in the tiny room that stank of filth and mildew, Charlie worried that the trauma of the arrest had accelerated Winston’s decline.

There was a rap on the steel door, and Charlie turned to see a guard and a man he guessed was an associate sent by Crutchfield. The young man—closely cropped blond hair, air of noblesse oblige—dripped with disdain for his surroundings. Winston gave the slightest nod to acknowledge their arrival, then lowered his head and whispered urgently into the receiver: “Find out what Bobby wants and give it to him.”

Charlie looked at his father, waiting for more, but the guard grabbed Charlie under his arm and roughly pulled him out of the seat so the young lawyer could take his place.

Chapter ThreeNew York City

December 1961

Charlie couldn’t wait to breathe the cold air outside after the stench and claustrophobia of the Tombs. A brutal wind ripped his coat open; a winter storm had rolled onto Manhattan Island, pelting the city with freezing rain. He looked left and right for a neon sign. He needed a bar.

Ah. Across the street: the Last Shot.

It was 9:40 a.m.

The day drinking had started when his shell shock—a constant state of restless anxiety—had returned in full force, around the time of his fortieth birthday. So far he’d done a decent job of hiding it. Pushing away thoughts of what would happen if Margaret found out was as much a part of his routine as the mouthwash and chewing gum.

He had gone from nearly daily to assuredly daily drinking earlier that year, after a tough election. Forced into a brutal contest for his House seat against a young Democratic city councilman, Charlie reluctantly hired an Albany consultant with legendarily fungible morality, a man who made promises to local labor unions that Charlie learned about only after he’d won. Some union goons came calling with a list of demands Charlie couldn’t possibly accommodate, and they made it clear they were backed by friends in Chicago whose manners weren’t so genteel. They had delivered the union vote for Charlie Marder and now it was time for Charlie to deliver for them.

Charlie kept all this stress from Margaret, said nothing about the fire that burned inside him that only booze could quell. But now, before he could even step off the curb and cross Canal for that breakfast bourbon, a black Chrysler Imperial pulled up. On the passenger side, a man with white hair and a bullfrog neck that swallowed his chin rolled down his window and flashed his ID.

“Addington White, Department of Justice,” he said. “Hop in.”

Charlie hesitated, looking longingly at the entrance to the bar, then ruefully did as he was told. He guessed that the driver and the man in the back seat were also with the Justice Department. Based on their washed-out faces and similar builds, he assumed they were once-trim veterans now growing soft due to too much time behind their desks.

Charlie focused on his breathing, which sometimes helped him overcome the agitation in his soul until he was able to get his hands on the means to drown it. Back in France, fighting the Krauts, he’d learned to jam his anxieties and emotions into some faraway corner of his mind. He tried to do this now; he needed to channel all his energy toward figuring out a way to extricate his father.

The agents were quiet. Then White said, “We’ll be there in a few short minutes, Congressman.”

“There?” Charlie said. “Am I under arrest?”

“No, no,” White said. “Nothing like that.”

“And you’re taking me…” Charlie said.

“To a meeting,” White said.

“Do I need to call my lawyer?” Charlie asked. “My wife?” He looked at his watch; at this hour Margaret would have dropped Lucy, seven, off at elementary school and would likely be at a playground with Dwight, five. He probably wouldn’t be able to reach her on the phone until after lunch. He and his wife had moved back to his Manhattan congressional district after an insanely crazed first year in Congress, during which both he and Margaret had been enveloped in a vast conspiracy. Charlie now spent his weeks in DC and traveled home from the capital on the weekends and during congressional breaks, as was the case now.

“No,” said White. “The attorney general wants to see you.”

“Well, great.” Charlie wasn’t sure which made him angrier, being shanghaied by the Feds or missing his morning appointment with Jack Daniel’s. The sight of his father—stooped in his prison grays, undereye bags so big they could hide contraband, hands shaking—had hollowed him.

“Find out what Bobby wants,” his father had said, “and give it to him.” What Attorney General Kennedy wanted, Charlie could not yet fathom.

Winston Marder hated Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and, by association, his sons Jack and Bobby with the intensity of the hellfire that the Allies had unleashed on Dresden. Charlie, for his part, had gotten along with the Democratic princes, an attitude born of both hope and necessity.

Charlie had campaigned, unenthusiastically, for Nixon. But when he lived in DC, before he and Margaret started their family, he had enjoyed having then Senator Kennedy and, more important, his wife, Jackie, as neighbors. And he respected Robert Kennedy’s brute force of intellect and ambition, even if he didn’t trust him; they had spent some time together due to Charlie’s work on a House Armed Services Oversight subcommittee as well as socially. He told Margaret he thought Robert the sharpest of the Kennedys, and she’d pointedly asked how he could be so sure without having met any of the Kennedy sisters.