Joe Steele (19 page)

It didn't bother the President. Or if it did, Joe Steele didn't show it. Not showing he was bothered was another of his strengths. Not far from Charlie, Lazar Kagan and Stas Mikoian both looked miserable. Even Scriabin might have wanted to be somewhere else, and his pan was almost as dead as his boss'.

“We have finished the first Four Year Plan. We will go on with the second Four Year Plan.” Joe Steele made his program seem as implacable as he was. “The first Plan laid the foundation for moving forward with reconstructing our country. Now we will build on that foundation. The powerful who have become powerful by tricks and by guile have tried to stop
me, but they have failed. The people see through their lies. We will move forward, and we will have better days ahead.”

He paused for applause. He got some, but it was tepid and muffled. Almost everybody was too soaked to show much enthusiasm—and the steady rain drowned the sound of clapping.

“I will work without rest to make this great nation more secure both at home and abroad,” the President said. “No wreckers will be allowed to stand in the way of progress or to sabotage it. No foreign foe will be allowed to challenge our strength. We defy Reds and Fascists alike. Neither disease will ever touch these shores!”

Another pause for applause. Some more soggy handclaps. Charlie thought the inaugural address would read well, but nobody except perhaps Gypsy Rose Lee would be able to excite this crowd—and Gypsy Rose Lee would freeze to death if she came out in what she usually almost wore.

Joe Steele plowed ahead. He promised jobs. He promised food. He promised dams and highways and canals. He promised warships on the seas, warplanes in the skies, and tanks on the ground. The microphone didn't electrocute him. Charlie couldn't have said why it didn't, but it didn't.

And after the speech was done, Joe Steele stood on an open-air reviewing stand while soldiers and tanks and marching bands rolled past. No one held an umbrella over his head there. He had his familiar cloth cap, and that was it. According to the program, bombers were supposed to have flown by overhead, but that bit of business did get canceled. Nobody could have seen the planes through the thick, dark clouds.

When he went back to the White House, it was in the same open car that had brought him to the Mall. Charlie was also in an open car, eight or ten vehicles behind the President's. People lining the streets waved to him and the other shivering, dripping reporters, thinking they were dignitaries. A couple of them waved back. Charlie didn't have the energy.

Secret Service men hurried the reporters into the White House. Going past the President's car, Charlie saw that it had something like a half inch of water sloshing around in the bottom of the passenger compartment. The one he'd ridden in must have, too.

Colored cooks and servants set out hot coffee and tea and snacks. A Negro bartender in a tux waited for business. If he didn't get rich from the tips the grateful gentlemen of the press gave him, they were even cheaper than they got credit for.

“I may live,” Charlie said after he got outside of a cup of coffee and a shot of bourbon.

“I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini.” Another newspaper man shamelessly cribbed from a movie script.

Charlie was contemplating another bourbon—as antifreeze, of course—when Lazar Kagan came up to him. The chunky Jew had put on a dry jacket, but his shirt still clung to him under it. “The President would like to talk to you for a few minutes,” he said.

“He would?” Charlie wondered how much trouble he was in. Joe Steele was not the most forthcoming President the country had ever had. He seldom talked for the sake of talking.

Kagan led Charlie from the press room to the President's Study, the oval chamber above the Blue Room. Joe Steele sat behind a massive desk made from California redwood with a granite top. The President puffed vigorously on his pipe. He'd had to do without it while he was watching soldiers and musicians squelch by. No one could have kept it lit out there.

“Hello, Sullivan,” Joe Steele said, voice friendly but eyes hooded as always.

“Mr. President,” Charlie said cautiously. He tried something more: “Good luck on your new term, sir.”

“Thank you. Thank you twice, in fact. You helped some with ‘The Matter with Kansas.'”

“It wasn't mine, you know. I just hauled it out and used it.”
Better I tell him myself,
Charlie thought.

“Oh, yes.” Joe Steele nodded. Even relaxed and smoking, he radiated danger as a banked fire radiated heat. “But you did haul it out, and it stuck to Landon like a burr. One of the easiest ways to beat a man is to make him look ridiculous.”

“Yes, sir.” Charlie knew that, as any reporter did. But reporters didn't make it sound clinical, the way Joe Steele had.

The President leaned forward, toward Charlie. “Yes, I have you to thank, to some degree. I do not thank your brother, though.” For a moment, the fire wasn't banked, and the danger fairly blazed.

Gulping, Charlie said, “Mr. President, I don't know what I can do about that.”

“No? Too bad.” Joe Steele made a small, flicking gesture with his left hand. Charlie left the study. Charlie, if you want to get right down to it, fled.

Even a President who wasn't the most forthcoming did have to come forth now and again. Modern politics demanded it. If you stayed in Washington all the time, people would forget about you. Or, if they remembered, they would think you were hiding out there for a reason. Radio and newsreels helped some, but they couldn't do it all. Real people had to see a real President, or else he might stop seeming real.

And so Joe Steele took a train from Washington to Chattanooga to celebrate the completion of one of the dams that would ease flooding in the Tennessee River Valley and bring electricity to millions who lived nearby. Charlie was one of the reporters who got invited to travel with him. The President . . . noticed Charlie these days. As with the fellow who found himself tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, if not for the honor of the thing, Charlie would rather have walked.

He played poker and bridge with the other reporters on board—and with Mikoian and Scriabin. Mikoian played better bridge than poker. Vince Scriabin was a shark at both games: his expressionless face was good for all kinds of things. “The government doesn't pay you enough?” Charlie groused after the Hammer squeezed out a small slam in diamonds.

“When it comes to money or power, is there ever such a thing as enough?” Scriabin replied. Not having a good answer for that one, Charlie kept his mouth shut.

Along with cards,
Gone With the Wind
killed time. Charlie had resisted since the novel came out the summer before, even though Esther went crazy for it along with the rest of the country. But a train ride, and especially one down into the South, left him with no more excuses. Nothing like a good, fat book to make you forget you were rattling down the rails. Unlike a deck of cards, a book wouldn't even cost you money after you bought it.

And he did keep turning pages. He would have kept turning them had he been sitting in the overstuffed front-room rocking chair in his apartment. He could see why everybody had swallowed the book whole.

Well, almost everybody. He ate supper in the dining car sitting across the table from Stas Mikoian. He had Swiss steak, which could have been worse but also could have been better. As one of the colored stewards carried his plate away on a tray, he remarked, “I wonder what
he
thinks of
Gone With the Wind
.”

“I saw you were reading it,” Mikoian said. “I went through it at the end of last year, when I could come up for air after the election. She can write—no two ways about that.”

“She sure can. But what
do
you suppose Negroes think about it?”

Mikoian answered the question with another one: “What would you think, if you were a Negro?”

Charlie contemplated that. “I think I might want to punch Margaret Mitchell right in the snoot—only they'd string me up if I did.”

“Yes, they would,” Mikoian agreed . . . sadly? “Segregation in Washington was an eye-opener for me when I came from California. For you, too, I'm sure, since you're from New York City.”

“It's strange, all right,” Charlie said. “After the Civil War, the South figured out that it had to let Negroes be free, but it didn't have to let them be equal. And that's where we've been ever since.”

“We are, yes,” Mikoian said. “Whether we still should be after all this time—that's a different story.”

“Are you speaking for Joe Steele?” Charlie asked, pricking up his ears. He hadn't been able to think of anything that would cost the President much of his enormous political clout. Trying to get equal rights for Negroes in the Deep South might turn the trick, though.

“No, just for Anastas Mikoian.” Joe Steele's aide quickly shook his head. “I'm an Armenian, remember. In Armenia, my people were niggers to the Turks. It was wrong there, and it's wrong here, too. Armenians, Negroes, Jews—it shouldn't matter. We're all human beings. We all deserve to be treated that way.”

“Won't get any arguments from me,” Charlie said.

“That's what draws people to the Reds, you know,” Mikoian went on. “If they really followed through on ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,' they'd have something going for them. But they don't, any more than the Nazis do. That's one of the reasons Joe Steele hates Lenin and Trotsky so much. They just found themselves a new excuse to be tyrants. Instead of doing it in the name of one people like Hitler, they say they do it for all humanity—”

“—and they end up doing it to all humanity,” Charlie finished for him.

Mikoian flashed a smile. “That's right. They do.”

“What about the people who say Joe Steele is doing the same thing to the USA that Lenin and Trotsky have done to Russia?” Charlie asked.

“They're full of shit, that's what,” Stas Mikoian said. Charlie must have blinked, because the Armenian let out a sour chuckle. “I'm sorry. Wasn't I plain enough for you?”

“Oh, you might have been.” Other questions jumped up and down on the end of Charlie's tongue as if it were a springboard: questions about Franklin Roosevelt, about Huey Long, about the Supreme Court, about Father Coughlin. They jumped up and down, yes, but they didn't dive off. The swimming pool under that springboard had no water in it, not a drop. You'd smash into the concrete bottom, and you would break, and it wouldn't.

*   *   *

W
ith about 120,000 people in it, Chattanooga struck Charlie as a hick town. Then again, Washington also struck him as a hick town. When you grew up in New York City, the only other place in the world that might not strike you as a hick town was London. That most of the people in Chattanooga talked like Southerners—which they were—did nothing to make them seem less hickish.

Joe Steele stayed at the Road House Hotel, a couple of blocks from Union Station. (Charlie did wonder whether, had the South won the Civil War, it would have been called Confederate Station.) The hotel dated from the boom of the mid-1920s. The lobby was paneled in walnut, to show how ritzy it was. The building was twelve stories high, which made it one of the tallest in Chattanooga. Definitely a hick town.

The restaurant was decent, and surprisingly cheap. Charlie ordered sturgeon, which he'd never had before. “Straight outa the Tennessee River, suh,” the waiter said. “Mighty good, too.” It tasted fishy, but not quite like any other fish he'd eaten before. He didn't think he would have called it mighty good, but it wasn't bad.

A motorcade took the President and his aides and the reporters who covered his doings to the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium, where he would speak. The motorcade didn't take long to get where it was going: the auditorium lay only about four blocks northeast of the hotel. Still, some people stood on the sidewalk to watch the President roll by. It was a mild spring day, nothing like the dreadful one on which Joe Steele's second term started.

Here and there, a man or a woman or, most often, a child would wave an American flag. Most of the thin crowd seemed friendly, though one man shouted, “Who killed Huey Long?” as the President's car went by. Charlie watched a cop run up and give the man a shove. The car he was in kept him from seeing what, if anything, else happened to the heckler.

The auditorium took up a whole city block. It wasn't Madison Square Garden, but it wasn't small, either—the main hall had to hold more than five thousand people. It was filling up fast, too. The President didn't come to Chattanooga every day. Charlie wondered if a President came to Chattanooga every decade.

With the other reporters, he had a seat on the stage. They were off to the side and dimly lit, so the crowd would look at the man behind the lectern and not at them. Charlie noticed a low, broad wooden stool in back of the lectern. The crowd wouldn't see that, but Joe Steele would seem taller than he really was. He chuckled quietly. Reporters noticed such things, but they didn't write about them. Politicians got to keep some illusions.

Reporters also had the sport of watching the people who watched the
President. The
Washington Times-Herald
's Presidential correspondent nudged Charlie and whispered, “Check the soldier in the first row. He's so excited, he's about to wet his pants.”

He was, too. He was a young officer—a captain, Charlie thought, seeing the overhead lights flash silver from the bars on his shoulders. He wiggled like a man with ants in his pants. His eyes were open as wide as if he'd gulped eighteen cups of coffee. Even from a good distance away, Charlie could make out white all around his irises.

“And Joe Steele's not even out there yet,” Charlie whispered back. “I wonder if he's an epileptic or something, and getting ready to throw a fit.”

“That'd liven up the day, wouldn't it?” the
Times-Herald
man said.

“Be nice if something could,” Charlie said. He'd been to too many speeches.

Out came the mayor of Chattanooga, to welcome the audience and the President. Out came the engineer who'd been in charge of the local dam, to tell everyone how wonderful it was. Unfortunately, he talked like an engineer—he was so dull, he might have exhaled ether. People applauded in relief when he stopped.

And out came Congressman Sam McReynolds, who'd represented Chattanooga and the Third District of Tennessee for years. He wasn't—Charlie had checked—related to the late Justice James McReynolds; that worthy had come from Kentucky. Only a sadist would have made the brother or cousin of a man he'd executed introduce him to a crowd.

Introduce Joe Steele Congressman McReynolds did. “He pays attention to Tennessee!” McReynolds said, as if announcing miracles. “He pays attention to the little people, the forgotten people, of Tennessee. And here he is—the President of the United States, Joe Steele!”

By the oomph he put into it, he might have been bringing out Bing Crosby or some other popular crooner. And the crowd responded almost as if he were. That Army captain bruised his palms banging them together. No smooth, handsome, debonair crooner came to the lectern, though. It was just Joe Steele, hawk-faced, fierce-mustached, wearing a black suit that might have come straight off the rack at Sear's.

He looked out over the audience from behind the lectern. Charlie
could see the sheets with the text of his speech, though the people in front of the stage couldn't. Joe Steele raised a hand. The applause died away.

“Thank you,” the President said. “Thank you very much. It is good to remember that the people care about me, no matter what the newspapers claim.” He won a few chuckles. That dry, barbed wit was the only kind he owned. “And it's good to come to Chattanooga, because—”

“I'll show you what the people think about you, you murdering son of a bitch!” the Army captain screeched. He sprang to his feet, pulled the service pistol from the holster on his hip, and started shooting.

Charlie thought the .45 barked twice before Secret Service men returned fire. He was sure the captain got off at least one more shot after he was hit. Red stains appeared on the front of his tunic. He fell over backward and fired one last time, straight up at the ceiling.

Several people near him in the crowd were shrieking and bleeding, too. Charlie had no idea how many Secret Service men tried to kill the would-be assassin, or how many rounds they fired doing it. One thing was all too obvious: not all those rounds struck the man they were aimed at. A bullet from an excited, hasty gunman was liable to go anywhere.

Joe Steele slumped down to one knee behind the lectern. “Jesus Christ!” the
Times-Herald
man said. “If that bastard killed him, John Nance Garner's President, and God help us all!”

Charlie hardly heard him. The gunfire'd left him paralyzed. He hadn't even had the sense to flatten out on the stage when the shooting started to make himself a smaller target—he didn't have combat reflexes drilled into him from the Great War, since he'd got to France after the shooting ended. He'd just sat there gaping like everybody else. Now he made himself get up and run over to Joe Steele.

The President had both hands pressed to the left side of his chest. Between his fingers, Charlie saw blood on his white shirt. After a moment, he smelled it, too, hot and metallic. “Mr. President! Are you all right?” he bleated—the usual idiot question.

To his surprise, Joe Steele nodded. “Yes, or I think so. It grazed me and glanced off a rib. That may be broken, but unless I am very, very wrong it did not go in.”

“Well, thank heaven!” Charlie said. “Let me see it, please?” Scowling, Joe Steele took his hands away. Sure enough, his shirt had a long tear, not a round hole. Charlie unbuttoned a couple of buttons and tugged aside the President's undershirt. There was a bleeding gash below and to the left of Joe Steele's left nipple, but his furry chest wasn't punctured.

“Did they get the asshole who shot me?” he asked—not a line that sounded Presidential, maybe, but one that was plainly heartfelt.

“Yes, sir. He's got more holes than a colander,” Charlie said. “Some of the other people by him got hit, too.”

Joe Steele waved that back, as being of no account. “He's dead? Too bad. Alive, he could have answered questions.” Charlie would not have wanted to answer questions of the kind that burned in the President's eyes.

Somebody grabbed Charlie from behind and yanked him away. He landed on his tailbone on the waxed planks of the stage. It hurt like hell—he saw stars. But he bit down on the yip he wanted to let out. For one thing, the Secret Service guy who'd thrown him aside was only doing his job. For another, he was a long, long way from the worst hurt here.

“Is there a doctor in the audience?” the agent by Joe Steele yelled. Some medical men were there. Looking out, Charlie saw them doing what they could for the wounded close by the assassin. At the call, a tall man with a cowlick jumped up on the stage and hurried to the President's side.