Joe Steele (20 page)

“Take a gander at this,” one Secret Service man said to another. “Look how the waddayacallit here has these chromed bars for reinforcement or decoration or whatever the hell.” He was pointing at the lectern. “And the bullet caught one of 'em and slewed, like. Otherwise, it might've hit the boss dead center.”

“That woulda been all she wrote, sure as hell. You
don't
want to meet up with a .45, not square on you don't,” his friend replied.

“Who was the guy who fired at the President?” Charlie asked.

They seemed to remember he was in the neighborhood. “No idea yet,” one of them said. “But we'll find out, and we'll find out who was behind him, too. Oh, yeah. You bet we will.”

*   *   *

T
he assassination attempt spawned screamer headlines around the country—around the world, in fact. It also spawned the biggest investigation since the Lindbergh kidnapping. J. Edgar Hoover growled out new little nuggets of fact—or of what he said was fact—to the press almost every day.

No one doubted that the gunman was Captain Roland Laurence South, of San Antonio. He was thirty-one years old, a West Point graduate who'd got his second bar just ten days before his fated, and fatal, encounter with Joe Steele. He'd done very well at the Military Academy. People said he was a general in the making, or he had been till politics started eating away at him.

Hoover was a busy beaver. He gnawed down tree after tree of rumor to bring in twig after twig of fact. The twigs led upward in the chain of command. Like a lot of men who seemed to have a bright future ahead of them, Roland South had made friends in high places. Plenty of men of rank much higher than captain had known him or known who he was.

By all accounts, Captain South hadn't been shy about saying what he thought of Joe Steele. None of his friends in high places had reported him for expressing opinions like that.

“It makes you worry,” J. Edgar Hoover said. “It truly does. They claim they didn't report him because talk was cheap and they couldn't imagine he would take out a gun and try to murder the President. But you have to wonder—did they keep quiet because they agreed with him?”

Joe Steele took to the airwaves to say, “People of America, I want you to hear with your own ears that I am alive and doing well. X-rays show that one bullet Captain South fired cracked a rib. I believe that. It hurts like anything when I cough. But the doctors say I will make a full recovery in about six weeks. Captain Roland Laurence South was just one more wrecker who tried to put a roadblock on America's path to progress.”

“That's twice in a minute he called him
Captain South
,” Esther said as she and Charlie listened to the President in their apartment. “He wants people to remember South was in the Army.”

“Uh-huh.” Charlie nodded. “And he and his men have talked about wreckers before, but he kind of bore down on it there.”

Meanwhile, Joe Steele was continuing, “We have already seen too
many wreckers in high places. Wreckers corrupted the workings of the Supreme Court till we set it right. Although Senator Long was murdered before he could be tried, all the evidence points to his being a wrecker, too. Father Charles Coughlin wrecked the teachings of his church to try to tear down the American way of life. And this attempt on my life shows that wreckers may also have infiltrated the highest ranks of our military. The force that should defend our beloved country may want to turn against it.”

“Oh-oh,” Esther said.

“
Oh-oh
is right,” Charlie agreed. “Sounds like the gloves are coming off.”

So they were. “We must get to the bottom of this,” the President said. “We must be able to rely on our courts, our legislators, and our soldiers to do their duties the way they should. I have appointed Mr. J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice Department to head a new Government Bureau of Investigation—the GBI, for short—to investigate wrecking and to root it out wherever he finds it.”

“Wow,” Charlie said.

His wife put it somewhat differently: “Yikes!”

“Not all wrecking is in high places, either. We all know that,” Joe Steele went on. “The businessman who gouges customers, the farmer who waters his milk before he sells it, the newsman who spreads anti-American lies, the auto builders whose machines start falling to pieces a week after they come off the showroom floor? They're all wreckers, aren't they? Of course they are. And the GBI will have the authority to go after them all.”

“Yikes!” Esther said again. “Hitler has Himmler, Trotsky has Yagoda, and now Joe Steele's got J. Edgar Hoover.”

“I don't think it's that bad. I hope it's not.” But Charlie's mind was a jackdaw's nest. What sprang out of it was the last line of an Edgar Allan Poe story:
And the Red Death held illimitable sway over all.

As usual, his wife was more pragmatic: “He talked about reporters, Charlie. He singled them out. If you write a story he doesn't like, will somebody from this brand-new super deluxe GBI grab you and give you a shovel and put you to work digging a canal across Wyoming?”

“I . . . hope not,” Charlie said slowly. He gnawed on the inside of his
lower lip for a few seconds. “All the same, I think I'd better pay a call on the White House tomorrow morning and find out what's going on.”

“Good. I was going to tell you I thought you should,” Esther said. “I'm glad you've got the sense to see it for yourself.”

“Yes, dear,” Charlie said, which was never the wrong answer from a husband.

*   *   *

W
hen Charlie went to the White House, he asked to see Scriabin. He thought he might as well hear the worst, and the Hammer would give him that with both barrels. But he got shunted to Lazar Kagan. The receptionist said, “I'm sorry, Mr. Sullivan, but Mr. Scriabin is otherwise engaged for the time being.”

Which was more polite than
Go peddle your papers
, but no more helpful. Kagan was a little more helpful than
Go peddle your papers
, but not a whole lot. Scratching his double chin, he said, “The way it looks to me is, you personally haven't got a thing to worry about, Charlie.”

Charlie wasn't sure whether that was good news or bad news. “I'm not here just on account of myself. There's a swarm of people in my racket. And, last time I looked, nobody's repealed the First Amendment.”

“Nobody's even talking about repealing it, for heaven's sake.” Kagan spread his fleshy hands, appealing for reason. Then he wagged a finger under Charlie's nose. “People can't go around yelling ‘Fire!' in a crowded hall, either, though. You need to keep that in mind.”

“Yeah, yeah. But somebody can say the President's wrong, or even that he's full of malarkey, without yelling ‘Fire!' You don't go to jail for something like that, not since the Alien and Sedition Acts you don't.”

“We'll fight wrecking wherever we find it,” Kagan said, which might mean anything or nothing. “Politics is rougher than football these days. If we're soft, we'll lose.”

“Politics has always been rougher than football,” Charlie said. “I'll tell you why, too—there's more money in politics.” He waited. He didn't get a rise out of Lazar Kagan. When he decided he wouldn't, he took a different tack: “What's Vince up to right now?”

“You mean, that's more important than seeing you?” Kagan chuckled to
himself, pleased at zinging Charlie. “As a matter of fact, he's putting his head together with J. Edgar Hoover. We
are
going to set our house in order.”

“Our house as in Washington or our house as in the whole country?” Charlie asked.

“Set Washington straight and leave the rest of the country the way it is and in two years' time Washington will be a mess again,” Kagan said. “Set the country straight and Washington will stay all right because the people will choose the best public servants.”

“Good luck!” Charlie blurted.

“Thank you.” Lazar Kagan sounded placid and happy and confident. He sounded so very placid and happy and confident that Charlie wondered if he had a case of reefer madness.

He also sounded so placid and happy and confident that Charlie got out of there as fast as he could. Then he made a beeline for the nearest watering hole. He didn't usually drink before lunch, but the sun was bound to be over the yardarm somewhere. After Joe Steele's speech and after his own little talk with Kagan, he needed some liquid anesthetic.

He'd been in this dive before. He'd run into John Nance Garner in this dive before, too. As best he could remember, the Vice President was sitting on the same barstool now as he had been then. Garner might well have been wearing the same suit, too, though the cigarette smoldering between his fingers now was probably different from the one he'd been smoking back in Joe Steele's first term. Charlie couldn't prove he'd moved off that barstool since then.

Garner raised an eyebrow when Charlie ordered his double bourbon. “Getting to be a big boy, hey, Sullivan?” he drawled.

Charlie refused to rise to the baiting. “I need it today,” he replied. When the barkeep gave it to him, he raised the glass in salute. “Down with reporters and other riffraff!” he said, and down the hatch the drink went. Like a big boy, he didn't cough.

“I'll drink to that.” John Nance Garner fit action to words. “'Course, I'll drink to damn near anything. That's all a Vice President is good for—drinking to damn near anything. Beats the snot out of presiding over the Senate, let me tell you.”

“Oh, I don't know.” The bourbon was hitting Charlie like a Louisville Slugger. “You almost wound up with the top job a little while ago.”

“Nah.” Garner shook his head in scorn. “No stupid little worthless shit of an Army captain was gonna punch Joe Steele's ticket for him, even if he did come from San Antone. Joe Steele, he'll be President as long as he wants to, or till the Devil decides to drag him back to hell.”

“
Back
to hell?” That was an interesting turn of phrase.

“Hell, Fresno, it don't make no difference.” How long and how hard had the Vice President been drinking? Long enough to lose his grammar, anyhow. He pointed a nicotine-yellowed forefinger at Charlie. “I know what's wrong with you. You been listenin' to the radio, an' you're in here drowning your sorrows.”

“Now that you mention it,” Charlie said, “yes.”

“It's a crazy business, ain't it?”

“A scary business.”

“The thing of it is,” John Nance Garner said as if Charlie hadn't spoken, “Joe Steele, he's gonna do what he wants, and ain't nobody gonna stop him or even slow him down much. You see that, you see you can't change it so's you ride with it instead, you'll be all right. I'm all right now—I'm just fine. You bump up agin' him, though, your story don't got no happy ending.” He raised that forefinger to ask for another drink without words.

“You've got it all figured out, don't you?” Charlie said.

“Joe Steele, he's got it all figured out,” Garner answered. He got to work on the fresh bourbon. Charlie raised his index finger, too. One double wasn't enough, not this morning.

*   *   *

I
t was summer. Under the sun, under the humidity, Washington felt as if it were stuck in God's pressure cooker. Thunderheads boiled up out of the south. Not even rain, though, could drain all the water from the air.

The baseball Senators wallowed through a dismal season. They weren't last, where the old jingle put them, but they weren't going anywhere, either. They'd brought back Bucky Harris to manage them a couple of years earlier, but it didn't help. The then-boy manager had led them to
two pennants in the Twenties. Whatever magic he'd had in those days was as gone now as the soaring stock market.

The Senators who played their games in the Capitol also weren't having a great year. Every so often, Joe Steele would put in a bill to tighten up on this or to make that a Federal crime. The Senators and Representatives passed them in jig time, one after another. Joe Steele signed them into law. A lower-court judge who declared a couple of them unconstitutional ended up in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, after a terrible car crash. Andy Wyszynski appealed his rulings while he was still in the hospital, and a district court overturned them. Things hummed along.

Charlie and Esther started talking about children. As far as Charlie was concerned, using rubbers was a sin. That didn't stop him; it just gave him something to confess. He didn't go to church as regularly as his mother would have liked. Of course, if he had gone as regularly as Bridget Sullivan liked, he would hardly have had time to do anything else.

Summer was the slow news season. The Japanese bit big chunks out of China, but who could get excited about slanties murdering other slanties? Nobody in America, that was for sure. Hitler was shouting at Austria, and at Czechoslovakia for the way it treated Germans in the Sudetenland, but who on this side of the Atlantic knew, or cared, where the Sudetenland was unless his granny came from there?

And then Charlie's phone rang early one morning, so early that he was just sitting down to coffee and three of Esther's great over-medium eggs. Esther was dressed for work, too—she rode herd on an office full of idiots studying to be morons, at least if you listened to her.

“What the heck?” Charlie said. Either something had gone wrong in the world or it was a wrong number. Grumpily hoping it was a wrong number, he picked up the telephone and barked, “Sullivan.”

“Hello, Sullivan. Stas Mikoian.” No, not a wrong number. “If you show up at the Justice Department Building at ten this morning, you may find something worth writing about.”

“Oh, yeah? Anywhere in particular or sorta all over?” Charlie asked, only slightly in jest. Justice Department headquarters had gone up on Pennsylvania Avenue, half a dozen blocks from the White House, at the
start of Joe Steele's presidency. The building was enormous. If the birds ate the bread crumbs you left to mark your trail, you might never get out again.