Joe Steele (21 page)

“Go to the GBI's exhibition center, room 5633,” Mikoian said. “I hear that Mr. Hoover will have something to exhibit, all right.”

“Like what?”

“That would be telling,” the Armenian answered, and hung up.

Charlie swore as he slammed the handset into the cradle. Esther clucked and laughed at the same time. “What's going on?” she asked.

He told her, finishing, “He knows I've got to show up, the miserable so-and-so. It'll probably be some Carolina moonshiner, or else a pig poacher from Oklahoma.”

“Well, you've got time to finish breakfast first,” Esther said.

Sure enough, Charlie went over to the Justice Department and with plenty of coffee keeping his eyelids apart. He wasn't completely amazed to run into Louie Pappas on the way to room 5633. “Who tipped you off?” Charlie asked.

“One of the White House guys called AP,” the photographer said. “So something's going on, and they want pictures of whatever it is.”

Checking his watch, Charlie said, “Whatever it is, we'll know in fifteen minutes.”

“Hot diggety dog.” If Louie was excited, he hid it well.

J. Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was as bouncy as a chunky man could get. He kept looking down at his own wrist so he could time things to the second. Either his watch ran slow or Charlie's was fast, because Hoover got going at 10:02 Charlie Standard Time.

“The reason you are here today, folks,” Hoover told the reporters who fidgeted on folding chairs, “is that the GBI wishes to announce one of the largest and most important series of arrests in American history.” He gestured to several men cradling Tommy guns. Hoover, from what Charlie had seen, liked telling armed men what to do.

His henchmen led in ten or twelve dispirited-looking fellows, all of them middle-aged or older. Three wore dark blue; the rest were in khaki. The clothes might have been uniforms, but no rank badges or decorations or emblems remained on them.

“These,” J. Edgar Hoover said in portentous tones, “are some of the leading generals in the U.S. Army and admirals in the U.S. Navy. We arrested them last night and this morning. The charge is treason: namely, conspiracy with a foreign power to assassinate the President of the United States. We expect to make further arrests within the military shortly. The accused will be tried before military tribunals. The penalty upon conviction is death.”

“Is this connected with Captain South?” Charlie called.

“That is correct,” J. Edgar Hoover said while Louie and the other lensmen snapped away at the disgraced officers. More reporters bawled questions. Hoover held up a well-manicured hand. “I don't wish to comment any further at this time. I would say the arrests speak for themselves. I wish I did not have to bring you here on such an unfortunate, embarrassing occasion, but that is what the country has come to.”

“Like fun you wish that,” Louie muttered out of the side of his mouth. “You're having the time of your life up there.”

Hoover gestured to his troops again. They herded the generals and admirals out of the big room and back to wherever they were being confined. The reporters ran for telephones. Had anyone been timing them, some of the sprint records Jesse Owens had set in Berlin the year before would have fallen.

Charlie had to wait for a pay phone this time. The pause helped him organize the story in his mind a little better. He wasn't so stunned as he had been when the Supreme Court Four were accused of treason, or when it was the turn of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. When things happened over and over, they lost some of their power to shock.

But what would the Army and Navy do without their top commanders? Whatever it was, how well could the armed forces do it? One thing he was sure of—Joe Steele didn't worry about it. The President wanted men loyal only to him, and didn't care what he needed to do to get them.

A reporter came out of a phone booth. Charlie elbowed his way into it. He stuck in some nickels, waited till he got an answer, and started talking.

Mike Sullivan slid a half-dollar under the ticket-seller's grill. “Two, please,” he said.

The girl dropped the coin into her cash box and handed back two green tickets. “Enjoy the show,” she said listlessly.

“I don't know about the show, but I'll enjoy the air-conditioning,” Stella said. New York sweltered, but she had a sweater on her arm. Air-conditioning came with two settings: not working at all and way too cold. There was no happy medium.

“I don't know about the show, either.” Mike also carried a sweater. “We'll see how it is, that's all.” It was a fight film called
Kid Galahad
, with Bogart, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, and a new actor named Wayne Morris in the title role. Despite the strong cast, it had been out for a while without setting the world on fire.

A youngster with a straggly try at a David Niven mustache took their tickets and tore them in half. Mike got popcorn and Good & Plentys and sodas at the snack counter. Popcorn and licorice didn't exactly go together, but what the hell? They didn't exactly not go together, either.

He and Stella went inside and found seats. They passed the goodies back and forth while they put on the sweaters. Yeah, the air-conditioning was going full blast. Two seats over from Stella, a woman hadn't thought to bring a cover-up. She shivered, and her teeth chattered like castanets.

Down went the house lights. The projector turned the big screen to magic. Mike had thought of movies like that ever since he saw his first silent picture when he was a short-pants kid, and a little short-pants kid at that. Movies weren't just bigger than life, they were
better
than life.

Even coming attractions for films that would be forgotten five minutes after their runs ended seemed more interesting than the sweaty world outside the theater. Then the newsreel came on. The Japs pushed forward over heaps of Chinese corpses. Nationalists and Loyalists banged heads in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini fighting Trotsky by proxy.

“And in news closer to home . . .” the announcer boomed. The screen showed more officers tied to the conspiracy against Joe Steele—or what Joe Steele and J. Edgar Hoover said was the conspiracy against the President. “The first batch of military traitors have already been executed,” the announcer said, sounding indecently pleased about it. “More severe punishments will be handed down against anyone who plots against America.”

A card flashed the name of a city: P
HILADELPHIA
. The newsreel showed GBI men loading unhappy, unshaven, badly dressed men—plainly ordinary working stiffs, not lieutenant colonels or brigadier generals—into paddy wagons and a couple of big trucks that might have been taken from the Army.

“The crackdown on wreckers continues in the civilian world as well,” the announcer said. “These men will labor to help rebuild the country's midsection after they are judicially processed.”

“Processed?” Mike made a face as he whispered the word to Stella. “Sounds like they're gonna turn them into bratwurst, doesn't it?”

“Hush,” she whispered back. Mike did, but he still wasn't anything close to happy.
Judicially processed
came a lot closer to the truth than
tried
did. People accused of wrecking barely got a trial. They went before a judge—often before a guy styled an administrative law judge, who didn't do anything but deal with wreckers. The men (and women, too) administrative law judges saw got their papers rubber-stamped and went off to do a term in a labor encampment in New Mexico or Colorado or Montana.

Due process? Due process was either a joke or a memory. Mike knew he wasn't the only person who saw that so much of what went on didn't
come within miles of being constitutional. But judges willing to say so were thin on the ground; too many had found that unfortunate things happened to those who tried to go against the President.

They said the Devil could quote Scripture to his purpose. Joe Steele quoted past Presidents. He'd used Lincoln repeatedly. He knew Andrew Jackson, too. Whenever a court decision went against him and he didn't feel like killing or crippling the judge right away, he would echo the man on the double sawbuck: “‘John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.'” Then he would go on doing whatever the judge had told him not to.

A lot of men who pulled a stunt like that would have looked down the barrel of the impeachment gun. Joe Steele had an enormous majority in both houses of Congress. He'd swept to reelection less than a year before. He was still popular with everybody but
The Literary Digest
's pollsters . . . and the wreckers. If they were wreckers.

Mike knew darn well reporters weren't. The people in his racket might or might not like the President. They universally liked, even loved, their country. As far as he could see, nobody knew of any wreckers in his own line of work. Almost everybody, though, figured there had to be some in other trades. That struck Mike as crazy, but there you were. And here he was.

He paid no attention to the sports highlights, even though the Yankees were knocking the American League to pieces and the Giants were in the race in the National. He hardly watched the two-reeler, either. He could take Westerns or leave them alone.

His political moping carried all the way through the feature. The only point to going out, as far as he could see, was that he was cold and gloomy here, where he would have been hot and sticky and gloomy back in the apartment. Oh, and going out made Stella happy. That counted.

But when they got home he went straight to his portable typewriter—it weighed half a ton instead of a regular machine's full ton—and started banging away. Stella looked miffed. “What are you doing?” she asked. Yes, she sounded miffed, too.

“Trying to tell the truth,” he answered, not looking up from what he was doing. The line he'd written at the top of the piece in progress was
W
HERE
I
S
O
UR
F
REEDOM
G
OING
? “Trying to tell as much of it as I can, anyhow. As much of it as I know.”

“Well, do you have to tell it all right this minute? Why don't you come to bed first?”

Not without a pang, Mike stood up. Some suggestions you ignored only at your peril—and at your marriage's. That “first,” though, gave him the excuse to go back out to the front room afterwards and start typing again. After a few minutes, Stella closed the bedroom door. Maybe that was to keep the typewriter's noise from bothering her. Or maybe she was making a different point.

Mike took what he'd written to the
Post
the next morning. He kept at it there, pausing twice to go down to the morgue to check on just when Joe Steele had jumped up and down on the Constitution in a particular way. He wanted to make sure he had his facts straight. When he was satisfied, he stashed a carbon in the locking drawer of his desk and took the original in to the managing editor.

“What have you got there?” Stan Feldman asked him.

“An ice cream cone,” Mike answered, deadpan.

“What if I want chocolate, not vanilla?”

“This ain't vanilla, I promise.”

“Yeah, that's what they all say.” Stan started reading. He didn't say another word till he finished. It was a long story; Mike took the silence as some of the highest praise he'd ever won. At last, the editor looked up. “Well, I just have one question for you.”

“What's that?”

“Are you only trying to get yourself hauled away for wrecking, or are you angling to get the
Post
shut down, too?”

“It isn't that bad,” Mike said. “I didn't say anything in there that isn't true. I can document everything I did say—which is a hell of a lot more than Joe Steele or J. Edgar Vacuum Cleaner can claim.”

“Heh.” One chuckle and a brief baring of teeth: Stan gave the gibe all the appreciation it deserved. “What's truth got to do with anything? The only way to stay safe these days is to keep your head down and to hope the wolves don't notice you.”

“And if everybody keeps his head down and hopes he doesn't get noticed, by the time Joe Steele runs for a third term—and he will, sure as the devil—he'll have the whole country sewed up tight, the way Hitler's got Germany.”

Stan stood up and closed the door to his office. Mike couldn't remember the last time he'd done that. Walking back to his beat-up, messy desk, the editor said, “I won't tell you you're wrong. In a theoretical way, I mean. But you know what happens to the people who stick their necks out.” The edge of his hand came down on a pile of papers like an axe blade.

“If nobody stands up to those people, we all get it in the neck,” Mike replied.

Stan did a drumroll on the story with his fingers. “I'm not going to print this on my own hook. Too many careers go on the line if I do. I'm not kidding, Mike. I don't want that on my shoulders. But I will take it upstairs to the publisher. If Mr. Stern says it's okay, we roll with it. If he doesn't . . . It's a fine piece of work, don't get me wrong. So is an artillery shell. That doesn't mean you want one on the coffee table.”

J. David Stern had bought the
Post
a few years before. He'd swung it to the left. It had backed Joe Steele on the whole, through his reelection. Now . . . Now it tried not to bang his drum or to say anything bad about him. Mike sighed. “Do whatever you think you have to do. We'll see what he says, and then I'll go from there.”

If Stern said no, Mike feared he would have to go from the
Post
. He wondered whether any paper would hire him after that. They'd ask why he'd left. Either he'd have to lie or he'd have to say something like
I tried to tell the truth about Joe Steele.
Yeah, that would make anybody who was thinking of using him jump for joy, all right. Wouldn't it just?

The
Daily Worker
might still take me on,
he thought. The
Worker
followed Trotsky's line no matter how much it zigzagged. On Joe Steele, it didn't zigzag much. Trotsky liked the President no better than the President liked him. There were only two things wrong with working there that Mike could see. They didn't pay for beans. And, even if he couldn't stand Joe Steele, he wasn't a Red.

No, there was one thing more. Mike had heard that a couple of men
who'd written for the
Daily Worker
were currently breaking rocks or digging canals or doing whatever else people at a labor encampment had to do.

Of course, if J. David Stern did decide to run his story, he might find out about that for himself. Life was full of fascinating possibilities, wasn't it?

For the next few hours, Mike went through the motions of being a newspaperman. His heart wasn't in it. Most of his head wasn't, either. But, as he'd found, he could write some stories simply because he knew how. They wouldn't be great, but they'd do. Nobody expected Hemingway when you were writing about a pistol-packing punk who'd stuck up a delicatessen.

He was about to go to lunch when Stan called, “Hey, Sullivan! C'mere!” and gestured to the doorway to his office.

Bringing the holdup story with him, Mike came. “What do you need?” he asked—it might not have been about W
HERE
I
S
O
UR
F
REEDOM
G
OING
?

But it was. “Mr. Stern says we'll go with it,” the editor told him. “We're gonna run it on the first page, in fact. You get the byline—unless you don't want it.”

There it was, a chance to hit back at the Steele administration without putting himself in quite so much danger. He shook his head. “Thanks, but that's okay,” he said. “They wouldn't need long to figure out it was me, anyhow. Not like I never swung on 'em before.”

“I told Mr. Stern you'd say that.” Stan looked pleased, or as pleased as an editor ever did. “If the paper stands behind the story, the guy who did it ought to stand behind it, too.”

“That's my take on it.” Mike felt brave and self-sacrificing, like a doughboy about to go over the top when the German machine guns were stitching death across the shattered landscape. The doughboy had a bayoneted rifle. They said the pen was mightier than the sword. This came close enough to make a good test case.

“Mr. Stern said you had it straight,” Sam went on. “He said we need to hit Joe Steele six ways from Sunday while we can still do it. He said he was proud he had people like you working for him. And he said to bump you up ten bucks a week.”

Mike grinned. “I like the way he talks.” Stella would like the raise, too.
Every bit helped. They were getting by, but they were a long way from Easy Street. How much Stella would like a story that called Joe Steele an American tyrant and gave chapter and verse to explain why . . . Mike tried not to think about that.

*   *   *

C
harlie was having lunch at a sandwich place when another reporter said, “You're Mike Sullivan's brother, aren't you? The guy who writes for the
Post
in New York?”

“That's me.” Charlie took another bite of corned beef on rye. “How come?”

“On account of he just went after the President like Ty Cobb stealing third with his spikes sharp and high.” The other reporter was in his fifties, old enough to have watched the Georgia Peach at his most ferocious.

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie wasn't surprised that Mike had gone after Joe Steele one more time. Mike had it in for the President, and had had it in for him ever since the Executive Mansion in Albany burned down with Franklin Roosevelt trying to wheel his way out.

He was surprised he hadn't got one of those early-morning calls from Kagan or Scriabin or Mikoian.
I'm in Washington, so they yell at me when they're mad at Mike,
he thought. Only they hadn't this time. Had they decided it didn't do them any good? Or had they just given up on hoping Charlie could talk sense into Mike?