Joe Steele (22 page)

“Yeah,” the other reporter said, derailing his train of thought. “He really tore into him. Said he was a cross between Adolf and Leon, with a little Benito thrown in like mustard on your corned beef there. Said he was lying and sneaking his way to tyranny. Added up all the things he'd done since even before he got elected the first time, and said he didn't fancy what they came to.”

“How about that?” Charlie had thought his sandwich was pretty tasty. It suddenly lost its flavor. He might as well have been chewing cardboard.

“
How about that?
is right. The
Post
has a big circulation, and other rags pick up pieces from it. This'll raise a big old stink.”

“I hope Mike's ready for it,” Charlie said. He wondered whether putting in a word for his brother would immunize Mike against Joe Steele's
wrath or make it worse. The latter, he feared. He'd already defended Mike to the President's henchmen too often, and even to Joe Steele himself. They knew what he thought.

Unfortunately, he also knew what they thought. The gloves had come off after Roland South shot at—shot—Joe Steele. This whole campaign against wreckers never would have got going the way it had if the country hadn't been shocked by what was almost the fourth assassination of a President in a lifetime. But it was rolling now, and showed no signs of slowing down.

The other reporter said, “Can your brother take a boat to Cuba or Mexico or something? Or the train to Toronto? Or one of those clipper planes to England?” He chuckled to show he was kidding, but none of those sounded like a bad scheme to Charlie.

He was damned if he would show it, though. “It'll blow over. People have been writing nasty stories about Presidents since George Washington. Before that, they wrote nasty stories about George III instead.”

“Hope you're right,” the older man said. He dug in his pocket and set four bits by Charlie's plate. “Here. Lunch is on me.” He bailed out of the eatery before Charlie could either thank him or push the money back.

Charlie stared at the quarter, the two dimes, and the nickel. The other guy had to be telling him he didn't think Mike's chances were good. Charlie muttered to himself. He didn't think his brother's chances were so hot, either. He didn't want to think that, so he tried not to think anything at all. He did some more muttering.
Not
thinking wasn't so easy.

He went back to his desk, hoping he would find a message from the White House. That would let him call back without looking like a beggar. There was a message—from his wife, asking him to pick up a loaf of bread and a cabbage on his way home. He started to crumple it up and throw it out. Then he stuck it in an inside jacket pocket instead. That might help him remember.

Nobody from the White House called all afternoon. It wouldn't be that they hadn't seen or heard about Mike's piece. They didn't miss such tricks. No. Plainly, they'd washed their hands of him. They were going to do whatever they were going to do, and they didn't give a damn what Charlie had to say about it.

He did bring home the bread and the cabbage. He also brought home a fifth of Old Grand-Dad. Esther raised an eyebrow when she took it out of the bag. Charlie explained. She grimaced and hugged him. That made him feel a little better, but not nearly enough. After supper, the bourbon helped, too—but also not nearly enough.

*   *   *

P
eople who'd escaped Trotsky's Russia and Hitler's Germany talked about the knock on the door at midnight, with the secret police waiting outside to grab you as soon as you opened up. The midnight knock had been a staple of spy novels since the Great War ended, if not longer. The movies used it all the time, too. Of course they did—it was suspenseful as all get-out.

But, no matter what, you never thought it could happen to you. That was an enormous part of what made Joe Steele's campaign against wreckers so effective. Nobody ever thought it could happen to him till it did. By then, it was too late.

Even Mike didn't really believe it could happen to him. Oh, he knew he'd poked the bear in the White House with a stick. He knew the bear had teeth and claws, too. He also knew, though, that there was such a thing as the First Amendment. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press were enshrined in the Constitution. He assumed that still mattered.

Nothing was wrong with his knowledge. His assumptions, now, his assumptions proved sadly out of date.

When the knock came, it was actually closer to one in the morning than to midnight. It wasn't a very loud knock. Whoever was out there didn't aim to wake everybody up and down the hall. But it was very insistent. Knock, knock, knock . . . Knock, knock, knock . . . Knock, knock, knock . . .

It got to Stella first. “What's that?” she mumbled, still half asleep.

Her words made Mike open his eyes. Knock, knock, knock . . . “Somebody at the door,” he said. He scowled, there in the warm dark.
Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee
ran through his mind. John Donne had it pegged, all right.

“Whoever it is, tell 'em to get lost.” No, Stella wasn't with it yet.

Mike was. For better or worse, he woke quickly and completely. “I'll
give it my best shot,” he said, and padded out to the front room in his bare feet. He shut the bedroom door behind him before he turned on a light out there. Blinking, he asked the obvious stupid question: “Who is it?”

“Government Bureau of Investigation, Sullivan,” a gruff voice answered. “Open up. You're under arrest.”

“What if I don't?”

“We break the door down or else we shoot through it and then break it down,” the voice said. “So open up. If you don't, we tack on resisting and everything you catch gets worse.”

He believed the guy out there. He'd been doing his job when he wrote the article that tore into Joe Steele. The GBI men out there were convinced they were just doing their job, too. You could hear it in the way that fellow talked. You could also hear that he'd done this plenty of times before.

Numbly, Mike opened the door. Three men in cheap suits stood out there, one with a Tommy gun, one with a revolver, and one smacking the palm of his left hand with a blackjack held in his right. “Smart fella,” he said. “C'mon. Quiet. No fuss.”

“Can I get some regular clothes?” Mike gestured at his seersucker pajamas. “The closet's right here.”

The Jeebies looked at one another. “What the hell—go ahead,” said the one with the cosh. He'd been doing all the talking. “Make it snappy, though.”

Pants, shirt, jacket, shoes . . . Those were all easy. Socks were back in the bedroom. Mike decided to do without. If the goons weren't inclined to bother Stella, he didn't want to give them ideas. “I'm ready,” he said, one of the bigger lies he'd ever come out with.

“Awright.” They took him away. Stella didn't come out screaming and fighting. That was nothing but a relief to Mike. It would have done no good, and it might have got her hurt or seized with him. Maybe she fell back to sleep.

A man down the hall opened his door, saw what was happening, and slammed it shut again. He might have been keeping demons away. The GBI men took Mike down the stairs and out to a car waiting not far away.

“When we get to jail, I want to call a lawyer,” he said as he bent to get in.

The Jeebie with the blackjack used it then. Later, when Mike could think clearly again, he decided the guy would have clobbered him even if he hadn't said a word. Knocking a prisoner over the head was just part of the process of getting him under control. If he was loopy, he couldn't cause trouble.

Loopy Mike was. Everything about his ride in that car—except the stink of tobacco, sour sweat, and old puke—stayed blurry ever after. They didn't go to a police station. They went to the Federal Building on the Lower West Side. They got there ridiculously fast. There was next to no traffic at that time of night. Even with his brains rattled, Mike noticed that.

“Another wrecker, huh?” a security guard outside the building said as the Jeebies hauled Mike out of the car and kept him on his feet. They treated him more like a sack of beans than a man. He felt more like a sack of beans, too.

“You betcha,” answered the GBI agent with the blackjack. To his comrades, he said, “Bring him on in. We'll get him processed and go out for the next bastard on the list.”

Processed Mike was, like a side of beef. Some kind of official demanded his name. He had to think twice before he could give it. They searched him. They fingerprinted him. They photographed him. He doubtless looked like hell, but they didn't care.

They gave him a number: NY24601. Someone wrote it on a piece of cloth with an indelible pen and stapled it to his lapel. For good measure, the man yanked the jacket off him and wrote it on the lining. “Don't forget it,” he said. “From now on, that's you.”

Since Mike had trouble with his name just then, he wasn't sure about stowing the number in his pounding head, but he had help with it. They hauled him up in front of a fellow with a nameplate on his desk that said M
ORRIS
F
RUMKIN
and below it, in smaller letters, A
DMINISTRA
TIVE
L
AW
J
UDGE
. “Charges?” Frumkin asked in a bored voice.

“Wrecking, to wit, libel against the Administration and its enlightened policies,” replied the man with the enlightened blackjack.

“Oh. He's
that
Sullivan.” Morris Frumkin made a check mark on a list held in a clipboard. “Well, we don't need much of a hearing for him,
do we? He obviously did it. Sullivan, as administrative punishment for wrecking, you are transferred to a labor encampment in the Deprived Areas”—even groggy, Mike heard the capital letters thud into place—“for a term not to be shorter than five years and not to exceed ten. Transfer to take place immediately, sentence to be counted from arrival at the encampment.” He gabbled that out by rote and nodded to the men who had charge of Mike. “Put him in the holding cells till the next paddy wagon goes to Penn Station.”

They did. Half a dozen men already waited there. They were all the worse for wear. A couple had blood on their heads and shoulders—the Jeebies who clouted them hadn't been so smooth as Mike's captor. And one was all bloody and bruised. He'd put up a fight before Joe Steele's agents could subdue him. What had it got him? Fifteen to twenty instead of five to ten. He was proud of the longer term, as he was of his lumps.

Mike's head started pounding like a steel mill. One of the other wreckers slipped him two aspirins from a little tin the GBI men had missed. That was sending a baby to do a man's job, but every little bit helped.

Another man got tossed in. Then the Jeebies herded them into a van. They went to Penn Station, and down to a level Mike had never imagined, much less seen. The splendid imitation of the Baths of Caracalla on the ground floor might as well not have existed. This wasn't Roman. It was all bare, angular concrete and hard metal benches without backs. Mike sank down onto one and held his poor abused noggin in his hands. Several other wreckers assumed the same pose.

A train clattered in. The noise hurt, the way it would have with a hangover. Guards chivvied them into the front two cars. Those were already crowded. Most of the guys in them talked with New England accents. The guards didn't care that they were only making the crowding worse.

“Don't worry about it none, you sorry shitheads,” one of them said. “Time you get where you're goin', whole fuckin' train'll be packed.” He laughed. Mike didn't think it was funny, not that the guard gave a damn.

The whistle screamed. That hurt, too. The train pulled away from that subterranean stop. Mike was bound for . . . somewhere.

*   *   *

T
he telephone rang. Charlie did his best to jump through the ceiling. When the phone goes off in the middle of the night, it means one of two things. Either some sleepy operator has made a wrong connection at the switchboard or something horrible has happened to somebody who thinks you're important.

“Gevalt!”
Esther said.

“No kidding.” Charlie rolled out of bed and headed for the living room. He hit his toe on the door frame and his shin on the coffee table before he could grab the phone. “Hello?”

“This is the long-distance operator,” said a prim female voice. “I have a call for you from Stella Sullivan in New York City. Will you accept?”

“Yeah,” Charlie answered. Something horrible had happened, all right, and he was only too sure he knew what it was.

“Go ahead, Miss Sullivan . . . excuse me,
Mrs.
Sullivan,” the operator said. To Charlie, her voice seemed muffled—she was really talking to Stella at the other end of the connection.

“Charlie?” Stella said through pops and clicks.

“Yeah, it's me, all right.” He wasn't sleepy any more. Hoping against hope for a miracle, he asked, “What's cooking?”

“Oh, my God, Charlie! They grabbed Mike! They came for him and they took him away and I don't know what they did with him and I just stayed in the bedroom all scared and shivering till I knew they were gone and then I called you and oh my God Charlie what am I gonna do?” Stella didn't usually talk like that. She didn't usually have any excuse
to
talk like that.

Charlie let out a long, long sigh. “Oh . . .” he said, and stopped right there. His father's hard hand applied to the side of his head had taught him not to swear in front of women.
On the phone with
counted as
in front of
.

“What will you do, Charlie?” Stella said. “Can you do anything?”

“I'll try,” Charlie said. “I don't know what they'll say. I don't
think
trying will make it any worse for Mike. I don't know if it'll make things any better, either. But I'll try. The worst they can tell me is no. I'm pretty sure that's the worst they can tell me.”