Joe Steele (44 page)

“It hasn't been. I don't want it to start,” Esther said. “After a while, you can't walk away from it. Maybe you should try while you're still ahead of the game. I don't mean quit cold—I don't think you have to go that far. But you should cut back.”

“Well, maybe. Hard to do that in Washington, but I guess I can give it a shot.” If she wasn't going to push it as hard as she might have, he wouldn't dig in his heels the way he could have done. He kissed her again, saying, “You take good care of me, babe.”

She smiled against his cheek. “It's a filthy job, but somebody's got to do it.”

The kids hadn't come out to say hello—a returning father wasn't an inspiring spectacle—so he pawed her a little. She squeaked—softly, remembering that they were around. He said, “You want filthy, wait till later tonight.” He nibbled her earlobe.

She pushed him away, but she was still smiling. “We'll see who's awake,” she said. Anyone listening to them would have thought they'd been married for a while.

*   *   *

A
rtillery boomed, off to the north. Looking across the Agano River, Mike said, “Christ, what are the Russians up to now?”

Officially, Captain Calvin Armstrong commanded the company. Unofficially, he leaned a lot on his first sergeant, who was twice his age. That was what experienced noncoms were for. “What do you think it is?” he asked.

“Who the hell knows with them, sir? As long as nothing comes down on our side of the line, we can't make it our business.”

“I understand that.” Armstrong looked no happier. “I hope they don't have an uprising up there, though. That's the kind of thing that could spill over to here.”

“Yes, sir.” Mike hoped the same thing. South Japan wasn't so much a powder keg as North Japan, but the locals didn't exactly love their conquerors, either. They especially resented seeing Emperor Akihito reduced to the status of General Eisenhower's mouthpiece. Cartoons showed Akihito as a ventriloquist's dummy sitting on Eisenhower's lap with Eisenhower's hand reaching into him from behind. You could get into piles of trouble for posting those flyers, but the Japs did it anyhow.

“Do you think they'd tell us if they did have an uprising?” Captain Armstrong asked.

He wasn't a dope. He found interesting questions. “I doubt it, sir,” Mike said slowly, “unless things got out of hand and they couldn't squash it or something. Near as I can see, the Russians don't tell anybody anything as long as they can help it.”

Armstrong nodded. He looked more as if he belonged on a college campus than here looking toward North Japan. He might have been a
college kid before he went into the service, and raced through OCS to get christened a ninety-day wonder. Most of those guys stayed second looeys, though. If he was one, he must have impressed some people to win not one but two promotions.

“Maybe I'll ask Major Dragunov at the monthly meeting, if I remember,” he said. “Too bad the next one's three weeks away.” Local commanders from the two sides of the demilitarized zone did still get together to hash over problems that could cross from one to the other.

The big guns boomed again, off to the north. “Well, sir, if that goes on from now till then, you sure won't forget about it,” Mike said.

It did, on and off. Dragunov and Armstrong met at the river, unarmed. It was Dragunov's turn to cross to the American side, which he did in a putt-putt of a motorboat. He didn't speak English; Armstrong knew no Russian. They got along in a schoolboy mishmash of French and German. Since neither was fluent, both gestured a lot. Mike could follow bits and pieces, though his French was of much less recent vintage than Calvin Armstrong's and his German was New York City Yiddish, also none too fresh these days.

He certainly knew when Armstrong asked about the artillery fire. Dragunov didn't answer right away, not in a language the Americans could understand. Instead, he spoke in Russian with his assistant, a lieutenant whose blue arm-of-service color and know-it-all air said he came from the NKVD. Mike didn't know exactly what the initials stood for. He did know that
NKVD man
was how you said
Jeebie
in Russian.

After making sure he could open his mouth without catching hell for it, Dragunov went back to German and French. He said something that sounded to Mike like
the popular army of the Japanese People's Republic
.

Captain Armstrong asked what seemed like the next logical question: “This popular army, it is composed of Japanese?”

“Oui,”
Dragunov admitted reluctantly. More back-and-forth with the NKVD lieutenant. Then mostly French again: “How not? The Japanese People's Republic has the necessity of being able to defend itself.”

“Defend itself? Against whom?” Armstrong asked, which also seemed like a good question.

“Why, against warmongers and imperialists,
aber natürlich
,” Major Dragunov answered, switch-hitting with the German phrase. “Those are the enemies a peace-loving state has the need to be on guard against.”

“I don't think there are many warmongers left in South Japan,” Armstrong said. “We killed most of them.”

“It could be that you are right.” The Red Army man didn't sound as if he believed it for a minute. “If you are, no doubt we will march well. But one must prepare for every possibility, is it not so?”

They talked about other, less important, things for a few minutes. After a sharp exchange of salutes, Major Dragunov and his—minder?—got back into their boat and chugged over to the North Japanese side of the river.

“You better get on the horn with the brass, sir,” Mike said. “If they don't know about this, they sure as hell need to, and right away.”

“You're reading my mind, Sullivan,” Captain Armstrong answered. “We just spent all that time and blood smashing the Jap Army flat, and now they're putting together a new one? Jesus wept!”

“If their Japs have guns, our Japs'll want guns, too,” Mike said. “And how are we supposed to tell them no?”

“Beats me.” Calvin Armstrong stared after the motorboat with the Russians in it as it crossed to the far side of the Agano. “The only thing I'm glad about is, I'm not the one who has to figure out the answer.”

*   *   *

J
oe Steele eyed Charlie. “I am looking for a way to say something important,” he said. “I know the idea, but I do not have the words I need yet. Words are your department. Maybe you can come up with some.”

“I'll give it my best shot, Mr. President,” Charlie said, as he had to. Yes, Joe Steele did get words from him. “What's the idea?” He couldn't say
What's the big idea?
, not to the President. You needed a working sense of whimsy to smile at that. Joe Steele would have scowled instead.

“I want to talk about how the Reds are clamping down wherever they've taken power, how they aren't letting us help them rebuild the countries that the war tore to pieces, how they just want to take with both hands but not give with either.” Joe Steele gestured in frustration. “That's the
idea. But it sounds like nothing when I say it that way. I want it to sound as important as it is. If I can make other people see it the way I do, maybe we won't have to fight a war with Russia in a few years.”

No matter how much Charlie longed for peace, he could see that war looming ahead, the way anyone with his eyes open in 1919 could have seen that Germany would have another go as soon as she got her strength back. Plenty of people
had
seen the seeds of World War II. Charlie remembered the cartoon that showed a weeping baby outside Versailles as the Big Four emerged from signing the treaty. The baby's diaper was labeled C
ONS
CRIPTION
C
LASS
OF
1940
. That guy'd hit it right on the nose.

So would the United States and Red Russia square off in 1960 or 1965? Charlie wanted to do whatever he could to head that off. Joe Steele did, too. Say what you would about the man, but he deserved credit for that.

“Let's see what I can do, sir.” Scratching the side of his jaw, Charlie went back to his office, locked the door, and took the phone off the hook. When the dial tone annoyed him, he stuck the handset in a desk drawer and closed it. Then he settled down to think.

What was it that made the Reds so hard to work with? You could never tell what they were going to do till they did it. No one had dreamt Litvinov would sign a treaty with the Nazis till he hopped on a plane, went to Berlin, and signed the damn thing. No one had dreamt his name on the dotted line would cost so much blood, either.

The Reds wrapped a blackout curtain around everything they did. Charlie wasn't sure that was because they were Reds. It might just have been because they were Russians, or Jews who'd grown up among Russians. Why didn't matter. The phrase did.

Blackout curtain? That wasn't bad. It was on the way to what Joe Steele wanted. Charlie didn't think it was there. Red-out curtain? He wrote it on a piece of scratch paper. It didn't make him stand up and cheer—it was too cute. But it was something he could offer if he didn't come up with anything better.

He pulled his trusty Bartlett's off the shelf. It was one of the speechwriter's best friends. People had said a lot of clever things over the past few
thousand years. Here they were, ready for the taking. Or for giving you a new idea, and with luck a better one.

Nothing sprang out at him. He still liked the notion of the curtain, though. Not the blackout curtain. Black was the wrong color for Trotsky's regime and for the ones he backed. Red-out curtain still sounded silly.

“Red Curtain?” Charlie muttered to himself. Then he said it again: louder, more thoughtfully. He wrote it down. Yes, that might do. It just might.

He ran a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Maybe his fingers could do the rest of his thinking for him. Only one way to find out: turn 'em loose and let 'em rip.

From the Adriatic to the Baltic, from Leipzig to Sapporo, a Red Curtain has fallen over a quarter of the world
, he wrote.
Behind it lie governments that are not really governments at all, but organized conspiracies, every one equally resolute and implacable in its determination to destroy the free world.

He looked at that. If it wasn't what Joe Steele was trying to say, he'd misunderstood what the boss wanted. It was worth taking a chance on. He pulled it out of the typewriter and took it up to the President's oval study.

This time, he had to wait a little while before he got to see Joe Steele. Andy Wyszynski came out looking serious. “How are you, Sullivan?” the Attorney General said with a nod.

“I'm all right. Yourself?” Charlie answered. He got tired of the flat, flavorless speech of Joe Steele and his California cronies. Wyszynski had a big-city accent different from his own, but at least it was a big-city accent.

“Well, Sullivan, what have you got?” Joe Steele asked when Charlie went in. Charlie handed him the typewritten paragraph. The President perched reading glasses on the arched bridge of his nose. “Red Curtain . . .” He shifted his pipe to the side of his mouth so he could bring out the phrase. Then he puffed, tasting the words as well as the tobacco. He ran a hand through his hair. It was still thick, though he'd gone very gray. “Red Curtain . . .” He nodded a second time, as if he meant it now. “Every once in a while, you earn your paycheck, don't you?”

“I try, Mr. President,” Charlie said. Joe Steele offhand and insulting was Joe Steele as friendly as he ever got.

Newspapers all over the United States seized on the Red Curtain when the President used it in a speech about Russia. Charlie would have been prouder of that if American newspapers weren't in the habit of seizing on anything Joe Steele said and trumpeting it to the skies. When papers in Canada and England and even one in New Zealand picked up the phrase, he really started to think he'd earned his pay that day.

*   *   *

J.
Edgar Hoover arrested spies in the War Department and in the State Department and even in the Department of the Interior. They were working to sell America down the river to Leon Trotsky, he declared. The way he stuck out his jaw dared anyone in the world to call him a liar.

Andy Wyszynski pounded the lectern when he told the world—or at least the reporters, nearly all of them American, at the press conference—what a pack of scoundrels the men seized because of spying for Trotsky were. “They want to drag the United States behind the Red Curtain!” the Attorney General shouted furiously. “They've already dragged too many countries behind it, and not a one of them has come out free yet!”

“Ouch!” Charlie said when he heard Wyszynski's tirade on the news that night. “I didn't mean it like that.”

“And so?” Esther said. “People take things and make them mean whatever they want, not what you wanted.”

“Tell me about it!” Charlie said ruefully. He'd felt proud when Joe Steele called the part of the world led from Moscow the part behind the Red Curtain. He'd felt even prouder when people used the line wherever English was spoken.

When Andy Wyszynski used it the way he did . . . Charlie might have been less proud if he'd seen
Red Curtain
scribbled on a privy wall, or perhaps as the name of a whorehouse. On the other hand, he also might not have.

He wanted a drink. Some bourbon would clean out the nasty taste the Attorney General left in his mouth. His thigh muscles bunched as he started to get up from the couch and go to the kitchen. But then he eased back again. He was trying to be a good boy and not grab the whiskey bottle whenever he got the yen. It didn't always work, but it did some of the time. He was drinking less than he had before Esther called him on it.