Joe Steele Read online

  “Good, loyal Americans, you say?” Spruance rubbed his impeccably shaved chin. “Will you name those good, loyal Americans for me?” He didn’t sound like someone putting quotation marks around the phrase. He said it the same way Sutherland had.

  “Yes, sir,” said the justice—ex-justice now, Charlie supposed—and confessed traitor. Levine and the other ACLU lawyer tried to stop him. He waved them away. Charlie heard him say, “What difference does it make now?” He wasn’t sure the newsreel recordings would pick that up.

  “Will you name them?” Spruance asked once more when Sutherland didn’t go on right away.

  “Yes, sir. One was Senator Long, from Louisiana. Another was Father Coughlin.”

  That loosed a hawk, or a whole flock of hawks, among the pigeons. Captain Spruance had to rap loudly for order. It didn’t help much. Huey Long had been sniping at Joe Steele ever since Steele got the nomination the Kingfish wanted. Father Coughlin was a radio preacher from Michigan. Politically, he stood a little to the right of Attila the Hun, but millions of people listened to him. You could see how he might like der Führer better than the President.

  “You’ve taken that down?” Spruance asked the yeoman.

  “Yes, sir, I have.” The CPO looked and sounded a little flabbergasted himself.

  “I’m sure that will be the subject of further investigation,” Spruance said. “I now declare a recess until two o’clock this afternoon so that the gentlemen of the press can file their stories and eat and so the members of this tribunal can consider the fate of the four men sitting at the defendants’ table.” Down came the gavel one more time.

  Charlie sprinted for a telephone booth. As soon as someone picked up the other end of the line, he started dictating. Half a dozen other men in cheap suits and fedoras were doing the same thing along the bank of phones. The doors for most of the booths were open. That let Charlie hear how the rest of the reporters, like him, sounded more coherent and better organized than they did in ordinary conversation. They’d all had to do this before, a great many times. Like writing, it was a skill that improved with practice.

  When Charlie stopped shoving in nickels and hung up, two guys behind him got into a wrestling match over who’d use the phone next. He grabbed Louie and headed for the cafeteria in the basement. He’d eaten there only once before. As soon as he bit into his turkey sandwich, he remembered why.

  Louie’d got roast beef, and didn’t look any happier with it. “Holy Jesus, Charlie!” he said with his mouth full. “I mean, holy jumping Jesus!” He swallowed heroically.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Charlie agreed.

  “They confessed,” the photographer said. “I mean, they confessed. I knew they’d tell Joe Steele to piss up a rope. I knew it. Only they didn’t.”

  “They sure didn’t. They fingered some other big shots who can’t stand him, either.” Charlie kept eating the sandwich even if it was lousy. “And they didn’t look like J. Edgar Hoover was giving ’em the third degree. They just decided to sing.”

  “Like canaries.” Louie lowered his voice: “You believe ’em? You believe all that treason malarkey’s legit?”

  “I believe anybody who sets out to prove it isn’t will have a tough time doing it unless the justices take back their confessions,” Charlie said.

  Louie chewed on that, literally and metaphorically. Then he nodded. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I bet Father Coughlin’s spitting rivets right now.” Well, he might have said spitting.

  Charlie didn’t get such a good seat when the tribunal reconvened. Other reporters had either eaten faster or skipped lunch. He’d made it to a phone in a hurry. He wouldn’t complain about this.

  At two o’clock straight up, Captain Spruance gaveled the proceedings back into session. “We have reached a decision in this case,” he said. “Are the defendants ready to hear it?”

  If any of the four Associate Justices wasn’t ready, he didn’t say so.

  “Very well,” Spruance continued. “Because of their confessions earlier today and because of the evidence against them, evidence they did not seek to contest, we find them guilty of the crime of treason against the United States of America.” He turned to the Army officers sitting at his left hand. “Is that not our unanimous decision, gentlemen?”

  “It is,” chorused Colonel Marshall, Major Bradley, and Major Eisenhower.

  “Furthermore,” Spruance said, “we sentence the defendants to death, the sentence to be carried out by firing squad.” Willis Van Deventer slumped in his seat. The other three sat unmoving. Captain Spruance looked at the other officers again. “Is that not our unanimous decision, gentlemen?”

  “It is,” they said together.

  Levine bounced to his feet. “This is a kangaroo court, nothing else but! We’ll appeal this outrageous verdict!”

  “Who to? The Supreme Court?” Over at the prosecutors’ table, Andy Wyszynski went into gales of laughter. The ACLU lawyer stared at him, popeyed. Wyszynski rubbed it in some more: “Or maybe you’ll appeal to the President?” Oh, how he laughed!

  He laughed until Captain Spruance brought down the gavel. “Mr. Attorney General, your display is unseemly.”

  “Sorry, sir.” Wyszynski didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry, either. But he did stop openly gloating.

  Soldiers, sailors, and U.S. marshals took the convicted traitors away. The reporters scrambled to file their new stories. Charlie wondered how many late editions would sport a one-word headline: DEATH!

  He wondered some other things, too. But that didn’t matter, or not very much. If the accused men admitted that they’d done what they were accused of, and if you couldn’t prove they’d been forced to admit it, what could anybody do? Not much, not that Charlie could see. And questions without good answers seemed all too much like questions better left unasked.

  * * *

  “Take it easy, Mike.” Stella sounded scared. “You’ll blow a gasket if you don’t relax.”

  “Somebody needs to blow a gasket, by God,” Mike said savagely. “They were railroaded. They must’ve been railroaded—nobody in his right mind would confess to anything like that. I bet they got plenty of rubber hoses and castor oil and water up the nose. You don’t need to leave marks to hurt somebody so bad he’ll say anything you want. Ask Mussolini . . . uh, no offense.”

  Stella Morandini said something incandescent about il Duce in the language she’d learned at her mother’s knee. Then she went back to English: “But you know, even here in the Village a lot of people think the Supreme Court Four are guilty as sin.”

  Mike did know that. It left him depressed, if not neurotic. “You know what it proves?” he said.

  “What?” Stella asked, as she knew she should.

  “It proves a lot of people are goddamn imbeciles, that’s what.” Mike made as if to tear out his hair. “Ahh . . . ! What I really need to do is go on a six-day bender, stay so pickled I can’t even remember all the different ways this country’s going to the dogs.” He started for the kitchen to see what he had in the way of booze. In his apartment, nothing was more than a few steps from anything else.

  “Wait,” Stella said.

  “How come? What could be better than getting smashed?”

  He didn’t think she’d have an answer for that, but she started taking off her clothes. He paused to reconsider. Making love wouldn’t give him six days of forgetfulness, but it also wouldn’t leave him wishing he were dead afterwards. In his haste to join her, he popped a button off his shirt.

  His bed was of the Murphy persuasion. Instead of shoving a chair and an end table out of the way to use it, they made do with the sofa. Still straddling him in the afterglow, her face on his shoulder, she asked, “Happier now?”

  “Some ways, sure.” He patted her behind. “Others, not so much. The country’s still a mess.”

  �
�What can you do about it?”

  “I’ve been doing what I can—and look how far it’s got me,” he answered. “What happened today, that makes me want to go out in the streets and start throwing bombs at police stations. Then they’ll hang a treason rap on me, too.”

  “I don’t think I’ll let you have your pants back,” Stella said seriously. “You can’t go out and throw bombs without pants.”

  “You’re right. Somebody would arrest me.” Mike laughed. It was either laugh or push Stella off him and go pound his head against the wall. The noise from that would make the neighbors complain. Besides, Stella was far and away the best thing he had going for him, and she had been for a while. Wasn’t it about time he figured out what he needed to do about that? “Hon,” he said, “you want to marry me?”

  Her eyes widened. “What brought that on?”

  “A rush of brains to the head, I hope. Do you?”

  “Sure,” she said. “My mother’s gonna fall over, you know. She was sure you wouldn’t ever ask me. She figured you were just using me to have fun. ‘He’s a man,’ she says, ‘and you know the only thing men want.’”

  “I’ve never just used you to have fun, and that isn’t the only thing I want you for,” Mike said. Then he spoiled his foursquare stand for virtue by patting her again. “It’s pretty darn nice, though, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t be in this compromising position if I didn’t think so.”

  “You didn’t compromise, sweetie. You cooperated. There’s a difference.”

  “So what do we do once we tie the knot? Do we live happily ever after, like in the fairy tales?”

  “We live as happily ever after as Joe Steele will let us,” Mike said. Stella poked him in the ribs. He supposed he deserved it, but he hadn’t been kidding even so.

  VIII

  Since Levine and the ACLU couldn’t come up with any better ideas, they did appeal the death sentences of the Supreme Court Four to Joe Steele. Levine also published the letter in the papers. In it, he asked the President to spare the lives “of four dedicated public servants whose differences with him over fine points of law were perhaps unfairly perceived as differences over public policy.”

  Pointing to the letter in the Washington Post, Esther asked Charlie, “Do you think it will do any good?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Nope. It might, if they just kept making decisions he didn’t go for. But this whole treason business . . . He can’t look like he’s letting them get away with that.”

  “Oh, come on!” she said. “How much of that do you believe? How much of that can anybody believe?”

  “I’ll tell you—I don’t know what to believe,” Charlie answered. “Mike thinks it’s a bunch of hooey, too. But he wasn’t there. I was. Would you confess to something that horrible, something you had to know would get you the death penalty, unless you did . . . some of it, anyway?”

  “See? Even you have trouble swallowing the whole thing.” To Charlie’s relief, his wife didn’t push it any further. Instead, she pointed to the paper again and asked, “What do you think Joe Steele will do about it?”

  “I don’t think he’ll do anything till the whole Louisiana mess gets straightened out, and God only knows how long that’ll take,” Charlie answered.

  On the strength of George Sutherland’s accusations, Attorney General Wyszynski had got warrants against Father Coughlin and Huey Long. The rabble-rousing priest had gone meekly into custody, showing off his bracelets for the reporters swarming around his Michigan radio studio and quoting the Twenty-third Psalm: “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.’”

  That sounded very pretty. It also left him behind bars. No judge would grant bail or issue him a writ of habeas corpus. Eventually, Joe Steele and Andy Wyszynski would try him or send him before a tribunal or do whatever they did to him. Meanwhile . . .

  Meanwhile, Huey Long was kicking up a ruckus. Unlike Father Coughlin, the Kingfish didn’t sit around waiting to get jugged. As soon as he heard that Sutherland had taken his name in vain, he drove to Washington National Airport, chartered a Ford Trimotor, and flew off to Baton Rouge.

  Nobody arrested him there. Even Federal officials in Louisiana kowtowed to the Kingfish. And from Louisiana, Long bellowed defiance at Joe Steele and at the other forty-seven states. “If that lying, cheating fool infesting the White House wants a new War of Yankee Aggression, let him start it!” the Senator roared. “He may fire the first shot, but the American people will fire the last one—at him! Everybody who’s against Joe Steele ought to be for me!”

  What he didn’t seem to realize was that, if the choice lay between him and the President, most people outside Louisiana came down on Joe Steele’s side. Yeah, Joe Steele was cold and crafty. Everybody knew that. But most people also thought he had his head screwed on tight. Outside of Louisiana, Huey Long came off as something between a buffoon and a raving loony.

  When Joe Steele went on the radio, he sounded like a reasonable man. “No one is going to start another Civil War,” he said. He had his name for the late unpleasantness, as Huey Long had his. Joe Steele’s was the one more Americans used, though. He continued, “But we will have the laws obeyed. A warrant for Senator Long’s arrest on serious charges has been issued. It will be served at the earliest opportunity.”

  The Kingfish’s next radio speech amounted to Nyah, nyah, nyah—you can’t catch me! Charlie listened to it and shook his head in reluctant admiration. “He’s got moxie—you have to give him that.”

  “If he gets people laughing at Joe Steele, that’s his best chance,” Esther said. “Then nobody will want the government to get tough.” It looked the same way to Charlie.

  Huey Long traveled around Louisiana making speeches, too. He had to keep the juices flowing there—if his own state turned against him, his goose went into the oven. He traveled with enough bodyguards to fight a small war. They wouldn’t have won against Federal troops, but they would have put up a scrap. And they definitely helped keep Louisiana in line.

  None of which did the Senator any good when he spoke in front of the Alexandria city hall. A sniper at least half a mile away fired one shot. The .30-06 round went in the Kingfish’s left ear and came out just below his right ear, bringing half his brain with it. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

  His bodyguards went nuts. Some of them did run in the direction from which the shot had come. Others started firing in that direction. Still others, in a frenzy of grief and horror and rage, emptied their revolvers into the crowd that had been listening to Long. More than twenty people, including eleven women and an eight-year-old girl, died in the barrage and in the stampede that followed.

  No one caught the assassin. At lunch a few days later, Louie Pappas remarked to Charlie, “My brother is a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.”

  “Is that so?” Charlie said around a mouthful of ham and cheese.

  “Uh-huh. He was in France in 1918—he was just a PFC then. He says he knew plenty of guys in the Corps who coulda done what the fella in Louisiana did.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. The photographer nodded. Charlie asked, “Is he saying a leatherneck did punch Huey’s ticket for him?”

  “Nah. How could he say that? He wasn’t there.” Louie was eating liverwurst and onions: a sandwich to make skunks turn tail. “Only that it coulda been.”

  “How about that?” Charlie said. He waved to the counterman. “Hey, can you get me another Coke, please?”

  * * *

  Mike knew why Stan had put him on a train to Baton Rouge to cover Huey Long’s funeral. He was a reporter who had a reputation for going after Joe Steele. If he went after him some more, it would just be icing on the cake, not a whole new cake. Joe
Steele and his flunkies already couldn’t stand him. I’m expendable, Mike thought, not without pride.

  The funeral made him think of nothing so much as the ones banana republics threw for dead military dictators. Baton Rouge was decked in black crepe. U.S. flags flew at half staff. Sometimes they flew upside down, an old, old signal of distress.

  What must have been a couple of hundred thousand people, almost all in black, lined up in front of the grand new state Capitol to file past Long’s body. The new Capitol had gone up while the Kingfish was Governor of Louisiana. The old one, a Gothic horror out of Sir Walter Scott, stood empty and unloved a few blocks south and a little west, by the banks of the Mississippi. Along with other reporters, Mike climbed the forty-eight steps—one for each state, and recording its name and admission date—and past through the fifty-foot-tall bronze doors into the rotunda.

  Long’s coffin lay in the center of the rotunda. It was double, copper inside of bronze, and had a glass top to let people peer down at the tuxedoed corpse. The pillows on which Long’s head rested had been built up on the right side so no one would have to contemplate the ruins of that side of his head.

  Mourners filed by in a continuous stream, rich and poor, men and women, whites and even some Negroes. Some of them had the look of people who were there because they thought being there would do them some good. More seemed genuinely sorry their eccentric kingpin was gone.

  At least four mourners turned to the reporters and said, “Joe Steele did this.” Mike wouldn’t have been a bit surprised, but he thought they needed to get hold of the gunman to nail that down. It hadn’t happened yet. The sloppy and grandiose feel of Louisiana made Mike wonder if it ever would.

  A hellfire-brimstone-and-damnation minister preached the funeral oration. “We were robbed of our sun! We were robbed of our moon! Washington stole the stars from our sky!” he thundered. “God will smite those who foully slew him and those who plotted his destruction! They will go into the lake of burning lava and cook for all eternity! Huey Long will look down on them from heaven, and he will laugh to see their suffering. He will laugh, for he has been translated to bliss eternal!”