Joe Steele Read online

  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: PHILADELPHIA. 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 WHERE IS OUR FREEDOM GOING? “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 Worke
r 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 WHERE IS OUR FREEDOM GOING?

  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.

  * * *

  Charlie 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?

  “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.

  * * *

  People 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 w
as 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.