Joe Steele Read online

  They still weren’t eager about it, though. In the war against the Kaiser, Russia had done a big chunk of the Entente’s dying. France and England wanted Russia on their side again, even if it was Red, Red, Red. They sent delegations to Moscow to sweet-talk Trotsky into bed with them.

  Charlie had always thought Trotsky looked like a fox, with his auburn hair, his knowing eyes, his sharp nose, and his pointed chin whiskers. He listened to what the French and English diplomats and military envoys said—and what they didn’t or wouldn’t say. He listened, and he made no promises, and he waited to find out whether he heard from anyone else.

  When he did . . . At the start of the last week of August, Maxim Litvinov flew from Moscow to Berlin. The Jew ruling Red Russia sent his Jewish foreign commissar to the world’s capital of anti-Semitism. Litvinov and Ribbentrop put their heads together. The very next day, with Adolf Hitler beaming in the background, they signed a nonaggression treaty and an enormous trade package.

  The news burst like a bomb in Paris and London . . . and in Warsaw. Whatever the Russians would do, they wouldn’t fight to keep the Germans out of Poland. Russians didn’t think Poles were Untermenschen, the way the Nazis did. But an independent Poland affronted Moscow almost as much as it outraged Berlin.

  Lazar Kagan was the first important aide Charlie ran into after the story broke. “What do we do about this?” Charlie asked him, feeling very much like a jumped-up reporter. “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Kagan sounded as stunned as Charlie felt. When Charlie realized the large, round man was thrown for a loop, too, something inside of him loosened. This wasn’t just too big for him. This was too big for everybody. After a moment, Kagan went on, “There’s probably nothing the United States can do except to tell France and England to stick to their guns. We’re too far away from what’s going on to influence Germany and Russia one way or the other.”

  “I guess so.” Charlie hesitated, then asked, “Have you seen the boss?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen him.” Kagan managed a nod. “He . . . isn’t very happy.”

  And that would do for an understatement till a bigger one rolled down the pike. If Charlie was any judge, none would any time soon. The two world leaders Joe Steele despised more than any others had suddenly made common cause. Charlie found one more question: “How long does he think Poland’s got?”

  “Days. Not weeks—days,” Kagan answered. “The Poles say they’ll fight. It’s just a question of how well they can. They have a lot of men in uniform—a lot more than we do. Maybe Hitler has bitten off more than he can chew. Maybe.” He sounded like a man trying to talk himself into believing it but not doing very well.

  “Okay. Thanks—I guess.” Charlie went back to his office and wrote a statement condemning the Nazis and Reds for joining in a pact “obviously aimed at the nation between them” and hoping that the remaining European democracies “would remain true to their solemn commitments.”

  When Joe Steele spoke on the radio that night, he used Charlie’s phrases unchanged. Listening, Charlie felt satisfaction mixed with dread. Joe Steele had the air of a doctor standing outside a sickroom, going over things with the relatives of a patient who wouldn’t pull through.

  But Sarah grinned and banged her Raggedy Ann doll on the coffee table. Charlie watched to make sure she didn’t bang her head on it—at not quite a year and a half, she didn’t have walking down pat yet. She also didn’t know what was going on across the Atlantic. Even if she had known, she wouldn’t have cared.

  Plenty of much older Americans didn’t care, either. They or their ancestors had come here so they wouldn’t have to worry about Europe’s periodic bouts of madness. Another war, so soon after the last one? You had to be crazy to do something like that. Didn’t you?

  Crazy or not, just over a week later Germany invaded Poland with tanks and dive-bombers and machine guns and millions of marching men in coal-scuttle helmets and jackboots. France and England sent ultimatums, demanding that Hitler withdraw. He didn’t. First one and then the other declared war.

  But that was all they did. They didn’t attack Germany the way Germany was attacking Poland. There were a few small skirmishes along the Reich’s western frontier. Past that, nothing. Meanwhile, before the fighting farther east was more than a few days old, it grew crystal clear that the Poles were in way over their heads. Shattered by weapons and by doctrine they couldn’t start to match, they reeled back or charged hopelessly. Charlie read reports about mounted lancers attacking tanks.

  “Yes, I’ve seen those, too,” Vince Scriabin said when he mentioned them. “It’s very brave, but it isn’t war, is it?”

  “What would you call it, then?” Charlie asked.

  “Murder,” Scriabin answered. He had on his desk just then a typewritten page full of the names of men condemned for wrecking and other kinds of treason. It was upside down, but Charlie could read things that way—a handy skill for a reporter to pick up. Scriabin had written HFP—all in red in the narrow margin above the names.

  Charlie did his best not to shiver. HFP abbreviated Highest Form of Punishment. In other words, that was a page full of the names of dead men. On how many other sheets had Scriabin scribbled those same three ominous letters? Charlie had no idea, but the number couldn’t be small.

  He didn’t see Mike’s name on the sheet. That was something: a small something, but something. If he had seen it, the sentence would already have been carried out. Nothing to do then but kill himself or take his best shot at killing Scriabin and J. Edgar Hoover and Joe Steele.

  Well, he didn’t have to worry about that, thank God. All he had to worry about was a new world war. Next to what happened to his brother, it didn’t seem like so much.

  Then, with Poland on the ropes, Trotsky jumped what was left of it from behind. His excuse, such as it was, was as cynical as anything Joe Steele could have come up with. He blandly announced that, since Poland had fallen into chaos, Red Army troops were moving in to restore order.

  And to split the country’s corpse with Hitler. Nazi and Red officers shook hands at the new frontier (which Litvinov and Ribbentrop had agreed to in advance). A British cartoonist turned out what became a famous drawing of Hitler and Trotsky graciously bowing to each other over a body labeled POLAND. The smirking Führer was saying, “The dirty Jew, I believe?”, to which the smiling Red leader was replying, “The assassin of the workers, I presume?”

  Joe Steele made a speech before the National Press Club. That wasn’t what it had been back in the day. If you didn’t like the President—if you insisted on saying you didn’t like the President—you weren’t at the banquet in a suit and tie or a tux. No, you were somewhere farther west, eating plainer grub and not much of it, and wearing less elegant attire.

  Or, if you were less lucky still, you’d gone West for good. You’d shown up on one of those sheets that crossed Scriabin’s desk, or maybe Joe Steele’s, and the aide or the boss had written HFP on it, and that was all she wrote. You’d never come back to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  Those were damn depressing thoughts to have while you were downing candied carrots and mashed potatoes and rubber chicken. Charlie tried to improve his attitude with bourbon. It helped some, even if he did stagger when he went to get his last couple of refills.

  Attorney General Wyszynski introduced Joe Steele. That was enough to make the reporters pay attention all by itself. If you didn’t merely end up on a bureaucratic list, if you needed to be tried, Wyszynski and his pet prosecutors were the ones who would send you up the river.

  Everyone applauded the President. Everyone watched everyone else to see how hard the others were applauding. Everyone tried to applaud harder than the people near him. You couldn’t just like Joe Steele. You had to be seen—and heard—to like him.

  The President ambled up to the lectern. He had a rolling, deliberate walk that would hav
e seemed more at home in a vineyard than in the corridors of power. Charlie didn’t expect much from the address, even if he’d helped draft it. Joe Steele was a decent speaker, but that was all he was.

  He outdid himself that night. Maybe he was speaking from the heart. (Yes, Charlie knew some people denied that Joe Steele had a heart. Sometimes, he was one of those people himself. Sometimes, but not that night.) The President’s talk got remembered as the Plague on Both Your Houses speech.

  “Half the troubles in our own country come from the Nazis. The other half come from the Reds,” he said. “Now they lie down together. They are not the lion and the lamb. They are two serpents. If we were lucky, each would grab the other by the tail. They would swallow each other up till nothing was left of either one. But we are not so lucky, and there are more players in the game than Germany and Russia alone.”

  He paused to puff on his pipe. It stayed close at hand all the time, even when he was making a speech. “For the second time in a generation, war tears at the vitals of Europe. We will not let it touch us here. This fight is not worth the red blood of one single American boy. No one over there has a cause that was worth going to war for. No, gentlemen. No one. All they have in Europe are hate and greed.

  “For the United States, for the land we all love, the greatest dangers lurk in insidious encroachments for foreign powers by fanatics. We must and we shall step up our vigilance against them—Reds and Nazis will both try to ensnare us. As long as we stamp them out at home, everything will go well here. And as long as we steer clear of Europe’s latest stupid war, everything will be fine—for us—there.”

  He dipped his head and stepped back. The hand he’d got before the speech was pragmatic, politic. The one he got after it? The reporters meant that one. He’d told them what they wanted to hear, and he’d done it well. Later, Charlie decided the difference was something like the one between a stage kiss and a real kiss.

  Sitting next to Charlie was the Los Angeles Times’ Washington correspondent. “He keeps talking like that, he won’t have any trouble getting a third term,” the man said. Chances were he meant it and wasn’t just currying favor. The Los Angeles Times was firmly in Joe Steele’s back pocket.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right,” Charlie said. He expected Joe Steele to run again, and to win again. Why wouldn’t he? Not just the L.A. Times was in his back pocket. These days, the whole country was.

  * * *

  News of the war reached the labor encampment, of course. Few men there got excited about it. They had more important things to worry about. Another Montana winter was coming on. If they didn’t do everything they could to get ready for it, they wouldn’t see spring.

  A couple of scalps, guys who’d been in only weeks or months and still sometimes thought of themselves as free men, tried to volunteer for the Army. The Jeebies who ran the encampment only laughed at them. “The bastard said, ‘Why do you think the Army needs wreckers in it?’” one would-be soldier reported indignantly.

  Mike listened. He sympathized. He didn’t get up in arms, though. You had to take care of Number One first. After more than two years, his old jacket had got too old and tattered for even the best tailor in the encampment to keep it in one piece. That didn’t necessarily mean they’d issue him a new one, though. Wreckers didn’t have to get replacements for such things. Who was to say they hadn’t wrecked the old, ratty ones?

  He’d spent weeks running errands for a sergeant in the supply cabin. He’d buttered the man up as if he were basting a Thanksgiving turkey. He’d let the sergeant get a good look at the cotton quilting coming out at the elbows of his old jacket and at the seams across the back.

  And he’d got a new one. The Jeebie had actually thrown the new one at him, growling, “Get your number on this, front and back, quick as you can. Make sure the ink dries so it doesn’t run.”

  “I’ll do it!” he’d said happily. “Thanks!” And he did.

  Now he had to keep that sergeant sweet with more small favors for another few weeks. He’d ease off a little at a time, so gradually that the sergeant didn’t notice. Or maybe he wouldn’t ease off at all. His boots were wearing out, too. A new pair would mean he didn’t have to plug holes with rags and cardboard to keep his toes from freezing.

  From somewhere, John Dennison had got his hands on a wool watch cap, the kind they wore in the Navy. Jacket, pants, and boots were all uniform items. The Jeebies didn’t get their knickers in a twist about what you put on your head. Oh, they’d kick your ass for you if you wore a turban like Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. But they’d cut you some slack if you didn’t do anything too stupid.

  “What I really crave is one of those Russian fur hats with the earflaps,” John said. “But this is the next best thing.”

  “You’re better off with what you’ve got, you ask me,” Mike told him. “If you put on one of those fur hats, sure as hell a guard’d steal it. The GBI doesn’t give them anything that nice.”

  “Huh,” Dennison said thoughtfully. “Well, you’ve got somethin’ there. I didn’t look at it like that.”

  Winter had some advantages. The latrines stank less. Flies and mosquitoes disappeared till the weather warmed up again. Even fleas grew less annoying for a while. Bedbugs and lice . . . Bedbugs and lice didn’t care what the weather was like. They’d get you any which way.

  A nearsighted wrecker used a sharp chunk of volcanic glass to carve louse combs out of wood. Mike got one with some tobacco. The craftsmanship was amazing; the comb looked as if a machine had shaped it. And the teeth were close enough together to rout lice from his hair and even to peel off nits. You couldn’t ask for a better tool.

  Three days after he started using it, Mike suddenly burst out laughing in his bunk. “What’s so funny?” four or five other men asked, more or less in chorus. In the encampment, anything funny was precious.

  He held out the elegant piece of woodcarving. “Look!” he said. “It’s a fine-toothed comb!”

  A couple of wreckers swore at him. The others laughed along. But Mike kept staring at the carved marvel. Damned if it wasn’t a fine-toothed comb. Back in the days before bathtubs and showers grew common, people needed fine-toothed combs to fight back against the pests that lived on them. When you searched with one of those, what were you searching for? Lice, that was what.

  He caught one, too, and crushed it between his thumbnails. He’d almost puked the first time he found a small, pale louse in his hair. Now all he felt was satisfaction when he killed one. Familiarity bred contempt, all right.

  The encampment had other kinds of adventures besides pest control. There was mail call, for instance. The Jeebies didn’t let in everything everybody wrote to you—nowhere close—but they did let in some mail. You always wanted to hear from people you loved, even if a censor’s scratchouts sometimes showed you weren’t the first one to set eyes on what they wrote.

  Mail call also had another side to it. It was a gamble. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If the bastard with the sack didn’t call your name, good form said you had to turn away without showing how disappointed you were. It was like not showing that a wound hurt you in the last war . . . or, Mike supposed, in this new one. Since Stella’s letters stopped coming, he’d got good at it.

  One cold day—a day colder than he would have thought possible with the sun shining brightly—the guard bawled, “Sullivan! NY24601!”

  “I’m here!” Mike pushed his way through the other wreckers and held out a mittened hand. The Jeebie gave him an envelope, then called out another name and number.

  It wasn’t a letter from anybody Mike knew. It was one of those cellophane-windowed envelopes businesses used. The return address was printed: Hogan, Hunter, Gasarch & Hume, with an address not too far from where he’d lived in the half-forgotten days before he came to Montana.

  He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. Hogan, Hunter,
Gasarch & Hume turned out to be a firm of lawyers. And the letter turned out to be a notification of divorce proceedings against him. The cause was given as abandonment. In view of the circumstances, the letter finished, no alimony is sought in this case. A signature that might have been Gasarch’s lay under the typewritten words.

  Mike stared at the piece of paper. Like so many wreckers’ wives, Stella’d had enough. She was getting on with her life without him. The Catholic Church didn’t recognize divorces. The state of New York damn well did, though. Stella might think about the world to come, but she lived in this one.

  “Fuck,” Mike muttered, breathing out fog. No, he wasn’t the first guy here whose wife ran out of patience with being on her own. He knew he wouldn’t be the last. That didn’t make the hurt, the loss, or the sense of betrayal any easier to take. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it over his shoulder. It was too thick and firm to be good around a cigarette or for anything else.

  XV

  “I’m going to work, sweetie,” Charlie told his daughter. “Come give me a kiss bye-bye.”

  “No.” Sarah was just past two. She said no at any excuse or none. Then she came over, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.

  “Okay. My turn now,” Esther said after Sarah disentangled herself from her daddy.

  “No,” Sarah said again.

  Taking no notice of her, Esther stepped into Charlie’s arms. They kissed. He counted his blessings every time he held her. One of the big ones was that he wasn’t in a labor encampment. If he were, would Esther have dumped him the way Stella’d dumped Mike? He hoped not, but how could you know?

  Stella and Esther had stayed friends in spite of everything. “It’s not that she didn’t love him,” Esther’d tried to explain to Charlie. “It’s just that he wasn’t there and he couldn’t be there and finally she got so she couldn’t stand being by herself any more and watching the world pass her by.”