Joe Steele Read online

  Charlie still resented it. “What about that ‘in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer’ stuff?” he’d asked.

  “What about ‘to have and to hold’?” Esther had returned. “She couldn’t have him, she couldn’t hold him, not for years. That’s why she talked to a lawyer. Who knows when they’ll turn him loose? Who knows whether they’ll let him come back to New York City if they do?”

  He’d had no retort for that. Some wreckers had been released from labor encampments, but on condition they stayed in the empty states that held the encampments. If they broke the deal and got caught where they weren’t supposed to be, back behind barbed wire they’d go, and for a longer stretch this time around.

  He squeezed Esther extra tight before heading out the door. He hoped she wouldn’t drop him and run as if from a grenade with the pin pulled if he did get thrown aboard a train and shipped to the prairie or the mountains. And he hoped the Jeebies never knocked on his door at midnight. Even when you worked in the White House, even when you talked to Joe Steele almost every day, hope was the most you could do.

  A short-pants kid was hawking papers at the corner where Charlie caught the bus. “Extra!” the kid shouted. “Nazis invade Low Countries! Read all about it!”

  “Oh, God!” Charlie said. The other shoe had finally dropped, then. The Germans had taken Denmark at a gulp, and hadn’t had much trouble in Norway, either. But Scandinavia was just a sideshow. Everybody knew it. The main event would be in the west, the way it had been the last time around. Now the bell for that one had rung. Charlie tossed the newsboy a nickel. “Lemme have one of those.”

  “Here you go, Mister.” The kid gave him a paper.

  He read it waiting for the bus, and then on it on the way to the White House. The Nazis weren’t doing anything halfway. They hadn’t just violated Belgium’s neutrality, as the Kaiser did in 1914. They’d trampled Holland’s neutrality, too. And Luxembourg’s, not that anybody gave a damn about Luxembourg. The only reason it seemed to be there was to get it in the neck.

  The Luftwaffe was bombing the hell out of the Low Countries, and out of France, too. Göring had shown what it could do as far back as the Spanish Civil War. He hadn’t let up in the attack on Poland. He wasn’t letting up now, either.

  And Neville Chamberlain was out as British Prime Minister. He’d underestimated Hitler over the Sudetenland. He’d said the Nazis had missed the bus even as they were devouring Scandinavia. He’d “won” a vote of confidence by a margin much smaller than the Tories’ majority in Commons—even they hadn’t had much confidence in him. Now he was gone. Winston Churchill would have to measure himself against the Führer.

  Charlie carried the paper into the White House. Seeing it, Stas Mikoian pointed at it and said, “Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket over there.”

  “Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?” Charlie agreed. “Hitler’s shoved all his chips into the pot.”

  “So has everybody else,” Mikoian answered. “Now we see what the cards are worth.”

  Over the next month, they did. The fighting was really decided in the first few days, when the Nazis’ tanks and troop carriers punched through the weak French defenses in the Ardennes and raced for the Channel. That only became clear looking back, though. What was obvious at the time were the surrenders of Holland and Belgium, the headlong French retreat, and the way the best French and British troops got cut off and surrounded against the sea at Dunkirk.

  Most of them managed to cross the Channel to England. From the perspective of anyone who didn’t root for the Nazis, it looked like a miracle. Churchill bellowed eloquent defiance at Hitler on the BBC.

  And Joe Steele summoned Charlie to the oval study above the Blue Room. The smell of the sweet pipe tobacco he favored hung in the air, as it always did there. “We need to keep England in the fight,” the President said bluntly. “Hitler is already on the Atlantic in France. If England goes down, too, America will face the whole continent united under a dictator.”

  “Yes, sir,” Charlie said, in place of Takes one to know one. He knew who and what he was working for. He just didn’t know how not to work for him. Well, he knew some ways, but they all struck him as cures worse than the disease.

  Still blunt, Joe Steele went on, “England is running out of money to buy war supplies from us. They can’t turn out enough to fight off the Germans on their own. If we don’t give them credit—or give them what they need now and worry later about getting paid back—they’ll fold up. So get me a draft of a speech saying that’s what we’ll do. I’ll run a bill through Congress to keep it legal.”

  He would, too. Congress was as much under his muscular thumb as the courts were. Congressmen who made him unhappy found themselves with legal troubles—or with scandals exploding in their districts.

  Charlie wrote the speech. Joe Steele used some of it on the radio. People didn’t jump up and down about the idea of taking a step closer to war. They didn’t do much complaining where anyone else could hear them, then. You never knew who might tell a Jeebie you were a wrecker. Labor encampments always needed fresh backs. Joe Steele’s bill sailed through Congress.

  Across the Atlantic, Churchill took note of the new law. “Once again, America is too proud to fight,” he said. “But, luckily, she is not too proud to help us fight. Well, fair enough. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. If the Devil opposed Adolf Hitler, I should endeavor to give him a good notice in the House of Commons. Thus I thank Joe Steele.”

  “Did I just hear that?” Esther exclaimed after Churchill’s speech crackled across the sea by shortwave. She sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

  “Yeah, you did, ’cause I heard it, too,” Charlie said. “I wouldn’t go on about it with your friends or anything, though.”

  She made a face at him. “I know better than that.”

  “Okay.” Charlie left it there. He needed a shortwave set. In his job, he had to hear the news as soon as he could. It wasn’t against the law for anybody to have that kind of radio and to listen to whatever he pleased. But Churchill wasn’t the only foreign leader who threw darts at Joe Steele over the airwaves. If you repeated them, you could find yourself in more trouble than you really wanted.

  Was Joe Steele listening to the Prime Minister’s speech? Charlie had no way of knowing. Sometimes Joe Steele slept in the middle of the day and stayed up all night—and made his aides and anyone who needed to do business with him stay up all night, too. Sometimes he kept the same hours as anybody else. He was a law unto himself.

  Whether the President was listening now or not, he would hear about the gibe. Charlie was sure of that. And, sooner or later, Joe Steele would find a way to make Churchill pay. Charlie was sure of that, too.

  * * *

  The Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to pick someone to run for President. Charlie wondered why they bothered. They might not know they wouldn’t win, but everybody else did. A couple of Senators wanted a crack at Joe Steele. So did Tom Dewey, the young Governor of New York. He’d been a crusading district attorney. To Charlie, he looked and sounded like a GBI man.

  They didn’t nominate him. Maybe they thought he was too young. Maybe they thought he acted like a Jeebie, too. They also didn’t nominate either Senator. They chose a dark horse, a newcomer to politics—and to the Republican Party—named Wendell Willkie.

  “I used to be a Democrat,” Willkie declared in his acceptance speech. “I used to be, till Joe Steele drove me out of the party. He’s driven everybody who cares about freedom out of the party. Now it’s time to drive him out of the White House! Nobody’s ever had a third term. Nobody’s ever deserved one. He sure doesn’t. Let’s put this country back together again!”

  All the Republicans in the hall cheered and clapped. Coming out of the radio in Charlie’s front room, the noise was like the roar of heavy surf. He had no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover�
�s men had already compiled a dossier for every delegate and alternate. Chances were, a list of all those names had already crossed Vince Scriabin’s desk. Beside how many of them had the Hammer scribbled HFP?

  Three weeks after the GOP tapped Willkie, the Democrats convened at the Chicago Stadium. Charlie hadn’t been back there since the convention in 1932. He wondered if that diner near the Stadium was still in business. He didn’t try to find out. He also made damn sure he didn’t remind Scriabin about it.

  Things were different now. He was working for Joe Steele, not covering his nomination. There wouldn’t be any fight at this convention, either. It would do what Joe Steele wanted. It would, and it did. It nominated him and John Nance Garner for third terms.

  “I thank you,” the President told the Democratic politicos (and chances were the Jeebies had files on them, too). “I thank you for your trust. If the world were not in such disorder, I might not run again. But the country needs an experienced hand on the wheel. I will do my best to keep us going in the right direction, and I will do my best to stay at peace with the whole world.”

  They cheered him. Charlie applauded with everybody else. You couldn’t sit there like a bump on a log. And the sentiment was worthwhile. The only question was whether Joe Steele, or anyone else, could live up to it.

  Wendell Willkie charged around the country. He had energy. He’d make a speech wherever a couple of dozen people gathered. Joe Steele didn’t campaign nearly so hard. He told people he didn’t intend to go to war. He asked them if they wanted to change horses in midstream.

  And his organization carried the ball for him. The only way somebody wouldn’t tell you to vote for Joe Steele was if you climbed a mountain, lived in a cave, and ate bugs. Even then, one of his men might try to recruit you for a HERMITS FOR JOE STEELE club.

  Charlie wrote the speeches Joe Steele told him to write. Hitler did his best to get the President reelected. The savage air attacks against England and the U-boats terrorizing shipping in the Atlantic warned against picking a rookie to try to run things.

  In the last six weeks before the election, J. Edgar Hoover came to the White House almost every day. He might have been briefing Joe Steele about Reds and Nazis doing their dirty work somewhere inside the country. He might have, but Charlie didn’t think so. Every time he saw the GBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover was grinning. Smirking might have been the better word.

  Like any bulldog, J. Edgar Hoover usually looked as if he wanted to take a bite out of whoever got near him. A happy J. Edgar Hoover made Charlie wonder how and why such a prodigy could happen. A happy J. Edgar Hoover also scared the hell out of him.

  Joe Steele often smiled after he talked to Hoover, too. The President showed amusement more often than the Jeebies’ head honcho did. He would have had trouble showing amusement less often than J. Edgar Hoover did. But a smiling Joe Steele, like a smirking J. Edgar Hoover, made anyone who saw him wonder what was going on behind that upcurved mouth.

  People who lived in Washington, D.C., all the time didn’t have the right to vote for President. Joe Steele retained his California registration. He had himself photographed dropping an absentee ballot in the mailbox so it would arrive in good time.

  And then election day rolled around. Joe Steele had trounced Herbert Hoover fair and square (as long as you didn’t dwell on how he’d won the nomination, anyhow). He hadn’t pulled any funny business clobbering Alf Landon, either. He hadn’t needed any.

  Charlie would have liked to stay with Esther and Sarah and listen to the returns on the radio. When you wrote speeches for the President of the United States, nobody cared what you liked to do, not on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of a year divisible by four. He went to the White House instead.

  Colored cooks brought in trays of ham and fried chicken and sweet potatoes and string beans. Colored waiters served the men who served Joe Steele. A colored bartender had set up shop in a corner of the East Hall.

  “Bourbon over ice,” Charlie told him.

  “Yes, suh,” the barkeep answered with a smile. That was an easy one: no mixing, no thinking. Charlie tipped him a dime anyway. The bartender smiled again. So did Charlie. He used bourbon the way a knight of old used his shield: to hold trouble at a distance.

  Joe Steele’s California cronies were in the East Hall, of course. So was J. Edgar Hoover. So was Andy Wyszynski. So were a good many other men who’d helped the President run the country since 1933. Everybody seemed confident.

  And, when the polls in the Eastern Time Zone closed and returns started coming in, they found they had reason to be confident. Joe Steele ran up percentages even higher than he had against Alf Landon. He’d got past sixty percent in 1936. This year, he looked to be winning by almost two to one.

  “I figured he’d get his third term,” Charlie said to Stas Mikoian. “But Willkie ran hard. I thought he’d make a better showing than this.”

  Mikoian’s eyes, dark as black coffee, narrowed under bushy eyebrows. “You never know, do you?” he said blandly. “That’s why they have the election—so you can find out.”

  “Uh-huh,” Charlie said. Something lay behind the clever Armenian’s words, but Charlie couldn’t unravel it. He’d had enough bourbon to shield himself from thought as well as trouble.

  By eleven o’clock, polls on the West Coast were closing, too. Joe Steele’s rout had swept clean across the country. Most of the candidates he liked for the House and Senate were comfortably ahead, too.

  He and his wife came down to the East Hall a little before midnight. Maybe he’d been working. Maybe he’d been sleeping. You never could tell. Everybody cheered when the President and First Lady walked in. Joe Steele waved and dipped his head and looked as modest as a not very modest man could look.

  He walked over to the bartender. “Apricot brandy, Julius,” he said.

  “Comin’ up, suh. Congratulations, suh,” the man said.

  Apricot brandy was one of the few bits of his heritage Joe Steele left on display. As far as Charlie was concerned, the stuff made good paint thinner or flamethrower fuel, but you needed a stainless-steel gullet to toss it down the way the President did.

  Betty Steele asked Julius for a scotch and soda. She mostly kept to herself around the White House; Charlie seldom saw her. She was anything but an active First Lady, the way, say, Eleanor Roosevelt might have been. She still had her usual air of quiet sadness.

  People hollered and pointed at the radio. “Wendell Willkie has conceded defeat,” the announcer was saying. “His statement has just reached us. He claims there were certain voting irregularities in some areas, but admits they were not enough to change the result. He extends his best wishes to the President for leading the country through this difficult and dangerous time.”

  “Well, you can’t get much more gracious about it than that.” Stas Mikoian seemed in a mood to be gracious himself. He commonly showed more class than the other men who’d come east from California with Joe Steele.

  Vince Scriabin, by contrast, laughed like a hyena, laughed till tears streamed down his face from behind his spectacles, when he heard Willkie’s concession statement. Charlie gaped at him, hardly believing his own eyes. He couldn’t remember seeing the Hammer smile, though he supposed he must have. He was positive he’d never seen Scriabin laugh. He hadn’t imagined the pencil-necked little hardcase had laughter in him.

  “Voting irregularities!” Scriabin chortled. “Oh, good Lord!” He dissolved into fresh hilarity.

  Joe Steele and J. Edgar Hoover thought that was pretty goddamn funny, too. “You know what Boss Tweed said, don’t you?” the President asked the head of the GBI.

  “No. What?” Hoover asked, as he was meant to do.

  “‘As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?’” Joe Steele quoted with great gusto. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “And I damn well do!” He and J. Edgar Ho
over both thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  “Now, Joe,” Betty Steele said, but she was chuckling, too.

  Charlie also laughed, along with everybody else close enough to the President and the GBI boss to hear the exchange. Boss Tweed had been dead for a hell of a long time. And anyone who repeated Joe Steele’s crack anywhere outside of this room was much too likely to end up the same way in short order.

  Charlie went over to the bartender, who waited expectantly. “Let me have another bourbon, Julius,” he said. “Why don’t you make it a double this time?”

  “You got it, suh,” Julius said. Charlie inhaled the drink, and then another double after it, and another one after that. No matter how pickled he got, though, and no matter how drug through a knothole he felt the next morning, he couldn’t forget what Joe Steele said.

  * * *

  Another lodgepole tottered, crackled, and fell, landing in the snow within a few inches of where Mike had thought it would drop. He’d turned into a pretty fair lumberjack since they chucked him into this encampment. He hadn’t intended to, but he had anyway. As with anything else, practice made good if not perfect.

  Of course, working alongside John Dennison for more than three years now went a long way toward making good, too. The man with WY232 on the front and back of his jacket came over to stand next to Mike and admire the downfallen tree for a moment before they started lopping branches off it. “Nice job,” Dennison said.

  “Thanks.” Mike grinned. Praise from the carpenter counted for more than it did from most people, because he never came out with it unless he meant it.

  But Dennison hadn’t finished. Barely moving his lips, pitching his words so no guard could possibly hear them, he went on, “Help fuck up the count tonight, okay?”

  “Oh, yeah?” Mike answered the same way. That prison-yard style of talking was one more thing he hadn’t known he’d pick up when they shipped him here from New York City. But he had, all right. As with dropping trees where he wanted them to fall, he’d got good at it, too.