Joe Steele Read online

  * * *

  Mike climbed into the back of an olive-drab Army truck with nothing but relief. “And so we bid farewell to lovely, romantic North Japan, to its quaint natives, and to its curious and exotic customs,” he said. Even after so many years as a wrecker and a dogface, he still liked slinging words. It was a hell of a lot more fun than, say, slinging hash.

  He thought so, anyhow. The other soldiers boarding the truck with him jeered and hooted. “Cut the bullshit, Sarge,” one of them said. “Only good thing about the fuckin’ natives is, they didn’t manage to shoot me.”

  “I can’t even say that,” Mike replied.

  “Oh,” the soldier added, “and we didn’t get blown up by the atomic whoozis.”

  “That wasn’t the North Japanese. That was us,” Mike said.

  “Well, what if the flyboys had missed? Then it woulda come down on our heads and blown us to the moon instead of the Japs. Coulda happened, I bet. Them bomber pilots, they can fuck up a wet dream.”

  “Yeah.” Mike couldn’t even tell him he was full of it. Maybe he wasn’t. It wasn’t as if Mike hadn’t had to dive into a hole a time or three himself to escape his own side’s ordnance. But that big a screwup wouldn’t have been easy, and it hadn’t happened.

  Another soldier said, “Us and the Japs, we sure wasted a lot of time and blood and sweat to call it a tie and all go back to where we started from.”

  “Status quo ante bellum,” Mike said. He wasn’t sure whether that came from being a reporter or straight out of Catholic school. Either way, he’d had it a long time.

  It just confused the soldier from his section. “What the hell does that mean, Sarge?” the man asked.

  “The same thing as what you said, only in Latin.”

  “Latin? La-de-da!” the guy said. Mike gave him the finger. Everybody laughed. If Mike hadn’t shown he was as tough as anybody half his age, his men might have decided he was a fairy. He’d seen that soldiers often prided themselves on how ignorant they were, and distrusted anybody who knew anything that didn’t have to do with killing. The only worse group for that he could think of were Jeebies.

  The driver slid over from behind the wheel to look back through the little window in the partition that separated his compartment from the bigger one behind it. Seeing the truck was full, he said, “Okay, we’re gonna get outa here.” The men in the back gave him a hand. Mike joined in along with the rest.

  Down the coast road from Yamashita they went. Looking backward—the only way he could look out—Mike was reminded of the truck ride he’d taken from the railway siding to the labor encampment in the Rockies. The fields on either side of that highway hadn’t been pocked with shell craters, though. And, once that truck got up into the mountains, the air had been crisp, and smelled like pines. Now it was hot and muggy and held the faint but unmistakable whiff of death.

  Before too long, they left North Japan and went back into South Japan. The two countries that were unhappily learning to divide the Home Islands between them had already set up border checkpoints on the road. The two flags flew on poles of exactly the same height. Even though nobody on either side of the frontier bothered the truck convoy, Mike was glad to get out of the country that put the hammer and sickle inside the meatball and into the one that left the old Japanese flag alone.

  Not far south of the border, an enormous American processing center had sprouted, rather like a ring of toadstools after a rain. One advantage of being a sergeant was that Mike stood in a shorter line before the rear-echelon clowns who decided what to do with him.

  He showed a personnel sergeant his dog tags. “And where were you stationed before the fighting broke out?” the man asked.

  “On the demilitarized zone. Right outside of Wakamatsu, about fifteen miles east of the mountains.”

  “Really?” The personnel sergeant lifted an eyebrow. “You were . . . lucky, weren’t you?” That was a polite way of saying How come you’re still alive? Did you run like Red Grange?

  “Mac, you don’t know the half of it,” Mike answered. “I was coming back from leave on Shikoku when things went kablooie. My buddy and me, we’d just about made it to Tokyo when we got the news.” He wondered how Dick Shirakawa was doing. With his looks, Dick had a built-in excuse, one even the Army recognized, for staying behind the lines.

  “I see,” the personnel sergeant said. Mike wondered how he’d managed to steer clear of the fighting. The guy wore a clean uniform. He hadn’t missed any meals. He might as well have been in an insurance office back in Bridgeport. Now he asked, “Would it suit you if I send you to that area again?”

  “I guess so,” Mike answered. “I liked being there before. Christ only knows what it looks like these days, though, or how many of the people I knew last year are still there.” Are still alive, he thought, but he didn’t say it.

  “We’ll do that, then. Wakamatsu, you said?” The personnel sergeant seemed glad to solve a problem so fast. Mike wasn’t so sure he was glad to be going back. But now he had orders, so all he had to do was follow them.

  The processing center had its own motor pool. A buck private wouldn’t have been able to promote a jeep, but a veteran first sergeant with a chestful of ribbons (Mike made sure he put them on before he went over) had no trouble at all. They also might have given him a bad time had they known he’d served in a punishment brigade, but he hadn’t worn the P on his sleeve for a while now.

  Country around the demilitarized zone hadn’t been smashed up so badly as the rest of Japan during the Second World War. The Japanese War made up for that, and then some. All the damage here was fresher than it was farther south. And the North Japanese had kidnapped lots of people and taken them over the border. Others, they simply shot. Not many of his old friends greeted Mike when he made it back. The only thing that made him sure he’d come to the right place was his road map.

  On the far side of the zone, he got glimpses of far-off North Japanese soldiers laying barbed wire and digging tank traps. They’d invaded the Constitutional Monarchy, but now they were getting ready for somebody to invade them. Mike just scratched his head. He didn’t follow that kind of logic, if it was logic.

  Joe Steele would, he thought, and laughed quietly to himself.

  XXV

  Only a couple of months after atomic fire seared Sendai and Nagano, Mao ran Chiang off the Chinese mainland. Chiang and his Nationalists Dunkirked across the Formosa Strait to the island of the same name (though most maps also called it Taiwan). Without any navy to speak of, Mao’s Reds couldn’t follow them. Chiang declared that the Nationalists still were the legitimate government of all of China, and that one fine day they’d go back to the mainland for another few rounds with Mao.

  Joe Steele recognized Chiang as rightful President of China. Some of America’s allies did, too, but not all of them. Charlie wasn’t particularly surprised. Joe Steele hadn’t recognized Trotsky as ruler in Russia till they ended up on the same side in the war against Hitler.

  He did remark to Stas Mikoian, “I wondered if the boss was going to use some more A-bombs in China to give Chiang a helping hand.” Not by word or by inflection did he let on about how much the idea scared him. Showing that anything the boss might do scared you was an invitation to the Jeebies to come pick you up. The only way you could mention such things was with a neutrality more scrupulous than Switzerland’s.

  Mikoian nodded. “There was some discussion of it,” he answered, also as coolly as if he were talking about how much vermouth to put in a Martini. He was smoother with that tone than Charlie was. As far as Charlie could tell, Mikoian was smoother with it than anybody. He might have been lightly amused as he continued, “Remember when Gromyko visited last month?”

  “Sure,” Charlie said. The Russian ambassador always looked as if he had a poker shoved up his behind. The Great Stone Face was his Washington nickname. He made Vince Scriabin seem jolly by compa
rison, and that wasn’t easy. “Why? What did he say?”

  “He said that if we dropped anything on Shanghai or Peiping, for instance, he couldn’t answer for what might happen to Paris or Rome.”

  “Oh,” Charlie said. After that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say. A moment later, Charlie did find one more question: “He persuaded the boss he meant it or Trotsky meant it or however you want to put that?”

  “He must have, or the bombers would have flown,” Mikoian answered. “Myself, I thought they were going to. But the world can probably live through one atomic bomb from each side. Once you start throwing them around for every little thing, pretty soon there’s not much left to throw them at. Chances are there’s not much left of you, either.”

  “Is that you talking, or are you quoting Joe Steele?”

  “I’m quoting what I told him. General Marshall said the same thing,” Mikoian replied. “He thought it over, and he decided we were right.”

  “I see,” Charlie said, in place of the Thank heaven! he felt like shouting. He added, “You know, there are times it doesn’t break my heart that I’m not a big enough wheel to sit in when you guys talk about stuff like that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The glint in Mikoian’s eye gave his sardonic words the lie. With a wry chuckle, he said, “I didn’t expect I’d need to worry about blowing up the world when I came to Washington with Joe Steele right at the end of the First World War. All you can do is roll with the punches the best way you know how.”

  “Hey, I didn’t think I’d wind up here, either. I figured I’d write stories for the Associated Press the rest of my life, or maybe get good enough at what I did so a paper like the Boston Globe or the New York Times or the Washington Post would pick me up,” Charlie said. “But here I am.”

  “It hasn’t worked out too badly,” Mikoian said.

  Charlie couldn’t even tell him he was wrong. He’d done well for himself here. But the quote from Matthew that Esther hadn’t quite been able to remember kept coming back to mind. He hoped he hadn’t lost his soul. He thought things were better here with him than they would have been without him. He hadn’t exactly stood up to Joe Steele, though. He’d gone along with some things he wished he hadn’t.

  It was cold and rainy and getting close to Christmas when GBI men swooped down on half a dozen scholars of Chinese history, literature, and culture and dragged them off their campuses (in one case, straight out of a lecture hall) and into prison. The charge was aiding and abetting the fall of mainland China to the Reds.

  “We know who lost China for Chiang Kai-shek!” Andy Wyszynski boomed at a press conference. “Yes, we know, and those people will pay the price for their disloyalty!”

  “Haven’t we heard this song before?” Esther asked.

  “We aren’t just hearing it—we’re watching it,” Charlie said. And they were. The television set seemed an awful lot of cabinet—and an awful lot of money—for not much screen, but there was the Attorney General, bellowing away right in their living room.

  “Those treacherous fools deserve the long prison terms we will impose on them!” Wyszynski shouted, pumping the air with his clenched fist.

  When he said that, Esther raised an eyebrow. “What? He’s not going for the death penalty? Is Joe Steele getting soft?”

  Charlie gave one of those let-me-check-the-children looks. Then he said, “I don’t think he’s getting soft. I think he’s getting old. He really is slowing down some now that he’s passed seventy.”

  “About time, wouldn’t you say?” Esther made sure she kept her voice down.

  A commercial came on: a smiling blond girl who wore a costume that covered her torso with a rectangular cigarette pack pranced around in fishnet stockings while a background chorus sang about how wonderful the brand was. Charlie clucked sadly. “Boy, I didn’t think anything could be dumber than radio advertising, but this TV stuff shows me I was wrong.”

  “It’s pretty bad, all right.” Esther didn’t return to talking about Joe Steele. Charlie wasn’t sorry. Talking about the President had been dangerous at any time during his long, long administration. It seemed all the more so now that he was visibly starting to fail. He might lash out to show that his sand wasn’t really running out after all.

  Or he might live, and stay President, another ten years. Just because he was slowing down, that didn’t mean he had to stop soon. If he had any reason to live on, wasn’t it to spite John Nance Garner?

  * * *

  Every few weeks, a technical sergeant with a Geiger counter drove a jeep along the southern edge of the demilitarized zone, checking radiation levels from the bomb that had fallen on Nagano—and also, Mike supposed, from the one that had fallen on Sendai. The United States and Russia had both added to Honshu’s postwar misery.

  “How does it look?” Mike asked the guy, whose name was Gary Cunningham. “I mean, besides cold?”

  “I’m from Phoenix, Arizona. Not the weather I grew up with—that’s for goddamn sure.” Cunningham waved at the snow on the ground. “Didn’t have to worry about crap like this. But the radiation? It’s going down—seems to be dropping pretty much the way the slide-rule boys figured.”

  “Is it dangerous?” Mike asked.

  “I don’t think so, not where it’s at now. I mean, the smart guys don’t think so,” Cunningham answered. “All I do is, I get the numbers they want, and then I listen to them going on about what the shit means.”

  Mike suspected he was sandbagging. Plainly, he was nobody’s dope, even if he wasn’t a scientist himself. He would have seen enough and heard enough to make some pretty good guesses of his own. “I was in Yamashita when we dropped the one on Sendai,” Mike said. “What’s that going to do to me over time?”

  “So you were as close as anybody American,” Cunningham said. It wasn’t a question: he was putting a card in his mental filing cabinet. He went on, “You didn’t come down with radiation sickness, right? Your hair didn’t fall out? You didn’t start puking?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Mike said.

  Cunningham nodded. “Haven’t heard that any of us there came down with it. Some Americans who were too close to Nagano did.”

  “Some Americans who were in fucking Nagano, there’s nothing left of them now. Nothing left of a big old pile of Japs, either,” Mike said.

  “Well, you’ve got that right. I don’t know how many Russians we toasted in Sendai, either,” Gary Cunningham said. “But getting back to you . . . The short answer is, nobody knows what the radiation dose you picked up will do to you ten, twenty, thirty years down the line. You’re a guinea pig. If you die of cancer, maybe you can blame it on being too close to the bomb. Or maybe it would have happened anyway. I can’t tell you. Right now, I don’t think anyone can. The docs’ll be studying you and the other soldiers and the Japs who were in the neighborhood, and when your son’s as old as you are maybe they’ll know what’s what.”

  “I don’t have any kids. My wife deep-sixed me when I was in an encampment,” Mike growled. “Suppose I meet somebody now. Do I need to worry about what the bomb did to my nuts?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that, either. I can’t even begin to guess, so I won’t try, okay?” Cunningham said. He cocked his head to one side and studied Mike. “So you were a scalp, too, huh?”

  “Damn straight. Sullivan, Michael, NY24601. I was up in Montana, chopping down trees. How about you?”

  “Cunningham, Gary, AZ1797. I dug irrigation ditches in New Mexico and Colorado.” Cunningham took off the gloves shielding his hands from the cold. His palms were all over calluses, even after what had to be a good length of time away from forced labor. “They turned me loose in ’44, and I got drafted right afterwards. I liked the Army better than anything I could do on Civvy Street, so I stayed in. What’s your story?”

  “I volunteered in ’42 to get o
ut of the encampment,” Mike replied.

  “Wait . . .” Cunningham eyed him again, in a different way this time. “Guys who did that went straight into a punishment brigade.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mike said dryly.

  “But . . . Fuck, they told me what the odds were if I went into an outfit like that. I stayed in till my stretch ended on account of it. How many other guys who started out with you are still here?”

  “The ones who went all the way through everything and didn’t get maimed early on? My company CO did it. I know of two, three others. They weren’t people I was tight with or anything.”

  “Damn!” Cunningham said. “Now I feel like I’ve seen the Great White Whale. My hat’s off to you, man.” He doffed it. It was a fur cap with earflaps, the kind the guards in Montana would have drooled over. Mike didn’t think it was Army issue; he wondered if Cunningham had scavenged it from a dead North Japanese soldier or a Russian.

  “Yeah, well, that and a couple of yen’ll buy me some sake. Want to go into Wakamatsu and buy some sake?” Mike said. “You go through weather like this, you understand why the Japs drink it hot.”

  “That’s a fact,” Cunningham said. “I’ll buy you a couple. I’m honored to. You don’t run into many guys who went through everything you did and came out in one piece.”

  “Well, almost.” Mike rubbed the bottom of his left earlobe, which was most of an inch higher than the bottom of his right ear. “But thanks—I’ll take you up on that.” After so much terror and pain, serving in that punishment brigade had finally paid off—a couple of shots of sake’s worth, anyhow. What the hell? You took what you could get.

  * * *

  After Esther discouraged him from drowning his sorrows whenever he got the urge, Charlie didn’t go to the tavern near the White House anywhere near so often as he had before. He felt better for staying away, too . . . most of the time. Every once in a while, often on days when he’d had more of Vince Scriabin than he could take, he needed a Band-Aid for his brain. Bourbon did the trick better than anything else he knew.