Joe Steele Read online

  “Do you really think it matters if someone you don’t know overhears you?” Stella asked.

  “Yes.” Charlie bit off the single grudged word.

  There didn’t seem to be much to say to that. Mike didn’t try to say anything. He watched his brother shovel food into his chowlock . . . much the same way he had himself not long before. Esther ate more sedately. When they got done, Mike threw a dollar bill, a half, and a couple of dimes on the table. The two couples walked out of Hop Sing’s together.

  “Where now?” Stella said.

  “Back to my place,” Mike replied in tones that brooked no argument. “It’s closest. And I don’t have any spies in there.”

  “You hope you don’t,” Charlie said. Mike let that go. It was either let it go or get dragged into an argument that had nothing to do with what he really wanted to hear.

  The Village was . . . the Village. A Red stood on a soapbox and harangued a ten-at-night crowd that consisted of three drunks, a hooker, and a yawning cop who seemed much too lazy to oppress the proletariat. Posters touting Joe Steele and Norman Thomas sprouted like toadstools on walls and fences. Herbert Hoover’s backers had posted no bills in this part of town. They saved them for districts where somebody might look at them before he tore them down.

  Under a streetlamp, a sad-looking woman in frayed clothes hawked a crate of her worldly goods in lieu of selling herself. Mike thought that was a good idea. She’d get more for the novels and knickknacks and bits of cheap silver plate than she would for her tired, skinny body, and she wouldn’t want to slit her wrists come morning.

  Mike’s apartment was crowded for one. Four made it claustrophobic, especially when three of them started smoking. He didn’t care. He had a bottle of moonshine that claimed it was bourbon. It wasn’t, but it would light you up. He poured good shots into four glasses that didn’t match, added ice cubes, and handed them around.

  “Give,” he barked at Charlie.

  Give his brother did. “I can’t prove a damn thing,” Charlie finished. “I don’t know who Vince Scriabin was talking to, or where the guy was, or what Vince told him to do, or even if he did it. I don’t know a thing—but I sure do wonder.” He finished the rotgut at a gulp, then stared at the glass in astonishment. “Suffering Jesus! That’s awful! Gimme another one, will ya?”

  Mike handed him the second drink. His own head was whirling, too, more from what he’d heard than from the bad whiskey. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Scriabin calls . . . somebody . . . somewhere. He says to take care of it that night, because waiting would foul it up. And that night the Executive Mansion goes up in smoke.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Charlie agreed. Mike built himself a fresh drink, too. He needed it, no matter how lousy the hooch was.

  Stella and Esther were both staring at Charlie. Mike got the idea that Charlie hadn’t said anything to Esther about this till now. “You guys are sitting on the biggest story since Booth shot Lincoln,” she said. “Maybe since Aaron Burr shot Hamilton. You’re just sitting on it.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Mike said. “I’m just hearing it now, too.”

  “I don’t know what we’re sitting on,” Charlie said. “Maybe it’s an egg. Maybe it’s a china doorknob, and nothing’ll ever hatch out of it. For all I can prove, Scriabin has a bookie in California who’s giving him grief.” He took another healthy swig from the glass. “I ever say they call Vince the Hammer?”

  “Tough guy, huh?” Stella said.

  Charlie shook his head. “He looks like a pencil-necked bookkeeper. A bruiser with that kind of handle, he’s gonna be bad news, sure. But a scrawny little guy like Scriabin? You call him the Hammer, you can bet he’ll be ten times worse than the heavyweight.”

  “You’re scared,” Mike said in wonder.

  “You bet I am!” his brother said. “If you ever had anything to do with Scriabin, you would be, too. If I write a story that says he did this and that, ’cause Joe Steele told him to, it’s bad enough if he comes after me ’cause I’m wrong. If he comes after me ’cause I’m right . . . Way I’ve got things set up now, you and Esther split my life insurance.”

  “I don’t want your life insurance!” Esther said.

  “Me, neither,” Mike added.

  “I wouldn’t want it, either. It comes to about fifteen bucks apiece for you guys,” Charlie said. “But that’s where we are. Joe Steele’s gonna be the next President unless he gets hit by lightning or something. But there’s at least a chance that’s because he fried Franklin and Eleanor like a couple of pork chops.”

  Stella thrust her glass at Mike. “Make me another drink, too.” Esther held hers out as well.

  They killed that bottle, and another one that claimed it was scotch. Mike felt awful in the morning, and the hangover was the least of it.

  * * *

  The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Charlie wondered how and why the Founding Fathers had chosen that particular day to hold a Presidential election. For most of the time since the Civil War, America had been a reliably Republican country. It had been. By all the signs, it wasn’t any more. The polls back East had closed. Joe Steele and the Democrats held commanding leads almost everywhere. They were taking states they hadn’t won in living memory. And it wasn’t just Joe Steele trouncing Herbert Hoover. Steele had coattails.

  The Congress that came in with Hoover four years earlier had 270 Republicans and only 165 Democrats and Farmer-Labor men in the House, fifty-six Republicans and forty Democrats and Farmer-Labor men in the Senate. The one that came in two years later, after the Depression crashed down, was perfectly split in the Senate, while the Democrats and their Minnesota allies owned a minuscule one-vote edge in the House.

  This one . . . Not all the votes were counted, of course. But it looked as if the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party would dominate the House by better than two to one, maybe close to three to one. Their majority in the Senate wouldn’t be so enormous: only one Senator in three was running this year. They’d have a majority, though, and a big one.

  And so the victory party at the Fresno Memorial Auditorium was going full blast. The auditorium, built to commemorate the dead from the Great War, was hardly out of its box—it had opened earlier in the year. It was concrete and modern, all sharp angles, with nods to the classical style in the square columns that made up the main entranceway. For a town of just over 50,000, it was huge: it took up a whole city block.

  Up on the balcony of the auditorium was the Fresno County Historical Museum. Charlie didn’t see a lot of people going up there. The ones who did were mostly couples of courting age. He wasn’t sure, but he would have bet they were more interested in finding privacy than in looking over gold-mining equipment from seventy-five years before.

  Down on the main floor, a band that looked to be full of Armenians played jazz. Straight off of Bourbon Street, it wasn’t. Charlie wondered what a colored fellow from New Orleans would have thought of it. Not much, he figured. But the musicians did the best they could, and the campaign workers cutting a rug weren’t complaining.

  That might have been because of the punch filling half a dozen big cut-glass bowls. Joe Steele had said he favored repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition was on the way out, but remained officially in effect. That punch had fruit juice in it for cosmetic purposes. Fruit juice or not, though, it was damn near strong enough to run an auto engine.

  A Democratic State Senator came to the microphone to announce a Democratic Congressional victory in Colorado. The people who’d come for politics and not just a good time let out a cheer. The others went on dancing and drinking.

  A few minutes later, another California politico stepped up to the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted. “Ladies and gentlemen!” He sounded as if he were announcing the Friday night fights. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great privilege and distinct
honor to introduce to you the Vice President–elect of the United States, John Nance Garner of the great state of Texas!”

  More people cheered as Garner shambled up to the microphone. Controlling the Texas delegation had won him the second spot on the ticket, even if he couldn’t parlay it all the way to the top. His bulbous red nose said that not all the stories about his drinking habits were lies from his enemies.

  He had big, knobby hands, the hands of a man who’d worked hard all his life. He held them up in triumph now. “Friends, we went and did it!” he shouted, his drawl thick as barbecue sauce. “Herbert Hoover can go and do whatever he pleases from here on out, ’cause he won’t be doing it to America any more!”

  He got a real hand then, and basked in it like an old soft-shelled turtle basking on a rock in the sun. “Now we’re gonna do it to America!” shouted someone else who’d taken a good deal of antifreeze on board.

  “That’s right!” Garner began. Then he caught himself and shook his head. “No, doggone it! That’s not right. We’re gonna do things for America, not to it. You wait and see, folks. You won’t recognize this place once Joe Steele gets to work on it.”

  They cheered him again, even though you could take that more than one way. As if by magic, Stas Mikoian materialized alongside Charlie. “Joe Steele will speak in a little while,” he said. “He’ll take away whatever bad taste that drunken old fool leaves behind.”

  “When you win so big, nothing leaves a bad taste,” Charlie said. He couldn’t ask Mikoian what he knew about Franklin Roosevelt’s untimely demise. He was sure Mikoian didn’t know anything. Nobody who did know could have turned so pale on the convention floor in July.

  Charlie looked around for Vince Scriabin. He didn’t see Joe Steele’s Hammer. Asking Scriabin that question might bring out an interesting answer. Or it might be the last really dumb thing Charlie ever got a chance to do. Not seeing him might be good luck rather than bad.

  Or I might be imagining things, making up a story where there isn’t one. Charlie had been trying to convince himself of the same thing ever since the convention. On good days, he managed to do it for a little while. On bad days, he couldn’t come close. On bad days, he told himself it wouldn’t matter once Joe Steele took the oath of office. Now he had to hope he was right.

  * * *

  Mike Sullivan stood on the White House lawn, waiting for Herbert Hoover and Joe Steele to come out and ride together to the new President’s inauguration. It was almost warm and almost spring: Saturday, March 4, 1933. The lawn still looked winter brown; only a few shoots of new green grass pushed up through the old dead stuff.

  This was the last time a President would take office five months after he won the election. The states had just ratified the Twentieth Amendment. From now on, January 20 would become Inauguration Day. Winter for sure then, not that it was usually so bad down here in Washington. With telephones and radio, with trains and cars and even planes, things moved faster than they had when the Founding Fathers first framed the Constitution.

  A military band struck up the national anthem. As if he were at a baseball game, Mike took off his hat and held it over his heart. A door opened on the White House’s column-fronted entrance. The President and the President-elect walked out side by side.

  Hoover, a big man, stood several inches taller than Joe Steele. He didn’t tower over his successor by quite so much as Mike had thought he would. Had Joe Steele put lifts in his shoes? If he had, they were good ones; Mike couldn’t be sure at a glance, the way you could with a lot of elevator oxfords.

  One thing that did make Hoover seem taller was his black silk top hat. He also wore white tie and a tailcoat. He might have been an Allied leader dictating terms to defeated Germany at Versailles in 1919. Or he might have been one of the European diplomats who dickered the Treaty of Berlin between Russia and Turkey forty years earlier.

  Joe Steele, by contrast, was unmistakably a man of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Yes, he had on a black suit and a white shirt, but they were the kind of clothes a druggist might have worn to dinner. The shirt’s collar was stand-and-fall; it wasn’t a wing collar. He wore a plain black necktie, not a fancy white bow tie. And on his head sat not a topper, not even a fedora, but a gray herringbone tweed cap.

  Hoover’s clothes said I’m important. I have money. I tell other people what to do. Joe Steele’s outfit delivered the opposite message, and delivered it loud and clear. His suit said I’m an ordinary guy. I’m getting dressed up because I have to. Wearing a cloth cap with the suit added But I don’t think it’s all that important even so.

  All around Mike, people gasped when they saw what the new President had chosen to put on. “Shameful!” somebody muttered. “No, he has no shame,” someone else replied. Mike chuckled to himself. If those reporters weren’t a couple of old-guard Republicans from somewhere like Philadelphia or Boston, he would have been surprised. Whenever folks like that deigned to notice the world changing around them, they, like Queen Victoria, were Not Amused.

  Well, Queen Victoria had been dead for a long time now. He wondered whether the rock-ribbed (and rock-headed) GOP stalwarts had noticed yet.

  Photographers snapped away. Flash bulbs popped. Joe Steele genially touched the brim of his scandalous cap. Hoover looked as if he were sucking on a lemon. He’d looked that way in every photo of him taken since November that Mike had seen.

  Behind the men came their wives. Lou Hoover had been the only woman majoring in geology at Stanford while Herbert Hoover studied there. She remained a handsome woman forty years later, and wore a gown in which she might have greeted the King and Queen of England. Betty Steele’s dress looked as if it came from the Montgomery Ward catalogue—from one of the nicer pages there, but still. . . . Any middle-aged, middle-class woman with some small sense of style could have chosen and afforded it.

  She looked less happy than she might have. From what Charlie had heard, she often did. She and Joe Steele had lost two young children to diphtheria within days of each other, and never had any more. He poured his energy into politics after that. She didn’t seem to have much.

  More photographs recorded the outgoing and incoming First Ladies for posterity. No one close enough for Mike to overhear sneered about Betty Steele’s clothes. People had used up their indignation on her husband.

  The two Presidential couples got into a long open car for the ride to the swearing-in ceremony on the Mall. Reporters and photographers scrambled for the cars that would follow the fancy limousine to the formal inauguration. No one reserved seats in those; getting aboard reminded Mike of a rugby scrum. He managed to grab a seat next to the driver of a Model A. He felt like a tinned sardine, but at least he could go on.

  Smoke rose from small fires in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. People who had nowhere else to live made encampments there. No doubt they hoped it gave the President something to think about when he looked out the window. By all the things Hoover hadn’t done in his unhappy term, he didn’t look out that window very often.

  The Bonus Army had camped in several places near the Mall till Hoover ordered General MacArthur to clear them out. Clear them the Army did, with fire and bayonets and tear gas. Anyone who wasn’t rich sympathized with the hapless victims, not with their oppressors in uniform. Hoover seemed to have done everything he could to dig his own political grave and jump on in.

  What about Roosevelt? Mike wondered for the thousandth time. The arson inspector didn’t say the Executive Mansion had had help burning down. He didn’t say it hadn’t. He said he couldn’t prove it had. Charlie had tried to run down phone records to see if Vince Scriabin was talking to anybody in Albany early that morning. No matter how much cash he spread around, he had no luck. Those records “weren’t available.” Had someone made them disappear? If anyone had, nobody who knew would say so. Another dead end—as dead as FDR.

  Crowds lined the
streets to watch the new man in the White House go by. Some of the people in the crowd were the lawyers and talkers who catered to Congress—and to whom Congress had always catered. Money talked in Washington, the same as it did everywhere else. Money talked louder in Washington than it did in a lot of other places, to tell you the truth.

  Mike could recognize those people right away. They mostly didn’t dress as fancy as Herbert and Lou Hoover. They didn’t, but they could have. The quality of a haircut, the cut of a suit jacket, the glint of real gold links when somebody shot a cuff . . . Mike knew the signs, sure as hell.

  Most of the people who watched Joe Steele go to take the oath, though, were the ordinary folks who made Washington run. Butchers, bakers, waitresses, secretaries, sign-painters, cake decorators, housewives—people like that were out in force. Since it was Saturday, lots of them had brought their kids along so they could say they’d seen a President once upon a time.

  Some of the people in the crowd were colored. Washington had rich colored folks, but most of them were even poorer than the whites. They cleaned and kept house for the city’s prosperous whites, and raised their children for them, too. No Jim Crow laws on the sidewalks. They could mix and mingle with the folks who thought they were their betters—as long as they stayed polite about it, of course.

  Plenty of people on the sidewalk were out of work. Mike knew the signs: the shabby clothes, the bad shaves, most of all the pinched mouths and worried eyes. Unemployment stalked whites and Negroes alike. It brought its own odd kind of equality: when you didn’t have a job, everybody who did was better off than you were. A rising tide might lift all boats. The ebbing tide in America since Wall Street crashed had left millions of boats stranded on the beach.