Joe Steele (12 page)

“I . . . see.” Charlie scribbled in his notebook. This was explosive stuff—if they could prove it. “Is that the line of reasoning you're going to present when the justices go to trial?”

Hoover shrugged football-player shoulders. “I'm only an investigator, Mr. Sullivan. I'm not the prosecutor who will try the case. So I'm afraid I'm the wrong fella to ask about that.”

Tell me another one,
Charlie thought. If anything about J. Edgar Hoover was crystal clear, it was how much he admired J. Edgar Hoover. If he was po'-mouthing himself, he had to be doing it so he could duck the question.

But Charlie didn't see how he could push Hoover without putting his back up and making him pull his head into his shell. Sometimes the best thing you could do was quit while you were even if not ahead. “Thanks for your time, then,” he said. “Can we get a few more pictures, please?”

Using
please
and
thank you
was more important than keeping your car well greased. Charlie waved Louie forward. Hoover grinned and smirked for the camera. He was much more alarming when he did that than when the usual scowl stayed on his blunt mug. The scowl, you felt, belonged there. The more cheerful expressions seemed as phony, and as nourishing, as a plaster-of-Paris ham.

Hoover got back into the Packard. The driver whisked him away. “Holy crap, Charlie,” Louie said.

“You said a mouthful,” Charlie answered. “You get some good shots?”

“Oh, you bet I did,” the photographer said. “Only thing I'm worried about is if what's-his-name—J. Edgar—busted my lens there at the end. Talk about homely!”

“He won't win Miss America any time soon,” Charlie agreed. “Don't let him hear you say so, that's all. Otherwise, you'll wind up in the cell across the hall from the Supreme Court.”

“Listen, Charlie, I done a bunch o' stupid things in my time, but I ain't never been dumb enough to give a flatfoot an excuse to work out on me. Too many times, them sonsabitches don't even need one,” Louie said. “And that Hoover character, he's a heap big chief flatfoot, him and his
chrome-plated roscoe.” The photographer spat on the sidewalk to show what he thought of that.

“There you go,” Charlie said. “Let's get back to the office. You give 'em your pictures, and I'll write the piece that goes with 'em.”

*   *   *

N
aturally, the arrests of the Supreme Court Four caused banner headlines to flower in newspapers from sea to shining sea. Just as naturally, the papers split on party lines. The ones that backed Joe Steele called the justices the worst traitors since Benedict Arnold—if not since Judas Iscariot. The ones that didn't like the President called him even worse.

It came out . . . somehow . . . that the foreign country the justices were said to be working for was Germany. In Berlin, William L. Shirer asked Adolf Hitler what he thought of the justices' arrest. The
Führer
, he reported, looked at him as if he'd lost his marbles. “Except for Hollywood, I pay no attention to the United States,” Hitler answered. “As for these judges, are they Jews?”

“Not so far as I know,” Shirer said.

Hitler shrugged. “Well, perhaps they need purging even so.” Not too much later, during the Night of the Long Knives, he showed he knew everything he needed to know about purges.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court Four and their lawyers demanded writs of
habeas corpus
so they could appear in court and try to show that they'd been improperly arrested and imprisoned. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals refused to issue the writs. So did the judges of the U.S. District Court for Washington.

That fed fresh conniptions. Everybody who didn't like Joe Steele quoted Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

The judges, of course, were judges, and didn't have to explain why they did what they did. Joe Steele didn't
have
to explain anything, either. His stern face didn't encourage people who hankered for explanations. But he did talk to reporters not long after the Associate Justices went to their cells.

“I don't know what everyone is getting so excited about,” he said. “It's
not as if
habeas corpus
hasn't been suspended before. Lincoln did it, for instance.”

“That was during a rebellion!” Three reporters shouted the same thing at the same time. Charlie was one of them, as much to see what Joe Steele would do as for any other reason. Poking the animal behind the bars to make it jump and roar wasn't always a reporter's smallest pleasure.

Joe Steele didn't jump or roar. He made a small production of filling his pipe and getting it going. After sending up some smoke signals, he said, “Friends, I have news for you. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. As Lincoln asked when Chief Justice Taney complained about his suspension of
habeas corpus
, ‘Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?' The men who have been arrested are a clear and present danger to the United States. They must not be set at liberty to subvert the country further until proceedings against them are complete.”

Walter Lippmann looked ready to blow a gasket. “Lincoln did what he did during the Civil War!” the liberal columnist called. “We aren't at war now!”

“No?” Joe Steele puffed some more. He turned his head toward Lippmann, his expression as opaque as usual. “Isn't the United States at war against hunger, and against poverty, and against want? Aren't those four justices fighting for the enemy?”

“That has nothing to do with treason, or with spying for Germany,” Lippmann said. “And we're at peace with Germany.”

“The Attorney General will show in the proceedings against these men how they follow Hitler's lead and take Hitler's money,” Joe Steele answered. “And we were at war with Germany not so long ago, and we may be again one day, if Hitler stays on the road he is walking. Not all enemies openly declare themselves beforehand.”

“You're dancing on the Constitution for your own purposes!” Lippmann exclaimed.

Puff. Puff. “I don't think so, Mr. Lippmann,” Joe Steele said coolly. “I
have the responsibility. All you have is a deadline. I am not sorry the writs of
habeas corpus
were denied. Those men will keep hurting the country if they are set free, or else run away to their Nazi paymasters.”

All you have is a deadline.
That was the best answer Charlie had heard from a man in power to a poking, prodding reporter. Still . . . “You won't change your mind?” Charlie asked.

For the first time at the press conference, Joe Steele looked honestly surprised. “Change my mind? Of course not.” The idea might never have occurred to him before. His voice firmed as he went on, “The four traitors from the Supreme Court will stay in prison until proceedings against them go forward.”

And that was about as much that as anything was ever likely to be.

*   *   *

H
ABEAS
C
ORPUS
D
ENIED
A
GAIN
! shouted the
New York Post
. The smaller subhead was P
RESIDENT
SAYS
S
UPRE
ME
C
OURT
TRAITORS
TO
STAY
JAILED
TILL
TR
IALS
.
Mike Sullivan eyed the words in the newspaper that paid his salary as if they belonged to some language other than English.

He went through the whole story, which even quoted a couple of questions from his brother. He was shaking his head before he got halfway down, and shaking it more than ever by the time he tossed the paper down on his desk. “Man,” he said. “Man, oh, man.”

He was working on a piece about a Wall Street brokerage house where money kept disappearing into thin air . . . and into brokers' pockets. He couldn't keep his mind on his writing. He picked up the paper and read the story about Joe Steele's press conference over and over. If
habeas corpus
went bye-bye . . .

“If
habeas corpus
goes bye-bye, we're all screwed. Every one of us,” he said at lunch that day. The stuffed cabbage on his plate left something to be desired. The Goulash House was around the corner from the
Post
's offices, and was cheap and quick. Good? That could be a different story. Sometimes you'd rather talk than eat.

“Have his carcase,” one of the other reporters said between forkfuls of Wiener schnitzel.

“Not funny, Ken,” Mike said.

“Hey, I thought it was,” Ken said. “That's the name of the Dorothy Sayers mystery from a coupla years ago, remember?”

“Um—” Mike hoped he looked sheepish, because he felt that way. “I forgot all about it, to tell you the truth. Stella likes whodunits, but I go in more for adventure stuff.”

Ken turned to the guy behind the counter. “Hey, Jules, draw me a Falstaff, willya?”

Jules, Mike happened to know, was really named Gyula. “I vill do dat,” he said—his accent sounded just like Bela Lugosi's, only he didn't have pointy teeth or turn into a bat. Mike had never seen him turn into a bat, anyhow.

The reporter chuckled to himself, but not for long. Nothing seemed funny in light of the day's big story. “I'm not kidding,” Mike said. “Honest to God, Joe Steele wants to make like Mussolini or Hitler. Without
habeas corpus
, he can throw anybody in the can for as long as he wants and lose the key.”

Ken swigged from his beer. “He can, sure, but will he? Why would he? You put people in jail for no reason, you get all their friends and relations ticked off at you and you lose the next election.”

“So what's he doing, then?” Mike demanded.

“You ask me, he's putting the old squeeze play on the Supreme Court,” Ken answered. “They bounced some laws of his, and he's telling them there's a price for everything even if they do wear those black robes. It'll all have a happy ending, just like in the movies.”

That was the first explanation of the arrests besides the notion that Joe Steele was a hatching tyrant that made any kind of sense to Mike. But he said, “I bet he starts a forest fire when he wants to light a cigarette, too.”

Ken chuckled. “C'mon—you know he smokes a pipe.”

If they'd been back in the newsroom, Mike would have given him the finger. In a restaurant, even one as crummy as the Goulash House, he held back. All he said was, “You shoulda been a lawyer or a barber. You're good for nothing but splitting hairs.”

“Har-de-har-har. See how hard I'm laughing?” Ken slid a couple of
quarters across the counter. Jules/Gyula started to give him a nickel back, but he waved it away. He poked Mike. “See you in paradise.”

“Hold on. I'm coming.” Mike took one more bite, paid the counterman, and escaped the Goulash House.

He still had trouble getting anywhere with the latest Wall Street story after he went back to his beat-up desk. Stan Feldman, not seeing it when he wanted it, breathed down his neck, which was one of the things editors were for. “Sorry, Stan,” Mike said, and meant it, because he took pride in getting work done on deadline. “The whole thing with Joe Steele's thrown me for a loop.”

“Well, you better straighten up and fly right.” When dealing with a story that wasn't there, Feldman had all the warmth and understanding of an undertaker or a principal.

“Story may not be as good as I wanted it to be.” Mike spread his hands in apology.

“Good I can live without sometimes,” his editor answered. “The story, I can't. Get it on my desk by half past four.”

Mike got it on his desk by half past four. It wasn't as good as he wished it would have been. The only reason it was even as good as it was was that he knew how to put stories together. He could do it while most of his brain was chewing on something else.
Let's hear it for experience,
he thought.

He wanted to work on something important, dammit, something that would get him remembered. The brokerage-house story wasn't it. He'd had hopes for the piece when he sailed into it, but it was just one more tale of greed. The world had seen too many of them lately. They'd helped spark the Depression, and they kept popping up in its aftermath. Greed was as common a driver as sex—too common to make most of the stories about it very interesting.

Greed for power, now . . . If Ken was right, Joe Steele was playing rougher than a President had any business playing.
And if Ken's wrong, then I'm right,
Mike thought.
And if I'm right, we're in even more trouble than we were when the market crashed.

*   *   *

T
he kid from the mailroom threw an envelope on Mike's desk. “What's this?” Mike asked.

“I dunno.” The kid was steady, but not long on brains. “Somethin' for you.”

“Okay. I'll investigate.” Mike pulled his letter-opener out of the top drawer. It was overqualified for its job: it was a saw-toothed German bayonet from the Great War, as long as a young sword, the kind the hero in
All Quiet on the Western Front
said you needed to grind down because Entente soldiers would kill you if they caught you with it.

It bit into yellow-brown heavy paper as readily as it would have torn through flesh. Inside were four typewritten sheets stapled together. Paperclipped to them was a note.
I finally found this—never mind where,
it said.
With everything that's going on in Washington these days, it's extra interesting.

The note was unsigned. Mike pulled the envelope out of the wastebasket. It had no return address. But it was postmarked in Menands, the little town next door to Albany where the minor-league team played its games.