Joe Steele (15 page)

*   *   *

“T
ake it easy, Mike.” Stella sounded scared. “You'll blow a gasket if you don't relax.”

“Somebody needs to blow a gasket, by God,” Mike said savagely. “They were railroaded. They must've been railroaded—nobody in his right mind would confess to anything like that. I bet they got plenty of rubber hoses and castor oil and water up the nose. You don't need to leave marks to hurt somebody so bad he'll say anything you want. Ask Mussolini . . . uh, no offense.”

Stella Morandini said something incandescent about
il Duce
in the language she'd learned at her mother's knee. Then she went back to English: “But you know, even here in the Village a lot of people think the Supreme Court Four are guilty as sin.”

Mike did know that. It left him depressed, if not neurotic. “You know what it proves?” he said.

“What?” Stella asked, as she knew she should.

“It proves a lot of people are goddamn imbeciles, that's what.” Mike made as if to tear out his hair. “Ahh . . . ! What I really need to do is go on
a six-day bender, stay so pickled I can't even remember all the different ways this country's going to the dogs.” He started for the kitchen to see what he had in the way of booze. In his apartment, nothing was more than a few steps from anything else.

“Wait,” Stella said.

“How come? What could be better than getting smashed?”

He didn't think she'd have an answer for that, but she started taking off her clothes. He paused to reconsider. Making love wouldn't give him six days of forgetfulness, but it also wouldn't leave him wishing he were dead afterwards. In his haste to join her, he popped a button off his shirt.

His bed was of the Murphy persuasion. Instead of shoving a chair and an end table out of the way to use it, they made do with the sofa. Still straddling him in the afterglow, her face on his shoulder, she asked, “Happier now?”

“Some ways, sure.” He patted her behind. “Others, not so much. The country's still a mess.”

“What can you do about it?”

“I've been doing what I can—and look how far it's got me,” he answered. “What happened today, that makes me want to go out in the streets and start throwing bombs at police stations. Then they'll hang a treason rap on me, too.”

“I don't think I'll let you have your pants back,” Stella said seriously. “You can't go out and throw bombs without pants.”

“You're right. Somebody would arrest me.” Mike laughed. It was either laugh or push Stella off him and go pound his head against the wall. The noise from that would make the neighbors complain. Besides, Stella was far and away the best thing he had going for him, and she had been for a while. Wasn't it about time he figured out what he needed to do about that? “Hon,” he said, “you want to marry me?”

Her eyes widened. “What brought that on?”

“A rush of brains to the head, I hope. Do you?”

“Sure,” she said. “My mother's gonna fall over, you know. She was sure you wouldn't ever ask me. She figured you were just using me to have fun. ‘He's a
man
,' she says, ‘and you know the only thing
men
want.'”

“I've never just used you to have fun, and that isn't the only thing I want you for,” Mike said. Then he spoiled his foursquare stand for virtue by patting her again. “It's pretty darn nice, though, isn't it?”

“I wouldn't be in this compromising position if I didn't think so.”

“You didn't compromise, sweetie. You cooperated. There's a difference.”

“So what do we do once we tie the knot? Do we live happily ever after, like in the fairy tales?”

“We live as happily ever after as Joe Steele will let us,” Mike said. Stella poked him in the ribs. He supposed he deserved it, but he hadn't been kidding even so.

Since Levine and the ACLU couldn't come up with any better ideas, they did appeal the death sentences of the Supreme Court Four to Joe Steele. Levine also published the letter in the papers. In it, he asked the President to spare the lives “of four dedicated public servants whose differences with him over fine points of law were perhaps unfairly perceived as differences over public policy.”

Pointing to the letter in the
Washington Post
, Esther asked Charlie, “Do you think it will do any good?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Nope. It might, if they just kept making decisions he didn't go for. But this whole treason business . . . He can't look like he's letting them get away with that.”

“Oh, come on!” she said. “How much of that do you believe? How much of that can anybody believe?”

“I'll tell you—I don't know what to believe,” Charlie answered. “Mike thinks it's a bunch of hooey, too. But he wasn't there. I was. Would you confess to something that horrible, something you had to know would get you the death penalty, unless you did . . . some of it, anyway?”

“See? Even you have trouble swallowing the whole thing.” To Charlie's relief, his wife didn't push it any further. Instead, she pointed to the paper again and asked, “What do you think Joe Steele will do about it?”

“I don't think he'll do anything till the whole Louisiana mess gets
straightened out, and God only knows how long that'll take,” Charlie answered.

On the strength of George Sutherland's accusations, Attorney General Wyszynski had got warrants against Father Coughlin and Huey Long. The rabble-rousing priest had gone meekly into custody, showing off his bracelets for the reporters swarming around his Michigan radio studio and quoting the Twenty-third Psalm: “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.'”

That sounded very pretty. It also left him behind bars. No judge would grant bail or issue him a writ of
habeas corpus
. Eventually, Joe Steele and Andy Wyszynski would try him or send him before a tribunal or do whatever they did to him. Meanwhile . . .

Meanwhile, Huey Long was kicking up a ruckus. Unlike Father Coughlin, the Kingfish didn't sit around waiting to get jugged. As soon as he heard that Sutherland had taken his name in vain, he drove to Washington National Airport, chartered a Ford Trimotor, and flew off to Baton Rouge.

Nobody arrested him there. Even Federal officials in Louisiana kowtowed to the Kingfish. And from Louisiana, Long bellowed defiance at Joe Steele and at the other forty-seven states. “If that lying, cheating fool infesting the White House wants a new War of Yankee Aggression, let him start it!” the Senator roared. “He may fire the first shot, but the American people will fire the last one—at him! Everybody who's against Joe Steele ought to be for me!”

What he didn't seem to realize was that, if the choice lay between him and the President, most people outside Louisiana came down on Joe Steele's side. Yeah, Joe Steele was cold and crafty. Everybody knew that. But most people also thought he had his head screwed on tight. Outside of Louisiana, Huey Long came off as something between a buffoon and a raving loony.

When Joe Steele went on the radio, he sounded like a reasonable man. “No one is going to start another Civil War,” he said. He had his name for
the late unpleasantness, as Huey Long had
his
. Joe Steele's was the one more Americans used, though. He continued, “But we will have the laws obeyed. A warrant for Senator Long's arrest on serious charges has been issued. It will be served at the earliest opportunity.”

The Kingfish's next radio speech amounted to
Nyah, nyah, nyah—you can't catch me!
Charlie listened to it and shook his head in reluctant admiration. “He's got moxie—you have to give him that.”

“If he gets people laughing at Joe Steele, that's his best chance,” Esther said. “Then nobody will want the government to get tough.” It looked the same way to Charlie.

Huey Long traveled around Louisiana making speeches, too. He had to keep the juices flowing there—if his own state turned against him, his goose went into the oven. He traveled with enough bodyguards to fight a small war. They wouldn't have won against Federal troops, but they would have put up a scrap. And they definitely helped keep Louisiana in line.

None of which did the Senator any good when he spoke in front of the Alexandria city hall. A sniper at least half a mile away fired one shot. The .30-06 round went in the Kingfish's left ear and came out just below his right ear, bringing half his brain with it. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

His bodyguards went nuts. Some of them did run in the direction from which the shot had come. Others started firing in that direction. Still others, in a frenzy of grief and horror and rage, emptied their revolvers into the crowd that had been listening to Long. More than twenty people, including eleven women and an eight-year-old girl, died in the barrage and in the stampede that followed.

No one caught the assassin. At lunch a few days later, Louie Pappas remarked to Charlie, “My brother is a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.”

“Is that so?” Charlie said around a mouthful of ham and cheese.

“Uh-huh. He was in France in 1918—he was just a PFC then. He says he knew plenty of guys in the Corps who coulda done what the fella in Louisiana did.”

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. The photographer nodded. Charlie asked, “Is he saying a leatherneck
did
punch Huey's ticket for him?”

“Nah. How could he say that? He wasn't there.” Louie was eating liverwurst and onions: a sandwich to make skunks turn tail. “Only that it coulda been.”

“How about that?” Charlie said. He waved to the counterman. “Hey, can you get me another Coke, please?”

*   *   *

M
ike knew why Stan had put him on a train to Baton Rouge to cover Huey Long's funeral. He was a reporter who had a reputation for going after Joe Steele. If he went after him some more, it would just be icing on the cake, not a whole new cake. Joe Steele and his flunkies already couldn't stand him.
I'm expendable,
Mike thought, not without pride.

The funeral made him think of nothing so much as the ones banana republics threw for dead military dictators. Baton Rouge was decked in black crepe. U.S. flags flew at half staff. Sometimes they flew upside down, an old, old signal of distress.

What must have been a couple of hundred thousand people, almost all in black, lined up in front of the grand new state Capitol to file past Long's body. The new Capitol had gone up while the Kingfish was Governor of Louisiana. The old one, a Gothic horror out of Sir Walter Scott, stood empty and unloved a few blocks south and a little west, by the banks of the Mississippi. Along with other reporters, Mike climbed the forty-eight steps—one for each state, and recording its name and admission date—and past through the fifty-foot-tall bronze doors into the rotunda.

Long's coffin lay in the center of the rotunda. It was double, copper inside of bronze, and had a glass top to let people peer down at the tuxedoed corpse. The pillows on which Long's head rested had been built up on the right side so no one would have to contemplate the ruins of that side of his head.

Mourners filed by in a continuous stream, rich and poor, men and women, whites and even some Negroes. Some of them had the look of people who were there because they thought being there would do them some good. More seemed genuinely sorry their eccentric kingpin was gone.

At least four mourners turned to the reporters and said, “Joe Steele did this.” Mike wouldn't have been a bit surprised, but he thought they needed
to get hold of the gunman to nail that down. It hadn't happened yet. The sloppy and grandiose feel of Louisiana made Mike wonder if it ever would.

A hellfire-brimstone-and-damnation minister preached the funeral oration. “We were robbed of our sun! We were robbed of our moon! Washington stole the stars from our sky!” he thundered. “God will smite those who foully slew him and those who plotted his destruction! They will go into the lake of burning lava and cook for all eternity! Huey Long will look down on them from heaven, and he will laugh to see their suffering. He will laugh, for he has been translated to bliss eternal!”

“That's right!” someone in the crowd shouted, as if in a Holy Roller church.

“The mustachioed serpent in the White House will not escape, for the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” the preacher went on. He got more responses to that, and an angry rumble that made the hair on the back of Mike's neck try to stand on end. “No, he will not get free of God's ineffable judgment, for his lying charges against the lion of Louisiana were what set Senator Long's death in motion. There is blood on his hands—blood, I say!”

Mike absently wondered how any serpent outside the Garden of Eden—even a mustachioed one—could have hands, bloody or not. The preacher went right on talking around accusing Joe Steele of ordering Long's murder. Was that prudence or fear? Was there a difference?

Some in the crowd were less restrained. “String up that son of a bitch in the White House!” a man hollered, and it became a rolling, throbbing chorus. Mike had never seen a funeral turn into a riot, and hoped to keep his record intact.

They buried the Kingfish on the lawn in front of the Capitol. There were about enough flowers for a Rose Parade and a half. As Mike wrote up some of the more florid floral displays, he wondered how much all this was costing. Certainly in the hundreds of thousands, probably in the millions. It came straight out of the pockets of everybody in Depression-strapped Louisiana.

He had to wait till after midnight to file his story. Baton Rouge just didn't have enough telegraph and telephone lines to cope with all the
reporters who had descended on it. Once he'd sent it on to New York, he found himself three stiff drinks—which seemed easy enough to do—and went to bed.

The only reason he didn't feel as if he was escaping a foreign country when his eastbound train left Louisiana was that he didn't have to stop and show his passport and clear customs.
Foreign country, nothing,
he decided. He might as well have been on a different world.

Stella met him at Penn Station. “How'd it go?” she asked him.

He thought about it. “I'll tell you,” he said at last. “Going to that funeral made me embarrassed to be against Joe Steele. Embarrassed by the company I was keeping, I mean.”

“Embarrassed enough to stop?”

Mike thought some more. Then he shook his head. “Nah. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. And somebody's gotta do it right, 'cause they sure weren't down there.”

*   *   *

J
oe Steele didn't comment about Huey Long's demise till the Senator from Louisiana was six feet under. Then he went on the radio to say, “I regret Senator Long's death at the hands of another. The Justice Department will make every effort to work closely with Louisiana's authorities to track down Senator Long's killer and to give him the punishment he deserves. We have known since the days of Lincoln that assassination has no place in the American political system.”

“First Roosevelt, now Long, and he says that?” Esther demanded.

“He says it,” Charlie answered wearily. They'd gone round this barn before. “We don't know for sure what happened either time.”

“Do I have to connect the dots for you?” his wife asked.

“You—” Charlie stopped.

He stopped because Joe Steele was talking again. The President had paused much longer than a professional radio performer would have; maybe he was fiddling with his pipe. “I also regret Senator Long's untimely death because he was not able to answer the charges leveled against him. He would have received the hearing he deserved.”

“What does
that
mean?” Esther said.

Charlie hushed her this time—the President hadn't stopped. “You will also know that I have been given a request for clemency on behalf of the four Supreme Court justices who confessed in an open hearing to treason on behalf of the Nazis. I am not a cruel man—”

“Ha!” Esther broke in.

“—but I find I cannot grant this request. If I did, it would only encourage others to plot against America. The sentence the military tribunal found fitting for their crimes will be carried out tomorrow morning. I hope I will not have to approve any more sentences like that, but I will do my Constitutional duty to keep the United States safe and secure. Thank you, and good night.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Esther said. “Now that Huey's gone, he's not wasting any time, is he?”

“If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.” Charlie had read a lot of Shakespeare. Not only did he enjoy it, but he thought it rubbed off on his writing.

Esther startled him by carrying on the quotation: “If the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch with his surcease success; that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here.” Giggling at his flummoxed expression, she added, “I was Lady Macbeth my senior year of high school. I can do it in Yiddish, too. Well, some of it—been a while.”

Before he could answer, the phone rang. When he picked it up, Lazar Kagan was on the other end of the connection. For a split second, Charlie wondered whether Kagan could do
Macbeth
in Yiddish. Then Joe Steele's factotum said, “Do you want to witness the executions tomorrow?”

That was about the last thing Charlie wanted. He said “Yes” anyhow. This was part of history. Not even Aaron Burr had been convicted of treason. Kagan told him where the firing squads would do their jobs: across the Potomac in Arlington, between the Washington Airport and the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary. If you had to do something like that near the capital, they'd found a good place for it. The airport wasn't busy, and only the occasional birdwatcher came out to peer at the ducks and egrets in the sanctuary.