Joe Steele (16 page)

Charlie didn't like getting out there at five in the morning. Joe Steele's
officials took the idea of “shot at sunrise” too seriously, as far as he was concerned. But, fortified by three cups of sludgy coffee, he made it on time. Hitting your mark was as important for a reporter as for an actor.

Four squads of soldiers waited in front of posts driven into the soft ground. Charlie talked with the first lieutenant in charge of them. “One rifle in each squad has a blank cartridge,” the young officer explained. “The guys can think they didn't kill anyone if they want to.”

A few minutes later, a khaki-painted panel truck pulled up. Soldiers took the four convicted traitors out of the back and shackled one to each post. They offered blindfolds; Butler declined his. Then they pinned a white paper circle to the center of each man's coarse cotton prison shirt.

“Squads, take your marks!” the lieutenant said briskly. The soldiers did. It went off almost the way it would have in a movie. “Ready . . . Aim . . . Fire!” The rifles roared and flashed. McReynolds let out a gurgling shriek. The others slumped in silence.

The lieutenant waited a couple of minutes, then felt McReynolds for a pulse. “He's gone. That's good,” he said. “I would've had to finish him otherwise.” He patted the .45 on his belt. He checked the other justices, too. They were also dead. The soldiers who'd brought them wrapped their bodies in waterproof shelter halves and put them into the truck again.

“What will happen to them now?” Charlie asked.

“They'll go back to their families for burial,” the lieutenant said. “I think there will be a request to keep services small and private. I don't know what will happen if the families disobey.”

“Thanks.” Charlie wrote down the reply. Then he asked, “How do
you
feel about being here this morning?”

“Sir, I'm just doing my job. That's how you have to look at things, isn't it? They gave me the orders. I followed them. Tomorrow I'll do something else.”

*   *   *

A
s Mike had been best man for Charlie, so Charlie was best man for Mike. Esther was one of Stella's bridesmaids, along with two of Stella's sisters and a first cousin. From what Mike told Charlie, Stella's folks had grumbled about a Jewish bridesmaid at a Catholic wedding, but he and Stella managed to sweeten them up. Charlie didn't tell Esther anything
about that, and Stella's father and mother stayed polite to her, if not exactly warm. That was their good luck. She would have gone off like a bomb if they'd said anything about her religion.

The reception was at a Knights of Columbus hall two doors down from the church. Since Stella's folks were footing the bill, the chow was Italian. So was the band. One of the trumpeters and a sax player looked as if they might be made men. Since Charlie was there as brother of the groom and not as a reporter, he didn't ask them. He made a point of not asking them, in fact.

He toasted Mike and Stella with Chianti. “Health, wealth, long life, happiness, kids!” he said. You couldn't go wrong with those. Everybody raised a cheer and everybody drank.

After Stella mashed wedding cake in Mike's face, he came over to Charlie and said, “What do you think our chances are?” His cheeks were flushed. He'd been drinking pretty hard, and not just Italian red wine.

“Hey, you've got a job and a pretty girl,” Charlie answered. “That puts you ahead of most people right there.”

“Till I go up in front of one of those goddamn treason tribunals, anyway,” Mike said.

“Mike . . . This isn't the time or the place,” Charlie said.

“Everybody says that. Everybody says that all the stinkin' time,” Mike snarled. “And everybody'll keep on saying it till we're as bad off and as much under the gun as the poor bastards in Italy or Germany or Russia.”

Charlie held a full glass of wine. He wanted to pour it over his brother's hot head, but people would talk. In lieu of starting trouble, he said, “Honest to God, Mike, it's not gonna come to anything like that.”

“No, huh? Ask Roosevelt what he thinks. Ask Huey Long, too. Huey was as crazy as the people who liked him, and that's really saying something. But what did it get him in the end? A cemetery plot on the front lawn on his gaudy, overpriced, oversized capitol.”

“A cemetery plot is all any of us gets in the end,” Charlie said quietly.

“Yeah, yeah.” Mike sounded impatient—and drunk as an owl. “But you want to get it later, not sooner. Joe Steele wanted Huey to get it sooner, and the Kingfish, he's in the cold, cold ground.”

“They still haven't found who shot Long.” Charlie felt as if he were reprising scenes he'd already played with Esther.

“Huey's storm troopers and the Louisiana cops, they couldn't find their ass with both hands,” Mike said with a fine curl of the lip. “And when Joe Steele's Department of Justice is down there giving them a boost, you think anybody'll go pointing fingers back at the big chief in the White House?” He cackled laughter bitter enough to make people stare at him.

“Mike, what I think is, you're at your wedding. You need to pay more attention to Stella and less attention to Steele.”

“Doggone it, Charlie,
nobody
wants to pay attention to what Steele's doing to the country. Everybody looks the other way because the economy seems a little better than it did right after the crash. Not good, but a little better. And Steele grabs a bit of power here and a bit more there, and pretty soon he'll hold all the strings. And everybody else'll have to dance when he pulls them.”

“Why don't you go dance, man, no strings attached? Like I told you, that's what you're here for. If you want to go after Joe Steele some more when you're back from your honeymoon, okay, you'll do that. In the meantime, enjoy yourself.
Dum vivimus, vivamus!
”

“‘While we live, let us live.' Good luck!” Mike said, but then, suddenly grinning, “I wonder what ever happened to Sister Mary Ignatia.”

“Nothing good, I hope,” Charlie said. The large, strong, stern nun was so old, Latin might have been her native language. She'd carried a ruler and inflicted the language and flattened knuckles on both of them.

“Who was the one with the mustache? Was that Sister Bernadette?” Mike asked.

“No—Sister Susanna.” Charlie happily chattered about teachers from years gone by. His brother was definitely buggy when it came to Joe Steele. Anything that distracted him from the President looked good to Charlie.

When Charlie went out onto the parquet dance floor with Esther a little later, she asked him, “What was going on there? Looked like Mike was getting kind of excited.”

“Maybe a little.” If Charlie minimized for his wife, he might be able to minimize for himself, too. “But I managed to calm him down.” That, he
was pretty sure about. Mike was dancing with Stella, and seemed happy enough.

“More politics?” Esther asked.

“Yeah. He looks at Joe Steele the same way you do, only more so. You know that.”

He hoped he would get Esther to back away, but his wife was made of stern stuff. “There's a difference,” she said.

“Like what?”

“If I don't like the President, what do I do? I talk to you. If Mike doesn't like him, he writes a story that says so, and thousands—maybe millions—of people know about it. Joe Steele knows about it, and so do his men.”

“They may know about it, but what can they do about it? We still have freedom of the press in this country,” Charlie said.

Esther didn't answer. She let him imagine all the things someone who didn't like what a reporter had to say might do. He was sure the things he imagined were worse than anything she might have said. He'd always had more imagination than was good for him.

So, like a man flicking a light switch, he deliberately turned it off. Sometimes you did better taking the world as you found it and not troubling yourself about moonshine and vapors and ghosties and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night. You couldn't do anything about those even if they happened to be real. Mike and Stella would be going bump in the night tonight. Charlie could hope they had a ton of fun doing it. He could, and he did.

Mike seemed to be playing the same kind of mental games with himself. He didn't talk about Joe Steele any more during the reception. He laughed and joked and looked like somebody having a good time at his wedding. If he wasn't, he didn't let anyone else see that. With any luck, he didn't let himself see it, either.

Stella seemed to be having a good time, too. But when Charlie danced with her, she whispered in his ear: “Don't let Mike do anything too crazy, okay?”

“How am I supposed to stop him?” Charlie whispered back. “And why don't you take care of it? You're his wife now, remember, not just his girlfriend.”

“That doesn't mean I know anything about newspapers. You do. He has to take you seriously.”

Charlie laughed out loud, there on the dance floor. “I'm his little brother. He hasn't taken me seriously since the day I was born. If you think he'll start now, I'm sorry, but you're out of luck.”

“I married him. That makes me lucky. I want to stay lucky for a while, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure.” Charlie left it there. Everybody wanted to stay lucky for a while. Just because you wanted it didn't mean you would get it. Hardly anybody managed that. But it wasn't the kind of thing you pointed out to a bride on her wedding day. Chances were she'd see for herself all too soon.

*   *   *

A
ndy Wyszynski ordered Father Coughlin brought back to Washington, D.C., for his hearing before a military tribunal. He scheduled the hearing for the lobby of the District Court Building: the place where the Supreme Court Four had met their fate.

In a press conference, Wyszynski said, “I wish he'd kept his nose out of politics, that's all. I'm a Catholic myself. Most of you know I am. I don't like the idea that a priest could betray his country. He should have stuck with God's things. Those are what priests are for. When he started messing with Caesar's, that's when he got in trouble.”

“Joe Steele didn't mind when Father Coughlin backed him in the election,” Walter Lippmann said. “He didn't mind when Coughlin supported some of his early programs, either.”

One of the Attorney General's bushy eyebrows twitched. But Wyszynski answered calmly enough: “The President wouldn't have minded if Father Coughlin campaigned for Herbert Hoover.”

“No?” Lippmann said. Charlie wondered the same thing. Joe Steele wanted people behind him, not pushing against him.

But Wyszynski said “No” and sounded like a man who meant it. He went on, “Herbert Hoover is an American, a loyal American. He is not someone who has thrown in his lot with tyrants from overseas. Father Coughlin is. We will show that he is at the upcoming tribunal.”

“Will he confess, the way the Supreme Court Four did?” a reporter asked.

“I have no idea,” Wyszynski answered. “If he does, that will simplify things. If he doesn't, we will prove the case to the satisfaction of the members of the military tribunal.”

“What if they acquit him?” the newshound persisted.

Both of Andy Wyszynski's eyebrows sprang toward his hairline then. If Charlie was any judge, that meant the possibility had never occurred to him. After a shrug, though, he responded smoothly enough: “If they do, then they do, that's all. I think it would be a shame, because Father Coughlin has shown that he's the enemy of everything the USA stands for. But I didn't win every case in Chicago, and I don't know whether I'll win every case here.”

A slicked-down Army colonel named Walter Short headed the tribunal. Also on it were a Navy captain named Halsey, an Army Air Corps major called Carl Spatz (he pronounced it
spots
, not
spats
), and an Army Air Corps first lieutenant with the interesting handle of Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Only his eyebrows reminded Charlie of his Confederate ancestor.

Charlie and Louie had the good sense to get to the District Court Building early. The crush was a little less overwhelming than it had been for the Associate Justices' hearing. Coughlin wasn't a government figure, and this wasn't the first such proceeding.

The ACLU lawyer named Levine was one of Father Coughlin's defense attorneys. He had on another godawful jacket, and a scarlet bow tie with bright blue polka dots that almost made it seem sedate by comparison. His companion, in pinstriped charcoal gray with a white shirt and a discreet maroon four-in-hand, was next to invisible beside him.

At the prosecutors' table, Andy Wyszynski might have been the most relaxed man in the place. He smoked a cigarette, told a joke that made an aide wince, and generally seemed without a care in the world. If he wasn't ready for anything Coughlin might do or say, he didn't let on.

Colonel Short gaveled for order at ten sharp. “Close those doors,” he barked at the MPs and shore patrolmen by the entrance. “Let's get on with it—the sooner the better.” He pointed to U.S. marshals at the edge of the lobby. “Bring in the prisoner, you men.”

He was the kind of officer Charlie disliked on sight. He owned a mean mouth, he used too much grease on his thinning hair, and, unlike Captain Spruance at the last tribunal, he had routineer stamped all over him.

In came Father Coughlin, handcuffed and herded along. He was in his mid-forties, the map of Ireland on his face. Wire-rimmed glasses aided his bright blue eyes. He had a shock, almost a quiff, of brown hair. In place of a clerical dog collar, he wore prison clothes.

“State your name for the record,” Short told him.

“I am Charles Edward Coughlin, sir.”

“Well, Mister Coughlin—”

“I prefer Father Coughlin, sir.”

“Well, Mister Coughlin,” Walter Short repeated with sour relish, “you are charged with doing the business of foreign countries seeking to weaken and destroy the United States of America and with doing it for money—with the crime of high treason, in other words. How say you to the charges, Mister Coughlin?”