Joe Steele (27 page)

But all that was a long way away. Charlie had other things on his mind, things closer to home. Sarah was teething, which left him and Esther both even lower on shuteye than usual. And a couple of more desks near him had nobody sitting behind them. Two reporters had vanished almost without a trace. Where were they now? Somewhere between New Mexico and North Dakota—that was as much as anybody knew.

His telephone rang. He picked it up. “Sullivan, AP.”

“Scriabin, White House.” The Hammer could be viciously sardonic. “The President wants to see you.”

“About what?” Charlie asked, in lieu of a gulp.

“He'll tell you. If he wanted me to do it, I would,” Scriabin said. “Are you coming?”

“I'm on my way,” Charlie said. If the Heebie Jeebies were going to grab him, they could do it here or at his apartment. Or, of course, if Joe Steele felt like watching J. Edgar Hoover's men in action, they could do it at the White House. But Charlie couldn't say
I don't want to see him
. The President and all his men had long memories for slights.

When Charlie got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a steward took him up to the oval study above the Blue Room. Joe Steele sat behind that big redwood desk, puffing on his pipe. “Sullivan,” he said with an abrupt nod.

“Mr. President.” Charlie tried not to show how nervous—hell, how scared—he was. “What do you need, sir?”

“Here.” Joe Steele shoved typewritten pages across the desk at him. “I am going to issue a statement saying how wrong France and England were to appease Hitler over the Sudetenland. None of the drafts from my writers is any damn good. You throw words around. Let's see what you can do.” He waved Charlie to the chair on the other side of the desk.

Sinking down into it, Charlie wondered what the stakes were. If Joe Steele liked what he did, would Mike come out of the labor encampment? If Joe Steele didn't like it, would Charlie go into one and leave another AP desk vacant? Those were . . . interesting questions, weren't they?

He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and got to work. Joe Steele was right about one thing, anyway: as it stood now, the statement was muddy and opaque. Charlie thought of himself as a good editor and polisher. Now it seemed to be put up or shut up.

The statement wasn't very long. He spent fifteen minutes noodling and nipping and tucking. Twice, he needed to ask the President just how specific and how sharp he wanted to be. Between puffs, Joe Steele told him.

“Here you go, sir.” Charlie passed the statement back. He waited for the sky to fall.

Joe Steele put on glasses to read what he'd done. The President used them, but seldom let himself be photographed wearing them. His hair was grayer than when he first took office. After two or three minutes, he looked at Charlie over the tops of the spectacles. As always, his eyes were unreadable.

But then, out of the blue, he smiled. Like a snake with a bird, he could be charming. “This is excellent!” he said. “Much better than anything my hacks turned out. I'll use it, or something very close to it.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Charlie said. The lady, not the tiger.

“How would you like to work here?” Joe Steele asked. “I can use someone who doesn't write English like a foreign language. I'll raise your pay two thousand dollars over what the Associated Press gives you. With a baby in the house, money comes in handy, doesn't it?”

One brother in a labor encampment, one working in the White House? Wasn't that insane?
But what will he do if I say no?
Charlie didn't want—didn't dare—to find out. “Thank you, sir. I'm honored,” he muttered.
Honor or not, I'd still rather walk.
Walking, though, wasn't a choice Joe Steele had offered him.

Not even a year after German troops marched into Austria, not even six months after German troops goose-stepped into the Sudetenland (and after the
Führer
swore he had no more European territorial demands), the
Reich
annexed Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech parts of what had been Czechoslovakia. The Slovak part became “independent” under a bunch of homegrown Fascists headed by a priest.

Charlie got the wire-service feeds in the White House, the same as he had while he was still working for the Associated Press. He pulled an atlas off the shelf in his little office and eyed the map of Central Europe. With the revisions, it didn't look so good, not if you wanted the world to stay at peace.

A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Stas Mikoian stuck his head into the office. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

“The next world war, that's what,” Charlie answered gloomily.

“I hope it's not as bad as that,” Joe Steele's aide said.

“I hope so, too, but it damn well is. C'mere and see for yourself,” Charlie said. When Mikoian did, Charlie pointed to the map. “Look. Now the Nazis can put soldiers in Slovakia, not just the Sudetenland. With East Prussia, they've got Poland in the same kind of nutcracker they squeezed Czechoslovakia with after they grabbed Austria.”

Mikoian studied the Rand McNally, no doubt filling in the new
borders for himself. He grunted thoughtfully. “Yeah, it looks that way to me, too. And if we can see it, the brass at the War Department will see it, too.”

That made Charlie grunt. Some of what had been the top brass in the Army and Navy had been shot for treason. Other officers were serving long prison terms. Still others were breaking rocks or cutting down trees or digging ditches or doing whatever else wreckers did in labor encampments. Newer, younger men Joe Steele trusted further—not that Joe Steele trusted anybody very far—sat in those emptied chairs. Were they smart enough to see such things?
They'd damn well better be,
Charlie thought.

But Stas Mikoian hadn't finished: “And if we can see it, the brass in Paris and London can also see it. And the brass in Moscow, not that they wear much brass there.” Charlie nodded—the Reds had leveled things so thoroughly, even generals' uniforms were hardly fancier than those of private soldiers.

Another thought crossed Charlie's mind. “I bet they're having spasms in Warsaw,” he said. “Poland grabbed a little chunk of Czechoslovakia, too, when Hitler moved into the Sudetenland. I wonder how they like the taste of it now. Talk about shortsighted!”

“You said it,” Mikoian agreed.

“What's the boss going to do about it?” Charlie asked. Before Joe Steele's aide could answer, the telephone rang. Charlie picked it up. “Sullivan.” He still sometimes had to remind himself not to add
AP
after his name.

“Yes.” That rasp belonged to the President. “Put together a draft for me. I want to let the people know that this latest German move pushes Europe closer to war. I want them to know that we have to move closer to being able to defend ourselves no matter what happens, but that I don't want or aim to get drawn into a fight on the other side of the Atlantic. Got that?”

“Sure do.” Charlie had scrawled notes while Joe Steele talked.

“Then take care of it.” The phone went dead.

“Was that him?” Mikoian asked. Charlie nodded. The California Armenian gave forth with a crooked grin. “Well, now you know what he's going to do about it, in that case.” He nodded and left. He probably
expected his own call any minute, or that he'd have to respond to one that came while he was talking with Charlie.

That was how Joe Steele worked. He'd hand several people the same assignment, take what he liked most from each man's work, stir those chunks together, and use them as his own. It gave him the best from each member of his staff. It also kept the men he relied on competing against one another for his favor. One thing he knew was how to wrap people around his finger.

Charlie ran two sheets of paper sandwiched around a carbon into his typewriter and started clacking away. He bore down hard on keeping America out of the fight. Going to war again in Europe was pure political poison, nothing else but. Joe Steele could—and did—do pretty much what he wanted inside the borders of the USA. Halfway through his second term, the Constitution was what he said it was. Anybody who didn't go for that would soon be sorry. But not even the Jeebies could ship everyone who didn't fancy a war to the closest labor encampment. Spacious as the encampments were, they couldn't begin to hold all those people.

And Charlie bore down hard on what a lying, cheating SOB Hitler was. Kagan and Mikoian and Scriabin and whoever else was working on this would also emphasize that. Everybody knew Joe Steele couldn't stand Hitler. You couldn't go wrong calling him names.

Charlie wondered how much of his draft Joe Steele would use. He was the new kid on the block. He hadn't been on the staff since Joe Steele was a Congressman nobody outside of Fresno—and not many people in the town—had ever heard of. In a way, having a fresh approach gave him an edge. But the old-timers often teamed up against him, as much to remind him he
was
new as for any reason important in and of itself.

Office politics worked that way. They did in a bank, at the Associated Press, and here in the most important office in the country. Sometimes Charlie remembered that, and didn't let slights get him down. Sometimes, instead, he remembered that, if Joe Steele turned against him, firing was the least of his worries. If Joe Steele turned against him, it could be the firing squad. Or they could chuck him into a labor encampment and forget he was there. On days like that, he bit his nails and gnawed his cuticles till they bled.

On days like that, he also went to the watering hole near the White House, the one where the Vice President held court. Joe Steele never asked John Nance Garner for drafts of speeches. He never asked him what he thought about the great storm rising in Europe, or about the troubles that still dogged the United States.

And John Nance Garner wasn't sorry that he didn't. “I ain't got a thing to worry about,” the Vice President declared one afternoon when he'd taken on enough bourbon to pickle his grammar. “Joe Steele don't give a damn about me. Long as I stay out of the way and keep my trap shut and don't kick up no trouble, he'll leave me alone. You should be so lucky, Sullivan.”

“Yeah.” Charlie was morose that day. Joe Steele had talked about strikes, and how to keep the country producing in spite of them. He hadn't used many of Charlie's ideas. If Charlie had to guess, most of the ideas he had used came straight from J. Edgar Hoover, with maybe a few from Vince Scriabin. The speech hadn't had any compromise in it, in other words.

The Vice President leered at him like a fox eyeing a bunny. “Just recall, son—you
volunteered
for this,” Garner said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said again, more morosely yet. Then he eyed Garner in turn. “Now that I think about it, so did you.”

“Uh-huh.” The Vice President's sigh was so high-proof, it was a good thing he wasn't smoking—he might have impersonated a blowtorch. “Too late to fret none about it now. You grab the tiger by the ears, you got to hang on for the ride. Long as you're on his back, he can't eat you.”

Joe Steele didn't literally devour followers who displeased him. No, not literally. But when you had the most powerful job in the country and you took it three or four steps further than any other President had ever gone . . . Maybe the times demanded that. Maybe the times conspired with Joe Steele's nature. However that worked, even a metaphorical devouring could leave a man bloodied or dead.

Charlie held up his hand to ask for another drink.

*   *   *

I
t was summer—summer high in the Rockies. It got up into the sixties, sometimes into the seventies. Nights stayed chilly as the warmth of the day fled after sundown. Chilly, yes, but they didn't drop below freezing.

Mike enjoyed the good weather, knowing it wouldn't last. Even in summer up here, winter lay right around the corner. Winter always lay right around the corner . . . except when it sprang out and clasped you in its frigid embrace.

One day at a time, though.
Right around the corner
didn't mean
here
. He'd been in the labor encampment for a couple of years now. He had its measure, as much as anyone could. Even inside his own head, he was NY24601, wrecker, more often than he was Mike Sullivan,
New York Post
reporter.

He leaned on his axe, there in the woods. He was scrawny and dirty and shaggy and shabby. He also had harder muscles than he'd ever dreamt of, to say nothing of owned, before the Jeebies grabbed him. Nietzsche might've had it straight after all. What didn't kill you honest to God did make you stronger.

Sometimes it did kill. Too many men had left the labor encampment in pine boxes. They couldn't do the work. Or they couldn't stand the food. Or they simply despaired. If you gave up, you didn't last long.

“Spare any alfalfa?” Mike asked John Dennison.

The carpenter pulled out his tobacco pouch. When he did have some, he was always ready to share with friends. If they didn't share in turn, they didn't stay friends long. Mike understood that. “Get your paper ready,” Dennison said.

Mike tore a cigarette-sized piece off a wad of newspaper he kept in his pocket. He could wipe his ass on the rest when he had to shit. By what the papers printed these days, that was about what they were good for. They all sucked up to Joe Steele like you wouldn't believe. Or, considering how many reporters were in labor encampments these days, you might believe it.

Even smoking, even wiping your ass, you had to watch yourself. If somebody finked on you for burning up a newsprint photo of Joe Steele or getting it brown and stinking, you'd do a stretch in the punishment cells. Insulting the President was a serious business.

John Dennison poured the cheap, harsh tobacco onto the paper. Machine-made cigarettes with the tasty stuff inside them were as good as
money in the encampments. As often as not, they were too precious to smoke. This nasty junk just kept you from getting the no-cigarette jitters. That was all Mike cared about, that and the excuse for a short break.

Dennison rolled one for himself, too. He sucked in smoke, blew it out, and looked around. “By the time they turn us loose,” he said, “won't be a goddamn tree left in this part of Montana.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” Mike said, and then, after a puff of his own, “If they ever turn us loose.”

“Sooner or later, they'll get sick of us,” John Dennison said. “Wonder if I'll know how to fit in anywhere but a place like this by then.”

“Mmm,” Mike said—not a happy noise. He'd had the same worry, and the one on its flip side: whether Stella would want anything to do with him once they did let him go back to New York City and civilization as he'd known it. Plenty of the wives of wreckers at the encampment had already divorced them. Some of those ladies had found new men, not caring to wait for their husbands to return.

And others had filed for divorce to cleanse their own names. If you were married to a wrecker, something had to be wrong with you, too, didn't it? If you were looking for work, wouldn't whoever was hiring pick somebody reliable instead? If your son was applying for college, wouldn't they admit someone from a loyal household in his place? If you needed a loan, wouldn't a bank decide you made a poor risk because you might go off to an encampment yourself?

Mike had no reason to believe Stella was anything but faithful and one hundred percent behind him. But he hadn't heard from her for several months now. He didn't know whether that was because the Jeebies were sitting on his mail (or just tossing it in the trash) or because his wife couldn't find anything to say to him.

He didn't spend every waking moment brooding about it. He wasn't Hamlet, to brood about every goddamn thing that happened to him. Besides, during most of his waking moments he was too busy or too tired. Every so often, though, most often when he paused for a smoke, the worry bubbled back to the surface.

“What I really want to do,” Dennison went on, “is pay back the skunk
who told the Jeebies about me. Yeah, that son of a bitch, he's gonna have hisself an accident or three.”

“Mmm,” Mike repeated. Nobody'd needed to point him out to J. Edgar Hoover's thugs. The way he'd gone after Joe Steele, he'd done everything but shine a searchlight on himself. He'd been asking for it, and he'd got it.

The trouble was, he hadn't realized fast enough how much the rules had changed. Back in the old days—before Joe Steele's first inauguration—the First Amendment still meant something. If you behaved as if it did when it didn't . . . you ended up on a mountainside in Montana, leaning on your axe while you smoked so you wouldn't have to work for a few minutes.

A couple of hundred yards away, another lodgepole went over with a rending crash. A wrecker let out an excited yip. Some people could get worked up about whatever they wound up doing, even if it was only a short piss away from slave labor. Mike didn't have that knack. They could make him do it, but they couldn't make him get excited about it.

A guard came toward Mike and John Dennison. He was smoking a Camel; guards could burn their machine-mades whenever they got the urge. Sure as hell, the bastard looked at what was left of the wreckers' roll-your-owns. Had he spotted Joe Steele's mustache on either one, there would have been hell to pay.

Since he didn't, he just said, “Okay, kids—playtime's over. Get it in gear and knock down some wood.”

“Sure thing,” Mike said. You couldn't tell 'em to piss up a rope. But you could look busier than you were. Slaves had known that trick before the Pyramids rose. In the outside world, most of the wreckers had been hard workers. Not here, not when they didn't have to. What was the point? Mike didn't see any at all.