Joe Steele (30 page)

“I figured he'd get his third term,” Charlie said to Stas Mikoian. “But Willkie ran hard. I thought he'd make a better showing than this.”

Mikoian's eyes, dark as black coffee, narrowed under bushy eyebrows. “You never know, do you?” he said blandly. “That's why they have the election—so you can find out.”

“Uh-huh,” Charlie said. Something lay behind the clever Armenian's words, but Charlie couldn't unravel it. He'd had enough bourbon to shield himself from thought as well as trouble.

By eleven o'clock, polls on the West Coast were closing, too. Joe Steele's rout had swept clean across the country. Most of the candidates he liked for the House and Senate were comfortably ahead, too.

He and his wife came down to the East Hall a little before midnight. Maybe he'd been working. Maybe he'd been sleeping. You never could tell. Everybody cheered when the President and First Lady walked in. Joe Steele waved and dipped his head and looked as modest as a not very modest man could look.

He walked over to the bartender. “Apricot brandy, Julius,” he said.

“Comin' up, suh. Congratulations, suh,” the man said.

Apricot brandy was one of the few bits of his heritage Joe Steele left on display. As far as Charlie was concerned, the stuff made good paint thinner or flamethrower fuel, but you needed a stainless-steel gullet to toss it down the way the President did.

Betty Steele asked Julius for a scotch and soda. She mostly kept to herself around the White House; Charlie seldom saw her. She was anything but an active First Lady, the way, say, Eleanor Roosevelt might have been. She still had her usual air of quiet sadness.

People hollered and pointed at the radio. “Wendell Willkie has conceded defeat,” the announcer was saying. “His statement has just reached us. He claims there were certain voting irregularities in some areas, but admits they were not enough to change the result. He extends his best wishes to the President for leading the country through this difficult and dangerous time.”

“Well, you can't get much more gracious about it than that.” Stas Mikoian seemed in a mood to be gracious himself. He commonly showed
more class than the other men who'd come east from California with Joe Steele.

Vince Scriabin, by contrast, laughed like a hyena, laughed till tears streamed down his face from behind his spectacles, when he heard Willkie's concession statement. Charlie gaped at him, hardly believing his own eyes. He couldn't remember seeing the Hammer smile, though he supposed he must have. He was positive he'd never seen Scriabin laugh. He hadn't imagined the pencil-necked little hardcase had laughter in him.

“Voting irregularities!” Scriabin chortled. “Oh, good Lord!” He dissolved into fresh hilarity.

Joe Steele and J. Edgar Hoover thought that was pretty goddamn funny, too. “You know what Boss Tweed said, don't you?” the President asked the head of the GBI.

“No. What?” Hoover asked, as he was meant to do.

“‘As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?'” Joe Steele quoted with great gusto. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “And I damn well do!” He and J. Edgar Hoover both thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard.

“Now, Joe,” Betty Steele said, but she was chuckling, too.

Charlie also laughed, along with everybody else close enough to the President and the GBI boss to hear the exchange. Boss Tweed had been dead for a hell of a long time. And anyone who repeated Joe Steele's crack anywhere outside of this room was much too likely to end up the same way in short order.

Charlie went over to the bartender, who waited expectantly. “Let me have another bourbon, Julius,” he said. “Why don't you make it a double this time?”

“You got it, suh,” Julius said. Charlie inhaled the drink, and then another double after it, and another one after that. No matter how pickled he got, though, and no matter how drug through a knothole he felt the next morning, he couldn't forget what Joe Steele said.

*   *   *

A
nother lodgepole tottered, crackled, and fell, landing in the snow within a few inches of where Mike had thought it would drop. He'd turned into
a pretty fair lumberjack since they chucked him into this encampment. He hadn't intended to, but he had anyway. As with anything else, practice made good if not perfect.

Of course, working alongside John Dennison for more than three years now went a long way toward making good, too. The man with WY232 on the front and back of his jacket came over to stand next to Mike and admire the downfallen tree for a moment before they started lopping branches off it. “Nice job,” Dennison said.

“Thanks.” Mike grinned. Praise from the carpenter counted for more than it did from most people, because he never came out with it unless he meant it.

But Dennison hadn't finished. Barely moving his lips, pitching his words so no guard could possibly hear them, he went on, “Help fuck up the count tonight, okay?”

“Oh, yeah?” Mike answered the same way. That prison-yard style of talking was one more thing he hadn't known he'd pick up when they shipped him here from New York City. But he had, all right. As with dropping trees where he wanted them to fall, he'd got good at it, too.

“Uh-huh.” John didn't nod. He didn't do anything to draw the Jeebies' notice toward Mike and him. The guards weren't paying them much attention now anyway. They'd just cut down a tree. That showed they were working. And they were veterans of the encampment by now. The bastards with the Tommy guns trusted them as far as they trusted anybody. The scalps, the guys who didn't know how things worked and who still had the taste of freedom in their mouths, those were the dangerous people. Or so the guards thought.

“Okey-doke,” Mike said through a mouth that stayed still. He tramped over to the top of the trunk and started trimming the branches and cutting the main growth into manageable lengths. When the work gang knocked off for the day, he and John dragged a sledge full of wood back to the encampment with ropes over their shoulders.

Mike's usual place in the count was third row, seventh man from the left. But he could slide into another slot in the next row farther back as soon as the Jeebie with the clipboard walked past him. Everything got to be
routine for the guards after the encampment had run smoothly for a while. They didn't think any harder than they had to.

He kept his head down when he was standing in the row behind his assigned position. He kind of scratched at his chest with his mittened hand to obscure his number from the guard. You were supposed to stand at attention while the count was going on, but everybody had itches that needed scratching. The screws had long since quit getting excited about it.

He didn't look around to see if other wreckers were helping to wreck the count. He also didn't look around to see who wasn't there. What he didn't know, they couldn't pull out of him no matter how long they left him in a punishment cell.

As soon as he could, he slid back to his proper place. Footprints in the snow would give him away for a little while, but not for long. As soon as everybody else started moving around, the tracks would get wiped out.

“Dismissed to dinner!” the lead Jeebie shouted. Whatever stunt the prisoners had pulled, it worked this time. It would unravel. All the shabby, dirty, skinny men tramping through the snow toward the kitchen understood as much. Well, all the wreckers who knew something was going on did, anyhow.

They got through the next morning's roll call. Somebody answered for every number and name the Jeebie called out. Whether the man who answered was always the man to whom that number and name belonged . . . Mike had no way of knowing. Neither John nor anyone else asked him to sing out for somebody who wasn't there to sing out for himself.

But the morning count went wrong. Mike didn't know how. As far as he could tell, no one noticed his shuffle from his proper place to his improper one. Still, at the end of things, the boss guard said, “We gotta do it again.” He sounded disgusted, at his men as well as at the inmates. It was an article of faith among the wreckers that the Jeebies couldn't count to twenty-one without reaching into their pants. Smart people didn't want work like that. No—smart people who ended up in an encampment landed there with stretches on their backs.

“No moving around, you assholes!” a guard shouted when they tried
again. He kicked somebody who'd started to switch spots too soon. Not wanting a boot in the belly, Mike held his place.

The other wreckers who'd been playing games must have done the same thing, because at the end of the count the boss guard clapped a hand to his forehead in extravagant disbelief and despair. “Holy fucking shit!” he howled. “We got four o' these pussies missing! Four! God only knows how long the turds been gone, too!”

They got no breakfast that morning. Instead of food, they got interrogations. Mike said “I don't know” a lot. He said, “I didn't know anybody was missing till the count came out wrong.” He said, “Could I get something to eat, please? I'm hungry.”

“You're a lying shitsack, is what you are!” The Jeebie who was grilling him slapped him in the face. But he did it only once, and with his hand open—it was a slap, not a punch. That told Mike the guards didn't really suspect him of anything. This guy was just knocking him around on general principles.

They put him in a punishment cell for two days. He got bread and water—and not much bread. They didn't give him a blanket. He rolled himself into a ball, shivered, and hoped he didn't freeze to death.

Three days after he got sent back to Barracks 17, the Jeebies brought in two live wreckers and a corpse. “This is what happens if you run away from your deserved punishment,” the camp commandant said. Then the guards beat the surviving escapees to within an inch of their lives while the rest of the wreckers watched and listened. After the stomping, the men the Jeebies had recaptured didn't go to the encampment's infirmary. No, they went into the punishment barracks, and for a stretch a lot longer than two days. If they recovered and came out, that was all right. And if they didn't, the guards wouldn't lose a minute of sleep over them.

But four men had run off. The Jeebies got hold of only three. Mike clung to that, the way a man bobbing in the sea after a shipwreck would cling to a wooden plank. Maybe the fourth wrecker was dead, frozen meat somewhere high up in the harsh Montana mountains. Maybe bobcats and cougars were scraping flesh from his bones with their rough tongues right now.

Maybe he'd got away, though. Four had escaped the labor
encampment. One still wasn't accounted for. Maybe he was free. Maybe, right this minute, he was back in Ohio. Or if he was still in Montana, maybe he was shacked up with a rancher's pretty sister.

Mike sure hoped so. And he knew he was a long way from the only wrecker who did.

*   *   *

A
s 1940 groaned into 1941, the war seemed to pause to catch its breath. The Nazis still bombed England and torpedoed every ship they could, but it seemed plain the swastika wouldn't fly from Buckingham Palace any time soon. The RAF raided Germany night after night. Goebbels screamed about terror flyers the way a calf screamed when the branding iron seared its rump. But the
Luftwaffe
hadn't broken the Londoners' will to keep fighting. It also seemed plain the British bombers wouldn't scare the Berliners into abandoning Hitler.

Charlie got drunk again after Joe Steele's third inauguration. Even toasted, he knew better than to say what he was thinking. If he came to the White House with a hangover the next morning, the President's other aides—and the President himself—figured he'd hurt himself celebrating, not for any other reason.

On the home front, Esther got Sarah potty-trained. “Thank God!” Charlie said. “If I never see another dirty diaper as long as I live, I won't miss 'em one bit.” He held his nose.

His wife sent him a quizzical look. “You don't want to have another baby one of these days before too long?” she asked.

“Um,” Charlie said, and then “Um” again. Knowing he'd stuck his foot in it, he added, “Well, maybe I do. But I still don't like diapers.”

“Nobody likes diapers except the people who make them and the companies that wash them,” Esther said. “You need 'em, though. Nobody likes babies peeing and pooping all over everything, either.”

“You got that right, babe,” Charlie agreed—a safe response, he thought.

“I didn't want to have two kids wearing diapers at the same time,” Esther said. “That's enough to drive anybody squirrely. But Sarah will be close to four by the time I have another one. She may even be past four if I don't catch right off the bat.”

“Catch right off the bat?” Charlie said. “Do you want to have another baby or sign up with the Senators?” Esther made a horrible face, so he could hope she'd forgiven him.

She didn't catch right off the bat, the way she had when they started Sarah. The little girl turned three. Out in the wider world, the Germans pulled Mussolini's chestnuts out of the fire by invading Yugoslavia and Greece. In the North African desert, the German Afrika Korps also helped the Italians keep their heads above water against England.

And in the Far East, Japan took bite after bite out of China. The Japs had occupied airfields and naval bases in the northern part of French Indochina the year before—fallen France was in no position to tell them they couldn't. Now they pressured the Vichy regime to let them move into the whole region.

Churchill didn't want them doing that. It put fresh pressure on British Malaya and Singapore. Joe Steele didn't like it, either. Indochina was too close to the Philippines, which belonged to the USA. Douglas MacArthur was one of the few senior officers Joe Steele hadn't purged in the 1930s. He was already in the Philippines by then, helping the natives build their own army against the day when they won independence. The local authorities gave him the rank of field marshal. He was the only American ever to hold it, even if it wasn't with his own country's forces.