Joe Steele (36 page)

It got hotter and stickier every day. When they crossed the Equator, the sailors summoned the soldiers topside and drenched them with fire hoses. King Neptune and his court magically transformed the polliwogs to sturdy shellbacks.

They disembarked at Guadalcanal. The scars in the jungle were
already healing, but the place still looked like hell. They went into an encampment that made the one outside of Lubbock seem like a Ritz-Carlton by comparison.

There'd been mice in the barracks in Montana. Some of the guys there, with nothing else to give their affection to, had made pets out of them. No mice scurrying over these bunks. There were cockroaches instead: cockroaches almost as big as mice. You couldn't tame them. All you could do was squash them, and they made a mess when you did.

Ordinary soldiers, Mike quickly discovered, weren't allowed to mingle with men from punishment brigades. No fraternization—that was what the Army called it. That was why they had the P on their sleeves. They were soldiers, and then again they weren't.

Time dragged on. The brass still didn't seem to have decided how best to dispose of them. Some men cooked up a nasty brew from fruit and sugar and whatever else they could promote that would ferment. A fellow from South Carolina who swore he'd been a moonshiner rigged a still. What came out of it was even fouler than the undistilled product. Mike sampled both, so he had standards of comparison.

Captain Magnusson hunted him up when he was still feeling the aftereffects. “One thing about this year,” the company CO said. He'd been putting away rotgut, too; his breath stank of it.

“What's that, sir?” Mike was discovering that heat and humidity didn't improve a hangover. He wished Magnusson would go away.

But the captain had tabbed him as somebody he could talk to. “We go into action before it's over, that's what,” he said. “And we see how many of us get to say hello to 1944, let alone 1945.”

“You always know how to cheer me up, don't you, sir?”

As if he hadn't spoken, Luther Magnusson went on. “And you know what else? I'm still looking forward to it.” Almost in spite of himself, Mike nodded. He was, too.

*   *   *

C
harlie looked out of the hotel at Basra. The smells coming in through the window would have told him he wasn't in America any more even if he couldn't have seen any of the Iraqi city. No town in the United States
had smelled like this since the turn of the century, maybe longer. Neither the locals nor the British, who'd grabbed hold of Iraq after the First World War (and who'd hung on to it despite a pro-Nazi uprising) seemed to have bothered with putting in flush toilets or sewer lines. The canals near the river only added to the stink.

Right by the Shatt al-Arab Hotel was a little England, at least to the eye. Rich people, limeys and their wog flunkies, lived in those rose-gardened houses. Farther away, most of the buildings he could see were made of mud brick, with flat roofs. He could have found the like in Albuquerque or Santa Fe; he'd done a good bit of knocking around the country in his AP days. But nowhere in the USA would he have seen domed mosques with minarets spearing up toward the sky. Just looking at them made him think of the
Arabian Nights
, or of Douglas Fairbanks buckling a swash in a silent movie.

Basra wasn't silent. The mosques weren't even close to silent. They had PA systems to amplify the muezzins' wailing calls to prayer. The first time Charlie heard one, he knew he wasn't in Kansas any more.

The hotel, like its surrounding district, was a little bit of England dropped into the Middle East. The elevator—the lift, they called it—creaked. The beer was warm. The dining room served roast beef and Yorkshire pudding although, even in October here, Basra was hotter than London ever got.

Charlie didn't know how many Tommies were protecting the hotel from any mischief the natives or even the now-distant Germans could brew up. He did know the number wasn't small. And the security was needed. Charlie wouldn't have come a quarter of the way around the world if Joe Steele hadn't come. The President had his own guards under J. Edgar Hoover, who was also along.

Joe Steele wasn't just playing tourist. He hadn't come to ride in one of the almost-gondolas that plied the canals. He'd come here to meet with Winston Churchill, and with Leon Trotsky. They needed to plan how the rest of the war would go, and to talk about what the world might look like once it didn't hold crazy Nazis and fanatical samurai.

Churchill had greeted Joe Steele when he and his followers flew in
from Cairo. Trotsky was due at the airport any minute now. He'd said he didn't want to be greeted. He would meet the leaders of the Western democracies when he got to the hotel.

How many people around the world would have wanted to be in the room to witness the first confrontation between Trotsky and Joe Steele? Millions. Millions and millions, for sure.
I get to be one of the lucky ones who do it,
Charlie thought. The reporter he had been quivered in anticipation.

Someone knocked on the door. Charlie opened it. There in the wildly carpeted hallway stood J. Edgar Hoover. “I just received word that Trotsky has arrived safely. The President and the Prime Minister will greet him in the Grand Ballroom on the first floor.” He made a face. “What the limeys call the first floor. It'd be the second floor to us.”

“Gotcha. Thanks,” Charlie said. To an Englishman, the American first floor was the ground floor.
Two countries separated by the same language.
Charlie couldn't remember who'd said that. Whoever it was, he'd known what he was talking about.

He walked down the stairs to the Grand Ballroom. He didn't trust that lift. He wouldn't have trusted it if they'd called it an elevator. The ballroom was a garish horror. It was a bad English imitation of Arab decor that was bad to begin with. Low couches, footstools, silk brocade, cloth-of-gold . . . Put it all together and it spelled tasteless. The British crystal candelabra with light bulbs in place of candles only added to the surreal gaucheness.

Churchill and his entourage sat on the right side of the chamber as you came in. Joe Steele and his were over to the left. Charlie headed that way. In the center would be Trotsky and his followers. Only a few hard-faced Red security men stood there now. They eyed the decadent capitalist imperialists to either side of them with an odd and—Charlie was to learn—very Russian mix of fear and contempt.

Lazar Kagan nodded to Charlie as he came over. So did General Marshall. Scriabin ignored him. Mikoian and Joe Steele were whispering back and forth. The President chuckled at something Mikoian said.

J. Edgar Hoover strode in. He'd only grown heavier and jowlier in the years since Charlie first met him when he seized the Supreme Court Four. He took his place with the rest of the Americans. “Any minute now,” he said.

A British military band outside the hotel struck up “The Internationale.” That had to be one of the more bizarre moments of Charlie's life. It also had to mean the boss Red was here.

When the lift worked, you could hear it all over the building. Charlie listened to it now. Into the Grand Ballroom strode Trotsky, accompanied by a couple of generals, by Foreign Commissar Litvinov, by a skinny little man who had to be his translator, and by some more tough-looking Russian security men with submachine guns. The three leaders' guardsmen could have themselves quite a little war if things went south.

But they didn't. “My dear Leon—a lion indeed!” Churchill said warmly. He'd met Trotsky before—he'd gone to Moscow a couple of times after England and Russia both found themselves fighting the Nazis. Now he walked up to the Red leader carrying, of all things, a sword. “Allow me to present to you the Sword of Valor, given to you in the name of the Russian people by his Majesty, King George VI.”

Trotsky murmured something in Russian. The translator sounded as if he'd gone to Oxford (maybe he had): “He says this is not how he ever expected the ruler of the world's biggest empire to give him the sword.”

Charlie laughed in surprise. Even translated, that showed wit. Well, Trotsky looked as foxy as ever, with that shock of graying red-brown hair, the red-brown chin beard—also graying—the nose that did duty for a muzzle, and the clever eyes behind glasses a lot like Scriabin's. Chances were he hadn't risen to the top in the dog-eat-dog world of Red politics by accident.

Winston Churchill laughed, too: a booming chortle that invited everyone who heard it to join in. “Politics is a strange business, all right,” he said. “But anyone who opposes Adolf Hitler passes the most important test.” He glanced over his shoulder and saw Joe Steele coming up. “And now let me introduce you to the President of the United States, whom you have not met before.”

Joe Steele and Leon Trotsky sized each other up. Plainly, there was still no love lost between them. But when, after two or three seconds, Trotsky stuck out his hand, Joe Steele took it. The President spoke first: “Churchill has it right. We will beat Germany and Japan first, and worry later about everything that comes later.”

As a matter of fact, Russia and Japan had a neutrality treaty. Russian freighters crossed the Pacific, loaded up on American weapons to shoot at the Germans, and steamed back to Vladivostok to put them on the Trans-Siberian Railway without worrying about Japanese submarines. As Churchill said, politics was a mighty strange business.

Trotsky's smile didn't quite reach his eyes. “Well, we can start worrying about them now, but we won't let them stand in our way,” he said.

“Fair enough,” Joe Steele said. The two men took a step back from each other, both at the same time.

Joe Steele was short and lean. Leon Trotsky was short and had a middle-aged man's potbelly, but wasn't really heavy. Winston Churchill was short and roly-poly. Charlie didn't know what that meant, or whether it meant anything. From what he'd heard, though, Adolf Hitler also wasn't exactly a skyscraper.
The short shall inherit the earth, or at least order it around?
Since Charlie didn't have a whole lot of inches, he found himself liking the idea. Vince Scriabin probably would, too.

As the leaders chatted, Trotsky through his interpreter, their entourages warily mingled. Among the Russians, Litvinov spoke good English. He'd been Red envoy to England and, Charlie found out, had an English wife. Lazar Kagan knew enough Yiddish to get by, and it was close enough to German to let him talk with a couple of the Red generals.

*   *   *

A
t the banquet that evening, Trotsky drank vodka as if it were water. Churchill poured down whiskey the same way. Joe Steele had but one liver to give for his country, and manfully kept up. Charlie had not been unacquainted with strong drink in the course of his life. He put down enough that evening to know he'd be sorry in the morning. Scriabin was doing a good job of knocking them back, too. Charlie didn't know where the little man put all the booze, because he didn't show it. Maybe he had a hollow leg. He and Litvinov got into a row about the Second Front. The Russians had wanted England and the USA to invade France in 1943. It hadn't happened, and they were still steamed about that. Just to make matters worse, Scriabin and Litvinov seemed to love each other as little as Joe Steele and Trotsky did.

From everything Charlie'd seen, Churchill had stalled the landings on the Channel coast more than Joe Steele had. Churchill remembered too well the bloodbath in France from the last war. He didn't want England to go through that again. Meanwhile, the Russians went through a bigger bloodbath of their own.

Charlie took three aspirins before he finally hit the hay that night. He woke up with the jimjams anyway. He sent more aspirins down the hatch, then headed for the ballroom in search of coffee. The kitchen had gone native to the extent of offering an Arab-style brew: thick as mud, clogged with sugar, and served in tiny cups. Charlie drank three, one after the other. They didn't cure him but, along with the little white pills and the hair of the dog that had mauled him, they left him functioning.

Other men from all three great powers staggered down, most of them a good deal the worse for wear. Yanks, limeys, Ivans—it didn't matter. A hangover hurt just as bad no matter who had it. A couple of the worst sufferers walked with great care, as if afraid their heads would fall off. Charlie wasn't quite so damaged, but he sympathized.

When Churchill came down, he seemed fresh as a daisy. He greeted Charlie with “Ah, the Irishman!” and went on to guzzle tea and eat a hearty breakfast. Trotsky also showed few signs of all he'd drunk the night before. If you were going to run Russia, you had to be able to hold your liquor. Joe Steele was sallow and scowling, but he was always sallow and often scowling, so that proved nothing.

After breakfast, the leaders and their top military and political men sat down together to hash things over. Charlie wasn't a big enough wheel to be invited to that get-together. He knew why Joe Steele had brought him along: to help draft the statement the President would release when the conference ended.

In the meantime, he could see a little of Basra. He bought a copper-and-glass water pipe at a bazaar. He likely paid four times what it was worth, but it was still cheap. Some of the filth and poverty . . . The worst Hoovervilles at the Depression's lowest ebb hadn't come within miles of this. He went back to the Shatt al-Arab Hotel with a new respect for Western civilization.

At the banquet that evening, Scriabin whispered to him: “Trotsky! That son of a bitch is the stubbornest man in the world.”

“Is he?” Charlie whispered back. He'd always thought the Hammer was in the running for that prize, and Joe Steele with him. Saying so didn't seem smart. Scriabin nodded. He probably figured he was a reasonable fellow, which only proved not everybody knew himself.

After dinner, the booze came out. People made toasts. “To the bravery of the Red Army!” Joe Steele said. Everybody drank.