Joe Steele (54 page)

That outpouring of respect and grief made Charlie wonder whether Joe Steele would have won all his elections even if he hadn't left anything to chance. He might well have. But he'd never been one to risk anything he didn't have to. He'd always assumed the deck would be crooked. If he didn't stack it, someone else would. He made damn sure nobody else did.

They'd planned to let him lie there one day, till eight p.m. The crowds were so large, they kept the Capitol open all day and all night . . . for three days in a row. When they closed it at last, disappointed mourners threw rocks and bottles at the police and Jeebies who tried to clear them away.

Joe Steele went into the ground at Arlington National Cemetery, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. His final resting place wasn't far from where
he'd executed the Supreme Court Four and other adjudged traitors. Charlie wondered how many besides him would think of that. Most of the reporters covering the funeral hadn't been in the business when Joe Steele started ordering people shot.

John Nance Garner delivered the memorial address. He started by adapting Shakespeare: “I come to praise Joe Steele, not to bury him. For all he did will live on in this country for years to come. He lifted us out of the Depression by our bootstraps. Not everyone now remembers how bad off we were then. He led us through the greatest war in the history of the world. And he made sure the Reds wouldn't be the only ones with atom bombs. We're as free as we are on account of him.”

The new President paused. He looked as if he wanted to light a smoke or take a drink. But this was the time and place for neither. He drew in a deep breath and went on: “Some will say we ought to be freer than we are. Maybe they're right, but maybe they're wrong. Maybe this is the way things have to be if we're going to stay even so free. I don't know the answer to that yet. I'll be working on it, the same as Joe Steele was.”

Another pause. “The President we used to have is dead. I'm sorry as all get-out. I wish I wasn't standing here in front of you making this speech right now. But even with Joe Steele gone, the United States of America is still in business. God bless America, and God bless each and every one of you.” He stepped away from the microphone.

By the graveside, Betty Steele gently wept. Most of Joe Steele's cronies and Cabinet members, as well as the Senators and Representatives and Supreme Court justices who'd served under him for so long, also sobbed. Charlie sniffled a little himself. He couldn't help it. Had he not been there when Joe Steele died, he might have thought they were all hypocrites shedding crocodile tears. He understood better now. Some losses simply were too big to take in. This was one of them. They could worry later about whether Joe Steele and all he'd done were good or bad. What mattered now was that the man was gone. His passing couldn't help leaving a void inside everyone who remained.

Cemetery workers lowered the bronze casket into the ground. They
took hold of shovels and began to fill in the grave. Dirt thudding down on the coffin lid was the most final sound Charlie knew. TV cameras brought the funeral to the whole country.

Dignitaries walked back to their Cadillacs and Lincolns and Imperials and Packards. Some men drove themselves away. Others let chauffeurs take care of the work. Armed GBI guards on motorcycles escorted the small convoy of expensive Detroit cars Charlie rode in: the one that went back to the White House. People filled the sidewalks, many with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces as they mourned. Nobody under thirty-five had any idea what the country'd been like before Joe Steele won his first national election in 1932.

John Nance Garner (
President
John Nance Garner—sure enough, that still had just begun to sink in) stood waiting by his limousine as Charlie came up to him along with Scriabin and Kagan and Mikoian. “Mr. President,” Charlie murmured. The other aides nodded, all of them in their somber mourning suits.

“Gentlemen,” Garner said. He suddenly seemed taller and straighter than Charlie remembered. Going from Number Two to Number One would do that, even if Garner hadn't looked to be President. He went on, “Gentlemen, I would like to talk with all of you in the conference room in fifteen minutes.”

They all nodded again, though the look Kagan sent Scriabin said nobody but Joe Steele had any business ordering them around like that. Who did John Nance Garner think he was, the President or something? By the way he stood next to the Cadillac, that was just what he thought.

Charlie hadn't been in the conference room since Joe Steele had his stroke there. He shivered when he walked in. The place still overwhelmingly reminded him of the dead President. The lingering aroma of Joe Steele's pipe tobacco rammed the memory home—smell was tied in with emotion and evocation more than any of the other senses.

John Nance Garner was smoking a Camel, not a pipe. A drink sat on the table in front of him, but he didn't pick it up. “Hello, Sullivan,” he said. “Who woulda figured it'd come to this?”

“I know I didn't, sir.” Charlie glanced at the clock on the wall behind the new President. If Joe Steele's California henchmen didn't hustle, they'd be late.

They weren't. They came in together, on time to the second. “Mr. President,” they chorused as they slid into their usual seats.

Garner slid sheets of paper across the table at them and at Charlie. “These are letters of resignation,” he said. “They're for form. I'm getting them from the Cabinet, too.”

Charlie signed his and passed it back. If John Nance Garner wanted someone else putting words in his mouth, he was entitled to that. Charlie didn't know just what he'd do if the new President let him go, but he expected he could come up with something. He might wind up poorer—no, he would wind up poorer—as a newspaperman, but he might be happier, too. He wondered if he remembered how to write a lead any more. Chances were it would come back to him.

The glances Mikoian, Scriabin, and Kagan sent him were all distinctly hooded. But they couldn't very well refuse to sign letters like that. One by one, they scrawled their names. Kagan needed to borrow Scriabin's pen so he could put his signature on the underscored line.

John Nance Garner set reading glasses on his nose and examined each letter in turn. He clucked his tongue between his teeth and sighed. Then he said, “Mikoian, Kagan, Scriabin—I'm going to accept your resignations, effective immediately. Sullivan, you can stick around a little longer, anyways.”

Joe Steele's henchmen stared at him in disbelief too theatrical for any director to use. “You can't do that!” the Hammer exclaimed.

“You don't dare do that!” Kagan added.

“Oh, yes, I can, and I damn well do dare,” John Nance Garner replied.

“Why are you doing this?” Mikoian asked. Charlie also thought that was a pretty good question.

Garner answered it: “Why? I'll tell you why. Because for the past twenty years you whistleass peckerheads have pretended I'd never been
born, that's why. That's easy when you're messing with the Veep. But I'm not the goddamn Veep any more. Now I call the shots, and I'll keep the company I want to keep, same as Joe Steele did before me. Tell you what, though—I'll make it easier on you, so it doesn't look quite so much like I'm kicking you out the White House door.”

“How do you mean?” Scriabin demanded, hard suspicion curling his voice.

“Well, I was thinking I'd name Mikoian here ambassador to Afghanistan, and Kagan ambassador to Paraguay,” Garner said. “I don't reckon I'll have any trouble getting the Senate to confirm those.”

“What about me?” the Hammer asked.

“Don't you worry about a thing, Vince. I got a place for you, too,” John Nance Garner replied. No one called Scriabin
Vince
, not even Joe Steele. No. No one had. Smiling, Garner continued, “I'll put you up for ambassador to Outer Mongolia. Have fun with the camels and the sheep.”

“You won't get away with this.” Scriabin would have sounded less frightening had he sounded less frigid.

“No, huh? People like you, they serve at the President's pleasure. Well, the pleasure ain't mine. Now get the hell out of the White House, before I call the hired muscle to throw you out.”

They stalked from the conference room, Mikoian serene as always, Kagan scowling, and Scriabin shaking his head in tightly held fury. That left Charlie alone with the new President. “What about me, sir?” he asked. But that wasn't the question he wanted to ask. After a moment, he got it out: “Why didn't you fire me, too?”

“Like I told you, you can hang around if you want to,” Garner said. “And here's why—you remembered I was a human being even when Joe Steele didn't. You'd drink with me. You'd talk with me. More'n Joe Steele or those three puffed-up thugs o' his ever did. You know how I found out there was such a thing as an atom bomb?”

“How?” Charlie asked.

“When I heard on the radio we dropped one on that Sendai place, that's how,” John Nance Garner growled. “Nobody said a word to me
before. Not one goddamn word, Sullivan. I was Vice President of the United States, an' they treated me like a dirty Red spy. Did
you
know about the bomb ahead of time?”

“Well . . . some.” Charlie wondered whether Garner would show him the door for telling the truth.

“I ain't surprised. I wish I was, but I ain't.” The President lit another cigarette. “You wrote some pretty good words for Joe Steele. You might've done even better if he'd wanted you to, too. So we'll see how it goes, if that suits you. If I don't like it, I'll toss you out on your ear.”

“All the way to Outer Mongolia?” Charlie asked.

Garner chuckled hoarsely. “Shit, even that ain't far enough for Scriabin. I'd send him to the far side of the moon if only I could get him there.”

“I'll stay for a while, Mr. President,” Charlie said. “But you'd better keep an eye on the Hammer before he leaves. He's had the office in here a long time. He won't want to give up everything that goes with it.”

“Now tell me something I didn't know. I'll have J. Edgar's boys watching him every second. Oh, you bet I will.” John Nance Garner muttered to himself. “Now who do I get to watch Hoover?” He knew the questions that needed asking, all right.

Charlie looked for something, anything, more to say. The best he could do was, “Good luck, sir.”

“Thanks,” Garner said. “I'll take whatever I can get.”

*   *   *

M
ike stuck a nickel in a machine and took out a copy of the
Casper Morning Star
. He wondered why he bothered. It was a thin, anemic sheet compared to the
New York Post
. Compared to the
New York Times
, it was barely a newspaper at all.

But it was what Casper had for a morning paper. The evening
Herald-Tribune
was no better. That a town as small as Casper had both a morning and an evening paper said something, though Mike wasn't sure what. He shrugged as he folded the
Morning Star
, stuck it under his arm, and carried it into the diner where he ate breakfast most days.

“Morning,” a man and a woman said when he came in. He'd been here long enough for people to know him for a regular at the joint. But the locals still thought of him as new in town. He was, of course, but they'd go right on thinking of him that way if he stayed here till he was ninety. They cut him a little extra slack because he was friends with John Dennison, but only a little.

The counterman poured coffee and gave him the cup. “You want hash browns or pancakes?” he asked. Mike almost always ate bacon and eggs over medium, but he went now with one side, now the other.

“Hash browns today,” he said, adulterating the coffee with cream and sugar.

The counterman called the order back to the kitchen. Mike opened the paper and started to read. Some of the local writing was pretty good. The
Morning Star
kept the city fathers on their toes. National and world news all came from the wire services. The next time the paper sent a reporter out of Wyoming would be the first.

A story below the fold on the front page caught his eye. W
HITE
H
OUSE
S
HAKEUP
, the headline read. The story announced that three of Joe Steele's longtime assistants had resigned and been offered ambassadorial positions by President Garner. For a moment, Mike swore under his breath. They deserved to be tarred and feathered as far as he was concerned, if not drawn and quartered.

Then he noticed where John Nance Garner wanted to send them. You couldn't leave the USA any farther behind, not unless you did a swan dive from a B-29 into the South Pacific halfway between Australia and New Zealand.

He wanted to whoop. He wanted to holler. He wanted to jump off his stool and cut capers right there at the counter. But he just sat, reading the paper. You never could tell who was a Jeebie or who informed for the GBI. Even though a ton of scalps lived here, people had mourned Joe Steele, and mourned him yet. They might still feel something for his nasty henchmen, unlikely as that seemed to Mike. You didn't want to take chances, not in America the way it was these days.

Mike did let himself smile as he sipped from his cup. No informer could report him for that. Right next to the story about the ambassadorships to the back of beyond was one about a colt rescued from a drainage ditch. That one might have made Vince Scriabin smile. It sure would have made him happier than being named ambassador to Outer Mongolia did.

“Thanks,” Mike said when the counterman set the plate in front of him. He grabbed the syrup, and was about to use it when he remembered he'd asked for the potatoes. They got salt and pepper instead, along with the eggs. After breakfast and two cups of snarling coffee, he headed for the carpenter's shop. He took the
Morning Star
with him, though he usually left it behind in the diner.