Joe Steele (55 page)

With John Dennison, he could gloat over the fall of the Pain Trust to his heart's content. The more he gloated, the more contented his heart got, too. John was less delighted than he was. “The bastards'll still be living off the fat of the land, right?” he said. “Only difference'll be, from now on it's the fat of somebody else's land.”

“So what would you do with 'em, then?” Mike asked.

“Send 'em to an encampment, that's what,” Dennison said with no hesitation at all. “Let's see 'em live on the thin for a change. They deserve it! Bread made out of sawdust and rye? Stew from potato peels and old cabbage and turnip greens and maybe a little dead goat every once in a while if you're lucky? A number on 'em front and back? Chopping wood when it's twenty below? How many times did they give it to other folks? Let 'em find out what it's like and see how they enjoy it.”

“Only one thing wrong with that,” Mike said.

“Like what?” Plainly, John didn't think it was wrong at all.

“As soon as the wreckers realize who they are, how long will they last?” Mike said. “Not long enough to get skinny, that's for sure.”

“Oh.” Dennison paused. Then, reluctantly, he nodded. But he also said, “You gonna tell me they don't deserve to get ripped to pieces? Go ahead, scalp! Make me believe it.”

“I don't want anybody grabbing hold of them when I'm not there to help,” Mike said. “I'd dig up Joe Steele if I was back East and tear him to bits along with his flunkies.”

“He got you as bad as anybody, didn't he?” John said. “The stretch, the punishment brigade, two wars, and now internal exile. You sure as hell didn't miss much.”

“He didn't have me shot,” Mike said. “He figured the Japs would take care of it for him, but they fell down on the job.”

Midori understood American politics in Japanese terms. After Mike got home, still full of the news, she said, “The new Prime Minister always shakes up the cabinet. Sometimes it matters. Most of the time?” She shook her head.

“Yeah, that makes sense.” Mike wanted to keep talking about it. Seeing bad things happen to Scriabin, Mikoian, and Kagan pleased him almost as much as learning Joe Steele was dead had done. But Midori hardly seemed interested. Because Mike was so excited about what he'd read in the
Morning Star
, he needed longer to notice than he might have. After a while, though, he asked, “Are you okay, honey?”

“I am very okay.” Even after she'd come to the States and started using it all the time, her English had a few holes in it. Or so Mike thought, till she went on, “Dr. Weinbaum says yes, I am going to have a baby.”

Mike's jaw dropped. He could feel it drop, something he never remembered before. “Oh, my God!” he whispered. He hadn't really thought that would happen. She'd turned forty the summer before. You never could tell, though. He forgot all about Vince Scriabin, Lazar Kagan, Stas Mikoian, and even—miracle of miracles!—Joe Steele himself. “That's wonderful!” He hugged her. He kissed her. He said, “If it's a little girl, I hope she looks just like you!”

She smiled a bit crookedly. “So you would want another Sullivan with black hair and slanted eyes?” She was joking, and then again she wasn't. There were no more than a handful of Orientals in Casper. Most of the others were Chinese who wanted nothing to do with her. Though the war'd been over for years, whites could still be rude, sometimes without even meaning to.

“You're darn tootin', I do!” Mike meant that. He could bring it out quickly, and he did.

“I am glad that you are glad.” She sounded relieved. If she'd
wondered . . . Try as they would, how well could two people truly know each other in the end? How well could one person know himself? Or even herself?

“A baby!” Part of him, part of her, would go down through the years after all. That baby would be years younger than he was now when the odometer turned over and the twenty-first century started. And that baby, lucky kid, would know about Joe Steele only through history books.

For a little while, things went on without Joe Steele very much as they had while he was President. His widow moved back to Fresno. No one had paid much attention to Betty Steele while she was the First Lady. No one paid any attention to her once she went into retirement.

At the White House, John Nance Garner made a less demanding boss than the man he succeeded. Charlie had trouble conceiving of a more demanding boss than Joe Steele. The new President carried out the policies he found in place when he took over. He was in his mid-eighties. How many changes could he try to make, even if he wanted to?

Kagan went to Paraguay. Mikoian went to Afghanistan. “I'm sure I'll get as many thanks there as I ever did in Washington,” he quipped to reporters before boarding the airliner that would start him on his long, long journey.

Scriabin didn't go to Outer Mongolia, at least not right away. Like someone waking from a drugged, heavy sleep, Congress needed a while to realize Joe Steele's heavy hand no longer held it down. Members didn't automatically have to do whatever the President said or else lose the next election or face one of those late-night knocks on the door. John Nance Garner didn't carry that kind of big stick.

And the Hammer still had clout of his own in the Senate. It was a pale shadow of Joe Steele's clout, but it was enough to keep him out of Ulan
Bator. It wasn't friendship. Except perhaps for Joe Steele, Scriabin had never had any friends Charlie knew of. Charlie didn't know what it was. Blackmail didn't seem the worst of guesses.

John Nance Garner had accepted the resignations of all his Cabinet members except the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War. Dean Acheson was a reasonably able diplomat, while George Marshall had kept himself respectable despite serving Joe Steele for many years.

Acheson was due to speak at an international conference on the Middle East in San Francisco. The DC-6 he was riding in crashed as it went into its landing approach. Forty-seven people died. He was one of them. It was tragic. Despite all the progress in aviation over the past twenty years, things like that happened more often than they should.

Charlie didn't think it was anything more—or less—than tragic till a week later, when Marshall got up to make an after-the-dinner speech during a cannon-manufacturers' convention. He strode to the lectern with his usual stern, erect military bearing. All the newspaper reports that came out of the convention said he stood there for a moment, looking surprised. Then he turned blue—“as blue as the carpeting in the dining room,” one reporter wrote—and keeled over.

Several doctors were in the audience. One gave him artificial respiration while another injected him with adrenaline. Nothing helped. Both medicos who tried to save him said they thought he was dead before he hit the floor.

But Charlie found out most of that later. The morning after it happened, John Nance Garner summoned him to the oval study Joe Steele had used for so long. The old President's desk was still there. So was the pipe-tobacco smell that everyone who knew Joe Steele associated with him.

“Some no-good, low-down, goddamn son of a bitch is gunning for me, Sullivan,” Garner growled when Charlie came in.

“Sir?” Charlie said. He wanted another cup of coffee.

“Gunning for me,” Garner repeated, as if to an idiot. “I'm President. Ain't no Vice President. Presidential Succession Act of 1886 says, if the President dies when there's no Vice President, Secretary of State takes over, then the other Cabinet fellas. Ain't no Cabinet now, either. Senate
ain't confirmed anybody. If I drop dead this afternoon, who runs the show? God only knows, 'cause the law sure don't. In the Succession Act of 1792, it was the President
pro tem
of the Senate and then the Speaker of the House, but the 1886 rules threw that out. So like I say, God knows.”

Two vital Cabinet deaths inside a week swept Charlie's thoughts back more than twenty years. “I bet Scriabin set it up,” he blurted.

“Oh, yeah?” Garner leaned forward. “Sonny, you better tell me why you think so.” So Charlie did, starting with what he'd heard before the Executive Mansion fire cooked Roosevelt's goose, and Roosevelt with it, in 1932. When he finished, the President asked him, “How come you never said anything about this before?”

“Because I could never prove it. Hell, I still can't. And when my brother did kick up a stink, what happened to him? He wound up in an encampment, and then in a punishment brigade. But when two more die like that—”

“—and when Joe Steele ain't around any more,” Garner broke in.

Charlie nodded. “That, too. I figured you'd better know.”

“Well, I thank you for it,” John Nance Garner said. “I expect Vince Scriabin ain't the only one who can arrange for people to have a little accident.”

“That's good, Mr. President,” Charlie said. “But if we're gonna start playing the game by banana-republic rules, there's something else you'd better think about.”

“What's that?”

“All your guards here belong to the GBI. How far do you trust J. Edgar Hoover?”

Garner's eyes narrowed as he considered the question. “You and me, we go back to the days when they'd've strung up anybody who even talked about them labor encampments, never mind set 'em up. Himmler killed himself when the limeys caught him. How long you reckon Yagoda'll last once they finally stuff Trotsky and stick him next to Lenin in Red Square?”

“Twenty minutes,” Charlie said. “Half an hour, tops.”

“That's how it looks to me, too—unless he's quicker on the trigger than all the bastards gunning for him.” Garner scowled. “But what am I
supposed to do about J. Edgar? Who do I get to watch this place except for the Jeebies?”

“Soldiers?” Charlie suggested. “You think the Army can't add two and two? They'll have a pretty good notion of what happened to Marshall, and why.”

“Maybe.” But John Nance Garner didn't sound happy about it. “That would really take us down to South America, wouldn't it?”

“Which would you rather have, sir? The Army protecting the President or a putsch from the head of the secret police?”

The telephone on the desk that had been Joe Steele's for so long rang. Garner picked it up. “Yeah?” he barked, and then, “
What?
” His face darkened with rage. “All right, goddammit, you've let me know. I'll deal with it. How? Shit, I don't know how. I'll work something out. Jesus God!” He slammed the handset back into place.

“What was that, sir? Do I want to know?” Charlie asked.

“Those fucking pissants in the House.” Garner had been one of that number for many years, but he didn't care now. And he had good reason not to: “They've introduced a motion to impeach me, the stinking dingleberries! Says I'm ‘complicit in the many high crimes and misdemeanors of the Joe Steele administration.'” He quoted the lawyerese with sour relish, even pride. “I bet Scriabin put 'em up to it, the cocksuckers.”

Charlie knew perfectly well that Joe Steele's administration had committed high crimes and misdemeanors past counting. He also knew perfectly well that John Nance Garner wasn't complicit in any of them. Joe Steele hadn't let him get close enough for complicity. But the House and Senate wouldn't care. They couldn't put a bell on Joe Steele; he'd been too strong, and now he was too dead. Garner, both weaker and still breathing, made an easier target.

Something else occurred to Charlie. “If they throw you out of office, who comes in to take over for you?”

“Beats me.” Now Garner sounded almost cheerful. “The law we've got now doesn't say, not in the spot we're in here. Constitution says Congress can make a law picking who comes after the President and Vice President,
but a law is something the President signs. How can you have a new law if you ain't got no President?”

“I have no idea, sir.” Charlie's head started to ache.

*   *   *

M
ike turned on the television. He'd bought it secondhand. The screen was small and the picture none too good, but some inspired haggling had brought the guy who was getting rid of it down to forty bucks. Now he could watch Lucille Ball and Sid Caesar and baseball games with everybody else—or so it seemed.

And he could watch the news. Washington kept boiling like a kettle of crabs. Nobody seemed to remember how to play politics the old-fashioned way, the way people had done things before Joe Steele was President. The new game, when seen from close to two thousand miles away, seemed a lot bloodier. They were playing for keeps—for keeps all kinds of ways.

As it went in the United States, so it also went in the wider world. The East Germans rioted against their Russian overlords. Trotsky preached world revolution, but not revolution against him. The news showed smuggled film of Red Army tanks blasting buildings and machine-gunning people in the streets of East Berlin.

“President Garner has issued an executive order eliminating the restricted zone for people released from labor encampments,” the handsome man reading the stories announced. “GBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly deplored the move, stating that it endangers the nation's safety. And leaders of the impeachment drive in the House say the order will have no effect on their insistence that Garner be removed. More after this important message.”

Music swelled as the commercial started. Over it, Midori said, “I understand that right? He says wreckers can now live anywhere in the country?”

“That's what he said.” Mike thought about going back to New York City. Hell, he didn't even know if the
Post
was still in business. He'd been away more than fifteen years. Picking up the city's frantic pace after so long wouldn't be easy.

“You want to go somewhere else?” she asked.

“I was just thinking about that. I don't know,” Mike said. Midori might like the Big Apple. If any place in America could remind her of her crowded homeland, New York City would be it. “How do you feel about it?”

“Where you go, I will go,” she said. She wasn't a Christian; she'd never heard of
Whither thou goest, I will go
. If you had that thought, though, the words would follow directly.

Before Mike could reply, the newsman came back. Next to him was a photo of a familiar face. “Vincent Scriabin, Joe Steele's longtime chief assistant, died last night at the age of sixty-three. He was struck and killed by an automobile while crossing the street after eating dinner at an Italian restaurant in Washington. Because Scriabin was not in a crosswalk, the driver, who police said showed no signs of intoxication, was not held.”

“Oh, my,” Mike said softly as the fellow went on to the next story.

“Nan desu-ka?”
Midori asked.

How could you explain the Hammer to somebody who hadn't been here while Joe Steele was President? Charlie might have been able to. Why not? Charlie'd worked side by side with him for years. Mike reminded himself he needed to let his brother know Midori would be having a baby. He'd had that thought before, had it without doing anything about it.

How accidental was Scriabin's death? As accidental as Franklin D. Roosevelt's? Probably just about. Scriabin hadn't gone off into exile without any trouble, the way Kagan and Mikoian had. He'd stayed in Washington and kicked up a fuss. John Dennison guessed he was behind the House's stab at impeaching Garner. It wouldn't have surprised Mike. Like the man he'd served for all those years, the Hammer went in for revenge.

Mike realized he hadn't answered his wife's question. “He was one of Joe Steele's ministers,” he said, which put it in terms she'd get. “The new President didn't want to keep him. He didn't like that. Now he's dead. He walked in front of a car—or the guy in the car was hunting him.”

Midori's eyes widened. “I did not think American politics go that way?”

“They didn't used to,” Mike said. “Now? Who knows now? Everything is all different from the way it used to be.” He'd been away from
politics since early in Joe Steele's second term. In political terms, that was a lifetime, if not two.

“People would kill politicians on the other side all the time in Japan,” Midori said. “It made politics too dangerous for most people to try. The ones who did always had bodyguards with them.”

“It may wind up like that here, too,” Mike said. “English has a word for killing people in politics. When you do that, you
assassinate
somebody.”

“Assassinate,” Midori echoed. “I will remember. Assassinate. If English has this word, it needs it,
neh?
”

“Hai,”
he said.
Neh?
meant something like
Isn't that right?
Japanese used it all the time. He wished English had such a short, handy word for the same phrase. It would have been useful.

As far as Mike knew, Charlie was still at the White House, working for John Nance Garner. The new President hadn't canned him, the way he'd canned Joe Steele's California cronies. To Mike, that said something good about his brother, anyhow. Working for Joe Steele hadn't made all of Charlie's soul dry up, turn to dust, and blow away. Hard to believe, but it could be true.

“You say—you have said—you lived in New York City.”
Whither thou goest
or not, Midori came back to it. “You do not want to go back to New York City, now that law says you may?”

“No, I don't think so, not unless Casper drives you crazy,” he said.

She shrugged. “It is a strange place, but to me any place in America is strange. It starts to seem not so strange. If you want to stay here, we can stay here.”

“We'll do that, then,” Mike said. Fighting for work against guys half his age didn't appeal to him. Joe Louis had stayed in the ring too long, and got badly beaten up several times on account of it. And, after being away from New York City for so long, going back might make his head explode. He nodded. “Yeah, we'll do that.” He got up, went into the kitchen, pulled two bottles of beer from the icebox, opened them with the blunt end of the church key, and brought them back to the TV.