Joe Steele (6 page)

“That's right!” Garner began. Then he caught himself and shook his head. “No, doggone it! That's
not
right. We're gonna do things for America, not to it. You wait and see, folks. You won't recognize this place once Joe Steele gets to work on it.”

They cheered him again, even though you could take that more than one way. As if by magic, Stas Mikoian materialized alongside Charlie. “Joe Steele will speak in a little while,” he said. “He'll take away whatever bad taste that drunken old fool leaves behind.”

“When you win so big, nothing leaves a bad taste,” Charlie said. He couldn't ask Mikoian what he knew about Franklin Roosevelt's untimely demise. He was sure Mikoian didn't know anything. Nobody who did know could have turned so pale on the convention floor in July.

Charlie looked around for Vince Scriabin. He didn't see Joe Steele's Hammer. Asking Scriabin that question might bring out an interesting answer. Or it might be the last really dumb thing Charlie ever got a chance to do. Not seeing him might be good luck rather than bad.

Or I might be imagining things, making up a story where there isn't one.
Charlie had been trying to convince himself of the same thing ever since the convention. On good days, he managed to do it for a little while. On bad days, he couldn't come close. On bad days, he told himself it wouldn't matter once Joe Steele took the oath of office. Now he had to hope he was right.

*   *   *

M
ike Sullivan stood on the White House lawn, waiting for Herbert Hoover and Joe Steele to come out and ride together to the new President's inauguration. It was almost warm and almost spring: Saturday, March 4, 1933. The lawn still looked winter brown; only a few shoots of new green grass pushed up through the old dead stuff.

This was the last time a President would take office five months after he won the election. The states had just ratified the Twentieth Amendment. From now on, January 20 would become Inauguration Day. Winter for sure then, not that it was usually so bad down here in Washington. With telephones and radio, with trains and cars and even planes, things moved faster than they had when the Founding Fathers first framed the Constitution.

A military band struck up the national anthem. As if he were at a baseball game, Mike took off his hat and held it over his heart. A door opened on the White House's column-fronted entrance. The President and the President-elect walked out side by side.

Hoover, a big man, stood several inches taller than Joe Steele. He didn't tower over his successor by quite so much as Mike had thought he would. Had Joe Steele put lifts in his shoes? If he had, they were good ones; Mike couldn't be sure at a glance, the way you could with a lot of elevator oxfords.

One thing that did make Hoover seem taller was his black silk top hat. He also wore white tie and a tailcoat. He might have been an Allied leader dictating terms to defeated Germany at Versailles in 1919. Or he might have been one of the European diplomats who dickered the Treaty of Berlin between Russia and Turkey forty years earlier.

Joe Steele, by contrast, was unmistakably a man of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Yes, he had on a black suit and a white shirt, but they were the kind of clothes a druggist might have worn to dinner. The shirt's collar was stand-and-fall; it wasn't a wing collar. He wore a plain black necktie, not a fancy white bow tie. And on his head sat not a topper, not even a fedora, but a gray herringbone tweed cap.

Hoover's clothes said
I'm important. I have money. I tell other people what to do.
Joe Steele's outfit delivered the opposite message, and delivered it loud and clear. His suit said
I'm an ordinary guy. I'm getting dressed up because I have to.
Wearing a cloth cap with the suit added
But I don't think it's all that important even so.

All around Mike, people gasped when they saw what the new President had chosen to put on. “Shameful!” somebody muttered. “No, he has no shame,” someone else replied. Mike chuckled to himself. If those reporters weren't a couple of old-guard Republicans from somewhere like Philadelphia or Boston, he would have been surprised. Whenever folks like that deigned to notice the world changing around them, they, like Queen Victoria, were Not Amused.

Well, Queen Victoria had been dead for a long time now. He wondered whether the rock-ribbed (and rock-headed) GOP stalwarts had noticed yet.

Photographers snapped away. Flash bulbs popped. Joe Steele genially touched the brim of his scandalous cap. Hoover looked as if he were sucking on a lemon. He'd looked that way in every photo of him taken since November that Mike had seen.

Behind the men came their wives. Lou Hoover had been the only woman majoring in geology at Stanford while Herbert Hoover studied there. She remained a handsome woman forty years later, and wore a gown in which she might have greeted the King and Queen of England. Betty Steele's dress looked as if it came from the Montgomery Ward catalogue—from one of the nicer pages there, but still. . . . Any middle-aged, middle-class woman with some small sense of style could have chosen and afforded it.

She looked less happy than she might have. From what Charlie had heard, she often did. She and Joe Steele had lost two young children to diphtheria within days of each other, and never had any more. He poured his energy into politics after that. She didn't seem to have much.

More photographs recorded the outgoing and incoming First Ladies for posterity. No one close enough for Mike to overhear sneered about Betty Steele's clothes. People had used up their indignation on her husband.

The two Presidential couples got into a long open car for the ride to the swearing-in ceremony on the Mall. Reporters and photographers scrambled for the cars that would follow the fancy limousine to the formal inauguration. No one reserved seats in those; getting aboard reminded Mike of a rugby scrum. He managed to grab a seat next to the driver of a Model A. He felt like a tinned sardine, but at least he could go on.

Smoke rose from small fires in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. People who had nowhere else to live made encampments there. No doubt they hoped it gave the President something to think about when he looked out the window. By all the things Hoover hadn't done in his unhappy term, he didn't look out that window very often.

The Bonus Army had camped in several places near the Mall till Hoover ordered General MacArthur to clear them out. Clear them the Army did, with fire and bayonets and tear gas. Anyone who wasn't rich sympathized with the hapless victims, not with their oppressors in uniform. Hoover seemed to have done everything he could to dig his own political grave and jump on in.

What about Roosevelt?
Mike wondered for the thousandth time. The
arson inspector didn't say the Executive Mansion had had help burning down. He didn't say it hadn't. He said he couldn't prove it had. Charlie had tried to run down phone records to see if Vince Scriabin was talking to anybody in Albany early that morning. No matter how much cash he spread around, he had no luck. Those records “weren't available.” Had someone made them disappear? If anyone had, nobody who knew would say so. Another dead end—as dead as FDR.

Crowds lined the streets to watch the new man in the White House go by. Some of the people in the crowd were the lawyers and talkers who catered to Congress—and to whom Congress had always catered. Money talked in Washington, the same as it did everywhere else. Money talked louder in Washington than it did in a lot of other places, to tell you the truth.

Mike could recognize
those
people right away. They mostly didn't dress as fancy as Herbert and Lou Hoover. They didn't, but they could have. The quality of a haircut, the cut of a suit jacket, the glint of real gold links when somebody shot a cuff . . . Mike knew the signs, sure as hell.

Most of the people who watched Joe Steele go to take the oath, though, were the ordinary folks who made Washington run. Butchers, bakers, waitresses, secretaries, sign-painters, cake decorators, housewives—people like that were out in force. Since it was Saturday, lots of them had brought their kids along so they could say they'd seen a President once upon a time.

Some of the people in the crowd were colored. Washington had rich colored folks, but most of them were even poorer than the whites. They cleaned and kept house for the city's prosperous whites, and raised their children for them, too. No Jim Crow laws on the sidewalks. They could mix and mingle with the folks who thought they were their betters—as long as they stayed polite about it, of course.

Plenty of people on the sidewalk were out of work. Mike knew the signs: the shabby clothes, the bad shaves, most of all the pinched mouths and worried eyes. Unemployment stalked whites and Negroes alike. It brought its own odd kind of equality: when you didn't have a job, everybody who did was better off than you were. A rising tide might lift all boats.
The ebbing tide in America since Wall Street crashed had left millions of boats stranded on the beach.

Colored men and women who were out of work eyed Joe Steele with a painful kind of hope: painful not least because hope was something they'd been scared to feel and even more scared to show. But he was different from Hoover. He'd made them believe their worries were his worries, not just unpleasant noises in another room. If that turned out to be one more lie, chances were they wouldn't just be disappointed. They'd be furious.

That same mix of people, rich and poor, white and black, packed the temporary bleachers on the Mall. Some construction firm or another had given day laborers work to run them up. Those same workers, or a different set, would get paid to knock them down after the ceremony ended.

One of the bleachers, the one right behind the podium with the microphones, was full of Congressmen and Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices and other movers and shakers. The one next closest was for reporters and photographers. Mike piled out of the Model A as unceremoniously as he'd got in. He grabbed himself a pretty good seat.

On the podium, awaiting Joe Steele's arrival, stood Charles Evans Hughes. The Chief Justice seemed from even further back in time than President Hoover. Partly, that sprang from his flowing black judicial robes. And it was partly because of his neatly groomed but still luxuriant white beard. Most men who'd worn beards before the Great War were dead, and the fashion had died with them. Hughes and his whiskers lingered still.

Mike rubbed his own clean-shaven chin. He had a nick on the side of his jaw. Even when you didn't slice yourself, shaving every day was a time-wasting pain in the neck. He wondered why beards had ever gone out of style.

More to the point, he wondered what Charles Evans Hughes was thinking as he waited on the podium. Chief Justice was a pinnacle of sorts. But Hughes had almost—almost!—taken the Presidential oath instead of giving it. He'd gone to sleep on election night in 1916 positive he'd licked Woodrow Wilson. Only when California's disappointing returns came in the next day did he find out he'd lost.

Nimbly, his cap under his arm now, Joe Steele hopped up onto the
podium with the Chief Justice. “Are you ready to take the oath, Mr. President?” Hughes asked.

“Yes, sir. I am.” Steele's baritone had the flat lack of regional accent so common in California, the lack of accent that was a kind of accent in itself. Underneath that plain, plain General American lay a hint—no, a ghost—of something harsh and guttural, something that didn't belong to English at all.

“All right, then. We shall proceed. Repeat after me: “‘I'—state your full legal name.”

“I, Joseph Vissarion Steele—”

“‘—do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'”

Hughes broke the oath down into chunks a few words long. Phrase by phrase, Joe Steele echoed it. When they'd both finished, Hughes held out his hand. “Congratulations, President Steele!”

“Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice.” Joe Steele held on to Hughes' hand for a few extra seconds so the photographers could immortalize the moment. Applause from the bleachers washed over the two of them. There sat Herbert Hoover politely clapping for his successor when he could have wanted nothing more than to take the oath of office again himself. Democracy was a strange and sometimes wondrous thing.

Chief Justice Hughes descended from the podium and took his place next to the now ex-President. Joe Steele put the cloth cap back on his head and stuck reading glasses on his nose before he fiddled with his mike for a moment, positioning it just the way he wanted it. He held his notes on cards in his left hand, and glanced down at them every once in a while. For the most part, though, he knew what he intended to say.

“This country is in trouble,” he began bluntly. “You know that. I know that. We all know that. If everything was great in the United States, you wouldn't have elected me. You do not elect people like me when everything is great. You elect important people, fine-talking people, people like President Hoover or Governor Roosevelt, God have mercy on his soul.”

Mike looked over at Herbert Hoover. He was scowling, but he'd been
scowling all day long. It wasn't as if Joe Steele were wrong. It was more that he was saying what someone with better manners wouldn't have mentioned.

“I grew up on a farm outside of Fresno,” the new President went on. “I worked with my hands in the fields. My father and mother came to America because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children than they could hope for where they used to live. Millions of people listening to me today can say the same thing.”

He paused. Applause came from the bleachers full of ordinary people—and, Mike noticed, from the one full of reporters and photographers. It also came from the bleachers full of government officials, but more slowly and grudgingly.