Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yeah,” the second man said miserably. “I’d almost sooner keep Hoover than see Huey as VP. Almost.”

  “If Huey is, Roosevelt better watch his back but good,” the first fellow said. His buddy nodded. So did Charlie, not that they paid him any mind. Anyone who trusted Huey Long needed to have his head examined—and his life insurance paid up.

  One cup of coffee turned into three. Three turned into a trip to the men’s room. The diner had pay phones on one wall of the hallway leading back there. Vince Scriabin fed quarters into a telephone as Charlie walked by: a long-distance call.

  There were lines at both urinals. Plenty of Democrats unloaded the coffee they’d taken aboard the past few hours. Charlie waited, then eased himself. He got out of the john as fast as he could; the aroma didn’t make you want to linger.

  At the telephone, Scriabin had got through. “Yeah,” he was saying. “Take care of it—tonight. You let it go, it’ll be too late.” He sounded like a politician. Tomorrow was always too late. He added, “That son of a bitch’ll be sorry he ever messed with us.” Then he hung up and headed for the restroom himself.

  Anybody thought twice before crossing Joe Steele. Ever since he got on the Fresno city council, he’d been his friends’ best friend and his enemies’ worst enemy. Charlie wondered who was getting paid back now. He also wondered whether Scriabin thought he needed to hurry now because his man trailed. If Roosevelt won, Joe Steele’s revenge wouldn’t be anything to fear so much.

  The fight wasn’t over yet, though. FDR had come back to take the lead. Joe Steele could rally, too. Mikoian and Kagan and Scriabin would do everything they knew how to do to make that happen. Charlie wondered if Joe Steele’s men knew enough.

  II

  They’d be at it again tonight, out there in Chicago. They’d already gone through fifty-odd ballots. You had to wonder whether the Democrats owned a death wish. They claimed they’d run things better than the GOP had. Considering how deep the Depression was, that didn’t seem like a high bar to jump. But if they couldn’t even settle on a nominee, didn’t you have to wonder what kind of job they’d do once they finally wrapped their sweaty palms around the steering wheel?

  Some people would say so. Herbert Hoover sure would, as often and as loud as he knew how. But who’d believed Hoover since Wall Street rammed an iceberg and sank on Black Tuesday? Mike Sullivan knew he didn’t. Precious few people did.

  So here he was in Albany, still keeping tabs on FDR for the Post. Reporters from half the papers in the country seemed to be here. They jammed hotels and boardinghouses. They filled the town’s indifferent restaurants and technically illicit saloons. They followed one another around, each hoping the next was on to something juicy. They told one another lies over card games and in barber shops.

  Roosevelt was coy about the invasion. Except for the press conference, he stayed secluded with Eleanor on the second floor—the living quarters—of the State Executive Mansion. The way it looked to Mike, staying secluded with Eleanor Roosevelt was within shouting distance of a fate worse than death. If you had to seclude yourself, couldn’t you at least do it with somebody cute?

  Had he been back in New York City, he could have watched the Yankees or the Giants or the Dodgers (well, actually the Giants were out of town). Here, the Albany Senators of the Eastern League were taking on the New Haven Profs at Hawkins Stadium on Broadway in the village of Menands, a couple of miles north of downtown Albany. Ticket prices ran from half a buck in the bleachers to $1.10 for the best seat in the house.

  He went to a game that night. Hawkins Stadium had something Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field couldn’t match. They played baseball under the lights in Albany (um, in Menands). The big leagues didn’t want to put them in. This was the first night game Mike had ever seen.

  The crowd was somewhere around 4,000—not half bad for a midseason game between two Class A teams going nowhere. The second-division Giants might not have drawn as many. They were so rotten, John McGraw had finally called it a career after thirty years at their helm.

  New Haven won the game, 6-4, sending the local fans home unhappy. Mike had no rooting interest in either team. The night game was enough of an attraction all by itself. He looked at his watch as he left the ballpark. Half past ten. He’d walk down Broadway and be back at his hotel a few minutes after eleven. It had a radio in the lobby. He could listen to the bloodletting from Chicago for a while. If they chose Roosevelt there, the new nominee would almost have to make a statement in the morning.

  He was nearly to the hotel—just south of the state Capitol, as a matter of fact—when fire-engine sirens started wailing like damned souls. Three of the long red machines roared past him, one after another, their flashing lights warning ordinary cars off the road. Police black-and-whites followed hard on the fire engines’ heels.

  The engines he saw weren’t the only ones he heard, either—nowhere close. Albany had itself a four-alarm fire, sure as the devil. And sure as the devil, he saw the flames ahead, a little farther inland from the Hudson than he was. He started to run. It wasn’t the story he’d come to cover, which didn’t mean it couldn’t be big.

  Plenty of people were running toward the fire. “Isn’t that the Mansion?” one man called to another.

  “’Fraid it is,” the second man said.

  “Which mansion?” Mike asked, panting. They said cigarettes played hell with your wind. For once, they knew what they were talking about.

  “Executive Mansion. Governor’s mansion. FDR’s mansion,” the two fellows said, not really in chorus. One of them added, “He’s up there on the second floor, how’s he supposed to get out?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Mike crossed himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Mass or gone to confession, but sometimes what you took for granted when you were a kid came out at the oddest moments.

  “Yeah, wouldn’t that screw the pooch?” said one of the guys trotting along with him.

  “In spades, doubled and redoubled,” the other one put in.

  Landscaped grounds surrounded the Executive Mansion, which stood well back from the street. Some of the trees near the Governor’s residence were on fire, too. But the big two-story building might as well have exploded into flame. Mike couldn’t have got there more than ten minutes after the first sirens began to scream. All the same, fire engulfed the mansion. Anybody could see it would burn to the ground, and soon. Flames taller than a man leaped from almost every window.

  Silhouetted against that inferno, the fire engines didn’t look so long and impressive any more. And the streams of water the firemen aimed at the blaze also seemed punier than they should have. Eyeing that, Mike decided it wasn’t his imagination. He shoved his way through the crowd till he found himself standing beside a burly guy in a heavy canvas coat and a broad-brimmed rubber helmet. “Shouldn’t you have got more water pressure than this?” he shouted.

  “Most places, yeah, but maybe not around here,” the fireman said. “You gotta remember, everything around here is old as the hills. They built this thing during the Civil War. I bet it didn’t have no plumbing then—just thundermugs and outhouses, and a well to get typhoid from. Even the gas got added on later. And the electricity?” He smacked his forehead with the heel of his right hand.

  Mike had noticed the same thing when Roosevelt gave his press conference. “You think that’s how the fire started?” he asked.

  “I dunno. However it started, it’s goin’ great guns, ain’t it?” The fireman shrugged broad shoulders. “I don’t gotta figure out what happened. I just gotta try an’ put it out. The how and the what, they’re for the guys from the arson patrol.”

  “Was it arson?” Mike demanded.

  “I dunno,” the fireman said again. “When one burns this big and this hot, though, we’d poke around even if it was a bunch of empty offices and not the Executive Mansion.”

&nb
sp; “Did anybody . . . get caught in the fire?”

  The fireman scowled at Mike as if, for the first time, he’d asked a really dumb question. And so he must have, because the man said, “A housemaid got out, and a nigger cook from the kitchen busted a window and jumped out with his pants on fire. Everybody else who was in there . . . Christ have mercy on their souls, that’s all I can tell ya.” As Mike had, he crossed himself.

  “Oh, my Lord.” Hearing it that way was like a kick in the belly. “Roosevelt was inside, wasn’t he? Franklin and Eleanor both, I mean.”

  “That’s what we heard when we rolled, uh-huh.” The fireman nodded. “If they were, though, it’s gonna take a while to find ’em, on account of all the other shit that’s burning, pardon my French. Even when we do, they’ll be like charcoal. Sorry, but that’s how it is. Won’t hardly be enough of ’em left to bury.”

  I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Shakespeare chimed inside Mike’s head. Well, FDR would never be Caesar now. “I wasn’t thinking about burying them,” Mike said, which was half true, anyhow. “I was thinking, now who gets the Democratic nomination?”

  Once more, the fireman eyed him as if he were a moron. “Joe Steele does,” the man said. “Who else is left now?”

  When you asked it like that, the answer was simple. With Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the picture, no one else was left now, no one at all.

  * * *

  The movement from ballot to ballot at the Chicago Stadium reminded Charlie Sullivan of the Western Front in 1918. You couldn’t see much movement from one day to the next then, but after a while the French and English and Americans were always going forward and the Kaiser’s boys were always going back. Roosevelt kept moving forward here, and Joe Steele kept falling back. Sooner or later, the trickle would turn to a flood, and retreat to rout. Later was starting to look more and more like sooner, too.

  Charlie saw the exact moment when everything changed. A spotty-faced kid tore onto the convention floor at a speed an Olympic sprinter might have envied. He dashed straight for the New York delegation and huddled with Big Jim Farley.

  Farley clapped both hands to his head and spun away: an operatic gesture of despair. The anguished bellow he let out might have come straight from grand opera, too. He asked the kid something. The answer he got made him spin away again.

  His next shout had words in it: “Mister Chairman! Mister Chairman!”

  Although the secretary was calling the roll for the umpty-umpth time, the chairman motioned for him to pause. “The chair recognizes the distinguished delegate from New York.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I—” Jim Farley’s chin sagged down to his chest. His voice broke. For a moment, Charlie didn’t think he’d be able to go on. Then, visibly gathering himself, Farley did: “Mr. Chairman, I have the inexpressibly sad duty of informing you and the convention that Governor and Mrs. Roosevelt have perished in a quickly spreading fire at the Executive Mansion in Albany. The Governor, of course, was confined to his wheelchair and did not have a chance of escaping the flames.”

  Delegates on the floor and gawkers in the stand all cried out in horror. Charlie tried to imagine Roosevelt’s final moments, trapped in that chair as fire swept over him. Shuddering, he wished he hadn’t. The most you could hope for was that it ended pretty fast.

  Stas Mikoian and Lazar Kagan were with the rest of the California delegation. They looked as shocked and as devastated as anyone else on the floor, regardless of which candidate he backed. Mikoian in particular went white as a sheet and swayed where he stood. Like a lot of people down there and in the stands, he made the sign of the cross. With a reporter’s gift for noting useless details, Charlie saw that he shaped the horizontal stroke from right to left, not from left to right the way a Roman Catholic would.

  Charlie looked around the floor for Vince Scriabin. He couldn’t spot Joe Steele’s other California henchman. Maybe that was because Scriabin had the kind of face and build you forgot five seconds after you saw them. He seemed so ordinary, he blended into any crowd like a chameleon.

  Or maybe Charlie didn’t see him because he wasn’t there. A chill ran through Charlie as he remembered the chunk of Scriabin’s phone call he’d overheard early this morning—or a million years ago, depending on how you looked at things.

  Take care of it—tonight, he’d said. You let it go, it’ll be too late. By the money he fed into the telephone, he was calling long-distance.

  Where was he calling, exactly? Who was on the other end of the line? What did Vince want him to take care of? Why might it be too late if that other fellow waited?

  The obvious answer Charlie saw scared the piss out of him. He didn’t want to believe Joe Steele or his backers could imagine anything like that, much less do it. He had no proof at all, as he knew perfectly well. He didn’t even have what anybody would call a suspicion. He had a possibility, a coincidence. Only that, and nothing more.

  Some of the moans and groans and cries of grief around him shaped themselves into a different kind of noise inside his head. What it sounded like was a goose walking over his grave.

  Vince Scriabin had noticed him, there in the hallway leading back to that greasy spoon’s john. How much did Vince think he’d overheard? Would Vince figure he could add two and two and come up with four? If Vince did, what was he liable to do about it?

  If this wasn’t all moonshine, Scriabin had just arranged to have Joe Steele’s main rival roasted all black and crispy, like a ham forgotten in the oven. After that, getting rid of a reporter would be no more than snipping off a loose end. People who knew too much were some of the most inconvenient people in the world.

  If this wasn’t all moonshine. If Vince Scriabin hadn’t been talking about something else altogether. If he had been talking about something else, Charlie was just borrowing trouble. As if I don’t have enough already, he thought. Yeah, as if!

  Nobody was going to come after him right this minute. He wasn’t sure of much, but he was sure of that. Cautiously, the chairman asked, “Mr. Farley, what do you and your people have in mind for the delegates who have been supporting Governor Roosevelt?”

  “We would have liked to continue as we were going, to win the nomination here and to win the White House in November,” Farley said, every word full of unshed tears. “Obviously, that . . . will not happen now. Just as obviously, our party still needs to win the general election. This being so, Governor Roosevelt’s delegates are released from any pledges they may have made, and are free to follow the dictates of their several consciences.”

  Before the chairman could say anything or even ply his gavel, one of Huey Long’s wheeler-dealers moved for a one-hour recess. He got it; hardly anyone opposed him. He still thought the Kingfish could make headway against Joe Steele, then. Charlie would have bet double eagles against dill pickles that he was nutty as a Christmas fruitcake, but he deserved the chance to try—the chance to fail.

  Try the Long backers did. Fail they did, too, gruesomely. The delegates from outside the old Confederacy who wanted to have anything to do with Huey Long didn’t make anybody need to take off his shoes to count them. And a Mississippi Congressman who sported buttons for John Nance Garner and Joe Steele waved his cigar and shouted, “How about we win an election for a change, hey?”

  That put it in terms even another Congressman could understand. A few minutes after three in the morning, on the convention’s sixty-first ballot, West Virginia’s votes lifted Joe Steele over the two-thirds mark. Come November, he’d face Hoover.

  Blizzards of confetti blew through the Chicago Stadium. Delegates scaled straw hats. Some of them flew for amazing distances. Charlie watched one sail past the chairman’s left ear. That worthy, affronted, moved his head a little to avoid the collision.

  Charlie wasn’t affronted. He was entranced. If you could make a toy that glided so well, you’d be a millionaire in a month, he thought. Th
e band played “California, Here I Come” and “You Are My Sunshine.”

  The enchantment of flying straw hats didn’t perk Charlie up for long. Neither did the thought of becoming a millionaire in a month. For once, he couldn’t get excited about kicking Herbert Hoover out of Washington in November with a tin can tied to his tail. He wondered if he’d still be alive in a month, let alone in the dim and distant future of November.

  * * *

  Someone knocked on the door to Charlie’s hotel room. Whoever the son of a bitch was, he wouldn’t quit, either. Opening one eye a slit, Charlie peered toward the alarm clock ticking on the dresser against the far wall. It was a quarter past eight. To somebody covering a political convention, a knock at this heathen hour felt too much like the midnight visits that brought panic in Trotsky’s Russia.

  Yawning and cussing at the same time, Charlie lurched to the door. He threw it wide. Whoever was out there, he’d give him a good, jagged piece of his mind.

  But he didn’t. In the hallway, neatly groomed and dressed, stood Vince Scriabin. The only thing that came out of Charlie’s mouth was “Ulp.”

  “Good morning,” Scriabin said, as if they hadn’t last seen each other when the fixer was arranging something horrible (unless, of course, he wasn’t doing that at all).

  “Morning,” Charlie managed. It was an improvement on Ulp, if only a small one.

  “Joe Steele would like to see you in his room in fifteen minutes,” Scriabin said. “It’s 573.” He touched the brim of his homburg, nodded, and walked away.

  “Jesus!” Charlie said as he shut the door. His heart thumped like a drum. He’d half—more than half—expected Scriabin to pull a snub-nosed .38 from an inside pocket and fill him full of holes. A—breakfast?—invitation from the candidate? His crystal ball hadn’t shown him anything about that.

  Gotta get it fixed, he thought vaguely. He had to fix himself up, too, and in a hurry. He stuck a new Gillette Blue Blade in his razor and scraped stubble from his cheeks and chin and upper lip. He threw on some clothes, dragged a comb through his sandy hair, and went down to 573.