Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

  The ACLU lawyer named Levine was one of Father Coughlin’s defense attorneys. He had on another godawful jacket, and a scarlet bow tie with bright blue polka dots that almost made it seem sedate by comparison. His companion, in pinstriped charcoal gray with a white shirt and a discreet maroon four-in-hand, was next to invisible beside him.

  At the prosecutors’ table, Andy Wyszynski might have been the most relaxed man in the place. He smoked a cigarette, told a joke that made an aide wince, and generally seemed without a care in the world. If he wasn’t ready for anything Coughlin might do or say, he didn’t let on.

  Colonel Short gaveled for order at ten sharp. “Close those doors,” he barked at the MPs and shore patrolmen by the entrance. “Let’s get on with it—the sooner the better.” He pointed to U.S. marshals at the edge of the lobby. “Bring in the prisoner, you men.”

  He was the kind of officer Charlie disliked on sight. He owned a mean mouth, he used too much grease on his thinning hair, and, unlike Captain Spruance at the last tribunal, he had routineer stamped all over him.

  In came Father Coughlin, handcuffed and herded along. He was in his mid-forties, the map of Ireland on his face. Wire-rimmed glasses aided his bright blue eyes. He had a shock, almost a quiff, of brown hair. In place of a clerical dog collar, he wore prison clothes.

  “State your name for the record,” Short told him.

  “I am Charles Edward Coughlin, sir.”

  “Well, Mister Coughlin—”

  “I prefer Father Coughlin, sir.”

  “Well, Mister Coughlin,” Walter Short repeated with sour relish, “you are charged with doing the business of foreign countries seeking to weaken and destroy the United States of America and with doing it for money—with the crime of high treason, in other words. How say you to the charges, Mister Coughlin?”

  Levine reached out toward the priest. He must have believed everyone deserved legal help, because Coughlin ranted about wicked, greedy Jewish bankers with as much gusto as he tore into Joe Steele. Levine didn’t want the priest to admit the charges. He wanted to fight.

  In a voice almost too soft to hear even with the microphone, Father Coughlin said, “For the benefit of those who once believed in me, I find that I have no choice but to plead guilty, sir. I beg the tribunal for leniency for my sins, which the almighty God will also judge.”

  A sigh wafted through the lobby. It was nothing like the amazement the audience had shown when the Supreme Court Four pleaded guilty. Walter Short used the gavel with officious energy just the same. He asked whether Coughlin was confessing voluntarily, whether he’d been coerced, and whether he’d been treated all right while behind bars. Coughlin gave each question the expected answer.

  “All right, then.” Colonel Short sounded pleased with himself, and with how things were going. He turned to the other officers. “We’ve heard the prisoner confess. We know the charges against him. Do we need to waste a lot of time haggling over the sentence we pass?”

  Halsey and Spatz sat silent. Forrest said, “Only one penalty for a crime like his—one that makes sure he never does it again.”

  “Well put, Lieutenant. Well put.” Short eyed his fellow judges again. “Does anyone think anything less than the supreme penalty fits the crime?” If anyone did, he kept quiet about it. Short swung back to the radio priest. “For the crime of treason, which you have openly admitted in this tribunal, you are sentenced to die by the firing squad at a time and place the Attorney General or the President shall designate.”

  Coughlin managed a nod. “We’ll appeal this!” Levine shouted.

  “You have the right,” Walter Short admitted grudgingly.

  “Good luck,” Wyszynski added with a chuckle. The Supreme Court was back in business, with four new justices named by Joe Steele. Papers that didn’t like the President were already calling them the Rubber Stamps. They didn’t seem likely to bite the hand that could arrest them.

  “We will appeal,” Levine said. “The real truth needs to come out.”

  “The real truth has come out, admitted by Mister Coughlin,” Short said. “And, since it has, this tribunal’s business is concluded. We stand adjourned.” He used the gavel one more time.

  “They’re getting better at this,” Louie said as the assembly broke up. “Today, we don’t even gotta hurry back from lunch.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. He had no use for the priest. Whether Coughlin had done what he’d admitted doing might be a different question. If Charlie couldn’t prove that one way or the other, though, what was he supposed to do? Going along with the record as it came out in the tribunal might not be the bravest thing, but it was definitely the safest. And that was how Charlie wrote the story.

  Appeal Levine did. The Supreme Court played safe, too. It declined to hear the appeal, saying it lacked jurisdiction over verdicts from military tribunals. Undaunted, Levine asked Joe Steele for clemency. As Charlie expected, the President went on the radio to say he wouldn’t grant it. Charlie didn’t expect Joe Steele to quote Lincoln again, but he did: “‘Must I shoot a simple-minded deserter, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?’” The question was disturbingly good.

  No political kerfuffle delayed Father Coughlin’s shuffle off this mortal coil. A few days after Joe Steele rejected the appeal, Charlie got the phone call from Kagan he dreaded. The next morning, yawning despite coffee, he went to Arlington, to the open ground by the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary. Only one post driven into the earth this time. Only one waiting firing squad.

  Coughlin died as well as a man could. He refused a blindfold. Where Joe Steele had quoted Lincoln, he quoted Luke: “‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,’” he said, nodding toward the soldiers with Springfields.

  That made no difference in how things came out, of course. The men who’d brought him shackled him to the post. The lieutenant in charge of the firing squad ordered his soldiers into place. He went through the commands that were becoming familiar to Charlie: “Ready . . . Aim . . .”

  Courage perhaps failing him at last, Father Coughlin began to gabble out a Hail Mary: “Ave—”

  “Fire!” the lieutenant shouted, and the rifles barked together. Coughlin fell silent forever. Proving he’d studied Latin, too, the junior officer added, “Ave atque vale.”

  And he gave Charlie a headline that ran from coast to coast: AVE ATQUE VOLLEY.

  IX

  Some bills go through Congress with people having conniptions about them even before they’re fully drafted. Others come in, as it were, under assumed names, so nobody understands what they’re all about till they take effect. Sometimes, people don’t fully realize what they’re all about till years after they take effect. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was one of those sleepers.

  Another one—maybe on a smaller scale, but, then again, maybe not, too—was a proposal of Joe Steele’s with the innocuous, even soporific, title “A Bill Providing Labor for the Reconstruction of Facilities in States Adversely Affected by Weather During the Recent Economic Contraction.” It allowed the Federal government to draft prisoners out of local, state, and U.S. lockups and put them to work in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states building roads and bridges and dams and canals and pretty much anything else anybody thought needed building.

  It passed the House before Mike noticed it at all. Even then, he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t read a column about it in the New York Times. The columnist seemed of two minds about the bill. No one can deny that a great deal of building and rebuilding needs to be done between Oklahoma and Utah, he wrote. Not only the Depression but also the storms that created the Dust Bowl have ravaged America’s midsection. Yet when the country as a whole finds chain gangs in the South distasteful, we may wonder at the wisdom of creating Federal chain gangs over such an enormous region. Would we not be better served by reducing this form of punishmen
t than by expanding it?

  Mike took the Times piece to his editor. “How come we haven’t done anything with this?” he asked.

  Stan skimmed the column. “How come? I’ll tell you how come. ’Cause I never heard of it till right now. Go chase down the text of the bill and see what it’s all about. Once we find out what it really says, we’ll figure out what to do and whether we need to do anything.”

  “Okay.” As far as Mike was concerned, any excuse for a trip to the New York Public Library was a good one. He always felt smarter every time he walked up the steps and passed between the two big library lions. Just because he felt smarter didn’t mean he was, but he liked the feeling even so.

  He’d heard that something like 11,000 people used the enormous central building on Fifth Avenue every day. The library’s collection was grander than any but that of the Library of Congress. Mike knew where the shelf upon shelf of the Congressional Record lived. He pawed through indices in recent fascicules till he found the bill.

  Naturally, it was written in governmentese, a dialect that thought it was English but was in fact a far more degraded tongue. Mike had to pan for meaning the way the Forty-Niners had panned for gold. He sifted through tons of mud and gunk and gravel to win a precious few nuggets. Notes filled page after page of his spiral-bound notebook.

  When he put the fascicule back on the shelf, he was shaking his head. He paid another nickel to ride the subway back to the Post’s headquarters on West Street. The seventeen-story pile of buff brick was as familiar to him as his face in the mirror when he shaved every morning.

  “Well?” Stan said when Mike walked into his office again.

  “Well,” Mike said, “you know that German prison camp called Dachau, where Hitler throws anybody he doesn’t happen to like?”

  “Personally, no. But I have heard of it,” Stan said. “So?”

  “So if Joe Steele grabs this law and runs with it as far as he can go, he’ll be able to make as many prison camps as he wants, all over the Midwest. He can pull people out of jails and put them to work. I didn’t see anything in the bill that limits how long he can hold them and keep them busy. That may be in there—I went through it pretty fast. But if it is, I didn’t spot it.”

  “How sure are you that it isn’t?” Stan Feldman asked.

  “Oh, about ninety-five percent. It’s the kind of thing that ought to jump out at you if it’s the law.”

  “All right, then. Write it up and we’ll get it out there. Maybe the Senate will come through for us, or maybe we’re only spinning our wheels. But if we don’t stand up and show people what’s going on, they almost deserve what they get.”

  Mike banged away for all he was worth. Like his brother, he was a two-fingered typist. Also like his brother, he was as fast and accurate as most people who typed by touch. His headline was LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE LABOR CAMP?

  Stan made one change in it—he turned the question mark into an exclamation point. He didn’t make many more changes in the story. The ambiguous one in the New York Times hadn’t gained much traction. The Post had a reputation for all kinds of things, but ambiguity wasn’t any of them.

  “What I really want us to do is get people like Will Rogers and Walter Winchell talking about this bill,” Mike said. “If they can get folks mad at it or laughing at it, it won’t pass.”

  “You hope it won’t,” his editor replied. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people—”

  “Thank you, H. L. Mencken,” Mike broke in.

  “—and that goes double for the Senate,” Stan finished, unfazed. “Well, we’re still in there swinging. Maybe the whole country will come to its senses and boot Joe Steele the hell out next year.”

  “Maybe.” Mike did his best to sound as if he believed it. But he had the bad feeling his best might not be good enough.

  * * *

  Charlie was cranking out a story about the Daughters of the American Revolution when the phone on his desk rang. He reached for the telephone with something like relief. Writing what he was writing was about as creative as pouring cement for a new sidewalk. Very little brain was engaged doing either. Any excuse for a break seemed a good one.

  “This is Charlie Sullivan,” he said.

  “Scriabin, at the White House,” a harsh voice said in his ear. “Get over here.”

  “On my way,” Charlie said. Scriabin hung up on him. Even the clunk sounded harsh. He wondered why he obeyed so automatically, but not for long. Vince Scriabin never sounded happy, but he rarely sounded as irked as he did right now. Something had struck a nerve on Pennsylvania Avenue. Charlie didn’t know that it had anything to do with Mike, but he had the feeling it might. Mike couldn’t resist taking potshots at the White House. One of these days, the White House would shoot back. Having seen firing squads in action lately, Charlie hoped like hell he wasn’t being literal.

  “What’s cooking?” another desk man asked as he grabbed his fedora.

  “Something at the White House,” Charlie asked. “Dunno what yet. I’ll find out when I get there.”

  The guards at the entrance were expecting him. “Scriabin said you’d be coming,” one said. If the Hammer impressed him, he hid it well. He’d seen aides come and go before. “Head straight for his office. He’s waiting for you.”

  So Scriabin was. On his desk lay a copy of the New York Post from the day before yesterday. He slammed his small, pale fist down on an article headlined LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE LABOR CAMP! “What do you have to say about this?” he snapped.

  “That I haven’t seen it yet,” Charlie answered—reasonably, he thought.

  “Well, look at it, then. And tell me why your brother distorts everything Joe Steele is trying to do.”

  Charlie read the article. Like most people in Washington, he’d paid no attention to the bill. He hadn’t spotted the column in the New York Times that Mike mentioned, either. When he finished, he looked up and asked Scriabin, “Okay, what’s your side of the story?”

  “It’s simple.” Scriabin spread his hands. Even though they were pale, their backs were thatched with dark, wiry hair. He had five o’clock shadow, too, even if it was only half past ten. “We have, in jails and prisons across the country, thousands and thousands of young, healthy men sitting behind bars. Women, too. What are they doing? Sitting there eating their heads off. With this legislation, we can use their labor for socially important purposes. Your brother makes it sound like we’re going to turn them into galley slaves or something.” His glare said that was partly—more likely mostly—Charlie’s fault.

  “Hey, for one thing, I’m not my brother’s keeper,” Charlie said.

  “Someone needs to be,” Scriabin said.

  “And for another thing, it sounds to me like he has a point,” Charlie went on. Joe Steele’s aide looked death and destruction at him. He plowed ahead anyhow: “Suppose you swiped a couple of baseball gloves and you’re doing sixty days in a county jail somewhere. This would put you out in the middle of nowhere at hard labor for as long as they feel like keeping you if Mike has things straight.”

  “Yes. If,” Scriabin said scornfully. “But the provision of proportionality is included in the legislation whether your brother bothered to notice it or not.”

  “Okay. Pull out a copy and show it to me,” Charlie said.

  He got another first-rate glare from Vince Scriabin. Then the Hammer opened a desk drawer, grabbed a printed copy—it was at least as fat as a spicy crime pulp you could buy at a newsstand—and thumbed through it. After a minute or two, he grunted in triumph and pointed to a paragraph halfway down a page. “Here you go.”

  Charlie read it. The gobbledygook was thick even by Washington standards. But it said, or he thought it said, nobody could be kept at labor in a Federal establishment beyond the terms of his original sentence unless he violated the regulati
ons of the camp where he was assigned.

  “What about that?” Charlie asked, doing some pointing of his own.

  “What about it?” Scriabin returned. “If you keep breaking rules, you deserve more punishment. Be reasonable, Sullivan. It is an inch. Your fool of a brother thinks we will use it to take a mile. But it is only an inch.”

  Mike was a hothead. Charlie knew that. A fool, however, he was not. If he saw the possibility of something, that possibility was there. Whether it would turn real might be a different question. Trying to turn the conversation, Charlie asked, “What do you want from me, anyhow?”

  “A piece pointing out the positive features of this legislation might be appropriate,” Scriabin said. “That area does need restoration. Who could possibly doubt it? This is a way to accomplish that at minimal expense. It may even help reform criminals. At the least, it will keep them far away from new trouble. I ask you—where is the wickedness in that?”

  “When you put it that way . . .” Charlie said slowly.

  “I do put it that way. So does the bill,” Scriabin answered. “Anyone who isn’t biased against us should be able to see that.”

  “Why do you want me to do it?” Charlie asked. A story like that out of his typewriter would only make trouble with Mike. Didn’t they have enough already?

  But Vince Scriabin said, “Partly to show the world that at least someone in the Sullivan clan can be a sensible human being and not see things that aren’t there like a drunken stumblebum with the DTs.”

  Mike didn’t see things that weren’t there. Charlie knew him too well to believe that for a minute. He could be seeing things that might not be there. Anybody could do that; imagination was part of the human condition. One of the things Charlie could see right now was a door slammed in his face hard enough to smash his nose if he told Joe Steele’s flunky to take a long walk off a short pier. If he didn’t do the administration a favor now and then, he couldn’t expect it to do any for him. No less than any other segment of mankind, Washington ran on that kind of barter.