Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

  By all accounts, Captain South hadn’t been shy about saying what he thought of Joe Steele. None of his friends in high places had reported him for expressing opinions like that.

  “It makes you worry,” J. Edgar Hoover said. “It truly does. They claim they didn’t report him because talk was cheap and they couldn’t imagine he would take out a gun and try to murder the President. But you have to wonder—did they keep quiet because they agreed with him?”

  Joe Steele took to the airwaves to say, “People of America, I want you to hear with your own ears that I am alive and doing well. X-rays show that one bullet Captain South fired cracked a rib. I believe that. It hurts like anything when I cough. But the doctors say I will make a full recovery in about six weeks. Captain Roland Laurence South was just one more wrecker who tried to put a roadblock on America’s path to progress.”

  “That’s twice in a minute he called him Captain South,” Esther said as she and Charlie listened to the President in their apartment. “He wants people to remember South was in the Army.”

  “Uh-huh.” Charlie nodded. “And he and his men have talked about wreckers before, but he kind of bore down on it there.”

  Meanwhile, Joe Steele was continuing, “We have already seen too many wreckers in high places. Wreckers corrupted the workings of the Supreme Court till we set it right. Although Senator Long was murdered before he could be tried, all the evidence points to his being a wrecker, too. Father Charles Coughlin wrecked the teachings of his church to try to tear down the American way of life. And this attempt on my life shows that wreckers may also have infiltrated the highest ranks of our military. The force that should defend our beloved country may want to turn against it.”

  “Oh-oh,” Esther said.

  “Oh-oh is right,” Charlie agreed. “Sounds like the gloves are coming off.”

  So they were. “We must get to the bottom of this,” the President said. “We must be able to rely on our courts, our legislators, and our soldiers to do their duties the way they should. I have appointed Mr. J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice Department to head a new Government Bureau of Investigation—the GBI, for short—to investigate wrecking and to root it out wherever he finds it.”

  “Wow,” Charlie said.

  His wife put it somewhat differently: “Yikes!”

  “Not all wrecking is in high places, either. We all know that,” Joe Steele went on. “The businessman who gouges customers, the farmer who waters his milk before he sells it, the newsman who spreads anti-American lies, the auto builders whose machines start falling to pieces a week after they come off the showroom floor? They’re all wreckers, aren’t they? Of course they are. And the GBI will have the authority to go after them all.”

  “Yikes!” Esther said again. “Hitler has Himmler, Trotsky has Yagoda, and now Joe Steele’s got J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad. I hope it’s not.” But Charlie’s mind was a jackdaw’s nest. What sprang out of it was the last line of an Edgar Allan Poe story: And the Red Death held illimitable sway over all.

  As usual, his wife was more pragmatic: “He talked about reporters, Charlie. He singled them out. If you write a story he doesn’t like, will somebody from this brand-new super deluxe GBI grab you and give you a shovel and put you to work digging a canal across Wyoming?”

  “I . . . hope not,” Charlie said slowly. He gnawed on the inside of his lower lip for a few seconds. “All the same, I think I’d better pay a call on the White House tomorrow morning and find out what’s going on.”

  “Good. I was going to tell you I thought you should,” Esther said. “I’m glad you’ve got the sense to see it for yourself.”

  “Yes, dear,” Charlie said, which was never the wrong answer from a husband.

  * * *

  When Charlie went to the White House, he asked to see Scriabin. He thought he might as well hear the worst, and the Hammer would give him that with both barrels. But he got shunted to Lazar Kagan. The receptionist said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Sullivan, but Mr. Scriabin is otherwise engaged for the time being.”

  Which was more polite than Go peddle your papers, but no more helpful. Kagan was a little more helpful than Go peddle your papers, but not a whole lot. Scratching his double chin, he said, “The way it looks to me is, you personally haven’t got a thing to worry about, Charlie.”

  Charlie wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad news. “I’m not here just on account of myself. There’s a swarm of people in my racket. And, last time I looked, nobody’s repealed the First Amendment.”

  “Nobody’s even talking about repealing it, for heaven’s sake.” Kagan spread his fleshy hands, appealing for reason. Then he wagged a finger under Charlie’s nose. “People can’t go around yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded hall, either, though. You need to keep that in mind.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But somebody can say the President’s wrong, or even that he’s full of malarkey, without yelling ‘Fire!’ You don’t go to jail for something like that, not since the Alien and Sedition Acts you don’t.”

  “We’ll fight wrecking wherever we find it,” Kagan said, which might mean anything or nothing. “Politics is rougher than football these days. If we’re soft, we’ll lose.”

  “Politics has always been rougher than football,” Charlie said. “I’ll tell you why, too—there’s more money in politics.” He waited. He didn’t get a rise out of Lazar Kagan. When he decided he wouldn’t, he took a different tack: “What’s Vince up to right now?”

  “You mean, that’s more important than seeing you?” Kagan chuckled to himself, pleased at zinging Charlie. “As a matter of fact, he’s putting his head together with J. Edgar Hoover. We are going to set our house in order.”

  “Our house as in Washington or our house as in the whole country?” Charlie asked.

  “Set Washington straight and leave the rest of the country the way it is and in two years’ time Washington will be a mess again,” Kagan said. “Set the country straight and Washington will stay all right because the people will choose the best public servants.”

  “Good luck!” Charlie blurted.

  “Thank you.” Lazar Kagan sounded placid and happy and confident. He sounded so very placid and happy and confident that Charlie wondered if he had a case of reefer madness.

  He also sounded so placid and happy and confident that Charlie got out of there as fast as he could. Then he made a beeline for the nearest watering hole. He didn’t usually drink before lunch, but the sun was bound to be over the yardarm somewhere. After Joe Steele’s speech and after his own little talk with Kagan, he needed some liquid anesthetic.

  He’d been in this dive before. He’d run into John Nance Garner in this dive before, too. As best he could remember, the Vice President was sitting on the same barstool now as he had been then. Garner might well have been wearing the same suit, too, though the cigarette smoldering between his fingers now was probably different from the one he’d been smoking back in Joe Steele’s first term. Charlie couldn’t prove he’d moved off that barstool since then.

  Garner raised an eyebrow when Charlie ordered his double bourbon. “Getting to be a big boy, hey, Sullivan?” he drawled.

  Charlie refused to rise to the baiting. “I need it today,” he replied. When the barkeep gave it to him, he raised the glass in salute. “Down with reporters and other riffraff!” he said, and down the hatch the drink went. Like a big boy, he didn’t cough.

  “I’ll drink to that.” John Nance Garner fit action to words. “’Course, I’ll drink to damn near anything. That’s all a Vice President is good for—drinking to damn near anything. Beats the snot out of presiding over the Senate, let me tell you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” The bourbon was hitting Charlie like a Louisville Slugger. “You almost wound up with the top job a little while ago.”

  “Nah.” Garner shook his head in scorn.
“No stupid little worthless shit of an Army captain was gonna punch Joe Steele’s ticket for him, even if he did come from San Antone. Joe Steele, he’ll be President as long as he wants to, or till the Devil decides to drag him back to hell.”

  “Back to hell?” That was an interesting turn of phrase.

  “Hell, Fresno, it don’t make no difference.” How long and how hard had the Vice President been drinking? Long enough to lose his grammar, anyhow. He pointed a nicotine-yellowed forefinger at Charlie. “I know what’s wrong with you. You been listenin’ to the radio, an’ you’re in here drowning your sorrows.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Charlie said, “yes.”

  “It’s a crazy business, ain’t it?”

  “A scary business.”

  “The thing of it is,” John Nance Garner said as if Charlie hadn’t spoken, “Joe Steele, he’s gonna do what he wants, and ain’t nobody gonna stop him or even slow him down much. You see that, you see you can’t change it so’s you ride with it instead, you’ll be all right. I’m all right now—I’m just fine. You bump up agin’ him, though, your story don’t got no happy ending.” He raised that forefinger to ask for another drink without words.

  “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Charlie said.

  “Joe Steele, he’s got it all figured out,” Garner answered. He got to work on the fresh bourbon. Charlie raised his index finger, too. One double wasn’t enough, not this morning.

  * * *

  It was summer. Under the sun, under the humidity, Washington felt as if it were stuck in God’s pressure cooker. Thunderheads boiled up out of the south. Not even rain, though, could drain all the water from the air.

  The baseball Senators wallowed through a dismal season. They weren’t last, where the old jingle put them, but they weren’t going anywhere, either. They’d brought back Bucky Harris to manage them a couple of years earlier, but it didn’t help. The then-boy manager had led them to two pennants in the Twenties. Whatever magic he’d had in those days was as gone now as the soaring stock market.

  The Senators who played their games in the Capitol also weren’t having a great year. Every so often, Joe Steele would put in a bill to tighten up on this or to make that a Federal crime. The Senators and Representatives passed them in jig time, one after another. Joe Steele signed them into law. A lower-court judge who declared a couple of them unconstitutional ended up in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, after a terrible car crash. Andy Wyszynski appealed his rulings while he was still in the hospital, and a district court overturned them. Things hummed along.

  Charlie and Esther started talking about children. As far as Charlie was concerned, using rubbers was a sin. That didn’t stop him; it just gave him something to confess. He didn’t go to church as regularly as his mother would have liked. Of course, if he had gone as regularly as Bridget Sullivan liked, he would hardly have had time to do anything else.

  Summer was the slow news season. The Japanese bit big chunks out of China, but who could get excited about slanties murdering other slanties? Nobody in America, that was for sure. Hitler was shouting at Austria, and at Czechoslovakia for the way it treated Germans in the Sudetenland, but who on this side of the Atlantic knew, or cared, where the Sudetenland was unless his granny came from there?

  And then Charlie’s phone rang early one morning, so early that he was just sitting down to coffee and three of Esther’s great over-medium eggs. Esther was dressed for work, too—she rode herd on an office full of idiots studying to be morons, at least if you listened to her.

  “What the heck?” Charlie said. Either something had gone wrong in the world or it was a wrong number. Grumpily hoping it was a wrong number, he picked up the telephone and barked, “Sullivan.”

  “Hello, Sullivan. Stas Mikoian.” No, not a wrong number. “If you show up at the Justice Department Building at ten this morning, you may find something worth writing about.”

  “Oh, yeah? Anywhere in particular or sorta all over?” Charlie asked, only slightly in jest. Justice Department headquarters had gone up on Pennsylvania Avenue, half a dozen blocks from the White House, at the start of Joe Steele’s presidency. The building was enormous. If the birds ate the bread crumbs you left to mark your trail, you might never get out again.

  “Go to the GBI’s exhibition center, room 5633,” Mikoian said. “I hear that Mr. Hoover will have something to exhibit, all right.”

  “Like what?”

  “That would be telling,” the Armenian answered, and hung up.

  Charlie swore as he slammed the handset into the cradle. Esther clucked and laughed at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  He told her, finishing, “He knows I’ve got to show up, the miserable so-and-so. It’ll probably be some Carolina moonshiner, or else a pig poacher from Oklahoma.”

  “Well, you’ve got time to finish breakfast first,” Esther said.

  Sure enough, Charlie went over to the Justice Department and with plenty of coffee keeping his eyelids apart. He wasn’t completely amazed to run into Louie Pappas on the way to room 5633. “Who tipped you off?” Charlie asked.

  “One of the White House guys called AP,” the photographer said. “So something’s going on, and they want pictures of whatever it is.”

  Checking his watch, Charlie said, “Whatever it is, we’ll know in fifteen minutes.”

  “Hot diggety dog.” If Louie was excited, he hid it well.

  J. Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was as bouncy as a chunky man could get. He kept looking down at his own wrist so he could time things to the second. Either his watch ran slow or Charlie’s was fast, because Hoover got going at 10:02 Charlie Standard Time.

  “The reason you are here today, folks,” Hoover told the reporters who fidgeted on folding chairs, “is that the GBI wishes to announce one of the largest and most important series of arrests in American history.” He gestured to several men cradling Tommy guns. Hoover, from what Charlie had seen, liked telling armed men what to do.

  His henchmen led in ten or twelve dispirited-looking fellows, all of them middle-aged or older. Three wore dark blue; the rest were in khaki. The clothes might have been uniforms, but no rank badges or decorations or emblems remained on them.

  “These,” J. Edgar Hoover said in portentous tones, “are some of the leading generals in the U.S. Army and admirals in the U.S. Navy. We arrested them last night and this morning. The charge is treason: namely, conspiracy with a foreign power to assassinate the President of the United States. We expect to make further arrests within the military shortly. The accused will be tried before military tribunals. The penalty upon conviction is death.”

  “Is this connected with Captain South?” Charlie called.

  “That is correct,” J. Edgar Hoover said while Louie and the other lensmen snapped away at the disgraced officers. More reporters bawled questions. Hoover held up a well-manicured hand. “I don’t wish to comment any further at this time. I would say the arrests speak for themselves. I wish I did not have to bring you here on such an unfortunate, embarrassing occasion, but that is what the country has come to.”

  “Like fun you wish that,” Louie muttered out of the side of his mouth. “You’re having the time of your life up there.”

  Hoover gestured to his troops again. They herded the generals and admirals out of the big room and back to wherever they were being confined. The reporters ran for telephones. Had anyone been timing them, some of the sprint records Jesse Owens had set in Berlin the year before would have fallen.

  Charlie had to wait for a pay phone this time. The pause helped him organize the story in his mind a little better. He wasn’t so stunned as he had been when the Supreme Court Four were accused of treason, or when it was the turn of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. When things happened over and over, they lost some of their power to shock.

  But what would the
Army and Navy do without their top commanders? Whatever it was, how well could the armed forces do it? One thing he was sure of—Joe Steele didn’t worry about it. The President wanted men loyal only to him, and didn’t care what he needed to do to get them.

  A reporter came out of a phone booth. Charlie elbowed his way into it. He stuck in some nickels, waited till he got an answer, and started talking.

  XI

  Mike Sullivan slid a half-dollar under the ticket-seller’s grill. “Two, please,” he said.

  The girl dropped the coin into her cash box and handed back two green tickets. “Enjoy the show,” she said listlessly.

  “I don’t know about the show, but I’ll enjoy the air-conditioning,” Stella said. New York sweltered, but she had a sweater on her arm. Air-conditioning came with two settings: not working at all and way too cold. There was no happy medium.

  “I don’t know about the show, either.” Mike also carried a sweater. “We’ll see how it is, that’s all.” It was a fight film called Kid Galahad, with Bogart, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, and a new actor named Wayne Morris in the title role. Despite the strong cast, it had been out for a while without setting the world on fire.

  A youngster with a straggly try at a David Niven mustache took their tickets and tore them in half. Mike got popcorn and Good & Plentys and sodas at the snack counter. Popcorn and licorice didn’t exactly go together, but what the hell? They didn’t exactly not go together, either.

  He and Stella went inside and found seats. They passed the goodies back and forth while they put on the sweaters. Yeah, the air-conditioning was going full blast. Two seats over from Stella, a woman hadn’t thought to bring a cover-up. She shivered, and her teeth chattered like castanets.

  Down went the house lights. The projector turned the big screen to magic. Mike had thought of movies like that ever since he saw his first silent picture when he was a short-pants kid, and a little short-pants kid at that. Movies weren’t just bigger than life, they were better than life.