Joe Steele

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 punishment 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 regulations 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.

He sighed. He made a production of lighting a cigarette (Joe Steele’s pipe was better for that). He blew out smoke. Having stalled as long as he could, he mumbled, “I’ll take care of it.” He was a reporter, not a hero.

Had Vince Scriabin been a proper politician, he would have glad-handed Charlie till Charlie felt good, or at least not so bad, about doing what he saw he had to do. But the Hammer was an aide. He didn’t have to worry about getting elected. He was prickly, not greasy. He grudged Charlie a nod. “Okay. Good.” He shoved the Post at him. “Take this with you. If it stays here, I’ll use it in the bathroom.”

“Nice to see you’re still as charming as ever,” Charlie said, and had the small pleasure of walking out while Scriabin scratched his head.

He wrote the story. Where Mike had painted the bill as black as he could, Charlie chose pastels. He went on about the ruination of the Dust Bowl. He went on about how empty the states where the bill would take effect were, and about how much they needed labor. He talked about how the criminals who would be doing the labor were paying their debt to society. He put in so much sugar, if he were a diabetic he would have needed an insulin shot.

He wondered if he was laying it on too thick, if the White House would think he was mocking it by singing its praises too loudly. He also wondered if he really was doing that. You could insult somebody by calling him sweetie just as well as you could by calling him a son of a bitch.

But the story ran in papers from Bangor to San Diego. A few days after it did, he got a call from the White House at home. It wasn’t Scriabin this time. It was Stas Mikoian. “Good job, Charlie!” the Armenian said. “The wires and letters coming into the Senate about the bill are running close to four to one for it.”

“They are?” Charlie said. “How do you know?”

Mikoian laughed. “We have ways. You bet we do.”

He didn’t say what they were. Did someone report to Joe Steele from every Senator’s office? Did the President have spies in the mailroom at the Capitol? Did somebody in the Western Union office tally every telegram as it came off the wire? Charlie had trouble believing that, but he had just as much trouble not believing Mikoian. Vince Scriabin, without a doubt, would lie straight-faced. Mikoian seemed much more at home with the truth.

Which meant. . what? Suppose you were one of the minority, someone who didn’t like Joe Steele’s bill. Would a cop or a Justice Department agent knock on your door or rough you up on the street? Charlie shook his head. This was America, not one of those sorry countries far away across the sea. That kind of thing couldn’t happen here.

“Anyhow,” Mikoian went on, his voice warm and genial, “Joe Steele’s pleased with what you did. He told me to say thanks, so I am. See you.”

“What was that all about?” Esther asked as Charlie hung up.

“That was the White House-Mikoian.” If Charlie sounded dazed, well, he felt that way, too. “Joe Steele liked my piece.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Probably.” Charlie walked into the kitchen and fixed himself a stiff drink.

A week later, the bill for reconstructing the Midwest passed the Senate. Joe Steele signed it into law. Charlie was one of the reporters he invited to cover the signing ceremony. J. Edgar Hoover stood at the President’s right hand while Joe Steele put on his John Hancock. Hoover looked even happier about the law than his boss did. Seeing Hoover happy made Charlie wonder how big a mistake he’d made.

* * *

France didn’t lose all its royalists after the French Revolution, or after Napoleon, or even after the founding of the Third Revolution. France had royalists to this day, still convinced a Bourbon ought to be ruling from the palace of Versailles. People said about the French royalists that they’d learned nothing and that they understood nothing.

America didn’t have royalists-well, except for those who worshiped home-run hitters and movie stars. But nobody, not even the worshipers, wanted to see a movie star as President. That didn’t mean the USA did without people who’d learned nothing and who understood nothing. On this side of the Atlantic, they called them Republicans.

As the election of 1936 began to rise over the horizon, the GOP seemed intent on pretending that Joe Steele’s first term had never happened. The Elephants might better have been called the Ostriches, so intent were they on sticking their heads in the sand. When Hitler marched the Reichswehr into the Rhineland in March, not one of the leading GOP candidates said a word about it. It happened, after all, on the faraway planet called Europe.

Joe Steele spoke up. Charlie noticed that. Unlike most Republican politicos, Joe Steele didn’t come from a family American for generations. His parents had made the trip. The Old Country still meant something to him, as it did to millions of his countrymen.

“With this move, Adolf Hitler has torn up the Treaty of Locarno,” he said in a radio address. “Germany was not forced to sign that treaty. She did so of her own free will. And now German and French soldiers stare at each other across the Rhine, rifles in their hands. If France had moved, she might have toppled Hitler. The United States would have backed her by all means short of war. I am afraid it’s too late now.”

From across the Atlantic, the Führer thumbed his nose at the President. For all Charlie knew, they both enjoyed it. They could call each other as many names as they pleased. Neither was in any position to go after the other. “Joe Steele understands nothing of the national will or of national self-determination,” Hitler bellowed. “No one has ever told him he does not have the right to fortify his frontier.”

“Good neighbors don’t need forts,” Joe Steele retorted. “Our border with Canada is three thousand miles long, without a fort on either side of it. Trust counts for more in keeping the peace than concrete and cannons.”

Every bit of that flew straight over the Republicans’ heads. They wanted to turn the clock back to 1931. (Actually, they wanted to turn it back to 1928 and prosperity, but no one seemed to know how to bring that off.) In one of his articles about the state of the GOP, Charlie quoted Mr. Dooley, a wit from the turn of the century: Th’ raypublican party broke ye, but now that ye’re down we’ll not turn a could shoulder to ye. Come in an’ we’ll keep ye-broke.

He got a phone call from a chuckling Stas Mikoian about that one. And he also got a rebuttal of sorts from Westbrook Pegler. The Chicago Tribune columnist had supported Joe Steele over Hoover in 1932, but soon soured. Now nothing the President did was any good to him. He threw Mr. Dooley back in Charlie’s face-and in Joe Steele’s, too: A man that’d expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tu-rrned into angels be an iliction is call a rayformer an’ remains at large.

Charlie laughed in spite of himself when he saw Pegler’s piece. So did Esther, when he showed it to her. “He got you, Charlie,” she said, which Charlie couldn’t very well deny. But then she added, “I bet even Joe Steele thinks that’s funny.”

“Nope.” Charlie shook his head. “Mikoian may. Joe Steele and Scriabin, though, they don’t laugh at a whole bunch.”

He hied himself off to Cleveland to watch the Republicans pick someone to run against the President. Herbert Hoover wanted another crack at Joe Steele. However big a death wish the GOP owned, it wasn’t that big. The convention nominated Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas on the first ballot. For a running mate, the delegates gave him Chicago newspaper publisher Frank Knox (he put out the Daily News, not the Tribune).

Landon was in his late forties. He was better-looking than Joe Steele; he might have been a preacher or a high school principal. He meant well. Charlie could see that. Hoover had meant well, too. And what did it get him? Shantytowns named after him, and a smashing electoral defeat.

“I am a man of the people,” Landon said in his acceptance speech. “Someone needs to be for them, because Joe Steele has turned against them. The Populists came out of Kansas when I was a boy. If you like, I am a Populist myself.”

Charlie liked that fine. Quoting Ambrose Bierce was even more fun than quoting Mr. Dooley. Gone but not forgotten, Bierce defined a Populist as A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as “The Matter with Kansas.”

He hadn’t thought to do anything more than have fun with The Devil’s Dictionary. But sometimes a phrase sticks. Sometimes people will make it stick if they think that will do them good. After the Democrats came together to renominate Joe Steele and John Nance Garner, they started calling Alf Landon “The Matter with Kansas,” too. Every ad for the ticket used the phrase.

“If I am ‘The Matter with Kansas,’ then Joe Steele is what’s the matter with the whole country,” Landon declared. He proudly wore a Kansas sunflower on his lapel. But he was about as exciting as oatmeal with skim milk. His campaign bounced and rattled. It never took off and flew.

The Literary Digest took a poll. It predicted that Landon would win twice as many electoral votes as Joe Steele. Charlie asked Stas Mikoian what he thought about that. “We aren’t voting about literature,” the wily Armenian answered.

People swarmed to the polls on election day. As soon as the polls started closing, it became obvious that The Literary Digest’s poll couldn’t touch the real results with a ten-foot pole. In 1932, Joe Steele had beaten Herbert Hoover by a landslide. Everybody said so at the time. That made headline writers grope for a new word to describe what he did to Alf Landon. Avalanche was the one they hit on most often.

An avalanche it was. Joe Steele won forty-six of the forty-eight states. AS MAINE GOES, SO GOES VERMONT, one wag of a newspaperman wrote. The President took more than sixty percent of the popular vote. His coattails gave the Democrats even more Senators and Representatives than they’d had before.

Over Christmas, Charlie and Esther went up to New York City to visit family and friends. Chanukah had ended on the sixteenth, but Esther’s mother made latkes for them when they got there. Charlie loved latkes. The only problem was. . “Gawd, I feel like I swallowed a bowling ball,” he said as the two of them staggered out of Istvan and Magda Polgar’s apartment.

“An onion-flavored bowling ball,” Esther said.

Charlie burped. “Yeah, that, too.”

With the Polgars, he didn’t have to worry about anything but overeating and heartburn. Things got trickier when he and Esther went out to dinner with Mike and Stella. “Well, your guy got another four years,” Mike said even before they sat down in the steakhouse. “Looks like you can fool most of the people most of the time.”

“Mike, I’m gonna tell you two things about that,” Charlie answered. “The first one is, Joe Steele ain’t my guy. I just work out of Washington, so I write a lot about politics.”

“You suck up to those California gangsters, is what you do,” Mike said.

Charlie held up a hand, and held on to his temper. “The other thing is, we came up here to see people we care about-”

“People we love,” Esther broke in.

“People we love.” Charlie nodded. “That’s right. We didn’t come up here to wrangle about politics. That’s not a whole lot of fun. Okay?”

Mike was scowling. Charlie wondered if he’d had a drink or three before he came over here. Stella put her hand on his arm. He started to shake her off, but seemed to think twice. With what looked like a real effort, he made himself nod. “Okay, Charlie. We’ll do it that way. For auld lang syne, and all.”

“For auld lang syne,” Charlie agreed gratefully. He didn’t want to fight with his brother, especially out in public. He was in New York for a good time, not a row.

He got a T-bone. Esther chose a New York strip. Each cut off a bite and passed it to the other. Mike and Stella did the same thing with his sirloin and her veal chop. Marriage had all kinds of advantages. You got to try two different entrees whenever you went out to eat together.

But, except for the food, the dinner wasn’t a success. Charlie sighed once he and Esther got back to their hotel room after good-byes and handshakes and hugs. “Even if we didn’t talk about it, the elephant was still in the room,” he said.

“The elephants are all lying on their backs with their legs in the air,” Esther said.

He made a face at her. “You know what I mean. He thinks I’m a sellout. He might not’ve said it, but he still thinks it. And the way it looks to me is, he’s so buggy about Joe Steele, he doesn’t like anything the man does. And he has done some good, doggone it.”

“Some, maybe,” Esther said judiciously. “But everything comes with a price. And now we’ve got four more years to see how expensive it is.”

* * *

March, people said, came in like a lion. If March did come in like a lion, then January, 20, 1937, was. . what? A Tyrannosaurus rex, maybe. The Twentieth Amendment had moved Inauguration Day forward by six weeks, but it hadn’t moved the weather.

The day was about as nasty as Washington ever got, in fact. Close to a quarter of a million had come into the nation’s capital to watch Joe Steele take the oath of office for his second term, and Charlie was sure just about all of them wished they’d stayed wherever they came from. Several thousand holed up in Union Station and never got any farther. They might have been the lucky ones, or the smart ones.

It was cold. It was wet. It was miserable. It started raining before sunup and it didn’t stop all day. In the morning, some of the rain was freezing and some turned to sleet. By noon, the mercury did climb above freezing: one whole degree above freezing. Shivering in a topcoat under an umbrella, Charlie would sooner have been home in bed. Much sooner.

Joe Steele went ahead with the ceremony as if it were seventy-five degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Joe Steele, from everything Charlie had seen, always went ahead with what he’d already planned to do, no matter what. If people got in his way, he went through them or ran over them. If the weather got in his way, he just ignored it.

That meant Charles Evans Hughes also had to go ahead with the ceremony. The Chief Justice was in his mid-seventies. Watching water drip from the end of his nose and from his beard, Charlie hoped the poor old man wouldn’t come down with pneumonia and die. Hadn’t that happened to somebody, to one of the Presidents? Was it William Henry Harrison? He thought so, but wasn’t sure without looking it up. (Was Joe Steele, on the other hand, hoping Hughes did die of pneumonia so he could name a pliable replacement? Charlie told himself that was the kind of thing Mike would think.)

The President took the oath of office about twenty past twelve. It was raining harder than ever. A Secret Service man held an umbrella over Joe Steele’s head. Another held one above the microphone. Charlie watched that with some apprehension. Wouldn’t you fry yourself using the mike in this weather?

It didn’t bother the President. Or if it did, Joe Steele didn’t show it. Not showing he was bothered was another of his strengths. Not far from Charlie, Lazar Kagan and Stas Mikoian both looked miserable. Even Scriabin might have wanted to be somewhere else, and his pan was almost as dead as his boss’.

“We have finished the first Four Year Plan. We will go on with the second Four Year Plan.” Joe Steele made his program seem as implacable as he was. “The first Plan laid the foundation for moving forward with reconstructing our country. Now we will build on that foundation. The powerful who have become powerful by tricks and by guile have tried to stop me, but they have failed. The people see through their lies. We will move forward, and we will have better days ahead.”

He paused for applause. He got some, but it was tepid and muffled. Almost everybody was too soaked to show much enthusiasm-and the steady rain drowned the sound of clapping.

“I will work without rest to make this great nation more secure both at home and abroad,” the President said. “No wreckers will be allowed to stand in the way of progress or to sabotage it. No foreign foe will be allowed to challenge our strength. We defy Reds and Fascists alike. Neither disease will ever touch these shores!”

Another pause for applause. Some more soggy handclaps. Charlie thought the inaugural address would read well, but nobody except perhaps Gypsy Rose Lee would be able to excite this crowd-and Gypsy Rose Lee would freeze to death if she came out in what she usually almost wore.

Joe Steele plowed ahead. He promised jobs. He promised food. He promised dams and highways and canals. He promised warships on the seas, warplanes in the skies, and tanks on the ground. The microphone didn’t electrocute him. Charlie couldn’t have said why it didn’t, but it didn’t.

And after the speech was done, Joe Steele stood on an open-air reviewing stand while soldiers and tanks and marching bands rolled past. No one held an umbrella over his head there. He had his familiar cloth cap, and that was it. According to the program, bombers were supposed to have flown by overhead, but that bit of business did get canceled. Nobody could have seen the planes through the thick, dark clouds.

When he went back to the White House, it was in the same open car that had brought him to the Mall. Charlie was also in an open car, eight or ten vehicles behind the President’s. People lining the streets waved to him and the other shivering, dripping reporters, thinking they were dignitaries. A couple of them waved back. Charlie didn’t have the energy.

Secret Service men hurried the reporters into the White House. Going past the President’s car, Charlie saw that it had something like a half inch of water sloshing around in the bottom of the passenger compartment. The one he’d ridden in must have, too.

Colored cooks and servants set out hot coffee and tea and snacks. A Negro bartender in a tux waited for business. If he didn’t get rich from the tips the grateful gentlemen of the press gave him, they were even cheaper than they got credit for.

“I may live,” Charlie said after he got outside of a cup of coffee and a shot of bourbon.

“I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini.” Another newspaper man shamelessly cribbed from a movie script.

Charlie was contemplating another bourbon-as antifreeze, of course-when Lazar Kagan came up to him. The chunky Jew had put on a dry jacket, but his shirt still clung to him under it. “The President would like to talk to you for a few minutes,” he said.

“He would?” Charlie wondered how much trouble he was in. Joe Steele was not the most forthcoming President the country had ever had. He seldom talked for the sake of talking.

Kagan led Charlie from the press room to the President’s Study, the oval chamber above the Blue Room. Joe Steele sat behind a massive desk made from California redwood with a granite top. The President puffed vigorously on his pipe. He’d had to do without it while he was watching soldiers and musicians squelch by. No one could have kept it lit out there.

“Hello, Sullivan,” Joe Steele said, voice friendly but eyes hooded as always.

“Mr. President,” Charlie said cautiously. He tried something more: “Good luck on your new term, sir.”

“Thank you. Thank you twice, in fact. You helped some with ‘The Matter with Kansas.’”

“It wasn’t mine, you know. I just hauled it out and used it.” Better I tell him myself, Charlie thought.

“Oh, yes.” Joe Steele nodded. Even relaxed and smoking, he radiated danger as a banked fire radiated heat. “But you did haul it out, and it stuck to Landon like a burr. One of the easiest ways to beat a man is to make him look ridiculous.”

“Yes, sir.” Charlie knew that, as any reporter did. But reporters didn’t make it sound clinical, the way Joe Steele had.

The President leaned forward, toward Charlie. “Yes, I have you to thank, to some degree. I do not thank your brother, though.” For a moment, the fire wasn’t banked, and the danger fairly blazed.

Gulping, Charlie said, “Mr. President, I don’t know what I can do about that.”

“No? Too bad.” Joe Steele made a small, flicking gesture with his left hand. Charlie left the study. Charlie, if you want to get right down to it, fled.