Joe Steele

XV

“I’m going to work, sweetie,” Charlie told his daughter. “Come give me a kiss bye-bye.”

“No.” Sarah was just past two. She said no at any excuse or none. Then she came over, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.

“Okay. My turn now,” Esther said after Sarah disentangled herself from her daddy.

“No,” Sarah said again.

Taking no notice of her, Esther stepped into Charlie’s arms. They kissed. He counted his blessings every time he held her. One of the big ones was that he wasn’t in a labor encampment. If he were, would Esther have dumped him the way Stella’d dumped Mike? He hoped not, but how could you know?

Stella and Esther had stayed friends in spite of everything. “It’s not that she didn’t love him,” Esther’d tried to explain to Charlie. “It’s just that he wasn’t there and he couldn’t be there and finally she got so she couldn’t stand being by herself any more and watching the world pass her by.”

Charlie still resented it. “What about that ‘in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer’ stuff?” he’d asked.

“What about ‘to have and to hold’?” Esther had returned. “She couldn’t have him, she couldn’t hold him, not for years. That’s why she talked to a lawyer. Who knows when they’ll turn him loose? Who knows whether they’ll let him come back to New York City if they do?”

He’d had no retort for that. Some wreckers had been released from labor encampments, but on condition they stayed in the empty states that held the encampments. If they broke the deal and got caught where they weren’t supposed to be, back behind barbed wire they’d go, and for a longer stretch this time around.

He squeezed Esther extra tight before heading out the door. He hoped she wouldn’t drop him and run as if from a grenade with the pin pulled if he did get thrown aboard a train and shipped to the prairie or the mountains. And he hoped the Jeebies never knocked on his door at midnight. Even when you worked in the White House, even when you talked to Joe Steele almost every day, hope was the most you could do.

A short-pants kid was hawking papers at the corner where Charlie caught the bus. “Extra!” the kid shouted. “Nazis invade Low Countries! Read all about it!”

“Oh, God!” Charlie said. The other shoe had finally dropped, then. The Germans had taken Denmark at a gulp, and hadn’t had much trouble in Norway, either. But Scandinavia was just a sideshow. Everybody knew it. The main event would be in the west, the way it had been the last time around. Now the bell for that one had rung. Charlie tossed the newsboy a nickel. “Lemme have one of those.”

“Here you go, Mister.” The kid gave him a paper.

He read it waiting for the bus, and then on it on the way to the White House. The Nazis weren’t doing anything halfway. They hadn’t just violated Belgium’s neutrality, as the Kaiser did in 1914. They’d trampled Holland’s neutrality, too. And Luxembourg’s, not that anybody gave a damn about Luxembourg. The only reason it seemed to be there was to get it in the neck.

The Luftwaffe was bombing the hell out of the Low Countries, and out of France, too. Göring had shown what it could do as far back as the Spanish Civil War. He hadn’t let up in the attack on Poland. He wasn’t letting up now, either.

And Neville Chamberlain was out as British Prime Minister. He’d underestimated Hitler over the Sudetenland. He’d said the Nazis had missed the bus even as they were devouring Scandinavia. He’d “won” a vote of confidence by a margin much smaller than the Tories’ majority in Commons-even they hadn’t had much confidence in him. Now he was gone. Winston Churchill would have to measure himself against the Führer.

Charlie carried the paper into the White House. Seeing it, Stas Mikoian pointed at it and said, “Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket over there.”

“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?” Charlie agreed. “Hitler’s shoved all his chips into the pot.”

“So has everybody else,” Mikoian answered. “Now we see what the cards are worth.”

Over the next month, they did. The fighting was really decided in the first few days, when the Nazis’ tanks and troop carriers punched through the weak French defenses in the Ardennes and raced for the Channel. That only became clear looking back, though. What was obvious at the time were the surrenders of Holland and Belgium, the headlong French retreat, and the way the best French and British troops got cut off and surrounded against the sea at Dunkirk.

Most of them managed to cross the Channel to England. From the perspective of anyone who didn’t root for the Nazis, it looked like a miracle. Churchill bellowed eloquent defiance at Hitler on the BBC.

And Joe Steele summoned Charlie to the oval study above the Blue Room. The smell of the sweet pipe tobacco he favored hung in the air, as it always did there. “We need to keep England in the fight,” the President said bluntly. “Hitler is already on the Atlantic in France. If England goes down, too, America will face the whole continent united under a dictator.”

“Yes, sir,” Charlie said, in place of Takes one to know one. He knew who and what he was working for. He just didn’t know how not to work for him. Well, he knew some ways, but they all struck him as cures worse than the disease.

Still blunt, Joe Steele went on, “England is running out of money to buy war supplies from us. They can’t turn out enough to fight off the Germans on their own. If we don’t give them credit-or give them what they need now and worry later about getting paid back-they’ll fold up. So get me a draft of a speech saying that’s what we’ll do. I’ll run a bill through Congress to keep it legal.”

He would, too. Congress was as much under his muscular thumb as the courts were. Congressmen who made him unhappy found themselves with legal troubles-or with scandals exploding in their districts.

Charlie wrote the speech. Joe Steele used some of it on the radio. People didn’t jump up and down about the idea of taking a step closer to war. They didn’t do much complaining where anyone else could hear them, then. You never knew who might tell a Jeebie you were a wrecker. Labor encampments always needed fresh backs. Joe Steele’s bill sailed through Congress.

Across the Atlantic, Churchill took note of the new law. “Once again, America is too proud to fight,” he said. “But, luckily, she is not too proud to help us fight. Well, fair enough. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. If the Devil opposed Adolf Hitler, I should endeavor to give him a good notice in the House of Commons. Thus I thank Joe Steele.”

“Did I just hear that?” Esther exclaimed after Churchill’s speech crackled across the sea by shortwave. She sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

“Yeah, you did, ’cause I heard it, too,” Charlie said. “I wouldn’t go on about it with your friends or anything, though.”

She made a face at him. “I know better than that.”

“Okay.” Charlie left it there. He needed a shortwave set. In his job, he had to hear the news as soon as he could. It wasn’t against the law for anybody to have that kind of radio and to listen to whatever he pleased. But Churchill wasn’t the only foreign leader who threw darts at Joe Steele over the airwaves. If you repeated them, you could find yourself in more trouble than you really wanted.

Was Joe Steele listening to the Prime Minister’s speech? Charlie had no way of knowing. Sometimes Joe Steele slept in the middle of the day and stayed up all night-and made his aides and anyone who needed to do business with him stay up all night, too. Sometimes he kept the same hours as anybody else. He was a law unto himself.

Whether the President was listening now or not, he would hear about the gibe. Charlie was sure of that. And, sooner or later, Joe Steele would find a way to make Churchill pay. Charlie was sure of that, too.

* * *

The Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to pick someone to run for President. Charlie wondered why they bothered. They might not know they wouldn’t win, but everybody else did. A couple of Senators wanted a crack at Joe Steele. So did Tom Dewey, the young Governor of New York. He’d been a crusading district attorney. To Charlie, he looked and sounded like a GBI man.

They didn’t nominate him. Maybe they thought he was too young. Maybe they thought he acted like a Jeebie, too. They also didn’t nominate either Senator. They chose a dark horse, a newcomer to politics-and to the Republican Party-named Wendell Willkie.

“I used to be a Democrat,” Willkie declared in his acceptance speech. “I used to be, till Joe Steele drove me out of the party. He’s driven everybody who cares about freedom out of the party. Now it’s time to drive him out of the White House! Nobody’s ever had a third term. Nobody’s ever deserved one. He sure doesn’t. Let’s put this country back together again!”

All the Republicans in the hall cheered and clapped. Coming out of the radio in Charlie’s front room, the noise was like the roar of heavy surf. He had no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover’s men had already compiled a dossier for every delegate and alternate. Chances were, a list of all those names had already crossed Vince Scriabin’s desk. Beside how many of them had the Hammer scribbled HFP?

Three weeks after the GOP tapped Willkie, the Democrats convened at the Chicago Stadium. Charlie hadn’t been back there since the convention in 1932. He wondered if that diner near the Stadium was still in business. He didn’t try to find out. He also made damn sure he didn’t remind Scriabin about it.

Things were different now. He was working for Joe Steele, not covering his nomination. There wouldn’t be any fight at this convention, either. It would do what Joe Steele wanted. It would, and it did. It nominated him and John Nance Garner for third terms.

“I thank you,” the President told the Democratic politicos (and chances were the Jeebies had files on them, too). “I thank you for your trust. If the world were not in such disorder, I might not run again. But the country needs an experienced hand on the wheel. I will do my best to keep us going in the right direction, and I will do my best to stay at peace with the whole world.”

They cheered him. Charlie applauded with everybody else. You couldn’t sit there like a bump on a log. And the sentiment was worthwhile. The only question was whether Joe Steele, or anyone else, could live up to it.

Wendell Willkie charged around the country. He had energy. He’d make a speech wherever a couple of dozen people gathered. Joe Steele didn’t campaign nearly so hard. He told people he didn’t intend to go to war. He asked them if they wanted to change horses in midstream.

And his organization carried the ball for him. The only way somebody wouldn’t tell you to vote for Joe Steele was if you climbed a mountain, lived in a cave, and ate bugs. Even then, one of his men might try to recruit you for a HERMITS FOR JOE STEELE club.

Charlie wrote the speeches Joe Steele told him to write. Hitler did his best to get the President reelected. The savage air attacks against England and the U-boats terrorizing shipping in the Atlantic warned against picking a rookie to try to run things.

In the last six weeks before the election, J. Edgar Hoover came to the White House almost every day. He might have been briefing Joe Steele about Reds and Nazis doing their dirty work somewhere inside the country. He might have, but Charlie didn’t think so. Every time he saw the GBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover was grinning. Smirking might have been the better word.

Like any bulldog, J. Edgar Hoover usually looked as if he wanted to take a bite out of whoever got near him. A happy J. Edgar Hoover made Charlie wonder how and why such a prodigy could happen. A happy J. Edgar Hoover also scared the hell out of him.

Joe Steele often smiled after he talked to Hoover, too. The President showed amusement more often than the Jeebies’ head honcho did. He would have had trouble showing amusement less often than J. Edgar Hoover did. But a smiling Joe Steele, like a smirking J. Edgar Hoover, made anyone who saw him wonder what was going on behind that upcurved mouth.

People who lived in Washington, D.C., all the time didn’t have the right to vote for President. Joe Steele retained his California registration. He had himself photographed dropping an absentee ballot in the mailbox so it would arrive in good time.

And then election day rolled around. Joe Steele had trounced Herbert Hoover fair and square (as long as you didn’t dwell on how he’d won the nomination, anyhow). He hadn’t pulled any funny business clobbering Alf Landon, either. He hadn’t needed any.

Charlie would have liked to stay with Esther and Sarah and listen to the returns on the radio. When you wrote speeches for the President of the United States, nobody cared what you liked to do, not on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of a year divisible by four. He went to the White House instead.

Colored cooks brought in trays of ham and fried chicken and sweet potatoes and string beans. Colored waiters served the men who served Joe Steele. A colored bartender had set up shop in a corner of the East Hall.

“Bourbon over ice,” Charlie told him.

“Yes, suh,” the barkeep answered with a smile. That was an easy one: no mixing, no thinking. Charlie tipped him a dime anyway. The bartender smiled again. So did Charlie. He used bourbon the way a knight of old used his shield: to hold trouble at a distance.

Joe Steele’s California cronies were in the East Hall, of course. So was J. Edgar Hoover. So was Andy Wyszynski. So were a good many other men who’d helped the President run the country since 1933. Everybody seemed confident.

And, when the polls in the Eastern Time Zone closed and returns started coming in, they found they had reason to be confident. Joe Steele ran up percentages even higher than he had against Alf Landon. He’d got past sixty percent in 1936. This year, he looked to be winning by almost two to one.

“I figured he’d get his third term,” Charlie said to Stas Mikoian. “But Willkie ran hard. I thought he’d make a better showing than this.”

Mikoian’s eyes, dark as black coffee, narrowed under bushy eyebrows. “You never know, do you?” he said blandly. “That’s why they have the election-so you can find out.”

“Uh-huh,” Charlie said. Something lay behind the clever Armenian’s words, but Charlie couldn’t unravel it. He’d had enough bourbon to shield himself from thought as well as trouble.

By eleven o’clock, polls on the West Coast were closing, too. Joe Steele’s rout had swept clean across the country. Most of the candidates he liked for the House and Senate were comfortably ahead, too.

He and his wife came down to the East Hall a little before midnight. Maybe he’d been working. Maybe he’d been sleeping. You never could tell. Everybody cheered when the President and First Lady walked in. Joe Steele waved and dipped his head and looked as modest as a not very modest man could look.

He walked over to the bartender. “Apricot brandy, Julius,” he said.

“Comin’ up, suh. Congratulations, suh,” the man said.

Apricot brandy was one of the few bits of his heritage Joe Steele left on display. As far as Charlie was concerned, the stuff made good paint thinner or flamethrower fuel, but you needed a stainless-steel gullet to toss it down the way the President did.

Betty Steele asked Julius for a scotch and soda. She mostly kept to herself around the White House; Charlie seldom saw her. She was anything but an active First Lady, the way, say, Eleanor Roosevelt might have been. She still had her usual air of quiet sadness.

People hollered and pointed at the radio. “Wendell Willkie has conceded defeat,” the announcer was saying. “His statement has just reached us. He claims there were certain voting irregularities in some areas, but admits they were not enough to change the result. He extends his best wishes to the President for leading the country through this difficult and dangerous time.”

“Well, you can’t get much more gracious about it than that.” Stas Mikoian seemed in a mood to be gracious himself. He commonly showed more class than the other men who’d come east from California with Joe Steele.

Vince Scriabin, by contrast, laughed like a hyena, laughed till tears streamed down his face from behind his spectacles, when he heard Willkie’s concession statement. Charlie gaped at him, hardly believing his own eyes. He couldn’t remember seeing the Hammer smile, though he supposed he must have. He was positive he’d never seen Scriabin laugh. He hadn’t imagined the pencil-necked little hardcase had laughter in him.

“Voting irregularities!” Scriabin chortled. “Oh, good Lord!” He dissolved into fresh hilarity.

Joe Steele and J. Edgar Hoover thought that was pretty goddamn funny, too. “You know what Boss Tweed said, don’t you?” the President asked the head of the GBI.

“No. What?” Hoover asked, as he was meant to do.

“‘As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?’” Joe Steele quoted with great gusto. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “And I damn well do!” He and J. Edgar Hoover both thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

“Now, Joe,” Betty Steele said, but she was chuckling, too.

Charlie also laughed, along with everybody else close enough to the President and the GBI boss to hear the exchange. Boss Tweed had been dead for a hell of a long time. And anyone who repeated Joe Steele’s crack anywhere outside of this room was much too likely to end up the same way in short order.

Charlie went over to the bartender, who waited expectantly. “Let me have another bourbon, Julius,” he said. “Why don’t you make it a double this time?”

“You got it, suh,” Julius said. Charlie inhaled the drink, and then another double after it, and another one after that. No matter how pickled he got, though, and no matter how drug through a knothole he felt the next morning, he couldn’t forget what Joe Steele said.

* * *

Another lodgepole tottered, crackled, and fell, landing in the snow within a few inches of where Mike had thought it would drop. He’d turned into a pretty fair lumberjack since they chucked him into this encampment. He hadn’t intended to, but he had anyway. As with anything else, practice made good if not perfect.

Of course, working alongside John Dennison for more than three years now went a long way toward making good, too. The man with WY232 on the front and back of his jacket came over to stand next to Mike and admire the downfallen tree for a moment before they started lopping branches off it. “Nice job,” Dennison said.

“Thanks.” Mike grinned. Praise from the carpenter counted for more than it did from most people, because he never came out with it unless he meant it.

But Dennison hadn’t finished. Barely moving his lips, pitching his words so no guard could possibly hear them, he went on, “Help fuck up the count tonight, okay?”

“Oh, yeah?” Mike answered the same way. That prison-yard style of talking was one more thing he hadn’t known he’d pick up when they shipped him here from New York City. But he had, all right. As with dropping trees where he wanted them to fall, he’d got good at it, too.

“Uh-huh.” John didn’t nod. He didn’t do anything to draw the Jeebies’ notice toward Mike and him. The guards weren’t paying them much attention now anyway. They’d just cut down a tree. That showed they were working. And they were veterans of the encampment by now. The bastards with the Tommy guns trusted them as far as they trusted anybody. The scalps, the guys who didn’t know how things worked and who still had the taste of freedom in their mouths, those were the dangerous people. Or so the guards thought.

“Okey-doke,” Mike said through a mouth that stayed still. He tramped over to the top of the trunk and started trimming the branches and cutting the main growth into manageable lengths. When the work gang knocked off for the day, he and John dragged a sledge full of wood back to the encampment with ropes over their shoulders.

Mike’s usual place in the count was third row, seventh man from the left. But he could slide into another slot in the next row farther back as soon as the Jeebie with the clipboard walked past him. Everything got to be routine for the guards after the encampment had run smoothly for a while. They didn’t think any harder than they had to.

He kept his head down when he was standing in the row behind his assigned position. He kind of scratched at his chest with his mittened hand to obscure his number from the guard. You were supposed to stand at attention while the count was going on, but everybody had itches that needed scratching. The screws had long since quit getting excited about it.

He didn’t look around to see if other wreckers were helping to wreck the count. He also didn’t look around to see who wasn’t there. What he didn’t know, they couldn’t pull out of him no matter how long they left him in a punishment cell.

As soon as he could, he slid back to his proper place. Footprints in the snow would give him away for a little while, but not for long. As soon as everybody else started moving around, the tracks would get wiped out.

“Dismissed to dinner!” the lead Jeebie shouted. Whatever stunt the prisoners had pulled, it worked this time. It would unravel. All the shabby, dirty, skinny men tramping through the snow toward the kitchen understood as much. Well, all the wreckers who knew something was going on did, anyhow.

They got through the next morning’s roll call. Somebody answered for every number and name the Jeebie called out. Whether the man who answered was always the man to whom that number and name belonged. . Mike had no way of knowing. Neither John nor anyone else asked him to sing out for somebody who wasn’t there to sing out for himself.

But the morning count went wrong. Mike didn’t know how. As far as he could tell, no one noticed his shuffle from his proper place to his improper one. Still, at the end of things, the boss guard said, “We gotta do it again.” He sounded disgusted, at his men as well as at the inmates. It was an article of faith among the wreckers that the Jeebies couldn’t count to twenty-one without reaching into their pants. Smart people didn’t want work like that. No-smart people who ended up in an encampment landed there with stretches on their backs.

“No moving around, you assholes!” a guard shouted when they tried again. He kicked somebody who’d started to switch spots too soon. Not wanting a boot in the belly, Mike held his place.

The other wreckers who’d been playing games must have done the same thing, because at the end of the count the boss guard clapped a hand to his forehead in extravagant disbelief and despair. “Holy fucking shit!” he howled. “We got four o’ these pussies missing! Four! God only knows how long the turds been gone, too!”

They got no breakfast that morning. Instead of food, they got interrogations. Mike said “I don’t know” a lot. He said, “I didn’t know anybody was missing till the count came out wrong.” He said, “Could I get something to eat, please? I’m hungry.”

“You’re a lying shitsack, is what you are!” The Jeebie who was grilling him slapped him in the face. But he did it only once, and with his hand open-it was a slap, not a punch. That told Mike the guards didn’t really suspect him of anything. This guy was just knocking him around on general principles.

They put him in a punishment cell for two days. He got bread and water-and not much bread. They didn’t give him a blanket. He rolled himself into a ball, shivered, and hoped he didn’t freeze to death.

Three days after he got sent back to Barracks 17, the Jeebies brought in two live wreckers and a corpse. “This is what happens if you run away from your deserved punishment,” the camp commandant said. Then the guards beat the surviving escapees to within an inch of their lives while the rest of the wreckers watched and listened. After the stomping, the men the Jeebies had recaptured didn’t go to the encampment’s infirmary. No, they went into the punishment barracks, and for a stretch a lot longer than two days. If they recovered and came out, that was all right. And if they didn’t, the guards wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over them.

But four men had run off. The Jeebies got hold of only three. Mike clung to that, the way a man bobbing in the sea after a shipwreck would cling to a wooden plank. Maybe the fourth wrecker was dead, frozen meat somewhere high up in the harsh Montana mountains. Maybe bobcats and cougars were scraping flesh from his bones with their rough tongues right now.

Maybe he’d got away, though. Four had escaped the labor encampment. One still wasn’t accounted for. Maybe he was free. Maybe, right this minute, he was back in Ohio. Or if he was still in Montana, maybe he was shacked up with a rancher’s pretty sister.

Mike sure hoped so. And he knew he was a long way from the only wrecker who did.

* * *

As 1940 groaned into 1941, the war seemed to pause to catch its breath. The Nazis still bombed England and torpedoed every ship they could, but it seemed plain the swastika wouldn’t fly from Buckingham Palace any time soon. The RAF raided Germany night after night. Goebbels screamed about terror flyers the way a calf screamed when the branding iron seared its rump. But the Luftwaffe hadn’t broken the Londoners’ will to keep fighting. It also seemed plain the British bombers wouldn’t scare the Berliners into abandoning Hitler.

Charlie got drunk again after Joe Steele’s third inauguration. Even toasted, he knew better than to say what he was thinking. If he came to the White House with a hangover the next morning, the President’s other aides-and the President himself-figured he’d hurt himself celebrating, not for any other reason.

On the home front, Esther got Sarah potty-trained. “Thank God!” Charlie said. “If I never see another dirty diaper as long as I live, I won’t miss ’em one bit.” He held his nose.

His wife sent him a quizzical look. “You don’t want to have another baby one of these days before too long?” she asked.

“Um,” Charlie said, and then “Um” again. Knowing he’d stuck his foot in it, he added, “Well, maybe I do. But I still don’t like diapers.”

“Nobody likes diapers except the people who make them and the companies that wash them,” Esther said. “You need ’em, though. Nobody likes babies peeing and pooping all over everything, either.”

“You got that right, babe,” Charlie agreed-a safe response, he thought.

“I didn’t want to have two kids wearing diapers at the same time,” Esther said. “That’s enough to drive anybody squirrely. But Sarah will be close to four by the time I have another one. She may even be past four if I don’t catch right off the bat.”

“Catch right off the bat?” Charlie said. “Do you want to have another baby or sign up with the Senators?” Esther made a horrible face, so he could hope she’d forgiven him.

She didn’t catch right off the bat, the way she had when they started Sarah. The little girl turned three. Out in the wider world, the Germans pulled Mussolini’s chestnuts out of the fire by invading Yugoslavia and Greece. In the North African desert, the German Afrika Korps also helped the Italians keep their heads above water against England.

And in the Far East, Japan took bite after bite out of China. The Japs had occupied airfields and naval bases in the northern part of French Indochina the year before-fallen France was in no position to tell them they couldn’t. Now they pressured the Vichy regime to let them move into the whole region.

Churchill didn’t want them doing that. It put fresh pressure on British Malaya and Singapore. Joe Steele didn’t like it, either. Indochina was too close to the Philippines, which belonged to the USA. Douglas MacArthur was one of the few senior officers Joe Steele hadn’t purged in the 1930s. He was already in the Philippines by then, helping the natives build their own army against the day when they won independence. The local authorities gave him the rank of field marshal. He was the only American ever to hold it, even if it wasn’t with his own country’s forces.

When Joe Steele didn’t like something, he did something about it. Here, he summoned Charlie to his study and said, “I am going to stop selling Japan oil and scrap metal. All they do with it is use it against China. Before you know it, they’ll use it against us, too. And I am going to freeze Japanese assets in the United States. They need to understand that I will not put up with them going down the road they’re on.”

“Yes, sir.” Charlie hesitated, then asked, “Isn’t that only about a step away from declaring war?”

“Farther than that.” Joe Steele puffed on his pipe. He didn’t say how much farther it was. He did say, “When I announce the news, I want to sugarcoat it as much as I can. I don’t want Tojo any angrier than I can help, and I don’t want Americans getting all hot and bothered about it, either. So give me a draft that leans in that direction. I’ll want it by this time tomorrow.”

Instead of shrieking in despair, Charlie nodded. “I’ll have it for you.” Being in the newspaper racket for as long as he was had got him used to impossible-seeming deadlines. And Joe Steele commonly used them as tests for his people. He remembered when you passed them. And he remembered when you didn’t. You might get by with booting the ball once. If you did it twice, you wouldn’t stay at the White House.

Again, Charlie wouldn’t be the only one working on how to put Joe Steele’s idea across. He knew that. But neither Vince Scriabin nor Lazar Kagan knew much about sugarcoating anything. Mikoian might-Charlie admitted that much to himself. Just the same, he expected the President to use big pieces of what he wrote.

And Joe Steele did. Even when he tried to speak softly, you saw the big stick he was holding. He took after Theodore Roosevelt that way. In some other respects, perhaps a little less.

The speech, and the howls Japan let out right after it, were front-page news for four days. Papers didn’t print much that risked the Jeebies’ displeasure these days. They couldn’t ignore a speech from Joe Steele, though, or the foreign response to it.

On the fifth day, everybody from Washington state to Florida forgot all about it. That was the day Hitler invaded Russia. Joe Steele summoned his top military men to see what they thought of the new, titanic war. George Marshall was a three-star general now, not a colonel sitting on a military tribunal. Although that wasn’t exactly a previous acquaintance, Charlie buttonholed the stone-faced soldier. “What do you think Trotsky’s chances are?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the President,” Marshall answered. Of course, he would have been insane to tell Charlie anything different. If Joe Steele found out he had, he wouldn’t keep those stars on his shoulders long. He went on, “If the Russians last six weeks, I’ll be surprised.”

“Okay,” Charlie said-he’d heard much the same thing from map readers (and tea-leaf readers) of less exalted rank.

Marshall shook his head. “It isn’t okay. If Hitler holds everything from the Atlantic to the Urals, he’s a deadly danger to the whole world. The way the President put it was, ‘I want to see lots of dead Germans floating down the river, each one on a raft of three dead Russians.’”

“Heh,” Charlie said. That sounded like Joe Steele, all right. His sense of humor, such as it was, was grim. Then again, he wasn’t kidding here, or he was kidding on the square. And he hated Trotsky just as much as he hated Hitler.

Six weeks later, the Reds were still fighting. They’d given up a lot of ground and lost a ton of men, but they didn’t show their bellies the way the French had. They kept slugging. Charlie presumed Marshall was surprised. He knew he was.