Joe Steele

VIII

Since Levine and the ACLU couldn’t come up with any better ideas, they did appeal the death sentences of the Supreme Court Four to Joe Steele. Levine also published the letter in the papers. In it, he asked the President to spare the lives “of four dedicated public servants whose differences with him over fine points of law were perhaps unfairly perceived as differences over public policy.”

Pointing to the letter in the Washington Post, Esther asked Charlie, “Do you think it will do any good?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Nope. It might, if they just kept making decisions he didn’t go for. But this whole treason business. . He can’t look like he’s letting them get away with that.”

“Oh, come on!” she said. “How much of that do you believe? How much of that can anybody believe?”

“I’ll tell you-I don’t know what to believe,” Charlie answered. “Mike thinks it’s a bunch of hooey, too. But he wasn’t there. I was. Would you confess to something that horrible, something you had to know would get you the death penalty, unless you did. . some of it, anyway?”

“See? Even you have trouble swallowing the whole thing.” To Charlie’s relief, his wife didn’t push it any further. Instead, she pointed to the paper again and asked, “What do you think Joe Steele will do about it?”

“I don’t think he’ll do anything till the whole Louisiana mess gets straightened out, and God only knows how long that’ll take,” Charlie answered.

On the strength of George Sutherland’s accusations, Attorney General Wyszynski had got warrants against Father Coughlin and Huey Long. The rabble-rousing priest had gone meekly into custody, showing off his bracelets for the reporters swarming around his Michigan radio studio and quoting the Twenty-third Psalm: “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.’”

That sounded very pretty. It also left him behind bars. No judge would grant bail or issue him a writ of habeas corpus. Eventually, Joe Steele and Andy Wyszynski would try him or send him before a tribunal or do whatever they did to him. Meanwhile. .

Meanwhile, Huey Long was kicking up a ruckus. Unlike Father Coughlin, the Kingfish didn’t sit around waiting to get jugged. As soon as he heard that Sutherland had taken his name in vain, he drove to Washington National Airport, chartered a Ford Trimotor, and flew off to Baton Rouge.

Nobody arrested him there. Even Federal officials in Louisiana kowtowed to the Kingfish. And from Louisiana, Long bellowed defiance at Joe Steele and at the other forty-seven states. “If that lying, cheating fool infesting the White House wants a new War of Yankee Aggression, let him start it!” the Senator roared. “He may fire the first shot, but the American people will fire the last one-at him! Everybody who’s against Joe Steele ought to be for me!”

What he didn’t seem to realize was that, if the choice lay between him and the President, most people outside Louisiana came down on Joe Steele’s side. Yeah, Joe Steele was cold and crafty. Everybody knew that. But most people also thought he had his head screwed on tight. Outside of Louisiana, Huey Long came off as something between a buffoon and a raving loony.

When Joe Steele went on the radio, he sounded like a reasonable man. “No one is going to start another Civil War,” he said. He had his name for the late unpleasantness, as Huey Long had his. Joe Steele’s was the one more Americans used, though. He continued, “But we will have the laws obeyed. A warrant for Senator Long’s arrest on serious charges has been issued. It will be served at the earliest opportunity.”

The Kingfish’s next radio speech amounted to Nyah, nyah, nyah-you can’t catch me! Charlie listened to it and shook his head in reluctant admiration. “He’s got moxie-you have to give him that.”

“If he gets people laughing at Joe Steele, that’s his best chance,” Esther said. “Then nobody will want the government to get tough.” It looked the same way to Charlie.

Huey Long traveled around Louisiana making speeches, too. He had to keep the juices flowing there-if his own state turned against him, his goose went into the oven. He traveled with enough bodyguards to fight a small war. They wouldn’t have won against Federal troops, but they would have put up a scrap. And they definitely helped keep Louisiana in line.

None of which did the Senator any good when he spoke in front of the Alexandria city hall. A sniper at least half a mile away fired one shot. The.30–06 round went in the Kingfish’s left ear and came out just below his right ear, bringing half his brain with it. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

His bodyguards went nuts. Some of them did run in the direction from which the shot had come. Others started firing in that direction. Still others, in a frenzy of grief and horror and rage, emptied their revolvers into the crowd that had been listening to Long. More than twenty people, including eleven women and an eight-year-old girl, died in the barrage and in the stampede that followed.

No one caught the assassin. At lunch a few days later, Louie Pappas remarked to Charlie, “My brother is a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.”

“Is that so?” Charlie said around a mouthful of ham and cheese.

“Uh-huh. He was in France in 1918-he was just a PFC then. He says he knew plenty of guys in the Corps who coulda done what the fella in Louisiana did.”

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. The photographer nodded. Charlie asked, “Is he saying a leatherneck did punch Huey’s ticket for him?”

“Nah. How could he say that? He wasn’t there.” Louie was eating liverwurst and onions: a sandwich to make skunks turn tail. “Only that it coulda been.”

“How about that?” Charlie said. He waved to the counterman. “Hey, can you get me another Coke, please?”

Mike knew why Stan had put him on a train to Baton Rouge to cover Huey Long’s funeral. He was a reporter who had a reputation for going after Joe Steele. If he went after him some more, it would just be icing on the cake, not a whole new cake. Joe Steele and his flunkies already couldn’t stand him. I’m expendable, Mike thought, not without pride.

The funeral made him think of nothing so much as the ones banana republics threw for dead military dictators. Baton Rouge was decked in black crepe. U.S. flags flew at half staff. Sometimes they flew upside down, an old, old signal of distress.

What must have been a couple of hundred thousand people, almost all in black, lined up in front of the grand new state Capitol to file past Long’s body. The new Capitol had gone up while the Kingfish was Governor of Louisiana. The old one, a Gothic horror out of Sir Walter Scott, stood empty and unloved a few blocks south and a little west, by the banks of the Mississippi. Along with other reporters, Mike climbed the forty-eight steps-one for each state, and recording its name and admission date-and past through the fifty-foot-tall bronze doors into the rotunda.

Long’s coffin lay in the center of the rotunda. It was double, copper inside of bronze, and had a glass top to let people peer down at the tuxedoed corpse. The pillows on which Long’s head rested had been built up on the right side so no one would have to contemplate the ruins of that side of his head.

Mourners filed by in a continuous stream, rich and poor, men and women, whites and even some Negroes. Some of them had the look of people who were there because they thought being there would do them some good. More seemed genuinely sorry their eccentric kingpin was gone.

At least four mourners turned to the reporters and said, “Joe Steele did this.” Mike wouldn’t have been a bit surprised, but he thought they needed to get hold of the gunman to nail that down. It hadn’t happened yet. The sloppy and grandiose feel of Louisiana made Mike wonder if it ever would.

A hellfire-brimstone-and-damnation minister preached the funeral oration. “We were robbed of our sun! We were robbed of our moon! Washington stole the stars from our sky!” he thundered. “God will smite those who foully slew him and those who plotted his destruction! They will go into the lake of burning lava and cook for all eternity! Huey Long will look down on them from heaven, and he will laugh to see their suffering. He will laugh, for he has been translated to bliss eternal!”

“That’s right!” someone in the crowd shouted, as if in a Holy Roller church.

“The mustachioed serpent in the White House will not escape, for the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” the preacher went on. He got more responses to that, and an angry rumble that made the hair on the back of Mike’s neck try to stand on end. “No, he will not get free of God’s ineffable judgment, for his lying charges against the lion of Louisiana were what set Senator Long’s death in motion. There is blood on his hands-blood, I say!”

Mike absently wondered how any serpent outside the Garden of Eden-even a mustachioed one-could have hands, bloody or not. The preacher went right on talking around accusing Joe Steele of ordering Long’s murder. Was that prudence or fear? Was there a difference?

Some in the crowd were less restrained. “String up that son of a bitch in the White House!” a man hollered, and it became a rolling, throbbing chorus. Mike had never seen a funeral turn into a riot, and hoped to keep his record intact.

They buried the Kingfish on the lawn in front of the Capitol. There were about enough flowers for a Rose Parade and a half. As Mike wrote up some of the more florid floral displays, he wondered how much all this was costing. Certainly in the hundreds of thousands, probably in the millions. It came straight out of the pockets of everybody in Depression-strapped Louisiana.

He had to wait till after midnight to file his story. Baton Rouge just didn’t have enough telegraph and telephone lines to cope with all the reporters who had descended on it. Once he’d sent it on to New York, he found himself three stiff drinks-which seemed easy enough to do-and went to bed.

The only reason he didn’t feel as if he was escaping a foreign country when his eastbound train left Louisiana was that he didn’t have to stop and show his passport and clear customs. Foreign country, nothing, he decided. He might as well have been on a different world.

Stella met him at Penn Station. “How’d it go?” she asked him.

He thought about it. “I’ll tell you,” he said at last. “Going to that funeral made me embarrassed to be against Joe Steele. Embarrassed by the company I was keeping, I mean.”

“Embarrassed enough to stop?”

Mike thought some more. Then he shook his head. “Nah. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And somebody’s gotta do it right, ’cause they sure weren’t down there.”

* * *

Joe Steele didn’t comment about Huey Long’s demise till the Senator from Louisiana was six feet under. Then he went on the radio to say, “I regret Senator Long’s death at the hands of another. The Justice Department will make every effort to work closely with Louisiana’s authorities to track down Senator Long’s killer and to give him the punishment he deserves. We have known since the days of Lincoln that assassination has no place in the American political system.”

“First Roosevelt, now Long, and he says that?” Esther demanded.

“He says it,” Charlie answered wearily. They’d gone round this barn before. “We don’t know for sure what happened either time.”

“Do I have to connect the dots for you?” his wife asked.

“You-” Charlie stopped.

He stopped because Joe Steele was talking again. The President had paused much longer than a professional radio performer would have; maybe he was fiddling with his pipe. “I also regret Senator Long’s untimely death because he was not able to answer the charges leveled against him. He would have received the hearing he deserved.”

“What does that mean?” Esther said.

Charlie hushed her this time-the President hadn’t stopped. “You will also know that I have been given a request for clemency on behalf of the four Supreme Court justices who confessed in an open hearing to treason on behalf of the Nazis. I am not a cruel man-”

“Ha!” Esther broke in.

“-but I find I cannot grant this request. If I did, it would only encourage others to plot against America. The sentence the military tribunal found fitting for their crimes will be carried out tomorrow morning. I hope I will not have to approve any more sentences like that, but I will do my Constitutional duty to keep the United States safe and secure. Thank you, and good night.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Esther said. “Now that Huey’s gone, he’s not wasting any time, is he?”

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Charlie had read a lot of Shakespeare. Not only did he enjoy it, but he thought it rubbed off on his writing.

Esther startled him by carrying on the quotation: “If the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch with his surcease success; that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here.” Giggling at his flummoxed expression, she added, “I was Lady Macbeth my senior year of high school. I can do it in Yiddish, too. Well, some of it-been a while.”

Before he could answer, the phone rang. When he picked it up, Lazar Kagan was on the other end of the connection. For a split second, Charlie wondered whether Kagan could do Macbeth in Yiddish. Then Joe Steele’s factotum said, “Do you want to witness the executions tomorrow?”

That was about the last thing Charlie wanted. He said “Yes” anyhow. This was part of history. Not even Aaron Burr had been convicted of treason. Kagan told him where the firing squads would do their jobs: across the Potomac in Arlington, between the Washington Airport and the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary. If you had to do something like that near the capital, they’d found a good place for it. The airport wasn’t busy, and only the occasional birdwatcher came out to peer at the ducks and egrets in the sanctuary.

Charlie didn’t like getting out there at five in the morning. Joe Steele’s officials took the idea of “shot at sunrise” too seriously, as far as he was concerned. But, fortified by three cups of sludgy coffee, he made it on time. Hitting your mark was as important for a reporter as for an actor.

Four squads of soldiers waited in front of posts driven into the soft ground. Charlie talked with the first lieutenant in charge of them. “One rifle in each squad has a blank cartridge,” the young officer explained. “The guys can think they didn’t kill anyone if they want to.”

A few minutes later, a khaki-painted panel truck pulled up. Soldiers took the four convicted traitors out of the back and shackled one to each post. They offered blindfolds; Butler declined his. Then they pinned a white paper circle to the center of each man’s coarse cotton prison shirt.

“Squads, take your marks!” the lieutenant said briskly. The soldiers did. It went off almost the way it would have in a movie. “Ready. . Aim. . Fire!” The rifles roared and flashed. McReynolds let out a gurgling shriek. The others slumped in silence.

The lieutenant waited a couple of minutes, then felt McReynolds for a pulse. “He’s gone. That’s good,” he said. “I would’ve had to finish him otherwise.” He patted the.45 on his belt. He checked the other justices, too. They were also dead. The soldiers who’d brought them wrapped their bodies in waterproof shelter halves and put them into the truck again.

“What will happen to them now?” Charlie asked.

“They’ll go back to their families for burial,” the lieutenant said. “I think there will be a request to keep services small and private. I don’t know what will happen if the families disobey.”

“Thanks.” Charlie wrote down the reply. Then he asked, “How do you feel about being here this morning?”

“Sir, I’m just doing my job. That’s how you have to look at things, isn’t it? They gave me the orders. I followed them. Tomorrow I’ll do something else.”

* * *

As Mike had been best man for Charlie, so Charlie was best man for Mike. Esther was one of Stella’s bridesmaids, along with two of Stella’s sisters and a first cousin. From what Mike told Charlie, Stella’s folks had grumbled about a Jewish bridesmaid at a Catholic wedding, but he and Stella managed to sweeten them up. Charlie didn’t tell Esther anything about that, and Stella’s father and mother stayed polite to her, if not exactly warm. That was their good luck. She would have gone off like a bomb if they’d said anything about her religion.

The reception was at a Knights of Columbus hall two doors down from the church. Since Stella’s folks were footing the bill, the chow was Italian. So was the band. One of the trumpeters and a sax player looked as if they might be made men. Since Charlie was there as brother of the groom and not as a reporter, he didn’t ask them. He made a point of not asking them, in fact.

He toasted Mike and Stella with Chianti. “Health, wealth, long life, happiness, kids!” he said. You couldn’t go wrong with those. Everybody raised a cheer and everybody drank.

After Stella mashed wedding cake in Mike’s face, he came over to Charlie and said, “What do you think our chances are?” His cheeks were flushed. He’d been drinking pretty hard, and not just Italian red wine.

“Hey, you’ve got a job and a pretty girl,” Charlie answered. “That puts you ahead of most people right there.”

“Till I go up in front of one of those goddamn treason tribunals, anyway,” Mike said.

“Mike. . This isn’t the time or the place,” Charlie said.

“Everybody says that. Everybody says that all the stinkin’ time,” Mike snarled. “And everybody’ll keep on saying it till we’re as bad off and as much under the gun as the poor bastards in Italy or Germany or Russia.”

Charlie held a full glass of wine. He wanted to pour it over his brother’s hot head, but people would talk. In lieu of starting trouble, he said, “Honest to God, Mike, it’s not gonna come to anything like that.”

“No, huh? Ask Roosevelt what he thinks. Ask Huey Long, too. Huey was as crazy as the people who liked him, and that’s really saying something. But what did it get him in the end? A cemetery plot on the front lawn on his gaudy, overpriced, oversized capitol.”

“A cemetery plot is all any of us gets in the end,” Charlie said quietly.

“Yeah, yeah.” Mike sounded impatient-and drunk as an owl. “But you want to get it later, not sooner. Joe Steele wanted Huey to get it sooner, and the Kingfish, he’s in the cold, cold ground.”

“They still haven’t found who shot Long.” Charlie felt as if he were reprising scenes he’d already played with Esther.

“Huey’s storm troopers and the Louisiana cops, they couldn’t find their ass with both hands,” Mike said with a fine curl of the lip. “And when Joe Steele’s Department of Justice is down there giving them a boost, you think anybody’ll go pointing fingers back at the big chief in the White House?” He cackled laughter bitter enough to make people stare at him.

“Mike, what I think is, you’re at your wedding. You need to pay more attention to Stella and less attention to Steele.”

“Doggone it, Charlie, nobody wants to pay attention to what Steele’s doing to the country. Everybody looks the other way because the economy seems a little better than it did right after the crash. Not good, but a little better. And Steele grabs a bit of power here and a bit more there, and pretty soon he’ll hold all the strings. And everybody else’ll have to dance when he pulls them.”

“Why don’t you go dance, man, no strings attached? Like I told you, that’s what you’re here for. If you want to go after Joe Steele some more when you’re back from your honeymoon, okay, you’ll do that. In the meantime, enjoy yourself. Dum vivimus, vivamus!”

“‘While we live, let us live.’ Good luck!” Mike said, but then, suddenly grinning, “I wonder what ever happened to Sister Mary Ignatia.”

“Nothing good, I hope,” Charlie said. The large, strong, stern nun was so old, Latin might have been her native language. She’d carried a ruler and inflicted the language and flattened knuckles on both of them.

“Who was the one with the mustache? Was that Sister Bernadette?” Mike asked.

“No-Sister Susanna.” Charlie happily chattered about teachers from years gone by. His brother was definitely buggy when it came to Joe Steele. Anything that distracted him from the President looked good to Charlie.

When Charlie went out onto the parquet dance floor with Esther a little later, she asked him, “What was going on there? Looked like Mike was getting kind of excited.”

“Maybe a little.” If Charlie minimized for his wife, he might be able to minimize for himself, too. “But I managed to calm him down.” That, he was pretty sure about. Mike was dancing with Stella, and seemed happy enough.

“More politics?” Esther asked.

“Yeah. He looks at Joe Steele the same way you do, only more so. You know that.”

He hoped he would get Esther to back away, but his wife was made of stern stuff. “There’s a difference,” she said.

“Like what?”

“If I don’t like the President, what do I do? I talk to you. If Mike doesn’t like him, he writes a story that says so, and thousands-maybe millions-of people know about it. Joe Steele knows about it, and so do his men.”

“They may know about it, but what can they do about it? We still have freedom of the press in this country,” Charlie said.

Esther didn’t answer. She let him imagine all the things someone who didn’t like what a reporter had to say might do. He was sure the things he imagined were worse than anything she might have said. He’d always had more imagination than was good for him.

So, like a man flicking a light switch, he deliberately turned it off. Sometimes you did better taking the world as you found it and not troubling yourself about moonshine and vapors and ghosties and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night. You couldn’t do anything about those even if they happened to be real. Mike and Stella would be going bump in the night tonight. Charlie could hope they had a ton of fun doing it. He could, and he did.

Mike seemed to be playing the same kind of mental games with himself. He didn’t talk about Joe Steele any more during the reception. He laughed and joked and looked like somebody having a good time at his wedding. If he wasn’t, he didn’t let anyone else see that. With any luck, he didn’t let himself see it, either.

Stella seemed to be having a good time, too. But when Charlie danced with her, she whispered in his ear: “Don’t let Mike do anything too crazy, okay?”

“How am I supposed to stop him?” Charlie whispered back. “And why don’t you take care of it? You’re his wife now, remember, not just his girlfriend.”

“That doesn’t mean I know anything about newspapers. You do. He has to take you seriously.”

Charlie laughed out loud, there on the dance floor. “I’m his little brother. He hasn’t taken me seriously since the day I was born. If you think he’ll start now, I’m sorry, but you’re out of luck.”

“I married him. That makes me lucky. I want to stay lucky for a while, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure.” Charlie left it there. Everybody wanted to stay lucky for a while. Just because you wanted it didn’t mean you would get it. Hardly anybody managed that. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you pointed out to a bride on her wedding day. Chances were she’d see for herself all too soon.

* * *

Andy Wyszynski ordered Father Coughlin brought back to Washington, D.C., for his hearing before a military tribunal. He scheduled the hearing for the lobby of the District Court Building: the place where the Supreme Court Four had met their fate.

In a press conference, Wyszynski said, “I wish he’d kept his nose out of politics, that’s all. I’m a Catholic myself. Most of you know I am. I don’t like the idea that a priest could betray his country. He should have stuck with God’s things. Those are what priests are for. When he started messing with Caesar’s, that’s when he got in trouble.”

“Joe Steele didn’t mind when Father Coughlin backed him in the election,” Walter Lippmann said. “He didn’t mind when Coughlin supported some of his early programs, either.”

One of the Attorney General’s bushy eyebrows twitched. But Wyszynski answered calmly enough: “The President wouldn’t have minded if Father Coughlin campaigned for Herbert Hoover.”

“No?” Lippmann said. Charlie wondered the same thing. Joe Steele wanted people behind him, not pushing against him.

But Wyszynski said “No” and sounded like a man who meant it. He went on, “Herbert Hoover is an American, a loyal American. He is not someone who has thrown in his lot with tyrants from overseas. Father Coughlin is. We will show that he is at the upcoming tribunal.”

“Will he confess, the way the Supreme Court Four did?” a reporter asked.

“I have no idea,” Wyszynski answered. “If he does, that will simplify things. If he doesn’t, we will prove the case to the satisfaction of the members of the military tribunal.”

“What if they acquit him?” the newshound persisted.

Both of Andy Wyszynski’s eyebrows sprang toward his hairline then. If Charlie was any judge, that meant the possibility had never occurred to him. After a shrug, though, he responded smoothly enough: “If they do, then they do, that’s all. I think it would be a shame, because Father Coughlin has shown that he’s the enemy of everything the USA stands for. But I didn’t win every case in Chicago, and I don’t know whether I’ll win every case here.”

A slicked-down Army colonel named Walter Short headed the tribunal. Also on it were a Navy captain named Halsey, an Army Air Corps major called Carl Spatz (he pronounced it spots, not spats), and an Army Air Corps first lieutenant with the interesting handle of Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Only his eyebrows reminded Charlie of his Confederate ancestor.

Charlie and Louie had the good sense to get to the District Court Building early. The crush was a little less overwhelming than it had been for the Associate Justices’ hearing. Coughlin wasn’t a government figure, and this wasn’t the first such proceeding.

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.