Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

  “Just fine, thank you very much. They’ll report the bill out of committee day after tomorrow. And that isn’t background. You can use it.”

  “And help make it come true.” Charlie knew the mysterious ways in which politics often moved.

  “Well, maybe. With a little luck.” Kagan’s voice was bland.

  “Why are you telling me?” Charlie asked.

  “The President likes you,” Lazar Kagan said. When Charlie let out a startled yip of laughter, the Jew nodded. “He does. He thinks you give him a fair shake. That’s all he wants, for people to give him a fair shake. He wishes your brother would do the same thing.”

  Which meant what, exactly? Make your brother come around and we’ll keep feeding you good stories? Something like that, anyway. Carefully, Charlie said, “Mike writes what he writes, that’s all. We quit trying to make each other do stuff about the time we started to shave.”

  “I have a brother, too. He’s a tailor in Bakersfield. So I know what you mean,” Kagan said. “I was just telling you what Joe Steele thought.”

  “Thanks. It’s good to know,” Charlie said, which was bound to be true in all kinds of ways.

  * * *

  The Tennessee Valley program was the last important bill to go through Joe Steele’s special session of Congress. Almost everything the President proposed passed. Although none of Joe Steele’s aides would admit it, even off the record, Charlie had the feeling that the few bills which failed were ones the President offered just so they could fail. That was a mark of a smart, sly politico—give the lawmakers a few things they could shoot down and they wouldn’t worry so much about the rest.

  And what did pass was enough and then some. Wall Street operators screeched that the new rules squeezed them like anacondas. So did construction companies in the road- and dam-building businesses. So did union bosses who didn’t fancy federally ordered cooling-off periods interrupting their strikes.

  You could tell whose ox was being gored by the bellows that came from it. A gored ox might gore back. A gored construction-company executive reached for a lawyer instead. That produced less blood and more noise.

  Almost before the ink dried on some of Joe Steele’s legislative signatures, Federal judges started ruling the bills unconstitutional. Naturally, Federal lawyers appealed those rulings. Charlie had never found Federal lawyers particularly appealing, but he knew where they got their marching orders.

  So did they, and also which side their bread was buttered on. Anyone who worked for Joe Steele could see the benefits of keeping him happy. The appeals that came out of the Attorney General’s office were uncommonly vehement and uncommonly urgent. The programs passed in Joe Steele’s special Congressional session zoomed up toward the Supreme Court as if shot from a battlewagon’s big guns.

  And the Supreme Court listened to arguments for both sides, and then it deliberated. Since the turn of the century, the Democrats had had only eight years to appoint Supreme Court justices. The rest of the time, the White House lay in Republican hands. Herbert Hoover might have lost the latest election, but the Supreme Court didn’t care. To a good many of the justices enshrined in their chamber in the Capitol, even Hoover was a dangerous liberal.

  Which, in their eyes, made Joe Steele . . . well, what, exactly? Not Trotsky, maybe. Not the Antichrist, maybe. Then again, maybe not. To say the Supreme Court was suspicious of any changes to the economic life of the country beggared the power of language.

  The justices tossed out one of his relief bills: they said it exceeded the Federal government’s authority. They said the same thing about the bill that regulated Wall Street. And they said the same thing about the one that limited management’s ability to coerce labor.

  Charlie dutifully hammered out stories about the Supreme Court decisions. And he hammered out stories about the President’s reaction to the Supreme Court decisions. He had access to Joe Steele’s closest cronies. He had it, and he used it.

  “No, the President isn’t happy,” Stas Mikoian told him. “The President doesn’t like it when nine old fools try to torpedo the recovery.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Charlie asked.

  Mikoian started to nod, but checked himself. “I’m afraid you’d better not,” he said regretfully. “If it gets back to the nine old fools, they’ll really show the President how hard they can screw him.”

  Since Charlie was sure Stas had that straight, he just clucked and said, “That isn’t how they teach you things work in your civics class.”

  “Things in a civics class work fine,” Mikoian answered. “But we aren’t in a civics class right now. We’re in Washington, dammit. And so are those bastards in the black robes.”

  When Charlie talked with Vince Scriabin at the White House a couple of weeks later—right after the Supreme Court said the Federal government had no business sticking its snoot into banking regulation, either—the little man they called the Hammer was even blunter than Mikoian had been. “The justices want to bang heads with Joe Steele?” he said. “They’d better have harder heads than I think they do—that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

  “What can the President do?” Charlie asked. “The Supreme Court is a separate branch of government. Until they start dropping dead so he can choose his own men, he can’t make them call his laws constitutional.”

  Scriabin leaned back in his swivel chair. It squeaked. The lightbulb in the ceiling fixture flashed off the oval lenses of his wire-framed spectacles. For a few seconds, it turned them big and yellow, so that he might have had an owl’s fierce, predatory eyes rather than his own. He could have been preening when he scratched his closely trimmed little mustache. “Nobody elected them,” he said in a deadly voice. “If they think they can block what the people want, they’d better think again.”

  He didn’t mean what the people want. He meant what Joe Steele wants. The two weren’t quite the same, but Charlie could see that Scriabin would never admit there was a difference. Anything Joe Steele wanted, the Hammer wanted, too. Anything at all.

  “What can Joe Steele do?” Charlie asked again. He didn’t think the Capitol would go up in flames and barbecue Charles Evans Hughes and his robed comrades. It crossed his mind, but he didn’t believe it. Mike would, he thought.

  When Vince Scriabin leaned toward Charlie once more, he looked like a small, mild-mannered man, not something that hunted through the night on silent wings. “He’ll take care of it,” the aide said, and his voice held complete assurance. “Nobody stops Joe Steele, not when he gets going.”

  That seemed to be the end of that interview. As Charlie was leaving the White House, he paused to take his umbrella from the stand—it was raining outside. In came a jowly young man whose square head and underslung jaw reminded Charlie of a mastiff. His face was vaguely familiar, but Charlie couldn’t hang a name on him. Whoever he was, he wore a sharp fedora and a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his stocky frame.

  “Excuse me,” he murmured as he closed his own umbrella and thrust it into the polished brass stand. His voice was surprisingly high. He hurried off to whatever appointment he had.

  “Who is that fellow?” Charlie asked Scriabin.

  Joe Steele’s aide smiled a thin smile. “Believe it or not, his name is Hoover.”

  “Ripley wouldn’t believe that!” Charlie said with a snort.

  “It’s true anyway. He’s an investigator in the Justice Department. He’s smarter than you’d think from his mug, too. The only thing I wonder about sometimes is whether he’s too smart for his own good.”

  He had to be the guy Mikoian had mentioned a little while before. His look was right—bulldog came closer than mastiff—and so was his job. “What’s he doing here today?” Charlie asked.

  “I don’t know.” Scriabin shrugged narrow shoulders. “The President wanted to see him. When Joe Steele sends for you, you come.” That last was cert
ainly true. Saying no to Joe Steele was like saying no to a bulldozer. You could say it, sure, but how much good would that do you? As for Scriabin’s shrug, Charlie took it with a grain of salt about the size of the Polo Grounds. What was Scriabin there for, if not to know his boss’ mind?

  Of course, knowing it and talking about it were also two different things. Even talking about it with a reporter in the White House’s good graces might not be what the President wanted. Evidently it wasn’t, because Vince Scriabin kept his thin lips buttoned tight. With a shrug of his own, Charlie walked out into the rain. He popped the umbrella open. It was coming down harder than it had when he got there.

  * * *

  Charlie soaked up the last of the gravy from the beef stew on his plate with the heel of a loaf of bread. He smiled across the table at Esther. “That was mighty good,” he said, patting his belly to show he meant it.

  “I’ve done worse,” she agreed.

  “Hey, you’re getting the hang of it,” Charlie said. Her cooking had been on the catch-as-catch-can side when they got married. Since what he’d called cooking was heating up a can of hash, he couldn’t get too critical.

  “It’s not hard. It’s not nearly as hard as running an office,” she said—she’d been an administrative assistant before they tied the knot. “It just takes practice, that’s all, like anything else.” She lit an after-dinner cigarette and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “Charlie?”

  “What’s cookin’, babe?” He knew something was by the way she said his name.

  “Would you mind if I look for part-time office work here?”

  He frowned. “I’m bringing in enough money. We won’t put the Du Ponts outa business any time soon, but we’re doing okay.”

  “I know we are,” she said quickly. “It’s not for the money, not really, even though a little extra never hurt anybody. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m rattling around the apartment when you aren’t home, and you aren’t home a lot of the time.”

  She’d held her job, held it and done it well, when millions and millions of people lost theirs. If she hadn’t done it well, she would have lost it. She might have lost it no matter how well she did it. She was used to going out and taking care of things on her own. But even if she was . . . “I don’t want people thinking I can’t support you,” Charlie said.

  “It wouldn’t be like that. Honest to Pete, it wouldn’t,” Esther said. “Before the market crashed, people might’ve thought that way. Not any more, though. Everybody knows you latch on to anything you can get, ’cause you may be out of work again tomorrow.”

  “You really want to do this.”

  She heard that it wasn’t a question. “Yeah, I do. I’m all by myself here. My friends are back in New York. I’d like to get to know people, not just sit in the chair and read sappy novels and listen to the radio all day.”

  If he told her no, she’d do things his way, or he thought she would. But she wouldn’t be happy about it. He didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to have the little gray cells to figure that out. Right now, the apartment probably seemed like a little gray cell to her. Telling her she should stay in it would only cause trouble down the line. Charlie didn’t like trouble, not nearly so much as Mike did. He never had.

  And so he sighed, not too loud and not too sorrowfully, and said, “Okey-doke. Go ahead and do it. But when you land something, try and get home in time to have dinner on the table for me. Deal?”

  “Deal!” She must have expected him to tell her no, because she jumped at the bargain.

  Not only did she jump at it, she celebrated it by fixing gin-and-tonics for them. The gin was strong, but that was as much as it had going for it. Charlie sighed again, on a different note this time. “Tastes like it came from somebody’s bathtub—or his chemistry set.”

  “I bet it did,” Esther said. “That bottle’s from before Repeal. Still not much good stuff on the shelves.”

  “What there is is expensive, too.” Charlie took another sip. “Well, we can drink this. When it’s gone, we’ll get more, that’s all.”

  “I don’t mind the radio so much when I’ve got company,” Esther said. “After I do the dishes, we can listen for a while, have another drink while we do.”

  “And who knows what’ll happen then, huh?” He leered at her.

  She glanced back out of the corner of her eye. “Who knows?”

  Some nice, romantic music would have been great. But when Charlie turned on the set and the tubes had warmed up, what he got were commercials for soap and shampoo and then one of those smooth-voiced announcers going, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast so we may bring you an address from the President of the United States.”

  “What’s he going to talk about?” Esther asked.

  “Beats me,” Charlie answered.

  He would have gone on from there, but the President’s voice came out of the radio: “This is Joe Steele.” He didn’t sound smooth. He never did, but tonight even less so than usual. “I need to talk to you tonight because the country has a problem. There are nine old men sitting in a dusty old chamber in the Capitol who think they have the power to do whatever they want with the hopes and dreams of Americans everywhere.”

  “Uh-oh,” Esther said.

  “Yeah.” Charlie couldn’t have put it better himself. When Joe Steele went after something or somebody, he didn’t do it halfway.

  “You elected the new Congress—you did, the people of the United States,” the President went on. Charlie thought he heard cold fury in the voice coming out of the radio. Or Joe Steele might just have been a good actor. How could you know for sure? “You elected the new Congress, and you elected me. I’ve done everything I know how to do to try to get our country back on its feet again. Congress—well, most of Congress—has helped me by passing the laws that set up my Four Year Plan.”

  Even when he was mostly talking about something else, he couldn’t resist throwing a dart or two at the conservatives the election hadn’t swept out of Washington. Whatever else you did, you didn’t want to get on his bad side.

  “But no one elected the nine old fools in their black robes who sit in their musty room and dare to stop the people’s progress,” Joe Steele growled. “Why are they doing that? What can they want? They are hurting the country. They are wrecking the country. How could any loyal American say that the laws we need to fix what is broken go against the Constitution? There has to be something wrong, something horribly wrong, with anyone who would do that. I don’t know what it is, but I tell you this—I’m going to find out.”

  He kept on for a while after that, but he was firing at the same targets over and over. When he signed off, the announcer sounded faintly stunned and more than faintly relieved to turn the airwaves over to a jazz band.

  Charlie and Esther stared at each other. “Wow,” Charlie said.

  “Wow is right,” Esther said. “You could see what he was doing when he went after the Congressmen who were stalling his bills. But what’s the point to hammering the Supreme Court like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie answered. “Joe Steele said it himself—nobody elected them. If people write them angry letters, you think they’ll care? Not likely. The only way justices leave the Supreme Court is feet first. Once they’re there, they’re there. The rest of the country’s stuck with ’em.”

  “They could—waddayacallit—impeach them,” Esther said. But even she didn’t sound as if she believed it would happen.

  Neither did Charlie. “You practically have to catch somebody taking bribes on his front lawn to get rid of him that way. The Supreme Court justices aren’t doing anything like that, and Joe Steele’s got to know it. It’s politics, that’s all it is. You can’t impeach somebody just on account of politics.”

  “Andrew Johnson,” Esther said. “I remember from high school history.”

 
“Uh-huh. But they couldn’t throw him out of office, and they had at least as big a bulge in Congress as Joe Steele does.”

  “Maybe Joe Steele thinks that, if the justices find out how many people can’t stand them, they’ll start taking a different look at the Constitution,” Esther said.

  “It could happen. It makes more sense than anything else I can think of—I’ll tell you that,” Charlie said. “But it could backfire on him, too. They’re liable to dig in their heels and toss out all of his laws just because they’re his. He’s got pride, but so do they.”

  “Nothing we can do about it except try not to get stuck in the gears when they grind together,” Esther said.

  “No, there’s one more thing I can do,” Charlie said.

  “Like what?”

  “Talk to the White House people tomorrow and see if they know what Joe Steele has in mind. Scriabin didn’t the last time I was there—or if he did, he didn’t let on. He’s got the deadest pan you ever saw. But I’ll see what I can pry out of Kagan and Mikoian. Mikoian could be a regular guy if he didn’t keep looking over his shoulder so much.”

  “That’s tomorrow,” Esther said archly. “What do you intend to do tonight?”

  “The wench grows bold,” Charlie said. “I expect I’ll think of something.” And he did.

  He had less luck when he called at the White House the next morning. That Justice Department investigator named Hoover was just leaving as Charlie walked in. Hoover smiled at him on the way out. Had Charlie been a kid, that smile would have scared him out of a year’s growth. Hoover had one of those faces that seemed only a little south of ordinary in repose or angry. When he smiled, he made you want to run away.

  Charlie said as much to Stas Mikoian. He made Mikoian laugh. Nothing frightening about Mikoian when he did; he was handsome in a swarthy, strong-nosed way. “We don’t work with Hoover because he’s pretty,” Stas said.