“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 wed
ding, 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 Lippm
ann 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.
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