Numbly, Mike opened the door. Three men in cheap suits stood out there, one with a Tommy gun, one with a revolver, and one smacking the palm of his left hand with a blackjack held in his right. “Smart fella,” he said. “C’mon. Quiet. No fuss.”
“Can I get some regular clothes?” Mike gestured at his seersucker pajamas. “The closet’s right here.”
The Jeebies looked at one another. “What the hell—go ahead,” said the one with the cosh. He’d been doing all the talking. “Make it snappy, though.”
Pants, shirt, jacket, shoes . . . Those were all easy. Socks were back in the bedroom. Mike decided to do without. If the goons weren’t inclined to bother Stella, he didn’t want to give them ideas. “I’m ready,” he said, one of the bigger lies he’d ever come out with.
“Awright.” They took him away. Stella didn’t come out screaming and fighting. That was nothing but a relief to Mike. It would have done no good, and it might have got her hurt or seized with him. Maybe she fell back to sleep.
A man down the hall opened his door, saw what was happening, and slammed it shut again. He might have been keeping demons away. The GBI men took Mike down the stairs and out to a car waiting not far away.
“When we get to jail, I want to call a lawyer,” he said as he bent to get in.
The Jeebie with the blackjack used it then. Later, when Mike could think clearly again, he decided the guy would have clobbered him even if he hadn’t said a word. Knocking a prisoner over the head was just part of the process of getting him under control. If he was loopy, he couldn’t cause trouble.
Loopy Mike was. Everything about his ride in that car—except the stink of tobacco, sour sweat, and old puke—stayed blurry ever after. They didn’t go to a police station. They went to the Federal Building on the Lower West Side. They got there ridiculously fast. There was next to no traffic at that time of night. Even with his brains rattled, Mike noticed that.
“Another wrecker, huh?” a security guard outside the building said as the Jeebies hauled Mike out of the car and kept him on his feet. They treated him more like a sack of beans than a man. He felt more like a sack of beans, too.
“You betcha,” answered the GBI agent with the blackjack. To his comrades, he said, “Bring him on in. We’ll get him processed and go out for the next bastard on the list.”
Processed Mike was, like a side of beef. Some kind of official demanded his name. He had to think twice before he could give it. They searched him. They fingerprinted him. They photographed him. He doubtless looked like hell, but they didn’t care.
They gave him a number: NY24601. Someone wrote it on a piece of cloth with an indelible pen and stapled it to his lapel. For good measure, the man yanked the jacket off him and wrote it on the lining. “Don’t forget it,” he said. “From now on, that’s you.”
Since Mike had trouble with his name just then, he wasn’t sure about stowing the number in his pounding head, but he had help with it. They hauled him up in front of a fellow with a nameplate on his desk that said MORRIS FRUMKIN and below it, in smaller letters, ADMINISTRATIVE LAW JUDGE. “Charges?” Frumkin asked in a bored voice.
“Wrecking, to wit, libel against the Administration and its enlightened policies,” replied the man with the enlightened blackjack.
“Oh. He’s that Sullivan.” Morris Frumkin made a check mark on a list held in a clipboard. “Well, we don’t need much of a hearing for him, do we? He obviously did it. Sullivan, as administrative punishment for wrecking, you are transferred to a labor encampment in the Deprived Areas”—even groggy, Mike heard the capital letters thud into place—“for a term not to be shorter than five years and not to exceed ten. Transfer to take place immediately, sentence to be counted from arrival at the encampment.” He gabbled that out by rote and nodded to the men who had charge of Mike. “Put him in the holding cells till the next paddy wagon goes to Penn Station.”
They did. Half a dozen men already waited there. They were all the worse for wear. A couple had blood on their heads and shoulders—the Jeebies who clouted them hadn’t been so smooth as Mike’s captor. And one was all bloody and bruised. He’d put up a fight before Joe Steele’s agents could subdue him. What had it got him? Fifteen to twenty instead of five to ten. He was proud of the longer term, as he was of his lumps.
Mike’s head started pounding like a steel mill. One of the other wreckers slipped him two aspirins from a little tin the GBI men had missed. That was sending a baby to do a man’s job, but every little bit helped.
Another man got tossed in. Then the Jeebies herded them into a van. They went to Penn Station, and down to a level Mike had never imagined, much less seen. The splendid imitation of the Baths of Caracalla on the ground floor might as well not have existed. This wasn’t Roman. It was all bare, angular concrete and hard metal benches without backs. Mike sank down onto one and held his poor abused noggin in his hands. Several other wreckers assumed the same pose.
A train clattered in. The noise hurt, the way it would have with a hangover. Guards chivvied them into the front two cars. Those were already crowded. Most of the guys in them talked with New England accents. The guards didn’t care that they were only making the crowding worse.
“Don’t worry about it none, you sorry shitheads,” one of them said. “Time you get where you’re goin’, whole fuckin’ train’ll be packed.” He laughed. Mike didn’t think it was funny, not that the guard gave a damn.
The whistle screamed. That hurt, too. The train pulled away from that subterranean stop. Mike was bound for . . . somewhere.
* * *
The telephone rang. Charlie did his best to jump through the ceiling. When the phone goes off in the middle of the night, it means one of two things. Either some sleepy operator has made a wrong connection at the switchboard or something horrible has happened to somebody who thinks you’re important.
“Gevalt!” Esther said.
“No kidding.” Charlie rolled out of bed and headed for the living room. He hit his toe on the door frame and his shin on the coffee table before he could grab the phone. “Hello?”
“This is the long-distance operator,” said a prim female voice. “I have a call for you from Stella Sullivan in New York City. Will you accept?”
“Yeah,” Charlie answered. Something horrible had happened, all right, and he was only too sure he knew what it was.
“Go ahead, Miss Sullivan . . . excuse me, Mrs. Sullivan,” the operator said. To Charlie, her voice seemed muffled—she was really talking to Stella at the other end of the connection.
“Charlie?” Stella said through pops and clicks.
“Yeah, it’s me, all right.” He wasn’t sleepy any more. Hoping against hope for a miracle, he asked, “What’s cooking?”
“Oh, my God, Charlie! They grabbed Mike! They came for him and they took him away and I don’t know what they did with him and I just stayed in the bedroom all scared and shivering till I knew they were gone and then I called you and oh my God Charlie what am I gonna do?” Stella didn’t usually talk like that. She didn’t usually have any excuse to talk like that.
Charlie let out a long, long sigh. “Oh . . .” he said, and stopped right there. His father’s hard hand applied to the side of his head had taught him not to swear in front of women. On the phone with counted as in front of.
“What will you do, Charlie?” Stella said. “Can you do anything?”
“I’ll try,” Charlie said. “I don’t know what they’ll say. I don’t think trying will make it any worse for Mike. I don’t know if it’ll make things any better, either. But I’ll try. The worst they can tell me is no. I’m pretty sure that’s the worst they can tell me.”
“Thank you, Charlie. God bless you!” Stella said. “I’m gonna go light a candle in church right now.”
“Can’t hurt.” Charlie feared it was liable to do as much good as he could with Kagan or Scriabin
or Mikoian.
He said his good-byes with Stella and stumped back to the bedroom. Esther had turned on the lamp on her nightstand, so he didn’t injure himself during the return trip. “Was that . . . ?” she began. She didn’t go on, or need to.
“Yeah, that’s what that was.” Charlie made a fist and hit the mattress as hard as he could. Then he hit it again. It didn’t accomplish anything, but it made him feel a tiny bit better. Darwin had it straight—men were only a small step from apes banging on stumps with branches. “They’ve got Mike.”
“Can you do anything about it?”
“I told Stella I’d try. I’ll go to the White House when it gets light. I’ll go hat in hand. I’ll wear dark glasses and wave a tin cup around. In the meantime, turn out the lamp again, okay?”
“Sure.” As she did, she asked, “Do you think you’ll go back to sleep?”
“No, but I’ll give it a shot.” He lay down on his back and stared up at the blackness under the ceiling. He tried to count sheep. In his mind, they all turned to mutton chops and legs of lamb. Eventually, after what seemed a long time and no doubt was, he did drop into a muddy doze that left him almost more tired than if he’d stayed awake.
When the alarm clock clattered, for a bad moment he thought it was Stella on the phone again. He’d never killed it with more relief. Esther set something on the table in front of him. He ate breakfast without noticing what it was. He did realize she kept his coffee cup full, and her own. He went on yawning in spite of all the help the java could give him.
He visited AP headquarters before heading for Pennsylvania Avenue. People were quietly sympathetic when he told them where he had to go. They knew Mike had gone after Joe Steele with brass knucks. They also knew what happened to anyone who did something so foolhardy. Talking about such things was bad manners, but everybody knew.
Even the guard outside the White House expected Charlie. “Mr. Mikoian told me you’d likely stop by this morning, Mr. Sullivan,” the Spanish-American War veteran said. “You go straight to his office. He’ll see you.”
Charlie went straight to Mikoian’s crowded little office. He had to cool his heels outside, but only for fifteen minutes. The Assistant Secretary of Agriculture came out with a worried look on his well-bred face.
Charlie stuck his head in. “Come on, sit down,” Stas Mikoian told him. “Close the door behind you.”
“Thanks.” Charlie did. After he sank into his chair, he said, “I got a call from my sister-in-law in the middle of the night. They arrested Mike and took him away. I don’t like to beg, Stas, but I’m begging. If there’s anything you can do, please do it. I’ll pay you back some kind of way.” If that meant writing fawning stories about Joe Steele for as long as he stayed President, Charlie would do it, and count the cost later.
But Mikoian shook his head. “I’m sorry. There isn’t anything I can do.” He actually did sound sorry, where Kagan would have said the same thing with indifference and Scriabin might have gloated. Shaking his head again, he went on, “My hands are tied. The boss says he’s taken enough fleabites from your brother. He made his bed. Now he can lie in it.”
“Will he . . . talk to me?” Charlie had to lick dry lips halfway through the question. He didn’t want to have to talk to Joe Steele, not about anything like this. But Mike was his brother. For flesh and blood, you did things you didn’t want to do.
“No,” the Armenian answered. “He knew you’d be coming around. He keeps track of everything, you know. He has for as long as I’ve worked for him, since right after the war. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. He told me to tell you this was once too often. And he told me to tell you that if he didn’t care for what you did it would have been once too often a long time ago now.”
“If I can guarantee that Mike will keep quiet—”
“You know you can’t. Keeping that kind of promise isn’t in him, any more than a drunk keeps promises to sober up. Your brother would fall off the wagon in a month, tops.”
No matter how much Charlie wanted to call him a goddamn liar, he couldn’t. Mikoian was too likely to be right. Voice dull with hopelessness, Charlie asked, “What am I supposed to tell Stella?”
“Tell her you did everything a brother could. You know I have a brother in California. There are wreckers among the engineers and scientists, too. I understand your trouble. Right now, it’s the country’s trouble. We’ll be better for it in the end.” Mikoian seemed to mean that, too. Charlie wondered how.
XII
The train wheezed to a stop. They were somewhere west of Livingston, Montana. Mike had seen the sign announcing the name of the town through the shutters the guards had put over the windows. He was convinced that wasn’t because they didn’t want the prisoners seeing out. No—it was because they didn’t want ordinary people looking in and seeing what they were doing with the men they’d arrested for wrecking.
He’d thought this car had been crowded when he stumbled into it under Penn Station. Well, it had been, and it got more and more so. You couldn’t go to another car to use the toilet. They had honey buckets in here. By now, the buckets were overflowing. Nobody’d bathed. There was barely enough water to drink, let alone to use for getting clean. The stink of unwashed bodies warred with that from the buckets.
There hadn’t been much food, either. They gave out stale chunks of bread and crackers and sheets of beef jerky hard enough to break a tooth on. All of it was like the free lunch at a saloon just inside hell’s city limits. It made everybody in the car thirstier—not that the guards cared.
Some men simply couldn’t take it. They gave up and died. The prisoners had passed the guards two bodies at different stops. From the way the air was starting to smell, somebody else had cashed in his chips, too, and was going off. If the guards wanted to let the prisoners know that nobody cared any more about what happened to them, well, they knew how to get what they wanted.
A guard banged on the locked and barred door at the front of the car. He kept banging on it till the cursing, moaning prisoners quieted down some. Then he shouted, “My buddy an’ me, we got Tommy guns with full drums. We got reinforcements, too. We’re gonna open this door. You fuckers come out slow, in good order. Slow, you hear? You all come chargin’ out at once, we’re gonna kill a whole bunch o’ you. Nobody’ll give a shit if we do, neither. So do like we tell you or get ventilated. Them’s your choices.”
He waited to let that sink in. Then, slowly and cautiously, he did open the door. As slowly and cautiously as they could, the wreckers came out: hungry, thirsty, whiskery, frightened men. Mike was angry as well as scared. He would have bet some of the other prisoners were, too. But the guards hadn’t been lying about their firepower. Charging Tommy guns with your bare hands was just a way to kill yourself, and maybe not quickly.
Sunlight made him blink and set his eyes watering. It had been gloomy in the car after they mounted those shutters. Montana. What did they call it? Big Sky Country, that was the name. It deserved the handle, too. The sweep of sky was wider and bluer than anything Mike had seen back East. The train stood on a siding in what could have been the exact middle of nowhere. A four-lane blacktop road paralleled the tracks. Not a car coming, not a car going.
“Line up in rows of ten!” a guard with a Tommy gun yelled. “Stand at attention if you know what that is. If you don’t, pick somebody who looks like he does and do like him.”
Mike took his place in one of those rows. All his other choices seemed worse. A drill sergeant would have cussed him out for his stand at attention—stab at attention would have been closer. But as long as the wreckers stood up straight and held still, the Jeebies didn’t fuss.
A breeze tugged at Mike’s uncombed, sweat-matted hair. It felt dry, and smelled of pine and grass. The mercury couldn’t have been over seventy-five. Along with everything else, he’d left New York City’s heat and humidity behind.
“Fu
ck!” somebody in back of him said softly. It sounded more like a prayer than an obscenity. The word dropped into a spreading pool of silence and disappeared. No traffic noise. No elevators going up and down in the building—no buildings, not as far as the eye could see. No radios blatting. No nothing.
More and more wreckers stumbled out of more and more train cars and formed more and more rows of ten. Along with the rest of them, Mike stood there, trying to stay on his pins while he waited to see what happened next.
He didn’t see it. He heard it. Some of the men at attention didn’t turn their heads to the left as soon as they caught the noise, for fear of what the guards would do. Others did, either taking the chance or not knowing better than to move without permission while at attention. When they got away with it, the rest, Mike among them, also looked.
A convoy of khaki-painted Army trucks was rumbling up the road toward them. Wherever they were going next, it was somewhere the railroad didn’t run. Mike wondered if there’d be any food and water at the end of the truck trip. All he could do was hope.
“Board the trucks till they’re full. I mean full!” a guard shouted after the big snorters stopped. “Don’t get cute. It’s the last dumb thing you’ll ever do. Somebody will be watching you at all times.”
Mike scrambled into the back of a truck. A canvas canopy spread over steel hoops kept out the sun and prying eyes. Pretty soon, the truck got rolling again. Out the back, he could see a little of where he’d been, but not where he was going.
“We oughta jump and run,” said the mousy little man shoehorned in next to him.
“Go ahead,” Mike answered. “You first.”
The mousy guy shook his head. “I don’t have the nerve. I wish I did. This is liable to be nothing beside whatever we’re going to.”
“It’s a labor encampment. They’ll work us. How bad can it be?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of—how bad it can be.”
Joe Steele Page 20
