“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 b
ite 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.
XVI
A little more than a month after the Nazis jumped on the Reds, Winston Churchill came to North America to confer with Joe Steele. He flew from England to Newfoundland, then cruised down to Portland, Maine, in a Royal Navy destroyer.
Vince Scriabin expressed sour satisfaction about that. “Churchill wanted Joe Steele to come to Newfoundland or Canada,” he told Charlie. “We told him no. He’s the one who’s hat in hand. If he needs something from us, he can damn well do the traveling and the begging.”
“Doesn’t make any difference to me one way or the other,” Charlie answered. Diplomacy reminded him too much of what went on on elementaryschool playgrounds. The smaller kids had to do what the bigger kids said. Every so often, fights started. The trouble was, there were no teachers to break them up and paddle the punk who’d started things.
“Have you ever been to Portland before?” Scriabin asked.
“I’ve been to the one in Oregon. I don’t think I’ve been to the one in Maine,” Charlie said.
“Well, pack a suitcase. The boss wants you along,” Scriabin said. “Throw in a sweater or two. We’ll be out on the ocean some of the time, and it’s not warm even in the middle of summer.”
As he was packing, Esther said, “Can I send you a wire while you’re there?”
“I don’t think you’d better,” Charlie replied. “This is supposed to be hush-hush, you know? How come? What may not keep till I get back?”
“Well, I’m more than a week late now,” she said. “I’m not sure yet, but I’ve kinda got the feeling, if you know what I mean.”
“All right!” He squeezed her till she squeaked. He knew he hadn’t sounded thrilled about the idea of a second kid when she put it to him. He tried his best not to make the same mistake twice.
“I do think it’s good that they’re bringing you along,” Esther said.
“Yeah, me, too.” Charlie nodded. “Means—I hope it means—they’ve decided they trust me after all.”
He’d always had the fear Joe Steele had asked him to work at the White House not least to keep an eye on him. Mike had provoked the administration enough to get tossed into that damned labor encampment. No wonder they’d figure Charlie was liable to be another dangerous character. And, of course, nine years ago now Charlie had walked past Vince Scriabin when the Hammer was telling whoever was on the other end of the line to take care of something tonight, because tomorrow would be too late.
Even now, he didn’t know that Scriabin had been arranging Governor Roosevelt’s untimely demise. He’d never once mentioned it to the Hammer in all the years since. Keeping his mouth shut about it felt like paying lifeinsurance premiums. Scriabin might laugh—not that he was the laughing kind—and tell him he was full of baloney. But he also might not. If Franklin D. Roosevelt could have a tragic accident, Charlie Sullivan sure as hell could, too.
He kept his mouth shut on the train trip up to Portland. He had no tragic accidents on the way or after he got there. The President and his entourage traveled in far higher style than an AP stringer on the way to cover a trial or a grain-elevator explosion.
They rode a U.S. Navy destroyer out to meet the Royal Navy warship. The two vessels made an interesting contrast. The British ship was painted a slightly darker gray than its American counterpart. But it was a warship in ways the U.S. Navy destroyer wasn’t. Everything not essential had been stripped away from it. The Royal Navy sailors and officers wore uniforms that had seen hard use. Their expressions said they’d seen hard use, too. They eyed the noncombatant American sailors and offi
cials with faint—or sometimes not so faint—contempt.
Pink and round-faced, Churchill looked like a pugnacious, cigar-smoking baby. He and his advisors met Joe Steele and his followers in the officers’ mess.
“You’ve come a long way,” Joe Steele said after a silent steward served drinks—Royal Navy ships weren’t dry. “What can I do for you?”
“This side of fighting, you’re already doing all you can do for me,” the Prime Minister answered. In person, his voice seemed even more resonant than it did on the radio. “Now I want you to do—I need you to do—the same thing for Trotsky and Russia.”
Joe Steele scowled. “I knew you were going to say that. If I wanted to do it, I would have done it already.”
“Whether or not you want to do it, you need to do it,” Churchill said. “Trotsky may rant about world revolution, but that’s all it is—ranting. Red Russia is a nation other nations can deal with.”
“Pfah!” Joe Steele said. The United States had no embassy in Moscow, nor did the Reds have one in Washington. Kerensky had got out of Paris just before the Nazis marched in. He was in New York these days. The USA still didn’t recognize him, either. As far as American diplomacy was concerned, a sixth of the globe’s land area was only a blank space on the map.
“Oh, but you must,” Churchill said, as if the President had spelled all that out for him instead of making a disgusted noise. “Russia, as I told you, we can deal with. Not well, perhaps, nor smoothly, but we can. Hitler’s Germany, on the other hand, is not a state at all. It is a cancer on the world’s body politic. Unless it is cut out, it will spread without limit. That is what cancers do. You need not love Trotsky to see that Hitler is the more dangerous of the two.”
“Pfah!” Joe Steele said again. This time, he added real words: “He’s turned that whole country into a prison camp.”
Joe Steele Page 27
