“How do you mean?” Scriabin demanded, hard suspicion curling his voice.
“Well, I was thinking I’d name Mikoian here ambassador to Afghanistan, and Kagan ambassador to Paraguay,” Garner said. “I don’t reckon I’ll have any trouble getting the Senate to confirm those.”
“What about me?” the Hammer asked.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Vince. I got a place for you, too,” John Nance Garner replied. No one called Scriabin Vince, not even Joe Steele. No. No one had. Smiling, Garner continued, “I’ll put you up for ambassador to Outer Mongolia. Have fun with the camels and the sheep.”
“You won’t get away with this.” Scriabin would have sounded less frightening had he sounded less frigid.
“No, huh? People like you, they serve at the President’s pleasure. Well, the pleasure ain’t mine. Now get the hell out of the White House, before I call the hired muscle to throw you out.”
They stalked from the conference room, Mikoian serene as always, Kagan scowling, and Scriabin shaking his head in tightly held fury. That left Charlie alone with the new President. “What about me, sir?” he asked. But that wasn’t the question he wanted to ask. After a moment, he got it out: “Why didn’t you fire me, too?”
“Like I told you, you can hang around if you want to,” Garner said. “And here’s why—you remembered I was a human being even when Joe Steele didn’t. You’d drink with me. You’d talk with me. More’n Joe Steele or those three puffed-up thugs o’ his ever did. You know how I found out there was such a thing as an atom bomb?”
“How?” Charlie asked.
“When I heard on the radio we dropped one on that Sendai place, that’s how,” John Nance Garner growled. “Nobody said a word to me before. Not one goddamn word, Sullivan. I was Vice President of the United States, an’ they treated me like a dirty Red spy. Did you know about the bomb ahead of time?”
“Well . . . some.” Charlie wondered whether Garner would show him the door for telling the truth.
“I ain’t surprised. I wish I was, but I ain’t.” The President lit another cigarette. “You wrote some pretty good words for Joe Steele. You might’ve done even better if he’d wanted you to, too. So we’ll see how it goes, if that suits you. If I don’t like it, I’ll toss you out on your ear.”
“All the way to Outer Mongolia?” Charlie asked.
Garner chuckled hoarsely. “Shit, even that ain’t far enough for Scriabin. I’d send him to the far side of the moon if only I could get him there.”
“I’ll stay for a while, Mr. President,” Charlie said. “But you’d better keep an eye on the Hammer before he leaves. He’s had the office in here a long time. He won’t want to give up everything that goes with it.”
“Now tell me something I didn’t know. I’ll have J. Edgar’s boys watching him every second. Oh, you bet I will.” John Nance Garner muttered to himself. “Now who do I get to watch Hoover?” He knew the questions that needed asking, all right.
Charlie looked for something, anything, more to say. The best he could do was, “Good luck, sir.”
“Thanks,” Garner said. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”
* * *
Mike stuck a nickel in a machine and took out a copy of the Casper Morning Star. He wondered why he bothered. It was a thin, anemic sheet compared to the New York Post. Compared to the New York Times, it was barely a newspaper at all.
But it was what Casper had for a morning paper. The evening Herald-Tribune was no better. That a town as small as Casper had both a morning and an evening paper said something, though Mike wasn’t sure what. He shrugged as he folded the Morning Star, stuck it under his arm, and carried it into the diner where he ate breakfast most days.
“Morning,” a man and a woman said when he came in. He’d been here long enough for people to know him for a regular at the joint. But the locals still thought of him as new in town. He was, of course, but they’d go right on thinking of him that way if he stayed here till he was ninety. They cut him a little extra slack because he was friends with John Dennison, but only a little.
The counterman poured coffee and gave him the cup. “You want hash browns or pancakes?” he asked. Mike almost always ate bacon and eggs over medium, but he went now with one side, now the other.
“Hash browns today,” he said, adulterating the coffee with cream and sugar.
The counterman called the order back to the kitchen. Mike opened the paper and started to read. Some of the local writing was pretty good. The Morning Star kept the city fathers on their toes. National and world news all came from the wire services. The next time the paper sent a reporter out of Wyoming would be the first.
A story below the fold on the front page caught his eye. WHITE HOUSE SHAKEUP, the headline read. The story announced that three of Joe Steele’s longtime assistants had resigned and been offered ambassadorial positions by President Garner. For a moment, Mike swore under his breath. They deserved to be tarred and feathered as far as he was concerned, if not drawn and quartered.
Then he noticed where John Nance Garner wanted to send them. You couldn’t leave the USA any farther behind, not unless you did a swan dive from a B-29 into the South Pacific halfway between Australia and New Zealand.
He wanted to whoop. He wanted to holler. He wanted to jump off his stool and cut capers right there at the counter. But he just sat, reading the paper. You never could tell who was a Jeebie or who informed for the GBI. Even though a ton of scalps lived here, people had mourned Joe Steele, and mourned him yet. They might still feel something for his nasty henchmen, unlikely as that seemed to Mike. You didn’t want to take chances, not in America the way it was these days.
Mike did let himself smile as he sipped from his cup. No informer could report him for that. Right next to the story about the ambassadorships to the back of beyond was one about a colt rescued from a drainage ditch. That one might have made Vince Scriabin smile. It sure would have made him happier than being named ambassador to Outer Mongolia did.
“Thanks,” Mike said when the counterman set the plate in front of him. He grabbed the syrup, and was about to use it when he remembered he’d asked for the potatoes. They got salt and pepper instead, along with the eggs. After breakfast and two cups of snarling coffee, he headed for the carpenter’s shop. He took the Morning Star with him, though he usually left it behind in the diner.
With John Dennison, he could gloat over the fall of the Pain Trust to his heart’s content. The more he gloated, the more contented his heart got, too. John was less delighted than he was. “The bastards’ll still be living off the fat of the land, right?” he said. “Only difference’ll be, from now on it’s the fat of somebody else’s land.”
“So what would you do with ’em, then?” Mike asked.
“Send ’em to an encampment, that’s what,” Dennison said with no hesitation at all. “Let’s see ’em live on the thin for a change. They deserve it! Bread made out of sawdust and rye? Stew from potato peels and old cabbage and turnip greens and maybe a little dead goat every once in a while if you’re lucky? A number on ’em front and back? Chopping wood when it’s twenty below? How many times did they give it to other folks? Let ’em find out what it’s like and see how they enjoy it.”
“Only one thing wrong with that,” Mike said.
“Like what?” Plainly, John didn’t think it was wrong at all.
“As soon as the wreckers realize who they are, how long will they last?” Mike said. “Not long enough to get skinny, that’s for sure.”
“Oh.” Dennison paused. Then, reluctantly, he nodded. But he also said, “You gonna tell me they don’t deserve to get ripped to pieces? Go ahead, scalp! Make me believe it.”
“I don’t want anybody grabbing hold of them when I’m not there to help,” Mike said. “I’d dig up Joe Steele if I was back East and tear him to bits along with his flunkies.”
“He didn’t have me shot,” Mike said. “He figured the Japs would take care of it for him, but they fell down on the job.”
Midori understood American politics in Japanese terms. After Mike got home, still full of the news, she said, “The new Prime Minister always shakes up the cabinet. Sometimes it matters. Most of the time?” She shook her head.
“Yeah, that makes sense.” Mike wanted to keep talking about it. Seeing bad things happen to Scriabin, Mikoian, and Kagan pleased him almost as much as learning Joe Steele was dead had done. But Midori hardly seemed interested. Because Mike was so excited about what he’d read in the Morning Star, he needed longer to notice than he might have. After a while, though, he asked, “Are you okay, honey?”
“I am very okay.” Even after she’d come to the States and started using it all the time, her English had a few holes in it. Or so Mike thought, till she went on, “Dr. Weinbaum says yes, I am going to have a baby.”
Mike’s jaw dropped. He could feel it drop, something he never remembered before. “Oh, my God!” he whispered. He hadn’t really thought that would happen. She’d turned forty the summer before. You never could tell, though. He forgot all about Vince Scriabin, Lazar Kagan, Stas Mikoian, and even—miracle of miracles!—Joe Steele himself. “That’s wonderful!” He hugged her. He kissed her. He said, “If it’s a little girl, I hope she looks just like you!”
She smiled a bit crookedly. “So you would want another Sullivan with black hair and slanted eyes?” She was joking, and then again she wasn’t. There were no more than a handful of Orientals in Casper. Most of the others were Chinese who wanted nothing to do with her. Though the war’d been over for years, whites could still be rude, sometimes without even meaning to.
“You’re darn tootin’, I do!” Mike meant that. He could bring it out quickly, and he did.
“I am glad that you are glad.” She sounded relieved. If she’d wondered . . . Try as they would, how well could two people truly know each other in the end? How well could one person know himself? Or even herself?
“A baby!” Part of him, part of her, would go down through the years after all. That baby would be years younger than he was now when the odometer turned over and the twenty-first century started. And that baby, lucky kid, would know about Joe Steele only through history books.
XXVIII
For a little while, things went on without Joe Steele very much as they had while he was President. His widow moved back to Fresno. No one had paid much attention to Betty Steele while she was the First Lady. No one paid any attention to her once she went into retirement.
At the White House, John Nance Garner made a less demanding boss than the man he succeeded. Charlie had trouble conceiving of a more demanding boss than Joe Steele. The new President carried out the policies he found in place when he took over. He was in his mid-eighties. How many changes could he try to make, even if he wanted to?
Kagan went to Paraguay. Mikoian went to Afghanistan. “I’m sure I’ll get as many thanks there as I ever did in Washington,” he quipped to reporters before boarding the airliner that would start him on his long, long journey.
Scriabin didn’t go to Outer Mongolia, at least not right away. Like someone waking from a drugged, heavy sleep, Congress needed a while to realize Joe Steele’s heavy hand no longer held it down. Members didn’t automatically have to do whatever the President said or else lose the next election or face one of those late-night knocks on the door. John Nance Garner didn’t carry that kind of big stick.
And the Hammer still had clout of his own in the Senate. It was a pale shadow of Joe Steele’s clout, but it was enough to keep him out of Ulan Bator. It wasn’t friendship. Except perhaps for Joe Steele, Scriabin had never had any friends Charlie knew of. Charlie didn’t know what it was. Blackmail didn’t seem the worst of guesses.
John Nance Garner had accepted the resignations of all his Cabinet members except the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War. Dean Acheson was a reasonably able diplomat, while George Marshall had kept himself respectable despite serving Joe Steele for many years.
Acheson was due to speak at an international conference on the Middle East in San Francisco. The DC-6 he was riding in crashed as it went into its landing approach. Forty-seven people died. He was one of them. It was tragic. Despite all the progress in aviation over the past twenty years, things like that happened more often than they should.
Charlie didn’t think it was anything more—or less—than tragic till a week later, when Marshall got up to make an after-the-dinner speech during a cannon-manufacturers’ convention. He strode to the lectern with his usual stern, erect military bearing. All the newspaper reports that came out of the convention said he stood there for a moment, looking surprised. Then he turned blue—“as blue as the carpeting in the dining room,” one reporter wrote—and keeled over.
Several doctors were in the audience. One gave him artificial respiration while another injected him with adrenaline. Nothing helped. Both medicos who tried to save him said they thought he was dead before he hit the floor.
But Charlie found out most of that later. The morning after it happened, John Nance Garner summoned him to the oval study Joe Steele had used for so long. The old President’s desk was still there. So was the pipe-tobacco smell that everyone who knew Joe Steele associated with him.
“Some no-good, low-down, goddamn son of a bitch is gunning for me, Sullivan,” Garner growled when Charlie came in.
“Sir?” Charlie said. He wanted another cup of coffee.
“Gunning for me,” Garner repeated, as if to an idiot. “I’m President. Ain’t no Vice President. Presidential Succession Act of 1886 says, if the President dies when there’s no Vice President, Secretary of State takes over, then the other Cabinet fellas. Ain’t no Cabinet now, either. Senate ain’t confirmed anybody. If I drop dead this afternoon, who runs the show? God only knows, ’cause the law sure don’t. In the Succession Act of 1792, it was the President pro tem of the Senate and then the Speaker of the House, but the 1886 rules threw that out. So like I say, God knows.”
Two vital Cabinet deaths inside a week swept Charlie’s thoughts back more than twenty years. “I bet Scriabin set it up,” he blurted.
“Oh, yeah?” Garner leaned forward. “Sonny, you better tell me why you think so.” So Charlie did, starting with what he’d heard before the Executive Mansion fire cooked Roosevelt’s goose, and Roosevelt with it, in 1932. When he finished, the President asked him, “How come you never said anything about this before?”
“Because I could never prove it. Hell, I still can’t. And when my brother did kick up a stink, what happened to him? He wound up in an encampment, and then in a punishment brigade. But when two more die like that—”
“—and when Joe Steele ain’t around any more,” Garner broke in.
Charlie nodded. “That, too. I figured you’d better know.”
“Well, I thank you for it,” John Nance Garner said. “I expect Vince Scriabin ain’t the only one who can arrange for people to have a little accident.”
“That’s good, Mr. President,” Charlie said. “But if we’re gonna start playing the game by banana-republic rules, there’s something else you’d better think about.”
“What’s that?”
“All your guards here belong to the GBI. How far do you trust J. Edgar Hoover?”
Garner’s eyes narrowed as he considered the question. “You and me, we go back to the days when they’d’ve strung up anybody who even talked about them labor encampments, never mind set ’em up. Himmler killed himself when the limeys caught him. How long you reckon Yagoda’ll last once they finally stuff Trotsky and stick him next to Lenin in Red Square?”
“Twen
ty minutes,” Charlie said. “Half an hour, tops.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too—unless he’s quicker on the trigger than all the bastards gunning for him.” Garner scowled. “But what am I supposed to do about J. Edgar? Who do I get to watch this place except for the Jeebies?”
“Soldiers?” Charlie suggested. “You think the Army can’t add two and two? They’ll have a pretty good notion of what happened to Marshall, and why.”
“Maybe.” But John Nance Garner didn’t sound happy about it. “That would really take us down to South America, wouldn’t it?”
“Which would you rather have, sir? The Army protecting the President or a putsch from the head of the secret police?”
The telephone on the desk that had been Joe Steele’s for so long rang. Garner picked it up. “Yeah?” he barked, and then, “What?” His face darkened with rage. “All right, goddammit, you’ve let me know. I’ll deal with it. How? Shit, I don’t know how. I’ll work something out. Jesus God!” He slammed the handset back into place.
“What was that, sir? Do I want to know?” Charlie asked.
“Those fucking pissants in the House.” Garner had been one of that number for many years, but he didn’t care now. And he had good reason not to: “They’ve introduced a motion to impeach me, the stinking dingleberries! Says I’m ‘complicit in the many high crimes and misdemeanors of the Joe Steele administration.’” He quoted the lawyerese with sour relish, even pride. “I bet Scriabin put ’em up to it, the cocksuckers.”
Charlie knew perfectly well that Joe Steele’s administration had committed high crimes and misdemeanors past counting. He also knew perfectly well that John Nance Garner wasn’t complicit in any of them. Joe Steele hadn’t let him get close enough for complicity. But the House and Senate wouldn’t care. They couldn’t put a bell on Joe Steele; he’d been too strong, and now he was too dead. Garner, both weaker and still breathing, made an easier target.
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