Something else occurred to Charlie. “If they throw you out of office, who comes in to take over for you?”
“Beats me.” Now Garner sounded almost cheerful. “The law we’ve got now doesn’t say, not in the spot we’re in here. Constitution says Congress can make a law picking who comes after the President and Vice President, but a law is something the President signs. How can you have a new law if you ain’t got no President?”
“I have no idea, sir.” Charlie’s head started to ache.
* * *
Mike turned on the television. He’d bought it secondhand. The screen was small and the picture none too good, but some inspired haggling had brought the guy who was getting rid of it down to forty bucks. Now he could watch Lucille Ball and Sid Caesar and baseball games with everybody else—or so it seemed.
And he could watch the news. Washington kept boiling like a kettle of crabs. Nobody seemed to remember how to play politics the old-fashioned way, the way people had done things before Joe Steele was President. The new game, when seen from close to two thousand miles away, seemed a lot bloodier. They were playing for keeps—for keeps all kinds of ways.
As it went in the United States, so it also went in the wider world. The East Germans rioted against their Russian overlords. Trotsky preached world revolution, but not revolution against him. The news showed smuggled film of Red Army tanks blasting buildings and machine-gunning people in the streets of East Berlin.
“President Garner has issued an executive order eliminating the restricted zone for people released from labor encampments,” the handsome man reading the stories announced. “GBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly deplored the move, stating that it endangers the nation’s safety. And leaders of the impeachment drive in the House say the order will have no effect on their insistence that Garner be removed. More after this important message.”
Music swelled as the commercial started. Over it, Midori said, “I understand that right? He says wreckers can now live anywhere in the country?”
“That’s what he said.” Mike thought about going back to New York City. Hell, he didn’t even know if the Post was still in business. He’d been away more than fifteen years. Picking up the city’s frantic pace after so long wouldn’t be easy.
“You want to go somewhere else?” she asked.
“I was just thinking about that. I don’t know,” Mike said. Midori might like the Big Apple. If any place in America could remind her of her crowded homeland, New York City would be it. “How do you feel about it?”
“Where you go, I will go,” she said. She wasn’t a Christian; she’d never heard of Whither thou goest, I will go. If you had that thought, though, the words would follow directly.
Before Mike could reply, the newsman came back. Next to him was a photo of a familiar face. “Vincent Scriabin, Joe Steele’s longtime chief assistant, died last night at the age of sixty-three. He was struck and killed by an automobile while crossing the street after eating dinner at an Italian restaurant in Washington. Because Scriabin was not in a crosswalk, the driver, who police said showed no signs of intoxication, was not held.”
“Oh, my,” Mike said softly as the fellow went on to the next story.
“Nan desu-ka?” Midori asked.
How could you explain the Hammer to somebody who hadn’t been here while Joe Steele was President? Charlie might have been able to. Why not? Charlie’d worked side by side with him for years. Mike reminded himself he needed to let his brother know Midori would be having a baby. He’d had that thought before, had it without doing anything about it.
How accidental was Scriabin’s death? As accidental as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s? Probably just about. Scriabin hadn’t gone off into exile without any trouble, the way Kagan and Mikoian had. He’d stayed in Washington and kicked up a fuss. John Dennison guessed he was behind the House’s stab at impeaching Garner. It wouldn’t have surprised Mike. Like the man he’d served for all those years, the Hammer went in for revenge.
Mike realized he hadn’t answered his wife’s question. “He was one of Joe Steele’s ministers,” he said, which put it in terms she’d get. “The new President didn’t want to keep him. He didn’t like that. Now he’s dead. He walked in front of a car—or the guy in the car was hunting him.”
Midori’s eyes widened. “I did not think American politics go that way?”
“They didn’t used to,” Mike said. “Now? Who knows now? Everything is all different from the way it used to be.” He’d been away from politics since early in Joe Steele’s second term. In political terms, that was a lifetime, if not two.
“People would kill politicians on the other side all the time in Japan,” Midori said. “It made politics too dangerous for most people to try. The ones who did always had bodyguards with them.”
“It may wind up like that here, too,” Mike said. “English has a word for killing people in politics. When you do that, you assassinate somebody.”
“Assassinate,” Midori echoed. “I will remember. Assassinate. If English has this word, it needs it, neh?”
“Hai,” he said. Neh? meant something like Isn’t that right? Japanese used it all the time. He wished English had such a short, handy word for the same phrase. It would have been useful.
As far as Mike knew, Charlie was still at the White House, working for John Nance Garner. The new President hadn’t canned him, the way he’d canned Joe Steele’s California cronies. To Mike, that said something good about his brother, anyhow. Working for Joe Steele hadn’t made all of Charlie’s soul dry up, turn to dust, and blow away. Hard to believe, but it could be true.
“You say—you have said—you lived in New York City.” Whither thou goest or not, Midori came back to it. “You do not want to go back to New York City, now that law says you may?”
“No, I don’t think so, not unless Casper drives you crazy,” he said.
She shrugged. “It is a strange place, but to me any place in America is strange. It starts to seem not so strange. If you want to stay here, we can stay here.”
“We’ll do that, then,” Mike said. Fighting for work against guys half his age didn’t appeal to him. Joe Louis had stayed in the ring too long, and got badly beaten up several times on account of it. And, after being away from New York City for so long, going back might make his head explode. He nodded. “Yeah, we’ll do that.” He got up, went into the kitchen, pulled two bottles of beer from the icebox, opened them with the blunt end of the church key, and brought them back to the TV.
* * *
John Nance Garner sounded disgusted. “You know what the trouble is?”
Sure I do, Charlie thought. The House is gonna impeach you, and then the Senate is gonna convict you and throw you out on your ass. After that, you can spend all your time at the tavern around the corner again. But that wasn’t what Garner needed to hear. “What is it, Mr. President?” Charlie said dutifully. “Is it anything you can fix?”
“I only wish I could,” the President said. “But I don’t hardly know anybody in the House any more. That’s what’s wrong. None of the boys I was in there with is still around, or damn few, anyways. Some lost. Some got old and died. Some went into the encampments. And some of the ones who’re still there, them bastards never did cotton to me.”
“Hoover could clean them out,” Charlie remarked. Had Joe Steele ever found himself in this predicament, the Jeebies would have cleaned out the House. But Joe Steele had intimidated Congress too much for it to rise against him. The new President didn’t.
“Nah.” John Nance Garner shook his head. “I ain’t gonna do that. If I did that, Hoover’d be running the show, not me. Fuck him, Sullivan. I may go down, but by Jesus I’ll go down swinging.”
“Okay.” Charlie was more glad than angry. He thought a deal with J. Edgar Hoover was a deal with the Devil, too. But he and Garner had made deals like that before. The one who hadn’
t made a deal was Mike. And how did virtue get rewarded? He’d gone through years of hell in the encampments, years of worse hell in the Army, and now he was living in Casper goddamn Wyoming married to a Jap. All things considered, the wages of sin seemed better. Charlie asked, “Can you give them anything to get them off your back?”
“Christ, I already gave ’em Mikoian and Kagan and Scriabin. Wasn’t enough. They say, ‘You’re as bad as they were. You gotta go, too.’”
“Shame about Scriabin,” Charlie remarked.
“Ain’t it?” Garner chuckled, coughed, hawked phlegm, and chuckled again. “I wonder if anybody came to his funeral.”
“Don’t know. I wasn’t there.” Charlie thought he would have gone had Mikoian died before heading for Kabul. He might have gone for Lazar Kagan. But Scriabin? It would have been too much like attending the memorial service for somebody’s pet rattlesnake.
“But I mean, how’re they gonna impeach me and convict me? How can they do that?” Garner dragged his mind away from pleasure and back to the business at hand. “If they do, they shoot the whole executive branch right behind the ear. I’m all there is of it, for Chrissake. They can’t make laws by their lonesome, not if there’s nobody to approve ’em. Not even the chickenshit Supreme Court Joe Steele left us’d let ’em get away with that.”
“Mr. President, every single word you just said is true.” Having told John Nance Garner what he wanted to hear, Charlie also told him once more what he needed to hear: “But you know what else? I don’t think Congress gives a damn. They’ve got the atom bomb, and they’re gonna drop it.”
“I only wish I could tell you you were full of crap. That’s how it looks to me, too, though,” Garner said gloomily. “What happens if they throw me out and twenty minutes later, Trotsky, he starts somethin’ in South Japan or West Germany? Who’s gonna give our soldiers orders then? If somebody does, why should the soldiers do what he says?”
“I have no idea.” Charlie figured Trotsky had to be laughing in his beer, or more likely his vodka. He’d outlived his American rival, and now the USA was in a hell of a mess. The only thing that might hold him back was the fear of reuniting America—against him. That was a thin, weak reed to lean on.
“Me, neither.” John Nance Garner reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He didn’t bother with ice, or even a glass. He just swigged. Then he slid the bottle across the stone desktop to Charlie. Charlie had a belt, too. He needed one. Garner went on, “But I don’t know what I can do to make ’em see it. I don’t know what I can do to make ’em show any common sense. They look at me, and all they see is, they’re givin’ Joe Steele one in the eye. Biting the hand that fed ’em, half the time. Hell, more’n half.”
“Joe Steele’s dead,” Charlie said roughly.
“I thought so, too, when we planted him,” Garner said. “But right after Antony talks about burying Caesar, not praising him, he goes, ‘The evil that men do lives after them,/ The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Boy, did old Will hit that nail square on the head. We’ll still be untangling ourselves from Joe Steele when your kids get as old as I am now.”
That had the unpleasant ring of truth. “Do we need a Constitutional crisis straight off the bat, though?” Charlie asked.
“Need one? Shit, no, sonny. It’s the last goddamn thing we need. But we’ve sure got one.” Garner stood up, leaned across the desk, and retrieved the whiskey bottle. He took another stiff knock. “This here, this is what I need.”
Drunk and sober, he politicked as long and as hard as he could against the impeachment charges. Charlie wrote speech after speech, trying to sway public opinion against the proceedings in the House. None of that did any good. Charlie hadn’t really expected it would.
The House Interior Committee reported out three articles of impeachment, passing them by votes of 37-1, 33-5, and 31-7. The whole House passed them by almost equally lopsided margins. For the first time in eighty-five years, a President was impeached. The case went to the Senate for trial.
Chief Justice Prescott Bush presided with the look of a man who acutely wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else. An Associate Justice who was a real lawyer sat at Bush’s elbow to guide him through whatever legal thickets might crop up. The President’s attorneys tried to make the thickets as impenetrable as they could. The Chief Justice ruled in their favor whenever he could without making himself look completely ridiculous.
It didn’t matter. The three Congressmen who managed the push for conviction dealt with legal thickets by driving over them with a Pershing tank and crushing them flat. Joe Steele had committed all kinds of impeachable offenses. Everybody knew it. Nobody’d done, nobody’d been able to do, a thing about it while he was alive to commit them. Now that he was dead, John Nance Garner made a handy scapegoat.
When the Senate voted on whether to convict, the tallies on the three articles were 84-12, 81-15, and 73-23, all well over the two-thirds required. Watching from the visitors’ gallery, Charlie saw Prescott Bush lick his lips before stating the obvious: “President Garner has been convicted of the three articles for which he was impeached. Accordingly, he is removed from office and disqualified from holding and enjoying any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States. He remains liable to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law.” He banged his gavel. “These proceedings are concluded.”
“Who runs things now?” someone yelled from the gallery. Two cops grabbed him and hustled him away. Nobody answered the question.
Charlie got back to the White House just in time to hear a young reporter ask John Nance Garner, “What do you think of your conviction and removal, sir?”
“Fuck ’em all,” Garner said.
The kid turned red. Whatever he put in his story, that wouldn’t be it. Gamely, he tried again: “What will you do now?”
“Go on home to Uvalde and eat worms,” Garner answered. “You reckon the country was goin’ to hell with me, just watch how it goes to hell without me.” And that was the end of the press conference.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Charlie told him.
“Me, too, Sullivan.” John Nance Garner shrugged. “What can you do, though? Let’s see how those damn fools run this damn country, that’s all. Like I told that little punk, fuck ’em all. If it wasn’t for the assholes who done this to me, I’d be glad for the excuse to leave.”
“Good luck,” Charlie said. They shook hands. Charlie hoped nobody would throw Garner in jail for however much time he had left. He’d been in Joe Steele’s administration, but not of it. The policies weren’t his fault. Of course, he also hadn’t done anything to stop them.
Well, neither did I, Charlie thought uncomfortably. If they were still on the prowl after scapegoats, he was around.
After finishing his good-byes with John Nance Garner, he went home. “What are you doing here at this time of day?” Esther asked in surprise.
“Honey, I’m a presidential speechwriter in a country without a President,” he said. “What’s the point to sticking around?”
“Will they pay you if you don’t show up?” Yes, she was the practical one.
“I dunno. To tell you the truth, I didn’t worry about it. As long as they don’t arrest me, I figure I’m ahead of the game.”
“Arrest you? They can’t do that!” Esther made a face. “Or I guess they can if they want to. That’s what you get for working for that man for so long.”
Charlie sighed. “Yeah, I guess that is what I get. What I’m liable to get, anyhow. But we both know I would have got it a lot sooner if I hadn’t gone to work for him.”
“It isn’t fair,” Esther said. “What can you do when all your choices are rotten?”
“The best you can. That’s all you can ever do.” After a moment, Charlie continued, “My senior year with the nuns, we did some Tacitus. You know—the Roman historian. God, t
hat was tough Latin! But I remember he talked about how good men could serve bad Emperors. That crossed my mind a few times while I worked for Joe Steele. I tried to be a good man. I’m sure I wasn’t always, but I tried.”
Esther put her arms around him. “I think you’re a good man,” she said. “In spite of everything.” That she added the last four words explained why they worried someone might come after him.
More out of curiosity than for any other reason, he went to the White House the next morning. There was no THIS SPACE FOR RENT sign on the front gate. He supposed that was something, at any rate. He had no trouble getting in; it wasn’t as if the guards didn’t know who he was. But once he was in, he had nothing to do. He sat in his office and listened to the radio.
When it was getting on toward lunchtime, he casually walked down the corridors—the corridors of power, he thought, only not right now. The offices that had belonged to Scriabin and Kagan and Mikoian were all closed and locked. Like Joe Steele, Scriabin was beyond judgment now. Charlie wondered whether the other two would ever come back to the United States.
He went home early, but not so early as he had the day before. After dinner, he turned on the television. It was a good evening for letting the box entertain him. You could watch it and not think about anything else. Not thinking seemed wonderful right now.
At half past eight, though, they cut away in the middle of a commercial. An urgent-voiced announcer said, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you this special announcement from Washington, D.C.”
“What now?” Esther exclaimed.
“Don’t know,” Charlie said. “We’ll find out, though.”
And they did. In a studio presumably in Washington, a man sitting in front of an American flag stared at the camera. He was middle-aged and beefy, with beetling eyebrows and a big, strong jaw. Recognizing him, Charlie felt his heart sink down to his toes.
Joe Steele Page 49
