Joe Steele

X

Even a President who wasn’t the most forthcoming did have to come forth now and again. Modern politics demanded it. If you stayed in Washington all the time, people would forget about you. Or, if they remembered, they would think you were hiding out there for a reason. Radio and newsreels helped some, but they couldn’t do it all. Real people had to see a real President, or else he might stop seeming real.

And so Joe Steele took a train from Washington to Chattanooga to celebrate the completion of one of the dams that would ease flooding in the Tennessee River Valley and bring electricity to millions who lived nearby. Charlie was one of the reporters who got invited to travel with him. The President. . noticed Charlie these days. As with the fellow who found himself tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, if not for the honor of the thing, Charlie would rather have walked.

He played poker and bridge with the other reporters on board-and with Mikoian and Scriabin. Mikoian played better bridge than poker. Vince Scriabin was a shark at both games: his expressionless face was good for all kinds of things. “The government doesn’t pay you enough?” Charlie groused after the Hammer squeezed out a small slam in diamonds.

“When it comes to money or power, is there ever such a thing as enough?” Scriabin replied. Not having a good answer for that one, Charlie kept his mouth shut.

Along with cards, Gone With the Wind killed time. Charlie had resisted since the novel came out the summer before, even though Esther went crazy for it along with the rest of the country. But a train ride, and especially one down into the South, left him with no more excuses. Nothing like a good, fat book to make you forget you were rattling down the rails. Unlike a deck of cards, a book wouldn’t even cost you money after you bought it.

And he did keep turning pages. He would have kept turning them had he been sitting in the overstuffed front-room rocking chair in his apartment. He could see why everybody had swallowed the book whole.

Well, almost everybody. He ate supper in the dining car sitting across the table from Stas Mikoian. He had Swiss steak, which could have been worse but also could have been better. As one of the colored stewards carried his plate away on a tray, he remarked, “I wonder what he thinks of Gone With the Wind.”

“I saw you were reading it,” Mikoian said. “I went through it at the end of last year, when I could come up for air after the election. She can write-no two ways about that.”

“She sure can. But what do you suppose Negroes think about it?”

Mikoian answered the question with another one: “What would you think, if you were a Negro?”

Charlie contemplated that. “I think I might want to punch Margaret Mitchell right in the snoot-only they’d string me up if I did.”

“Yes, they would,” Mikoian agreed. . sadly? “Segregation in Washington was an eye-opener for me when I came from California. For you, too, I’m sure, since you’re from New York City.”

“It’s strange, all right,” Charlie said. “After the Civil War, the South figured out that it had to let Negroes be free, but it didn’t have to let them be equal. And that’s where we’ve been ever since.”

“We are, yes,” Mikoian said. “Whether we still should be after all this time-that’s a different story.”

“Are you speaking for Joe Steele?” Charlie asked, pricking up his ears. He hadn’t been able to think of anything that would cost the President much of his enormous political clout. Trying to get equal rights for Negroes in the Deep South might turn the trick, though.

“No, just for Anastas Mikoian.” Joe Steele’s aide quickly shook his head. “I’m an Armenian, remember. In Armenia, my people were niggers to the Turks. It was wrong there, and it’s wrong here, too. Armenians, Negroes, Jews-it shouldn’t matter. We’re all human beings. We all deserve to be treated that way.”

“Won’t get any arguments from me,” Charlie said.

“That’s what draws people to the Reds, you know,” Mikoian went on. “If they really followed through on ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,’ they’d have something going for them. But they don’t, any more than the Nazis do. That’s one of the reasons Joe Steele hates Lenin and Trotsky so much. They just found themselves a new excuse to be tyrants. Instead of doing it in the name of one people like Hitler, they say they do it for all humanity-”

“-and they end up doing it to all humanity,” Charlie finished for him.

Mikoian flashed a smile. “That’s right. They do.”

“What about the people who say Joe Steele is doing the same thing to the USA that Lenin and Trotsky have done to Russia?” Charlie asked.

“They’re full of shit, that’s what,” Stas Mikoian said. Charlie must have blinked, because the Armenian let out a sour chuckle. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t I plain enough for you?”

“Oh, you might have been.” Other questions jumped up and down on the end of Charlie’s tongue as if it were a springboard: questions about Franklin Roosevelt, about Huey Long, about the Supreme Court, about Father Coughlin. They jumped up and down, yes, but they didn’t dive off. The swimming pool under that springboard had no water in it, not a drop. You’d smash into the concrete bottom, and you would break, and it wouldn’t.

* * *

With about 120,000 people in it, Chattanooga struck Charlie as a hick town. Then again, Washington also struck him as a hick town. When you grew up in New York City, the only other place in the world that might not strike you as a hick town was London. That most of the people in Chattanooga talked like Southerners-which they were-did nothing to make them seem less hickish.

Joe Steele stayed at the Road House Hotel, a couple of blocks from Union Station. (Charlie did wonder whether, had the South won the Civil War, it would have been called Confederate Station.) The hotel dated from the boom of the mid-1920s. The lobby was paneled in walnut, to show how ritzy it was. The building was twelve stories high, which made it one of the tallest in Chattanooga. Definitely a hick town.

The restaurant was decent, and surprisingly cheap. Charlie ordered sturgeon, which he’d never had before. “Straight outa the Tennessee River, suh,” the waiter said. “Mighty good, too.” It tasted fishy, but not quite like any other fish he’d eaten before. He didn’t think he would have called it mighty good, but it wasn’t bad.

A motorcade took the President and his aides and the reporters who covered his doings to the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium, where he would speak. The motorcade didn’t take long to get where it was going: the auditorium lay only about four blocks northeast of the hotel. Still, some people stood on the sidewalk to watch the President roll by. It was a mild spring day, nothing like the dreadful one on which Joe Steele’s second term started.

Here and there, a man or a woman or, most often, a child would wave an American flag. Most of the thin crowd seemed friendly, though one man shouted, “Who killed Huey Long?” as the President’s car went by. Charlie watched a cop run up and give the man a shove. The car he was in kept him from seeing what, if anything, else happened to the heckler.

The auditorium took up a whole city block. It wasn’t Madison Square Garden, but it wasn’t small, either-the main hall had to hold more than five thousand people. It was filling up fast, too. The President didn’t come to Chattanooga every day. Charlie wondered if a President came to Chattanooga every decade.

With the other reporters, he had a seat on the stage. They were off to the side and dimly lit, so the crowd would look at the man behind the lectern and not at them. Charlie noticed a low, broad wooden stool in back of the lectern. The crowd wouldn’t see that, but Joe Steele would seem taller than he really was. He chuckled quietly. Reporters noticed such things, but they didn’t write about them. Politicians got to keep some illusions.

Reporters also had the sport of watching the people who watched the President. The Washington Times-Herald’s Presidential correspondent nudged Charlie and whispered, “Check the soldier in the first row. He’s so excited, he’s about to wet his pants.”

He was, too. He was a young officer-a captain, Charlie thought, seeing the overhead lights flash silver from the bars on his shoulders. He wiggled like a man with ants in his pants. His eyes were open as wide as if he’d gulped eighteen cups of coffee. Even from a good distance away, Charlie could make out white all around his irises.

“And Joe Steele’s not even out there yet,” Charlie whispered back. “I wonder if he’s an epileptic or something, and getting ready to throw a fit.”

“That’d liven up the day, wouldn’t it?” the Times-Herald man said.

“Be nice if something could,” Charlie said. He’d been to too many speeches.

Out came the mayor of Chattanooga, to welcome the audience and the President. Out came the engineer who’d been in charge of the local dam, to tell everyone how wonderful it was. Unfortunately, he talked like an engineer-he was so dull, he might have exhaled ether. People applauded in relief when he stopped.

And out came Congressman Sam McReynolds, who’d represented Chattanooga and the Third District of Tennessee for years. He wasn’t-Charlie had checked-related to the late Justice James McReynolds; that worthy had come from Kentucky. Only a sadist would have made the brother or cousin of a man he’d executed introduce him to a crowd.

Introduce Joe Steele Congressman McReynolds did. “He pays attention to Tennessee!” McReynolds said, as if announcing miracles. “He pays attention to the little people, the forgotten people, of Tennessee. And here he is-the President of the United States, Joe Steele!”

By the oomph he put into it, he might have been bringing out Bing Crosby or some other popular crooner. And the crowd responded almost as if he were. That Army captain bruised his palms banging them together. No smooth, handsome, debonair crooner came to the lectern, though. It was just Joe Steele, hawk-faced, fierce-mustached, wearing a black suit that might have come straight off the rack at Sear’s.

He looked out over the audience from behind the lectern. Charlie could see the sheets with the text of his speech, though the people in front of the stage couldn’t. Joe Steele raised a hand. The applause died away.

“Thank you,” the President said. “Thank you very much. It is good to remember that the people care about me, no matter what the newspapers claim.” He won a few chuckles. That dry, barbed wit was the only kind he owned. “And it’s good to come to Chattanooga, because-”

“I’ll show you what the people think about you, you murdering son of a bitch!” the Army captain screeched. He sprang to his feet, pulled the service pistol from the holster on his hip, and started shooting.

Charlie thought the.45 barked twice before Secret Service men returned fire. He was sure the captain got off at least one more shot after he was hit. Red stains appeared on the front of his tunic. He fell over backward and fired one last time, straight up at the ceiling.

Several people near him in the crowd were shrieking and bleeding, too. Charlie had no idea how many Secret Service men tried to kill the would-be assassin, or how many rounds they fired doing it. One thing was all too obvious: not all those rounds struck the man they were aimed at. A bullet from an excited, hasty gunman was liable to go anywhere.

Joe Steele slumped down to one knee behind the lectern. “Jesus Christ!” the Times-Herald man said. “If that bastard killed him, John Nance Garner’s President, and God help us all!”

Charlie hardly heard him. The gunfire’d left him paralyzed. He hadn’t even had the sense to flatten out on the stage when the shooting started to make himself a smaller target-he didn’t have combat reflexes drilled into him from the Great War, since he’d got to France after the shooting ended. He’d just sat there gaping like everybody else. Now he made himself get up and run over to Joe Steele.

The President had both hands pressed to the left side of his chest. Between his fingers, Charlie saw blood on his white shirt. After a moment, he smelled it, too, hot and metallic. “Mr. President! Are you all right?” he bleated-the usual idiot question.

To his surprise, Joe Steele nodded. “Yes, or I think so. It grazed me and glanced off a rib. That may be broken, but unless I am very, very wrong it did not go in.”

“Well, thank heaven!” Charlie said. “Let me see it, please?” Scowling, Joe Steele took his hands away. Sure enough, his shirt had a long tear, not a round hole. Charlie unbuttoned a couple of buttons and tugged aside the President’s undershirt. There was a bleeding gash below and to the left of Joe Steele’s left nipple, but his furry chest wasn’t punctured.

“Did they get the asshole who shot me?” he asked-not a line that sounded Presidential, maybe, but one that was plainly heartfelt.

“Yes, sir. He’s got more holes than a colander,” Charlie said. “Some of the other people by him got hit, too.”

Joe Steele waved that back, as being of no account. “He’s dead? Too bad. Alive, he could have answered questions.” Charlie would not have wanted to answer questions of the kind that burned in the President’s eyes.

Somebody grabbed Charlie from behind and yanked him away. He landed on his tailbone on the waxed planks of the stage. It hurt like hell-he saw stars. But he bit down on the yip he wanted to let out. For one thing, the Secret Service guy who’d thrown him aside was only doing his job. For another, he was a long, long way from the worst hurt here.

“Is there a doctor in the audience?” the agent by Joe Steele yelled. Some medical men were there. Looking out, Charlie saw them doing what they could for the wounded close by the assassin. At the call, a tall man with a cowlick jumped up on the stage and hurried to the President’s side.

“Take a gander at this,” one Secret Service man said to another. “Look how the waddayacallit here has these chromed bars for reinforcement or decoration or whatever the hell.” He was pointing at the lectern. “And the bullet caught one of ’em and slewed, like. Otherwise, it might’ve hit the boss dead center.”

“That woulda been all she wrote, sure as hell. You don’t want to meet up with a.45, not square on you don’t,” his friend replied.

“Who was the guy who fired at the President?” Charlie asked.

They seemed to remember he was in the neighborhood. “No idea yet,” one of them said. “But we’ll find out, and we’ll find out who was behind him, too. Oh, yeah. You bet we will.”

* * *

The assassination attempt spawned screamer headlines around the country-around the world, in fact. It also spawned the biggest investigation since the Lindbergh kidnapping. J. Edgar Hoover growled out new little nuggets of fact-or of what he said was fact-to the press almost every day.

No one doubted that the gunman was Captain Roland Laurence South, of San Antonio. He was thirty-one years old, a West Point graduate who’d got his second bar just ten days before his fated, and fatal, encounter with Joe Steele. He’d done very well at the Military Academy. People said he was a general in the making, or he had been till politics started eating away at him.

Hoover was a busy beaver. He gnawed down tree after tree of rumor to bring in twig after twig of fact. The twigs led upward in the chain of command. Like a lot of men who seemed to have a bright future ahead of them, Roland South had made friends in high places. Plenty of men of rank much higher than captain had known him or known who he was.

By all accounts, Captain South hadn’t been shy about saying what he thought of Joe Steele. None of his friends in high places had reported him for expressing opinions like that.

“It makes you worry,” J. Edgar Hoover said. “It truly does. They claim they didn’t report him because talk was cheap and they couldn’t imagine he would take out a gun and try to murder the President. But you have to wonder-did they keep quiet because they agreed with him?”

Joe Steele took to the airwaves to say, “People of America, I want you to hear with your own ears that I am alive and doing well. X-rays show that one bullet Captain South fired cracked a rib. I believe that. It hurts like anything when I cough. But the doctors say I will make a full recovery in about six weeks. Captain Roland Laurence South was just one more wrecker who tried to put a roadblock on America’s path to progress.”

“That’s twice in a minute he called him Captain South,” Esther said as she and Charlie listened to the President in their apartment. “He wants people to remember South was in the Army.”

“Uh-huh.” Charlie nodded. “And he and his men have talked about wreckers before, but he kind of bore down on it there.”

Meanwhile, Joe Steele was continuing, “We have already seen too many wreckers in high places. Wreckers corrupted the workings of the Supreme Court till we set it right. Although Senator Long was murdered before he could be tried, all the evidence points to his being a wrecker, too. Father Charles Coughlin wrecked the teachings of his church to try to tear down the American way of life. And this attempt on my life shows that wreckers may also have infiltrated the highest ranks of our military. The force that should defend our beloved country may want to turn against it.”

“Oh-oh,” Esther said.

“Oh-oh is right,” Charlie agreed. “Sounds like the gloves are coming off.”

So they were. “We must get to the bottom of this,” the President said. “We must be able to rely on our courts, our legislators, and our soldiers to do their duties the way they should. I have appointed Mr. J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice Department to head a new Government Bureau of Investigation-the GBI, for short-to investigate wrecking and to root it out wherever he finds it.”

“Wow,” Charlie said.

His wife put it somewhat differently: “Yikes!”

“Not all wrecking is in high places, either. We all know that,” Joe Steele went on. “The businessman who gouges customers, the farmer who waters his milk before he sells it, the newsman who spreads anti-American lies, the auto builders whose machines start falling to pieces a week after they come off the showroom floor? They’re all wreckers, aren’t they? Of course they are. And the GBI will have the authority to go after them all.”

“Yikes!” Esther said again. “Hitler has Himmler, Trotsky has Yagoda, and now Joe Steele’s got J. Edgar Hoover.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad. I hope it’s not.” But Charlie’s mind was a jackdaw’s nest. What sprang out of it was the last line of an Edgar Allan Poe story: And the Red Death held illimitable sway over all.

As usual, his wife was more pragmatic: “He talked about reporters, Charlie. He singled them out. If you write a story he doesn’t like, will somebody from this brand-new super deluxe GBI grab you and give you a shovel and put you to work digging a canal across Wyoming?”

“I. . hope not,” Charlie said slowly. He gnawed on the inside of his lower lip for a few seconds. “All the same, I think I’d better pay a call on the White House tomorrow morning and find out what’s going on.”

“Good. I was going to tell you I thought you should,” Esther said. “I’m glad you’ve got the sense to see it for yourself.”

“Yes, dear,” Charlie said, which was never the wrong answer from a husband.

* * *

When Charlie went to the White House, he asked to see Scriabin. He thought he might as well hear the worst, and the Hammer would give him that with both barrels. But he got shunted to Lazar Kagan. The receptionist said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Sullivan, but Mr. Scriabin is otherwise engaged for the time being.”

Which was more polite than Go peddle your papers, but no more helpful. Kagan was a little more helpful than Go peddle your papers, but not a whole lot. Scratching his double chin, he said, “The way it looks to me is, you personally haven’t got a thing to worry about, Charlie.”

Charlie wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad news. “I’m not here just on account of myself. There’s a swarm of people in my racket. And, last time I looked, nobody’s repealed the First Amendment.”

“Nobody’s even talking about repealing it, for heaven’s sake.” Kagan spread his fleshy hands, appealing for reason. Then he wagged a finger under Charlie’s nose. “People can’t go around yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded hall, either, though. You need to keep that in mind.”

“Yeah, yeah. But somebody can say the President’s wrong, or even that he’s full of malarkey, without yelling ‘Fire!’ You don’t go to jail for something like that, not since the Alien and Sedition Acts you don’t.”

“We’ll fight wrecking wherever we find it,” Kagan said, which might mean anything or nothing. “Politics is rougher than football these days. If we’re soft, we’ll lose.”

“Politics has always been rougher than football,” Charlie said. “I’ll tell you why, too-there’s more money in politics.” He waited. He didn’t get a rise out of Lazar Kagan. When he decided he wouldn’t, he took a different tack: “What’s Vince up to right now?”

“You mean, that’s more important than seeing you?” Kagan chuckled to himself, pleased at zinging Charlie. “As a matter of fact, he’s putting his head together with J. Edgar Hoover. We are going to set our house in order.”

“Our house as in Washington or our house as in the whole country?” Charlie asked.

“Set Washington straight and leave the rest of the country the way it is and in two years’ time Washington will be a mess again,” Kagan said. “Set the country straight and Washington will stay all right because the people will choose the best public servants.”

“Good luck!” Charlie blurted.

“Thank you.” Lazar Kagan sounded placid and happy and confident. He sounded so very placid and happy and confident that Charlie wondered if he had a case of reefer madness.

He also sounded so placid and happy and confident that Charlie got out of there as fast as he could. Then he made a beeline for the nearest watering hole. He didn’t usually drink before lunch, but the sun was bound to be over the yardarm somewhere. After Joe Steele’s speech and after his own little talk with Kagan, he needed some liquid anesthetic.

He’d been in this dive before. He’d run into John Nance Garner in this dive before, too. As best he could remember, the Vice President was sitting on the same barstool now as he had been then. Garner might well have been wearing the same suit, too, though the cigarette smoldering between his fingers now was probably different from the one he’d been smoking back in Joe Steele’s first term. Charlie couldn’t prove he’d moved off that barstool since then.

Garner raised an eyebrow when Charlie ordered his double bourbon. “Getting to be a big boy, hey, Sullivan?” he drawled.

Charlie refused to rise to the baiting. “I need it today,” he replied. When the barkeep gave it to him, he raised the glass in salute. “Down with reporters and other riffraff!” he said, and down the hatch the drink went. Like a big boy, he didn’t cough.

“I’ll drink to that.” John Nance Garner fit action to words. “’Course, I’ll drink to damn near anything. That’s all a Vice President is good for-drinking to damn near anything. Beats the snot out of presiding over the Senate, let me tell you.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” The bourbon was hitting Charlie like a Louisville Slugger. “You almost wound up with the top job a little while ago.”

“Nah.” Garner shook his head in scorn. “No stupid little worthless shit of an Army captain was gonna punch Joe Steele’s ticket for him, even if he did come from San Antone. Joe Steele, he’ll be President as long as he wants to, or till the Devil decides to drag him back to hell.”

“Back to hell?” That was an interesting turn of phrase.

“Hell, Fresno, it don’t make no difference.” How long and how hard had the Vice President been drinking? Long enough to lose his grammar, anyhow. He pointed a nicotine-yellowed forefinger at Charlie. “I know what’s wrong with you. You been listenin’ to the radio, an’ you’re in here drowning your sorrows.”

“Now that you mention it,” Charlie said, “yes.”

“It’s a crazy business, ain’t it?”

“A scary business.”

“The thing of it is,” John Nance Garner said as if Charlie hadn’t spoken, “Joe Steele, he’s gonna do what he wants, and ain’t nobody gonna stop him or even slow him down much. You see that, you see you can’t change it so’s you ride with it instead, you’ll be all right. I’m all right now-I’m just fine. You bump up agin’ him, though, your story don’t got no happy ending.” He raised that forefinger to ask for another drink without words.

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Charlie said.

“Joe Steele, he’s got it all figured out,” Garner answered. He got to work on the fresh bourbon. Charlie raised his index finger, too. One double wasn’t enough, not this morning.

* * *

It was summer. Under the sun, under the humidity, Washington felt as if it were stuck in God’s pressure cooker. Thunderheads boiled up out of the south. Not even rain, though, could drain all the water from the air.

The baseball Senators wallowed through a dismal season. They weren’t last, where the old jingle put them, but they weren’t going anywhere, either. They’d brought back Bucky Harris to manage them a couple of years earlier, but it didn’t help. The then-boy manager had led them to two pennants in the Twenties. Whatever magic he’d had in those days was as gone now as the soaring stock market.

The Senators who played their games in the Capitol also weren’t having a great year. Every so often, Joe Steele would put in a bill to tighten up on this or to make that a Federal crime. The Senators and Representatives passed them in jig time, one after another. Joe Steele signed them into law. A lower-court judge who declared a couple of them unconstitutional ended up in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, after a terrible car crash. Andy Wyszynski appealed his rulings while he was still in the hospital, and a district court overturned them. Things hummed along.

Charlie and Esther started talking about children. As far as Charlie was concerned, using rubbers was a sin. That didn’t stop him; it just gave him something to confess. He didn’t go to church as regularly as his mother would have liked. Of course, if he had gone as regularly as Bridget Sullivan liked, he would hardly have had time to do anything else.

Summer was the slow news season. The Japanese bit big chunks out of China, but who could get excited about slanties murdering other slanties? Nobody in America, that was for sure. Hitler was shouting at Austria, and at Czechoslovakia for the way it treated Germans in the Sudetenland, but who on this side of the Atlantic knew, or cared, where the Sudetenland was unless his granny came from there?

And then Charlie’s phone rang early one morning, so early that he was just sitting down to coffee and three of Esther’s great over-medium eggs. Esther was dressed for work, too-she rode herd on an office full of idiots studying to be morons, at least if you listened to her.

“What the heck?” Charlie said. Either something had gone wrong in the world or it was a wrong number. Grumpily hoping it was a wrong number, he picked up the telephone and barked, “Sullivan.”

“Hello, Sullivan. Stas Mikoian.” No, not a wrong number. “If you show up at the Justice Department Building at ten this morning, you may find something worth writing about.”

“Oh, yeah? Anywhere in particular or sorta all over?” Charlie asked, only slightly in jest. Justice Department headquarters had gone up on Pennsylvania Avenue, half a dozen blocks from the White House, at the start of Joe Steele’s presidency. The building was enormous. If the birds ate the bread crumbs you left to mark your trail, you might never get out again.

“Go to the GBI’s exhibition center, room 5633,” Mikoian said. “I hear that Mr. Hoover will have something to exhibit, all right.”

“Like what?”

“That would be telling,” the Armenian answered, and hung up.

Charlie swore as he slammed the handset into the cradle. Esther clucked and laughed at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked.

He told her, finishing, “He knows I’ve got to show up, the miserable so-and-so. It’ll probably be some Carolina moonshiner, or else a pig poacher from Oklahoma.”

“Well, you’ve got time to finish breakfast first,” Esther said.

Sure enough, Charlie went over to the Justice Department and with plenty of coffee keeping his eyelids apart. He wasn’t completely amazed to run into Louie Pappas on the way to room 5633. “Who tipped you off?” Charlie asked.

“One of the White House guys called AP,” the photographer said. “So something’s going on, and they want pictures of whatever it is.”

Checking his watch, Charlie said, “Whatever it is, we’ll know in fifteen minutes.”

“Hot diggety dog.” If Louie was excited, he hid it well.

J. Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was as bouncy as a chunky man could get. He kept looking down at his own wrist so he could time things to the second. Either his watch ran slow or Charlie’s was fast, because Hoover got going at 10:02 Charlie Standard Time.

“The reason you are here today, folks,” Hoover told the reporters who fidgeted on folding chairs, “is that the GBI wishes to announce one of the largest and most important series of arrests in American history.” He gestured to several men cradling Tommy guns. Hoover, from what Charlie had seen, liked telling armed men what to do.

His henchmen led in ten or twelve dispirited-looking fellows, all of them middle-aged or older. Three wore dark blue; the rest were in khaki. The clothes might have been uniforms, but no rank badges or decorations or emblems remained on them.

“These,” J. Edgar Hoover said in portentous tones, “are some of the leading generals in the U.S. Army and admirals in the U.S. Navy. We arrested them last night and this morning. The charge is treason: namely, conspiracy with a foreign power to assassinate the President of the United States. We expect to make further arrests within the military shortly. The accused will be tried before military tribunals. The penalty upon conviction is death.”

“Is this connected with Captain South?” Charlie called.

“That is correct,” J. Edgar Hoover said while Louie and the other lensmen snapped away at the disgraced officers. More reporters bawled questions. Hoover held up a well-manicured hand. “I don’t wish to comment any further at this time. I would say the arrests speak for themselves. I wish I did not have to bring you here on such an unfortunate, embarrassing occasion, but that is what the country has come to.”

“Like fun you wish that,” Louie muttered out of the side of his mouth. “You’re having the time of your life up there.”

Hoover gestured to his troops again. They herded the generals and admirals out of the big room and back to wherever they were being confined. The reporters ran for telephones. Had anyone been timing them, some of the sprint records Jesse Owens had set in Berlin the year before would have fallen.

Charlie had to wait for a pay phone this time. The pause helped him organize the story in his mind a little better. He wasn’t so stunned as he had been when the Supreme Court Four were accused of treason, or when it was the turn of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. When things happened over and over, they lost some of their power to shock.

But what would the Army and Navy do without their top commanders? Whatever it was, how well could the armed forces do it? One thing he was sure of-Joe Steele didn’t worry about it. The President wanted men loyal only to him, and didn’t care what he needed to do to get them.

A reporter came out of a phone booth. Charlie elbowed his way into it. He stuck in some nickels, waited till he got an answer, and started talking.