Joe Steele

XXII

Mike stayed in the Army after what they called peace came. All his other choices seemed worse. They made it plain to him that, as someone who’d served a stretch in an encampment, he could live legally only in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. What would he do there? Asking the question answered it. He’d starve, that was what.

Who would hire a reporter who’d got jugged for going after Joe Steele? No one in his right mind, even if the President had personally given him a Bronze Star with V for valor. The other trade he knew was lumberjack. He hadn’t enjoyed doing it for the Jeebies enough to want to keep doing it on his own.

After a bit, he realized he’d also got good at one other thing. But how much demand for a button man was there in places like Denver or Salt Lake City or Albuquerque? Not enough, chances were, to support him in the style to which he’d like to become accustomed. And, as with cutting down trees, cutting down people was something he could do when he had to but not something he wanted for a career.

So he kept the uniform on. They promoted him to first sergeant-getting a medal from Joe Steele’s own mitts carried weight with them. And they mustered him out of the punishment brigade and into an ordinary infantry unit. He felt a pang of regret when he took off the tunic he’d worn so long, the one with the P on the sleeve. Part of the regret came from remembering how many guys he’d liked who’d worn that P with him weren’t here to take it off. Getting rid of guys like that-guys like him-was what punishment brigades were all about. It just hadn’t quite worked in his case.

He could have lied about his past and said he’d come from some other ordinary unit. When they cut his new orders, they even offered to give him a fictitious paper trail: probably one more consequence of getting the Bronze Star from Joe Steele. But he said, “Nah, don’t bother.”

He was proud of his stretch in the punishment brigade. He was proud of the four oak-leaf clusters on the ribbon for his Purple Heart. He was proud of his stretch as a wrecker, too. A lot of the poor bastards in the encampments got their time because somebody sold them out. Not him. He’d earned a term as honestly as a man could.

And when he went to the brigade near the demilitarized zone, he found that the men there were in awe of what he’d lived through. He’d seen more hard fighting in more bad places than any four of them put together. Most of them wanted to go home as soon as they could and start reassembling the lives they’d had before they put on the uniform.

Mike had nothing left to reassemble back in the States. He’d liked seeing Charlie. But they’d gone their separate ways even before the knock on the door at one in the morning. Charlie’d come to terms with Joe Steele. Mike hadn’t and couldn’t. In the United States these days, no chasm gaped wider.

So Mike figured he was better off an ocean away from the United States. Now that he wasn’t trying to kill the Japs, he discovered they could be interesting. They bowed low to the American conquerors whenever they walked past. A lot of soldiers accepted that as no less than their due. Mike wondered what would happen if he started bowing back.

Old men stared as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Younger men-often demobilized soldiers, plainly-also acted surprised, but a few of them grudged him a smile. And women of any age went into storms of giggles. He couldn’t decide whether he was the funniest thing in the world or he embarrassed them.

They also giggled when he learned a few words of Japanese and trotted them out. He liked being able to ask for food and drink without going through a big song and dance. Beer-biru-was easy. He learned the word for delicious, too, or thought he did. That set off more laughter than anything else he said. He wondered why till a Jap with bits of English explained oishi meant something lewd if you didn’t say it just right. He did his best after that and used it a lot, because he liked Japanese food more than he’d thought he would.

He liked soaking in a Japanese bath, too. Other Americans ribbed him when he said so. “I like bathing by myself, thanks,” one of them told him.

“Hey, this beats the shit out of climbing into a tub full of disinfectant with a bunch of smelly scalps,” Mike answered. As far as he knew, the other soldier had never been within a hundred miles of an encampment. But the guy understood the slang. Joe Steele left his mark on America all kinds of ways.

He’d left his mark on Japan, too. Everyone was desperately poor. The Japs scrounged through the base’s garbage without shame. Old tin cans, scraps of wood, and broken tools were all precious to them. So was cloth, because they had so little of their own.

Not surprisingly, a black market sprang up. Some things passed from the base to the natives in unofficial ways. Americans wound up owning little artworks that hadn’t got ruined in the fighting. A village druggist rigged up a still that would have made a moonshiner proud during Prohibition. Mike had drunk plenty of worse white mule back in the States.

And, of course, some of the women paid for what they wanted in the oldest coin of all. If that bothered them, they showed it less than their counterparts in the West would have. It was, their attitude seemed to say, all part of a day’s work. Mike liked that better than the hypocrisy he’d grown up with.

Some of the men resented the Americans for beating them. There were places in South Japan where soldiers had to travel in groups so they wouldn’t get bushwhacked. The island of Shikoku was especially bad for that. It had been bypassed, not overrun and ground to sawdust. The Japs there hadn’t been licked the way the ones on Kyushu and Honshu had.

Up here near the demilitarized zone, the locals gave the Americans far less grief. Bad as things were on this side of the Agano River, all the Japs had to do was look over the border into North Japan to know they could have had it one hell of a lot worse.

The Americans were at least going through the motions of trying to get the Japs in their half of the prostrate country back on their feet. The Russians? They treated North Japan the way they treated East Germany: as a source for what they needed to rebuild their own ravaged land. Factories and mills got broken down and shipped by sea to Vladivostok for reconstruction somewhere in Russia. Farmers were herded together into agricultural collectives (Mike saw little difference between those and Joe Steele’s community farms, but nobody asked him so he kept his mouth shut).

Anyone in North Japan who complained vanished-into a reeducation camp or into an unmarked grave. Of course, anyone in South Japan who complained could find himself in big trouble, too. But there was a difference. More people tried to flee from the north to the south than the other way round. When it came to voting with their feet, the Japs preferred the U.S. Army to the Red Army.

Days flowed by, one after another. Winter along the Agano was tougher than it had been in New York City-storms blew down from Siberia one after another. But it was a piece of cake next to what it had been like in the Montana Rockies. Mike laughed at the men who complained.

He laughed more than he had since before the Jeebies took him. Next to being a wrecker in a labor encampment, next to hitting beach after beach in a punishment brigade, this wasn’t just good-this was wonderful. He hoped he’d remember how wonderful it was after he got more used to it.

* * *

For a little while after the war ended, Charlie had hoped real peace would take hold in the world. People had felt the same way after the First World War. They’d called it the War to End War. And they’d been all the more bitterly disappointed when history didn’t come to an end with the Treaty of Versailles.

Having seen his hopes blasted once, Charlie was less surprised when they came a cropper again. Trotsky really believed in world revolution, or acted as if he did. Red regimes sprouted like toadstools in Eastern Europe. Italy and France bobbled and steamed like pots with the lids down too tight. Korea and North Japan were good and Red, too. In China, Mao was ahead of Chiang on points, and looked to be getting ready to knock him out.

Before the war, J. Edgar Hoover’s GBI had chased Nazis, Reds, and people who were neither but didn’t like Joe Steele, all with about equal vigor. Now the Jeebies seemed intent on filling labor encampments with Reds. If you didn’t hold your nose and run away when you heard Leon Trotsky’s unholy name, you’d find out more about lodgepole pines than you ever wanted to know.

Charlie thought the USA would do better, both abroad and at home, if it looked at why so many people wanted to chuck out the governments they had and put in new ones, even if the new ones were Red. You could still think such things. J. Edgar Hoover had no mind-reading machines, though he might have been working on them. But if you opened your mouth. .

He tried to imagine saying something like that to Vince Scriabin. How long would he stay free if he did? As long as the Jeebies took to get to his office after the Hammer called them. Or maybe Scriabin would just grab some White House guards and handle it himself.

That cheered Charlie up so much, he knocked off halfway through the afternoon and headed for the bar near the White House where John Nance Garner drank away his terms. Sure enough, the Vice President was there smoking a cigarette and working on a bourbon.

“Well, hell, it’s Sullivan!” he said. “They let school out early today, Charlie boy?”

“Time off for bad behavior,” Charlie answered. He nodded to the bartender. “Let me have Wild Turkey over ice.”

“You got it, suh,” the Negro answered, and in a moment Charlie did. He sipped. This wasn’t one of the bad days where he had to get smashed as fast as he could, but he needed a drink or three. At least a drink or three.

John Nance Garner watched him fortify himself. With a small shock, Charlie realized the Veep had to be close to eighty. Drinking and smoking were supposed to be bad for you, weren’t they? He couldn’t have proved it by Garner, who was still here and still had all his marbles, even if he wasn’t what you’d call pretty.

“I expect the boss is gettin’ ready for term number five,” Garner said.

“Hasn’t he talked about it with you?” Charlie asked.

The Vice President guffawed. “You reckon I’d be tryin’ to find out if I knew? The less Joe Steele’s got to say to me, happier I am.”

“Shall I tell him you said so?”

“Shit, sonny, go ahead. It’s nothin’ he don’t know already. You think he wants to talk to me? If he did, he’d do more of it-I’ll tell you that.”

“Why-?” Charlie began, but he let the question die unasked.

“Why don’t he dump me if he feels that way?” John Nance Garner answered the question whether Charlie asked it or not: “On account of I don’t make waves. I don’t make trouble. I do what he tells me to do, and I don’t give him no back talk. He knows he don’t got to worry about me while he’s lookin’ some other way. Japan cornholed him but good while he was makin’ faces at Hitler an’ Trotsky. I just sit there in the Senate or I sit here in the tavern. He can count on that, an’ he knows it.”

It made sense-if you looked at it from Joe Steele’s point of view, anyhow. Hitler’s flunkies hadn’t disobeyed him till the war was good and lost. Trotsky’s henchmen were loyal or they were dead. Joe Steele needed people he could rely on, too. He didn’t need much from the Vice President, but what he needed John Nance Garner delivered.

What does he need from me? Charlie wondered. Words. The answer formed of itself. He’d given Joe Steele words, and the President had used the ones he wanted. But there was more to it than that. Putting Charlie in a White House office while Mike was in a labor encampment was the kind of thing that amused the President. It was a nasty sense of humor, but it was what Joe Steele had.

Charlie turned to the quiet man behind the bar. “Let me have another one, please.”

“I will do that, suh,” the barkeep said.

Wild Turkey was safer than thought. To keep from dwelling on Joe Steele’s sense of humor, or the part of it that had bitten him, Charlie asked the Vice President, “What do you think of all the fuss about the Reds?”

“They’re no bargain. Unless you’re a Red yourself, you know that. Trotsky says he wants world revolution, but what he’s really got in mind is all those revolutions dancing to his tune,” Garner replied, which was safe enough. Then he added, “Now, J. Edgar Hoover, he’s a nasty little pissant any way you look at him.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. But Charlie lacked the nerve to come out and say so.

John Nance Garner must have seen the look on his face. The Veep laughed, coughed, and laughed some more. “They ain’t gonna take me away,” he said. “You reckon Joe Steele don’t know Hoover’s a nasty little pissant? Don’t make me laugh! ’Course he knows. But Hoover’s his nasty little pissant, like a mean dog that’ll lick the face of the fella who owns it. He don’t got to fret about him any more’n he’s got to fret about me.”

And what would the none too modest J. Edgar Hoover think of that? Charlie was curious, but not curious enough to find out. The less he had to do with the head of the GBI, the better off he’d be.

He bought some Sen-Sen on the way home that night, but it didn’t help. Esther screwed up her face when she kissed him after he walked in. “How many did you have before you got here?” she asked.

“A few,” he said. “I’m okay.”

“Are you?” She didn’t sound so sure. Jews were often harder on people who put it away than the Irish were. Shikker iz a goy. The gentile is a drunk. When you learned some Yiddish, you learned phrases like that. Esther when on, “You’ve been drinking more lately than I wish you were.”

“I’m okay,” Charlie said again. “Honest to Pete, I am. I’m holding the bottle. It isn’t holding me.”

“It hasn’t been. I don’t want it to start,” Esther said. “After a while, you can’t walk away from it. Maybe you should try while you’re still ahead of the game. I don’t mean quit cold-I don’t think you have to go that far. But you should cut back.”

“Well, maybe. Hard to do that in Washington, but I guess I can give it a shot.” If she wasn’t going to push it as hard as she might have, he wouldn’t dig in his heels the way he could have done. He kissed her again, saying, “You take good care of me, babe.”

She smiled against his cheek. “It’s a filthy job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

The kids hadn’t come out to say hello-a returning father wasn’t an inspiring spectacle-so he pawed her a little. She squeaked-softly, remembering that they were around. He said, “You want filthy, wait till later tonight.” He nibbled her earlobe.

She pushed him away, but she was still smiling. “We’ll see who’s awake,” she said. Anyone listening to them would have thought they’d been married for a while.

* * *

Artillery boomed, off to the north. Looking across the Agano River, Mike said, “Christ, what are the Russians up to now?”

Officially, Captain Calvin Armstrong commanded the company. Unofficially, he leaned a lot on his first sergeant, who was twice his age. That was what experienced noncoms were for. “What do you think it is?” he asked.

“Who the hell knows with them, sir? As long as nothing comes down on our side of the line, we can’t make it our business.”

“I understand that.” Armstrong looked no happier. “I hope they don’t have an uprising up there, though. That’s the kind of thing that could spill over to here.”

“Yes, sir.” Mike hoped the same thing. South Japan wasn’t so much a powder keg as North Japan, but the locals didn’t exactly love their conquerors, either. They especially resented seeing Emperor Akihito reduced to the status of General Eisenhower’s mouthpiece. Cartoons showed Akihito as a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on Eisenhower’s lap with Eisenhower’s hand reaching into him from behind. You could get into piles of trouble for posting those flyers, but the Japs did it anyhow.

“Do you think they’d tell us if they did have an uprising?” Captain Armstrong asked.

He wasn’t a dope. He found interesting questions. “I doubt it, sir,” Mike said slowly, “unless things got out of hand and they couldn’t squash it or something. Near as I can see, the Russians don’t tell anybody anything as long as they can help it.”

Armstrong nodded. He looked more as if he belonged on a college campus than here looking toward North Japan. He might have been a college kid before he went into the service, and raced through OCS to get christened a ninety-day wonder. Most of those guys stayed second looeys, though. If he was one, he must have impressed some people to win not one but two promotions.

“Maybe I’ll ask Major Dragunov at the monthly meeting, if I remember,” he said. “Too bad the next one’s three weeks away.” Local commanders from the two sides of the demilitarized zone did still get together to hash over problems that could cross from one to the other.

The big guns boomed again, off to the north. “Well, sir, if that goes on from now till then, you sure won’t forget about it,” Mike said.

It did, on and off. Dragunov and Armstrong met at the river, unarmed. It was Dragunov’s turn to cross to the American side, which he did in a putt-putt of a motorboat. He didn’t speak English; Armstrong knew no Russian. They got along in a schoolboy mishmash of French and German. Since neither was fluent, both gestured a lot. Mike could follow bits and pieces, though his French was of much less recent vintage than Calvin Armstrong’s and his German was New York City Yiddish, also none too fresh these days.

He certainly knew when Armstrong asked about the artillery fire. Dragunov didn’t answer right away, not in a language the Americans could understand. Instead, he spoke in Russian with his assistant, a lieutenant whose blue arm-of-service color and know-it-all air said he came from the NKVD. Mike didn’t know exactly what the initials stood for. He did know that NKVD man was how you said Jeebie in Russian.

After making sure he could open his mouth without catching hell for it, Dragunov went back to German and French. He said something that sounded to Mike like the popular army of the Japanese People’s Republic.

Captain Armstrong asked what seemed like the next logical question: “This popular army, it is composed of Japanese?”

“Oui,” Dragunov admitted reluctantly. More back-and-forth with the NKVD lieutenant. Then mostly French again: “How not? The Japanese People’s Republic has the necessity of being able to defend itself.”

“Defend itself? Against whom?” Armstrong asked, which also seemed like a good question.

“Why, against warmongers and imperialists, aber natürlich,” Major Dragunov answered, switch-hitting with the German phrase. “Those are the enemies a peace-loving state has the need to be on guard against.”

“I don’t think there are many warmongers left in South Japan,” Armstrong said. “We killed most of them.”

“It could be that you are right.” The Red Army man didn’t sound as if he believed it for a minute. “If you are, no doubt we will march well. But one must prepare for every possibility, is it not so?”

They talked about other, less important, things for a few minutes. After a sharp exchange of salutes, Major Dragunov and his-minder? — got back into their boat and chugged over to the North Japanese side of the river.

“You better get on the horn with the brass, sir,” Mike said. “If they don’t know about this, they sure as hell need to, and right away.”

“You’re reading my mind, Sullivan,” Captain Armstrong answered. “We just spent all that time and blood smashing the Jap Army flat, and now they’re putting together a new one? Jesus wept!”

“If their Japs have guns, our Japs’ll want guns, too,” Mike said. “And how are we supposed to tell them no?”

“Beats me.” Calvin Armstrong stared after the motorboat with the Russians in it as it crossed to the far side of the Agano. “The only thing I’m glad about is, I’m not the one who has to figure out the answer.”

* * *

Joe Steele eyed Charlie. “I am looking for a way to say something important,” he said. “I know the idea, but I do not have the words I need yet. Words are your department. Maybe you can come up with some.”

“I’ll give it my best shot, Mr. President,” Charlie said, as he had to. Yes, Joe Steele did get words from him. “What’s the idea?” He couldn’t say What’s the big idea?, not to the President. You needed a working sense of whimsy to smile at that. Joe Steele would have scowled instead.

“I want to talk about how the Reds are clamping down wherever they’ve taken power, how they aren’t letting us help them rebuild the countries that the war tore to pieces, how they just want to take with both hands but not give with either.” Joe Steele gestured in frustration. “That’s the idea. But it sounds like nothing when I say it that way. I want it to sound as important as it is. If I can make other people see it the way I do, maybe we won’t have to fight a war with Russia in a few years.”

No matter how much Charlie longed for peace, he could see that war looming ahead, the way anyone with his eyes open in 1919 could have seen that Germany would have another go as soon as she got her strength back. Plenty of people had seen the seeds of World War II. Charlie remembered the cartoon that showed a weeping baby outside Versailles as the Big Four emerged from signing the treaty. The baby’s diaper was labeled CONSCRIPTION CLASS OF 1940. That guy’d hit it right on the nose.

So would the United States and Red Russia square off in 1960 or 1965? Charlie wanted to do whatever he could to head that off. Joe Steele did, too. Say what you would about the man, but he deserved credit for that.

“Let’s see what I can do, sir.” Scratching the side of his jaw, Charlie went back to his office, locked the door, and took the phone off the hook. When the dial tone annoyed him, he stuck the handset in a desk drawer and closed it. Then he settled down to think.

What was it that made the Reds so hard to work with? You could never tell what they were going to do till they did it. No one had dreamt Litvinov would sign a treaty with the Nazis till he hopped on a plane, went to Berlin, and signed the damn thing. No one had dreamt his name on the dotted line would cost so much blood, either.

The Reds wrapped a blackout curtain around everything they did. Charlie wasn’t sure that was because they were Reds. It might just have been because they were Russians, or Jews who’d grown up among Russians. Why didn’t matter. The phrase did.

Blackout curtain? That wasn’t bad. It was on the way to what Joe Steele wanted. Charlie didn’t think it was there. Red-out curtain? He wrote it on a piece of scratch paper. It didn’t make him stand up and cheer-it was too cute. But it was something he could offer if he didn’t come up with anything better.

He pulled his trusty Bartlett’s off the shelf. It was one of the speechwriter’s best friends. People had said a lot of clever things over the past few thousand years. Here they were, ready for the taking. Or for giving you a new idea, and with luck a better one.

Nothing sprang out at him. He still liked the notion of the curtain, though. Not the blackout curtain. Black was the wrong color for Trotsky’s regime and for the ones he backed. Red-out curtain still sounded silly.

“Red Curtain?” Charlie muttered to himself. Then he said it again: louder, more thoughtfully. He wrote it down. Yes, that might do. It just might.

He ran a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Maybe his fingers could do the rest of his thinking for him. Only one way to find out: turn ’em loose and let ’em rip.

From the Adriatic to the Baltic, from Leipzig to Sapporo, a Red Curtain has fallen over a quarter of the world, he wrote. Behind it lie governments that are not really governments at all, but organized conspiracies, every one equally resolute and implacable in its determination to destroy the free world.

He looked at that. If it wasn’t what Joe Steele was trying to say, he’d misunderstood what the boss wanted. It was worth taking a chance on. He pulled it out of the typewriter and took it up to the President’s oval study.

This time, he had to wait a little while before he got to see Joe Steele. Andy Wyszynski came out looking serious. “How are you, Sullivan?” the Attorney General said with a nod.

“I’m all right. Yourself?” Charlie answered. He got tired of the flat, flavorless speech of Joe Steele and his California cronies. Wyszynski had a big-city accent different from his own, but at least it was a big-city accent.

“Well, Sullivan, what have you got?” Joe Steele asked when Charlie went in. Charlie handed him the typewritten paragraph. The President perched reading glasses on the arched bridge of his nose. “Red Curtain. .” He shifted his pipe to the side of his mouth so he could bring out the phrase. Then he puffed, tasting the words as well as the tobacco. He ran a hand through his hair. It was still thick, though he’d gone very gray. “Red Curtain. .” He nodded a second time, as if he meant it now. “Every once in a while, you earn your paycheck, don’t you?”

“I try, Mr. President,” Charlie said. Joe Steele offhand and insulting was Joe Steele as friendly as he ever got.

Newspapers all over the United States seized on the Red Curtain when the President used it in a speech about Russia. Charlie would have been prouder of that if American newspapers weren’t in the habit of seizing on anything Joe Steele said and trumpeting it to the skies. When papers in Canada and England and even one in New Zealand picked up the phrase, he really started to think he’d earned his pay that day.

* * *

J. Edgar Hoover arrested spies in the War Department and in the State Department and even in the Department of the Interior. They were working to sell America down the river to Leon Trotsky, he declared. The way he stuck out his jaw dared anyone in the world to call him a liar.

Andy Wyszynski pounded the lectern when he told the world-or at least the reporters, nearly all of them American, at the press conference-what a pack of scoundrels the men seized because of spying for Trotsky were. “They want to drag the United States behind the Red Curtain!” the Attorney General shouted furiously. “They’ve already dragged too many countries behind it, and not a one of them has come out free yet!”

“Ouch!” Charlie said when he heard Wyszynski’s tirade on the news that night. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“And so?” Esther said. “People take things and make them mean whatever they want, not what you wanted.”

“Tell me about it!” Charlie said ruefully. He’d felt proud when Joe Steele called the part of the world led from Moscow the part behind the Red Curtain. He’d felt even prouder when people used the line wherever English was spoken.

When Andy Wyszynski used it the way he did. . Charlie might have been less proud if he’d seen Red Curtain scribbled on a privy wall, or perhaps as the name of a whorehouse. On the other hand, he also might not have.

He wanted a drink. Some bourbon would clean out the nasty taste the Attorney General left in his mouth. His thigh muscles bunched as he started to get up from the couch and go to the kitchen. But then he eased back again. He was trying to be a good boy and not grab the whiskey bottle whenever he got the yen. It didn’t always work, but it did some of the time. He was drinking less than he had before Esther called him on it.

It worked tonight. Instead of a drink, he had a cigarette. Esther smiled at him. She must have known what he wanted to do. They’d been together a good many years now. Chances were she understood how he ticked better than he did himself.

Sarah came into the front room. She made a face at seeing her boring old parents listening to the boring old news. At going on ten, she was convinced they were as far behind the times as Neanderthal Man or the Republican Party. What she would be like when that high-school class of 1956 graduated-not nearly so far away now! — Charlie shuddered to think.

“Can someone please help me with my arithmetic homework?” she said. As far as she was concerned, the news existed only to keep her from getting the help she needed. She would have made a pretty good cat.

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.

“It’s long division. With decimal places, not remainders.” By the way she said it, that ranked somewhere between Chinese water torture and the Black Hole of Calcutta when measured on the scale of man’s inhumanity to students.

“Well, come on to the kitchen table and we’ll have a look.” Charlie found a new reason to be glad he hadn’t had that bourbon. It wouldn’t have helped him do long division even with remainders.

Sober, he didn’t need long to see why Sarah was having trouble. She’d multiplied seven by six and got forty-nine. “Oh!” she said. “Is that all it was?” She snatched the paper away and ran off to do the rest of the work by herself.

“That was fast, Einstein,” Esther said when Charlie came back.

“I’m not Einstein,” Charlie said. “I’m the one who’s still breathing.” With his wife, he could still come out with things like that. He never would have had the nerve with anybody else. He wondered how Captain Rickover and his scalps were doing with uranium. Joe Steele hadn’t told him anything about it. He didn’t go out of his way to ask, which was putting it mildly. If anyone decided he needed to know, he’d find out. If nobody did. . Maybe no news was good news.

The treason trials helped liven up a dreary winter. Andy Wyszynski outdid himself in some of the prosecutions. He would scream at the luckless men and women the GBI had grabbed: “Shoot these mad dogs! Death to the gangsters who side with that vulture, Trotsky, from whose mouths a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of democracy. Let’s push the animal hatred they bear our beloved Joe Steele back down their throats!”

Shoot those mad dogs, if they were mad dogs, government firing squads did. Things had got simpler and quicker in the justice system year by year after Herbert Hoover went out and Joe Steele came in.

An assistant attorney general also made a reputation for himself in the spy trials. He was a kid from California, only in his mid-thirties, with a Bob Hope ski-slope nose and crisp, curly black hair. He didn’t rant like Wyszynski. He just pounded away, relentless as a jackhammer. “Are you now or have you ever been a Red?” he would demand of each defendant in turn, and, “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

He got convictions, too, about as many as his boss. Joe Steele smiled whenever his name came up. Charlie wondered if the President saw something of his own young, ambitious self in that graceless, hard-charging lawyer.

It was going to be another election year. It got to be February 1948 before Charlie even remembered. He laughed at himself. Back in the day, Presidential races had been the biggest affairs in American politics. The only thing that would keep Joe Steele from winning a fifth term now was dying before November rolled around.

And that wouldn’t happen. Joe Steele had disposed of swarms of other men, but he showed no sign of being ready to meet the Grim Reaper himself.