Joe Steele

XXVI

Days would go by at the White House; Charlie would look back at them and try to remember what he’d done, only to discover he had no idea. Sometimes his head would come up after what he thought were a couple of days, and he would look at the calendar and see three weeks had passed. Where did they escape to? What had he been dealing with while they slipped through his fingers?

He noticed Christmas of 1951-he spent that time with his family. But the only way he really noticed it was 1952 was by peeling the cellophane off the calendar a White House clerk left on his desk. Another year! Not just another year, but another election year. Joe Steele had already had five terms. It was like talking about five drinks. Once you’d had that many, what was one more?

“He is going to run again, then?” Esther asked when Charlie came home with the astonishing news that 1952 had arrived after all.

“I sure don’t see any signs that he won’t,” Charlie said. “But you know, going in these days is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”

“How do you mean?”

“It feels like riding on a merry-go-round,” Charlie answered. His wife gave him a quizzical look, or maybe just one that meant he was full of hops. “It does,” he insisted. “That’s the best way I know how to put it. You climb on, and it starts to go, and pretty soon it’s up to speed. You spin round and round, and round and round, and round and round some more.”

Esther’s finger spun round and round, by her right ear. Charlie stuck out his tongue at her. “Sorry,” she said-a lie if he’d ever heard one. “But you aren’t making any sense.”

“You didn’t let me finish. So the merry-go-round turns at that one speed for most of the ride. But when it’s heading toward time for your bunch to get off and the next bunch to get on, the merry-go-round doesn’t stop all at once. It slows down a little bit at a time. And when you’re on it, at first you don’t even notice, ’cause you’re still moving. But then you see things going around in slow motion instead of regular speed, and you know what’s going on. And that’s what the White House feels like these days.”

“Oh. Okay, now I see what you mean,” Esther said. “Well, we’ve had twenty years of King Stork. A term or two of King Log might not be so bad.” Aesop’s fables had been a hit with Sarah and then again with Pat. Reading the stories over and over lodged them in Esther’s head and Charlie’s, too.

“Maybe,” Charlie said. “Or maybe he’ll go on another kick instead. For a while, I thought who-lost-China? would be it, but he seems to have lost interest in that.”

“I’ll tell you the one that scared me,” Esther said. “Einstein. . died, and then some of the other physicists who Joe Steele thought didn’t speak up, they. . died, too.”

“I remember,” Charlie said unhappily. That discreet pause conveyed a world of meaning.

“But I don’t know if you were paying attention to the names. Oppenheimer-a Jew. Van Neumann-a Jew. Szilard-a Jew. A Hungarian Jew, in fact, poor man.”

“Enrico Fermi wasn’t Jewish,” Charlie said.

“No, but he had a Jewish wife,” Esther returned. Charlie hadn’t known that. She went on, “For a while there, I thought Joe Steele would decide Hitler’d had a good idea about what to do with the Jews. To the Jews, I should say.”

“He got rid of those guys because he was sore at them, not because they were Jewish.” Before coming to the White House, Charlie’d never dreamt he could sound so calm about murder, but here he was. And here those physicists weren’t. He added, “Besides, Captain Rickover-well, he’s Admiral Rickover now-he’s a Jew, too. And so were some of the guys he grabbed from the labor encampments. Teller, Feynman, Cohen, I don’t know how many other wreckers.”

“I know that now. I didn’t know it then,” Esther said. “And they made the bomb work, and fried all the Japs in that city. Suppose it didn’t, though. Suppose Trotsky made his first. What would Joe Steele have done to the wreckers then? Or to all the Jews?”

That was a good question, wasn’t it? Charlie decided he was better off not knowing the answer-and so was Esther. Much better. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “That’s what you have to remember. It’s just something you worried about. It’s not anything that came true.”

“I know. But my folks came to America so they wouldn’t have to be afraid of pogroms any more, and so I wouldn’t, either,” Esther said. “That was what America stood for-being able to get along no matter who you were. But it didn’t exactly work out that way, did it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Not too long ago, I heard a shoeshine man talking with a janitor when they didn’t know I was listening.” Charlie didn’t say the men he was talking about were colored-with those jobs, what else would they be? He continued, “One of them said, ‘That Joe Steele, he done more for equality than any other four Presidents you can think of.’ ‘What you talkin’ about?’ the other fellow said. And the first guy told him, ‘He treats everybody jus’ the same way-like a nigger.’”

Esther laughed and looked horrified at the same time. “That’s terrible!”

“It sure is,” Charlie agreed. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

* * *

Mike walked into the classroom with his usual mix of excitement and dread. He supposed actors felt the same way as the curtain rose. He got a better reception than actors commonly did. All the kids in the room jumped to their feet, bowed, and chorused, “Konichiwa, Sensei-san!” Then they said the same thing in English: “Good morning, teacher!”

When Mike returned the bow, he didn’t go as low as they had. They were just middle-school students, and he was a grown man. He didn’t grasp all the details of how Japanese bowed to one another; he wondered if any foreigner did. But he got the broad outlines, and they forgave his blunders because he was a foreigner and couldn’t be expected to know any better. As with a three-legged dancing bear, the wonder was that he did it at all, not that he did it well.

“Konichiwa!” he said, and “Good morning!” Then he bowed to Midori Yanai as one equal to another and told her, “Konichiwa, Sensei-san!”

Her bow was slightly lower than his: the bow of woman to man. The Constitutional Monarchy wrote women’s equality into its laws. Mike had no trouble playing along. For someone like her, who’d been raised in the old ways, change came harder.

“Good morning, Sergeant Sullivan,” she said in English. Hanging around with him the past couple of years had made her better at distinguishing the r sound in his title and the l sound in his name. She went back to Japanese to talk to the class: “Sergeant Sullivan has come here today to help you learn his language.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Sullivan!” the boys and girls sang out in English. Most of them said Surrivan; Japanese didn’t use the l sound, and they had trouble hearing it, let alone saying it. Quite a few of them said Sank you, too; the th sound was another one their language didn’t own.

“I am honored to be here,” Mike said in Japanese. He used that phrase whenever he visited a classroom. They took honor seriously here. Because he used it a lot, he said it well. When he went on, he didn’t sound so smooth. He knew his Japanese was bad. He didn’t worry about it. Because he’d hung around with Midori for a while, he had enough to do what he needed to do here-and she’d help him if he stumbled. “When I speak your language I am ichiban baka gaijin.” They giggled-the A-number-one stupid foreigner was admitting what he was. He continued through the giggles: “But when you speak my language, you are ichiban baka gaijin.”

That brought them up short. They weren’t used to thinking of themselves as foreigners. That another language had its own native place was an idea they needed work on.

“I try to speak Japanese better each time I do it,” Mike said. “You should try to speak English better each time, too.”

He led them in touching their tongues to the backs of their front teeth to make l noises, and to putting their tongues between their top and bottom teeth for th. Because he’d been making those sounds since he was a baby, he was better at showing how to do it than Midori Yanai was. For her, they were as foreign as they were to the kids.

He went through conversation drills with them, letting them hear what a native speaker sounded like. Then he asked for questions in English. A boy raised his hand. Mike nodded to him. “Why English the verb not at the end puts?” he asked.

“Why does Japanese put it at the end?” Mike answered. The kid blinked; that was water to a fish to him. Mike went on, “I don’t know why. Why, I don’t know.” He grinned. The kid just frowned. He didn’t get wordplay in English yet. So Mike continued, “But Japanese is wrong with the verb in the middle. English is wrong with the verb at the end.” It wasn’t always, but they were still learning rules. They weren’t ready for exceptions.

They bowed him out of the classroom with a singsong “Arigato gozaimasu, Sensei-san!” He killed time in Wakamatsu till school let out. Then he went back there to meet Midori.

“Thank you,” she told him. “I think that went well today.”

“Good. I thought so, too, but you know better than I do.” Mike didn’t hug her or give her a kiss. Men didn’t show women affection in public here. Things like that were starting to catch on with youngsters who imitated the Americans they saw in person or in the movies, but Midori kept the ways she’d grown up with. Mike didn’t push it, which was one of the reasons they got along.

After they walked side by side, decorously not touching, for a while, they went to a restaurant. It was more than a greasy spoon, less than fancy. She had tonkatsu: breaded pork chop fried and cut into bite-sized slices, with a thick, spicy sauce. He ordered a bowl of ishikari nabe. It was a Japanese take on salmon stew that he’d learned to enjoy.

Once they’d eaten, they went to her little apartment. The building was new since the Japanese War. It was made of bricks and concrete, not wood and paper. “My only fear,” Midori had said, “is that it will not stay up in an earthquake.”

Mike had felt several since coming to Japan. He hadn’t been in one strong enough to knock down buildings, but he knew they had them. He’d said, “I hope it stays up, too.” What else could you say?

The apartment was bigger than a jail cell, but not much. It would have driven Mike crazy. Midori took it in stride. She made the most of the space she had by not putting a lot in it, and by making sure everything stayed in its proper place if she wasn’t using it.

She didn’t even have a bed. She had futons-floor mats. The Japs had been using them forever. Rooms here were so many futons long and so many wide. If you piled two or three together, well, that was pretty nice when you felt like fooling around.

Lazy and happy in the afterglow, Mike said, “You’re wonderful, you know that?” He tried to say the same thing in Japanese, too.

“I am also happy with you,” she said. “Sometimes I feel I should not be, but I am.”

“You shouldn’t be? How come? Because I’m American?”

“Hai.” She nodded. “I am sorry. I am so sorry, but it is true. You are a good man, but you are a gaijin. You cannot fit here for the rest of your life.”

She was bound to be right about that. Sooner or later-sooner, since he was well past fifty-they’d muster him out of the Army and ship him home. And then he’d have to face all the nasty choices he’d ducked in 1946 by leaving the uniform on. Montana? New Mexico? Wyoming? Colorado? Reporter? Tree feller? People feller? Go back East and risk the Jeebies jugging him again, this time for what would be a life stretch?

With Midori, there might be other possibilities. “Do you think you could fit in in the United States, in a country full of round-eyed barbarians?”

He said it as a joke, but he knew that was how she thought of Americans in general. After a moment, she asked, “How do you mean that?”

Mike took a deep breath. “Do you want to marry me?” he asked. When Stella, or her lawyers, told him she was cutting him loose, he’d never dreamt he would ask that of another woman. But that letter had come to the labor camp more than a dozen years ago now. Stella had long since found somebody else: a booking agent named Morris Cantor. Why shouldn’t he?

“I would like to do that, yes,” Midori said slowly, “but how hard will it be?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find out.” Mike did know they didn’t make it easy. But he thought he could manage it. He’d done everything the USA asked from him and then some the past ten years. The USA might manage a little something for him. And the rules about getting together with local women were easier now than they had been right after the big war. Fraternizing then might land you in the guardhouse.

“It is good to know you care about me for more than this.” Still naked in the warm night, Midori touched herself between the legs for a moment. “I thought so, but it is still good to know.”

“Good to know you care about me-you love me-too.” Mike’s voice sounded rough even to himself. Americans who took up with Japanese women often wondered if their lady friends cared or if they were only meal tickets.

“I did not expect you to propose to me tonight.” Midori laughed.

Hearing that laugh made Mike feel better. “It’s about time, you know?” he said. She nodded. He could have said It’s now or never, and that would have been every bit as true. It sounded better this way, though. He still had a bit of writer in him after all.

* * *

When the Republicans gathered in Chicago, they nominated Robert Taft. He aimed to be the first man since John Quincy Adams to follow his father into the White House. Before they nominated him, they talked about drafting Omar Bradley or Dwight Eisenhower.

The conqueror of Western Europe and the architect of victory in the Pacific both turned them down. “Politics is no place for soldiers,” Bradley said. George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Zachary Taylor, among others, might have come out with a different view of things. But Washington, Grant, and Taylor hadn’t served under Joe Steele.

Casually, Charlie asked Vince Scriabin, “Do you know how the two generals happened to say no?”

“Yes,” the Hammer answered, and not another word. Charlie was left to his own imaginings. He hoped they were juicier than what really happened, but he had no guarantees.

Three weeks after the GOP cleared out of the International Amphitheatre, the Democrats came in to renominate Joe Steele and John Nance Garner. Charlie always felt funny about going back to the Windy City for a convention. This one, at least, was in a different building from the one they’d used to pick Joe Steele the first time. Banners hanging from the rafters shouted TWENTY YEARS OF PROGRESS!

In his acceptance speech, Joe Steele said, “When I first became the Democratic candidate in 1932, the United States suffered in the grip of the Depression. Many of you can remember that. Now we are the greatest, the strongest, the richest country in the world. Every one of you knows that. I am not braggart enough to claim I had everything to do with that. But I am not modest enough to claim I had nothing to do with it, either.”

Delegates laughed and applauded. So did Charlie, up on the podium. Most of the words were his. The delivery was the President’s, and he could have done better. He stumbled over a few phrases; it was almost as if he were sleepwalking through the speech.

It wouldn’t sound too bad over the radio, though, and he hadn’t wanted TV here. The Republicans had had it, and it played up a vicious floor fight. The Democrats didn’t have those brawls, not under Joe Steele they didn’t. But that might not have been why he vetoed the cameras. He wasn’t young any more. He also wasn’t well any more. But he was still shrewd enough to realize he would do better not to show the country how old and unwell he was.

Taft went around the United States arguing that it would be better to bring American troops home from Europe and from South Japan. “If they want our weapons to defend themselves, that is one thing,” he said. “But haven’t we spent enough lives outside our borders to pay the butcher’s bill for the rest of this century?”

“We are part of the world whether we like it or not,” Joe Steele replied. “Even if we go away from it, it won’t go away from us. Bombers with atomic weapons can already reach our shores. One day soon, rockets will fly halfway around the world in minutes. We have enemies, countries that hate and fear and envy our wealth and safety. We have to hold them back wherever we can.”

“Not a bad speech,” Esther said to Charlie. “How much did you do?”

“The line about being part of the world whether we like it or not, that was mine,” he said.

“Sounds like you,” she agreed.

“But the rest. . I don’t know where the writing came from,” Charlie said. “The ideas are what he’s been talking about since we got into World War II. Except for the rockets, I mean. I don’t know who fed him that one, or whether he came up with it himself. But it’s pretty silly, wherever it came from.”

“I guess so.” Esther’s chuckles sounded nervous. “You never can tell with that Buck Rogers stuff, though, not any more. Who would have believed an atom bomb was possible before they dropped that one on Sendai?”

“Well, Trotsky would have, or he wouldn’t have had one ready to drop on Nagano,” Charlie said. Esther made a face at him. He spread his hands in half an apology. Even so, he went on, “I’ll believe in rockets that can go halfway around the world when one comes down on Washington.”

“If one ever does, God forbid, you won’t believe in it for very long.” Esther didn’t usually insist on getting the last word, but she did that time.

As he’d done every four years since 1940, Charlie stayed late at the White House on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. As she’d done every four years since 1940, Esther stayed home on election night. Sarah was fourteen now; Patrick was ten. She could have left them alone. But the less she had to do with Joe Steele and the men who did his bidding, the happier she was. Charlie didn’t even ask her to come any more. He knew how she felt. To not such a small degree, he felt the same way. But she had a choice. He didn’t. He’d made his choice not long after Joe Steele jugged Mike, and he’d had to live with it ever since.

“A whole generation has grown up knowing no President of the United States but Joe Steele,” a radio commentator said. He made sure he sounded as though that was a good thing. Had he sounded any other way, his mellow voice would have traveled the airwaves no more. In Joe Steele’s America, everybody made choices like that and lived with them. . or didn’t.

New York went for the President. So did Pennsylvania. So, Charlie noted, did Maryland-whatever Kagan had done to fix things there after 1948, it had worked. Ohio didn’t, but Ohio was Taft’s home state. When Central Time Zone results came in, Illinois swung Joe Steele’s way, too.

“By the time the President completes the sixth term he now seems sure to win, he will have led the country for almost a quarter of a century,” the commentator said. “It will be many years before anyone comes close to that astonishing record.”

Robert Taft conceded a little before midnight. Joe Steele didn’t come down to celebrate with his crew. That was different from the way things had gone the past three times. Julius, the colored bartender, told Charlie, “He’s gonna take it easy tonight, suh. I did send a bottle o’ that nasty apricot brandy he likes to the bedroom for him and his missus.”

“That should work,” Charlie said. Yes, the boss was getting old. Julius had gray in his hair, too, and he sure hadn’t when Charlie first met him. And Charlie knew too well that he wasn’t any younger himself.

* * *

Midori oohed and ahhed when the Golden Gate Bridge loomed out of the fog. “So big! So beautiful!” she said.

“It’s something, all right. I remember when they finished it, almost twenty years ago now.” Mike realized this was the first glimpse of American soil-well, American ironmongery-he’d had in nearly half that time. He’d sailed out of San Diego in 1943, and here 1953 was only a month away. Time flies when you’re having fun, he thought vaguely. The trouble was, time also flew when you weren’t.

The freighter they’d boarded in Yokohama let loose with its foghorn. It had been sounding the horrible thing every couple of minutes for hours now. Other mournful blasts came out of the mist every so often. Mike hated the racket, but he did approve of not colliding with another ship.

He smiled at Midori. “Well, Mrs. Sullivan, I’ve seen a lot of your country. Now you’ve seen some of mine, anyhow.”

“Yes, Mr. Sullivan, that is true. Hai-honto.” She said the same thing in English and Japanese. Then she spread the fingers of her left hand. Her ring was just a plain gold band, but not even a ten-carat diamond could have sparkled in this gloom. Hey, it’s the thought that counts, Mike thought. And as long as she felt the same way, everything was fine.

After the freighter docked in San Francisco, they had to go through customs and Immigration and Naturalization. Mike had a manila folder to accompany his passport. It held papers that included his Army discharge, his official permission to marry a Japanese national, and records pertaining to his Purple Heart, all the oak-leaf clusters, and his Bronze Star. There was a note attached that Joe Steele himself had presented the Bronze Star-the first time his acquaintance with the President had ever been worth anything to him. Midori also carried an impressive collection of documents in English and Japanese, though hers was thinner than Mike’s.

“Everything seems to be in order,” the Immigration and Naturalization clerk said after he’d gone through it all. “However, I do need to check your passport number against one other list.” He started to turn his swivel chair towards a file cabinet.

Mike knew exactly what that list would be. “Don’t bother,” he said quietly. “It’s NY24601.”

“Ah, thank you.” The clerk nodded. “You do understand the restrictions imposed on former inmates of labor encampments?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mike said. “But it’s kinda hard to take a ship from Japan to Montana or Wyoming.”

“Indeed. If I give you ten days’ incoming authorization to remain outside the restricted zone for former inmates, will that be adequate?”

“That should be plenty. Thanks. I know where we’re gonna go, and yes, it’s inside the zone.” Mike had wondered how the authorities would handle an ex-wrecker. He might have known they would have procedures in place. He wasn’t the first of his kind to come home to the good old USA. He wouldn’t be the last, either.

“We’ll do it that way, then,” the clerk said. They had procedures, all right. One of the stamps he used on Mike’s passport had a number of days he could adjust as required. If Mike was still in San Francisco and had to show that passport more than ten days from now, his story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

For the time being, he said, “Can you point us to a hotel not too far from here? With luck, one close to a Western Union office? I need to send a couple of wires, let people know I’m back.”

The clerk mentioned a couple. One was only a block away. Mike and Midori walked there with their worldly goods. Midori stared at the streets, and at all the cars on them. “Everything is so rich, so wide, so open!” she said.

“Sweetie, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Mike told her.

She exclaimed again at the hotel room, which was bigger than her apartment in Wakamatsu. Mike went out and sent his telegrams. When he came back, he asked the desk clerk about nearby restaurants. He splurged and took Midori to a steakhouse.

How much she got amazed her all over again. “This is too much for three!” she said, which didn’t keep her from making a big dent in it. Mike finished what she couldn’t.

They had an American honeymoon at the hotel for a couple of days. Then they took a cab to the train station. Mike bought tickets. He hadn’t made much in his Army time, but he’d spent even less. He had plenty of money for now. Once he’d got the tickets, he sent one more wire.

By dumb luck, the train left in less than an hour. They went to their seats. The roomy car and big, snorting engine impressed Midori, too. She squashed her nose against the window as the train pulled out. After they left town and got out into the open, she mashed it even tighter.

“So much space!” she breathed after a while. “So much! I knew America was wide, but I had no idea how wide. Our generals must have been crazy to think they could fight so much.”

She said the same kind of thing several more times as they rolled east. The more of America she saw, the bigger it seemed. The farther east they went, the colder it got, too, as they left the mild coastal climate behind. Snow, though, unlike broad open spaces with no people in them, Midori was used to.

They changed trains in Salt Lake City. Sunrise on the snow-covered salt flats outside of town was one of the most beautiful things Mike had ever seen. Midori was dozing, though, and he didn’t want to wake her.

From Utah, they went into Wyoming and crossed the Continental Divide. The prairie on the far side of the Rockies astonished the woman from Japan all over again. Then the conductor called, “Casper! All out for Casper!”

“That’s us, babe,” Mike said. He and Midori hurried out.

John Dennison waited on the platform. He might not have aged a day in the ten years since Mike had last seen him. A slow smile stretched across his face as he stuck out his hand. “Howdy, scalp,” he said.

* * *

Joe Steele took the Presidential oath of office for the sixth time on a cool, cloudy day. Chief Justice Prescott Bush administered it. Bush was as pliable a Chief Justice as even Joe Steele could want. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was friendly and gregarious and smart enough not to say no to the man who’d appointed him.

At the lectern, the President fumbled with the text of his latest inaugural address. Charlie watched from the bleachers behind the lectern. These days, he always wondered how well Joe Steele would get through a public event. Sometimes he was fine. Sometimes, he wasn’t.

Today, he pulled himself together. It wasn’t a great speech, but he never gave great speeches. He gave speeches that got the job done. “Man’s power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of all ages,” he said. “We can turn rivers in their courses, level mountains to the plains. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create-and turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities. Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.

“The Reds know no god but force, no devotion but its use. They tutor men in treason. They feed upon the hunger of others. Whatever defies them, they torture, especially the truth.”

Charlie carefully didn’t wonder about accurate election returns from the last few years divisible by four, and from the ones divisible only by two. That took work, but he did it.

“Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark,” Joe Steele went on. “It confers a common dignity on the French soldier who dies in Indochina, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Japan. The strength of all free peoples lies in unity; their danger, in discord. We face the Red threat not with dread and confusion, but with confidence and conviction.”

He waited for applause, and he got it. He went on to talk about the need to keep America prosperous and to boost trade around the world. And he finished, “Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible. This is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, and with prayer to Almighty God.”

He stumbled a little turning away from the lectern. He caught himself before he fell, though. He was shaking his head as he went to the limousine that would take him back to the White House. Getting old had to be a terrible business. You could feel your grip slipping day by day, but you couldn’t do anything about it.

Charlie didn’t go to any of the inaugural balls and banquets. He never had. Esther didn’t enjoy them. More to the point, she didn’t enjoy the people she would run into at them. Going to a ball by himself wasn’t Charlie’s idea of fun. It wasn’t like election nights. His absence at the social gatherings might be noticed, but he wouldn’t be missed.

After January 20, things went back to normal in a hurry. With so many under his belt, one more inauguration day was only a formality for Joe Steele. He kept the lid on at home and dueled with Trotsky by proxy around the world. Trotsky was no spring chicken, either-he was the President’s age, give or take a few months.

“I’m waiting for him to drop dead,” Joe Steele said at a meeting of his aides. He had held more of those the past couple of years than he’d been in the habit of doing before. Chuckling, he went on, “That place will fall to pieces as soon as his hand comes off it.”

No one wondered out loud what might happen to this place as soon as Joe Steele’s hand came off it. Anyone who did wonder out loud about such things wouldn’t stick around long enough to learn the answer.

Joe Steele called another one of those meetings on a bright almost-spring day in early March. The general in charge of U.S. forces near the Japanese demilitarized zone had complained that his troops didn’t have enough ammunition in reserve if the North Japanese came over the border. Eisenhower seemed to think General Van Fleet was worrying over nothing.

Even though the President had summoned his henchmen, he had trouble acting interested in what they said. He kept frowning and raising his left hand to rub behind his ear. Finally, Charlie asked him, “Are you all right, sir?”

The frown deepened into a scowl. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” Joe Steele said. He started to bring up his left hand again, but never finished the gesture. His eyes widened, then slid shut. He slumped forward, his chin hitting the table hard.

His aides all jumped up, shouting and cursing. “Get him to the couch next door!” Scriabin said urgently. “And for Christ’s sake call Doc Pietruszka!”

Charlie helped carry the President out of the conference room. “Be careful,” Joe Steele muttered, half conscious at best. They laid him on the couch, as the Hammer had suggested. Mikoian loosened his tie. His breathing still sounded bad: slow and irregular and harsh. He looked bad, too. He was pale, almost gray. Charlie fumbled for his wrist to take his pulse. It felt weak and much too fast.

“What is it?” Kagan asked.

“I wasn’t counting, but I don’t think it’s good,” Charlie answered.

“What do we do now?” Mikoian said.

“Wait for Pietruszka and hope he can help,” Scriabin snapped.

By Mikoian’s expression, that wasn’t what he’d meant. “We’d better let Betty know,” he said.

Joe Steele’s wife waited with the aides, all of them shivering and numb, till Dr. Pietruszka got to the White House. It took less than fifteen minutes, but seemed like forever. Joe Steele had gone grayer yet by then. The aides described what had happened. The doctor took the President’s pulse and peeled back his eyelids to examine his pupils. “He’s had another stroke, a bad one this time,” he said. That answered whatever questions Charlie might have had about the headache a couple of years before.

“Is there any hope?” Mikoian asked.

Before Dr. Pietruszka could reply, Joe Steele groaned. He inhaled one more time. Then he simply-stopped. No one who saw him could doubt he was dead. To Charlie’s own horrified humiliation, he burst into tears.