Joe Steele

V

During the special session, Joe Steele fed bills to the leaders of the House and Senate one after another. After the brief pause at nationalizing the banks, those bills went through, lickety-split-the advantage of winning an election by a landslide, and the advantage of putting the fear of God (or at least of embarrassment) into Representatives and Senators. More new laws regulated Wall Street. They tried to make sure financiers’ foibles didn’t send the economy crashing down in ruins again. Bills regulating banks did their best to keep the bankers from lending money they didn’t have.

Charlie Sullivan got calluses on the tips of his index fingers banging out stories about the start of the President’s Four Year Plan. He had plenty to write about. Every day, Joe Steele seemed to sign a bill that would have been a good year’s work in ordinary times. On a lively day, he’d sign two or three bills like that.

The country’s never going to be the same seemed to be the theme of the special session. Bills regulated what management could do to labor. More bills set out how labor could and couldn’t dicker with management. There were massive public-works programs. Roads, canals, tunnels, airstrips. . Joe Steele had swarms of hungry men-and not a few hungry women-eager to dig in with a shovel or swing a pick in exchange for three square meals, a place to sleep, and a little cash in their pockets now and then.

Foreclosures and dust storms meant big stretches of farmland in the Midwest lay idle. Joe Steele’s bill set up community farms on abandoned land. People lived on the land together, worked it all together, and shared whatever they got from the crops they raised. The Republicans asked how that was any different from what was going on in Russia.

Joe Steele went on the radio to answer them. “Some people would rather keep the country hungry and farmers out of work,” he said. “If you want to see food on the table and men proud of what they do, let your Senators and Representatives know about it.” The people who listened to him must have done that, because the farm bill passed with all the others.

After it did, Charlie took a few days off so he could go back up to New York and marry Esther Polgar. Mike was his best man. At the reception, Mike asked him, “Do you really like that SOB so much? I swear to God, he murdered Roosevelt to get the nomination.”

“If you can prove it, I’ll worry about it then,” Charlie answered. “In the meantime, he’s doing the country good. People have hope again. When Hoover was sitting there twiddling his thumbs, everybody just wanted to lay down and die.”

“Lie down,” Mike said automatically.

Charlie thumbed his nose at him. “You didn’t put on that monkey suit to be my copy editor.”

Mike laughed, but not for long. “One of the reasons nobody can prove anything is that a lot of the paperwork’s gone and disappeared. That tells you something right there, or it does if you’re not a cheerleader for the bum in the White House.”

“I’m no cheerleader, dammit.” Charlie wasn’t kidding around any more, either. “I watched Mikoian on the convention floor when news came of the fire in Albany. He almost dropped dead. Nobody’s that good an actor.”

“And you heard Scriabin order it, too.”

“I heard Scriabin on the phone talking about something. I don’t know what any more than you do. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

Mike took a deep breath, blew it out, and then took another one. “Okay. It’s your wedding. I don’t want to fight with you on your big day. But it sure seems you’re banging Joe Steele’s drum for him with those stories you keep cranking out.”

“The bills are important. They’ll help clean up the mess we’re in. I don’t care if the Devil wrote them. They’re still good bills.”

“Who says the Devil didn’t?” Mike said. Charlie threw up his hands and went over to the bar for another bourbon. He didn’t want to fight with his brother, either, not on a day like this.

Esther had a fresh drink in her hand, too. “What were you and Mike going on about?” she asked.

“Nothing that has anything to do with you, babe,” he said, and kissed her. “Just dumb old politics.”

“He really can’t stand the President, can he? That’s so funny-it’s not like he’s a Republican or anything.”

“He doesn’t trust him,” Charlie said, which was putting it mildly. To his relief, the band Esther’s folks had hired started going through its paces. He gulped his bourbon and led Esther out onto the dance floor. “C’mon, Mrs. Sullivan. Let’s cut a rug.” If he was dancing, he didn’t have to think about his brother or Joe Steele or anything else.

“Mrs. Sullivan. I like that.” Esther smiled at him. She spread the fingers of her left hand so the tiny diamond in her wedding ring sparkled. “I’ve got to get used to it, but I like it.”

“You better get used to it. You’ll be wearing it the next fifty or sixty years.” He leaned close to whisper in her ear: “And tonight you won’t be wearing anything else.” She squeaked and made as if to hit him, but they were grinning at each other.

They honeymooned at Niagara Falls. It was not too far and not too expensive. Charlie didn’t much care where they went. He didn’t plan on seeing much besides the hotel room they’d rented any which way. He and Esther did finally go to the Falls the day before they were supposed to head back to New York City and Charlie to continue to Washington and to find a bigger apartment than the cramped place he’d had up till then.

The Falls were impressive. Damned if he’d admit it, Charlie spoke to his new wife in a mock-gruff growl: “I wouldn’t even know what this place looks like if you hadn’t worn me out.”

This time, Esther did hit him. No one around them paid any attention. A lot of the people gaping at the Falls were young couples too tired from honeymooning to do any more of it right that minute. One of these days before too long, Charlie figured, Mike and Stella would come here, too. He wondered how much of Niagara they’d see.

* * *

“Ladies and gentlemen, live from the White House in Washington, D.C., the President of the United States.” The radio announcer had the rich, slightly plummy tones of an actor who’d spent a lot of time in first-rate vaudeville and a few short stretches in Broadway flops.

Charlie noticed the hamminess but didn’t fuss about it. At least half the leading radio announcers sounded like this guy. Besides, Charlie wasn’t inclined to fuss about anything then. He liked the new apartment. He could walk through the living room with a good chance of evading the shin-eating coffee table. More space did make a difference. He could grab Esther and go to bed with her whenever he felt like it, too. That also made a difference, one much more pleasant than that which came from a larger front room.

“This is Joe Steele.” The President didn’t sound like a pretty good actor. He sounded like someone who should have been a tough guy but had somehow ended up with an education instead. His voice held a faint rasp. Some of that might have come from the pipe he smoked. The rest he would have had anyway. Anybody who didn’t hear the don’t-mess-with-me in his voice wasn’t listening hard enough. To Charlie, it was as unmistakable as the warning buzz of a rattlesnake’s tail.

“I want to talk to you tonight about my bill for electrifying the Tennessee Valley,” Joe Steele said. “It’s an important bill. It will build dams up and down the river. The dams will give thousands of people jobs for years. They will stop the floods that have drowned the lowlands in those parts every so often since only Indians lived there. And the electricity the dams generate will bring millions of people into the twentieth century.”

The President paused to cough. “Only when the farmer is surrounded by electrical wiring will he fully become an American citizen. The biggest hope and weapon for our country is industry, and making the farmer part of industry. It is impossible to base construction on two different foundations, on the foundation of large-scale and highly concentrated industry, and on the foundation of very fragmented and extremely backward agriculture. Systematically and persistently, we must place agriculture on a new technical basis, and raise it to the level of an industry.”

He coughed again. He used that cough, Charlie realized, as a kind of punctuation mark to show when he was moving from one idea to another. “This is also the logic behind my new system of community farms. But in the Tennessee Valley, some men have grown rich by keeping most farmers poor and backward. They are trying to bottle up the bill authorizing the dams and the electrical industry so they can hold on to their control of them. I wanted to talk to you on the radio tonight to ask you to urge your Representative and Senator to support the Tennessee Valley electrification project. This is your government. Its leaders have to listen to your will. If they don’t, we will throw them on the ash-heap of history, where they belong. Thank you, and good night.”

“That was President Joe Steele, speaking from the White House,” the announcer said. “We’ll be right back after this important message.”

The important message plugged a brand of coffee that, to Charlie, tasted like Mississippi mud. Lighting a Chesterfield, he asked Esther, “What did you think of the speech, sweetie?”

“Let me have one of those, please,” she said. He tossed her the pack. After she lit up, she went on, “I noticed something interesting at the end.”

“Like what?”

“He said ‘your government.’ He said ‘the leaders will listen to your will.’ But then he said we would throw them out if they didn’t. Not you would-we would.”

“Are you sure?” Charlie asked. “I didn’t catch that.”

“I’m positive.” Esther nodded emphatically.

“Okay,” Charlie said. His wife was nobody’s dope. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her-well, no, she was pretty enough that he might have wanted something to do with her, but he wouldn’t have wanted to marry her-if she had been. He did a little thinking himself. “Probably just political talk. He doesn’t want people going after Senators by themselves or anything. That’s too much like the Bonus Army.”

“Maybe.” Esther’s cheeks hollowed as she sucked in smoke. She didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced, but she didn’t argue about it, either. She was easy to get along with. Charlie tried to be the same way, but he had more trouble with it than his wife seemed to.

Whatever Joe Steele meant by switching between you and we, the speech did what he wanted it to do. It scared the living bejesus out of the people in Congress who were trying to block the bill.

That amused Lazar Kagan. The President’s moonfaced aide and Charlie met for lunch at a little Italian restaurant a few blocks from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Charlie ordered spaghetti and meatballs; Kagan chose lasagna. As they started to eat, Joe Steele’s underling said, “I would have got the spaghetti, too, only I never have been able to twirl it worth a damn.”

Charlie eyed him. He decided Kagan wasn’t kidding. “It’s not that important,” he said. “You could just cut up the noodles and eat ’em with your fork. Plenty of people do-it’s easier. I sure wouldn’t care.”

“You might not,” Kagan said, “but the waiter would laugh at me behind my back. So would the dago who runs this joint. If you can’t do it so it looks good, you should do something else instead.”

That made Charlie eye him again. Kagan seemed perfectly serious. “Is that the kind of thing you tell the President?” Charlie asked, a hint of laughter in his voice so Kagan could laugh, too, and tell him he was full of baloney.

But the Jew nodded. “Not that I need to tell him very often. He’s the one who taught me that. Take the Tennessee Valley bill. The President wanted people to let their Congressmen hear from them, right?”

“Sure.” Charlie nodded, too. “So?”

“So. . You haven’t heard this from me, you know. This doesn’t go in your next story. This is background.”

“Sure,” Charlie said again, not without some reluctance. Yes, you heard things off the record. That was part of the business. If you broke one source’s trust, you risked losing all your sources. If your source had the President’s ear, you risked more than that. Sometimes you had to take those risks. More often, you were a sponge. You soaked up what you heard. It might flavor what you wrote, but it wouldn’t show up there.

Lazar Kagan ate lasagna as daintily as a cat might have. Dabbing at his full lips with a napkin, he said, “So we make sure the reactionaries hear from the people. The people don’t have good handwriting and they don’t spell very well, but they sure know what they want. They want dams and electricity in the Tennessee Valley, that’s what.”

“Wait a minute.” Charlie stopped, a twirled forkful of spaghetti in tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese halfway to his mouth. “Are you telling me you cooked up some of those letters?”

“I didn’t say that. You said that,” Kagan answered, which was what any sensible official would have said in place of yes.

“Well, no wonder it’s background.” Charlie would have been more surprised had he been more shocked. Yes, it was a cheap trick. Yes, it was a sleazy trick. No, it wasn’t a new trick. The ancient Greeks had probably used it, scratching their messages on potsherds with nails. Charlie found the next question to ask: “So how’s it working?”

“Just fine, thank you very much. They’ll report the bill out of committee day after tomorrow. And that isn’t background. You can use it.”

“And help make it come true.” Charlie knew the mysterious ways in which politics often moved.

“Well, maybe. With a little luck.” Kagan’s voice was bland.

“Why are you telling me?” Charlie asked.

“The President likes you,” Lazar Kagan said. When Charlie let out a startled yip of laughter, the Jew nodded. “He does. He thinks you give him a fair shake. That’s all he wants, for people to give him a fair shake. He wishes your brother would do the same thing.”

Which meant what, exactly? Make your brother come around and we’ll keep feeding you good stories? Something like that, anyway. Carefully, Charlie said, “Mike writes what he writes, that’s all. We quit trying to make each other do stuff about the time we started to shave.”

“I have a brother, too. He’s a tailor in Bakersfield. So I know what you mean,” Kagan said. “I was just telling you what Joe Steele thought.”

“Thanks. It’s good to know,” Charlie said, which was bound to be true in all kinds of ways.

* * *

The Tennessee Valley program was the last important bill to go through Joe Steele’s special session of Congress. Almost everything the President proposed passed. Although none of Joe Steele’s aides would admit it, even off the record, Charlie had the feeling that the few bills which failed were ones the President offered just so they could fail. That was a mark of a smart, sly politico-give the lawmakers a few things they could shoot down and they wouldn’t worry so much about the rest.

And what did pass was enough and then some. Wall Street operators screeched that the new rules squeezed them like anacondas. So did construction companies in the road- and dam-building businesses. So did union bosses who didn’t fancy federally ordered cooling-off periods interrupting their strikes.

You could tell whose ox was being gored by the bellows that came from it. A gored ox might gore back. A gored construction-company executive reached for a lawyer instead. That produced less blood and more noise.

Almost before the ink dried on some of Joe Steele’s legislative signatures, Federal judges started ruling the bills unconstitutional. Naturally, Federal lawyers appealed those rulings. Charlie had never found Federal lawyers particularly appealing, but he knew where they got their marching orders.

So did they, and also which side their bread was buttered on. Anyone who worked for Joe Steele could see the benefits of keeping him happy. The appeals that came out of the Attorney General’s office were uncommonly vehement and uncommonly urgent. The programs passed in Joe Steele’s special Congressional session zoomed up toward the Supreme Court as if shot from a battlewagon’s big guns.

And the Supreme Court listened to arguments for both sides, and then it deliberated. Since the turn of the century, the Democrats had had only eight years to appoint Supreme Court justices. The rest of the time, the White House lay in Republican hands. Herbert Hoover might have lost the latest election, but the Supreme Court didn’t care. To a good many of the justices enshrined in their chamber in the Capitol, even Hoover was a dangerous liberal.

Which, in their eyes, made Joe Steele. . well, what, exactly? Not Trotsky, maybe. Not the Antichrist, maybe. Then again, maybe not. To say the Supreme Court was suspicious of any changes to the economic life of the country beggared the power of language.

The justices tossed out one of his relief bills: they said it exceeded the Federal government’s authority. They said the same thing about the bill that regulated Wall Street. And they said the same thing about the one that limited management’s ability to coerce labor.

Charlie dutifully hammered out stories about the Supreme Court decisions. And he hammered out stories about the President’s reaction to the Supreme Court decisions. He had access to Joe Steele’s closest cronies. He had it, and he used it.

“No, the President isn’t happy,” Stas Mikoian told him. “The President doesn’t like it when nine old fools try to torpedo the recovery.”

“Can I quote you on that?” Charlie asked.

Mikoian started to nod, but checked himself. “I’m afraid you’d better not,” he said regretfully. “If it gets back to the nine old fools, they’ll really show the President how hard they can screw him.”

Since Charlie was sure Stas had that straight, he just clucked and said, “That isn’t how they teach you things work in your civics class.”

“Things in a civics class work fine,” Mikoian answered. “But we aren’t in a civics class right now. We’re in Washington, dammit. And so are those bastards in the black robes.”

When Charlie talked with Vince Scriabin at the White House a couple of weeks later-right after the Supreme Court said the Federal government had no business sticking its snoot into banking regulation, either-the little man they called the Hammer was even blunter than Mikoian had been. “The justices want to bang heads with Joe Steele?” he said. “They’d better have harder heads than I think they do-that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

“What can the President do?” Charlie asked. “The Supreme Court is a separate branch of government. Until they start dropping dead so he can choose his own men, he can’t make them call his laws constitutional.”

Scriabin leaned back in his swivel chair. It squeaked. The lightbulb in the ceiling fixture flashed off the oval lenses of his wire-framed spectacles. For a few seconds, it turned them big and yellow, so that he might have had an owl’s fierce, predatory eyes rather than his own. He could have been preening when he scratched his closely trimmed little mustache. “Nobody elected them,” he said in a deadly voice. “If they think they can block what the people want, they’d better think again.”

He didn’t mean what the people want. He meant what Joe Steele wants. The two weren’t quite the same, but Charlie could see that Scriabin would never admit there was a difference. Anything Joe Steele wanted, the Hammer wanted, too. Anything at all.

“What can Joe Steele do?” Charlie asked again. He didn’t think the Capitol would go up in flames and barbecue Charles Evans Hughes and his robed comrades. It crossed his mind, but he didn’t believe it. Mike would, he thought.

When Vince Scriabin leaned toward Charlie once more, he looked like a small, mild-mannered man, not something that hunted through the night on silent wings. “He’ll take care of it,” the aide said, and his voice held complete assurance. “Nobody stops Joe Steele, not when he gets going.”

That seemed to be the end of that interview. As Charlie was leaving the White House, he paused to take his umbrella from the stand-it was raining outside. In came a jowly young man whose square head and underslung jaw reminded Charlie of a mastiff. His face was vaguely familiar, but Charlie couldn’t hang a name on him. Whoever he was, he wore a sharp fedora and a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his stocky frame.

“Excuse me,” he murmured as he closed his own umbrella and thrust it into the polished brass stand. His voice was surprisingly high. He hurried off to whatever appointment he had.

“Who is that fellow?” Charlie asked Scriabin.

Joe Steele’s aide smiled a thin smile. “Believe it or not, his name is Hoover.”

“Ripley wouldn’t believe that!” Charlie said with a snort.

“It’s true anyway. He’s an investigator in the Justice Department. He’s smarter than you’d think from his mug, too. The only thing I wonder about sometimes is whether he’s too smart for his own good.”

He had to be the guy Mikoian had mentioned a little while before. His look was right-bulldog came closer than mastiff-and so was his job. “What’s he doing here today?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know.” Scriabin shrugged narrow shoulders. “The President wanted to see him. When Joe Steele sends for you, you come.” That last was certainly true. Saying no to Joe Steele was like saying no to a bulldozer. You could say it, sure, but how much good would that do you? As for Scriabin’s shrug, Charlie took it with a grain of salt about the size of the Polo Grounds. What was Scriabin there for, if not to know his boss’ mind?

Of course, knowing it and talking about it were also two different things. Even talking about it with a reporter in the White House’s good graces might not be what the President wanted. Evidently it wasn’t, because Vince Scriabin kept his thin lips buttoned tight. With a shrug of his own, Charlie walked out into the rain. He popped the umbrella open. It was coming down harder than it had when he got there.

* * *

Charlie soaked up the last of the gravy from the beef stew on his plate with the heel of a loaf of bread. He smiled across the table at Esther. “That was mighty good,” he said, patting his belly to show he meant it.

“I’ve done worse,” she agreed.

“Hey, you’re getting the hang of it,” Charlie said. Her cooking had been on the catch-as-catch-can side when they got married. Since what he’d called cooking was heating up a can of hash, he couldn’t get too critical.

“It’s not hard. It’s not nearly as hard as running an office,” she said-she’d been an administrative assistant before they tied the knot. “It just takes practice, that’s all, like anything else.” She lit an after-dinner cigarette and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “Charlie?”

“What’s cookin’, babe?” He knew something was by the way she said his name.

“Would you mind if I look for part-time office work here?”

He frowned. “I’m bringing in enough money. We won’t put the Du Ponts outa business any time soon, but we’re doing okay.”

“I know we are,” she said quickly. “It’s not for the money, not really, even though a little extra never hurt anybody. It’s just. . I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m rattling around the apartment when you aren’t home, and you aren’t home a lot of the time.”

She’d held her job, held it and done it well, when millions and millions of people lost theirs. If she hadn’t done it well, she would have lost it. She might have lost it no matter how well she did it. She was used to going out and taking care of things on her own. But even if she was. . “I don’t want people thinking I can’t support you,” Charlie said.

“It wouldn’t be like that. Honest to Pete, it wouldn’t,” Esther said. “Before the market crashed, people might’ve thought that way. Not any more, though. Everybody knows you latch on to anything you can get, ’cause you may be out of work again tomorrow.”

“You really want to do this.”

She heard that it wasn’t a question. “Yeah, I do. I’m all by myself here. My friends are back in New York. I’d like to get to know people, not just sit in the chair and read sappy novels and listen to the radio all day.”

If he told her no, she’d do things his way, or he thought she would. But she wouldn’t be happy about it. He didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to have the little gray cells to figure that out. Right now, the apartment probably seemed like a little gray cell to her. Telling her she should stay in it would only cause trouble down the line. Charlie didn’t like trouble, not nearly so much as Mike did. He never had.

And so he sighed, not too loud and not too sorrowfully, and said, “Okey-doke. Go ahead and do it. But when you land something, try and get home in time to have dinner on the table for me. Deal?”

“Deal!” She must have expected him to tell her no, because she jumped at the bargain.

Not only did she jump at it, she celebrated it by fixing gin-and-tonics for them. The gin was strong, but that was as much as it had going for it. Charlie sighed again, on a different note this time. “Tastes like it came from somebody’s bathtub-or his chemistry set.”

“I bet it did,” Esther said. “That bottle’s from before Repeal. Still not much good stuff on the shelves.”

“What there is is expensive, too.” Charlie took another sip. “Well, we can drink this. When it’s gone, we’ll get more, that’s all.”

“I don’t mind the radio so much when I’ve got company,” Esther said. “After I do the dishes, we can listen for a while, have another drink while we do.”

“And who knows what’ll happen then, huh?” He leered at her.

She glanced back out of the corner of her eye. “Who knows?”

Some nice, romantic music would have been great. But when Charlie turned on the set and the tubes had warmed up, what he got were commercials for soap and shampoo and then one of those smooth-voiced announcers going, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast so we may bring you an address from the President of the United States.”

“What’s he going to talk about?” Esther asked.

“Beats me,” Charlie answered.

He would have gone on from there, but the President’s voice came out of the radio: “This is Joe Steele.” He didn’t sound smooth. He never did, but tonight even less so than usual. “I need to talk to you tonight because the country has a problem. There are nine old men sitting in a dusty old chamber in the Capitol who think they have the power to do whatever they want with the hopes and dreams of Americans everywhere.”

“Uh-oh,” Esther said.

“Yeah.” Charlie couldn’t have put it better himself. When Joe Steele went after something or somebody, he didn’t do it halfway.

“You elected the new Congress-you did, the people of the United States,” the President went on. Charlie thought he heard cold fury in the voice coming out of the radio. Or Joe Steele might just have been a good actor. How could you know for sure? “You elected the new Congress, and you elected me. I’ve done everything I know how to do to try to get our country back on its feet again. Congress-well, most of Congress-has helped me by passing the laws that set up my Four Year Plan.”

Even when he was mostly talking about something else, he couldn’t resist throwing a dart or two at the conservatives the election hadn’t swept out of Washington. Whatever else you did, you didn’t want to get on his bad side.

“But no one elected the nine old fools in their black robes who sit in their musty room and dare to stop the people’s progress,” Joe Steele growled. “Why are they doing that? What can they want? They are hurting the country. They are wrecking the country. How could any loyal American say that the laws we need to fix what is broken go against the Constitution? There has to be something wrong, something horribly wrong, with anyone who would do that. I don’t know what it is, but I tell you this-I’m going to find out.”

He kept on for a while after that, but he was firing at the same targets over and over. When he signed off, the announcer sounded faintly stunned and more than faintly relieved to turn the airwaves over to a jazz band.

Charlie and Esther stared at each other. “Wow,” Charlie said.

“Wow is right,” Esther said. “You could see what he was doing when he went after the Congressmen who were stalling his bills. But what’s the point to hammering the Supreme Court like that?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie answered. “Joe Steele said it himself-nobody elected them. If people write them angry letters, you think they’ll care? Not likely. The only way justices leave the Supreme Court is feet first. Once they’re there, they’re there. The rest of the country’s stuck with ’em.”

“They could-waddayacallit-impeach them,” Esther said. But even she didn’t sound as if she believed it would happen.

Neither did Charlie. “You practically have to catch somebody taking bribes on his front lawn to get rid of him that way. The Supreme Court justices aren’t doing anything like that, and Joe Steele’s got to know it. It’s politics, that’s all it is. You can’t impeach somebody just on account of politics.”

“Andrew Johnson,” Esther said. “I remember from high school history.”

“Uh-huh. But they couldn’t throw him out of office, and they had at least as big a bulge in Congress as Joe Steele does.”

“Maybe Joe Steele thinks that, if the justices find out how many people can’t stand them, they’ll start taking a different look at the Constitution,” Esther said.

“It could happen. It makes more sense than anything else I can think of-I’ll tell you that,” Charlie said. “But it could backfire on him, too. They’re liable to dig in their heels and toss out all of his laws just because they’re his. He’s got pride, but so do they.”

“Nothing we can do about it except try not to get stuck in the gears when they grind together,” Esther said.

“No, there’s one more thing I can do,” Charlie said.

“Like what?”

“Talk to the White House people tomorrow and see if they know what Joe Steele has in mind. Scriabin didn’t the last time I was there-or if he did, he didn’t let on. He’s got the deadest pan you ever saw. But I’ll see what I can pry out of Kagan and Mikoian. Mikoian could be a regular guy if he didn’t keep looking over his shoulder so much.”

“That’s tomorrow,” Esther said archly. “What do you intend to do tonight?”

“The wench grows bold,” Charlie said. “I expect I’ll think of something.” And he did.

He had less luck when he called at the White House the next morning. That Justice Department investigator named Hoover was just leaving as Charlie walked in. Hoover smiled at him on the way out. Had Charlie been a kid, that smile would have scared him out of a year’s growth. Hoover had one of those faces that seemed only a little south of ordinary in repose or angry. When he smiled, he made you want to run away.

Charlie said as much to Stas Mikoian. He made Mikoian laugh. Nothing frightening about Mikoian when he did; he was handsome in a swarthy, strong-nosed way. “We don’t work with Hoover because he’s pretty,” Stas said.

“Why do you work with him, then?” If he gave Charlie an opening, Charlie’d run through it.

“Because he’s one of those people who can take care of things,” Mikoian replied.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What it says,” answered jesting Stas, and would not stay for more questions.