A hellfire-brimstone-and-damnation minister preached the funeral oration. “We were robbed of our sun! We were robbed of our moon! Washington stole the stars from our sky!” he thundered. “God will smite those who foully slew him and those who plotted his destruction! They will go into the lake of burning lava and cook for all eternity! Huey Long will look down on them from heaven, and he will laugh to see their suffering. He will laugh, for he has been translated to bliss eternal!”
“That’s right!” someone in the crowd shouted, as if in a Holy Roller church.
“The mustachioed serpent in the White House will not escape, for the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” the preacher went on. He got more responses to that, and an angry rumble that made the hair on the back of Mike’s neck try to stand on end. “No, he will not get free of God’s ineffable judgment, for his lying charges against the lion of Louisiana were what set Senator Long’s death in motion. There is blood on his hands-blood, I say!”
Mike absently wondered how any serpent outside the Garden of Eden-even a mustachioed one-could have hands, bloody or not. The preacher went right on talking around accusing Joe Steele of ordering Long’s murder. Was that prudence or fear? Was there a difference?
Some in the crowd were less restrained. “String up that son of a bitch in the White House!” a man hollered, and it became a rolling, throbbing chorus. Mike had never seen a funeral turn into a riot, and hoped to keep his record intact.
They buried the Kingfish on the lawn in front of the Capitol. There were about enough flowers for a Rose Parade and a half. As Mike wrote up some of the more florid floral displays, he wondered how much all this was costing. Certainly in the hundreds of thousands, probably in the millions. It came straight out of the pockets of everybody in Depression-strapped Louisiana.
He had to wait till after midnight to file his story. Baton Rouge just didn’t have enough telegraph and telephone lines to cope with all the reporters who had descended on it. Once he’d sent it on to New York, he found himself three stiff drinks-which seemed easy enough to do-and went to bed.
The only reason he didn’t feel as if he was escaping a foreign country when his eastbound train left Louisiana was that he didn’t have to stop and show his passport and clear customs. Foreign country, nothing, he decided. He might as well have been on a different world.
Stella met him at Penn Station. “How’d it go?” she asked him.
He thought about it. “I’ll tell you,” he said at last. “Going to that funeral made me embarrassed to be against Joe Steele. Embarrassed by the company I was keeping, I mean.”
“Embarrassed enough to stop?”
Mike thought some more. Then he shook his head. “Nah. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And somebody’s gotta do it right, ’cause they sure weren’t down there.”
* * *
Joe Steele didn’t comment about Huey Long’s demise till the Senator from Louisiana was six feet under. Then he went on the radio to say, “I regret Senator Long’s death at the hands of another. The Justice Department will make every effort to work closely with Louisiana’s authorities to track down Senator Long’s killer and to give him the punishment he deserves. We have known since the days of Lincoln that assassination has no place in the American political system.”
“First Roosevelt, now Long, and he says that?” Esther demanded.
“He says it,” Charlie answered wearily. They’d gone round this barn before. “We don’t know for sure what happened either time.”
“Do I have to connect the dots for you?” his wife asked.
“You-” Charlie stopped.
He stopped because Joe Steele was talking again. The President had paused much longer than a professional radio performer would have; maybe he was fiddling with his pipe. “I also regret Senator Long’s untimely death because he was not able to answer the charges leveled against him. He would have received the hearing he deserved.”
“What does that mean?” Esther said.
Charlie hushed her this time-the President hadn’t stopped. “You will also know that I have been given a request for clemency on behalf of the four Supreme Court justices who confessed in an open hearing to treason on behalf of the Nazis. I am not a cruel man-”
“Ha!” Esther broke in.
“-but I find I cannot grant this request. If I did, it would only encourage others to plot against America. The sentence the military tribunal found fitting for their crimes will be carried out tomorrow morning. I hope I will not have to approve any more sentences like that, but I will do my Constitutional duty to keep the United States safe and secure. Thank you, and good night.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Esther said. “Now that Huey’s gone, he’s not wasting any time, is he?”
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Charlie had read a lot of Shakespeare. Not only did he enjoy it, but he thought it rubbed off on his writing.
Esther startled him by carrying on the quotation: “If the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch with his surcease success; that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here.” Giggling at his flummoxed expression, she added, “I was Lady Macbeth my senior year of high school. I can do it in Yiddish, too. Well, some of it-been a while.”
Before he could answer, the phone rang. When he picked it up, Lazar Kagan was on the other end of the connection. For a split second, Charlie wondered whether Kagan could do Macbeth in Yiddish. Then Joe Steele’s factotum said, “Do you want to witness the executions tomorrow?”
That was about the last thing Charlie wanted. He said “Yes” anyhow. This was part of history. Not even Aaron Burr had been convicted of treason. Kagan told him where the firing squads would do their jobs: across the Potomac in Arlington, between the Washington Airport and the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary. If you had to do something like that near the capital, they’d found a good place for it. The airport wasn’t busy, and only the occasional birdwatcher came out to peer at the ducks and egrets in the sanctuary.
Charlie didn’t like getting out there at five in the morning. Joe Steele’s officials took the idea of “shot at sunrise” too seriously, as far as he was concerned. But, fortified by three cups of sludgy coffee, he made it on time. Hitting your mark was as important for a reporter as for an actor.
Four squads of soldiers waited in front of posts driven into the soft ground. Charlie talked with the first lieutenant in charge of them. “One rifle in each squad has a blank cartridge,” the young officer explained. “The guys can think they didn’t kill anyone if they want to.”
A few minutes later, a khaki-painted panel truck pulled up. Soldiers took the four convicted traitors out of the back and shackled one to each post. They offered blindfolds; Butler declined his. Then they pinned a white paper circle to the center of each man’s coarse cotton prison shirt.
“Squads, take your marks!” the lieutenant said briskly. The soldiers did. It went off almost the way it would have in a movie. “Ready. . Aim. . Fire!” The rifles roared and flashed. McReynolds let out a gurgling shriek. The others slumped in silence.
The lieutenant waited a couple of minutes, then felt McReynolds for a pulse. “He’s gone. That’s good,” he said. “I would’ve had to finish him otherwise.” He patted the.45 on his belt. He checked the other justices, too. They were also dead. The soldiers who’d brought them wrapped their bodies in waterproof shelter halves and put them into the truck again.
“What will happen to them now?” Charlie asked.
“They’ll go back to their families for burial,” the lieutenant said. “I think there will be a request to keep services small and private. I don’t know what will happen if the families disobey.”
“Thanks.” Charlie wrote down the reply. Then he asked, “How do you feel about being here this morning?”