“Sir, I’m just doing my job. That’s how you have to look at things, isn’t it? They gave me the orders. I followed them. Tomorrow I’ll do something else.”
* * *
As Mike had been best man for Charlie, so Charlie was best man for Mike. Esther was one of Stella’s bridesmaids, along with two of Stella’s sisters and a first cousin. From what Mike told Charlie, Stella’s folks had grumbled about a Jewish bridesmaid at a Catholic wedding, but he and Stella managed to sweeten them up. Charlie didn’t tell Esther anything about that, and Stella’s father and mother stayed polite to her, if not exactly warm. That was their good luck. She would have gone off like a bomb if they’d said anything about her religion.
The reception was at a Knights of Columbus hall two doors down from the church. Since Stella’s folks were footing the bill, the chow was Italian. So was the band. One of the trumpeters and a sax player looked as if they might be made men. Since Charlie was there as brother of the groom and not as a reporter, he didn’t ask them. He made a point of not asking them, in fact.
He toasted Mike and Stella with Chianti. “Health, wealth, long life, happiness, kids!” he said. You couldn’t go wrong with those. Everybody raised a cheer and everybody drank.
After Stella mashed wedding cake in Mike’s face, he came over to Charlie and said, “What do you think our chances are?” His cheeks were flushed. He’d been drinking pretty hard, and not just Italian red wine.
“Hey, you’ve got a job and a pretty girl,” Charlie answered. “That puts you ahead of most people right there.”
“Till I go up in front of one of those goddamn treason tribunals, anyway,” Mike said.
“Mike. . This isn’t the time or the place,” Charlie said.
“Everybody says that. Everybody says that all the stinkin’ time,” Mike snarled. “And everybody’ll keep on saying it till we’re as bad off and as much under the gun as the poor bastards in Italy or Germany or Russia.”
Charlie held a full glass of wine. He wanted to pour it over his brother’s hot head, but people would talk. In lieu of starting trouble, he said, “Honest to God, Mike, it’s not gonna come to anything like that.”
“No, huh? Ask Roosevelt what he thinks. Ask Huey Long, too. Huey was as crazy as the people who liked him, and that’s really saying something. But what did it get him in the end? A cemetery plot on the front lawn on his gaudy, overpriced, oversized capitol.”
“A cemetery plot is all any of us gets in the end,” Charlie said quietly.
“Yeah, yeah.” Mike sounded impatient-and drunk as an owl. “But you want to get it later, not sooner. Joe Steele wanted Huey to get it sooner, and the Kingfish, he’s in the cold, cold ground.”
“They still haven’t found who shot Long.” Charlie felt as if he were reprising scenes he’d already played with Esther.
“Huey’s storm troopers and the Louisiana cops, they couldn’t find their ass with both hands,” Mike said with a fine curl of the lip. “And when Joe Steele’s Department of Justice is down there giving them a boost, you think anybody’ll go pointing fingers back at the big chief in the White House?” He cackled laughter bitter enough to make people stare at him.
“Mike, what I think is, you’re at your wedding. You need to pay more attention to Stella and less attention to Steele.”
“Doggone it, Charlie, nobody wants to pay attention to what Steele’s doing to the country. Everybody looks the other way because the economy seems a little better than it did right after the crash. Not good, but a little better. And Steele grabs a bit of power here and a bit more there, and pretty soon he’ll hold all the strings. And everybody else’ll have to dance when he pulls them.”
“Why don’t you go dance, man, no strings attached? Like I told you, that’s what you’re here for. If you want to go after Joe Steele some more when you’re back from your honeymoon, okay, you’ll do that. In the meantime, enjoy yourself. Dum vivimus, vivamus!”
“‘While we live, let us live.’ Good luck!” Mike said, but then, suddenly grinning, “I wonder what ever happened to Sister Mary Ignatia.”
“Nothing good, I hope,” Charlie said. The large, strong, stern nun was so old, Latin might have been her native language. She’d carried a ruler and inflicted the language and flattened knuckles on both of them.
“Who was the one with the mustache? Was that Sister Bernadette?” Mike asked.
“No-Sister Susanna.” Charlie happily chattered about teachers from years gone by. His brother was definitely buggy when it came to Joe Steele. Anything that distracted him from the President looked good to Charlie.
When Charlie went out onto the parquet dance floor with Esther a little later, she asked him, “What was going on there? Looked like Mike was getting kind of excited.”
“Maybe a little.” If Charlie minimized for his wife, he might be able to minimize for himself, too. “But I managed to calm him down.” That, he was pretty sure about. Mike was dancing with Stella, and seemed happy enough.
“More politics?” Esther asked.
“Yeah. He looks at Joe Steele the same way you do, only more so. You know that.”
He hoped he would get Esther to back away, but his wife was made of stern stuff. “There’s a difference,” she said.
“Like what?”
“If I don’t like the President, what do I do? I talk to you. If Mike doesn’t like him, he writes a story that says so, and thousands-maybe millions-of people know about it. Joe Steele knows about it, and so do his men.”
“They may know about it, but what can they do about it? We still have freedom of the press in this country,” Charlie said.
Esther didn’t answer. She let him imagine all the things someone who didn’t like what a reporter had to say might do. He was sure the things he imagined were worse than anything she might have said. He’d always had more imagination than was good for him.
So, like a man flicking a light switch, he deliberately turned it off. Sometimes you did better taking the world as you found it and not troubling yourself about moonshine and vapors and ghosties and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night. You couldn’t do anything about those even if they happened to be real. Mike and Stella would be going bump in the night tonight. Charlie could hope they had a ton of fun doing it. He could, and he did.
Mike seemed to be playing the same kind of mental games with himself. He didn’t talk about Joe Steele any more during the reception. He laughed and joked and looked like somebody having a good time at his wedding. If he wasn’t, he didn’t let anyone else see that. With any luck, he didn’t let himself see it, either.
Stella seemed to be having a good time, too. But when Charlie danced with her, she whispered in his ear: “Don’t let Mike do anything too crazy, okay?”
“How am I supposed to stop him?” Charlie whispered back. “And why don’t you take care of it? You’re his wife now, remember, not just his girlfriend.”
“That doesn’t mean I know anything about newspapers. You do. He has to take you seriously.”
Charlie laughed out loud, there on the dance floor. “I’m his little brother. He hasn’t taken me seriously since the day I was born. If you think he’ll start now, I’m sorry, but you’re out of luck.”
“I married him. That makes me lucky. I want to stay lucky for a while, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure.” Charlie left it there. Everybody wanted to stay lucky for a while. Just because you wanted it didn’t mean you would get it. Hardly anybody managed that. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you pointed out to a bride on her wedding day. Chances were she’d see for herself all too soon.
* * *
Andy Wyszynski ordered Father Coughlin brought back to Washington, D.C., for his hearing before a military tribunal. He scheduled the hearing for the lobby of the District Court Building: the place where the Supreme Court Four had met their fate.