Coughlin died as well as a man could. He refused a blindfold. Where Joe Steele had quoted Lincoln, he quoted Luke: “‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,’” he said, nodding toward the soldiers with Springfields.
That made no difference in how things came out, of course. The men who’d brought him shackled him to the post. The lieutenant in charge of the firing squad ordered his soldiers into place. He went through the commands that were becoming familiar to Charlie: “Ready. . Aim. .”
Courage perhaps failing him at last, Father Coughlin began to gabble out a Hail Mary: “Ave-”
“Fire!” the lieutenant shouted, and the rifles barked together. Coughlin fell silent forever. Proving he’d studied Latin, too, the junior officer added, “Ave atque vale.”
And he gave Charlie a headline that ran from coast to coast: AVE ATQUE VOLLEY.
IX
Some bills go through Congress with people having conniptions about them even before they’re fully drafted. Others come in, as it were, under assumed names, so nobody understands what they’re all about till they take effect. Sometimes, people don’t fully realize what they’re all about till years after they take effect. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was one of those sleepers.
Another one-maybe on a smaller scale, but, then again, maybe not, too-was a proposal of Joe Steele’s with the innocuous, even soporific, title “A Bill Providing Labor for the Reconstruction of Facilities in States Adversely Affected by Weather During the Recent Economic Contraction.” It allowed the Federal government to draft prisoners out of local, state, and U.S. lockups and put them to work in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states building roads and bridges and dams and canals and pretty much anything else anybody thought needed building.
It passed the House before Mike noticed it at all. Even then, he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t read a column about it in the New York Times. The columnist seemed of two minds about the bill. No one can deny that a great deal of building and rebuilding needs to be done between Oklahoma and Utah, he wrote. Not only the Depression but also the storms that created the Dust Bowl have ravaged America’s midsection. Yet when the country as a whole finds chain gangs in the South distasteful, we may wonder at the wisdom of creating Federal chain gangs over such an enormous region. Would we not be better served by reducing this form of punishment than by expanding it?
Mike took the Times piece to his editor. “How come we haven’t done anything with this?” he asked.
Stan skimmed the column. “How come? I’ll tell you how come. ’Cause I never heard of it till right now. Go chase down the text of the bill and see what it’s all about. Once we find out what it really says, we’ll figure out what to do and whether we need to do anything.”
“Okay.” As far as Mike was concerned, any excuse for a trip to the New York Public Library was a good one. He always felt smarter every time he walked up the steps and passed between the two big library lions. Just because he felt smarter didn’t mean he was, but he liked the feeling even so.
He’d heard that something like 11,000 people used the enormous central building on Fifth Avenue every day. The library’s collection was grander than any but that of the Library of Congress. Mike knew where the shelf upon shelf of the Congressional Record lived. He pawed through indices in recent fascicules till he found the bill.
Naturally, it was written in governmentese, a dialect that thought it was English but was in fact a far more degraded tongue. Mike had to pan for meaning the way the Forty-Niners had panned for gold. He sifted through tons of mud and gunk and gravel to win a precious few nuggets. Notes filled page after page of his spiral-bound notebook.
When he put the fascicule back on the shelf, he was shaking his head. He paid another nickel to ride the subway back to the Post’s headquarters on West Street. The seventeen-story pile of buff brick was as familiar to him as his face in the mirror when he shaved every morning.
“Well?” Stan said when Mike walked into his office again.
“Well,” Mike said, “you know that German prison camp called Dachau, where Hitler throws anybody he doesn’t happen to like?”
“Personally, no. But I have heard of it,” Stan said. “So?”
“So if Joe Steele grabs this law and runs with it as far as he can go, he’ll be able to make as many prison camps as he wants, all over the Midwest. He can pull people out of jails and put them to work. I didn’t see anything in the bill that limits how long he can hold them and keep them busy. That may be in there-I went through it pretty fast. But if it is, I didn’t spot it.”
“How sure are you that it isn’t?” Stan Feldman asked.
“Oh, about ninety-five percent. It’s the kind of thing that ought to jump out at you if it’s the law.”
“All right, then. Write it up and we’ll get it out there. Maybe the Senate will come through for us, or maybe we’re only spinning our wheels. But if we don’t stand up and show people what’s going on, they almost deserve what they get.”
Mike banged away for all he was worth. Like his brother, he was a two-fingered typist. Also like his brother, he was as fast and accurate as most people who typed by touch. His headline was LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE LABOR CAMP?
Stan made one change in it-he turned the question mark into an exclamation point. He didn’t make many more changes in the story. The ambiguous one in the New York Times hadn’t gained much traction. The Post had a reputation for all kinds of things, but ambiguity wasn’t any of them.
“What I really want us to do is get people like Will Rogers and Walter Winchell talking about this bill,” Mike said. “If they can get folks mad at it or laughing at it, it won’t pass.”
“You hope it won’t,” his editor replied. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people-”
“Thank you, H. L. Mencken,” Mike broke in.
“-and that goes double for the Senate,” Stan finished, unfazed. “Well, we’re still in there swinging. Maybe the whole country will come to its senses and boot Joe Steele the hell out next year.”
“Maybe.” Mike did his best to sound as if he believed it. But he had the bad feeling his best might not be good enough.
* * *
Charlie was cranking out a story about the Daughters of the American Revolution when the phone on his desk rang. He reached for the telephone with something like relief. Writing what he was writing was about as creative as pouring cement for a new sidewalk. Very little brain was engaged doing either. Any excuse for a break seemed a good one.
“This is Charlie Sullivan,” he said.
“Scriabin, at the White House,” a harsh voice said in his ear. “Get over here.”
“On my way,” Charlie said. Scriabin hung up on him. Even the clunk sounded harsh. He wondered why he obeyed so automatically, but not for long. Vince Scriabin never sounded happy, but he rarely sounded as irked as he did right now. Something had struck a nerve on Pennsylvania Avenue. Charlie didn’t know that it had anything to do with Mike, but he had the feeling it might. Mike couldn’t resist taking potshots at the White House. One of these days, the White House would shoot back. Having seen firing squads in action lately, Charlie hoped like hell he wasn’t being literal.
“What’s cooking?” another desk man asked as he grabbed his fedora.
“Something at the White House,” Charlie asked. “Dunno what yet. I’ll find out when I get there.”
The guards at the entrance were expecting him. “Scriabin said you’d be coming,” one said. If the Hammer impressed him, he hid it well. He’d seen aides come and go before. “Head straight for his office. He’s waiting for you.”