“He would?” Charlie wondered how much trouble he was in. Joe Steele was not the most forthcoming President the country had ever had. He seldom talked for the sake of talking.
Kagan led Charlie from the press room to the President’s Study, the oval chamber above the Blue Room. Joe Steele sat behind a massive desk made from California redwood with a granite top. The President puffed vigorously on his pipe. He’d had to do without it while he was watching soldiers and musicians squelch by. No one could have kept it lit out there.
“Hello, Sullivan,” Joe Steele said, voice friendly but eyes hooded as always.
“Mr. President,” Charlie said cautiously. He tried something more: “Good luck on your new term, sir.”
“Thank you. Thank you twice, in fact. You helped some with ‘The Matter with Kansas.’”
“It wasn’t mine, you know. I just hauled it out and used it.” Better I tell him myself, Charlie thought.
“Oh, yes.” Joe Steele nodded. Even relaxed and smoking, he radiated danger as a banked fire radiated heat. “But you did haul it out, and it stuck to Landon like a burr. One of the easiest ways to beat a man is to make him look ridiculous.”
“Yes, sir.” Charlie knew that, as any reporter did. But reporters didn’t make it sound clinical, the way Joe Steele had.
The President leaned forward, toward Charlie. “Yes, I have you to thank, to some degree. I do not thank your brother, though.” For a moment, the fire wasn’t banked, and the danger fairly blazed.
Gulping, Charlie said, “Mr. President, I don’t know what I can do about that.”
“No? Too bad.” Joe Steele made a small, flicking gesture with his left hand. Charlie left the study. Charlie, if you want to get right down to it, fled.
X
Even a President who wasn’t the most forthcoming did have to come forth now and again. Modern politics demanded it. If you stayed in Washington all the time, people would forget about you. Or, if they remembered, they would think you were hiding out there for a reason. Radio and newsreels helped some, but they couldn’t do it all. Real people had to see a real President, or else he might stop seeming real.
And so Joe Steele took a train from Washington to Chattanooga to celebrate the completion of one of the dams that would ease flooding in the Tennessee River Valley and bring electricity to millions who lived nearby. Charlie was one of the reporters who got invited to travel with him. The President. . noticed Charlie these days. As with the fellow who found himself tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, if not for the honor of the thing, Charlie would rather have walked.
He played poker and bridge with the other reporters on board-and with Mikoian and Scriabin. Mikoian played better bridge than poker. Vince Scriabin was a shark at both games: his expressionless face was good for all kinds of things. “The government doesn’t pay you enough?” Charlie groused after the Hammer squeezed out a small slam in diamonds.
“When it comes to money or power, is there ever such a thing as enough?” Scriabin replied. Not having a good answer for that one, Charlie kept his mouth shut.
Along with cards, Gone With the Wind killed time. Charlie had resisted since the novel came out the summer before, even though Esther went crazy for it along with the rest of the country. But a train ride, and especially one down into the South, left him with no more excuses. Nothing like a good, fat book to make you forget you were rattling down the rails. Unlike a deck of cards, a book wouldn’t even cost you money after you bought it.
And he did keep turning pages. He would have kept turning them had he been sitting in the overstuffed front-room rocking chair in his apartment. He could see why everybody had swallowed the book whole.
Well, almost everybody. He ate supper in the dining car sitting across the table from Stas Mikoian. He had Swiss steak, which could have been worse but also could have been better. As one of the colored stewards carried his plate away on a tray, he remarked, “I wonder what he thinks of Gone With the Wind.”
“I saw you were reading it,” Mikoian said. “I went through it at the end of last year, when I could come up for air after the election. She can write-no two ways about that.”
“She sure can. But what do you suppose Negroes think about it?”
Mikoian answered the question with another one: “What would you think, if you were a Negro?”
Charlie contemplated that. “I think I might want to punch Margaret Mitchell right in the snoot-only they’d string me up if I did.”
“Yes, they would,” Mikoian agreed. . sadly? “Segregation in Washington was an eye-opener for me when I came from California. For you, too, I’m sure, since you’re from New York City.”
“It’s strange, all right,” Charlie said. “After the Civil War, the South figured out that it had to let Negroes be free, but it didn’t have to let them be equal. And that’s where we’ve been ever since.”
“We are, yes,” Mikoian said. “Whether we still should be after all this time-that’s a different story.”
“Are you speaking for Joe Steele?” Charlie asked, pricking up his ears. He hadn’t been able to think of anything that would cost the President much of his enormous political clout. Trying to get equal rights for Negroes in the Deep South might turn the trick, though.
“No, just for Anastas Mikoian.” Joe Steele’s aide quickly shook his head. “I’m an Armenian, remember. In Armenia, my people were niggers to the Turks. It was wrong there, and it’s wrong here, too. Armenians, Negroes, Jews-it shouldn’t matter. We’re all human beings. We all deserve to be treated that way.”
“Won’t get any arguments from me,” Charlie said.
“That’s what draws people to the Reds, you know,” Mikoian went on. “If they really followed through on ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,’ they’d have something going for them. But they don’t, any more than the Nazis do. That’s one of the reasons Joe Steele hates Lenin and Trotsky so much. They just found themselves a new excuse to be tyrants. Instead of doing it in the name of one people like Hitler, they say they do it for all humanity-”
“-and they end up doing it to all humanity,” Charlie finished for him.
Mikoian flashed a smile. “That’s right. They do.”
“What about the people who say Joe Steele is doing the same thing to the USA that Lenin and Trotsky have done to Russia?” Charlie asked.
“They’re full of shit, that’s what,” Stas Mikoian said. Charlie must have blinked, because the Armenian let out a sour chuckle. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t I plain enough for you?”
“Oh, you might have been.” Other questions jumped up and down on the end of Charlie’s tongue as if it were a springboard: questions about Franklin Roosevelt, about Huey Long, about the Supreme Court, about Father Coughlin. They jumped up and down, yes, but they didn’t dive off. The swimming pool under that springboard had no water in it, not a drop. You’d smash into the concrete bottom, and you would break, and it wouldn’t.
* * *
With about 120,000 people in it, Chattanooga struck Charlie as a hick town. Then again, Washington also struck him as a hick town. When you grew up in New York City, the only other place in the world that might not strike you as a hick town was London. That most of the people in Chattanooga talked like Southerners-which they were-did nothing to make them seem less hickish.
Joe Steele stayed at the Road House Hotel, a couple of blocks from Union Station. (Charlie did wonder whether, had the South won the Civil War, it would have been called Confederate Station.) The hotel dated from the boom of the mid-1920s. The lobby was paneled in walnut, to show how ritzy it was. The building was twelve stories high, which made it one of the tallest in Chattanooga. Definitely a hick town.