He also sounded so placid and happy and confident that Charlie got out of there as fast as he could. Then he made a beeline for the nearest watering hole. He didn’t usually drink before lunch, but the sun was bound to be over the yardarm somewhere. After Joe Steele’s speech and after his own little talk with Kagan, he needed some liquid anesthetic.
He’d been in this dive before. He’d run into John Nance Garner in this dive before, too. As best he could remember, the Vice President was sitting on the same barstool now as he had been then. Garner might well have been wearing the same suit, too, though the cigarette smoldering between his fingers now was probably different from the one he’d been smoking back in Joe Steele’s first term. Charlie couldn’t prove he’d moved off that barstool since then.
Garner raised an eyebrow when Charlie ordered his double bourbon. “Getting to be a big boy, hey, Sullivan?” he drawled.
Charlie refused to rise to the baiting. “I need it today,” he replied. When the barkeep gave it to him, he raised the glass in salute. “Down with reporters and other riffraff!” he said, and down the hatch the drink went. Like a big boy, he didn’t cough.
“I’ll drink to that.” John Nance Garner fit action to words. “’Course, I’ll drink to damn near anything. That’s all a Vice President is good for-drinking to damn near anything. Beats the snot out of presiding over the Senate, let me tell you.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” The bourbon was hitting Charlie like a Louisville Slugger. “You almost wound up with the top job a little while ago.”
“Nah.” Garner shook his head in scorn. “No stupid little worthless shit of an Army captain was gonna punch Joe Steele’s ticket for him, even if he did come from San Antone. Joe Steele, he’ll be President as long as he wants to, or till the Devil decides to drag him back to hell.”
“Back to hell?” That was an interesting turn of phrase.
“Hell, Fresno, it don’t make no difference.” How long and how hard had the Vice President been drinking? Long enough to lose his grammar, anyhow. He pointed a nicotine-yellowed forefinger at Charlie. “I know what’s wrong with you. You been listenin’ to the radio, an’ you’re in here drowning your sorrows.”
“Now that you mention it,” Charlie said, “yes.”
“It’s a crazy business, ain’t it?”
“A scary business.”
“The thing of it is,” John Nance Garner said as if Charlie hadn’t spoken, “Joe Steele, he’s gonna do what he wants, and ain’t nobody gonna stop him or even slow him down much. You see that, you see you can’t change it so’s you ride with it instead, you’ll be all right. I’m all right now-I’m just fine. You bump up agin’ him, though, your story don’t got no happy ending.” He raised that forefinger to ask for another drink without words.
“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Charlie said.
“Joe Steele, he’s got it all figured out,” Garner answered. He got to work on the fresh bourbon. Charlie raised his index finger, too. One double wasn’t enough, not this morning.
* * *
It was summer. Under the sun, under the humidity, Washington felt as if it were stuck in God’s pressure cooker. Thunderheads boiled up out of the south. Not even rain, though, could drain all the water from the air.
The baseball Senators wallowed through a dismal season. They weren’t last, where the old jingle put them, but they weren’t going anywhere, either. They’d brought back Bucky Harris to manage them a couple of years earlier, but it didn’t help. The then-boy manager had led them to two pennants in the Twenties. Whatever magic he’d had in those days was as gone now as the soaring stock market.
The Senators who played their games in the Capitol also weren’t having a great year. Every so often, Joe Steele would put in a bill to tighten up on this or to make that a Federal crime. The Senators and Representatives passed them in jig time, one after another. Joe Steele signed them into law. A lower-court judge who declared a couple of them unconstitutional ended up in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, after a terrible car crash. Andy Wyszynski appealed his rulings while he was still in the hospital, and a district court overturned them. Things hummed along.
Charlie and Esther started talking about children. As far as Charlie was concerned, using rubbers was a sin. That didn’t stop him; it just gave him something to confess. He didn’t go to church as regularly as his mother would have liked. Of course, if he had gone as regularly as Bridget Sullivan liked, he would hardly have had time to do anything else.
Summer was the slow news season. The Japanese bit big chunks out of China, but who could get excited about slanties murdering other slanties? Nobody in America, that was for sure. Hitler was shouting at Austria, and at Czechoslovakia for the way it treated Germans in the Sudetenland, but who on this side of the Atlantic knew, or cared, where the Sudetenland was unless his granny came from there?
And then Charlie’s phone rang early one morning, so early that he was just sitting down to coffee and three of Esther’s great over-medium eggs. Esther was dressed for work, too-she rode herd on an office full of idiots studying to be morons, at least if you listened to her.
“What the heck?” Charlie said. Either something had gone wrong in the world or it was a wrong number. Grumpily hoping it was a wrong number, he picked up the telephone and barked, “Sullivan.”
“Hello, Sullivan. Stas Mikoian.” No, not a wrong number. “If you show up at the Justice Department Building at ten this morning, you may find something worth writing about.”
“Oh, yeah? Anywhere in particular or sorta all over?” Charlie asked, only slightly in jest. Justice Department headquarters had gone up on Pennsylvania Avenue, half a dozen blocks from the White House, at the start of Joe Steele’s presidency. The building was enormous. If the birds ate the bread crumbs you left to mark your trail, you might never get out again.
“Go to the GBI’s exhibition center, room 5633,” Mikoian said. “I hear that Mr. Hoover will have something to exhibit, all right.”
“Like what?”
“That would be telling,” the Armenian answered, and hung up.
Charlie swore as he slammed the handset into the cradle. Esther clucked and laughed at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked.
He told her, finishing, “He knows I’ve got to show up, the miserable so-and-so. It’ll probably be some Carolina moonshiner, or else a pig poacher from Oklahoma.”
“Well, you’ve got time to finish breakfast first,” Esther said.
Sure enough, Charlie went over to the Justice Department and with plenty of coffee keeping his eyelids apart. He wasn’t completely amazed to run into Louie Pappas on the way to room 5633. “Who tipped you off?” Charlie asked.
“One of the White House guys called AP,” the photographer said. “So something’s going on, and they want pictures of whatever it is.”
Checking his watch, Charlie said, “Whatever it is, we’ll know in fifteen minutes.”
“Hot diggety dog.” If Louie was excited, he hid it well.
J. Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was as bouncy as a chunky man could get. He kept looking down at his own wrist so he could time things to the second. Either his watch ran slow or Charlie’s was fast, because Hoover got going at 10:02 Charlie Standard Time.
“The reason you are here today, folks,” Hoover told the reporters who fidgeted on folding chairs, “is that the GBI wishes to announce one of the largest and most important series of arrests in American history.” He gestured to several men cradling Tommy guns. Hoover, from what Charlie had seen, liked telling armed men what to do.
His henchmen led in ten or twelve dispirited-looking fellows, all of them middle-aged or older. Three wore dark blue; the rest were in khaki. The clothes might have been uniforms, but no rank badges or decorations or emblems remained on them.
“These,” J. Edgar Hoover said in portentous tones, “are some of the leading generals in the U.S. Army and admirals in the U.S. Navy. We arrested them last night and this morning. The charge is treason: namely, conspiracy with a foreign power to assassinate the President of the United States. We expect to make further arrests within the military shortly. The accused will be tried before military tribunals. The penalty upon conviction is death.”