“Is this connected with Captain South?” Charlie called.
“That is correct,” J. Edgar Hoover said while Louie and the other lensmen snapped away at the disgraced officers. More reporters bawled questions. Hoover held up a well-manicured hand. “I don’t wish to comment any further at this time. I would say the arrests speak for themselves. I wish I did not have to bring you here on such an unfortunate, embarrassing occasion, but that is what the country has come to.”
“Like fun you wish that,” Louie muttered out of the side of his mouth. “You’re having the time of your life up there.”
Hoover gestured to his troops again. They herded the generals and admirals out of the big room and back to wherever they were being confined. The reporters ran for telephones. Had anyone been timing them, some of the sprint records Jesse Owens had set in Berlin the year before would have fallen.
Charlie had to wait for a pay phone this time. The pause helped him organize the story in his mind a little better. He wasn’t so stunned as he had been when the Supreme Court Four were accused of treason, or when it was the turn of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. When things happened over and over, they lost some of their power to shock.
But what would the Army and Navy do without their top commanders? Whatever it was, how well could the armed forces do it? One thing he was sure of-Joe Steele didn’t worry about it. The President wanted men loyal only to him, and didn’t care what he needed to do to get them.
A reporter came out of a phone booth. Charlie elbowed his way into it. He stuck in some nickels, waited till he got an answer, and started talking.
XI
Mike Sullivan slid a half-dollar under the ticket-seller’s grill. “Two, please,” he said.
The girl dropped the coin into her cash box and handed back two green tickets. “Enjoy the show,” she said listlessly.
“I don’t know about the show, but I’ll enjoy the air-conditioning,” Stella said. New York sweltered, but she had a sweater on her arm. Air-conditioning came with two settings: not working at all and way too cold. There was no happy medium.
“I don’t know about the show, either.” Mike also carried a sweater. “We’ll see how it is, that’s all.” It was a fight film called Kid Galahad, with Bogart, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, and a new actor named Wayne Morris in the title role. Despite the strong cast, it had been out for a while without setting the world on fire.
A youngster with a straggly try at a David Niven mustache took their tickets and tore them in half. Mike got popcorn and Good amp; Plentys and sodas at the snack counter. Popcorn and licorice didn’t exactly go together, but what the hell? They didn’t exactly not go together, either.
He and Stella went inside and found seats. They passed the goodies back and forth while they put on the sweaters. Yeah, the air-conditioning was going full blast. Two seats over from Stella, a woman hadn’t thought to bring a cover-up. She shivered, and her teeth chattered like castanets.
Down went the house lights. The projector turned the big screen to magic. Mike had thought of movies like that ever since he saw his first silent picture when he was a short-pants kid, and a little short-pants kid at that. Movies weren’t just bigger than life, they were better than life.
Even coming attractions for films that would be forgotten five minutes after their runs ended seemed more interesting than the sweaty world outside the theater. Then the newsreel came on. The Japs pushed forward over heaps of Chinese corpses. Nationalists and Loyalists banged heads in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini fighting Trotsky by proxy.
“And in news closer to home. .” the announcer boomed. The screen showed more officers tied to the conspiracy against Joe Steele-or what Joe Steele and J. Edgar Hoover said was the conspiracy against the President. “The first batch of military traitors have already been executed,” the announcer said, sounding indecently pleased about it. “More severe punishments will be handed down against anyone who plots against America.”
A card flashed the name of a city: PHILADELPHIA. The newsreel showed GBI men loading unhappy, unshaven, badly dressed men-plainly ordinary working stiffs, not lieutenant colonels or brigadier generals-into paddy wagons and a couple of big trucks that might have been taken from the Army.
“The crackdown on wreckers continues in the civilian world as well,” the announcer said. “These men will labor to help rebuild the country’s midsection after they are judicially processed.”
“Processed?” Mike made a face as he whispered the word to Stella. “Sounds like they’re gonna turn them into bratwurst, doesn’t it?”
“Hush,” she whispered back. Mike did, but he still wasn’t anything close to happy. Judicially processed came a lot closer to the truth than tried did. People accused of wrecking barely got a trial. They went before a judge-often before a guy styled an administrative law judge, who didn’t do anything but deal with wreckers. The men (and women, too) administrative law judges saw got their papers rubber-stamped and went off to do a term in a labor encampment in New Mexico or Colorado or Montana.
Due process? Due process was either a joke or a memory. Mike knew he wasn’t the only person who saw that so much of what went on didn’t come within miles of being constitutional. But judges willing to say so were thin on the ground; too many had found that unfortunate things happened to those who tried to go against the President.
They said the Devil could quote Scripture to his purpose. Joe Steele quoted past Presidents. He’d used Lincoln repeatedly. He knew Andrew Jackson, too. Whenever a court decision went against him and he didn’t feel like killing or crippling the judge right away, he would echo the man on the double sawbuck: “‘John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.’” Then he would go on doing whatever the judge had told him not to.
A lot of men who pulled a stunt like that would have looked down the barrel of the impeachment gun. Joe Steele had an enormous majority in both houses of Congress. He’d swept to reelection less than a year before. He was still popular with everybody but The Literary Digest’s pollsters. . and the wreckers. If they were wreckers.
Mike knew darn well reporters weren’t. The people in his racket might or might not like the President. They universally liked, even loved, their country. As far as he could see, nobody knew of any wreckers in his own line of work. Almost everybody, though, figured there had to be some in other trades. That struck Mike as crazy, but there you were. And here he was.
He paid no attention to the sports highlights, even though the Yankees were knocking the American League to pieces and the Giants were in the race in the National. He hardly watched the two-reeler, either. He could take Westerns or leave them alone.
His political moping carried all the way through the feature. The only point to going out, as far as he could see, was that he was cold and gloomy here, where he would have been hot and sticky and gloomy back in the apartment. Oh, and going out made Stella happy. That counted.
But when they got home he went straight to his portable typewriter-it weighed half a ton instead of a regular machine’s full ton-and started banging away. Stella looked miffed. “What are you doing?” she asked. Yes, she sounded miffed, too.
“Trying to tell the truth,” he answered, not looking up from what he was doing. The line he’d written at the top of the piece in progress was WHERE IS OUR FREEDOM GOING? “Trying to tell as much of it as I can, anyhow. As much of it as I know.”