“Well, do you have to tell it all right this minute? Why don’t you come to bed first?”
Not without a pang, Mike stood up. Some suggestions you ignored only at your peril-and at your marriage’s. That “first,” though, gave him the excuse to go back out to the front room afterwards and start typing again. After a few minutes, Stella closed the bedroom door. Maybe that was to keep the typewriter’s noise from bothering her. Or maybe she was making a different point.
Mike took what he’d written to the Post the next morning. He kept at it there, pausing twice to go down to the morgue to check on just when Joe Steele had jumped up and down on the Constitution in a particular way. He wanted to make sure he had his facts straight. When he was satisfied, he stashed a carbon in the locking drawer of his desk and took the original in to the managing editor.
“What have you got there?” Stan Feldman asked him.
“An ice cream cone,” Mike answered, deadpan.
“What if I want chocolate, not vanilla?”
“This ain’t vanilla, I promise.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say.” Stan started reading. He didn’t say another word till he finished. It was a long story; Mike took the silence as some of the highest praise he’d ever won. At last, the editor looked up. “Well, I just have one question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Are you only trying to get yourself hauled away for wrecking, or are you angling to get the Post shut down, too?”
“It isn’t that bad,” Mike said. “I didn’t say anything in there that isn’t true. I can document everything I did say-which is a hell of a lot more than Joe Steele or J. Edgar Vacuum Cleaner can claim.”
“Heh.” One chuckle and a brief baring of teeth: Stan gave the gibe all the appreciation it deserved. “What’s truth got to do with anything? The only way to stay safe these days is to keep your head down and to hope the wolves don’t notice you.”
“And if everybody keeps his head down and hopes he doesn’t get noticed, by the time Joe Steele runs for a third term-and he will, sure as the devil-he’ll have the whole country sewed up tight, the way Hitler’s got Germany.”
Stan stood up and closed the door to his office. Mike couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Walking back to his beat-up, messy desk, the editor said, “I won’t tell you you’re wrong. In a theoretical way, I mean. But you know what happens to the people who stick their necks out.” The edge of his hand came down on a pile of papers like an axe blade.
“If nobody stands up to those people, we all get it in the neck,” Mike replied.
Stan did a drumroll on the story with his fingers. “I’m not going to print this on my own hook. Too many careers go on the line if I do. I’m not kidding, Mike. I don’t want that on my shoulders. But I will take it upstairs to the publisher. If Mr. Stern says it’s okay, we roll with it. If he doesn’t. . It’s a fine piece of work, don’t get me wrong. So is an artillery shell. That doesn’t mean you want one on the coffee table.”
J. David Stern had bought the Post a few years before. He’d swung it to the left. It had backed Joe Steele on the whole, through his reelection. Now. . Now it tried not to bang his drum or to say anything bad about him. Mike sighed. “Do whatever you think you have to do. We’ll see what he says, and then I’ll go from there.”
If Stern said no, Mike feared he would have to go from the Post. He wondered whether any paper would hire him after that. They’d ask why he’d left. Either he’d have to lie or he’d have to say something like I tried to tell the truth about Joe Steele. Yeah, that would make anybody who was thinking of using him jump for joy, all right. Wouldn’t it just?
The Daily Worker might still take me on, he thought. The Worker followed Trotsky’s line no matter how much it zigzagged. On Joe Steele, it didn’t zigzag much. Trotsky liked the President no better than the President liked him. There were only two things wrong with working there that Mike could see. They didn’t pay for beans. And, even if he couldn’t stand Joe Steele, he wasn’t a Red.
No, there was one thing more. Mike had heard that a couple of men who’d written for the Daily Worker were currently breaking rocks or digging canals or doing whatever else people at a labor encampment had to do.
Of course, if J. David Stern did decide to run his story, he might find out about that for himself. Life was full of fascinating possibilities, wasn’t it?
For the next few hours, Mike went through the motions of being a newspaperman. His heart wasn’t in it. Most of his head wasn’t, either. But, as he’d found, he could write some stories simply because he knew how. They wouldn’t be great, but they’d do. Nobody expected Hemingway when you were writing about a pistol-packing punk who’d stuck up a delicatessen.
He was about to go to lunch when Stan called, “Hey, Sullivan! C’mere!” and gestured to the doorway to his office.
Bringing the holdup story with him, Mike came. “What do you need?” he asked-it might not have been about WHERE IS OUR FREEDOM GOING?
But it was. “Mr. Stern says we’ll go with it,” the editor told him. “We’re gonna run it on the first page, in fact. You get the byline-unless you don’t want it.”
There it was, a chance to hit back at the Steele administration without putting himself in quite so much danger. He shook his head. “Thanks, but that’s okay,” he said. “They wouldn’t need long to figure out it was me, anyhow. Not like I never swung on ’em before.”
“I told Mr. Stern you’d say that.” Stan looked pleased, or as pleased as an editor ever did. “If the paper stands behind the story, the guy who did it ought to stand behind it, too.”
“That’s my take on it.” Mike felt brave and self-sacrificing, like a doughboy about to go over the top when the German machine guns were stitching death across the shattered landscape. The doughboy had a bayoneted rifle. They said the pen was mightier than the sword. This came close enough to make a good test case.
“Mr. Stern said you had it straight,” Sam went on. “He said we need to hit Joe Steele six ways from Sunday while we can still do it. He said he was proud he had people like you working for him. And he said to bump you up ten bucks a week.”
Mike grinned. “I like the way he talks.” Stella would like the raise, too. Every bit helped. They were getting by, but they were a long way from Easy Street. How much Stella would like a story that called Joe Steele an American tyrant and gave chapter and verse to explain why. . Mike tried not to think about that.
* * *
Charlie was having lunch at a sandwich place when another reporter said, “You’re Mike Sullivan’s brother, aren’t you? The guy who writes for the Post in New York?”
“That’s me.” Charlie took another bite of corned beef on rye. “How come?”
“On account of he just went after the President like Ty Cobb stealing third with his spikes sharp and high.” The other reporter was in his fifties, old enough to have watched the Georgia Peach at his most ferocious.
“Oh, yeah?” Charlie wasn’t surprised that Mike had gone after Joe Steele one more time. Mike had it in for the President, and had had it in for him ever since the Executive Mansion in Albany burned down with Franklin Roosevelt trying to wheel his way out.
He was surprised he hadn’t got one of those early-morning calls from Kagan or Scriabin or Mikoian. I’m in Washington, so they yell at me when they’re mad at Mike, he thought. Only they hadn’t this time. Had they decided it didn’t do them any good? Or had they just given up on hoping Charlie could talk sense into Mike?
“Yeah,” the other reporter said, derailing his train of thought. “He really tore into him. Said he was a cross between Adolf and Leon, with a little Benito thrown in like mustard on your corned beef there. Said he was lying and sneaking his way to tyranny. Added up all the things he’d done since even before he got elected the first time, and said he didn’t fancy what they came to.”