Most of the wreckers couldn’t stand the President, no. But there were a few. . Four or five guys in Barracks 17 were certain their sentences were just what they deserved. “I love Joe Steele,” insisted a sad-eyed little bookkeeper named Adam Bolger. “I just couldn’t do the work my firm needed from me. If that doesn’t make me a wrecker, I don’t know what would.”
“What don’t you put a fucking sock in it, Bolger?” somebody in a top-tier bunk called. “Nobody wants to listen to your shitass sob stories.”
“All of us are guilty,” Bolger said. “Nobody works as well as he ought to all the time. That makes everyone a wrecker.”
“Then they should chuck everybody into one of these goddamn encampments, let all the people see how they like it,” his critic said. “Me, I’m in here on account of some asshole told the Jeebies lies about me. Ain’t no other reason.”
Several other men chimed in with loud, obscene agreement-in the encampment, there was usually no other kind. If you admitted you’d done anything to make yourself belong here, you won the GBI’s battle for it. So Mike thought, along with the majority.
He didn’t chime in tonight. They’d be blowing out the lanterns pretty soon. He lay in his bunk, atop the joke of a mattress and under the joke of a blanket. The stove was hot, but not much warmth reached this far. The only clothes he’d taken off were his boots. They made a crappy pillow, but they were the only pillow he had-he’d wrapped his tattered Outside clothes around his feet to help keep them warm.
He yawned. He wondered how Stella was doing. Every once in a while, most of the time when he least expected them, loneliness and horniness pierced him like a stiletto. More often than not, though, he was too weary or too hungry or-most of the time-both to conjure up anything but a shadow of the feeling he knew he ought to have. The slow extinction here reminded him too much of the beginning of death.
The other choice, of course, was an extinction not so slow. A man who’d had all he could take would try to sneak through the barbed wire without trying very hard to be sneaky. Or he’d go after a guard with an axe or a rock or his bare hands. And he’d wind up dead, most of the time without laying a glove on the Jeebie. Some wreckers said guards got bonuses for killing wreckers. That, Mike didn’t believe. Were it true, a lot more of the sorry so-and-sos with numbers on their clothes would have been holding up a lily.
Even with all the snow on the ground, some optimists-or jerks, depending on how you looked at things-ran away when their work gang went out to the woods. Then, of course, the evening count was off. As soon as the count was off, the search was on. Mike had never yet heard of anybody who got away.
Some people died trying. As long as the guards found the bodies, that didn’t worry them. A body made the count work, too. Some would-be escapees realized how far they were from any human beings who didn’t live in labor encampments. They gave themselves up. That also made the count work.
As far as Mike could see, dying was better. The encampment had a punishment barracks next to the administration building. The cells there were too small to stand up or lie down in. The punishment barracks had no stoves for heat. Rations were bread and water-piss and punk, in the jailhouse slang that lay behind so much encampment lingo. They didn’t give you much, either. By the time they let you out, you were like an inner tube with a permanent slow leak.
Mike yawned again. But what could you do? Not much, not so far as he could see. John Dennison had the best way. Take it one day at a time, get through that, and then do it again when reveille sounded the next morning. Mike leaned out of his bunk for a second. He couldn’t spot the carpenter from Wyoming, not in the dim red lamplight.
A guard banged a steel bar hanging from a rope with a hammer. That was the lights-out signal. The wreckers blew out the kerosene lamps. Only the hot embers in the stove reminded the barracks that darkness wasn’t absolute. Mike thrust his hands into the pockets on his jacket to keep them as warm as he could. His eyelids came down like garage doors. He slept.
* * *
Hitler kept screaming about the Sudetenland. As far as Charlie could see, Hitler screamed about everything, like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. Nobody’d paddled his fanny for him when he was a three-year-old, so he still thought he could get away with that kind of nonsense. The Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria sure hadn’t shown him he was wrong.
The only way he wouldn’t jump on Czechoslovakia with both feet in hobnailed boots to get back his pet Germans was if somebody either stopped him or handed him those Germans on a silver platter. The countries that would have to stop him, if anyone did, were France and England. Neither had its heart in the job.
Joe Steele and Leon Trotsky cheered them on from the sidelines. If war broke out, Red Russia and the USA wouldn’t have to get sucked into the fighting. Russia bordered neither Czechoslovakia nor the Third Reich; Romania, Poland, and the Baltic republics shielded Trotsky from consequences. And not only the broad Atlantic but also the Western European democracies stood between the United States and the Führer.
Charlie thought it was funny that the President and the guy the papers called the Red Czar were both cheering for the same thing when they loathed each other so much. Here more than twenty years after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover, the United States still refused to recognize the Reds as Russia’s legitimate government. That pretty much meant the USA recognized nobody as overlord of the biggest country in the world. The real Czar and his family were dead, deader, deadest. Kerensky remained in exile in Paris with so many other Russian émigrés, but not even Joe Steele, Trotsky-hater though he was, could take Kerensky seriously.
Charlie thought Joe Steele and Trotsky singing in chorus was funny till Daladier and Chamberlain, instead of fighting to save Czechoslovakia, did hand Hitler the Sudetenland on a silver platter at Munich. Hitler promised it would be his last territorial demand in Europe. If he was telling the truth, wunderbar. If he wasn’t, things didn’t look so good.
But all that was a long way away. Charlie had other things on his mind, things closer to home. Sarah was teething, which left him and Esther both even lower on shuteye than usual. And a couple of more desks near him had nobody sitting behind them. Two reporters had vanished almost without a trace. Where were they now? Somewhere between New Mexico and North Dakota-that was as much as anybody knew.
His telephone rang. He picked it up. “Sullivan, AP.”
“Scriabin, White House.” The Hammer could be viciously sardonic. “The President wants to see you.”
“About what?” Charlie asked, in lieu of a gulp.
“He’ll tell you. If he wanted me to do it, I would,” Scriabin said. “Are you coming?”
“I’m on my way,” Charlie said. If the Heebie Jeebies were going to grab him, they could do it here or at his apartment. Or, of course, if Joe Steele felt like watching J. Edgar Hoover’s men in action, they could do it at the White House. But Charlie couldn’t say I don’t want to see him. The President and all his men had long memories for slights.
When Charlie got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a steward took him up to the oval study above the Blue Room. Joe Steele sat behind that big redwood desk, puffing on his pipe. “Sullivan,” he said with an abrupt nod.
“Mr. President.” Charlie tried not to show how nervous-hell, how scared-he was. “What do you need, sir?”
“Here.” Joe Steele shoved typewritten pages across the desk at him. “I am going to issue a statement saying how wrong France and England were to appease Hitler over the Sudetenland. None of the drafts from my writers is any damn good. You throw words around. Let’s see what you can do.” He waved Charlie to the chair on the other side of the desk.