Sinking down into it, Charlie wondered what the stakes were. If Joe Steele liked what he did, would Mike come out of the labor encampment? If Joe Steele didn’t like it, would Charlie go into one and leave another AP desk vacant? Those were. . interesting questions, weren’t they?
He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and got to work. Joe Steele was right about one thing, anyway: as it stood now, the statement was muddy and opaque. Charlie thought of himself as a good editor and polisher. Now it seemed to be put up or shut up.
The statement wasn’t very long. He spent fifteen minutes noodling and nipping and tucking. Twice, he needed to ask the President just how specific and how sharp he wanted to be. Between puffs, Joe Steele told him.
“Here you go, sir.” Charlie passed the statement back. He waited for the sky to fall.
Joe Steele put on glasses to read what he’d done. The President used them, but seldom let himself be photographed wearing them. His hair was grayer than when he first took office. After two or three minutes, he looked at Charlie over the tops of the spectacles. As always, his eyes were unreadable.
But then, out of the blue, he smiled. Like a snake with a bird, he could be charming. “This is excellent!” he said. “Much better than anything my hacks turned out. I’ll use it, or something very close to it.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Charlie said. The lady, not the tiger.
“How would you like to work here?” Joe Steele asked. “I can use someone who doesn’t write English like a foreign language. I’ll raise your pay two thousand dollars over what the Associated Press gives you. With a baby in the house, money comes in handy, doesn’t it?”
One brother in a labor encampment, one working in the White House? Wasn’t that insane? But what will he do if I say no? Charlie didn’t want-didn’t dare-to find out. “Thank you, sir. I’m honored,” he muttered. Honor or not, I’d still rather walk. Walking, though, wasn’t a choice Joe Steele had offered him.
XIV
Not even a year after German troops marched into Austria, not even six months after German troops goose-stepped into the Sudetenland (and after the Führer swore he had no more European territorial demands), the Reich annexed Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech parts of what had been Czechoslovakia. The Slovak part became “independent” under a bunch of homegrown Fascists headed by a priest.
Charlie got the wire-service feeds in the White House, the same as he had while he was still working for the Associated Press. He pulled an atlas off the shelf in his little office and eyed the map of Central Europe. With the revisions, it didn’t look so good, not if you wanted the world to stay at peace.
A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Stas Mikoian stuck his head into the office. “What are you looking at?” he asked.
“The next world war, that’s what,” Charlie answered gloomily.
“I hope it’s not as bad as that,” Joe Steele’s aide said.
“I hope so, too, but it damn well is. C’mere and see for yourself,” Charlie said. When Mikoian did, Charlie pointed to the map. “Look. Now the Nazis can put soldiers in Slovakia, not just the Sudetenland. With East Prussia, they’ve got Poland in the same kind of nutcracker they squeezed Czechoslovakia with after they grabbed Austria.”
Mikoian studied the Rand McNally, no doubt filling in the new borders for himself. He grunted thoughtfully. “Yeah, it looks that way to me, too. And if we can see it, the brass at the War Department will see it, too.”
That made Charlie grunt. Some of what had been the top brass in the Army and Navy had been shot for treason. Other officers were serving long prison terms. Still others were breaking rocks or cutting down trees or digging ditches or doing whatever else wreckers did in labor encampments. Newer, younger men Joe Steele trusted further-not that Joe Steele trusted anybody very far-sat in those emptied chairs. Were they smart enough to see such things? They’d damn well better be, Charlie thought.
But Stas Mikoian hadn’t finished: “And if we can see it, the brass in Paris and London can also see it. And the brass in Moscow, not that they wear much brass there.” Charlie nodded-the Reds had leveled things so thoroughly, even generals’ uniforms were hardly fancier than those of private soldiers.
Another thought crossed Charlie’s mind. “I bet they’re having spasms in Warsaw,” he said. “Poland grabbed a little chunk of Czechoslovakia, too, when Hitler moved into the Sudetenland. I wonder how they like the taste of it now. Talk about shortsighted!”
“You said it,” Mikoian agreed.
“What’s the boss going to do about it?” Charlie asked. Before Joe Steele’s aide could answer, the telephone rang. Charlie picked it up. “Sullivan.” He still sometimes had to remind himself not to add AP after his name.
“Yes.” That rasp belonged to the President. “Put together a draft for me. I want to let the people know that this latest German move pushes Europe closer to war. I want them to know that we have to move closer to being able to defend ourselves no matter what happens, but that I don’t want or aim to get drawn into a fight on the other side of the Atlantic. Got that?”
“Sure do.” Charlie had scrawled notes while Joe Steele talked.
“Then take care of it.” The phone went dead.
“Was that him?” Mikoian asked. Charlie nodded. The California Armenian gave forth with a crooked grin. “Well, now you know what he’s going to do about it, in that case.” He nodded and left. He probably expected his own call any minute, or that he’d have to respond to one that came while he was talking with Charlie.
That was how Joe Steele worked. He’d hand several people the same assignment, take what he liked most from each man’s work, stir those chunks together, and use them as his own. It gave him the best from each member of his staff. It also kept the men he relied on competing against one another for his favor. One thing he knew was how to wrap people around his finger.
Charlie ran two sheets of paper sandwiched around a carbon into his typewriter and started clacking away. He bore down hard on keeping America out of the fight. Going to war again in Europe was pure political poison, nothing else but. Joe Steele could-and did-do pretty much what he wanted inside the borders of the USA. Halfway through his second term, the Constitution was what he said it was. Anybody who didn’t go for that would soon be sorry. But not even the Jeebies could ship everyone who didn’t fancy a war to the closest labor encampment. Spacious as the encampments were, they couldn’t begin to hold all those people.
And Charlie bore down hard on what a lying, cheating SOB Hitler was. Kagan and Mikoian and Scriabin and whoever else was working on this would also emphasize that. Everybody knew Joe Steele couldn’t stand Hitler. You couldn’t go wrong calling him names.
Charlie wondered how much of his draft Joe Steele would use. He was the new kid on the block. He hadn’t been on the staff since Joe Steele was a Congressman nobody outside of Fresno-and not many people in the town-had ever heard of. In a way, having a fresh approach gave him an edge. But the old-timers often teamed up against him, as much to remind him he was new as for any reason important in and of itself.
Office politics worked that way. They did in a bank, at the Associated Press, and here in the most important office in the country. Sometimes Charlie remembered that, and didn’t let slights get him down. Sometimes, instead, he remembered that, if Joe Steele turned against him, firing was the least of his worries. If Joe Steele turned against him, it could be the firing squad. Or they could chuck him into a labor encampment and forget he was there. On days like that, he bit his nails and gnawed his cuticles till they bled.