Joe Steele’s California cronies were in the East Hall, of course. So was J. Edgar Hoover. So was Andy Wyszynski. So were a good many other men who’d helped the President run the country since 1933. Everybody seemed confident.
And, when the polls in the Eastern Time Zone closed and returns started coming in, they found they had reason to be confident. Joe Steele ran up percentages even higher than he had against Alf Landon. He’d got past sixty percent in 1936. This year, he looked to be winning by almost two to one.
“I figured he’d get his third term,” Charlie said to Stas Mikoian. “But Willkie ran hard. I thought he’d make a better showing than this.”
Mikoian’s eyes, dark as black coffee, narrowed under bushy eyebrows. “You never know, do you?” he said blandly. “That’s why they have the election-so you can find out.”
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said. Something lay behind the clever Armenian’s words, but Charlie couldn’t unravel it. He’d had enough bourbon to shield himself from thought as well as trouble.
By eleven o’clock, polls on the West Coast were closing, too. Joe Steele’s rout had swept clean across the country. Most of the candidates he liked for the House and Senate were comfortably ahead, too.
He and his wife came down to the East Hall a little before midnight. Maybe he’d been working. Maybe he’d been sleeping. You never could tell. Everybody cheered when the President and First Lady walked in. Joe Steele waved and dipped his head and looked as modest as a not very modest man could look.
He walked over to the bartender. “Apricot brandy, Julius,” he said.
“Comin’ up, suh. Congratulations, suh,” the man said.
Apricot brandy was one of the few bits of his heritage Joe Steele left on display. As far as Charlie was concerned, the stuff made good paint thinner or flamethrower fuel, but you needed a stainless-steel gullet to toss it down the way the President did.
Betty Steele asked Julius for a scotch and soda. She mostly kept to herself around the White House; Charlie seldom saw her. She was anything but an active First Lady, the way, say, Eleanor Roosevelt might have been. She still had her usual air of quiet sadness.
People hollered and pointed at the radio. “Wendell Willkie has conceded defeat,” the announcer was saying. “His statement has just reached us. He claims there were certain voting irregularities in some areas, but admits they were not enough to change the result. He extends his best wishes to the President for leading the country through this difficult and dangerous time.”
“Well, you can’t get much more gracious about it than that.” Stas Mikoian seemed in a mood to be gracious himself. He commonly showed more class than the other men who’d come east from California with Joe Steele.
Vince Scriabin, by contrast, laughed like a hyena, laughed till tears streamed down his face from behind his spectacles, when he heard Willkie’s concession statement. Charlie gaped at him, hardly believing his own eyes. He couldn’t remember seeing the Hammer smile, though he supposed he must have. He was positive he’d never seen Scriabin laugh. He hadn’t imagined the pencil-necked little hardcase had laughter in him.
“Voting irregularities!” Scriabin chortled. “Oh, good Lord!” He dissolved into fresh hilarity.
Joe Steele and J. Edgar Hoover thought that was pretty goddamn funny, too. “You know what Boss Tweed said, don’t you?” the President asked the head of the GBI.
“No. What?” Hoover asked, as he was meant to do.
“‘As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?’” Joe Steele quoted with great gusto. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “And I damn well do!” He and J. Edgar Hoover both thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
“Now, Joe,” Betty Steele said, but she was chuckling, too.
Charlie also laughed, along with everybody else close enough to the President and the GBI boss to hear the exchange. Boss Tweed had been dead for a hell of a long time. And anyone who repeated Joe Steele’s crack anywhere outside of this room was much too likely to end up the same way in short order.
Charlie went over to the bartender, who waited expectantly. “Let me have another bourbon, Julius,” he said. “Why don’t you make it a double this time?”
“You got it, suh,” Julius said. Charlie inhaled the drink, and then another double after it, and another one after that. No matter how pickled he got, though, and no matter how drug through a knothole he felt the next morning, he couldn’t forget what Joe Steele said.
* * *
Another lodgepole tottered, crackled, and fell, landing in the snow within a few inches of where Mike had thought it would drop. He’d turned into a pretty fair lumberjack since they chucked him into this encampment. He hadn’t intended to, but he had anyway. As with anything else, practice made good if not perfect.
Of course, working alongside John Dennison for more than three years now went a long way toward making good, too. The man with WY232 on the front and back of his jacket came over to stand next to Mike and admire the downfallen tree for a moment before they started lopping branches off it. “Nice job,” Dennison said.
“Thanks.” Mike grinned. Praise from the carpenter counted for more than it did from most people, because he never came out with it unless he meant it.
But Dennison hadn’t finished. Barely moving his lips, pitching his words so no guard could possibly hear them, he went on, “Help fuck up the count tonight, okay?”
“Oh, yeah?” Mike answered the same way. That prison-yard style of talking was one more thing he hadn’t known he’d pick up when they shipped him here from New York City. But he had, all right. As with dropping trees where he wanted them to fall, he’d got good at it, too.
“Uh-huh.” John didn’t nod. He didn’t do anything to draw the Jeebies’ notice toward Mike and him. The guards weren’t paying them much attention now anyway. They’d just cut down a tree. That showed they were working. And they were veterans of the encampment by now. The bastards with the Tommy guns trusted them as far as they trusted anybody. The scalps, the guys who didn’t know how things worked and who still had the taste of freedom in their mouths, those were the dangerous people. Or so the guards thought.
“Okey-doke,” Mike said through a mouth that stayed still. He tramped over to the top of the trunk and started trimming the branches and cutting the main growth into manageable lengths. When the work gang knocked off for the day, he and John dragged a sledge full of wood back to the encampment with ropes over their shoulders.
Mike’s usual place in the count was third row, seventh man from the left. But he could slide into another slot in the next row farther back as soon as the Jeebie with the clipboard walked past him. Everything got to be routine for the guards after the encampment had run smoothly for a while. They didn’t think any harder than they had to.
He kept his head down when he was standing in the row behind his assigned position. He kind of scratched at his chest with his mittened hand to obscure his number from the guard. You were supposed to stand at attention while the count was going on, but everybody had itches that needed scratching. The screws had long since quit getting excited about it.
He didn’t look around to see if other wreckers were helping to wreck the count. He also didn’t look around to see who wasn’t there. What he didn’t know, they couldn’t pull out of him no matter how long they left him in a punishment cell.
As soon as he could, he slid back to his proper place. Footprints in the snow would give him away for a little while, but not for long. As soon as everybody else started moving around, the tracks would get wiped out.
“Dismissed to dinner!” the lead Jeebie shouted. Whatever stunt the prisoners had pulled, it worked this time. It would unravel. All the shabby, dirty, skinny men tramping through the snow toward the kitchen understood as much. Well, all the wreckers who knew something was going on did, anyhow.