Again, Charlie wouldn’t be the only one working on how to put Joe Steele’s idea across. He knew that. But neither Vince Scriabin nor Lazar Kagan knew much about sugarcoating anything. Mikoian might-Charlie admitted that much to himself. Just the same, he expected the President to use big pieces of what he wrote.
And Joe Steele did. Even when he tried to speak softly, you saw the big stick he was holding. He took after Theodore Roosevelt that way. In some other respects, perhaps a little less.
The speech, and the howls Japan let out right after it, were front-page news for four days. Papers didn’t print much that risked the Jeebies’ displeasure these days. They couldn’t ignore a speech from Joe Steele, though, or the foreign response to it.
On the fifth day, everybody from Washington state to Florida forgot all about it. That was the day Hitler invaded Russia. Joe Steele summoned his top military men to see what they thought of the new, titanic war. George Marshall was a three-star general now, not a colonel sitting on a military tribunal. Although that wasn’t exactly a previous acquaintance, Charlie buttonholed the stone-faced soldier. “What do you think Trotsky’s chances are?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the President,” Marshall answered. Of course, he would have been insane to tell Charlie anything different. If Joe Steele found out he had, he wouldn’t keep those stars on his shoulders long. He went on, “If the Russians last six weeks, I’ll be surprised.”
“Okay,” Charlie said-he’d heard much the same thing from map readers (and tea-leaf readers) of less exalted rank.
Marshall shook his head. “It isn’t okay. If Hitler holds everything from the Atlantic to the Urals, he’s a deadly danger to the whole world. The way the President put it was, ‘I want to see lots of dead Germans floating down the river, each one on a raft of three dead Russians.’”
“Heh,” Charlie said. That sounded like Joe Steele, all right. His sense of humor, such as it was, was grim. Then again, he wasn’t kidding here, or he was kidding on the square. And he hated Trotsky just as much as he hated Hitler.
Six weeks later, the Reds were still fighting. They’d given up a lot of ground and lost a ton of men, but they didn’t show their bellies the way the French had. They kept slugging. Charlie presumed Marshall was surprised. He knew he was.
XVI
A little more than a month after the Nazis jumped on the Reds, Winston Churchill came to North America to confer with Joe Steele. He flew from England to Newfoundland, then cruised down to Portland, Maine, in a Royal Navy destroyer.
Vince Scriabin expressed sour satisfaction about that. “Churchill wanted Joe Steele to come to Newfoundland or Canada,” he told Charlie. “We told him no. He’s the one who’s hat in hand. If he needs something from us, he can damn well do the traveling and the begging.”
“Doesn’t make any difference to me one way or the other,” Charlie answered. Diplomacy reminded him too much of what went on on elementaryschool playgrounds. The smaller kids had to do what the bigger kids said. Every so often, fights started. The trouble was, there were no teachers to break them up and paddle the punk who’d started things.
“Have you ever been to Portland before?” Scriabin asked.
“I’ve been to the one in Oregon. I don’t think I’ve been to the one in Maine,” Charlie said.
“Well, pack a suitcase. The boss wants you along,” Scriabin said. “Throw in a sweater or two. We’ll be out on the ocean some of the time, and it’s not warm even in the middle of summer.”
As he was packing, Esther said, “Can I send you a wire while you’re there?”
“I don’t think you’d better,” Charlie replied. “This is supposed to be hush-hush, you know? How come? What may not keep till I get back?”
“Well, I’m more than a week late now,” she said. “I’m not sure yet, but I’ve kinda got the feeling, if you know what I mean.”
“All right!” He squeezed her till she squeaked. He knew he hadn’t sounded thrilled about the idea of a second kid when she put it to him. He tried his best not to make the same mistake twice.
“I do think it’s good that they’re bringing you along,” Esther said.
“Yeah, me, too.” Charlie nodded. “Means-I hope it means-they’ve decided they trust me after all.”
He’d always had the fear Joe Steele had asked him to work at the White House not least to keep an eye on him. Mike had provoked the administration enough to get tossed into that damned labor encampment. No wonder they’d figure Charlie was liable to be another dangerous character. And, of course, nine years ago now Charlie had walked past Vince Scriabin when the Hammer was telling whoever was on the other end of the line to take care of something tonight, because tomorrow would be too late.
Even now, he didn’t know that Scriabin had been arranging Governor Roosevelt’s untimely demise. He’d never once mentioned it to the Hammer in all the years since. Keeping his mouth shut about it felt like paying lifeinsurance premiums. Scriabin might laugh-not that he was the laughing kind-and tell him he was full of baloney. But he also might not. If Franklin D. Roosevelt could have a tragic accident, Charlie Sullivan sure as hell could, too.
He kept his mouth shut on the train trip up to Portland. He had no tragic accidents on the way or after he got there. The President and his entourage traveled in far higher style than an AP stringer on the way to cover a trial or a grain-elevator explosion.
They rode a U.S. Navy destroyer out to meet the Royal Navy warship. The two vessels made an interesting contrast. The British ship was painted a slightly darker gray than its American counterpart. But it was a warship in ways the U.S. Navy destroyer wasn’t. Everything not essential had been stripped away from it. The Royal Navy sailors and officers wore uniforms that had seen hard use. Their expressions said they’d seen hard use, too. They eyed the noncombatant American sailors and officials with faint-or sometimes not so faint-contempt.
Pink and round-faced, Churchill looked like a pugnacious, cigar-smoking baby. He and his advisors met Joe Steele and his followers in the officers’ mess.
“You’ve come a long way,” Joe Steele said after a silent steward served drinks-Royal Navy ships weren’t dry. “What can I do for you?”
“This side of fighting, you’re already doing all you can do for me,” the Prime Minister answered. In person, his voice seemed even more resonant than it did on the radio. “Now I want you to do-I need you to do-the same thing for Trotsky and Russia.”
Joe Steele scowled. “I knew you were going to say that. If I wanted to do it, I would have done it already.”
“Whether or not you want to do it, you need to do it,” Churchill said. “Trotsky may rant about world revolution, but that’s all it is-ranting. Red Russia is a nation other nations can deal with.”
“Pfah!” Joe Steele said. The United States had no embassy in Moscow, nor did the Reds have one in Washington. Kerensky had got out of Paris just before the Nazis marched in. He was in New York these days. The USA still didn’t recognize him, either. As far as American diplomacy was concerned, a sixth of the globe’s land area was only a blank space on the map.
“Oh, but you must,” Churchill said, as if the President had spelled all that out for him instead of making a disgusted noise. “Russia, as I told you, we can deal with. Not well, perhaps, nor smoothly, but we can. Hitler’s Germany, on the other hand, is not a state at all. It is a cancer on the world’s body politic. Unless it is cut out, it will spread without limit. That is what cancers do. You need not love Trotsky to see that Hitler is the more dangerous of the two.”
“Pfah!” Joe Steele said again. This time, he added real words: “He’s turned that whole country into a prison camp.”