The Reds wrapped a blackout curtain around everything they did. Charlie wasn’t sure that was because they were Reds. It might just have been because they were Russians, or Jews who’d grown up among Russians. Why didn’t matter. The phrase did.
Blackout curtain? That wasn’t bad. It was on the way to what Joe Steele wanted. Charlie didn’t think it was there. Red-out curtain? He wrote it on a piece of scratch paper. It didn’t make him stand up and cheer-it was too cute. But it was something he could offer if he didn’t come up with anything better.
He pulled his trusty Bartlett’s off the shelf. It was one of the speechwriter’s best friends. People had said a lot of clever things over the past few thousand years. Here they were, ready for the taking. Or for giving you a new idea, and with luck a better one.
Nothing sprang out at him. He still liked the notion of the curtain, though. Not the blackout curtain. Black was the wrong color for Trotsky’s regime and for the ones he backed. Red-out curtain still sounded silly.
“Red Curtain?” Charlie muttered to himself. Then he said it again: louder, more thoughtfully. He wrote it down. Yes, that might do. It just might.
He ran a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Maybe his fingers could do the rest of his thinking for him. Only one way to find out: turn ’em loose and let ’em rip.
From the Adriatic to the Baltic, from Leipzig to Sapporo, a Red Curtain has fallen over a quarter of the world, he wrote. Behind it lie governments that are not really governments at all, but organized conspiracies, every one equally resolute and implacable in its determination to destroy the free world.
He looked at that. If it wasn’t what Joe Steele was trying to say, he’d misunderstood what the boss wanted. It was worth taking a chance on. He pulled it out of the typewriter and took it up to the President’s oval study.
This time, he had to wait a little while before he got to see Joe Steele. Andy Wyszynski came out looking serious. “How are you, Sullivan?” the Attorney General said with a nod.
“I’m all right. Yourself?” Charlie answered. He got tired of the flat, flavorless speech of Joe Steele and his California cronies. Wyszynski had a big-city accent different from his own, but at least it was a big-city accent.
“Well, Sullivan, what have you got?” Joe Steele asked when Charlie went in. Charlie handed him the typewritten paragraph. The President perched reading glasses on the arched bridge of his nose. “Red Curtain. .” He shifted his pipe to the side of his mouth so he could bring out the phrase. Then he puffed, tasting the words as well as the tobacco. He ran a hand through his hair. It was still thick, though he’d gone very gray. “Red Curtain. .” He nodded a second time, as if he meant it now. “Every once in a while, you earn your paycheck, don’t you?”
“I try, Mr. President,” Charlie said. Joe Steele offhand and insulting was Joe Steele as friendly as he ever got.
Newspapers all over the United States seized on the Red Curtain when the President used it in a speech about Russia. Charlie would have been prouder of that if American newspapers weren’t in the habit of seizing on anything Joe Steele said and trumpeting it to the skies. When papers in Canada and England and even one in New Zealand picked up the phrase, he really started to think he’d earned his pay that day.
* * *
J. Edgar Hoover arrested spies in the War Department and in the State Department and even in the Department of the Interior. They were working to sell America down the river to Leon Trotsky, he declared. The way he stuck out his jaw dared anyone in the world to call him a liar.
Andy Wyszynski pounded the lectern when he told the world-or at least the reporters, nearly all of them American, at the press conference-what a pack of scoundrels the men seized because of spying for Trotsky were. “They want to drag the United States behind the Red Curtain!” the Attorney General shouted furiously. “They’ve already dragged too many countries behind it, and not a one of them has come out free yet!”
“Ouch!” Charlie said when he heard Wyszynski’s tirade on the news that night. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“And so?” Esther said. “People take things and make them mean whatever they want, not what you wanted.”
“Tell me about it!” Charlie said ruefully. He’d felt proud when Joe Steele called the part of the world led from Moscow the part behind the Red Curtain. He’d felt even prouder when people used the line wherever English was spoken.
When Andy Wyszynski used it the way he did. . Charlie might have been less proud if he’d seen Red Curtain scribbled on a privy wall, or perhaps as the name of a whorehouse. On the other hand, he also might not have.
He wanted a drink. Some bourbon would clean out the nasty taste the Attorney General left in his mouth. His thigh muscles bunched as he started to get up from the couch and go to the kitchen. But then he eased back again. He was trying to be a good boy and not grab the whiskey bottle whenever he got the yen. It didn’t always work, but it did some of the time. He was drinking less than he had before Esther called him on it.
It worked tonight. Instead of a drink, he had a cigarette. Esther smiled at him. She must have known what he wanted to do. They’d been together a good many years now. Chances were she understood how he ticked better than he did himself.
Sarah came into the front room. She made a face at seeing her boring old parents listening to the boring old news. At going on ten, she was convinced they were as far behind the times as Neanderthal Man or the Republican Party. What she would be like when that high-school class of 1956 graduated-not nearly so far away now! — Charlie shuddered to think.
“Can someone please help me with my arithmetic homework?” she said. As far as she was concerned, the news existed only to keep her from getting the help she needed. She would have made a pretty good cat.
“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.
“It’s long division. With decimal places, not remainders.” By the way she said it, that ranked somewhere between Chinese water torture and the Black Hole of Calcutta when measured on the scale of man’s inhumanity to students.
“Well, come on to the kitchen table and we’ll have a look.” Charlie found a new reason to be glad he hadn’t had that bourbon. It wouldn’t have helped him do long division even with remainders.
Sober, he didn’t need long to see why Sarah was having trouble. She’d multiplied seven by six and got forty-nine. “Oh!” she said. “Is that all it was?” She snatched the paper away and ran off to do the rest of the work by herself.
“That was fast, Einstein,” Esther said when Charlie came back.
“I’m not Einstein,” Charlie said. “I’m the one who’s still breathing.” With his wife, he could still come out with things like that. He never would have had the nerve with anybody else. He wondered how Captain Rickover and his scalps were doing with uranium. Joe Steele hadn’t told him anything about it. He didn’t go out of his way to ask, which was putting it mildly. If anyone decided he needed to know, he’d find out. If nobody did. . Maybe no news was good news.
The treason trials helped liven up a dreary winter. Andy Wyszynski outdid himself in some of the prosecutions. He would scream at the luckless men and women the GBI had grabbed: “Shoot these mad dogs! Death to the gangsters who side with that vulture, Trotsky, from whose mouths a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of democracy. Let’s push the animal hatred they bear our beloved Joe Steele back down their throats!”
Shoot those mad dogs, if they were mad dogs, government firing squads did. Things had got simpler and quicker in the justice system year by year after Herbert Hoover went out and Joe Steele came in.
An assistant attorney general also made a reputation for himself in the spy trials. He was a kid from California, only in his mid-thirties, with a Bob Hope ski-slope nose and crisp, curly black hair. He didn’t rant like Wyszynski. He just pounded away, relentless as a jackhammer. “Are you now or have you ever been a Red?” he would demand of each defendant in turn, and, “What did you know, and when did you know it?”