“Don’t blame me,” Mike said. “I’m just hearing it now, too.”
“I don’t know what we’re sitting on,” Charlie said. “Maybe it’s an egg. Maybe it’s a china doorknob, and nothing’ll ever hatch out of it. For all I can prove, Scriabin has a bookie in California who’s giving him grief.” He took another healthy swig from the glass. “I ever say they call Vince the Hammer?”
“Tough guy, huh?” Stella said.
Charlie shook his head. “He looks like a pencil-necked bookkeeper. A bruiser with that kind of handle, he’s gonna be bad news, sure. But a scrawny little guy like Scriabin? You call him the Hammer, you can bet he’ll be ten times worse than the heavyweight.”
“You’re scared,” Mike said in wonder.
“You bet I am!” his brother said. “If you ever had anything to do with Scriabin, you would be, too. If I write a story that says he did this and that, ’cause Joe Steele told him to, it’s bad enough if he comes after me ’cause I’m wrong. If he comes after me ’cause I’m right. . Way I’ve got things set up now, you and Esther split my life insurance.”
“I don’t want your life insurance!” Esther said.
“Me, neither,” Mike added.
“I wouldn’t want it, either. It comes to about fifteen bucks apiece for you guys,” Charlie said. “But that’s where we are. Joe Steele’s gonna be the next President unless he gets hit by lightning or something. But there’s at least a chance that’s because he fried Franklin and Eleanor like a couple of pork chops.”
Stella thrust her glass at Mike. “Make me another drink, too.” Esther held hers out as well.
They killed that bottle, and another one that claimed it was scotch. Mike felt awful in the morning, and the hangover was the least of it.
* * *
The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Charlie wondered how and why the Founding Fathers had chosen that particular day to hold a Presidential election. For most of the time since the Civil War, America had been a reliably Republican country. It had been. By all the signs, it wasn’t any more. The polls back East had closed. Joe Steele and the Democrats held commanding leads almost everywhere. They were taking states they hadn’t won in living memory. And it wasn’t just Joe Steele trouncing Herbert Hoover. Steele had coattails.
The Congress that came in with Hoover four years earlier had 270 Republicans and only 165 Democrats and Farmer-Labor men in the House, fifty-six Republicans and forty Democrats and Farmer-Labor men in the Senate. The one that came in two years later, after the Depression crashed down, was perfectly split in the Senate, while the Democrats and their Minnesota allies owned a minuscule one-vote edge in the House.
This one. . Not all the votes were counted, of course. But it looked as if the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party would dominate the House by better than two to one, maybe close to three to one. Their majority in the Senate wouldn’t be so enormous: only one Senator in three was running this year. They’d have a majority, though, and a big one.
And so the victory party at the Fresno Memorial Auditorium was going full blast. The auditorium, built to commemorate the dead from the Great War, was hardly out of its box-it had opened earlier in the year. It was concrete and modern, all sharp angles, with nods to the classical style in the square columns that made up the main entranceway. For a town of just over 50,000, it was huge: it took up a whole city block.
Up on the balcony of the auditorium was the Fresno County Historical Museum. Charlie didn’t see a lot of people going up there. The ones who did were mostly couples of courting age. He wasn’t sure, but he would have bet they were more interested in finding privacy than in looking over gold-mining equipment from seventy-five years before.
Down on the main floor, a band that looked to be full of Armenians played jazz. Straight off of Bourbon Street, it wasn’t. Charlie wondered what a colored fellow from New Orleans would have thought of it. Not much, he figured. But the musicians did the best they could, and the campaign workers cutting a rug weren’t complaining.
That might have been because of the punch filling half a dozen big cut-glass bowls. Joe Steele had said he favored repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition was on the way out, but remained officially in effect. That punch had fruit juice in it for cosmetic purposes. Fruit juice or not, though, it was damn near strong enough to run an auto engine.
A Democratic State Senator came to the microphone to announce a Democratic Congressional victory in Colorado. The people who’d come for politics and not just a good time let out a cheer. The others went on dancing and drinking.
A few minutes later, another California politico stepped up to the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted. “Ladies and gentlemen!” He sounded as if he were announcing the Friday night fights. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great privilege and distinct honor to introduce to you the Vice President-elect of the United States, John Nance Garner of the great state of Texas!”
More people cheered as Garner shambled up to the microphone. Controlling the Texas delegation had won him the second spot on the ticket, even if he couldn’t parlay it all the way to the top. His bulbous red nose said that not all the stories about his drinking habits were lies from his enemies.
He had big, knobby hands, the hands of a man who’d worked hard all his life. He held them up in triumph now. “Friends, we went and did it!” he shouted, his drawl thick as barbecue sauce. “Herbert Hoover can go and do whatever he pleases from here on out, ’cause he won’t be doing it to America any more!”
He got a real hand then, and basked in it like an old soft-shelled turtle basking on a rock in the sun. “Now we’re gonna do it to America!” shouted someone else who’d taken a good deal of antifreeze on board.
“That’s right!” Garner began. Then he caught himself and shook his head. “No, doggone it! That’s not right. We’re gonna do things for America, not to it. You wait and see, folks. You won’t recognize this place once Joe Steele gets to work on it.”
They cheered him again, even though you could take that more than one way. As if by magic, Stas Mikoian materialized alongside Charlie. “Joe Steele will speak in a little while,” he said. “He’ll take away whatever bad taste that drunken old fool leaves behind.”
“When you win so big, nothing leaves a bad taste,” Charlie said. He couldn’t ask Mikoian what he knew about Franklin Roosevelt’s untimely demise. He was sure Mikoian didn’t know anything. Nobody who did know could have turned so pale on the convention floor in July.
Charlie looked around for Vince Scriabin. He didn’t see Joe Steele’s Hammer. Asking Scriabin that question might bring out an interesting answer. Or it might be the last really dumb thing Charlie ever got a chance to do. Not seeing him might be good luck rather than bad.
Or I might be imagining things, making up a story where there isn’t one. Charlie had been trying to convince himself of the same thing ever since the convention. On good days, he managed to do it for a little while. On bad days, he couldn’t come close. On bad days, he told himself it wouldn’t matter once Joe Steele took the oath of office. Now he had to hope he was right.
* * *
Mike Sullivan stood on the White House lawn, waiting for Herbert Hoover and Joe Steele to come out and ride together to the new President’s inauguration. It was almost warm and almost spring: Saturday, March 4, 1933. The lawn still looked winter brown; only a few shoots of new green grass pushed up through the old dead stuff.
This was the last time a President would take office five months after he won the election. The states had just ratified the Twentieth Amendment. From now on, January 20 would become Inauguration Day. Winter for sure then, not that it was usually so bad down here in Washington. With telephones and radio, with trains and cars and even planes, things moved faster than they had when the Founding Fathers first framed the Constitution.