“All the way to Outer Mongolia?” Charlie asked.
Garner chuckled hoarsely. “Shit, even that ain’t far enough for Scriabin. I’d send him to the far side of the moon if only I could get him there.”
“I’ll stay for a while, Mr. President,” Charlie said. “But you’d better keep an eye on the Hammer before he leaves. He’s had the office in here a long time. He won’t want to give up everything that goes with it.”
“Now tell me something I didn’t know. I’ll have J. Edgar’s boys watching him every second. Oh, you bet I will.” John Nance Garner muttered to himself. “Now who do I get to watch Hoover?” He knew the questions that needed asking, all right.
Charlie looked for something, anything, more to say. The best he could do was, “Good luck, sir.”
“Thanks,” Garner said. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”
Mike stuck a nickel in a machine and took out a copy of the Casper Morning Star. He wondered why he bothered. It was a thin, anemic sheet compared to the New York Post. Compared to the New York Times, it was barely a newspaper at all.
But it was what Casper had for a morning paper. The evening Herald-Tribune was no better. That a town as small as Casper had both a morning and an evening paper said something, though Mike wasn’t sure what. He shrugged as he folded the Morning Star, stuck it under his arm, and carried it into the diner where he ate breakfast most days.
“Morning,” a man and a woman said when he came in. He’d been here long enough for people to know him for a regular at the joint. But the locals still thought of him as new in town. He was, of course, but they’d go right on thinking of him that way if he stayed here till he was ninety. They cut him a little extra slack because he was friends with John Dennison, but only a little.
The counterman poured coffee and gave him the cup. “You want hash browns or pancakes?” he asked. Mike almost always ate bacon and eggs over medium, but he went now with one side, now the other.
“Hash browns today,” he said, adulterating the coffee with cream and sugar.
The counterman called the order back to the kitchen. Mike opened the paper and started to read. Some of the local writing was pretty good. The Morning Star kept the city fathers on their toes. National and world news all came from the wire services. The next time the paper sent a reporter out of Wyoming would be the first.
A story below the fold on the front page caught his eye. WHITE HOUSE SHAKEUP, the headline read. The story announced that three of Joe Steele’s longtime assistants had resigned and been offered ambassadorial positions by President Garner. For a moment, Mike swore under his breath. They deserved to be tarred and feathered as far as he was concerned, if not drawn and quartered.
Then he noticed where John Nance Garner wanted to send them. You couldn’t leave the USA any farther behind, not unless you did a swan dive from a B-29 into the South Pacific halfway between Australia and New Zealand.
He wanted to whoop. He wanted to holler. He wanted to jump off his stool and cut capers right there at the counter. But he just sat, reading the paper. You never could tell who was a Jeebie or who informed for the GBI. Even though a ton of scalps lived here, people had mourned Joe Steele, and mourned him yet. They might still feel something for his nasty henchmen, unlikely as that seemed to Mike. You didn’t want to take chances, not in America the way it was these days.
Mike did let himself smile as he sipped from his cup. No informer could report him for that. Right next to the story about the ambassadorships to the back of beyond was one about a colt rescued from a drainage ditch. That one might have made Vince Scriabin smile. It sure would have made him happier than being named ambassador to Outer Mongolia did.
“Thanks,” Mike said when the counterman set the plate in front of him. He grabbed the syrup, and was about to use it when he remembered he’d asked for the potatoes. They got salt and pepper instead, along with the eggs. After breakfast and two cups of snarling coffee, he headed for the carpenter’s shop. He took the Morning Star with him, though he usually left it behind in the diner.
With John Dennison, he could gloat over the fall of the Pain Trust to his heart’s content. The more he gloated, the more contented his heart got, too. John was less delighted than he was. “The bastards’ll still be living off the fat of the land, right?” he said. “Only difference’ll be, from now on it’s the fat of somebody else’s land.”
“So what would you do with ’em, then?” Mike asked.
“Send ’em to an encampment, that’s what,” Dennison said with no hesitation at all. “Let’s see ’em live on the thin for a change. They deserve it! Bread made out of sawdust and rye? Stew from potato peels and old cabbage and turnip greens and maybe a little dead goat every once in a while if you’re lucky? A number on ’em front and back? Chopping wood when it’s twenty below? How many times did they give it to other folks? Let ’em find out what it’s like and see how they enjoy it.”
“Only one thing wrong with that,” Mike said.
“Like what?” Plainly, John didn’t think it was wrong at all.
“As soon as the wreckers realize who they are, how long will they last?” Mike said. “Not long enough to get skinny, that’s for sure.”
“Oh.” Dennison paused. Then, reluctantly, he nodded. But he also said, “You gonna tell me they don’t deserve to get ripped to pieces? Go ahead, scalp! Make me believe it.”
“I don’t want anybody grabbing hold of them when I’m not there to help,” Mike said. “I’d dig up Joe Steele if I was back East and tear him to bits along with his flunkies.”
“He got you as bad as anybody, didn’t he?” John said. “The stretch, the punishment brigade, two wars, and now internal exile. You sure as hell didn’t miss much.”
“He didn’t have me shot,” Mike said. “He figured the Japs would take care of it for him, but they fell down on the job.”
Midori understood American politics in Japanese terms. After Mike got home, still full of the news, she said, “The new Prime Minister always shakes up the cabinet. Sometimes it matters. Most of the time?” She shook her head.
“Yeah, that makes sense.” Mike wanted to keep talking about it. Seeing bad things happen to Scriabin, Mikoian, and Kagan pleased him almost as much as learning Joe Steele was dead had done. But Midori hardly seemed interested. Because Mike was so excited about what he’d read in the Morning Star, he needed longer to notice than he might have. After a while, though, he asked, “Are you okay, honey?”
“I am very okay.” Even after she’d come to the States and started using it all the time, her English had a few holes in it. Or so Mike thought, till she went on, “Dr. Weinbaum says yes, I am going to have a baby.”
Mike’s jaw dropped. He could feel it drop, something he never remembered before. “Oh, my God!” he whispered. He hadn’t really thought that would happen. She’d turned forty the summer before. You never could tell, though. He forgot all about Vince Scriabin, Lazar Kagan, Stas Mikoian, and even-miracle of miracles! — Joe Steele himself. “That’s wonderful!” He hugged her. He kissed her. He said, “If it’s a little girl, I hope she looks just like you!”
She smiled a bit crookedly. “So you would want another Sullivan with black hair and slanted eyes?” She was joking, and then again she wasn’t. There were no more than a handful of Orientals in Casper. Most of the others were Chinese who wanted nothing to do with her. Though the war’d been over for years, whites could still be rude, sometimes without even meaning to.
“You’re darn tootin’, I do!” Mike meant that. He could bring it out quickly, and he did.