“I am glad that you are glad.” She sounded relieved. If she’d wondered. . Try as they would, how well could two people truly know each other in the end? How well could one person know himself? Or even herself?
“A baby!” Part of him, part of her, would go down through the years after all. That baby would be years younger than he was now when the odometer turned over and the twenty-first century started. And that baby, lucky kid, would know about Joe Steele only through history books.
XXVIII
For a little while, things went on without Joe Steele very much as they had while he was President. His widow moved back to Fresno. No one had paid much attention to Betty Steele while she was the First Lady. No one paid any attention to her once she went into retirement.
At the White House, John Nance Garner made a less demanding boss than the man he succeeded. Charlie had trouble conceiving of a more demanding boss than Joe Steele. The new President carried out the policies he found in place when he took over. He was in his mid-eighties. How many changes could he try to make, even if he wanted to?
Kagan went to Paraguay. Mikoian went to Afghanistan. “I’m sure I’ll get as many thanks there as I ever did in Washington,” he quipped to reporters before boarding the airliner that would start him on his long, long journey.
Scriabin didn’t go to Outer Mongolia, at least not right away. Like someone waking from a drugged, heavy sleep, Congress needed a while to realize Joe Steele’s heavy hand no longer held it down. Members didn’t automatically have to do whatever the President said or else lose the next election or face one of those late-night knocks on the door. John Nance Garner didn’t carry that kind of big stick.
And the Hammer still had clout of his own in the Senate. It was a pale shadow of Joe Steele’s clout, but it was enough to keep him out of Ulan Bator. It wasn’t friendship. Except perhaps for Joe Steele, Scriabin had never had any friends Charlie knew of. Charlie didn’t know what it was. Blackmail didn’t seem the worst of guesses.
John Nance Garner had accepted the resignations of all his Cabinet members except the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War. Dean Acheson was a reasonably able diplomat, while George Marshall had kept himself respectable despite serving Joe Steele for many years.
Acheson was due to speak at an international conference on the Middle East in San Francisco. The DC-6 he was riding in crashed as it went into its landing approach. Forty-seven people died. He was one of them. It was tragic. Despite all the progress in aviation over the past twenty years, things like that happened more often than they should.
Charlie didn’t think it was anything more-or less-than tragic till a week later, when Marshall got up to make an after-the-dinner speech during a cannon-manufacturers’ convention. He strode to the lectern with his usual stern, erect military bearing. All the newspaper reports that came out of the convention said he stood there for a moment, looking surprised. Then he turned blue-“as blue as the carpeting in the dining room,” one reporter wrote-and keeled over.
Several doctors were in the audience. One gave him artificial respiration while another injected him with adrenaline. Nothing helped. Both medicos who tried to save him said they thought he was dead before he hit the floor.
But Charlie found out most of that later. The morning after it happened, John Nance Garner summoned him to the oval study Joe Steele had used for so long. The old President’s desk was still there. So was the pipe-tobacco smell that everyone who knew Joe Steele associated with him.
“Some no-good, low-down, goddamn son of a bitch is gunning for me, Sullivan,” Garner growled when Charlie came in.
“Sir?” Charlie said. He wanted another cup of coffee.
“Gunning for me,” Garner repeated, as if to an idiot. “I’m President. Ain’t no Vice President. Presidential Succession Act of 1886 says, if the President dies when there’s no Vice President, Secretary of State takes over, then the other Cabinet fellas. Ain’t no Cabinet now, either. Senate ain’t confirmed anybody. If I drop dead this afternoon, who runs the show? God only knows, ’cause the law sure don’t. In the Succession Act of 1792, it was the President pro tem of the Senate and then the Speaker of the House, but the 1886 rules threw that out. So like I say, God knows.”
Two vital Cabinet deaths inside a week swept Charlie’s thoughts back more than twenty years. “I bet Scriabin set it up,” he blurted.
“Oh, yeah?” Garner leaned forward. “Sonny, you better tell me why you think so.” So Charlie did, starting with what he’d heard before the Executive Mansion fire cooked Roosevelt’s goose, and Roosevelt with it, in 1932. When he finished, the President asked him, “How come you never said anything about this before?”
“Because I could never prove it. Hell, I still can’t. And when my brother did kick up a stink, what happened to him? He wound up in an encampment, and then in a punishment brigade. But when two more die like that-”
“-and when Joe Steele ain’t around any more,” Garner broke in.
Charlie nodded. “That, too. I figured you’d better know.”
“Well, I thank you for it,” John Nance Garner said. “I expect Vince Scriabin ain’t the only one who can arrange for people to have a little accident.”
“That’s good, Mr. President,” Charlie said. “But if we’re gonna start playing the game by banana-republic rules, there’s something else you’d better think about.”
“What’s that?”
“All your guards here belong to the GBI. How far do you trust J. Edgar Hoover?”
Garner’s eyes narrowed as he considered the question. “You and me, we go back to the days when they’d’ve strung up anybody who even talked about them labor encampments, never mind set ’em up. Himmler killed himself when the limeys caught him. How long you reckon Yagoda’ll last once they finally stuff Trotsky and stick him next to Lenin in Red Square?”
“Twenty minutes,” Charlie said. “Half an hour, tops.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too-unless he’s quicker on the trigger than all the bastards gunning for him.” Garner scowled. “But what am I supposed to do about J. Edgar? Who do I get to watch this place except for the Jeebies?”
“Soldiers?” Charlie suggested. “You think the Army can’t add two and two? They’ll have a pretty good notion of what happened to Marshall, and why.”
“Maybe.” But John Nance Garner didn’t sound happy about it. “That would really take us down to South America, wouldn’t it?”
“Which would you rather have, sir? The Army protecting the President or a putsch from the head of the secret police?”
The telephone on the desk that had been Joe Steele’s for so long rang. Garner picked it up. “Yeah?” he barked, and then, “What?” His face darkened with rage. “All right, goddammit, you’ve let me know. I’ll deal with it. How? Shit, I don’t know how. I’ll work something out. Jesus God!” He slammed the handset back into place.
“What was that, sir? Do I want to know?” Charlie asked.
“Those fucking pissants in the House.” Garner had been one of that number for many years, but he didn’t care now. And he had good reason not to: “They’ve introduced a motion to impeach me, the stinking dingleberries! Says I’m ‘complicit in the many high crimes and misdemeanors of the Joe Steele administration.’” He quoted the lawyerese with sour relish, even pride. “I bet Scriabin put ’em up to it, the cocksuckers.”
Charlie knew perfectly well that Joe Steele’s administration had committed high crimes and misdemeanors past counting. He also knew perfectly well that John Nance Garner wasn’t complicit in any of them. Joe Steele hadn’t let him get close enough for complicity. But the House and Senate wouldn’t care. They couldn’t put a bell on Joe Steele; he’d been too strong, and now he was too dead. Garner, both weaker and still breathing, made an easier target.
Something else occurred to Charlie. “If they throw you out of office, who comes in to take over for you?”