So did they, and also which side their bread was buttered on. Anyone who worked for Joe Steele could see the benefits of keeping him happy. The appeals that came out of the Attorney General’s office were uncommonly vehement and uncommonly urgent. The programs passed in Joe Steele’s special Congressional session zoomed up toward the Supreme Court as if shot from a battlewagon’s big guns.
And the Supreme Court listened to arguments for both sides, and then it deliberated. Since the turn of the century, the Democrats had had only eight years to appoint Supreme Court justices. The rest of the time, the White House lay in Republican hands. Herbert Hoover might have lost the latest election, but the Supreme Court didn’t care. To a good many of the justices enshrined in their chamber in the Capitol, even Hoover was a dangerous liberal.
Which, in their eyes, made Joe Steele. . well, what, exactly? Not Trotsky, maybe. Not the Antichrist, maybe. Then again, maybe not. To say the Supreme Court was suspicious of any changes to the economic life of the country beggared the power of language.
The justices tossed out one of his relief bills: they said it exceeded the Federal government’s authority. They said the same thing about the bill that regulated Wall Street. And they said the same thing about the one that limited management’s ability to coerce labor.
Charlie dutifully hammered out stories about the Supreme Court decisions. And he hammered out stories about the President’s reaction to the Supreme Court decisions. He had access to Joe Steele’s closest cronies. He had it, and he used it.
“No, the President isn’t happy,” Stas Mikoian told him. “The President doesn’t like it when nine old fools try to torpedo the recovery.”
“Can I quote you on that?” Charlie asked.
Mikoian started to nod, but checked himself. “I’m afraid you’d better not,” he said regretfully. “If it gets back to the nine old fools, they’ll really show the President how hard they can screw him.”
Since Charlie was sure Stas had that straight, he just clucked and said, “That isn’t how they teach you things work in your civics class.”
“Things in a civics class work fine,” Mikoian answered. “But we aren’t in a civics class right now. We’re in Washington, dammit. And so are those bastards in the black robes.”
When Charlie talked with Vince Scriabin at the White House a couple of weeks later-right after the Supreme Court said the Federal government had no business sticking its snoot into banking regulation, either-the little man they called the Hammer was even blunter than Mikoian had been. “The justices want to bang heads with Joe Steele?” he said. “They’d better have harder heads than I think they do-that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”
“What can the President do?” Charlie asked. “The Supreme Court is a separate branch of government. Until they start dropping dead so he can choose his own men, he can’t make them call his laws constitutional.”
Scriabin leaned back in his swivel chair. It squeaked. The lightbulb in the ceiling fixture flashed off the oval lenses of his wire-framed spectacles. For a few seconds, it turned them big and yellow, so that he might have had an owl’s fierce, predatory eyes rather than his own. He could have been preening when he scratched his closely trimmed little mustache. “Nobody elected them,” he said in a deadly voice. “If they think they can block what the people want, they’d better think again.”
He didn’t mean what the people want. He meant what Joe Steele wants. The two weren’t quite the same, but Charlie could see that Scriabin would never admit there was a difference. Anything Joe Steele wanted, the Hammer wanted, too. Anything at all.
“What can Joe Steele do?” Charlie asked again. He didn’t think the Capitol would go up in flames and barbecue Charles Evans Hughes and his robed comrades. It crossed his mind, but he didn’t believe it. Mike would, he thought.
When Vince Scriabin leaned toward Charlie once more, he looked like a small, mild-mannered man, not something that hunted through the night on silent wings. “He’ll take care of it,” the aide said, and his voice held complete assurance. “Nobody stops Joe Steele, not when he gets going.”
That seemed to be the end of that interview. As Charlie was leaving the White House, he paused to take his umbrella from the stand-it was raining outside. In came a jowly young man whose square head and underslung jaw reminded Charlie of a mastiff. His face was vaguely familiar, but Charlie couldn’t hang a name on him. Whoever he was, he wore a sharp fedora and a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his stocky frame.
“Excuse me,” he murmured as he closed his own umbrella and thrust it into the polished brass stand. His voice was surprisingly high. He hurried off to whatever appointment he had.
“Who is that fellow?” Charlie asked Scriabin.
Joe Steele’s aide smiled a thin smile. “Believe it or not, his name is Hoover.”
“Ripley wouldn’t believe that!” Charlie said with a snort.
“It’s true anyway. He’s an investigator in the Justice Department. He’s smarter than you’d think from his mug, too. The only thing I wonder about sometimes is whether he’s too smart for his own good.”
He had to be the guy Mikoian had mentioned a little while before. His look was right-bulldog came closer than mastiff-and so was his job. “What’s he doing here today?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know.” Scriabin shrugged narrow shoulders. “The President wanted to see him. When Joe Steele sends for you, you come.” That last was certainly true. Saying no to Joe Steele was like saying no to a bulldozer. You could say it, sure, but how much good would that do you? As for Scriabin’s shrug, Charlie took it with a grain of salt about the size of the Polo Grounds. What was Scriabin there for, if not to know his boss’ mind?
Of course, knowing it and talking about it were also two different things. Even talking about it with a reporter in the White House’s good graces might not be what the President wanted. Evidently it wasn’t, because Vince Scriabin kept his thin lips buttoned tight. With a shrug of his own, Charlie walked out into the rain. He popped the umbrella open. It was coming down harder than it had when he got there.
* * *
Charlie soaked up the last of the gravy from the beef stew on his plate with the heel of a loaf of bread. He smiled across the table at Esther. “That was mighty good,” he said, patting his belly to show he meant it.
“I’ve done worse,” she agreed.
“Hey, you’re getting the hang of it,” Charlie said. Her cooking had been on the catch-as-catch-can side when they got married. Since what he’d called cooking was heating up a can of hash, he couldn’t get too critical.
“It’s not hard. It’s not nearly as hard as running an office,” she said-she’d been an administrative assistant before they tied the knot. “It just takes practice, that’s all, like anything else.” She lit an after-dinner cigarette and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “Charlie?”
“What’s cookin’, babe?” He knew something was by the way she said his name.
“Would you mind if I look for part-time office work here?”
He frowned. “I’m bringing in enough money. We won’t put the Du Ponts outa business any time soon, but we’re doing okay.”
“I know we are,” she said quickly. “It’s not for the money, not really, even though a little extra never hurt anybody. It’s just. . I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m rattling around the apartment when you aren’t home, and you aren’t home a lot of the time.”
She’d held her job, held it and done it well, when millions and millions of people lost theirs. If she hadn’t done it well, she would have lost it. She might have lost it no matter how well she did it. She was used to going out and taking care of things on her own. But even if she was. . “I don’t want people thinking I can’t support you,” Charlie said.