“It wouldn’t be like that. Honest to Pete, it wouldn’t,” Esther said. “Before the market crashed, people might’ve thought that way. Not any more, though. Everybody knows you latch on to anything you can get, ’cause you may be out of work again tomorrow.”
“You really want to do this.”
She heard that it wasn’t a question. “Yeah, I do. I’m all by myself here. My friends are back in New York. I’d like to get to know people, not just sit in the chair and read sappy novels and listen to the radio all day.”
If he told her no, she’d do things his way, or he thought she would. But she wouldn’t be happy about it. He didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to have the little gray cells to figure that out. Right now, the apartment probably seemed like a little gray cell to her. Telling her she should stay in it would only cause trouble down the line. Charlie didn’t like trouble, not nearly so much as Mike did. He never had.
And so he sighed, not too loud and not too sorrowfully, and said, “Okey-doke. Go ahead and do it. But when you land something, try and get home in time to have dinner on the table for me. Deal?”
“Deal!” She must have expected him to tell her no, because she jumped at the bargain.
Not only did she jump at it, she celebrated it by fixing gin-and-tonics for them. The gin was strong, but that was as much as it had going for it. Charlie sighed again, on a different note this time. “Tastes like it came from somebody’s bathtub-or his chemistry set.”
“I bet it did,” Esther said. “That bottle’s from before Repeal. Still not much good stuff on the shelves.”
“What there is is expensive, too.” Charlie took another sip. “Well, we can drink this. When it’s gone, we’ll get more, that’s all.”
“I don’t mind the radio so much when I’ve got company,” Esther said. “After I do the dishes, we can listen for a while, have another drink while we do.”
“And who knows what’ll happen then, huh?” He leered at her.
She glanced back out of the corner of her eye. “Who knows?”
Some nice, romantic music would have been great. But when Charlie turned on the set and the tubes had warmed up, what he got were commercials for soap and shampoo and then one of those smooth-voiced announcers going, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast so we may bring you an address from the President of the United States.”
“What’s he going to talk about?” Esther asked.
“Beats me,” Charlie answered.
He would have gone on from there, but the President’s voice came out of the radio: “This is Joe Steele.” He didn’t sound smooth. He never did, but tonight even less so than usual. “I need to talk to you tonight because the country has a problem. There are nine old men sitting in a dusty old chamber in the Capitol who think they have the power to do whatever they want with the hopes and dreams of Americans everywhere.”
“Uh-oh,” Esther said.
“Yeah.” Charlie couldn’t have put it better himself. When Joe Steele went after something or somebody, he didn’t do it halfway.
“You elected the new Congress-you did, the people of the United States,” the President went on. Charlie thought he heard cold fury in the voice coming out of the radio. Or Joe Steele might just have been a good actor. How could you know for sure? “You elected the new Congress, and you elected me. I’ve done everything I know how to do to try to get our country back on its feet again. Congress-well, most of Congress-has helped me by passing the laws that set up my Four Year Plan.”
Even when he was mostly talking about something else, he couldn’t resist throwing a dart or two at the conservatives the election hadn’t swept out of Washington. Whatever else you did, you didn’t want to get on his bad side.
“But no one elected the nine old fools in their black robes who sit in their musty room and dare to stop the people’s progress,” Joe Steele growled. “Why are they doing that? What can they want? They are hurting the country. They are wrecking the country. How could any loyal American say that the laws we need to fix what is broken go against the Constitution? There has to be something wrong, something horribly wrong, with anyone who would do that. I don’t know what it is, but I tell you this-I’m going to find out.”
He kept on for a while after that, but he was firing at the same targets over and over. When he signed off, the announcer sounded faintly stunned and more than faintly relieved to turn the airwaves over to a jazz band.
Charlie and Esther stared at each other. “Wow,” Charlie said.
“Wow is right,” Esther said. “You could see what he was doing when he went after the Congressmen who were stalling his bills. But what’s the point to hammering the Supreme Court like that?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie answered. “Joe Steele said it himself-nobody elected them. If people write them angry letters, you think they’ll care? Not likely. The only way justices leave the Supreme Court is feet first. Once they’re there, they’re there. The rest of the country’s stuck with ’em.”
“They could-waddayacallit-impeach them,” Esther said. But even she didn’t sound as if she believed it would happen.
Neither did Charlie. “You practically have to catch somebody taking bribes on his front lawn to get rid of him that way. The Supreme Court justices aren’t doing anything like that, and Joe Steele’s got to know it. It’s politics, that’s all it is. You can’t impeach somebody just on account of politics.”
“Andrew Johnson,” Esther said. “I remember from high school history.”
“Uh-huh. But they couldn’t throw him out of office, and they had at least as big a bulge in Congress as Joe Steele does.”
“Maybe Joe Steele thinks that, if the justices find out how many people can’t stand them, they’ll start taking a different look at the Constitution,” Esther said.
“It could happen. It makes more sense than anything else I can think of-I’ll tell you that,” Charlie said. “But it could backfire on him, too. They’re liable to dig in their heels and toss out all of his laws just because they’re his. He’s got pride, but so do they.”
“Nothing we can do about it except try not to get stuck in the gears when they grind together,” Esther said.
“No, there’s one more thing I can do,” Charlie said.
“Like what?”
“Talk to the White House people tomorrow and see if they know what Joe Steele has in mind. Scriabin didn’t the last time I was there-or if he did, he didn’t let on. He’s got the deadest pan you ever saw. But I’ll see what I can pry out of Kagan and Mikoian. Mikoian could be a regular guy if he didn’t keep looking over his shoulder so much.”
“That’s tomorrow,” Esther said archly. “What do you intend to do tonight?”
“The wench grows bold,” Charlie said. “I expect I’ll think of something.” And he did.
He had less luck when he called at the White House the next morning. That Justice Department investigator named Hoover was just leaving as Charlie walked in. Hoover smiled at him on the way out. Had Charlie been a kid, that smile would have scared him out of a year’s growth. Hoover had one of those faces that seemed only a little south of ordinary in repose or angry. When he smiled, he made you want to run away.
Charlie said as much to Stas Mikoian. He made Mikoian laugh. Nothing frightening about Mikoian when he did; he was handsome in a swarthy, strong-nosed way. “We don’t work with Hoover because he’s pretty,” Stas said.
“Why do you work with him, then?” If he gave Charlie an opening, Charlie’d run through it.
“Because he’s one of those people who can take care of things,” Mikoian replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it says,” answered jesting Stas, and would not stay for more questions.
VI
Time went on, and time went on, and time went on some more. The papers had a field day with Joe Steele’s speech. They split pretty much down the middle between backing him and calling him a would-be Hitler or Trotsky. That amused Charlie. “I can see calling him one name or the other, but both?” he said to Esther. “If you call him both, then he’s somewhere between the two of them. Seems to me that’s the right place to be.”