“Well, it’s hard to get left of Trotsky or right of Hitler,” his wife answered, which was bound to be true. Then she went on, “They’re both dictators, though, whether they fly the red flag or the swastika. I think that’s what the editorial writers were getting at, or aiming at, anyway.”
“Huh,” Charlie said: a thoughtful grunt. He looked her over in a way unusual for him-altogether untinged by desire. “I sure didn’t marry a dummy when I tied the knot with you, did I?”
“I hope not.” Esther left it right there. She would toot her own horn sometimes, but never very loud.
After a while, the papers forgot about the speech. To a newspaperman, everything was a nine days’ wonder. You reported it, you screamed about it, and then you stopped talking about it because you were too busy screaming about the next nine days’ wonder. Charlie understood that a lot of what he wrote, he wrote on the wind. He didn’t let it bother him. His bills were paid, he didn’t owe anybody in the world a dime (Mike owed him fifteen bucks, and had since not long after the Treaty of Versailles. Charlie wasn’t holding his breath about collecting.), and he couldn’t think of anything he’d sooner be doing.
He was at the AP office, writing a story about a Congressman from Mississippi who’d never heard of discretion, when the phone on his desk rang. He grabbed it halfway through the second chime. “Sullivan,” he barked, hoping for more dirt about the way the Congressman soaked up campaign cash like a greedy sponge.
“Hello, Sullivan.” The voice on the other end of the line obviously knew him, but he didn’t recognize it right away. It didn’t give him a chance to, either, for it continued, “If you’re outside the north end of the Capitol tomorrow morning a little before ten o’clock, you’ll see something interesting.”
“Oh, yeah? What?” he said, but he was talking to a dead line. He took longer to realize that than he might have, too. Swearing under his breath, he hung up.
“What’s going on?” asked the newshawk at the next desk.
“Don’t know. Crank call, I think.” Charlie didn’t want anyone else at the Capitol to see-and to write about-whatever there was to see.
“Sometimes I hate telephones,” the other reporter said. “They’re handy and all, but Christ, they can be annoying.”
“You got that right,” Charlie said. The other guy-his name was Zach Stark-kept on bellyaching. Charlie listened with less than half an ear. He kept playing the phone call in his mind, over and over again. He hadn’t recognized the voice, but he kept feeling he should have.
He couldn’t place it, though, so he went back to the story of the Congressman on the take. His stomach rumbled. He was hungry-he should have knocked off for lunch twenty minutes earlier and headed for a diner.
A diner. . He remembered that one in Chicago going on two years earlier now, the one he’d gone to after the Democrats balloted through the night and broke up in the morning without a nominee. He remembered Vince Scriabin talking into the pay phone in the hallway when he went back to take a leak.
Sure as hell, that was the voice he’d heard just now. So something was cooking, or would be at the Capitol tomorrow morning. The little guy they called the Hammer wouldn’t call just to pass the time of day. He wouldn’t waste time with a practical joke, either. Charlie could imagine Stas Mikoian doing that, but not Scriabin. As far as Charlie could tell, Scriabin had had his sense of humor surgically removed when he was nine.
Somehow, Charlie would have bet the mansion he didn’t own that Scriabin had dropped a nickel in a telephone today, too. It didn’t sound like the kind of call that ought to come from the White House. It also didn’t sound like the kind of call that ought to be traceable to the White House.
Which meant. . Who the hell could say what it meant? Had Scriabin wanted him to know, the cold-blooded little bastard would have done more explaining. No, Scriabin wanted him to come see for himself. And Scriabin knew damn well he would, too.
Charlie didn’t like being so easy to jerk around. But he would have liked not getting that call even less. He didn’t want anybody scooping him. And he particularly didn’t want Vince Scriabin to help anybody scoop him. He knew too well the Hammer would be chuckling to himself while he did it. Screwing a reporter was almost as much fun as pulling the wings off flies.
* * *
Charlie stood outside of the Capitol, waiting for whatever he was waiting for. Inside, Congress was in session and the Supreme Court was deliberating, however little Joe Steele liked that. A new building especially for the court was going up a few blocks away, but it wouldn’t be ready to use for another year.
Just on the off chance, Charlie’d brought a photographer with him, a stocky, bald guy named Louie Pappas. Louie had the habit of gnawing on a cigar without ever lighting it. Maybe he wanted to split the difference between smoking and chewing tobacco. Maybe he was simply on the peculiar side.
“So what exactly’s going on here?” he asked Charlie.
“I don’t know. That’s what we’re here to find out,” Charlie answered. “If it turns out to be nothing, I’ll buy you lunch.”
“Okay. I’ll let you,” Louie said. “Not freezing my nuts off out here, anyhow. Spring’s on the way.” The air was still cool, but did give promise of warming up some. Hopeful green leaves were starting to show up on what had been bare, bony twigs. Robins hopped across dirt, keeping an eye peeled for worms. Of course, they did that all through the winter, too, so it didn’t prove much. Louie pointed at Charlie’s watch. “What time you got?”
“Quarter after nine-almost twenty after.” Like any halfway decent reporter, Charlie was compulsively early.
A silver-painted panel truck stopped near them. A crew got out and pulled a newsreel camera and tripod from the back. “How about that?” Louie said.
“Yeah, how about that?” Charlie echoed tonelessly. Vince Scriabin must have had more than one nickel in his pocket when he ducked into that telephone booth. Charlie still didn’t know what they were waiting for, but now he was sure it would be a story worth writing about.
Louie pointed up Capitol Street. “Look-here comes the parade.” The dead cigar twitched in his mouth.
Not all the cars were the same make. Some were Fords, some Chevrolets, while a big, lordly Packard led them. But they all plainly belonged together. They pulled to a stop with that lead Packard-surprise! — right behind the newsreel van.
Doors flew open. Out of the lead Packard sprang the Hoover who wasn’t Herbert. He wore a dark blue pinstriped suit and a pale gray fedora that marked him as a commander like a ship captain’s white-crowned cap. In his right hand he carried a gleaming revolver.
More men jumped from the plebeian cars. All their hats were dark. Some of them had pistols, too. Others cradled Tommy guns with big drum magazines full of death. Most of them looked to be advancing on forty. Unless Charlie missed his guess, they would have gone Over There in the Great War, and gone over the top, too. Their faces had that hard, ready-for-anything look.
Hoover waved them forward. “Come on, men!” he shouted. “We’ll clean out that nest of vipers, all right!”
As the newsreel cameraman cranked away and Louie snapped photo after photo, Hoover and his followers (They had to come from the Department of Justice, didn’t they? Well, didn’t they?) charged into the Capitol. After a couple of seconds of dithering, Charlie charged after them. He didn’t think a gun battle would break out in one of the two great centers of the Federal government. He sure hoped not.
Inside the North Small Rotunda, a cop who looked almost old enough to have fought on one side or the other at Pickett’s Charge wagged a finger at Hoover and said, “What do you think you’re doing in here with all that firepower?”