That was the first explanation of the arrests besides the notion that Joe Steele was a hatching tyrant that made any kind of sense to Mike. But he said, “I bet he starts a forest fire when he wants to light a cigarette, too.”
Ken chuckled. “C’mon-you know he smokes a pipe.”
If they’d been back in the newsroom, Mike would have given him the finger. In a restaurant, even one as crummy as the Goulash House, he held back. All he said was, “You shoulda been a lawyer or a barber. You’re good for nothing but splitting hairs.”
“Har-de-har-har. See how hard I’m laughing?” Ken slid a couple of quarters across the counter. Jules/Gyula started to give him a nickel back, but he waved it away. He poked Mike. “See you in paradise.”
“Hold on. I’m coming.” Mike took one more bite, paid the counterman, and escaped the Goulash House.
He still had trouble getting anywhere with the latest Wall Street story after he went back to his beat-up desk. Stan Feldman, not seeing it when he wanted it, breathed down his neck, which was one of the things editors were for. “Sorry, Stan,” Mike said, and meant it, because he took pride in getting work done on deadline. “The whole thing with Joe Steele’s thrown me for a loop.”
“Well, you better straighten up and fly right.” When dealing with a story that wasn’t there, Feldman had all the warmth and understanding of an undertaker or a principal.
“Story may not be as good as I wanted it to be.” Mike spread his hands in apology.
“Good I can live without sometimes,” his editor answered. “The story, I can’t. Get it on my desk by half past four.”
Mike got it on his desk by half past four. It wasn’t as good as he wished it would have been. The only reason it was even as good as it was was that he knew how to put stories together. He could do it while most of his brain was chewing on something else. Let’s hear it for experience, he thought.
He wanted to work on something important, dammit, something that would get him remembered. The brokerage-house story wasn’t it. He’d had hopes for the piece when he sailed into it, but it was just one more tale of greed. The world had seen too many of them lately. They’d helped spark the Depression, and they kept popping up in its aftermath. Greed was as common a driver as sex-too common to make most of the stories about it very interesting.
Greed for power, now. . If Ken was right, Joe Steele was playing rougher than a President had any business playing. And if Ken’s wrong, then I’m right, Mike thought. And if I’m right, we’re in even more trouble than we were when the market crashed.
* * *
The kid from the mailroom threw an envelope on Mike’s desk. “What’s this?” Mike asked.
“I dunno.” The kid was steady, but not long on brains. “Somethin’ for you.”
“Okay. I’ll investigate.” Mike pulled his letter-opener out of the top drawer. It was overqualified for its job: it was a saw-toothed German bayonet from the Great War, as long as a young sword, the kind the hero in All Quiet on the Western Front said you needed to grind down because Entente soldiers would kill you if they caught you with it.
It bit into yellow-brown heavy paper as readily as it would have torn through flesh. Inside were four typewritten sheets stapled together. Paperclipped to them was a note. I finally found this-never mind where, it said. With everything that’s going on in Washington these days, it’s extra interesting.
The note was unsigned. Mike pulled the envelope out of the wastebasket. It had no return address. But it was postmarked in Menands, the little town next door to Albany where the minor-league team played its games.
And the four typewritten pages were the missing arson inspector’s report on the fire that gutted the Executive Mansion and killed Franklin D. Roosevelt in the summer of 1932. So Mike could make a pretty good guess about who’d sent it to him. But it would only be a guess-he couldn’t prove a thing. That had to be just the way the clerk in the Albany Fire Department wanted it.
Mike dove into the report headfirst. When he came up again on the other side, he was blowing like a whale. No wonder the arson report had vanished from the file! It didn’t quite say the fire had been set. It mentioned the possibility of liquor bottles or rubbing alcohol helping the flames spread so fast. But it sure implied that the conflagration and the way it engulfed the old building weren’t accidental.
Whistling tunelessly between his teeth, Mike picked up the report and took it into Stan’s office. He dropped it on the editor’s desk. Stan was on the phone. He glanced down at the report. Then he took a longer look and stiffened. “Al?” he said. “Listen, lemme call you back in a little while.” He hung up. Glaring at Mike, he asked, “Where the hell’d you get this?”
“A little bird dropped it in the mailbox,” Mike said.
“Some little bird. Jesus!” Stan went through the report faster than Mike had. When he looked up again, he said, “What do you want to do with it?” Then he took a pint of Old Crow out of his own desk drawer, swigged, and offered Mike the bourbon. Mike drank, too. He needed it.
“I want to get it out there,” he said when he could breathe again-straight bourbon on an empty stomach in midmorning wasn’t something he did every day. “People have the right to know how Roosevelt died. When you add in what my brother heard the morning before-”
Stan held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You can’t write that, on account you can’t prove it connects. Your brother didn’t hear what’s-his-face go, ‘Okay, cook Roosevelt tonight.’ He just heard him say, ‘Take care of it’-whatever it is.” He slammed the report with his fist. “Not even all the way sure it was arson. Probably, the guy says, but not for sure.”
“Even probably is dynamite.” The Old Crow seemed to make Mike’s wits work double-quick. “How about this? I write about the report, and I make sure I leave the probably in. Then I write about how Franklin Roosevelt and Joe Steele were locking horns for the nomination summer before last, how Roosevelt was edging ahead and might’ve won if he didn’t burn to a crisp. I won’t say that I think Joe Steele and his merry men had anything to do with the fire, but you’ll be able to read between the lines if you want to.”
Stan studied him. Then the editor took another knock from the bottle, a bigger one this time. “No matter how careful you write it, you’re gonna be in deep shit as soon as it comes out. So will I.”
“I won’t make any accusations. If you think I do, you’ll take ’em out,” Mike said.
“Even so,” Stan said. “Joe Steele and his boys, they’ve got a memory like an elephant for anybody who does ’em dirt. And you’re already on their list from before, don’t forget.”
“So?” Mike shrugged. “If we let ’em scare us out of doing our job, they’ve already won, right?”
Stan cast a longing look at the flat-sided bottle of Old Crow, but didn’t drink again. “Easy to talk brave when you aren’t really putting anything on the line,” he remarked, not quite apropos of nothing. He eyed the bourbon one more time, then sighed and shook his head. “Go write the goddamn story. Maybe I’ll run it, or maybe I’ll can it. Right now, I’ve got no idea. Go on-get the hell outa here.”
As Mike left, he saw the editor pick up the telephone. Getting back to his bookie or whoever that was, he thought. He ran a sheet of paper into the Underwood upright and pounded away. Words flowed out of him. This wasn’t hard labor, the way the brokerage story had been. If Someone put him on earth, it was to do something like this.
He laid the story on Stan’s desk after stashing a carbon where it wouldn’t be easy to find. An hour later, the managing editor walked by his desk. He nodded and raised his right thumb. “Now the fun starts,” he said.