When Charlie stopped shoving in nickels and hung up, two guys behind him got into a wrestling match over who’d use the phone next. He grabbed Louie and headed for the cafeteria in the basement. He’d eaten there only once before. As soon as he bit into his turkey sandwich, he remembered why.
Louie’d got roast beef, and didn’t look any happier with it. “Holy Jesus, Charlie!” he said with his mouth full. “I mean, holy jumping Jesus!” He swallowed heroically.
“That’s about the size of it,” Charlie agreed.
“They confessed,” the photographer said. “I mean, they confessed. I knew they’d tell Joe Steele to piss up a rope. I knew it. Only they didn’t.”
“They sure didn’t. They fingered some other big shots who can’t stand him, either.” Charlie kept eating the sandwich even if it was lousy. “And they didn’t look like J. Edgar Hoover was giving ’em the third degree. They just decided to sing.”
“Like canaries.” Louie lowered his voice: “You believe ’em? You believe all that treason malarkey’s legit?”
“I believe anybody who sets out to prove it isn’t will have a tough time doing it unless the justices take back their confessions,” Charlie said.
Louie chewed on that, literally and metaphorically. Then he nodded. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I bet Father Coughlin’s spitting rivets right now.” Well, he might have said spitting.
Charlie didn’t get such a good seat when the tribunal reconvened. Other reporters had either eaten faster or skipped lunch. He’d made it to a phone in a hurry. He wouldn’t complain about this.
At two o’clock straight up, Captain Spruance gaveled the proceedings back into session. “We have reached a decision in this case,” he said. “Are the defendants ready to hear it?”
If any of the four Associate Justices wasn’t ready, he didn’t say so.
“Very well,” Spruance continued. “Because of their confessions earlier today and because of the evidence against them, evidence they did not seek to contest, we find them guilty of the crime of treason against the United States of America.” He turned to the Army officers sitting at his left hand. “Is that not our unanimous decision, gentlemen?”
“It is,” chorused Colonel Marshall, Major Bradley, and Major Eisenhower.
“Furthermore,” Spruance said, “we sentence the defendants to death, the sentence to be carried out by firing squad.” Willis Van Deventer slumped in his seat. The other three sat unmoving. Captain Spruance looked at the other officers again. “Is that not our unanimous decision, gentlemen?”
“It is,” they said together.
Levine bounced to his feet. “This is a kangaroo court, nothing else but! We’ll appeal this outrageous verdict!”
“Who to? The Supreme Court?” Over at the prosecutors’ table, Andy Wyszynski went into gales of laughter. The ACLU lawyer stared at him, popeyed. Wyszynski rubbed it in some more: “Or maybe you’ll appeal to the President?” Oh, how he laughed!
He laughed until Captain Spruance brought down the gavel. “Mr. Attorney General, your display is unseemly.”
“Sorry, sir.” Wyszynski didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry, either. But he did stop openly gloating.
Soldiers, sailors, and U.S. marshals took the convicted traitors away. The reporters scrambled to file their new stories. Charlie wondered how many late editions would sport a one-word headline: DEATH!
He wondered some other things, too. But that didn’t matter, or not very much. If the accused men admitted that they’d done what they were accused of, and if you couldn’t prove they’d been forced to admit it, what could anybody do? Not much, not that Charlie could see. And questions without good answers seemed all too much like questions better left unasked.
* * *
“Take it easy, Mike.” Stella sounded scared. “You’ll blow a gasket if you don’t relax.”
“Somebody needs to blow a gasket, by God,” Mike said savagely. “They were railroaded. They must’ve been railroaded-nobody in his right mind would confess to anything like that. I bet they got plenty of rubber hoses and castor oil and water up the nose. You don’t need to leave marks to hurt somebody so bad he’ll say anything you want. Ask Mussolini. . uh, no offense.”
Stella Morandini said something incandescent about il Duce in the language she’d learned at her mother’s knee. Then she went back to English: “But you know, even here in the Village a lot of people think the Supreme Court Four are guilty as sin.”
Mike did know that. It left him depressed, if not neurotic. “You know what it proves?” he said.
“What?” Stella asked, as she knew she should.
“It proves a lot of people are goddamn imbeciles, that’s what.” Mike made as if to tear out his hair. “Ahh. .! What I really need to do is go on a six-day bender, stay so pickled I can’t even remember all the different ways this country’s going to the dogs.” He started for the kitchen to see what he had in the way of booze. In his apartment, nothing was more than a few steps from anything else.
“Wait,” Stella said.
“How come? What could be better than getting smashed?”
He didn’t think she’d have an answer for that, but she started taking off her clothes. He paused to reconsider. Making love wouldn’t give him six days of forgetfulness, but it also wouldn’t leave him wishing he were dead afterwards. In his haste to join her, he popped a button off his shirt.
His bed was of the Murphy persuasion. Instead of shoving a chair and an end table out of the way to use it, they made do with the sofa. Still straddling him in the afterglow, her face on his shoulder, she asked, “Happier now?”
“Some ways, sure.” He patted her behind. “Others, not so much. The country’s still a mess.”
“What can you do about it?”
“I’ve been doing what I can-and look how far it’s got me,” he answered. “What happened today, that makes me want to go out in the streets and start throwing bombs at police stations. Then they’ll hang a treason rap on me, too.”
“I don’t think I’ll let you have your pants back,” Stella said seriously. “You can’t go out and throw bombs without pants.”
“You’re right. Somebody would arrest me.” Mike laughed. It was either laugh or push Stella off him and go pound his head against the wall. The noise from that would make the neighbors complain. Besides, Stella was far and away the best thing he had going for him, and she had been for a while. Wasn’t it about time he figured out what he needed to do about that? “Hon,” he said, “you want to marry me?”
Her eyes widened. “What brought that on?”
“A rush of brains to the head, I hope. Do you?”
“Sure,” she said. “My mother’s gonna fall over, you know. She was sure you wouldn’t ever ask me. She figured you were just using me to have fun. ‘He’s a man,’ she says, ‘and you know the only thing men want.’”
“I’ve never just used you to have fun, and that isn’t the only thing I want you for,” Mike said. Then he spoiled his foursquare stand for virtue by patting her again. “It’s pretty darn nice, though, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t be in this compromising position if I didn’t think so.”
“You didn’t compromise, sweetie. You cooperated. There’s a difference.”
“So what do we do once we tie the knot? Do we live happily ever after, like in the fairy tales?”
“We live as happily ever after as Joe Steele will let us,” Mike said. Stella poked him in the ribs. He supposed he deserved it, but he hadn’t been kidding even so.
VIII