“I dunno. However it started, it’s goin’ great guns, ain’t it?” The fireman shrugged broad shoulders. “I don’t gotta figure out what happened. I just gotta try an’ put it out. The how and the what, they’re for the guys from the arson patrol.”
“Was it arson?” Mike demanded.
“I dunno,” the fireman said again. “When one burns this big and this hot, though, we’d poke around even if it was a bunch of empty offices and not the Executive Mansion.”
“Did anybody. . get caught in the fire?”
The fireman scowled at Mike as if, for the first time, he’d asked a really dumb question. And so he must have, because the man said, “A housemaid got out, and a nigger cook from the kitchen busted a window and jumped out with his pants on fire. Everybody else who was in there. . Christ have mercy on their souls, that’s all I can tell ya.” As Mike had, he crossed himself.
“Oh, my Lord.” Hearing it that way was like a kick in the belly. “Roosevelt was inside, wasn’t he? Franklin and Eleanor both, I mean.”
“That’s what we heard when we rolled, uh-huh.” The fireman nodded. “If they were, though, it’s gonna take a while to find ’em, on account of all the other shit that’s burning, pardon my French. Even when we do, they’ll be like charcoal. Sorry, but that’s how it is. Won’t hardly be enough of ’em left to bury.”
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Shakespeare chimed inside Mike’s head. Well, FDR would never be Caesar now. “I wasn’t thinking about burying them,” Mike said, which was half true, anyhow. “I was thinking, now who gets the Democratic nomination?”
Once more, the fireman eyed him as if he were a moron. “Joe Steele does,” the man said. “Who else is left now?”
When you asked it like that, the answer was simple. With Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the picture, no one else was left now, no one at all.
* * *
The movement from ballot to ballot at the Chicago Stadium reminded Charlie Sullivan of the Western Front in 1918. You couldn’t see much movement from one day to the next then, but after a while the French and English and Americans were always going forward and the Kaiser’s boys were always going back. Roosevelt kept moving forward here, and Joe Steele kept falling back. Sooner or later, the trickle would turn to a flood, and retreat to rout. Later was starting to look more and more like sooner, too.
Charlie saw the exact moment when everything changed. A spotty-faced kid tore onto the convention floor at a speed an Olympic sprinter might have envied. He dashed straight for the New York delegation and huddled with Big Jim Farley.
Farley clapped both hands to his head and spun away: an operatic gesture of despair. The anguished bellow he let out might have come straight from grand opera, too. He asked the kid something. The answer he got made him spin away again.
His next shout had words in it: “Mister Chairman! Mister Chairman!”
Although the secretary was calling the roll for the umpty-umpth time, the chairman motioned for him to pause. “The chair recognizes the distinguished delegate from New York.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I-” Jim Farley’s chin sagged down to his chest. His voice broke. For a moment, Charlie didn’t think he’d be able to go on. Then, visibly gathering himself, Farley did: “Mr. Chairman, I have the inexpressibly sad duty of informing you and the convention that Governor and Mrs. Roosevelt have perished in a quickly spreading fire at the Executive Mansion in Albany. The Governor, of course, was confined to his wheelchair and did not have a chance of escaping the flames.”
Delegates on the floor and gawkers in the stand all cried out in horror. Charlie tried to imagine Roosevelt’s final moments, trapped in that chair as fire swept over him. Shuddering, he wished he hadn’t. The most you could hope for was that it ended pretty fast.
Stas Mikoian and Lazar Kagan were with the rest of the California delegation. They looked as shocked and as devastated as anyone else on the floor, regardless of which candidate he backed. Mikoian in particular went white as a sheet and swayed where he stood. Like a lot of people down there and in the stands, he made the sign of the cross. With a reporter’s gift for noting useless details, Charlie saw that he shaped the horizontal stroke from right to left, not from left to right the way a Roman Catholic would.
Charlie looked around the floor for Vince Scriabin. He couldn’t spot Joe Steele’s other California henchman. Maybe that was because Scriabin had the kind of face and build you forgot five seconds after you saw them. He seemed so ordinary, he blended into any crowd like a chameleon.
Or maybe Charlie didn’t see him because he wasn’t there. A chill ran through Charlie as he remembered the chunk of Scriabin’s phone call he’d overheard early this morning-or a million years ago, depending on how you looked at things.
Take care of it-tonight, he’d said. You let it go, it’ll be too late. By the money he fed into the telephone, he was calling long-distance.
Where was he calling, exactly? Who was on the other end of the line? What did Vince want him to take care of? Why might it be too late if that other fellow waited?
The obvious answer Charlie saw scared the piss out of him. He didn’t want to believe Joe Steele or his backers could imagine anything like that, much less do it. He had no proof at all, as he knew perfectly well. He didn’t even have what anybody would call a suspicion. He had a possibility, a coincidence. Only that, and nothing more.
Some of the moans and groans and cries of grief around him shaped themselves into a different kind of noise inside his head. What it sounded like was a goose walking over his grave.
Vince Scriabin had noticed him, there in the hallway leading back to that greasy spoon’s john. How much did Vince think he’d overheard? Would Vince figure he could add two and two and come up with four? If Vince did, what was he liable to do about it?
If this wasn’t all moonshine, Scriabin had just arranged to have Joe Steele’s main rival roasted all black and crispy, like a ham forgotten in the oven. After that, getting rid of a reporter would be no more than snipping off a loose end. People who knew too much were some of the most inconvenient people in the world.
If this wasn’t all moonshine. If Vince Scriabin hadn’t been talking about something else altogether. If he had been talking about something else, Charlie was just borrowing trouble. As if I don’t have enough already, he thought. Yeah, as if!
Nobody was going to come after him right this minute. He wasn’t sure of much, but he was sure of that. Cautiously, the chairman asked, “Mr. Farley, what do you and your people have in mind for the delegates who have been supporting Governor Roosevelt?”
“We would have liked to continue as we were going, to win the nomination here and to win the White House in November,” Farley said, every word full of unshed tears. “Obviously, that. . will not happen now. Just as obviously, our party still needs to win the general election. This being so, Governor Roosevelt’s delegates are released from any pledges they may have made, and are free to follow the dictates of their several consciences.”
Before the chairman could say anything or even ply his gavel, one of Huey Long’s wheeler-dealers moved for a one-hour recess. He got it; hardly anyone opposed him. He still thought the Kingfish could make headway against Joe Steele, then. Charlie would have bet double eagles against dill pickles that he was nutty as a Christmas fruitcake, but he deserved the chance to try-the chance to fail.
Try the Long backers did. Fail they did, too, gruesomely. The delegates from outside the old Confederacy who wanted to have anything to do with Huey Long didn’t make anybody need to take off his shoes to count them. And a Mississippi Congressman who sported buttons for John Nance Garner and Joe Steele waved his cigar and shouted, “How about we win an election for a change, hey?”