Harry Turtledove: Joe Steele

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?”

That put it in terms even another Congressman could understand. A few minutes after three in the morning, on the convention’s sixty-first ballot, West Virginia’s votes lifted Joe Steele over the two-thirds mark. Come November, he’d face Hoover.

Blizzards of confetti blew through the Chicago Stadium. Delegates scaled straw hats. Some of them flew for amazing distances. Charlie watched one sail past the chairman’s left ear. That worthy, affronted, moved his head a little to avoid the collision.

Charlie wasn’t affronted. He was entranced. If you could make a toy that glided so well, you’d be a millionaire in a month, he thought. The band played “California, Here I Come” and “You Are My Sunshine.”

The enchantment of flying straw hats didn’t perk Charlie up for long. Neither did the thought of becoming a millionaire in a month. For once, he couldn’t get excited about kicking Herbert Hoover out of Washington in November with a tin can tied to his tail. He wondered if he’d still be alive in a month, let alone in the dim and distant future of November.

* * *

Someone knocked on the door to Charlie’s hotel room. Whoever the son of a bitch was, he wouldn’t quit, either. Opening one eye a slit, Charlie peered toward the alarm clock ticking on the dresser against the far wall. It was a quarter past eight. To somebody covering a political convention, a knock at this heathen hour felt too much like the midnight visits that brought panic in Trotsky’s Russia.

Yawning and cussing at the same time, Charlie lurched to the door. He threw it wide. Whoever was out there, he’d give him a good, jagged piece of his mind.

But he didn’t. In the hallway, neatly groomed and dressed, stood Vince Scriabin. The only thing that came out of Charlie’s mouth was “Ulp.”

“Good morning,” Scriabin said, as if they hadn’t last seen each other when the fixer was arranging something horrible (unless, of course, he wasn’t doing that at all).

“Morning,” Charlie managed. It was an improvement on Ulp , if only a small one.

“Joe Steele would like to see you in his room in fifteen minutes,” Scriabin said. “It’s 573.” He touched the brim of his homburg, nodded, and walked away.

“Jesus!” Charlie said as he shut the door. His heart thumped like a drum. He’d half-more than half-expected Scriabin to pull a snub-nosed.38 from an inside pocket and fill him full of holes. A-breakfast? — invitation from the candidate? His crystal ball hadn’t shown him anything about that.

Gotta get it fixed, he thought vaguely. He had to fix himself up, too, and in a hurry. He stuck a new Gillette Blue Blade in his razor and scraped stubble from his cheeks and chin and upper lip. He threw on some clothes, dragged a comb through his sandy hair, and went down to 573.

When he knocked, Lazar Kagan let him in. The round-faced Jew hadn’t shaved yet this morning. “It’s a great day for America,” Kagan said.

“I think so, too,” Charlie answered. He might have sounded heartier if he hadn’t walked past Vince Scriabin at just the wrong moment, but how hearty was anyone likely to sound before he had his coffee?

Joe Steele was sipping from a cup. The pot perked lazily on a hot plate. A tray of scrambled eggs and another full of sausages sat above cans of Sterno. A loaf of bread lay beside a plugged-in toaster.

Scriabin and Mikoian were also there with their boss. No other reporters were. Charlie didn’t know whether that was good news or bad. “Congratulations on winning the nomination,” he said.

“Thanks. Thanks very much.” Joe Steele set down the coffee cup. He came over to shake Charlie’s hand. He had a strong grip. He might not be a large man, but his hands were good-sized. “Believe me, Charlie, this is not the way I wanted to do it.”

“I guess not!” Charlie exclaimed. Of course the Californian would have wanted to take the prize without anything happening to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He would have wanted to beat the stuffing out of the Governor of New York. He probably wouldn’t have been able to do that, but it didn’t matter any more.

Joe Steele waved to the spread. “Help yourself to anything,” he said.

“Thank you. Don’t mind if I do.” Charlie wondered if he needed a food taster, the way kings had in the old days. If he did, he had several, because the candidate and his aides had already had some breakfast. Kagan and Joe Steele took more along with Charlie.

After Charlie had had coffee and a cigarette and had got outside of some breakfast, he asked Steele, “What can I do for you this morning?”

The Congressman from California smoked a pipe. Getting it going let him pause before he answered. Charlie watched him-studied him-while he fiddled with it. His face gave away nothing. You could peer into his eyes forever, and all you’d see would be eyes. Whatever was going on behind them, Joe Steele would know and you wouldn’t.

After a couple of puffs of smoke floated up to the ceiling, the candidate said, “I wanted to tell you how well you’ve done, how fair you’ve been, covering the campaign up till now. I’ve noticed, believe me.”

“I’m glad,” Charlie said. When a politician told you you’d been fair, he meant you’d backed him. Well, Charlie had. He’d thought Joe Steele could set the country right if anybody could. He still wanted to think so. It wasn’t so easy now, not when he wondered what Vince Scriabin had talked about on that long-distance call.

And when a politician said Believe me , you had to have rocks in your head if you did. Any reporter worth the crappy wage he got learned that in a hurry.

Joe Steele looked at Charlie. Looking back, Charlie saw. . eyes. Eyes and that proud nose and the bushy mustache under it. Whatever Joe Steele was thinking, the façade didn’t give it away.

“As long as you keep writing such good stories, no one in my camp will have anything to complain about,” the candidate said.

Stas Mikoian grinned. When he had his color, as he did now, his teeth flashed against his dark skin. “Of course, people in political campaigns never complain about the stories reporters write,” he said.

“Of course,” Charlie said, with a lopsided smile of his own.

“Well, then,” Joe Steele said. He opened a nightstand drawer and pulled out a squat bottle of amber glass. The writing on the label was not in an alphabet Charlie could read. Steele pulled the cork and poured a slug from the bottle into each coffee cup. Charlie sniffed curiously. Brandy of some kind-apricot, he thought-and strong, unless he missed his guess.

“To winning!” Vince Scriabin said. They clinked cups as if they held wine glasses. Charlie sipped. Yes, even cut with coffee, that stuff would put hair on your chest. It would probably put hair on your chest if you were a girl.

“Winning is the most important thing, yes,” Joe Steele said. His henchmen nodded in unison, almost as if a single will animated the three of them. More slowly, with all of the other men watching him, Charlie followed suit. He didn’t know what he’d expected when Vince Scriabin summoned him here. Or maybe he did know, but he didn’t want to think about it.