Free Joe Steele by Harry Turtledove Page A

out a stream of smoke. “It won’t matter. Glass’ll just keep saying no. He’ll get as loud as he reckons he needs to. He’ll go on about Trotsky and the Reds, and maybe about Hitler and the Nazis, too. Then he’ll say no some more. He doesn’t reckon the Federal government’s got the right to do this.”
    â€œOne of the guys who doesn’t reckon Washington has the right to shake it after a leak, huh?” Charlie said with a sour chuckle.
    â€œThat’s him,” Dabney said, not without pride. “States’ rights all the way.” By the way he answered, he was a states’ rights man himself. He was a white Southerner. Not all of them filled that bill, but most of them did.
    You couldn’t argue with them. Oh, you could, but you’d only waste your time. Charlie didn’t waste any of his. Instead, he said, “Let me scrounge one of your cigarettes, okay?”
    â€œSure.” Dabney handed him the pack and even gave him a match. Camels were stronger than Charlie’s usual Chesterfields, but he didn’t complain. He’d gone to France in 1918, though too late to see combat. With what they smoked over there, he was amazed that German poison gas had bothered them.
    After about an hour and fifteen minutes, Carter Glass came out of the White House. He always looked kind of weathered. He was in his mid-seventies; he’d come by it honestly. Now . . . Now Charlie wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Unless he was imagining things, Glass looked as if he’d just walked into a haymaker from Primo Carnera. The giant Italian wasn’t heavyweight champ just yet, but he had a fight with Jack Sharkey set for the end of June.
    â€œSenator Glass!” Charlie called. “Did the President bring you around to his way of thinking, Senator?”
    Glass flinched at the question, as if he were afraid Primo Carnerawould belt him again. He took a deep breath, like a man coming off the canvas and trying to stay upright. “After some discussion with President Steele, I have decided that the nationalization bill is, ah, a worthy piece of legislation. I intend to vote for it, and I will work with the President to persuade my colleagues to support it as well. Right now, that’s all I have to say. Excuse me.”
    He scuttled away. Up till that moment, Charlie had always thought T. S. Eliot stretched language past the breaking point when he compared a man to a pair of ragged claws. If ever a man walked like a dejected crab, it was Carter Glass.
    Charlie held out his hand. “Pay up.”
    Virginius Dabney was still gaping after the Senator from his home state. “Dog my cats,” he said softly, more to himself than to Charlie. He took out his billfold, fumbled, and pulled out an engraved portrait of George Washington. “Here y’are. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. The President, he’s got some big mojo working.”
    After pocketing the dollar, Charlie said, “Some big what?”
    â€œMojo,” Dabney repeated. “It’s nigger slang. Means something like magic power. I can’t think of anything else that would make Carter Glass turn on a dime like that.”
    â€œMojo, huh? Have to remember that,” Charlie said. “But didn’t I tell you Joe Steele had a way of getting what he wanted?”
    â€œYou told me. I didn’t believe you. Nobody who knows anything about Glass would’ve believed you.”
    A couple of other recalcitrant Senators went to confer with the President. When they came out of the White House, they were all for nationalization, too. Charlie didn’t see them emerge, so he didn’t know whether they looked as steamrollered as Carter Glass had. He figured it was likely, though. Joe Steele could be mighty persuasive. Look how well he’d persuaded Franklin Roosevelt, after all.
    The Senators remained among the