Gideon's Sword (44 page)

Reaching into my top drawer, I pull out a fresh manila envelope, open the flap, and sweep the taxicab receipts
inside. Time for some interoffice mail. On the front of the envelope, I write
Harris Sandler—427 Russell Bldg.
Next to the address, I add the word
Private,
just to be safe. Of course, even if Harris’s assistant opens it—even if the Speaker of the House opens it—I’m not dropping a bead of sweat. I see a hundred-dollar bet. Anyone else sees a ten-dollar taxi receipt—nothing to look twice at.

Stepping into our reception area, I toss the envelope into the rusty metal basket we use as an Out box. Roxanne does most of our interoffice stuff herself. “Roxanne, can you make sure to take this out in the next batch?”

She nods as I turn back to my desk. Just another day.

“Is it there yet?” I ask twenty minutes later.

“Already gone,” Harris answers. From the crackle in his voice, he’s got me on speakerphone. I swear, he’s not afraid of anything.

“You left it blank, right?” I ask.

“No, I ignored everything we discussed. Good-bye, Matthew. Call me when you have news.”

As he’s about to hang up, I hear a click in the background. Harris’s door opening. “Courier’s here,” his assistant calls out.

With a slam, Harris is gone. And so are the taxi receipts. From me to my mentor, from Harris to his. Leaning back in my black vinyl rolling chair, I can’t help but wonder who it is. Harris has been on the Hill since the day he graduated. If he’s an expert at anything, it’s making friends and connections. That narrows the list to a tidy few thousand. But if he’s using a courier, he’s going off campus. I stare out the window at a perfect view of the Capitol
dome. The playing field expands before my eyes. Former staffers are everywhere in this town. Law firms… PR boutiques… and most of all…

My phone rings, and I check the digital screen for caller ID.

… lobbying shops.

“Hi, Barry,” I say as I pick up the receiver.

“You’re still standing?” he asks. “I heard you guys were negotiating till ten last night.”

“It’s that time of year,” I tell him, wondering where he got the info. No one saw us leave last night. But that’s Barry. No sight, but somehow he sees it all. “So what can I help you with?”

“Tickets, tickets, and more tickets. This Sunday—Redskins home opener. Wanna see ’em get trounced from insanely overpriced seats? I got the recording industry’s private box. Me, you, Harris—we’ll have ourselves a little reunion.”

Barry hates football, and he can’t see a single play, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like the private catering and the butler that come with those seats. Plus, it gives Barry the temporary upper hand in his ongoing race with Harris. Neither will admit it, but it’s the unspoken game they’ve always played. And while Barry may get us the skybox, come game day, Harris will somehow find the best seat in it. It’s classic Capitol Hill—too many student government presidents in one place.

“Actually, that sounds great. Did you tell Harris?”

“Already done.” The answer doesn’t surprise me. Barry’s closer to Harris—he always calls him first. But that doesn’t mean the reverse is true. In fact, when Harris needs a lobbyist, he sidesteps Barry and goes directly to the man on top.

“So how’s Pasternak treating you?” I ask, referring to Barry’s boss.

“How do you think I got the tickets?” Barry teases. It’s not much of a joke. Especially to Barry. As the firm’s hungriest associate, he’s been trying to leap out from the pack for years, which is why he’s always asking Harris to throw him a Milk-Bone. Last year, when Harris’s boss changed his stance on telecom deregulation, Barry even asked if he could be the one to bring the news to the telecom companies. “Nothing personal,” Harris had said, “but Pasternak gets it first.” In politics, like the mob, the best presents have to start up top.

“God bless him, though,” Barry adds about his boss. “The guy’s an old master.” There’s no arguing with that. As the founding partner of Pasternak & Associates, Bud Pasternak is respected, connected, and truly one of the kindest guys on Capitol Hill. He’s also Harris’s first boss—back from the days when Harris was running the pen-signing machine—and the person who gave Harris his first big break: an early draft of a speech for the Senator’s reelection bid. From there, Harris never touched the auto-pen again.

I study the arched windows on the side of the Capitol. Pasternak invited Harris; Harris invited me. It’s gotta be, right?

I chat with Barry for another fifteen minutes to see if I hear a courier arrive in the background. His office is only a few blocks away. The courier never comes.

An hour and a half later, there’s another knock on my door. The instant I see the blue blazer and gray slacks, I’m out of my seat.

“I take it you’re Matthew,” a page with black hair and an awkward underbite says.

“You got it,” I say as he hands me the envelope.

As I rip it open, I take a quick survey of my three office mates, who are sitting at their respective desks. Roy and Connor are on my left. Dinah’s on my right. All three of them are over forty years old—both men have professorship beards; Dinah’s got an unapologetic fanny pack with the Smithsonian logo on it—professional staffers hired for their budget expertise.

Congressmen come and go. So do Democrats and Republicans. But these three stay forever. It’s the same on all the Appropriations subcommittees. With all the different power shifts, no matter which party’s in charge, someone has to know how to run the government. It’s one of the few examples of nonpartisan trust in the entire Capitol. Naturally, my boss hates it. So when he took over the subcommittee, he put me in this position to look out for his best interests and keep an eye on them. But as I open my unmarked envelope, they’re the ones who should be watching me.

Dumping the contents on my desk, I spot the expected pile of taxi receipts. This time, though, while most of the receipts are still blank, one’s filled in. The handwriting’s clearly male: tiny chicken scratch that doesn’t lean left or right. The fare’s listed at fifty bucks. Unreal. One round and we’re already up to five hundred dollars. Fine by me.

Harris calls it the Congressional Pissing Contest. I call it Name That Tune. All across the Capitol, House and Senate pages deliver blank taxicab receipts to people around the Hill. We all put in our bids and pass them up to whoever invited us into the game, who then passes them to their sponsor, and so on. We’ve never figured out
how far it goes, but we do know it’s not a single straight line—that’d take too long. Instead, it’s broken up into branches. I start our branch and pass it to Harris. Somewhere else, another player starts his branch. There could be four branches; there could be forty. But at some point, the various bets make their way back to the dungeon-masters, who collect, coalesce, and start the process again.

Last round, I bid one hundred dollars. Right now, the top bid is five hundred. I’m about to increase it. In the end, whoever bids the most “buys” the right to make the issue their own. Highest bidder has to make the proposition happen, whether it’s getting 110 votes on the baseball bill or inserting a tiny land project into Interior Approps. Everyone else who antes in tries to make sure it doesn’t happen. If you pull it off, you get the entire pot, including every dollar that’s been put in (minus a small percentage to the dungeon-masters, of course). If you fail, the money gets split among everyone who was working against you.

I study the cab number on the five-hundred-dollar receipt:
326.
Doesn’t tell me squat. But whoever 326 is, they clearly think they’ve got the inside track. They’re wrong.

Staring down at a blank receipt, I’ve got my pen poised. Next to
Cab Number,
I write the number
727.
Next to
Fare,
I put
$60.00.
Six hundred now, plus the $125.00 I put in before. If the bet gets too high, I can always drop out by leaving the dollar amount blank. But this isn’t the time to fold. It’s time to win. Stuffing all the receipts into a new envelope, I seal it up, address it to Harris, and walk it out front. Interoffice mail won’t take long.

It’s not until one-thirty that the next envelope hits my desk. The receipt I’m looking for has the same chicken scratch as before. Cab number 326. The fare is
$100.00.
One thousand even. That’s what happens when the entire bet is centered on an issue that can be decided with a single well-placed phone call. Everyone in this place thinks they’ve got the jags to get it done. And they may. But for once, we’ve got more.

I close my eyes and work the math in my head. If I go too fast, I’ll scare 326 off. Better to go slow and drag him along. With a flourish, I fill in a fare of
$150.00.
Fifteen hundred. And still counting.

By a quarter after three, my stomach’s rumbling and I’m starting to get cranky—but I still don’t go to lunch. Instead, I gnaw through the last handfuls of Grape-Nuts that Roy keeps hidden in his desk. The cereal doesn’t last long. I still don’t move. We’re too close to gift-wrapping this up. According to Harris, no bet’s ever gone for more than nineteen hundred bucks—and that was only because they got to mess with Teddy Kennedy.

“Matthew Mercer?” a page with cropped blond hair asks from the door. I wave the kid inside.

“You’re popular today,” Dinah says as she hangs up her phone.

“Blame the Senate,” I tell her. “We’re battling over language, and Trish not only doesn’t trust faxes, but she won’t put it on E-mail because she’s worried it’s too easy to forward to the lobbyists.”

“She’s right,” Dinah says. “Smart girl.”

Turning my chair just enough so Dinah can’t see, I open the envelope and peer inside. I swear, I feel my testicles
tighten. I don’t believe it. It’s not the amount, which is now up to three thousand dollars. It’s the brand-new cab number: 189. The handwriting is squat and blocky. There’s another player in the game. And he’s clearly not afraid to spend some cash.

My phone screams, and I practically leap from my chair. Caller ID says it’s Harris.

“How we doing?” he asks as soon as I pick up.

“Not bad, though the language still isn’t there yet.”

“You got someone in the room?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” I say, keeping my back to Dinah. “And a new section I’ve never seen before.”

“Another player? What’s the number?”

“One-eighty-nine.”

“That’s the guy who won yesterday—with the baseball bill.”

“You sure?”

It’s a dumb question. Harris lives and breathes this stuff. He doesn’t get it wrong.

“Think we should worry?” I ask.

“Not if you can deliver.”

“Oh, I’ll deliver,” I insist.

“Then don’t stress. If anything, I’m happy,” Harris adds. “With two bidders out there, the pot’s that much bigger. And if he won yesterday, he’s cocky and careless. That’s the perfect time to swipe his pants.”

Nodding to myself, I hang up the phone and stare down at the cab receipt with the block writing.

“Everything okay?” Dinah asks from her desk. Scribbling as fast as I can, I up the bet to four thousand dollars and slide the receipt into the envelope. “Yeah,” I say as I head for the metal Out box up front. “Just perfect.”

The envelope comes back within an hour, and I ask the page to wait so he can take it directly to Harris. Roxanne’s done enough interoffice delivery service. Better to mix it up so she doesn’t get suspicious. Clawing my way into the envelope, I search for the signal that we’ve got the top bid. Instead, I find another receipt. Cab number 189. Fare of five hundred dollars.
Five grand—plus everything else we already put in.

For one picosecond, I hesitate, wondering if it’s time to fold. Then I remind myself we’re holding all the aces. And the jokers. And the wild cards. 189 may have the cash, but we’ve got the whole damn deck. He’s not scaring us off.

I grab a blank receipt from the envelope and write in my cab number. In the blank next to
Fare,
I jot
$600.00.
That’s a pretty rich cab ride.

Exactly twelve minutes after the page leaves my office, my phone rings. Harris just got his delivery.

“You sure this is smart?” he asks the instant I pick up. From the echo, I’m back on speakerphone.

“Don’t worry, we’re fine.”

“I’m serious, Matthew. This isn’t Monopoly money we’re playing with. If you add up the separate bets, we’re already in for over six thousand. And now you wanna add another six grand on top of that?”

When we were talking about limits last night, I told Harris I had a little over eight thousand dollars in the bank, including all my down-payment money. He said he had four grand at the most. Maybe less. Unlike me, Harris sends part of his paycheck to an uncle in Pennsylvania. His parents died a few years back, but… family’s still family.

“We can still cover it,” I tell him.

“That doesn’t mean we should put it all on black.”

“What’re you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Harris insists. “I just… maybe it’s time to catch our breath and walk away. No reason to risk all our money. We can just bet the other side, and you’ll make sure the project never gets in the bill.”

That’s how it works—if you don’t have the high bid, you and the rest of the low bidders shift to the other side and try to stop it from taking place. It’s a great way to even the odds: The person with the best chance of making it happen faces off against a group that, once combined, has an amazing amount of muscle. There’s only one problem. “You really want to split the winnings with everyone else?”

He knows I’m right. Why give everyone a free ride?

“If you want to ease the stakes, maybe we can invite someone else in,” I suggest.

Right there, Harris stops. “What’re you saying?”

He thinks I’m trying to find out who’s above him on the list.

“You think it’s Barry, don’t you?” he asks.

“Actually, I think it’s Pasternak.”

Harris doesn’t reply, and I grin to myself. Pasternak may be the closest thing he has to a mentor, but Harris and I go back to my freshman year. You can’t lie to old friends.