Joel took a swig of bourbon.
“I stared at my cell phone screen and realized something: I have his number.”
“Leave him out of this. Leave him alone.”
“No, he’s in this with us. He’s got my number, but I’ve got his. And the number of the guy who hooked up me and the Senator.”
“What guy?” said Joel.
“This guy, this lobbyist. He’s gay, so… No business between us. Don’t know how, but he hooked up with your Senator.”
“I can’t be with him all the time,” said Joel. “What’s the guy’s name?”
“Frank Greene.”
A bulldog who wears Wall Street suits. Joel said: “I didn’t know Frank was gay.”
“It’s not who he is,” said Lena, “it’s what he offered me.”
She leaned closer. “Frank told me that if I could get the Senator to tell me who he was going to vote for on a military planes contract—”
“The F-77 authorization bill.”
“Yeah. Frank offered me $5,000 if I got your boss to say who he was voting for.”
Joel took a swig from the bottle.
“My idea,” she said, “is that if five grand is a fee for just knowing about a deal, what would it be worth to a guy like Frank to be able to broker that deal?”
Joel’s stomach churned sour acid.
“You told me all about it!” said Lena. “It’s not like this vote makes any difference. It’s not about America or national defense or fighting evil.”
“We can’t be about this.”
“We’re not! We’re about us. This is about getting us free.”
“It’s for you.”
“Yeah, it’s for me. And you said you want me. I’ll always be who I was, but this way I have something to show for it. This buys me a getaway. Here.”
“Not enough,” he whispered. “We’re not worth enough to do this.”
“What other chance do we have? I’m changing my life for us. What about you?”
He walked to his window full of night. Stared out at the city he’d chosen to make his home. He searched the darkness outside. Faced what he’d never embraced.
“Only one way we can do this,” said Joel. “We need to make doing what’s wrong be for more right than just us.”
After he told her how, she said: “I’ll set it up.”
“Won’t work,” he said. “Frank won’t believe just you. Buy just you.”
“I don’t want you touching—”
He stroked her hair. “Too late.”
Joel nodded to her cell phone. “Make the call.”
“What about the Senator?”
“Nobody needs him,” said Joel.
But two nights later, Joel sat in his car with the bulldog in a Wall Street suit who said: “Hey, fucko, I need the Senator.”
Across the street waited Capitol Hill’s neighborhood ball-field-sized Lincoln Park that 198 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence became D.C.’s first public site for any statue honoring a woman or an African-American.
“It’s not about what you need,” said Joel. “It’s about what I can do.”
“You don’t get to vote in Committee. Or on the Floor.”
“Not in the flesh, but I’m the spirit moving the man.”
“This town’s full of people who died thinking they were somebody else.”
“You get close to him,” said Joel, “the odds go up that we’ll all get caught.”
Frank Greene drummed his fingers on Joel’s dashboard. “$100,000.”
“My price includes more than cash. There’s a relief bill for Sudan that’s come over from the House on a wing and a prayer. You’re going to angel that prayer. Muscle that bill into a workable law.”
“This is a money town and you want me to save the world? What’s the catch?”
“No catch. But I get to deliver my guy to lead the charge in the Senate.”
“One hand cleans the other, huh?”
Yellow headlights silhouetted them sitting in the car as a cop drove past two more men sharing secrets in D.C.’s dark night.
“Believe what you gotta believe,” said the bulldog. “But deliver what you sell.”
“Don’t you trust me?” Joel shook his head at the man’s silence. “Me too. That’s why I have to see motion on your side before I deliver from mine.”
“What do you mean motion? I call you in a few days, tell you which company, you lock your man down, I deliver the cash through the babe.”
“Never call her again. If you see her on the street, walk on by. And make me see what I need to see.”
On the following Wednesday, Mimi dropped a “Dear Colleague” letter on Joel’s desk, a mass mailing to all lawmakers on Capitol Hill from the Congressman who’d authored the Sudan relief measure and was now proud to announce that a caucus of business and labor groups had organized to support the bill.
Letter in hand, Joel walked to the suite Mimi shared with Press Secretary Ricki.
Mimi was on the phone. “Good to talk to you, Glenn.” She mouthed the name Parker to Joel. “The Senator will be sorry to have missed your call, but Joel’s standing right here.”
Joel took the phone. “Glenn, how are you?”
“How I am is stuck. Not sure we should be talking — legally.”
“The law says there’s no problem with a citizen calling his Senator’s office — one time, anyway. They let guys like us touch base for free.”
“Free?” Glenn laughed. “Then FYI, a bunch of the Senator’s friends out here plus some folks back in D.C. just formed an independent educational committee so voters realize who to touch the computer screen for next time.”
Dead air filled the phone call between the Senator’s D.C. office and the bank president’s phone back home in the capital of the Senator’s state.
Until Joel said: “That sounds like great news, but you’re right, it’s possibly of a partisan nature, so we can’t talk about it on this publicly funded phone, or from this taxpayer-owned office.”
Joel gave him a phone number for the town house that the party’s Senatorial Campaign Committee rented across the street from the Senate, told Glenn to call him there in an hour.
Mimi said: “Is this one of those things I don’t know about?”
Joel knocked on the brown door to the Senator’s private suite, didn’t wait for a “Come in” before he did, and closed the door behind him.
Senator Carl Ness sat with suit jacket off, tie loosened, three cell phones and BlackBerry on the massive desk, as he worked his way through a stack of papers.
“You talk to Glenn Parker recently?” said Joel.
The Senator shrugged. “Joyce ran into him at that Bay City pancake breakfast for the Girl Scouts.”
“And I suppose they chatted about how things are and how they could be better.”
“God bless the First Amendment. People can talk.” “Did you give Joyce her script?”
“She’s been at this a long time. She knows what to say.” The Senator smiled. “What are you upset about? None of us left any fingerprints.”
“Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again without first running it by me.”
“Hey, I am the Senator.” He raised his hand. “Point taken, but this is a done deal.”
Joel dropped the “Dear Colleague” Sudan letter on his boss’ desk. “If you lead the charge for that bill over here, you’re going to make a lot of important people happy.”
“Who will I make mad?”
“Nobody who can hurt you.”
The Senator leaned back in his chair. “We live in a brutal world. It’s incumbent upon us as Americans and human beings to do all we can to help innocent men and — no: innocen children — who violence, evil, and greed have blah blah blah The Senator raised a warning finger. “Don’t get me in trouble on this.”