“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:
Staring down at a blank receipt, I’ve got my pen poised. Next to
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
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
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.
