There’s no way to know for sure, but you might be in danger yourself. We need to talk. And I need to establish my identification with you. That I really do work with the White House.”
He tried to look helpless. He saw her hesitate, then look at his walking stick. He leaned on it a little more heavily.
She said, “Al was shot? I just talked to him yesterday.”
“Yes, he was shot. The FBI is working the case now.”
“Are they coming here?” she asked.
“You’ll eventually have to talk to them, if they determine this package is relevant. But . . . Mrs. Levine, I really need to look at it, and talk to my superiors in Washington.”
Alone inside the house, she seemed more nervous about him. Jake took out his cell phone, called Danzig’s office. Gina answered: “This is Jake. I need to talk to the guy.”
“I thought you were all done?”
“I am. But something came up, and this is pretty urgent.”
Danzig came on the phone a minute later, his voice cautious. “Jake? I’ve been hearing some rumors about Madison . . .”
“The city, or the woman?”
“The city . . .”
“Yeah. I was there. Things are rough. But: I’ve made contact with the package in question. I need you to establish my bona fides with a woman here . . . It’s important.” He glanced at Levine and smiled. “She doesn’t necessarily trust me, given the circumstances. I would like to have her call the White House, and have her switched up to your office so she could talk to you for a second.”
“Is this absolutely necessary?” He didn’t want to do it.
“I think so, sir. We’ll have to talk to the FBI, though. There’s another copy, somewhere in Madison.”
Silence, then, “Tell her to call.”
“You can call the White House?” Levine asked doubtfully.
“Sure. It’s basically an office building with a big lawn,” Jake said. “This is the only way I could think to prove that I’m okay.”
She called Washington directory assistance, got the main number for the White House, and at Jake’s instruction gave her full name: “This is Sarah MacLaughlin Levine, calling for Mr. Danzig.”
She had to wait a minute, then said, “Yes . . . yes.” Another few seconds, then, “Yes. Yes I do.” She looked at Jake. “Okay, thank you. I’ll talk to him. Okay. Thank you.”
“They said you’re official.” She was more confident now. “They said you were coordinating with the FBI.”
“I am—but before we get too far down that road, we have to assess the contents of the package. We don’t want to get caught up in a fraud; we have to make sure that everything is legitimate; that they’re for real.”
“One thing, though,” she said. “This is about your . . . vice president. How do I know you just won’t throw them in the river?”
Jake tried to look as pious as he could: “Mrs. Levine, this package is going to come out, sooner or later. There are copies. Once I have it, there’s no way I can bury it. If I did, I’d go to prison. But we have to make sure that it’s real.”
“It’s real,” she grunted. “Landers is crookeder than a hound dog’s leg. The whole bunch of them are crooked.”
The package was almost exactly that: a cardboard box that said Xerox on the side, and that had once held ten reams of 92-bright white printer paper. Inside the box was a stack of notebooks, some files, and three DVD disks in a Ziploc freezer bag.
“We hoped . . . ,” Levine said tentatively, as Jake began thumbing through the paper. “You know, my husband passed away three years ago. He had an infarction. I hoped that maybe because I helped out, you know, that I could get help getting a job. They took my husband’s pension away, those people at ITEM, those big shots, they said he elected to get more money early, or something like that.”
“We can talk about your help,” Jake said. “I think you’ll be okay. If you tried to get to the authorities.”
“I tried, Lord knows I tried,” she said. “I knew Al from when he was fund-raising, I knew he was well connected in Washington. I thought that was the best way to get this to the proper people.”
She put Jake in the living room to read, brought a package of Oreos and glasses of orange juice as he worked.
The package described a standard piece of corruption, notable only for the arrogance shown by the vice president and his friends, and the size of the return. The highway project involved reconstruction of about ninety miles of Wisconsin’s federal Highway 65, from its intersection with Interstate 94 a few miles east of the Minnesota line, to the town of Hayward in the north woods.
