The Hart Senate Building was built on one of the highest pieces of ground in D.C., the altitude giving the third floor office of Senator Day a sweeping view of the capitol and the national mall that ran two miles southwest to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a room with a view, and one the senator had jockeyed position to get for two terms. Competition for perks was intense, and there was no shortage of battles to fight to improve one’s position within the elite of the elite. Senators aren’t usually elected by mistake, but when it does happen, the constituents tend to notice by the end of the first term. Three inaugurations was the standing record.
Senator Day’s page shuffled around the office, making coffee and planning his work schedule, wedging personal agendas between whatever the senator had on his plate for the day. The senator’s Ivy League all-star aide, still recovering from his water skiing injuries incurred in the west Pacific, was sorely missed. The page, a recent grad named Doug, was now teamed with Dana and four other full-time helpers. They had one task among them—caring for the self-admitted brashest senator on the Hill.
Senator Day was on the speakerphone when Dana slipped into the room and delivered the envelope. With lips colored fire-engine red, she mouthed the words “he said it was important,” before walking out. The senator nodded, gave a slight wave, and watched the tightest ass in the Hart Senate Building sway its way out of the room. The perfect office assistant.
Senator Day opened the envelope without trepidation, still engrossed in a conversation over a proposal to build a high-level bioresearch center in downtown Boston. A future incubation and study mecca for the most deadly pathogens and viruses known to man, many of which the human species itself created. The highly contested topic was gaining momentum on both sides of the political coin. Local Massachusetts politicians were focusing on the prestige and jobs the center would bring. Everyone else with an IQ above the water temperature on Cape Cod was estimating the potential death toll should a mishap occur in the state’s most populated area. As it was with most decisions, it was coming down to the important issue—money. The senator was weighing the proposals, and presently having his ear chewed off by the Mayor of Hopkinton, a small town west of Boston that was also bidding for the project.
The senator pulled the contents from the envelope and read it slowly, continuing his conversation on the bioresearch center, pausing between sentences. Yes, he understood the ramifications of a biological agent being released into downtown Boston. Yes, he understood the potential death toll could be in the tens of thousands. Yes, he could only hope that if such a calamity occurred it would claim his ex-wife as a victim. When the senator reached the second paragraph of the letter, his chest tightened, and he cut the conversation short. “I will have to get back to you, Mayor.”
The senator felt light-headed as he staggered out of his personal office. The reception room was smaller than his office with two short hallways running in either direction. The senator could hear members of his staff at work as he approached the front desk. His face pale, he asked his faithful Senate page and unfaithful office entertainment a simple question. “Where did this envelope come from?”
Both employees looked at the senator with concern. Identifying shock doesn’t require formal medical training. The senator stared at his dumbfounded dynamic duo and asked the question again, this time with enough force to arouse the rest of the staff in the adjacent rooms from their chairs. Dana looked around the reception office as if she didn’t understand the question, which may have, in fact, been the case.
Doug the Page, wearing a stunning pink bow tie, answered. “Someone dropped it off about ten minutes ago. An Asian man. Very polite. Very well-spoken.”
“Did you get a name?”
“No, he didn’t leave one.”
The senator asked for a description of the delivery person, someone doing his best to give the senator an early morning coronary. Doug the Page and Dana the Bimbo gave matching descriptions of an unremarkable Asian figure. Senator Day, face now turning crimson, walked back to his office and slammed the door behind him hard enough to put a crack in the small transom above the frame. Staring at the letter, fuming with anger, Senator Day picked up the phone.
Two floors below, Walter Payton, a seasoned veteran of the Capitol Police force, looked down at the blinking red light. A direct line ran from every Senate office in the building to the main security booth, and when the red light flashed, per protocol, everything else became less of a priority. Walter Payton raised his hand trying to silence the madness going on around him and picked up the phone.
“This is Senator Day, I’m ordering a security shutdown.”
“Good morning, Senator. This is Walter Payton of the Capitol Police. What is the situation, exactly?”
“I’m requesting the immediate apprehension of a suspicious person on the premises. Consider the suspect armed and dangerous,” the senator added with authority, almost delirious.
“Are you injured, sir?”
“No.”
“Is anyone on your staff injured?”
“No.”
“Was anything stolen or vandalized?”
“No. No crime has been committed…and I was hoping we could avoid one.”
Most of the calls to the “bat phone” were lame, emergencies only in title, urgent only to an elite group whose lives ran as smoothly as the Tokyo subway system. The adrenaline the red light had stirred in Officer Payton was already subsiding. “Could you provide a description of the suspect?” the uniformed officer asked, almost bored.
“An Asian man, approximately five-foot-six.”
Walter Payton looked down the crowded entrance hall and scratched his head. “An Asian man, you say?”
“Yes, goddamn it, an Asian man. Did I stutter?!” Senator Day screamed, saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth as he leaned over his desk and yelled into his phone.
Walter Payton peered out of his steel and Plexiglas security booth at the sea of black heads surrounding him. The newly formed group calling themselves Asian Welfare and Rights Equality (AWARE) was packed into the hall, five abreast. It had taken the busload of bag-toting citizens nearly an hour to go through security, and the main hallway on the first floor of the Hart Senate Building was now buzzing like a standing-room only sushi buffet. Senator Hamilton from the state of Washington scrambled to lead the group to an open committee room, trying desperately to appease his constituents. Showing full support for the oppressed minority was a PR opportunity no elected official dared to miss.
The AWARE group was on a mission, and Kazu Ito was their poster boy. The murder of a young straight-A student, who was then framed by the police, had galvanized the Asian rim population in the Seattle suburb. They had had enough. Trumped-up moving violations by the police at four times the rate of the white population had been the tip of the iceberg. Then came Kazu, the latest of three innocent lives snuffed out in their prime.
Not even a cross-country bus trip with a toilet that overflowed twice between Minneapolis and Chicago would prevent Kazu Ito’s father from having time on the Hill. But being herded like cattle into the cramped hall, going through repeated security checks, and being forced to stand for hours was making the bus ride, stink and all, seem pleasant by comparison. The AWARE group had passed impatient. Waiting for an empty committee room only further emboldened them and strengthened their push for greater protection of their equal rights.
Senator John Day, in a rage, was about to throw gasoline on the AWARE fire, and then fart for good measure.
Walter Payton looked at the scene in the hall and shook his head ever so slightly, the phone still in his ear. “All right, Senator. I can hold them, but you better hurry.”
Senator Day grabbed Doug the Page by the arm and headed for the first floor. Dana followed as fast as her three-inch heels would allow, her ankles on the verge of snapping as she swayed and bounced her way to forward momentum.
Senator Day roared out of the elevator, turned the corner, and came to a screeching halt, mouth open. Five-dozen jet-black heads turned toward the senator as Officer Payton stuck out his hand, pointed, and announced to the hall. “There he is.”
Senator Hamilton, grabbing the opportunity to make the news for doing something positive, stopped berating Officer Payton who remained in the comfortable confines of his bulletproof glass booth.
It was a small riot in terms of people involved and duration, but a riot nonetheless. Senator Hamilton, sixty-two and in need of all the voting support he could get, tried to simultaneously calm the AWARE group while dishing out a tongue-lashing the likes of which Senator Day hadn’t received since he burned down a neighbor’s horse barn when he was twelve. Senator Hamilton articulated his threats with grace, the overtures for impeachment with eloquence. He deftly redirected the real mission of the AWARE group, confidently guaranteeing that the newly labeled “most racist senator in modern U.S. politics” would never be re-elected. The senator from Washington, milking the chance to be a hero to his constituents, worked toward a climax. He huffed and puffed, postured and postulated. But before he could deliver the punch line to his impromptu speech, Senator Day, the target of his ire, simply turned and walked away.
The senator from Massachusetts returned to his office, his page and Dana behind him, both less impressed with their fearless leader than they had been when they arrived earlier in the day.
Pausing on his way to his office, he looked at Dana and his page and raised a finger, “Not a word to anyone about an Asian man or a letter. Not a word.”
The senator found his way behind his desk and sat in a daze, alternating between re-reading the letter and downing Jack Daniels, straight up. Just when he thought things were back on track. Being blackmailed for money was one thing. This was something else entirely. The cluster-fuck in the hall downstairs merely made the sting of the letter more poignant. Senator Day called his chief aide at home and checked on the progress of the wire-transfer-hide-and-seek he was playing with a trail of banks in China. No news. The senator cussed into the phone. He had let himself believe that the danger had passed. He had paid the money for the original blackmail and waited. He now realized the silence he had been enjoying was merely a lull in the storm.
The AWARE group set up camp outside the Hart Senate Building and made three calls to the local media. As the news trucks converged on the scene with cameras rolling, Senator Day sent his staff home with a week off, unplugged the phone, and barricaded himself in his office.
He picked up the letter again and read it slowly. It was simple. Unless he wanted to hear about an illegitimate child fathered by a senator with a sweatshop seamstress on the news, Senator Day was to follow the directions to the smallest detail. The letter wasn’t demanding money. It was requesting something far more difficult to obtain, far more challenging; something that required a far greater degree of cunning. He wished he could just write a check.
There was an upcoming recommendation by the Special Senate Committee on Overseas Labor regarding the exportation of jobs to third world countries and the establishment of an international minimum wage for American companies doing business overseas. As a show of good faith, and as a measure of Senator Day’s resolve as Chairman of the Special Committee, the letter was demanding a unanimous, unequivocal position against a proposed bill that would limit what the letter’s composer referred to as “free trade” and “globalization.” The letter was a test. And standing between the senator and success were three colleagues on the Special Committee who didn’t share his desire for further internationalization of the great American corporate machine.
Senator Day had work to do.
The senator cringed at the television set in the oak cabinet across the room. He reeked of bourbon, a stench that went beyond his personal space and pervaded every corner of his office. One of the senator’s shoes was under his desk, the other shoved toe-first into the thin gap beneath the leather sofa and the carpet. His tie was on the shelf under the window. A swig remained at the bottom of the bottle of Jack on his desk. Outside it was dark, and the only indication of time was that the sun went down somewhere near nine o’clock at the beginning of official summer. The senator’s head pounded, an appropriate feeling to go with one of the worst days of his silver-spoon life.
The fiasco with the Asian equality group was turning into a nightmare. Kazu Ito’s father, the leader of AWARE, wasted no time in milking the press coverage for everything it was worth. The group’s own handheld video recorder had caught most of hallway humiliation from earlier in the day. The quality of the tape was poor, the audio scratchy, the hand of the cameraman shaky, but it all came together with great cinematic appeal. And the AWARE group mainlined it straight into the capital’s news veins. The timing was perfect. They had been stopped as suspicious visitors in the halls of the Senate, the very halls where their elected officials worked and breathed. Plans to bring their organization and the plight of their Asian brethren to light couldn’t have been better orchestrated. It was time to shine. Kazu Ito’s death was going primetime.
The eleven o’clock evening news opened with the crowd outside the Hart Senate Building. In his office, the senator’s eyes were still glued to the screen. The crowd outside, which had surged to over two hundred thanks to calls from Kazu Ito’s father to every Asian organization in the D.C. phone book, had dwindled to fewer than twenty. Most of the AWARE group was now back at the hotel in L’Enfant Plaza, strategizing their plan for tomorrow. The group knew that protesting at night defeated the purpose. There was no traffic to block, no passers-by to incite.
The news crews finished their last clips for the night and were closing up shop. In the confines of his foxhole, Senator Day pulled himself together with a cup of coffee and a wet towel across his face. He put his shoes on, first trying the left shoe on his right foot, and then making the switch.
He turned off his office lights, teasing the final remains of AWARE protesters and news crews who had been watching his office from the ground like a crowd waiting for a jumper on a ledge. Senator Day, hat on his head, strolled to the elevators on the opposite side of the building, body swaying down the long corridor. A lone senate page passed and gave his best “Good night, Senator,” salutation, before stifling a laugh. The senator didn’t acknowledge the snicker. He was making his first attempt to move past the day’s misadventure. The longer he dwelled on it, the longer it would be news. You don’t make it to the Senate without thick skin, a silver tongue, spells of temporary amnesia, and multiple personalities.
Senator Day rode the elevator to the basement and walked to the underground sidewalk that ran like a maze throughout the Capitol complex and its surrounding buildings. The senator eyed the small train that ran parallel to the underground walkway, a toy used to shuttle voting senators to the Capitol in comfort. The train was serious business when it was in use, but parked in the hall without any passengers it looked like an enlarged version of a child’s amusement park ride. It was not a perk limited to the Senate; the House had its own choo-choo too, bought and maintained with taxpayers’ money, of course.
The senator took three underground tunnels and exited a small door on the north side of the Capitol Building. He stepped into the empty street and hailed a cab. Twenty minutes later, he paid his tab in the alley that ran behind his Georgetown home and walked across the backyard and into his house.
The honorable senator sat completely motionless on the foot of the bed, his wife asleep with her head under the pillow. He held his own head in his hands. The image he spent his life trying to portray now dangerously teetering on the cliff of disaster—a cliff named Wei Ling. The years of education, proper upbringing, and the sacrifice of the family lineage that came before him climaxed in one thought that the senator said aloud. “Fuck.”
It was the best he could do.
For the first time since his car had broken down in South Central L.A., the senator was scared. But politics were on his side. He was from Massachusetts, historically one of the friendliest states to morally questionable acts by their governing representatives. His mind raced between desperation and hope, ego and humility. His life was on the line—his wife, his job, his ambition. “Nice job, John,” the senator said to himself. “Two and a half decades of hard work, thrown out the window on a third-world sweatshop skank.”
The goateed man with a penchant for positive camera angles and the lion’s share of a recently cashed fifteen-thousand-dollar paycheck, chatted with the off-duty stewardess at Club Iota in Arlington. A local acoustic husband-and-wife team was packing up their guitars after an early weeknight show that had the bar half-full. The bartender cleaned glasses and hit the remote control for the small TV in the corner of the enclosed drink-mixing workspace. With the TV news in one ear, the man with the goatee tried his best to impress the stewardess, his goal to say whatever it took to get her down the street and into the bedroom of his new condo.
With the stewardess playing coy, the cameraman looked at the news on the TV and spoke involuntarily. “Look at this asshole.”
“Who?” the stewardess asked.
“Senator Day. I filmed a documentary for him last month.” So what if it wasn’t a full-fledged documentary. No one was there to call bullshit on him.
The stewardess warmed up considerably and put her hand on the cameraman’s knee. They both watched the story and the bartender turned up the sound.
The cameraman chuckled.
“What are you laughing at?” the stewardess asked, her arm moving to his shoulder.
“It’s just fitting. You have Senator Day defending himself against an Asian Rights Group a month after going to Asia to film a documentary on Human Rights and Overseas Labor.”
“Why is that funny?”
“Honey, that’s between me, him, and the rest of the poor souls at the Ritz he kept up all night.”
The cameraman asked for the check and pointed to the stewardess to indicate he was covering her bill as well. “You want to see a copy of the documentary? I live right down the street. I have the whole thing on DVD,” he said getting off his stool.
“Okay. But just the documentary. Nothing else.”
“Of course,” the cameraman replied, the muscles in the corner of his mouth fighting to suppress a smile.