Sweat (3 page)

The Day residence was a meticulously restored townhouse on the corner of P and Thirty-Fourth Streets in Georgetown. The renovated home with a historic lineage had been on the market for over a year when the senator and his better half offered $6.5 million. Papers were signed the following week and by the end of the month, the Days moved in. The garage stored a Mercedes S-class sedan and a Lexus SUV. A distant cousin of the senator's wife, a Georgetown University graduate student, rented the small apartment on the second floor of the carriage house overlooking the heated pool.

Mrs. Day was cooking spaghetti, one of her many “specialties,” none of which challenged the professionally accessorized kitchen. She hired a chef with an impressive résumé who came twice a week to give the appliances a thorough running through. He made whatever was requested and ad-libbed a few other gourmet meals that he left covered in plastic wrap in the refrigerator. The ever-changing dietary whims of the senator's wife kept the chef on his toes. She wasn't picky by nature, and it wasn't her fault that she was bossy and oversensitive. It was the third-trimester hormones.

The senator got out of the car and waved to his personal driver. Briefcase in hand, he stepped through the iron gate that enclosed the short brick walkway and made his way to the door. He passed through the small study, throwing his briefcase, the day's
Washington Post
, and a stack of mail he brought home from work on the leather club chair in the corner. He followed his nose to the kitchen.

“Smells great.”

“You might want to wait until you taste it before you throw out too many compliments,” she replied.

The senator kissed her on the cheek and touched her protruding stomach.

“Any action today?” he asked, hand just above her stretched navel.

“No, he's been quiet. Must not be in the mood to treat his mother's bladder like a soccer ball.”

The senator bent over and put his ear on the top of the protruding mound. It was six weeks before the due date.

When dinner was finished, the senator cleared the table. The maid would take care of the dirty dishes and the laundry in the morning. Mrs. Day waddled upstairs for a shower.

The honorable senator from Massachusetts grabbed the paper and the mail off the chair in the study. He poured a double bourbon in a glass of the finest Austrian crystal and slipped out of his black Italian leather shoes. He flipped through the stack of mail he brought home and sorted the envelopes into three piles. The “must reads” went on his lap, a few letters from his constituents went on the corner of his desk, and the remainder went into the wastebasket.

He sipped his bourbon, read the paper, and opened his mail with CNN on in the background. He looked at the last piece of mail in his hands, an eight by eleven inch envelope with no return address. His full name and title was written in impeccable penmanship across the front.

He reached for his letter opener; a gold-plated blade with a bald eagle mounted on the end, and cut the top off the envelope. The neatly typed letter was short and to the point. It was also completely unnecessary. The photographs told him all he needed to know. A nice shot of his hand on the upper thigh of a beautiful Asian woman in the quiet corner of a classy restaurant. Another picture of the senator leaving the restaurant, his hand on his female companion's ass.

The rules were clear. The price for silence was one hundred thousand dollars.

Senator Day picked up the phone.

From a mobile bed on the fifth floor of George Washington Hospital, the senator's chief-of-staff tugged at the cord of the wall-mounted phone. His swollen knee screamed with pain. A tube ran from the IV stand to a vein in the crook of his right arm. The skin was raw, irritated. The adhesive used to keep the needle in place was a constant source of annoyance. Even more annoying was being out of the political loop, away from the schmoozing necessary to get things done. He had been in the hospital for over a week, and it was now nearly three since he had felt his ACL snap, an out-of-control water ski twisting his leg to an unnatural angle.

“Scott? How's the knee?”

“Senator… The knee is fine, as long as I don't move and the Oxycontin bottle still rattles when I shake it. The staph infection, well, that's a different story.”

“Jesus.”

“He hasn't been listening,” Scott replied, trying to lighten the mood.

“Any word on when you'll be released?”

“Not yet. MRSA is a bit of a wild card. At least the doctors have stopped talking about the possibility of losing the leg.”

“I'll take that as good news.”

“My leg seems to think so.”

The senator paused and then continued. “Business question for you. What do you know about international wire transfers?”

Scott took a pensive breath. “Wire transfers? From what angle? Got a bill in the works I haven't heard about? The legislative director hasn't mentioned anything.”

“No, it's of a more personal nature. Hypothetically speaking, is it possible to do an anonymous wire transfer?”

“How hypothetical are we talking?”

“A hundred grand of hypothetical.”

Scott sat up in his bed and grimaced. “Well, the current statute flags the IRS for any wire transfer over ten thousand dollars. Meaning that if you wire an amount ten grand or over, you have to fill out paperwork that goes to the IRS. In theory, anyway.”

“So if you wanted to do a wire transfer without notifying the IRS, you could send, say, nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine?”

“They call that smurfing. It was a practice popularized by drug dealers in the eighties and now used by myriad elements of the regulation-avoiding public. I would stay away from nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. It's an overly suspicious number.”

“So maybe eight grand here, nine grand there.”

“That's what I would do,” Scott said. “From different accounts.”

The senator considered the advice before his chief aide continued. “There's another option I can think of.”

“I'm still here.”

“I might know someone in banking who could arrange to do the wire transfer without the paperwork.”

Senator Day thought aloud. “How much would that cost me?”

“Monetarily…nothing. Politically, it would be a debt. We wouldn't get it for free.”

The senator loved it when his chief-of-staff used the word “we.” As far as he was concerned, it was a term of endearment. Good help was hard to find.

The senator didn't think long. “Make the call and see what your contact says.”

“I'll get back to you later this evening.”

“And Scott…keep this quiet. No one finds out. I mean no one. Especially the staff.”

“Yes, sir.”

The senator read the letter and the explicit directions again. He drained his glass, filled another, and tilted the bottom toward the ceiling. Images of former presidential candidate Senator Hart with a blonde on his lap, sitting on a yacht appropriately named
Monkey Business
, flashed in his mind.

The sound of his wife's footsteps on the floor above shook him from his momentary daze. He stuffed the pictures into his briefcase and reread the letter. One hundred thousand dollars to a bank account in Hong Kong. For a senator with ambition, a hundred grand seemed like a reasonable sum to pay to keep his career on track. Hiding a six-figure payout to a Hong Kong bank was easy. His wife didn't keep track of the money. As long as the credit cards weren't declined at Saks Fifth Avenue and the checks didn't bounce, she would never notice. Calming the sea of revenge brewing in the senator's head was more difficult. He would pay the money, and then he would see to it that the owner of the bank account in Hong Kong understood that John Day was not a person who could be squeezed without repercussions. He was a senator, a Harvard Man, and a member of one of the most influential families in the history of the Northeast. He had power, wanted more, and nothing was going to stand in the way of his ambitious plan to one day reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jake got out of his car and eyed the mailbox at the end of the driveway. It was only a ten second walk across a small patch of grass that masqueraded as a front lawn, but it was a trip that was growing more painful by the day. Jake reached the end of the yard, shoved his hand in the standard issue black box with its red flag, and pulled out the day's torment. He carried the thick stack of mail across the grass, past the “For Sale” sign that he and the real estate agent had pushed into the soft ground a week ago, and up the four stairs of the front porch.

The days were numbered for the house where he had grown up. The sadness he felt added to the burden he now faced. For the majority of his life the house had been a source of good memories—the normal stuff of childhood and the teenage years. Birthday parties, holiday gatherings, pictures on prom night. He got his first kiss on the very porch where he now stood, the same porch where his mother had sat him down and broke the news of her cancer.

He fumbled for the key to the deadbolt, balancing the stack of mail in the crook of one elbow. He stepped across the threshold of the foyer, threw his wallet and keys on the small table resting at the foot of the stairs, and made his way through the living room. The mail went on the coffee table, next to the disaster area of bills that already waited for his attention.

He changed clothes in the laundry room off the back of the house, grabbed the last beer bottle from the fridge, and made his way to the sofa. He sipped the cold suds and stared at the pile of mail.

The stack of envelopes stared back.

His mother's medical treatment, which ultimately failed, had cost a fortune. It was a fortune she didn't have. Health insurance covered the initial diagnosis and treatment, but when she reached the maximum lifetime limit of the policy, the debt outpaced the ability to pay by roughly the speed of light. When the house sold, if it sold, it would bring in enough money to cover almost half her debt. The rest was unrecoverable. It was a deal his mother had agreed to, giving up everything she had worked for in exchange for more time with the only thing that mattered. The collectors were already on the hunt, and Jake hadn't answered the home phone in three days.

With
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
on the TV, Jake dug through the stack of mail and pulled out a half-dozen, late-arriving condolence cards. He flipped through the stamped envelopes and answered the questions on the game show playing in the background without looking up. He set aside the bills for the gas, electricity, water, and phone without opening them. The bill from Georgetown University Hospital loomed large on the corner of the table, and Jake reached for the envelope cautiously as if it were booby-trapped. It seemed heavy to the touch. Jake sighed, opening the multiple-page invoice slowly, squinting as if it would ease the pain of the six-figure debt announced within. Three hundred twenty-two thousand dollars and change. Jake thought about the sum, shook his head, and reached for his beer.

He had five hundred twenty-seven dollars in his personal bank account, another forty in his wallet, and a ten-year-old Subaru station wagon in the driveway with a full tank of gas. The balance of the medical bill was out of his league. Way out of his league.

They had survived the last six months of his mother's life on loans taken out against the equity of the sixty-year-old home. Jake wasn't responsible for whatever balance the sale of the house wouldn't cover, but he would be left with nothing, his mother's life insurance policy long since cashed out. But he would need to come up with money for the bills and the monthly mortgage until the house sold. Not to mention whatever money he needed to live. Uncle Steve offered to help, but Jake couldn't force himself to take money from an out-of-work roofer who was barely getting by.

The only thing certain about the future was that he would be facing it alone. He was looking for work and an apartment near the university, but things were slow on the job front. Before his mother had passed and reality set in, he had made a pact with himself to hold out for what he had taken to calling “meaningful employment.” No more working until two o'clock in the morning in the service industry. The race between dead-broke and waiting tables was one he wasn't sure he'd win. After an eighteen-month hiatus, rejoining the Masters program in English Literature at American University was the only real plan he had. Three months of summer vacation and then ten months of serious studying until graduation.

He needed cash. School loans would come in September and provide enough to make it through the fall semester, but that was still three months away. If he limited himself to frozen TV dinners and skipped lunch, he would be broke in two weeks. He could forget about paying the mortgage for July. The prospect of a long hot summer made him sweat. He had exchanged the burden of taking care of his mother with the burden of taking care of himself. He wasn't sure which was worse.

The refrigerator was barren and the thought of having a few more beers leached into Jake's brain. Ten minutes later, he made the responsible decision to get drunk. It had been a long time since he had sucked down dollar drafts for Happy Hour at McFadden's. And if he drank enough tonight, his stomach wouldn't be in the mood for food tomorrow. With the money he would save by not eating tomorrow, he could afford a beer or two. It had been a year and a half since he had tied one on. He could use the temporary break from himself and his life.

He made some calls looking for drinking recruits, pounded out a few text messages, and then made the eight-block walk to the bar.

Jake showed his ID to the doorman and walked un-accosted through empty space to a stool at the bar. Georgetown, George Washington, and American University were on summer vacation, and the pub business in downtown D.C. was feeling the usual summer pinch. For certain bars, the influx in summer tourists just couldn't make up for the weekly binge-drinking student crowd.

Jake ordered a draft—each glass was selling for seventy-five cents until eight-thirty. He had already saved a quarter from the usual one-dollar Happy Hour price. He downed his beer, called over the bartender, and saved another twenty-five cents.

Maroon 5 played on the sound system and echoed off the walls of the empty bar. Jake realized it was the first time he had ever breathed clean air in the maze-like, three-story establishment. McFadden's was relatively new, a modern steel and concrete watering hole in the midst of some of the nation's oldest bars—joints with missing mortar and cracked walls. McFadden did what most bars trying to simulate old age did—they put in wood-paneled walls, threw antiques around the room like a blind interior decorator and, for a finishing touch, turned down the lights. Jake had once been a Thursday night regular, right after his evening class on nineteenth century authors. He looked around the bar and missed being a student, missed the carefree lifestyle that was now a distant memory.

“I'm Matt,” the bartender said, introducing himself. The bartender knew the first rule to pulling in the tips, in the absence of a perky set, was to establish rapport.

“Jake. Nice to meet you.”

“From around here?”

“Born and raised.”

“Not many of those around.”

“No, not too many real Washingtonians left,” Jake answered. “It's quiet in here tonight.”

“It's summer. Most of our customers are GW students. It'll pick up a little later. It's still early, my friend.”

Jake looked down at his watch. Five minutes after eight. Twenty-five minutes until the seventy-five-cent drafts bumped up to a full dollar. He ordered another.

“Drinking alone this evening?”

“Depends if anyone feels like coming to look for me. We'll see.”

“No shame in downing a few by yourself,” the bartender answered. He was in the wrong profession to point out any of the AA telltale signs of alcoholism.

“Yeah, well, it's been a bad year,” Jake said, without elaborating. He wasn't going to share his life story with a bartender. Drinking by himself was one thing; weeping into his beer with his head on the bartender's shoulder was something else entirely. A man does have his limits.

The bartender didn't press for details. When a customer says, “It's been a bad day,” he tended to ask. When a customer says, “It's been a bad year,” he didn't want to know. He brought Jake his third beer in twenty minutes.

“Redskins fan?”

“Absolutely. Hard to grow up around here and not be one.”

The two fell into football chatter, the kind of serious emotional banter that is the glue of the male social infrastructure.

“Snyder ruined the team,” Jake said. “A billionaire businessman with no more football knowledge than you or I.”

“He did do one thing right.”

“What's that?”

“Hired the hottest cheerleaders in the league.”

“Unfortunately they can't catch for shit.”

The conversation continued through the return and departure of Joe Gibbs, stupid draft picks, free agency, the upcoming schedule, and predictions for the playoffs.

“No one looks better on paper than the Redskins in April.”

“Amen to that,” the bartender answered, pouring a beer for another patron at the far end of the bar.

The quiet mood of the bar was broken with the entrance of eight twenty-something ladies in a bachelorette party. The group of well-accessorized and fully primped females filled the gap around the stools between Jake and the bar's only other patron. A brunette from the group ordered eight lemon drop shooters, and the young ladies threw them back with synchronized gusto.

The bartender looked at Jake with a raised eyebrow and a smile. “Looks like you have some drinking competition.”

Jake laughed a little and tried to eye the females without staring.

Matt, the bartending matchmaker, jumped in. “Ladies, let me introduce you to my good friend Jake.”

The group gave Jake a cautious once over.

The bachelorette was wearing a t-shirt with a scavenger-hunt list of items she needed to collect, or tasks she needed to accomplish before the end of the evening. The list ran the gamut: from scoring a kiss, to unbuttoning a guy's shirt using only her teeth, to getting a guy to hand over his underwear. Lacking an alternative male audience, the women moved in on their prey.

“Hi, I'm Kate,” said the drink-ordering cute brunette with shoulder-length hair. She pulled her friend-of-honor closer so that Jake and the bachelorette stood face-to-face. “This is Paula. She is getting married next week.”

“I figured as much,” Jake replied, lightly flicking the bachelorette's ridiculous looking tiara with his finger.

“You wanna help us out with her scavenger list?”

“Sure he does,” the bartender answered for Jake before he had a chance to think about it.

Jake scanned the list on the girl's shirt. A kiss he could do. A public spanking was within the realm of possibility if he kept drinking.

“What about your boxers?” Kate asked.

Jake looked up and tried to remember what he was wearing under his khaki cargo shorts. He turned away, pulled up his t-shirt, and pulled out the top of his boxers. A reasonably new pair with a conservative dark green checked pattern. He turned back toward the ladies who tugged at his waist to get a look at the goods up for negotiation.

“I'll tell you what. Let me have another beer or two and I'll think about giving you my boxers.”

The ladies cheered. Paula the bachelorette grabbed Jake's beer off the bar and pushed it toward his lips. He drank as fast as he could, beer trickling from the corners of his mouth. He wiped the beer from his face and swiped at the drips on the front of his shirt. He apologized for his lack of manners to the heart-breaking brunette with mesmerizing brown eyes.

“If you give me your phone number, I'll give your friend my boxers,” Jake said, backed by the confidence of four beers.

“Deal.”

“I'll be right back,” Jake said hopping off the stool and heading toward the restrooms in the back of the bar, beyond the pool table.

“Where are you going?” Kate asked.

“To take off my boxers.”

“No, no, no. You have to take them off in front of us. Right, ladies?” Kate said. More cheers and one “hell yeah” shot from the group.

Jake moved back to his stool. “I'm not drunk enough for that.”

“No boxers, no number,” Kate taunted.

Jake's reinforcements rolled through the door halfway through his next beer. Tim and Aaron divided the sea of eight ladies who encircled Jake and were taking turns pulling at the waist of his knee-length shorts.

“What do we have going on here?” Aaron asked, dressed in a suit and fresh from another day of summer employment at a Washington think-tank that analyzed world migration.

“Hey guys,” Jake answered. He turned toward the women and made introductions. “Ladies, meet Tim and Aaron.”

The women surrounded the new recruits and began tugging at the belts of the complete strangers. There was something magical about inebriated girls out on the town for a bachelorette party.

While Aaron entertained the ladies with his well-rehearsed pick-up lines and shovels of bullshit, Tim, wearing old Birkenstocks and a t-shirt, pulled Jake aside. “We bought tickets for Europe this morning. It's still not too late to go.” Judging by his attire, Tim was already in boarding-pass mode.

“Not going to make it. Cash is a little tight at the moment.”

“I can loan you the money. I'll hit my parents up for it. I'll tell them my car needs some work. They live in Colorado. They'll never know. It's going to be the trip of a lifetime. Six guys, hitting the highlights of Europe. French, Spanish, and Italian women.”

“Those are the highlights of Europe?”

“Is there anything else?”

“I'd love to go. If something changes, you'll be the first to know.”