“So . . . are you ready to tell me what’s in the cache? Or are you still trying to decide whether you can trust me?”
Her smile vanishes. She looks over her shoulder to the faint outline of her worktable. “Why don’t we sit down? Let me get some light on.”
She crosses the room in the dark, then turns on the bathroom light and leaves the door cracked, enough to throw a faint wedge of fluorescent light into the room. I take my coffee and sit on the near side of the table. She sits opposite me and absently picks up a pen resting on a notepad.
“There are three main issues,” she says, doodling on the pad. “First, what’s in the cache. Second, how I got it and what Sally intended should be done with it. Third, what are we going to do with it? A lot of this is going to get very personal for you. But we have to talk about it. Where do you want to start?”
“What’s in the cache? I need to know what’s at stake for everybody.”
“A lot,” she begins, tapping the pad like an attorney framing a question in a deposition. “There’s a staggering amount of general business corruption. Political manipulation, bribery, tax evasion, you name it. Most of that’s local, except the tax stuff, which involves accounts in the Seychelles. There’s a local dimension to the paper mill and the interstate and bridge as well. The Poker Club wired those deals every way they could think of, skimmed in ways I’ve never seen before. All the new infrastructure, the ancillary businesses—every angle has been maximized for graft and spread among the local constituencies, including the black leaders. But all that’s nothing compared to the central knot. The plum on the wedding cake. It’s the crime of the century, Marshall—I kid you not.”
“That’s enough foreplay.”
Nadine mimes disappointment. “Don’t deny me my little triumphs. It’s been killing me to be the only person who knows this shit. Scaring me, really. This mill deal is like the ultimate expression of Trump’s America. It took the new EPA granting an unprecedented exemption to allow construction on top of the old electroplating factory, which was almost declared a Superfund site ten years ago. But who cares, right? It’s moneymaking time. And that mill is the golden anchor that made the interstate and the bridge and all the rest possible.”
“Jesus, would you tell me the heart of the thing already?”
There’s wicked pleasure in her eyes. “Can’t you tell me? I’ve been pushing you toward the answer for three days. Think. Why did Azure Dragon choose Bienville, Mississippi, for their billion-dollar paper mill? At least five other towns on their list were far superior in every respect.”
I throw up my hands. “Why?”
She sighs with disappointment. “Avery Sumner.”
“Judge Sumner? The Poker Club member who got appointed to fill the vacant Senate seat?”
“Yes!” She looks as though the whole truth should be self-evident.
“I must be a moron. Explain, damn it.”
“God. Bienville was in the running to get the paper mill, but way down the list. It was a cattle call. Most potential site cities sent distinguished delegations to China to make their pitches. Some state governors flew over. Everybody’s singing the same song. They compete to give the biggest tax breaks and best infrastructure package, a contest Bienville couldn’t possibly win. Right?”
“I imagine not.”
“But somebody in the Poker Club—I’m pretty sure it was Max Matheson—got the brilliant idea of offering the Chinese something nobody else could.”
“Which was . . . ?”
She extends an open hand as though offering me something of immense value. “A U.S. Senate seat.”
Avery Sumner. “How could they offer the Chinese Sumner’s Senate seat?”
“Not the seat itself. They offered votes. Pro-China votes on major pending legislation. Especially trade legislation.”
I must have been more exhausted than I knew. But now my heart is racing. “The Poker Club guaranteed Sumner would vote pro-China in exchange for Azure Dragon building their paper mill in Bienville?”
“Bingo. For a cool six billion yuan invested in southwest Mississippi, China got a guaranteed Senate vote.”
“Christ. But . . . leaving aside the treason, or whatever crime that is, Avery Sumner was only appointed to serve out the remainder of a term. How many votes affecting China will come up in the time he has left?”
“In two years and four months? Enough. I think the Chinese would consider his vote on even two major bills a thousand percent return on their investment.”
She’s right: the scale of this crime is staggering. It’s hubris on the part of the Poker Club, but to Buckman and Donnelly and the rest, the potential payoff must have seemed worth the risk. “And the Chinese government?” I ask. “Were they involved with this? Or was it just Azure Dragon Paper?”
Nadine laughs softly. “That’s like asking me if Putin knew his oligarch buddies were involved in election tampering. You think some Shanghai businessman would risk espionage against the U.S. without the sanction of his government? You get a bullet in the back of the neck for that in China.”
“All this is detailed in Sally’s cache?”
“Painstakingly. Her recordings of the Poker Club meetings contain several discussions about it, and her documentary evidence verifies it beyond doubt.”
Though I’m sitting, I feel dizzy, as though I’ve been whisked a thousand feet into the air. “This is bigger than . . . almost anything I can think of. Selling a U.S. Senate seat to a foreign power?”
Nadine has an almost beatific smile on her face. “If you think about it, U.S. Senate seats have been sold for a long time. Candidates have to spend millions to even have a chance at winning one. The Citizens United decision worsened the problem exponentially. And once a senator’s in office, lobbyists pay millions to get their votes. How big a leap was it, really, to start selling votes directly?”
“It’s not the first time, is it?” I realize. “Governor Rod Blagojevich tried to sell the seat vacated by Barack Obama. Went to jail for it. Fourteen years. Did you ever hear the FBI tape of what he said about that seat?”
She shakes her head.
“‘I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden. I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.’”
“He’d have been right at home in the Bienville Poker Club. At least Buckman and his crew are trying to help the city as well as themselves.”
Despite my earlier indignation over Nadine’s lack of trust, I can’t help but fantasize what breaking a story of this magnitude would mean to my career. It’s like being the only reporter with the Pentagon Papers story, or Watergate. I feel an irrational fear that I’ll be killed before I can write it up and get it out to the world. Or maybe that’s not so irrational— “This crime is actually ancient history,” Nadine informs me. “The Romans had a specific law to deal with bribery of senators for their votes. Lex Acilia repetundarum. But our situation gets into ambitus, as well—all the illegal crap the Poker Club did to get Sumner appointed to that seat. All twelve members pulled every string they could reach to put his butt in that chair.”
“Where is the cache now?” I ask.
“A safety-deposit box.”
My fear ratchets up three notches. “Not here in Bienville!”
Nadine smiles. “Not a chance. I’ll bet there’s not a safety-deposit box in this town that Claude Buckman couldn’t get opened one way or another. No, it’s in Monroe, Louisiana, in a bank with no ties to the Buckman empire.”
Monroe is seventy miles across the river. “Okay, good thinking. How long have you had the cache?”
“Eleven days.”
We’ve come to the point where things are going to get personal. But before I can ask my first question about Sally’s motive, Nadine says, “What did they do to you in the jail? Come on. I see petechiae under your eyes.”
I might as well tell her. “Officer Obie and a black-hooded buddy waterboarded me.”
“Shit, they didn’t.”