Stepping into our reception area, I toss the envelope into the rusty metal basket we use as an Out box. Roxanne does most of our interoffice stuff herself. “Roxanne, can you make sure to take this out in the next batch?”

She nods as I turn back to my desk. Just another day.

“Is it there yet?” I ask twenty minutes later.

“Already gone,” Harris answers. From the crackle in his voice, he’s got me on speakerphone. I swear, he’s not afraid of anything.

“You left it blank, right?” I ask.

“No, I ignored everything we discussed. Good-bye, Matthew. Call me when you have news.”

As he’s about to hang up, I hear a click in the background. Harris’s door opening. “Courier’s here,” his assistant calls out.

With a slam, Harris is gone. And so are the taxi receipts. From me to my mentor, from Harris to his. Leaning back in my black vinyl rolling chair, I can’t help but wonder who it is. Harris has been on the Hill since the day he graduated. If he’s an expert at anything, it’s making friends and connections. That narrows the list to a tidy few thousand. But if he’s using a courier, he’s going off campus. I stare out the window at a perfect view of the Capitol dome. The playing field expands before my eyes. Former staffers are everywhere in this town. Law firms… PR boutiques… and most of all…

My phone rings, and I check the digital screen for caller ID.

… lobbying shops.

“Hi, Barry,” I say as I pick up the receiver.

“You’re still standing?” he asks. “I heard you guys were negotiating till ten last night.”

“It’s that time of year,” I tell him, wondering where he got the info. No one saw us leave last night. But that’s Barry. No sight, but somehow he sees it all. “So what can I help you with?”

“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: 326. Doesn’t tell me squat. But whoever 326 is, they clearly think they’ve got the inside track. They’re wrong.

Staring down at a blank receipt, I’ve got my pen poised. Next to Cab Number, I write the number 727. Next to Fare, I put $60.00. Six hundred now, plus the $125.00 I put in before. If the bet gets too high, I can always drop out by leaving the dollar amount blank. But this isn’t the time to fold. It’s time to win. Stuffing all the receipts into a new envelope, I seal it up, address it to Harris, and walk it out front. Interoffice mail won’t take long.