"Will blades cut HUD staffer's throat?"
Valentine scanned a couple of paragraphs. Evidently a judge's clerk named Palmetto was caught sharing a portable walkie-talkie phone with a congressional aide named Bergstrom, violating Separation of Powers practice. The "new evidence" was from the Housing and Urban Development chief of staff, who admitted to Justice Department investigators that he tried to call Bergstrom, got Palmetto, and mentioned that a fresh supply of razor blades had come in.
"What an unwise", Ducks said. "All I can think is she didn't know who Palmetto was. They're just making a meal out of it because right now the VP and Donovan Baltrout are both in Majoritarian. So what about that contribution?"
"This shake is going right through me. I'll be right back", Valentine said. He went to the washroom, festooned with no smoking and water nondrinkable signs, took out two of his gold coins - the belt was now well over half-empty - and returned to their booth.
"Okay, I've got..."
"Oh good God, don't give it to me", Ducks said, sliding so far away from him she almost fell out of the booth. "Are you out of your mind? We'll swing by the Fair Politics booth and you'll fill out an envelope, one for Winter Harvest and a separate one for the senator's campaign. You'll have to do a lot of paperwork for the latter. Then they'll give me the envelopes".
"Uh-huh".
"The senator is on the anticorruption committee, you know. We're not going to be caught out".
She put the meal on the senator's account and they went through the paperwork at the busy booths off the Mall, which had an entire section of tunnel devoted to them.
Clusters of people with placards, pamphlets, cups, jugs, and purses filled the hall, swirling around those traveling to and from the booths. "Support Booth-Ramierez!" "Bring America Back needs you!" "Volunteer labor needed for Food for Thought, one free meal per day!" "Stop the Midwestern Senatorial Junta before they stop you!"
Ducks used her satchel like the prow of an icebreaker, holding it in front of her and forcing her way through the throng.
"Unpleasant".
Valentine pressed tightly behind her. People were shoving flyers in his collar, his boot, his empty holster, anything they could reach. They made it to a police officer, who put them in line for the next available federal bursar.
Valentine watched people step up to the glass booths. He'd seen rations doled out at old currency exchanges in the KZ and the setup reminded him of a clean, well-lit version of that. They only had a ten-minute wait, and Valentine's stomach gurgled as it tried to figure out what to do with the pub shake. Valentine extracted folded flyers from his clothing. Most featured drawings of ragged, starving children or trios of heroic-looking soldiers, two healthy supporting a wounded comrade.
Ducks' eyes lit up when she saw the gold coins. She helped him with the paperwork under the bored eye of the woman behind the glass. The bursar gave her a receipt for the Winter Harvest contribution, and the coin for the campaign went into a concealed neck pouch under Ducks' thin clothes.
The rigmarole left Valentine nonplussed. But all the careful record keeping gave the people in here something to do.
"You just made my day, Val", she said, pushing her way through the donation seekers again.
They emerged from the crowd, where another policeman made sure the donation seekers didn't step out into the "sidewalks" and grass of the Mall.
"When can I see the senator?" Valentine asked.
She consulted a clock projecting from the wall ahead. "They're in session for another hour. Want to watch from the senatorial gallery?"
Valentine shrugged. "I could use a shower".
"You can use the one off my unit. Staffers have to share bathrooms, though".
They passed an overlarge team of gardeners taking care of a set of trees and
she took him to another elevator bank. She showed her card to the operator inside, who punched a button for 26 and the elevator descended.
The tunnel level 26 was a good deal rougher, about fourteen feet high and still circular, painted in a cheery soft yellow that had gone dingy, with exposed conduits and pipes running the ceiling. This part was not as well lit; only one light in three even had a bulb. It snaked along in a long bend of about three degrees, Valentine guessed. Seven-foot-high blue cubicle separators closed off by shower curtains divided the tunnel on either side. Some had "roofs"; others were open to the tunnel ceiling.
The cubicle panels were decorated with family pictures, cartoons, even old pictures taken from what Valentine guessed to be calendars.
"This is mine", she said, stopping at a roofless cubicle. Her "door" was a quilt of old materials, mostly faded logos from T-shirts. A Rodgers and Hammerstein Oklahoma! poster decorated the outside, a 2016 Broadway production with the cast either rootin' or tootin' energetically in splashy colors. She also had a semifamous black-and-white photo of a tired-looking guerrilla, his back to an old oak, keeping watch while an old man, a woman, and two kids slept in a huddle.
"Hope you live here alone", Valentine said.
"I do, unfortunately. Marrieds and cohabitants get more space - families even get their own toilet. But this is really pretty nice. Downstairs the service staff really just gets a barrack bed with some privacy curtains hanging down. Yeah, the cubicle paneling smells musty, but it absorbs noise like a sponge. I could never sleep in a barrack".
"Consider the criticism withdrawn", Valentine said.