“How?”
The anger from earlier was already calmed from the tea and booze but learning intimate things about the asshole senator was great. “The men tell me for a minimal fee.”
“They didn’t sign NDAs?”
“I’m the one who gave them the NDAs, Eli.”
He laughed and absolutely giggled when Mars got another bottle from under the sink. It was an expensive bottle for being stashed there. “Where’d you get that?”
“After one of the senator’s…more fuzzy nights, I made him think he drank the entire thing. I do it often. Are you going to tell on me?”
“No! No, and actually, you are the only reason I’m not out of here.” He was given more of the smooth whisky, then he grew serious. “How do you stand it?”
“I’m paid well, Eli, and before you become high and mighty over that, you must realize it’s all I’ve ever known. My father was a butler, his father before him, and they taught me the job down to the smallest detail.” He looked up at Eli and confessed, “My father retired at fifty-five, given a severance of a million dollars and is now living in Greece with his twenty-seven-year-old wife.”
He was shocked to his core. “He’s…and you’re…”
“He, unlike me, loved being around these people. He emulated them.”
“But not you.”
Mars smiled wickedly. “No, Eli. I secretly hate them, but that is the ticket. To do it in secret. You listen and learn, and then…”
Eli had the sneaking suspicion that Mars would use his knowledge. “You have to have signed one too, Mars.”
“That’s not how we do things, Eli. I would never go to the public. I’ve waited, patiently, knowing that the lure of power and money would come so overwhelming to them that they’d start making a lot of mistakes and a lot of enemies. Pitting them against one another is easier than even they know.”
Eli wanted to change things, change the way Lee and others like him did things. It didn’t seem like pitting one viper against another would work. “What does that do?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve stayed comfortable in my life’s work thus far, perhaps waiting for someone to…help me. As I said, Eli, down in there, deep in his soul, Lee Madison is a good man. He’s just hidden himself below lies and power and greed. Maybe, if you stay and help me, neither of us will have to do more than pry that man out of there.”
More of the whisky, more thinking, and perhaps that was a bad combination. “Stay? Stay here, around…him?”
“Eli, he could have many men, but he saw something that night at that club. He wanted you for more than a night, which would have been simple to do, given your desperation for money. No offense.”
After he dryly laughed, he admitted, “I can’t say that isn’t true. I was working there, so it’s not like my morals outweighed my need. Still…”
“You can leave, Eli. You can wash your hands of this, or you can help me. You can help him. And you may be able to help your country.”
“All that, huh?”
He watched Mars and saw his eyes, saw in them the care he had for the insufferable man.
“You love him.”
“I raised him.”
He couldn’t combat that. He swallowed the rest of the booze in the cup, the tea long gone, and pushed it away from him. “That’s it. If I’m going to set some ground rules, I need to be sober.”
Mars stopped him before he could get far. Before Eli could ask why he was being stopped, Mars got up and went to the knife magnet above the stove. Suddenly, he got nervous, but when Mars got back to him, he cut one of the buttons from his jacket.
“What are you doing?”
“Patience.”
Mars took off his shoe and used the heel to smash the button. That’s when Eli looked over to see the tiny electronic that was broken in the middle of the plastic from the button. “The button was plastic? On this?”
“The point went right over your head, poor boy. Look at the tracking chip.”