Nothing Ventured

by Roderick Price

  Taylor had wanted to ask Martin a million questions as he talked and talked. Most of all, she wanted to know if he still loved Liz, but she was afraid of the answer. She couldn’t interrupt him anyway, so she just listened carefully to every word. She knew Martin very well. He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself and he would never make excuses. He wasn’t beaten down, either. But he was angry—angry and determined—and she knew that meant trouble for whoever he might be facing. She had been far too ashamed, and frankly her ego was too big, to ever admit that she had given in to the big oil companies. They had blackmailed her. She felt dirty and disgusted with herself, even as she heard Martin talk. But by the end of the evening, Taylor had told Martin everything about her job and her life.

  She and her staff had started off planning to just kill the refinery expansion in Superior. It was a bad idea. The area had some of the most pristine wilderness in all of North America. There wasn’t a market for the products in the Midwest anyway, that couldn’t be served just as easily from existing facilities somewhere else. Everything they were going to manufacture with the expansion, was going to Chicago and Cleveland and Minneapolis, anyway. The first two feasibility meetings with the DNR had gone very poorly for the oil companies. Jason had told Taylor from the beginning that he was adamantly opposed to the project and he got plenty of budget money from Taylor to put a DNR research team together that cut huge holes into the oil company plan. It had gotten personal. Jason even hired a couple of senior professors from the chemical engineering department at the University. Years ago, one of the professors had actually taught engineering to some of these oil company executives when they were students in Madison. The old professor ripped apart the design of the refinery expansion, suggesting that perhaps the executives should have paid a little more attention when they were back in his classroom. The sessions had made headlines that made it all the way back to the executive offices of the oil companies. Taylor assumed they would just pack up their stuff and go someplace like Louisiana or New Jersey, where it would be easier to expand their existing refineries. But a couple of days after the initial hearings, she got a phone call from the governor’s office. It wasn’t the governor, it was one of his campaign advisors, Ricky Amery, the campaign finance director, who said the state was concerned about the “messages” she had been sending to corporations wanting to invest in Wisconsin, something about giving them a break. Even when she talked to the governor later in the day, he was agitated with her. Governor Conlan said that these oil companies were important to the state. Maybe they should have a third feasibility meeting where the oil companies could regain some respect, suggested Conlan, even if Taylor still shut them down later. Reluctantly, she agreed and sent a junior team to meet with the companies at the third session, telling them to “just listen.” After that meeting, the headlines had read, “Oil Companies See Improved Chances for Expansion.” Jason had brought it over to her house and stuck it in her face the next morning when he came to pick her up.

  She replayed for Martin, in detail, her dealings with Dick Jansen and Sheldon Mack, the oil company representatives—”snakes” she called them. She even told Martin that Mack had taunted her once, telling her that she had the “best tits of any bureaucrat he had ever met.” Lastly, she told Martin about the meeting out at the governor’s mansion. She told him how they blackmailed her, how they’d gotten pictures of her with the lieutenant governor. She told Martin how they threatened her with political ruin if she didn’t approve the deal. There was no doubt the governor was crooked, taking some big money backdoor from Big Oil, assuming they hadn’t dug up dirt on him, too. He could talk all he wanted about “industry being good for the state.” Taylor wondered with Martin if they had given Conlan cash; maybe a condo down in Florida. Who would ever know?

  Taylor reminded Martin how she had worked her way through school. She was smart, but her parents were poor. When Taylor and Martin had been dating back in college, Martin had been to the parents’ place south of Iron River.

  Taylor told Martin that even last year she had paid for their new roof and bought them a used car. All the years she had spent in Madison working in the cafeteria as an undergraduate and then at the library when she was in Law School; all those years she had dreamed of making a difference. She dreamed about standing up for something and being in a position where she could make a difference. She had given her life for this. Her life was her work. Any evening out had to be for some business purpose. With her schedule ,there was no time to get to really know somebody. Now that she was so well known in Madison, that was almost impossible anyway. She had had sex with the lieutenant governor only twice while they had been working on the Appleton Industrial Park, his hometown. For her it had almost been out of desperation, fear that she had forgotten what it was like to be with a man. Now she hated them all, hated the governor, the oil snakes, Amery, and it was her against them all. If indeed she was elected lieutenant governor, she saw it only as a stepping stone to governor. Suddenly, she stopped, realizing that she had been talking a long, long time to Martin. It was getting late. She smiled at Martin and then shrugged her shoulders.

  “Well,” said Martin as he lifted his wine glass, “we were a perfect fit for each other twenty years ago. Based on what you are saying, I think we are still a perfect fit for each other. Let me tell you a little story about that golf bag.”

  CHAPTER 35

  On Monday morning, Taylor was back in Madison, and he made a routine call to the DNR’s controller. It had taken her no more than ten minutes on the net to find an article on computer disaster recovery and file storage. She now looked over a list of “Ten Commandments of Computer Storage.” The controller was obviously nervous just talking to her. She never called accounting. Taylor indicated she had read an article over the weekend on disaster recovery of computer systems. While she personally didn’t have very much time to worry about these things, the article had said that top-level executives periodically needed to ensure that the right steps were being taken. Taylor wondered what type of program the DNR had in place to address the issue and she proceeded to go down the “Ten Commandments,” careful to sound only casually interested in any answer. “Were all files catalogued and indexed? Was all data backed up on off-site locations? Occasionally, she would ask a follow up question just to keep the controller engaged. Just before wrapping up, Taylor asked a couple of questions about the area of records management. Yes, the state meticulously maintained paper and electronic records. These days, what with all of the environmental work they did and the legal liability of much of this, records retention was a big deal. The state never destroyed old files. No, the DNR didn’t actually run the Records Facility Management office, that was actually done at

  the state level for all of the departments that needed Records Management and a storage facility for old files. Yes, the DNR kept two months of records onsite in their offices, but anything over six months old was managed by the Records Facility Management group. At that, Taylor said she felt better knowing the DNR sounded as if they had thought through the issues, and she said if she ever got asked a question, she could respond to it.

  Still at her desk, she looked in her state government phone directory under Records Management and sure enough, they had offices right in the Capitol building. The Capitol was big, but it wasn’t that big. Taylor had never recalled seeing them. Even in her days as a page intern, when she ran all over the Capitol, she hadn’t seen any big file rooms. At the time, Taylor was studying political science as a sophomore and she had gotten a job as an intern with the state representative from Ashland.

  She looked again at the phone number. It was an internal four-digit number from her office. Indicating that she and the controller had been chatting about this just the other day, Taylor was following up with a casual call to understand how Records Management worked. She was in the public eye a lot, and if someone ever asked her the question it was worth a few minutes of her time now to ensure she had a background.<
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  The supervisor, a Mr. Gantry, was a real talker. It turned out that the RM offices were in the basement of the Capitol, of all places. Taylor didn’t even know that the Capitol had a basement. Seems that all of the bulky paper files and microfiche, items that did not require air conditioning or a controlled climate, were stored in a huge warehouse down on South Beltway. They regularly picked up items from all of the state agencies in Madison and transported them to the warehouse for cataloguing and storage.

  Digital media, was different though, the supervisor continued. It needed to be in a cool, dry place. Back in the sixties, they had started by storing electronic tapes and disks in the capitol basement, more for convenience than anything else. At the time, the state’s computer department was still pretty small and it was located in the basement, too. The basement temperature hovered in the upper sixties year-round, saving them a fortune in climate control. In 1975, the computer department had grown so much they were ready to move to their new facilities. They took all of the critical records with them when they moved, but anything dated before 1970 they had left right there in the basement. That had avoided a lot of additional moving costs and wouldn’t fill up their new facility with stuff that almost never got used. It didn’t cost anything to guard the records either, since they already fell under the security of the capitol itself. Besides that, the stuff was so old, the guy joked, there wasn’t much of a risk that a terrorist was going to target a bunch of fifty-year-old files.

  There was a great filing system too, he volunteered. Taylor had actually used it a few times in her legal work at the DNR. The guy explained that anything with a “D” in the third position of the file reference was stored in the basement of the Capitol, and anything with a B was out on the South Beltway.

  More recently, Taylor had gotten familiar with the state filing system while doing research on some of the big environmental cases at the DNR. At lunch time, she was meeting Jason in the dining room of the capitol. She left her office about fifteen minutes early and took the elevator down to the ground level and then found the stairs down to the basement. At the end of a dark, narrow hallway she passed through two sets of swinging double doors and found Mr. Gantry sitting at an old, gray, steel desk. A couple of silver-haired clerical ladies were working on the computers behind him. Taylor had stopped by just to say hello and thank him for answering a few silly questions. He was pleased that she had come and even took a minute to show her around, apologizing that there wasn’t much to see, just row after row of tape racks and storage containers. After a couple of minutes, she politely thanked him one more time and wished him a pleasant day. For Taylor, this was a reconnaissance mission. There were no security cameras in the basement, or the stairs. Not even one. There was really no security in the basement at all.

  The afternoon moved slowly. She was still laying low from the Superior case and her head was spinning from her time in Chicago with Martin. Jason told her at lunch she looked tired and needed to take the afternoon off. She smiled to herself. If Jason only knew why she had missed some sleep for a couple of nights he would go crazy. Actually, he’d be very happy for her. More than once he had told her point blank that there was a lot more to life than politics and work. At 4:00 p.m. Taylor got her stuff together and told her secretary she had to meet someone out of the office. Rather than call a car, she took the elevator down to the main floor of the rotunda and walked out the west doors down State Street. She walked slowly, watching the college kids coming back from classes. She remembered the long bike rides she used to take along the lake on the way down to Nielsen to play tennis. The wind would be blowing in her hair as she raced along. The sound of the gravel would crunch under those skinny tires in the early morning stillness, the lake waves lapping along the brushy shoreline behind Elizabeth Waters dorm. Then on her way back, she would weave quickly through the people and the cars over to the library.

  Martin. Martin. She didn’t know where she was going with Martin, and she didn’t know where he was going with her. She wanted to ask him, but she knew he probably didn’t know anyway. She thought he still loved her. It was the way he listened to her when she talked, the way he moved when he was with her, especially by the way he held her head after they had made love. She paused to look through the window at the silver jewelry in one of the stores. She saw herself in the reflection. She was older now. Professional. Her hair seemed shorter than she had remembered it being, and then she realized she was comparing herself to when she was a young co-ed back in college, riding her bike with her long hair flying in the breeze.

  Martin might marry her. He had almost married her once. It was she who had said they were too young. She had law school to finish. No money. He needed to go somewhere outside the state to get a job; it ended up being Texas. There was no way she could give up law school to follow him. He knew she was on a mission too. Didn’t expect her to follow him, wasn’t sure he wanted her to. She looked back at her image in the window, turning slightly in the late afternoon sun. The crow’s feet around her eyes were pronounced, partly from squinting in the sun, mostly from the years of battling in her job. Too many weeks with too little sleep, the hours of late meetings where she was known to negotiate a settlement all the way until morning. Martin had told her when he had met Liz. He hadn’t said he was attracted to her, just that he was playing tennis again and really enjoying it. He had a great partner named Elizabeth. She could tell by the tone of his voice that she was in trouble, that he was slipping away. But Taylor had a dream job and she loved living in Madison. Over the next six months, they talked less and less. When Martin came back home for the Fourth of July weekend, they had walked here along State Street arm-in-arm. Over an iced coffee down on Union Terrace, he had told her that Liz had grown very special to him. They had both cried. When they rose to leave, they had hugged for a long time. She could feel the tight muscles in his arching back. They walked slowly back up State Street hand-in-hand, and when they got to her street, they had simply dropped hands and she had walked off toward home in one direction while he walked off in another. It was better that way. She could never have said goodbye to him standing by the front door. She would have pulled him into the house. They would have tried to make things work. And he would have gone back to Houston torn between hanging on to what used to be and grabbing on to what could be.

  She turned back down State Street and walked a half block before turning left on a side street and walking back to her house on East Washington. She took a long bath, and then sat on the couch watching the early evening news and drinking a Diet Coke and eating some chips. She was never home this early, and it was a treat just to hang out. She made herself a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. After the news, she called her mom and dad and talked for an hour. Things were the same. They were always great. After ten years they had finally stopped asking her about grandchildren. Dad had been out chopping firewood of all things, and Mom had spent the afternoon worrying that he was going to overdo it or lose his concentration and hurt himself. Then her dad told her mom that he’d been chopping wood for fifty years and he wasn’t about to stop. At 7:00, she went upstairs and called Jason. He was over at his friend’s house. They were making Chinese food and they had rented “Evita,” planning to stay-in for the night. That was good. He was one of the only people in the entire Capitol who worked past seven or eight.

  She changed back into her work clothes, grabbed her briefcase and headed downstairs. Opening the door in the hall closet, she dragged Martin’s golf bag out into the foyer and opened it. Placing a dark, nylon shoulder bag on the floor, she carefully grabbed the first tape to place it in the nylon bag. She paused and looked at the label that Martin had applied and compared it to the label she had written down in her office. Exactly the same number sequence as she had seen on her desktop at work, even the “D” that the Records guy had talked about was in bold print. The old tapes should be in the capitol basement. She didn’t think these canisters and tapes were all that sensitive, but
she carefully stacked one on top of another until all seven were in the nylon bag. Hoisting the bag over her shoulder, she grabbed her briefcase and pulled the door closed behind her. The lock clicked decisively. She walked down the street to the pay phone on the corner and called the Records Management office. No answer. Everyone was gone for the day. In minutes, she had hailed a cab to take her back over to the east side of the Capitol building. If someone had seen her leave in the afternoon, she could easily tell them she was coming back to drop something off at the office. If they hadn’t seen her leave, she told herself, it would be easier to explain coming in off East Washington Street. She flipped her picture identification card at the security guard as she walked in, he waved back at her, engaged in a conversation with one of the maintenance guys. Her steps echoed as she walked across the marble floor of the rotunda and took the elevator to her office. Her magnetic ID card clicked in the slot and when the little green security light flashed back at her, she pulled open the door to the offices and dragged the heavy nylon bag into her office and lowered it gently behind her desk. She rolled up the sleeves on her blue cotton blouse. She took her reading glasses out of her purse, placing them down on the edge of her nose. She then sat down at her desk and turned on her desk light, set her briefcase on the chair and opened it and took three working files and spread them across the top of the desk. Opening her second drawer on the right side of the desk, she searched through staplers, paper clips, and post-its and found two visitor identification cards she kept in reserve for unexpected guests, and she slipped them in her pocket. She opened her brief case and grabbed the list of file labels that Martin had given her. She hoisted the nylon bag back over her shoulder and walked out of her office with pen and yellow highlighter in hand. It was 8:00 p.m., unlikely that she would even see anyone in the basement; and even if she did, it would be unlikely they would question who she was or what she was doing. With work on her desk and an armful of files, if she got questioned it would be pretty easy to explain that she was reviewing some files late in the day and wanted to pick up some things from Records Management. She took the stairs this time all the way to the basement—no need to be stuck on an elevator with someone making small talk at this hour. Back down the narrow hallway, she went to the Records Management office. She quickly slid the visitor badge through the magnetic slot, but the little red door lock light glowed back steadily at her. She didn’t want to use her card, but she was prepared to. Sliding the visitor card again, this time more slowly, the light quickly turned green and she pulled the door open. So much for Capitol security. The guest badge got her in. As she expected, most of the lights were off, part of the energy conservation plan that one of the DNR task forces had put together back in the Carter administration. She walked over to the panel of light switches and flipped them all on. If someone was going to walk in on her she could hardly be poking around with a flashlight. She walked briskly down row after row of tape racks and file cabinets eyeing the series of labeling numbers on the end of the aisle. When she got to her sequence set, she turned into the aisle and found a series of tape canisters with numbers that matched Martin’s. With relief, she saw that there were exactly seven canisters with the same number sequence, and the canisters were exactly the same in size and appearance as those Martin had given her in Chicago. Setting down her paper files, she slipped the nylon case off her shoulder and unzipped it. Using the cotton cloth that Martin had first used to avoid fingerprints, she removed the seven canisters from the shelf and placed them on the floor. Then, one by one, she moved each of the seven canisters from the nylon bag to the shelf. The whole process took less than a minute. A few minutes later, she was back in her office where she repacked her things and walked back out of the Capitol through her regular exit.