The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

“Laws. I don’t know. The Americans, they call the shots now. No more secrets for anybody. All I know is you don’t just walk in with a password and walk out with the money.”

  “There’s a way. Theoretically. My dad thinks so.”

  “And then what? Let’s say you get the money. How do you move it, how do you spend it without paying taxes?”

  “I’ll pay taxes. I don’t care about that.”

  Terrance snatches his boxers from the floor and puts them on. “It’s not about paying. They want to know where it came from. How you got it.”

  “But people—rich people—they get away with it all the time, right? Moving money. Spending it.”

  I hear him moving behind me, coming up close. Then his hands are around my waist and he presses his chest to my back.

  He kisses my neck. “Want to know the secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “Attorneys. Good ones. Naz Sadik, in Zurich. Whatever you can imagine, she can find a way to do it.”

  “Who’s Naz Sadik?”

  “The attorney my dad uses. And all his friends.” He squeezes me tightly.

  “How much?”

  “Expensive,” he says. “Thousands an hour.”

  “Thousands, plural?” I say. “Jesus.”

  “You want to turn water into wine, that’s what it costs.”

  I reach behind me, touch his head, running my fingers over his scalp. “Come with me,” I say. “To Zurich. We’ll split the money.”

  I hear the uncertainty in his breathing. “I don’t want the money,” he whispers. “In fact, you can have some of mine. More when I get the trust fund. Whatever you need.”

  He means to be generous, and even though I know this intellectually, the idea makes me angry. “This money isn’t just money. It’s—justice.”

  “Revenge,” he says.

  “Justice,” I say again. “You coming with me or not?”

  He turns me around so we’re pressed chest to chest, hips to hips. He takes my face between the palms of his hands and kisses me. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m going with you.”

  Eleven

  Wanting is love. Or maybe wanting is simply like love. Or maybe I don’t know what love is. But I do know what wanting is. And it’s this. The opposite of fear.

  When you’re afraid, you work like hell to avoid the thing you’re afraid of. But when you want, you work like hell to steer toward the thing you want. Thus, there will be no more cowering for me. No more hiding. I will go about the business of obtaining what I want brazenly. I will be fearless. I will be merciless. And I will take the money.

  I peel my skin away from Terrance’s body, and the air is cold there in the places we were pressed together. We make love again, this time on the floor. In the process, we knock over a stand with a vase of flowers on top and the water is pooling on the ratty old rug. As Terrance stirs, I slip on my shirt and climb into my jeans. From here, I can see the clock on the bedside table: 10:17 p.m. I push aside the curtains and look down on nighttime BA below us, full and buzzing.

  Terrance approaches and stands beside me at the window. I see our silhouettes, feel the warmth of his naked chest floating just a centimeter away from my naked arm. “Let’s go out,” he says. “Get drunk. Dance.”

  “For tomorrow we die.”

  “No. We celebrate. The end of being afraid.”

  “Dangerous for you to be seen with me,” I say.

  He touches my shoulder. “It’s nighttime, Gwen. No one sees anything.”

  * * *

  The line along the San Telmo street stretches down the block and around the corner. Beautiful, sexy porteños laugh and smoke and eye one another. The crowds I’ve seen here are not generally given to orderly queuing, but tonight they are on their best behavior for the one-night-only engagement at a rave in a disused warehouse space. Even though he’s in a city he doesn’t know, the date and time and location of the rave are, of course, known to Terrance. Maybe there’s an app just for international rich kids.

  The scent of good weed crisscrosses with the scent of good perfume as Terrance pulls me by the hand past the line and all the way to the steel doors at the front, where a pair of oak-tree bouncers stand guard. By the standards of the expensively dressed women in line, my clothing—jeans, tank top, sneakers—is pathetic. The smaller of the two oak doormen glances at us once, then waves us away. But Terrance sidles up next to him, puts on that killer smile. I spot a folded green square in Terrance’s palm that’s not there a second later. The denomination is apparently large enough for the doorman to actually give a little bow as he opens the door and waves us in.

  The bass hammers at my chest and eardrums, and strobes freeze ecstatic faces in the crowd. On a stage in the center of the dance floor, the DJ stands behind a control panel of turntables and laptops. With the music’s every shift, every build, every drop, the crowd roars its approval, and the DJ, a glorious blond boy with a mouth full of LED teeth, grins back.

  We are sucked into the crowd, pressed into the spaces among them, and suddenly moving with them. Our hands reach up as if trying to snatch one of the lasers cutting across the sea of bodies. It’s been years since I’ve been at a club purely for the pleasure of it. Since my dad was stationed in Moscow, where the drinking age is four and the only thing they check at the door is to make sure your skirt is short enough. Dancing in a club felt illicit and thrilling then; now it’s luxurious release. To be among others, feeling what they feel, moving as they move, the music pulling at my stomach as if I’m cresting the hill on a roller coaster.

  Terrance takes my hand and leads me to the bar. A moment later, he’s handing me a shot glass, something green and sugary-smelling, a mad scientist’s magic formula. “I clink the rim of my glass to his, and then we both drink. It’s sweet and marvelous. I slam the glass onto the bar. “Another,” I say.

  He looks at me from the corners of his eyes, then signals the bartender. Too much, too quick, I warn myself. Tactical awareness. Always. At every moment. And this green poison will give me anything but.

  But.

  But screw it. Let me be the me without a name tonight. Let me live in a different world tonight. I drink, then take Terrance by the hand and lead him into the center of the dance floor. Even as the song drifts into another, morphing into a happy, blipping, bouncing children’s version of bass-heavy dance music, we don’t stop moving. This is one of this DJ’s big hits, apparently, because everyone roars even louder. I have spent so much energy on fear, so much of myself on fear, that it is bliss to spend it on something else. Terrance’s body presses into me; I press into the woman next to me; she presses into someone else. So it goes, so it spreads, until all of us are fused in this way.

  The sweat on my arms shines in the strobes and the lasers like I’m made of silver. Then Terrance’s arm is around my waist and he’s leading me off the floor. Another transaction takes place at the foot of a staircase, then another at the top that sees us escorted to a white leather couch all to ourselves.

  Bottle service only here, so it’s a bottle we’ll have to get. Through me as his interpreter, Terrance orders vodka and soda water to mix it with, both twenty times the price they’d sell for on the street.

  A trio of women approach. Gorgeous and nervous. Cocktail dresses and artfully piled black hair and sequined clutches. They say something to Terrance in Spanish, and when he can’t hear, they say it again, louder. Laughter bursts from my mouth just as I take a sip of the vodka. I cough and cough and spit the vodka into my hand.

  “What’s so funny?” Terrance asks.

  “They’re asking if you’re a rapper.”

  “A what?”

  “A rapper.”

  Now Terrance bursts out laughing.

  I run through a list of rappers in my head but can’t think of anyone he looks like. “Ladies, may I present to you T-Maxus,” I say in Spanish, cringing at the name even as it comes out.

  They consult, and each in turn shakes her head. One of them hands me he
r iPhone. “Spell it,” she says.

  “His debut album is coming out next month,” I say. “He’s not famous yet, but in a year, bigger than Kanye.”

  They swoon anyway—a word I’ve never really appreciated until I see them do it—simultaneously moaning and clutching their stomachs as if they’re about to vomit. The three pile in close to Terrance and pull their iPhones out to take selfies with him, but I step in.

  “No photos,” I say, taking the phone away from one of the girls.

  “And who are you, bitch?” one of them says.

  “His bodyguard,” I say.

  I’m about to shoo them away, then don’t. Instead, I invite them to sit, and Terrance asks a passing server for more glasses. Here we all are, new friends, living life as friends do. The glasses come and Terrance pours vodka for everyone. It goes down hard and is cold as ice cream and sends a web of tingles outward from my stomach to my head and fingers and toes.

  Life feels good as someone else.

  They are named Delfina, Marti, and Sol, I find out. Native porteños who know one another from nursing school. I learn all this from the first minute or so as I interpret for Terrance. In the second minute I learn that two are Catholic, while the third—the one who called me a bitch—“identifies as Buddhist.” They are, all of them, charming and cute, and the girl called Sol has an untranslatable wit that’s hilarious in Spanish but doesn’t work in English. Terrance and I make up stories of what it’s like as a soon-to-be hip-hop star, the grueling tour schedule as an opening act for someone famous, the throngs of fans waiting for him at the Tokyo airport. All of it so much more appealing than reality.

  One of them—Delfina?—spills vodka on herself, and Terrance helps her wipe it up. A gentlemanly gesture; he’s careful to avoid touching her too much. I use the opportunity to take another drink from the vodka, then another. My eyes close and I see fiery swirls thrumming and breathing in time to the music. This is it, the feeling I was after. Alcohol makes you sentimental. It makes you fall in love. It makes you cry because you’ve never seen a boy so beautiful.

  I stand, or rather, find myself standing. I find myself descending the staircase to the dance floor, too. I find myself slipping into the crowd, arms up, body pressed against other bodies. The music lifts me, carries me. I spin, or rather, am spun. The tempo changes, builds. Soft blips turn to scratches and the sound of tearing fabric. A violent war-drum bass line starts up and I see the heads of other dancers tilted to the ceiling, mouths open, as if struggling for air, their arms reaching up as if trying to climb to the surface. In the crisscrossing lasers above us, our breath coils into plumes of dragon fire. I’m drowning.

  A ring of booths lines the perimeter of the dance floor and I fight my way toward them. I find an empty table with unattended drinks waiting for their owners to return and empty one of the glasses in three swallows. It’s a room-temperature something that tastes of maraschino cherries and gasoline.

  I should leave. I should leave and disappear. It was wrong of me to drag Terrance into this. Selfish of me. Greedy. He is not mine to do with as I please. He doesn’t need the money I’ll steal. Which I won’t get anyway. Because I’ll die before I even come close. And so will he.

  * * *

  An arm is around my waist. A mouth is kissing my neck.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” Terrance says.

  We stumble into the night, me nearly tripping over curbs and obstacles that aren’t there, him catching me.

  Terrance is angry with me. I drank too much, and now he’s angry with me for being sloppy and stupid. As he pulls me upright, I grab handfuls of fabric from his shirt and pull him close.

  “You’re an idiot,” I say.

  He tries to pull my hands away, straighten me up, but I hold tight.

  “You’re an idiot,” I repeat. “I’m using you, Terrance. Don’t you see that?”

  “Everyone uses everyone.” He finally gets my hands away and turns me around. “It’s just a question of what for.”

  With one arm around my waist, he extends the other into the street, imperially slim fingers raised at an imperially casual angle, commanding a taxi to materialize. And so one does.

  “Look at you, all magic,” I say.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  Terrance pulls me next to him in the backseat of the old Fiat as we head to the hotel. We bounce along, and somehow I see inside the Fiat’s buzzy little engine, at the cyclone of bees powering it. As other cars pass us, their headlights throw beams of fire and glass—searing and cold, respectively, and smooth to the touch. But these are just drunken hallucinations, or shards of hallucinations, unreal properties of things that are real. I squeeze my eyes shut and press my forehead into Terrance’s shoulder.

  “If they catch you with me, they’ll hurt you, Terrance.”

  “I imagine they’ll try.”

  But he can’t imagine, because he’s a good person and the imagination of a good person can’t see the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve read about in my father’s doomsday device.

  “Tajikistan,” I say.

  “What’s in Tajikistan?” Terrance says.

  “It’s where they’ll send you. If they catch us.”

  He smiles, patronizing the drunk girl, and curls a finger through my hair. “I hear it’s nice there,” he says.

  I rip myself up from his shoulder and lean forward, about to order the driver to pull over, about to jump out the door and slip into the dark and be gone from Terrance’s life.

  But we’re already in front of the hotel. And Terrance is pulling money from his pocket. And the doorman in a threadbare vest and rumpled white shirt is opening the back door of the cab and grinning.

  “Welcome back,” the doorman says.

  * * *

  One more night. Then I’ll go.

  This is my shitty world, not his. How dare I drag him into it. Thank the booze-gods I caught my mistake in time to make my exit.

  Terrance pulls the keycard out of the lock and swings the door open.

  “I’m going to throw up now,” I say.

  He follows me into the bathroom, crouches next to me as I kneel and bend my head over the toilet, holds my hair behind my ear with slender fingers as I puke the night out, liquor and pink bile. He touches my mouth with a washcloth white as an angel’s robe. He tilts a glass of water to my lips. “Baby sips,” he says.

  “I’m seeing things, Terrance. Hallucinating.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “Enough.” I wave him away. “Go. I need to wash.”

  I sit on the floor of the tub, rinse my mouth, spit, rinse again. I rub viciously with the washcloth at the black glue on my arm where the knife and cardboard sheath were held in place with duct tape. The green stuff and vodka has peaked and I’m now stumbling back toward the ground. The shy better angel inside me tells me to hold on to the lessons learned: Keep your word, Gwen, and leave tomorrow.

  From somewhere outside the bathroom I hear Terrance bump into something. Maybe he’s ordered room service and the cart hit the wall. Some dry toast would be nice. That’s just the sort of thing he would think of: dry toast for the puking girl.

  I turn off the water and wrap myself in a scratchy robe. “Terrance?” I call, rubbing a spot clear on the foggy mirror and combing my hair. No answer.

  “Terrance?” I repeat.

  Still nothing.

  I cinch the belt of the robe tight around my waist and step out of the bathroom. Terrance is sitting on the foot of the bed, arms politely in his lap, wrists bound with white plastic riot cuffs. Two meters away, a man stands with a pistol held loose at his side.

  Twelve

  The man leans a weary shoulder against the wall and doesn’t even raise the gun as I enter. He’s in his mid-twenties, pudgy and big, and has done this enough to be casual about it. “Gwendolyn Bloom,” he says in English. “Show to me your hands.” An accent, Slavic, but not Russian.

  Insulted
vanity. That’s what it is, the thing inside me that in that moment is louder than the panic. Lovrenc Zoric’s gift for me is just as I thought: an idiot wearing latex gloves and carrying a pistol. I’d imagined a leather jacket and track pants, but this one is in jeans and sneakers and a track jacket, which is close enough to still be right.

  I raise my hands to shoulder level and dart a glance toward Terrance. His eyes are wide and panicked. He has, it occurs to me, never had a gun held on him.

  “I have money,” Terrance says firmly, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “A lot more than whatever they’re paying you.”

  “Yes?” the man says. “Here? With you?”

  “No. In a bank.”

  “Ah,” the man says, raising the gun toward Terrance’s head. “Too bad we’re in a hotel.”

  I lift my hands higher, just enough to pull the belt on the robe loose, just enough to let the robe fall open in the front. It is, emphatically, not an invitation. Not a come-on. It is an accident. An accident that I made happen.

  The man’s eyes turn, and I feel them crawl over me. This thug is of a kind, a sort, a species that I know. In the pocket of his track jacket I will find a pack of Marlboros and keys to a BMW. On his phone I will find American hip-hop and racist German rap and pictures of nude blond women with giant tits.

  I lower my hands just a little. Let the robe creep down my shoulders just a little. His eyes catch mine, and I turn my eyes away shyly.

  He hesitates, the gun still on Terrance, but looking at me. He has orders, a paycheck waiting at the end. He’s been told about me, warned. But he’s already picturing himself fucking me. He’s picturing himself afterward, telling his friends about it in a bar back home, the gestures he’ll use. How raptly his friends will sit. How wide their eyes will be.

  He takes a tentative step forward, then a more assured one. I keep my eyes lowered and submissive. Then his fingers touch my breast, clammy because of the latex gloves. He squeezes my breast gently at first, then harder. I feel his breath on my forehead. Cigarettes and gum.

  With the tip of the silencer, he brushes my hair back behind my ear and prods the robe the rest of the way off my shoulders. It falls to the floor, and only the end of the belt stays in my hand.