The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  I glance at her. “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes,” she says. “We had a class together, at university. History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, I believe it was.”

  I try to smile. “No, I’ve never…”

  “Professor Brent Simanski.”

  I glance around, but the few other passengers aren’t paying attention. We look at each other for a moment. She’s smiling, I’m not. There’s something about her I recognize now, not in her physical features but in the way she holds herself—relaxed but ready, certain of her own intentions but not mine.

  The tram slows as it enters the first station in the Altstadt. The woman rises, then gestures with her head for me to follow.

  On the sidewalk, I fall into step beside her. She walks quickly, like she has someplace important to be.

  “I’m called Mazal,” she says.

  “What is this about?” I say.

  But Mazal doesn’t answer. We’ve entered a busy square, crisscrossed by tram tracks running between café tables and street cart vendors, the polite, convivial anarchy of afternoon Zurich.

  Mazal takes my arm like an old friend and leans in. “Lovrenc Zoric is alive.”

  “Lovrenc isn’t in charge,” I say quietly. “It’s his sister. And there’s no more arms trafficking. That was their father, not them. The business is shut down.”

  “Do you have confirmation?”

  “They told me,” I say. “She did. Dragoslava.”

  “You had orders, which you ignored.” She squeezes my arm. “The baby stroller we just passed. Tell me about the woman pushing it.”

  “Black yoga pants, blue jacket. Thirtyish.”

  “Did you see a man eating ice cream while talking on a phone?” Mazal says.

  “Pink shirt, gray suit. Tall, athletic. Indian. Or Pakistani. Forty, maybe.”

  Mazal nods with a sly smile. “Now, who else do you see, up ahead? Who’s ours?”

  I scan the crowd, looking for clues, the ordinary-out-of-ordinary. “Construction worker,” I say. “Beard, yellow vest, and helmet. Smoking a cigarette.”

  “And?”

  “A woman, blond hair in a pageboy. Green jacket. Walking a bike.”

  “Anyone else?”

  I keep scanning, but no one else jumps out. I shake my head.

  “Two out of four,” Mazal says, giving my arm a squeeze. “Not bad for a rookie. Tell me, how did you know?”

  I shake my head. “A feeling.”

  “Good,” she says. “Good. Then you’re not overthinking it. It’s like muscle memory in that way.”

  Praise, but also something else. She’s telling me I’m surrounded.

  “Why are they here?” I say.

  “We’re going to have an unpleasant conversation, Judita,” Mazal says brightly. “They’re here so you don’t get stupid.”

  “What kind of unpleasant conversation?”

  She gives me a quick smile. “I’m going to pull a cigarette out of my pocket and light it. That’s the signal that everything’s all right between us. I drop the cigarette, they drop you. Clear?”

  I nod.

  “Good.” The cigarette appears between her lips and she strikes a flame on a cheap plastic lighter. She inhales once and coughs. “You failed your first mission. So we gave you a new one, which you completed successfully.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The pace of her walking slows. “The money you got out of Zoric’s accounts. Nineteen million francs. The old-timers in Tel Aviv who were doubting you, they’ve changed their tune. Calling you a prodigy now.”

  Something that feels like helium fills my veins, about to lift me into the air. My back straightens, my face goes slack. “First, I don’t work for you,” I say softly. “Second, that’s my money. Mine.”

  Mazal inhales and lets smoke wander from her nostrils. “This is the part you aren’t going to like,” she says. “The part where you really need to control yourself. No sudden movements, okay? Let me hear you promise, ‘No sudden movements.’”

  “Fine,” I say with a trembling voice. “No sudden movements.”

  Mazal holds my arm tightly. “We intercepted the money this morning, as it was being transferred. It’s our money now. Sorry about that.”

  Twenty-Four

  It is everything I can do, everything, not to drive the heel of my hand into Mazal’s chin, get my arm around her neck, and murder her. But the construction worker is watching me, hand under his yellow vest, and so is the blond with the pageboy, who appears to be digging for something in her messenger bag.

  “My lawyer, Naz Sadik—she was working for you,” I manage to say.

  “Oh, no. We took a peek at her e-mail for the wiring instructions. Spoofed the bank’s credentials when the transfer was initiated. She knows now, though. And believe me, she’s terrified.”

  “Terrified of what?”

  “Of you,” Mazal says. “My advice: Let it pass. It’s not your attorney’s fault. But take her out if it makes you feel better. Just be discreet about it, please.”

  The world starts to slip away, the people in the square fading into blackness, the murmur of the city turning into the harmony of a thousand wasps buzzing in concert. Only Mazal remains.

  “I need to sit,” I whisper.

  She guides me by the arm to a bench and takes the seat next to me.

  “You had no right,” I whisper. “The money was mine. It was mine.”

  “Your money?” Mazal’s voice becomes stern. “Because you deserve it, for what you went through?”

  “Yes!”

  “Keep your voice down.” Mazal looks around, then leans in close. “So all Gwendolyn Bloom’s suffering is worth more than the suffering of all the women and children Zoric trafficked, more than the suffering of families destroyed by Zoric’s weapons.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Who earned the money you call yours? You or the fifteen-year-old girl Zoric sold as a slave? You or the kid with no arms who picked up Zoric’s cluster bomb?”

  “It was mine because I took it.”

  “And such a good job you did, too.” She points with the end of her cigarette toward a jewelry store and a mirrored display case gleaming silver and gold even in the steel-gray light. “What was your plan for all the money, anyway? Look, there you can buy a twenty-five-thousand-dollar watch. Or how about a few Bentleys—maybe one for each day of the week.”

  My mind clenches, pushing out the profane idea that she’s right, that she’s right and I’m wrong. “And what is Israel going to do with it?”

  “Those passports you burn through, the escape routes, the training. You think those are free?”

  “They’re not nineteen million francs.”

  She follows a couple walking past with her eyes, speaking only when they’re out of earshot. “When I was four years old, I walked with my mother from Ethiopia to Sudan, smearing shit on our bodies to keep the bandits in the refugee camps away. Know what happened next?”

  “No,” I whisper.

  “An Israeli cargo plane came, landed on a dirt airstrip, the markings painted over. Loud as the devil. I was terrified; I’d never seen a plane before.”

  Her face is firm, as if ordering me to hear her.

  “The woman who came up to us, I’d never seen someone like her. An Arab, we thought, but in army fatigues. She told my mother they’d come to take us home, to Israel, where we wouldn’t be slaughtered anymore. Imagine that. Home, to a place you’d never been.”

  Mazal’s eyes linger on me, as if determining whether her words are getting through. “The money pays for that, too.”

  I can hear the breath whistling fast in and out of my nostrils, the anger inside me not wanting to buy her argument. “Humanitarian work,” I say. “That’s what Israel’s known for, right? Parachuting hugs to the kids of Gaza.”

  “Sometimes the wrong people get killed.” She takes a drag from the cigarette. “Sometimes the right people get helped.”


  I close my eyes. Goddamn her. Goddamn her for being right. This cash had run in dank streams from all over the world until it collected here in a little pond called Switzerland. Zoric had stolen it from the victims. I’d stolen it from Zoric. Tel Aviv had stolen it from me.

  “Be angry, that’s okay,” Mazal says quietly. “Just don’t confuse your anger with righteousness.”

  Take away the sense that somehow I’d been wronged, and what kind of fury is left? A pure one that burns white and very, very hot. It’s not just sudden, unexpected defeat, but victory stolen when the rules changed at the last second. But even this idea, that there ever were rules, seems so pathetically naive that my fury is directed back at me, too.

  Mazal shifts, takes another drag on her cigarette. It’s burning low, close to the filter. Either the conversation will end soon or I will. “You took, what—five hundred thousand?” she says. “In cash. For yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “You may keep it. A bonus, call it. For your good work.”

  I glare at her.

  “Seven years,” Mazal says. “That’s how long I have to work before I see that much. Before taxes.”

  I shove my hands in my pockets, nod. “Then I guess we’re done, you and me.”

  “I guess we are.”

  “Be seeing you,” I say.

  “Probably.” Mazal stands, starts to walk away, then turns to me. There both is and is not a smile on her mouth as she says, “The State of Israel is grateful for your efforts.”

  * * *

  They disappear a moment later, all of them, sliding from view like shadows into sunshine. Even Mazal, who steps across a set of tracks just as a tram arrives, evaporates into the crowd of afternoon commuters. I remain on the bench where she left me for a long time, unable to move.

  The white-hot anger burns out quickly, though, when there’s no more fuel. Mazal and the others are gone, and as for me, I’m gone, too, an immolated metal husk, a 1/36 fraction of what I was. My ghost rises and feels nothing, passing through matter, unseen by the living. A vague urge to get off the tram as it nears Naz’s office. But then we’re leaving the stop and the urge is gone. Let her be, I tell myself. It’s not her fault.

  Then the ghost is back in the room at the Obelisk Grande, opening Terrance’s laptop, carefully typing in the log-in for the banks in St. Kitts and the Canary Islands. They are, as Mazal promised, empty. I fumble for my phone, manage to dial Naz’s number. I hang up when it goes to voice mail, but she calls back a second later. The word unprecedented is used several times, as is tragic, and regrettable. Promises are made, even an oath. We’ll reconvene tomorrow, she tells me at the end, adding that she’ll know more then. But her tone is of an attorney far outside her ability to promise anything anymore. Here again Mazal was right: Running through every word Naz utters is fear.

  An hour later, I hear fumbling at the door, the aggressive tone of a Swiss lock saying the card key went in the wrong way. It’s Terrance, of course, gorgeously oblivious for the three seconds it takes to scan the room for me.

  “Why are you sitting on the floor?”

  And evidently I am, though why, or when I moved here, I can’t remember. The tears come, and I clutch my fingertips over my face as if trying to tear it off. “It’s gone, it’s gone. They fucking took it, they fucking took it, Terrance.…”

  He’s at my side, on his knees, pulling me into him, stroking my hair. “What’s gone? Gwen, what happened?”

  The story comes out in a greasy mess, sliding too far ahead, and my having to backtrack. Then I fill in some useless detail as if it mattered, the color of the jacket the blond with the bike was wearing, the brand of cigarette Mazal smoked. But by the end, though, he hears everything and understands.

  His face is spread wide and open with disbelief, as if trying to take it in with all his senses, as if the story could be seen and tasted and sniffed. He goes calmly to his laptop, asks me for my log-ins and passwords, then nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Gone.”

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so fucking stupid.…”

  Terrance paces a bit, back and forth across the room, sneakers squeaking on the wood.

  “Jesus fucking Christ I fucked it up.…”

  Then he stops, comes over to me again, pulls my hands away from my face so that I can see him. His mouth and jaw are set, eyes narrowed, breathing even and controlled. “You’re alive, Gwen. You’re going to be fine.”

  I start up again, but he squeezes my wrists until they hurt, demanding I listen.

  “It’s money, Gwen. Paper. Not even that, electrons.” He forces a smile, leans in close. “And—the safe-deposit box, you said you put three hundred in there.”

  I suck in air noisily, wrestle back control of my voice. “It’s still there. They let me keep it. Let me.”

  “So you have that and whatever you have on you—Gwen, you’re fine. I swear it.”

  “You’re fine. You’re fine, Terrance. Your father’s money, waiting in the trust fund…” As soon as the words are out, I hate myself for saying them. The shot hits him right in the chest, and he recoils a little. A muscle twitches in his jaw.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “That was shitty of me.”

  “It’s all right,” Terrance says. “It’s all right.”

  He sits in front of me, cross-legged.

  “When the feds took my father’s money, I thought I’d die. My father said there are worse things, but I didn’t believe him.” He scoots closer to me, moving his head with mine so that I can’t help keeping his gaze. “Then they sent him to prison. And it turns out, he was right.”

  I nod slowly. “I understand.”

  “Do you? Because you’re alive, and you have lots of cash in a metal box. The rest of the world would kill to be in your shoes, Gwen.”

  I turn and lower my head onto his thigh, and he strokes my hair.

  * * *

  We’ll check out in the morning, and after that, go east. That’s as specific as either of us feels like getting. I try to stay calm about Mazal and the money, and with Terrance’s help, it mostly works. But I might be mistaking calm—manifested in the deep desire to not move from where I sit, ever—for shock and despair.

  Through it all, I repeat what Terrance said, that faultless logic about three hundred thousand hidden away and whatever I have on me being an excellent start. Obscene to think it isn’t. But when you’re on the run, where working legitimately or even enrolling in a school means papers and living in the open, exposed—well, it’s an expensive way to live, and Terrance doesn’t know as much about that as I do.

  A last hurrah, a last blowout: döner kebabs brought in from a street vendor. Terrance licks sauce from his fingers, and I have a strand of cabbage or onion dangling from my mouth like a shoelace. He smiles at me, points to my chin.

  “You feel better? Even a little?” he asks.

  “I think I can be happy as long as there are döner kebabs,” I say, mostly to please him.

  “Not cheap here. Almost fifteen dollars.”

  “They’re three in Berlin,” I say. “We should go.”

  “The CIA will look for us there,” he says.

  “They’ll look for us everywhere,” I say.

  When we finish, he collapses onto the bed, and I do too, landing in the nook between his arm and chest. A flare of anger again, but I ignore it, breathe, ignore it, breathe. He used the word us, that’s something.

  “Fun while it lasted, though,” he says, nearly reading my mind. “I’ll miss this place.”

  “I don’t want to waste it by sleeping.”

  “Me neither.”

  So we just lie there, looking at the excellent ceiling.

  Twenty minutes of this in a nearly trancelike state, then the phone next to the bed lets out a shrill ring. Both of us jump at the sound and look over at its source. A red light on top flashes urgently as the warbling continues. It stops after four rings, though, and we go back to the way we were.
/>   Then it rings again.

  “I’m not going to get it,” Terrance says. “It’s a wrong number. Nobody knows we’re here.”

  Unless they do.

  The thought occurs to both of us at once. Terrance picks up the receiver. “Yes?”

  I hear the voice shouting into Terrance’s ear, “Get out, get out, get out, get out…”

  * * *

  We’re on our feet in less than a second. Terrance scoops his laptop and phone into his backpack. I throw what I see lying around into mine. Terrance is at the door first, ear pressed against it, then mouths the word empty.

  On some instinct, I reach for the desk, where our döner kebab wrappers are still balled up, and snatch the lovely gold-plated letter opener with OBELISK GRANDE written in script down the handle.

  He opens the door, and we slip into the hallway. Empty, as Terrance had said, and nearly silent. We move toward the elevator, hear it chime as the door opens, and backtrack, dashing in the other direction. Over my shoulder I hear heavy footfalls in a dead run coming up behind us. At least two men, breathing hard as they sprint. I hit the door to the staircase first and burst through it, Terrance right behind. Three steps at a time, then four. The men from the elevator are only a flight behind us.

  More footfalls on the concrete stairs below us, too, coming up quickly. Terrance and I are pinned in between those following and those up ahead, so I grip the letter opener just as the men coming up the stairs appear on the landing. The blunted tip of the blade lands hard in the first one’s neck, pushing deep inside his throat just below his Adam’s apple. With everything I have, I shove him backward into the second man and snatch up his pistol as it skitters across the concrete floor.

  Both Terrance and I glance back over our shoulders to see the traffic jam on the landing, the two coming down colliding with the others, one of them gasping loudly. A shouted command to move, move, keep going—all delivered in English that is unmistakably American.

  We explode into the lobby, tearing past elegant couples who shriek and leap for cover, creating a useful melee behind us that slows the men down. I shoulder through the revolving door, and Terrance follows. The carport is brilliantly lit as couples arrive in taxis. Two Chevy SUVs hulk at the curb, distinctly out of place. For a moment, Terrance and I both freeze—the driveway is very long, but it’s the only way to the street. If we run, they’ll be back in their SUVs and on top of us before we’re even halfway down.