Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  We drive over a bridge out toward the desert. She can’t promise we’re not being followed but has a friend in real estate. Development is rampant on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, technology still booming. Here they move systems to market faster and cheaper, there’s no time to waste. She tells me my father cycled some of his dirty money into backend machinery for electronics, computers, smart bombs. Gila drives quickly, every so often sipping from a bottle of clear liquid, then handing it to me. It tastes like licorice and motor oil, and I’m drinking again, better than not-drinking. Yemenite disco on the CD player, we drive through poorly lit highways, long past the Bauhaus curves into a half-baked lot with multiple excavations, two cranes dipped like gazelles. She pulls up in front of a trailer, shuts off the car. I reach for her. She stops me, says she must go in first, five minutes later, me. Five excruciating minutes in a hot, dark car, lights in the distance tingling like space saucers, half expecting my father to beam in beside me, defiance fanning desire. You have to want the thing before you can steal it, and I want, I want! Ten exhale … nine exhale … a bang, loud click … the trigger? I scream. But it’s just the car door, Gila’s return. She covers my mouth and drags me into the trailer. Locking the door behind her, she clicks on a portable lantern, and we’re in musty shadows.

  “You lost count or something?”

  I steady myself against the faux-wood paneling, then burst out laughing.

  Ma? What? You don’t believe me, but you don’t know how many people are after him. This is no joke.”

  “Gila—”

  “You think you know—”

  “Shut up.” I step forward and grab her by the shirt. It tears. She closes her eyes. I push her against the cardboard wall. Her lungs floating up and down, I run my hand along her ribs under the holster. “Take this off,” I say, ordering the way I like, sensing it’s what he does. She unbuckles the leather strap, gun bouncing against the flat carpet, then rips off her shirt. I step back to look—gold ring through her belly button, compact breasts, neck like an expensive vase, all hot issue—then open onto her, my tongue flicking her nipple as my hand slips under her skirt, fast and cheap.

  “We have only two hours,” she confirms, clamping down on me, and for two hours we dive in and out of blissful waves of fucking.

  Two. Drinking from my father’s cup

  The next morning I call the emergency number my father’d given me. Okay, I’ll do this thing for you, Dad, I tell him, but then we’re even, you can’t ask me for anything else. I hear him talking to someone on the other end … her?

  “I had a feeling you’d come through,” he says, holding a beat, “for me.”

  A few hours later he arrives at my hotel room with two men in heavy cologne, tight gelled hair, black T-shirts, and perfectly creased jeans, so obviously bodyguards. Used to be brown leather jackets tapered at the waist, accentuating how puffed-up they were in all the right places. I kissed one once to see if his lips were as robotic as the rest of him: They were. A few weeks later he was gone.

  “Nice laptop,” my father says, eyeing the screen I’ve kept up all morning waiting for her, as if he’s also expecting someone to come galloping through on the Trojan. “Personally, I hate Macs.”

  He removes his silver cigarette case, and though I point to no-smoking symbols all over the room, he lights up. Rules are superfluous to him. A decade ago, when Republicans in Congress tried to ban flag burning while civilians sued cigarette companies for hooking them on cancer, my father had American flags stenciled on his Dunhills, so he could burn old glory every time he lit up. Libertarian to his bones, he abhors too much government and too little personal responsibility. In other words, he’s been very lucky. He’s smoked for five decades, survived two heart attacks, is crammed with plastic tubes under his ribs, and outside he’s Dorian Gray—he’s been done, of course, a few slices around the eyes and chin, and keeps his finely cured mane a dark, distinguished gray. We all know the story: Something’s got to bear the scars. He lies back on my bed, defiantly kicking up his feet, and puffs, the edge of his cigarette curved down like a retired dick, and I hate how sex seeps into every inch of me. He spills on the carpet, deliberately. I unwrap a glass, take it to the bathroom, and run the tap.

  “Let me tell you something, Jen,” he shouts from the bed. “Time is an invidious mind fuck. You look around one day and everything’s unfamiliar. All these people working for you, they’re little womblets, your favorite suit’s hope-lessly out of date, rings don’t fit, and even though you’re getting fat, and I’m talking way beyond love handles, it feels like you’re evaporating.”

  I hold the water glass in front of him.

  “Your brother was lucky,” he says, and I feel a hole opening in my chest. “There’s something to be said for pissing away the whole damn thing.”

  “He was twenty-five. He drove into a mountain going ninety miles an hour, and don’t pretend you don’t know why.”

  “He was never that bright.”

  Chest throbbing, the glass in my hand shakes. “Why do you have to be such an asshole? You almost had me feeling something for you.”

  “What? The kid was born with one testicle, couldn’t read until he was eight … He might have been retarded.”

  I throw the water in his face.

  “Hey!” he shouts, sitting up and shaking a few drops from his hair. The bodyguards step toward me but he warns them off. “Listen to me: Whenever you went away, he slept in your goddamn bed, his head on that little monkey thing looking like—Serena always said you two acted really weird together.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Maybe there’s another side of the story where I’m not the villain, maybe it’s you.”

  “Fuck you!” I stammer backwards, then regain my footing. “And fuck this … And you know what? I fucked your girlfriend last night.”

  He stands up, towering over me, and gives his head a final shake. A bead of water hits my nose like a razor. “Jen, Jen, Jen,” he says, “do you think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know what’s going on here? Why do you think—” He slips forward, punches his right hand against his heart, eyes squeezed together tightly, then through gritted teeth to one of his bodyguards: “You need to get me somewhere.”

  Oldest of the three competitive skating sports, speed skating is the most misunderstood. It lacks the glorious partnerships that give figure skating its connubial thrill, compounding defeat with total psychological annihilation. Gone too is the vicious orgy of hockey, players so convinced they’re one organism they think nothing of slamming their stick over the head of the opposition. Speed skating, especially long track, is more psychological. You study your enemy, learn her mind, her methods, so you can defeat her. But when it comes down to it, you’re out there circling those three thousand meters of ice alone.

  I am outside Tel Aviv, perhaps not far from where I heedlessly entered Gila last night, in a hospital waiting room with Dan the bodyguard. We sit together looking at Israeli magazines, CNN. On screen, an orthodox woman with a New York accent cries, “Never did I think I’d live to see my country take away my home!” Dan nods in agreement, calls government officials Palestinian sympathizers, trying to enlist me in this opinion, but I’ve heard how the settlers steered their Trojan horses, sometimes carting possessions into Gaza under cover of night, and once you’re in, well, my father might say possession is nine-tenths of the law, if I hadn’t laid him flat on his back. Or perhaps it was her, lips dripping enough to sink a fucking fleet—how else would he have known … unless they’d planned it. I can’t figure out who’s playing who, I’m not that bright, but this country has a way of raising the stakes.

  I bury my head in my hands, feel a palm on my back, Dan whispering, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” and though I’m not sure what he means, I let him rub my shoulders until the doctor comes out.

  He won’t shake my hand, he’s orthodox, but in Hebrew says the rabbi will be fine. “His heart is strong, the hardware is
doing its job, perhaps he ate something.”

  “The rabbi?”

  “Of course, he is first a father to you.”

  “I’d like to see him.”

  One. If I were a suicide bomber

  Anyone here will tell you it’s easier getting out than in. But decades of terrorism have refined suspicion of air travel into policy. After the towers fell—the first and only time I remember seeing my father truly unhinged, he knew so many people who worked on high floors, and his lawyer and best friend, Chuck Birnbaum, had been finishing up a cozy breakfast at Windows on the World with a young woman who was not Chuck’s wife—America turned to Israel for lessons in airport security. But nobody takes seriously questions from U.S. airline workers about whose hands might have fondled their luggage, not even the interrogators. At Ben-Gurion, men (and the odd woman) trained in espionage do the asking, randomly swapping questions to make even the most seasoned traveler squirm.

  When they finally get to me, I’m as wilted as the city outside and long past counting. For the past hour, I’ve tried to forget I am a Trojan horse, crammed with hot accounts and registers where two nights earlier Gila’s heated tongue had trailed, the spoils of my father’s dirty little war, and perhaps it’s his dream of dying in the Holy Land, how sickly and unkempt he looked in that hospital bed despite the doctor’s assertions as he clued me in: I am carrying the key to every one of his off-shore accounts, decades of profits gleaned from his years on Wall Street and reinvested all over this tiny country, even in the settlements, which pleased neither the Israeli government nor the opposition—how did he ever talk me into this?

  “Who is taking care of your children?” a security officer asks in English, after checking my fake passport and itinerary.

  “My sister-in-law,” I shrug, suitably religious, maternal, uxorial. “She knows how difficult it is for me to leave my family.”

  He nods, mama’s boy through and through, and part of me thinks it’s too easy, this is El Al, and another part feels like skating, feels like sex, the world heightened into a short incandescent stretch, and maybe that’s the big secret of crime: It’s exhilarating. The officer flips again through my passport, then slaps it back and forth against his palm. “Why are you carrying only one bag?” he asks.

  “It’s all I need.”

  “No gifts for anyone?”

  “I’m cheap.”

  He smirks, and I am through security: mule, liar, my father’s emissary, feeling closer to him than I can ever remember, but he’s warned me—there are undercover security people on every flight.

  In the passengers’ lounge, I open my computer and tap into the Internet, hoping for a sign, but … Just before Marc and I ended our trip, I fell apart. There’d been an older woman from Britain (she was all of thirty-five!) who cornered me on the roof of the hostel with a view of the boardwalk, the beach, the muddy brown Sheraton. Up on the roof from where we’d watched the pretty Dutch girl dive to her death, this woman came up behind me, slipped her hands around my stomach, down my inner thighs, and squeezed. “If we were stranded on a desert island together,” she whispered, “these are what I’d eat first,” and I fell hopelessly in love. We snuck away to the Sinai together, leaving Marc to put together the pieces, and when we returned several days later, she unceremoniously took up with a Palestinian dishwasher, dragging him up to our rooftop parties, kissing him flagrantly in bars haunted by travelers, as if she’d started eating from my heart. As the years move on, I remember less and less of her, can barely reconstruct her face, while Marc looms large: one of his graceful hands gripping my shoulder, he smiles, “Even the old bastard’s got better taste than that.”

  My flight is called over the loudspeaker. I shut the laptop and walk with a group of religious women to the gate, feeling somber. I know Gila is my father’s girlfriend, know she’s probably betrayed me, yet I walk seamlessly through the gate comforted she’s part of the data snug inside me. It’s only when I’m in my seat, looking out the window at the green army planes, that I spot her standing on the tarmac in her miniskirt, sunglasses on top of her head, arguing with a soldier. She raises a fist in his face as if she’s about to pound, tears streaming down her cheeks, and I’m looking, then not lookin so hard it’s worse. A stake drives through my gut: My father is dead.

  DUE DILIGENCE

  BY REED FARREL COLEMAN

  Tegucigalpa, Honduras

  Trisha Tanglewood didn’t bother with the safety card in the seat pouch in front of her, nor did she bother listening to the flight attendant’s sonorous reading of the evacuation procedures. Her disdain was neither an expression of fatalism nor boredom, but of familiarity. Ms. Tanglewood knew more about commercial aircraft than most human beings who didn’t actually design them for a living. It was a safe bet she knew more about the 737–700 than the pilot at the controls of the updated Boeing, certainly more than the cabin crew.

  “Excuse me … Kathy,” she read the flight attendant’s winged name tag, “can you tell me, are these engines GE CFM56-7B26s or 27s?”

  A blank stare washed over Kathy’s face. Trisha might just as well have asked her for the gross national product of Burkina Faso.

  “I’ll make sure to ask the pilot,” Kathy said, recovering nicely. “Enjoy the flight.”

  It was silly, she knew, harassing flight attendants this way, but it comforted her.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Saunders on the flight deck. Just wanted to let you know we’ll be taking off in just a couple of minutes here. We’ll be cruising at an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet at a speed of approximately five hundred and fifty miles per hour. The weather’s pretty clear between here and Tegucigalpa, so we anticipate a fairly smooth flight. If there’s anything we can do to make your trip more enjoyable, please let one of the cabin staff know. Once we get to cruising altitude, I’ll be back on with you. Until then, enjoy the ride. Flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for departure.”

  “You seem to know a lot about planes,” said the man in the next seat.

  Trisha started—usually on top of everything, she hadn’t even seen him there. She just hadn’t been herself lately. No, that wasn’t really true. In spite of the self-confidence and competence she wore like armor in the halls of Paisley Shutter, Trisha had, since her father’s death eleven months before, been functioning in a state of psychological vertigo. An executive at Sikorsky had once told her that flying a helicopter was like playing the piano while balancing one-legged on a basketball. She hadn’t quite gotten it the first time she heard it. These days, she understood it perfectly.

  “I said, you seem to know an awful lot about planes,” he repeated.

  She looked at the man. He was forty-ish, ruggedly handsome, with a square chin and lined face; a refugee from Marlboro Country. He had a mouthful of straight white teeth and shiny, silver-gray hair like her father’s. She noticed too that he had his armrest in a death grip, and that his speckled blue eyes darted nervously to and from the cabin window.

  “I do indeed,” she said. “And there’s not a lot to worry about, so try and relax.”

  “You a pilot or something?”

  Trisha laughed. “Or something.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m an investment banker,” she said, as if that explained something.

  The man nodded. “I’m Pete Dutton, by the way.” He removed his hand from the armrest and offered it to her.

  “Trisha Tanglewood.” She briefly shook his hand. He had a firm grip and a surprisingly dry palm.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Trisha.” He tipped an invisible hat.

  “Yes, a pleasure.”

  “How is it that a banker knows so much about planes?”

  “I spent seven years analyzing the aircraft manufacturing industry—the last two years as chief analyst.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. If you’d like to discuss the relative merits of this aircraft as opposed to, let’s say, the Airbus A320, or wh
y some airlines prefer Pratt & Whitney power plants over GE or Rolls Royce, just let me know.”

  “No thanks. Too much knowledge makes me even more unsettled,” Pete said, trying to smile and failing. “I already have enough trouble thinking of jets as gas tanks with wings.”

  “Well, that’s essentially correct; wings and seats.”

  “Great. You’re a real comfort.”

  As if on cue, the pilot wound up the turbofans and the jet began its urgent rumbling down the tarmac. Then they were off, gradually leaving Miami behind and beneath them. Trisha could see the near panic in Pete’s face as the servos repositioned the flaps and the bottom seemed to drop out of the starboard side of the aircraft, the captain turning west into the setting sun. In her own way, she was just as unsteady.

  She had gotten what she thought she had wanted, a kick up the ladder. No longer could she hide herself in the shadow of tail fins or rotor blades. Trisha had been forced out of her cozy titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber womb. The whole manufacturing sector was her gig now, all of it, everything from baby bottles to ball bearings, from farm equipment to pharmaceuticals. The days of simple, seamless trips to Seattle and Toulouse were no more. She was far less familiar with her new arena, an arena with a distinctly Third World flavor.

  Trisha knew she was good at managing herself and her career. She was more than good, she was superior, and had handled her small team deftly. Problem was, the team had grown exponentially. And as much money as was at stake in aircraft manufacturing, it was penny-ante compared to the whole manufacturing shebang. Shebang, she thought, what a silly word, but her dad had used it all the time. He was full of quaint phrases and cowboy wisdom. Even now she had trouble accepting he was gone. Other than her job, he had been all she had. He would have been so proud of her. Remembering him, his crooked smile, his rough good looks, the day he gave her her first saddle, Trisha looked past Pete Dutton and out the window into the deepening night. And she found her eyes drifting back toward Pete’s face.