Megan Abbott - Wall Street Noir

— i’m waiting

— it’s more complicated than you think

I’m typing a response when the phone rings, then

— pick it up

Static on the other end, what sounds like a recorded message: “Go to the window and undress, then turn on the TV loud enough to be heard. Put on your clothes in the bathroom and crawl low to the door...”

I do as I’m told, slipping out the back stairway that empties onto the beach. Gila Zyskun is downstairs in a Fiat with black windows.

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 hopelessly 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.