Megan Abbott - Wall Street Noir

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.

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.”