Megan Abbott - Wall Street Noir

“The fault was mine, but no more apologizing. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They shook on it. Trisha held onto his hand a little longer this time. This silly encounter was the first relief she’d had in months. She even felt a bit of a buzz. This man had that rare quality of both relaxing and exciting her.

“What do you do that you’re down here twice a month?”

“I’m sort of in HR.”

“Human resources? Who with?”

“I’m on my own, really — a consultant.”

“A headhunter?”

“Sort of. It’s a little more complicated.”

“Interesting?”

“Challenging, more like. Now, what about you — you do lot of business travel as part of your mysterious banking business?”

Trisha laughed. “No mystery — just visiting clients. And, yes, I travel a lot, though not to Latin America before.”

“You like it — the travel part, I mean?”

It was a simple question — a throwaway question from one stranger to another, to be answered without thinking — but it brought Trisha up short. New York, Seattle, Toulouse, Tegucigalpa — they were, she now realized, all the same to her. One airport, one Town Car, one conference room, identical to all the rest, and how different really was her apartment from a hotel room? Did she mind the travel? What the hell else was she going to do with her life? What else was there to it? It took her nearly a minute to answer.

“I don’t... It’s... it’s part of the job,” she said finally. Just a few words, but she felt as if she’d said too much. She wanted to look away, but those speckled blue eyes held her

Dutton nodded. “It wears on you after a while, though, doesn’t it? The strange food, the strange smells, the money, the language — everything’s an effort. And there’s always something to look out for. The water, local customs, the neighborhood you’re in — you’re always on your guard, and especially down here. You can never just relax. You can never rest.”

Trisha Tanglewood felt her throat close up and her eyes start to burn, and she managed to wrench her gaze from Dutton’s to the inside of her champagne glass. She took a sip, and then a full swallow. Dutton put a hand on her arm, and she flinched.

“You all right, Trisha?” His voice was a comforting rumble. “I didn’t put my foot in it again, did I? You looked so sad for a minute there — homesick almost.”

His eyes found Trisha’s again, and she felt utterly exposed. Homesick? Didn’t you need a home for that? For Trisha, home was where the money was — Hong Kong, Tokyo, the fifth circle of Hell, wherever — it washed around the world, and she followed in its wake. Suddenly her life in New York seemed so empty and insubstantial — all her acquaintances spectral and hollow and half a step from spinning into space. Certainly the men she saw were no anchors — their main concerns had to do with finding the hippest new proxies for the size of their dicks. She was sick to death of their finest this and most exclusive that, and she swore sometimes, if she heard another word about the hottest new anything, she’d scream.

The scariest part was that it had taken a total stranger to recognize the sadness in her. Sure, there had been condolences when her father died — the Take-as-much-time-as-you-need speech from the senior partners, and the Let-me-know-if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos from her colleagues. But it was all pro forma — the thing that one did, like mucking the stalls at day’s end. And here was this total stranger...

“My daddy died about a year ago,” she found herself confessing in her spontaneously returned Laramie accent. “My momma died when I was little, so it was just me and him forever.”

“Sorry doesn’t come close, does it? Listen, I’m gonna be in Teguze for about a week, and it’s a city I know pretty well. Why don’t you let me show it to you, or at least take you to dinner? I’d like to hear about your daddy, if you wouldn’t mind sharing.”

No “Dinner would be lovely,” Trisha heard herself say, “but I’ve got to go north for a day or two, and then—”

“I understand,” Pete saved her from the awkward explanation. “You’ve got that mysterious business to do.”

Trisha managed a smile. “Not so mysterious.”

Pete smiled back and took out a business card. He scrawled a number across the back. “You can reach me at this number anytime. This way there’s no pressure if you change your mind, and at least we had a pleasant flight together.”

Trisha looked at it. It wasn’t so much a business card as a calling card. There was his name, a Miami phone number, and a cryptic e-mail address on heavy beige stock. No company name, no snail-mail address, no title. Trisha studied it, hesitating, wondering if she should return the courtesy. He noticed her pause, and let her off the hook again.

“No card necessary. Remember, no pressure.”

After two more glasses of champagne, Pete Dutton drifted off into sleep. For her part, Trisha went back to her work, occasionally twirling Pete’s card in her fingers and smiling. Yes, he reminded her of her daddy, but there was something else about him, something sweet and comfortable, but also a little bit elusive. She liked it. The boys on the Street all fancied themselves masters of the universe, but disarmed of their Pings and their squash rackets they were a relatively impotent bunch. Impotent was the last word she would associate with Pete Dutton. When she put his card away on final approach to Toncontín International, Trisha noticed she was more than a little wet.

If anyone wanted to see where all those textile jobs from Georgia and North Carolina had gone, they’d just have to hop a plane from Tegucigalpa to San Pedro Sula in the northwest of Honduras. That’s where Trisha Tanglewood spent her first two days in-country, and where PriceStar, Inc. had its main textile plants, or maquilas , as the locals called them. But PriceStar was just one of many firms to set up shop in the free trade zones. Driving in from the airport, Trisha saw Oshkosh B’Gosh, Maidenform, Hanes, and Wrangler factories, and more than a few South Korean and Taiwanese plants. Mile after mile, the long, low structures slid across her car window, and by the time the driver pulled up to the largest of the PriceStar buildings, Trisha had begun to think of the whole country as one big free trade zone. But vast as these plants were, Trisha knew, and as fixed in the landscape as they seemed, they’d empty out tomorrow if it suddenly became cheaper to work in Thailand or Tibet. It was simply smart business.

If she didn’t know better, Trisha would have thought San Pedro Sula was the patron saint of inertia. There seemed to be shackles on the hands of the clocks as she ground through two days of meetings with her team and the PriceStar executives. She was struggling to pay attention, and found herself thinking that maybe her colleagues in New York had been right. You could pore over the same spreadsheets in Manhattan, and with a lot better air-conditioning. By 3 p.m. on her first day, Trisha was almost regretting making a show of her meticulousness.

As a matter of courtesy and protocol, she strolled the factory floor with the Honduran operations manager, a PriceStar exec, and a Paisley Shutter analyst named Ellis Quantrill. Although he was a member of her team, Trisha wasn’t terribly fond of Quantrill. Just thirty, WASP-ishly handsome, and bred for success, Ellis fancied himself quite the shark. He made no secret of his desire to go very far, very fast, and at any cost... any cost to others. She’d seen his type before, the eaglet hatched first who pushes its brother out of the nest. What Ellis hadn’t learned yet was that there is always a bigger eaglet. Always.