Megan Abbott - Wall Street Noir

There on the desk sat a spectacular arrangement of orchids, and a single white rose. The card read: No pressure. Pete

She finally made the call.

Later, at the PriceStar maquila on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Trisha felt fully awake for the first time since Miami. Both her own people and the PriceStar execs noticed the change, though they weren’t necessarily happy about it. The woman who’d struggled to keep the drool off her chin during the sessions in San Pedro Sula was spitting out questions like a Gatling gun. And if the answers didn’t come as rapidly in return, she did not hide her displeasure. Even Trisha recognized she was being hard on everyone, but she was enjoying the high of her own adrenaline, and fuck ’em if they couldn’t take the heat.

The morning smelled of spilled champagne, orchids, and sex. Pete’s flavor still lingered in her mouth, with grace notes of herself. And she was gloriously sore. Pete had been everything she had imagined, and more. He seemed to see right through her, to read her, and somehow he’d known exactly how far to push things and just when to draw back. The real surprise, however, had been her. For the first time in years she’d held nothing back — not her hungers or her fantasies or her screams. Dinner was great. Maybe. She realized she couldn’t remember a thing about the meal.

Pete was gone. There was no surprise in that. He had warned her he had early business, but that he would take her to dinner again tonight, if that’s what she wanted. If she wanted! At the moment, it was all she wanted. When she left the suite, Trisha placed a twenty-dollar bill in an envelope for the chambermaid. Given the state of the bedroom, it might not have been enough.

Walking past the reception desk, the clerk got her attention

“Miss Tanglewood, por favor . We have a message for you,” he said, handing her a note.

The note was in English, but very cryptic: If you want to see how PriceStar makes such profits, come see the real factories.

There was an address, which Trisha showed to the clerk. He did not try to hide his worry.

“This is not a place for a...” he searched for the word.

“A woman,” she offered.

“For anyone, but especially for an American. It is a slum. Very dangerous. Very dangerous.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Trisha took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts. It was late in the game for this kind of bullshit — fucking late. There’d been questions up front about how PriceStar, a chronic underachiever by all other measures, had managed to outperform its competitors when it came to the profitability of its in-house label, and for a while there’d been whispers of unsavory labor practices. But those kinds of rumors — of child labor, beatings, virtual slavery — always circulated in trade zones like this, and PriceStar had checked out. At least, that’s what Ellis and his team had assured her, and they’d been on the ground here for weeks. No one had even hinted...

“Damn it,” she whispered. This had to be investigated — that’s what due diligence was all about. But she couldn’t very well ask the PriceStar execs about it, nor could she ask anyone on the Paisley Shutter team — she wasn’t about to give one of them, especially not Ellis Quantrill, a chance to shred their way out of this kind of fuck-up. If there was a fuck-up. She put the note in her purse and called the only person in Honduras she could trust.

“They’re called cuarterias “ Peter Dutton explained, driving his rented Jetta through the narrow streets. “It means in English. They’re these long tracts of wooden buildings with tile roofs, dirt floors, and connected rooms. Usually six or seven people to a room.”

“Oh my god.”

“It’s rough, but they’re good people. We’ll be okay.”

“Why did the desk clerk warn me that this was a bad place for Americans?”

“Well, there’s the obvious reason. Money. They’re good people, but they’re sometimes desperate too.”

“And the baby thieves myth,” she said.

“Yes, that too. It’s bullshit, pardon my French, but these are poor people with no education.”

“I understand.”

“Can we change the subject?” he asked.

“Please.”

“Last night was...”

“Yeah, I know, Pete. For me too. I’ve never felt like that before.” His face reddened, and that made her smile.

“Here we are,” he said, rolling to a stop. “You ready?”

“Let’s go.”

Before they got five feet, Trisha stopped and pointed at the noisy gas generator right outside the door they were about to enter. “What’s this for?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

Pete Dutton had tried to warn her she might not like what she was about to see, but words were inadequate to the task. Inside, ten girls — the youngest about eight years, the oldest about fourteen — dressed in filthy, frayed frocks, were ankle-tethered with leather straps to sewing machine tables. Most of the girls kept their heads down, unfazed by the man and woman who had come through the door. One girl — bony, with a harelip and the most haunting brown eyes Trisha had ever seen — stared with frank curiosity. This did not go unpunished. A squat man with a cloudy left eye, who stank of alcohol even above the smell of urine, snapped a switch across the harelipped girl’s hands.

Pete locked a hand on Trisha’s forearm. “Don’t do any-thing,” he said. “Let me handle this.”

Dutton called the man over and whispered something to him. Cloudy Eye grunted. But when Pete slipped a twenty-dollar bill in his hand, his mouth split into a gapped brown-toothed grin. He stepped outside.

“We have five minutes,” Pete said.

“Her!” Trisha said, pointing to the harelipped girl.

That evening the sex was more intense, if less satisfying. Trisha had gotten so mind-numbingly drunk that she barely remembered asking Pete to hit her as he rode her from behind. In fact, it was only when she looked in the dressing mirror and noticed the palm-shaped bruises on her flanks that she recalled making her demands. She brushed her fingers across the bruises. The pain had been only a temporary fix. The weather outside had deteriorated, as if to match her mood. The skies were eclipse dark and a biblical rain threatened to drown the city. Trisha would have welcomed the water over her head.

“Something’s come up,” she said to Susan Blum, her assistant in New York. “I’m taking the day to handle some loose ends. I’ll call everyone here. By tomorrow, we should be back on track.”

Even as she spoke, Trisha could not get her head around what the harelipped girl had told her and Pete. Her name was Linda, and she was twelve. She was the eldest of six children, the daughter of a whore who had no idea who the fathers were of any of her children. Recently, her mother had gotten very sick. So about three months ago, the whore had “sold” her eldest child into pseudo-slavery. The girl worked fourteen-hour days and made a few lempira per piece. None of the clothes she sewed had labels, but yes, a man from PriceStar occasionally came to talk to Jorge, the cloudy-eyed overseer who sometimes made the girls fuck him.

“I am a smart girl,” Linda said through Pete. “I may be ugly, but I hear things, I see things.”

But Trisha had no proof. She could not stop a multi-billion-dollar deal based on the word of an abused twelve-year-old Honduran girl. She needed something real, something tangible, something to bring to the firm. Even then, she wasn’t quite sure it would do any good. These sorts of deals have a kind of self-sustaining inertia, especially this late in the process. Trisha had explained to Linda that she needed proof.