Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  The woman cried, “My son … My hope. Please.”

  A candle peddler was retrieved and pressed into service as a translator. He was nudged amid the crowd surrounding the wailing woman.

  “He is a boy. Simple,” she said in Italian. “He is confused, and he is lost. You cannot tell me he is—You cannot!”

  The peddler said, “Please. We wish to help you, but … First, did you visit the hospitals?”

  “It is possible he has forgotten his name,” she said, her voice a song of desperation. “He is frightened. He is just a small boy.”

  Mr. Piatti intervened, and it was finally understood by the crowd that the boy was ten years old and he had been treated to a day-visit to the district by a neighbor.

  When her son and the nameless man had not returned by late Thursday evening, the woman reported to a nearby police station. There she had learned of the bomb attack.

  The peddler tilted his head in sympathy.

  After contacting the New York City police, Mr. Piatti explained, Paterson officials had come to Essex Street to examine the apartment on the third floor.

  “Ah,” said the peddler, nodding to the crowd.

  They found it empty, save for the furniture that had been left by a previous tenant and a few discarded pages from the latest edition of La Questione Sociale

  TOWN CAR

  BY DAVID NOONAN

  85 Exchange Place

  It was waiting for him in front of the building, as always, eight quick steps across the sidewalk. Black, tinted windows, minimal chrome, a little bulgy in the haunches, like a 140-pound woman in a tight dress. One of a million, utterly anonymous. But special, too, his alone, for twenty minutes anyway. This one was freshly washed; he noticed droplets of water glistening on the bumper, catching the sparkle of the traffic light on the corner. He liked that. One night the car was so dirty he sent it away and threatened to take the firm’s business elsewhere. It wasn’t his call to make—Hackett handled all the vendors—but the frazzled dispatcher didn’t know that. He only knew he had a seriously unhappy customer screaming in his ear and a big account suddenly in play. They sent a limo to calm him down, no charge. It worked. The limo was superior to the Town Car, no question. He knew a lot of the big earners stayed with the Town Car after they made it, that whole low-profile thing. Not him. When he broke through he was getting a limo, and a retired NYPD detective to drive it and handle his personal security, one of those tough Irish guys with the blank expressions, the ones he saw in the Daily News all the time, escorting murder suspects out of their dreary apartment buildings in the Bronx. The car was as clean on the inside as it was on the outside, odor-free except for a hint of the driver’s cheap aftershave. He could live with that. It was a lot easier to take than the greasy stench of curried goat or whatever aromatic delicacies the Middle Eastern drivers wolfed down between calls. This guy looked American, an increasingly rare thing, and he was even listening to the Yankees game.

  “Eighty-third and Third, right?” said the driver, in perfect Jersey, as they slid away from the curb.

  He had planned to head straight home, but now he thought he might swing over to the West Side and see Heather. Maybe pick up some Chinese on the way from that joint she liked on Amsterdam, Hunan whatever. He checked his watch. It was 10:30 already. If his wife wasn’t asleep yet, she would be soon. Taking care of the twins wiped her out, with the full-time nanny. He didn’t really get that. His mother raised five kids on her own and did the old man’s books every night, too. She had more energy than ten of these hot-house flowers on the Upper East Side. And she was still going strong at seventy-eight, playing tennis every morning in the jungle heat of Miami, volunteering at Jackson Memorial in the afternoon, knocking off a bottle of cabernet every night with one or another of her widow buddies. Heather would be up, of course, studying for the LSAT or doing situps or making pies or writing one of her wacky poems or meditating or organizing her rock climbing equipment or IMing with one of her eight million close personal friends. She was a jammer, and that was fine with him. The last thing he needed was a girlfriend with nothing to do, calling him six times a day, sitting in front of the TV all night wondering why he couldn’t spend more time with her, carefully watering her boredom until it bloomed into glorious hysteria. Heather was too busy for that shit. He saw her three times a week, max. And forget about spending the night. She was in it for the sex, just like he was. Fucking her was like going to the gym for two hours, and that’s usually where he told his wife he was.

  “Change in plans,” he said to the driver. “Let’s head for the Upper West Side.”

  “Upper West Side. You got it.”

  Then he remembered that Heather was having her period. Or was it his wife? One of them was, he was pretty sure. Could it be both? Was that possible? He hadn’t seen Heather since the Chicago trip. Or had he? Somebody had mentioned cramps recently, he knew that much. He should probably keep track of stuff like that, but then he’d have to start writing things down and that would put the whole arrangement at risk. He didn’t know anyone who had a setup as sweet as his—exhausted wife on the East Side, inexhaustible mistress on the West Side, the two of them separated by the great green expanse of Central Park. And there was no chance of a random encounter because he never took Heather to the East Side and Callie, his wife, hated the West Side. When she was thirteen, some old creep in a doorway waved his dick at her and her friends as they were leaving a movie theater on Broadway. Talk about making an impression. Twenty years later, the dominant image she had of the neighborhood that included Lincoln Center, the Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, hundreds of good restaurants, and at least a dozen great ones was of a droopy penis winking at her from the shadows. He knew it was droopy because he had questioned her once in great detail about the incident. Now, it was all he could do to get her to cross the park in a limo once a year for the charity benefit the Old Man threw every fall at the Metropolitan Opera.

  He sensed a change in the world and suddenly the Hudson River was on his left, wide and flat and undeniable. New Jersey loomed across the dark water, a mile away at least. A hulking tanker pushed north against the current, the white streak of its bow wave pointing the way. Manhattan was an island. He liked that. Manhattan was an island, and he lived on it. It was a great castle, surrounded by a great moat, with many kings and many more princes. It was a kingdom, full of riches and treachery, where the game was played as well as it was played anywhere in the world. And he was one of the players. And he was winning. It wasn’t always pretty, it wasn’t always fair, but how could anyone expect it to be? When two people wanted the same thing, one of them was bound to be disappointed. The weak would always lose to the strong, that was nature’s way. If he beat someone on a deal, that was their problem, not his.

  He reached across the seat to open the window—he wanted to feel the rush of air and smell the river and the summer night—but when he pushed the switch, nothing happened. He tried the window on his right, same problem.

  “What’s with the windows?” he asked. “They’re not working.”

  “Short circuit, I think,” the driver said.

  “Can you open them from up there? I’d like some air.”

  “No, sorry, they’re all on the blink.”

  “Well, that’s fucked up.”

  “Hey, at least the AC’s working, right?”

  He thought about getting angry, but decided not to waste the energy. “Good point.”

  They stopped at a red light and through the tinted glass he could see that the car on their right was also a black Lincoln Town Car, as was the car in front of them and the car behind them. He called in the order to the restaurant, checked his e-mail, and, finally, eighteen hours after he put it on and slid it tight, he loosened his tie. It was only Monday, and the week wasn’t going to get any easier, but he felt strong and in control. He put his head back and closed his eyes. Life. Was. Good.

  He dozed for a bit and when he awoke they were bu
mper-to-bumper on the Henry Hudson, inching past the 72nd Street exit.

  “Shit, driver, we need to get off here.”

  “Must be an accident up ahead,” the driver said. “The traffic shouldn’t be so heavy this time of night.”

  “Did you hear what I said? We have to get off here. The restaurant’s at 77th and Amsterdam, then we’re going to 82nd and West End.”

  “Could be from the Yankees game, I suppose. Jersey fans heading home, fucking everything up at the bridge.”

  “Hey, asshole, are you listening to me? The exit’s right there. Turn the fucking wheel and get us the fuck out of here.”

  The driver eased the car past the exit and snugged it up against the thick stone wall that separated the highway from Riverside Park. As horns honked and cars squeezed past on the left, he turned to face the backseat.

  “Don’t call me asshole, asshole,” the driver said.

  It wasn’t possible that the driver had just called him an asshole. He knew it wasn’t possible because it just wasn’t possible. He knew that. And yet, even though it wasn’t possible that the driver had called him an asshole, the driver had in fact called him an asshole. He knew that, too. So he knew it couldn’t have happened and he also knew that it had happened. Hence, his initial confusion.

  “What … did you say?”

  “I said don’t call me asshole, asshole.”

  Now he laughed, because it was so impossible it was actually kind of funny. And then the adrenaline hit and the confusion ended and things became perfectly clear. He loved this shit, for some reason, almost as much as he loved making money. Close encounters of the fucked-up kind. His wife called them run-ins—his confrontations with waiters, parking garage attendants, the people sitting next to them in restaurants or behind them in theaters—and she hated them. To him they were like training exercises, a way to keep his edge when he was away from the office. The world was full of people who didn’t keep their shit tight and he considered it his duty to straighten them out when the opportunity presented itself. The way he looked at it, he was a force for good, trying in his own small way to make the city a more organized, efficient, and civilized place by coming down hard on dopes like this driver, who thought they could say anything to anybody.

  “You might as well drive straight to the unemployment office, motherfucker, because you just lost your job.”

  He started to dial the dispatcher, but the driver reached back and snatched the BlackBerry out of his hands. Two things about this amazed him—that it happened at all, and how quick the driver moved.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said. “Give me my phone.”

  But the guy didn’t give him the phone. Instead, with the same lizard quickness, the driver grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward. He came off the seat awkwardly and found himself kneeling, with his arms over the front seat. The driver banged on the handcuffs and shoved him back into the corner. Then a pistol appeared.

  “You’re going to sit still and keep your mouth shut,” the driver said. “Do you understand?”

  The barrel of the gun was a small black hole, deep as a well, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it. What would he see if the driver pulled the trigger? Would he see the bullet? Would he see a small flame? Smoke? Anything? Was it a real gun? It looked real. The handcuffs were real, heavy and solid. What the fuck was going on?

  “Are you robbing me?”

  “I told you to keep your mouth shut.”

  “I’ve got eight hundred in cash on me. If you take me to an ATM I can get you another thousand or so. There’s a limit on daily withdrawals.”

  The driver ignored him and eased back into the traffic. Was he being kidnapped? Is that what this was? But why him? He was just another trader. Sure, there were the Caribbean accounts, but nobody knew about them. Nobody. And kidnapping never worked in the States, anyway. Ever. It was a booming business in South America, but the FBI didn’t put up with that Wild West shit. He rattled the cuffs. Maybe it was a joke. There was nothing funny about the driver, but that was the point, wasn’t it? The more he thought about it, the more it seemed right. And he had a pretty good idea whose strange sense of humor was at work here—Christensen, that lunatic fucker. He had weird friends and he was always talking about crazy stunts, like the time he sent a bunch of hookers to his brother’s wedding or the time he had one of his cop buddies pull over his ex-wife’s new boyfriend and search his car with a drug-sniffing dog. The driver was exactly the kind of thug Christensen would know. They probably went to kindergarten together. “He’s a great guy,” Christensen would always say when he introduced one of these characters. Later on, he’d casually mention that the great guy just did a year for beating up a nun, but it wasn’t really his fault because he was on acid at the time and he thought the nun was a hallucination. Real handcuffs, real gun, real criminal at the wheel—this was Christensen at his excessive best, no doubt about it. So how should he play it? He’d been pretty cool so far, and that was a good thing. There was probably one of those lipstick video cameras running. Christensen expected him to fall apart, piss his pants, maybe even cry. Then he’d e-mail the clip to everybody and they’d all have a good laugh. Well, sorry to disappoint.

  “Listen, pal, I don’t know who you are or who you’re working for, but there’s no reason we can’t be civilized about this. Why don’t you let me buy you a drink? There’s a joint on Broadway and 97th, McGuire’s. It’s dark and the bartender hates everybody who comes through the door. You’ll fit right in. We can sit in the back and negotiate a figure that works for both of us.”

  “I told you to shut the fuck up.”

  “Eat shit. I’m offering you a deal here.” This was actually pretty great, a perfect chance to show people how tough he could be. They’d send the clip around, all right, but they wouldn’t be laughing at him.

  The driver left the highway at a pullout just north of 86th Street. He put the car in park and turned to face the backseat. The gun appeared again.

  “You’re not listening to me, douche bag,” said the driver.

  Jesus, where’d Christensen meet this guy? His head was the size of a cinder block and he had a lumpy scar that started in the corner of his left eye and ran down to his neck. The gun was like a toy in his big meaty hand. A bone-snapper with a rock for a heart. Born scary. Unless he was an actor. That was also a possibility. The city was full of them, all colors and sizes. He met a few when Heather took an acting class in the Village. Losers, every one. Broke, delusional, dedicated to their art, and destined for oblivion. He used to take them out to dinner, ten at a time. Fucking babies. They ate like Teamsters. Did anything to pay the rent. This guy probably did children’s theater in Brooklyn on the weekends, playing ogres and talking trees. He was good, though, really good. There was an emptiness about him, something missing, like a soul.

  “Look, man—”

  The driver cracked him across the forehead with the barrel of the gun. Blood gushed into his eyes and down the front of his suit. Dazed, in pain, he put his cuffed hands to his head. They came away slippery and warm.

  “Oh … shit … what the fuck …”

  “Am I getting through to you, now, asshole?”

  “Christensen …” The blood kept coming.

  “What?”

  “Practical joke …” His white shirt wasn’t white any-

  “A joke? You think this is a joke?” The driver coughed up an ugly laugh. “Trust me, motherfucker, this ain’t no joke. You made somebody very unhappy. Now you just lie there and bleed quietly.”

  Back into the traffic, his head throbbing. Who was unhappy? Who was this fucking unhappy? He had pissed off some people over the years, but who hadn’t? Business was business. He’d been beat a few times himself. You suck it up and move on. You learn from your mistakes and let it go. You scream a little, maybe a lot, maybe you even make some threats. But that’s it. You take the hit. And you try not to get beat again. There was always more money to be made. Nobody got rou
gh. Not really. He’d heard stories, but he figured they were just that, stories. Christ, the blood wouldn’t stop. He went back over his side deals—no way this was company business—from the last couple of years. What about that Australian, Elliott? He was a hothead, for sure. But if he was going to get crazy he’d do it himself, in person, no hired help. The South Africans? The Koreans? The Russians? All had reasons to be unhappy, all had threatened him in some way. But it was mostly bullshit about going to the SEC. It had to be the Russians. They lost the most. They were the scariest. But the driver wasn’t Russian. Wouldn’t they use one of their own people? It was hard to think, his head hurt like hell. If he could just think it through, he could figure this thing out. He could fix it, he knew he could, if he could just get to his office, get out of this goddamn car and get to his office, make a few calls, talk to people, say the right things. He had to make a deal with the driver. That was the first step. There was $25,000 in cash in the safe in the apartment.

  “Listen to me, I can pay you. Ten thousand. Cash.”

  “You’re some piece of work, you are,” the driver said.

  “I know what this is about. I know who you’re working for. There’s been a misunderstanding. I can fix it, but I have to make some calls. I have to get out of this car. I’ll pay you.”

  “You think you can fix this? You can’t fix this. This is unfixable.”

  “Where are you taking me? Who are we meeting?”

  “Your maker.”

  “Twenty thousand. Cash. It’s in my apartment. On the East Side.”

  “Thanks for the raise. Now shut the fuck up.”

  “Twenty-five thousand. All yours. The Russians will never know.”

  “What Russians? What are you talking about? And why are you talking at all?”

  The driver turned up the radio as loud as it would go, reached back, pressed the gun against his knee, and pulled the trigger. It was like being hit with a sledge hammer and stabbed at the same time. He screamed and the driver screamed with him. The people in the car next to them looked over and saw the driver screaming. Just another crazy New Yorker.