Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

Every so often a young woman sprays gentle streams of water, moistening the seaweed. I feel like an eel. A happy little eel falling in and out of sleep, relaxed in way I can’t remember ever being without drugs.

  “Hello, Jen.”

  I rip off my goggles. My father’s standing in front of me, and Gila’s disappeared. Bisected by cubist rays, he’s light and dark and larger than ever. I sit up slightly, afraid to crack my cellophane cover. “What are you doing here?” I ask, and he smiles—obviously the wrong question: Gila Zyskun is a rat.

  “It’s great to see you.” He lights a cigarette, leans back against the granite. “I miss you. I hate being so out-of-pock-et.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Dad. Everyone’s going crazy looking for you. I’ve got lawyers harassing me, not to mention the feds … What makes you think they’re not tailing me?”

  He smiles. “What’s it they say? Everyone’s got a doppelganger.”

  “Shit! I should have known, the minute I heard Israel—”

  “Let’s face it, your brain’s just not wired that way,” he says, dispirited I’m not the canny apprentice he’d always wanted. He shifts in the piercing rays, and I see stars, I think, I’m dizzy. I cup a hand against my forehead, twist my neck up into the sun, and our eyes meet, the stars really millions of tiny gnats, and I’m suddenly shamed, the contours of my body wet and shiny, hidden but not, the theory of latex. “Put on your clothes,” he says. “We’re having lunch.”

  The early settlers survived on tilapia, my father tells me, as we’re served colorful plates of fish, hummus, pickles, pink radishes, tomatoes and cucumbers diced infinitesimally small, what they call salad. Tilapia is peasant fish; the kings ate trout. We sit on another terrace, this one also scooped into the side of the mountain but with a long dining table. We squeeze together at one end, a waterfall rushing behind us, the air cleaner and cooler than it should be on a sticky summer day. My father eats voraciously, in between bites signaling staff to bring us more food, wine, his laptop, bantering as if it hasn’t been nine months since we’ve seen each other.

  “More fish?” He pushes a platter of smoked trout under my nose. I roll my eyes and break off a piece with my fork.

  “Sorry about you and …”

  “Barbara.”

  “Right … Never liked her. How’s your mother?”

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “She’s my favorite, you know that.”

  “She’s living in the mountains with Lionel. They’re into race horses and Fresh Air kids. And what’s going on here?”

  “What?” he says, palms open, shoulders up like Gila’s, innocent as the state of Israel … What, what did I do? We’re staring but it’s hopeless: I can take him down with one look. He exhales deeply, pours another glass of wine, and the tale flows from his mouth like something out of the Old Testament. I am not in Israel for a conference. He needs my help.

  Six. The kite

  My ride back to Tel Aviv comes in a small sport utility vehicle with tinted windows, the driver, Moti, a stout, surly man with no neck. When I ask where’s Gila, my father steels and I know there are things he’s left out of the story, things too indecorous even for a man on his fourth wife, and I want to spit in his over-tanned face, but count … ten exhale, nine, exhale …

  At the Sheraton, they still believe I am here for a government conference. “Shalom, Shalom!” they greet overzealously, asking how my day went, was there anything I needed. No, nothing, thank you, I’ll be in the gym. Forty-five minutes on the elliptical trainer gets my heart up, though I hate pumping in place, you lose the gorgeous expanse of speed. It’s your everyday corporate hotel. The gym is well equipped. In my room there are movies in English, bottles of water, free wireless, plush pillows, and a feathery comforter that reeks of stale anonymous sex. I climb under the covers and check my e-mail, when a window pops up on my screen. I’m not set to receive instant messages, but there she is: Meet me at the bar in Yaffa.

  Backdropped once more by the Mediterranean, the gurgling lava lamps, ’80s lounge music, I let her apologize. “I shouldn’t even be here,” she says. “It’s dangerous.”

  “What’s the danger?”

  “I know he told you.”

  “He said you were lovers.”

  Caught sipping from her cloudy glass, she holds the liquid against the roof of her mouth, lowers her chin slightly, swallows. My neck is hot, back hot, eyes burning white, it’s all the confirmation I need. “He is a very interesting man,” she says.

  “He’s a thief.”

  We are silent for a moment, then she says it started as business. Says she’d been researching for him in New York, angling her way into other VC companies and investment banks, helping him figure out who was backing what, how he could bridge the right startup then liquidate it before his partners knew what hit them. Much of it was legal, she says, there’s no law against misrepresenting yourself nor using information obtained in bad faith. He made many enemies and far too much money for his tax returns—and here’s where his story gets nebulous. For years he’d been skimming profits and funneling them into Israeli accounts; before the towers fell you could do this under the radar. She liked his mind, she says, even the way he ordered meals was tactical, and he was audacious in business, could convince investors an empty shell of a company was hot issue stock … What was it like growing up with that? Big, I say, everything about him was enormous, even his absences.

  Her phone goes off, that damn score, Beethoven maybe, blaring like a nervous breakdown. She looks at the number, a revelation in those few seconds, embarrassed. “Hello! Hello!” she says, some intimacy to it. “Nothing, really … I’m in the car … Sure …”

  Up she goes, and I’m grateful. Cell phones: how one can ramble across from another at a table, uncivilized on any level, particularly dicey when it’s my father’s lover and he is on the other end and we are out late.

  You learn over the years when people are holding back. Afraid to jump in, they extend, obfuscation teasing nightcaps, long anecdotes. Should we walk along the beach? she says. The water glows in moonlight. They say it’s phosphorus… or the remnants of oil spills. The soldiers are not far away. You get used to them. Gila drops her bomb: After the army she was recruited by Mossad. She helped develop new technologies for the field and learned how to gather information, a commodity as valuable as dry goods once were. But disillusion quickly set in, she hated politics, and she took her skills to market. She is what they call a kite.

  I kick off my sandals, feel the sand between my toes as we stroll. “So you’re the thief.”

  “I am simply pulling together data, same as I used to for Mossad. If I have to tell a story or rearrange things to get what I want, it’s what I do. Stealing, I don’t know. I think you must want the thing before you can steal it.”

  “You’re as delusional as he is. If you take something that’s not yours, it’s stealing. You just give him the out if you’re caught, he can shrug, What? Who is she?

  I touch her arm, slow us down. She is a brisk walker.

  “What?” she says, then turns away, utterly still for the first time since we met. The chatty one in her skirts, glasses without frames. This woman who’s maybe romanced members of Parliament and worked her way into corporations with ten levels of security. She raises her head slightly, eyes reflecting moonlight like a raccoon’s. “In Mossad I learned to be more cunning than anyone at the table, to think out of the box. We were bold, risky, we had no choice. We created systems that could detect a heartbeat ten feet outside of a tank, all kinds of surveillance devices tapping into databases, and still we killed so many wrong people. Where do you put that? There’s no place for it. But money, it makes more sense. People think—”

  “Stop it with the ‘people think,’ okay, I’m not interested in your little philosophies.”

  “Then what interests you? From what I can tell, nothing.”

  “That’s not true, you have no idea.” I hear my voice crack, blood coursing under m
y skin, Gila steady as a news-caster. She is so much like my father: clever, manipulative, “audacious,” everything I’m not. I work this through in less than thirty seconds, while she’s not-looking, trust me, I know not-looking, and then I’m babbling about the sea, the stars, how different this country is from the one I’d traversed with Marc, and somehow we’re conversing again, bumping into each other slightly as we walk. Desire always gets me by the throat first. Then elsewhere. The various twitches and puls But the throat …

  She walks a step in front and takes my arm. “Shhhh.”

  “I—”

  Regah, regah! Do not speak a word, don’t move!” She sits me down, then disappears into the sand, up over the board-walk. Left in shadows, I wish I were armed with something other than a BlackBerry. Fear and desire share a path to the heart. I count backwards until she appears, stuffing a shiny object inside her shirt—definitely not a BlackBerry. “It’s nothing, just him.”

  “Who?”

  “He often has me followed.”

  I realize she’s talking about my father. “Sounds like you two have a great relationship.”

  “Come, we’ll take you to the hotel. I must go to him.”

  Five. Old habits die hard

  At the Sheraton, she drops me without a word, and I know my father’s on to me. I twist open a midget bottle of Scotch and suck it down in one sip, lying back on the lonely comforter. Hotel beds make me want to come, but this time it’s more. Gila Zyskun is not like any of my father’s lovers, though she asked about them. At first they liked to care for me, be my best friend. Some insisted we “go shopping,” a ridiculous activity. Gila laughed, she hated shopping too. The few he married stopped trying. A hand on my arm, she understands, her father had been a notorious philanderer, a general, and that’s all we need, so different from those who’d endlessly probe, How did it feel? in the name of love. Like my father, I have failed every relationship in my life, but Gila doesn’t care, says we’re more alike than different. I come so fast it’s clear: I don’t trust me either.

  Four. An unbelievable story

  The three of us have lunch at an upscale Russian restaurant in Herzliya. This is diamond money, my father says, tapping his thin, manicured finger on the crisp white linen. Marc had the same fingers, long and elegant, a few neat black hairs above each knuckle as if they’d been perfectly embroidered. You wouldn’t think such pretty hands capable of such mischief.

  My father divulges the plan over bowls of creamy pink borscht, blinis, caviar—comfort food, he says. On Sundays, as a boy, his father took him to visit Russian relatives in Brighton Beach and on the way home they ate lunch. He misses New York but won’t endure a trial. “I’ll die first,” he says, and he’s not joking. Gila says he carries vials of hemlock, at any moment ready to cut out on his own.

  The plan is simple. I am to take a jump drive to Paris and deliver it to an associate, who’ll move the contents accordingly. Simple until I know how I’m carrying—“It’s small and thin,” my father says. “Undetectable as a tampon. And there’s something else you should know.”

  “Don’t bother her with that,” Gila says, worried, I think. Spying has taught her to be stoic, controlled.

  “She has to know, everyone’s on edge. The police are being extra-vigilant.”

  “It’ll just make her nervous.”

  He glowers at Gila, then me, knows something’s up, maybe? Her concern warms me, then nurtures paranoia: What if this conversation is staged? “Look, Jen, there was trouble here recently. Something like twenty companies were busted for spying on each other … It’s an unbelievable story. One day out of the blue, this mystery writer calls the police and says parts of his unpublished novel are appearing all over the Internet and they trace it to a virus planted on his computer—”

  “No, not a virus,” Gila interrupts. “It was a Trojan horse, you know that.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it is not the same, the Trojan is much smarter, you have to invite it in. Tell the story right or don’t tell it. Already, you leave out that he was writing with his wife, they were a team, but the son-in-law was related to the wife.”

  “He was after the husband, trying to humiliate him.”

  Voices raised, the vein under my father’s left eye puls-ing, Gila’s long neck coiled, they argue back and forth about who did what and when, a slick coat of oil congealing over the untouched blinis. The gist: Upset over his breakup with their daughter, the former son-in-law hacked into the mystery-writing couple’s computer with spying software, mining whatever he could and releasing it on the Internet, at times altered to sully the man’s reputation. He’d also sold his Trojan to a number of private detectives who used it to spy for their corporate clients.

  “They were very sloppy,” Gila says.

  “Israel has one of the most competitive business climates in the world,” my fathers says.

  “They left a trail longer than a rocketship to the moon.”

  “Without that writer—writers,” he winks at Gila, “they would have been fine, which is the takeaway here: Don’t mess with the family.”

  “What’s on the drive?” I jump in, speaking loudly, as much to topple their excitement, the current between them, as to figure out what I’m in for. They angle toward me, my father no doubt wondering how much to divulge, whether it’ll make a difference. Everything I own, he says. No need to elaborate, it can’t be legal, and though my father’s gall shouldn’t stun me, throughout my life I’ve been his foil, I am slightly taken aback that he’d sacrifice me for his crumbling empire.

  Gila excuses herself to go to the restroom, silencing my father and me as we stare, traces of her lingering, the after-glow. He sighs, “Did she tell you she worked for Mossad?”

  I nod.

  “She’s come up with things you wouldn’t believe if you saw them in a James Bond movie. Can’t imagine what I’d do without her. She’s amazing.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  My own version of the Israeli shrug: “What?

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Jen.” He cuts a fork into a hardened blini, me down to fourteen. “This is disgusting … Hey!” He barks a few words of Russian at the waiter, lights a cigarette, and we’re eye to eye.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to do this for you,” I say.

  “Then you might as well drive a stake through my heart.”

  Gila returns as the waiter sets down another set of plates: blinis, chicken, salmon, chilled shots of vodka. “More food?”

  “I take care of my people,” says my father, stubbing out his cigarette, then piling his plate. We eat together, talking of a gentrifying Tel Aviv, how to smoke a fish … through much of it, her toe tickling my ankle.

  On the way home, Gila and I go shopping. We park off Allenby and walk to the shuk, but there’s nothing to buy. I wanted metal stalls with Oriental rugs, hookahs, kaffiyehs—years ago I’d bought one like Arafat’s in solidarity with the opposition. But now it’s just jellied sandals, cheap jeans, underwear, plastic sunglasses. Global capitalism run amok. Sensing my disenchantment, Gila takes me down a block to a bustling street fair. We stop and listen to a woman with eyes like caverns busk a Hebrew folk song, the refrain a desperate Anee rotzah, Anee rotzah (I want, I want) …

  After my mother left, my father stayed late at the office. He’d fall asleep on his couch, then take long walks through the Fulton fish market, bargaining in the coldest hours for the catch of the day. Mornings we’d find men in thermal sweatshirts with grizzled faces and thick leathery fingers being served soft boiled eggs in tiny silver cups, strips of bacon, thick slices of toast dripping with butter, and my father, upon noticing Marc and me shyly hovering in our pajamas, beamed, “See how they taste it, it’s like they’ve never eaten an egg!” I have inherited his romance of the working class, a propensity for self-aggrandizing acts of tenderness.

  Gila raises the corner of her mouth at the singer. “So ho
rrible,” she says. I agree but toss a few coins in her sack, and we move silently, flanked by artists in canvas tents hawking jewelry, ceramic pots, stained-glass icons. A mime tries to engage us in faceplay, but we break away, walking toward the sea.

  “You put that Trojan horse on my computer,” I say finally.

  “Not that one … Mine is much better,” she says proud-ly.

  “How long have you been spying on me?”

  “For a little while only. We had to make sure you would come.”

  “And here I am,” I smile. This time she holds it but has to go. Before dropping me off she tells me to keep my computer on.

  Three. The ballad of the Trojan horse

  Myth has it the Greeks won the Trojan War by sneaking their army into a giant hollow horse and rolling it into the city of Troy for the grand pillage. Gila stuffed her soldiers into “conference” files I’d blithely downloaded but swears there is no danger, my data is safe with her. It’s not the data I’m worried about. After midnight, my hotel room dark but for the computer screen, we talk through tiny windows:

  —are you in love with him?

  —interested, sure … but love?

  —you have to understand, young men are filled up with themselves, they have nothing to say but who they are

  —he’s more than twice your age

  —this means nothing to me, if you saw him in action you’d understand

  —that’s twisted and disgusting

  —in business … you have a dirty mind

  —better than dirty money

  —he said you wouldn’t understand, you were too serious and wouldn’t respect who I am in this world, and for some reason I want to show you you are all wrong

  —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.