Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  Trisha managed a smile. “No, that’s okay—and I appreciate the heads-up. I’m just tired is all. Maybe we better call it a night.”

  But it wasn’t all right. Pam’s story had somehow brought all of Trisha’s vertigo and sadness rushing back, and the alcohol had only made things worse. Trisha stared at the table, and at the tiny saddle she’d been given, nearly lost amidst the empty glasses, overflowing ashtrays, and sodden napkins. At some point it had acquired a tiny rider—a stiff-limbed man made from skinny plastic straws. He was tilted and reeling, barely hanging on above a puddle of Scotch, and Trisha felt very much the same. She looked up and saw Ellis Quantrill standing ten feet away. He raised his cognac to her, a mischievous smile on his face. Had he been listening? No, she thought, it was just booze and paranoia.

  Back at the hotel, she took a long hot bath. Her thoughts kept drifting to Pete Dutton, and after a while her fingers drifted to her pussy. She masturbated over and over again, imagining any number of ways Pete Dutton might have her, or she him. Her orgasms were as intense as if the sex was real, and it scared her a little. She found she liked being scared, that it heightened her climax and took away some of her sadness. She found his card in her purse and placed it on her bedside, but didn’t call the number.

  She still hadn’t called thirty-six hours later, when a plane returned her to Tegucigalpa. Trisha had the driver take her straight to the hotel. The sky was turquoise blue and cloudless, but the streets of the capital city spread out before her in a muddy blur. She was exhausted and headachy. The traffic noise mixed with colors around her, the colors merged with indistinct shapes, and pretty soon the whole world was sliding away. She couldn’t focus on anything, and she found herself filled with … what … homesickness? She missed her old job; she missed her dad; she even missed Tommy Skilling, the first boy she’d let slip a hand into her panties, in a car on a roadside just north of Laramie. She hadn’t thought of him in years. She opened the door to her hotel suite and her world came back into focus.

  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 deman
ds. 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.

  “Okay,” said the little girl, “I understand. You come to my house tomorrow night and I will bring your proof. Other girls, too, to tell their stories.”

  Trisha had reached into her bag to give money to Linda.

  “No! No! Not now!” the girl shouted in English. Then in Spanish to Pete, “Jorge will just take it. Bring it tomorrow night. Bring money for all the girls.”

  When she clutched Trisha’s hand and kissed her fingers, Trisha found it hard to take a breath.

  The rain had gone from biblical to drizzle. Pete picked her up in front of the hotel at 9:00. Trisha got in the backseat. There was someone in the front with Pete. He was a bull-dog-faced fellow of thirty with red skin, thick arms, and flat affect.

  “This is Paolo,” Pete said. “He works for me. He’ll have your back. He speaks perfect English. Right Paolo?”

  “Very perfect. The best,” he said in an accentless mono-one

  “What about you? Aren’t you—”

  “I wish I could, but I’ve got business of my own to handle. And besides, the two of us in that area at night … We’d attract too much of a crowd. The wrong kind of crowd. You’ll be much safer with Paolo. Trust me. No one is apt to fuck with him. Isn’t that right, Paolo?”

  “They wouldn’t dare.”

  Please, please, Pete, forget your business. I’m scared out of my mind. I’ll do anything if you come with me. I’ll do anything …

  “Okay,” she said.

  They drove into the mountains that surrounded the city. Trisha was numb, frightened about getting into a situation over which she would have very little control, but remained silent. When Pete turned off the main road and into a neighborhood of cuarterias it was hard for Trisha to know if these were the same slums she had been to the previous day. Places, times, dates … It was all starting to run together into another indistinguishable blur.

  “It’s right over there,” Pete said, pointing to a shabby door as he rolled by. “I’m going to leave you and Paolo off at the end of the row. I’ll be back for you in …” he checked his watch, “half an hour, tops.” He reached over the seat and squeezed Trisha’s hand reassuringly. “You’ll be fine. Paolo will see to that. Right, Paolo?”

  “I’ll take good care of the lady.”

  “Good,” Pete said. “I’ll be right back in this spot in a half hour.”

  Paolo and Trisha got out of the Jetta. Pete beckoned Trisha to his rolled-down window. She knew he wanted her to kiss him, which she did with little enthusiasm, the rain pelting her cheeks. He smiled at her when their lips parted. There was, she thought, something disquieting about his expression. Then, as she watched his taillights disappear, Trisha shook it off. It was her own discomfort, she thought, projected onto Pete.

  “Let’s go,” Paolo urged, placing his meaty hand around her bicep.

  Paolo didn’t bother knocking and just pushed back the shabby door to the harelipped girl’s house. The inside was lit by a string of bare bulbs. The tamped-down dirt floor was not muddy, but was dark with moisture. The room was crowded and noisy and smelled of a sickening mixture of wet garbage and feces.

  Linda sat on a crude bench, a young baby wrapped in a blanket cradled in her twiglike arms. There were children of varying ages all over the place, the older ones staring at Trisha and the big man at her side. The younger ones cried or played, happily ignoring the strangers. There were adults too, mostly haggard old women, probably not nearly as old as they looked. There were a few younger women as well, but no one, in Trisha’s estimation, who looked like the whore who had sold her child into a life of slavery and rape.

  “Ask her where her mother is,” Trisha told Paolo.

  He did as she requested and translated the answer. “She’s out sucking strangers’ cocks for some lempira.”

  Some of the women laughed. Trisha failed to see the humor.

  “Okay, ask her if these are the girls and women who will talk about PriceStar.”

  “Yes,” Linda answered herself.

  Again some of the women laughed. Again Trisha failed to see the joke.

  “You have the money?” Linda asked in perfect English.

  Trisha removed an envelope which contained five hundred American dollars in twenty-dollar bills.

  “Let me see it, touch it,” Linda said in Spanish. Paolo translated.

  Trisha Tanglewood slowly removed the cash from the envelope and placed it in Linda’s bony left hand. Linda showed the money to the baby in her arms and cooed something in the child’s ear. Then, when she was done, she looked up at Trisha. On the harelipped girl’s face was a cruel, almost feral smile. It made Trisha’s blood run cold. She could feel herself blanch, feel the strength run out of her through the soles of her shoes and seep slowly into the shifting wet earth under her feet. All the individual sounds in the little room became a muted ringing in her ears. A wave of nausea slammed into her and she nearly fainted.

  Linda’s malformed lips and darting tongue shaped words which Trisha’s eyes read but could not understand. They repeated the words again and again. She was shouting them. Now everyone was shaking their fists at Trisha, shouting, but the shouts just blended into the ringing. Somehow Trisha found the strength to ask Paolo, “What are they saying? What are they saying?”

  Paolo turned to look Trisha right in the face. His flat affect seemed to vanish, replaced by a broad mirthful smile. “Baby thief. They’re calling you baby thief. Run!” he screamed. “Run!”

  In a quieter cuarteria, no more than a mile away from where Trisha Tanglewood was now running for her life, Peter Dutton was taking cover and comfort in the house of a sixeen-year-old whore. He found her disappointing. Even at sixteen she was so experienced as to be robotic, but he let her finish what she had started. He needed at least another five or ten minutes. He wasn’t much for regrets, but he had really enjoyed fucking the broad from New York. What she lacked in expertise, she made up for in enthusiasm. A shame, he thought, to waste that kind of talent.

  When he finally came, he yanked the Honduran girl by the hair to make sure she swallowed. He couldn’t abide spitters. He zipped up and threw two twenty-dollar bills onto the damp earthen floor. She smiled at him with more feeling than she’d displayed the whole time he’d been there.

  The skies had opened up once again, and as he closed the driver’s side door, Pete could hear the cries of Baby thief! Baby thief! spreading through the slum like an airborne virus. Not a soul noticed as he drove of
f into the blackness.

  Trisha kept herself in great shape, and she’d gotten a good lead on the mob. Unfortunately, a good lead when you have no idea of where you’re going, or the terrain you’re going on, or what lurks around the next dark corner, is of limited value. Suddenly, a searing pain tore through her left shoulder. A rock! Shit, they’re throwing stones. They’re going to stone me to death! Trisha picked up her pace, but to no avail—the next rock caught her square in the jaw. Only adrenaline and her instinct for self-preservation kept her legs moving, and then only for a few more steps.

  She toppled face-first into the mud, and into the netherworld between consciousness and coma. Things she heard, things she felt, all seemed like they were happening to someone else. She could sense her body move with each kick, but the pain was remote. Above her, buried in the clouds, she heard the roar of an ascending jet. She could not distinguish what kind of aircraft. It suddenly occurred to her that the flight attendant, Kathy, had never gotten back to her with the answer to her question. It’s funny what you think about. Then something bounced violently against her skull and the world turned a silent shade of black.

  * * *

  A few hours later, Peter Dutton met with Ellis Quantrill at a prearranged spot on the road to Toncontín Airport.

  “Is it done?” Quantrill wanted to know.

  “Like you wanted, painful and nasty. It’s going to be hard to identify her. I got the call a few minutes ago from my man confirming it.”

  “Excellent. That’s the other forty grand, plus expenses,” Quantrill said, handing over a sleek leather attaché case.

  “Boy, she must’ve really pissed you off.”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your affair. Now, I’ve got to go and act shocked. Goodbye, Mister …?”

  “Dutton will do,” he said, walking to his car. “And remember, if anything should happen to me in the near future, I’ve seen to it that you’ll go in a manner far worse than Miss Tanglewood. My colleagues will make it last much, much longer.”