The Fugitives

by Christopher Sorrentino

  50 COMMONS

  You’re Home

  Luxury Residential and Retail Spaces

  For Purchase and Lease

  There was an architect’s rendering with the usual hopeful tableau—couples holding hands, children carrying balloons and pointing excitedly into the distance, smiling Rollerbladers, a woman loading a flat of flowers into the back of a minivan—that imagined the looming structure with its gaunt and faded spires as a happy castle ballasted with gleaming shops whose windows bore signs like GOURMET SPECIALTIES, BISTRO, FINE WINES. Not too fanciful a projection, given the evidence of Front Street’s relatively recent evolution, but still an upgrade away from the town’s current level of self-conceit. Beneath, a small legend announced that the undertaking was a project of Morello Developers, LLC.

  Following the main footpath, which widened as it drew near to the complex, I circled around the buildings. Here and there plywood had been removed from the window openings and you could see the interior, all peeling paint and ravaged, water-stained walls and ceilings. Behind everything was a low post-and-rail fence dividing the main grounds from acres of farmland. The nuthouse had, in keeping with the philosophy of the day, put patients to work tending to crops and livestock. In the summer, tall grass rose now where once had risen rows of corn, and the gnarled unpruned forms of cherry trees leaned into one another in the orchard. Barns and other outbuildings had faded to the same dusty red as the spires atop Building 50. Here and there. Everything here and there in the ghost park, as if it hadn’t yet accommodated itself to its civic repurposing. I always walked it as if the open space to be spanned between each leftover object, each ruin, was a nullity; as if the place’s true life lingered in all the lonely corners they were determined either to polish or destroy. Hard to imagine enjoying a picnic on that broad green presenting its placid face to Division, with the specter of forced confinement literally hanging over your shoulder; harder still to imagine moving into 50 Commons: showering, cooking, telling bedtime stories, making love in the banshee zone of bitter delusion, sadness, and captivity.

  The sign on the fence around Building 50 was new, late-breaking news from the corporate sphere. I don’t know what exactly I had believed before, but the sign informed me now that even here, on my own, “it”—meaning pretty much anything and everything—would find me; that there were no holy places of understatement and untapped utility in American life; that the belief in the beauty of the not-so-nice, in the value of forsaking the dollar that could be rendered from the bones of anything, was a dying one—and that was what the jangling demands of Dylan, of Monte, of Boyd Harris himself had been prompting me to recognize. I’d wanted to climb beyond the plateau of accountability—first the accountability of married life, and then my apparent accountability to those who thought I owed them moral consistency, and finally the accountability that used to measure itself out in pieces of silver. Ultimately that was what I owed; the same thing that was demanded of these acres and the buildings on them, the justification that I wasn’t just taking up space, consuming resources. O, to be twenty-five and back in my Williamsburg sublet, jerking off into a napkin, a paragraph of juvenilia, drawn from the Nothing of ignorance—drawn, actually, from other people’s books—awaiting me in the typewriter (O, gentle machine). Was that where the fascination with Salteau had come from? His purchase on the undemanding legends that conjured a world apart from trade, where things appeared and were given names and permitted to exist in harmony with each other? Yeah, sure. There was no point in fetishizing the primitive: Salteau probably lived in a trailer out by a gravel pit somewhere. I wondered about Kat’s apparent reticence with Salteau. If she would only wrap her story up, we might spend an inconsequential night together. This was how I always should have done things: casual, unserious, not exactly respectable but hardly irresponsible, and what nobody knows doesn’t hurt anybody. Would that I had had the nature, if not the wisdom, to crawl out of Susannah’s bed after getting my taste and return to my wife, my kids, my books, my desk, with a rejuvenated sense of appreciation, rather than taking them all in with the coldly appraising eye of a horse trader.

  About 300 degrees into my circuit of the complex I spotted a sandwich board set up outside one of the doors. Engraved in the lintel was DISPENSARY, and, true to the mild irony of the times, the board announced in fluorescent chalk the grand opening of the Dispensary Café. I went inside the empty place and ordered a coffee from the kid behind the counter, midwestern as a scarecrow but scored with dark green Maori designs up and down his arms, and took it to a table. Someone had left behind a copy of the alternative weekly, Northern Exposure, and I flipped through it, locating amid the listings for the bar bands, the historic home tours, the Hemingway trail, and the ads for the Manitou Sands casino, a small boxed ad announcing Charlevoix’s Annual Indoor Smelt Fry on Saturday, which among other things would feature the appearance of “renowned” Native storyteller John Salteau.

  19

  PEOPLE are not happy,” Argenziano said. “It weighs on me. I feel responsible. This is due in part because I am a responsible person. It’s in my nature. When people feel bad, I want to make them feel better.”

  Kat was sitting with Argenziano in his suite at Manitou Sands. It was Wednesday. They sat in a pair of club chairs arranged before a slab of plate glass that overlooked the bay, where a single ship was moving across the water, navigating slowly around the fractal ice that clotted its surface. Argenziano was wearing a heavy terry-cloth bathrobe and was drinking hot water with lemon from a mug.

  “That’s sympathetic of you,” said Kat.

  “I’m trying to sincerely express myself and you’re being smart.”

  “Maybe if you could tell me who’s unhappy and how it has to do with me.”

  “Who and how it has to do with you is that after we talked I was obliged to go to my colleagues at South Richmond Consultants and inform them of the possibility that a story about an unfortunate loss occurring over March Madness last year would likely be appearing in a Chicago newspaper. And the prospect does not make them happy, for a number of reasons, some of them obvious. You don’t look so hot.”

  “Bad night’s sleep. You are responsible, you were saying?”

  “For what you do, only incidentally. I’m responsible for the original problem, in the buck-stops-here sense. I oversaw the operation in question.”

  “And what operation is that, exactly?”

  “Don’t come in, I invite you in here, and you come in taking an accusatory tone. You think that because the operation is something you don’t approve of, I couldn’t possibly feel a sense of responsibility. Your disapproval is nothing but a misunderstanding of the terms.”

  “What terms?”

  “You don’t need to know them. The people involved know and understand the terms. Everyone involved accepts the terms. These arrangements between people in a society have always been around, Kat. It’d be naive to think they haven’t. It’s very similar to feudalism. There’s a sense of belonging, of goals that can only be achieved through a recognition of common interests.” Again he pronounced it “innarests,” evidently a consistent imperfection in his presentation of himself. “I’ll bet you think that the higher up awareness of these situations goes, the more likely it is that someone, some upright person, will act to put a stop to it. Wrong. You are wrong. What happens is that the higher up it goes, the more institutionalized the acceptance of the terms becomes. That’s a lesson for you. It’s a lesson about money, like what I always seem to be teaching you, but it’s also a lesson about power, and about responsibility. In these situations you so disapprove of, according to these terms you can’t understand, people are bound to each other and responsible to each other in a way that just isn’t possible at all levels of democracy. For all of democracy’s many merits. People are attracted to these situations, these terms. Not just the economics of them, but the loyalties and allegiances they create. Because finally it’s also a lesson about what people aspire to. People a
spire to these loyalties and allegiances. They look out for each other because they’re looking out for themselves. They want to belong to something bigger than themselves and what they say when they’re talking to the bathroom mirror. They aren’t looking out for abstractions—they’re looking out for each other. That’s true democracy.”

  Kat massaged her temples with her thumb and middle finger and said, “So you’re saying why should I even bother with that part of the story.”

  “The part about the details of our operation the loss arose from, no. I think that’s a nonstarter, is what I’m saying. That’s not your story, Kat.”

  “I think people might be interested.”

  “In that case you might have trouble finding someone to talk on the record about any of it.”

  “But I have a source.”

  Argenziano threw his head back. “Ahh,” he said to the ceiling. “A source. This would be your disgruntled former employee.” He dropped his chin to look at her. “I’ll tell you one thing. Let’s say that your story did have something to it. I wouldn’t rely too heavily on that source.”

  “The countinghouse view.”

  “You remembered.” Argenziano nodded approvingly, impressed.

  “You took what I told you seriously enough to go to South Richmond with it.”

  “What can I say? Your information was plausible. I had to at least raise the possibility that what you told me was true.”

  “And you’re meeting with me again.”

  “The fact of the matter is that I was urged not to communicate with you anymore.” He paused. “If this were a movie, we’d be meeting on a bench in a windswept, deserted park where nobody could overhear us.”

  “And you would check me for a wire.”

  “And I would check you for a wire. If this were a movie. But I said fuck it, pardon my french. Too damn cold and wet.”

  “I appreciate your meeting me. I appreciate your not making me meet you in the cold. I appreciate your not checking to see if I’m wearing a wire.”

  Argenziano regarded her warily for a moment, as if trying to figure out the balance between sarcasm and sincerity in what she’d just said. “Forget it,” he said. “Strictly selfish on all counts. My knee starts killing me when it gets like this out, for one thing. For another, I think it’s important that I act independently to expedite the solution of the problem. That means for starters that this conversation is completely off the record.”

  “Again. We have to stop meeting like this.”

  “Ha ha. Now, now, Kat. I’m trying to help you out. But, obviously, I’m interested in knowing everything you think you know about Saltino’s involvement. And of course the identity of your source.”

  “The source is still confidential. And last time we met, you worked pretty hard to convince me that Jackie Saltino couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the loss. You weren’t really even willing to acknowledge the loss.”

  “Let’s say my position has changed.”

  “That’s interesting. What changed it?”

  “Don’t get technical. The point is, I think we can mutually agree on the parameters of a story that will satisfy both our needs.”

  “Parameters.”

  “What goes in, what stays out.”

  “I still don’t know why I would agree to that.”

  “Like I said, part of the story is a nonstarter.”

  “The part about skimming money from the casino’s gross, you mean.”

  “I didn’t say that and you couldn’t prove it if you wanted to.”

  “Please. If some girl in the cage knew about it . . .” She trailed off.

  “A girl?” asked Argenziano. He smiled. “That eliminates half my suspects.”

  “All I’m saying is, at the very least the rumor is out there.”

  “Yeah, that may be true. So I’m supposed to add fire to the fire? Give me a break. I want to put it out, the fire. And I’m telling you how.”

  Kat waited.

  “Look,” said Argenziano. “This is a story you want, am I right? You came here from Chicago because you wanted a big story. Because even a chickenhead like me can go onto the World Wide Web and see that you cover, what, high school chess tournaments? A committee meeting once in a while? You want a big story? You can have a big story. It’s a story about a trusted individual who got greedy and became a thief, a big thief. And I will consent to be interviewed about it, as a consultant to the hotel, and I will instruct the necessary people to give you access to the proper personnel to round out and complete that story, which is that somebody committed a crime, a crime that did not negatively impact our guests, or our fiduciary relationship with the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians, or our legal obligation to the taxing authorities, or the Gaming Control Board, or anybody at all but us. We are the victims, the foolish and trusting victims, of that crime. That’s your story. It’s not as big as if it involved those other aspects you mentioned, but it beats covering the Winnetka Junior League. Now please tell me that you understand what I’m saying when I’m saying I’m setting the limits on your story. It would make it so much easier, and more pleasant, because I honestly and truly do enjoy your company.”

  “What about things that fall outside of those limits?”

  Argenziano chuckled, and leaned forward to grasp her knee and shake it a little. His robe fell open slightly and Kat caught a glimpse of an ugly, vertical scar running the length of his breastbone.

  “Nothing’s going to fall outside the limits.” He leaned back. “Don’t be a kid, OK? Let’s get going on this. I’m offering you cooperation, access to all the information you need to make this into a story, rather than the figment of some ex-nobody’s imagination. Look. This could be a wonderful opportunity for you. Or it could be nothing. Something not so wonderful. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  They looked up as a man entered the suite and paused at the top of the two steps descending to the sunken living room. Argenziano nodded and the man went through a doorway adjacent to the entry, emerging a few moments later carrying a wooden valet and a folded shirt with a paper band from the laundry around it, a dark blue suit draped over his arm.

  “I need to hear what you know about Jackie Saltino,” said Argenziano.

  “I pretty much know what you know.”

  “I can’t say I’d feel any better even if that were true, Kat. But you know it isn’t.” Argenziano pouted. “You must know something. You’re back here in town.”

  “Maybe I’m here to see my source.”

  “Maybe you are. And who is she?” He snapped his fingers. “Give me a name.”

  Kat smiled. “Maybe I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Maybe this and maybe that.” He raised his chin to address the man. “Don’t wrinkle the suit, Ignatz.” He chopped at the air with his hand. The man nodded and set up next to the sofa, hanging the suit on the valet and placing the shirt on one of the sofa cushions. He left and returned a moment later with socks and a pair of shoes. He stood beside the valet, holding the shoes and socks in his hand. Argenziano stood up. “Excuse me, Kat.”

  She watched as he shed the robe. Beneath it he was wearing only a pair of powder blue bikini briefs. The scar was red, about ten inches long, and the ridge it formed was as if the two sides of his chest had been joined by pinching them together like clay or dough.

  “I’m not an exhibitionist,” he said, “since I’m wearing underpants. Even partial nudity, unreciprocated, is an interesting thing, though, Kat, don’t you think? I used to take life drawing classes, believe it or not. I remember the models, naked in a crowded room, under everyone’s scrutiny. Am I trying to seduce you? Do I appear vulnerable? Am I at ease? Or does it seem simply as if a busy man like myself is not going to neglect his schedule for the sake of an unsatisfying conversation?”

  unnerpance

  noodiddy

  innaresting

  skrootny

  suhdooce

  skedual
/>   “I don’t know,” said Kat, honestly enough.

  Argenziano strode across the room, absently running the fingertips of his right hand down the length of the scar. He broke the band of paper around the shirt, shook out the garment, and put his arms through the sleeves. He began to button it. “It’s a mystery, in other words. So many interpretations. You’ll go away saying, ‘What was he thinking?’ You’ll be having lunch with a friend and you’ll tell the story about how all of a sudden the guy you’re talking to just up and takes his clothes off and you have no idea why. Am I right?” He put the pants on and fastened the waist. He snapped his fingers. “Belt.” The man disappeared into the other room. Argenziano sat on the couch, pulled on the socks, and slipped his feet into the shoes. Almost to himself, he murmured, “Of course I’m right.”

  He stood and took the belt from the man and ran it through the loops around his waist, then cinched it. The man took the jacket from the valet and moved behind Argenziano, helping him into it.

  “No matter how many times you tell the story, no matter who you tell it to, you’ll always be asking a question as much as you’re telling a story. Why’d he do it? What was he thinking? Totally ambiguous. Now tell me: is there anything ambiguous about what I told you just before this gentleman joined us? Anything at all that you can say, ‘I really didn’t get his meaning,’ where you can say, ‘What was he trying to get at?’ I don’t think so. Brush me off.” He snapped his fingers. The man removed a clothes brush from a shelf on the valet and began to brush Argenziano’s suit, working down from the shoulders as Argenziano stood still, his legs slightly spread and his arms held out from his sides as if he were being frisked. When the man had finished, he adjusted the cuffs of the pants so that they broke nicely over Argenziano’s shoes.