The Fugitives Read online

  Now, a buzzard really can’t think about something for very long except for where his next meal is coming from, and that gave Nanabozho an idea. He transformed himself into a dead deer, which is exactly what a buzzard likes to eat, lying in plain view in a clearing. Soon enough Buzzard took notice of the big, juicy meal laid out below him, and he landed nearby and hurried over, eager to be the first to eat his fill. He picked away at the carcass, eventually making a hole big enough for him to place his entire head inside it, where he could easily feast away on the meat and fat. All at once Nanabozho leaped to his feet and squeezed shut the hole Buzzard had made, trapping his head and neck. “Now I’ve got you, you foul creature,” said Nanabozho. “What are you going to do to me?” said the terrified bird, although his voice, coming from inside the carcass, was muffled. “Not a thing. I’m going to let you try to remove your head from the hole you tore into my body. Go ahead.” So Buzzard pulled and yanked and strained and heaved and finally he freed himself, except that all of his feathers had been stripped from his head and neck, and his neck had been stretched to a ridiculous length, and all of the exposed flesh was red and raw. “There,” said Nanabozho. “Ugly is as ugly does. You and your descendants will live your lives without feathers on your heads, and with ridiculous long necks, and you’ll smell like what you eat.” And that is why to this day a buzzard has a bare head and a long, raw-looking neck, and smells like a carcass that has been left to lie in the sun.

  5

  WHILE Salteau was telling his story I began to examine the faces of the kids, to figure out which of them might belong to the woman from the parking lot. Compared with her relative exoticism, the kids were uniformly ordinary-looking; bare of the brazen class signifiers I would have read at a glance in New York. While so far I’d been pleased by the egalitarianism I thought I’d found here—nostalgically pleased, I might add, being a native son of the midwest, the child of university professors, raised among the kids of farmers and truckers and small businessmen while eating and wearing and listening to the same things as they did—for the first time I felt an elitist stab of impatience, of dissatisfaction, with the drab equivalency of appearance. As in the case of my flirtation with thrift shop decor, I recognized that my eager disguise amid the natives was contingent and qualified, no more than a complicated private joke I’d be at a loss to have to explain. Rather than try to identify her children, I really wanted to make certain that she didn’t mistake any of these bloodless kids for mine. Of course, then I’d have to explain why I was lurking, alone, in a kids’ reading room, watching a Native American storyteller, but I figured I could cover that later.

  She didn’t have that half-preoccupied look that the mothers had, though, dreaming whatever they dreamed while they plied yet another “activity” with their kids. She watched Salteau intently, as if listening carefully, looking down from time to time to write in a spiral-bound notepad. Of course she was a journalist: here to loft a meaningless puff of hot air into the world, the finery of her professional indignation on display in the parking lot. Pissed at being made to schlep out into the snow to cover the garden party beat. Jot jot jot. When Salteau had finished I expected her to make her way through the scrum of kids and grown-ups to interview him; I even manufactured some trite little thought about how sad, what a loss it was that Salteau’s charming and innocently local sort of fame was about to disappear into the anterior hopper of the celebrity machine, as if it were only contaminated individuals like me who warranted money, comfort, the ego-kneading blandishments of renown. But she flipped her notebook closed and turned to leave, and Salteau, busy speaking to a little girl and her mother, didn’t seem to register her presence. I followed her out.

  She was standing outside the front entrance, jabbing at her phone. I moved close, so that I was standing at her side. She looked up from the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “How’s the hip?”

  “Oh. Sore enough. I’ll find out around four in the morning, no doubt, when I wake up in the throes.”

  “Ice it.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Just long experience with a messed-up back. You writing about Salteau?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I saw you taking notes. No kid with you.”

  “Good. Very astute.”

  “I’m sharp that way. What paper?”

  “The Chicago Mirror.” She said this with a slightly embarrassed air, as if I’d pried a shameful secret from her. “And where’s your own snotty little bequest to the future?”

  “Bequests, actually. I have two. They’re back in Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn, Michigan?”

  “Is there one?”

  “Just outside Detroit. The original, then. You do seem a little out of place.”

  “Well, back in place, really. I’m from the midwest originally.”

  “Lucky you.” She turned her attention once more to the phone in her hand.

  “I guess it was only a matter of time before someone found him,” I said.

  “Before what?” She glanced up sharply.

  “Before someone wrote him up, sent him to the big time.”

  She laughed suddenly, a harsh bark. “Oh. You have very funny ideas about what’s in demand out there in celebrityland.”

  “Oh, not so. I watched a TV show the other night all about a competition among a bunch of women to see who could most artfully rearrange the closets of family members, friends, and neighbors. The judges’ panel was made up of the most preeminent bed and bath specialists in the nation. The play-by-play was delivered breathlessly by two retired home-storage greats. I watched another show about the quest to find America’s Greatest Hamburger. This is how they put it. The Greatest, obscurely sizzling away in some forgotten hollow. Both shows had subplots, intrigues and crises—Kohl’s is out of shelf paper. The bakery truck blew a tire on the interstate and today’s sesame seed buns are strewn across three lanes of traffic. I’m not the one with funny ideas.”

  She was laughing genuinely now and I began, for the first time in months, to feel the saner satisfactions of my own rusty allure, to feel neither off the air sexually nor out of control. She had the habit of reaching across herself with her right hand to sweep away the hair that fell over the left side of her face and she was doing it now, exposing with each unselfconscious swipe a smile that beckoned like a door opening into a sunny room. It was a good moment; the kind you take away from an otherwise dull party: an unambiguous glimpse of the ability to attract and beguile that had helped me to haul myself through eleven years of monogamy, dusk to dawn each day without a single seriously considered thought of infidelity. Until, of course, the streak had ended.

  “Lunch?”

  “Really? You’re hitting on me at the children’s library?” Up with the hand, crossing the body to part the hair falling as she laughed. “Really hopping town.”

  “I guess I could tell you I wanted to compare notes.”

  “You writing a story about John Salteau too?” She laughed even harder.

  “Nope, nope. Just his number one fan. You could work me into the piece. I’m quotable.”

  “Yeah, you’ve already shared some of your quotes with me. I’d get myself fired if I used one of your quotes.”

  “Not with the alternative press, huh?”

  “Here?” She gestured, taking in the entire northwest lower peninsula.

  “I’ll buy.”

  “I can expense my meals.”

  “Even better. You buy. I’ll tell you everything I know about John and you can either use that, or you can make up whatever you want me to have said and put quotation marks around it.”

  “Wait, you know him?”

  “We’re friends,” I said, with a kind of dazed pleasure, like some New Hampshire yokel divulging a connection to Salinger.

  “Well, OK. Come on.”

  6

  THE reflective skin of the Manitou Sands Casino & Hotel, the tallest structure between the
Mackinac Bridge and Grand Rapids, appeared as a faint metallic shimmer on the winter horizon miles before the building itself could be discerned as something separate and distinct from the sandy hills rolling toward the lake. Kat Danhoff was driving to meet a man who had promised to talk to her about Jackie Saltino, or Jackie Crackers as he was sometimes called. The man was named Robert Argenziano and when they had spoken on the phone he had described himself, a little obscurely, as a “liaison” working with the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians to help them implement the new family-friendly resort hotels that were introducing casino gambling to the area. But the first of the casinos had been open now for more than a dozen years, Kat had observed mildly. Robert Argenziano had laughed a hearty laugh and said something nonsensical about one hand washing the other, and Kat detected the long, rounded vowels of northeastern pronunciation in his speech, which otherwise sounded as placelessly clipped as that of a television announcer. They made a date, or so Robert Argenziano had persisted in calling it, to meet that Thursday for lunch at Highlands, the whisky bar and “first-class casual dining environment” just off the main 60,000-square-foot gaming floor. The exquisite tackiness of Highlands was later confirmed by Kat in an online search, although the place fell short, as Robert Argenziano himself had fallen short, of outright sleaze. More than anything else, it represented an insistence on the primacy of nice even in a place where it was possible to lose everything in an instant.

  Up close, it appeared that the building’s architects had taken the silhouette of a cardboard milk carton as their inspiration, wrapping the form in gleaming reflective plastic and enlarging it hundreds of times. Although it was indeed by far the tallest structure in view, it inspired neither contemplation nor wonder, only the peculiar and adamant sensation of wanting it out of sight.

  While online, Kat had also found 517 results in response to her search query about Robert Argenziano. 504 of them had to do with a Florida osteopath; ten with an Oberlin student on Facebook; two listed separate triathlon results for a thirty-six-year-old man living in Mesa, Arizona; and one, also in Florida, was a court order in connection with a divorce case. LexisNexis yielded ordinary-looking filings with the Michigan Gaming Control Board, and a five-year-old local news story describing Argenziano as one of the “experts” who had helped resolve incidences of suspected card-counting that had been taking place at two of the Chippewa casinos. Looking up Rob Argenziano generated similar results. Then she’d tried Bob, and found a single brief New York Times story from the mid-1980s reporting the arrest, along with two other suspects, of Bobby F. Argenziano, twenty-six, of Staten Island, on charges of second-degree murder in connection with the beating death of James Patrick Sheehan, also twenty-six, of Rockaway.

  She parked and approached the front entrance. A man wearing a red jacket and cap stood by a luggage cart near the doors, but ignored her. The doors parted for her by themselves when she drew near. Inside, the lobby space seemed to reach back through the ages, grabbing at architectural and interior flourishes from random points in history while retaining an out-of-the-box-new appearance. Though she could hear noise from the casino, a muted buzzing and ringing, the lobby was as sober and hushed a monument to the waste of enormous amounts of square footage as the casino was no doubt a hectic one to its maximization. Across a quarter-acre of spongy fleur-de-lys-patterned carpeting, archipelagoes of modular furniture stood at distant removes from one another and from the front desk, a long, curved piece of dark wood at which a man in a blue blazer stood tapping at a computer keyboard. One wall of glass looked out upon the lake; on other walls were hung framed historical photographs of the region: Indians at Peshawbestown, farmers unloading cherries at the old Front Street Market in Cherry City, bathers in cumbersome one-piece suits near Little Bonny Lake, and, as if in odd self-rebuke, an enormous photo of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

  At the entry to a passage leading from the diffident lobby, a small sign—tasteful, understated—directed Kat to both Highlands and the Grand Gaming Floor. Here any sense that she was inside just another vanilla mid-range hotel began to dissipate. The buzzing and ringing took on definition, became discrete and individual peals. It was mostly cheerful, with the soft edge of morning calm to it, like conversation coming from someone else’s kitchen on a bright getaway Sunday, the feeling of caffeine gently kicking in, of kettles whistling, of egg timers softly pinging; of the day is still ours to make the most of. Still, these people here, having chosen to do so from among several more or less equally attractive alternatives, were gambling. Kat was not disapproving, merely incomprehending: a gambler she could understand, but someone who threw away money one day and then went sailing or golfing the next defied her understanding. She felt no competitive heat here—that she could easily have understood. People stood there and fed money into one pot or another, periodically gently cursed or celebrated their luck, and then walked away. And the sexuality that always seemed intertwined with the proximity to chance—now, that she could have understood—was completely absent amid these mutually solicitous retired couples, tanned right to the crinkled edges of their elastin-depleted skin, and the fatties, their kids parked in the Tot Lot, laboring at the two-dollar tables.

  Still, someone here was poised to lose it all, if not just yet. At lunchtime, the day was still organized as something you could fit within the margins of a four-color brochure. Now was not the slack and uninhibited hour when one discovered reckless desires. If she could have stood there at the carpeted edge of things where she could watch the players, she might have pegged the one who would blow the kids’ college fund or tap the IRA. But just walking by, the room looked like any contained space full of mutual strangers and the whiff of polite transience. She headed for the restaurant’s entryway, catching sight of herself in a mirror as she passed. She looked good.

  “Kat.” Robert Argenziano looked like he was in his late forties, in good shape except for a slight jowliness. Dressed like a professor in an adult extension MBA program, a pair of eyeglasses in squared little Versace frames, blue Egyptian cotton shirt, and a Harris tweed sportsjacket over gray slacks. Hamilton watch. Good shoes. No pinky ring.

  “How’d you know me?”

  “Are you kidding?” He smiled and shot a quick look around the room, pointedly taking in the other diners. Kat wasn’t sure if he was complimenting her or insulting them. “Come on, I have a table waiting.”

  He led her to a section of the restaurant where no one else was seated. A waiter rushed to beat them to the table. Argenziano collapsed into his chair as if throwing himself into a La-Z-Boy, pulling his napkin from where it was stuffed into his water goblet in the same motion.

  “Help the lady into her seat, Ignatz,” he told the waiter, chopping the air in her direction with the edge of his hand.

  “It’s Sean, sir.”

  “Whatever.”

  The nonrhotic pronunciation flared into the rejoinder, as did a certain macho shrugged impatience that was familiar to Kat from about a million movies and TV shows. Sean helped her into her chair.

  “Now,” Argenziano said, the attentive mentor again, “please order whatever you’d like. I’d recommend the single-malt scotch marinated tips of beef with the asparagus in Armagnac reduction and the gorgonzola polenta. Surprisingly light. Excellent.”

  Kat glanced at the menu. “I’ll have a salad niçoise,” she said.

  “Excellent,” repeated Argenziano. “Some wine with that?”

  “Do you have anything Sicilian?”

  Argenziano smiled tightly. “Very nice Trebbiano.”

  “I’ll have a glass of that, then, please.”

  Sean poked the components of her order into a handheld electronic device and then turned formally toward Argenziano.

  “Bring me a steak, rare, and a glass of mineral water.”

  Sean entered the order and then hustled away. Argenziano leaned forward as if sharing a secret. “I only eat half. Doctor’s orders.” Kat nodded, and then the two of the
m sat for a moment in silence.

  “So,” said Kat. “You’d said that you could tell me something about Jackie Saltino.”

  “So I did. What would you like to know about him?”

  Sean returned with the mineral water and a bottle of wine, which he extended for Kat’s inspection. She assented to his turning her wineglass right side up and pouring a thimbleful into it. She found herself nodding appreciatively before she’d even gotten the glass to her lips, and thought about how she felt sometimes as if these rituals were embarrassing for everybody.

  “Oh,” she answered, when Sean had gone to get bread, “everything.” They shared a small prescribed laugh.

  “What can I say? He worked for us, he left our employ voluntarily, I haven’t seen him since.”

  “He worked for the casino?”

  “Not exactly. He shared the same employer I have.”

  “Which is?”

  “South Richmond Consultants. Ah.” Kat had removed a notebook and pen from her purse.

  “You consult with casinos.”

  “We develop business solutions uniquely suited to the gaming and hospitality industries. We also broker arrangements between resort owners and certain trades: construction, waste management, vendors of goods and services, and so forth. We bring people together.”

  The bread arrived and Argenziano literally drummed his fingers while the boy set out two small dishes and poured olive oil from a decanter into the center of each.

  “What sort of ‘business solutions’ have you come up with for Manitou Sands?”

  “That would be proprietary information, I’m afraid.”

  “And when you broker these arrangements, I take it that you earn a commission?”

  “Yes, that’s the standard practice. A commission based on the value of the contract.”

  “From both ends?”

  “No. Generally payment is on the resort’s end. It’s very similar to real estate. The buyer pays the commission.”

  “What if the resort decides, say, that it wants to hire someone on its own? Buy locally produced food, say.”