Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

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 them 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.”