The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino Page B

It’s a strange thing about money, Kat. Very strange thing. People who don’t have any, they love to tell stories about it: about the ways it gets wasted, about the ways it gets lost, about the ways the people who do have it just throw it around. No skin off their nose, I guess. They dream about having so much they can go around giving away Cadillacs like Elvis. Of course, everybody’s near the money. Work at a McDonald’s on a busy stretch of the interstate and you’re right on top of ten, fifteen million a year. But not everybody sees it laying around in big piles like we do here, though. People who do, they think, hey—easy come, easy go, casino makes money like that !” He snapped his fingers, then began to count off on them: “They don’t think about overhead. They don’t think about the cost of insurance and security. Computer systems, custom-designed systems. Maintenance and repairs. They don’t think about the salaries for the entertainment. The chef. Place like this has an executive chef. The golf pro, the tennis pro. They don’t think about the comps. They don’t think about the cost of training workers in the pit or in the cage—that’s highly skilled work with very high turnover.”
    “This is you saying the story’s made up.”
    “This is me saying that it’s a daydream they stuck a name on, apparently. You sit in that cage all day long surrounded by fucking stacks of cash, pardon my french. Why not? It’s like plucking one grape off the bunch at the greengrocer, right?”
    “So it didn’t happen.”
    “That would be a hell of a lot of money not to report stolen, wouldn’t you agree, Kat?”
    “I thought it was possible that a company transacting a lot of its business in cash might not want to call attention to its accounting practices.”
    “See, now you have that countinghouse view. Stacks of money. Bags of money. Must be something wrong with it.” He laughed warmly and with easy contempt. “It’s a very interesting thought, Kat. But our financials are on file with about eight zillion government and tribal authorities, though. We’re audited by a Big Four firm. Manitou Sands and South Richmond both.”
    Kat gave a little back-to-the-drawing-board shrug. “Guess that answers my question.” She popped a piece of tuna into her mouth and glanced at her watch. He hadn’t come close to disproving her conjecture, but Argenziano was weirdly right about the money. She didn’t know why money that couldn’t be traced or accounted for seemed illicit; why we felt upright and legitimate only when our money could be used to track us. It was as if we found ourselves whole in the record of our spending; could be held to account for our lives only by being held to account for our transactions.
    “Jackie Crackers.” Argenziano shook his head. “A name from the dead.”
    “Is he dead?” asked Kat.
    “Figure of speech,” said Argenziano, fixing her with the pair of eyes that she knew was the last thing James Patrick Sheehan had seen before an epidural hematoma had plunged him into the coma from which he’d never awoken.
    “Of course,” she said. “But then, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
    “Like I said, I haven’t heard anything about him since he left here.”
    “How long had you known him?”
    “Met him at P.S. 102, in Brooklyn. He was a couple of grades ahead of me. That was a million years ago.” Argenziano leaned back and looked into the middle distance, rather theatrically contemplating the past.
    “So you’re childhood friends.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you hired him.”
    “I did.”
    “But then he leaves and you never hear from him again. It’s odd.”
    “It happens.”
    “Did you have a falling-out?” asked Kat.
    He laughed. “No, nothing like that.”
    “And he left right after this theft is alleged to have taken place.”
    “Looks like we’re back where we started,” said Argenziano. He glanced at his watch.
    Kat flipped through her notebook and stopped at a