The Diviners (29 page)

He said, “Lois, I have to tell you something. I know we don’t know each other all that well, but I feel like I have to tell you just the same.”

She said, wiping off her chin, “Don’t you give me any bad news now. I don’t do this kind of thing very often, and it is not fair to give me any bad news right now, because I just acted like I was a porn star. So don’t give me any bad news.”

What he said was that he was an embezzler. It took a good thirty seconds for the information to sink in.

“You’re a what?”

“I’m an embezzler,” Arnie said. “Or I have been. I’ve been an embezzler, a thief. And God help me.”

If she were going to reach a preliminary conclusion, a snap judgment, her conclusion would have been that every good thing contains its opposite. The foul thing is all mixed up with the fair thing, they’re next-door neighbors, and any time you have a good afternoon, you can bet your last dollar that some nightmare is next on your schedule. You feel warm feelings for a person, and right behind those warm feelings will be a big challenge.

What Arnie did, apparently, was set up these fictitious corporations on these islands in the Caribbean. It was just one scam at first, one fictitious subsidiary for one particular corporation, except that no one knew that it was a wholly owned subsidiary and that it didn’t even exist. No one knew. There was no office in the Cayman Islands with a gently rotating ceiling fan and a rack of mainframes and an excellent view of that blue green water. The wholly owned subsidiary was Arnie’s creation, on paper and nowhere else, and it was so successful that soon he was setting up a second one. In this second instance, he had the parent company selling portions of itself to a subsidiary corporation and booking the sale as income and using the sale proceeds to set up another subsidiary on these islands in the Caribbean, on an island called St. Jude, appropriately enough, an island that didn’t even exist. He had even started making up geography now, in addition to office buildings. And this wholly owned subsidiary was buying and trading futures, using derivatives and other fiscal transactions that Lois didn’t understand because she had always worked for small arts-related organizations.

Arnie got out of the consulting business because the rats were starting to jump off the ship at this one particular company, which company was under investigation for inflating the dollar value of some of its transactions, and that meant that soon they were going to start looking at the fine print, and Arnie didn’t want to be anywhere around when that happened. And yet when he set up his own company, he was using his references from before, and for some reason he was again landing the sorts of clients who would be attracted to certain kinds of transactions, a fictitious business with fictitious offices and fictitious transactions, or maybe a company that doesn’t make a product but just buys and sells ideas about products. These were all businesses where the rats were jumping off the ship. This one company, Arnie said, was being run by people from Salt Lake City, all Mormons, and their company had ties with the FBI, though that didn’t mean it wasn’t dirty. He got out. Except that he couldn’t get out entirely, because what was he going to do? Suddenly there were no clients at all, and the phone didn’t ring, and if it did, he didn’t answer it because he was afraid that it was the FBI, and so what he started doing, because he had time on his hands, was that he started taking some of the business money, the stake that had enabled his consulting business, and he began moving it around. Day-trading, that’s what they called it.

When he had lost that money, what he had to do in order to keep his business was to write a few things onto the books of this one client, the venture capital company from Salt Lake City. He saddled them with some bad trades. He concealed it all on their books as a business expense.

Now what he wanted was that Lois should forgive him for these things, because he knew what he’d done. Women had this magical capacity, according to Arnie, to forgive a man, and maybe it wouldn’t change the situation, but he’d feel a little better for a few hours. He wanted to go legit, he said, in the hotel by LaGuardia Airport, and he wanted her to see that he was a man who had no choice but to do what he did, namely, write off fifty thousand shares of a fly-by-night biotech stock onto the books of a Mormon venture capital company. Sooner or later those Mormons were going to find out. His story was confused; his despair was violent. His mood swung back and forth all over the place, on the bed in the motel.

When he’d calmed down a little, they went to sleep.

In the morning, Lois DiNunzio slipped out of the motel early, because she slept fitfully, and she paid the bill and left Arnie Lovitz there, temporarily peaceful. She drove back to Astoria and got herself into a clean outfit for work. Where another woman would have cried on that drive, on account of how passionately she had felt the night before, Lois didn’t cry, because she wasn’t the sort of woman who cried over things like failure. You’d end up crying too often.

Means of Production was in one of its flush periods. The market was “top ticking.” That’s the kind of thing Arnie said. It seemed as if there was more money around for their kinds of movies, or this is what Vanessa told her whenever she called Lois into her office. Means of Production was on the gravy train with a Dutch conglomerate, with the guy who helped pioneer some programming language for servers, and with some French producers for a film about Catholic priests molesting kids in the suburbs.
Cauldron of Belief,
it was called. Lois thought the subject of this movie was appalling. She thought the movie painted a bad picture of her church because it claimed that the higher-ups were always protecting the lower-downs, that they didn’t care what these priests did.

It was the day after Arnie had said what he said. Lois didn’t have the usual DiNunzio detachment, the kind that comes from losing your mother to congestive heart failure and taking care of your younger brothers, those spoiled brats. And so she made the mistake of saying to Vanessa that she didn’t think Catholic priests really did stuff like that. She reminded Vanessa that the church gave a lot of money to the poor, and it was a place for people to go who didn’t have anything, and anyway the church was the sum of all its parts and it didn’t need to be demonized just because of a couple of rogue priests who couldn’t keep their privates under their robes.

“Leave the development issues to me,” Vanessa said.

“I’m just saying.”

“Have you read the script?”

“I don’t need to read it,” Lois said. A big mistake.

“When I start developing a movie about accountants, I’ll be sure to call you in.”

She was eating, of course. Vanessa was always eating when she was in a mood for a tirade. Today it was jelly beans. Vanessa turned her back on Lois, looking in the direction of the window, toward the deluge.

Lois said, “Your boorish displays don’t wash with me. I’ve heard it all before. You can say what you like, but I don’t pay attention to your rudeness. I’ve worked for you for two years. I’ve made sure you could keep the company going. I’ve kept the rest of the girls in line, and I make sure they are okay when you’re behaving like a little child. So you watch your mouth with me.”

Vanessa needed a couple of breaths to really get going, but when she got going, it was as if she were a superhero swelling up in some fabulous demonstration of strength from the sheer force of her dissatisfaction.

“You’re the
accountant.
You’re like the back part of the set, where all the two-by-fours are showing. You’re the classic example of a person who’s never had a creative thought and who never will have a creative thought, and that may play well at the big studios, where they have not had a creative thought in twenty-five years, but in here, in this office, it means that we tolerate you. We tolerate you here just because we need someone to cover the books. But don’t ever get the idea that your opinion is welcome or that it matters, because we barely recognize that you’re here. You were hired to do the numbers and to shut up. And, for the record, I’m a Catholic, too, in case you haven’t noticed, and every day that I have failed to slump in the pews of the Catholic Church is a day that I’ve improved as a person. I could show you some of the spots where I was personally scarred for life by the priests and nuns I’ve known, but I’m not going to because you’re not smart enough for that particular conversation, the one in which I get stronger and begin to overcome these things through the vitality of
disgust.
I’m the one developing
Cauldron of Belief.
I’m the one who story-edited a story where a priest in Wisconsin abuses a bunch of boys and tries to get away with it, okay? And every day that they shoot the movie, I feel a little bit better, just on principle, but also because every day that they shoot that movie, I’m getting
paid.
And so are you. And so are the women out there in the hall, right? They’re getting paid now because this movie is being made, because some French people hate the church as much as I do. So let’s collect the checks, and let’s deposit them, and let’s bill this particular conversation as a general administrative expense, all right? Now get the fuck out of my office.”

What followed did not include any slamming of doors, nor any bitter tears. Lois DiNunzio simply walked out of Vanessa’s office and back into her own, passing, on the way, Annabel and Jeanine. They were blushing at what they’d overheard. But Lois didn’t pay any attention to this because she’d already made her decision. She wasn’t at her desk fifteen minutes before she’d cut a check made out to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the amount of a thousand dollars, which, as accountant, she was empowered to sign in the absence of Vanessa Meandro, who was leaving that afternoon for the West Coast to sit in on the beginning of editing on
Cauldron of Belief.
The check was backdated by one day. It was legal tender in every one of the fifty states. She took a package of foreign cigarettes from her purse, and she rode the elevator down to the promenade, and she smoked for a few minutes, and then, with a lightness in her step, she carried the check across the street to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and slipped it into one of the little boxes where people leave coins in exchange for an illuminated candle. Lois said a little prayer, the gist of which was that Vanessa Meandro should be struck with grace, as if grace were a safe falling out of the sky, and should, in that dizzy experience of being so concussed, suffer with a love for her fellow mankind and womankind that was so overwhelming that her present life would be rendered unlivable because of it. And also, dear Lord, please make her business acumen seize up and make her smitten with some fabulous unrequited longing for some grossly unpleasant and homely person. That is my prayer, amen.

That was maybe twelve weeks ago. And in those weeks, during which Vanessa got involved in a fight to the death with the director and editor of
Cauldron of Belief,
and during which the market began its unmistakable downward spiral, Lois felt like a robin picking worms from the lawn of life. She was happy, and even her neighbors in Astoria remarked on how happy she seemed. It was a good feeling at first, because she could understand Arnie now, as she was a fellow embezzler, and she would try to comfort him, and she could take him out to see the play-offs at Shea featuring his beloved Al Leiter, and in this way Arnie could try to get comfortable with the idea that men in trench coats weren’t following him each and every day. Lois felt happy because she was now charging administrative expenses to various French people that were nonetheless going straight into the coffers of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, twice a month, to the tune of about six thousand dollars, bottom line.

It had been a good fiscal quarter for Means of Production. Or at least for Lois. It was all good until she got the call from Arnie in late October. One of the online brokerage firms that Arnie used was calling in some short positions. Shorts were a satisfying way of seeing the world. He loved looking for companies that were fraudulent. It was the fraud in him that loved thinking about all his fellow frauds. She’d go over to his apartment in Yonkers, and he’d be calling up reporters, telling them that some company called Primadon or something was intimidating its wholesalers. He’d be smoking and laughing about the whole thing. Until this particular call came. He needed to cover this short, on Interstate Mortuary Services, a large-scale, publicly traded mortuary company that offered family burial plans at bargain rates and shipping across state lines, but which had not even checked the federal statutes on interstate shipping of caskets and dead bodies. A great company for Arnie. But apparently they were about to be bought out in a major deal.

“Lois,” he said, “I don’t want to put you through this.”

Living with Arnie was like plugging the dike of truth. You got one set of holes plugged, but you could see the tempest-tossed sea breaking through someplace else. Still, Lois and Arnie were an item now, and Lois didn’t give up easily. That’s just not what the women of the extended DiNunzio clan did. They were stick-around girls. They were loyal and they were tough. She picked up a towel from the floor of his mildewy bathroom. She carried it to the hamper in the closet. She fetched spray-on bleach.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I’ve heard that one before.”

Arnie said, “Just look at me.” And here he gestured at MSNBC on the cable television and the scrolling of stock prices as though the scrolling of prices were somehow identical with him.

For a moment she was impatient: “Arnie, act like you can do something about your predicament. Go out there and make fifty thousand dollars somehow, and show me and the world how you can do it. People have overcome a lot worse things. People who know less than you do. Be yourself and do the thing you can do. Create wealth!”

Lois felt sort of hollow even as she was saying the words. If you tipped over a rock and looked for chicanery and betrayal, you’d find these things under every rock. In every closet there was fraudulence secreted away, next to the frilly dresses. Fraudulence was there. Betrayal was there. And fraudulence was always in greatest supply where righteousness camped out. Arnie agreed with her sentiment. He agreed that he was going to
try,
as he always said, he was going to
try
to find the money in some legitimate way, like by selling cars or something, something he could do with his bounteous charm.