THE SOUTHAMPTON
PRESS, September
22, 2005
This One’s a Book for All Seasons
By Fred
Volkmer
Even though the summer is over and the need for
a beach book has passed, I would still recommend Chris Knopf’s “The
Last Refuge,” a book for all seasons. It won’t
make you feel like you’ve left your I. Q. home, and
will keep you madly turning pages to find out what happens
next.
Chris Knopf lives in Southampton Village. He is
an award-winning copywriter, and one of the principals of Mintz & Hoke,
a Connecticut marketing communications firm. “The Last
Refuge” is
his first novel and it’s a humdinger. It takes place
in Southampton, and Mr. Knopf is clearly in communion with
what Lawrence Durrell
has called “the spirit of place,” in this case
the “last
refuge on earth” for his protagonist.
Sam Acquillo is
a man who has been defeated by life. He has dropped out of
his corporate job, divorced his wife, and
estranged his
only daughter. His lifestyle is definitely not the kind celebrated
in the glossy weekend magazines.
He lives in a small cottage
in North Sea, left to him by his parents. “…I
slept on the porch, but mostly I’d sit at the table
and smoke Camels, drink over-priced vodka and look at the
bay. I had a bargain going
with Nature. She was supposed to let me do this long enough
to get my fill, before shutting down all my internal organs,
and I
was supposed to worship her greater works, like the salt
water taffy hydrangeas at the edge of the lawn, the fishy,
smelly flavor
of the breeze and the gaudy red/purple sky that shattered
into a billion shards as it played across the Little Peconic
Bay.”
Acquillo describes his little patch of North Sea
affectionately as “a neighborhood
like this, in a place like this, is a little like a guy in a cheap suit
accidentally invited to a gallery opening.”
Acquillo
didn’t only inherit his cottage from his parents; he
also inherited his neighbor, Regina Broadhurst. She slept
with her windows open and he could
hear her moaning in the night. And he inherited from his father the obscurely
philanthropic urge to help her, even though she was hard to like.
“She would stand at the edge of the scrubby
bed of wild flowers that defined our property line,” Mr.
Knopf writes, “and release a single noun
the way you’d send forth a carrier pigeon. Something like ‘furnace,’ and
my father would swear at her and go fetch his tools. This was such a
routine occurrence that when she did it to me the first time I complied
without hesitation.”
One day he is troubled by an overpowering smell
that seems to emanate from Regina’s
house. He’s right about the smell. He finds her black and bloated
body face down in the water of her bathtub.
Acquillo has an engineer’s
sense of the way things work and knows when something in the design
doesn’t quite fit. Regina, he is convinced, never
took baths. She was too crippled with arthritis to be able to climb
into and out of the tub. And her towel and bathrobe were hanging
next to the shower stall
across the bathroom. He suspects foul play.
Why she was murdered is
the engineering problem of the moment. Finding who murdered her
becomes the moral imperative. It takes only a little
knowledge of crime fiction
to know that this down-at-the-heels refugee from corporate America,
walking the mean streets of Southampton, has an unwavering sense
of right and
wrong.
Acquillo has himself made the administrator of
Regina’s
estate. Her only relative is a foul-mouthed young punk who works
as a heavy equipment operator
for a local construction firm. He knows that Regina had no money,
so he doesn’t
want to be bothered with her estate.
One of the things that Acquillo
has discovered is that Regina not only didn’t
own her house—it’s owned by a mysterious company
called Bayside Holdings—but
also never paid a cent in rent. In pursuit of this knowledge
he makes himself more intimately acquainted with the wife of
the local bank manager in the hope
that she might shed some light on the subject. Romantic sparks
fly.
In fact, romance seems to be always almost in the
air. In further pursuit he contacts the aged former accountant
for
Bayside
Holdings, whose
daughter is
taking care of him. Acquillo notes that the daughter has exquisite
legs, and other superior
body parts, but a nose that “filled the living room.” Nevertheless,
he is attracted.
Then there’s the former lawyer for Bayside
Holdings, Jackie Swaitkowski, an attractive lawyer who smokes
too much pot, and who becomes his unlikely ally
in uncovering the truths about the firm.
Sam Acquillo can crack
wise with the best of them. I was reminded of no one so much
as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, or Robert Parker’s
Spenser on a good day. “I gave her [my hand], then had
a little trouble getting it back again.” On the older houses
in the estate section: “…the
turn of the century. That’s when people competed with
Versailles and called the results a cottage.” Of people
who lived in the estate section: “They
were a type of celestial being that God had marooned on earth
as a penalty for their vanity and arrogance.”
His sense of the relations between the locals and the second-home
owners is unerring. He describes a local man, a cop who is
on the case, Joe
Sullivan: “Some
of the old mix of duty and defiance was sketched across his
face. Local guys often have that look. A vague sense of being
one of the chosen, born to the South
Fork, and yet one of the conquered, bound to the service
of a powerful elite—an
occupation force who had swept in from the west, taking possession
of the land, plundering her gifts.”
By means of flashbacks
interleaved throughout the narrative we learn of Acquillo’s
earlier life, his marriage, his career, his daughter. It
is a parallel narrative portraying his personal devolution,
just as his trying to solve the murder becomes
a small act of redemption.
A reviewer must not be churlish
and reveal too much in reviewing a whodunit. Suffice it
to say that at the heart of the mystery
is the
immense attraction
of real estate and its value. Some people will kill for
it.
Mr. Knopf is a superb stylist with an unerring
sense of narrative. His work has been compared to that of Elmore
Leonard, yet
his moral sense
is clearly
more
akin to that of the heroes of Chandler and Hammett. I
hope
we have not heard the last of Sam Acquillo. |
