Prologue: Let's Stop Here
*SPOILERS*
Two thousand twenty-seven.
The office was locked. Nobody got in without a key, a fingerprint and a passcode, and tonight there was nobody in it but him and the mirror.
It sat at the top of the Jack Warner house in Beverly Hills, the estate the old Warner Bros. boss had built for himself in the thirties, with its terraced lawns and its long drive up from the gate. Alex had owned it for years.
On the wall behind him hung the group photographs: political and business leaders from a dozen countries, a photograph with Mandela, a dinner photograph with his ex-wife, Walter, David Cole and Robert Clivillés. Next to them were the early promotional posters, a young man with an eight-pack, grinning. In the honor corner stood the Grammy, the Oscar, the Emmy and the Tony. People in the business called that set an EGOT, and only a handful of people had ever collected all four.
At fifty-two he looked better than he had at forty. The hair was still dark, the face had filled out. He straightened the antler ornament that had hung in his first studio and had gone a little crooked, opened the hidden compartment, put in the code and his fingerprint, and took the real speech out of the safe. The one Marissa wrote was balled up in the wastebasket. He'd thrown it there forty minutes ago.
"America has arrived at the most dangerous crossroad of its life. I am not being alarmist. I have to stand up and do what I ought to do — as an American, and as the duty of the richest American—"
It didn't have any heat in it yet. He went over to the stereo and put on Dou Wei's "And You," the first track, a slow, cold Chinese rock song about absence and waiting, one voice and a guitar going round and round the same worry. Dou Wei had sung for Black Panther, the Beijing hard-rock band, at the end of the eighties, then walked away from it to make stranger, quieter records of his own. Then he poured himself a glass of the new Chivas Regal, the one finished in the Chinese sauce-aroma style.
"Okay."
He put his head back and drank it, licked his lips and let out a satisfied breath. He burped, poured a second one and carried it back to the mirror.
"I — the stage name is APLUS and my real name is Alexander Song, and I was born in a slum on the South Side of Chicago. When I first set foot on Manhattan, at fifteen, I was still wearing secondhand clothes. America made me—"
"And it was also America that very nearly destroyed me. I still carry six scars. I was shot six times — right, and so on, so on."
He knew that part too well and skipped it, and worked on the gestures instead.
"Firm," he told his own right hand, conducting it. "And warm enough to carry people with you."
He got into it, freer and freer. The liquor had dried out his throat and there was a small burn in his chest, but he hadn't had enough yet to feel it, so he took another sip.
"The problem of the gap between rich and poor has to be solved immediately. Immediately! And I am the richest, so I know this far too well. These people have more financial instruments than anybody to hide their money inside charities and trusts—"
There should be applause there. He waved slightly at the mirror, smiled and waited for it to finish.
"We will break up Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon—"
Amazon. He stumbled on that one. He'd owned Amazon stock since 1997, and a man promising to break it up had better sell his own shares before the press did the arithmetic for him. "Remind me to call the broker in the morning," he told the empty room, and kept going, because there were four more pages.
"We can't keep living on borrowed money. If the dollar keeps being spread this thin it'll be waste paper! Let the dollar be real money again — American gold, the way people used to call it — cough — cough, cough—"
He choked on himself. His chest had gone tight and hot and his face was red. He drank off what was left in the glass to wash it down and set it on the table harder than he meant to.
"Motherfucker, what is wrong with me?"
He coughed again into his hand, and there was a red thread lying across the palm.
"What the hell?"
Alex looked at it, honestly puzzled, then opened his mouth wide at the mirror. "Is something broken in there?"
Ring. Ring. Ring.
He went over, still frowning at his hand, and picked up the handset.
"I am going to kill you, APLUS! Waaaaah!"
His ex-wife was screaming down the line. "I am going to kill you!"
"What's wrong with your nerves this time?" Alex shouted back.
"You fucking ask me?"
"Can you not just say the thing, Mimi? It's always like this with you."
"The porn site! Go and look at it yourself! You've destroyed me — humiliated me in front of the whole world, at my age—"
"What porn—"
He was still wondering what she meant when he clicked through to the site she named. The front page was one enormous row of videos with APLUS in the keywords. He clicked on one with his name and Mariah Carey's and—
"Ho!"
It turned out to have been shot by the two of them.
His pupils tightened. "No. This is impossible!"
"Why has it leaked?" Mariah demanded.
"This is impossible! Shit—"
He clicked the one with Rashida and shut it in the same second. There were ones with Sherilyn, with Milla, with Amy, with Shakira, with Charlize. Even with Jodie Foster.
"I want an answer from you!"
"Uh. Uh—" Alex was trying to remember. All of it had been shot on old DV tape, a very long time ago. "There's only one way. I had those transferred and remastered at 2K years back. But I put perfect protection on them!"
"You— go and die!" Mimi swore at him. "The children could see this—"
"I only did it so—"
This was aimed at the election. The speech in the safe was the one he meant to give when he announced his run for president, and somebody had dumped the tapes a week before the announcement. Sink the candidate in a sex scandal before he's even declared. Alex was so angry his chest had shut. "So we'd have something good to remember! Those cassettes don't keep, the picture goes bad. Look at it — look how good your figure used to be—"
That was true, actually. The comments were going up faster than the page could draw them.
So Mariah Carey used to look like THAT?
APLUS is built. I'm so jealous.
Money really does buy everything.
"Oh my God!" Mimi wailed.
"It's a conspiracy. It has to be a conspiracy—"
He was running out of air and his head was a mess. Something sweet came up his throat and he coughed blood straight onto the screen.
"No — the wine—"
"What wine?"
"Call an ambulance, Mimi. I'm at the Jack Warner house!"
Then he worked it out. The tapes were only half of it. Somebody had got into the house and put something in the bottle of Chivas, and the tapes were there so that tomorrow's headlines would be about sex and nobody would ask how he died. He dropped the handset, turned and threw himself at the door. "Mike!"
His strength ran out before his hand reached the knob. He staggered, went down, and everything in his body hurt.
"Mike! Mike!"
His heart was hammering. He fought his way over onto his back. The ceiling had gone hazy.
"Help. You useless old man—"
Outside the door Old Mike's head hung and his hands lay soft in his lap. He didn't hear a thing.
Beep-beep-beep. Ring-ring-ring.
Every phone in the office was ringing itself to pieces, and the video on the computer rolled on into the next one by itself. Jodie Foster was laughing at a man in nothing but shorts who was dancing his way toward her with a great deal of hip in it. She poked him in the iron slab of his stomach and tucked a small green bill into his waistband as a tip.
"Ah ha ha!"
Halle and Nastassja Kinski were shaking with laughter, and off to the side Milla had collapsed on a sofa with her face in her hands.
Damn, is that Nastassja Kinski?
Who was holding the camera? Is that Sherilyn's voice?
APLUS had a hell of a time.
What a life, APLUS. Worth living.
The actresses of the nineties were so beautiful—
The song had come back around to the first verse.
The Gangster Disciples! For Lori!
Ratatatat!
In the haze he was back in the Harlem nightclub. On a shout, Lil Bunny started pouring fire onto the stage, and that young, crazed face was extremely vivid.
GD! GD! GD!
Lil Lori went backward under the stabbing of a man in prison blues, holding his chest, and the blood spread out fast underneath him. Alex had paid for that one.
Dile hung slumped over a cold industrial washing machine with a rope twisted out of his own clothes around his neck.
Bang bang bang!
A Black police officer emptied a magazine at Irv Gotti, whose hands were out the car window. The rounds went through his palms and he died right there with his hands hanging soft.
Tell APLUS I'll be waiting for him in hell.
Mottola finished saying it to Old Mike, and his hands dropped and swung outside the armrest.
Scenes came past at speed. On the cold floor, Alex shook his head with the last of what he had.
Fuck you!
Milla turned her head at the dressing room door and cursed him — green eyes, the little frown, unbearably cute — and slammed the door.
Hi.
Sherilyn took the wine glass, the famous face coming out of the shadow of a hotel corridor, her other hand holding the collar of her robe shut, leaning a little on the wall, greeting him softly.
To get this part, how many people do I have to sleep with?
Halle walked into the audition room looking like she'd smoked something, sick, and asked it without blinking.
Mm.
Mariah had the folding fan between her teeth and was hanging on him like an octopus in a box high above the floor of the opera house. In the dark her eyes were blurry and full of feeling, and the tenor on the stage went on and on.
Pff.
Amy's head knocked into Shakira's, and the two of them laughed at the same moment and looked up at him at the same moment.
All right.
Let's stop here.
His pupils widened slowly, and the light went out of his eyes.
Beep.
Four seconds.
Beep.
He lay in the dark with his eyes shut for a long time and listened to it. It was a stupid sound. He didn't want it to be the one.
Beep.
There was a television going somewhere above his feet with no sound on. It smelled like floor cleaner and warm plastic. A tube was pulling at the skin above his hip, and there was a weight across his chest that turned out, when he tried it, to be his own arm. It wouldn't lift.
He got one eye open.
A bracket in the corner. Two men in a boxing ring, silent. A clock over the door reading 1:40, and under the clock a small camera with a red light on it.
Alex looked at the hand lying on the blanket.
It was thin. The knuckles were smooth, there were no marks across the back of it, and it belonged to somebody who was twenty-two years old.
He lay there and didn't move and didn't make a sound.
Outside the door, a chair creaked. A heavy old man had been sitting in it a long time and had shifted in his sleep.
Alex turned his head an inch on the pillow toward the sound and stopped. It hurt. And there was the other thing.
Everyone was alive.
He shut his eye again.
Then he opened it, filled his chest as far as it would go, and used it.
"Mike."