My father’s benefactor. My brother’s mentor. My own employer. The founder of my family’s feast. The friend of presidents. The owner of media outlets. The funder of political campaigns and charities and popular movements. And he was the one who had brought me here at gunpoint. He was the one who had dispatched that murderer to snuff out Sean Gunther like a candle. I couldn’t take it in right away, not fully, but I understood that somehow the entire story of my life had just been rewritten.
As if in a dream, I stepped up onto the platform where the table was set. I waited there for Orosgo to walk back through the night to me. It occurred to me in the midst of my confusion that when I had searched for Another Kingdom on my phone, I had used the Oh-Gee search engine. Oh-Gee—that name—it was a cute little way of branding the engine as part of the Orosgo empire. That confirmed my suspicions about how they knew to come after me. They had been monitoring the engine—Orosgo’s engine—waiting for someone to make the search.
The little old man stepped up onto the dining platform with me. He lay a paternal hand on my shoulder as he had with the guard. He smiled a charming smile. It was almost possible to forget that he had had a man killed in cold blood. Almost possible.
“Sit. Sit,” he said.
We sat. Me at the foot of the table and him at the head, the candles and the chandelier burning brightly in between. A refreshing breeze came in from every side and was toasted to a mellow perfection by the outdoor heaters. It was a charming place to dine.
And, in fact, I was hungry. I’d eaten almost nothing at my dinner with my parents, and now, in spite of everything, I was ready to dig in. There were several courses, all of them very delicate and delicious. An elaborate mix of lettuces with pralines and chèvre and pears. Thin pastries filled with meat-like somethings and shredded vegetables with an exquisite sauce. Strawberries dipped in chocolate for dessert. Each course brought to the table by a brace of waiters who seemed to shimmer in and out of the shadows as if they were shadows themselves. Through it all, there was wine too, a rich red wine so good and so refreshing I had to exert all my will to keep from drinking myself silly. I had to keep reminding myself that I was dining with a billionaire who had men snuffed out with casual indifference. It seemed wise to keep my wits about me.
So we ate and drank, and all the while, Orosgo talked. Talked and talked and talked ceaselessly. I remembered my brother, Rich, had said something to me about this once.
“Billionaires talk. They don’t listen,” he had told me—ruefully, but not without humor and affection. “It’s true of every billionaire I’ve ever met. It’s what their money buys them: the right to hold forth. Why shouldn’t they? They know they’re smarter than you. If they’re not smarter, how come they have so much more money?”
Myself, I’d never met any billionaires before, so I had no way of knowing if Rich’s observation applied to the breed in general or just to this guy. But it sure applied to this guy. All through dinner, his monologue rambled on—on and on almost without pause. Rich had made this billionaire logorrhea sound like an endearing eccentricity. It wasn’t. It was unpleasant. First, because of the monotony, the one voice droning. Even a billionaire ought to shut the hell up and let someone else say something now and then. Second, because of the suspense. He’d already had one man killed tonight for not having the answers he wanted. What was he going to do to me, and how long would I have to wait to find out? And third, after he’d gone on for a while, it became clear to me that Serge Orosgo—the founder of my father’s chair, the leader of my brother’s institute, the owner of the studio where I worked—was not just evil but batshit crazy too.
“Memory. Fascinating,” the old man was saying. He rolled the red wine in his bowl-like glass so that its mulberry depths reflected the yellow candlelight. “As one gets older, one begins to suspect that many of the things one remembers may not be, strictly speaking, true. Essential, even formative chapters of one’s biography may be whole-cloth inventions. And yet if these false memories shaped you, aren’t they real enough? Real enough to have an effect on the world, at any rate?”
I nodded attentively, because it felt like nodding attentively was my role here. But I was not attentive, not really. I was too busy wondering whether I was going to die tonight, and wondering also what it meant to my own memories to realize that my entire family had been in orbit around this murderer since I was a child. I couldn’t process that and listen to him and fear for my life all at the same time.
Orosgo took another sip of wine. I had to wait in silence for him to continue. I picked at my meat-filled—what was it called?—phyllo pastry, that’s it—just to have something to do. Finally the billionaire emerged from his glass with a satisfied gasp. He continued.
“A perfect example. I remember—at least, I seem to remember—a conversation I had many years ago, a conversation with a strange, pale, starved, rather monkish person wearing a sort of robe with a … a whatchem—” He drew a circle around his head with his free hand, trying to describe what he meant. “A cowl. Just like a monk would wear. Who could he have been? What was the occasion? I no longer know. I remember we were in my dacha outside of Moscow, so it must have been before I emigrated but after the fall—the fall of the Soviet Union—because I must’ve already made my fortune in the privatization, you see. And we were speaking about that, about one’s aspirations, one’s ambitions: what’s left to strive for after one has made so much money that any more would make no difference.”
He bowed low over his plate. His wizened hands worked his knife and fork. He lifted a bite straight to his mouth in the European fashion. He went on talking even as he chewed.
“I can remember we talked all night, sitting side by side before the fire. But the words themselves … they’re faded, vague. Was I describing my desires, or was he offering me advice? I’m not sure, but at some point one of us articulated a … a vision, call it: the idea that one might write one’s name upon the human singularity, one might be enshrined in every grateful heart forever as the architect of the era of perfected man. The Orosgo Age.” He said these words with irony, but there was no irony in his wide, bright, infant eyes, neither the first time he said them nor when he repeated them again, “The Orosgo Age,” savoring them on his tongue as he had savored the wine. “What would it cost? That was the gist of the conversation. To be that man? What would I be willing to give in the reckoning?”
Somewhere during this soliloquy, we finished the main course. Two waiters appeared from the edge of night, removed our plates, and evanesced. I couldn’t help but be aware that every bite, every course brought us closer to the end of dinner. It was like watching the sand run out of an hourglass. And what would happen then? The next time I lifted my wine, I couldn’t hide the fact my hand was trembling.
Orosgo, meanwhile, dabbed his lips with his napkin. Sat back in his chair. Somehow he managed to seem relaxed and intense at the same time. “My point is—that conversation—I can’t remember who it was with or when exactly it happened or even if it truly did happen. And yet it set the entire direction of my life from that point forward, which makes it real enough. And now, of course …” He made a nonchalant gesture, tilting his head, lifting his hand, as if he were confessing some charming vulnerability. “Now that I am approaching the end of my life, it comes back to me. He comes back to me. In dreams. Or are they dreams? A figure in the dark corridor. A face in the mirror that is not my face. Someone standing behind me. Even his voice. Indistinguishable whispers at first. Old age, I told myself. But they’re louder each time. More real. More insistent. The reckoning. The debt must be paid.”
Again, two waiters oscillated in from nowhere and set the chocolate-covered strawberries before us. And when they had vibrated back into nothingness, Orosgo lifted his wine glass again and said, “I need that book, Austin.”
I don’t know whether I’d been mesmerized by the monotony of his jabbering or whether I’d lost the train of his thought or what. But those words took me off guard co
mpletely. They rang in that charming hilltop dining space like a bell, like a great tower bell knelling the hour of decision. Whatever clouds of inattention had gathered in my consciousness, they were shaken away and gone, all gone, just like that. I sat there. I stared at him. I thought: What has he been saying all this time? I didn’t know. It had seemed random, meditative, half-meaningless, and now … it turned out to be—what?—his explanation of why I was here? Of why he had had Sean Gunther killed? Of why he would kill me after we’d enjoyed the chocolate-covered strawberries?
“The book,” was all I could choke out, echoing him. And though I had tried to go easy on the wine, I had to drink some now to keep the inside of my mouth from going dry as dust.
He nodded, still leaning back, still relaxed—and also not relaxed, intense, his eyes so wide, so bright, that I wondered if he was afraid too, maybe even more afraid than I was. “Another Kingdom. You were searching for it, Austin. Why?”
It was at this point I felt a presence behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw Billiard Ball standing just beyond the dining space in the half-lit dark. He had his arms crossed on his chest and his eyes trained on my head. Dull, merciless, strangely witty eyes, judging just where he would strike when it came time to deal me pain.
I faced Orosgo again, licking what felt like ashes off my lips. “It was submitted to me to read at Mythos—where I work.”
“I know where you work.”
“But it was withdrawn before I had a chance to read it.”
“I know that too.” How did he know that? Could he look into my e-reader? I figured he could. “Who submitted it?” he asked. “Do you know?”
“Sean Gunther.” It hurt to speak the author’s name to the man who had had him executed. “But he did it at the request of the author. Ellen Evermore. That’s what he told me.”
“She submitted it. And she decided to withdraw it?” Orosgo asked.
“That’s what he said.”
I knew he was about to ask me why—why she had withdrawn it—and in the second before he did ask, I suddenly realized why. Global. That’s what Gunther had said when I asked him. Ellen Evermore must have realized that by submitting the book to Mythos, she had sent the book into the realm of Global Pictures and therefore within the grasp of Orosgo. That had to be it. She knew he was after it, and she didn’t want him to have it.
“Why?” said Orosgo. “Why did she withdraw it?”
I hesitated. Should I tell him what I thought? I remembered the photograph of Ellen Evermore in Gunther’s phone. I remembered the serenity and humor and wisdom in her face. I looked at the desiccated surprised-baby face of the billionaire across from me. Not hard to tell who the good guys and bad guys were in this story. Not hard to know which side to be on.
“I don’t know,” I lied. Because screw him. He was probably going to kill me no matter what I said.
“And why did you search for it?”
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? How far would I get into my absurd tale of being transported to Galiana before Billiard Ball knocked me senseless? Luckily, I remembered the story I’d made up to use on Candy Filikin at the office. I used it again.
“The book stuck with me. What little I’d read. I thought it might make a good movie. I’d been looking for a new direction.”
“Because your agent rejected your last script.”
God, he knew everything. One misguided lie, and he’d catch me cold. “That’s right,” I said.
“And is that the only reason?”
“Yeah, sure. What else could there be?”
I thought I saw an expression of frustration, maybe anger, cross his plastic mask of a face, but it was gone in a moment. “And so you went to Sean Gunther,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“But he couldn’t tell you where the book was or where the author was.”
“He didn’t know.”
“No. He didn’t. And so you don’t know.”
Well, now we were right down to it, weren’t we? This was the point in the conversation where Gunther had been shot—shot dead for not knowing the answer to Orosgo’s question. I wanted to ask if I was going to be shot dead too, but it seemed such a weak, pathetic thing to say. So instead I said, “Your man. Or whatever he is. The girly guy with the cat face.”
“Sera.”
“Sara?”
“Sera. Short for Serafim. An old Russian name. I gave it to him when he was a child.”
For some reason, these words sickened me, but fortunately I didn’t have time to figure out why.
“He killed him,” I said. “Gunther. Sera shot him.”
Orosgo never took his over-wide baby-blue eyes off me. He picked up his wine without looking away, drank without looking away. “Mm,” he said. “He does that. When I ask him to. Sometimes when I don’t.” He put the wine down again, still without looking at anything but me. Man, those eyes were wide! “I think he likes it, really. I think he pretends the victim is me. Daddy issues. Why? Does it trouble you, his killing Mr. Gunther?”
“Well, it is murder,” I managed to say.
He shrugged. “Murder. Don’t be a small man, Austin. We’re talking about big things. Humanity perfected. The world that is to be.”
The Orosgo Age, I thought, trying to put the pieces of this insane conversation together.
“Sera says you struck him,” Orosgo said.
“I did.”
“That was unwise.”
“I didn’t plan it. I wasn’t thinking. He made me angry.”
“Ha! Yes. He can do that. But unfortunately, he wishes to kill you now. Actually, killing you is only the last thing he wishes to do to you.”
Since he raised the issue, this seemed like a good time to ask the question that was really foremost in my mind. “Are you going to let him? Kill me? Is that what this is all about?” I indicated the table between us. “My last supper?”
Orosgo seemed to give the issue a moment of serious consideration. “The truth is, I can’t always control what he does. Our relationship is complex. The moral authority shifts back and forth, depending on who committed the latest sin against whom.” He leaned forward, pinning me in my seat with a no-nonsense glare. He rapped the tabletop with his index finger. “But I do want that book, Austin, and he knows that.”
Well, that was clear enough: if I gave him what he wanted, he might be able to talk Kitten Face out of revenge. Maybe? For a while?
“I don’t know what I can do,” I said. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
There was a soft shifting sound behind me. Orosgo’s eyes lifted to the place where I knew Billiard Ball waited. Almost imperceptibly, the billionaire shook his head no. Whatever the bald thug was about to do to me, he didn’t do.
Orosgo plucked a chocolate-covered strawberry from the dessert cup before him. He lifted it to his eyes and examined it, a jeweler with a gem, or maybe a cat with a mouse. “Your family have been friends of mine for a long time, Austin,” he said.
These words sickened me too, sickened me more, and chilled me. “Is that just a coincidence?” The question occurred to me so suddenly I asked it without thinking. “That they know you, work for you, and I got the book? Did that just happen?”
“I doubt it,” he said, and he ate the strawberry. “But that’s not my point,” he said around the mouthful. He swallowed. “My point is only that I want to be your friend too. I want you to be my friend, like your father and mother and your brother are. I don’t want anything unpleasant to happen to you, son.”
“Unpleasant like with Gunther,” I said.
“Nothing unpleasant happened to Mr. Gunther until there was no longer any chance that he could help me. Is there still any chance that you could help me, Austin?”
By this time, I felt I was beginning to make some sort of sense of things, to fashion some sort of narrative out of it. It was such a bizarre narrative—so bizarre and so surreal—that it was hard for me to take it seriously. This long-ago ma
n with the cowl he’d talked about, for instance—was he real? And if he was, what exactly was the conversation they had had all night by the dacha fireplace? What was this mysterious reckoning that was coming? Would finding the book somehow keep it at bay? And did I have some cosmic part to play in the whole thing? Or was I just a fool who had been sucked into the whirlpool of his delusions?
“This must be a very valuable book,” I said.
His surprised-baby eyes looked even more surprised and more babyish. “A thing is worth what someone is willing to pay for it,” he said. “So for me, yes, in this case, it’s priceless. Which brings me back to my original question. Do you think there’s any chance you might be able to recover Another Kingdom for me?”
He was watching me closely as I thought over my answer. Not that there was any question what my answer would be. We both knew I was going to say yes—yes, I would try to find the book for him. What else could I say? He had made it clear he would have me killed if I refused. The only real mystery was whether I would be lying or not when I said it. That’s what he was watching me so closely for. That’s what he wanted to see.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do my best, anyway.” And yes, I was lying. That is, I was going to go on looking for the book. I had to. It was my only hope of explaining my interworldly condition, my only hope of curing it before I got myself killed by some fantastic Galianan beast or other. But if I did find the book, there was no chance I would give it to him. Not willingly anyway. Whatever trouble Orosgo had gotten himself into with the cowl guy, I’d be damned if I was going to ransom him out of it.
He continued to study me for a long moment after I spoke. Did he believe me? Could he tell what I was thinking? He had hacked into my search engine, after all, and my phone records and my e-reader. Could he hack into my mind as well? Could he tell I was not like my parents and my brother? That I was not his friend but his enemy?
Another Kingdom Page 14
