Part 4 (1/2)

The back-story of events on Galileo-1 had taken on a proliferating life of its own. Never before had Solanka needed-wanted-to go into such detail. Fiction had him in its grip, and the figurines themselves began to feel secondary: not ends in themselves, but means. He, who had been so dubious about the coming of the brave new electronic world, was swept off his feet by the possibilities offered by the new technology, with its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear progression, a bias that had already bred in its users a greater interest in variation than in chronology. This freedom from the clock, from the tyranny of what happened next, was exhilarating, allowing him to develop his ideas in parallel, without worrying about sequence or step-by-step causation. Links were electronic now, not narrative. Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized, an exact mirror of the divine experience of time. Until the advent of hyperlinks, only G.o.d had been able to see simultaneously into past, present, and future alike; human beings were imprisoned in the calendar of their days. Now, however, such omniscience was available to all, at the merest click of a mouse.

On the website, as it came into being, visitors would be able to wander at will between the project's different storylines and themes: Zameen of Rijk's search for Akasz Kronos, Zameen vs vs. the G.o.ddess of Victory, the Tale of Two Dollmakers, Mogol the Baburian, Revolt of the Living Dolls I: The Fall of Kronos, Revolt of the Living Dolls II (This Time It's War), The Humanization of the Machines vs vs. the Mechanization of the Humans, the Battle of the Doubles, Mogol Captures Kronos (or Is It the Dollmaker?), the Recantation of the Dollmaker (or Was It Kronos?), and the grand finale, Revolt of the Living Dolls III: The Fall of the Mogol Empire. Each of these in turn would lead to further pages, plunging ever deeper into the multidimensioned world of the Puppet Kings, offering games to play, video segments to watch, chat rooms to enter, and, naturally, things to buy.

Professor Solanka was intoxicated for hours on end by the Puppet Kings' six-pack of ethical dilemmas; was at once fascinated and revolted by the emerging personality of Mogol the Baburian, who turned out to be a competent poet, expert astronomer, pa.s.sionate cultivator of gardens, but also a soldier of Coriola.n.u.s-like blood l.u.s.t, and the most cruel of princes; and was deliriously entranced by the shadow-play possibilities (intellectual, symbolic, confrontational, mystificational, even s.e.xual) of the two sets of doubles, the encounters between ”real” and ”real,” ”real” and ”double,” ”double” and ”double,” which blissfully demonstrated the dissolution of the frontiers between the categories. He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window, and thus came to understand what Mila Milo had meant when she said that this was where she felt most alive. Here, inside the electricity, Malik Solanka emerged from the half-life of his Manhattan exile, traveled daily to Galileo-1, and began, once more, to live.

Ever since Little Brain's censored remarks to Galileo Galilei, questions of knowledge and power, surrender and defiance, ends and means, had gnawed at Solanka. ”Galileo moments,” those dramatic occasions when life asked the living whether they would dangerously stand by the truth or prudently recant it, increasingly seemed to him to lie close to the heart of what it was to be human. Man, I wouldn't have taken that stuff lying down. I'd have started a f.u.c.king revolution, me Man, I wouldn't have taken that stuff lying down. I'd have started a f.u.c.king revolution, me. When the possessor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might one discover a deeper strength in oneself and lay the despot low? When the soldiers of truth launched a thousand s.h.i.+ps and burned the topless towers of the lie, should they be seen as liberators or had they, by using their enemy's weapons against him, themselves become the scorned barbarians (or even Baburians) whose houses they had set on fire? What were the limits of tolerance? How far, in the pursuit of the right, could we go before we crossed a line, arrived at the antipodes of ourselves, and became wrong?

Near the climax of the back-story of Galileo-1, Solanka embedded one such defining moment. Akasz Kronos, a fugitive from his own creations, was captured in great old age by the Mogol's soldiers and brought in chains to the Baburian court. By this time the Puppet Kings and the Baburians had been at war for a long generation, locked in a stalemate as debilitating as the Trojan War, and ancient Kronos, as creator of the cyborgs, was blamed for all their deeds. His explanation of his creations' arrival at autonomy was rejected by the Mogol with a snort of disbelief. There followed, in the pages Solanka wrote, a long dispute between the two men on the nature of life itself-life as created by a biological act, and life as brought into being by the imagination and skill of the living. Was life ”natural,” or could the ”unnatural” be said to be alive? Was the imagined world necessarily inferior to the organic one? Kronos was still a creative genius in spite of his downfall and long penurious concealment, and he proudly defended his cyborgs: by every definition of sentient existence, they had grown into full-fledged life-forms. Like h.o.m.o faber h.o.m.o faber, they were users of tools; like h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens, they reasoned and engaged in moral debate. They could attend to their ills and reproduce their species, and by shedding him, their maker, they had set themselves free. The Mogol rejected these arguments out of hand. A malfunctioning dishwasher did not become a busboy, he argued. By the same token, a rogue puppet was still a doll, a renegade robot was still a robot. This was not a fit direction for their discussions to take. Rather, it was for Kronos to recant his theories and then provide the Baburian authorities with the technological data required to bring the Peekay machines under control. If he refused, the Mogol added, changing the tenor of the conversation, he would of course be tortured and, if necessary, torn limb from limb.

The ”recantation of Kronos,” his declaration that machines had no souls whereas man was immortal, was greeted by the deeply religious Baburian people as a mighty victory. Armed with information provided by the broken scientist, the antipodean army created new weapons, which paralyzed the cyborgs' neurosystems and rendered them inoperative. (The term ”killed” was forbidden; what was not alive could not be dead.) The Peekay forces fled in disarray, and a Baburian victory looked a.s.sured. The Dollmaker cyborg himself lay among the fallen. Too egotistical-too ”consistent”-to have created any replicas of himself, the Dollmaker was still one of a kind; thus his character was erased with his termination. The only person who could have re-created him was Akasz Kronos, whose fate was obscure. Perhaps the Mogol killed him, even after his abject surrender; or perhaps he was blinded like Tiresias and permitted, by way of further humiliation, to wander the world, begging bowl in hand, ”speaking the truth that no man would believe,” while from every quarter he heard tales of the collapse of his own great enterprises, of the reduction of the great Kronosian Puppet Kings, the sentient cyborgs from Rijk, the first machines ever to cross the frontier between mechanical ent.i.ties and living beings, into piles of useless junk. And while n.o.body would now believe the truth that he had himself denied, he himself had no choice but to accept the reality of the catastrophe that his own cowardice, his lack of moral fort.i.tude, had brought about.

At the eleventh hour, however, the tide turned. The Puppet Kings regrouped under a new, dual leaders.h.i.+p. Zameen of Rijk and her cyborg counterpart the G.o.ddess of Victory joined forces, like twin Ranis of Jhansi rising up against imperialist oppression, or like Little Brain in a new, double-trouble incarnation, leading her promised revolution. They used their combined scientific brilliance to build electronic s.h.i.+elds against the new Baburian weapons. Then, with Zameen and the G.o.ddess at their head, the Peekay army began a major offensive and invested the Mogol's citadel. Thus began the Siege of Baburia, which would not end for a generation or more ...

In the world of the imagination, in the creative cosmos that had begun with simple doll-making and then proliferated into this many-armed, multimedia beast, it wasn't necessary to answer questions; far better to find interesting ways of rephrasing them. Nor was it necessary to end the story-indeed, it was vital to the project's long-term prospects that the tale be capable of almost indefinite prolongation, with new adventures and themes being grafted onto it at regular intervals and new characters to sell in doll, toy, and robot form. The backstory was a skeleton that periodically grew new bones, the framework for a fictional beast capable of constant metamorphosis, which fed on every sc.r.a.p it could find: its creator's personal history, sc.r.a.ps of gossip, deep learning, current affairs, high and low culture, and the most nouris.h.i.+ng diet of all-namely, the past. The ransacking of the world's storehouse of old stories and ancient histories was entirely legitimate. Few Web users were familiar with the myths, or even the facts, of the past; all that was needed was to give the old material a fresh, contemporary twist. Trans.m.u.tation was all. The Puppet Kings website went on-line and at once achieved and sustained a high level of ”hits.” Comments flooded in, and the river of Solanka's imagination was fed from a thousand streams. It began to swell and grow.

Because the work never settled, never stopped being a work in progress but remained in a condition of perpetual revolution, a degree of untidiness was inevitable. The histories of characters and places, even their names, sometimes changed as Solanka's vision of his fict.i.tious universe clarified and sharpened. Certain storyline possibilities turned out to be stronger than he had at first realized, and were greatly amplified. The Zameen/G.o.ddess of Victory strand was the most important of these. In the initial conception, Zameen had simply been a beauty, not a scientist at all. Later, however, when Solanka-prompted, he had to concede, by Mila Milo-understood how important Zameen would be in the story's climactic phase, he went back and added much material to her early life, turning her into Kronos's scientific equal as well as his s.e.xual and moral superior. Other avenues turned out to be blind alleys and were discarded. For example, in an early draft of the back-story, Solanka imagined that the ”Galilean” figure captured by the Mogol was the cyborg Dollmaker, not the vanished Akasz Kronos. In this version the Dollmaker's denial of his right to be called a ”life-form,” his confession of his own inferiority, became a crime against himself and his own race. Later the Dollmaker escaped from his Baburian jailers, and when news of his ”recantation” was spread by the Mogol's propaganda machine with the aim of undermining his leaders.h.i.+p, the cyborg hotly denied the accusations, announcing that he had not been the prisoner in question, that in fact his human avatar, Kronos, was the real traitor to the truth. Even though he discarded this version, Solanka retained a soft spot for it, and often wondered if he'd been wrong. Eventually, benefiting from the Web's fondness for variora, he added the excised story to the site, as a possible alternate version of the facts.

The names Baburia and Mogol were late additions, too. Mogol of course came from ”Mughal,” and Babur had been the first of the Mughal emperors. But the Babur of whom Malik Solanka had been thinking wasn't an old dead king. He was the designated leader of the aborted ”Indo-Lilly” parade-demonstration in New York, to whom, in Solanka's opinion, Neela Mahendra had paid far too much attention. The parade had started out as a poor affair and ended up as a brawl. At the northwest corner of Was.h.i.+ngton Square, under the faintly interested scrutiny of a.s.sorted cold-drink salesmen, magic tricksters, unicyclists and cutpurses, one hundred or so men and a handful of women of Indian-Lilliputian origin a.s.sembled, their numbers augmented by American friends, lovers, spouses, members of the usual left groupuscules, token ”solidarity cadres” from other diaspora-Indian communities in Brooklyn and Queens, and the inevitable demonstration tourists. Over a thousand in toto, the organizers claimed; around two hundred and fifty, said the police. The parallel demonstration of the ”indigenous” Elbees had been even less well attended, and had shamefacedly dispersed without marching. However, groups of disgruntled and well-lubricated Elbee males had found their way to Was.h.i.+ngton Square to taunt the Indo-Lilly men and hurl s.e.xual insults at the women. Scuffles broke out; the N.Y.P.D., looking amazed that so tiny an event could have generated such heat, moved in a few beats too late. As the crowd fled the advancing police officers, several quick knifings took place, none of them lethal. Within instants, the square was empty of demonstrators, except for Neela Mahendra, Malik Solanka, and a hairless giant, who stood stripped to the waist, holding a megaphone in one hand and in the other a wooden flagstaff bearing the new saffron-and-green flag of the proposed ”Republic of Filbistan”-the FILB stood for ”Free Indian Lilliput-Blefuscu” and the rest was added on because it sounded like a word from ”home.” This was Babur, the young political leader who had traveled all the way from his distant islands to address the ”rally,” and who now looked so forlorn, so shorn of purpose as well as hair, so unexpressed, that Neela Mahendra hastened to his side, leaving Solanka where he stood. When he saw Neela approaching, the young giant let go of the flagstaff, which thumped him on the head as it fell. He staggered but, to his considerable credit, remained upright.

Neela was all solicitude, evidently believing that by giving Babur the full benefit of her beauty she could make up for his long, useless trip. And Babur did indeed brighten, and began, after a few moments, to address Neela as if she were the enormous and politically significant public meeting he had hoped for. He spoke of a Rubicon being crossed, of no compromise no compromise and and no surrender no surrender. Now that the hard-won const.i.tution had been abrogated and Indo-Lilly partic.i.p.ation in the government of Lilliput-Blefuscu so shamefully terminated, he said, only extreme measures would suffice. ”Rights are never given by those who have them,” he declaimed, ”only taken by those in need.” Neela's eyes brightened. She mentioned her television project, and Babur nodded gravely, seeing that something might be salvaged from the rubble of the day. ”Come,” he said, taking her arm. (Solanka noted the ease with which she slipped her arm through her countryman's.) ”Come. We must discuss these things for many hours. There is much that needs urgently to be done.” Neela left with Babur without a backward glance.

Solanka was still in Was.h.i.+ngton Square at closing time that night, sitting wretchedly on a bench. As a patrol car was ordering him to leave, his cell phone rang. ”I'm really sorry, honey,” Neela said. ”He was so unhappy, and it is my work, we did need to talk. Anyway, I don't need to explain. You're a smart man. I'm sure you worked it out. You should meet Babur. He's so full of pa.s.sion it's scary, and after the revolution he may even be president. Oh, can you hold on, honey? It's the other line.” She had spoken of the revolution as an inevitability. With a deep rumble of alarm, Solanka, on hold, remembered her own declaration of war. I'll fight alongside them if I have to, shoulder to shoulder. I'm not kidding, I really will I'll fight alongside them if I have to, shoulder to shoulder. I'm not kidding, I really will. He looked at the bloodstains drying on the darkened square, evidence here in New York City of the force of a gathering fury on the far side of the world: a group fury, born of long injustice, beside which his own unpredictable temper was a thing of pathetic insignificance, the indulgence, perhaps, of a privileged individual with too much self-interest. And too much time on his hands. He could not give Neela up to this higher, antipodean rage. Come back, he wanted to say. Come to me, my darling, please don't go. But she was back on the line, and her voice had changed. ”It's Jack,” she said. ”He's dead, his head's been blown off, and there's a confession in his hand.” You've seen the headless Winged Victory, Solanka dully thought. You've heard of the Headless Horseman. Give it up for my headless friend Jack Rhinehart, the Wingless, Horseless Defeat.

PART three.

15.

Nothing made sense. Jack's body had been found in the Spa.s.sky Grain Building, a Tribeca construction site on the corner of Greenwich and N Moore whose developers had recently come under union fire for employing scab labor. It was a fifteen-minute walk from Jack's Hudson Street apartment, and he had apparently strolled here with a loaded shotgun in his hand, crossed Ca.n.a.l-still busily crowded in spite of the late hour-without attracting attention, then broken into his chosen location, taken an elevator to the fourth floor, positioned himself by a west-facing window with a good view of the moonlit river, placed the snout of the gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and fallen to the rough, unfinished floor, dropping the weapon but somehow holding on to the suicide note. He had been drinking heavily: Jack Daniel's and c.o.ke, an absurd drink for an oenophile like Rhinehart. When he was discovered, his suit and s.h.i.+rt were folded neatly on the floor, and he was wearing only his socks and underpants, which, for some reason, or perhaps by chance, were on back to front. He had recently cleaned his teeth.

Neela decided to make a clean breast of it and told the detectives everything she knew-the fancy-dress costumes in Jack's closet, her suspicions, everything. She could have been in trouble, withholding information being a serious offense, but the police had bigger fish to fry, and, besides, the two officers who came to her Bedford Street apartment to interview her and Malik Solanka were having troubles of their own in her presence. They kept breaking pencils and stepping on each other's feet and knocking over ornaments and bursting into simultaneous speech and then falling blus.h.i.+ngly silent, to none of which Neela paid the slightest attention. ”The point is,” she concluded as the two detectives b.u.mped heads in eager agreement, ”this so-called suicide smells strongly of fish.”

Malik and Neela had known that Jack owned a gun, though they had never seen it. It dated from the black-Hemingway hunting-and-fis.h.i.+ng period that had preceded his Tiger Woods phase. Now, like poor Ernest, most feminine of great male American writers, destroyed by his failure to be the phony, macho Papa-self he had chosen to inhabit, Jack had gone hunting for himself, the biggest game of all. That, at least, was what they were being invited to believe. On closer examination, however, this version of events became less and less convincing. Jack's building had a doorman, who had seen him leave the premises alone at around seven P.M. P.M., carrying no bags and dressed for an evening on the town. A second witness, a plump young woman wearing a beret who had been waiting on the sidewalk for a taxi, came forward in response to a police appeal to say that she had seen a man answering to Jack's description getting into a large black sports utility vehicle with smoked windows; through the open door, she had briefly glimpsed at least two other men, with, and she was quite clear on this point, large cigars in their mouths. An identical SUV was seen driving away along Greenwich Street soon after the established time of death. A couple of days later, a.n.a.lysis of the technical data from what was already provisionally being called the crime scene revealed that the damage to the Spa.s.sky Grain Building's temporary access door had not been inflicted by Rhinehart's shotgun. No other instrument capable of breaking down the very solid door-wooden, with a reinforcing metal frame-was found on or near his body. Moreover, it was strongly suspected that the damage to the door had not been the means of gaining entry to the premises. Somebody had had a key.

The suicide note itself was instrumental in establis.h.i.+ng Jack's innocence. Rhinehart was famous for the polished precision of his prose. He rarely made an error of syntax, and never, never made a spelling mistake. Yet here among his last words were solecisms of the worst kind. ”Ever since my war corespondent days,” the note read, ”I have had a violent streak. Sometimes in the middle of the nite I smash up the phone. Horse, Club and Stash are innocent. I killed their girls bec they would-not f.u.c.kme, probably bec I was of Color.” And, finally, heartbreakingly, ”Tell Nila I love her. I know I f.u.c.ked up but I love her true.” Malik Solanka, when his turn came to be interviewed by the police, told them emphatically that even though the note was in Jack's strong, unmistakable hand, it could not have been his freely written work. ”Either it has been dictated by somebody with a far lower level of language skills than Jack or else he has deliberately dumbed down his style to send us a message. Don't you see? He has even told us his three murderers' names.”

When it was established that Keith ”Club” Medford, last lover of the late Lauren Klein, was the son of the wealthy developer and unionized workers' bete noire Michael Medford, one of whose companies was handling the conversion of the Spa.s.sky Grain Building into a mixture of high-end lofts and townhouse-style residences, and that Keith, who had been asked to plan the project's opening-night party, possessed a set of keys, it became clear that the killers had made an irretrievable mistake. Most murderers were stupid, and a life of privilege was no defense against folly. Even the most expensive schools turned out badly educated dolts, and Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford were semi-literate, arrogant young fools. And murderers, too. Club, faced with the acc.u.mulating facts, was the first to confess. His buddies' defenses collapsed a few hours later.

Jack Rhinehart was buried in the depths of Queens, thirty-five minutes' drive from the bungalow he'd bought his mother and still-unmarried sister in Douglaston. ”A house with a view,” he'd joked. ”If you go to the end of the yard and lean all the way over to your left, you can just catch a what?, call it a whisper whisper, of the Sound.” Now his own view would forever be of urban blight. Neela and Solanka got a car to drive them out. The cemetery was cramped, treeless, comfortless, damp. Photographers moved around the small group of mourners like pollution floating at the edges of a dark pond. Solanka had somehow forgotten that there would be media interest in Jack's funeral. The moment the confessions had been made and the story of the S & M Club became the society scandal of the summer, Professor Solanka lost interest in the event's public dimension. He was mourning his friend Jack Rhinehart, the great, brave journalist, who had been sucked down by glamour and wealth. To be seduced by what one loathed was a hard destiny. To lose the woman you loved to your best friend was perhaps even harder. Solanka had been a bad friend to Jack, but then it had been Jack's fate to be betrayed. His secret s.e.xual preferences, which he had never inflicted on Neela Mahendra, but which meant that not even Neela would finally have been enough for him, had led him into bad company. He had been loyal to men who did not merit his loyalty, had persuaded himself of their innocence-and what an effort that must have been for a natural finder-out and muckraker, what delusionary brilliance he must have employed!-and consequently had helped to s.h.i.+eld them from the law, and his reward was to be killed by them in a clumsy attempt at scapegoating: to be sacrificed on the altar of their invincible, egomaniacal pride.

A gospel singer had been hired to sing a farewell medley of spirituals and more contemporary material: ”Fix Me, Jesus” was followed by Puff Daddy's tribute to Notorious B.I.G., ”Every Breath You Take (I'll Be Missing You);” then came ”Rock My Soul (In the Bosom of Abraham).” Rain looked imminent but was holding off. The air was moist, as if full of tears. Here were Jack's mother and sister; also Bronislawa Rhinehart, the ex-wife, looking simultaneously devastated and s.e.xy in a short black dress and high-fas.h.i.+on veil. Solanka nodded at Bronnie, to whom he'd never found anything to say, and muttered empty words at the bereaved. The Rhinehart women didn't look sad; they looked angry. ”Jack I know,” Jack's mother said briefly, ”would've seen through those white boys in nine seconds flat.” ”Jack I know,” his sister added, ”didn't need no whips or chains to have himself some fun.” They were mad at the man they loved for the scandal but even madder at him for having put himself in harm's way, as if he had done it to hurt them, to leave them with the lifelong pain of their bereavement. ”The Jack I know,” Solanka said, ”was a pretty good man, and if he's anywhere at all right now, I'd say he's happy to be set free from his mistakes.” Jack was right there with them, of course. Jack in the box from which he would never rise up. Solanka felt a hand tighten around his heart.

In his grief's eye Solanka pictured Jack stretched out in an upscale loft conversion while the whole world gossiped over his corpse and photographers frothed about. Next to Jack lay the three dead girls. Released from the fear of his own involvement in their deaths, Solanka mourned them too. Here lay Lauren, who had become afraid of what she was capable of doing to others and allowing others to do to her. Bindy and Sky had tried and failed to keep her inside their charmed circle of pleasure and pain, but she had sealed her fate by threatening the club's members with the shame of a public expose. Here lay Bindy, the first to comprehend that her friend's death had been no random killing but a coldblooded execution: which comprehension was her own death warrant. And here lay Uptown Sky, game-for-anything s.e.xual athlete Sky, the wildest of the doomed three and the most s.e.xually uninhibited, her m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic excesses-now meticulously detailed in the delighted press-sometimes alarming even her s.a.d.i.s.tic lover, Brad the Horse. Sky, who believed herself immortal, who never thought they would come for her, because she was the empress of their world, they followed where she led, and her levels of tolerance, her thresholds, were the highest any of them had ever known. She knew about the murders and was crazily aroused by them, murmured in Marsalis's ears that she had no intention of blowing the whistle on so much man, and whispered to both Stash and Club in turn that she would be happy to stand in for her dead friends in any way they wanted, just name it, baby, it's yours. She also explained to all three men, in separate, luridly retold encounters, that the killings bound them together for life; they had pa.s.sed the point of no return, and the contract of their love had been signed in her friends' lifeblood. Sky, the vampire queen. She died because her killers were too scared of her s.e.xual fury to let her live.

Three scalped girls. The public talk was of voodoo and fetis.h.i.+sm, and above all of the icy ruthlessness of the crimes, but Solanka preferred to ponder the death of the heart. These young girls, so desperately desirous of desire, had only been able to find it at the outside extremes of human s.e.xual behavior. And these three young men, for whom love had become a question of violence and possession, of doing and being done to, had gone to the frontier between love and death, and their fury had worn it away, the fury they could not articulate, born of what they, who had so much, had never been able to acquire: lessness, ordinariness. Real life.

In a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand horrified conversations buzzing over the dead like stench-seeking flies, the city discussed the murders' most minute details. They killed one another's girls! They killed one another's girls! Lauren Klein had been taken out by Medford for one last grand night on the town. She sent him home, as he had planned, because of a quarrel he'd deliberately provoked near the evening's end. A few moments later he phoned her, pretending to have had a car accident just around the corner. She ran out to help him, found his vintage Bentley unmarked and waiting with its door open. Lauren Klein had been taken out by Medford for one last grand night on the town. She sent him home, as he had planned, because of a quarrel he'd deliberately provoked near the evening's end. A few moments later he phoned her, pretending to have had a car accident just around the corner. She ran out to help him, found his vintage Bentley unmarked and waiting with its door open. Poor babe. She thought he wanted to apologize Poor babe. She thought he wanted to apologize. Annoyed at the deception but not alarmed, she climbed in, and was. .h.i.t repeatedly on the head by Andriessen and Marsalis, while Medford drank margaritas in a nearby bar, announcing loudly that he was drowning his sorrows because his b.i.t.c.h wouldn't put out, obliging the bartender to ask him to shut up or leave, and making sure his presence would be remembered. And then the scalping. They must've put down plastic sheeting to make sure the car wasn't stained. And the body thrown like garbage in the street And then the scalping. They must've put down plastic sheeting to make sure the car wasn't stained. And the body thrown like garbage in the street. The same technique worked on Belinda Candell.

Sky, however, was different. As was her way, she took the initiative, whispering her plans for the night to Bradley Marsalis over their last supper. Not tonight, he said, and she shrugged. ”Okay. I'll call Stash or Club and see if they're up for some fun.” Furious, insulted, but obliged to stick to the game plan, Brad said good night at her lobby door, and phoned her a few minutes later, saying, ”Okay, you win, but not here. Meet me at the room.” (The room was the soundproofed five-star hotel suite booked year-round by the S&M Club for the use of its noisier members. Bradley Marsalis, it was revealed, had made the booking several days in advance, which went to prove premeditation.) Sky never reached the room. A large black sports utility vehicle pulled up beside her and a voice she recognized said, ”Hi, princess. Climb aboard. Horse asked us to give you a little ride.”

Twenty, nineteen, nineteen, Solanka counted. Their combined age had been just three years more than his.

And what of Jack Rhinehart, who lived through a dozen wars only to die miserably in Tribeca, who wrote so well on much that mattered and so stylishly on much that didn't, and whose last words were, deliberately or by necessity, both poignant and inane? Jack's story was all out in the open, too. The theft of the shotgun by Horse Marsalis. Jack's invitation to his S&M Club induction ceremony. You made it, man. You're in You made it, man. You're in. Even when they arrived at the Spa.s.sky Grain Building, Rhinehart had no idea he was close to death. He was probably thinking of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut, imagining masked girls naked on podiums, waiting for the sting of his sweet lash. Solanka was weeping now. He heard the killers insist that, as part of the ritual, Rhinehart needed to drink a br.i.m.m.i.n.g jug of Jack and c.o.ke, the spoiled kids' tipple, at high speed. He heard them order Jack to strip and reverse his underpants, in the name of club tradition. As if it were being tied around his own eyes, Solanka felt the blindfold they had used on Jack (and afterward removed). His tears soaked through the imagined silk. Okay, Jack, are you ready, this'll blow you away.-What's happening, guys, what's the deal?-Just open your mouth, Jack. Did you clean your teeth like we said? Good job. Say aah, Jack. This'll kill you, doll Okay, Jack, are you ready, this'll blow you away.-What's happening, guys, what's the deal?-Just open your mouth, Jack. Did you clean your teeth like we said? Good job. Say aah, Jack. This'll kill you, doll. How pathetically easy it had been to lure this good, weak man to his death. How willingly-giving five high, getting five low-he stepped into his own hea.r.s.e and took his brief last ride. Lord, rock my soul Lord, rock my soul, the singer cried. Good-bye, Jack, Solanka said silently to his friend. Go on home. I'll be calling you.