Chapter 1104: The Big Game
June 1997
On the afternoon the Lear came down at Midway, Aunt Susie and Tony had come out to meet the plane, past two police cars and a man with a clipboard who took one look at her and got out of the way.
Alex let himself be hugged. "All right, Auntie, all right— I'm about to come apart here."
Tony put out a fist. "Hey!"
Alex got his hand up and touched it. "Knee still bad?"
"Nah, knee's fine."
Tony shifted his weight off his left leg, which answered the question.
"The wind out here is too strong," Sloane said. "APLUS can't be out in it for long—"
Tony elbowed the paramedics aside and, with one of the South Africans, lifted the whole wheelchair into the ambulance.
The attending from the University of Chicago Medical Center rode in the back. He'd had this patient from January to May, then watched him get flown out of state over his written objection, and he was still sore about it.
"It's rather embarrassing, you know. Every specialist in the state goes through that room, and you open your eyes in New Jersey. Princeton cured you."
"Ha. Princeton just got lucky. You'll be getting a check from me, Doctor."
"That really isn't necessary. It goes through a committee, and people start asking questions."
Alex held his eye. "Forget the treatment. This one's for the certificate you didn't sign. You know the one I mean."
Two doctors had been asked to sign that page. Neither had. The doctor looked at the floor and nodded, and didn't say who'd asked him, and Alex didn't ask.
"So who's handling your rehabilitation?"
"You are. Three mornings a week, at the house. Talk to Old Mike about the room."
"I'll want parallel bars in before Friday."
The paparazzi came after them on motorcycles, and the ambulance didn't slow down once. By the time they turned into Highland Park there was a TV helicopter hanging off beyond the trees.
O'Grady of Northern Trust was in the front hall with Ballard and two 3dfx board people, and he started talking before the chair was through the door.
"APLUS! Look at the state of the man! You know, every month since February I've had to certify to the trustees that the beneficial owner is incapacitated. There's a form. With a notary. Five times I did that!"
"What can you do?"
"Now I get to write and tell them he's sitting up, and there's a form for that too. Hahaha!"
A dozen white people he didn't know were standing around the hall. Sherilyn's relatives. The aunt and her son had been trading looks with Tony since Sunday, and had been going in and out of the upstairs rooms for a lot longer than that.
"Mike, our guests look thirsty."
Old Mike invited them all out to the swimming pool, and they went, and afterward nobody could say how he'd done it.
"Give me a moment, please, everybody. I'll be right back down."
Tony and a South African carried him up. One of the second-floor rooms had been emptied out and turned into a rehab ward: a massage table, parallel bars still in pieces, and a stack of foam mats Tony had bought at a sporting goods store and was very proud of.
Then Linda pushed him to the master bedroom door.
"Tony." She glared until Tony left, took Alex in herself, and shut the door behind them.
"Sansa— look who's here!"
Sherilyn, still stuck in bed, started crying the moment she saw him. There was a pile of magazines on the nightstand with his face on most of them, and one open to an article about whether coma patients can hear. When the wheelchair reached her, she lifted their daughter up in front of him. Red, wrinkled, furious, a few days old.
"She's beautiful... beautiful as you are. Oh, oh." He had no strength to hold her, so he smiled at the wrinkled little thing and rubbed the tip of his nose against hers. "Sansa, is it? She's so sweet."
"I'm sorry... I couldn't stop them. I didn't have the strength to deal with McGill and the rest of them. I was flat on my back—"
"Hey. Stop that. Stop crying over McGill, he's not worth it."
She'd rehearsed the whole thing that morning, the dates and who'd carried what down the stairs, and now none of it came out.
"It's not your business. You had a baby. You kept the house standing. That's all you had to do, okay?"
"But my aunt— Alex, she's my mother's sister, she held me when I was born—"
"And she walked out of my house with my Grammys in a laundry bag. She's out tonight. I'll pay for a hotel for a month, and then she's on her own."
"Alex, please—"
He put his hand against her wet cheek and left it there. "There are two detectives downstairs dressed up as board members. They brought back everything she took. But from today there's one rule. You don't do anything on your own. Not one thing. You come to me first."
She nodded fast and cried harder. Then, in the flattest voice she had, she said the thing she'd been holding back. "Ms. Carey was in the room before I was."
"She had the proxy. It was just a form."
Sherilyn looked down at the blanket. "She was in the room. Somebody filmed her going in with the baby, and they kept running it. Every channel. I was lying here with Sansa on me watching your ex-wife hold your hand on Hard Copy."
He got his thumb under her jaw and turned her face back up, and it took everything that arm had. "Hey. Look where the ambulance stopped. I came here."
Sherilyn sniffed and looked at him, and then she started talking just to fill the room, like she always did when she was upset. The house, the nanny, the relatives, the books she'd been reading at night because she couldn't sleep. Some new novel about the Civil War that everybody in her book club was talking about, a Confederate soldier walking home from the war to a woman he barely knew—
It hit him right then, in the middle of her sentence.
A Revelation, the whole thing, finished. Cold Mountain. A theatrical film, two and a half hours, all of it at once: Romanian forests standing in for North Carolina, Jude Law walking home through the whole length of the war, Nicole Kidman as Ada, the preacher's daughter from Charleston, and Renée Zellweger stomping in halfway through as Ruby. The fiddle music, the Sacred Harp singing in the church.
[Revelation scene: Cold Mountain — the crater at Petersburg, and the ending in the snow]
He knew the cut, the performances, the score, down to the credits.
Alex blinked, and Sherilyn was still talking, and hadn't noticed anything.
"—and I cried at the end like an idiot, at four in the morning, with Sansa on me."
"Cold Mountain," he said. "The novel. That's the one, right?"
"I— yes— how did you know?"
"You've been talking about it for five minutes." He got his breath. "Yeremov's going after the rights this month. Whatever it costs. And you're producing it."
"Me? Producing?"
"Yeah. You. You love the book, you've been in the business since you were a kid, and I don't want some studio guy who's never read it deciding what goes in. And the rule covers that too. You don't do anything on your own. You come to me."
Sherilyn stared at him, and then laughed through the tears, wet and surprised. "Ooh. Investor power."
"That's right. Be scared."
The nanny brought Robb and Jon in, and Robb jumped straight into his lap.
"Daddy! Why are you skinny!"
"Because the hospital food was terrible, buddy. Don't ever go in a hospital."
He played with them a while, badly, one-handed. Over Sansa's head, Sherilyn figured out that he hadn't said another word about her aunt leaving, and that meant it wasn't up for discussion.
"You get some real rest, Sherilyn. I'm going down for a meeting first."
"You have to work the day you come home?"
"Mm."
The two plainclothes were still standing among the board people, drinking coffee. The 3dfx men had taken them for San Jose lawyers.
Since the shooting and the riots, Chicago politicians had been extremely jumpy about any trouble on his side of the fence. Sherilyn's aunt and her son had held the keys to the house for months, and between them they'd walked off with a lot of property and tried to turn it into cash. The son was stupid and in over his head, and the officers keeping an eye on the house had picked him up almost as soon as he started.
"We recovered everything on the inventory from a dealer in Evanston and a second address in Skokie. We need you to confirm these items and sign in two places, Mr. APLUS."
Gold statuettes in an evidence bag, and an inventory typed by somebody who'd spelled two of the award names wrong. Sloane folded his fingers shut around the pen and he dragged his arm crookedly across the forms.
"Should we come back in a few days, APLUS?" O'Grady said.
"Hm?" His hand went slack, and he got the last stroke down anyway. "No. I'll be fine."
Then the three founders came in from the pool, wet to the knee and not bothered by anything.
"Ha! APLUS, we just moved a baseball arcade machine into your basement. It's fun! It really is!"
"Let's hold the meeting here in the hall. My apologies. I don't have a big conference room in this house."
Ballard opened standing up, holding a page he didn't read from. He was the president, so he was the one who had to say the numbers out loud.
"On the ninth of March Sega terminated Black Belt, and our design win went with it. The reason they gave in writing was that we disclosed a confidential agreement in the prospectus."
The rest was arithmetic. Two quarters of missed guidance. The stock down from twenty-two to nine. Icahn's funds lending out stock so people could short it, because a big holder gets paid a fee for that. And the Sega order, a console Sega meant to sell for six years, gone to NEC and a company in England that nobody at 3dfx had taken seriously a year ago.
"Ross wants to countersue. Carmack's representative has his own view. And so does our largest shareholder, who, uh, has been asleep."
"Why did you put information covered by Sega's confidentiality agreement in the prospectus?" Alex asked.
Scott Sellers shrugged. "It was good for the stock price. The bankers wanted a named design win in there and we had one, so we priced at the top of the range. We figured Sega wouldn't dare do anything. They had no GPU option except Voodoo."
Before a company listed, its investment bankers took it around the country on a roadshow and told the big funds what price range to expect. Pricing at the top of the range meant the company raised more money for the same shares. A design win was a customer committing to put your chip in its product, and a name like Sega's on that page was worth dollars a share to the bankers.
"They had Katana. NEC. VideoLogic," Alex said.
Ross had the folder open before the third name was out. He'd been waiting four months for somebody in the room to say it. "And we've got their engineering notes. Two of their people on the record. Katana runs our tile ordering with the numbers changed. They stole it, plain and simple."
"The lawyers say twelve million, if it goes the whole way," Ballard said.
"And what good is that? None of you want Sega's order anymore? That's a console that can go up against Sony's next PlayStation!"
Carmack's man was cleaning his glasses on his shirt, and he kept at it. "Sony hasn't even announced a machine. There's no silicon. John's not going to rewrite Quake for a console that doesn't exist, I can tell you that right now."
Ross was on his feet. "We are not bowing our heads to them! We've got fifty-five percent of the add-in board market. Every developer writes to Glide first. Let them ship a machine with half the fill rate and see what happens to it! We'll have those short sellers crying all the way home to their mothers!"
Alex let him finish. By the end of it two of the outside directors were looking at the carpet. A third, who'd flown in from San Jose to resign, quietly put his letter back in his jacket.
"All right. Let's stop here for today and pick it up tomorrow."
"Netscape really isn't going to make it," O'Grady said, once the others had gone. "Explorer is free and it ships with the operating system. Their whole revenue is a license fee nobody has to pay anymore."
"Don't sell it yet."
"APLUS—"
"Not now, O'Grady. The lock-up on the two percent is still on anyway, and I'm not dumping the rest into a falling market so the papers can say I panicked."
O'Grady had never had a client who'd sit in a falling position without asking what the plan was. "The paper loss is past thirty percent, and the trustees want a line about it in the quarterly letter."
"Then I'll eat the paper losses. Same with Yahoo. Same with the Infoseek stuff. They're internet stocks. They go up and down."
"Your money, your funeral," O'Grady said, and didn't argue a second time.
"And 3dfx. Can you get me to Bill Gates's father?" Alex said. "Sega and Icahn should see the Gates name next to mine this month. And sooner or later 3dfx has to make its peace with Microsoft's Direct3D, and I want a line into that family when it does."
"The lawyer? At Preston Gates? Heh. He's in Seattle, he's on the Bar's board of governors, and he doesn't fly out to clients. He'd want a reason."
William Gates Sr. was seventy-one, six foot seven, courtly and slow-spoken, and he'd been president of the Washington State Bar Association in the eighties. His son was now the richest man in the world, and the father still went into the office.
"I've already hired the firm. I want the man himself."
"By when?"
"Two weeks. I'm going to Tokyo first, to apologize to Sega."
"You can't fly! Look at you!"
Alex didn't answer that.
"When the apology hits the wire, you're on the desk at Northern Trust. You buy every 3dfx share Icahn has lent out. All of it, on leverage, until the shorts are off the board."
O'Grady opened his mouth and closed it. "On leverage? At nine dollars? APLUS, if Sega doesn't come back—"
"If Sega says yes, the stock goes up and the shorts have to cover. If Sega says no, I'm still the biggest shareholder of a company with fifty-five percent of the market, and I bought more of it at nine. Either way I'm fine. Icahn's the one who isn't."
O'Grady did the math and his face changed. "Heh. You really hate that old man. And the desk fee on a position like that—"
"You'll get your quarter point. Move fast, and don't call me every ten minutes to tell me the price, I can read a screen."
"You can't read a screen, you can't sit up long enough." But O'Grady was already on his feet.
He was carried to the study and watched Linda put the statuettes back on the shelf one at a time against the inventory. Sherilyn had locked the photographs and the computer in the safe before the relatives ever got up the stairs.
Old Mike came in, shut the door, and stood with his back to it.
"You wanted to talk to me alone. That's why you gave my seat on the plane to Ms. Sloane, right?"
"Right."
"So talk, kid."
Alex crooked a finger. Old Mike came over. Alex grabbed the old man's collar, pulled his ear down to his mouth, and said it into his good ear. "Steve Haines. FBI, Chicago office. He walked the Pellicano boxes out of the vault last July, and Sony had them by August."
Old Mike straightened up slowly. His face had gone the color of the wall.
"You know him," Alex said.
"I know the group he runs with," Old Mike said, very quietly. "HR. Everybody in my line knows about it. Agents in Chicago, New York, two in Miami. When a file gets somebody in trouble, they move the man to another office and the file gets lost." He stopped. "How the hell do you know that name?"
"There's more. Not tonight. There are forty people in the yard." Alex let go of the collar. "Pool deck, six o'clock."
Old Mike stood in the doorway with his hand on the light switch. "Six. I'll bring coffee."
"And my guitar."
"It's in the basement. I'll bring that too."
The old man went out. Alex sat there with the statuettes back in their places and picked up the Grammy nearest him with his good hand. It was heavier than he remembered, and his wrist gave out halfway to his lap. He set it on the blanket and left it there.
Old Mike brought the guitar up a little before midnight. "It was behind the arcade machine."
"Of course it was. Somebody shoved the machine in front of the stand." He set the case flat across the arms of the wheelchair.
"Don't hurt yourself with that thing." The old man went out and left the door open about the width of his hand.
Normally the latches flicked open with a thumb. He pushed at them with his palm until the left one went, then worked the right one with the heel of his hand. Inside was a 1962 Gibson with a pickguard somebody had replaced badly in 1989.
It was out of tune. He tuned it by ear, stopping halfway through the E string to rest his forearm on the lid. Then he put his left hand on the neck.
Two fingers came down. The third landed late and hit two strings at once, and the fourth didn't come at all.
He tried an easier one, three fingers, and that one almost worked. He held it, and the hand started shaking almost at once and let go.
"Shit."
At half past midnight he had Old Mike send for Muffler, who came up the stairs, looked at the guitar and didn't say anything about it.
"Is there a tape recorder anywhere in this house?"
"Boombox. Kitchen."
"Get it."
"Susie's Mahalia's in it."
"Take it out, put it on the counter where she can see it, and nobody dies."
Muffler came back with the boombox and a bag of blank tapes from the drawer where the batteries lived. He set it on the massage table and stood in the doorway with his back to the room.
Alex worked out the record button with his thumb.
He shut his eyes first and let it come.
The Revelation had given him Stay With Me years ago, and it had been sitting in the vault in his head ever since. Now it played again as clear as the night it first came: a young man's voice, thin and plain, over a gospel organ holding one chord, hand claps on two and four in a room with a hard floor, and in the last chorus a choir coming up behind him. It was a slow one, the kind that sits on one chord a long time before it decides to move. He knew every breath in it.
He couldn't play, so there was nothing under it. He pressed record with his thumb and sang the organ line first, low, "dum, dum, dum," so whoever got the tape would know where the chord sat. Then he counted himself in under his breath and sang the song, a guy in a wheelchair at one in the morning, a weight on the floor next to him, a microphone four inches away behind a plastic grille.
[lyrics]
At the end of the second chorus his air ran out. The note went thin and then went nowhere.
He stopped in the middle of the line and sat there breathing while the tape kept running. Then he leaned in and talked to it instead. "Claps come in here. Real hands. Choir on the last chorus, eight voices, and the lead holds the last word flat until the very end. No runs. Whoever sings this, no runs." He pressed stop, and the mechanism clunked.
"Again?" Muffler said from the doorway, without turning around. "Ran out of gas."
"I know I ran out of gas. That's the take anyway. It's not for me to sing. I'm giving it to somebody."
Muffler thought about it. "Stops in the middle."
"Whoever I give it to can finish it. I'm not trying to sell my voice on this one, I'm trying to sell the song. I want a kid with a church voice singing it straight, no tricks. I want grown women crying in their cars, man."
"Maybe." Muffler popped the tape out and stuck a strip of masking tape on it, STAY 1, in capitals that took him a while. Then Alex had him put the guitar back in the case and leave the case open on the massage table, where he could see it from the bed.
"Boss."
"What?"
"I was off with Tony that day," Muffler said from the door. "So do your exercises."
"Go to bed, Muffler. You sound like my aunt."
"Cool," Muffler said, and went down the stairs.