Only the penthouse was finished and furnished, rushed into completion while Bolivar was away on his European tour. The rest of the rooms in the lower floors were roughed out, some of them plastered, others still dressed in plastic wrap and insulation. Sawdust had worked its way onto every surface and into every crevice. Bolivar’s business manager had briefed him on the developments, but Bolivar wasn’t much interested in the journey, only the destination of his soon-to-be lavish and decadent palace.

The “Jesus Wept” tour had ended on a down note. The promoters had had to work hard to fill the arenas so that Bolivar could truthfully claim to have played to sold-out audiences everywhere—but he had. Then the tour charter crapped out in Germany, and rather than wait behind with the others, Bolivar had consented to hop a commercial flight home. He was still feeling the aftereffects of that big mistake. In fact, it was getting worse.

He moved inside the front entrance with his security detail and three young ladies from the club. A few of his larger treasures had been moved in, including twin black marble panthers poised on either side of the twenty-foot-high foyer. Two blue industrial-waste drums said to have belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer and several rows of framed paintings: Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Chet Zar—big, expensive stuff. The loose light switch on the wall activated a string of construction lights winding up the marble staircase, beyond a great, winged, weeping angel of uncertain provenance, having been “rescued” from a Romanian church during the Ceausescu regime.

“He’s beautiful,” said one of the girls, looking up into the angel’s shadowed, time-worn features.

Bolivar stumbled near the great angel, seized by a pain in his gut that was more than a cramp, that was like a punch from an adjoining organ. He gripped the angel’s wing to steady himself, and the girls converged on him.

“Baby,” they cooed, helping him to stand, and he tried to shake off the pain. Had someone slipped him something at the club? It had happened before. Christ, girls had drugged him before, so desperate were they to have their way with Gabriel Bolivar—to get the legend underneath the makeup. He pushed the three of them away, waving off his bodyguards as well, standing erect despite the ache. His detail remained below while he used his silver-encrusted walking stick to shoo the girls up the curling flights of blue-veined white marble to the penthouse.