Cian was purportedly born in New Orleans one night during a Category 4 hurricane. His mother gave birth in their crumbling garage apartment on Saint Charles Avenue, with a midwife and a gardener providing support. When Cian was five, he and his mother moved to Ames, Iowa. Following that, records about him are scarce, as Cian was never enrolled in any formal school—he was apparently homeschooled by his single mother until he entered Yale School of Drama on a full scholarship.
Even as an undergrad, he spellbound his professors and fellow students with his Teutonic good looks and exceptional capability to truly become another person while playing a part. His classroom exercises brought fellow students to tears; other students audited his classes if they thought he might be performing even a one-minute exercise. Devoted to his craft, Cian soon adopted an ascetic lifestyle, staying in his dorm room to study and abstaining from extracurricular activities and socializing. He simply meditated on his craft, performing scenes from his favorite plays alone in his dorm room. His roommate had long since moved to a different room. All this only added to Cian Clery’s mystique, and classmates honored his lifestyle by leaving him to his own devices.
As a freshman he was awarded the lead in Yale School of Drama’s fall season production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. An article in the university newspaper noted that Cian Clery, as Pale, the combustible lead character, “held the audience in a hypnotic spell” for the entirety of the play.
From that point on, he was the lead in practically all of the productions, from Spring Awakening to Desire Under the Elms. Each staging was dubbed a classic, with ticket prices skyrocketing and a thriving New Haven black market of students scalping tickets to dedicated theater fans from Boston and New York. In fact, the school had to hire extra security to stop people from attempting to sneak into the auditorium to see Cian. Hollywood came calling during his sophomore year, but Cian rebuffed every offer. He simply wanted to study.
Summer after junior year was the seminal period in his life. From what we could discover—albeit via sometimes unreliable sources—Cian hitchhiked to Austin, Texas, to try out for a role at an independent theater called the Ultimate. They operated as a low-budget co-op producing operas—as opposed to the usual small theater’s one-act plays. He auditioned and sang flawless Italian—although the original was in Russian—and took the lead of Robert, Duke of Burgundy, in the Ultimate’s production of Iolanta. Many patrons in the audience who were interviewed for an article in the New York Times still remember his presence completely overshadowing the other actors onstage. They could recall tears running down the faces of the patrons and others sobbing from the emotions involved in his performance. It still affected them to that day.
Maybe in the same way I’m still affected by the Dallas Cowboys losing to the New York Giants every year. I’m misting up just thinking about it.
After five performances, and with no notice, Cian left Austin and proceeded to hitchhike back to Yale. Yet somewhere between Austin and New Haven, Connecticut, Cian was re-created.
The exact circumstances of his re-creation are not known—though many journalists have tried to investigate the mysterious circumstances—but what is known is that upon arriving at Yale, Cian went straight to the house of the dean of the drama school at two in the morning. Cian informed the dean of his new status as a Gloaming and said he wanted to be accommodated in order to finish his degree. This was before the passage of the Equal Rights for All Act, but the dean readily agreed, and Cian received his bachelor’s degree within the year. However, strangely enough, during his senior year he refused to participate in any more productions at Yale, preferring to study his craft in isolation and plan for his next venture.
Cian was a shoo-in to become a Hollywood heartthrob, but his new Gloaming status made film and television work impossible. By all accounts, however, he would not have it any other way—he felt more comfortable connecting with a live audience than in front of cameras. After graduation, his first starring role—greatly anticipated in the theater world—was soon announced. Thanks to Gloaming investors, Cian formed his own production company, and he would personally star in the company’s debut, a ten-city tour of Nixon in China, an opera based on President Nixon’s groundbreaking—given his status as an anti-communist leader—visit to China in 1972.
It was a decidedly strange idea to stage this opera—or any opera—especially as the first production of Cian’s company. The subject matter seemed incredibly dry and not sexy enough to attract a mass audience. Cian would be taking the title role of Richard Nixon, looking nothing like him but somehow feeling that such a difficult transformation would be a challenge worth undertaking. He had been working on the performance in private throughout his senior year, until he felt it had finally come to him and was ready to be seen by the public.
But Cian’s next coup was securing the original director, Peter Sellars, to direct this revival. The opera premiered in New York City and was an immediate success. Cian’s voice and presence exploded throughout the concert hall; people claimed he could be heard outside, where a crowd waited for any glimpse of Cian. By the end of the performance, many audience members would describe themselves as exhausted and exhilarated by the portrayal, considering it more of a communal event than an opera.
The show’s front-page New York Times rave led to two more sold-out shows and tickets being scalped for thousands of dollars. The Internet only increased the hype after an article in BuzzFeed raved about the production and about Cian in particular. The site used accurate drawings to show scenes from the opera and backstage, including outside the stage door, where hundreds, even thousands, of fans mobbed Cian for autographs and an opportunity to see or touch him. The city had to assign over fifty officers to crowd control, including their mounted units. The mayor threatened for weeks to shut down the production unless the producers contributed to the cost of security and crowd control. Lawsuits were threatened but eventually the city decided to provide security for the limited run of the production.
The media and the Internet would publish stories about the energy of the show, and various patrons would go to great lengths to describe how Cian’s eyes were a deep shade of yellow that seemed to sparkle and see every face at once.
Every scheduled performance was sold out, and during its run, no movie or concert was a hotter ticket than Nixon in China.
The first gold theft occurred during the third performance in New York City, at the home of John Hatcher, a wealthy trial attorney who’d amassed a small fortune suing asbestos manufacturers. As a person given to unorthodox views, ranging from government conspiracies to advocating doomsday prepping, he kept a portion of his holdings in gold to inoculate himself from the next economic collapse. He built a private gold depository in the basement of his Manhattan brownstone. The depository was constructed out of the gutted former washer-and-dryer room; it didn’t meet the specifications of a bank vault, but it was solidly built with reinforced concrete and Kevlar, with a one-foot-thick steel door with a retinal scan lock. On the night in question, John Hatcher attended a performance of Nixon in China and ate a late sushi dinner with friends at Masa, which lasted for three hours. He departed for his brownstone with only his bodyguard. When he arrived, the first thing he did was go down to the basement, where he kept a bar, and he saw the safe open and all of his gold missing.
The FBI was called in two weeks after the burglary, the length of time due to Hatcher’s reluctance to disclose how much of his money was kept in gold. Wealthy people know how such admissions can lead to the IRS taking an interest in their finances, and most have something to hide when it concerns income. Immediately after the theft, Hatcher hired a team of confidential private investigators, but they failed to turn up any solid leads. That’s when he called the FBI—two weeks later. The regional New York City FBI office took on the case, but between terrorist alert investigations and counterespionage, it languished.
The next theft occurred in Boston, during the opera’s run of three nights
in that city.
This one occurred at an independent gold distributor, the Ellison Corporation, located on the first floor of an old bank building in downtown Boston. On the night of the second performance of Nixon in China, someone, or a group of people, disabled the cameras; broke into the building’s basement, where only gold was stored, without sounding the alarm; incapacitated the guards by an unknown means; and emptied the vaults of $5 million worth of gold. Unlike Hatcher, the Ellison Corporation reported the theft immediately to the FBI, although as with Hatcher’s case, this one languished. There were simply no clues.
The third theft occurred during the opera’s next series of performances, in Houston, Texas. At this point, the young FBI agent Calvin James, who was based in Los Angeles and assigned to the recent theft, sent me his theories regarding possible Gloaming involvement. It was a week before I read the email and considered his theories, but I was deeply impressed by Calvin’s meticulous evidence.
There had to be a connection. Of course, others in the FBI assumed it was my suspicion of all things Gloaming that made me draw this conclusion, but it was hard to dismiss the elaborate coincidences related to the thefts and the opera. They say you live and learn, but I had long since dismissed that advice. I’ll live from not learning and be fine with it.
So I booked a ticket to Houston, only to find out that the opera was already moving on to its next destination: a weeklong residency in Los Angeles.
“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright who said that. It was my first thought stepping off the plane and being accosted by all the Botoxed faces. It looked like a remake of Vincent Price’s House of Wax.
I met Agent Calvin James at LAX. He was a tall, built, ex–college football player with caramel skin and model good looks. He had joined the FBI after a two-year stint as an accountant for HP computers. He had already established himself as a thorough agent, someone you could count on to have your back.
To plan our next steps, we had dinner at the Lucky Grill, a crowded old-school diner that smelled like breakfast day and night. Old counters and faded leather booths packed with new suits and tight faces. Also hipsters. The buzz of conversations bounced off the walls with the sizzle of grilling food and the clanging of pots and pans.
“How can you live here?” I asked James.
He smiled and took a bite of his avocado toast hamburger. “Other than the urban blight, vapid idiots, endless traffic, pollution, how people couldn’t care less about you unless you can do something for them or advance their careers, a psychotic indifference to anything resembling empathy, and lack of soul? I fucking love it here! It’s perfect.”
After a few minutes of reviewing the evidence, we both were convinced the Gloamings were behind the gold thefts and that the opera played an integral, yet unknown, part in the operation. I felt we had a few days to find the means of the upcoming—or so we thought—theft before it occurred. Agent James proposed some plans.
Our first objective was to research and find any possible targets, which would include private gold depositories run by companies and private investors who held their gold at their residences. Obviously not an easy task considering the time constraints. However, the FBI assigned us a staff for two days to help us narrow down our list to the most likely targets. We established three possible targets: a four-story 1950s-era commercial building in Boyle Heights housing the Inland Valley LLC, a private metals holding facility; another precious metals dealer handling heavy quantities of diamonds and gold, located in a nondescript one-story building in Westwood and known as Millennial Corp.; and a ten-thousand-square-foot residence in Bel Air owned by dot-com billionaire Sasha Bowie, who held a substantial amount of gold at her residence.
We concluded that the Bel Air residence was most likely, since it arguably held the most gold and had the lightest comparable security. We scheduled an immediate meeting with Sasha Bowie, which was one of the more difficult things the FBI has ever attempted—I’ve had an easier time scheduling a meeting with the Speaker of the House or the secretary of Homeland Security.
Of course, as we all knew, Sasha Bowie was pretty busy Instagramming, Snapchatting, and tweeting her glorious life and numerous parties and premieres. Her fortune was made as one of the original Facebook employees—she was an engineer by training—who had cashed out her billions in stock and invested in other tech supernovas, only multiplying her wealth. She also had millions of followers on every social media app you could imagine.
We met at her house in Bel Air, which sat on a gated 2.5-acre lot—all post and beam, steel and marble. If you need any more evidence that the top 1 percent need to be taxed to within an inch of their lives and that the inheritance tax should be 99 percent, look no further than this estate. We sat in a large banquette in her kitchen the size of a Denny’s. It was only myself, Calvin, and Sasha—no lawyers or advisers or publicists. She spoke on the phone near the refrigerator as we waited. I leaned over to Calvin. “She’s thirty-five and looks like she’s had more Botox than Madonna or Meg Ryan.”
“Thirty-five?” Calvin snorted. “She’s been thirty-five for more than a decade.”
Sasha strolled over and sat across from us. “So where did you get this information that I—if I do have gold here, that is—might be at risk for theft?” she asked.
I sighed. We had already told her, and her lawyers, that the FBI couldn’t reveal our means of acquiring such information. “I’m sorry about that, but we do feel that our information is correct and conclusive.”
Sasha stared at me for a moment and scrolled on her iPhone as she continued. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that I do have a large amount of gold stored here. It would be beyond the capabilities of any so-called burglars to come in and take it. It would be virtually impossible to penetrate the security measures I have installed here at my house.”
I leaned over toward her and opened my palms. “You have to understand that the other thefts were from safes that were guarded by some of the most secure systems ever built. As secure as yours, I assure you.”
“What exactly do you want from me?”
“Let us have surveillance on and around your property for the next three days. If nothing happens then I can safely assume your gold is okay. No harm in that.”
Sasha went through the charade of actually considering all this, even though I knew her lawyers had determined the answer days earlier. She finally grinned. “Oh sure, why not? It’s only three days and I’m going to be in Colorado for some work stuff. Heck, my people will probably leak it to the press after it’s been done for some publicity later too. Be my guest.”
I wanted to do a slow clap but that would be pushing my luck.
We thanked her profusely. In the car, when we finally exited her property, Calvin and I looked at each other—and just burst out laughing.
“I don’t think you realize how sensitive this matter has become.” Cian’s publicist, one William Gascoigne who oddly kept referring to himself by his full name, stood in front of us wringing his hands and twitching as if someone were poking him with a cattle prod.
Calvin and I arrived at the Standard hotel—purportedly now Gloaming-owned—at nine in the evening. This was the hotel closest to Disney Hall, where Nixon in China was being performed. William Gascoigne met us in the dim lobby, hands mincing at his chest in nervous energy. His silk shirt stood out like a neon sign in the dark space. He was not a Gloaming. I could tell. I wondered why, given that he was a powerful Hollywood publicist, he hadn’t been re-created yet like most of his colleagues. It must have been somewhat humiliating for him. Maybe he needed that carrot dangled a while longer. He seemed to have a nervous tic of rolling his eyes after every sentence.
Getting access to Cian was even harder than scheduling our interview with Sasha. William Gascoigne was quite stubborn in his attempts to delay or refuse any interview, to the point of calling in Cian’s high-powered law firm to issue threats o
f litigation and to our job security. But I had threats of my own to offer: I could leak details of the investigation to the media about the Gloamings’, and the opera production’s, involvement. William Gascoigne finally offered a quick interview before rehearsals for the Los Angeles premiere.
“You do realize the sensitivity of this?” William Gascoigne shouted. “Am I talking to myself?” He shook his head as if done with us.
Behind Gascoigne stood a few large European-looking bodyguards in black suits, shaved heads, and scowls. William flattened the front of his black trousers with his twitching hands before he took my own hand in a limp shake and moved over to Calvin’s.
He finally nodded and pointed at the elevator behind us. “This way, please,” he said, and we followed him into the elevator. I caught Calvin glancing at me with a face that said “I’m ready for anything to go down.”
We found ourselves on the penthouse floor. William Gascoigne stopped in front of the room door. “Please remember to be respectful of Mr. Clery. He requires a highly meditative state of mind before each performance, and that state must not be altered in any negative manner. You are being afforded a great opportunity, so please make sure this interview is entirely confidential.”
Then William Gascoigne abruptly stopped talking.
He stared at each of us, as if to confirm we understood this valuable information.
I glanced over at Calvin, who suppressed a slight grin. “Yes sir, William Gascoigne,” he said. “You have our word.”
I wasn’t surprised to find the large suite in almost total darkness, as most Gloamings could see in the dark easily. I rested my hand on my sidearm out of habit; by now the FBI kept us in ready supply of depleted uranium bullets.
My eyes were drawn to the light in the far bedroom, and I followed William in that direction. I was somewhat disoriented by the peculiar scent—that flowery yet metallic smell I knew to expect around some Gloamings by now, yet I could never get used to it. I wanted to completely expel it from my nose but was unable to, just like that day in Austin. I could feel a mix of anxiety and anger brewing in my mind.
A People's History of the Vampire Uprising_A Novel Page 14