By this point, Tristan had moved to Los Angeles full time, although the King Lion Gang was still catching up with him.
With all the dirty and clean money, he could afford a spacious apartment for each identity, full of comfortable things and storage space. Far from his best friend and close to the bunch of weirdos who were his allies in the criminal world...
But Nelson was planning to move to greener pastures too soon. And the GTG agency was eager to make a new office for themselves near Hollywood.
When the bad news came, though, Tristan was far from his apartment. He was networking, as in, attending one of the small-scale parties he had been invited to in a local restaurant.
The call came at a fortunate moment—there was a girl trying to get uncomfortably close to Tristan. He liked the attention, but he didn't like her, so he eagerly escaped outside the restaurant to reply.
The air was fresh, and it was only early evening—but it was still unusual to hear a call from Derek at this time of the day.
"Mr. Gemello! I'm afraid we will have to reschedule the album release date. There was an emergency..."
"An emergency?" Tristan asked into the phone receiver. "Derek, what emergency? The release date is next month, and the album is ready for it! And so was the marketing, as you told me."
"Yes, yes. They still are, Mr. Gemello. It was all a big stroke of bad luck. We all thought that the GTG agency was lucky that we could secure a place as big as we did, but... The stadium closed today without prior announcement. There was an accident."
Tristan frowned. He glanced at the restaurant and began walking toward his parked car, abandoning the party altogether.
The stadium chosen for the premiere could fit 15000 people in the audience. Far from the biggest venue in Los Angeles, but impressive enough. GTG only invested in it because of the profit Tristan already made for them with his few released songs. They all were very successful for singles from a newbie, even that improvised Christmas song.
It really was lucky that Derek could organize this, too, on a relatively short notice of a few months.
"An accident? Derek, what exactly happened?"
"Someone broke a leg when a part of the stage fell apart, and the building safety inspectors closed the entire stadium to comb it through for safety violations. I have already contacted the venue manager, and from what he told me... The place won't be open anytime soon. It's not about safety violations anymore, there are legal issues. Lawsuits being thrown around, and so on.
They already opened the ticket refunds, too."
Derek sighed into the call. He hated to be the bearer of bad news, although by now, he at least had confidence that Tristan won't become hysterical over them like many celebrities could be.
'I wasn't doing this all for no reason. Perhaps one of the people I've charmed could help?'
Tristan had to make a lot of calls and send a lot of messages now—evening was a good time for that, the time when people weren't working their day jobs. He took in a breath and drove toward his apartment.
This was going to be a long evening.
***
Two days later.
Finding a person who could help Tristan arrange a venue for a concert within an impossibly short time frame was not a matter of convincing people.
He could do that.
It was a matter of finding the right people to convince!
Tristan had dozens of acquaintances by now, and all of them were useless.
"Sorry, but I know nothing that might help."
"Oh, my agency always deals with these things... I don't even know many places!"
And so on and so forth.
Many people were also just hard to reach—too busy to reply immediately.
When Tristan got some hope, it was a message from a person like that—a person who needed two full days to read and send a reply to Tristan's voice message.
The reply was a text. Because, of course, a recluse like Asher Ilom won't call back.
[You are lucky—I know someone... But if I'm going to ASK that person for YOUR sake, Gemello, then you are going to do something for me in return.]
[Alright, Mr. Ilom. What do you want?]