by Aidan Truhen
“Hannah Berlickon of the JONAS Einsatzgruppe. Hi. My name is Jacob Morgenstern Price of the international criminal organization known as the Seven Demons. I am here in your country to do crime. It was not intended that it should be loud annoying crime and I made—I made several bona fide efforts in the direction that it not even be obviously illegal. I am not—you have heard about the Seven Demons because they are known for tearing up the world in places that are unlike Switzerland and because under my predecessor they were a significant threat to the maintenance of international peace and security—but I am just a guy trying to get along in the world and honestly if we never did another thing that was insanely evil I would be fine with that. For years I was a dealer in locally sourced branded cocaine and there was not one death during that time not one. I specialized in victimless crime. In fact I specialized in the atomization of crime to the point where almost no one committed an actual offense under law. Do not misunderstand me I do not propose you believe I am a good guy and in fact I am here to suggest you be complicit in quite a lot of murders and you will hate this evening forever but I guess—I guess I want you to know I am not some guy who just lives to murderize people in outré ways. That is a response to my environment like there are some breeds of amphibian which are insanely toxic that is me. I am not venomous I am poisonous. I will now pause so you can say I’m under arrest again.”
“You’re under arrest.”
“I turned off your recording system. I’m here to talk not hand you my ass in a bouquet and now I’m thinking of an ass bouquet, thank you so much by the way. Send someone to the Black House please.”
“What?”
“Send a cop to the Black House.”
“That is a territorial violation—”
“Hannah. They only have to look through a window.”
I don’t know what she sees in my face but she gets on the phone and says something and it’s happening. We sit and eat salami and drink more schnapps. It is the kind that is made with plums. The Swiss word for it means small plum. The plum is not all that small and it has muscles.
A few minutes later she gets the pictures on her phone and I wait while she looks at them. I see the color go out of her face and her lips get very tight.
“Hannah,” I say, “I am going to happen to the guys who did this. I am very, very going to happen to them indeed. I would like to talk to you about that. And then I will go away and whatever else I do I will not come here again.”
She nods once, sharp, and pours the schnapps.
* * *
—
It is almost morning when I leave Hannah’s apartment and no we do not have sex what is wrong with you? But all the same, I have been out late so it is just natural that I go and buy another cigar. I walk through the empty streets to the cigar shop and wait on the doorstep like a hobo, which they do not allow here, so I take care to stand like a rich party boy instead. Eventually the little guy comes and if he thinks it is weird that I am here before he opens he does not say so. If he can smell the schnapps he does not say that either. Instead he takes my money and he says is today the day. I ask him what I want to ask and I say that it is, and he does not say anything else.
The cigar has a weird orange tint woven into the paper and the tobacco smells almost like fresh water it is so pure. It is a vastly expensive cigar. I stand there and think for a while about tobacco and how strange it is that Switzerland is one of the last places in Europe where they still sort of go for it.
“You smell of death,” the little guy says and I don’t say anything because I do. He says: “More today even than before.”
“I guess you would know. Caporal-Chef.”
Little guy snorts and says yes, he would know.
Caporal-Chef in the legion back when and so they were all together and it was this little man’s job to keep them alive and point them in the right direction. Hans Eiger and all his friends including Frankie Leclerc. Caporal-Chef Aaron from Addis, whose mother was Beta Israel, looking after the squad so white they gotta throw shade. Hashtag. Caporal-Chef Aaron who has a mezuzah on his door frame and family in Addis and Istanbul and Eilat and Eiger must walk past it without paying attention every single time he comes in.
He must know and yet he doesn’t even consider it something that matters because he is an old white guy in an old white country and things have always been this way.
Little guy goes to the counter and into the baggie with the cigar he puts a single memory stick poking out the back half of a plastic cow. Figure there was at one time a front half also but it is gone now. I do not know because he does not supply any detail and he does not need to. It is a gift.
“Five minutes,” he says.
I go down the street to a copier place like a business center and I use the computer there to do some very small mostly unimportant things to the file stored on the memory stick and then I take the little half a cow back to the tobacco shop and the little guy puts it back behind the counter.
Sometimes you don’t have to pay a man or threaten him or anything at all he is just right there in life’s window waiting for you to come and stand underneath, and when you know that, he can see that you know it, and then you are together in a kind of conspiracy forever that is deeper than friendship because it is about souls.
And usually it is what happens when a bad person or someone who is just flat out an asshole relies on the best person he knows to do something secret and important for him and little by little that good person who is his friend gets a sense of who he is friends with and then one day very quietly after a long long time, all he wants to do is punch that fucker in the head until you can see bone because good people are not weak people or even necessarily nice people they are just slower to get to where the rest of us are all the damn time and that is as good as souls get in this world.
I do not believe in those but even so I know this is true.
I know because Caporal-Chef Aaron—after all this time and coffee and not talking—just gave me Eiger’s fail-safe code key and he knows that means Eiger is likely going to die. This is Eiger’s super-secret system for designating an alternate if he is compromised. His death beeper in his watch or his pacemaker or whatever the shit it is sends a message to this little guy and the guy walks the memory stick to a lawyer’s office and they put it into the system and authorize the new person and then and only then does anyone outside of Eiger and the little guy know who that is.
And this is the moment at which I kind of could just shut this all down because from now on the only thing between me and Eiger’s bank is Eiger’s heartbeat and if Volodya was here—
Well. He’s not.
They say that in the end everyone dies alone but in pure mathematical terms I am bound to say I doubt that will be true in this case.
* * *
—
I go back to the pig farm and tell Charlie that Bruno is dead.
Charlie says “Oh.”
I tell her to take a moment to appreciate the hugeness of the universe and all the many suns and the wide expanse of the mountains and the sky and the deep earth beneath us and she says yuh-huh she has done that.
I ask if she wants to kill a bunch of people and she says she is wondering what Giant Egg would do.
I tell her Giant Egg would appear and cause everyone to reassess their life choices.
Charlie says no that is Giant Egg and she is talking about the negative energy Giant Egg from the dimension of purest evil and I say I’m pretty sure that negative energy Giant Egg would do exactly the same thing because that is Giant Egg and she says yes that is quite true and then she says that she is not Giant Egg and she would very much like to murderize the shit out of a lot of bad guys now and I say that is fine and she says okay.
Lucille takes off his knife suit and sits there in his appalling undies and Charlie cries onto his chest hair
until it is matted with snot and really I do not know what to say about that.
Rex makes comfort food. The comfort food is bad. It turns out Rex is great at eating and terrible at cooking and bad comfort food is not comforting at all.
Saul takes the bad food away and comes back with crispbreads and cheese. They are Swiss so they are amazing. Everyone eats rotted bovine lactation and compressed wheat.
Doc does not speak at all but I can feel her eyes the whole damn time and I look back and I tell her yes. On the HOMER board all the things in her page have little green ticks next to them except the security guy who has to be fresh. I go to the board and look at my page. I feel like a dick looking at Banjo Telemark’s joke page while Charlie is weeping but there are jokes and there are jokes and this one has a great punchline. There are many many words on my page and little drawings and some helpful remarks from my people, which are not hugely helpful, and someone has drawn a forest of trees with male genitalia instead of fruit but even so it is possible to see that Banjo Telemark has bought or rented—
Two large bulldozers
Colored smoke (red green yellow blue brown)
Many tons of recyclable traditional copper cowbells (heavily oxidized)
Many tons of recyclable aluminum auto paneling from expensive consumer vehicles
Professional-grade pyrotechnics to a value of one hundred thousand francs (assorted pinks and purples, some gold scatter)
Ten 3,000-watt equivalent searchlights with generator systems for exciting nighttime displays
A concert sound system of epic loudness I do not even know how many zoinks or wallabies it emits and I do not care it is too loud.
And most of these have been delivered to the Kircheisen Festung although Hans Eiger has been in particular very grouchy about the heavier items which he says cannot be transported using his precious itty-bitty cable car they are too heavy so they are waiting on the valley floor while Inge Desirée runs around yelling. I am sure everyone is having a great old time indeed.
Rex now is sitting alongside Charlie and Lucille, and he is saying something that makes her laugh through the snot.
Good for Rex he is a good human.
I go to Doc and tell her she will not like what happens next and she takes me into our room and pointedly has sex with me and then says that she did in fact like what happened next. I say obviously not that and she says if I do not control a given outcome I should not make statements about it. I say okay and bearing that in mind I go out again and I go to a phone booth and call François Leclerc.
* * *
—
“We have nothing to talk about Mr. Price.”
I tell him what we have to talk about and he says he will send a car. I say that I am not getting in his nasty Franco-Belgian ethnosupremacist automobile because number one I do not ride with the enemy and number two more important that is getting taken to a second location at which point he will ethno-supremely torture the shit out of me until I die and I am not at home to that idea. At. All.
“Then we cannot talk Mr. Price because certainly we cannot talk on the phone.”
I could tell him that if he had proper VoIP secure calling from Poltergeist we could talk on the phone like FOR HOURS and all they would know in the many many rooms where such things are intercepted was that dot A and dot B were maybe sexting maybe plotting the end of human civilization. But he cannot have proper VoIP secure calling from Poltergeist because the anarchokobolds who make this happen think he is an asshole.
Instead I tell him where to meet me and I pretend I am bringing someone along to watch my back.
ELEVEN
USED TO BE THE BÄRENGRABEN WERE ACTUAL GRABEN, which is to say pits. There were three of them like circular stone holes in the ground each maybe fifteen meters across and dressed with sad little tree stumps and scratching posts. You went to a kiosk and you bought figs and threw them to the bears in the bottom of the pit and they would stand up and dance for you. You also could buy carrots and the bears would dance also for carrots but not with much enthusiasm because who wants a fucking carrot when you can have figs? I do not know what the interior accommodations looked like but I am guessing they were not the ursine Ritz either. The whole thing looked like medieval because it was medieval it was a reminder of the honored past but a few years back the cantonal government took a long look at itself and decided that actual bear pits were not how you honored your heraldic animal in the era of climate change and Miley Cyrus, so they built a garden for bears, which is like a terraced park with panoramic views on the far side of the river from the old site. It is wide and public and there is absolutely no way anyone can know they are not in the crosshairs of a Dragunov. I am pretty sure I am in the crosshairs of one thing or another but I am used to that. Professional soldiers have rules about not getting into those situations so I am guessing Frankie Leclerc is not loving sitting in row three with a bucket of mineral-enriched bear kibble, which is what the bears get now instead of figs.
I guess some you win some you lose.
I can see some of the G-Wagen guys dotted around the viewing platform and they have little scratches and boo-boos from all the flying glass of their kidnap attempt the other day and I am guessing they are real sore that they got dinged up and a bunch of their buddies got arrested or shot to death by Swiss grocers with automatic weapons training. I guess they probably also do not love having to feed the bears instead of break me in half so I feed the bears a bit.
Then I sit down and say “hi” and Leclerc says we have nothing to talk about.
“Yeah we do.”
“I think not.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Perhaps I just like to see the dawning acknowledgment of death.”
“…Wow that is some fucking Gitanes black polo Jules et Jim gangsterism right there. Excuse me while I get my chessboard out.”
“You are a tedious man Mr. Price. Offer me your deal.”
I think about it. I think about the job and about Volodya and about my people.
The people who are mine.
And I do not tell him to shove it up his Arc de coq au vin. I give him what he wants as if I’m out of my depth. I let him see all my doubts.
Then I swallow the urge to puke or rip his face off and I make a deal—I make a solemnly binding vow—with François Leclerc.
* * *
—
After that I call Mozart and I tell her I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. Mozart says she’s sorry too. I say why is she sorry and she says she has accidentally posted the security footage of me peeing on her plane on G-Bread so now all the low-to-mid-brow criminals in the world have seen my junk.
“…Sure why not. Put me on speaker.”
“You do not give me orders Jack. Plus your lady friend here is a drag she cries all the time and when she is not crying she yells bad words in Italian.”
“You have fifteen million euros you can retire with that why are you still here?”
“I dunno asshat why are you still here?”
“To fuck some guys up who are assholes and make even more than that doing it plus also I’m gonna be faaaaamous. You wanna do that too?”
“Speaker on man.”
“Flavia? Can you hear me?”
* * *
—
So here we are at last. Banjo’s event is due and there’s nothing left to do and when that happens you don’t wait. You go. It all comes together now or it falls apart.
Incoming VoIP call Solidcrypt. Accept: y/n?
y
Doc says:
“I’m at the Nordwandhüs.”
This is the name of the house where the security guard she has nominated to be her personal-entry key card lives. In Kircheisen, houses do not generally have numbers they just have names because it is small and totally pictur
esque. In fact, it is too much to say this guy will be her key card because although she considered bribing him, in fact, she assessed that way of doing things as being too high risk unless he was also unconscious, and in the end why would you pay a guy to be unconscious while you rob a bank? So he will not so much be a key card as he will be a key eyeball that she will carry around sedated because the machine can tell if the eyeball is not connected to a viable heart and if you have just ripped it out the doors will not open they are persnickety that way.
Doc says:
“It’s time.”
TWELVE
I AM HAPPY IN MY WORKING ENVIRONMENT and my professional role so I sing:
“Well I walked in / and she got up—I saw her draw / and I raised my cup—I looked right down that baaaaaarrel and I knewwwww—We’d be married and in bed / before that night was through—”
“Holy shinola boss what the crap is that appalling nu-country what—”
“It is my mojo song Charlie I am mojoing right now—”
“Who is the singer that is just shocking—”
“It is me singing Charlie me personally right this minute in the cable car I am singing my little song—”
“Well please do not anymore because it is very very awful—”
“MY SONG IS A GREAT SONG OF THE GREATEST SONGS—”
“Anyone gonna back me up here? I know you are all feeling it—”
“The song is horrible Charlie we all know that but he is making art it is his process.”
“…”
“…”
“His process is horrible.”
“Yes it is also flat but it is his process.”
“Is it like a digestive process?”
“…”
“…”
“Everyone is mocking me Saul. Charlie is mocking me Doc is mocking me. Even Lucille is mocking me with his eyes I can tell. Even Rex et tu Rex. Saul…kill everyone. Save the last bullet for me.”