by Aidan Truhen
Love turned to hate all at once and no one—no one—hates like a nine-year-old betrayed.
No one.
The second thing that happened was that Joe Johnstone and Ole Kirk Christiansen got together, at least spiritually. Joe was the designer on a popular movie you may have heard of named Star Wars and Ole was the guy who invented Lego, and in these great modern days it is possible to make a 1:1 model of the Millennium Falcon out of tiny plastic bricks. The schematic was created by a team of Danish enthusiasts who inevitably know Mr. Friday, and the model requires a total of thirteen million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand eight hundred and twenty-one Lego pieces and costs a little over three million Swiss francs because there’s no bulk discount although delivery on orders over seventy-five francs is free so there’s that. There is a great deal of debate in the giant construction nerd community (which is global and very large) about the precise Pantone for the seat covers but by and large the end product is thought to be acceptable and the kid whom we have hereto known as Evil Hansel asked his grandfather for one and Hans Eiger said: Are you out of your tiny homicidal mind, and junior said no I am not this is a thing that I must do to become a man, and senior said work on your knife throwing and then we shall see, and then Hans Eiger went away and told all his man friends of this hilarious request and Evil Hansel was shamed.
People I tell you do not shame the pre-tween assassin you have made it is a bad plan because then when it turns out you fucked a chicken in a public place…Why then su Hansel mi Hansel, if you get my drift.
So a little while back I went to the arcade and we blew up the Death Star together I said to Evil Hansel given all that I had made him cry by calling him a Nazi and given his grandfather was right now up to his ballsack in French Nazis and that must be causing some nine-year-old cognitive dissonance and from that trap there is really only one way out: how about he would kill his grandfather in the back of the head with an oyster knife and he said:
“I cannot give you what you want.”
And I said that is fine because I do not want you to give it to me, I wish to pay for it or if you find that mercenary you will give it to me as a present and I will give you a present of equal scale just name your present.
And when I said present like that I saw it in his eyes.
So Evil Hansel named his price and I did not laugh because I am not a motherfucking snob I am a professional I said yes I will get you one of those and we will call that a down payment and then I will also put much money into an offshore account and all that shit. Evil Hansel said why? And I said because one day kid you’re gonna be doing my job that is fucking inevitable and I would very much like for that day to be a happy one for both of us. There has been too much of that shit where we have to assassinate our forefathers to get on up and he said obviously excepting my grandfather obviously and I said yeah obviously that.
Hans Eiger falls to the floor and I can see that he knows what has happened and some kind of why and it hurts more than dying.
So that’s one down and two to go.
As like a contractual rider on my deal with Evil Hansel I had to tell him I was going to cut a deal with François Leclerc too or I could not depend on his reaction in the moment. He didn’t like it much but he said his emotional distress was covered under the original deal and I said that was real professional and threw in a trip to the studio experience as an ex gratia.
* * *
—
So then later I go meet Frankie Leclerc in the Bear Gardens and I say:
“You want that billion in emeralds without a leash, François? Because I will give you that.”
“You cannot.”
“That is not a no.”
So we have lunch.
Yeah we have lunch in a little place down by the river. Me and the modern-day Nazi.
I eat Galgenspieß with Frankie Leclerc. Frankie is not a good man. He hurts people for ideological reasons and his ideology is a bunch of racist puke. This is what it means to be first of the Seven Demons. You eat mixed grilled meats on a spiked gibbet that looks like a gallows with a guy like that.
With rice and spiced fruit, which is double crap because it’s really better with frites.
We eat lunch and we come to a deal. I take out Eiger, Leclerc will handle the guard team and then walk. He gets the emeralds. We get whatever. That is the extent of our deal.
See, if you’re a contractor you need a client, and after all Frankie was always Mr. Client. There’s optics in this situation, I tell him, matters of perception. You do not want to be creating a perceptual issue not at all.
Demon makes a deal with the devil. Film at eleven.
* * *
—
It doesn’t take very long for Leclerc’s men to finish off Eiger’s security men and they are not tender about it there is some splat and some splash. Evil Hansel watches the whole thing like it doesn’t really mean very much and perhaps it doesn’t. He looks at me for a while and I give him the nod: yes I remember the rest of the deal yes I will deliver. Yes there has been enough assassinating our forefathers now that is enough enough.
Because I mean really haven’t enough people died today already?
Eiger’s wristwatch glows in the dark as the system finally acknowledges what Eiger knew some minutes ago: he dead.
Message sent. Green light.
Back in Bern in the cigar shop the little guy gets the message. He gets up out of bed and he plugs the memory stick into his computer and sends the text file to the place he’s supposed to send it and then he goes back to bed.
I wait a minute longer.
Then I put my hand on the final door and I say:
“Open sesame.”
The door opens.
Doc says: “You fucked up my plan and you made your own plan for the fucking robbery.”
“I did.”
“You made a deal with fucking Leclerc.”
“He was Mr. Client. He was always Mr. Client.”
“You stepped on my work with this bullshit.”
“I did. For reasons.”
“When we are out of here I am going to fucking kill you Jack.”
“You’re going to be pissed with me but you will understand.”
“Will I.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think that will make it better or worse?”
* * *
—
And that is that for the bank. It is only a bank after all, the hard part is always people.
I mean, that is not all, that obviously we have to bring lots of watertight cases out of the vault and drive them in little golf buggies along the corridors back to the main entrance and then we get them down the mountain using the cable car just like Doc said we would. We bring a bunch of boxes for ourselves also with much diamonds and bonds and monies. More than three quarters of what is there we just cannot goddamn carry.
All the same we have robbed the bank just like we were contracted to do by Eiger and then when Eiger turned out to have betrayed us we found a new client and now we will split the take with the new client and that is the end of that job. It was not quiet I guess I mean people will know we were here, but since the quiet thing was Eiger’s stipulation—
This is what winning looks like I guess.
Four Demons and a reserve go down the mountain in silence.
We don’t talk about Rex, and Doc stands at the far end of the cable car and looks out at the night and does not speak.
* * *
—
Leclerc is waiting down in the valley and he is very polite. Very professional and content he has everything he wanted from this hire. He gets revenge and he gets to polish his bastard medals and be associated with a loud, splashy situation where he was wronged and the wronger is gone and he looks cool. His oh-so-modern Fascist cred
will go up and he will no doubt recruit many disenfranchised European youths to his righteous cause that is bullshit but bullshit is the soul of politics. I read where he has strong support as a political hero in some parts of Hungary and Poland. He is like a Fascist Carlos the Jackal I guess and do not tell me that Carlos was okay really because he was not. There are assholes across politics sometimes you do deals with them.
Very sensible François does not try to betray us. Profile like this, moment like this, no telling how people would read that. Maverick behavior, unreliable behavior. Kind of thing gets you enemies you never even know about.
I tell him we will go and get our transport and that I trust him to look after our share. He says my trust is well placed. I say I know our trust is well placed. We do googly trust eyes of death at one another for a moment and then I go. My Demons come with me. There are two little bulldozers next to the cable car station and some earth-moving gear but all the recyclable junk is gone.
We go and get our great big container truck for moving stolen goods. It is parked in a container truck park.
We get to the truck.
Doc punches me in the face.
I go down because it is a good hit and Doc keeps going in on me and I realize she may not stop. She maybe just doesn’t have limits like a normal person and she may just kill me. She’s using her boots now and not like to make me sad. She is hurting me.
WHUD.
And then she picks the next angle like a surgeon if surgeons used blunt objects.
WHUD.
I guess.
WHUD.
This is the thing.
WHUD WHUD WHUD.
Evil medical science.
Evil medic.
Doesn’t have human limits.
WHUD WHUD WHUDWHUDWHUDWHUD.
“Khhhfffshit Doc! DOC! KAhhffshit shit—”
WHUD
“GODDAMMIT JACK YOU ARE A FUCKING ASSHOLE—”
“I—”
WHUD WHUD WHUD
“REX IS DEAD AND YOU MADE A DEAL WITH LECLERC AND YOU DID NOT TELL ME”
WHUD WHUD
“YOU—”
WHUD
“DID NOT—”
WHUD
“TRUST ME TO DO MY JOB—”
WHUD
“Docc cc I cck—Doc?”
“YES BY ALL MEANS EXPLAIN IT TO ME”
“Yes ma’am can’t”
WHUD
And then I know I am really in trouble when she stops.
Doc says:
“Explain. Yourself. Now. Because Jack I liked Rex and he trusted you and so did I so do you see where his fate and your decision not to tell me things I needed to know might affect our relationship going forward?”
This time she does not kick me or hit me. She just puts her hand on me. Just that. Like just the gentlest touch in this particular place on my skin. She puts—
Her fingers
All the way around my windpipe
So that they meet without breaking my skin.
I can feel the hole in my trachea pushing against the glue.
But most of all I can feel her fingers in a place they absolutely should not be and I know she can keep me still like this forever. I will do anything she says.
And then I realize I can’t breathe.
“Doc—”
(Disgust.)
“Can’t breathe—”
“Shit fuck fine.”
I can’t because I am bleeding into a lung somewhere. It has gone wrong and I wonder if she meant that. Did she mean that? I cannot talk. What am I if I can’t talk? I’m just meat.
Doc looks at me and at the strange shape of my chest where her boot went and she spits and drives an empty hypo into my lower ribs like WHAM and I feel the lung reinflate and I start to say—
But by then I do not have to because there is a dog barking.
Doc says:
“Tycho?”
But it is not Tycho. Tycho is back home safe and that is not his bark. That bark belongs to Marta, who belongs to Mrs. Van der Zee.
She is just over there like a hundred meters back down the road maybe a bit more.
Because that is where the trail of aniseed leads. I had the kids from the Kircheisen school create a very distinct track from the Kircheisen Palast hotel.
So that is where she came to when she went out for her walk.
Because a dog like that will walk through fire for aniseed. It is like cocaine for them.
Doc says:
“O shit Price—”
Mrs. Van der Zee says:
“MARTA! MARTA WHERE ARE YOU?”
I look at Doc and I say it again:
“I got a new client Doc and she told me to make a horrible plan and I did. Eiger’s gone down Doc there’s just two left. The dog—I’m real sorry about the dog Doc.”
“MARTA!” yells Mrs. Van der Zee. “MARTA WHERE ARE YOU O YOU ARE HERE YOU BAD GIRL WHAT ARE YOU DOING ALL THE WAY OVER HERE—”
She’s so fast, the Doctor. So fast. I see her mind working and she’s so amazingly fast. She’s putting it all together because what else can Mrs. Van der Zee be doing here? In crime there are no coincidences and if Mrs. Van der Zee is here I have put her here and why would I do that? And she remembers emeralds and the smell on Evil Hansel at the art party and I see her get there without ever being told and I see her know what I have done.
But no one is fast enough to stop this now. Not even Doc. Not even if she wanted to, and deep down you know she does not. She wants to want to. But she’s a Demon. There are matters pertaining. There is old business.
You cannot go around shooting our friends with long guns.
Volodya is dead.
And this is how that goes.
The ground is shaking.
* * *
—
The ground is shaking. Doc looks at me and even the fury is gone now, just resignation like she should have known this.
And she should. This is what she asked for.
“What have you done Price?”
I look up at the mountains. From the far side of the valley, a line of burning white lights ignites. Searchlights. Spotlights. Picking out the Kircheisen Festung so that it shines in the dark like a radiant heavenly city. Between the lights you can just make out a flat patch of early snow and Ottavio Leopold Calvanese sitting on a very expensive chair as if to watch his favorite TV show. It looks like Rex went with the balik and it’s going down very well.
Ah shit Rex.
Shit.
“What have you done Price?”
“I took your contract Doc and delivery is due.”
* * *
—
The ground is shaking like vibrating and up on the plateau I guess there’s still a couple hundred people and the really smart ones right now are heading for the tree line and right now I guess Agent Hannah is telling the dumb ones to do the same and both of those groups are almost certainly going to live. The only fairly smart ones think Agent Hannah is wrong or evil and they are heading into the bank and those guys…yeah they’re likely not gonna make it. Figure there’s about thirty or forty of those.
Someone somewhere is calling in his helicopter to get him the fuck out and what the outcome is for him largely depends on the timing and I got no control over that now.
This is going down.
I can’t see it—in fact no one can see it except maybe Rex if he’s lasted this long in his suit, and I like to think that he has, so let’s say that’s what’s happening.
Rex fell down over the ledge into the dark and the suit kept him alive exactly this long and he knows—he knows, down there under all that water—that he is no way getting out and the only question is whether the suit fails or he runs ou
t of air and that is a shitty way to go either way.
But he’s not alone down there.
Down there under a bajillion tons of water at a squidzillion atmospheres there is a pile of boxes with a coffin on the top.
Volodya’s coffin of course.
And under him well under Volodya there is a bunch of boxes of Swiss junk ground up really small to powder. And I mean really a lot.
About a hundred tons of it.
And I threw in some magnesium from the fireworks Rex bought, and Flavia—yeah that Flavia who was hanging with Mozart—Flavia gave me some Z-Vat so that whole thing is kinda stuffed up together in a giant spiderball.
Copper oxide.
Aluminum.
Magnesium.
That is a mixture I have mentioned at certain times in other contexts. It is volatile and it is not your friend unless you like having dangerous and exothermic friends.
Which I do.
So here is what Rex sees in this last moment:
He sees a burst of light like a white basketball made of fire is eating into a tea crate. And then the greedy aluminum starts ripping oxygen away from the copper and the copper is not giving it up easy no sir. Not at all. That copper is stubborn Swiss cow copper it has seen life and it has done its military service and it will not be fucked with but in the end well there are laws and it has to comply.