Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

a bunch of coffee for sale and you get a letter of intent to buy and then you turn around and show everyone that oh so confidential letter and you create a demand. You fuck the first buyer and the price goes up and you sell at the top and everyone else is left holding the fucking bag when the price resumes seasonal levels.

“Sharkey this is all very cogent but I have to ask what made you look at Eiger in the first place?”

“Well Jack there is a thing about Eiger.”

“What thing?”

“There is the thing about his being in the Legion and all.”

“He was in the Legion he was this hard-ass we know this.”

“Yeah but Jack it didn’t matter until now so you didn’t likely look much at his record—”

“Just say it—”

“Okay okay he was a recon scout sniper—”

“FUCK—”

“Jack please do not wave the detonator—”

“Saul I’m not waving the—oh thank you yes I was—”

“That is fine but Mr. Sharkey here has been most helpful Jack and it’s important to be seen to be reasonable under difficult circumstances is that not right Mr. Sharkey?”

“Yes Skipper it absolutely—”

Saul hands me back the detonator and asks Sharkey super-duper nicely not to call him that.

Yeah haha. Very ha indeed but here is the thing Sharkey is right. Sharkey is right and—

Hans Eiger.

Hans Eiger has done that with his bank and the first buyer is me and he has fucked me in my Ukrainian.

—

All around the world there are a bajillion differing perceptions of what you owe to your friends and loved ones and what is appropriate when someone fucks with them. These perceptions range from respecting their caritas and the forgiveness of all mankind to burning cities and putting heads on sticks but the points is there is a spectrum or in fact there is a like a complex three-dimensional space into which all these responses could be placed. What there is not is unanimity and no one gets to tell you what is appropriate to your grief your relationship your private inner knowledge that maybe things were not as they seemed or la la la. Right?

But here this is not that, it is o so much simpler because yes Volodya was on some level my friend. Sure. That is to say I enjoyed his company and god help me his dubiously-sourced-dried-meat hobbyism and his grisly Soviet Industrial murder bullshit. I even loved that he carried his ridiculous out-of-date-ass rifle everywhere and we had to dress it up as a puppet one time whatever. He was an old fart and I liked him and he liked me, so to say he approved of my brand of awful and he liked that I liked his terrible jokes and his dubiously sourced dried meats and yeah maybe just maybe there was some kind of commonality of soul or I don’t know what.

I am not a soul kinduva person. I don’t really do that stuff so I am not sad right now not like sad sad not like crying. I am totally in touch with my emotions but I am not the crying sort of person and I am not sad. I’m fine. I mean I’ll miss him but I am.

Fine.

Commonality of soul yeah sure but that is not relevant all that is data for your 3D grief graph and that graph is not part of my workflow now because yes right yes you heard me I said: workflow.

Volodya worked for me. That was the nature of our relationship. It was professional.

I have people and he was my people and we are—we were—our RELATIONSHIP yes fucker I said it twice don’t @ me—our relationship is of a professional and even what you would say like a military nature. We were in a killing business and he would have killed anyone—anyone at all in the universe—if I had said so.

Probably not without some discussion and fartery unless the situation was exigent but still.

And he would have—maybe he did and I do not know but that also is not relevant NOT relevant and certainly it is not emotionally relevant or it would be emotionally relevant IF we our relationship was of the sort where that sort of thing was itself relevant but see above—he would have stepped in front of a bullet for me because he was combat and I was leadership and in the end that is what it is.

And reciprocally there is stuff. My Person stuff. Like debts and obligations and interestingly those obligations are super consistent across cultures.

So when I say this it is not like an irrational response to emotional pain at all it is totally rational it is a professional matter is all.

Completely professional.

Mr. Eiger.

O Mr. Eiger.

I am rethinking my approach to this job sir. I am considering a new vision of our onward relationship with certain stakeholders in the wider community. Certain stakeholders who have taken a negatively aspected route in re our privacy and the confidentiality of our new venture. It is not likely Mr. Eiger I am afraid it is not likely at all that everyone will retain their present employment status in the new iteration of the profit track. I’m afraid some positions will be redundant and certain people—yes even some senior executives—will have to seek a new level they will have to be managed out. People with the wrong attitude will not make the cut they will be downsized. I don’t like to say it I do not but here is the honest truth in terms. In the argot. The blunt truth is that it won’t be a soft transition. In the end it has to be acknowledged—well. Sometimes there just aren’t any good remedies for that moment in the corporate life cycle and sometimes you can’t give someone—with the best will in the world you cannot give someone the ending they would like.

I don’t know how else to put this and it is totally your choice that this is where we are—your choice from start to finish do please remember that as we embrace