Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

“I am seriously not a terrorist.”

“Please don’t tell me you make art. Zum Wohl.”

“Kampai.”

Agent Hannah puts the whole shot down not fast but slowly and then she cuts some bread and pours another.

“What do you want?”

“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