The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay by Maurice Hewlett (great books of all time .TXT) 📕

who owns a bank to rob that bank. But I offered him a bunch of money for his bank like waaaay too much. Hans Eiger does not care about money or at least he does not care about money only or money in that way.

I say this to Sharkey and Sharkey says that he is once more thinking about the whole business with whales and the thermocline and Saul says quickly I am not to explode Sharkey’s balls so I just frown my ball-exploding frown that I have just made up. Sharkey gets the message because balls.

Why would a man who does not care about money rob his own bank?

Sharkey says Hans Eiger does care about money because Hans Eiger is oh so very broke, but he cannot sell his bank because if he tries he will probably die.

The thing is that Hans Eiger did not create Die Festung because it was a good idea, he created it because he wanted it to be a good idea and honestly it is a terrible idea. But Hans Eiger cares about stability so much that he cannot see that and someone who cannot adjust to reality is not a good person to be running a company. No sir.

The truth is that no one gives a shit for physical storage these days except a few old folks and Hans Eiger. You care that much about physical stuff and you are that rich, you build your own vault in a volcano—but honestly wealth is vapor now. It is concept more than it ever has been and the hoarding of British Empire diamonds in gold nests like an evil chipmunk is no longer considered a sign of taste and distinction. There’s a certain class of person that has shit that needs to be hidden away somewhere like Die Festung and that class is old-money sinners with no future and there are fewer of them every year. When you have a dwindling client pool you got to be the only sensible choice for the evil-chipmunk people and as it turns out Hans Eiger is not. Not only is Swiss law getting less and less amenable to the stashing of secret money and secret stolen stuff but also there is competition for the evil-chipmunk market. There’s private islands and there’s Hatton Garden and old nuclear bunkers in Dipshit, Milwaukee, and there’s museum loans with maintenance grants and a condition that the item not be displayed for twenty years, and a dozen other ways to get the job done that do not require putting your expensive and illegal shit in a bunker with a rob me sign on the door.

Eiger built his dream just in time for almost everyone else to realize they didn’t need it.

He cannot sell because the moment he does the few remaining customers he has—the legacy mob, your older Chinese and Russian oligarchs with fixations on physical wealth, some real traditional gold-standard believers and yeah likely also some of Those Guys that Ottavio Leopold was talking about—those good friends will feel that he has betrayed a sacred trust. A few of them will probably take steps to prevent any sale. Hans Eiger needed an alternative and that alternative was me.

Oh indeed this was not about running off with the proceeds of robbing his own bank and balling dancers under Mexican stars. This is about the darkest reaches of the human heart.

I’m talking about advertising.

—

Sharkey says he figured Eiger was legit intending to rob his own bank and claim the insurance on goods he actually still had. Sharkey is wrong. Sharkey is uninterested in revolutionary change. Sharkey is lumpen.

Hans Eiger was not thinking along those lines. Hans Eiger was looking to make a point. A splash. A revofuckinglution in personal financial security. To demonstrate that his bank was unassailable. That his bank had the largest banking genitals in all the wide swinging world of steel and concrete and holes in the ground.

And for that what he needed—what he needed—

He needed us.

The Demons.

Not to rob the bank.

To try to rob the bank.

And fail.

Because if there is one thing everyone likes it is a hero story and for a good hero story you need a villain because a villain makes a headline.

And with the right headlines he could turn the emptiness of the Kircheisen Festung into a frantic demand for space. His perceptual issue will become word of mouth.

If Hans Eiger kills the Seven Demons as we try to rob his bank, his bank becomes the coolest fucking bank in the universe. The evil-chipmunk community will want his smooth stone corridors and his musty steel vaults more than they want sex or money or power. International dumb people will open accounts with him and keep nothing in their fucking vaults at all, just to say that they got an account with Die Festung before their brother-in-law did. So he called me and he sent some flunky to be Mr. Client ooh la la and romance my larceny and—

I fell for it.

I fell for it.

I.

Fell.

For that.

I cannot believe I fucking—well that Eiger would believe I would fall for that is—

It is fucking offensive is what it is and that offense is in no way mitigated by the fact that he was right that is not the point I should not have and he should not have DREAMED that I would. Not EVER.

It’s offensive.

It’s offensive and it is also—he is also—he is fucking un-Swiss. Can you believe it? This whole shit is un-Swiss. He caused a hazard to the public in pursuit of profit and he got caught doing it. That is un-Swiss.

But there’s more than that there is something that is beyond offensive it is fucking Hegelian in its ingenuity to piss me off is what.

Do you know what is beyond offensive? That is a coffee trick. It is a commodities trick. Here is what you do you—and this is why you never invest in the fucking gold market because those fuckers barely do anything except this—you have