So he didn’t even open the boxes. Instead, he decided to take the remains of his drink and see what other kind of reading the library had.

The shelving system did not follow any of the established methods. No Library of Congress numbers or Dewey decimals. No decimals at all. It was more intuitive. Books grouped together by subject matter, mostly, and sometimes by size, or color. Donny looked at the oversized shelves. A photo book about the long wars of his youth, when the General was in charge. Intense black-and-white shots of marines in their fallout suits going in to the Iranian blast zone to clear out the remnants of the “outlaw state.” Jungle fighters working the border between Costa Rica and Panama, policing the US colony at Chiriquí, with fetishes on their machetes and fangs and tails and maybe even human ears around their necks. And then the fire patrols who went into Brazil to clear the rebels from the jungles with napalm, mortar, and man traps, followed by the military merchant companies who cleared the rain forest with Titan Jelly, chainsaws, bulldozers and fire, destroying the habitat of a lot more than the neo-nationalist nomads of ODA they were fighting, and paving the way for the accelerated warming of the atmosphere that followed.

When he put that away he found the older books. Dusty classics, some of them actual classics, including a three-volume re-compilation of the Greek myths by Hugh de Lavis, an English writer whose short novel about love in the trenches of the Somme Donny had read in college. He pulled up the entry on Demeter, thinking maybe there would be something there in the legends of the harvest that he could use to embellish his begging in the morning. And there was some of that, but then he got distracted reading about the wrath of Poseidon, stories that seemed equally applicable to storm-ruined New Orleans.

He went back to the boxes, trying to find the file that he remembered. Files, more accurately, a trove of binders that had been stolen by the outlaw archivists from Donny’s old law firm, Barker & Eames. Donny had requested it more out of curiosity than any sense that it would help his case—wondering what kinds of deals his former colleagues were up to these days, and thinking he might find something in there on Lou, who was now one of the firm’s senior partners.

It took him a while, but he found it. He worked his way through the merger agreements and the NDAs and the tender offers and the private-placement memoranda, and after a while he thought maybe it was a dumb idea after all.

Until he found the stock-purchase agreement.