“No sir. You are merely vested with money at this time and that is not the same. Your wealth is contingent on many factors.”

“Such as?”

“Such as me Mr. Eiger. Such as me.”

—

I wait and I wait and in the meantime I go online and read Mr. Eiger’s website and his brochure. I am just full of respect for everything he has achieved I mean this guy. French Foreign Legion in all kinds of hot situations such as the DijonAir hijacking before I was even out of school, comes home and you can see right off he believes more than anything in stability. He believes in stability so much that he builds himself a business that is all about making a hard foundation in the world. He literally carves out a place for himself I mean that is fucking poetic. There are pictures of him looking patrician and hard-ass in the brochure with all the big doors of his bank like big round space doors in big round door frames set into the rock. He has on a blue suit with a little blue flower in the lapel and he is hella good-looking for a guy his age. The Kircheisen Festung is a statement of permanence and I can completely see how he would not want to give it up but but BUT sentiment has no place in business. Business is not your identity anymore, that is some twentieth century you are carrying around right there. Business is process now and who you are is a whole other thing that you do.

Even so I give him the full twenty-four hours because of the respect. Eiger does not call. On the one hand you got to respect that kind of stubborn. On the other, stubborn in the end is just a way of saying you don’t take the world the way it really is.

Some people I guess just do not like it when they touch the real.

I go to tell everyone the good news and Volodya says: “No.”

TWO

SOME DAYS YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK I mean you just don’t. Here is this guy Volodya whom I love like a—I guess a real scary uncle who lives much of the time in a log cabin at an undisclosed location above the Arctic Circle and who may or may not eat ham made of people and we do not discuss it because he’s sensitive. He’s big and bristle-faced and he has hard hands from the moose wrestling and such and he smells of turpentine and old cotton. He does not wear a ridiculous merchant seaman’s hat but you know he kind of should. I lay it all out for them like BAM here is this classic job and we will do it. The world’s most unrobabble bank and here it is—