“Papal-fucking-indulgence Sharkey. I am pissed with you but so long as we can get through this conversation I consider actually hurting you a waste of resources.”

“You do?”

“I do and Sharkey this is also the point I am making to you and the world: I am Jack. Fucking. Price. I am not some cowboy I am a professional I like things to BE CALM. That is my fondest hope and in furtherance of things being motherfucking calm I will trade you your fondest hope, which I assume to be retaining your scrotum in non-aerosol form am I right?”

“…You actually did shoot a guy with a severed head that time.”

“And it was huge fun Sharkey and it made a hellacious mediapathic attention-getting mess but my point is it was appropriate and it was proportional to need, okay? Sadly it did not function as a prelude to sensible discussions but that is because other parties who should have known better became needlessly emotional about the whole situation and I cannot legislate for the behavior of others. However exigent fucking circumstances obtain right now, that is to say I have been shot in the Ukrainian and there are—you know Sharkey there are rules and conventions but above all this one, which is we provide a service and we do so according to the norms established by time-honored criminal practice and, you know, all that shit. Okay? We are a service entity and I just want the information necessary to carry on my business in all the relevant directions.”

—

Sharkey says he does not know like know like something you could use in court, and I have grown as a person in the last few days and months so I do not blow him up by the balls right then. Instead I say: “O RLY?”

And Sharkey says that he thinks it may all have been Hans Eiger all along.

—

Hans Eiger owns the Kircheisen Festung. Obviously it would be not unheard of for a guy 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.