They found him standing by the glass doors before dawn, the thin hue of the city’s lights behind him. He was a tall man, shoulders bent by relentless hours. The tie around his neck might as well have been a tourniquet. Across the hotel lobby, a few bleary-eyed travelers caught a glimpse of his figure and thought him lucky. Surely, he was a man of privilege and fortune. But who could know the quiet toll that mission exacted?
Somewhere else, in some flicker of a story told by losers, there was talk of Luigi shooting a CEO in the back. A moment of conspiratorial cheer, or so they claimed. Echoes of a halfhearted revolution. And the normal folk with sense shook their heads, whispering that civilization was in peril. A million more would fall if the envy and hatred grew. But none of them paused to consider the life this man led: a life that demanded constant vigilance, a life that ground him down for the machine he served.
He rose each day in the darkness, dressing in crisp suits to meet with other powers in hotel rooms that reeked of yesterday’s coffee and the faint odor of regrets. Sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours on his feet. There were phone calls that never truly ended, deals and details swirling like vultures overhead. He was both commander and soldier in a campaign that never slept. The assault of it all: uncountable deadlines, labyrinthine negotiations, the insatiable appetite of the board demanding results.
They would say he’s well-paid. That his mansion and accounts prove his existence is one of obscene wealth. But he sits there at the edge of his bed in the stale twilight, black circles etched under his eyes, and knows the wage he takes is a strange pittance. For in the ledger of life, the hours devoured and the health squandered must be tallied. The stress alone is a scar across the mind. If one could see the hidden costs—his tired heart stammering in the night, his family a blur of birthdays and events missed, his body surrendering before the clock turns sixty—it might prompt a different reckoning. The money looks good on paper, but it arrives like silver coins in a Shakespearian tragedy, dearly bought.
No one says these things aloud. They only see the brand of the suit and the glimmer of polished shoes, the high floor of the corner office. He invests all his waking hours in the cause, and that cause seldom thanks him. Could be a healthcare mission, ironically eroding his own health in the chase for bottom lines and expansions. He runs from city to city, conference to conference, gulping down fast-food coffee, fueling himself on the cheapest scraps. Pleasantries forced among peers, social drinks that become social obligations, each glass a small gamble against the next day’s clarity.
And so he stands in that early morning dim, every nerve humming with anxiety, a thousand mental boxes needing a check. Figures dancing in the mind’s eye. Over in some dark corner of the world, someone who’s never lived a day in those shoes contemplates how easy it must be to just do away with such a man. A quick shot in the back, celebrate, claim to bring down Goliath. They do not speak of the nights he lay in bed, unable to recall the last time he felt calm. They do not speak of the intangible cost of devoting one’s soul to the unstoppable gears of enterprise.
Yes, he owns suits. Yes, he commands men and women who follow his directives. But inside that chassis of success stands a solitary figure whose time is no longer his own, who signs deals in boardrooms in lieu of any real horizon of peace. The losers who dream of violence do not see that the baron they hate is sometimes a prisoner of his own ambition, this top commander forging onward through bouts of near-constant stress. The normal folks fear the chaos, warn about the downfall of civilization should envy take root and the lethal fixations multiply. But few ever wonder if there’s a human behind the polished veneer, living a life pinned to the desk like a butterfly in a collection.
He looks up finally, glances at the watch, and the day begins in earnest. Meetings. Memos. Quiet, desperate checks of his phone for messages from a family he barely sees. By the time the day ends, it will be nearly tomorrow. And he will have aged another week’s worth in spirit, paying his wages hour by hour for that lonely empire he upholds.
They labor at a frantic pace, double-checking the data that no one else truly comprehends. A slip in the numbers, a muttered hesitation at the wrong time, can shift entire kingdoms of balance sheets. The outcome can pivot billions of dollars in profit or loss. And in the ledger’s end, the CEO will have earned a fraction—a bare morsel compared to what they have wrought. Ten million against four billion. A champion that the owners applaud from the safety of their grand estates. He is not the true master, only a figure behind the curtain who is granted a few coins for the spectacle.
He wonders sometimes if the pay is worthy of the sacrifice. If the suits in which he stands are worth the sleepless nights, the scorn of a neglected spouse, and the slow hollowing that carves his health away. That question fades before the daily clamor. Over time, any illusions vanish: he is a hired mercenary, a general paid to win wars he does not fully own. If he held out for more, demanded the ten or twenty-five percent that his talent deserved, who would back him? The board would blanch, the shareholders grumble, and in the end they might produce another willing soul—less skilled, sure, but cheaper to retain. Yet the cost to the enterprise, were he to leave, could be staggering. Billions at stake, entrusted to the next unproven warrior whose ambition has not yet learned the price to be paid.
And so he drags his battered self from city to city, from deal to deal, seeing the markets shift beneath him like shifting desert sands. Year on year he ages, the lines on his face deepening as though etched by the stock tickers he pours over each dawn. And the money he accumulates becomes an abstract—carved away by taxes, ground down by divorce lawyers who ghost about the periphery, taking advantage of a life too busy for love. For all his millions, he is but a gilded laborer. Exploited. Tethered to the sum of the numbers he conjures for another’s benefit.
In the hush of late-night corridors he replays the quiet arithmetic: billions made, millions received. Millions that seem immense, but not against the yield he produced. At times he imagines an agent negotiating a fairer cut. He imagines a life of balanced hours, of children who know him better than boardrooms. But the day begins anew, and the suits are laid out, and there are calls to answer, and there is no time. He goes to work again, unprotected but for the silent conviction that he must keep every plate spinning, every number aligned. And in doing so, he will move billions for a wage that robs him of the only currency that can never be recovered—his life.