Syrup Read Online Free PDF

disapprovingly. “Oh. Hey, sorry. You’re going to have to pick a ”New name.
    “New name?” I say faintly. There is a great roaring in my ears, which sounds, I imagine, a lot like three million dollars rushing past my face and heading for the toilet.
    “Yeah,” Einstein says. “There’s already a registered cola product called Fukk. Just a new one, too.”
    So there it is. I’ve been screwed over. I’m going to be the poorest inventor of a billion-dollar product in history. Marketing textbooks will probably have my story in an amusing little box on page 122, with a heading like “Great Marketing Blunders #4.”
    Somehow I manage to spit out: “Who owns it?” For my own masochistic reasons, I need to hear him say “6.”
    “Oh,” Einstein says. “Oh boy, that’s a tough one. How do you pronounce that?” His forehead screws up. I wouldn’t have thought there were too many variations, but I let Einstein struggle along at his own pace. “Well, there are two names. I mean, one person, known by two names.”
    Despite having just pissed three million dollars into the wind through sheer stupidity, the prospect of discovering 6’s real name makes me perk up.
    Until Einstein says:
    “The first one is, um, Yuong Ang. But the other one is Sneaky Pete.”

A Brief Interlude with Scat and Sneaky Pete

a no-holds-barred confrontation with sneaky pete
    I expect him to be gone when I return home—the whole empty closet, raided fridge and stolen aftershave deal—but he’s not. He’s on the sofa, watching Oprah. Oprah is challenging a panel of extremely fat women to come up with one reason why they can’t be beautiful, and Sneaky Pete is grinning at them as if he already knows the answer.
    I shut the door behind me and he turns. He is wearing his indoor shades, which are less tinted and almost allow me to see his eyes. For some reason I find this unnerving.
    “Hey,” I say.
    He nods at me, then picks up the remote and zaps Oprah and her fat women into oblivion.
    I dump my briefcase on the table and walk over to the sofa. My suit is already rumpled so I just sit down beside him.
    “I did the deal today.”
    He nods.
    “6 was trying to go it alone, but I caught her in time. In the end, I sold the idea to Coke. One up-front payment. No royalties.”
    He nods again, slowly. I sit there and watch him for a minute. I’m finding it difficult to work out how he can be so calm. In the end, I can’t take it. “Three million dollars.”
    A smile slowly spreads across his face. If I hadn’t just come back from the patent office, I would be pleased that Sneaky Pete is so enthusiastic about my success. But I have just come back from the patent office, and I’m not enjoying that grin at all.
    “The only thing is,” I say, standing from the sofa, “I realized at the last moment that I never registered a trademark on this thing. In fact, I only thought about it after Coke agreed to buy Fukk. So I went down to the patent office this afternoon.”
    Sneaky Pete says, “But I beat you there.”
    I exhale. The last little flickering hope that maybe he would say Yeah, you moron, here’s your trademark snuffs out.
    “Sneaky Pete,” I say, struggling a little. “That’s my money.”
    He shrugs expressionlessly. He turns away, and for a second I think he’s going to turn Oprah back on. Then he says, “That’s business.”
    My jaw drops: I actually feel it go. “You—you would—” The thing that’s really getting me here is that Sneaky Pete is the sort of guy who, if he was stuck at a nightclub with no money, would rather go thirsty than borrow from someone (well, Sneaky Pete isn’t the sort of guy who would be stuck at a nightclub with no money, but if he was, that’s what I think he would do). Up until three hours ago, I would have described him as the most honest person I had ever met. If, three hours ago, I had been forced to construct a list of the people most likely to steal three million dollars from me,