Start-Up

Start-Up

Olen Steinhauer

It wasn't even my idea; it was Jerry's. He was inspired by a pirated copy of From Russia With Love, sixteen years after his first viewing at the age of fourteen, nearly fifty years after the film was first released, and two days before I went back to Texas to watch my mother die. We sat in his uncle's mildewy basement in south Chicago watching it on his uncle's widescreen monster. It was a terrific film, and by the end we were both a little in love with Daniela Bianchi, but while the film was inspiring me to pick up and move to Italy to find more girls who looked like her, Jerry was inspired in an entirely different direction. He wanted to become a master criminal. A super-villain.