My first job was as a tour guide in Turkey and then i became a tout for a brothel but far more lucrative was my next line of employment as a fire man, not a fireman as in someone who puts put fires, but a man of fire as in a professional arsonist burning down mansions of the wealthy so the Constantinople Fire Brigade could extort rewards from their owners for saving the valuables within.
It was by luck that i met with a Swedish captain who was about to leave his job as an agent of arms manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt so i applied, and got his job and so began my spectacular career just as the political and military instability in the Balkan states, Turkey and Russia hit its height.
As any salesman will tell you, the best way to make a living selling anything is to create a demand for it and when it is weapons you are selling, trying to starting a bunch of wars is the way to go so that's exactly what i did.
After selling the world's first submarine to the Greeks, i went running to the Turkish government to tell them their enemy Greece now had a submarine and persuaded them to buy two of their own.
Then i went to Russia and explained that as Greece and Turkey now had submarines, they were such a threat to Russia it would be madness not to have a few of their own and they ordered six.
To balance things up Thorsten Nordenfelt produced a range of anti-torpedo boat guns but it turned out that the subs were actually useless and fell apart as soon as they tried to fire a torpedo but by then they had been paid for and i had moved on to hawking the first automatic machine gun.
It was the first but there was a better version being offered around at the same time by a rival firm but i managed to not only sabotage the presentation but be stood next to the potential buyers when it failed and just happen to mention that as luck would have it, i had machine gun they could buy.
After the turn of the century i held many sales meetings with the Germans who were concerned by the British Empire and then went straight from Berlin to Paris to tell the French that the Germans were rearming and they really should get themselves some decent military hardware to meet the threat posed by Germany.
World War 1 came and my profits from selling weapons to multiple nations on both sides of the conflict exploded like a British House hit by a bomb i had sold the German's during the blitz and i was asked by the British to negotiate to drag Greece into the war on their side and to persuade the Ottoman Empire to defect from the Germans.
I agreed as long as i was rewarded with a Knighthood for my services so i could call myself Sir. Despite my best efforts to prolong it indefinitely, World War I did eventually end, and i spent the remainder of my years working at a Monte Carlo casino but unfortunately dying before nuclear weapons were a thing, the money i could have made selling those things to everyone!
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