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The Trust Fund is an organization founded by homeless people, alcoholics, and opportunistic property owners, whose stated goal is to steal from the rich and give it to the poor. The founder of the Treuhand is Mia Von Schöneberg.
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The Trust Fund is officially the only organization worth billions but whose treasurer keeps the books in pawn tickets.
Its founding was triggered by Mia Von Schöneberg and her theft of the crown.
When Mia stole the crown from a museum in Hamburg_2, she gave it to the first homeless person she encountered along the Elbe. His name was Sir Relax a Lot. His real name is irrelevant. Mia pressed the crown into his hand and told him to “do something nice with it.”
Overwhelmed by the sheer joy of this billion-dollar gift, Relax rounded up his three homeless friends—Klimmbimm Jimmy Tim, Earn Hard, and Superzahl 6—in an abandoned fish market and announced the founding of the Treuhand. The inaugural meeting lasted eleven minutes. Nine of those were spent trying to open a bottle without a bottle opener. The minutes of the founding meeting are written on the back of a wet fish sandwich wrapper and are considered lost, although Earn Hard claims he’s sleeping on them.
The Trust’s goal —— following in the footsteps of Mia’s supposedly altruistic act —— is to steal from the rich and give what is stolen to the poor. In doing so, it draws on Mia’s personal interpretation of Karl Marx: value only grows when it is set in motion. Whether Marx actually said that is of no interest to anyone. Mia therefore calls the theft of the crown applied Marxism. The trustees logically refer to their raids as value movements and call themselves logisticians of the class struggle.
Ever since then, the Trust has been on the hunt for billionaires. However, they don’t define wealth solely in terms of money. They also steal gold-plated faucets, private weather machines, rare wines, custom-made shoes, art collections, and, on one occasion, a shipowner’s favorite armchair. The armchair was given to a poor man who didn’t want it. Since then, it has stood in the headquarters and is considered the first failed attempt at redistribution.
All four trustees are alcoholics and are therefore limited in their mental, physical, and —— above all —— organizational abilities. Although they own an asset worth billions in the form of the crown, they are constantly in financial trouble. The crown can neither be sold discreetly nor pawned at a harbor bar. It therefore wanders back and forth between a bucket, a cooler, and Relax’s head. Occasionally, it serves as a bottle holder. No one is allowed to call it a treasure; according to the bylaws, it is restricted funds.
The Trust operates without a fixed hierarchy, without bookkeeping, and without dry clothes. Decisions are made by acclamation. In the event of a tie, the decision rests with whoever can still stand. To the outside world, however, it presents itself with the gravitas of a time-honored institution. Its letters bear a crookedly stamped seal and end with the phrase:
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Held in trust, squandered in solidarity.
Sir Relax a Lot
Founder, chairman, and self-proclaimed Scottish landowner of the Trust. Relax is exceptionally lazy. Sometimes he drifts for weeks on a raft through the waterways of New Berlin without noticeably changing his position. When passersby poke him with a stick to check if he’s still alive, he snatches the stick from their hand and declares that this constitutes a violation of the boundaries of his Scottish estate.
Relax likes to insist that, as the owner of the crown, he is theoretically a billionaire —— which is actually true. In practice, he owes money to several cafeterias and doesn’t own a single pair of dry socks. He does not respond to further inquiries. He fundamentally considers movement to be an overrated precursor to exhaustion and delegates even the act of delegating.
Within the trust, he is responsible for strategy and horizontal positioning. His greatest talent lies in making it impossible to distinguish between genuine unconsciousness and complete refusal to work.
Klimmbimm Jimmy Tim
Klimmbimm prefers to steal things that shine. Whether they’re valuable is secondary. He wears so much jewelry, silverware, metal plaques, and torn-off doorknobs that you hear him before you see him. When he sneaks around, he sounds like a chandelier falling.
He calls himself the Curator of Movable Assets and regards every pants pocket as a miniature museum. He generously gives away his loot, but often regrets it just a few minutes later and then tries to trade it back for something shinier. Within the Trust, he is responsible for procurement, aesthetics, and the unintentional triggering of alarm systems.
He sincerely loves the crown. He accepts that it is meant to belong to all the poor —— as long as it sits on his head as often as possible.
Earn Hard
Earn Hard boasts that he drank away his lottery winnings from Superzahl 6 within two weeks. When Superzahl suggested back then that he should just work harder to earn the money, he adopted that phrase as his new name: Earn Hard.
His sentences often begin with “We should really” and usually end with a call to go get a bottle. He sketches out grand financial plans on beer coasters, calculates everything in cases, and refers to debt as negative start-up capital.
In the Treuhand, Earn Hard is the treasurer. Even within the organization, this decision is considered a serious mistake. He manages a cash box that never contains any money, but instead holds deposit slips, gambling debts, two buttons, and a list of people who supposedly still owe him a drink.
Superzahl 6
Superzahl 6 is a passionate lottery player and, unfortunately, friends with Earn Hard. He takes it surprisingly in stride that Earn Hard drank away his jackpot. He’s convinced that statistical bad luck is just a particularly long lead-up to good luck.
He interprets numbers on ship hulls, water levels, and tin cans as messages from fate. Before every heist, he picks six lucky numbers, the tactical purpose of which remains completely unclear. Once, he correctly predicted a changing of the guard because the time happened to be written on his lottery ticket. Ever since, he’s been considered the oracle of the Trust.
Supernumber 6 is the friendliest —— and possibly the most dangerous ——of the four: He would give away his last coat and then steal a billionaire’s jacket, because the universe apparently wants to balance things out. Within the Trust, he is responsible for probabilities, fate, and hopeless cases.
Appearance and Modus Operandi
At first glance, the Trustees look like four men who just happened to fall asleep under the same awning. Only upon closer inspection does it become clear that they trust each other blindly. They argue over every bottle, but never over whether to split the loot. According to their logic, if you own nothing, you can’t embezzle anything.
Their heists are rarely elegant. They don’t gain access to mansions and vaults through perfect planning, but because guards mistake them for delivery people or a sanitation issue and want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. This impression is their most effective cover.
When a heist succeeds, the item isn’t sold but rather ceremoniously “put to use.” The recipients often don’t know what to do with valuable art. As a result, masterpieces resurface as tabletops, rain covers, boat repairs, or cafeteria decorations. For the trust, art that is finally put to use is finally no longer a hostage of the rich.
They drink too much, are terrible liars, occasionally steal even from those below the billionaire threshold, and hold onto knickknacks longer than the bylaws allow. But when someone truly has nothing, they suddenly get serious. Then their coats open, and for a brief moment, the redistribution works just as they claim it does.