One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  “How do your clients even find you here?” John asked as Cristoforo pulled out his keys.

  “We no longer really have any clients who come looking for us,” the lawyer told him as he unlocked the door.

  When he looked around the inside of the narrow building, John realized the dilapidated façade was only camouflage. There were automatic locking bolts made of shiny chromium steel mounted on the inside of the door and a small video camera watching them. Cristoforo went to a wall-mounted keyboard and tapped in at least 10 numbers, whereupon a red LED lamp turned green. Up and down the entire stairwell he heard distant clicking noises, from all the doors being automatically unlocked.

  “We have many old original documents stored here,” Cristoforo explained as they climbed the stairs, crooked and aged, perhaps themselves centuries old. “Until now, we really had no reason to fear anyone would break into the office, but, one never knows. The second floor used to be an apartment for one of the Vacchi families until the last century. These days there’s only one real apartment left, in case one of us has a lot of work to do and doesn’t want to drive all the way home; that’s on the fourth floor.”

  He opened another door to reveal glass display cases that stretched as far as John could see, inside them endless were rows of dark, old tomes. The glass of the cases reflected the neon light from the low ceiling as John stepped closer to try and read the faded writing on the spines of the books … 1714, 1715, 1716 and so forth. It smelled like a museum: dust, cleaning fluids and linoleum flooring.

  “What sort of books are those?” John asked.

  “Accounting books,” the Padrone answered with a smile. “In them, you can see exactly how your fortune developed. My ancestors were very meticulous in this respect. One must humbly say that the account books of the Vacchis were much more exact and complete than those of Giacomo himself.”

  “Do those still exist too?”

  “Of course. Come along.”

  John followed the old man through a low doorway, ducking his head just in case, and stepped into a room that was resembled the last. But it was not exactly the same; upon closer inspection he saw that the books here were thinner, more worn and generally looked older, and that the display cases were more solid, practically armored, and with built-in air-conditioning.

  “Because of the air pollution,” Cristoforo Vacchi explained, shaking his head sadly. “Down all the past centuries the books hadn’t suffered as much as in the past decades. We had to ensure clean air for the books; otherwise they would have been damaged by car exhaust fumes.”

  They went through another door and into a small, almost empty, dark room that resembled a chapel. A crucifix hung on a wall and below it stood a display table, which had a chair standing by it. Cristoforo switched on two lamps that illuminated a compartment inside the glass-topped table. John stepped closer and felt an odd shudder go through his body. He sensed what he saw even before the lawyer spoke.

  “This is the testament,” Cristoforo explained, as if referring to something sacred, “Giacomo Fontanelli’s last will.”

  The testament consisted of two large, thick, dark-brown sheets of strangely lustrous paper, lying on white velvet underneath a glass plate. The writing on them was small and angular and barely legible. Both sheets were crammed with text and bound together with fragile looking strips of cloth, which had impressive looking seals attached to their ends.

  John pulled up the chair, which like everything else here also looked old, old and yet solid. He sat down, leaned over the glass and looked at the documents more closely, trying to comprehend that an ancestor of his had written these words with his own hands, setting in motion this insane project.

  “I don’t understand a single word,” he finally admitted. “But I guess that this is medieval Italian, or something?”

  “It’s Latin.”

  John nodded, stared at the dark-brown elegantly curved lines of the capital letters. It reminded him of a page from an old handwritten bible. “Latin. Did Lorenzo know Latin?”

  The Padrone put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t torture yourself with that,” he told him. “His death is no fault of yours.”

  “But I’m the beneficiary.”

  The lawyer’s hand kneaded his shoulder. “You are the heir. Look here.” He pointed to a part of the handwritten text, where John indeed could see a date written in Roman numerals. “The youngest male descendant who is alive on the 23 of April 1995. Alive — that is you, John. You’re the one.”

  John’s eyes wandered further down over the ancient document, and stopped by the elegant signature. Adjacent to it were a few more, smaller signatures; witnesses maybe, or tokens from notaries public, just like the dark, fragile seals. He had no idea if this document looked like a typical testament from the fifteenth century. The Padrone could have shown him just about anything and insisted that this or that was written on it. Only, what sort of sense would it make to falsify something like this? They were the ones who wanted to give him a trillion dollars. They were even enthusiastic about making him the richest man on earth. They had no reason to lie.

  What sort of man was this Giacomo Fontanelli? A religious fanatic? His signature looked strong, rounded and confident. The signature of a man in full possession of his senses and who knew what he was doing. John wished he could read the testament. No, what he really wanted was to know what it might be like to have such a clear vision that it would change your life and control your destiny.

  Diagonally above the table was a small window that resembled a castle’s embrasure glazed with thick streaky glass. A small part of a dome could be seen through it, and John wondered if it was the chapel Michelangelo had built for the dead Medici. He didn’t know, didn’t even have the slightest idea what direction this window faced.

  Michelangelo? Why was this name so special to him that it kept going around in the back of his mind? It was almost as if there was a voice deep within his head that kept saying the name, as if to remind him of something. But remind him of what? Michelangelo. He painted the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In Rome, where Lorenzo was born, lived and died.

  “How old was I when Lorenzo was born?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Cristoforo uttered, startled out of his own thoughts.

  “Twelve,” John said answering his question. “About twelve. And prior to that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before Lorenzo’s death. Who was the candidate?” John knew but asked anyway.

  “You.” He said it as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Were you watching me back then?”

  “Of course.”

  Now the memory came back to him, gushing up from the depths of his mind like water from a fountain: an elegantly dressed gentleman, silver temples, a manicured hand that handed him a chocolate bar, a benevolent expression below bushy eyebrows. Now he suddenly understood what this voice inside tried to tell him. It wasn’t saying “Michelangelo,” but “Mr. Angelo!” John exclaimed. He turned around, touched Cristoforo Vacchi’s face, and looked at his hunched, gaunt figure. “You were Mr. Angelo, am I right?”

  The Padrone smiled gently. “You remember?”

  “I saw you once — when you arrived on a flight from Europe. You had nothing with you except a plastic bag with shoes in it.”

  “Oh, that. You saw me then? That was my last visit. Normally I stayed in New York for a few days. After Lorenzo was born, I wanted to see you one more time, but you were not there when I went to your father’s shop. That’s odd. You were in the airport on that day?”

  John nodded. He began to recognize more and more about this old gentleman who he had once known. How long ago all this was! No wonder Cristoforo Vacchi seemed so familiar to him right from the start. “Yes. I can’t remember exactly why; I think a friend’s mom or dad had taken me with them — to get out of the house. But I saw you. For a long time I thought you never came back again because I had discovered your secret.”

  �
�Like in the fairy tale. Yes, I understand.” The old man nodded in thought. “Now, in retrospect, I think that we had overdone it with our observations. We couldn’t wait, even though the testament says explicitly that we could only introduce ourselves to you after the specified date. When you were still little we visited repeatedly. Alberto accompanied me initially and later Gregorio came, and in the beginning my late brother Aldo. We watched you on the way to school, at the playground …”

  Recollections, like memories of a land beyond the looking glass. “I remember coming across strange men who asked me strange questions. I remember three men in coats who stood on the other side of a fence while I was swinging. A large dark man with hair on the back of his hands …”

  “Who that was I don’t know, but the three men by the fence were Aldo, Alberto, and me.”

  John had to laugh. “My mother was always worried when I told her about that. First she thought they were some perverts, and then later she thought that there was something wrong with me.” He looked at the testament under the glass, the seals, the signature … “Who would have ever thought …?”

  “Come,” Cristoforo told him, “I want to show you something else.”

  They went downstairs to the cellar. The ceiling was low and there were no windows, but the whole place was amply lit, the walls finely stuccoed, and it looked almost clinically clean. The short hallway they went through ended with a heavy black-painted steel door. The sound of an electric motor could be heard, similar to a fridge running, which was odd in this house with walls as thick as a castle’s insulating them from all exterior noise. The gadget making the racket was a computer. It was a very large computer, as big as a cabinet, painted blue and bearing the familiar IBM logo. The computer dominated the room, humming, droning and looking old fashioned, like it too dated back to the days of the Medici. Thick gray cables ran to a whole bank of telephone connections along a wall.

  “We have a modern unit out in our estate,” Cristoforo said with a raised voice. “This one here was bought in 1969 and we had a program developed just for our purposes, which is able to access thousands of banks and manage millions of accounts doing calculations with monetary exchange rates to help keep the whole system up to date. Eduardo can show you how this is done with all the passwords and so on, but what I actually wanted to show is here … look.”

  He pointed with obvious pride at a large, old-fashioned computer monitor that showed nothing but a long number in radar-green color. When John took a closer look he saw that the last few of the thirteen digit numbers were changing in very fast sequence, and the very last digit was so fast that he couldn’t follow it. One trillion and many millions more; it was the current total account balance. Four thousand dollars per breath, Eduardo had said. John watched the racing numbers and tried to make out the details. Yes, it could be — four thousand per breath. But, as he watched closely for a bit, he saw that the number didn’t grow continuously, but seemed to pulsate, growing a bit faster and then a bit slower. One trillion; displayed as a number on a dark-gray computer screen it looked like nothing.

  “One trillion dollars really is quite a bit of money, isn’t it?” John said.

  Cristoforo stood before the monitor terminal like it was an altar. “An unbelievably vast sum,” he said earnestly. “Each year the American magazine Forbes publishes a list of names of the hundred richest people in the world. For a long time Sam Walton was number one. He had founded Wal-Mart and made it to about forty billion dollars. He died a few years ago from bone cancer. Bill Gates had surpassed him in the meantime with about fifty billion dollars. Not on the list are, for example, Queen Elizabeth or the Sultan of Brunei, even though they should be, and the Sultan in first place, at that. His fortune is an estimated seventy billion dollars. But even if all those hundred richest people in the world where to put their money together, they still couldn’t match what you have.”

  John looked at him incredulous. “But that is just crazy,” he said with a dry mouth. “What am I supposed to do with so much money?”

  The Padrone slowly shook his head. “I think the key is the exceptional position you have. You, John, are not only a man who is a bit richer than the others, but you are in an extraordinary situation. There is no one on earth who can even hope to approach your wealth. You have more assets than most of the countries in the world. You are not only rich; you are also a financial world power. It is up to you to do something with it.”

  John was almost dizzy at the thought. He heard the old man’s last words, but couldn’t entirely grasp their meaning. This was simply too much for him. He wasn’t born to understand the scale of all this. “I don’t know. How do you know that I won’t spend it all on Ferraris?”

  “I just do,” the old lawyer simply said. “Besides,” he added with a smirk, “there aren’t that many Ferraris around.”

  Later on in the evening after dinner, as a cool breeze blew in from the sea making the candle flames quiver inside the wind-glasses that provided the only source of light on the long table, they discussed the details of how the money would be handed over. John listened mostly, hardly asked anything, and answered “yes” when he was asked for his confirmation.

  He stared out into the night, losing focus somewhere in the silver-gray haze drifting over the dark sea. A handful of tiny stars twinkled high above. The wine looked dark in their glasses. The lawyers were talking in quiet voices that sounded similar. Somehow they seemed elated and relieved — as if the fortune had been a burden to them all along, which they could now finally put one someone else’s shoulders.

  “It must be as low key as possible,” the Padrone reiterated what they had decided: the transfer of the fortune would be made without any fanfare in the offices of a notary public in Florence within the next few days, as soon as they could fix a date. It would be left up to John if and when he cared to make public the extent and history of his fortune.

  John decided that he would buy a house like the Vacchis’. One that had a terrace with a view of the sea, somewhere he could hear the crickets chirping. A terrace made of natural stone that absorbed the heat of day and released it in the cool evenings. I’m starting to get used to the idea that I have money, John thought. He was still a long way from coming to terms with the real immensity of his wealth, but at least he no longer felt poor. He heard Cristoforo Vacchi’s voice.

  “Is that all right with you, John?”

  “Yes,” John answered.

  $5,000,000,000,000

  MARVIN COPELAND SELDOM read a newspaper. First, newspapers cost money, and he barely had enough as it was, and when he did have some money he spent it on other things. Second, newspapers didn’t interest him; reports about crimes, baseball games or politics — all that was irrelevant to him. And third, his life was so busy with different jobs, different girlfriends, and his music, that he simply didn’t have any time to read. Reading newspapers and watching TV, in Marvin’s opinion, was for people whose lives were boring and useless.

  That was why Marvin had no idea what was the biggest news story on this particular morning. For hours every newspaper and television channel reported on a single topic. Marvin, however, went down the street to Konstantino’s to do some shopping as if it were a day like any other. Konstantino was a vegetable merchant, but also sold many other everyday necessities, like instant coffee, condensed milk, three types of cereals, noodles, sweets, shoe polish, cigarettes, and the other things you needed but constantly forget about. If he had sold alcohol too, then the store would be perfect, but nothing is perfect in this world.

  The sun was scorching. Marvin had a feeling that he might’ve missed practice with a new band. No, that was tomorrow, wasn’t it? He had a note with the date and time on it, but it had somehow got lost. Maybe Pete’s new girlfriend threw it away when she cleaned the apartment. “What is this?” she constantly nagged, “an apartment or a monkey cage?” Anyhow, the place looked more than presentable now. Maybe he should invite his parents over. Who knows when it�
�ll be this clean again?

  He jangled the coins in his pocket. Last night they had smoked joints and played cards for quarters, and he won a bunch. A nice change of pace, especially since over the previous few nights he had gambled away all the money John had paid him for three months’ rent. Now he would be able to pay off some of his debts to Konstantino. Besides that, he had gone through all the mailboxes yesterday and fished out all the ads and after twenty minutes worth of work with a pair of scissors he had a nice collection of coupons. He had a bunch of buy-one-get-one-frees or fifty percent offs. He’d go see what he could get for them; the fridge was nearly empty. And it was his turn to get a bottle of dishwasher liquid. The old bottle was empty and had even been rinsed out with warm water to get out every last drop out.

  Konstantino wasn’t there; his endlessly moody wife stood by the cash register. That was usually a bad sign, because she hated to take IOUs, and if she did she would make a ruckus out of it, and that was embarrassing. But Marvin had a pocket full of quarters that he could dump on the countertop, which didn’t exactly make her smile either — actually, no one got her to smile — but at least she didn’t complain when he picked out the groceries he wanted and placed them before her. Without a word, she packed everything into a brown paper bag.

  Even so, she started nagging him again as he made his way to the door. On the way out he glanced at the newspapers in an old wire display, with headlines so big that even he couldn’t overlook them. There was a big photo too; it may have been the photo that made the bag slip out of Marvin’s hands.

  “How could this happen?” Gregorio Vacchi shouted and threw the day’s edition of Corriere della Sera on top of the other newspapers on the table. “How did they find out? I don’t understand it!”

  It was weird to read your own name in the newspapers. Especially in the headlines and in large fat black letters. It somehow made this whole thing more real than all the documents and stamps and authentications in the world.