John was tired and wished he had gone straight home from the airport. He was absolutely in no mood to argue. “You talk about him as if he was a rat, or something.”
“What else would you call it — what he’s doing with Constantina?” McCaine stood there, his arms crossed, against the backdrop of the London skyline like some immobile statue. “Marco was good enough to fill me in with the details.”
“Constantina Volpe is a grown woman and responsible for herself,” John said exasperated. “And Marvin was there for me when I needed it. I owed him.”
“You owed him? Oh, well then. And when will you not owe him anymore?”
“I don’t know.” John hadn’t thought about that yet. This could go on forever. “Well, I guess now we’re even.”
McCaine made a grunting noise. “You appear to be convinced that you’ve done him a favor.”
“I helped him get out of prison.”
“And? What will happen next? You paid the bail for him, he gets out of jail, and then he disappears?”
“Something like that.”
“You really think that he’ll be able to avoid border controls, or a manhunt by Interpol and do it all while on drugs? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I reckon he’s pretty clever at stuff like that, so yes,” John retorted angrily.
McCaine unfolded his arms and drummed his fingers for a moment on John’s desktop. Then he said, “Well, whatever. I want to ask you something, John. If you should ever run into this sort of problem again, could you come to me first? Can we agree on that?”
“What do you mean by this sort of problem?”
“You know what I mean.” McCaine stopped by the door with the knob in his hand. “Don’t do anything secretive; come to me with these matters. I’ll handle it.”
John entrusted a project manager named Lionel Hillman with getting the award project up and running. He was a bustling man with curly, rust-brown hair and had the same colored hair growing out of his nostrils, which it was hard to avoid staring at when speaking to him. Hillman dived into the project as if he could live on the work alone. He was the one who suggested calling the award the Gaea Prize, named after the Greek goddess of earth, mother of the heavens and the Titans, the source of dreams, the nourisher of all things.
John, who was unfamiliar with all that sort of stuff, gave it the nod enthusiastically. Hillman also selected a team of judges, consisting of five renowned biologists, ecologists, and environmentalists, each one from a different part of the world. He also created foundation and trust using the Nobel Prize as a basis to oversee the institution, and had an artist design a trophy, which was admired by everyone who saw it. Finally he proposed an ad campaign that would make the Gaea Prize and what it stood for known to everyone in the world. The first award presentation was set for November 1997, on the last Saturday of the month. The date, two weeks before the Nobel Prizes, was given as much consideration as the venue, Copenhagen, to assure maximum publicity.
He invited John to come along during the photo session for the ad pictures. The mother earth figure was modeled after no one less than Patricia DeBeers, the most expensive model in the world, hailed as the most beautiful woman of the century. And good lord, she was breathtaking. John stood next to what looked like a large white umbrella, and watched how the photographer gave instructions to her as she lolled and stretched and twisted before the cameras dressed only in a thin veil. If she could not get people worked up about saving the earth then John didn’t know who else could.
“Break!” the photographer called out. He gave his assistants some instructions to change the set and then he discovered John. “Ah, Mr. Fontanelli.” He came over, shook his hand. He looked older than he did from afar and by the way he moved. He was a wiry man with straggly white-blond hair and age spots on his face. “Curtis — Howard Curtis. Lionel told me that you might drop by for a look. Welcome. How do you like it?”
John nodded and told him that he was impressed.
“She’s a great woman, isn’t she? Really great — absolutely professional, knows one hundred percent how to handle herself, and has a good grip on the job. A real pro.”
John looked past him at the set. Patricia DeBeers sat straight-backed on a stool with her veil while a chunky make-up girl dabbed something on her breasts, probably make-up. He found the view rather distracted him from whatever it was the photographer was saying.
“Do you know what?” said the man who Hillman claimed was the best photographer in the world. He took a step back and looked at John with his eyes half-closed. “A question, Mr. Fontanelli … would you mind trying something?”
“Don’t tell me you want to photograph me.”
“Absolutely.”
“No.”
“I won’t accept no for an answer, Mr. Fontanelli.”
“No way.”
“For the sake of the award …”
“Especially because of that; I don’t want to make the prize look ridiculous before it is even awarded for the first time.”
Curtis took another step back with a deep sigh, and rubbed his chin. Without taking his eyes away from John, he said, “A suggestion…”
“No.” John wanted to leave.
“I’ll take a picture with you and Miss DeBeers with the trophy. And you decide what to do when you see the finished photos. Please …” Curtis lifted a hand before John could respond. “For me. I owe it to my reputation as a photographer.”
“And you’ll work on the finished photos until I say they’re okay.”
“Yes, absolutely. I can give it to you in writing or before witnesses, whatever you want it. When you say no, it’s no, period.” Curtis smiled impishly. “But you will not say no.”
A few days after the photo shooting, after he had handed over the prize to the earth goddess while trying hard not to stare at her breasts as the flash bulbs popped, he found the newspaper lying on the breakfast table folded with one of the pages in particular facing up. Someone had marked the article red. John had no idea who. Drug charges against American musician dropped, the headline said. The charges against Marvin had been dropped after initial suspicions were found to be unsubstantiated.
“Don’t be so naïve, John,” McCaine told him after John marched into his office with the newspaper. “Your friend is as guilty as Judas. I had to bribe five police officers and two judges before the charges were dropped.”
John looked at him aghast. “You did what? Bribed?”
“I told you I’d take care of it, didn’t I?”
“Sure, but bribes …?” suddenly John felt incredibly naïve.
McCaine folded his hands patiently. “John, you don’t think we could’ve avoided a headline like richest man in the world buys drug dealer’s freedom? All the money in the world couldn’t have. How would you have liked that?”
“I don’t know. But I also don’t like us bribing people like a bunch of Mafiosi.”
“No one expects that.” McCaine gazed at his eyes so inquisitively that John was surprised by it. There was a moment of silence in the room. “It is all right that you don’t like it,” McCaine finally said in a low tone of voice. “I don’t like it either. But if I must I’ll pay bribes anyway, and I will lie, and I will cheat, whatever it takes. I will do it to fulfill the prophecy. Do you understand that? I’ve sacrificed my life for this mission. I would sacrifice my soul, John. I’m serious. My soul.”
John looked down at the man, sitting in the midst of telephones and computer monitors, dressed in a tailor-made Savile Row suit designed to emanate power and might. But the only thing that McCaine was emanating at this moment was dedication — a kind of dedication that surpassed anything a normal human could handle. For a brief short moment he looked more like a monk than anything else.
John cleared his throat and looked at the newspaper in his hand. “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he said but the answer sounded cheerless. But there was only emptiness in his head, and the only thing he could think to say was: �
��Thanks.”
He walked away without looking back.
Malcolm McCaine indeed saw himself as a sort of monk. But on this very evening, as ever filled to the last minute with relentless work and decisions that affected thousands of people and millions of dollars, he decided it was about time to make an exception. He stretched out, flexed his shoulders, and glanced at the collection of clocks on the wall in front of him showing the time in the most important cities in the world. Then he threw the files on the towering stack of papers on his desk, as chaotic as ever. He slipped on his jacket, took the cassettes out of the dictation machines and turned off the lights on his way out.
The secretaries were long gone. He placed the cassettes on their desks, and then went to the elevator, which took him down to the parking garage.
Over the past few decades, Malcolm had neither the time nor the energy left over to pursue a relationship that would have suited his needs. That’s why he usually had gone to certain establishments in search for alternatives where certain basic physical needs could be met. One of those alternative establishments was the one he decided to visit tonight. It enjoyed an excellent reputation among its exclusive clients as being absolutely clean and discrete, worth it for those who were willing to pay exclusive prices.
The woman who ran the house, a tastefully dressed woman in her mid-forties who could’ve been taken for a company manager, greeted him. She never called the clients by their names, but remembered their faces.
“We have a bunch of new girls here,” she explained. “Pretty young ones from Asia and Africa …”
“Yes, yes,” McCaine didn’t really understand what she was going on about. He had lived in so many different countries, grown up with so many people of different nationalities and skin colors that racism wasn’t an issue for him so he missed the racist undertone in the woman’s remark. What he wanted was something different. He walked slowly past the row of girls, really close to them and looked into their eyes. He saw eyes that looked indifferent, or that were deadened, or that were filled with greed, and even a few that were friendly. He knew that he was not an attractive man, too big and heavy and clumsy. So he went from one girl to the next until he saw the expression he was looking for: Not me! Please don’t pick me!
“You!” he said and was satisfied to hear her startled little gasp.
She was slim but otherwise there was nothing special about her and her dirty-brown shoulder-length hair. He enjoyed following her up the stairs and watching her reluctant steps. It excited him to know that she found him disgusting but would spread her legs for him anyhow because he had the money for it.
It was the beginning of May 1997, and the British people voted for a new government under the Labour Party’s Tony Blair, the charismatic new prime minister who had promised to make everything better.
While watching the TV reports, John wondered if it might be a good idea to invite Blair over for dinner. At least he seemed nicer than his predecessor.
The photos Curtis had taken of John and Patricia DeBeers were ready, and just as the photographer had predicted, John was pleasantly surprised with the results. After a bit of reluctance and a talk about it with McCaine, he gave permission to use the photos in the ad campaign.
HUGEMOVER was causing trouble again. The union was trying to interfere with production by using slowdown strikes and other measures to force another round of negotiations. Donald Rash seemed clueless as he described the situation on the conference video screen.
McCaine’s expression was dark and threatening. “No doubt the union has key figures, functionaries, instigators, and so on. Do you know who they are?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Throw them out.”
The big American’s eyes widened. “But that’s against the law.”
“Throw them out — I don’t care.”
“And then what? The workers will go on strike. And this time I won’t be able to break the strike with workers from outside the company. It would be illegal.”
“Then send the pencil pushers from the offices into the production halls. Put the engineers and the entire middle and lower levels of management to work. And you too; go down and screw on bulldozer blades.” McCaine took a sheet of paper with a list of HUGEMOVER employees on it. “And you have five thousand part-time workers there who you can utilize without breaking any laws. Tell them that whoever wants to keep his job needs to get to work.”
“But that’s …” Rash stopped, considered his response and then nodded. “Okay.”
McCaine paused for a moment of pregnant but poisonous silence. Then he said, “This case will set a precedent. We must prevail. Do you understand, Donald?”
Donald Rash’s expression told him that he did understand that it was a good idea to agree. “Yes, Mr. McCaine.”
In the papers the next day it said that HUGEMOVER had fired all union functionaries. A day after that the plant employees went on strike again, sure of victory because the firings were illegal. Their one consolation was the amusing sight of salespeople donning blue coveralls, personnel executives handling heavy wrenches, and secretaries driving forklifts.
The single overhead projector on the end of the giant conference table beamed its bright light onto the screen. Darkness retreated to the far corners of the room and seemed to cower there like some animal afraid of the light.
“What do you think about the great chess match?” McCaine asked Professor Collins as the scientist was getting his transparencies in order. “Man against machine. Kasparov versus Deep Blue.”
Collins looked up. “I must confess that I’ve only been following the games occasionally. What is the score?”
“It’s over. Kasparov lost the last match today after nineteen moves. The IBM computer from is the champion of the chess world.”
Collins nodded. “Well, what can I say? I think those who believe man’s dignity is debased by this duel have been looking at it the wrong way. To me it simply shows what computers are capable of, what computers exist for, what all machines exist for: to do certain jobs better than people could.”
McCaine smiled. “Well said.”
Today’s report began as they always did: with a review of the past year’s activities. John struggled not to yawn.
“The move into the new and bigger building,” Professor Collins explained as he placed the corresponding transparency on the projector, showing a plain flat-roofed building, “had a very positive effect on our work. We were able to hire a number of excellent employees, although we don’t look as attractive to students and doctors as we would like, mainly due to the secrecy agreements we had to maintain. Concerning the computers, we have switched over totally to the RS six thousand and to the UNIX operating system. It is all interconnected and hooked-up to the Internet and behind an effective firewall. And I’d like to add that the work environment and motivation among the members of the staff could not be better.”
McCaine nodded, pleased. John leaned back and shoved his folder an inch to the left … just for the sake of it.
“And,” Collins went on, “we have done a trial run with a simulation that has produced the first practicable results.”
John felt the hairs on the back of his hands stand up and he raised his eyes. There was something about the professor’s voice that had a particular effect on him. This was not just another report. The researcher had big news.
Collins placed another transparency on the projector. This one showed a number of complicated diagrams that looked more like electrical plans. Nervously, he adjusted it back and forth until he was satisfied with its position. He cleared his throat and when he began to speak he had regained his normal tone of voice. But now it sounded like a diversion. He said, “What we observed for the past decades was a continuous improvement of productivity and living standards. This is an elementary correlation, since, independent of all other factors, the average standard of living is dependent on the average productivity. This is known as a positive loop, or in other wor
ds a self-perpetuating development. If it were possible to release productivity not directly needed for sustaining life, it would be possible to invest in education, and research and development to further improve productivity which in turn would make it easier to free further production capabilities, and so on. The jump in productivity that Henry Ford achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century was the result of new production methods, particularly as regards specialized work performed on assembly lines. These days, assembly lines play only a minor role. The number of people working on assembly lines is about the same as those working on farms. Increased productivity has mainly been achieved through the use of highly developed machines, robots, and chemicals, but above all to an increased level of education and production methods. There is even a meta-level, that is, new methods conceived for developers to improve working patterns in areas in which we will need quality managers and consultants.
McCaine was leaned forward, listening intently. Then he said, “All that sounds very positive.”
“It would be in a world with no natural limits. But the Earth is only so big. The increase in productivity has been matched — thankfully not proportionally — to a greater demand for raw materials. These are mined ever more efficiently but with a corresponding increased level of pollution of land, air, and water.
“Wouldn’t a further increase in productivity counter that? I remember standing on riverbanks as a child, looking at water that was nothing but a stinking mess polluted by sewage and chemical factories. Today we have affordable means of cleaning that waste water, and I could bathe in those same rivers if I wanted.”
“There are no simple answers to that. In many instances good technological solutions have been found. Efficient scrubbing of sulfur from factory exhaust gasses created gypsum of such high quality that power plants employing the process put gypsum mines out of business. But cleaning waste water containing heavy metals leaves behind solid waste material with a high concentration of metals that are often dumped where they cause harm. Or think about the subject of climate change: all technological solutions require the use of energy, and this means the release of climate changing gasses. Many small streams feeding a mighty river of heat that may change our climate.”
One Trillion Dollars Page 39