“What?” Ursula felt an electric jolt run through her. She took a closer look. At first glance the signature looked nothing more than an illegible scrawl, but now that Fabiana said so … “Jacopo?”
“That’s what it says,” the girl said unimpressed.
“I think,” Ursula said to herself, “I need to sit down.”
John saw the banker’s eyes twinkle when he told him his name. Obviously, he knew him from the news, recognized the name, and was trying not to appear overly impressed.
“My pleasure,” he said and introduced himself, with the tag on his jacket — Labarientos. He gestured for John and Balabagan to sit in the two chairs in front of his desk. “Please, what can I do for you?”
It was a small bank, and the interior was pleasantly air-conditioned. There were hardly any customers inside. John thought, after having seen all sorts of swank and splendor in countless other banks, that this one was rather spartan, almost cheap. Balabagan sat meekly, his head bowed on the edge of his chair.
John really didn’t know how best to proceed to uncover the network of machinations involved here. On the way there he contemplated to simply buying the bank so he could take a look into their books without any hassles. But he decided that this option was always open and that he would try to talk it through first.
He leaned far back and crossed his legs, his hands relaxed in his lap, just like McCaine had taught him, to give the appearance of being important and impressive during talks. He said, “I would like to know what made you charge Mr. Balabagan an interest rate of twenty-seven percent.”
Now Mr. Labarientos blinked his eyes nervously and answered hesitantly, “It is not part of our business practice to discuss credit issues of our customers with total strangers.”
John nodded. “I can believe that. Especially considering the loan sharking you’re involved in. But I suggest you ask your client if it’s okay with him.”
The fishmonger nodded hastily to avoid being spoken to.
“Very well then,” the banker said and looked at his computer, pushed a few buttons and waited. It took some time, but finally the data appeared on his screen. “Ten years ago we gave Mr. Balabagan a loan to pay off other outstanding loans. Do you need the exact amounts?”
“What interests me is the twenty-seven percent interest rate. Is that the rate you charge him?”
“That is correct.”
John leaned forward. “I would like to know another thing: how much has Mr. Balabagan already repaid? Approximately.”
Labarientos looked unsure at the fishmonger, and tapped around on his keyboard. He hesitated before answering. “Mr. Balabagan has asked for a deferment of payments several times, and asked for a reduction of interest rate eight years ago. We agreed to his request, but as you can imagine the payments were delayed.”
John felt anger starting to boil. “Spit it out. How much of the principal has he paid off? Two percent, one percent … nothing?”
Now sweat beads formed on the banker’s upper lip. “Indeed,” he mumbled, “it’s the last that is true.”
“What means that?” Balabagan asked suspiciously.
“This means that you have paid only interest on the loan over the past ten years, without your debts being reduced by even a single peso,” John said brutally. He was getting angry. He felt like beating the fat little man out of his nice blue suit.
“What?” the fishmonger cried out as he sprang up from his chair. “But … why? I pay, and I pay much, pay, pay, pay.”
“Not enough,” John said shaking his head.
“How go on? I pay all life long? Pay, pay, pay?”
Labarientos made a stone-faced expression. “No,” he said, “the loan runs twenty-five years. When the time is up it must be either paid-off or we must foreclose.”
John explained to him. “This means that when you can’t repay what’s left of the loan plus the interest all at once in fifteen years, the bank will take away your house or whatever else you used for collateral.”
Mr. Balabagan shouted, “How I do? How I do? Where I get all money all one time? My house? My son get house and business. What bank want do with fish business?”
“They might rent it to your son,” John said. He started to understand how this game was being played. He leaned forward again, looked the banker dead in the eyes, trying to keep his anger from exploding, and said: “Mr. Labarientos, how dare you, how dare your bank charge such a horrendous interest rate? Tell me. Tell me if this is normal business practice here.”
Tip-tap-tippity-tap. He tipped around on his keyboard. It looked like he was trying to play for time. “It was a loan,” he explained cautiously, “that was granted for a set rate during a high interest period. The loan had bad guarantees, which was risky for the bank. It is absolutely normal to charge extra when the bank takes on increased risk.”
“Is that all?” John asked. He was thinking of the dynamite fishermen and their lost limbs, the man hanging in a sack, the daughter who went to Hong Kong to sell her body for money for her family. “Is that all that matters? The risk for the bank?”
Labarientos looked at John, licked his lips nervously, and folded his hands on the desk. “As a bank,” he said not being intimidated, “we are responsible for our depositors. You, for instance, Mr. Fontanelli, yours is one of the largest accounts we have. You have entrusted us with many millions of pesos. I’m sure you don’t want us to lose this money, and you want interest for this money. True? This is what we are doing here. We earn your interest.”
John’s face burned with shame on the way back to his yacht. He thought he might be the first person ever to suffer facial burns from embarrassment. He leaned against the door on the back seat, an arm over his face, and felt sick to his stomach. He should have known all along. It was so plain the whole time, so clear. It was so obvious.
Question: How does money grow? Answer: It doesn’t.
What idiocy it was to believe anything else.
But yet it is preached to us from childhood. It was like a mantra and preached more fervently than a prayer. Money grows in your savings account. That was what we were all told. It was on ads, and parents, teachers and friends all said the same thing: Put your money in the bank and it will grow. Even Paul, the clever Paul Siegel who had finished Harvard with summa cum laude and was more intelligent than most people John knew, said the same thing: let your money work for you.
But money doesn’t work — people work.
How different it could be: What stopped enough money from being printed to make everyone a millionaire? Nothing. Except, there would be no one there to bake your breakfast waffles. No one to plant, harvest, and grind the wheat for your bread. No one to do any of that. Money doesn’t work, only people work. And money doesn’t reproduce. Each dollar, each cent that your account grows came from someone else’s labor. Someone who has debts and has to repay them and the interest on them.
Debts and interest were a giant cunning mechanism to move money from those that have little to those that have a lot. It was a transfer that occurred in very small doses that didn’t harm most people and calculated with absolute mathematical precision. That’s how his fortune came about, except for the original capital from which it all began. The ridiculous ten thousand dollars turned into one trillion through the work of many, many, many people over the course of five centuries.
John saw before his eyes a tremendously large web, a circulatory system, which had large veins leading to medium veins to smaller ones to tiny veins, and then into minute, hair-like capillaries that stretched to every corner of the earth, to every country, every city, every village, and the life of every individual who lived on earth. But it wasn’t blood that flowed in this system but money: cents and fractions of cents moving in the capillaries flowing together into quarters in the small veins, then dollars, then a hundred thousand dollars, a million until it was a huge amount of money flowing through the large veins and still growing as it flowed towards his accounts, forty billion dollars a year,
over a hundred million each and every day.
He followed the spider’s web to find the spider in the mirror. He had followed the food chain and found himself at the top. He was the boss of bosses. He was the top predator. He was the heir to the Fontanelli fortune and had believed himself the solution to the world’s problems. In reality, he was the cause of it.
“Stop the car,” he ordered.
The vehicle stopped, he spilled out of the door and vomited into a ditch by the side of the road as if he had to get rid of everything he had eaten over the past two years.
$34,000,000,000,000
THEY SOMEHOW GOT him back on board the ship. Somehow he survived the night and the next morning. But he wanted to go back to the island because there was still something to be done.
He was taken to Tuay with the motorboat, where the four-by-four was still parked. They asked him if it was still needed on land and he said no, it could be loaded back on board. They said the Prophecy was too big to be moored here and he only nodded. Everything inside him hurt. It was too big a cross for one man to bear. While they went to work to get the vehicle back on board the yacht, he made his way up the road with heavy feet.
The road was nothing more than compacted dirt with a few stones in it, and it led to the market square, which was at least asphalted. He stared at the oversized church. He felt as if there were a scream stuck in his throat. He went over to the fishmonger’s house.
Joseph Balabagan was sitting on a box watching a young man working on the moped’s engine. When he saw John he sprang up and went over to him. He told him he had called the hospital and his wife was doing well. He wanted to visit her this evening, by bus if the moped wasn’t fixed by then. He thanked John for all he had done. John went with him, nodded to the youth who gave him a friendly smile, his fingers black from engine crud. The fishmonger told one of his daughters to get some glasses while he got two bottles of Coke from the ice chest. John sat down on the chair he was offered and pulled out his checkbook and pen, which, although it didn’t look like it, cost more than everything the fishmonger owned.
“How big are your debts?” he asked Balabagan.
Balabagan’s eyes widened. “Oh no,” he uttered. “That … I not can take …”
John looked at him and felt deaf, mute and wounded. He said, “Mr. Balabagan, I am the richest man in the world. You helped me, now I want to help you. You need help, because you will never be able to repay the debt on your own. So, how big are your debts?”
The fishmonger stared straight ahead. He was thinking hard, until one side of him won over the other — perhaps it was the instinct to survive. He told John the amount and John wrote double that without making an effort to convert it into dollars. He tore the check from the book and gave it to him. “It would be good if you would not sell dynamite anymore,” he said.
“But…”
“Farewell,” John said and got up. “Give my greetings to your wife. Thanks for the Coke.”
John went away. It still smelled of smoke and the western skies were filled with a gray colored veil from forests burning in Indonesia. Fires set by people who also worked for him, his subjects, who knew nothing about him personally. It was like this all over the world, men and women everywhere were toiling, sweating, and grunting under their own burdens. They did dangerous work, or difficult work, or boring work, without knowing that they were doing it for his benefit, to assure the steady growth of his fortune, to make him wealthier and wealthier without him lifting a single finger.
What became painfully clear to him this morning was that it wasn’t only his subjects, his serfs, his slaves who had debts. No, the machinery of money was far cleverer than that. He and Marvin had to pay rent to Mrs. Pearson, the house owner, but she could not really keep the money, because she had to pass it on to the bank to repay the loan she had taken to buy the house. The cost of capital it was called, which he saw in countless calculations without thinking about it. With each product you buy you help pay off the manufacturer’s debts. A huge part of the taxes we pay goes to pay down interest incurred by the national debt. And whichever path it may have taken, this money ended up in his accounts. Well, not all, but more and more of it. The bigger the corporation, the more it sucked in, like a black hole getting stronger as it grows. Just as McCaine said, the whole world could belong to him one day.
John stopped. He peered across the bay at the landscape that looked like paradise but smelled of smoke and garbage. In the end wasn’t he and all his money at fault for the crises? Would things have developed differently if this monstrous fortune did not have such a voracious appetite for returns? Like a Moloch demanding sacrifices from the entire world until there was not enough left over for man and nature? And if it was as he feared, he’d need to run the numbers to make sure he was right. Maybe the way to fulfill the prophecy was to lose the fortune?
What an idea? What a paradox? Yet maybe it was the logical conclusion. No wonder the Vacchis never figured out what the solution was. The destruction of the fortune would banish an interest-hungry trillion dollar monster from the world. Was that it? Was this the answer?
In his imagination he saw a large piece of ground before him, a vast piece of land, maybe in a desert somewhere in the US. They would need to build roads. Spectators would want to come to watch. One trillion dollars in real money, in bills; how many truck-loads could that be? Quite a few for sure. What a sight that would be. It would be a scene that would go down in history, truck after truck dumping money, masses of bundled bills piled into a huge heap, larger than the world had ever seen. Armed guards would be needed. He would make a short speech; explain what he had discovered and why it was good to destroy the money. He would take a torch and jab it into the mountain of Benjamin Franklins and George Washingtons and together with the spectators he would watch with gruesome relief as the largest fortune that had ever existed went up in smoke, to would be burnt into ash — ash that would rain down miles away.
John blinked and rubbed his forehead. He was back … somewhere on the main street of Tuay. People were looking at him with odd expressions on their faces.
There was something wrong with the image he had conjured up, exciting as it was. He was seeking a solution like searching for a hole in a tooth with his tongue. He remembered a visit to a central bank. He could not remember in which country it was, but he and McCaine had stood behind a window of bullet-proof glass, watching employees sorting through old money bills and throwing them into a large shredder, and replacing them with fresh ones. Was a bank note the same as money? Could he destroy his fortune by cashing in all his bank accounts and burning the cash? He would be breaking the law in many countries, he remembered. In many places it was forbidden to destroy money printed with monarchs and national symbols. But apart from that, what would prevent the central banks from simply printing more bills to replace the destroyed ones? After all, it was only special paper. And while he was at it, why make such an effort with the trucks? He could ask the Federal Reserve Bank to print a trillion dollar bill just for him. He could burn it in an ashtray in the comfort of his home. Maybe it would even be as simple as writing a check! The point was simply to get his accounts down to zero. He could have the cash paid out or write a check, they were nothing but vouchers. In this case the books were balanced and all was valid. Or he could have all his assets transferred to his own bank, then go to the computer operator, and say, “Here, take this account — delete it and write a bunch of zeros.” Then the fortune would be destroyed too, wouldn’t it?
John shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair and brushed it away from his face. If money could be destroyed so easily, what was to prevent it being created just as easily? One could just as easily write any number into the same account, like one hundred trillion or a hundred quadrillion. But was that money too? And if not, why not? What was money?
Deep in thought, his feet carried him along unseeingly until he got to a place where a tree provided a bit of shade. He sat down and st
ared out over the blue sea at the shiny white yacht out there without really seeing it.
Money. Suppose people could not only destroy their own money but all the money on earth. What then? What would happen? Would people be helpless, be forced to develop a new kind of economy without money, go back to bartering?
Not likely. His father would write vouchers for a pair of shoes, go to the bakery, and trade it for a loaf of bread and vouchers for more bread to cover the cost of the shoes, and the price would be guided by the values they had before money’s destruction. People would re-create money again, in some way and some form.
That was it: Money is a human invention. And getting rid of it was as difficult as getting rid of nuclear weapons.
“Hello, Mr. Fontanelli?”
Startled, John stood up. A youth stood before him, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, looking at him curiously with bright, alert eyes. He seemed worried.
“What?” he looked around; he was sitting on a dirty yellow plastic box, like those used to transport vegetables. “Is this your box? Sorry. I hope I didn’t break it…”
“No, sir, Mr. Fontanelli,” the youth said with a waving hand. “That’s not my box. I just saw you sitting here and, well … I wanted to talk to you.” He reached out to shake John’s hand and smiled broadly. “My name is Manuel Melgar, sir. I’m honored to meet you.”
“Well, if you say so…” John shook his hand and looked at him. Manuel was slim, almost wiry, had black hair combed to one side, wore a clean pair of jeans that were clearly his pride and joy, and a blue tee-shirt with Bon Jovi, Keep the Faith printed on it. John had to grin when he read the shirt; a grin that made his heart ache. “Hello, Manuel. How are you?”
“Thank you, I’m well, sir,” he said proudly. Although he just stood there, there was something agile about him, as if he wasn’t used to standing still for very long.
“Nice to hear.”
Manuel rubbed his nose and seemed to be thinking. “Sir, do you have one minute? I thought of an idea and want to know what you think about it.” He looked nervous. “I apologize if I’m distracting you from whatever was on your mind. I thought, as long as you here…”
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