“Ursula Valen,” he said as he greeted her. Back then he had been quite upset with her, he remembered that too, but not exactly why. “The Padrone told me you had discovered something that I should see.”
She lifted her eyebrows with surprise. “He said that to you? Amazing.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just because. You will understand it when you see it.” She made a gesture. “As soon as all this is … well, over.”
But things didn’t move that fast. They sat and waited and the doctor kept going up to check on the Padrone just to come back down shaking his head.
“I have never experienced something like this before … that someone should be so peaceful when dying,” the doctor told them at one point, and another time he asked: “Is there a particular date that is important to him? An anniversary or something like that?”
“Not that I know of,” Alberto answered. “Why, is that important?”
“It happens sometimes that a dying person will cling on to life to see a particular day … a birthday, an anniversary, the anniversary of the death of a loved one …”
“Our mother died in May 1976 … that can’t be it,” Gregorio said. He pulled his calendar booklet out, studied it for a while, and then shook his head. “No, I can’t think of anything.”
So they kept on waiting. Ursula had a guest room in the Vacchis’ mansion, and John was given one too. The bodyguards, for whom they had no more rooms available, were put up in the village guesthouse. They sat together, and the Vacchis told stories of years gone by. They ate and drank whatever Giovanna served, which was not inconsiderable; as if they could save the Padrone’s life by eating him out of house and home.
The night came and went. In the morning the Padrone was still alive. He lay in his bed and stared for hours out the window at the sky. He didn’t want to speak to anyone. During those hours that a profound tranquility descended on the house and the entire grounds — a sort of unearthly calm. It was if a magic spell had been cast over everyone and everything — a spell that seemed to stop time itself.
But this magic didn’t extend beyond the family. “Please, don’t consider me to be impious,” Gregorio said to the doctor, “but life must go on. The daily grind, appointments must be kept, they can’t be postponed indefinitely …”
“I can’t tell you when it will happen,” the doctor replied. “I simply don’t know how long it’ll be. No one can say that. A few days ago I would have told you not to worry about your appointments today, but now … he could last until October. At least it would not surprise me if it did.”
So, they kept waiting. They had less and less to say to one another. They were alone with their thoughts and wandered about restlessly, their nerves were twitching from the changing moods.
“Do you also think he’s waiting on something?” Ursula asked John when she saw him walking in the garden one late afternoon. They were at the far end of the grounds, where they had a good view of the sea.
John shrugged his shoulders. “No idea. I just hope he isn’t waiting for me to get an ingenious idea how to fulfill the prophecy.”
“That sounds like you believe in it.”
“I don’t know what I should believe. He believes in it.”
She nodded. “Yes, I know that,” she said, looking out over the sea. There was a thin layer of haze. Autumn was coming.
John looked at her profile. She was pretty in an austere way. He hadn’t noticed when they first met. He felt an impulse to say something nice, but it was better not to, considering how he had treated her back then. “You were examining the archives, I suppose,” he said instead. “For your book … you wanted to write a book, if I remember correctly.”
“I wanted to, yes.” She gave him a glance, crossed her arms and looked back out at the horizon.
Great! Now he had reminded her of their argument back then, exactly that what he had been hoping to avoid.
She turned around and looked at the house. “We’re standing directly outside Mr. Vacchi’s window, I think. It’s that one over there, with the thick curtains. Right?”
John looked in the direction she was pointing, tried to imagine where each room was located. He remembered heavy, golden drapes. “That could well be.”
“Do you think he can see us here?”
“I think he can only see heaven from his bed.” He was trying to choose his words. “In some way I envy him,” John admitted, wondering at the same time why he was saying what he did.
“A dying man?”
“Oh, I guess that sounded stupid,” John said apologetically, and then explained: “He’s dying with the satisfaction of having accomplished the task he felt he was destined to perform. I would like to feel like that some day. I wish I knew what my task in life is.”
She didn’t seem to appreciate the comment. “Don’t we all have the same task: to live life?”
John stared to the grass at his feet — the dried, brown stalks. “To be honest, I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.”
“That life isn't some difficult, complicated thing. You live, you love, and you laugh, and you cry when you need to.”
“People have done that for eons, and if we keep it up there won’t be any more people within a few decades.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not the answer.”
She turned to look at him. Her eyes were like large dark lakes. Bottomless. And he liked the way she looked at him … He liked that she was looking at him. “You’re laying it on pretty thick,” she told him.
“It’s the burden that was placed on my shoulders… that and a crazy amount of money.” Money that enslaved humanity. He didn’t want to think about it.
She said, “I think there is something I had better show you.”
“The incredible discovery?”
“It is more than that.” She looked around. “We need to go to Florence, to the office.”
He noticed how quiet it was. There used to be cicadas chirping in the brush, but now even they seemed to be waiting quietly. The clouds in the skies were pale and motionless.
“The doctor said it may be quite some time,” she told him.
John hesitated. “Should we take the risk … just because I’m curious?”
“Is it a risk? Every person dies alone.”
But what if there was something else to be said, something the Padrone needed to know? Yet there had been time enough already. John looked at her and had this strange feeling he had known her forever. He felt his eyes go moist, but he didn’t feel like he had to hide it. He looked up at the window, behind which the old man was waiting for death, and suddenly had the rewarding feeling that what was happening was inevitable. Whatever you do, it’ll be the right thing.
“Let’s go,” he told her.
The second floor of the law firm’s office was in disarray. The display case doors were open, the precious tomes carelessly stacked on top of it, there were reference books lying open on the tables, piles of notes too, and even notes hanging on the walls, with dates, sums, and key words written in German, which he could not read. She must have been working here for ages.
“Here, take a look at this first.” She took a book from the air-conditioned display case. A layer of moisture formed on the glass when she opened it. She placed it on the table and opened it to a particular page. “This is one of Giacomo’s account books. There are two remarkable things. First, what we today call double-entry bookkeeping was developed in Italy during the fifteenth century. Back then it was called bookkeeping a la veneziana, and this was one reason why the Italian merchants had such an eminent position. However, Fontanelli didn’t use this method. Instead he used a sort of business diary, which was fairly unsystematic — to put it kindly. Look at the handwriting … soft, flowing with changing directions. It is the same as the testament.”
John looked at the pale scrawls, compared it to the one on the testament still in its old place underneath the glass. The writer had made a bigger effort to write neatly on the t
estament, yet it was undoubtedly the same handwriting. “Well,” he said, “that was to be expected, right?”
She agreed. “It will play a role later on. For the moment it’s important to know that this, let’s call it chaotic method of bookkeeping, makes it hard to get an overview of Giacomo’s actual finances. That’s why it took ages for anyone to notice that Fontanelli’s account didn’t end with three hundred florins in assets, but with a three hundred florin deficit. To be exact, I was the first to notice that, and this was only about three months ago.” She placed another account book in front of John. It was the last one of the series, she opened to a page with writing on it. “The second point.”
“Deficit?” John was totally confused as he stared at the numbers. They meant nothing to him. He had to take her word for it — trust that she knew what she was talking about. “But how was he able to bequeath a fortune when he did not have one?
“That’s what I asked myself too. And this was why I searched for the missing documents of Giacomo Fontanelli, with the help of Alberto, by the way. He seems to know everything and everyone around here.” She lifted the lid from an old-looking metal box and took out papers that looked just as old. “And that’s when I found these.”
It was several sheets of paper with rows of numbers on them. John stared at them and tried to comprehend what he saw. Many numbers looked strange: the number “2”, for instance, looked more like a wavy line. “Are those years?” He suddenly looked with astonishment. “Here, 1525, 1526 …” He went to the last sheet. “It ends with 1995.”
“Bingo!” Ursula said. “It is the calculation for the fortune, how it would develop over the coming five hundred years. Now look at the handwriting. It is stern, precise, and even. Whoever wrote this, it wasn’t Giacomo Fontanelli. What you’re looking at is a letter he must have received in the year 1523.”
John stared so intently at the numbers he thought his eyes would fall out of his head. “That means …?”
“It was not his money, and it was not his idea.” She had just told him something outrageous. “Someone else thought of this plan and provided the money for it.”
John’s head was beginning to spin. “The man who wrote this letter?” He flipped through the pages, to reach the end. “This … what does this say? Jacopo?”
“Jacopo,” she confirmed “is the Italian version of Jakob in German. We know that Jakob Fugger wrote his name like this for letters meant to be sent to Italy. Does the name Jakob Fugger mean anything to you?”
“Jakob Fugger the Rich,” John heard himself say. McCaine had mentioned the name, McCaine called him the most powerful man that ever lived on. “You think that I have him to thank for the fortune?”
Her eyes opened wide, like mysterious gems. “More than that,” she said. “I believe that you are his descendant.”
He looked so confused, befuddled, helpless. She felt like taking him in her arms and cuddling him. There was nothing left of the arrogance she saw in him the first time they met. Instead of revulsion she felt a strong attraction, so strong that all her alarm bells started to ring, making her remember New York, Friedhelm, naked with that unknown woman, and her terrible anger. She still felt the pain after all this time, buried deep in her very soul. Now, in face of this man she felt inexplicable warmth, as if someone who had been gone for a long time had finally returned.
But she wasn’t going to let that happen. It couldn’t happen, she was simply feeling mixed-up after the watching the decline of Cristoforo Vacchi over the last three weeks. It was hard on her to see him deteriorate day by day. The closeness of death had created an exceptional situation that made all feelings seem more intense and awakened the hunger for life. She would have to watch out to make sure she wasn’t drawn into something she didn’t need. The realm of facts and historic theories were a safe haven.
She grabbed a history book as if it were a life vest. “It all fits together. Jakob Fugger was born in 1459, the youngest of seven sons, and he was actually supposed to become a clergyman. After four of his brothers died, apparently from some infection, Jakob was taken out of the monastery and brought back to the firm in Augsburg in 1478.
“The first thing he did was to travel to Italy to get to know the family’s branch office there. He initially went to Rome, then to Venice a short time later, where he stayed about a year. After that he returned to Augsburg, where his work would earn the name he’d later become known by: Jakob the Rich.” She put the book away and looked at John. “As far as we known, for one reason or another Jakob never had any children. It is often assumed that he was impotent, but for no obvious reason. Infertility from some disease in his early years could be an explanation. But whatever the reason, in 1479 he was young, only twenty years old, and he was in Venice, a pulsating merchant city. There was the intensive sun and the heat that he wasn’t accustomed to. It is plausible that all this had an effect on him. The masquerade balls, the licentious lifestyle. It is very imaginable that he, a healthy young man, spending an entire year in this hot and humid atmosphere far from home, could have had at least one affair. And even if he did become infertile later on, it doesn’t mean he was so as a young man. So, it doesn’t take much imagination to consider the possibility that Jakob Fugger got a young lady pregnant and left Italy without knowing about it. A woman we only know the name of.”
He looked at her agreeably. “Fontanelli.”
“Exactly. Giacomo Fontanelli’s year of birth, 1480, would fit right in, and some other details too. Why, for instance, did he refuse to keep his books a la venenziana? Maybe his mother associated everything from Venice as being bad.”
John Fontanelli looked at the letter, the numbers on it and the signature. “What about the handwriting?”
She pulled out the fax that a helpful curator in Germany had sent her. It was a copy of another letter, one from Jakob Fugger. “Look at this. It’s not identical but close enough.”
“Unbelievable!” He looked both papers side by side, but his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Suddenly, he looked up to her. “Miss. Valen, I want to apologize to you. I don’t know why I was so rude during our first meeting, but I’m sorry.”
She was surprised and stared at him. The apology was so unexpected that she didn’t know how to respond. “Well,” she managed to say, “I wasn’t Ms. Friendly either.”
“But I started it,” he insisted. “Please excuse me. I’m truly amazed that you discovered all of this. Really. I wish I could do something like that.” He smiled a helpless smile and held up the letter. “I sure didn’t get his business genes, you know. My bank account before the inheritance runs contrary to your theory.”
She had to laugh, and she was thankful for him bringing the conversation back to the historical aspect of things. “Oh, that was nothing. Even your ancestor Giacomo didn’t get much of it either. He was often in debt and barely made ends meet. Look here.” She showed him a book that the Padrone had shown her before. “Here’s an entry: March 1522 … a Mr. J loaned him two hundred florins.”
“J as in Jacopo.”
“Probably.”
“But how did he make contact with his father? And why did he never mention who his father was?”
Ursula hesitated. It was such wild speculation and she simply was not completely sure about whole thing. “I can imagine that at one point his mother told him about it all. Maybe just before she died, though we don’t know when that was. Everyone in Europe, on the other hand, knew what had become of the young man she had met in her youth. Jakob may have bought her silence with the loan. The earliest contact, according to the books, was in 1521. Jakob had another four years to live back then, and maybe he felt death approaching. His designated heir was his nephew Anton, and Jakob Fugger wouldn’t have wanted to change that in favor of an illegitimate child, especially one with such little sense for business.”
“But he developed the plan.”
“Definitely. And it is far easier to accept that someone with Jakob’s vision and busin
ess sense thought of something like that and not Giacomo.”
“But,” John asked hesitantly, “what about the prophecy?”
Now they reached the touchiest part. Ursula felt her cheeks burning. “I think Giacomo really did have his dream. You have to remember that he grew up in a monastery, with all its legends, myths, and stories of prophets and martyrs. To me, it not at all surprising that a fifteen-year-old back then might have such a dream and interpret it as a vision.
“A dream in which he described our time-period with uncanny accuracy. A full five hundred years in the future.”
“You think so? They are general descriptions that could have just as well been taken out of the Bible, the apocalypse, or the Book of Daniel. No, he had a dream, interpreted it as a vision, or a prophecy, if you will. But I think that Jakob Fugger made use of this prophecy.” She pointed to the last sentence of the letter. “This here says — if it’s translated correctly: ‘the functioning of the laws of mathematics is such that they will give my fortune immortality and thus you might say your vision will come true.’ He wanted to use the religious convictions of Giacomo Fontanelli and Michelangelo Vacchi to recreate in the distant future what he himself had at that very moment: the greatest fortune on Earth.”
John stared into thin air for a moment. “One way of looking at it could be to say that divine providence used the money and Jakob Fugger’s intelligence as a way to create the means of fulfilling the prophecy.”
“Yes, you could see it like that. Cristoforo Vacchi, for instance, sees it that way, but I don’t.”
“Did you show him all this?”
“Of course.” Ursula frowned. “That wasn’t what caused him to collapse. Don’t worry.”
John stood up and stretched, as if trying to shed the burden from his shoulders — but it was in vain. He went over to the rows of display cases. “And all this here? The Vacchi family did something quite incredible. Don’t you think? I find it difficult to believe that Jakob Fugger was responsible for this and not some divine will.”
One Trillion Dollars Page 52