One Trillion Dollars Read online

  “That isn’t one hundred percent certain either, but generally it’s capable of saying who the father is. The samples for the tests must be gathered under proper supervision and so on, but that is no problem. A hair or a bit of saliva is all that’s required for such a test, so this is no big deal even for a small child. It’s more pleasant than having blood taken for a blood test, at any rate.”

  “You never performed a genetic test on me.”

  “No,” Eduardo said while stirring his coffee in thought. “It is not necessary for children born to a wedded couple. In the case of your brother, we have to take into account the possibility that this is some sort of scam.”

  John was glad that at least they suspected Lino was trying to pull something over on them all. But Lino had always been a womanizer; there was hardly a girl in the neighborhood who wasn’t a potential target for him. And he was always sneaky about it. As a kid, when John caught Lino making out with a girl, Lino would give him a look that threatened a beating if John told anyone. Lino was also the one who told John about the birds and the bees when John was nine or ten and Lino was fifteen. Lino always seemed like the kind of guy who knew what he was talking about. It’s very possible that he did father the child. He could even understand that Deborah Peterson would keep the child secret from Lino. John always had the feeling that Lino didn’t treat women very well after he got what he wanted.

  “And what if it’s not a scam?” John asked.

  “If not,” Eduardo said and licked the spoon off before he placed it neatly on the fine porcelain saucer, “then Andrew Peterson will be a trillionaire.”

  The reporters at the gates had gone from a besieging army to an attacking one. They began to shake the iron bars demanding access. Eduardo required three bodyguards just to go as far as the locked gate. He told the journalists roughly the same things he had told John during breakfast — that they suspected Lino was playing some sort of trick to get at the Fontanelli fortune, and briefly explained the next steps of the legal proceedings. The mob went wild with questions.

  “I’ll go deaf if I have to do that again,” Eduardo shuddered when he was back in the house. “What are they doing here? Shouldn’t they be covering O.J. Simpson’s trial instead?”

  Barely two hours later he watched himself answering the reporters’ questions on NBC, and the angry rebuttal of Lino Fontanelli, dragged out of bed to comment on the Italian lawyer’s claims and repeating that his only motive was the well-being of his child.

  The chopper returned, then a second one, and then even a third. The Vacchi employees, who were out to run errands, reported in the afternoon that they were offered large sums of money for any written documents or photos of the Vacchis or the inside of the house, and even more if they would allow a reporter onto the premises.

  The guards increased their security measures.

  John called his mother that afternoon; it was just before noon on the east coast of the US. She was preparing lunch when the phone rang. The last few times he called she had been confused about what had happened and excited because her son was in all the papers, but now she was really unhappy about the infighting the “million,” as she called it, had brought to her family.

  “It’s not a million, mamma,” John tried to explain again. “It’s one million times one million.”

  “Non mi piace, non mi piace,” she lamented. “Who needs so much money, tell me that! Is it worth it that brothers are fighting? And now he wants to leave Vera and marry that woman from Philadelphia, just for the money.”

  John felt a shudder. Who gets the money when a child dies? The parents? It was a gruesome thought that came to him out of the blue and which he now couldn’t shake.

  “But you always wanted a grandchild,” he told his mother, not without some effort. A copy of the Corriere della Sera was lying before him on the table, and big-eyed Andrew Peterson stared at him from the front page.

  “Mira was like a grandchild to me, and now I’m going to lose her! Oh, it’s all a disaster. This money brought nothing but disaster.” She kept on complaining, until she remembered that she wanted to put water on for pasta. She made John promise her to call back, or better yet to come back home soon, then she hung up.

  Go back home, sure, maybe he could face it all better there. It was true he had always felt out of place here. He was convinced from the start that the Vacchis had been wrong. All this luxury was nice, no doubt, and he could get used to it, but the fact remained that he couldn’t handle money. He couldn’t handle even a small sum of money so he definitely couldn’t handle a fortune. If the real purpose of all this was to restore some lost future to humanity then he was definitely the wrong man. He had a hard enough time thinking about his own future, much less the problems of the world.

  He took the paper and looked at Andrew Peterson’s photo. It was a nice-sounding name. Like Andrew Carnegie. They could have him attend the right schools, let him slowly grow into the role; have him properly trained for living with this kind of wealth and power. If you thought about the reality of it, maybe it wasn’t such a bad turn of events after all.

  The mood at the dinner table was inevitably somber. The Vacchis tried hard to make conversation and to pretend that things were okay, but their efforts were so obvious that John felt his stomach tighten. Their thoughts were far away with a three-year-old boy on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and the question of whether the true heir and fulfiller of the prophecy had gone unnoticed by them for all this time. Although Giovanna had tried her best, John’s appetite was gone, and he soon withdrew to his room. He went through the kitchen on his way to apologize for hardly touching the meal she prepared.

  The darkness in his room was oppressive, but he did not dare to turn on a light for fear of drawing the reporters’ attention. He got undressed in the dark and went to bed.

  Why didn't Cesare and Helen have a child? Then it would have been easier for him to accept. Cesare was always so much older, so far above him that it would not have bothered him so much. But no, it just had to be Lino, Lino, of all people, who was always stronger and took advantage of it, Lino, the only one who got good grades in school, Lino, who always won at everything.

  Now he'd win again.

  And what would John do now? He had never done much with his life, and the little he had done lately was being destroyed. He would go down in history as a tragic figure — the man who was almost a trillionaire. People would stare at him like some circus attraction wherever he went. There was no chance of going back to his previous life, the way things had been before all of this.

  His mind went around in circles. He got back up and felt his way by touch in the dark to the bathroom. There was a medicine cabinet with all sorts of medication. He found it, opened it, let his fingers feel their way round, vials and bottles and pillboxes. In the end he had to turn on a light. He found a tablet tube with valium. He took it and opened it.

  The next morning the announcement went around the world that the heir to a trillion dollars, John Salvatore Fontanelli, had committed suicide during the night.

  The sobbing on the other end of the phone didn’t stop. “What a tragedy … madre mio, dio mio … it brings nothing but tragedy, the money, it destroyed the family, destroyed everything.”

  “Mother …”

  “And these journalist — the spawn of the devil — have surrounded our house, they come inside and won’t leave us alone. How can they write something like that? I could’ve had a heart attack — it could have killed your father. How can they say that you’re dead?”

  “Maybe because they always want to report something sensational,” John told her.

  “I couldn’t breathe. Your father isn’t as young as he was, remember that, our family has a history of heart attacks. They said it on the late evening news. We normally don’t watch it. I haven’t slept all night.”

  John worked out the time difference. It had to be two thirty in the morning in New York now. “We found out just a little whi
le ago, otherwise I would’ve called much…”

  “And that photo of you standing there with 20 valium tablets in your hand!”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you what happened. The guy, Jim Huston, all he does is chase scandals — he’s a paparazzo. He had a helicopter drop him on the roof, by rope or whatever. It’s chaotic here, and no one noticed. There is a blind spot up there that can’t be seen from below, and he hid there. In the evening he climbed down to my room window, like some kind of mountain climber, and waited there with his camera. When I went into the bathroom to get a sleeping pill he photographed me. I never even noticed it. Things here have been crazy.”

  “But there were at least twenty pills, you could clearly see it!”

  “They just spilled out of the bottle, mom.” That wasn’t true. He had wanted to see how many pills there were, because he had the ridiculous feeling that someone might count them to see if he took any.

  After calming his mother down, he put on his best suit and went downstairs to show his face to the press along with the Vacchis, to prove to the world that he was still alive.

  They shouted a flurry of questions and held microphones on long poles in front of his face: “What will you do now?” “Do you believe that Andrew Peterson is really your brother’s son?” But John remained silent and only shook his head.

  Eduardo showed the crowd the rappelling equipment and explained how Huston got the photos. After a few reporters whistled to acknowledge his feat, he warned them of attempting anything similar. “Jim Huston entered the grounds illegally, and we will sue him for trespassing, breaking and entering, fraud and deception, and failure to assist in an emergency. He will be charged and prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law.”

  After they went back into the house, John told the Vacchis he thought it would be best for him to return to the States until the situation was clarified. “My parents can’t deal with the pressure of the press. I think it’s best if I’m there to draw their attention to me instead my parents.”

  The Vacchis nodded, except the Padrone, who shook his head in disagreement. “Your place is here, John,” he told him. “This whole thing is nothing but a farce that will blow over.”

  “Well, I understand John,” Alberto told him.

  “I also think that is the best thing to do,” Gregorio agreed.

  Eduardo sighed. “If you want, I’ll book a flight for you for tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” John said.

  John went to his room to pack. But standing in front the wardrobe he realized that nothing in it really belonged to him. He decided to ask Eduardo to get him something to wear from his own sorry possessions, which must be stored here somewhere in cardboard boxes.

  Looking around the room he thought this is how his dream would end. He let himself fall onto the bed and sat there, defeated. He laid back and stared at the ceiling. It had started all at once, from one minute to the next. And it was ending the same way.

  He woke up without even realized that he’d dozed off. It had to be sometime in the afternoon judging by the light outside. He felt remarkably well.

  How quiet it was! John got up and went over to the balcony that used to be his. He took a deep breath of the salty air blowing in from the sea and closed his eyes. There were insects chirping and buzzing in the bushes below. From a distance he could hear the voices of the crowd of reporters by the gate.

  Too bad; he would miss the feeling of being a millionaire. Over the past few days during his introduction to unimaginable wealth, he had never got beyond the idea of being a millionaire, let alone a billionaire or even a trillionaire. But he had begun to feel like a millionaire at times, and he liked it.

  The phone rang. He hoped it might be his mother — maybe to tell him that she had slept a little and was feeling better. He went over and answered the call. “Yes?”

  “Do you have a fax?” the stranger’s deep voice asked him.

  John was startled. He went down on his knees and looked underneath the bed. There was a carton there — Marco must have brought it when he was sleeping. “Yes. Yes, I have one.”

  “Is it connected?”

  “What? No. Not yet. I think I have to disconnect the phone first.”

  “Fine.” The stranger seemed to be smirking. “The phone lines there are probably at least thirty years old, just like the telephone, right?”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  “All right; connect the fax machine now. I will fax you a document in five minutes. I guarantee its authenticity. Put it to good use.”

  “Okay,” John said. “But I don’t understand. What’s going…” There was a click, then the line went dead.

  Five minutes? Oh boy. Maybe he should read the instructions. He pulled the carton from beneath the bed. He tore the box open and peeled the machine out of its plastic and Styrofoam covering. Marco had thankfully even remembered to get a roll of fax paper and an adapter so he could connect the new machine into the old phone outlet. It took him three minutes to get the machine ready to go. He sat the rest of the time sitting before it and staring at the machine and waiting for it to cackle to life for what felt like hours.

  Then suddenly something began to click inside the dark-gray gadget. The slot lit up with a blue-green light. With a low hum the paper started coming out. John unrolled the paper as it came out of the machine, trying to make sense of the scraggly lines and smeared letters.

  The document, printed on a long roll of thermal paper, was Second Lieutenant Lino Fontanelli’s medical report, prepared by a military doctor at McGuire Air Force Base in February 1991. There was page upon page of EKG, EEG, test results for lung capacity, cardio-stress test, reactionary test, blood tests, analysis of spinal fluid, and so forth. The last page had the check in the box that stated that he was medically qualified to become a pilot, and beside that the illegible signature of the doctor.

  John almost overlooked the most crucial remark. In the section headed “Medical test results irrelevant to flight qualification” was a single word: “Infertile.”

  $8,000,000,000,000

  THE FAX WAS like a kick in the stomach. John sat on the bed and stared at it with no awareness of the passage of time as he tried to grasp the impact. No one came, no one called while he automatically unplugged the fax machine and shoved it back under the bed. No one disturbed him so he had some time to think.

  By dusk he had made the decision to keep the fax secret so that he wouldn’t have to explain where it came from. Instead, during yet another gloomy dinner, he mentioned casually: “Can it be determined by a genetic test if someone is fertile or not?”

  “No.” Eduardo shook his head as he dissected a dumpling with a silver fork from the eighteenth century. “Why?”

  “I remembered a conversation I had last Christmas with Vera, my brother’s girlfriend. She mentioned that she was wondering why Lino had never got her pregnant.” He’d thought up the story in his room. Vera would never have talked to him about anything personal like that, but no one here would know.

  “Good grief!” Gregorio Vacchi exclaimed and lowered his fork. What little hair he had seemed to stand on end. “I hadn’t even considered that.”

  The Padrone was also staring wide-eyed at him. “Infertility! It’s a common affliction in the Fontanelli line.”

  Alberto looked skeptical. “But he can’t possibly think that something like that would go undiscovered!”

  Expanding on his fairy tale, John continued, “I don’t think Lino ever knew that Sarah had been trying for a child.”

  “This means that this Peterson woman is trying to foist her child upon Lino!” Eduardo guessed.

  Eduardo’s father took the napkin from his lap and threw it beside his half empty plate. “I have to make some calls immediately.”

  By the next morning the story was a sensation. Lino admitted, with clenched teeth, in front of cameras that he had been talked into the trick by Bleeker. In fact, he had never met Deborah Peterson before. He ha
d no idea he was infertile. In the background yellow police tape fluttered in the breeze on his lawn and police officers were coming and going. Neither Vera Jones nor her daughter was anywhere to be seen.

  Deborah Peterson told a reporter how Randolph Bleeker had sought her out and talked her into the plan. She knew Bleeker fleetingly from her previous job at the law firm, but never considered him to be a pleasant man. As a single parent in need of some money she agreed to go along with the scheme. It was Bleeker who got her and Lino together and told them the details of their supposed affair before he went public with the phony story. As it turned out Andrew Peterson was indeed the result of a brief affair, after which his mother never saw or heard from his father again. After Andrew’s birth she thought that she could handle everything by herself and was too proud to mention the father on the birth certificate. When her savings ran out she turned to Randolph Bleeker to find the child’s father and to sue him for child support. Bleeker did find him: The former trucker was lying in a neurologic hospital after an armed robbery went wrong and was in a vegetative state. The young woman’s face reflected felt a mixture of shame and fascination as she explained how the lawyer had set out to use her for his plot. He had actually taken hair and tissue samples from the comatose patient and kept them frozen until Lino was tested, and then exchanged the specimens. She had no idea how he managed to pull off the exchange.

  This far-fetched story knocked the Ebola virus off the front pages despite it being responsible for thousands of deaths in the central African town of Kikwit by causing people’s internal organs to disintegrate. To the obvious delight of the reporters, the lawyer, Randolph Bleeker — known to his friends as Randy — had disappeared. His apartment in Philadelphia was found empty, and a camera team that went to Bleeker’s little musty office at the same time as the police only found his unsuspecting secretary who had no idea where her boss had gone.