One Trillion Dollars Read online

  Sarah Brickman had twinkling eyes and skin as white as fine porcelain. At one point she suggested they retreat into the shade under a tree or large bush, as many other concert goers had done. So they did. Then kissed, their lips salty from the sweat. While the chorus, “Free … Nelson … Mandela … free … Nelson … Mandela!” droned across the field, John unhooked Sarah’s bra. Considering that he was doing this for the first time in his life, and that he had more alcohol in his blood than ever before, he mastered that feat very well.

  When he awoke the next morning with a pounding head, he found himself lying in a strange bed. But when he saw the black locks beside him on the pillow, he knew he must have done something right, even though he could not remember all the details. Accompanied by his mother’s tears, he later moved out of his parents’ house and into the small drafty apartment on the West side that Sarah had inherited from her parents.

  Sarah Brickman was an artist. She painted large wild paintings in gloomy colors that no one wanted to buy. About once a year she displayed her work for one or two weeks in an art gallery, which charged a fee and took a commission. And every time she either sold no paintings or too few even to pay the gallery. For days afterwards she was hard to talk to.

  John found a night job in a laundromat and learned how to fold shirts and use the laundry press. He burned both his hands during the first week, but the money was enough to pay the electric bills and buy food. For a while he tried to keep up with his studies at college, but he now had a long commute, and he still didn’t know what good going to school would do him. So one day he quit, without even telling his parents. They found out a few months later, which led to a hefty argument in which the word ‘whore’ was used, referring to Sarah. John refused to see his family for a long time afterwards.

  He was always impressed to see Sarah standing before the scaffold wearing a paint-smeared smock over her clothes and a quirky expression on her face. In the evenings Sarah would drag him to smoke-filled bars in Greenwich Village, where she would talk with other artists about art and business. He had a hard time figuring out what they would go on and on about, but that was kind of cool too. He felt he had found a niche in life. But Sarah’s friends weren’t so ready to share their niche in life with a redneck from nowhere. They laughed at him when he said something, or ignored him or rolled their eyes when he asked questions. For them he was nothing more than Sarah’s lover, her sidekick, her cuddly bear.

  The only person in the group he could talk to in was a fellow outsider, Marvin Copeland, the boyfriend of another artist, Brenda Carrington. Marvin shared an apartment with a few other people in Brooklyn, made a meager living as a bassist in various unsuccessful bands, and wrote his own songs, which no one wanted to play. He spent a lot of time looking out of his window or smoking marijuana, and there wasn’t a crazy idea he didn’t believe. He was as convinced of the government’s involvement in hiding the Roswell aliens in Area 51 as he was about the healing powers of pyramids and gems. The only conspiracy theory he doubted was that Elvis was still alive. He always made for entertaining company.

  John and Sarah got into fights on a regular basis over her art. It was bad when he thought one of her paintings was good while she disagreed, and it was even worse when he doubted her self-proclaimed masterpieces. One day he decided to learn what made a picture good or bad. Since he had no idea what Sarah and her friends were talking about, he started to read books about art and spent whole days in the Museum of Modern Art, where he mixed inconspicuously with other visitors, following the tour guides, until he began to be recognized and they started asking him embarrassing questions. He paid close attention to the explanations about the paintings, about which he was both enthusiastic and uncomprehending, and he thought that painting could be the one thing in his life he was looking for. Why hadn’t he discovered this before? How could he have, with his father a shoemaker, one brother an IRS officer and the other a military pilot? He started to paint.

  That was not a good idea as it later turned out. He thought that Sarah would be happy, but instead she criticized everything he did and even badmouthed his efforts to her friends. John was convinced that everything she said was true, and he humbly accepted the critique and used it as motivation to work even harder. He would have loved to take lessons, but, even if he found time for them, he wouldn’t have been able to afford them.

  At one stage there was a painting course on TV. It came on at four in the morning and was hacked up with commercials, but he didn’t miss a single episode. It showed how to paint mountain lakes lined with pine trees, or windmills in stunning sunsets. Without having ever seen them in real life, he found he was able to follow the instructions and do a fairly decent job recreating the scenes; even Sarah didn’t criticize him anymore, she just rolled her eyes.

  One day there was a short report about Sarah Brickman and her work in a local art periodical, which she cut out, framed, and proudly hung it over her bed. Not long after that article was published, a young potential buyer from Wall Street with slicked back hair appeared. He wore a wide-striped shirt with suspenders and he explained several times that he saw art as a form of investment and that he wanted to secure artwork from talented artists before they might become famous. He thought this was a great idea. Sarah took him into her studio and showed him her paintings, but he found it difficult to understand them. Only when he saw one of John’s early works, a silhouette of a city done with a wild mix of colors, which Sarah had only scoffed at, did he show much enthusiasm. He offered ten thousand dollars, and John just nodded.

  The buyer and painting were hardly out the door when Sarah stomped into the bathroom, slammed the door shut and locked herself in. John, still holding the bundle of money in his hand, knocked on the door and wanted to know what the matter was.

  “Do you know that you just earned more money with that shitty cityscape than I have in my entire life?” she cried.

  Their relationship was never the same, and it ended a short while later in February 1990. Sarah told John that it was over on the same day that Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

  He moved in with Marvin and his housemates. It so happened that an uncomfortable narrow room had just become available. He sat there on the floor with his few belongings, still not understanding what had happened.

  Selling the painting of the city’s silhouette was to be his only success as an artist, and the money was spent faster than he could have imagined. After he was forced to move, he had to quit his job at the laundry. After a few weeks of running around chasing job ads, during which his bank account shrank down to zero, he finally got hired as a delivery man for a pizzeria run by someone from India, who preferred hiring young, Italian-looking men to work outside the kitchen. A job like this in south Manhattan meant having to snake your way through the more or less stationary traffic with a bicycle and to know all the short cuts through narrow alleys. It was a job that made his legs and lungs strong, but he still managed to develop a sort of smoker’s cough due to all the exhaust he inhaled. On top of that, he barely earned enough money to survive.

  He might have had just enough space to paint inside his little room, but even on sunny days there was hardly enough light, and he also lacked the time to commit to art. His shift often ended late at night and he was so tired that he slept like a log, until his alarm clock would wake him up to start all over again. Every time he took a day off to go to a job interview his bank account would slip a bit more into the red.

  This is how Paul Siegel found him when he returned to New York with an awe-inspiring diploma from Harvard in his pocket and a well-paid job at a consulting company that counted nearly every renowned international company and quite a few governments among its clients.

  John visited him once in his tastefully arranged apartment in West Village and marveled at the view over the Hudson River while Paul told him — as merciless as only a good friend can — everything he was doing wrong in his life.

  “First you have to lose y
our debts; as long as you’re in debt, you’re not free,” he explained. “Then you have to get some breathing space so you can go in a new direction, but above all you need to know what you want from life.”

  “Yeah,” John said, “you’re right.”

  But he couldn’t wish away his debts or figure out an idea of what he wanted out of his life.

  To set his establishment apart from the others, Murali, the owner of the pizzeria John worked for, got the hair-brained idea to guarantee delivery within thirty minutes for every customer south of the Empire State Building. Anyone who had to wait longer got their pizza free. It was an idea from some book Murali hadn’t even read, but had been told about. The results were devastating. Each delivery man got four “lates” a week for free, after that the cost of the “free” pizza was taken from the man’s pay. During busy times the pizza was already late when it came out of the oven.

  John’s bank closed his account, he got into an argument with Marvin because he paid the rent late, and he hardly had anything left over to take to the pawnshop. In the end he sold the pocket watch he got from his father on his First Communion, which proved a bad idea since he ended up feeling too guilty to visit his parents — the only place he was invited to eat for free once in a while since breaking up with Sarah. On some days he was actually suffering from hunger pangs while he transported the flat boxes smelling of delicious pizza.

  That’s how 1995 started. Once in a while the men from John’s youth appeared in his dreams; they waved at him and smiled and said things he didn’t understand. London’s Baring’s Bank went broke after one of its employees, Nick Leeson, mismanaged huge sums of money. The Japanese Aum Shiri Kyo sect killed twelve people and injured five thousand others with poison gas in the Tokyo subways, and 186 people got killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Bill Clinton was still president, but had a tough time after his party lost its majority in both houses of Congress.

  John realized that he hadn’t painted for over a year and that time had somehow just simply slipped away. He had a feeling that he was waiting for something, but he didn’t know what it was.

  The 23rd of April wasn’t exactly a lucky day. First, it was a Sunday and he had to work. There was a message from his mother waiting for him at the pizzeria telling him to call home. Luckily, the phone in Marvin’s apartment hardly ever worked. John threw the note away and concentrated on his deliveries, which like most Sundays were few. He knew he’d end up barely earning anything for his trips to the craziest addresses. Since he had already used up his “lates” for the week, he pedaled his fastest to be on time. Maybe it was the stress that caused the accident. He rode out from between two buildings onto a street, braked a bit too late and rammed a car that looked like something the Michael Douglas character in Wall Street would climb into. The bike was a heap of junk after the collision, the pizza was ruined, and the car drove off as if nothing happened. John looked after the dark-red tail lights of the car as he rubbed his knee through his ripped jeans and realized it could have ended much worse for him.

  Murali was ranting at him when John came limping back. The two exchanged unkind words, and then John lost his job.

  John went home with ten cents in his pocket and a bunch of pent-up anger. He walked through a night that got colder the longer he took. During the last miles in Brooklyn, sleet began to pour down, and by the time John got home he didn’t know if he was a frozen stiff, or stiffly frozen.

  When he opened the door the room was wonderfully warm with the aroma of eggs and cigarettes. Marvin sat with his legs crossed in the kitchen, his Fender Jazz Bass plugged into the amp and the volume turned up loud enough that it was just audible above the bare strings. Instead of tweaking wildly on the strings like he usually did, he simply plucked them making dull sounds, much like a heart beat; du-dum, du-dum, du-dum.

  “Someone was here asking for you,” he said when John went to the bathroom.

  “What?” John stopped. Take a leak and go to bed; that’s what he had told himself over and over again on the freezing walk home for the past hour. “Me?”

  “Two men.”

  “What men?”

  “No idea. Just some men.” Du-dum, du-dum. "Two men in fancy suits, ties, tie clips, and everything. They wanted to know if a John Salvatore Fontanelli lives here.”

  John took the few steps into the kitchen. Stoically, Marvin kept plucking at the strings. Du-dum, du-dum, du-dum. “John Salvatore,” Marvin said shaking his head. “I didn’t even know you had a middle name. By the way, you look like shit.”

  “Thanks. Murali fired me.”

  “Not nice of him. Especially since we have to pay the rent next week.” Du-dum, du-dum, du-dum. Without losing the rhythm, Marvin reached over to the table and handed John a business card. “Here, I’m supposed to give you this.”

  It was an expensive looking, four-color business card with a fancy looking coat-of-arms on it. It said:

  Eduardo Vacchi

  Lawyer

  Florence, Italy

  Currently at: The Waldorf Astoria

  301 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y.

  Tel. 212-355-3000

  John stared at the card. He felt heavy and lethargic from the warmth in the kitchen. “Eduard Vacchi … Can’t say I ever heard the name before. Did they tell you what they want with me?”

  “You’re supposed to call him. He said, ‘If he comes home, give him the card and tell him to call me. It’s very important.’” Du-dum, du-dum, du-dum. “Something about an inheritance.” Du-dum, du-dum. “To me it sounds like money; could be cool, maybe.”

  $2,000,000,000,000

  THE OLD MAN — the Padrone, as Eduardo called him, took the pillow that had been resting on his lap, and placed it on a small table next to his chair. Then he stood up, which because of his rheumatism took a bit of effort. He pulled his sweater together with arthritic hands and smiled gently to everyone.

  John sat there stiffly. His mind went blank for the moment.

  The old man — or the Padrone — or Eduardo’s grandfather, came closer with silent and measured steps. He slowly went around the table, as if he had all the time in the world. When he went past John, behind his chair, he pated John’s shoulder in a kindly manner; real gently and casually, as if the Padrone was adopting him into their family, so to speak. He ended his casual walk around the table, sat down on the empty chair, and opened the last folder.

  John’s mind was not able to figure out what was going on here. Maybe it was like in those IQ tests? We have the numbers 2 — 4 — 6 — 8. What is the next logical number? Right — 10. We have the numbers 2 — 4 — 8 — 16. What is the next logical number? Right — 32. We have the numbers 80,000 — 4,000,000 — 2,000,000,000. What is the next logical number?

  But logic ended right there for John. Maybe they weren’t lawyers at all. Maybe they were crazy people, playing a crazy game. Maybe he was the victim of a psychology experiment. Maybe this is nothing more than a form of Candid Camera.

  “My name is Cristoforo Vacchi,” the old man said with a gentle yet firm voice, “and I’m a lawyer from Florence, Italy.” He looked at John in such a manner that made John dismiss any idea that this could be a psychology experiment or a TV game show. This was real, was true, this was indisputably authentic.

  There was a pause. John felt as if he was expected use his dry throat, and swollen, football-sized tongue to say something, to ask something, to articulate something, but he found no words to express what he felt. The only thing he brought out was a whisper-like utterance: “More money?”

  The Padrone nodded compassionately. “Yes, John, more money.”

  It was hard to guess how old Cristoforo Vacchi was, but it was safe to say that he was at least eighty. There wasn’t much left of his snow-white hair. His skin was loose and full of spots and wrinkles. But he still looked like someone who was very competent and in control of things when he folded his hands together gracefully and looked at the papers. Anyone who saw this, otherwise fragile looking
man, would never get the idea that he could be anywhere near senile. The idea was simply too ridiculous

  “I will tell you the whole story,” he said. John now understood that it had been left up to the old man to give it to him, so to speak. “It began in the year 1480 in Florence, Italy. It was then that your ancestor, Giacomo Fontanelli, was born out of wedlock. His mother found shelter for him in a monastery under the leadership of a merciful abbot. The boy grew up amongst monks. When he was fifteen years old on April 23, 1495, Giacomo had a dream, or perhaps it’s better to call it a vision, even though he always called it a dream in his writings. It was a vision so bright and intense that it influenced the rest of his life. The monks had taught him how to read, to write and to do math. Not long after his dream he moved away to become a merchant and trader. He worked in Rome and especially in Venice, which was an economic powerhouse in southern Europe back then. He later got married and had six children — all sons, who later, for the most part, also became merchants. Giacomo, however, returned to the monastery in 1525 to realize the rest of his dream.”

  John shook his head. “I keep hearing about a dream. What dream?”

  “The dream he had at fifteen was a dream in which Giacomo Fontanelli saw the future of his own life. He saw his future wife and, among other things, what a successful business he would have. But, far more important than that, he foresaw a time five hundred years into the future, which he described as a time filled with misery and pathetic fear, a time in which no one saw a real future anymore. And he saw that it was the will of Divine Providence — the will of God, you could say, for him to bequeath his fortune to the youngest heir alive on the five hundredth anniversary of his dream. This man would be the chosen one to give humanity its lost future back, and he would do this with Giacomo Fontanelli’s fortune.”