Ursula Valen looked up in surprise. “How did you know I was in the States?”
“Oh, I follow your work with the greatest of interest. You do know that, right?” He smiled like a magician who had just performed a good trick. “Besides, the editor who sent you there, might work for another magazine, but he gets his paycheck from the same account as I do. That’s how it is these days in the world of publishing: one dragon, many heads.”
Ursula nodded slowly. She always found it hard to keep track of who owned what in the world of media conglomerates. She didn’t like to think about it, because it reminded her of the way things were in the former East German press. “It was very informative,” she told him. “I’d be happy to send you a copy of the article, if you wish.”
Van Delft raised his hands. “Please, don’t. Please, only articles I’m allowed to print.”
“That brings us to the point. I stumbled onto something that may turn out to be a sensational story. I’d like to investigate it further.”
“You told me the last time we spoke that finishing your studies was your first priority.”
“I know.”
“Alright. I’m all ears.”
Ursula told him what had happened on the plane. She changed a few minor details, because she didn’t want to explain what she had been doing in New York, which hadn’t had a lot to do with the history of the automobile. “The thing is,” she said at last, “why would they have lied to me? They didn’t know who I was, so it would not have made any sense. On the other hand, a prophecy would be a reason why this family of lawyers had kept this unbelievable fortune for generations, nurtured it, and actually handed it over in the end.”
Van Delft had started to play around with his large letter opener — a habit he had when he was thinking hard. “And you’re certain it was Fontanelli’s brother?”
“Absolutely.”
He swiveled his office chair around and looked at the wall calendar, full of notes and scribbled over so that it was as colorful as the kindergarten drawing by his granddaughter hanging above it. “It is interesting, you’re right about that,” he admitted. “But you do realize that this story would have to be bulletproof before we can publish it?”
“Naturally,” she nodded.
Twelve years earlier Stern magazine had fallen for the fake Hitler diaries, a fiasco from which the periodical still hadn’t fully recovered.
He ran a finger along the edge of the opener as he said: “I wouldn’t consider a casual conversation between two fellow travelers you eavesdropped on to be a trustworthy source.”
“I realize that. The first thing I’d do is to go to Florence and take a look at the original testament. If it looks like there’s a grain of truth, I’ll do some research on Giacomo Fontanelli …” She paused, because van Delft was grinning at her as if she had just said something totally idiotic.
“My dear child, do you even realize what you are going up against? This family — the Vacchis, they have isolated themselves from the press in a way I have never seen before. The list of journalists who’ve come back empty-handed would reach from here to the Alster River. I think it might be easier to get permission to photograph Michael Jackson in the shower, than to get a look at the Vacchi documents.”
“Really?”
“Really. American newspapers have already offered millions. But the Vacchis are rich enough already. There’s no way.”
Ursula leaned back and grinned. “Interesting,” she said. “I spoke with Cristoforo Vacchi yesterday and told him what I wanted, and he asked me round. Next Tuesday. He’s even picking me up from the train station.”
Van Delft almost cut his finger with the letter opener. “You can’t be serious!”
“I’ve just come from the train station where I was checking the connections. All I have to do is book the ticket.”
“And you are sure that you spoke with the old Vacchi?” When he saw the expression on her face he waved a hand. “Alright, that was a stupid question. But tell me, what in the world did you tell him?”
“Only the truth, that I’m a history student and that I work for a newspaper part time.”
Wilfried van Delft shook his head. He was visibly impressed. “And you told him that you want to see the testament?”
“Of course. He only wanted to know if I knew Latin.” Ursula bit her lower lip when it dawned on her what van Delft’s reaction would be. She took a breath and said, “I’ll offer you rights to be the first to print the story after I finish writing the article.”
“First rights?” he echoed.
“For Germany,” she added. She thought feverishly where she had put the business card of the press agent she had met at a publisher’s reception. She would need his help. And everything had to happen fast. “Not exclusive rights.”
“I didn’t know you were such a tough business woman,” Wilfried van Delft said sourly.
The library took longer to set up then John had expected. It had been a week already, and all Marvin put in the little salon that John had told his personnel to clear out the day they discussed it was one lousy shelf with a measly thirty books on it. They all had esoteric titles about UFOs, prophecies of the end of the world by Nostradamus, or calling for the world’s population to return to life as nomads.
“I wanted scientific books! Books about physics, biology, sociology, economics, and not this junk!”
Marvin was lounging on the sofa reading a book called The Great Conspiracies. “They’re ordered, calm down,” he said without looking up. “That’s all the bookstores had and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get them. This way you can get acquainted with a bit of blue sky thinking?”
John looked at the covers of the two books he was holding. “Neither UFOS nor Nostradamus are exactly blue sky thinking.”
“This here, for one, is pretty informative,” Marvin said holding up the book he was reading. “If it’s true what it says in here…“
“Which it isn’t, luckily,” John grumbled.
“Then you really are a victim of the conspiracy!”
John rolled his eyes. “Somehow I knew you would say that.”
“The date says it all, the twenty-third of April. The number twenty-three is a symbolic number for the Illuminati — the most secret conspiracy in the world. They have infiltrated everything to gain worldwide power.”
“If they are so secret then why can you read all about them in that book?”
“Well, information seeped out every once in awhile. Kennedy, for example, posed too much of a threat to them — that’s why they had him killed. It was on a twenty-third to demonstrate their power to everyone who knows about them.”
John looked at him skeptically. “If I remember correctly then the assassination happened on the twenty-second of November.”
“Really?” Marvin stared. “Weird. Maybe they made a mistake. They had it all done by assistants, you know, and maybe they didn’t stick to the instructions exactly.”
“Oh sure,” John said. “I can imagine what problems they have with their personnel. Have you set up a bank account yet?”
“Nope, forgot.”
“Well if you do get round to it, don’t bother giving Jeremy the number, okay?”
When John looked at the solitary bookshelf he realized it would start a riot if the others he employed knew how much he was paying Marvin for sitting on his ass. He would pay him without Jeremy’s knowledge from another bank account. Luckily he had more than enough of them.
But he wasn’t happy about it. It would mean he was punishing those doing honest work for their money. Just like his father had said.
Marvin nodded as he yawned. “Gotcha.”
Later on, after Marvin left to go meet with Constantina, John went out onto the terrace, which he had arranged for himself underneath a taut yellow awning. There was a table, chair, writing utensils, an Italian-English dictionary, and a copy of Lorenzo’s article. He had decided to translate the text into English on his own. He thought tha
t that way he would make sure he really understood it.
In recent years so much has been written and said — most of it highly depressing — on the subject of the ‘Limits of Growth,’ the future of humanity and so on, that people don’t want to think about it anymore. Nobody wants to read books or articles like that, therefore, none is being published. And because none is being published, people think the situation is no longer as bad as it was.
But this is wrong. Our parents’ generation, those born shortly after the war and who fell in love to the sounds of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Abba, and warned off sexual intercourse by Pope Paul VI, lived through mankind’s Golden Age. Their quality of life was higher than ever before and than it ever will be again. We, my friends, are seeing the end of this era.
The reason for its decline is the same as for its rise: industrialization. Technological developments had spurred on an increase in living standards that would seem like pure magic to people from previous centuries. But those inventions alone didn’t cause all our problems, this happened only through mass production. A car for everyone, telephones and color TVs in every home. It was industrialization that made this dissemination possible. Antibiotics must be mass-produced to have them available all the time and everywhere. Agricultural methods today have virtually nothing in common with those of only a hundred years ago. Machines, artificial fertilizers, and pesticides have increased agricultural output to such an extent that we artificially restrict it.
Medical advances have cut infant mortality rates and increased life expectancy, which has led to an extremely rapid growth in the world’s population. Up until now, agriculture has been able to keep pace with the increasing number of humans. World hunger is a distribution problem and not one of production. However, agriculture is eventually reaching the limits of increased production; to make matters worse desertification is causing a loss of arable, maybe forever.
Industry too is reaching its maximum capacity. Raw materials are becoming scarce, and the environment is already suffering tremendous damage.
You may say that you don’t see or hear anything about these problems. Everyday goods are readily available and some are getting cheaper rather than more expensive. The predicted catastrophic pollution of air and water haven’t happened yet. Somehow things are still manageable, aren’t they?
But let us imagine that we could raise the standard of living overnight for every human in the world to the level we enjoy here in Italy or in the other industrialized nations. A billion Chinese driving cars, a billion Indians with suburban homes and a barbeque grill and so on. The negative environmental consequences of this are easy to imagine.
There are about four times as many people living in underdeveloped nations as in the developed ones. But one person from an industrialized nation pollutes the earth ten to twenty times as much as someone from the Third World. This means that higher living standards would cause at least ten times more pollution in a world which already has too much!
That would be the end.
To cut things short: the limits have been reached. If the way we live in developed countries is not possible for everyone else on earth, then we are simply taking more of the pie than we have a right to. The only reason we don’t notice this calamitous state of affairs is because we have made sure the problems exist in far away countries. For a long time now, Italy has been using more raw materials than exist within its territory, and this is the case in other European nations as well. Our continuous growth is possible only because we steal the raw materials from Third World countries at knockdown prices. We have even found a way to get rid of our garbage: we send it to them.
And we’re still not satisfied. Even though Italy’s population growth is practically stagnant, we remain hell-bent on growth. We want more of everything and want it bigger and better and cheaper. Nobody seems able to say, “STOP! Let’s be satisfied with what we already have.”
Where is this going to take us, this constant economic growth, which seems more important to governments than anything else? They whine when it’s only two percent. Let’s say it was five percent — a lousy five percent. Do the math if you paid attention in school, but if not, this means a doubling in sixteen years. Or twice as much use of raw materials, twice the environmental burden, and so on. Even one percent of economic growth will add up to gigantic growth over many years — more than you can imagine.
John nodded when he got to this part of the article. That’s how his fortune grew. That had also been a gigantic growth.
Naturally, this cannot go on forever. If a family ten years ago had one car and now has three, it doesn’t mean that every family will eventually have a hundred. All these things, raw materials, environment, health, reproduction, living standards, climate and so on, are intertwined with each other in many ways. A change in one will affect the others. What could happen to a network of systems under constant strain for a long time is an eventual and sudden collapse. When one system in a network breaks down it will cause the others to break down too — a sort of domino effect. A minor example we know of happened in northern European lakes; they had pollutants pumped into them for a long time until their entire ecosystems collapsed; they are now biologically dead — no aquatic plants, no fish, and no amphibians. The same thing can happen to the giant system that is Planet Earth and maybe there will be intelligent insects 65 million years from now wondering why we disappeared so suddenly, just like the dinosaurs before us.
The world has many problems right now and at first sight it all looks pretty grim for humanity. However, I will demonstrate that this is only a flaw in the way our civilization is constructed, one that we ourselves can also eliminate. So, don’t commit suicide yet, and stick around to read the next issue of Ritirata!
That, John thought as he went through his translation again, was maybe not brilliant, but quite a feat for a sixteen-year-old. The last paragraph sounded very bold, nevertheless. But most of all he found it depressing that he hadn’t the least idea what might be in part two!
$17,000,000,000,000
IT WAS GETTING to be a regular ritual. Just as John was about to go to bed the phone rang in the bedroom. As usual the caller wanted to know how his thoughts were coming.
“I think that industrialization itself is the root of the problem,” John told the stranger, leaning back on the little sofa deliberately positioned to allow him a view of the wide, dark, empty beach, and the silver breakers. He enjoyed talking like this, speaking aimlessly to someone on the other end of the line who listened attentively. He realized the conversations gave him new ideas. It was like in the past when he used to go to confession. Or as if he were lying on a couch next to a psychiatrist — at least that’s how imagined it might be. He had only been to a therapist once in his life: as a child, because his mother was worried that he was a dreamer who lived in a world of his own imagination. The therapist made him play with little toy dolls and invent stories about them. Then he told his mother that her son was definitely a dreamer, but didn’t have much imagination.
“Industrialization? Aha. And based on this knowledge what do you plan to do?”
“We must find a way back, back to nature. I realize this isn’t a very original plan.”
The dark laugh almost sounded disparagingly. “It’s a deadly plan. It is industrialized civilization that keeps many people alive. If you remove artificial fertilizer and domesticated plants you’ll have the streets strewn with corpses.”
“Of course not all at once; I was thinking of a slow change to agriculture based on sustainable food production methods, the use of solar energy, you know, the whole gamut of alternative ways and means.”
“You can smoke cigarettes produced by sustainable agriculture, but they are still cigarettes. Or you can simply quit smoking. That is difficult. What you must keep in mind is that without technological aid, this planet can support maybe five hundred million people. You cannot forego the use of technology until you’ve reduced the world’s population to that
level.”
John sighed. “All right, I have no plan. What do you suggest?”
“I know what’s to be done.”
“Then tell me.”
He sounded as if he were smirking. “I’d be glad to, but I can’t on the phone.”
What kind of plan could that be? He’s bluffing, just like Lorenzo. There was no such plan. There was nothing to be done. That was the truth.
“We must meet,” the stranger said, “as soon as possible.”
“I’ll think about it,” John said and hung up.
He felt restless, locked in a golden cage, the fortune crushing him like a monstrous invisible weight. One trillion dollars … an unimaginable amount of money. One thousand times a billion. One million times one million. But to do something really effective with such a sum was like forcing the steam train of history onto different tracks.
And what was the most effective thing to do? Was there anything at all, or was it already too late to change the way things are?
He walked restlessly around the big house. He tried to find relaxation in the whirlpool, but got back out before the water had even warmed up. He stood on the terrace and looked blankly out over the sea.
In a dark moment he thought, when the shit hits the fan at least it wouldn’t affect him. With his money he could effectively protect himself and those dear to him. He would still have clean water as war raged all around. He could buy a piece of land and have it defended to the bitter end if necessary. He could have bunkers built if he wanted to. He would have access to the best medical care. He could buy, hire, bribe, and whatever else no matter what happened.
In one of those dark moments it was suddenly clear to him what the prophecy meant. Humanity has lost its future. This meant that there was a fearful premonition that from now on everything would get worse and would eventually end. Rather than face it, people looked back through rose-tinted glasses at the past or lived today’s hectic busy life to the fullest, simply so they wouldn’t have to think about the future. And it was a black hole that humanity was rushing into.
One Trillion Dollars Page 24
