Humanity had lost its future. At some point, somehow it had got lost. People had lost their faith in the future. They said faith moves mountains? It was also possible that it would cause a civilization to go under.
All people cared about was money-grubbing: me, myself, and I. For as long as possible. No matter what comes afterward, nothing comes afterwards anyway. Get whatever you can. Live as well as you can before it all ends.
Was this really the basis of our civilization? If someone started to guess what it would be like in 2100 people laughed at him, didn’t they? What else could there be in 2100 except a sooty sky, stinking water, and maybe a few cockroaches that could survive everything, even atomic fallout? To think otherwise was a sign of utter naivety.
Somewhere during his restless wanderings through the house, John found a bottle. It was a bottle of old, strong port wine that was probably very expensive, and he emptied it somberly pouring one glass after the other as the sun was setting. The alcohol finally brought the carousel of thoughts in his mind to a standstill.
Among the books delivered by the box load, John found one about earth’s overpopulation that was written when he was five years old. Marvin must’ve found it in an antique shop. He couldn’t ask him, because his glorious-yet-never-available-secretary-for-all-and-no-occasions was unavailable at the moment, just like the promised bookshelves.
He leafed through the book and looked at the many diagrams and formulas, read a bit here and there. He didn’t understand much, only that the author must’ve been an authority, who questioned everything that was considered to be the truth on overpopulation. He posed the question: what exactly is overpopulation? Why was Calcutta considered overpopulated but not Paris? Bangladesh had the same population density as Malta, so that on its own could not be a criterion to define a country as being overpopulated. Is a country overpopulated when in reality it is nothing more than utterly poor? If the people in underdeveloped countries weren’t so terribly poor they could afford the price of food. Then the increased investments for machines and so forth in agriculture would pay off.
To speak of a world population problem, the author wrote, is to make an inadmissible generalization. It had already been determined that the world’s population would at some point settle down to a fixed level, perhaps around twelve to fifteen billion, and it was even possible that it would go down again. This had happened often before in the past in certain limited localities. What is being described as overpopulation is in fact a category of poverty, or to be more exact, impoverishment.
Misery is a symptom of hard crisis in the economic and social systems. To see a race between the stork and plow, as Robert Malthus postulated in the nineteenth century, is misleading and may lead in the end to a Lebensraum ideology, the concept of a people without living space, as happened in the Third Reich.
John turned the book over and read the text on the inside cover and the author’s biography. Was he exaggerating the situation, or a lonely voice of reason in a sea of hysteria? If only he didn’t have such a hangover this morning! He felt as if he had destroyed half his brain, yet wherever he opened the book he found it written clearly and concisely and with cool calculating analysis. It was reassuring. Perhaps the whole deal wasn’t so dramatic after all? He had no idea anymore.
The inheritance would restore humanity’s lost future.
What else did it say in the testament? He had never actually read it because he couldn’t read Latin. He never thought about having someone help him with this. But he would need help. This thing was simply too big for him to solve alone. He had always admired the cool, hyper-intelligent super heroes in the movies; the Tom Cruises and Arnold Schwarzeneggers who took on overwhelming odds to save the whole world and who always knew what was to be done and were always right in the end and always won. If such dudes really existed in this world, he certainly wasn’t one of them.
He called Eduardo. He asked him to accompany him to the firm’s archives in Florence, to help him read the testament, word for word. And everything else that was from Giacomo Fontanelli. “And then afterwards I want us to either have dinner together, or to get drunk, or to beat the shit out of each other.”
That at least made Eduardo smirk; since the incident at Capannori he had barely any contact with John. Maybe this was a way to patch up their friendship. “Why is everyone suddenly so interested in the archive?” Eduardo wanted to know. “Am I missing something here? Is today the International Old Paper day, or what?”
John asked him what he meant.
“Grandfather is there today with a history student from Germany who is interested in the Fontanelli prophecy. Didn’t he tell you?”
“No,” John answered, irritated. “How did she even find out about the prophecy’s existence?”
“Good question, isn’t it?”
“I can’t understand what’s written in those old books, really,” Eduardo told John as they drove to Florence. “It’s dusty old paper, nothing more. I sometimes get irritated how we are bound and live by words that were written five hundred years ago. What right did he have to lay down the law to us?”
“No idea,” John said. “But right now you don’t sound like a Vacchi.”
It was his first ride in the armored Mercedes that Marco insisted on. It took special training to drive such a vehicle properly, which was why Marco was driving it. The interior still smelled brand new, of leather and money. And somehow it felt as if all the potholes in the small roads were filled up overnight.
“I was the last keeper of the Fontanelli fortune,” Eduardo said grimly. “We have fulfilled our solemn vow. Now the Vacchi family is finally free.” He looked out the window. “And will probably die out.”
Florence was full of tourists, as usual. The traffic wasn’t moving. Pedestrians tried to see through the car’s tinted windows when it was forced to stop again in a jam. John found out what an advantage it was to have curtains in the back window. Luckily the law firm was located in a small street without buildings of any architectural and historical significance, so it was very quiet there. John had got used to the procedure of exiting the car; Marco stopped right by the entryway, despite it being a “Strictly No Parking” area, got out with his right hand in his jacket, looked all around, and then opened the rear door. He got back into the car only after everyone was safely inside the house. He would park the car elsewhere and come back when he was called on the car phone.
Inside the house it was still cool and smelled old as usual. They could barely hear voices. So the Padrone and the female student were already here. They went upstairs to the second floor. The door was half open and the lights were on. The voices could be heard more clearly now, chiefly the female voice. There was something in her tone that made John feel edgy, but he didn’t know why. Had he heard this voice before? No, that’s not it. Maybe he felt slighted by the senior Vacchi; that he had brought someone else here to these chambers and to these documents without asking John or even informing him.
The two didn’t hear John and Eduardo approaching the room. Padrone and a young woman with light brown hair sat together hunched over further back in the room, concentrating on the testament beneath the glass. She had a little dictionary, notepad and pen and repeated what she was writing down. “… and thus it happened in the night of the twenty-third of April in the year of our Lord 1495 that I had a dream in which God spoke to me …”
Herewith I, Giacomo Fontanelli, born in the year of our Lord 1480 in Florence, declare this to be my last will and testament. I declare this and write this down in presence of witnesses who will attest to this. Furthermore, I do declare that I am at full bodily strength and as far as can be determined by my fellow man am far from being on the threshold of death. I further declare that I will abnegate all my fortunes and worldly goods and from this day forward will devote myself to the service of God our Lord in Heaven, which I have long intended to do. I humbly do declare this.
I was appointed to this by a dream that I dreamt as a
child, a dream more lucid and clear than any I had before or since. And this dream came on the night of the twenty-third of April in the year of our Lord 1495, wherein God spoke to me. I humbly declare that it was as if God allowed me a tiny view of His omniscience, and it was truly wonderful to see. I saw myself lying on the bed in the chamber of the domestic servant house in which my mother and I lived and although every detail I saw was clear, I still knew it to be a dream. I looked up and saw the land and the city of Florence, but I did not only see to distances that are usually visible to the human eye, but also the past and the future. I saw the end of God’s rule in the Prior Savonarola and that he would burn before the town hall, and that brought forth great fear in me, since I was a boy of fifteen and tried to lead a pious and devout life. But I remained calm in my dream, at the same time I was serene and untouched by the wants of this world and with my eyes and mind I was even able to see further into the future. I saw wars and battles, famine, and pestilence, great men and cowardly treason, and saw so many faces that I wrote them down in another place to serve as a guide.
As I finally saw a time that I knew was five hundred years from now and was on the threshold to the next millennium, I saw a world unimaginably splendid but terrible at the same time. I saw millions of people live as opulently as the Medici and do things with machines that I fully understood in my dream yet cannot describe anymore today, only so much that it is to us like magic, but it was not magic, and the children too could use some of them. But it was not paradise that I saw. There were also wars that raged, people marched over the land like ants and devoured the land, where the sun itself could be flung down upon an enemy, and all were frozen with fear that this power might be unleashed and that a war would break out that could engulf the earth itself so mighty had mankind become. They had turned away from God and worshipped Mammon in his stead, yet they lived in screaming misery and awful fear and none of them saw a future. Many believed in a second Flood and that mankind would be wiped from the face of the earth for good, and many people lived under the yoke of this expectation.
But I saw that God loved His people truly despite their deeds and whether they turned from Him or not and that it is not God who punishes them but that they punish themselves enough by turning away from love and seek their salvation in worldly things. I saw this so clear and impressionably that I wish I could be more eloquent than I am and able to have you share my wonderful certitude, but alas I cannot.
I then saw my own life develop in front of me and saw what God wanted of me. I saw myself leaving the monastery and going into apprenticeship with a merchant who would be my patron and teach me well and who would make me his partner. I saw myself go to Venice and Rome as a merchant and saw the lucrative businesses and those that I would avoid with luck and saw how my wealth would grow. I saw in my dream even the woman who was destined for me, and I saw it so as it would happen later. I saw that I would have six sons and have a happy life which others could be jealous of, but I also saw the sad moment that I would never forget in all the years, in which I would have to carry my loving wife to her grave.
And now this has happened, I know that the time had come to fulfill the plan of providence. Thus I make this declaration. I bequeath all my fortunes to be kept in custody with Michelangelo Vacchi. He shall keep it to preserve it and he may increase it by loans and interest, yet I do not decree it as his property, but rather it shall be preserved and multiplied and bequeathed to my youngest male descendant who is living on the 23rd of April 1995, since he shall be the chosen one to return the future to mankind and he will do this with the help of this fortune.
Because I was born out of wedlock, I decree that he who is born out of wedlock and is the youngest male heir be included but a child not born of family blood but merely taken on shall be excluded. In my dream I saw that Michelangelo, although he may not believe this, will have children and that his family will not be extinct in the coming five hundred years, and they will do their duty. His family may keep the thousandth of a tenth of the fortune and all my papers. This document and this endeavor must be kept secret until the aforementioned date.
“…must be kept secret until the aforementioned date,” Ursula Valen finished translating the testament. “Hereby signed in the year of our Lord, 1525. And there’s Fontanelli’s signature and those of the witnesses down on the bottom.” She looked up and saw the old man beside her with a kind smile on his face. “That is simply unbelievable!” She was being economical with the truth. For any historian this entire archive was a sensation. This was an archive that had been well cared for and preserved for five hundred years, just waiting to be examined and assessed! It was as if generations of intelligent attentive people had done preliminary work for the scientific community of today.
The account books alone were a treasure trove of information about old currencies, their period of use and their buying power. She had seen notes in the books where one Vacchi had described world politics to help explain why he took money from one region to bring it to another. They was a five-hundred-year-old diary of the finances and economics of Europe and the known world of the time; this is what was had lain hidden in all those leather-bound, consecutively numbered tomes: far more material than she would need for her thesis. She would do anything possible to write her paper here. At the very least. This was a find that a scientist could examine for a lifetime.
And then there was still the little matter of an article to write for the Stern.
“Do you think you make do something of this?” Cristoforo wanted to know.
Ursula laughed helplessly. “You need to ask? It is … what can I say? It is unbelievable. Absolutely fascinating. ‘Whether I can make something of this?’ What a question! If I can’t do anything with all this then I’m in the wrong profession.”
Even an explosion couldn’t have startled her more than the dry throat clearing behind them.
“May I ask what you want to do with all this?” an impatient voice asked.
John had a strong, irrational feeling that this woman was after his money. She was slim and graceful and her hair framed smooth, but otherwise unremarkable face with big eyes dark as onyx. She looked like a dark, quiet angel at first, yet there was something about her that made him shudder, made him fear her with a nameless inescapable fear.
She had a delicate hand on her chest. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed. They had an arousing shape; the nipples could be seen through her blouse. It was clear he had startled her.
She said something in German, something automatically said when startled. Then she recovered and said in fluent English: “I intend to do scientific research with this. That is, I will write treatises for history magazines and maybe even a book. And I will also write an article for a German magazine. I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Fontanelli. I would appreciate it if you knocked the next time.”
Why was she so disturbed? “An article? What sort of article?”
“About the historic background of your fortune,” she answered with cool certainty. “Apart from a load of dull stories about interest and compound interest the media has published nothing very remarkable.”
“I don’t think that I can agree to that!”
“Why? Are you hiding something?”
John struggled to suppress the impulse to get into an argument. He turned to the Padrone, who seemed only slightly irritated by their appearance. “Why wasn’t I informed about this?”
Cristoforo Vacchi frowned. “Oh, sooner or later I would have introduced you to each other. Signora Valen, this is John Fontanelli, the heir mentioned in the testament, and this is my grandson, Eduardo. John, may I introduce to you Miss Ursula Valen. She’s a history student from Germany and a part-time journalist.”
John nodded curtly. “Do you think it’s a good idea to allow a journalist in here to view the documents?”
“Yes,” the Padrone said. “I thought it appropriate.”
“Don’t I have something to say about this too?”
“I’m sorry, John, no. The archive is our property, the property of the family Vacchi, a record of our achievements. It is natural that we want recognition for this.”
Ursula Valen studied Fontanelli. What an arrogant asshole. He seemed to think he was something superior. Sure, he was the chosen one, God’s tool, a messiah if you will. He was somewhat tanned, slim, almost too thin, and dressed expensively as elegantly. But he had an ordinary-looking face. No one would have turned to take a second look at him if it weren’t for his expensive clothing. The erotic aura he had must be the money.
One trillion dollars stood there in front of her. Madness! An example of what incredible achievements people were capable of when they were driven by a vision, a prophecy, and an unbending belief — and how little such prophesies were worth even if they had their origins in a divine vision.
But the old lawyer seemed to be on her side. And the question of who owned the documents was clear. She wasn’t going to let an opportunity like this be taken away by some ill-tempered, bad-mannered upstart. She would never allow anything to be taken away from her again. She had grown up in a communist state, and was the granddaughter of a declared Nazi. As a result she had been barred from most aspects of social life in East Germany, from joining the communist party youth organization, and from attending university. But then the state that kept her from studying history collapsed, and she was able to study after all, even if a little later than she had intended. No, she would never be intimidated again.
The Stern article, bylined Ursula Valen, appeared the following Thursday as a title story and brought the news magazine the second-highest sales in its history. The following day, the article was reprinted by practically all the world’s important newspapers. Months later Ursula Valens was still getting royalties from the story thanks to the syndication fees. She was even getting payments in such unusual currencies as Thai baht and Vietnamese dong and from such countries such as Nauru and Burkina Faso. The money she earned from the photos of the testament alone was enough to allow her to pay back her student loans.
One Trillion Dollars Page 25
