One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  The man with the hook instead of a right hand explained that he tried to pay his debts. He went far out into the ocean at first light and worked until the evening, until it was too dark to see, until he almost collapsed from exhaustion. He took off the hook assembly and stretched out his right arm, which was haggard, covered with scars, and had a gruesome looking stub at the end. It had happened one particular evening. He was so tired that he could hardly keep his eyes open and that’s when he miscalculated and released the dynamite a bit too late. “My nice hand,” he said in English with a heavy accent, and although he smiled, like the villagers always smiled, there were tears glistening at the corners of his eyes.

  John looked at him, touched. He couldn’t imagine what it would be to lose a hand. “How do you make a living now?” he asked gently.

  The fisherman lowered his eyes and stared at the mat upon which they all sat. His mouth went taught suddenly. “His daughter sends money. She’s working as a nursemaid in Hong Kong,” Benigno translated.

  “As a nursemaid?” John wondered.

  Benigno cleared his throat embarrassed. “That probably means as a prostitute,” he explained in a low tone.

  “Oh.” John looked at the people, the brown-skinned invalids who sat around him with gentle smiles and sad eyes. His imagination saw, as if in a feverish hallucination, the whole misery of violence, wretchedness, misuse, and suffering of their existence, a gaping sore of blood and pain. It lasted only a short terrible moment, but he suddenly shuddered at the sight of the palm trees, the sea, and the village that had at first looked so idyllic. The tropical setting suddenly seemed more like a disguise for a terrible secret, like flowers on a mass grave.

  “How much is a peso worth in US dollars, by the way?” he asked Benigno.

  “About two cents.”

  “Two cents!?” He handed out the rest of the money he brought with him to the people, got up and gestured to Marco. “Call the Prophecy. I want the four-by-four unloaded. I want to go to Tuay.”

  The first group of fishermen was returning with the meager morning catch as the four-wheel-drive was brought ashore. They pulled their boats up on the beach and watched as the big, pristine vehicle was carefully driven over metal ramps off the motorboat.

  Patricia DeBeers had come along too. “I don’t want to let you have all the fun,” she told John.

  “Your hair may not ever be the same,” he replied.

  “Dirt can be washed out, but boredom can’t.”

  The narrow road to Tuay was covered with white gravel and the vehicle was dusty in no time. They drove past splendid palm trees and muddy waterholes accompanied by swarms of insects and the sound of crickets, cicadas and singing birds. They reached Tuay just over a half hour later.

  The place looked like it had been built by Spanish conquistadors and had not changed since. There was a church, angular and pale brown, that rose up higher then other structures around it. The narrow paths between the houses were barely wide enough for their vehicle to pass through. It smelled of fire, fish, and rotting garbage. They saw workers repairing shoes and others planing boards, and women sitting in front of cooking pots, and schoolchildren sitting in neat rows below palm thatched roofs listening to their teachers, and they saw a harbor, which surprised them. A handful of men were unloading brown sacks and cases of Coca Cola from a barge.

  “Maybe the Prophecy could moor here,” Marco thought aloud. “Then we could just lift the vehicle back on board.”

  “We’ll see, on the way back,” John said, unwilling to go along with the idea.

  Joseph Balabagan was a well-nourished man of around fifty. He was dressed in shorts, a clean white polo shirt and a cap, and he was working on his moped in front of his house when they arrived. The two-wheeler didn’t want to cooperate they noticed, because they saw him kicking it and shouting cuss words.

  As Marco brought the vehicle to a stop beside him he glanced at them involuntarily and bellowed, “I no time!”

  “We need to talk,” John told him.

  The fishmonger gave the moped another kick. “I say I no time,” he shouted. “You have bad hearing?”

  A shrill woman’s voice shouted for him from within the dark house, at which he angrily shouted something back, which contained a lot of “oo” and “oho” sounds. Then he kicked the moped’s kick-starter, again and again, but with no success.

  John told Marco to turn the engine off. Two little girls came out of the store behind the fishmonger. You could see a bunch of wooden boxes inside the house filled with fish bedded on ice. There was smell of fish and salt in the air, mixed with the stench of exhaust gases.

  “We want to talk to you about your business practices,” John explained to him doggedly. “And about the type of loans you give the fishermen, and about…”

  At this moment there was a screech from within the house that made their blood curdle. A woman screamed in excruciating pain.

  “Go away!” Balabagan shouted at John. “You hear me? I no time now!”

  John stared at him and at the shabby house, heard the screams reverberating in his memory. Clueless, he looked to the others.

  “John,” Patricia slid through the gap between the front seats, “ask him if his wife needs to go to a hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “The screams. Only a woman giving birth screams like that.”

  Moments later they were on their way to Lomiao, the nearest town with a hospital. Marco drove as fast as the bad roads allowed. John and Benigno were squashed together on the front passenger seat, while Patricia and the Balabagan couple were in the back. The woman was bathed in sweat and barely conscious, she moaned and panted and had a belly so big she could’ve filled the rear seat on her own. The potholes and uneven road surface must have been hell on her.

  After about fifteen miles they passed by the first few houses on the outskirts of Lomiao. The town looked rough. There were many huts with corrugated sheet metal roofs and walls, and the streets were full of people, gaudy billboards, bicycles, and mopeds. Balabagan leaned forward and told them which way to go until they got to a building that was clearly the hospital.

  The fishmonger ran into the emergency room, his wife lying deathly pale on the back seat with her hands on her belly, and kept whispering something that sounded like prayers. She looked half-dead. Patricia held her head, and they all looked impatiently at the hospital’s double doors expecting doctors and nurses to rush out any second.

  “Finally,” Marco said as the door wings started to move, but it was only the frustrated Balabagan.

  He came over and stammered about not having enough money. “They not want take her … I must pay them …”

  John reached into his pocket. “How much do you need?”

  “They want six hundred and fifty pesos … I only five hundred have …”

  “Here, ten dollars. Do they take dollars?”

  “I not know. I ask.” The man was shaking as he went back inside. But the hospital accepted dollars. Two nurses rushed out with a gurney and helped lift the pregnant woman out of the vehicle.

  Hospitals seemed to look the same all over the world, John thought. They had parked the car in a parking lot earlier and had been waiting in the lobby for some time now. They were hoping to either have Balabagan come out soon or get some kind of news what was going on.

  John said to Patricia, “I was wondering how you knew what a woman sounds like giving birth.”

  She raised her brows in amusement, the same ones that were in every fashion magazine in the world. “Why?”

  “You just didn’t seem the type of woman to know that sort of thing.”

  “What type of woman do I look like?”

  “Well, like someone who’s above such things.”

  She sighed. “You don’t really think that DeBeers is my real name, do you? My name is Patricia Miller, and I grew up in Maine, the dreariest place. I have four younger sisters who were all born at home, all during the winter and at night, and all
before the midwife arrived. I try to avoid such things these days, but I’m not ignorant of them, or above them.”

  “Oh,” John said, feeling terribly stupid.

  After some time a somewhat embarrassed Balabagan came out, twisting his New York Yankees cap in his hands. “I sorry for be so unkind,” he told them. “Heaven you send me, I know now.” He bit his lips. He made an awkward gesture with his right arm, like he was throwing something away. “That moped! It drive me crazy! Always when I need, it not work. I should throw away. Yes, really, I should.”

  “How is your wife doing?” Patricia asked.

  “Better, they say. It no time yet … three days they say, say I should go home …”

  John felt a mixture of both satisfaction and frustration. Satisfied, because they were obviously of great help to a desperate woman, and frustrated, because the woman’s husband was the man they were looking for, and didn’t appear to be the type of person he thought he might be, according to what he heard from the villagers. Balabagan was not the answer to his question. He might be taking advantage of the fishermen, but he was also only a small link in the food chain. They were one layer closer to the center of the spider web, but they hadn’t found the spider yet.

  John asked the fishmonger to sit down. He told him what they had learned about dynamite fishing by the Panglawan, and about the loans he gave the fishermen. While John spoke Joseph Balabagan went quiet and when the word “dynamite” was mentioned, he looked around with anxious eyes.

  “Listen me,” he said in a low tone of voice, “what you want from me? I only trying to provide for my family. Have to I charge eight pesos for loans, because most fishing men not can pay back anyway. What else I do? I not can give money away … I not can pay more for fish because I not can make profit. Oh, I many times buy their fish … really are not fish; I put them in ice and hope fish factory not notice. But they see many times and they my money pay less. Who will replace money for me? No one. You see you self I’m no rich. Would I have broken moped if I rich? Would I have ask you money for hospital?”

  “Where does the dynamite come from?” Benigno asked.

  Balabagan shrugged his shoulders. “I get from policeman. I have pay him and his boss too. I not much money after that. I sell dynamite to fishing men who want. They want because they want catch more fish, that how is here. Everyone want more money.”

  “Do you know what dynamite does to the coral?” the government representative hissed. “And what it does to the fishing grounds?”

  “You not can eat coral reefs,” Balabagan said and lifted his hands helplessly. “If I not sell dynamite … other will.”

  “This fish factory,” John interjected “where is it?”

  “San Carlos. Pay same money as ten years ago and everything more expensive. But who I sell fish then? When I catch lapu-lapu I sell restaurant here in Lomiao, but they not want all other fish. I not nothing can do.” He shook his head. “I see must how I pay back money. No one body give me money, and bank less even.”

  John looked astonished. “The bank? Which bank?”

  “Bank in Lomiao. They not patient with me as I patient with fishing men. You believe me that.”

  “And what rates do you pay them?”

  The fishmonger looked at John unsure. “Rates I do,” he said hesitantly.

  “For loans?”

  “Yes, why else pay bank?”

  “And what kind of loans?”

  The man looked like he was about to get up and leave. Even Benigno took a deep breath. Filipinos don’t like to be asked such direct questions; John had learned that already. But he wasn’t going to give up. He stared at the fishmonger, until the man gave in.

  “It is always something,” he said in a low tone of voice. “When ice machine was paid it went broke and I no money to fix. I then buy must a gas tank for pump … Always something.” He grimaced. “I not can pay hardly money lately. Now I money owe.”

  John opened his hands wide and said, “I’ll pay them, as a gift to you and your wife.” He was thinking about the fish factory. Maybe it was the next link in a chain of exploitation. Maybe they did the same thing as Balabagan: take advantage of their monopoly so the fishermen could not sell their fish to anyone else while at the same time paying the lowest possible prices and earning the most money. “You know,” Balabagan said, “I think twenty-seven percent too much.”

  “What did you say?” John asked, his mind having drifted for a moment. “Twenty-seven percent?”

  “You say me I eight pesos take for five pesos loan. This sixty percent. From me bank take twenty-seven and want security … it too much … no?”

  John looked at him in disbelief. “Twenty-seven percent”? he asked again to make sure he understood correctly. “The bank here demands twenty-seven percent interest?”

  “Yes.”

  John let the formulas he had learned what seemed like an eternity ago run through his head; 27 percent meant that the amount to repay would double every two years — approximately.

  “How can you ever to repay that?”

  “I ask me too. Ice machine I pay fourteen percent — I pay back.”

  “But twenty-seven percent? Why did you even do that?”

  “What I do? Ice machine broke … no ice machine, no make business with fish.”

  “Go to another bank.”

  “Other banks not give me money.”

  John nodded slowly. This looked like a hot lead. He felt his frustration replaced by anger. He asked himself what he would do if he found the center of this ruthless intimidation and merciless coercion, the spider in its web, the end of the chain, the boss of bosses, the top predator.

  He wondered if he could control himself if and when he did!

  “There we go,” Ursula Valen whispered. In the dusty stillness of the library her voice sounded like a bombshell.

  The outgoing registry turned out to be just what she was looking for. In 1969 the entire collection of documents was transferred to the Institute of History at the university where they were used for a dissertation, which was never finished. The documents remained there for around a year and a half before they were put into storage in the university’s library. They were in a special part of the library, reserved for original historical tomes and documents and which can be entered only with a special permit. It took Alberto Vacchi just one phone call to get the special permit.

  Unimaginable treasures were stored in here; manuscripts from the Middle Ages, ancient bibles, letters, diaries of historic personalities, and the list went on and on. She could not help herself from peering into the gray, thick-walled cardboard archive boxes. In one she stumbled upon a letter from Mussolini, written in large fancy handwriting. Naturally she could not read a single word, but it still looked interesting, whatever she thought of the author.

  She finally found the correct box with the right registry number, pulled it out of the shelf, and brought it over to the reading table, which was also an antique. She slipped on the required protective white cotton gloves, held her breath as she opened the box, took out the first sheet, and immediately recognized the handwriting. It even had the notes in the margins like the account books. This was it: these were the personal documents of Giacomo Fontanelli, merchant in Florence during the fifteenth century.

  Altogether it was quite a lot of written material for a man of the Middle Ages, Ursula thought as she went through the pages. They were loose leafs and in good shape — and quite legible. At least they would have been legible if she had the skill to read medieval Italian. Almost all the manuscripts were dated and most of them were from 1521. A few of the papers were formatted differently and had different handwriting, perhaps letters which Fontanelli had kept.

  She stopped at one particular document. Very strange: the entire letter contained rows of numbers, and only at the end were there two sentences of normal text. She held the document closer to the reading lamp and studied the numbers.

  1525 300 12

  15
26 312 12½

  1527 324½ 13

  Et cetera …

  She felt a wave of warmth when she realized what she had in her hands. The first column listed the years, the second was the assets, and the third was the difference between the second column and the following one, the yield of the assets. She did the math in her notebook, using a hypothetical interest value of four percent. Her eyes ran down the columns and she was just as amazed at what she saw as she had been when she first read the same calculations in the newspapers and learnt how the Fontanelli assets grew: very, very slowly at first, then gradually increasing until it reached astounding rates of return. It took more than a quarter of a century, until the 1556, before the three hundred florins grew to more than a thousand. It reached over a million for the first time in 1732, and in 1908 over one billion, and finally to more than thirty billion florins in 1995 — which when converted, came to one trillion dollars

  What she had found here were the calculations predicting the amount that the original three hundred florins would reach over 500 years.

  But this had not been done by Giacomo Fontanelli.

  “Fabiana?” She turned around to look for the young history student there to assist Ursula with any translations.

  Fabiana had gorgeous black hair all the way down to the small of her back, with a somewhat pasty complexion, but a great figure. Ursula found her sitting by the index card cabinets deeply involved in painting her nails.

  “Ciao, Ursula,” she beamed as she came over. “Did you find something?”

  Ursula placed the last page before her on the table and pointed at the text below the calculations. “What does this say?”

  Fabiana leaned forward, blowing her nails above the almost five-hundred-year-old document and studied the thin scraggly writing. “That says, hmm …” She frowned and held her breath. “I would say it means, ‘You see now how through the laws of math my work will acquire immortality,’ that’s an odd sentence. Isn’t it?” She read it once more. “Yes, that’s what it says. Signed Jacopo.”