She looked around warily. “How about this evening?”
“No problem.” He had been a guest of the Vacchis long enough.
“How about leaving your gorillas here?”
John had to cough. “Oh, you mean…”
“Only you and me. We will run away. Go by train second class like millions of other people and just forget about the whole circus for a few days.”
A determined voice inside him said that he had no choice if he didn’t want to lose her. “That won’t be as easy as you think,” he told her delicately. “I’m constantly in the newspapers or TV. I will be recognized, and someone might get some stupid ideas.”
“Not a soul will recognize you without bodyguards. Want to bet? What catches their attention is not your face, but the fact you are conspicuously surrounded by musclemen trying to look inconspicuous.”
“I don’t know. I’ve gotten so used to them that I would feel naked just thinking…”
“My God!” She rolled her eyes.
“Oh, all right,” he hurried to say. “But we must first find out the train schedules and…”
“Just before ten an express night train leaves for Munich,” she explained, and added, “I checked on Monday when I was shopping without you guys.”
John had to think about his Ferrari standing uselessly in Portecéto, parked in a garage by a house that was just as useless. “And how are we get there without drawing attention?”
She looked at him mockingly. “Well, that is simple!” she said.
That evening John ordered his guards to take him and Ursula to Florence to the Vacchi law firm. They said they wanted to look in the books some more, and their idea seemed normal enough, even though the men gave tiny hints that they did not believe a word he said — as far as “looking into books” was concerned. No one paid much attention to the fact Ursula brought a travel bag with her from the guest room. The bodyguards held the doors open, as usual, secured the surrounding area, and let them get out of the car.
Before they went into the house, Marco asked: “Will you require us any more tonight?”
“No,” John told him. That wasn’t a lie. “Thank you. I’ll call you.”
They went inside, cleaned the place up and packed Ursula’s other things. John had to wear a cheap gray leather jacket that she had bought for him during her solo shopping spree.
“Your fancy millionaire’s jacket goes in the bag for the trip,” she told him.
“You planned this all along,” John said. He looked at himself in the old mirror in the hallway. “I look terrible.”
“You look like a normal tourist,” she corrected him.
It was dark and the small alleyway was quiet and empty as the Vacchi house door opened and two figures came out, one with a bag over the shoulder. They closed the door and heard the steel bolts locking shut. A short while later, they entered the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence and purchased two second-class train tickets to Munich.
Their adventure remained undiscovered until 9:30 next morning, when the security service called the Vacchis. “We thought you said the two young people would be here today? There is no one here. There’s only an envelope hanging downstairs next the key-box that looks like a letter.”
But by this time Ursula Valen and John Fontanelli were already walking the streets of Augsburg.
The house was painted in a subtle reddish-brown, with a bas-relief in gold. ‘Fürst Fugger Privatbank’ John read on the sign hanging by the simple double-glass doors. Behind them cars were trundling down a cobbled street, passers-by hurrying back and forth and in the distance a big blue streetcar came around a corner. The townscape was one of magnificent old stuccoed facades, painted walls, and golden adornments. But to John the streets looked wide and airy compared to the narrow medieval streets of Florence.
He looked at Ursula. “Does this mean that the Fuggers are still in charge here?”
“No, but they still exist. This bank here, for instance, belongs to the princely family Fugger-Babenhausen. The Fuggers are still enormously wealthy. They own breweries, industrial complexes and castles, but above all land. They are among the ten largest landowners in Germany. The Fugger family hasn’t earned any money since the days of Anton Fugger; they have just lived off the old fortunes from those days … for the last four hundred years.” She pointed to a nearby bistro. “Come on, let’s have breakfast.”
Sitting under framed photos of motorcycle races and with wheels, laurel wreaths and Formula 1 flags on the walls, they drank strong coffee and ate croissants filled with ham.
John took out some of the German money he had exchanged for lira in Munich and studied the coins and bills. “Who is Clara Schuman?” he asked. He turned the bill over and saw the piano. “Must have something to do with music.” The bills were elaborate — made with the watermarks, colorful inlayed bands and embossed numbers. Very different from dollar bills, and much more impressive, he thought.
In the meantime he had got used not being noticed. It was rather pleasant and liberating. And indeed, not a single person spoke to him during the entire trip; no one even noticed that he looked a bit like John Fontanelli. The only bad part was knowing Marco and the others would be very worried about his safety. It had been unfair to them to simply disappear.
“And, what is there to see here?” he wanted to know. “A museum, I take it.”
“Something far better,” Ursula answered and wiped her fingers on the little napkin. “The Fuggerei.”
They crossed the street, wandered through narrow, winding allies, another wide avenue, then walked down yet another side-street, and then they took another right before they got to their destination. They stood before a paled yellow painted house with two rows of small windows and a steep roof that looked like the rooms inside had to have low ceilings. Latin words were chiseled into stone above a blue and beige oblique-stripped arched entryway, with the words: MDXIX. IACOB FVGGERI AVGVST GERMANI. A small, hinged door was open and they stepped through it into another world.
As they walked through the arched portal, the sun came out from behind clouds and bathed the wide alleyways between the rows of cute, sand-colored houses in a golden autumn light. John felt as if he were in Italy, it all looked so different, so Mediterranean compared to the streets outside.
“And so where is the Fuggerei?” he asked.
Ursula waved an arm to encompass their surroundings. “We just entered it. All this is the Fuggerei, the oldest social housing project in the world.”
“Project? Social housing, is that what you mean?” John looked at the simple, yet aesthetically pleasing little houses, the snug, overgrown walls, the statues of saints in niches here and there. He had to think about the notoriously bad neighborhoods in New York City that were known as “the projects” with all the broken windows, walls full of graffiti and overfilled garbage cans. “Amazing! Fuggerei? You mean the Fuggers had all this built?!”
“By Jakob Fugger the Rich personally. During the year 1511 he felt that he should become a philanthropist sorts, but instead of hiring artists like the Medicis and the Grimaldis, he decided to build this. It was an ingenious idea, because it gave him a better reputation than anything else he had ever done.”
John nodded. Indeed, the whole place looked so comfortable that he was very impressed by his alleged ancestor.
They got to a tranquil looking well, which could have been one standing in the old part of Portecéto. The short stay in Italy seemed to have made a lifelong impression on Jakob if he encouraged this type of architectural style.
“And who lives here?” John wanted to know. Although there were curtains and potted flowers in all the windows, the alleyways were very quiet and empty of people. Only an old woman dressed in black made her arduous way forward, carrying a net shopping bag in one hand and a cane in the other.
“The Fuggerei was donated as living quarters for poor Catholic Augsburg citizens who got into financial difficulties through no fault of their own. If
I’m not mistaken, there are one hundred and six apartments, mostly with three rooms and comfortably equipped for the standards of the day. The entire settlement has a wall around it, like a small town within a town,” Ursula explained. “Even the gates were closed at night, and still are, by the way.”
“When did you say he had this built?”
“Between 1514 and 1523. This meant that by the time Giacomo contacted him, Jakob Fugger had already been planning for several years what should become of his fortune in the distant future after his death.”
“Hmm,” John said doubtfully. “Or maybe he reflected back on his life and asked what good it had done. It must have seemed an act of God to have a son appear out of nowhere, asking him for help to make some miraculous dream come true.”
Ursula shook her head. “I don’t think that Jakob thought like that,” she said and brushed a few strands of hair from her face. She pointed to a long alley crossing their path. “Come on, I’ll show you why not.”
At the end of the lane a small church stood amidst the houses. It was small inside with a high wood-paneled ceiling, had a massive, opulent altar with a few benches in front of it. A notice hanging by the entryway told them this was the St. Markus Kirche, built for the inhabitants of the Fuggerei who were supposed to pray daily for the salvation of the souls of the donors Georg, Ulrich and Jakob Fugger.
“Do you see?” Ursula asked John after she translated the text for him. “Two things were expected of every inhabitant of the Fuggerei for them to be allowed to live here. First, a yearly rent of one gulden had to be paid. Even back then this was a token amount. Today the price is one mark and seventy-two pfennigs, which is a ridiculously small amount, barely enough for a loaf of bread. Second, and this is what I wanted to draw your attention to, every inhabitant of the Fuggerei is required to pray daily for the souls of the donors. This was a contractual obligation taken deadly seriously. The foundation charter laid down the form and number of prayers to be said and included an Our Father, an Ave Maria, a credo and a Glory Be to the Father. And this church was built specially for this.”
John looked at the narrow church windows and wondered what would make someone lay down such rules. “That’s a lot of prayers said on their behalf over 500 years.
“Indeed. I suspect no one else’s souls have ever been prayed as much for as those of Jakob Fugger and his brothers.”
John found this all slightly spooky: “What had he done that made him think he would need so many prayers said on his behalf?”
“I don’t think that it was something he’d done” she said. “I think that he was calculating like a merchant even when it came to religion. If one prayer is good, then many prayers are better. And he had found ways, both in life and death, to get more of everything than anyone else. Jakob Fugger wanted to be wealthy even in heaven too. Simple as that.”
By that evening John had discovered that the Fuggers were omnipresent in Augsburg. Ursula and he had climbed up a tower, walked through historic streets and along remnants of the old town’s defensive walls, visited the Golden Room in the town hall, where in an adjacent room an exhibition informed visitors about the incredible magnitude of the Fuggers’ economic empire, which had extended all across the known world, even to the then-recently discovered New World. They also visited the former Fugger company headquarters on Maximilian Strasse, close to where they had eaten breakfast, where now the Fugger bank and a luxury hotel occupied the old building. John thought staying in that hotel would be too risky, so they stayed in another, less luxurious one. It was located further away in the modern part of the city and didn’t require ID to get a room. They checked in as John and Ursula Valen.
While Ursula went out again to call her parents — from a phone outside the hotel, just to be on the safe side, John stayed in the hotel room. He was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling trying to get his jumbled thoughts in order: The Padrone was dead, but unmoving in his belief in the prophecy. Then there was the discovery that money didn’t grow of its own accord, and that he was not a savior, but the biggest bloodsucker of humanity that ever existed. Lorenzo’s second article … Could it be true what his cousin wrote? Could a sixteen-year-old have discovered something that economists, even Nobel Prize winners, had missed? It seemed unlikely. But, the article really did sound logical and plausible to John. He would have to ask someone’s opinion when he got back to London. Maybe an economist, maybe Paul Siegel, he might know.
He glanced at his watch. What was taking Ursula so long? Well, since he had got to his feet, he might go and look out the window. There were a bunch of colorful illuminated advertisements along the street, and he saw names on some and realized that half of them belonged to Fontanelli Enterprises either wholly or in part. Even this hotel was part of a hotel chain he owned 30 percent of. A part of what he paid for this simple room would flow back to him, eventually and after passing through many channels. The same went for the black dress he bought Ursula. If things keep going the way they were, one day he might own everything and would find it impossible to spend money.
He saw Ursula coming back, passing between parked cars and pedestrians, headed straight to the hotel as she looked left and right before crossing the road. He let the musty curtain fall back in place. He still didn’t understand what had happened to them, but did he need to? All he knew was he felt happy around her and that when she looked at him nothing else mattered. Maybe he should do what she had suggested. Just give the money away, spend it on small sensible projects, refrigerated trucks in the Philippines, for instance. You could call it acupuncture for the planet. This could keep him busy for the rest of his life, and it would be a damn fulfilling life. To hell with all the stupid luxury, the showing off, the pomposity! And it didn’t matter if Jakob Fugger was his ancestor or not, he would continue where Fugger had left off — when he built that settlement — the Fuggerei. He would help people, and let the future take care of itself.
The door opened and Ursula came in. “Everything is set,” she told him. “My parents are expecting us tomorrow afternoon.”
He felt happy just at the sight of her. “And this weekend we’ll fly to New York,” he suggested, “then you’ll meet my parents.”
She looked uncertain. “Shouldn’t we wait?” she said hesitantly. “Let’s wait until you … know my whole family.”
McCaine was not amused at all when the bodyguards reported in early that morning. “In other words, you have no idea where he was yesterday,” he grumbled.
“We have found out that the girl called her parents in Leipzig,” Marco Benetti’s voice crackled out of the phone. “They are expecting her and Mr. Fontanelli for coffee this afternoon.”
“And you will be waiting for them at the train station, I hope.”
“Of course we will. Chris is speaking with the pilot right now to take us to Leipzig.”
“Pray to God that they didn’t fool you guys.” He slammed the phone down, and grabbed the TV remote to turn up the volume as the Fontanelli logo appeared on the screen beside the newscaster. “… Senator Drummond is vehemently against the take-over of Dayton Chemicals by the Fontanelli Group. He demands the Senate …”
McCaine dialed the phone. “Wesley? I’ve just watched the news program on NEW. Who is this Senator Drummond?” He listened for a moment. “Alright, then send someone to him who will make it clear that if he can’t keep his emotions under control we might discover we just don’t need ever again to buy anything that comes out of Ohio. If he still refuses, then give him the numbers on how many jobs will be lost, and tell him which TV channels and newspapers will blame him for the job losses. Then you can offer the ex-senator a job as a packer in our Toledo shipping company. What? Today, of course. I want to hear on the television news tonight that we own Dayton Chemical.”
Nothing but trouble! He rubbed his temples while he checked his schedule. The Venezuelan delegation was waiting. Oil was still the backbone of the corporation. He had used his influence in most of the major
oil harbors in the world to make them delay servicing the tankers of Cumana Oil, and to run safety checks on them frequently. It meant the company missed important deadlines and lost customers, and the high breach-of-contract penalties had done the rest to soften the management. Today he would buy the oil company. After that he would have lunch with the CEO of the Miyasaki Steel Corporation, whom he had to convince to re-reconsider suppliers in light of their tight credit situation. And finally he would go to Hartford to have Professor Collins explain to him how he could fulfill the Giacomo Fontanelli prophecy using this complicated network of power and dependency that he had created.
There were far too many cars on the road, McCaine thought as he left London in a bad mood. That would be the first thing to do when they had established a monopoly in the oil market: make the price of gas so expensive that it wasn’t worth driving anymore. He was stuck in a terrible jam of honking cars, crawling at a snail’s pace — just awful!
He had thought of getting Collins to come to him, but decided against it. Instead, he wanted to see the Institute of Future Research with his own eyes, see what they had done with all the money he had invested in the place, and find out first hand how reliable the professor’s calculations were. Only a personal visit could accomplish all that.
The talks today hadn’t gone well. Perhaps he wasn’t in top form. Normally he would have eaten the Venezuelans for breakfast for demanding the independence of Cumana Oil, but today he was satisfied simply sending them back home and getting the boys in the investment section to fire some broadsides at the oil company on the markets. Who did they think they were? Of course, the company was basically healthy — otherwise he would hardly be interested in it. But they were little and he was big — it was his natural right to swallow them.
Kasaguro must have found a lender McCaine didn’t know about. He probably was able to win over one of those old Japanese billionaires as a limited partner. That had to be the only logical explanation for the way he grinned at him and his stubbornness. He could forget winning influence over the government using Miyasaki Steel as a bargaining chip, one of the largest employers in southern Japan.
One Trillion Dollars Page 54
