The visitors, gathered outside under a blue sky, clapped warmly. The trees bore the colors of autumn, and winter was on its way to Australia.
“Very smooth,” one of the journalists whispered to his neighbor and raised a hand. “What do you say to the rumors that you would be answering to the Fontanelli Corporation once you’re world speaker?”
Mandela looked at the questioner pensively. “I’ve heard of this rumor,” he said. “It is not true. It is not Mr. Fontanelli who will elect me but the people of the world. I will answer to them. But what you may expect me to do if I should be voted into this office is what I’ve done for my country: strive for truth and justice.”
The people in the crowd started to whisper and make comments to each other. Some of the guests, especially those invited from the economic and political realms considered the journalist’s question out of line.
“A whim of fate,” Nelson Mandela went on to explain with a gentle almost apologetic smile, “has it that John Fontanelli himself will to be the first person to feel the consequences of the planned financial restructuring, very seriously indeed. He received his inheritance without paying inheritance taxes — and that is something we cannot allow.”
$49,000,000,000,000
SO, THIS IS how it would all end.
The light in the foyer seemed to be dimmer than usual, the voices in the hallway more muffled, the colors of the furnishings a little grayer. People who yesterday considered him master of the world avoided him today as if he was a condemned man.
The lawyers, sitting around the massive table like a pack of vicious dogs, fell silent when John Fontanelli entered the conference room. They had sweat stains on the armpits of their shirts and stacks of papers on the table, and some of them looked like they had spent the entire night howling and gnarling.
The tension of an impending massacre permeated the air.
“So where are we?” John asked as he sat down.
“So far everything is still up in the air,” the head of the corporation’s legal team bellowed loudly. He was a stocky fellow with veined skin and thick fingers. “In which country is the tax to be paid? Italy … the USA? What is the legal justification for demanding back payment?”
“Which jurisdiction would any trial fall under?” another heavyset lawyer asked, his Adam’s apple going up and down.
“What about the settlement you made with the Italian government?” snapped an almost skeletal blond waif, wielding her pen like a rapier.
“Mr. Fontanelli never fulfilled his part of the bargain,” a fat guy with pockmarked skin argued. “We won’t be able to make that point.”
John lifted his hand and waited for the people sitting around the table to calm down. Everyone looked at him expectantly, breathing heavily, eager to be freed from this cage and let loose on their prey. But they sat and looked at him and waited. “How much?” he asked.
“Five hundred billion dollars,” one of them bellowed out.
“At least,” another one said.
“And only if no other demands are made.”
“All we need is someone to realize that the Vacchis never paid any taxes either.”
“But why should we pay for them?” one of them barked and slammed his fist on one of the leather bound folios lying scattered on the table.
John lifted his hand again silencing them. “I will pay,” he said. Their jaws fell open. Their eyes almost bulged out of the sockets. “What other choice do I have?” he added.
They looked at each other, looked for someone who would know what else there was to do, but there was nothing there, only a few undetermined noises that sounded like groans. John had also been surprised by this unavoidable conclusion when he thought about it during his sleepless night. To vote for someone who is supported by the majority of all the people of the world — when he had first thought of the idea and then discussed it with others over and over until it was polished to perfection, they had never thought for a moment that they themselves might be affected by the consequences. They had been too accustomed not having to adhere to the laws of individual nations, so adept had they become at pitting countries against each other for their own benefit that the mere idea of a world speaker making demands on them was a shock to them all.
He had heard Mandela’s words on television. There was no escaping them on any channel. Almost triumphantly every station had picked up the statement and discussed and commented on it. At first, John felt something like mocking contempt. It had never really concerned him what politicians talked about or decided — he had been beyond that. During the years that McCaine was by his side, he had gradually grown accustomed to thinking like this he realized, but by now it had become second nature. He and McCaine had sneered and scoffed at them all, confident they were all losers and time wasters they could easily outwit. It had become natural for him to think like this. But he came to the painful conclusion, that he could not isolate himself from the remit of a world speaker. Who did he want to pit against him? There was no one. Taking away his money was one issue in which the nations of the world would only too willingly follow the world speaker’s lead. He didn’t have a chance.
“I will pay,” John repeated. “This means that I will be forced to sell a large portion of the corporation. I would like to ask everyone here to start concentrating on this matter now and to make the necessary preparations. I’ve already issued instructions for the analysis department to make some preparatory plans. There are still a few months before the vote that should be enough time to avoid panic and obtain the best price.”
One of the lawyers wanted to say something, but clapped his mouth shut again without uttering a word and then nodded like all the others.
“And hmm … I’m sorry to have made you all work under so much pressure yesterday,” John said, standing up to indicate the meeting was over. “I wasn’t thinking, so please forgive me.”
They nodded again, and kept on nodding until he was out the door.
He bumped into Paul who had been looking for him. “What a mess, isn’t it?”
It felt good to get out of the meeting, to be striding down the hallway. “Why?” John asked. He suddenly felt lighter, why almost cheerful. “It’s what I wanted, isn’t it?”
“For Mandela to take all your money?”
“He’ll let me keep one or two million. I didn’t know what to do with the rest anyway. Let him decide who gets what.”
“I don’t know …” Paul shook his head. “It all seems so thankless to me.”
John stopped suddenly. “It’s what we always want, isn’t it? Justice for all, but special rules for us.” He laughed. “Paul, don’t you get it … what’s going on here? Don’t you see it? It’s working. The plan is working!”
The call came through as John sat in the car on his way home … a home that would soon no longer be his home, he reflected as he pulled the phone out of his pocket. “Yes?”
“It’s me,” a voice said that John had not heard in ages, “Marvin.”
“Marvin?” John repeated with surprise. “That’s a …” That was more than a surprise. “How are you? Where are you calling from?”
Marvin’s voice sounded far away and with some delay, like calls across the Atlantic sometimes sounded. “Don’t matter where I am, man. I’m not calling to talk about old times. I’m calling because of you. You’re in the process of letting everything go to shit. You’re flushing us all down the shitter and you think you’re doing everyone a big favor. That’s why I’m calling, man.”
“What?” John blinked his eyes confused. Outside the car the street lanterns whizzed by like a row of moons.
“John, I know you’ve been the head honcho lately and that everyone does what you say, but this one time in your life, I’m begging you, just this one time you must please listen to me … until I’m finished, because this time it’s damned important. Do you understand?” A deep breath. “I’ve been in rehab. It was in a clinic, but I can tell you all the nice little details
some other time. The important thing is that I met someone there who knows what’s going on. Who knows absolutely everything, do you understand? He knows absolutely what goes on behind the scenes. He was part of the scheme but decided to get out, and that’s why they’re after him now, by the way. So far so good?”
“Hmm,” John said, frowning. “Sure.”
“The first humdinger is your money — your one trillion dollars. The whole thing about interest and compound interest and five hundred years and the whole story everyone heard on TV, read in newspapers and books … are you sitting down?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. The Fontanelli fortune doesn’t really exist.”
It was hard to say why, but Marvin sounded different. He did not seem to be drunk or on drugs, but also not like John remembered him. “Interesting,” he said carefully. “Marvin, at the moment I’m riding in an armored Mercedes that cost one million dollars, and I thought I paid for it, but not with the money I earned while delivering pizza. I know what’s what.”
Marvin did not seem to be in the mood for jokes. “Yeah, sure, man. They gave you a bunch of money, but that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t come from where you think it does. There really was a Giacomo Fontanelli in old Florence, and he really was a merchant. He may have even been your ancestor. But he didn’t leave any money … nothing, nada, niente.”
“Oh?” John said, wondering how Marvin could know what Ursula had found out. Who else knew anything about that? “Then where did the money come from?”
Marvin explained, “Sometime during the mid-eighties there was a secret project called the Millennium Fund. It was a sort of savings fund, but only those with especially big wallets had access to it. People, like bankers, industrialists and other super-rich paid into it until there was a trillion dollars in it. That is the money you got. All that other crap, the prophecy and so on … it’s all a con. The testament and all those other documents are all fakes. You got involved in a totally planned scheme, man, and they all know what’s goin’ on, only you don’t, and the public don’t either. Everyone else knows — McCaine, the Vacchis they all know. There never was a Michelangelo Vacchi, man. Have you ever looked into a history book … the past five hundred years? No one is capable of keeping a fortune like that intact through all those chaotic times, I tell you. That’s absolutely out of the question. You got caught up in a con, believe me. They used you the whole time, just used you, man. You’ve been their puppet from the word go. And now, John, its payday, now they’re coming to cash in. These people, you know, they don’t just want to pay into an investment fund, sooner or later they want something out of it too. And they’re not going to be happy with a little taste.”
“Payday?” John echoed, disquieted. What Marvin was blabbering gave him goose bumps. Or was it his voice — the way he said it? “What exactly are you talking about, Marvin? Let’s assume it’s all just like you say: what can anyone gain out of what has happened?”
“That’s not what it’s about … shit! It has nothing to do with what happened, man, it has something to do what’s going to happen. Well, does it ring a bell now?”
John felt an impulse to open the window and toss the phone out into the night. “No, sorry.”
“The world government, man. You are in the process of establishing a world government, and that’s what they want. All the other stuff — the youngest male descendent, the inheritance, the prophecy — that’s all lies, fantasy, a fairy tale to impress everyone. They want a world government, man, and you are the tool to get people enthusiastic about it all, because the people believe in you, ‘cause you are the heir, you will fulfill the prophecy, and you will give back our future, amen. Shit, man! You will do shit. A world government. All that means is that they can run the world the way they want even more easily, bribe and steer in any direction they want, all from behind the scenes. Everything will be so much easier for them. They will have total control over everyone. They will tattoo barcodes on our skin and we will cheer about it because we don’t need credit cards anymore. They will forbid us to have kids and raise their slave workers in their genetic engineering labs just the way they want them. Some time in the future there will be only them, about a thousand families who will be the absolute masters, the master race, man. And us, the rest, we’re their slaves — the brainless and the defenseless, nothing but meat. John, I’m begging you, you gotta stop this!”
For one moment John almost believed him. For a moment it seemed a curtain had been drawn back to reveal a scene of unspeakable atrocity, a conspiracy of monstrous proportions — a world so gruesome that the very sight of it would drive you mad. Then he remembered Marvin's other obsessions: the aliens at Roswell, the legends of the Hopi Indians, the drug philosophy of Carlos Castaneda, the prophetic powers of runes and the healing powers of gemstones. “What did this man say about your secret acquaintance, Elvis?”
“What?” Marvin blared. “What the hell?”
“Marvin, forget it. This is way too much, too crazy. No one could ever have planned it the way it happened.”
He heard something akin to a howl, with the delay of an intercontinental call. “You don’t know what they are capable of, man! They have infiltrated everything, every organization, every political party … they are behind everything, really everything … They have technology that you can’t imagine, like hypnosis, unbelievable drugs, they can even influence your aura …”
“Yeah, I bet they can.”
“Yeah, man, I’m telling you they also have the alien technology from the spaceship crashed in the forties. They can fly to Mars with hyper-magnetic discs and have been building cities and then telling us believe that there’s nothing but desert.”
“Marvin?” John interrupted him, “that’s all bullshit. Who ever told you all this is off his rocker or is lying. Not even the part concerning the world government is true. I’m not establishing a world government.
“But that’s where everything is heading to.”
“Maybe in fifty years. Right now an effort is being made to vote for a world speaker, and he will change a few taxes at most and…”
“Oh, man!” It sounded like Marvin was vomiting. “I should have known — they have brainwashed you already. They have control over your mind. Shit, man, they’re in your brain, John, and you don’t even know it!”
“No one’s in my brain.”
“Shit man, I can hear them talking from inside you!” Marvin shouted, and then the connection ended abruptly.
John took the phone away from his gave it a worried look, and then turned it off. How did Marvin get his number? McCaine seemed to be right about one thing: it would really be better to avoid contact with Marvin.
After the first malicious round of glee over the setback for the trillionaire John Fontanelli had died down, other people began to understand that they too had to worry about the law focusing on their money. A new kind of pressure arose. Lawyers everywhere who had the rich and powerful as their clients and had previously been secretive and stealthy about it, suddenly "discovered" that it might be considered treasonous to participate in an election for the world speaker. After all, most law books forbade the joining of foreign armies: Wasn’t voting in a global referendum the same thing? Disturbing debates in panel discussions, talk shows, and newspapers flared up among legal scholars with differing views.
Many companies made employees and workers sign clumsily worded statements in which they committed to refrain from voting. "Not legally binding," other lawyers said, and sued the companies for obstructing the right to freedom of expression. But the trials would drag on until after the vote, and at the moment everyone was completely unsure about the entire matter.
Groups against the referendum announced that they wanted to send observers to polling stations; not so much because of the election, but to watch those who participated in the election and record their names. They remained silent over the purpose of the lists, and this was more intimidating than any re
al threat they might pose. The We The People organization could hardly forbid them from making such lists, since total openness of the electoral process was the basis of the process. The right to inspection was guaranteed to every citizen, including those who were against the whole project. People began to feel the pressure, uncertainty, and intimidation. Polls showed a rapid decrease in the expected voter turnout, and many of the surveys were falsified to discourage the people from voting.
He was waiting, sitting on the double-sized bed with the dark-yellow covers, which clashed horribly with the brown wallpaper. He stared at the door of his room and waited. Every few minutes he jumped up, darted to the window and peered through the curtains, which stank of hundred-year-old cigarette smoke. He scanned the walkway, the parking lot and the road. Traffic came and went. A young couple got into a car, speaking French and looking like they had had just spent a passionate night together. Old, lonely men wearing flannel shirts and hats with fishing lures hanging on them loaded fishing gear and coolers into pick-ups. Babies cried in the backseats and were calmed down by their mothers.
There sure was a lot going on here on the weekend.
The motel had a small shop called Super Marché, but with a floor space barely larger than a spread out newspaper. He would go to it every once in a while and buy something to munch on: chips, candy bars, and all those ready-made sandwiches the motel had had there for who knows how long. They were leathery, rubbery things with plain tasting chicken or bland ham that smelled awful, but he still ate them all. Not because he was so hungry, but because it was a change of pace. He tried to get quarters for loose change when he bought something. They were Canadian quarters and looked strange, but they were the only coins that the TV accepted. One hour of TV cost a quarter, and most of the time the money ran out just when there was an interesting scene, and the screen would just go black bringing him back into reality.
One Trillion Dollars Page 73
