“To the newlyweds!” said Chloé, wetting her lips. Then she turned to me. “You’ve decided to go to Rome? Are you McDonald’s now? C’mon, don’t be silly, let’s go dance instead…Will you teach me?”
And the way she turned to me and smiled, I understood that it was not just sex. Not for either of us.
Around three in the morning, the bride and groom took off in a white-and-orange limousine, and the couples started to go home. Chloé too left because the following day she had to be in the office early. It had been a beautiful wedding. The waiters were making fewer and fewer rounds with hot chocolate and rum, and suddenly dawn came. I was no longer used to partying so late. Federico and I were the last ones there and kept on walking in circles, arm in arm, passing between us a bottle of retsina we had found in the kitchen.
We were both drunk, happy, and discombobulated each in our own way: Federico by that one first kiss you never forget, and I by a second chance at love that I never thought I’d get.
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 4, 2009, New York City
n July 3, 2008, 620 million dollars was wired to an offshore account labeled COA; on August 7, 840 million dollars was wired to the same COA account; on September 9, 1.2 billion dollars…” The prosecutor approached my witness stand. “Aren’t COA your initials, Ms. Chloé…Ombra…Allegra?”
ROSSO FIORENTINO
November—December 2008, Rome
e were seated on the top floor at 5 Via Condotti, a Late Renaissance Italian palazzo in Rome facing the Spanish Steps that now hosted five wood-fired ovens. I had succumbed to the temptation of the McDonald’s strategy: to continue to grow the company and buy bakeries even if things were slowing down; to continue to “eat up” potential competitors in order not to be eaten up and to keep the banks on my side.
“Annibale Carracci, sixteenth-century master, commissioned by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese.” I pointed to the fresco on the ceiling, trying to use what my father had taught me of Italian art to distract the board of directors from the balance sheet’s footnotes. The directors looked up and the red angels in the fresco—the cherubim—looked back down at them.
“Carracci,” said an unconvinced Gunter Vint, also known as Gunny, the representative of the Swiss Banks. His ash-blond hair was perfectly combed and parted on the left, and he kept on pressing it with his hand. We later discovered that he suffered from a (severe) hypersensitive scalp disorder. “But what is a Carracci doing in a bakery?”
“The same can be asked of you, Gunter,” I noted.
“Easy answer,” he replied with his chirpy Swiss accent. “I’m here to advise the banks whether they should extend additional credit to your company or not.”
“Yes, I think he is,” Federico whispered in my ear, adding to our suspicion that Gunter gave off bad energy.
I pressed the Drakkar Noir bottle against my lip. Because it didn’t have the desired effect of relaxing me, I looked outside the window and tried to breathe in all the remaining glory from the 135 Spanish Steps. But once my eyes readjusted to the indoor lights, my confidence was gone again. At the end of the boardroom the irresistible Monday morning smile of seven U.S. bankers was appearing on a screen. They were all sitting in a large videoconference room in New York.
“Midterm debt is skyrocketing and sales are dropping,” said a voice from the screen. “Why, again, are we expanding in Europe?”
“You asked us the same question when we opened in L.A.,” I said.
“Past luck is no guarantee for future luck,” said Gunter. “What measures are you taking?”
Federico looked at me. “Should I…”
I hesitated.
“What measures are you taking to stop the losses?” repeated Gunter.
As I nodded, Federico left the conference room. We heard the echo of his disappearing footsteps from the high ceilings, then a sound of squeaking plastic wheels slowly came back to us. The sixteen-year-old painter reentered the room pushing a trolley, which displayed all the works: a pair of scissors, pink sea salt, matches, a bottle of water, and his famous oil. Federico positioned the trolley next to Gunny and poured some water in a pot and then dropped two spoons of oil.
“Hey, what’s going on?” asked Gunter.
The painter looked inside the pot and nodded. “Yes, the oil is not floating up.”
“What?” said Gunter, touching his well-combed ash-blond hair, growing increasingly agitated.
“What’s going on, guys?” asked the chairman of Morgan Four Stones on the large videoconference screen.
“You asked which measures we took last time around, when things were slowing down,” I said.
“Yes. What measures did you take?”
“We removed the bad luck.”
“And allegedly Gunter, the representative of the Swiss Banks, brings bad luck?”
“Correct.”
“Nein. Nein,” repeated Gunter compulsively.
The chairman cleared his throat trying to calm him down. “We’re backstopping the Swiss financing, Gunter, we’re backstopping your loans. We’re in this together, please, Gunny.”
Federico was given the go-ahead to carry out the bad luck removal ritual. Gunter’s hair was washed, his scalp was dressed with olive oil, and his blond sideburns and the rest of his head were shaved. All along he continued to scream as if he was being skinned alive. The U.S. banks then agreed to extend our credit facilities.
hen the board meeting finally ended and I walked out of the conference room, I took in the clear December night. I was losing track of time. In the hall, outside the window, the moon was climbing up the Gianicolo Hill and it was so bright it seemed alive. By contrast, the thoughts in my head were blurred.
“What the hell am I supposed to sign now?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Chloé sweetly, standing in front of the open window.
She was wearing a pair of jeans and a tweed jacket, and her long black curls fell on her shoulders like a stream of lava, just as they did the first night I had met her. She slipped two train tickets in my hand.
“What’s this?” I asked, looking at the tickets.
“Let’s take a break tonight. You’ve been working nineteen hours a day…you look awful. Let’s take a break and go and make love,” she said, almost begging me.
She smiled the way Marinella did the night of the accident, the moment before she stepped inside the car. She had that same gentle, defenseless smile.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
Chloé had decided to take an indefinite leave from SL&B and come with me to Italy. She said she was going to help with the company. At the beg inning I was okay about it, almost flattered; after looking at today’s numbers I was scared. If just a month ago our bakeries were slowing down but still in the black, now they were all losing money.
The previous month we’d worked around the clock trying to come up with solutions. We wouldn’t even stop for lunch and continued to review market reports at night walking on the sidewalks of the Lungo Tevere, next to the river. Why were people suddenly not eating focaccia? Why was it no longer cool to stroll down the street with a slice in your hand? Why were our bakeries not a meeting point for teenagers anymore? How could we stop the banks from short-selling our stock (a trading technique that drove the price down)? Why was the downturn happening so fast?
Some evenings we would brainstorm reverse mergers at El Paino, a little pizza place on Via del Lavatore, before a pizza so thin that we then asked for a discount. The fall air was still mild and it was nice to eat outside, next to the tall heat lamps. We walked hand in hand through the squares of Rome—Piazza Navona, Piazza di Spagna—discussing how we could improve the numbers. It was like making love in the time of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Almost always we stopped to kiss in Piazza della Quercia, the Square of the Oak, below the large and forever-gr
een oak tree. I felt the beat of her heart, the steady, beautiful beat of her heart.
Then we would go back to our B&B and try to make love. Because of the company’s difficult financial situation, we minimized expenses and stayed at a moderately priced room behind the Pantheon. I wanted her so badly, yet some nights I couldn’t even touch her, and I felt a sense of rage and impotence and loss. Then we would have a cold shower standing up in our small bathtub.
On other evenings we went out to the Appia Antica, a great road of the Roman Empire ten minutes outside the city. For a moment the smell of the grass in November, the funny shape of the maritime pine trees, the washed-out marbles forgotten here and there made us think that everything was going to be okay. We walked through the cold Catacombs or in the mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, and continued to discuss accounting principles, comparing GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) to IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards)—which would decrease the business’s debt by close to $800 million—or we fought over the future of the company or said a prayer for the Maestro, thanks to whom we had first met. Then we’d forget our problems and run to eat the best carbonara pasta in a tavern called Qui’ Non si Muore Mai, which means “Here you never die.”
It was ten o’clock in the evening when the train stopped in a station in the open countryside. With the excuse that I needed a break, Chloé had put us on the first train to Saturnia, a little town known for its thermal baths. The Roman night was mild and sly.
“I have to talk to you,” I said again, but she had already gotten off and started walking along the tracks. I followed her. The station’s lights receded behind us. Chloé held a map of the area as if she was looking for the treasure that could save the company. Then she took off her jeans in the December night and ran down a slope, and I followed her slender, naked legs and her Uniqlo white panties.
We entered a pine grove. The moon illuminated the water and the thermal bath was covered in fog. It glittered. After she tested the water with the tip of her bare toe, Chloé softly slid into the pond. She threw off her panties.
“Come here,” she said, taking me inside of her.
And we made love for the last time. For the last time, I kissed her beautiful mouth, her small firm breasts, her singing nipples, her belly button that had more fire than a volcano, and every little inch of her skin. The yellow fumes rose in the cold air, and you could barely see the sky from the pine grove, and she tasted sweet and salty and a bit hardened, like a slice of leftover focaccia.
“See, you could build a bakery in all of the beautiful places in the world, like this one,” she said, stretching her arms to the sky. “But the world wouldn’t necessarily be a better place.”
“I have got to talk to you, Chloé,” I said, holding her hand.
“Why do you continue to open new bakeries and hire people?”
“I wanted to do something great and beautiful,” I said. “I am trapped inside my own dream.”
“You’re trapped inside the banks’ dream.”
I looked at her, hoping that what I was about to tell her would make things easier, would make my breaking up with her something she’d want.
“Chloé, there are forty dollars of debt per dollar of equity,” I said. “You’d better run, or this is going to drag you down.”
“So what?” she said calmly. “Why don’t we go to New York and try to put things back together?”
When we returned to our B&B it was two o’clock in the morning. Winter had suddenly arrived also in the Eternal City, the mild Roman night had turned evil, and the air was cold and crystalline. Even the marble sculptures of the Bernini in Piazza Navona seemed to shiver. I diligently folded my shirts inside my bag, concentrating on each single movement, trying not to think about the rest, because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
I walked through the corridor to the elevator.
“Are we returning to New York to put things back together?” she said again, with a ray of hope.
Again she looked at me, defenseless, like Marinella the night of the accident, the moment before she stepped inside the car. Then, all of a sudden, she understood, and two silent tears ran down her cheeks.
“You don’t think I can help you?” she asked. She held my hand and smiled. “Are you firing me?”
I felt the weight of her fingers inside the palm of my hand. Now her smile and her tears created some sort of rainbow on her cheek.
“Are you breaking up with me, Rosso?”
I went to look for my voice, for some word, inside my throat, but I couldn’t find anything, so I left.
I had failed at the only thing that really mattered to me: not to hurt her. The Christ of the Abyss had not granted my greatest prayer. I had managed to ruin the person who wasn’t afraid to jump into a tiger’s cage, a girl filled with desires who deserved a career, a beautiful family, and a future, and not to face an endless trial and then spend the rest of her days in jail.
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 4, 2009, New York City
s. Verdi is right, she hadn’t managed to help him,” the prosecutor said in the most hurtful way, looking at me. “Defendant Rosso Fiorentino had not changed. He was the same careless party boy who had simply gone from his grandfather’s tuxedo jacket to a double-breasted suit. He was neither capable of spending money nor of counting it. Everything continued to slip through his hands like the steering wheel on the night of the car accident seven years before.”
A prosecutor’s job is to point fingers. The truth is always more complicated. A start-up company is like a child: sometimes it has a growth spurt, sometimes it throws tantrums, and sometimes it gets sick. In this case all the mishaps came at once: the banks (for their own interests) had continued to throw money at the company as if there was no tomorrow; and the other banks who were not involved were betting against it and dragging the price down; instead of repaying some of its debt, the company continued to expand beyond the market’s capacity (as Martin, the bum-economist, warned); Don Otto had left and the focaccia’s quality had dropped to a moccasin’s sole; and Rosso, instead of cutting jobs and restructuring, continued to manage Focaccia House as if it were a not-for-profit by feeding bums for free, refusing to fire people, and sending profits to the Christ of the Abyss (believing that he had to honor his vow to a local Ligurian patron just like a $2.2 billion credit facility with JP Morgan). Any of these factors alone would have resulted in a mild cold for what had been a healthy company; all together they caused its collapse. And there was no time to react: once again everything had happened overnight, like a stroke that takes down the strongest body in just a few minutes.
Leonard Sterlicht, the public attorney, swiftly approached the bench to deliver his final arguments. Although he was in his mid-fifties he seemed in good form, not an ounce of extra fat under his cobalt-blue suit. He had a clear complexion, thick, curly white hair, and soft long lips. His entire persona made you feel comfortable, almost at ease. Yet, if you looked at him carefully, his eyes had no expression. Like a moray that’s about to strike.
“Now we know the defendant’s story,” he began. “This jury knows the rest. On December 20, 2,502 bakeries reported losses of approximately $82.1 billion. On January 2, Focaccia House defaulted on its 172 financing facilities. On January 5, the six leading banks that had financed the company collapsed, followed the day after by the collapse of Fortitude Retirement Fund, the fund that had purchased Focaccia House’s securities. On January 11, FIG Insurance Company was indicted for rating the fund’s securities as Triple-A.”
The prosecutor faced the jury.
“On January 17, Focaccia House filed for Chapter 11, entered into bankruptcy, and was indicted by the SEC on nineteen counts, including negligence and fraud. Concerning the count of fraud, this prosecution is seeking 137 years of imprisonment for defendant Rosso Fiorentin
o. This is the maximum sentence provided by law, but minimal if compared to the consequences of the defendant’s actions and the damages he caused. Damages to you, the jury.”
The public prosecutor paused and rubbed his heart-shaped mouth, which said the nastiest things in the kindest possible way.
“The downturn has thus no longer affected only the banks. Insurance companies that believed in a ‘nonmeat diet’ and invested their assets in Focaccia House are facing hard times. Tech companies that put their money on what they thought to be a real product have lost their savings. Automakers that diversified their portfolio when FH was trading at a multiple of a 102 times earnings are struggling. The downturn has trickled down to the real economy, the real world, and real people, to you the jury and your families. On January 19, in one session, the Dow Jones dropped 666 points.”
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 16, 2009, New York City
hen on Tuesday, May 11, 2009, I entered the courtroom, I immediately noticed that Federal Justice Henrietta Pontia Pilgrims was wearing the same Bleu de France suit, the same coral necklace as the day before; combined with those circles under her eyes I concluded that she had pulled an all-nighter to decide what she was about to say.
She nodded to the prosecution, Leonard Sterlicht, and then to the defense attorney, Jay Clark, although she found him to be terribly irritating. Jay Clark was a rosy-cheeked idealist, a twenty-six-year-old fresh out of law school, a totally unknown entity in the court system. All of the major firms had, in fact, declined to take on the case and represent Rosso Fiorentino. Not only had Clark not entered a single guilty plea on behalf of the defendant, which would have made the case much simpler, he had also taken the unprecedented position that Rosso Fiorentino was not guilty on any count, not even negligence. From the prospective of the need to find a culprit, the most annoying thing about Jay Clark was that he was talented and obsessively zealous: each of his statements was followed by a quote from at least one case law including the circuit and the page number. Beneath his rosy cheeks and passionate gray eyes, he seemed to hide the twelve-CD Westlaw encyclopedia.
Something Great and Beautiful Page 16
