“Let us hear the summations,” said Judge Pilgrims. “The jury may then retire to the jury room to begin deliberating.”
I could tell that most of the jurors had made up their minds, which, for some reason, I did not consider a good sign. Even the redheaded New Rochelle housewife, with whom I had bonded visually throughout my testimony, no longer gave me a hopeful smile.
“The prosecution may begin,” said the Judge.
The prosecutor, Leonard Sterlicht, stood up, his curly white hair shining, his motionless moray eyes awakened by instinct. “The facts are on the record,” he began, setting aside his well-reviewed notes. “As to motives, this jury may believe the defense: that the defendant wanted to feed the world, wanted to do something ‘great and beautiful,’ that he paid in cash 750,000 dollars to a homeless man for his ‘financial services,’ that COA stands for Christ of the Abyss, and that the defendant wired more than 2.6 billion dollars to an account in the name of a statue while the company was collapsing.” The prosecutor paused. “Even if the jury believes this fairy tale, the case is proven in re ipsa. The key distinction between fraud and negligence is that, in the case of negligence, one does not know what one is doing. Here, the defendant knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was advised all along by Wall Street’s number one law firm, thanks to Ms. Verdi.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is not a love story. There is nothing romantic about any of this. Ms. Verdi perfectly knew that Rosso Fiorentino was incapable of running a business, that he was a good-for-nothing, that he couldn’t even keep a dog on a leash, and yet, with her glossy, well-prepared filings and cute smile, she duped the SEC into approving the IPO, and the banks into loaning billions, and investors into investing trillions. Ms. Verdi needed Rosso to advance her career as a lawyer: remember, before the IPO, she was reorganizing law books in the library. And Rosso needed her: what other blue-chip firm, or law firm in general, would have assisted this wacko, financed by pornographers and advised by bums? Who, if not Ms. Verdi, could and did ‘save’ Focaccia House’s IPO?” The prosecutor paused. He knew what would be the deciding factor in the jury’s mind and went for it mercilessly. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is not a love story but a Ponzi scheme. They knew it and you, the people, know it too.”
As I heard those last words, I felt a cold shiver down my spine. He is guilty, and I am too. The prosecution will press charges against me.
“The defense may proceed,” the Judge said.
I held my breath, looking up desperately at the defense, at the twenty-six-year-old Jay Clark. Deliver the most amazing argument, come up with something.
But instead he had a one-liner.
“Rosso Fiorentino is not guilty,” said Jay Clark, and sat down again.
The Judge put on her white-framed glasses, frowning.
“The defense does not wish to make a final statement? You claim that defendant is not guilty on any count, not even negligence?”
Jay Clark stood up again. His gray eyes sparkled immensely this time.
“The defendant created two million jobs. Five different consulting firms—three of which were appointed by this prosecution—undertake that half of those jobs can be saved with a restructuring. Would anyone in this courtroom object if I said that I could create one million jobs? If I said that my financial consultant was homeless, and that for each dollar I made I paid one dollar to Buddha, Moses, Shiva, or the Christ of the Abyss? Would anybody object if I created one million jobs?”
The courtroom stood silent. Even the prosecutor caressed his cheek as if he had been whacked in the face.
“We have to be careful about blaming the defendant for our own faults,” continued Jay Clark. “No matter how large Focaccia House’s market capitalization may be, it would be ridiculous to hold it responsible for the financial meltdown, as the prosecution seems to be doing. It would be like blaming a squirrel for an earthquake. It’s like saying that by robbing a hot dog stand in Singapore one can cause the collapse of Wall Street. And if that is the case, if the laws of cause and effect of our hyperconnected world have indeed become so fragile and incomprehensible, then responsibilities ought to be sought elsewhere.
“Case law is well established. Negligence is to be evaluated based on our society’s moral standards. Did the defendant fail to behave with the level of care that an ordinary prudent man would have exercised under the same circumstances?
“There is no doubt that Rosso Fiorentino made mistakes, that he took on risks, that in hindsight he should have consolidated the company’s growth and not continued to expand it endlessly, but he did not deviate from today’s moral standards. America’s ‘ordinary, prudent man’ is encouraged, indeed forced, to take extraordinary risks in order to survive. Are the millions of people who buy their homes with a 20 percent down payment and an 80 percent loan negligent? If so every family, every businessman, every bank, every person in this courtroom, is guilty of negligence. And are we accusing a woman for loving her man and standing by him in failure? How can Americans be encouraged to succeed, if we, the people, shoot the losers?”
As the defense concluded its argument, I felt a sparkle of hope. He’s innocent! He’s innocent! I shook my head smiling. It made no sense. One moment I thought he was guilty, the next that he was innocent.
“The jury may retire to the jury room to begin deliberating,” said Judge Pilgrims.
The jurors stood up. I looked at each of them. Their faces too seemed to have a sparkle of warmth, as if that last speech had made their desires possible, or at least imaginable; even the redheaded New Rochelle housewife seemed to think the closing arguments protected her. Or maybe not. Maybe they had already made up their minds, and their faint smiles were simply due to the idea of being done with it.
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 26, 2009, New York City
emember,” I said, showing the palms of my hands to the bakers sitting in the conference room. “Nobody can use them the way you do.”
While a photo of Rapallo faded on the screen, I passed out the materials to the aspiring bakers seated in the conference room of the company’s new office on Astoria Boulevard, Queens. I was wearing the white-and-blue-striped T-shirt I wore at the seaside in Italy, which exposed my navel, although my hips felt bigger and rounder.
“And Don Otto will talk to you about preparation and baking,” I said, winking at him as he walked in.
I left the conference room and climbed up the stairs two at a time. Our new company headquarters did not have an elevator. We were now located in an inexpensive warehouse in Queens, close to where the first bakery had opened. When I reached the top floor I felt dizzy for a moment. I pressed my index finger against the bridge of my nose and took a deep breath to regain my balance. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I thought, as I caught a glimpse of the corporate-looking succulent plant on my desk. I knew that one day I’d become the CEO of something. I paced my steps on the gray executive rug of the long corridor. Instead of charging me with conspiracy, the court had appointed me as the company’s interim CEO. Everything had happened overnight, as is sometimes the case when judges have to deal with a case they don’t like. I had another dizzy spell. I was nauseated again. I leaned against the corridor’s railing and took a deeper breath. Why did you have to go? I reached out to my twin scar. Don’t you want me to put this baby of yours into the world? I walked to Sachin’s office at the end of the corridor. The door was half open.
“You’re late. Are you going to be finished before you take off tonight?” I asked.
“Yes. The results only just came in from Palo Alto,” Sachin said, apologizing. In reality, he was still going over the balance sheet’s data line by line, knowing that, with just one glance, I would spot anything that was off.
“Are you doing accounting or creative writing?” I asked, smiling. I had noticed that, with his elbow, Sachin had pushed Focaccia House’s bala
nce sheet over his writing notebook.
“Creative accounting,” he said. His voice was tired and a bit happy. He already knew that a good day of writing is always followed by a sleepless night because one is so wired. “Okay, I started writing again,” he admitted. “I’m also searching for the Venus again.” Then he swiveled in his chair and looked at me. With his eyes he touched my stomach. “Are you coming with us? Are you going to tell him?”
I rested my hands on my hips, which were slowly losing their shape, and I felt an irrepressible smile.
“I can no longer fly. I have a doctor’s appointment today. Will you tell him?”
“No,” said Sachin. “You should tell him. I think he’ll come back if you tell him.”
ROSSO FIORENTINO
June 2, 2009, West Bengal, India
looked at the thick binders where my past and future were neatly organized. The Indian night was humid. The silence was almost complete. I could only hear the whistle of the wind against the monastery’s stone wall. Since the trial ended and I left New York I’d repeated the decision to myself every so often. After I did, I would feel better for some time, then my head would start spinning, and I would feel sick, as if I’d had too much to drink.
“On the first count, breach of duty of care, this jury finds defendant Rosso Fiorentino…guilty.
“On the second count, negligence, this jury finds defendant Rosso Fiorentino…guilty.
“On the nineteen counts of breach of the duty of loyalty and fraud, this jury finds defendant Rosso Fiorentino…not guilty.
“The request for imprisonment is denied.”
I stood in the monastery cell, my forehead drenched. I felt a sense of temporary relief, as if I had just vomited. My apartment and all of my belongings were sold at auction. Some $2.6 billion were repatriated from the Christ of the Abyss, and the bankruptcy trustee was able to recover enough assets to restore people’s retirement savings. I wasn’t behind bars, but I never knew whether or not to feel relieved.
The edges of the sky began to turn gray. There was the cry of an animal that measured the distance outside, the distance among the prairies, the mountains, the ocean, the city, the buzzing sound of life, and there, where I was. The bell tolled the dawn prayer. I felt my knees buckling. I fell to the ground and joined my hands in prayer. I was alone and afraid. I prayed about the car accident and about this new accident. Despite all of my best intentions, my life was a series of accidents. And nobody listened, not even the Christ of the Abyss (maybe because his payment was revoked).
“I only fuck up down here. Can I come up with you?”
As my hands were joined at my mouth, I felt a presence in the room. The air was filled with a strong, sweet smell. Instead of the Christ of the Abyss, a white-and-yellow-pinstriped jacket, a coat of gel, and two tanned cheeks appeared before my eyes.
“You did what I couldn’t do…,” said a voice I thought I recognized. Then a deep laughter followed. “You’ve done something great and beautiful. Don’t be such a crybaby!” I had? And what was that?
hen I first heard the sound of the engine, it was probably an hour after dawn. My eyes were closed. I heard the sound from afar, climbing the mountains at first, and then approaching on the dusty road. When the car stopped in front of the monastery, the silence was almost complete again.
There was a loud roar (the two-thousand-year-old door opens) followed by footsteps. The footsteps echoed in the long corridor, bouncing off the thick walls, coming toward my cell. According to the monastery’s rules, visitors could only come in one at a time. My friends each brought me a gift as if it was my birthday.
“It’s on the house,” Don Otto said. He smiled and handed me a baked pan of focaccia.
Sachin, who came in second, offered as his gift all the latest gossip: that Don Otto was back, that the company was doing better, that Chloé was the new CEO, that the Dow Jones was picking up two hundred points a week, that Verger had kept his promise and given up porn, and that Buvlovski was disbarred for life for failing to supervise the case and had moved to Tajikistan to work as a paralegal in Juncal’s law firm.
“And I’ve started writing again!” he said, almost blushing.
Then his face gradually changed expression, from excitement to concern. He now no longer had that tic causing him to look up as if something were about to crash on him, because everything already had. He pointed to the frail young man kneeling in the small cell in front of mine. “You’re not going to take vows, right? You won’t have to give up focaccia?”
In the cell opposite mine, a young novice with long black eyelashes was kneeling on a blanket. He had taken the vow of silence. He could not speak, could not eat meat, cheese, flour, or eggs, and could wash himself only at two o’clock in the morning. The first year he could still receive letters and read them but could no longer respond. The second year he couldn’t even open them.
“Promise you won’t take vows?” asked Sachin.
I was hoping that the greatest gossiper of all time would tell me more, would tell me about the only thing I cared to hear of, would help me decipher the Maestro’s words and give me a reason to stick around, but he didn’t.
round seven, after the bell finished tolling the second prayer of the morning, the door of my cell creaked again.
“How did the two of you get in?” I asked.
Without responding, Federico and Franz sat on the ground and unwrapped the tray that Don Otto had brought for me. They shared the focaccia with their oil-stained fingers. Then they told me that they had to wait, that the monk in charge wouldn’t let more people in, and that he was tougher than all of New York City’s bouncers put together and couldn’t care less if they had come with Sachin and Don Otto all the way from the United States.
“C’mon, have a slice,” said the painter, handing me a piece of focaccia.
“C’mon, have some, don’t be such a downer!” Franz said. “Success doesn’t exist without failure. You’ve still given jobs to a million people.”
I hesitated, thinking again about the vision I had this morning. I’m sure it was the Maestro. I heard his words again.
“Is it true that Chloé is pregnant?” I asked.
Federico wrapped up the empty tray and put it away.
It was already daytime. The first morning noises came from the monastery’s walls.
People do many things to find a meaning in life. Some, like the Maestro, understand everything when their life is over in India; some work eighteen hours a day, like Dimitri Buvlovski; some, like me, run after petroleum-green eyes. Some defend and prosecute the fine line between success and failure.
There are people who don’t need to find a meaning in life, because they haven’t lived yet, because their best years were taken from them. Chloé wasn’t interested in finding a meaning. She was all about living. For her it was all about getting into the University of Chicago, finding a job, falling in love, helping Shimoto, saving my dream.
Then there are people like Franz, the better ones, who keep on partying until morning comes.
“Is it true?” I asked Franz again, waiting for that one and only answer. “Is she pregnant?”
Franz placed his face in the palms of my hands, just as when he visited me at the hospital after the car crash, when Marinella had died.
But this time he didn’t cry. He smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has taken so much time and generosity from all of my friends that the thank-you list could be as long as the book itself. And these words can express only a small part of my gratitude.
First of all, I wish to thank my publisher, Judith Gurewich, for her endless dedication and encouragement, and the very long hours and months she spent working on this story, and to all of the wonderful team at Other Press for making it possible.
Thank you to my wife, Katrina, and to my children Margherita, So
fia, and Maximus for being here. And to Kelly and Dean.
Thank you to Emmanuelle de Villepin for our literary friendship and for introducing me to Judith, and to my agent, Susan Golomb, and to Cindy Spiegel with gratitude. And to Chris Pereira and Clayton Harley. And of course to Donald Bogle for his club movie nights that remain as much a ritual as Sunday Mass.
Thank you to Kip Williams, Gretchen Mol, and Tod Harrison Williams for their friendship that is as long as my time in New York, and to Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and of course to David Tisch, and Anne Carey, and to all my colleagues at Pellegrini & Mendoza, to my friends and colleagues Luis Mendoza and Pato De Groote, Kenneth Regensburg, and Jack Heinberg, to Judith White and Michael Yi for the long hours and great results, to Phil Power and to Marjorie Sanon.
Thank you to Ram Sundaram and his wife, Preethi Krishna, for the loving fun and for allowing me to write these pages in the midst of their fabulous summer dinner parties in the Hamptons.
Thank you to Vanessa von Bismarck and her husband, Max Weiner, for their long-lasting friendship throughout these years. And to Dennis Paul and Coralie Charriol. And of course to Marianna Kulukundis. Thank you to Joerg, Imssy, and Kristina Klebe for having first welcomed me on 62nd Street, and the Deseglise family.
Thank you to my schoolmate Ferdinand Calice and his wife, Teresa, for the time in Chicago, Portofino, and New York, and for allowing me to use Ferdinand’s name in this book without lawsuits. Thank you to Marie and Tino Liechtenstein for our Hamptons adventures, and to Philippe Metternich.
Thank you to Bob Roth and Reza Ali for introducing me to Transcendental Meditation, which has changed my life.
Thank you to my cousins Giulia Marletta, Alexandra Pappas, and Louis Tsiros for their affection, and newborn Sonny Winthrop. And of course Zia Maria Sapounakis, and to Amanda Ross and how inspiring she has been to the children, to Ali Iz for a work relationship that turned into friendship, and thank you to Antonio Monda for writing the most perceptive interview of my father’s work and to his wife Jacquie’s hospitality.
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