The Debt

by Glenn Cooper

  He couldn’t place precisely where, but there was a faint rustling sound coming from somewhere in the direction of the elevator.

  ‘Hello? Mrs Gomes?’

  There was no reply. When he heard nothing further he chalked it up to the ventilation system blowing a piece of paper around, or maybe mice, not the best of creatures for an archive.

  The closer he got toward the end of the 1850s, the papers had a greater frequency and extent of fire damage, so much so that he had to take care in turning some pages to prevent crumbling.

  There were several bound ledger books covering the latter months of 1858 but precious few loose documents. However, one of them was a signed letter from Mayer Sassoon that he gulped down like a desert wanderer offered a flask of cool water.

  18 November 1858

  My dear Edouard,

  You must return from Manchester without delay. As your father it is my duty to inform you that the greatest calamity has befallen the bank. I will endeavour to provide you here with the bald particulars in order that you might appreciate the magnitude of the crisis. When you are safe to my bosom I will provide you with details. Although the events you will read here are traumatic you must prepare yourself to assume a new role at the firm, one where our side of the family may finally enjoy a true and equal partnership at the Sassoon Bank.

  FIFTEEN

  Rome, 1858

  Cardinal Antonelli had known this day was coming but the letter still came as a shock. It wasn’t as if he had been watching the calendar for the reckoning. Other affairs were uppermost on his mind. It had been a year of chaos and uncertainty within a decade of upheaval. In 1849 Mazzini had entered Rome and had declared a Roman Republic, complete with a constitution. But the heady days of the revolution soon came crashing down when the French intervened to cast out the republicans and restore the papacy. Mazzini, Garibaldi, and their compatriots were once again thrown into exile and Pope Pius, Antonelli, and their entourage returned from Gaeta to the Vatican. The years that followed were far from peaceful. The Papal States were restive and pockets of revolutionary zeal popped up here and there, requiring a military response. Then in 1857, Pisacane and Nicotera, followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi, mounted an invasion of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The revolution was coming to a boil once again and tensions within the Vatican were high. Was history repeating itself so soon? Would the leadership of the Vatican once again be forced into exile?

  And now this. A demand letter from this vile nonentity, Jean Sassoon. The nerve of the fellow! The insolence!

  1 November 1858

  Esteemed Cardinal Secretary,

  I write to you on behalf of the Sassoon Bank. The loan we provided you in 1848 is coming due and we wish to arrange for repayment of the principal plus interest that has accrued over these ten years. By my calculations, should the loan be repaid on the date of its tenth anniversary, we would be owed the 300,000 pounds sterling principal plus interest payments of 290,145 pounds sterling for a grand total of 590,145 pounds sterling. My offices are in Venice but I will gladly come to Rome to take possession of the bullion. I would remind you that under the terms of our contract, should payment not be made by the tenth anniversary, the interest would begin to compound on a monthly basis. It suits the bank and I venture to say that it should suit the Vatican to see to your obligations now so as to avoid costly interest payments in the future. Please reply at your earliest convenience with the particulars of the arrangements. Timely payment is a matter of some importance to the bank. My father who is the chairman of our firm has instructed me to inform you that he had never revealed the existence of the loan to the public. However, if prompt repayment is not made he believes he would no longer have the obligation of silence. I am aware that Cardinal Lambruschini died some years ago, but it will be a pleasure to see you again after so long an absence.

  Your faithful servant,

  J. Sassoon

  Antonelli read the letter again. A pleasure to see you again, he wrote! The last time the cardinal had laid eyes on the man had been on the day of the banker’s release from the dungeons at Gaeta Castle. Sarcasm! Sassoon had the gall to engage in sarcasm.

  He had received the letter the prior day and had elected to sleep on the matter rather than run headlong to the pope. Now, with his recommendation formulated, he headed for Pius’s office in the Apostolic Palace, where the pontiff had come after celebrating Mass at the basilica.

  The pope had lost some weight these recent years and he had a perpetually unhealthy pallor. Whether his diet was the culprit or some occult condition, or whether it was simply the product of stress, no one, including his doctors, knew for sure. He was sorting through papers at his desk when Antonelli entered and saw that his latest malady, a fine tremor of his writing hand, was on full display. Some uneaten food was on a side table. The air was stale and the cardinal took it upon himself to crack open one of the tall windows overlooking the great piazza to air it out.

  ‘Your Holiness, I have received a letter from the banker, Jean Sassoon. Would you care to read it?’

  The pope looked at the letter in Antonelli’s hand as if he was holding a dead animal.

  ‘Tell me what it says.’

  ‘He demands repayment.’

  ‘How much?’ the pope asked, his expression sour.

  ‘Approximately five hundred and ninety thousand pounds.’

  ‘But the loan was for three hundred thousand!’

  ‘The interest payments, Your Holiness.’

  The pope nodded ruefully.

  Antonelli continued. ‘The letter goes on to suggest that we might not wish to extend the loan beyond its term to avoid the harsher effects of monthly interest compounding.’

  ‘Is that very bad?’ the pope asked. ‘You know I have no facility for these things.’

  ‘It is quite disadvantageous to us. There is more. The letter contains a threat of sorts.’

  ‘What threat?’

  ‘He cautions that if repayment is not made then his father might see fit to divulge the existence of the loan to the general public.’

  The pope thrust his hands straight out as if he were trying to stop an invisible force.

  ‘Enough! This is too much. We cannot pay five hundred and ninety thousand. We cannot pay three hundred thousand. We hardly have enough in the treasury to maintain ourselves at a meager level. And now they would get the Rothschilds involved? They will demand payment for violating their agreement. The situation is intolerable, Antonelli.’

  ‘There is a way we might proceed to rid us of this matter,’ the cardinal said quietly.

  ‘Yes? How?’

  ‘It is better you do not know, Your Holiness. Before he died, Cardinal Lambruschini recommended that if and when this day came that we engage the services of a certain gentleman.’

  As he said this, Antonelli made a show of crumpling the Sassoon letter and tossing it into the fireplace. He missed and the cardinal had to kick it the rest of the way.

  ‘You are correct,’ the pope said, picking up his pen and gazing at his shaking hand for a moment. ‘I do not wish to know of what you speak.’

  Duke Francesco Tizziani was small but physically powerful with a barrel of a chest and bowed legs that gave the appearance of his being on horseback even when he was not. He was certainly not handsome. He endeavored to hide a weak chin under a cropped beard. His overly long nose was set between closely spaced eyes. Nevertheless, he fancied himself a ladies’ man, oblivious to the fact that his conquests were exclusively the result of rank and wealth. His ancestral estates in Romagna were lavish, particularly his palace a half-day’s ride from Bologna. That is where he received the letter from Cardinal Antonelli, hand-delivered by a Vatican horseman.

  His great room was drafty and cold, an inefficient space to heat on a cold late-November day but Tizziani liked its grand proportions and the view from its windows over manicured lawns and rolling horse meadows. After dismissing the rider and instructing his manservant to give him
food and lodging, the duke went to his desk and pulled out the previous letter from Monsignor Parizo that had come only a week earlier.

  This new letter was a fat one and when Tizziani broke the wax seal, it practically burst open. The top sheet was a short note from Parizo thanking the duke for his reply and stating that the documents were being delivered as promised. The duke knew full well that the cardinal secretary was a studiously careful man. It would have been unwise to send the first, explanatory letter and the contracts together lest they fell into the wrong hands. At this time, Tizziani would only make a cursory inspection of the contract and its annex; he had no interest in reading legal documents. His brain wasn’t made for this kind of activity. It was made for scheming and fighting, hunting and whoring.

  Tizziani knew Antonelli in passing. His true friend in the Vatican had been Lambruschini. The two men, in concert with the governor of Romagna, had made a killing in preferential trade deals with Rome. As the duke surveyed the new realities of 1858 he could see the handwriting on the wall. The old order was crumbling. Italian nationalism was on the rise. The Papal States might not survive for long. If the Vatican lost them, the Church would recede as a political power. Why should he stick his neck out to help a cardinal who could be shot any time by one of Garibaldi’s lot? On the other hand, Antonelli was still in power and the favor he sought didn’t seem overly dangerous. On this matter he would continue to be the pope’s faithful servant and hope for the best.

  The men he summoned were like a pair of obedient hounds – muscular, silent young men who were smart enough for this kind of work but not so intelligent as to elaborately scheme on their own account. Each had literally grown up on his estate, sons of retainers, and their allegiance to the duke was absolute.

  ‘Piero, Angelo, I have work for you.’

  ‘Anything, my lord,’ they said in a near unison.

  ‘Can either of you read?’ the duke asked.

  One pointed to the other. ‘Piero can.’

  ‘Then Piero, you take these papers. The work you must do for me is in Venice.’

  They were married now – Ricca, the baker’s daughter, and Jean Sassoon, the banker’s son – and they had a son, Ephraim, a four-year-old study in continuous motion. Perhaps it had been Jean’s lonely incarceration in Gaeta that had persuaded him that life was but a gossamer fabric, all too easy to rend and destroy, and that he would do well to marry the woman he loved rather than someone his father thought suitable. Upon his return to Rome he had gone to the ghetto bakery and asked Ricca’s father for her hand with the proviso that he no longer felt safe doing business in Rome. He would return to Venice, far from the grasp of the Vatican, and make a life with Ricca there.

  Business had been good. The Venetian offices of the Sassoon Bank were in the Cannaregio, the section of the city where the Jewish ghetto was located. Even though Napoleon Bonaparte had abolished the separation of the ghetto from the rest of the city when he conquered Venice in 1797, old habits died hard and Jews still tended to congregate there. Jean Sassoon had established himself as a reliable lender to the glass and mirror artisans and the middlemen who plied the eastern trade routes. Furthermore, the turmoil that had spawned the 1848 revolution was still creating waves of opportunity. Every Italian army garrison, every militia it seemed, needed fresh arms and ammunition and Sassoon letters of credit were popping up across Europe.

  The Sassoons lived above the bank in a narrow pink house on the Campo della Maddalena. To discourage thieves Jean posted a wholly truthful note in a front window stating that there was no money on the premises. To a merchant, his letters of credit were as good as hard currency and should silver or gold be needed for a transaction, arrangements could be made quickly enough. Upstairs, there were three comfortable rooms, a luxurious amount of space for such a small family.

  Jean and Ricca had put Ephraim to bed and were enjoying a quiet chat in their parlor when they heard an insistent knocking at the front door.

  ‘Who could that be?’ Ricca asked. ‘Ephraim will wake up.’

  ‘God forbid,’ Jean said for it was no easy thing getting the energetic boy to go to sleep.

  He put down his small glass of fortified wine and peered out the window, trying without success to get a view of the doorway below. However, he could see the piazza clearly enough and though it was dark, he was quite sure it was otherwise empty. When the knocking persisted, Jean feared the boy would surely begin to fuss, so he opened a shutter and leaned out. As he looked down, two strangers looked up.

  ‘Jean Sassoon?’ one of them said.

  ‘Yes, what do you want?’

  ‘We need to speak with you.’

  ‘Is it a business matter?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I beg you to return in the morning. I am retired for the night.’

  ‘It is urgent.’

  ‘Could you kindly state the nature of this urgency?’

  ‘It is private. We cannot let the entire city know our business.’

  ‘Very well, I can give you five minutes. Ten at most.’

  He told his wife he would be back shortly and went down the stairs to the office where he lit a kerosene lamp and unlocked the door. It was then that he saw that each cloaked man was holding identical pistols, together, a matching pair of Glisenti pinfire revolvers, valuable weapons supplied by their employer, Duke Tizziani.

  Jean backed away with a horrifying memory of the day, ten years earlier, when men had appeared at the door of his love nest.

  ‘I do not keep money here. Everyone knows this.’

  Piero entered first. ‘We don’t want money,’ he said. ‘Who else is in the house?’

  ‘Just my wife and child.’

  Angelo came in and shut the door. ‘Be silent,’ he said, ‘and no one will be hurt.’

  ‘If this isn’t a robbery, what is it?’ Jean asked, his hands hanging heavily. They were useless to him right now. He wasn’t a fighter. These hands of his were made for holding pens and paper.

  Piero had the contracts in a small leather shoulder bag.

  ‘Do you recognize these?’ he asked, showing them to the banker.

  Jean glanced at them by the light of the oil lamp. A pathetic, high-pitched sigh came from deep in his chest. So that’s what this is about, he thought. He rapidly played out the possible scenarios in his mind and none of them ended well. Whatever happened, he had to protect Ricca and Ephraim.

  He tried to sound unafraid. ‘They are loan contracts. How did you come to possess them?’

  Piero was the apparent spokesman. ‘Never mind that. We want your copies.’

  Jean understood what was happening. The Vatican was behind this, he had no doubt. If the contracts disappeared, if he disappeared, then the loan would disappear.

  ‘Who has sent you? Cardinal Antonelli?’

  ‘Don’t know any cardinals. Where are your copies?’

  ‘I don’t have them.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  The shelves in the spacious room were stacked with papers, hundreds of contracts and letters of credit. Piero kept his pistol trained on Jean while he walked the perimeter of the space, brushing at papers with his free hand.

  ‘It will take me all night to look through this lot,’ Piero said. ‘We don’t want to stay all night, do we, Angelo?’

  ‘We do not,’ his compatriot answered. ‘Let me break his fingers. That will loosen his tongue.’

  ‘I have a better idea,’ Piero said. ‘Bring his wife and child down here.’

  ‘No!’ Jean cried. ‘Don’t touch them!’ It was a cold night but he was sweating now. ‘The contracts are kept at the London office of the bank. I only keep the smaller, local contracts here.’

  Piero laughed at that and asked if he really expected them to simply take him at his word and piss off into the night.

  ‘I am begging you to believe me because it is the truth,’ Jean said.

  ‘Bring them
down, Angelo,’ Piero ordered and when Jean tried to block the young man he brought the butt of the pistol down on his head, opening up a gusher that Jean tried to staunch with the flat of his hand.

  Jean heard Ricca scream and when he began to rise up from his kneeling position, Piero pointed his gun and told him to stay down. Soon, Ricca was on the stairs, holding the boy’s hand, Angelo at their rear.

  ‘Jean, what’s happening? They’ve hurt you,’ she said. ‘Is this a robbery?’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘They want a contract.’

  ‘A contract? Then give it to them. They’re scaring Ephraim. They’re scaring me.’

  ‘I would if I could,’ Jean said. ‘The contract they want is in London.’

  ‘Did you tell them?’

  ‘They refuse to believe me.’

  The boy was staring at the pistol. ‘Is that a real gun?’ he asked.

  ‘It is indeed,’ Piero said. ‘A very powerful gun. Banker, if you don’t want a demonstration of its power you need to hand over the contract.’

  ‘How can I convince you that it is not here?’ Jean croaked.

  ‘There is only one way,’ Piero said, putting the pistol to Ricca’s temple. ‘I will count to ten. Show me the contract before my count is done and the gun will stay silent. One …’

  Ricca tried to say Jean’s name but her mouth was too dry.

  ‘As God is my witness,’ Jean cried, ‘the documents are in London!’

  ‘Five …’

  Jean rose to his feet and lurched toward the shelves to make a show of looking for what he knew was not there.