Episode 3: The Medici Bank
Sweat beaded on Ivan's forehead as he pulled down a heavy block of weights from the arm machine, staring pensively at the aerial view of Chicago outside the windows of his building's 22nd floor gym.
...seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,
he counted in his mind, releasing the handles of the machine and reaching for his phone when he finished the set. With his chest heaving and his back and shoulders burning pleasantly, he checked Instagram, repeating a search he'd done a few times already this morning.
#artinstitute
He refreshed the feed, looking for new posts or anything else he might have missed from last night. There was painfully little from the event online, just touristy-looking pics of older people he didn't recognize, posing in front of unfamiliar paintings.
He sighed.
He'd been able to sneak out of the event without running into anyone from the board again, but to his disappointment, he hadn't caught another glimpse of that girl or her friend, all evening.
He tried a few other hashtags, searching by location, even tapping through stories on his hunt for student accounts, but it was like she and her friends didn't exist online, and with only the nickname "Fee" to go by, he didn't have much hope of running into her again. If he had even a few more clues, he might have been able to track her down, but as the feed started to get stale, he forced the thought of her from his mind.
It was a pity, though. She was so young and beautiful, and clearly submissive, that part of him wanted to hunt her down like an animal, using any amount of resources to find her... but, the very word
"resources"
triggered a surge of unpleasant thoughts, Claire's sagging, papery features rising prominently in his mind.
Although he wanted to ignore the situation with the board, he couldn't ignore his mounting bills. He'd taken a lot of time off at the brokerage to deal with his fathers death, and it was frustrating to still have his inheritance tied up like this. Pocketing his phone in his sweatpants, he stood up, wiped off the bench and headed for the gym's exit.
He thought all of this was going to be a lot easier.
He'd envisioned simply showing up at the lawyers office, signing some papers, and receiving immediate access to corporate accounts and seven figure lines of credit. In reality, he'd stepped into a battlefield against a bunch of overpaid academics, who he sensed would do anything to keep their newfound control.
Sliding his key-card into the elevator, he was shuttled up to the penthouse level, thinking.
Even if some of the staff recognized his new role, if the board wouldn't work with him, he couldn't really do anything, and given enough time, they'd likely find a way to cut him out entirely.
They were probably working on it right now,
he seethed.
When the elevator doors opened on the top floor, he walked down another long hallway with only two other doors, one for his unit and the other for his neighbors, and slid his key-card until a red light flashed over the handle, then pushed the door inward to reveal an expansive, top-floor condo.
It was a modern-looking space, with the exterior walls made entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows. A black leather sectional, trendy coffee table books, and heavy, raw-edge wood tables dominated half the visible space, while a dark, glimmering, kitchen filled the rest. He'd had it decorated by a girl he was fucking when he'd first bought the place, years ago, back when the Chicago real estate market was hot and spending money on frivolous bullshit like rugs and oddly shaped jars barely registered with his continuous cashflow.
...but that was then.
Today, the place only represented a costly mortgage payment to him, and he was keenly aware as he got older how draining such debts could be. When the market was slow, he'd been forced to make the hefty, fifteen thousand dollar monthly payments from his savings account, and lately, he'd been watching the balance on that drain like some slow motion horror film. The stock market too.
Everything was fucked.
Despite being born into an affluent family, his indifference toward his fathers work had set him on a path for disapproval from a young age. As a result, all the money he'd made since leaving home, he'd made on his own through his real estate career (a fact he was generally very proud of), but seeing just how close he still was to the daily grind of work, and how easily it could all slip away only reinforced the feelings of quiet panic that'd been stirring within him since the funeral.
Even the funeral itself had been eye-opening. To see the resources afforded by the CEO of a bank in person after so many years barely speaking at all... the man had staff, a procession of Rolls Royce's, black horses, wave after wave of attendees. It wasn't just a corporation, it was a symbol of wealth and power.
And it was supposed to be his.
It was his right as his fathers only son...but how was he supposed to enforce it?
This wasn't the renaissance. He couldn't just charge into Claire's office at the museum with a sword and shield and demand cessation, even if in his mind, such an approach would've made things a lot faster and easier for him.
With growing annoyance, he realized if he was ever going to have a chance at getting the inheritance he was owed, he'd have to outsmart these people. Or this would go nowhere, and he'd be cut out of the family for good.
He took a shower, reflecting on all the options he'd already tried. He'd consulted with several external lawyers to get advice after he learned of his fathers death and impending inheritance, but the complicated situation with the company drove everyone away. A call with one lawyer stood out uncomfortably in his thoughts, the mans old-timey cowboy drawl as clear in his mind as if he were having the call all over again.
"Oh sonny, I don't deal with annnnythin' primogeniture."
"Say again?" Ivan had said to him, bumping the volume on his phone up a notch.
"Well, I haven't heard of a case of
agnatic primogeniture
since law school. You sure that's what you're dealing with here, son? Your old man didn't leave a will?"
The long silence on Ivan's end of the line must've been what prompted the lawyer to continue.
"
Primogeniture
is a legal term that refers to the firstborn child's right to the parent's entire estate. In the case of agnatic primogeniture, the rights lie with the firstborn son.... but that's not how it works anymore, not in this country. I can't think of a single case in the United States in at least two hundred years. It's very old-world... Salic Law. The House of Viceroy, Kingdom of Italy. All that."
Ivan blinked. "Well, the company is Italian."
"Sounds like you got yourself a classic money laundering operation there, son." The lawyer had paused to laugh at his own joke before continuing. "Not my thing, I like the easy stuff, setting the kids up for college and managing trust funds. Bread and butter, you know?"
As the hot water rolled over him, the memory of the cryptic conversation made a shiver of concern run down his spine. Until now, he hadn't thought of the company as anything other than a vehicle for his own personal gain - but what was the deal with this thing? He'd never heard of a company that had stayed in business for 700 years.
How had it operated so long, if it didn't sell anything? And why didn't anyone seem to acknowledge it existed, outside his own family?
Although he may not have had his fathers sense for philanthropy, he wasn't naive to finance. Even if the bank didn't deal in accounts full of cash directly, the art was making money somehow. He'd grown up very well-off; private school in Italy, winters in Norway, all fueled by this one business. The endless hours in dusty museums and art galleries had been lost on him growing up, but now, his curiosity was piqued.
He had to find out more, and crucially, he had to do it without his uncle or anyone too close to the board learning what he was up to, or they'd find a way to make things harder for him.
Stepping out of the shower, he toweled off and got dressed, his own closet a similar collection of suits and jackets as his fathers. The luxury real estate business demanded such a dress code, although he preferred the newer stuff to his fathers collection of full-cut jackets and peak lapels. Slim fits and athletic cuts. A wardrobe custom-designed to show off the ratio of his waist, to his much broader shoulders.
It would be too warm and humid later to wear a jacket, so he selected a collared shirt and gray trousers before making a direct path to the kitchen, where he flipped open a slender MacBook Air that was sitting on the counter and started searching the internet for clues.
An entry in a Wikipedia page made his eyebrows crease together.
"...The Medici Bank was a financial institution in Italy during the 13th century. It was the largest and most respected bank in Europe during its time, and the family who owned it was, for a while, the wealthiest in Europe. Estimating their wealth in today's money is imprecise, because the fortune was primarily stored in art, land, and gold, and because, in 1494, the bank collapsed after large amounts of funds were used to hire mercenary armies in Florence. Although the bank is credited with inventing the ledger system still used in modern finance today, records of its own accounts have never been recovered..."
"Must be the wrong bank," he murmured, the sentence about the institution's collapse hundreds of years ago sticking out.
...Right?
He continued searching, but the effort only drew more uncomfortable connections, an image of two rearing lions appearing on multiple different websites.
It was a logo, one he'd seen before, too. On the corner of a credit card, the glint of a gold and ruby lapel pin, even a set of wrought iron gates from boyhood if he really pushed himself to remember far back enough. He hadn't thought anything of it at the time, all those old, artsy symbols so easily lost on him back then. But now it was everywhere... it was like he couldn't un-see it.
Couldn't be the same, though,
he thought, switching to another browser tab about the museum itself. But doubt swelled within him.
Could it?
With the banks supposed collapse, he couldn't find any immediate connection between his inheritance and the museum, but Claire herself had confirmed his fathers collection made up half of their inventory, so he was becoming more and more confident that these symbols weren't coincidental.
