Lira From Heaven

In 1993 I spent a semester with a rude band of American students, criss-crossing Europe sampling medieval and Renaissance art. I knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity so I was already feeling lucky that afternoon in late October when our tour bus deposited us in front of our hotel in the Italian ski resort town of Cortina d’ Ampezzo. The village was nestled in the folds of the foothills of the Alps, the sight of which inspired an old-style Bavarian wanderlust within five of us; Randy, Kipp, Matt, Martin, and me. We quickly found our rooms, dropped off our luggage, regrouped outside the hotel, fueled our lungs with alpine air, and headed for the proverbial hills.

Having no sense of scale or distance and no trail to follow we recklessly made a beeline for what we naively believed was the nearest snowy peak which was in actuality at least a full day’s hike away. Yet we did manage to trek three or four miles into the steep and thickly wooded foothills where we laid down, exhausted, on the moist grass and listened to the stillness for over an hour. After our pulses slowed to a meditative pace we began to talk in low contemplative tones about the beauty of nature easily transcending any art created by man. It was a young man’s bull session but in that moment it felt profound and it engendered in me a bottomless tranquility and gratitude I have not felt before nor since.

While making our way back towards town we became slightly lost as we had not followed a trail to get up the mountain and therefore had no trail to follow back down. But we were not worried. Still so blissed out from our hillside meditation we didn’t even notice the thousands of paper bills scattered in the small clearing we were crossing. The trance was broken when I heard Kipp’s voice behind me calmly pronounce,

“Look! Money. You’re standing on money!”

I looked down and saw I was indeed standing on piles and piles of Italian lira scattered all over the wet ground in a roughly 30 foot radius, a sight so incongruous it took some extra processing for my brain to make sense of it. My eyes followed the trail of paper bills up to the tops of bushes, into the limbs of trees. It was, indeed, everywhere and I happened to be standing on the most concentrated pile of it. So I gathered up wads of it in my arms while the others raced around, jumping up to comb damp bills out of branches and dropping down to all fours to shovel piles into their pockets. Our transitory moment of tranquility, only several seconds past was already a distant memory, shattered by the sudden onset of gold rush fever. It was all so implausible. We were in the middle of nowhere, how did this money get here? Looking upwards, there were more bills in higher and higher branches until I spotted a duffle bag hanging at least 60 feet up on top of a massive spruce tree. After we vacuumed up all the accessible cash we considered climbing up to get the duffel, greedily imagining it contained uncounted millions--hell, why not?--billions of dollars. But we all acknowledged that it was too far up and quickly abandoned the idea. Clearly the bag had been thrown from a plane and the fact that we were on the border between Italy and Germany hinted at some criminal backstory. How much money did we have anyway? It was then we began comparing our individual hauls and realized I had lucked out by grabbing the giant pile. The other four stared at me and I began to feel like a cartoon shipwreck survivor who dissolves into a roasted duck under the gaze of their starving shipmates.

“Now, hold on,” I said, adopting a diplomatic tone. “This is no one’s money, we’ll split it five ways.” This was agreed upon and we set about counting our shares and adding them together. We had approximately ₤160,000,000 in our possession, most were in ₤100,000 denominations so we hid the 2,000-odd bills in our pockets and inside our shirts. As we stepped out of the clearing and into the undergrowth I saw a ziplock bag resting atop a branch at eye level. I grabbed it and found a small, black moleskine notebook inside. It had clearly fallen out of the duffel bag along with the money. A quick scan revealed only a few pages were written in but it was all in German.

The adrenaline made our descent down the mountain as fast and sure-footed as a goat’s but clouded our ability to mentally convert lira to U.S. dollars. Estimates ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Whatever the amount was, we knew it would have to be our secret.

After a brief meeting in my hotel room--aided by a calculator--we determined the tally was $101,236 and decided to split the $100,000 five ways. We would blow the remaining $1,236 collectively on something stupid. Martin and I had taken a few semesters of German and were able to translate most of the contents of the notebook. Cryptically, it seemed to contain only a grocery list, a speech for either a wedding or a graduation, and a street address for some place in Munich--which happened to be our next stop--but no names, no phone numbers. We were both frustrated and relieved to not know who it belonged to. It released us of the burden of doing the right thing.

We knew our irrepressible grinning would arouse suspicion and the other students would know something was up. It was decided it was easier to hide our big secret with a fragment of truth so we admitted to finding only $1,236 in the Alps--drinks at the tiny hotel bar were on us.

We bought unlimited rounds for the twenty six other students, our chaperones, a few random tourists, and our bus driver, Hans, whose capacity for beer seemed bottomless. Somewhere in the course of our merriment a snow storm knocked out the hotel’s power. The night took on the look and feel of a gothic novel as the candles were lit and the wind howled outside. I passed the time with one of our chaperones who was also a criminal psychologist. Brian introduced me to one exotic liquor after another while psychoanalyzing me. Adding to the moment’s eerie atmosphere was an unexplained 8-inch, ruler-straight scar running from one corner of his mouth to his ear where it had almost severed the lobe. It looked deeper in the candlelight which threw it into deep relief depending on the angle of his head. After a series of oblique questions and bitter liqueurs he announced his verdict, “You’re a compulsive liar”.

“Oh?” I said, more than a little surprised but hiding my intense disagreement.

“But don’t worry about it old boy, it’s mostly white lies, nothing that’ll cause too much damage.”

He then introduced me to Campari “to cleanse the pallet.”

“Well it better do something,” I griped, “because it tastes awful!” But I was thankful to be off the subject of my alleged pathological condition.

The following morning Hans, showing no signs of a hangover, greeted us with a broad, rosy cheeked smile, proudly showing off the bus’s newly fitted snow chains. The scenic trip through the Alps would have been more awe inspiring had I not been so distracted by the $20,000 I had rolled up in a T-shirt and tied around my waist. It seemed to generate its own heat and weigh more than it possibly could. What was I going to do with it? I knew it was an ill-gotten gain but I couldn’t think of anything karmically appropriate to do with it: drop it off at an orphanage? Donate it to an old folks home? My 21 year old imagination could only fathom the obvious stuff. Besides, wasn’t Europe socialist? Did anyone really need my money? Yes, I was now calling it mine.

On the bus the five of us wordlessly agreed to not sit together because we could not trust ourselves to not behave conspiratorially. Our minds were racing with endless questions regarding the legality of reentering the U.S. with all this undeclared cash of unknown origin. Besides, what if the people who threw the money out of a plane somehow tracked us down?

That evening in the Munich hotel we convened a quick meeting (the faster, the less suspicious) where I convinced the other four I should be the keeper of the notebook. It was an easy sell as possessing it felt like a liability no one else wanted. Randy’s father worked for a bank and informed us we could not legally carry more than $10,000 undeclared back to the US. This was useful information, but knowing Randy told his father our secret automatically made me trust him a little less. Paranoia began loosening my mind’s nuts and bolts. I spent most of the night awake imagining Italian or German mafia kicking in my door to bludgeon me to death while my “friends” smiled and split my money among them.

The dreary day found us in the Alte Pinakothek which houses what we were told was a fine panorama of Flemish paintings. It was hard to appreciate this educational opportunity now, my mind flooded by so many agitating hormones I could no longer distinguish fear from excitement. I could feel the money eroding my sense of gratitude like Gollum’s ring. Upon our class dismissal people clumped into their usual cliques to run amok in the city. The five of us stayed apart so conspicuously that now our avoidance of one another was setting off alarms.

“What’s up with you and Martin?” Rinne asked.

“Oh, nothin’. Just felt like doing our own thing, a statement so vague and noncommittal it likely only aroused further suspicion.

I was happy to break away from everyone and hail a cab. The taxi dropped me off at the address written in the book and I laughed when I found it was in fact a grocery store. I’ll never understand why I did this but I went in and proceeded to buy everything on the grocery list. Perhaps completing a stranger’s grocery shopping was the only penance I could fathom.

Back at the hotel the five of us picked through the groceries and imagined what kind of person would eat these things in combination: small summer sausages, waffle crackers, grapes, nutella spread, olive tapenade, sauerkraut, butterbrezel and paprika chips. We stared at this weird assortment of novel packages and exchanged theories but ultimately the groceries only deepened the mystery. None of it was fancy enough for a wedding so the theory the speech was for a graduation gained a little more credence. We ate everything but the sauerkraut and decided it would and should remain a mystery.

I decided to keep $9,000 and reasoned this was the portion the universe (and U.S. customs) wanted me to have. The rest should return to the sphere of luck from whence it had come. There was a medieval bridge outside our Munich hotel--one of the few to survive the allied bombardment. I waited until the wee hours and climbed down underneath it. I found a loose stone in the abutment, pried it free and dropped a tightly wrapped $11,000 brick into a small hole. I never told the other four and they never asked. Maybe one day I’ll return for it, or maybe send a son or daughter to recover it. Or maybe someone will get lucky and happen upon it the way we did. It would be only fair, luck can’t be hoarded and stockpiled anyway and I suspected attempting to do so would invite misfortune. I already had my portion of luck.