horror—very restrained horror, since Belle Duval would remain contained and understated in the midst of an asteroid collision. Her attire was typically subtle: a creamy faint-pink top with a beige pencil skirt, a thin white scarf adding a subdued dash. Her voice was quiet; her makeup was quiet; her not-quite-blond hair may have been recently touched up with highlights, but the do itself—soft and neat—was quiet as could be. Yet Belle’s was a smart quiet, her reserve an attempt to withhold judgment.
“Yup, all smuggled goods are impounded,” Lowell said. “I gather these confiscations of cash are getting immense emotional, too. Fainting. Shouting matches.”
“Worse,” Ryan said. “One guy lay on the floor and sobbed. They had to carry him out. A woman in front of us—big enough you wouldn’t want to cross her—got into a fistfight with one of the agents. Before they took his wad off him, another guy tried to set the money on fire. Meanwhile someone at the next machine over was ripping up thousand-dollar bills—which is also a federal offense, and just compounded the charges.”
“Anything but let someone else have it,” Lin Yu said. “Gosh, makes you think that wealth doesn’t have an improving effect on people.”
“Currency seizure is making a fortune for the feds,” Tom said. “It’s basically an ‘airport departure tax,’ except they get to charge whatever a passenger is packing. Minus that hundred-dollar allowance, of course. So gracious of them to let you keep a little something for a hot drink.”
Avery basked in Tom’s soothing provincial accent: eh-uh-paht depah-chuh taxes, hunner-dollah allownse. So many Warshingtonians, as Tom would say, were blow-ins from elsewhere that friends born in the region were blessedly anchoring. Tom made her feel she lived somewhere in particular.
“Call it a tax, then,” Lin Yu said. “Probably the first taxes the douche bags have ever paid.”
“You have a doctorate in economics,” Belle said to Lin Yu, politely but firmly. “You must know that’s not likely the case. People of means pay the vast proportion of federal income taxes—”
“I’ve always admired that ‘airport departure’ gambit,” Lowell said, keeping conversation light as he poured another round of wine. “Popular in Africa. You have to pay to be allowed to leave. Like being held hostage. It shows a healthy humility about the state of your nation: ‘We know you’ll fork over just about anything to get out of here.’”
“Pretty soon,” Tom said quietly, “we may be willing to pay just about anything to get out of the United States.”
Sharing her husband’s wish that this early in the evening the gathering not get too dark, Avery intervened. “Think about it: no way are those TSA officers hanging around that much hard cash without picking an occasional twenty off the floor.”
Lowell chuckled. “More than a twenty. I heard the New York airports are feeding frenzies. But what gripes me is that hundred-dollar limit. You can’t get a taxi home from the airport with a hundred bucks.”
“But why are so many people trying to get cash out of the country,” Belle asked, “at the risk of having to forfeit it all?”
“Foreign exchange in the US is suspended indefinitely,” Ryan said. “Since the initial crash, the dollar has been dropping, oh, two-tenths of a percent or so almost every day. The über-rich are frantically trying to bundle their booty to London or Hong Kong—anywhere they can convert it to another currency that will hold its value. Bancors, usually—whose value is going up slightly, to Alvarado’s chagrin.”
“But if the value of the dollar outside the country is so low,” Belle said, “why consolidate the loss?”
“These are greedy people,” Ryan said. “For whom anything is better than nothing.”
“What’s so ‘greedy,’ Tom said, “about wanting to safeguard some tiny fraction of the worth of money you may have worked hard to earn?”
“Oh, please,” Lin Yu said. “Do you know anything about the people we’re talking about? The only ‘hard work’ they do is poke at a fleX to check their hedge funds, or—even more debilitating—transfer the proceeds after some squillionaire parent dies. They’re not digging ditches.”
“It can be a mistake,” Belle said carefully, “to throw the upper middle class and the ‘über-rich’ in the same boat. The moderately well off may not, as you say, dig ditches. But they often put in quite long hours and may still struggle to pay mortgages and tuition—”
“Not the poor little rich people routine!” Lin Yu cried. “I’ve heard the tear-jerk stories—about how all over DC the affluent can’t afford childcare anymore. Well, the nannies are losing their jobs. I know where my sympathy lies.”
“Ever notice, with these folks,” Tom murmured in Avery’s ear, “how injustice only applies to the hard-up? Nothing unfair can possibly happen to you if you own more than one pair of shoes.”
Having recently earned her doctorate, Lin Yu worked at a nonprofit, the Real American Way (on the left and right alike, outfits trying to co-opt patriotism all sounded the same). Alas, the redistributive policies that RAW promoted—vastly higher property, inheritance, and upper-bracket income taxes; a blanket 2 percent wealth tax on all cash, investments, and tangible assets—were the very policies from which anyone in a position to give money away would recoil, and the organization was chronically underfunded. So on her do-gooder salary, Lin Yu was unlikely to have experienced a vertiginous drop in net worth during the last two months. Like Tom, Avery was queasy about these heedless opinions, which applied exclusively to other people and cost their advocate nothing. Those ready refills of imported Viognier notwithstanding, Lin Yu’s hosts were another matter. Oh, Avery had no idea how severely their family’s circumstances had been damaged; with his expertise, obviously Lowell handled that side of things, and she’d been too frightened to ask for specifics. Yet she could still feel the wind in her ears, as if riding an elevator in freefall. Making a note to herself that inviting Ryan and Lin Yu had probably been a mistake, she slipped away to sear the fish.
I was telling Avery earlier this evening how much it breaks my heart to see all these panicking bastards scrambling out at the bottom of the market,” Lowell opined at the head of the table.
“If it’s the bottom,” Ryan countered from the foot of the table.
“That very anxiety is a trap,” Lowell said. “Suckers slosh in when the market’s frothy, and freak when it tanks. The key is to keep your nerve. I’ll want credit for this later, Biersdorfer: the dollar’s going to recover and then some. So will the Dow.”
“A century ago,” Ryan said, “the Dow only returned to its pre-Depression valuation after twenty-six years. In that long, you’ll be in your mid-seventies.”
“I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with this superstition that history is repeating itself at a tidy base-ten interval,” Lowell said. “Whole sectors of the economy are hale, and with the dollar so devalued our exports will undercut Vietnam’s.”
Avery wished her husband wouldn’t stab at his bluefin so distractedly; that ginger dressing had come out smashing. And she thirsted for a change of subject. It was all her patients wanted to discuss as well, or the few who showed up: what had happened to their investments. So drear.
Ryan shook his head paternally. “You’re kidding yourself, Stackhouse. Stocks are only headed further down. It took three solid years of
