The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

That boy could never get enough attention. Alas, bigmouth showoff was a label that might apply to his elder son. “Sure,” Lowell said coolly.

“A friend of mine at school. He said his mother had a bar of gold she bought a while ago in Dubai. Where I guess you could buy it like, you know, shampoo, without a paper trail. His mom had to explain to him about Dubai because he walked outside when she was digging a hole for the bar in the backyard. Isn’t that against the law?”

“Right now, yes. But your friend is a knucklehead. He shouldn’t have told you that. He needs to keep his piehole shut.”

“Well, he made me swear not to tell anybody.”

“So why are you telling me?”

Goog looked hurt. He’d be the only teenager in DC upbraided for sharing secrets with a parent. “’Cause I wonder what to do. Whether I should report it to somebody.”

“Like the police?”

“Yeah, that’s what they told us to do in assembly.”

“That,” Lowell said, “is sinister. And the answer is no, you do not want to report that gold to the police, or even to a teacher. Keep a lid on it. Your friend’s mother could be fined and even thrown in jail.”

“But what about the law?”

“I don’t care. There have been places and times where everyone rats on everyone else, and nobody trusts anybody. They were bad places, and bad times. This is the United States, and we don’t operate that way, got it? If I had some gold I wasn’t handing over to the feds, would you turn me in?”

“Are you hiding any?”

“Given this discussion, I wouldn’t tell you if I were.” The levity fell flat.

“But if people who surrender their gold get a roachbar price from the Treasury, like you said … And then the recalcitrant”—Goog gave the recent addition to his vocabulary an emphatic flourish—“not only get away with hiding their gold but can get a better price for it on the black market, or overseas …” Lowell was bursting with pride that his son had mastered the basics here without any help. “Doesn’t that mean that the people who follow the rules get punished?”

“As your father, I shouldn’t be letting you in on this rather ugly fact of life, but people who follow the rules are almost always punished.”

On that mournful note, Lowell headed downstairs, where the guests had arrived.

Word of warning,” Ryan advised. “It slows down security something fantastic.”

Avery was a bit exasperated that their company didn’t sink into the plenitude of seats in the soft chocolate living room. Everyone remained standing with their wine, instinctively encircling the dark, striking man in a trendy bronze-weave tie. He employed the flamboyant hand gestures of a VIP accustomed to holding court. Receding hairline, true, but Ryan Biersdorfer exemplified that good looks were 50 percent conviction. He was neither as smart nor as entertaining as he thought he was either, but since he did think he was, other people did, too.

“We flew out of Reagan last week, since I had to give a lecture in Zurich,” he continued. “The lines were staggering. I’d say add two hours. Even in ‘Fast’ Track.”

“Naturally,” Lin Yu said. “Business travelers are the worst offenders.”

Half Chinese, Lin Yu Houseman had reaped the best of both worlds—with the smooth, purified lines of a classic Asian face, but a Westerner’s slender nose and wide eyes, which women in China were once eager to endure plastic surgery to mirror. (Avery had read that the younger mainland set now considered eyelid augmentation pandering and undignified.) Barely thirty, she combined that hint of the orient that fifty-ish men like Ryan found sexy with a relaxingly straight-up American accent. Intellectually as well, she’d melded the diligence of an Asian upbringing—she’d been one of Ryan’s star grad students—with the earnest political passion of the East Coast liberal. Avery would have admired the young woman more had she parted ideological ways with her partner-cum-mentor even occasionally.

“But you should see the scene,” Ryan said. “It’s almost worth the aggravation for the theater. They’re searching every bag, not only the belongings of an unlucky few.”

“Thank God that, ever since the Shaving Cream Bomber, you can’t check luggage anymore,” Avery noted. “Or security could take a week.”

“Right now, the TSA couldn’t care less about bombs!” Ryan said. “But they are checking the inside sleeves of suitcases, and sometimes ripping the linings out. They’re prying into the folds of every wallet. They’re authorized to do hand searches, too; they slide their palms into your pockets, right next to the groin—unsavory, to say the least. You don’t only take off your shoes but your socks. They examine the heels for signs of tampering, and pull out the insoles. You could haul a rocket launcher through Reagan, and nobody would blink. But don’t try slipping out with an extra ten bucks!”

“It’s amazing how many cheats they’re catching,” Lin Yu said gleefully. “You wouldn’t believe how brazenly corporate fat cats are trying to walk onto planes with briefcases bulging with cash. It was so gross. Stacks of thousand-dollar bills everywhere. All these supposedly upstanding citizens, and it looked like a drug bust.”

“Except the bills scattered around the X-ray machine aren’t necessarily illicit,” Tom said. “I mean, we can at least presume that it is their money.”

“We can presume nothing of the kind,” Lin Yu said. “That’s wealth that this entire country helped to create.”

Tom took an it’s-going-to-be-a-long-night breath. “According to that reasoning, no one owns their money. The funds in your bank account actually belong to everybody.”

The pleasantness of Tom’s tone sounded forced. Wearing an outdated suit jacket with a collar, he was a rumpled, easy-going, good-humored man, more inclined to defuse tension with a joke than to ratchet it up by getting personal. Ordinarily, his gentle Maryland accent—that would be Murrelun accent—further beveled his tactful opinions, but events this fall had put even the laid-back on edge.

“Morally, your money does belong to everybody,” Ryan said. “The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property. Private enterprise is dependent on the nation as a whole for an educated workforce, transportation networks, and social order. No country, no fortune.”

“Yadda, yadda,” Lowell said. “We’ve all read Fair Game.” (Liar. In his resentment of the fuss made over it, Avery’s husband had never brought himself to read past a few pages of the introduction.)

“I’ll grant you this much.” Tom was making an almighty effort to remain affable, for which Avery was grateful. “’Kay, for the last several years inflation has bounced between 3 and 4 percent. I realize that to experts like you folks, I’ll sound dumb as a coal shovel. But the figure I tripped across the other day came as a shock to me: with 3 percent inflation, the dollar halves in value every twenty-three years. That’s from Fed money printing. So when I don’t control what ‘my’ money is worth, maybe it isn’t really mine in the first place. At best, it’s a loan. Which Krugman can zap into ashes while it’s still in my pocket, like a superhero.”

“I’m afraid that’s a layman’s reading, Tom.” When amateurs trod on his patch, Lowell rarely heeded Avery’s admonition that he would better beguile his companions by acting humbly receptive, not haughtily authoritative. “And too simplistic. Inflation has to be kept positive, to prevent deflation, which is the real bogeyman. Most of that 3 to 4 percent hails from rising commodity prices, not loose monetary policy. In fact, increasing the monetary base has had all sorts of benefits for our economy. Everyone got so excitable about quantitative easing back in the teens. What happened? Jack. Most of the cash seeped, profitably for everyone, to emerging markets.”

“Look, I won’t argue about money supply, which is outside my purview.” Tom was now sounding testy. “I was trying to make a point about these airport searches. Because in the olden days, meaning two months ago, you could take what was, by popular conceit, delusional or otherwise, your money out of the country or back in again, as much and as often as you wanted. So I don’t see why y’all are getting het up about these terrible, criminal businessmen”—tear-ble, crimnal bidnessmin—“who have the gall to try and transport their own cash overseas, when in October the same behavior was perfectly legit.”

“I thought there was a limit,” Avery said. “Like on those Customs forms—”

“Lotta people misunderstand that, hon,” Tom said. “Before Alvarado’s Renunciation Address, you only had to report carrying over ten thousand dollars on a FinCEN 105. So long as you declared it, carrying more than ten grand over the border wasn’t illegal, and they sure as hell didn’t take it away from you, either.”

“Hold it—are they confiscating the cash at the airport?” his wife Belle asked in 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.”