It was early 2014, and gold's bull market was almost at the thirteenth anniversary point. Hugh Mueller had gotten a junior analyst's job, in 1998, with the now-huge Japteus gold fund. He was promoted to fund manager in 2006, over the heads of more senior analysts who didn't care. They were happier at their desks and staying private investors.
Mueller was now the officially recognized #1 manager of a large fund for 2013. He had arrived. The money was pouring in faster than he could invest it. He was no longer shunned; he was popular. His gold niche was no longer laughed at; he was close to revered. Everything was going much better than he could have reasonably expected. The big guys - the Masters of the Universe - were welcoming he and his wife into their circle.
He was triumphant - but what bubbled up from his psyche jarringly clashed with the fame bestowed upon him. Hugh Mueller was becoming a nervous wreck, now enslaved by the fear of losing it all....
[Warning: This story's for adults. There's one graphic bit.]
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Bail-Out
“You’re fired.”
It's said more politely, and is often laced with euphemism and even humouring. There are a hundred ways to get it across. Still, those hundred variants meant exactly the same thing:
“You’re fired.”
Hugh Mueller shook his head rapidly, to get those words out of his seared inner eye. The taxi still stopped, he could not get away. The foreboding words came from a restaurant, of all things. After blinking, and running two fingers across his forehead, he looked again and saw “Our fried chicken can’t be beat!” It was in the more modest, more picturesque part of the city he was passing though to get back from his interview. He had just been feted for running the #1 large fund of 2013. The interview went well; the interviewer had been congratulatory without being fawning. All of the questions were of the “how’d you do it?” variety. Standard for the winner.
He was the manager of the Japteus gold fund, had been since 2006. The return on the fund had actually been much better in 2009, but then the fund had been small. As knowledge of gold’s gains had spread, and the now-exploded deflation scare had turned into universal recognition of the inflation problem, the trickles into Japetus’ coffers has become a flood. With the press that the award had gotten, the flood had become an inundation.
Maybe that illusion had come from the taxi driver. Mueller had been using taxis regularly since late 1998, when he started off as an analyst. He had landed in the gold field by accident. Like so many of his peers, he had tried to hold himself up as a high-tech analyst. Having tried for the brass ring, he became familiar with the world of first, second and third interviews. He had garnered several first interviews, but only three seconds and one third. That one, he had blown because he was not technical enough. The firm was targeting the swelling accounts of programmers and Internet mavens, and wanted the tech equivalent of a detail man. He got beat out by someone whose MBA was about the same as his but had designed an HTML Webpage on the fly in the interview.
The offer from Japetus, in retrospect, was a lucky break. He had sent his résumé as part of a flood in the hopes that a scatter-shot approach would turn up some prospects. The name of the game was to collect several job offers from lacklustre companies, then use them as leverage in the interview process for the sought-after jobs. Dropping the fact that one had a job already waiting, made one more desirable to the interviewer: such was the game plan. It had worked, but not enough for young Hugh Mueller. The cream of the crop went to the top, and he wasn’t among the top. Nor could he make up for it by any greater technical skill than familiarity with the jargon.
Japetus, around since 1978, had been looking for a new junior analyst to fill the shoes of a retiree: that was the only way they could justify a new hire back then. Having been thwarted, Hugh had accepted the offer as a way of marking time. Sure, gold had been dead, but he had thought he could put in time and draw a salary in a beaten-down job that seemingly had no future. Nine-to-five’ ing would free up his time in the evening to bone up on HTML, Perl, and the then-new language PHP. That way, he could jump back into the big arena and grab one of the plums.
Six months on the job had cured him of that desire. The CEO of the fund-management company, a cynical but cheery old gent by the name of Maurice Perrin, had walked him through what a bubble was and how it got people deranged. By May of 1999, young Mueller was convinced that the Internet was a bubble. He saying so to his friends, which Mr. Perrin also recommended, had hazed him into the right attitude for his future life. They thought he was nuts. Thankfully, they had no opinion on gold that would have compounded his alienation. That came later.
When the bubble broke in March of 2000, Mueller was already devoting his evenings to pick up what he could on gold-mining geology. While on the job, the easiest part for him to learn was hedging; it had the closest tie to what he had learned in business school. When he had enthused about methodologies to forecast earnings, his older colleagues smiled at him. “Find out what the price of gold will be and then plug it into your crystal ball.”
He found out that even calculating intrinsic value was problematical. Thus hazed, he adapted himself to the more standard metric: gold companies' net asset values at present gold prices. The custom of taking the mean of the average gold prices over the last three years, standard for exploration companies' economic assessments and feasibility studies, he went along with because there was nothing better.
2001 was the year that gold took off and tech cratered. Mueller was very glad he hadn’t got the dream job he had sought so eagerly three years prior. It would have been two years of glory and one year of sweating, followed by a canning and possibly an indictment. As the stocks he watched took off, he found his friends starting to joke about his field. He heard that, as a gold man, he should put his salary into a retreat a hundred miles from nowhere and stock up with food and guns. He heard veteran gold men he respected, some he admired, being described as mentally pathological. His alienation became complete; soon, his only friends were in the gold world. Banded together like outcasts all over the world, they bonded by reminding each other of the inevitable fate of fiat currencies everywhere.
Further adding to his newfound clannishness was the sight of Japetus piling up double-digit gain after double-digit gain – and no-one caring. 2001 saw a percentage gain that any other fund manager would kill for. Japetus managed $739 million in May of 2001. May of 2002, long after 2001’s gain of 109% was published and even made the base of advertisements, its assets under management were $932 million. Not only was there hardly any new business, but also many of the clients had cashed out some. Some, he had found out, had cited the work of someone by the name of Robert Prechter, an Elliott Wave specialist.
How long ago that was! Back then, when he had treated himself to a taxi, all he had gotten were blank stares and discussions of basketball games by the drivers. Content in his safe subculture, Mueller knew well what his new friends meant when they flipped off about the “sheeple.”
This year, the driver had known who he was on sight. Rather than fawning, he was bending Mueller’s ear about the opportunities in exploration stocks. “Rowntree Gold!” he enthused through his rounded black moustache. “Symbol R-W-G. RTG was taken, you see.
“Around fifty cents two years ago. Now? It’s more than eight bucks! A guy I know, he put his life saving into it when the explorers sold off. He sold it at seven, and now owns three cabs. There’s room for you to get in. You see, he couldn’t believe his good luck so he got nerves and sold. Never had the taste for it; he’s old-fashioned. I got 10,000 shares, and I tell you: twenty-five, easy. Fifty’s not out of line.”
Turning off his mouth, the driver’s black eyes saw an oddly nervous man in a two thousand dollar suit. It was the same guy: small pot belly, medium height, a full head of straight brown hair neatly coiffed, roundish face, thin eyebrows, fashionable small square glasses, light blue silk shirt. The same guy he had seen on those podcast interviews, excerpted from the business channel. The same guy he had read being quoted all the time. The same guy, on the top of the world, sweating as if it were a seventeen-year-old noob behind the wheel. “Hey, what’s it with you? I been driving twenty years, and I haven’t had an accident!”
The vision was still dogging Mueller as he rose up the elevator to the twelfth floor. The new building, where Japetus had relocated in 2009, was the opposite of nondescript. Thanks to the ’08 crisis, the firm had gotten a good deal on a full-floor suite in a skyscraper that the boys would have laughed at back when gold started its magnificent run. When Mueller had become a full analyst, there were only four others. Now, there were thirteen and two interns. He had been amazed at the number of résumés that had come in for those two positions. Back in 1998, there had only been two other competitors for the slot he got. Now, he had to wade through hundreds for only two unpaid internships.
The first intern, Dalia Mather, was in charge of reviewing the exploration stocks’ net asset values. The second, Adam Downie, was the analysts’ dogsbody. Mueller had asked Dalia to run through Japetus’ holdings, tabulate the net asset value per share of each, and compute a weighted average giving the net asset value per unit of the fund. It now boasted assets of more than $27 billion.
She was a dark-haired neat young woman who was in for the summer. Not much shorter than him, nature had blessed her with a small upturned nose that complemented her dark fine features. She would return to a final year of study in one of the best business schools in the country. Her future was assured, and she was convinced the future was in gold. Her suits were pedestrian, her grooming was tasteful, her self-confidence was Ivy-League élite, her manner was upbeat. Smiling as she brought the figures into the office, she chirped that the premium over the companies’ net asset value said that gold wouldn’t be long at $3,000.
Feeling his chest tighten, Mueller asked her if she had comped it out.
“Yep,” she answered bright-eyed. “Everything works out if gold goes to $4,800. Give it a year or so and we’ll be there.”
His chest pain gone, he found he became a zombie. Now detached, he saw and felt himself thanking her and exchanging pleasantries. When she left, he turned back to his work and ran though the list. Stock after stock, showing premiums over net asset values that were way out of whack.
The zombie that was him got through the day. The earlier urge of his eyes to clutch randomly at his surroundings was gone. Walking around the workstation-filled main office, with quasi-office cubicles for each analyst, he spent quality time interfacing with them. Most treated him with deference and respect. Egon, Wayne, Karl and Seth – the old boys who had been there when Mueller had joined – winked at him. All of them were older, and all had genially acceded to him being the catbird kid. They didn’t mind because they preferred staying in the shadows, and everyone knew that the big boss was really in charge. All of them left at 5:00, which none of the new kids did. Preferring the freedom of the private investor, they played their retirement accounts in a manner that would get them charged and run out of the business had they been fund managers. Wayne’s and Seth’s net worth were higher than Meuller’s.
After the interfacing was done, Egon and Wayne looked at each other. Something had seemed wrong with the kid. After conversing for thirty seconds, they figured it was the interview. Part of the poor kid’s job was to be a come-on for the sheeple: he had to be in the throes of the jitters. The newer employees noticed nothing wrong, chalking up their boss’ remoteness to overwork.
Still in zombie mode, when his day was done, Mueller greeted his kids while they were getting ready for bed; it was that late when he finally got to his two-story condo. Both Scotty and Freddie were enrolled in the Hartley School, not the best in the city but close.
At first, his wife Gloria though he was tired. It has been a great day for him, and national recognition can be stressful sometimes. After the kids had gone to bed, her gray eyes looked concernedly at his glassy ones. “You’re tired,” she stated.
Jolting out of his zombie persona, he blurted out: “No, not yet - but I’m going to be.”
Surprised, she didn’t know until he had unburdened himself that he had heard:
“You’re fired.”
Gloria was a compact, red-haired woman who had been a college libertarian. She was seven years younger than her Hugh, who had went gaga over her when she had met him at a gold seminar. She was wasp-waisted, attractive, studious, and genuinely interested in gold. She didn’t know that a large part of her appeal was based in she respecting what every other gal looked blankly at. She was an attractive, young, available woman who liked what far too many others had laughed off. They were married a year after they first met, on June 15, 2002. The ides of June.
She had gone straight from college to homemaking, which used to bother her. Now, it didn’t. She had fit well into the tight-knit gold world, and she was fitting in to the larger and more exclusive world her high-flying husband had brought her to. The stories she had heard from the other wives in their new circle didn’t register: she was sure that her husband didn’t even think of other women except as people. Unlike the other wives.
The celebration she had planned, a catered lobster dinner, he gnawed through as he mulled over what he had gone through after the interview. His eyes were jerking to the dishes, cutlery, decorative candles and even the pattern in the tablecloth. In order for the stocks Japetus held to be fairly valued, gold would have to go to almost $5,000. That price came close to discounting an outright return to the gold standard. Money was flooding in, hot money that expected another doubling in 2014. He was almost certain to get a raise, which would push his annual compensation into seven figures. All he had to do was to increase his beta relative to gold. Surely, $5,000 was inevitable – wasn’t it?
After the dinner and talk, his wife had gone from proud to concerned to confused. She had seen him stressed, but never like this. She found herself gently suggesting that he see a therapist. Something was wrong: on the day he should be triumphant, his self-esteem was worrisomely low.
“I’ll be in bed shortly,” he said when 10:00 approached. Nodding, sadly, she went upstairs to the master bedroom – leaving him to face the sweating and chest-tightening that his good fortune had bestowed upon him. Sure, he could take on more risk. Surely, gold had a long way to go. Even the taxi drivers were making money hand over fist!
Scuttling to his home office, the second room on the right in the hall tastefully hidden from the monstrously sized main vestibule/living room/dining room, he looked up Rowntree Gold on the computer. It was located an hour’s drive away from Skern River, an old mining town that had once again visited by good fortune. Three mines were within commuting distance of the town. Jerking up another browser window, he entered the search string “Skern River Real Estate.” Robotically going through the listings, he found houses like the one he had grown up in for between $300,000 and $400,000 – far less for the down payment on his condo. It wasn’t a penthouse suite, but it was contained in number seventeen on a list of the twenty most exclusive developments in the city. He had seen so in a magazine.
Breathing heavily, he set down to his chore of beta adjustment. Japetus had gone cloud, so he could access the virtual part of his office from his desk and chair at home. He had finished the calculations at 2:00. The shuffle he planned would boost Japetus’ gold beta from 1.48 to 2.53. Sure, it was risky, but what other way could he expect to keep the flood of new money happy? How else could he prevent the excited money from becoming angry money, which would gut the fund he ran? Didn’t he owe it to the firm to squeeze as much out of the bull market as was possible? Sure, it meant the fund would be jacked up from 19% exploration issues to about 45%, but that’s what everyone wanted, didn’t they?
Looking back at the house listings, he felt himself jerkily printing out a few. Skern River was a six-hour drive. He could go down, get in his BMW, drive up, and arrive in time for the real-estate agents to be open. Yes, that was the way out. He wouldn’t be fired at all – he’ll quit! Yes, that way was freedom.
The payments on the condo were onerous, but it would sell quickly. He could have his home sold in a week, and net more than enough to buy a Skern River house with cash. His kids would go to the local school – they would have to be pulled out of Hartley – and his wife would fit in fine. Maybe they’d homeschool; maybe he himself would teach them. Neither he nor Gloria had hailed from the august circle they frequented now, but they were accepted now. He was a big fund manager, whose name and face frequented the business media. They would be accepted easily in the more relaxed ambience of Skern River. There were a lot of miners, and he had worked in gold for his entire working life. They’d get along, he told himself.
With that desire, which he thought was a plan, Mueller walked to the vestibule and got his coat and street shoes from the closet. Checking to make sure he had his wallet and keys, he numbly walked out to the elevator that would take him to the parking garage and freedom.
Only a few lonely trucks passed him on the opposite side of the road over the last five minutes as he sped along the two-lane highway, settled into the leather of his chair. Even when the road was straight enough for his high beams to vanish off into flatness, he could see no cars moving in his direction. Except for those lonely trucks, he was blessedly alone. His driving became more and more automatic as he approached the freedom of Skern River.
He knew he would have to crack down once he made the offer on a home like the one he had grown up in. Gloria hailed from a similar neighbourhood; she could lose her new-found vanity. Wasn’t that it? Vanity? Who did they really think they were? Who did his new-found buddies, several of which commanded assets of more than $100 billion for companies that owned dozens of funds, think they were? Flotsam, on a bull market. Nothing more.
That subject disposed of, he drifted back to the memories of the good old days when his world was cozy and small. Sure, Japetus had been looked down on; that had hurt at first. But weren’t all pioneers? They were the ones with the lock on the future; they could see the turmoil and chaos the financial world would go though long before everyone had stopped laughing at him. The gold word was tight-knit and safe. Back in the days when an internship would have been unfilled: those were the good old days. The days when believers in gold were the vanguard, which more than made up for the empty dollars scooped up by the sheeple. Most of his former friends were making more than he at that point, but he was happier because he was with the future. Yes: those conformist dullards, who would be flapping around like oil-drenched wildfowl when the awful days of reckoning hit them, would finally see. O laugh now, ye who shall weep!
Why did so many now want to invest with him? He had seen them, buttonholing him in the upscale malls he went to with Gloria and the kids. Some of them looked as if they wanted his autograph, yet they were the ones who had laughed at him in those happy days when gold had turned majestically around. Blinking, feeling as if his eyelids had weights attached to them, he noticed that his car had begun weaving a little. He was driving ten below the speed limit, uncharacteristically slowly for him. It was now 4:27 AM.
Skern River: that was freedom. Or at least it seemed to be.
The lights in the opposite lane went from cheery to painful. Blinking robotically, Mueller realized that he had left his high beams on. Flicking the left lever, he was rewarded with the other lights diminishing to pleasant.
A hardened feeling then overcame him. Those new investors, they were really speculators. They wanted to make a quick buck. With the clarity of someone who claimed a psychic experience, Mueller was sure that they were the same people who made fun of him. Now they wanted a guaranteed double with him as the point man. For the first time on his ride, he considered turning around and going home.
Yes, it would be easy to shoulder that additional risk. He could warn the old boys, just by emphasizing the popularity of Japtus. They would see what he was doing. They knew what it meant when the sheeple flocked around you. Even if they didn’t, he could make them clue in otherwise. As for the rest, they deserved what they got once the great bull market was over. Like lemmings, they were just answering their fated call.
Now blinking loggily, he saw that he was in the middle of the road. Yes, his fine expensive BMW was straddling the single broken yellow line. His body now bunched up by his new line of thought, he concluded that he had every right to both lanes. Wasn’t he friend and neighbour to the Masters of the Universe? Weren’t people who used to scorn him now begging for his attention? He saw the image of the young, neat, educated, well-made-up, smiling Dalia Mather and suddenly felt a rush of lust through his loins. He was a Master of the Universe!
Moving to the right lane, although shakily, he let his concentration drift towards his intern’s “continuing education.” Yes, it looked like his fantasy of seeing her dark, shiny hair cover her whimpering head as her breasts rubbed against his desk was keeping him awake and energized. Deciding that he could drive like the best of them, he pumped down the accelerator until his speed was twenty above the limit.
The transport truck coming around the curve bothered him not at all, as he was a god. Looking down at the tenting of his $2,000 suit, the highway horn from the vehicle barely registered as he gazed down in wonder at his mastery…
…and his flayed heart separated from his aorta as the front crumpled.
Gloria’s face was masklike underneath her tasteful black hat. Her kids’ veered from crushed to unbelieving. Neither had cried, yet.
The coffin had to be closed: the accident that had killed her husband and father of her two children had been that bad. In retrospect, it had been obvious that there was something very wrong with him. In lieu of flowers, Hugh Mueller’s funeral announcement had asked that donations be made to a bipolar disorder foundation.
The wake had been well attended. His new friends had been smoothly sad; his old friends were distraught. Hugh had not really known how liked and respected he had been in the gold world. Gloria counted eight CEOs of mining companies who had shown up. She had met some of his university friends. All of them were saddened, all regretful, and some looked guilty. Every one of them took the view that old Hugh had been a destined high flyer whose greatness had been tragically cut off. All of them had donated to the bipolar foundation, as it neatly explained the odd career path he took before his inevitable success enveloped him.
Maurice Perrin looked and acted as if he had lost a son. “If he had only come and talked with me!” Miserably, Gloria began counting the times he had said that: she was up to ten.
She had found comfort in the words of his gold-loving compadres. Her misery temporarily lifted when the new widow that was she heard that her husband had been head and shoulders above the sheeple. Her children would be raised with the vision of their father as a solid, calm, kind, modest, unflappable man who did not mind being laughed at.
It's said more politely, and is often laced with euphemism and even humouring. There are a hundred ways to get it across. Still, those hundred variants meant exactly the same thing:
“You’re fired.”
Hugh Mueller shook his head rapidly, to get those words out of his seared inner eye. The taxi still stopped, he could not get away. The foreboding words came from a restaurant, of all things. After blinking, and running two fingers across his forehead, he looked again and saw “Our fried chicken can’t be beat!” It was in the more modest, more picturesque part of the city he was passing though to get back from his interview. He had just been feted for running the #1 large fund of 2013. The interview went well; the interviewer had been congratulatory without being fawning. All of the questions were of the “how’d you do it?” variety. Standard for the winner.
He was the manager of the Japteus gold fund, had been since 2006. The return on the fund had actually been much better in 2009, but then the fund had been small. As knowledge of gold’s gains had spread, and the now-exploded deflation scare had turned into universal recognition of the inflation problem, the trickles into Japetus’ coffers has become a flood. With the press that the award had gotten, the flood had become an inundation.
Maybe that illusion had come from the taxi driver. Mueller had been using taxis regularly since late 1998, when he started off as an analyst. He had landed in the gold field by accident. Like so many of his peers, he had tried to hold himself up as a high-tech analyst. Having tried for the brass ring, he became familiar with the world of first, second and third interviews. He had garnered several first interviews, but only three seconds and one third. That one, he had blown because he was not technical enough. The firm was targeting the swelling accounts of programmers and Internet mavens, and wanted the tech equivalent of a detail man. He got beat out by someone whose MBA was about the same as his but had designed an HTML Webpage on the fly in the interview.
The offer from Japetus, in retrospect, was a lucky break. He had sent his résumé as part of a flood in the hopes that a scatter-shot approach would turn up some prospects. The name of the game was to collect several job offers from lacklustre companies, then use them as leverage in the interview process for the sought-after jobs. Dropping the fact that one had a job already waiting, made one more desirable to the interviewer: such was the game plan. It had worked, but not enough for young Hugh Mueller. The cream of the crop went to the top, and he wasn’t among the top. Nor could he make up for it by any greater technical skill than familiarity with the jargon.
Japetus, around since 1978, had been looking for a new junior analyst to fill the shoes of a retiree: that was the only way they could justify a new hire back then. Having been thwarted, Hugh had accepted the offer as a way of marking time. Sure, gold had been dead, but he had thought he could put in time and draw a salary in a beaten-down job that seemingly had no future. Nine-to-five’ ing would free up his time in the evening to bone up on HTML, Perl, and the then-new language PHP. That way, he could jump back into the big arena and grab one of the plums.
Six months on the job had cured him of that desire. The CEO of the fund-management company, a cynical but cheery old gent by the name of Maurice Perrin, had walked him through what a bubble was and how it got people deranged. By May of 1999, young Mueller was convinced that the Internet was a bubble. He saying so to his friends, which Mr. Perrin also recommended, had hazed him into the right attitude for his future life. They thought he was nuts. Thankfully, they had no opinion on gold that would have compounded his alienation. That came later.
When the bubble broke in March of 2000, Mueller was already devoting his evenings to pick up what he could on gold-mining geology. While on the job, the easiest part for him to learn was hedging; it had the closest tie to what he had learned in business school. When he had enthused about methodologies to forecast earnings, his older colleagues smiled at him. “Find out what the price of gold will be and then plug it into your crystal ball.”
He found out that even calculating intrinsic value was problematical. Thus hazed, he adapted himself to the more standard metric: gold companies' net asset values at present gold prices. The custom of taking the mean of the average gold prices over the last three years, standard for exploration companies' economic assessments and feasibility studies, he went along with because there was nothing better.
2001 was the year that gold took off and tech cratered. Mueller was very glad he hadn’t got the dream job he had sought so eagerly three years prior. It would have been two years of glory and one year of sweating, followed by a canning and possibly an indictment. As the stocks he watched took off, he found his friends starting to joke about his field. He heard that, as a gold man, he should put his salary into a retreat a hundred miles from nowhere and stock up with food and guns. He heard veteran gold men he respected, some he admired, being described as mentally pathological. His alienation became complete; soon, his only friends were in the gold world. Banded together like outcasts all over the world, they bonded by reminding each other of the inevitable fate of fiat currencies everywhere.
Further adding to his newfound clannishness was the sight of Japetus piling up double-digit gain after double-digit gain – and no-one caring. 2001 saw a percentage gain that any other fund manager would kill for. Japetus managed $739 million in May of 2001. May of 2002, long after 2001’s gain of 109% was published and even made the base of advertisements, its assets under management were $932 million. Not only was there hardly any new business, but also many of the clients had cashed out some. Some, he had found out, had cited the work of someone by the name of Robert Prechter, an Elliott Wave specialist.
How long ago that was! Back then, when he had treated himself to a taxi, all he had gotten were blank stares and discussions of basketball games by the drivers. Content in his safe subculture, Mueller knew well what his new friends meant when they flipped off about the “sheeple.”
This year, the driver had known who he was on sight. Rather than fawning, he was bending Mueller’s ear about the opportunities in exploration stocks. “Rowntree Gold!” he enthused through his rounded black moustache. “Symbol R-W-G. RTG was taken, you see.
“Around fifty cents two years ago. Now? It’s more than eight bucks! A guy I know, he put his life saving into it when the explorers sold off. He sold it at seven, and now owns three cabs. There’s room for you to get in. You see, he couldn’t believe his good luck so he got nerves and sold. Never had the taste for it; he’s old-fashioned. I got 10,000 shares, and I tell you: twenty-five, easy. Fifty’s not out of line.”
Turning off his mouth, the driver’s black eyes saw an oddly nervous man in a two thousand dollar suit. It was the same guy: small pot belly, medium height, a full head of straight brown hair neatly coiffed, roundish face, thin eyebrows, fashionable small square glasses, light blue silk shirt. The same guy he had seen on those podcast interviews, excerpted from the business channel. The same guy he had read being quoted all the time. The same guy, on the top of the world, sweating as if it were a seventeen-year-old noob behind the wheel. “Hey, what’s it with you? I been driving twenty years, and I haven’t had an accident!”
The vision was still dogging Mueller as he rose up the elevator to the twelfth floor. The new building, where Japetus had relocated in 2009, was the opposite of nondescript. Thanks to the ’08 crisis, the firm had gotten a good deal on a full-floor suite in a skyscraper that the boys would have laughed at back when gold started its magnificent run. When Mueller had become a full analyst, there were only four others. Now, there were thirteen and two interns. He had been amazed at the number of résumés that had come in for those two positions. Back in 1998, there had only been two other competitors for the slot he got. Now, he had to wade through hundreds for only two unpaid internships.
The first intern, Dalia Mather, was in charge of reviewing the exploration stocks’ net asset values. The second, Adam Downie, was the analysts’ dogsbody. Mueller had asked Dalia to run through Japetus’ holdings, tabulate the net asset value per share of each, and compute a weighted average giving the net asset value per unit of the fund. It now boasted assets of more than $27 billion.
She was a dark-haired neat young woman who was in for the summer. Not much shorter than him, nature had blessed her with a small upturned nose that complemented her dark fine features. She would return to a final year of study in one of the best business schools in the country. Her future was assured, and she was convinced the future was in gold. Her suits were pedestrian, her grooming was tasteful, her self-confidence was Ivy-League élite, her manner was upbeat. Smiling as she brought the figures into the office, she chirped that the premium over the companies’ net asset value said that gold wouldn’t be long at $3,000.
Feeling his chest tighten, Mueller asked her if she had comped it out.
“Yep,” she answered bright-eyed. “Everything works out if gold goes to $4,800. Give it a year or so and we’ll be there.”
His chest pain gone, he found he became a zombie. Now detached, he saw and felt himself thanking her and exchanging pleasantries. When she left, he turned back to his work and ran though the list. Stock after stock, showing premiums over net asset values that were way out of whack.
The zombie that was him got through the day. The earlier urge of his eyes to clutch randomly at his surroundings was gone. Walking around the workstation-filled main office, with quasi-office cubicles for each analyst, he spent quality time interfacing with them. Most treated him with deference and respect. Egon, Wayne, Karl and Seth – the old boys who had been there when Mueller had joined – winked at him. All of them were older, and all had genially acceded to him being the catbird kid. They didn’t mind because they preferred staying in the shadows, and everyone knew that the big boss was really in charge. All of them left at 5:00, which none of the new kids did. Preferring the freedom of the private investor, they played their retirement accounts in a manner that would get them charged and run out of the business had they been fund managers. Wayne’s and Seth’s net worth were higher than Meuller’s.
After the interfacing was done, Egon and Wayne looked at each other. Something had seemed wrong with the kid. After conversing for thirty seconds, they figured it was the interview. Part of the poor kid’s job was to be a come-on for the sheeple: he had to be in the throes of the jitters. The newer employees noticed nothing wrong, chalking up their boss’ remoteness to overwork.
Still in zombie mode, when his day was done, Mueller greeted his kids while they were getting ready for bed; it was that late when he finally got to his two-story condo. Both Scotty and Freddie were enrolled in the Hartley School, not the best in the city but close.
At first, his wife Gloria though he was tired. It has been a great day for him, and national recognition can be stressful sometimes. After the kids had gone to bed, her gray eyes looked concernedly at his glassy ones. “You’re tired,” she stated.
Jolting out of his zombie persona, he blurted out: “No, not yet - but I’m going to be.”
Surprised, she didn’t know until he had unburdened himself that he had heard:
“You’re fired.”
Gloria was a compact, red-haired woman who had been a college libertarian. She was seven years younger than her Hugh, who had went gaga over her when she had met him at a gold seminar. She was wasp-waisted, attractive, studious, and genuinely interested in gold. She didn’t know that a large part of her appeal was based in she respecting what every other gal looked blankly at. She was an attractive, young, available woman who liked what far too many others had laughed off. They were married a year after they first met, on June 15, 2002. The ides of June.
She had gone straight from college to homemaking, which used to bother her. Now, it didn’t. She had fit well into the tight-knit gold world, and she was fitting in to the larger and more exclusive world her high-flying husband had brought her to. The stories she had heard from the other wives in their new circle didn’t register: she was sure that her husband didn’t even think of other women except as people. Unlike the other wives.
The celebration she had planned, a catered lobster dinner, he gnawed through as he mulled over what he had gone through after the interview. His eyes were jerking to the dishes, cutlery, decorative candles and even the pattern in the tablecloth. In order for the stocks Japetus held to be fairly valued, gold would have to go to almost $5,000. That price came close to discounting an outright return to the gold standard. Money was flooding in, hot money that expected another doubling in 2014. He was almost certain to get a raise, which would push his annual compensation into seven figures. All he had to do was to increase his beta relative to gold. Surely, $5,000 was inevitable – wasn’t it?
After the dinner and talk, his wife had gone from proud to concerned to confused. She had seen him stressed, but never like this. She found herself gently suggesting that he see a therapist. Something was wrong: on the day he should be triumphant, his self-esteem was worrisomely low.
“I’ll be in bed shortly,” he said when 10:00 approached. Nodding, sadly, she went upstairs to the master bedroom – leaving him to face the sweating and chest-tightening that his good fortune had bestowed upon him. Sure, he could take on more risk. Surely, gold had a long way to go. Even the taxi drivers were making money hand over fist!
Scuttling to his home office, the second room on the right in the hall tastefully hidden from the monstrously sized main vestibule/living room/dining room, he looked up Rowntree Gold on the computer. It was located an hour’s drive away from Skern River, an old mining town that had once again visited by good fortune. Three mines were within commuting distance of the town. Jerking up another browser window, he entered the search string “Skern River Real Estate.” Robotically going through the listings, he found houses like the one he had grown up in for between $300,000 and $400,000 – far less for the down payment on his condo. It wasn’t a penthouse suite, but it was contained in number seventeen on a list of the twenty most exclusive developments in the city. He had seen so in a magazine.
Breathing heavily, he set down to his chore of beta adjustment. Japetus had gone cloud, so he could access the virtual part of his office from his desk and chair at home. He had finished the calculations at 2:00. The shuffle he planned would boost Japetus’ gold beta from 1.48 to 2.53. Sure, it was risky, but what other way could he expect to keep the flood of new money happy? How else could he prevent the excited money from becoming angry money, which would gut the fund he ran? Didn’t he owe it to the firm to squeeze as much out of the bull market as was possible? Sure, it meant the fund would be jacked up from 19% exploration issues to about 45%, but that’s what everyone wanted, didn’t they?
Looking back at the house listings, he felt himself jerkily printing out a few. Skern River was a six-hour drive. He could go down, get in his BMW, drive up, and arrive in time for the real-estate agents to be open. Yes, that was the way out. He wouldn’t be fired at all – he’ll quit! Yes, that way was freedom.
The payments on the condo were onerous, but it would sell quickly. He could have his home sold in a week, and net more than enough to buy a Skern River house with cash. His kids would go to the local school – they would have to be pulled out of Hartley – and his wife would fit in fine. Maybe they’d homeschool; maybe he himself would teach them. Neither he nor Gloria had hailed from the august circle they frequented now, but they were accepted now. He was a big fund manager, whose name and face frequented the business media. They would be accepted easily in the more relaxed ambience of Skern River. There were a lot of miners, and he had worked in gold for his entire working life. They’d get along, he told himself.
With that desire, which he thought was a plan, Mueller walked to the vestibule and got his coat and street shoes from the closet. Checking to make sure he had his wallet and keys, he numbly walked out to the elevator that would take him to the parking garage and freedom.
Only a few lonely trucks passed him on the opposite side of the road over the last five minutes as he sped along the two-lane highway, settled into the leather of his chair. Even when the road was straight enough for his high beams to vanish off into flatness, he could see no cars moving in his direction. Except for those lonely trucks, he was blessedly alone. His driving became more and more automatic as he approached the freedom of Skern River.
He knew he would have to crack down once he made the offer on a home like the one he had grown up in. Gloria hailed from a similar neighbourhood; she could lose her new-found vanity. Wasn’t that it? Vanity? Who did they really think they were? Who did his new-found buddies, several of which commanded assets of more than $100 billion for companies that owned dozens of funds, think they were? Flotsam, on a bull market. Nothing more.
That subject disposed of, he drifted back to the memories of the good old days when his world was cozy and small. Sure, Japetus had been looked down on; that had hurt at first. But weren’t all pioneers? They were the ones with the lock on the future; they could see the turmoil and chaos the financial world would go though long before everyone had stopped laughing at him. The gold word was tight-knit and safe. Back in the days when an internship would have been unfilled: those were the good old days. The days when believers in gold were the vanguard, which more than made up for the empty dollars scooped up by the sheeple. Most of his former friends were making more than he at that point, but he was happier because he was with the future. Yes: those conformist dullards, who would be flapping around like oil-drenched wildfowl when the awful days of reckoning hit them, would finally see. O laugh now, ye who shall weep!
Why did so many now want to invest with him? He had seen them, buttonholing him in the upscale malls he went to with Gloria and the kids. Some of them looked as if they wanted his autograph, yet they were the ones who had laughed at him in those happy days when gold had turned majestically around. Blinking, feeling as if his eyelids had weights attached to them, he noticed that his car had begun weaving a little. He was driving ten below the speed limit, uncharacteristically slowly for him. It was now 4:27 AM.
Skern River: that was freedom. Or at least it seemed to be.
The lights in the opposite lane went from cheery to painful. Blinking robotically, Mueller realized that he had left his high beams on. Flicking the left lever, he was rewarded with the other lights diminishing to pleasant.
A hardened feeling then overcame him. Those new investors, they were really speculators. They wanted to make a quick buck. With the clarity of someone who claimed a psychic experience, Mueller was sure that they were the same people who made fun of him. Now they wanted a guaranteed double with him as the point man. For the first time on his ride, he considered turning around and going home.
Yes, it would be easy to shoulder that additional risk. He could warn the old boys, just by emphasizing the popularity of Japtus. They would see what he was doing. They knew what it meant when the sheeple flocked around you. Even if they didn’t, he could make them clue in otherwise. As for the rest, they deserved what they got once the great bull market was over. Like lemmings, they were just answering their fated call.
Now blinking loggily, he saw that he was in the middle of the road. Yes, his fine expensive BMW was straddling the single broken yellow line. His body now bunched up by his new line of thought, he concluded that he had every right to both lanes. Wasn’t he friend and neighbour to the Masters of the Universe? Weren’t people who used to scorn him now begging for his attention? He saw the image of the young, neat, educated, well-made-up, smiling Dalia Mather and suddenly felt a rush of lust through his loins. He was a Master of the Universe!
Moving to the right lane, although shakily, he let his concentration drift towards his intern’s “continuing education.” Yes, it looked like his fantasy of seeing her dark, shiny hair cover her whimpering head as her breasts rubbed against his desk was keeping him awake and energized. Deciding that he could drive like the best of them, he pumped down the accelerator until his speed was twenty above the limit.
The transport truck coming around the curve bothered him not at all, as he was a god. Looking down at the tenting of his $2,000 suit, the highway horn from the vehicle barely registered as he gazed down in wonder at his mastery…
…and his flayed heart separated from his aorta as the front crumpled.
Gloria’s face was masklike underneath her tasteful black hat. Her kids’ veered from crushed to unbelieving. Neither had cried, yet.
The coffin had to be closed: the accident that had killed her husband and father of her two children had been that bad. In retrospect, it had been obvious that there was something very wrong with him. In lieu of flowers, Hugh Mueller’s funeral announcement had asked that donations be made to a bipolar disorder foundation.
The wake had been well attended. His new friends had been smoothly sad; his old friends were distraught. Hugh had not really known how liked and respected he had been in the gold world. Gloria counted eight CEOs of mining companies who had shown up. She had met some of his university friends. All of them were saddened, all regretful, and some looked guilty. Every one of them took the view that old Hugh had been a destined high flyer whose greatness had been tragically cut off. All of them had donated to the bipolar foundation, as it neatly explained the odd career path he took before his inevitable success enveloped him.
Maurice Perrin looked and acted as if he had lost a son. “If he had only come and talked with me!” Miserably, Gloria began counting the times he had said that: she was up to ten.
She had found comfort in the words of his gold-loving compadres. Her misery temporarily lifted when the new widow that was she heard that her husband had been head and shoulders above the sheeple. Her children would be raised with the vision of their father as a solid, calm, kind, modest, unflappable man who did not mind being laughed at.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Gryphon Mill
In the land of Wrilk, where gold was a magical metal which bestowed power, Grez plied his honorable trade. With his boy apprentice, Plud, the man was a gryphon catcher: an experienced master of his trade. Gryphons, although not easy to catch, carried gold in their gizzard that gave them power... and gave profit to the gryphon catcher. The right one made for a prize of a pet, for which nobility and gentry would pay in platinum.
Grez had indeed captured a prime specimen - prime enough to show to the King's Chancellor himself. It put up little resistance after being taken, and grew fond of Plud. That should have worried the old veteran...
Grez had indeed captured a prime specimen - prime enough to show to the King's Chancellor himself. It put up little resistance after being taken, and grew fond of Plud. That should have worried the old veteran...
Capture
Grez heard the struggling before he saw his full trap. He was a very experienced gryphon-catcher, having twenty-five years under his sash including apprenticeship. His own apprentice, Plud, was a new boy.
Unshaven, Grez had a fair bit of prosperity padding on him. Plud didn’t, as he was little more than a boy. Both were dressed in tunics that came down to the knee, held onto their bodies with coloured cloth belts denoting their status. Plud’s was plain yellow, as he was a mere apprentice. Grez’s was full red, as he was a master. The older man’s movements, as he snuck up to the trap, showed the litheness that was needed in the field. Plud’s were more pedestrian, but his lack of grace could be excused by the weight of the gryphon holder it was his duty to carry. That and the two satchels he had in his pockets, each filled with the powders of the trade.
The older man knew the land well, as it was his by right if not by formality. Yellow plants intermingled with green, indicating magic in the area. Granite outcroppings poked up above the foliage like the earth sending spies to oversee the surface creatures. Some of them had quartz, glittering in the air like welcome salt.
Looking back at the gangly youth, to see if he could keep up, Grez added: “Once you’re independent, this is the kind of place you look for. You’ll learn how to prospect along the way. If you become good, and the licensed prospectors concur, you’ll find a perfect place for a trap. Just remember: the gryphons aren’t smarter than us.”
Gauging the slump-shouldered boy’s tiredness, Grez decided that he had talked enough. “Now let’s get going. No need to be lazy.”
The trap itself was arranged in a small depression in the outcrop, which exposed lots of quartz speckled with yellowish pinpoints. It was fake gold, cunningly embedded in the crystal, which made for the perfect bait. Grez had needed weeks of work to arrange the earth and free stones so as to accept the hidden leg trap. Not only did there have to be a stout base, but also the whole foot-pad area had to look natural. It had been more than mule work: the area had to be crafted so that it looked hospitable for goldworms. Gryphons with gold were not smarter than humans, truly, but they were not dumber. Many a gryphon catcher had to shamefully hire himself out because he had been too hurried to build a proper trap. The gryphons did talk to each other.
Plud, sandy-haired and thin, struggled with the holder one last time as he put it down. His blue eyes, normally wide, widened even more when he saw the creature breathing rapidly as its eagle head looked over at them. The boy was intimidated; the man was not.
Stepping forward, Grez snapped out his usual parley. “Gryphon, you are captured. I am Grez. If you have heard of me, then you know that I never let one escape. You can come willingly, in which case it will be easy, or you will be taken in irons.”
As he expected, the gryphon merely responded with a hostile hiss. Its eyes, settled into its eagle’s head, were baleful. Its head bobbed, sizing up the two-legged creature that had subjected it to the indignity of being held. It was not lacking in feathers on its head, chest, or its front claws. The rest of its body, tawny-haired, showed no mange. Luckily, Grez had managed to capture a healthy specimen. Its right rear leg, bloodied above the ankle by the trap, chafed again at its mechanical captor. This gryphon was a fighter. It would go for a good price.
The man, balanced on the balls of his feet, was still unintimidated. Turning dexterously around, despite his subcutaneous padding, he ordered the scared boy: “Plud! The powder, in your right pocket.” Although the youth was in the bloom of health, he was still a boy and had the scatterbrainedness of someone his age.
“Take your time; we have all day.” There was no sarcasm in the man’s voice.
Plud reached into his pocket slowly, with the air of a schoolboy memorizing a lesson. That, Grez did not like. Schoolboys have a habit of forgetting their lessons. It came with school, it came with boys. His apprentice was still too young to learn in a man’s way.
The boy’s fair and long-fingered hands grasped the powder and handed it over to the meatier, hirsute hands of his master. Grez took it from him and turned to the gryphon.
“I know you can talk! If you can fly, you can talk.”
Seeing the youngster as the more psychologically vulnerable of the two, the gryphon answered contemptuously. “Two thieves! That is all you are, thieves. You want my gold! Do you think I would give up my gold for you? My hard-won gold?”
Plud blinked at the talk. Having been only recently out of school, he had not acquired an insulating deafness. He was prepared to defend gryphon-catching to the creature as the honourable trade it was, but respect for his master silenced him.
Grez just smirked back. A self-reassuring gaze at the well-crafted simulation of a rock-eating goldworm's nest helped his confidence. “You, gryphon, are one to talk. I get my gold the same way you get yours.”
The creature’s eyes became filmy for a moment, and then cleared. Resting, it then sprung up in the air as its beating wings propelled it to the free blue sky. Thwarted by the trap, its eyes filmed again: this time, from the pain in its leg.
“It is of no use, gryphon.” Actually, it had been of use – to him. Its exertions made it need more oxygen; its breathing quickened.
Seeing the moment was right, Grez flipped a handful of slate-grey powder at its air-holes. Needing breath, the creature could not help but inhale the dormative power. After flailing some more in the trap, it fell to rest.
As quick as a billy goat, Grez stepped over the fallen body and withdrew a lancet. “Boy! The powder in your left pocket!” Plud, hurriedly but studied, scurried over and put the bag of lapis-blue powder in his master’s hand. Dipping the lancet in the powder, Grez leaned over his fallen prize and began cutting with quick, economical strokes. Few minutes went by before he withdrew a large gold nugget embalmed with gizzard fluid.
“A nice one,” he said to Plud as he held it out. “Almost a pound.” It was indeed pure gold. The noble metal, the stuff of magic.
The healing blue powder had begun its work, so the master gryphon catcher had to slice some more with the lancet before he could replace the larger nugget with one much smaller. The replacement being little more than an ounce, it conveyed enough power for the gryphon to talk and reason but not enough for it to fly.
“We were lucky,” he continued to his wide-eyed apprentice. “Had this creature possessed a few more ounces of gold than it had, it could have magicked its way out of the trap.”
The healing powder did its work long before the grey sleeping powder lost its potency. A fully healed gryphon woke up, after being hauled up from its side with much sweat and exertion by the duo. Putting on the leg holder beforehand had been a comparatively easy task. All four of its limbs were clamped securely in the holder, which helped to keep it from falling back on its side. Still, Plud had to exert some effort keeping it propped up.
Feeling ground under its legs after it resuscitated, it reflexively raised its feathered wings. It realized what happened to its gold when the feathers did not carry it up to the sky and freedom.
Plud had done his apprentice’s job well. Adjusting the holder to the size of the gryphon, almost man-size had it been rampant, he had frozen the creature’s legs in such a way that it was not uncomfortable but was immobile. To minimize the risk of value-cutting scars, its clamps were padded. The iron rods freezing the legs did not come near the body of their prize.
He had not yet acquired man’s muscles: the effort of rolling the gryphon was a strain on him. Grez did not help; he merely sat back and waited, dark eyes watchful as he took in his apprentice’s inefficiencies. The wings had lost a few feathers, but they were not damaged or hurt. This gryphon was indeed a strong specimen.
This time, its hiss crescendoed into a squawk as it tested the holder with its legs. “You wage war! I am trothed to –“
“Spare us,” Grez cut him off. “There is no treaty between our kinds. You were captured fairly, and you will indeed be trothed.”
The creature was not used to being treated peremptorily. It remained silent.
“Either you come quietly, or we carry you. The second way is slower, and you will not eat until we reach our homestead and your new home.”
To emphasize the point, his fleshy hand folded on a sharp sword that eased out of the scabbard that his sash held. “I’ve killed before, and I can kill again. At most, you will injure my apprentice with your free beak but it will cost you your life.”
Grez meant it. A gryphon wild enough to attack its captor was too wild for his purpose. Best to write it off before it cost him too much money for its food. The gold would make for enough profit.
Unshaven, Grez had a fair bit of prosperity padding on him. Plud didn’t, as he was little more than a boy. Both were dressed in tunics that came down to the knee, held onto their bodies with coloured cloth belts denoting their status. Plud’s was plain yellow, as he was a mere apprentice. Grez’s was full red, as he was a master. The older man’s movements, as he snuck up to the trap, showed the litheness that was needed in the field. Plud’s were more pedestrian, but his lack of grace could be excused by the weight of the gryphon holder it was his duty to carry. That and the two satchels he had in his pockets, each filled with the powders of the trade.
The older man knew the land well, as it was his by right if not by formality. Yellow plants intermingled with green, indicating magic in the area. Granite outcroppings poked up above the foliage like the earth sending spies to oversee the surface creatures. Some of them had quartz, glittering in the air like welcome salt.
Looking back at the gangly youth, to see if he could keep up, Grez added: “Once you’re independent, this is the kind of place you look for. You’ll learn how to prospect along the way. If you become good, and the licensed prospectors concur, you’ll find a perfect place for a trap. Just remember: the gryphons aren’t smarter than us.”
Gauging the slump-shouldered boy’s tiredness, Grez decided that he had talked enough. “Now let’s get going. No need to be lazy.”
The trap itself was arranged in a small depression in the outcrop, which exposed lots of quartz speckled with yellowish pinpoints. It was fake gold, cunningly embedded in the crystal, which made for the perfect bait. Grez had needed weeks of work to arrange the earth and free stones so as to accept the hidden leg trap. Not only did there have to be a stout base, but also the whole foot-pad area had to look natural. It had been more than mule work: the area had to be crafted so that it looked hospitable for goldworms. Gryphons with gold were not smarter than humans, truly, but they were not dumber. Many a gryphon catcher had to shamefully hire himself out because he had been too hurried to build a proper trap. The gryphons did talk to each other.
Plud, sandy-haired and thin, struggled with the holder one last time as he put it down. His blue eyes, normally wide, widened even more when he saw the creature breathing rapidly as its eagle head looked over at them. The boy was intimidated; the man was not.
Stepping forward, Grez snapped out his usual parley. “Gryphon, you are captured. I am Grez. If you have heard of me, then you know that I never let one escape. You can come willingly, in which case it will be easy, or you will be taken in irons.”
As he expected, the gryphon merely responded with a hostile hiss. Its eyes, settled into its eagle’s head, were baleful. Its head bobbed, sizing up the two-legged creature that had subjected it to the indignity of being held. It was not lacking in feathers on its head, chest, or its front claws. The rest of its body, tawny-haired, showed no mange. Luckily, Grez had managed to capture a healthy specimen. Its right rear leg, bloodied above the ankle by the trap, chafed again at its mechanical captor. This gryphon was a fighter. It would go for a good price.
The man, balanced on the balls of his feet, was still unintimidated. Turning dexterously around, despite his subcutaneous padding, he ordered the scared boy: “Plud! The powder, in your right pocket.” Although the youth was in the bloom of health, he was still a boy and had the scatterbrainedness of someone his age.
“Take your time; we have all day.” There was no sarcasm in the man’s voice.
Plud reached into his pocket slowly, with the air of a schoolboy memorizing a lesson. That, Grez did not like. Schoolboys have a habit of forgetting their lessons. It came with school, it came with boys. His apprentice was still too young to learn in a man’s way.
The boy’s fair and long-fingered hands grasped the powder and handed it over to the meatier, hirsute hands of his master. Grez took it from him and turned to the gryphon.
“I know you can talk! If you can fly, you can talk.”
Seeing the youngster as the more psychologically vulnerable of the two, the gryphon answered contemptuously. “Two thieves! That is all you are, thieves. You want my gold! Do you think I would give up my gold for you? My hard-won gold?”
Plud blinked at the talk. Having been only recently out of school, he had not acquired an insulating deafness. He was prepared to defend gryphon-catching to the creature as the honourable trade it was, but respect for his master silenced him.
Grez just smirked back. A self-reassuring gaze at the well-crafted simulation of a rock-eating goldworm's nest helped his confidence. “You, gryphon, are one to talk. I get my gold the same way you get yours.”
The creature’s eyes became filmy for a moment, and then cleared. Resting, it then sprung up in the air as its beating wings propelled it to the free blue sky. Thwarted by the trap, its eyes filmed again: this time, from the pain in its leg.
“It is of no use, gryphon.” Actually, it had been of use – to him. Its exertions made it need more oxygen; its breathing quickened.
Seeing the moment was right, Grez flipped a handful of slate-grey powder at its air-holes. Needing breath, the creature could not help but inhale the dormative power. After flailing some more in the trap, it fell to rest.
As quick as a billy goat, Grez stepped over the fallen body and withdrew a lancet. “Boy! The powder in your left pocket!” Plud, hurriedly but studied, scurried over and put the bag of lapis-blue powder in his master’s hand. Dipping the lancet in the powder, Grez leaned over his fallen prize and began cutting with quick, economical strokes. Few minutes went by before he withdrew a large gold nugget embalmed with gizzard fluid.
“A nice one,” he said to Plud as he held it out. “Almost a pound.” It was indeed pure gold. The noble metal, the stuff of magic.
The healing blue powder had begun its work, so the master gryphon catcher had to slice some more with the lancet before he could replace the larger nugget with one much smaller. The replacement being little more than an ounce, it conveyed enough power for the gryphon to talk and reason but not enough for it to fly.
“We were lucky,” he continued to his wide-eyed apprentice. “Had this creature possessed a few more ounces of gold than it had, it could have magicked its way out of the trap.”
The healing powder did its work long before the grey sleeping powder lost its potency. A fully healed gryphon woke up, after being hauled up from its side with much sweat and exertion by the duo. Putting on the leg holder beforehand had been a comparatively easy task. All four of its limbs were clamped securely in the holder, which helped to keep it from falling back on its side. Still, Plud had to exert some effort keeping it propped up.
Feeling ground under its legs after it resuscitated, it reflexively raised its feathered wings. It realized what happened to its gold when the feathers did not carry it up to the sky and freedom.
Plud had done his apprentice’s job well. Adjusting the holder to the size of the gryphon, almost man-size had it been rampant, he had frozen the creature’s legs in such a way that it was not uncomfortable but was immobile. To minimize the risk of value-cutting scars, its clamps were padded. The iron rods freezing the legs did not come near the body of their prize.
He had not yet acquired man’s muscles: the effort of rolling the gryphon was a strain on him. Grez did not help; he merely sat back and waited, dark eyes watchful as he took in his apprentice’s inefficiencies. The wings had lost a few feathers, but they were not damaged or hurt. This gryphon was indeed a strong specimen.
This time, its hiss crescendoed into a squawk as it tested the holder with its legs. “You wage war! I am trothed to –“
“Spare us,” Grez cut him off. “There is no treaty between our kinds. You were captured fairly, and you will indeed be trothed.”
The creature was not used to being treated peremptorily. It remained silent.
“Either you come quietly, or we carry you. The second way is slower, and you will not eat until we reach our homestead and your new home.”
To emphasize the point, his fleshy hand folded on a sharp sword that eased out of the scabbard that his sash held. “I’ve killed before, and I can kill again. At most, you will injure my apprentice with your free beak but it will cost you your life.”
Grez meant it. A gryphon wild enough to attack its captor was too wild for his purpose. Best to write it off before it cost him too much money for its food. The gold would make for enough profit.
Training
The creature went willingly, albeit grudgingly. It accepted the leash thrown around its neck, although not without protest. Not used to shuffling its taloned legs on the winding trail through shaded forest and by soothing brook, its movements still restrained by the bars now loosened in their binding clamps, it frequently stopped for rest. Every time, Grez gruffly reminded it that there would be no food until it reached its new home. The creature, made skittish by the crowded shade of limbs and leaves, just hissed. It saved its words.
Some catchers take food for themselves with them, so as to taunt their captives while journeying home. Grez did not, adjudging it unprofessional. He was used to the hunger as noon time turned into afternoon; Plud was not. The boys’ stomach growled audibly as they reached the roadway leading to the village. The gryphon noticed.
Looking forward at what appeared to be the weaker party, it said: “Why do you share my hunger?”
Looking into the creature’s hunger-shined eyes, Plud replied: “We will be sharing much for some time, until you find a new home. I will be taking care of you.”
“Yes, you will,” Grez affirmed laconically. Curiosity satisfied, the creature fell silent. It put up no resistance subsequently.
Take care of it, Plud did. The surplus gold was sold by his master to the quartermaster of the Magickers’ Guild, who always had use for gold. It was the magical metal in the land of Wrilk, and necessary for any aspirant magicker to consume. Like the gryphons, magickers had a special pouch in their bodies that accumulated gold. All men, and women, had such a pouch but the normals’ capacities were too small to hold enough gold to magick with. Boys and girls with a sufficiently large pouch, wchich was the appendix in humans, were swiftly put under a master magicker’s supervision.
Since gold was magic, it was not used as mere money; silver and platinum were. Since there were no silver or platinum worms, the metals had to be mined.
Grez was lucky. He had gotten seventy silver disks for the nugget of gryphon’s gold, even after he had shaved off an ounce to replace the nugget he had used to keep the creature’s reason and voice. Had it had more, a minimum of three ounces, it could have flown away. Any gryphon possessing a troy pound or more in its gold gizzard had access to other tricks. Such a gryphon could magick its way out of the standard leg trap, warn its fellows and destroy a good location. That misfortune made for hard, lean times for a gryphon catcher. It takes time to find a new spot where goldworms seemed likely to feed, one which was not spoken for by a fellow member of the guild or the Prospector’s Guild. The compromised spots were thrown to senior apprentices for practice. Although they had the right to become journeymen after seven years, many stayed under their masters until they could catch gryphons on their own.
Plud was far, far away from even hoping for his independence. The gryphon having been caught and installed in the backyard of Grez’s homestead, it was now the boy’s job to feed, watch, take care of and talk with the captive creature. Sensitive boys, despite they being slow learners in the necessary practical parts of the craft, were sought after by grizzled journeyman hoping to become masters. They had the necessary sensitivity to cajole the captured creatures into their new lives.
Grez himself had used humour when he was an understudy. One of his proudest moments as an apprentice had come when he had charmed a gryphon into chuckling at his antics. His own apprentice, on the other hand, had an earnestness about him that (Grez hoped) would induce the creature to trust him and (by extension) all humans.
Its grey feathers, where a mere lion would have a mane, still ruffled but less so as the boy worked his own quiet charm on the creature. His master supplied the money for food and the property for keeping. The apprentice supplied the watchfulness, the care, and the scut work needed to keep the gryphon fed, watered and cleaned. Yes, that included waste disposal.
Plud, heaving and sweating, dragged the dead sheep into the back courtyard where the gryphon waited. Seeing his assistant keeper stop, the gryphon waited until the human was a safe distance before tearing into the flesh. No more did it have to be threatened by the master’s sword: becoming accustomed to its new fate, it accepted captivity and the associated ease. Its artificial nest was the size of a large hut, and was well sheltered from the rain. The gryphon, as its blood-coated beak kept tearing into the mutton and long-healed throat gulped the nourishing meat down to its stomach, looked more relaxed as its belly filled. Soon to be overtaken by post-prandial restedness, it would avail itself of the nest.
The first walks outside the homestead were a party of three, Plud leading the gryphon and Grez following behind watchfully. At first, he followed the gryphon with sword at the ready. As it became more domesticated, in part because of his earnest apprentice’s sincere words, Grez started to sheathe his sword. Once he was satisfied that the creature was inured to its capture, his apprentice would walk it by himself. It would be then time for the walk that mattered most: into the opulence of the capitol. That walk would announce to the dignitaries therein that a properly domesticated gryphon was for sale as a pet.
The meal finished, which had cost his master close to a disk of silver, Plud’s breaths slowed as he himself rested. The domestication seemed to be going smoothly. As part of his schooling, he had heard horror stores about cunning gryphons that had pretended to be domesticated but lay in wait to slash the backs of gullible apprentices. The creature in his care did not show those signs. It kept eyeing him, but its knot-muscled legs did not tense up when it appeared to be docile. Its feathers did not rustle when it appeared to be quiescent. It did not bother to sharpen its claws on the smooth rock face of the walls that held it in. It had made some runs for those walls, all defeated by the lack of a rough spot for its talons to grip, but its scrabblings stopped when it realized that escape attempts were of no use.
The field itself was neat: it had to be, as Plud was charged to keep it so. The grass was green, not yellow, and the earth was unbroken by rocks. It made for soft padding for the gryphon. The nest was made of fine, restful, golden straw; the building that contained it was made of solid wood with a sturdy roof. Like most apprentices, Plud moved from sleeping in his skimpy bed in the master’s residence to sleeping with the gryphon once it need not be supervised with the sword. As his training told him, the best way to bond with a gryphon was to listen to its adventures in the air, wind and mountains.
Luckily for Plud, and more luckily for Grez, the gryphon was a good storyteller. Its belly full, it graced the air with anecdotes of its first goldworm find, its struggles with the dog-rats that were a staple foodstuff, and tales of a magical mountain-cut with a whole goldworm colony: the mother lode. The last sounded like a legend. The apprentice, although inexperienced, detected no signs that the creature missed its freedom.
Grez was even more pleased to learn that the creature was a fair listener as well. Plud, attempting to hold up his end of the conversations between boy and gryphon, told the creature about his schooling and how he had learned about gryphons from his friends in the woods. The creature snorted whenever it heard one of Plud’s friends’ canards; the boy just shrugged in return.
It had taken more than two months and about a third of Grez’s profit when he decided it was time for the creature to take the extended walk into the capitol. That was the big walk: it was like a dog breeder taking his prize to the show. As advertising, it would announce that a gryphon was for sale. Looking into the creature's clear tawny eyes, studying the thick beak that was pointed at him, scanning the sometimes rippling leonine body, Grez concluded that this was an especially fine specimen. It would bring real platinum from a rich and powerful man. Why, this gryphon – it was fit for a Prince! He even saw signs of the creature becoming affectionate with his apprentice, as friendly gryphons are wont to do. It rubbed its beak against the boy’s belly from time to time, and rested its feathered head on the boy’s back when Plud was lying supine in his master’s field.
There was only one point of doubt. Although affectionate, the gryphon had a standoffishness about it. At first, Grez thought it would make for a selling point: a noble beast for a noble master. Nobles paid more.
But, his instincts told him something was off. Lying awake in his own well-appointed bed, looking at the utilitarian needlepoints covering his windows, wondering if he finally had enough security to take a wife, he felt his gut tell him that there was something not quite right about his prize.
Failing to pin it down, he switched to plans for a stately promenade and drifted off to sleep.
Some catchers take food for themselves with them, so as to taunt their captives while journeying home. Grez did not, adjudging it unprofessional. He was used to the hunger as noon time turned into afternoon; Plud was not. The boys’ stomach growled audibly as they reached the roadway leading to the village. The gryphon noticed.
Looking forward at what appeared to be the weaker party, it said: “Why do you share my hunger?”
Looking into the creature’s hunger-shined eyes, Plud replied: “We will be sharing much for some time, until you find a new home. I will be taking care of you.”
“Yes, you will,” Grez affirmed laconically. Curiosity satisfied, the creature fell silent. It put up no resistance subsequently.
Take care of it, Plud did. The surplus gold was sold by his master to the quartermaster of the Magickers’ Guild, who always had use for gold. It was the magical metal in the land of Wrilk, and necessary for any aspirant magicker to consume. Like the gryphons, magickers had a special pouch in their bodies that accumulated gold. All men, and women, had such a pouch but the normals’ capacities were too small to hold enough gold to magick with. Boys and girls with a sufficiently large pouch, wchich was the appendix in humans, were swiftly put under a master magicker’s supervision.
Since gold was magic, it was not used as mere money; silver and platinum were. Since there were no silver or platinum worms, the metals had to be mined.
Grez was lucky. He had gotten seventy silver disks for the nugget of gryphon’s gold, even after he had shaved off an ounce to replace the nugget he had used to keep the creature’s reason and voice. Had it had more, a minimum of three ounces, it could have flown away. Any gryphon possessing a troy pound or more in its gold gizzard had access to other tricks. Such a gryphon could magick its way out of the standard leg trap, warn its fellows and destroy a good location. That misfortune made for hard, lean times for a gryphon catcher. It takes time to find a new spot where goldworms seemed likely to feed, one which was not spoken for by a fellow member of the guild or the Prospector’s Guild. The compromised spots were thrown to senior apprentices for practice. Although they had the right to become journeymen after seven years, many stayed under their masters until they could catch gryphons on their own.
Plud was far, far away from even hoping for his independence. The gryphon having been caught and installed in the backyard of Grez’s homestead, it was now the boy’s job to feed, watch, take care of and talk with the captive creature. Sensitive boys, despite they being slow learners in the necessary practical parts of the craft, were sought after by grizzled journeyman hoping to become masters. They had the necessary sensitivity to cajole the captured creatures into their new lives.
Grez himself had used humour when he was an understudy. One of his proudest moments as an apprentice had come when he had charmed a gryphon into chuckling at his antics. His own apprentice, on the other hand, had an earnestness about him that (Grez hoped) would induce the creature to trust him and (by extension) all humans.
Its grey feathers, where a mere lion would have a mane, still ruffled but less so as the boy worked his own quiet charm on the creature. His master supplied the money for food and the property for keeping. The apprentice supplied the watchfulness, the care, and the scut work needed to keep the gryphon fed, watered and cleaned. Yes, that included waste disposal.
Plud, heaving and sweating, dragged the dead sheep into the back courtyard where the gryphon waited. Seeing his assistant keeper stop, the gryphon waited until the human was a safe distance before tearing into the flesh. No more did it have to be threatened by the master’s sword: becoming accustomed to its new fate, it accepted captivity and the associated ease. Its artificial nest was the size of a large hut, and was well sheltered from the rain. The gryphon, as its blood-coated beak kept tearing into the mutton and long-healed throat gulped the nourishing meat down to its stomach, looked more relaxed as its belly filled. Soon to be overtaken by post-prandial restedness, it would avail itself of the nest.
The first walks outside the homestead were a party of three, Plud leading the gryphon and Grez following behind watchfully. At first, he followed the gryphon with sword at the ready. As it became more domesticated, in part because of his earnest apprentice’s sincere words, Grez started to sheathe his sword. Once he was satisfied that the creature was inured to its capture, his apprentice would walk it by himself. It would be then time for the walk that mattered most: into the opulence of the capitol. That walk would announce to the dignitaries therein that a properly domesticated gryphon was for sale as a pet.
The meal finished, which had cost his master close to a disk of silver, Plud’s breaths slowed as he himself rested. The domestication seemed to be going smoothly. As part of his schooling, he had heard horror stores about cunning gryphons that had pretended to be domesticated but lay in wait to slash the backs of gullible apprentices. The creature in his care did not show those signs. It kept eyeing him, but its knot-muscled legs did not tense up when it appeared to be docile. Its feathers did not rustle when it appeared to be quiescent. It did not bother to sharpen its claws on the smooth rock face of the walls that held it in. It had made some runs for those walls, all defeated by the lack of a rough spot for its talons to grip, but its scrabblings stopped when it realized that escape attempts were of no use.
The field itself was neat: it had to be, as Plud was charged to keep it so. The grass was green, not yellow, and the earth was unbroken by rocks. It made for soft padding for the gryphon. The nest was made of fine, restful, golden straw; the building that contained it was made of solid wood with a sturdy roof. Like most apprentices, Plud moved from sleeping in his skimpy bed in the master’s residence to sleeping with the gryphon once it need not be supervised with the sword. As his training told him, the best way to bond with a gryphon was to listen to its adventures in the air, wind and mountains.
Luckily for Plud, and more luckily for Grez, the gryphon was a good storyteller. Its belly full, it graced the air with anecdotes of its first goldworm find, its struggles with the dog-rats that were a staple foodstuff, and tales of a magical mountain-cut with a whole goldworm colony: the mother lode. The last sounded like a legend. The apprentice, although inexperienced, detected no signs that the creature missed its freedom.
Grez was even more pleased to learn that the creature was a fair listener as well. Plud, attempting to hold up his end of the conversations between boy and gryphon, told the creature about his schooling and how he had learned about gryphons from his friends in the woods. The creature snorted whenever it heard one of Plud’s friends’ canards; the boy just shrugged in return.
It had taken more than two months and about a third of Grez’s profit when he decided it was time for the creature to take the extended walk into the capitol. That was the big walk: it was like a dog breeder taking his prize to the show. As advertising, it would announce that a gryphon was for sale. Looking into the creature's clear tawny eyes, studying the thick beak that was pointed at him, scanning the sometimes rippling leonine body, Grez concluded that this was an especially fine specimen. It would bring real platinum from a rich and powerful man. Why, this gryphon – it was fit for a Prince! He even saw signs of the creature becoming affectionate with his apprentice, as friendly gryphons are wont to do. It rubbed its beak against the boy’s belly from time to time, and rested its feathered head on the boy’s back when Plud was lying supine in his master’s field.
There was only one point of doubt. Although affectionate, the gryphon had a standoffishness about it. At first, Grez thought it would make for a selling point: a noble beast for a noble master. Nobles paid more.
But, his instincts told him something was off. Lying awake in his own well-appointed bed, looking at the utilitarian needlepoints covering his windows, wondering if he finally had enough security to take a wife, he felt his gut tell him that there was something not quite right about his prize.
Failing to pin it down, he switched to plans for a stately promenade and drifted off to sleep.
Escape And Capture
Grez spent a fair bit of time in the bath, and made sure that his apprentice Plud did too. He had sent his best tunic, the one he saved for formal occasions, to the washerman for hand cleaning. It, and the cleaning for Plud’s, had cost him a silver disk. The master’s red sash, holding his sword and the tunic to his body, looked bright and new. The apprentice’s yellow one, holding nothing except the tunic as befitting his lowly status, was close to new. Both were decked out to parade their captured gryphon to the neighbourhood of the wealthy and powerful.
Although Plud was still clumsy, he more than made up for it by being a good companion to the captured gryphon. Sadly, the boy put his heart into his work as did all good apprentices. Once the gryphon was sold to a fancy home as a pet, Plud would have to undergo a bit of heartbreak. It was something he must get used to, else he would never make a journeyman. Thankfully, the boy did not whine about having to give up the creature; that would have been unprofessional enough to rate a beating. Gryphon catchers could not afford to be anything but agents; they could never be like subsistence farmers!
They both decked out and clean, and with Grez now shaven, Plud saw to putting on the leash. He had spent the early morning, as the sun went from red to yellow, cleaning the creature with soft wet cloth for the tawny leonine torso and hindquarters. A duster served for the gray-feathered front. The paws were scrubbed, and the talons polished. The coarse hair was brushed with even strokes. The leash for the creature, complete with beak muzzle for safety, was bought new and made of soft but tough leather. The gryphon indeed looked fit for a Prince.
Grez had wandered into town to catch up on the gossip and find out which august families would be in the market for a noble pet. He had heard that the Chancellor had boys who were coming up to the age when they would be delighted with the companionship a gryphon could offer. Said gryphon, with only an ounce of gold in its gizzard, has enough magical power to talk and reason but not enough to fly. Two more ounces of gold and it could fly away to freedom. Grez and the rest of his guild made sure that the customer did not possess the kind of squishy sympathy that would lead to the gryphon being fed gold or gold-bearing goldworms. When the creature flew away, the catcher was always blamed.
Although not noble, he being merely the administrative servant to the King, the Chancellor made enough to easily afford such a pet. His children would be delighted, as it would allow them to consort as companions with the offspring of nobles who already owned such pets. There was always the chance that the King would ennoble a Chancellor that he took a fancy to.
So, the destination was set. Grez, Plud and the gryphon would walk to the capitol, parade to the interior, walk down wide and stately Falid Lane, stop at the Chancellor’s residence and make the sales pitch. Both the pair and the gryphon would have to be clean in order to get any kind of a hearing.
Leash fitted over neck, and muzzle fitted over beak, Plud walked ahead of a silent gryphon. Grez assumed the silence was because of the leash; his apprentice was not so sure.
Since they lived on the outskirts of the capitol, it took less than an hour for them to get to Falid Lane. As Grez expected, the Chancellor was there. So were his children. The veteran catcher was pleased to see them look at the gryphon, their eyes bright.
As with all family pets, a closed sale of a gryphon depended upon the children wheedling the head of the household to make the deal. There was little overt salesmanship needed to sell a gryphon; the beast had to sell itself.
He did not have to knock on the door, which was a good sign. The children had evidently been cajoling their father, as he stepped out to greet them. Looking at the gryphon, he did not need to prompt the catcher to take off the leash and muzzle.
“Great Chancellor,” Grez began respectfully, “this gryphon you see before you is a prize. It has received the best of care, and it is affectionate with people. Although not possessing enough magic to fly, it does have enough for its reason. It is as yet untrained, but with its reason it is eminently trainable. It will be a fitting grace for your household, sir.”
Since Chancellors are not known to haggle, Grez had a moderate price in mind. Ten platinum disks, which would be more than enough for him to finally have the wherewithal to take a wife. He averaged five gryphons a year, gross, and this fine beast would be enough to tide him and his apprentice over for a year. The others were less tractable, or mangy or smaller, so they either went for less or had to be gotten rid of. He making a sale of this great beast to the great Chancellor would make his name shine in the land and assure him of easy sales. He would be a made man after this transaction.
Perceiving that the man inspecting him was of importance, the gryphon hissed through its muzzle: “Are you a ruler?”
“I am the Chancellor, the administrative servant to the King.” The man was thin, dark-haired and mostly bald, with fine features and understated eyebrows. Tall, he looked the part of a loyal servant to the King.
“Come closer,” the gryphon hissed further. The Chancellor doing so, the gryphon whispered something in his ear that made him blanch more than normal.
Turning to his eldest son, a cheery if muted lad who had accompanied him to see the gryphon, the Chancellor told the boy to get the Grand Wizard.
Wondering what was going wrong, Grez saw a look of pity in his customer’s eyes as they locked with his own.
He found out when two other gryphons, summoned by the Grand Wizard, landed on the front courtyard of the Chancellor’s residence. One of them was obviously female, and she flew over to Grez’s captive gryphon with obvious delight. The other was quite plainly regal.
Grez, although master in his craft, was only a humble guildsman. He merely saw a regal-looking specimen, one fit to be the pet of the King. The Chancellor saw more. He and the regal-carriaged gryphon spent some time conversing. Two times, his eyes flashed over to Grez’s. Again and again, they showed pity.
Now looking somewhat harried, he glided over to the guildsman and explained the diplomatic incident that had been caused. “Grez,” he started smoothly, “I have to tell you that you have had the misfortune of capturing the intended consort to the gryphon king’s daughter.”
Evincing his humble status, Grez saw nothing in those words. He had some professional interest in the structure of gryphon society, but only insofar as it helped him locate and capture better pets. The Chancellor, being attuned to interspecies politics as well as administration, saw more.
The gryphon king had taken the capture of his daughter’s consort, an adolescent-aged gryphon, to be an act of war. The captive gryphon’s tales of the goldworm mother lode had not been legend. The creatures having found a veritable open-pit mine of goldworms feasting away on a rich deposit, the king and his loyal vassals had enough magical powers to wreak a fair bit of damage on humanity. He made that very clear, to both the Chancellor and the Grand Wizard. Normally genial underneath his full white beard, the Grand Wizard was uncharacteristically sobered after casting a quick augur spell. The gryphon king was not bluffing.
What that information entailed was a decision that a Chancellor normally avoided. The gryphon catchers’ guild was minor, but proud and independent. If the gryphon king has enough power to enforce a handover with apology, it was only a matter of time before it would be powerful enough to put an end to the guild entirely. It hurt the administrator to clip the vital wings of a long-standing guild, to push it towards an unavoidable demise, but the alternative was a war prosecuted by a newly powerful foe. For the greater good, Grez’s gryphon had to be returned and Grez himself forcibly retired. The gryphon king, after some calming words from the Chancellor, would accept that as compensation.
When the humble guildsman learned of the deal, struck right in front of him but without him, he exploded.
“What is this!? I caught him fairly! It has always been that way! You oleaginous hack, you are clopping on a free and independent guild of many centuries’ standing! Do you think your King will like seeing what all guilds will make of this outrage!?” Plud, although blushing, grinned as he heard his master give the august Chancellor what-for. His eyes brightened.
The Grand Wizard, acting as if he were bowing and scraping to a ghost, paused and nodded. Telepathic link broken, he rescued the Chancellor from more abuse and quietly whispered something in the chief servant’s ear.
No longer patient, the Chancellor’s dark eyes hardened: “I have been informed that I have the confidence of the King in this matter." Thanks to the Grand Wizard’s telepathy, he did. "You will find that your fellow guildsmen will not relish the prospect of war taxes, or the release of their apprentices to war service. That comes from the King.” His eyes said it might as well have.
Still locked in defending his rights, Grez found his outrage melt into bluster and evaporate into silence. The Grand Wizard, simply though his frowning gaze, made it very clear that the Chancellor and the King were one in this matter. The guildsman had the right to petition, but it became more and more clear that the King would pat him on the head and send him off. He could not win.
“Now, there are three conditions that have to be observed for this incident to not escalate into a war,” the Chancellor continued with his smooth mixed with iciness. “First of all, you are letting that gryphon go without compensation.”
Seeing no more splutter about to emerge, he continued. “The second condition is you retiring from the guild.” That got an audible reaction from the now-hapless Grez. Eyes now dim and sad, his apprentice Plud was blushing even more.
Spreading his arms out to the unsympathetic official, Grez protested: “But what about my Plud, my apprentice?” The boy to whom Grez had made a solemn promise, in the name of his centuries-old guild, to train in the arts of gryphon capture? What about his solemn responsibility?
Surrendering on all three points, Grez accepted the sinecure which the King granted in exchange for the ex-guildsman to attend to the greater good. His formal title was Secretary for Human-Gryphon Relations. The workload was little, but the royal pay was good enough for him to take a wife and start a family. Obligingly, he got rid of his old homestead and its memories. He moved into a suite five blocks away from the Palace – one befitting a minor but respectable civil servant. With the help of his wife, he became adjusted to the formerly degrading station of paper pusher. He learned to honour the King.
As for Plud, he had a happy life. The king of the gryphons, Graudink, had his retainers bring enough blood worms to his daughter’s fiancé Skalfet for him to recover his flying. Thus restored to flighthood, Skalfet took the third condition in his talons and flew back to his mountain home; it soon became his and Rahduk’s family abode once the marriage was completed and consummated.
The royal couple had three children, each of which grew up with a luxury that no gryphon could boast of beforehand: a real, live, cuddly, watchful, attentive, and even friendly pet human. Having a well-fed and well-maintained Plud in the family nest, enjoying a life of ease and comfort if intermittent boredom, brought the couple some popularity…and had given a few other gryphons some ideas. There was even talk of forming a guild…
Although Plud was still clumsy, he more than made up for it by being a good companion to the captured gryphon. Sadly, the boy put his heart into his work as did all good apprentices. Once the gryphon was sold to a fancy home as a pet, Plud would have to undergo a bit of heartbreak. It was something he must get used to, else he would never make a journeyman. Thankfully, the boy did not whine about having to give up the creature; that would have been unprofessional enough to rate a beating. Gryphon catchers could not afford to be anything but agents; they could never be like subsistence farmers!
They both decked out and clean, and with Grez now shaven, Plud saw to putting on the leash. He had spent the early morning, as the sun went from red to yellow, cleaning the creature with soft wet cloth for the tawny leonine torso and hindquarters. A duster served for the gray-feathered front. The paws were scrubbed, and the talons polished. The coarse hair was brushed with even strokes. The leash for the creature, complete with beak muzzle for safety, was bought new and made of soft but tough leather. The gryphon indeed looked fit for a Prince.
Grez had wandered into town to catch up on the gossip and find out which august families would be in the market for a noble pet. He had heard that the Chancellor had boys who were coming up to the age when they would be delighted with the companionship a gryphon could offer. Said gryphon, with only an ounce of gold in its gizzard, has enough magical power to talk and reason but not enough to fly. Two more ounces of gold and it could fly away to freedom. Grez and the rest of his guild made sure that the customer did not possess the kind of squishy sympathy that would lead to the gryphon being fed gold or gold-bearing goldworms. When the creature flew away, the catcher was always blamed.
Although not noble, he being merely the administrative servant to the King, the Chancellor made enough to easily afford such a pet. His children would be delighted, as it would allow them to consort as companions with the offspring of nobles who already owned such pets. There was always the chance that the King would ennoble a Chancellor that he took a fancy to.
So, the destination was set. Grez, Plud and the gryphon would walk to the capitol, parade to the interior, walk down wide and stately Falid Lane, stop at the Chancellor’s residence and make the sales pitch. Both the pair and the gryphon would have to be clean in order to get any kind of a hearing.
Leash fitted over neck, and muzzle fitted over beak, Plud walked ahead of a silent gryphon. Grez assumed the silence was because of the leash; his apprentice was not so sure.
Since they lived on the outskirts of the capitol, it took less than an hour for them to get to Falid Lane. As Grez expected, the Chancellor was there. So were his children. The veteran catcher was pleased to see them look at the gryphon, their eyes bright.
As with all family pets, a closed sale of a gryphon depended upon the children wheedling the head of the household to make the deal. There was little overt salesmanship needed to sell a gryphon; the beast had to sell itself.
He did not have to knock on the door, which was a good sign. The children had evidently been cajoling their father, as he stepped out to greet them. Looking at the gryphon, he did not need to prompt the catcher to take off the leash and muzzle.
“Great Chancellor,” Grez began respectfully, “this gryphon you see before you is a prize. It has received the best of care, and it is affectionate with people. Although not possessing enough magic to fly, it does have enough for its reason. It is as yet untrained, but with its reason it is eminently trainable. It will be a fitting grace for your household, sir.”
Since Chancellors are not known to haggle, Grez had a moderate price in mind. Ten platinum disks, which would be more than enough for him to finally have the wherewithal to take a wife. He averaged five gryphons a year, gross, and this fine beast would be enough to tide him and his apprentice over for a year. The others were less tractable, or mangy or smaller, so they either went for less or had to be gotten rid of. He making a sale of this great beast to the great Chancellor would make his name shine in the land and assure him of easy sales. He would be a made man after this transaction.
Perceiving that the man inspecting him was of importance, the gryphon hissed through its muzzle: “Are you a ruler?”
“I am the Chancellor, the administrative servant to the King.” The man was thin, dark-haired and mostly bald, with fine features and understated eyebrows. Tall, he looked the part of a loyal servant to the King.
“Come closer,” the gryphon hissed further. The Chancellor doing so, the gryphon whispered something in his ear that made him blanch more than normal.
Turning to his eldest son, a cheery if muted lad who had accompanied him to see the gryphon, the Chancellor told the boy to get the Grand Wizard.
Wondering what was going wrong, Grez saw a look of pity in his customer’s eyes as they locked with his own.
He found out when two other gryphons, summoned by the Grand Wizard, landed on the front courtyard of the Chancellor’s residence. One of them was obviously female, and she flew over to Grez’s captive gryphon with obvious delight. The other was quite plainly regal.
Grez, although master in his craft, was only a humble guildsman. He merely saw a regal-looking specimen, one fit to be the pet of the King. The Chancellor saw more. He and the regal-carriaged gryphon spent some time conversing. Two times, his eyes flashed over to Grez’s. Again and again, they showed pity.
Now looking somewhat harried, he glided over to the guildsman and explained the diplomatic incident that had been caused. “Grez,” he started smoothly, “I have to tell you that you have had the misfortune of capturing the intended consort to the gryphon king’s daughter.”
Evincing his humble status, Grez saw nothing in those words. He had some professional interest in the structure of gryphon society, but only insofar as it helped him locate and capture better pets. The Chancellor, being attuned to interspecies politics as well as administration, saw more.
The gryphon king had taken the capture of his daughter’s consort, an adolescent-aged gryphon, to be an act of war. The captive gryphon’s tales of the goldworm mother lode had not been legend. The creatures having found a veritable open-pit mine of goldworms feasting away on a rich deposit, the king and his loyal vassals had enough magical powers to wreak a fair bit of damage on humanity. He made that very clear, to both the Chancellor and the Grand Wizard. Normally genial underneath his full white beard, the Grand Wizard was uncharacteristically sobered after casting a quick augur spell. The gryphon king was not bluffing.
What that information entailed was a decision that a Chancellor normally avoided. The gryphon catchers’ guild was minor, but proud and independent. If the gryphon king has enough power to enforce a handover with apology, it was only a matter of time before it would be powerful enough to put an end to the guild entirely. It hurt the administrator to clip the vital wings of a long-standing guild, to push it towards an unavoidable demise, but the alternative was a war prosecuted by a newly powerful foe. For the greater good, Grez’s gryphon had to be returned and Grez himself forcibly retired. The gryphon king, after some calming words from the Chancellor, would accept that as compensation.
When the humble guildsman learned of the deal, struck right in front of him but without him, he exploded.
“What is this!? I caught him fairly! It has always been that way! You oleaginous hack, you are clopping on a free and independent guild of many centuries’ standing! Do you think your King will like seeing what all guilds will make of this outrage!?” Plud, although blushing, grinned as he heard his master give the august Chancellor what-for. His eyes brightened.
The Grand Wizard, acting as if he were bowing and scraping to a ghost, paused and nodded. Telepathic link broken, he rescued the Chancellor from more abuse and quietly whispered something in the chief servant’s ear.
No longer patient, the Chancellor’s dark eyes hardened: “I have been informed that I have the confidence of the King in this matter." Thanks to the Grand Wizard’s telepathy, he did. "You will find that your fellow guildsmen will not relish the prospect of war taxes, or the release of their apprentices to war service. That comes from the King.” His eyes said it might as well have.
Still locked in defending his rights, Grez found his outrage melt into bluster and evaporate into silence. The Grand Wizard, simply though his frowning gaze, made it very clear that the Chancellor and the King were one in this matter. The guildsman had the right to petition, but it became more and more clear that the King would pat him on the head and send him off. He could not win.
“Now, there are three conditions that have to be observed for this incident to not escalate into a war,” the Chancellor continued with his smooth mixed with iciness. “First of all, you are letting that gryphon go without compensation.”
Seeing no more splutter about to emerge, he continued. “The second condition is you retiring from the guild.” That got an audible reaction from the now-hapless Grez. Eyes now dim and sad, his apprentice Plud was blushing even more.
Spreading his arms out to the unsympathetic official, Grez protested: “But what about my Plud, my apprentice?” The boy to whom Grez had made a solemn promise, in the name of his centuries-old guild, to train in the arts of gryphon capture? What about his solemn responsibility?
Surrendering on all three points, Grez accepted the sinecure which the King granted in exchange for the ex-guildsman to attend to the greater good. His formal title was Secretary for Human-Gryphon Relations. The workload was little, but the royal pay was good enough for him to take a wife and start a family. Obligingly, he got rid of his old homestead and its memories. He moved into a suite five blocks away from the Palace – one befitting a minor but respectable civil servant. With the help of his wife, he became adjusted to the formerly degrading station of paper pusher. He learned to honour the King.
As for Plud, he had a happy life. The king of the gryphons, Graudink, had his retainers bring enough blood worms to his daughter’s fiancé Skalfet for him to recover his flying. Thus restored to flighthood, Skalfet took the third condition in his talons and flew back to his mountain home; it soon became his and Rahduk’s family abode once the marriage was completed and consummated.
The royal couple had three children, each of which grew up with a luxury that no gryphon could boast of beforehand: a real, live, cuddly, watchful, attentive, and even friendly pet human. Having a well-fed and well-maintained Plud in the family nest, enjoying a life of ease and comfort if intermittent boredom, brought the couple some popularity…and had given a few other gryphons some ideas. There was even talk of forming a guild…
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Hawaladar
The return of inflation had been very good to Albert Finney. A newly-retired hedge-fund principal, he had latched on to resource stocks. He had also taken positions in the now-huge commodity carry trade. The central bankers had indeed scotched the demon deflation, but at the cost of reviving the Beelzebub of inflation. The year that Albert decided to retire early, 2020, saw official inflation hit 14%. Unofficial inflation was much higher.
Contrary to what his still-active colleages thought, he had not retired because he had burned out. He did so because he was worried about the economy burning out. The inflation juggernaut was unstoppable, even with legislative sterilization remedies; Albert knew well that in the long run, the currency would all be dead. Resolving to do something about it, he found himself joining a conspiracy of goldbugs determined to save as much of the economy as they could.
In doing so, he would place a heavy adult responsibility of his teenage son Neil and his distant relative Dylan. How heavy, both would find out...
Contrary to what his still-active colleages thought, he had not retired because he had burned out. He did so because he was worried about the economy burning out. The inflation juggernaut was unstoppable, even with legislative sterilization remedies; Albert knew well that in the long run, the currency would all be dead. Resolving to do something about it, he found himself joining a conspiracy of goldbugs determined to save as much of the economy as they could.
In doing so, he would place a heavy adult responsibility of his teenage son Neil and his distant relative Dylan. How heavy, both would find out...
Ancestral Ties
News always traveled fast in Wakia. Like many towns, it adapted its name from a term used by the originary inhabitants - who were later told to take a hike. At first, it was one of many areas that weren’t settled quickly because of too much bedrock and too little topsoil. The peaceful Wakia Lake was a bonus, but not much of an enticement in a hardscrabble age when what counted was arable land.
So, the land was initially filled by settlers with a penchant for hunting, trapping and fishing - plus a few fools. The fools soon learned that the cheap land with the spectacular views wasn’t much good for farming. Their compensatory talk about the views and the swimmable lake were greeted with mirth, even by the other locals who shared those advantages. Those fools were less than a century ahead of their time, but a sound long-term view doesn’t fill an empty stomach. To the surprise of some, they learned to fish and even hunt and trap; they stayed.
Even when it became a town, Wakia was at heart a township. The fellows who got their hands on lake land, and thus could avail themselves of fish in their diet, had on average a thousand to two thousand feet of frontage each. Those who preferred dry land found that the hunting was better, so it all evened out. In order to keep things smooth, the lakesiders stuck to fishing and the drylanders specialized in hunting. Both types kept themselves fed, which was all that mattered at a time when the land was dirt-cheap and there were no property taxes to speak of. The latter came later.
Wakia the town, really the township centre, started off at the place where the lake drained off into another through a narrow and somewhat long river. As a result, it was easy to find – if you knew the area, that is. Because the river land was not picked up at first, it had evolved into a kind of commons where people could meet, trade and sometimes settle disputes. Long before the area was filled up, the most level-headed man in that neck of the woods was chivvied into buying and settling that border land. Since there was no legal category for the commons, only owned or unowned land, the folks back then had to find someone who’d be amenable to holding a plot that was already earmarked for gatherings and such.
The level-headed man they selected already owned more than two hundred acres and about three thousand and five hundred feet of frontage: well above the average homestead. Half of the frontage formed a natural harbour, making his land a natural destination point for those who didn’t know the area. The other half stretched to the right if you were leaving. The owner’s name was Brian Mullen.
When he heard of his neighbour’s plans, he first told them to hoof it. Why would a man, well settled in, up and move to a completely different place on the lake? After a few blandishments, he grumblingly conceded that his older brother – a lawyer in the big town of Freham – had enough to buy up a lot of acreage if he picked up sticks and moved to the riverside. And move he did – but his younger brother demanded that the blandishers pick up the cost of the stamp. And the paper, envelope and pen.
Willard Mullen, having been somewhat of a success on Freham, was expecting that the 2,000 acres with 4,000 feet of frontage on Lake Wakia would entitle him to the courtesies entitled to a man who gave up a successful law career and a possible judgeship. It didn’t. Instead he was ribbed a little, particularly by his younger brother. Sighing and bending to the inevitable, he learned how to hunt and fish. He was one of the few who did both; it was tolerated because he did keep the gathering-place arrangement on what was legally his land. To his surprise, he found himself becoming a real de facto judge when ribbing turned into respect. Even his younger brother Brian toned it down. Willard’s word became known as golden all over the Wakia township.
He had had a little money left over after the move, and had spread it around by having a place built out of real milled timber. More money came in later with the railroad, as people from Freham discovered that Wakia was indeed a relaxing place with beautiful views. Soon, the joke among the original settlers was “Don’t shoot the tourists; they’re too tough to eat.”
With tourism came more trade. Money began flowing freely in the township. But, the trade also brought something else.
The first man to sell his land to a distinguished Freham resident had been one of the fools. Lawrence Finney hadn’t been that much good at fishing, so he made up for it by trying his hand at distilling. He had enough of a potato patch to grow enough potato for he, and later he and his family, to supplement the fish diet. There was also enough left over to feed a still. The money for the still equipment came from him hoofing off to Freham and getting steady work for a period of two years. He found it easy to live with the Chinese immigrants, and they taught him how to save a few pennies while keeping body and soul together. Larry the Fool found that he had a talent for whipping up nice strong vodka, which the residents were happy to barter for. When money came in, he gently declined payment and insisted on meat and other goods. Misunderstanding the excise-tax laws, likely deliberately, he decided that it was okay for him to run his still as long as no cash changed hands. None did, except for a few pennies to buy new bottles and more yeast. He creditably offered to barter fish he caught for the empties, so as to minimize the cash component of his revenue, but most settled for a negotiated discount on a re-up. Being somewhat averse to work, and prone to wandering off on his lonesome at times, Finney “the Fish” didn’t participate in the cash economy at all when the tourist trade got rolling. He didn’t see much in it for him.
His own spread was about sixty acres; it had fifteen hundred feet of lake frontage. Although the border was somewhat irregular, his land extended an average of six hundred yards into the woods. By coincidence, part of it was flat enough to make for a good section of road. That part was two-thirds in.
A town legend that said Wakia was incorporated as a town, and began levying property taxes, in order to get Finney into a steady job. Grumbling to a now-august Willard Mullen about it, he found out the truth: there was enough trade for the township to consider putting down roads. The main road was going to be parallel to the railroad and eventually hitch up with the main cart line all the way to a now-bustling Freham. There was also a plan to put in side roads so the township folks could reach the new town centre more easily. Finney’s spread, like his neighbours’, would be cut in two by one of them.
Seeing the opportunity, he decided that he would be a good civil fellow and deed over the land for the road…in exchange for a ten-year tax abatement.
Willard objected. Since the town centre was going to be bisected by the river, a bridge suitable for vehicles was in order. The new tax monies would be used to demonstrate proof of payment for a first bond issue, whose proceeds would be used to build a proper bridge over the river and thus connect the future town. Several gentlemen of means in Freham had already been contacted, with details about how the tourist trade was turning the township from backwater to viable. Two had expressed interest in the bond issue.
When he found out that most were deeding the land for the road out of the goodness of their hearts, or for the advantage it would give them, Willard believed he had right on his side when he insisted. After all, he himself was going to deed the meeting-ground part of his land – about two hundred acres – free of charge to the town for a town-hall and court-house complex, and public park alongside the river. He was unsure about the rest, but was sure it would eventually be sold piecemeal to new residents and hopeful shopkeepers. By comparison to Willard and the others, Lawrence Finney looked just plain mean.
As for Larry, he insisted too. The specialty he had boxed himself into meant avoiding cash, by his own rules, and two years of regular work was enough for his lifetime. Out of the goodness of his own heart, he offered to give a few barrels’ worth of vodka for the incorporation party instead of the taxes.
From the perspective of the law, it was the cleanest transaction Finney had ever proposed to undertake. It was completely legal to give away moonshined liquor to friends out of the goodness of one’s heart with no expectation of return. Willard Mullen thanked him for his generosity, but didn’t bend on the abatement. Being a legal man, he feared the consequences for the bond issue if Finney set a precedent.
The issue remained stuck for some time, until Mullen threw in his hand and offered to pay Finney’s taxes in cash money for the first two years. Most others could pay the tax with funds they got from the marketplace. Those who couldn’t, could pay in barter of marketable goods or labour if they wanted to. Mullen insisted that the last part be voluntary: he didn’t want to inaugurate his town with a corvée. Forced labour was out.
Finney, of course, didn’t much like the idea of labouring on the bridge. Barter goods were out, as he bartered for his needs; the only good he could supply out of his own efforts were perishable fish and not-quite legal vodka. His wife, a former schoolteacher who shared his penchant for solitary ambling, offered to tutor the local kids for money. Finney, of course, would have none of it. Like many men of his time, he was firm in his belief that a woman’s most important job was that of wife and mother.
Although granted his two year’s respite, the new tax still left him with a problem. What to do when the de facto tax abatement ran out? The problem was solved more quickly than he expected when one of Freham’s more worthy financiers came to Wakia to visit.
Being one of the fools, Finney had selected a plot to homestead with one of the best views on the lake. Since it faced south, sunrise cheered the left and sunset graced the right. His frontage included some beach land as well as the rocky sort. Luckily, the ground underneath the water at the beach part was silty instead of rocky. It was squishy on the toes, but it was easy to walk on. The rocks were underground bedrock: large and easy to stand on. They were also easy to build on, as was the silt.
There were enough rocks in the underwater vicinity, near a less choice island whose bedrock has broken into many pieces, to make the weighing for cribs made with raw stripped tree logs. Finney, contrary to his reputation as a slacker, had assembled enough crib to make for an honest-to-Gosh dock; it played host to his oar-powered fishing boat. His home was a cozy 1,200 square foot one-story number that was nestled into the hillock overlooking the lake. Not far from the dock, it was made of milled lumber. Yes, it had been procured by barter, but informal trade had been good to him. He had the goods.
Finney’s tax problem got solved when H. Walthorp Denniger, distinguished Freham financier, came to visit Wakia to see to the bond issue. Being a conservative sort, Willard Mullen had prepared an estimate of the tax base by using only the cash that could be raised: the barter was valued at zero, so as to leave a reserve. Even with that conservatism, the tax rolls were enough to float a bridge. The deal was sound, and was cut shortly after the town was incorporated.
Denniger was a well-known teetotaller, and was invited to the incorporation party which Finney had generously lubricated. He was also invited by Willard’s younger brother Brian to meet a man on a very fine homestead. Of course, the man was none other than Mr. Lawrence Finney, who the younger Mullin said was so solid that his taxes were cash-paid two years in advance. Brian and his friends chuckled, waiting for Denniger to gasp at the sight of one of Wakia’s purportedly solid citizens running a still. Denniger did gasp, but for a different reason.
He fell in love with the place, at first sight. Being an established man, with suit, Van Dyke beard, near-gone salt-and-pepper hair and established girth to show it, he could take time off from his work and vacation up at Wakia Lake. It was a day’s trip by cart, but a new-fangled device called the horseless carriage promised to cut the travel time down considerably. The road land now excised from the property, Finney now had two parcels on each side. The lake parcel had about forty-five acres. The remainder had about thirteen.
Denniger offered Finney one thousand dollars cash on the spot for the lakefront parcel. Honestly demurring, Larry didn’t bite because he had nowhere else to go. He was a fisher, not a hunter, and for that calling he needed lake access. He was now getting on, having two sons that were teenagers, and he honestly didn’t know what to do with the less valuable parcel. He had even less idea of where to go in lieu of settling on the rocky and tree-filled remains.
Denniger, trying to coax him, said truthfully that a thousand dollars sufficed for a fine upstanding house in Freham. Finney, honestly stuck in his rut, just shook his head and mumbled a polite refusal. So, Denniger upped the offer to $1,500.
That was more than enough for a substantial Freham home, plus enough cash money to make a job search leisurely, but Finney still didn’t bite. He didn’t accept until the offer was upped to $2,000. Seeing as how he got the better of the bargain, Larry was good enough to destroy the still before Denniger fully realized what the still-shack contained.
By selling most of his property to H. Walthorp Denniger, Freham financier, Mr. Lawrence Finney had not only set a precedent but also made himself somewhat infamous. Although much of the complaining was displaced greed, there was also genuine resentment of the man. He had let an outsider into a tight-knit town. Almost overnight, he was known as Finney the bootlegger.
Willard Mullen secretly didn’t mind, as he was a professional man. Denniger was a much better risk in terms of taxes. He vacationing on the lake made him an easier touch when it came to raising more bond money to put down the side roads and improve the main road. Brian Mullen did mind, and not just because his prank fell flat. He saw an out-of-towner moving into a settled property, determining to use it as a mere vacation home, as something akin to an invasion. How long before other Freham blowhards came in and turned his beloved Wakia into New Freham? Mullen being popular, his opinion carried – but not enough to prevent a few other sales when the dust settled. Other Frehamites used a homesteading dodge to get vacation plots: the land they got was subpar from the homesteading standpoint, but coveted from the summer-home standpoint. For the first time, the islands on the lake were spoken for – making for a disgruntled crop of youngsters who used to treat them as parks, camping and sometimes dating sites. Their parents were miffed at the Freham slickers who put on airs as if they were settlers too.
The first crop of cottagers was somewhat pompous, and judgemental when crossed, but they had a knack of treating the old-timers respectfully despite the worldly gulf between them. As the decades flew by, a second crop moved in. They weren’t stilted, were far less judgemental, and were more gregarious than the first crop - but they had the habit of measuring people by the size of their wallets. Despite using manners to conceal, they still gave their measuring stick away. In retaliation, the locals got the town government to institute a rudimentary market-value assessment scheme. The Freham cottagers ended up paying the bulk of the town’s property taxes.
By the time the second crop came in, most of the settlers’ descendents on the lakefront had sold their properties for increasingly handsome sums and moved into town. They found they preferred town life and their own kind of gregariousness. Again, a stable equilibrium developed and quiet resumed. The town of Wakia became devoted to servicing the affluent clientele of Lake Wakia.
One of the few families who didn’t move was the Mullens. The descendent of Willard stayed in town, as befitting the heirs of the first mayor. Some of them were active in civic government; the rest had straight jobs. A few left for the big city or parts unknown, but not many. Willard had enough land left over, even after sales to shopkeepers, to make for more than enough homes for five generations of descendants. Brian parceled his land out in a similar way, but twenty acres surrounding the natural harbour was turned into a marina. That being the family business, it stayed intact. As was normal, the family outstripped the family business and some moved into town. The others set off for new pastures. None moved to Freham.
As for old Larry, he had left for Freham with the money he got from the sale – most of it. With the aid of a little age inaccuracy, he deeded the off-lake land to his younger son Patrick and left the boy with enough money to build a cabin and get by for the next five years. Larry had been tempted to make it ten, but he had halved it instead. Word was, he bought himself a house and took up drinking for a living – for about a year or so. Then, he opened up a tavern.
As the twentieth century turned into two decades less a year after the start of the twenty-first, the boy of the Patrick Feeney house was his great-great grandson Dylan. In the time being, Freham had gone from a bustling town to a huge metropolis and major financial centre. Dylan’s dad Darren, the man of the house, was an electrician who branched out into computer and network installation to keep up with the times. Dylan, being the great-great grandchild that was the scion of the eldest sons of Patrick, was in line to inherit the house and land when his dad moved on. Complaints about inflation, which had reached double digits by 2018, were part of the town’s conversation. Despite that additional burden, life was still simple. The Finneys had stayed away from the cottagers on the other side of the road except for business reasons.
Until 2020, when the property changed hands for more than twenty-three million well-depreciated dollars. The buyer was one Albert Finney, great-great-grandson of the original owner. The Finney scion, thrice removed, has come back to the old homestead.
So, the land was initially filled by settlers with a penchant for hunting, trapping and fishing - plus a few fools. The fools soon learned that the cheap land with the spectacular views wasn’t much good for farming. Their compensatory talk about the views and the swimmable lake were greeted with mirth, even by the other locals who shared those advantages. Those fools were less than a century ahead of their time, but a sound long-term view doesn’t fill an empty stomach. To the surprise of some, they learned to fish and even hunt and trap; they stayed.
Even when it became a town, Wakia was at heart a township. The fellows who got their hands on lake land, and thus could avail themselves of fish in their diet, had on average a thousand to two thousand feet of frontage each. Those who preferred dry land found that the hunting was better, so it all evened out. In order to keep things smooth, the lakesiders stuck to fishing and the drylanders specialized in hunting. Both types kept themselves fed, which was all that mattered at a time when the land was dirt-cheap and there were no property taxes to speak of. The latter came later.
Wakia the town, really the township centre, started off at the place where the lake drained off into another through a narrow and somewhat long river. As a result, it was easy to find – if you knew the area, that is. Because the river land was not picked up at first, it had evolved into a kind of commons where people could meet, trade and sometimes settle disputes. Long before the area was filled up, the most level-headed man in that neck of the woods was chivvied into buying and settling that border land. Since there was no legal category for the commons, only owned or unowned land, the folks back then had to find someone who’d be amenable to holding a plot that was already earmarked for gatherings and such.
The level-headed man they selected already owned more than two hundred acres and about three thousand and five hundred feet of frontage: well above the average homestead. Half of the frontage formed a natural harbour, making his land a natural destination point for those who didn’t know the area. The other half stretched to the right if you were leaving. The owner’s name was Brian Mullen.
When he heard of his neighbour’s plans, he first told them to hoof it. Why would a man, well settled in, up and move to a completely different place on the lake? After a few blandishments, he grumblingly conceded that his older brother – a lawyer in the big town of Freham – had enough to buy up a lot of acreage if he picked up sticks and moved to the riverside. And move he did – but his younger brother demanded that the blandishers pick up the cost of the stamp. And the paper, envelope and pen.
Willard Mullen, having been somewhat of a success on Freham, was expecting that the 2,000 acres with 4,000 feet of frontage on Lake Wakia would entitle him to the courtesies entitled to a man who gave up a successful law career and a possible judgeship. It didn’t. Instead he was ribbed a little, particularly by his younger brother. Sighing and bending to the inevitable, he learned how to hunt and fish. He was one of the few who did both; it was tolerated because he did keep the gathering-place arrangement on what was legally his land. To his surprise, he found himself becoming a real de facto judge when ribbing turned into respect. Even his younger brother Brian toned it down. Willard’s word became known as golden all over the Wakia township.
He had had a little money left over after the move, and had spread it around by having a place built out of real milled timber. More money came in later with the railroad, as people from Freham discovered that Wakia was indeed a relaxing place with beautiful views. Soon, the joke among the original settlers was “Don’t shoot the tourists; they’re too tough to eat.”
With tourism came more trade. Money began flowing freely in the township. But, the trade also brought something else.
The first man to sell his land to a distinguished Freham resident had been one of the fools. Lawrence Finney hadn’t been that much good at fishing, so he made up for it by trying his hand at distilling. He had enough of a potato patch to grow enough potato for he, and later he and his family, to supplement the fish diet. There was also enough left over to feed a still. The money for the still equipment came from him hoofing off to Freham and getting steady work for a period of two years. He found it easy to live with the Chinese immigrants, and they taught him how to save a few pennies while keeping body and soul together. Larry the Fool found that he had a talent for whipping up nice strong vodka, which the residents were happy to barter for. When money came in, he gently declined payment and insisted on meat and other goods. Misunderstanding the excise-tax laws, likely deliberately, he decided that it was okay for him to run his still as long as no cash changed hands. None did, except for a few pennies to buy new bottles and more yeast. He creditably offered to barter fish he caught for the empties, so as to minimize the cash component of his revenue, but most settled for a negotiated discount on a re-up. Being somewhat averse to work, and prone to wandering off on his lonesome at times, Finney “the Fish” didn’t participate in the cash economy at all when the tourist trade got rolling. He didn’t see much in it for him.
His own spread was about sixty acres; it had fifteen hundred feet of lake frontage. Although the border was somewhat irregular, his land extended an average of six hundred yards into the woods. By coincidence, part of it was flat enough to make for a good section of road. That part was two-thirds in.
A town legend that said Wakia was incorporated as a town, and began levying property taxes, in order to get Finney into a steady job. Grumbling to a now-august Willard Mullen about it, he found out the truth: there was enough trade for the township to consider putting down roads. The main road was going to be parallel to the railroad and eventually hitch up with the main cart line all the way to a now-bustling Freham. There was also a plan to put in side roads so the township folks could reach the new town centre more easily. Finney’s spread, like his neighbours’, would be cut in two by one of them.
Seeing the opportunity, he decided that he would be a good civil fellow and deed over the land for the road…in exchange for a ten-year tax abatement.
Willard objected. Since the town centre was going to be bisected by the river, a bridge suitable for vehicles was in order. The new tax monies would be used to demonstrate proof of payment for a first bond issue, whose proceeds would be used to build a proper bridge over the river and thus connect the future town. Several gentlemen of means in Freham had already been contacted, with details about how the tourist trade was turning the township from backwater to viable. Two had expressed interest in the bond issue.
When he found out that most were deeding the land for the road out of the goodness of their hearts, or for the advantage it would give them, Willard believed he had right on his side when he insisted. After all, he himself was going to deed the meeting-ground part of his land – about two hundred acres – free of charge to the town for a town-hall and court-house complex, and public park alongside the river. He was unsure about the rest, but was sure it would eventually be sold piecemeal to new residents and hopeful shopkeepers. By comparison to Willard and the others, Lawrence Finney looked just plain mean.
As for Larry, he insisted too. The specialty he had boxed himself into meant avoiding cash, by his own rules, and two years of regular work was enough for his lifetime. Out of the goodness of his own heart, he offered to give a few barrels’ worth of vodka for the incorporation party instead of the taxes.
From the perspective of the law, it was the cleanest transaction Finney had ever proposed to undertake. It was completely legal to give away moonshined liquor to friends out of the goodness of one’s heart with no expectation of return. Willard Mullen thanked him for his generosity, but didn’t bend on the abatement. Being a legal man, he feared the consequences for the bond issue if Finney set a precedent.
The issue remained stuck for some time, until Mullen threw in his hand and offered to pay Finney’s taxes in cash money for the first two years. Most others could pay the tax with funds they got from the marketplace. Those who couldn’t, could pay in barter of marketable goods or labour if they wanted to. Mullen insisted that the last part be voluntary: he didn’t want to inaugurate his town with a corvée. Forced labour was out.
Finney, of course, didn’t much like the idea of labouring on the bridge. Barter goods were out, as he bartered for his needs; the only good he could supply out of his own efforts were perishable fish and not-quite legal vodka. His wife, a former schoolteacher who shared his penchant for solitary ambling, offered to tutor the local kids for money. Finney, of course, would have none of it. Like many men of his time, he was firm in his belief that a woman’s most important job was that of wife and mother.
Although granted his two year’s respite, the new tax still left him with a problem. What to do when the de facto tax abatement ran out? The problem was solved more quickly than he expected when one of Freham’s more worthy financiers came to Wakia to visit.
Being one of the fools, Finney had selected a plot to homestead with one of the best views on the lake. Since it faced south, sunrise cheered the left and sunset graced the right. His frontage included some beach land as well as the rocky sort. Luckily, the ground underneath the water at the beach part was silty instead of rocky. It was squishy on the toes, but it was easy to walk on. The rocks were underground bedrock: large and easy to stand on. They were also easy to build on, as was the silt.
There were enough rocks in the underwater vicinity, near a less choice island whose bedrock has broken into many pieces, to make the weighing for cribs made with raw stripped tree logs. Finney, contrary to his reputation as a slacker, had assembled enough crib to make for an honest-to-Gosh dock; it played host to his oar-powered fishing boat. His home was a cozy 1,200 square foot one-story number that was nestled into the hillock overlooking the lake. Not far from the dock, it was made of milled lumber. Yes, it had been procured by barter, but informal trade had been good to him. He had the goods.
Finney’s tax problem got solved when H. Walthorp Denniger, distinguished Freham financier, came to visit Wakia to see to the bond issue. Being a conservative sort, Willard Mullen had prepared an estimate of the tax base by using only the cash that could be raised: the barter was valued at zero, so as to leave a reserve. Even with that conservatism, the tax rolls were enough to float a bridge. The deal was sound, and was cut shortly after the town was incorporated.
Denniger was a well-known teetotaller, and was invited to the incorporation party which Finney had generously lubricated. He was also invited by Willard’s younger brother Brian to meet a man on a very fine homestead. Of course, the man was none other than Mr. Lawrence Finney, who the younger Mullin said was so solid that his taxes were cash-paid two years in advance. Brian and his friends chuckled, waiting for Denniger to gasp at the sight of one of Wakia’s purportedly solid citizens running a still. Denniger did gasp, but for a different reason.
He fell in love with the place, at first sight. Being an established man, with suit, Van Dyke beard, near-gone salt-and-pepper hair and established girth to show it, he could take time off from his work and vacation up at Wakia Lake. It was a day’s trip by cart, but a new-fangled device called the horseless carriage promised to cut the travel time down considerably. The road land now excised from the property, Finney now had two parcels on each side. The lake parcel had about forty-five acres. The remainder had about thirteen.
Denniger offered Finney one thousand dollars cash on the spot for the lakefront parcel. Honestly demurring, Larry didn’t bite because he had nowhere else to go. He was a fisher, not a hunter, and for that calling he needed lake access. He was now getting on, having two sons that were teenagers, and he honestly didn’t know what to do with the less valuable parcel. He had even less idea of where to go in lieu of settling on the rocky and tree-filled remains.
Denniger, trying to coax him, said truthfully that a thousand dollars sufficed for a fine upstanding house in Freham. Finney, honestly stuck in his rut, just shook his head and mumbled a polite refusal. So, Denniger upped the offer to $1,500.
That was more than enough for a substantial Freham home, plus enough cash money to make a job search leisurely, but Finney still didn’t bite. He didn’t accept until the offer was upped to $2,000. Seeing as how he got the better of the bargain, Larry was good enough to destroy the still before Denniger fully realized what the still-shack contained.
By selling most of his property to H. Walthorp Denniger, Freham financier, Mr. Lawrence Finney had not only set a precedent but also made himself somewhat infamous. Although much of the complaining was displaced greed, there was also genuine resentment of the man. He had let an outsider into a tight-knit town. Almost overnight, he was known as Finney the bootlegger.
Willard Mullen secretly didn’t mind, as he was a professional man. Denniger was a much better risk in terms of taxes. He vacationing on the lake made him an easier touch when it came to raising more bond money to put down the side roads and improve the main road. Brian Mullen did mind, and not just because his prank fell flat. He saw an out-of-towner moving into a settled property, determining to use it as a mere vacation home, as something akin to an invasion. How long before other Freham blowhards came in and turned his beloved Wakia into New Freham? Mullen being popular, his opinion carried – but not enough to prevent a few other sales when the dust settled. Other Frehamites used a homesteading dodge to get vacation plots: the land they got was subpar from the homesteading standpoint, but coveted from the summer-home standpoint. For the first time, the islands on the lake were spoken for – making for a disgruntled crop of youngsters who used to treat them as parks, camping and sometimes dating sites. Their parents were miffed at the Freham slickers who put on airs as if they were settlers too.
The first crop of cottagers was somewhat pompous, and judgemental when crossed, but they had a knack of treating the old-timers respectfully despite the worldly gulf between them. As the decades flew by, a second crop moved in. They weren’t stilted, were far less judgemental, and were more gregarious than the first crop - but they had the habit of measuring people by the size of their wallets. Despite using manners to conceal, they still gave their measuring stick away. In retaliation, the locals got the town government to institute a rudimentary market-value assessment scheme. The Freham cottagers ended up paying the bulk of the town’s property taxes.
By the time the second crop came in, most of the settlers’ descendents on the lakefront had sold their properties for increasingly handsome sums and moved into town. They found they preferred town life and their own kind of gregariousness. Again, a stable equilibrium developed and quiet resumed. The town of Wakia became devoted to servicing the affluent clientele of Lake Wakia.
One of the few families who didn’t move was the Mullens. The descendent of Willard stayed in town, as befitting the heirs of the first mayor. Some of them were active in civic government; the rest had straight jobs. A few left for the big city or parts unknown, but not many. Willard had enough land left over, even after sales to shopkeepers, to make for more than enough homes for five generations of descendants. Brian parceled his land out in a similar way, but twenty acres surrounding the natural harbour was turned into a marina. That being the family business, it stayed intact. As was normal, the family outstripped the family business and some moved into town. The others set off for new pastures. None moved to Freham.
As for old Larry, he had left for Freham with the money he got from the sale – most of it. With the aid of a little age inaccuracy, he deeded the off-lake land to his younger son Patrick and left the boy with enough money to build a cabin and get by for the next five years. Larry had been tempted to make it ten, but he had halved it instead. Word was, he bought himself a house and took up drinking for a living – for about a year or so. Then, he opened up a tavern.
As the twentieth century turned into two decades less a year after the start of the twenty-first, the boy of the Patrick Feeney house was his great-great grandson Dylan. In the time being, Freham had gone from a bustling town to a huge metropolis and major financial centre. Dylan’s dad Darren, the man of the house, was an electrician who branched out into computer and network installation to keep up with the times. Dylan, being the great-great grandchild that was the scion of the eldest sons of Patrick, was in line to inherit the house and land when his dad moved on. Complaints about inflation, which had reached double digits by 2018, were part of the town’s conversation. Despite that additional burden, life was still simple. The Finneys had stayed away from the cottagers on the other side of the road except for business reasons.
Until 2020, when the property changed hands for more than twenty-three million well-depreciated dollars. The buyer was one Albert Finney, great-great-grandson of the original owner. The Finney scion, thrice removed, has come back to the old homestead.
To Hawala
The Lawrence Finney property was more than a vacation home to Albert Finney. With double-digit inflation came turmoil; with turmoil came nervousness. Albert Finney’s Freham homestead, a mini-mansion on an eighty by one hundred and fifty foot lot, wasn’t as safe as it had been. There had been three burglaries in three months in their exclusive neighbourhood. One of them, two blocks down, had been a full-scale home invasion. The police didn’t get to the scenes in time for any of them. Rumours flew that professional thieves were beginning to bribe the dispatchers in at least one major security company.
That invasion had been too close for comfort. Albert, his wife Susan and their only son Neil, although personally unaffected, had felt threatened enough for Albert to look for new digs. Their first choice was a luxury condo with security force on the payroll, but the sight of the old Finney property going on the market for $23,499,000 got Albert looking into it as a home. Not a vacation home, a new home. Like small towns everywhere, the town of Wakia was less prone to civil breakdown than Freham the unwieldy city. Albert had been enough of a genealogy buff to know that his great-great grandfather had lived up there. From what he could find, Lawrence Finney had been a fisher and small-scale farmer with the stereotypical-Irishman potato patch. That part of the land, though only a few acres of the mostly tree- and rock-filled property, had been enough to scrape a living from should the fish go scarce.
When he found out that his twice-great grandpa Lawrence had homesteaded that exact same $24 million plot, he had hit the offer without thinking twice. The family progression from tavern owner to major hedge-fund principal had resulted in Albert having enough liquid assets to buy the place on the spot. He could take his own time selling his Freham home.
Most of his neighbours, in a kindly way, thought he was nuts. He was shrewd enough to be reassured by that straw poll: it meant he could still sell the old address at a nice premium. The central bankers who wanted to cure the economy from a real-estate-induced depression had done their jobs too well: real estate had indeed recovered. More than recovered: hard assets, even real estate, became sought again as inflation loomed and ran rampant. Only this time, real estate wasn’t in a bubble unto itself. The entire economy had become ridden by the inflation bubble; if anything, real estate had been mighty slow out of the gate. As the reality of high inflation set in, though, homes and condos had started to catch up. Gold was closing in on $20,000 an ounce.
Albert has been late to becoming a father, even by citified standards. He was now fifty-three, thirty-seven years older than his boy, and had more than enough to retire on. He knew, as did the gold market, that the stated rate of inflation woefully underestimated the real thing. Although formally 14%, it was more like 30%: perhaps more.
Both Albert and Susan could see the way things were going. Crushing liabilities, the consequent deficits and the increasing need for the central bank to monetize them had set off an inflation spiral. The central bank’s sterilization dams blocking the inflationary effects of the monetization had developed serious cracks. A legislative remedy, hard credit-growth controls, was making its way through the legislature. Albert knew enough about the financial system, not to mention about his equally shrewd colleagues, to know that any such attempt would have enough loopholes to make the repair job crumble. What politician would dare say “no more credit” to the masses, without escape hatch?
Adding to the trouble was the fact that the dollar was plunging on the forex market, even though its more successful competitors were being inflated too. Yes indeed, the dollars were being repatriated. Even the proposed credit-rationing law could do nothing about the dollar carry trade, whose proceeds were going into gold and commodities. Given the inflation spiral, it was a better bet than high-interest short-term debt in less soft fiat currencies. Commodities kept going up: you just peeled off enough of a position to pay off the interest on the carry loan and let the rest ride. If a mistiming mishap took place, the central bank was there. More and more, the central bank was creating new reserves; more and more, those new reserves leaked into the carry trade.
Albert was old and experienced enough to see where the long run was going. In order to scope out how it would end, he used a trick that his father taught him at thirteen: the Nash Empathy Principle. In order to see how the game would play out, imagine that you’re your opponent and find the best move he or she could make. Then make your own move with that best play in mind.
He tried to imagine what he could do had he been the head of the central bank, but his imagination came up dry. That was the trouble. He could easily find ways to profit from inflation, knowing the ins and outs of the monetary, banking and shadow-banking system, but the prospect of stopping it baffled him. The only way out was to unleash a monster depression, which was politically impossible.
The financial pom-pom wavers were pushing the message that the robust economy could survive an extended spell of double-digit inflation. Albert knew better. He also could see the bleeding edge of civil chaos coming to Freham. So could his wife: she had gently pushed him to move after the home invasion.
So, he and his family were well prepared to move up to Lake Wakia permanently. Although distant, he had an ancestral claim to the property he had bought. He was prepared to go prepper, but he was shrewd enough to not pack anything in advance except for furniture, gadgets and clothes. He knew quite well that buying local was the way to go. Not only food, but also firewood. He’d be spending a fair bit of fiat up there – with one important exception, decided on because the product didn’t exist in any quantity up in Wakia.
His savings were in gold mining stocks: with a wistful tear, he had cashed in his share of the hedge fund after stepping aside for his successor. All of the proceeds were put into mining stocks – all of them. Albert was sure that the stocks would go up by the time it came time to pay his tax bill. In miniature, his manoeuvre was the same as the commodity carry trade: sell some of what went up most and pay the tax bill with the proceeds. Wash, rinse and repeat for the next tax year.
There was a risk of the stocks going down in the interim, but well-timed buys and the overall trend made it slight. Albert had comped out the risk and decided it was well worth shouldering, although not without a few qualms. Since his firm had been a hedge fund, he was not entitled to the bailouts the trading department of the banks now expected as a matter of course. That made him more prudent in his calculations than his professional colleagues trading for the banks. They justified the bailouts by the monumental amount of income taxes both they and the banks paid when times were good. He once noted that he and his own firm paid enough of a fair share to qualify, but wasn’t let in. They didn’t like where he was going with it, so he kept his further thoughts to himself for the sake of professional peace.
Now retired, with a private portfolio spilling out more than enough dividends to meet his needs, Albert saw to that exception on the day before he and the family moved. He had budgeted the entire day for the chore.
Going into a large bank, one with a very ample supply of gold coins, he wryly noted to himself that he could wait in the lengthy line for the first time in what seemed his life. The bank occupied the entire first floor of a high-rise that spanned half the block.
A now-balding, gray-haired thinnish man with not much girth, slightly more than the average height, Albert’s casual clothes could not hide his wealth. Perhaps that was because he wore them like his distant cousin Darren Finney would wear a three-piece suit. A bespoke suit, silk shirt, gold cuff links, genuine soft-leather shoes and Hermès tie were just Albert’s work clothes.
He went in with a huge cash balance. Two and a half hours later, he exited with a very heavy briefcase. It contained two hundred and fifty one-ounce bullion coins, one hundred half-ouncers, one hundred quarter-ouncers, five hundred tenth ouncers and five hundred twentieth-ouncers. The last had been a bit of a stretch for the bank’s inventory. In addition to the coins, he also had a single hundred-ounce gold bar. Having to haul five hundred ounces, he moved slowly towards the taxicab he had hailed by cell phone. Thankfully, the civil breakdown had no influence in the business district: instead of rustled, he was treated with great respect and given a wide berth. Aware of how conspicuous he was, he trundled to the door while blushing.
Tongues could wag: it didn’t matter. Had any authorities decide to inquire, his obvious lackadaisicalness with security would make his story about having lost the gold plausible. By ‘losing’ the gold, he would do his part to save the economy from the decaying currency. Albert planned, in his retirement, to help pave the way for an alternate money. He and a few others, at first, would save what part of the economy that they could.
As he struggled to get the gold-filled briefcase into the taxi, he wryly noted to himself that he was part of a conspiracy. A conspiracy of goldbugs.
All next day was moving day. The transport-truck moving van arrived promptly at 9 AM. It was more than a two-hour drive to the old Finney homestead. Because of the time it would take to load and unload the furniture and effects, the van and the men were spoken for over the entire day. Albert hoped that he wouldn’t have to put them up overnight.
As Susan and Dylan settled into the soft and conformable leather front seats of the 2019 Mercedes S550, Albert regretted having bought such an expensive vehicle. He himself was taking up their second car, a 2018 Mercedes G55, with the gold-laden briefcase tucked in with his personal effects. It was an excellent off-road vehicle, but both Mercedes yelled out “luxury.” He wasn’t sure how they would fit in, now that he and his family were moving for good. He did have an ancestral claim, but it was rooted in the distant past. So much had changed since his great-great grandpa had given up farming and fishing for taverning.
Albert had gotten into the hedge-fund world the honest way. His father had been a business professor and Modern Portfolio devotee; as a result, he grew up with quant theory for breakfast and dinner. Albert getting his MBA at an elite school followed as a matter of course.
Crucially, the dad had also passed along his observations about life and business to his eldest boy. Those discoveries came too late to help the father, in the practical sense, but they were early enough to help young Albert. His old man had passed away nine years ago, at seventy-four, and Albert had made sure that the funeral was lavish as well as tasteful. He remembered it turning into a business funeral. At the time, he felt that his dad deserved no less: he had deeply wanted his son to succeed, and the power funeral showed his son had. His father’s colleagues and friends had been duly, genuinely, impressed.
After years’ worth of retrospect, though, it had planted a seed of doubt. Is that was Albert the man really wanted – to turn his dad’s final rest into a quant-driven investment conference?
As he saw his wife and son off, with the moving van still parked and being loaded in the oversize driveway, he realized he now had the chance to think things through. Remembering the home invasion in the neighbourhood he was now vacating, he crazily hoped that his dad’s grave wouldn’t be desecrated once he was gone.
Susan had noticed that he had begun to act shy, like he had done when they had first met. She had enjoyed the money and the status; she was mature enough to realize that both cost in terms of Albert’s time and attention. But, he shucking off the yoke was something for which she had been profoundly glad. They had a lot of catching up to do.
The house, a full 6,500 square footer, now had a large but tasteful “For Sale” sign on the lawn. The real-estate agent had been charged with managing the transaction, up and including having access with spare keys. Albert hesitated before getting into the G55. One of the moving men accosted him as he was looking around the front yard for the last time: “You worried about something?”
The man was cheerful, and Albert realized that people like him were going to be the Finney’s neighbours. “No,” he responded with Freham urbanity. “I just wanted to say good-bye to the place.”
“Okay; happy waving,” the guy finished with a smile before getting back to his work.
Because Albert was in the habit of driving fast, he beat Susan up to their new place. Not stopping to look at his new neighbour across the road, he drove along the quarter-mile driveway and was rewarded to see his homestead. More than a century ago, there had been a modest pre-ranch house made out of milled wood. Now, in the same location, there was a 3,500 square foot spread – still in ranch, as there was more than enough land for it – done in modern rustic cedar. Three chimneys poked up from the spread of roof. Thankfully, a detached two-car garage was to the right of the house.
Instead of a lonely fisherman’s dock, there were now two extensive spreads of lumber that jutted into the lake. The one on the right, replacing that old dock made of slapped-together crib and saw-milled lumber, was made of solid-professionally made cribs that supported pressure-treated boards. Built on the network of docks was a three-slip two-story boathouse, whose roof angled up like an elongated barn’s. Several hundred feet to the left was a thick dock that split into two, making for a slip for two guest boats that fitted in single file. The rest of the dock was elongated enough to make room for six other docked boats. The fat part of the dock was big enough for dock chairs, and there was a forty-foot spread of dock running parallel to water’s edge joined to the rest. The place where Lawrence Finney’s old still had been was now covered by a dockhouse garage that was big enough to hold two ATVs along with the dock furniture and fixings.
For more than a century, this land has served as a haven for rest, recreation and relaxation. For Albert and his family, it was now a permanent home.
After looking around the large, circular, gravel-dusted dirt driveway, he stopped to wonder where the rest of his family was. His wife drove more slowly than he, but she should have gotten here by now. Did she stop to shop?
Five minutes later, Albert saw what she had stopped to do. The S550 was at the head of a three-vehicle procession ambling in towards the driveway. The other two were a Ford F250 and a Dodge Ram extended-cab; both trucks looked used.
There was a strange boy in the front passenger seat beside Susan, looking a little bemused. Neil was on the bench seat of the F250, looking dutiful. In the driver’s seat beside his son was a stranger whose features looked vaguely familiar. The man in the Ram was simply a stranger.
When she got out, Albert noticed his wife was genuinely happy. She was a good height, a little lanky, with streaks of grey in her black hair. The boy beside her now looked flummoxed, but he was smiling too. They had evidently chatted on the way in. The fortyish-looking man and Neil got out at the same time, both silent. The fellow in the Ram was silent too as he got out, but his eyes were twinkling. Neil and the strange lad walked towards one another as his wife walked to him.
“You’re not going to believe who I met!” she enthused. “The people who live on the other side of the road, they’re your distant cousins!”
Really! Albert’s eyes widened as they lighted on a man who – unbeknownst to him at that point – almost literally lived on the other side of the tracks. No wonder Susan had mixed kids with him.
Taking her words as an introduction, the man strode forward. He was a little bulkier than Albert, but about the same height. There was a vague resemblance in the eyes, the way that both men’s were set into their respective skulls. Darren Finney had only a widow’s peak, and his hair was closer to sandy than Albert’s dark, but their faced were both angular and their noses both snubbed. He wore his jeans and lumberjack shirt comfortably.
“Hi, cuz. I heard you’ve moved here permanently.”
“Makes for quite the homecoming,” the stranger observed while seeing a chance to move into the conversation. Extending his hand to Albert after Darren, he introduced himself as Paul Mullen. “I own the marina upstream. Been the family business since my great-great-great grandfather persuaded his elder bother to come up and keep us from killing each other,” he added easily. Moustachioed, his hair was balding like Albert’s but not greying. His face was wider than the Finneys’, as were his eyes and mouth, and he looked like he was used to being in charge in these parts. “Myself, I head up the bad Mullens,” he continued with his eyes becoming merry again. “We’re the ones that sponge off the government. The good Mullens pretty much are the government. They’re the ones in town, most of them.” With those last two sentences, the merriness disappeared; he meant it.
But it came back. With Darren patiently watching, Paul explained the set-up as he saw it. Susan listened; she was learning. The two boys had edged towards each other, both shy. Despite Darren being eleven years younger than Albert, the boys were about the same age. Dylan, though, had something on Neil: he knew how to drive, while the more sheltered boy hadn’t taken his lessons yet.
That biographical fact came up between the men. When he learned that Albert’s strapping young boy hadn’t learned how to drive, Paul goggled. “Seriously?
“I drove a truck for the first time when I was thirteen!”
Dylan smiled as his thinner counterpart Neil, a bit lewdly. “Don’t take him too seriously. The Mullens, they whup their kids when the kids don’t do something.”
His dad overheard. “Don’t sneer at it, son,” he said edgewise. “It does get them doing something.” Turning to Albert, who he assumed was listening in too, “The trouble with you city folks is, you get whupped for doing something.” Seeing Albert’s uncomprehending look, he specified: “Through the laws, cousin, through the laws.
“You can’t even cut down a tree on your own property down in Freham. Not even if it’s on a farm-sized spread,” he added as a coup de grâce.
“That’s the plain truth,” Paul added sidewise to Darren. “That’s why we have to take care of ‘em.”
Albert, still uncomprehending, looked back at the man who had gotten in the most words. Paul’s paunch now showed more than usual.
“The trouble is, Albert, it’s your great-great-granddad who started all the trouble by selling his place. It brought in the city folks.” Darren emphasized the point with a troubled nod. Paul continued. “I’m telling you because you’re the Feeney now; you’re the fit for the legend.” Darren circled his right hand as if to say “in a manner of speaking.” Oddly, he kept his left hand in his pocket when it had nothing to do. His right hand remained free.
“Oh yeah, he’s fitting the legend all right,” Darren added with merriness mixed with pride. “Albert here’s wife told me that he’s going into the family business. They call it ‘a wall-a’.”
“Hawala,” Albert corrected quietly. “A hawaladar’s a private banker, a node in a system of informal private banking.”
“Wrong, cuz,” Darren cut in cheerfully. “I looked it up before we drove in. The go-to guy’s a thak-uh-dahr.
“Yes, technically I’m a thakedar,” Albert responded with his still-citified polite, “but I’m the principal as well as the agent. If something goes wrong, I make good.” As he was clarifying, Paul pulled out his smart phone and looked up the term.
“I thought they cracked down on you hedgie guys when you covered up your mistakes,” Darren added a little too quietly. In his own way, he was telling his distant blood relative to not be a city sleaze.
Having found a summary and read it, Paul looked up from his phone and beamed. “Hey Albert, you really are the Finney! Gone right into the family business!”
Now confused, Albert looked at his cousin. There was something he wasn’t getting in all the cross-talk.
“Darren, how could our ancestor have been a private money-transfer node? From what I understand, there was hardly any money around before the town incorporated.”
Darren, the moment of warning now passed, started chuckling as if Albert had told him a good in-joke; his head turned to his old neighbour. “Might as well do the honours, Paul.” His eyes turned back to his distant cousin, expectancy mixing in with the merriment.
Paul did so, with a fair bit of glee. “Albert, old sod, your great-great grandpaw was none other than the local bootlegger. Your ATV garage, that’s the exact place he had his still.”
That invasion had been too close for comfort. Albert, his wife Susan and their only son Neil, although personally unaffected, had felt threatened enough for Albert to look for new digs. Their first choice was a luxury condo with security force on the payroll, but the sight of the old Finney property going on the market for $23,499,000 got Albert looking into it as a home. Not a vacation home, a new home. Like small towns everywhere, the town of Wakia was less prone to civil breakdown than Freham the unwieldy city. Albert had been enough of a genealogy buff to know that his great-great grandfather had lived up there. From what he could find, Lawrence Finney had been a fisher and small-scale farmer with the stereotypical-Irishman potato patch. That part of the land, though only a few acres of the mostly tree- and rock-filled property, had been enough to scrape a living from should the fish go scarce.
When he found out that his twice-great grandpa Lawrence had homesteaded that exact same $24 million plot, he had hit the offer without thinking twice. The family progression from tavern owner to major hedge-fund principal had resulted in Albert having enough liquid assets to buy the place on the spot. He could take his own time selling his Freham home.
Most of his neighbours, in a kindly way, thought he was nuts. He was shrewd enough to be reassured by that straw poll: it meant he could still sell the old address at a nice premium. The central bankers who wanted to cure the economy from a real-estate-induced depression had done their jobs too well: real estate had indeed recovered. More than recovered: hard assets, even real estate, became sought again as inflation loomed and ran rampant. Only this time, real estate wasn’t in a bubble unto itself. The entire economy had become ridden by the inflation bubble; if anything, real estate had been mighty slow out of the gate. As the reality of high inflation set in, though, homes and condos had started to catch up. Gold was closing in on $20,000 an ounce.
Albert has been late to becoming a father, even by citified standards. He was now fifty-three, thirty-seven years older than his boy, and had more than enough to retire on. He knew, as did the gold market, that the stated rate of inflation woefully underestimated the real thing. Although formally 14%, it was more like 30%: perhaps more.
Both Albert and Susan could see the way things were going. Crushing liabilities, the consequent deficits and the increasing need for the central bank to monetize them had set off an inflation spiral. The central bank’s sterilization dams blocking the inflationary effects of the monetization had developed serious cracks. A legislative remedy, hard credit-growth controls, was making its way through the legislature. Albert knew enough about the financial system, not to mention about his equally shrewd colleagues, to know that any such attempt would have enough loopholes to make the repair job crumble. What politician would dare say “no more credit” to the masses, without escape hatch?
Adding to the trouble was the fact that the dollar was plunging on the forex market, even though its more successful competitors were being inflated too. Yes indeed, the dollars were being repatriated. Even the proposed credit-rationing law could do nothing about the dollar carry trade, whose proceeds were going into gold and commodities. Given the inflation spiral, it was a better bet than high-interest short-term debt in less soft fiat currencies. Commodities kept going up: you just peeled off enough of a position to pay off the interest on the carry loan and let the rest ride. If a mistiming mishap took place, the central bank was there. More and more, the central bank was creating new reserves; more and more, those new reserves leaked into the carry trade.
Albert was old and experienced enough to see where the long run was going. In order to scope out how it would end, he used a trick that his father taught him at thirteen: the Nash Empathy Principle. In order to see how the game would play out, imagine that you’re your opponent and find the best move he or she could make. Then make your own move with that best play in mind.
He tried to imagine what he could do had he been the head of the central bank, but his imagination came up dry. That was the trouble. He could easily find ways to profit from inflation, knowing the ins and outs of the monetary, banking and shadow-banking system, but the prospect of stopping it baffled him. The only way out was to unleash a monster depression, which was politically impossible.
The financial pom-pom wavers were pushing the message that the robust economy could survive an extended spell of double-digit inflation. Albert knew better. He also could see the bleeding edge of civil chaos coming to Freham. So could his wife: she had gently pushed him to move after the home invasion.
So, he and his family were well prepared to move up to Lake Wakia permanently. Although distant, he had an ancestral claim to the property he had bought. He was prepared to go prepper, but he was shrewd enough to not pack anything in advance except for furniture, gadgets and clothes. He knew quite well that buying local was the way to go. Not only food, but also firewood. He’d be spending a fair bit of fiat up there – with one important exception, decided on because the product didn’t exist in any quantity up in Wakia.
His savings were in gold mining stocks: with a wistful tear, he had cashed in his share of the hedge fund after stepping aside for his successor. All of the proceeds were put into mining stocks – all of them. Albert was sure that the stocks would go up by the time it came time to pay his tax bill. In miniature, his manoeuvre was the same as the commodity carry trade: sell some of what went up most and pay the tax bill with the proceeds. Wash, rinse and repeat for the next tax year.
There was a risk of the stocks going down in the interim, but well-timed buys and the overall trend made it slight. Albert had comped out the risk and decided it was well worth shouldering, although not without a few qualms. Since his firm had been a hedge fund, he was not entitled to the bailouts the trading department of the banks now expected as a matter of course. That made him more prudent in his calculations than his professional colleagues trading for the banks. They justified the bailouts by the monumental amount of income taxes both they and the banks paid when times were good. He once noted that he and his own firm paid enough of a fair share to qualify, but wasn’t let in. They didn’t like where he was going with it, so he kept his further thoughts to himself for the sake of professional peace.
Now retired, with a private portfolio spilling out more than enough dividends to meet his needs, Albert saw to that exception on the day before he and the family moved. He had budgeted the entire day for the chore.
Going into a large bank, one with a very ample supply of gold coins, he wryly noted to himself that he could wait in the lengthy line for the first time in what seemed his life. The bank occupied the entire first floor of a high-rise that spanned half the block.
A now-balding, gray-haired thinnish man with not much girth, slightly more than the average height, Albert’s casual clothes could not hide his wealth. Perhaps that was because he wore them like his distant cousin Darren Finney would wear a three-piece suit. A bespoke suit, silk shirt, gold cuff links, genuine soft-leather shoes and Hermès tie were just Albert’s work clothes.
He went in with a huge cash balance. Two and a half hours later, he exited with a very heavy briefcase. It contained two hundred and fifty one-ounce bullion coins, one hundred half-ouncers, one hundred quarter-ouncers, five hundred tenth ouncers and five hundred twentieth-ouncers. The last had been a bit of a stretch for the bank’s inventory. In addition to the coins, he also had a single hundred-ounce gold bar. Having to haul five hundred ounces, he moved slowly towards the taxicab he had hailed by cell phone. Thankfully, the civil breakdown had no influence in the business district: instead of rustled, he was treated with great respect and given a wide berth. Aware of how conspicuous he was, he trundled to the door while blushing.
Tongues could wag: it didn’t matter. Had any authorities decide to inquire, his obvious lackadaisicalness with security would make his story about having lost the gold plausible. By ‘losing’ the gold, he would do his part to save the economy from the decaying currency. Albert planned, in his retirement, to help pave the way for an alternate money. He and a few others, at first, would save what part of the economy that they could.
As he struggled to get the gold-filled briefcase into the taxi, he wryly noted to himself that he was part of a conspiracy. A conspiracy of goldbugs.
All next day was moving day. The transport-truck moving van arrived promptly at 9 AM. It was more than a two-hour drive to the old Finney homestead. Because of the time it would take to load and unload the furniture and effects, the van and the men were spoken for over the entire day. Albert hoped that he wouldn’t have to put them up overnight.
As Susan and Dylan settled into the soft and conformable leather front seats of the 2019 Mercedes S550, Albert regretted having bought such an expensive vehicle. He himself was taking up their second car, a 2018 Mercedes G55, with the gold-laden briefcase tucked in with his personal effects. It was an excellent off-road vehicle, but both Mercedes yelled out “luxury.” He wasn’t sure how they would fit in, now that he and his family were moving for good. He did have an ancestral claim, but it was rooted in the distant past. So much had changed since his great-great grandpa had given up farming and fishing for taverning.
Albert had gotten into the hedge-fund world the honest way. His father had been a business professor and Modern Portfolio devotee; as a result, he grew up with quant theory for breakfast and dinner. Albert getting his MBA at an elite school followed as a matter of course.
Crucially, the dad had also passed along his observations about life and business to his eldest boy. Those discoveries came too late to help the father, in the practical sense, but they were early enough to help young Albert. His old man had passed away nine years ago, at seventy-four, and Albert had made sure that the funeral was lavish as well as tasteful. He remembered it turning into a business funeral. At the time, he felt that his dad deserved no less: he had deeply wanted his son to succeed, and the power funeral showed his son had. His father’s colleagues and friends had been duly, genuinely, impressed.
After years’ worth of retrospect, though, it had planted a seed of doubt. Is that was Albert the man really wanted – to turn his dad’s final rest into a quant-driven investment conference?
As he saw his wife and son off, with the moving van still parked and being loaded in the oversize driveway, he realized he now had the chance to think things through. Remembering the home invasion in the neighbourhood he was now vacating, he crazily hoped that his dad’s grave wouldn’t be desecrated once he was gone.
Susan had noticed that he had begun to act shy, like he had done when they had first met. She had enjoyed the money and the status; she was mature enough to realize that both cost in terms of Albert’s time and attention. But, he shucking off the yoke was something for which she had been profoundly glad. They had a lot of catching up to do.
The house, a full 6,500 square footer, now had a large but tasteful “For Sale” sign on the lawn. The real-estate agent had been charged with managing the transaction, up and including having access with spare keys. Albert hesitated before getting into the G55. One of the moving men accosted him as he was looking around the front yard for the last time: “You worried about something?”
The man was cheerful, and Albert realized that people like him were going to be the Finney’s neighbours. “No,” he responded with Freham urbanity. “I just wanted to say good-bye to the place.”
“Okay; happy waving,” the guy finished with a smile before getting back to his work.
Because Albert was in the habit of driving fast, he beat Susan up to their new place. Not stopping to look at his new neighbour across the road, he drove along the quarter-mile driveway and was rewarded to see his homestead. More than a century ago, there had been a modest pre-ranch house made out of milled wood. Now, in the same location, there was a 3,500 square foot spread – still in ranch, as there was more than enough land for it – done in modern rustic cedar. Three chimneys poked up from the spread of roof. Thankfully, a detached two-car garage was to the right of the house.
Instead of a lonely fisherman’s dock, there were now two extensive spreads of lumber that jutted into the lake. The one on the right, replacing that old dock made of slapped-together crib and saw-milled lumber, was made of solid-professionally made cribs that supported pressure-treated boards. Built on the network of docks was a three-slip two-story boathouse, whose roof angled up like an elongated barn’s. Several hundred feet to the left was a thick dock that split into two, making for a slip for two guest boats that fitted in single file. The rest of the dock was elongated enough to make room for six other docked boats. The fat part of the dock was big enough for dock chairs, and there was a forty-foot spread of dock running parallel to water’s edge joined to the rest. The place where Lawrence Finney’s old still had been was now covered by a dockhouse garage that was big enough to hold two ATVs along with the dock furniture and fixings.
For more than a century, this land has served as a haven for rest, recreation and relaxation. For Albert and his family, it was now a permanent home.
After looking around the large, circular, gravel-dusted dirt driveway, he stopped to wonder where the rest of his family was. His wife drove more slowly than he, but she should have gotten here by now. Did she stop to shop?
Five minutes later, Albert saw what she had stopped to do. The S550 was at the head of a three-vehicle procession ambling in towards the driveway. The other two were a Ford F250 and a Dodge Ram extended-cab; both trucks looked used.
There was a strange boy in the front passenger seat beside Susan, looking a little bemused. Neil was on the bench seat of the F250, looking dutiful. In the driver’s seat beside his son was a stranger whose features looked vaguely familiar. The man in the Ram was simply a stranger.
When she got out, Albert noticed his wife was genuinely happy. She was a good height, a little lanky, with streaks of grey in her black hair. The boy beside her now looked flummoxed, but he was smiling too. They had evidently chatted on the way in. The fortyish-looking man and Neil got out at the same time, both silent. The fellow in the Ram was silent too as he got out, but his eyes were twinkling. Neil and the strange lad walked towards one another as his wife walked to him.
“You’re not going to believe who I met!” she enthused. “The people who live on the other side of the road, they’re your distant cousins!”
Really! Albert’s eyes widened as they lighted on a man who – unbeknownst to him at that point – almost literally lived on the other side of the tracks. No wonder Susan had mixed kids with him.
Taking her words as an introduction, the man strode forward. He was a little bulkier than Albert, but about the same height. There was a vague resemblance in the eyes, the way that both men’s were set into their respective skulls. Darren Finney had only a widow’s peak, and his hair was closer to sandy than Albert’s dark, but their faced were both angular and their noses both snubbed. He wore his jeans and lumberjack shirt comfortably.
“Hi, cuz. I heard you’ve moved here permanently.”
“Makes for quite the homecoming,” the stranger observed while seeing a chance to move into the conversation. Extending his hand to Albert after Darren, he introduced himself as Paul Mullen. “I own the marina upstream. Been the family business since my great-great-great grandfather persuaded his elder bother to come up and keep us from killing each other,” he added easily. Moustachioed, his hair was balding like Albert’s but not greying. His face was wider than the Finneys’, as were his eyes and mouth, and he looked like he was used to being in charge in these parts. “Myself, I head up the bad Mullens,” he continued with his eyes becoming merry again. “We’re the ones that sponge off the government. The good Mullens pretty much are the government. They’re the ones in town, most of them.” With those last two sentences, the merriness disappeared; he meant it.
But it came back. With Darren patiently watching, Paul explained the set-up as he saw it. Susan listened; she was learning. The two boys had edged towards each other, both shy. Despite Darren being eleven years younger than Albert, the boys were about the same age. Dylan, though, had something on Neil: he knew how to drive, while the more sheltered boy hadn’t taken his lessons yet.
That biographical fact came up between the men. When he learned that Albert’s strapping young boy hadn’t learned how to drive, Paul goggled. “Seriously?
“I drove a truck for the first time when I was thirteen!”
Dylan smiled as his thinner counterpart Neil, a bit lewdly. “Don’t take him too seriously. The Mullens, they whup their kids when the kids don’t do something.”
His dad overheard. “Don’t sneer at it, son,” he said edgewise. “It does get them doing something.” Turning to Albert, who he assumed was listening in too, “The trouble with you city folks is, you get whupped for doing something.” Seeing Albert’s uncomprehending look, he specified: “Through the laws, cousin, through the laws.
“You can’t even cut down a tree on your own property down in Freham. Not even if it’s on a farm-sized spread,” he added as a coup de grâce.
“That’s the plain truth,” Paul added sidewise to Darren. “That’s why we have to take care of ‘em.”
Albert, still uncomprehending, looked back at the man who had gotten in the most words. Paul’s paunch now showed more than usual.
“The trouble is, Albert, it’s your great-great-granddad who started all the trouble by selling his place. It brought in the city folks.” Darren emphasized the point with a troubled nod. Paul continued. “I’m telling you because you’re the Feeney now; you’re the fit for the legend.” Darren circled his right hand as if to say “in a manner of speaking.” Oddly, he kept his left hand in his pocket when it had nothing to do. His right hand remained free.
“Oh yeah, he’s fitting the legend all right,” Darren added with merriness mixed with pride. “Albert here’s wife told me that he’s going into the family business. They call it ‘a wall-a’.”
“Hawala,” Albert corrected quietly. “A hawaladar’s a private banker, a node in a system of informal private banking.”
“Wrong, cuz,” Darren cut in cheerfully. “I looked it up before we drove in. The go-to guy’s a thak-uh-dahr.
“Yes, technically I’m a thakedar,” Albert responded with his still-citified polite, “but I’m the principal as well as the agent. If something goes wrong, I make good.” As he was clarifying, Paul pulled out his smart phone and looked up the term.
“I thought they cracked down on you hedgie guys when you covered up your mistakes,” Darren added a little too quietly. In his own way, he was telling his distant blood relative to not be a city sleaze.
Having found a summary and read it, Paul looked up from his phone and beamed. “Hey Albert, you really are the Finney! Gone right into the family business!”
Now confused, Albert looked at his cousin. There was something he wasn’t getting in all the cross-talk.
“Darren, how could our ancestor have been a private money-transfer node? From what I understand, there was hardly any money around before the town incorporated.”
Darren, the moment of warning now passed, started chuckling as if Albert had told him a good in-joke; his head turned to his old neighbour. “Might as well do the honours, Paul.” His eyes turned back to his distant cousin, expectancy mixing in with the merriment.
Paul did so, with a fair bit of glee. “Albert, old sod, your great-great grandpaw was none other than the local bootlegger. Your ATV garage, that’s the exact place he had his still.”
Conspiring
The two old Wakians were rewarded by seeing an all-out blush on the new boy’s face. Darren Feeney, Albert’s distant cousin, was used to being thought of as the distant seed of the local bootlegger; it didn’t bother him. He even played into it with a little under-the-table electrical and computer-installation work for cash, which added to him fitting in. It reassured the locals who liked to think of family behaviour as part of family tradition.
Paul Mullin, the scion of the “bad” Mullens, did his own part to fit in too. Since he ran a marina, a business that was easily targeted by the tax authorities, he didn’t go much for under-the-table transactions. But, his status as a business owner didn’t prevent him from collecting unemployment on the off-season along with his staff. The way he saw it, unemployment was like forced savings. The only way he could cash in on what he himself contributed was if he were unemployed. The marina being a seasonal business, it was the perfect vehicle for extracting prior contributions once the vacationers called it a year. Paul felt no guilt in doing so. If he came a little ahead as a result, it was just because he was smart.
Because both old-timers lived according to the old country code of seeking advantage from a too-citified government, they were pleased to see the new boy cultivating his own angle. Albert had joined up with several other well-off goldbugs to put together the bare bones of a gold hawala network. He and his friends would privately keep tallies on gold exchanged for goods; the aim was to build up an alternate monetary system to cushion the economy from the worst effects of hyperinflation. It was set up by believers in gold, so the alternative of using hard fiat currency wasn’t seriously entertained. Other could see to using Euros, yen and renminbi; Albert and his cohorts were sure that several payment networks had. The advantage of gold was that it was easier to hide. Had the national government decided to crack down on foreign-currency transactions, it could do so fairly easily. Like dollars, those other currencies were mostly in the form of computer blips. Thanks to the new world of international co-operation, the governments overseeing those currencies would be eager to aid and abet any such crackdown. Yes, even the communist Chinese; they needed good trade relations, and it was no skin off their backs. They had no duty to help out foreigners who were trying to protect themselves against the ravages of inflation caused by a non-Chinese government. Such non-citizens were of no account.
The same iron logic applied to physical bills. Had the feds been authorized to confiscate those bills and burn them as if they were confiscated marijuana, the respective governments would not intervene at all. The advantage of using Euros, yen or renminbi, which were also inflating but at a lesser rate, was outweighed by the disadvantage of they being tied to an overly policed financial system.
Physical gold, on the other hand, was independent of the very well-monitored banking system. There was no national gold registry. Unlike with digital and vault-stored gold, there were no records to impound. Gold in the shadows was very hard to confiscate. Given the amount of robberies lately, it could easily be ‘lost’ and thus enter the shadowy black market.
Not everyone can be a hawaladar, a node in the hawala money-transfer network. Imported from India, the system worked as follows: a hawaladar had a large stash of money. If a client wanted to transfer money to someone else, the hawaladar took a small cut and then checked his or her private records. If the client had a credit balance, then the agent adjusted it accordingly. If physical money was brought in, the hawaladar stored it along with the rest of the funds in his or her keeping.
If the recipient lived in the area, the hawaladar would ask if a credit balance would suffice for payment. If so, then the records were adjusted. If not, then the money was delivered and the account settled. Transaction closed, and fee earned.
Things got interesting when the money needed to be transferred out of the agent’s own turf. Then, a hawaladar would contact a colleague that looked after the territory where the funds were going. The same clearing-house process was employed: if it sufficed, records were adjusted and that other agent would release the funds from his or her own pile. Out of convenience, the nodes of the hawala system kept credit balances with each other; they didn’t draw upon the funds until their own stash got short. Not until then was a risky physical courier delivery resorted to.
By description, it sounds a lot like Western Union – but there were these crucial differences: Western Union was centralized; the hawala network was radically decentralized. Western Union went out of their way to solicit your business; hawaladars didn’t. Western Union could be shut down with a single edict and raid; a raid of even the biggest hawaladar would only shut down that one node. Once the network was large and thriving, the transactions could simply be rerouted like data packets over the Internet. The final difference, of course, is Western Union was cheaper. With respect to Albert and his crew, there was an additional difference: Western Union did not handle gold, although several digital-gold companies did.
How a single hawaladar handled his or her books was completely up to him or her, as long as probity was iron-clad. Records could be kept in a manner as primitive as pen and paper, perhaps in code to deter snoops. Or, it could be as sophisticated as a triple-encrypted spreadsheet - specially encrypted file on a hard drive also encrypted, with a cloud backup file also hidden and encrypted – with no password needed because the hawaladar’s eyeball served as the password. The latter system matched Albert’s set-up. He had no passwords to remember, so he had no need to write down strings of digits and letters or exert his memory. The iris-recognition system did use passwords, as it was layered over the standard system, but those were generated using a true-random number generator that was certified by the casinos as matching the real thing. Once the password was generated, the recognition software calibrated it to the data received by the eye-camera. A different iris would be translated into a different and therefore wrong password. Since human memory was no longer a factor, the passwords in question could be huge. One glance into the eye scanner on Albert’s system translated into a 128-character password. As a backup, the wrong iris immediately changed the password into a new random 128 characters. The eye-scanner went into lockdown until Albert's right iris relinked the scanner data to the password. The communication between the device and the desktop was encrypted at the Pentagon level.
It took a special person to be a hawaladar. Money was necessary but far from sufficient. A true and hard-won reputation for iron probity, underlying a word that’s golden, was also necessary. Not much spoken of, but also crucial, was being loved. Hawaladars always lived with the spectre of theft; the best defence was being nestled in a community who would all but lynch a robber who dared prey upon the well-nested agent. Being loved wasn’t a substitute for safes and safeguards, but it was more effective than physical means alone. Burglars know who not to touch; they know who’s looked out for. That’s why so few small-town widows with comfortable competences, and husbands who had been pillars of the local church, got burgled or even defrauded.
Albert Finney, being new to the world of hawala, was luckier than he knew. The ribbing he had just endured was a disguised invite into the well-knit fabric of Lake Wakia. Had he been a mere city boy, without an ancestral connection and a Wakian relative living just across the road, his node would have never gotten off the ground. Fame and widespread repute through the business media was not enough. Had he not had dormant but deep roots in Wakia, his hawaladaring would have been dead on arrival.
Moreover, he would have been seen by the salt of Wakia’s earth as just another “tourist” who put on airs when it suited him. No-one who knew the land would look out for him, and burglars would notice. Albert being known as the Finney, the great-great grandson of the local moonshiner back when the area was new and well-hid, gave the locals a dig at him but it also granted him a place. He had an opportunity to roll with the hazing and thus draw on it; by accepting the local customs himself, he had an opportunity to be one of the looked-out-for. He would need it.
He didn’t think of it in the above terms, but he had enough sense to cotton on to the process. Through his blush, he realized that he had to “Finney it up” to be accepted.
So, after recovering his tongue, he replied: “Well, the goldlegging still is going to be well buried.”
Both Darren Finney and Paul Mullen looked at each other, nodding. Albert, citified though he was, would do.
Neil and Dylan Feeney, now mutually-recognized distant cousins, began to spend some time together. Neil, having been yanked out of the exclusive Yancey Grove prep school, didn’t sign up for the local schooling; instead, he homeschooled. Dylan spread the word that Neil had found a way to goof off. That wasn’t true, but the new boy went along with the joke although stiffly.
He also went along with something else. Dylan, having grown up with electricity and computers, had showed a precociousness that was expressed in the time-honoured manner in which boys express their creativity in the useful arts. When twelve, he had built himself a clubhouse about a hundred yards away from the two-story family home. Bigger than a treehouse, it was the size of an overly large shed and thus had to be put down on the surface. The boy had to have help from his dad Darren when building the thing, directly modelled on a large shed, but he wired it himself. Pleased, his dad added a special circuit to the circuit-breaker board and marked it with the label “Boys’ Club.” The 15-amp line from the breaker went out the basement wall a foot below ground. It had been Dylan’s task to dig a trench for the wire from the house to the clubhouse, which he had undertaken with visible reluctance.
The 14-gauge wire had been shielded with a half-inch PVC pipe to prevent damage from any later digging. When it reached the clubhouse, it went to three sets of double-plugs in the small building before it reached the lights and the light switch. One set was, of course, for the computer. Being old-fashioned, Dylan’s main unit was a desktop. Computer, printer, monitor and other gadgets required a power bar that plugged into the first outlet. The second and third were for whatever additional junk he wanted to plug in. Dylan had thoughts of plugging in a permanent electric heater for those cold spring and fall nights, but his dad smilingly explained that it would overload the circuit unless it were a small one. And then, he told his son to add insulation to the roof and walls. “You asked for it,” he explained. His boy had been miffed but had gotten over it. In so doing, the youngster had learned in a rudimentary way how to wire a building properly. Something as simple as running the wires parallel to the floor, which was not that simple to a growing boy, made sense to him when he had to cut the fibreglass to fit around the wires.
Initially, it had been something like a secret fort. As boyhood turned into teenagerhood, it became something else. The computer desk was vertical; the desk chair, small, simple and easily moved. Both were tucked in the near corner of the clubhouse on the right side of the door when entering. The large monitor thus served the entire room as a TV and movie centre; speakers were beside the monitor, except for a woofer that was tucked on the floor. Said room was made up of a couch, on the left wall, and three stuffed chairs. One was behind the couch, one was backed up against the far wall, and the third was on the right wall. All of them came from the town dump; all were serviceable.
Near the computer desk was a foot locker secured with an old-fashioned combination lock, of the kind that that generations of schoolboys had secured their lockers with. Wanting to introduce his fellow teenager to one of the manly arts, Dylan headed straight for it after he had gotten back from Friday schooling, had accosted Neil, and had a polite and pleasant conversation with his distant aunt Susan. Amused to find the other boy still studying, Dylan verbally dragged him to the truck and booted out the driveway. While driving, he remarked to Neil that the only part of the drive that wasn’t on private property was the road between their places. Although the two driveways weren’t facing each other, there was only a hundred yards between them. Only one hundred yards of public-property road in the entire journey, which clocked in at almost a third of a mile.
Party time was after dinner, by convention, but Neil needed the orientation course.
Albert’s mission proved to be a frustrating one. His name and press got him quick invites from the cottagers, but they sized up his alternate-money idea as something worthy of an overwrought strung-out retiree. Word spread on social networks that poor old Albert Finney had gone native. Instead of playing the gold and commodities game like a professional, he had snapped and become a disreputable goldbug. One fantasizing about hyperinflation and the wreckage of the economy.
The closest thing to luck he had, ironically enough, was with one of the "good" Mullens. Caleb Mullen was Wakia’s tax collector, a neat nearly-bald man of medium height with a clipped moustache; he wore his ancestry lightly. Sizing up Albert as a mere gold buff, he said that the township would be pleased to accept Albert’s property taxes in gold. “Two years in advance would be nice,” he added with a genial smile, but Albert didn’t get the in-joke.
But the newcomer did get what the tax collector was driving at. Gold being more sensitive to real inflation than ostensible inflation, it held its value. The national legislature was well on its way to passing a bill that would ration credit, so as to stop the money supply from rocketing up as it had. Seeing the writing on the legislative wall, Caleb had privately lobbied the Mayor and town council to rush through a new bond issue that, when added to the current ones, would all-but break the back of the tax base. Before inflation caught up, that is.
Thanks to the official inflation rate being only 14%, the bonds could be floated with a 15% coupon. Wakia was a good credit, if a little stretched, and the bonds could be easily sold to those people who still trusted municipal bonds and the national government. Caleb already had the idea of putting the proceeds into gold, selling off only what was necessary to meet city expenses, but his meeting with Albert crystallized the decision. Albert was a Finney, and knew the angles. He clearly approved of Caleb’s idea.
A sticking point was reached when Albert suggested that Wakia take physical possession of the gold and store it locally. At first, Caleb thought the man was nuts. Why would the town take that risk, especially when storing it with an allocated dealer with an ultra-secure double vault was the obvious choice?
“Because there’s a risk that the federal government will confiscate it,” Albert answered. Soberly.
Caleb looked at Albert to see any trade of wild-eyedness but found none. Pausing to clean his glasses, he remembered hearing about his guest cementing a secure safe right in the bedrock underneath his home. This man clearly meant what he said.
Wakia’s theft rate was low, even in these inflationary times, and the thefts tended to be of the ‘borrowing’ sort. Still, the town having gold in a basement safe would upset the applecart. The bond issue, once it went though, would be enough to secure 5,000 oz. of gold at present prices. Fifty one-hundred ounce bars provided the right balance between compactness and vendiblility. Should the national government be pushed to confiscate, things would have gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Having a secret reserve might not be a bad idea. Since citified government officials still looked down on the small towners, Caleb and his colleagues could easily plead “bumpkin” after they took their time to hand the gold in.
A move that momentous, though, had to be discussed with the Mayor and the council. So Albert got sent off with a polite “we’ll let you know.” As he went off, disappointed yet again, he didn’t know that his fellow hawaladar had arranged a gold deal that would involve him directly.
Having got to the clubhouse and its foot locker, Dylan opened it up with a mischievous look in his eye. Neil waited beside him, uncomprehendingly.
Inside the locker were two four-litre bottles of liquid. One was near full, the other was half-empty. Both had semi-inflated balloons where the caps would be.
“This is mead,” Dylan explained. “You make it with honey and other stuff that’s store-bought.”
Not cluing in, Neil waited. The slightly older boy now assumed what he considered to be a pedagogical air; his voice became a little gruff.
“To make it, you need to buy a jug of spring water, although distilled works okay. Get an orange, and say you want to eat it. Peel the orange and put it in the bottle after draining about half. Put the water in juice jugs so you can pour back some if you need to. Make sure to tear the membrane of the orange slices before you put them in.” Neil, not quite understanding, nodded.
“You need raisins – about thirty of them. Snack raisins: you get?” Seeing a nod, Dylan also noted the owlish eyes. Not a worry: he had an Internet link if the kid needed it.
“Next, is yeast. Just one packet. You can buy three and use the other two for homemade bread. If your mom presses, you can say you lost the third.”
Now brandishing the half-filled bottle as if it were a teaching aid, Dylan faced Neil. “The sticky part’s the honey. You have to use raw, which means you have to order it online. There’s no apiary around here. You can order five pounds and put a quart of it in the bottle, and save the rest for your sweet tooth. If there are questions about why you want the water, buy two tins of juice concentrate. You’re developing a taste for the finer things in life.”
Having mixed his how-to-make lesson with how to avoid attracting suspicion, Dylan continued. “Once the ingredients are in, you shake it for five minutes to get the oxygen in the water. That’s for the yeast.
“The raisins and orange are for the yeast too. You have to put a balloon on the top, pricked twice with a needle, to let the carbon dioxide escape. You don’t want the bottle to explode.” He paused and looked Neil in the eye to make sure the point sunk in before continuing.
“After a month or so, you rack it. Use a strainer and your juice jugs to filter out the raisins, oranges and dregs from the mead. Pour the mixture once through the strainer and that’ll get your raisins and orange out. Pour it through the strainer again, this time with a dish cloth to get the dregs. You’ll have to rinse the cloth when the stuff backs up.”
Satisfied that Neil was following along, Dylan added: “You have to use the sink, so you wait until everyone’s gone before you rack. It takes about an hour and a half if you sanitize the juice jugs and mead jug with bleach. You have to use the bleach,” he emphasized, “otherwise you risk contamination. Put in about a tablespoon with warm water, and don’t forget to rinse three times after swishing the bleach around. You’ll want to wash them with dish soap beforehand to get the crap off. Don’t skip this step.
“Once the racking’s done, the mead is back in the bottle. Let it age six months, or less if you don’t mind a little roughness, and you’ve got your drinks.”
Now comprehending, Neil’s eyes lit up. His eyes shot to the half-filled bottle which his distant cousin was brandishing.
Albert got the news on his smart phone from his fellow hawaladar in Freham, Harold Renfrew. Renfrew was a man of inherited wealth who got into the gold network on a lark. He transmitted, as agent over the smart phone’s well-encrypted network, the message that an unknown client wanted to buy Albert's old home in Freham for one thousand ounces of gold. Physical gold.
Paul Mullin, the scion of the “bad” Mullens, did his own part to fit in too. Since he ran a marina, a business that was easily targeted by the tax authorities, he didn’t go much for under-the-table transactions. But, his status as a business owner didn’t prevent him from collecting unemployment on the off-season along with his staff. The way he saw it, unemployment was like forced savings. The only way he could cash in on what he himself contributed was if he were unemployed. The marina being a seasonal business, it was the perfect vehicle for extracting prior contributions once the vacationers called it a year. Paul felt no guilt in doing so. If he came a little ahead as a result, it was just because he was smart.
Because both old-timers lived according to the old country code of seeking advantage from a too-citified government, they were pleased to see the new boy cultivating his own angle. Albert had joined up with several other well-off goldbugs to put together the bare bones of a gold hawala network. He and his friends would privately keep tallies on gold exchanged for goods; the aim was to build up an alternate monetary system to cushion the economy from the worst effects of hyperinflation. It was set up by believers in gold, so the alternative of using hard fiat currency wasn’t seriously entertained. Other could see to using Euros, yen and renminbi; Albert and his cohorts were sure that several payment networks had. The advantage of gold was that it was easier to hide. Had the national government decided to crack down on foreign-currency transactions, it could do so fairly easily. Like dollars, those other currencies were mostly in the form of computer blips. Thanks to the new world of international co-operation, the governments overseeing those currencies would be eager to aid and abet any such crackdown. Yes, even the communist Chinese; they needed good trade relations, and it was no skin off their backs. They had no duty to help out foreigners who were trying to protect themselves against the ravages of inflation caused by a non-Chinese government. Such non-citizens were of no account.
The same iron logic applied to physical bills. Had the feds been authorized to confiscate those bills and burn them as if they were confiscated marijuana, the respective governments would not intervene at all. The advantage of using Euros, yen or renminbi, which were also inflating but at a lesser rate, was outweighed by the disadvantage of they being tied to an overly policed financial system.
Physical gold, on the other hand, was independent of the very well-monitored banking system. There was no national gold registry. Unlike with digital and vault-stored gold, there were no records to impound. Gold in the shadows was very hard to confiscate. Given the amount of robberies lately, it could easily be ‘lost’ and thus enter the shadowy black market.
Not everyone can be a hawaladar, a node in the hawala money-transfer network. Imported from India, the system worked as follows: a hawaladar had a large stash of money. If a client wanted to transfer money to someone else, the hawaladar took a small cut and then checked his or her private records. If the client had a credit balance, then the agent adjusted it accordingly. If physical money was brought in, the hawaladar stored it along with the rest of the funds in his or her keeping.
If the recipient lived in the area, the hawaladar would ask if a credit balance would suffice for payment. If so, then the records were adjusted. If not, then the money was delivered and the account settled. Transaction closed, and fee earned.
Things got interesting when the money needed to be transferred out of the agent’s own turf. Then, a hawaladar would contact a colleague that looked after the territory where the funds were going. The same clearing-house process was employed: if it sufficed, records were adjusted and that other agent would release the funds from his or her own pile. Out of convenience, the nodes of the hawala system kept credit balances with each other; they didn’t draw upon the funds until their own stash got short. Not until then was a risky physical courier delivery resorted to.
By description, it sounds a lot like Western Union – but there were these crucial differences: Western Union was centralized; the hawala network was radically decentralized. Western Union went out of their way to solicit your business; hawaladars didn’t. Western Union could be shut down with a single edict and raid; a raid of even the biggest hawaladar would only shut down that one node. Once the network was large and thriving, the transactions could simply be rerouted like data packets over the Internet. The final difference, of course, is Western Union was cheaper. With respect to Albert and his crew, there was an additional difference: Western Union did not handle gold, although several digital-gold companies did.
How a single hawaladar handled his or her books was completely up to him or her, as long as probity was iron-clad. Records could be kept in a manner as primitive as pen and paper, perhaps in code to deter snoops. Or, it could be as sophisticated as a triple-encrypted spreadsheet - specially encrypted file on a hard drive also encrypted, with a cloud backup file also hidden and encrypted – with no password needed because the hawaladar’s eyeball served as the password. The latter system matched Albert’s set-up. He had no passwords to remember, so he had no need to write down strings of digits and letters or exert his memory. The iris-recognition system did use passwords, as it was layered over the standard system, but those were generated using a true-random number generator that was certified by the casinos as matching the real thing. Once the password was generated, the recognition software calibrated it to the data received by the eye-camera. A different iris would be translated into a different and therefore wrong password. Since human memory was no longer a factor, the passwords in question could be huge. One glance into the eye scanner on Albert’s system translated into a 128-character password. As a backup, the wrong iris immediately changed the password into a new random 128 characters. The eye-scanner went into lockdown until Albert's right iris relinked the scanner data to the password. The communication between the device and the desktop was encrypted at the Pentagon level.
It took a special person to be a hawaladar. Money was necessary but far from sufficient. A true and hard-won reputation for iron probity, underlying a word that’s golden, was also necessary. Not much spoken of, but also crucial, was being loved. Hawaladars always lived with the spectre of theft; the best defence was being nestled in a community who would all but lynch a robber who dared prey upon the well-nested agent. Being loved wasn’t a substitute for safes and safeguards, but it was more effective than physical means alone. Burglars know who not to touch; they know who’s looked out for. That’s why so few small-town widows with comfortable competences, and husbands who had been pillars of the local church, got burgled or even defrauded.
Albert Finney, being new to the world of hawala, was luckier than he knew. The ribbing he had just endured was a disguised invite into the well-knit fabric of Lake Wakia. Had he been a mere city boy, without an ancestral connection and a Wakian relative living just across the road, his node would have never gotten off the ground. Fame and widespread repute through the business media was not enough. Had he not had dormant but deep roots in Wakia, his hawaladaring would have been dead on arrival.
Moreover, he would have been seen by the salt of Wakia’s earth as just another “tourist” who put on airs when it suited him. No-one who knew the land would look out for him, and burglars would notice. Albert being known as the Finney, the great-great grandson of the local moonshiner back when the area was new and well-hid, gave the locals a dig at him but it also granted him a place. He had an opportunity to roll with the hazing and thus draw on it; by accepting the local customs himself, he had an opportunity to be one of the looked-out-for. He would need it.
He didn’t think of it in the above terms, but he had enough sense to cotton on to the process. Through his blush, he realized that he had to “Finney it up” to be accepted.
So, after recovering his tongue, he replied: “Well, the goldlegging still is going to be well buried.”
Both Darren Finney and Paul Mullen looked at each other, nodding. Albert, citified though he was, would do.
Neil and Dylan Feeney, now mutually-recognized distant cousins, began to spend some time together. Neil, having been yanked out of the exclusive Yancey Grove prep school, didn’t sign up for the local schooling; instead, he homeschooled. Dylan spread the word that Neil had found a way to goof off. That wasn’t true, but the new boy went along with the joke although stiffly.
He also went along with something else. Dylan, having grown up with electricity and computers, had showed a precociousness that was expressed in the time-honoured manner in which boys express their creativity in the useful arts. When twelve, he had built himself a clubhouse about a hundred yards away from the two-story family home. Bigger than a treehouse, it was the size of an overly large shed and thus had to be put down on the surface. The boy had to have help from his dad Darren when building the thing, directly modelled on a large shed, but he wired it himself. Pleased, his dad added a special circuit to the circuit-breaker board and marked it with the label “Boys’ Club.” The 15-amp line from the breaker went out the basement wall a foot below ground. It had been Dylan’s task to dig a trench for the wire from the house to the clubhouse, which he had undertaken with visible reluctance.
The 14-gauge wire had been shielded with a half-inch PVC pipe to prevent damage from any later digging. When it reached the clubhouse, it went to three sets of double-plugs in the small building before it reached the lights and the light switch. One set was, of course, for the computer. Being old-fashioned, Dylan’s main unit was a desktop. Computer, printer, monitor and other gadgets required a power bar that plugged into the first outlet. The second and third were for whatever additional junk he wanted to plug in. Dylan had thoughts of plugging in a permanent electric heater for those cold spring and fall nights, but his dad smilingly explained that it would overload the circuit unless it were a small one. And then, he told his son to add insulation to the roof and walls. “You asked for it,” he explained. His boy had been miffed but had gotten over it. In so doing, the youngster had learned in a rudimentary way how to wire a building properly. Something as simple as running the wires parallel to the floor, which was not that simple to a growing boy, made sense to him when he had to cut the fibreglass to fit around the wires.
Initially, it had been something like a secret fort. As boyhood turned into teenagerhood, it became something else. The computer desk was vertical; the desk chair, small, simple and easily moved. Both were tucked in the near corner of the clubhouse on the right side of the door when entering. The large monitor thus served the entire room as a TV and movie centre; speakers were beside the monitor, except for a woofer that was tucked on the floor. Said room was made up of a couch, on the left wall, and three stuffed chairs. One was behind the couch, one was backed up against the far wall, and the third was on the right wall. All of them came from the town dump; all were serviceable.
Near the computer desk was a foot locker secured with an old-fashioned combination lock, of the kind that that generations of schoolboys had secured their lockers with. Wanting to introduce his fellow teenager to one of the manly arts, Dylan headed straight for it after he had gotten back from Friday schooling, had accosted Neil, and had a polite and pleasant conversation with his distant aunt Susan. Amused to find the other boy still studying, Dylan verbally dragged him to the truck and booted out the driveway. While driving, he remarked to Neil that the only part of the drive that wasn’t on private property was the road between their places. Although the two driveways weren’t facing each other, there was only a hundred yards between them. Only one hundred yards of public-property road in the entire journey, which clocked in at almost a third of a mile.
Party time was after dinner, by convention, but Neil needed the orientation course.
Albert’s mission proved to be a frustrating one. His name and press got him quick invites from the cottagers, but they sized up his alternate-money idea as something worthy of an overwrought strung-out retiree. Word spread on social networks that poor old Albert Finney had gone native. Instead of playing the gold and commodities game like a professional, he had snapped and become a disreputable goldbug. One fantasizing about hyperinflation and the wreckage of the economy.
The closest thing to luck he had, ironically enough, was with one of the "good" Mullens. Caleb Mullen was Wakia’s tax collector, a neat nearly-bald man of medium height with a clipped moustache; he wore his ancestry lightly. Sizing up Albert as a mere gold buff, he said that the township would be pleased to accept Albert’s property taxes in gold. “Two years in advance would be nice,” he added with a genial smile, but Albert didn’t get the in-joke.
But the newcomer did get what the tax collector was driving at. Gold being more sensitive to real inflation than ostensible inflation, it held its value. The national legislature was well on its way to passing a bill that would ration credit, so as to stop the money supply from rocketing up as it had. Seeing the writing on the legislative wall, Caleb had privately lobbied the Mayor and town council to rush through a new bond issue that, when added to the current ones, would all-but break the back of the tax base. Before inflation caught up, that is.
Thanks to the official inflation rate being only 14%, the bonds could be floated with a 15% coupon. Wakia was a good credit, if a little stretched, and the bonds could be easily sold to those people who still trusted municipal bonds and the national government. Caleb already had the idea of putting the proceeds into gold, selling off only what was necessary to meet city expenses, but his meeting with Albert crystallized the decision. Albert was a Finney, and knew the angles. He clearly approved of Caleb’s idea.
A sticking point was reached when Albert suggested that Wakia take physical possession of the gold and store it locally. At first, Caleb thought the man was nuts. Why would the town take that risk, especially when storing it with an allocated dealer with an ultra-secure double vault was the obvious choice?
“Because there’s a risk that the federal government will confiscate it,” Albert answered. Soberly.
Caleb looked at Albert to see any trade of wild-eyedness but found none. Pausing to clean his glasses, he remembered hearing about his guest cementing a secure safe right in the bedrock underneath his home. This man clearly meant what he said.
Wakia’s theft rate was low, even in these inflationary times, and the thefts tended to be of the ‘borrowing’ sort. Still, the town having gold in a basement safe would upset the applecart. The bond issue, once it went though, would be enough to secure 5,000 oz. of gold at present prices. Fifty one-hundred ounce bars provided the right balance between compactness and vendiblility. Should the national government be pushed to confiscate, things would have gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Having a secret reserve might not be a bad idea. Since citified government officials still looked down on the small towners, Caleb and his colleagues could easily plead “bumpkin” after they took their time to hand the gold in.
A move that momentous, though, had to be discussed with the Mayor and the council. So Albert got sent off with a polite “we’ll let you know.” As he went off, disappointed yet again, he didn’t know that his fellow hawaladar had arranged a gold deal that would involve him directly.
Having got to the clubhouse and its foot locker, Dylan opened it up with a mischievous look in his eye. Neil waited beside him, uncomprehendingly.
Inside the locker were two four-litre bottles of liquid. One was near full, the other was half-empty. Both had semi-inflated balloons where the caps would be.
“This is mead,” Dylan explained. “You make it with honey and other stuff that’s store-bought.”
Not cluing in, Neil waited. The slightly older boy now assumed what he considered to be a pedagogical air; his voice became a little gruff.
“To make it, you need to buy a jug of spring water, although distilled works okay. Get an orange, and say you want to eat it. Peel the orange and put it in the bottle after draining about half. Put the water in juice jugs so you can pour back some if you need to. Make sure to tear the membrane of the orange slices before you put them in.” Neil, not quite understanding, nodded.
“You need raisins – about thirty of them. Snack raisins: you get?” Seeing a nod, Dylan also noted the owlish eyes. Not a worry: he had an Internet link if the kid needed it.
“Next, is yeast. Just one packet. You can buy three and use the other two for homemade bread. If your mom presses, you can say you lost the third.”
Now brandishing the half-filled bottle as if it were a teaching aid, Dylan faced Neil. “The sticky part’s the honey. You have to use raw, which means you have to order it online. There’s no apiary around here. You can order five pounds and put a quart of it in the bottle, and save the rest for your sweet tooth. If there are questions about why you want the water, buy two tins of juice concentrate. You’re developing a taste for the finer things in life.”
Having mixed his how-to-make lesson with how to avoid attracting suspicion, Dylan continued. “Once the ingredients are in, you shake it for five minutes to get the oxygen in the water. That’s for the yeast.
“The raisins and orange are for the yeast too. You have to put a balloon on the top, pricked twice with a needle, to let the carbon dioxide escape. You don’t want the bottle to explode.” He paused and looked Neil in the eye to make sure the point sunk in before continuing.
“After a month or so, you rack it. Use a strainer and your juice jugs to filter out the raisins, oranges and dregs from the mead. Pour the mixture once through the strainer and that’ll get your raisins and orange out. Pour it through the strainer again, this time with a dish cloth to get the dregs. You’ll have to rinse the cloth when the stuff backs up.”
Satisfied that Neil was following along, Dylan added: “You have to use the sink, so you wait until everyone’s gone before you rack. It takes about an hour and a half if you sanitize the juice jugs and mead jug with bleach. You have to use the bleach,” he emphasized, “otherwise you risk contamination. Put in about a tablespoon with warm water, and don’t forget to rinse three times after swishing the bleach around. You’ll want to wash them with dish soap beforehand to get the crap off. Don’t skip this step.
“Once the racking’s done, the mead is back in the bottle. Let it age six months, or less if you don’t mind a little roughness, and you’ve got your drinks.”
Now comprehending, Neil’s eyes lit up. His eyes shot to the half-filled bottle which his distant cousin was brandishing.
Albert got the news on his smart phone from his fellow hawaladar in Freham, Harold Renfrew. Renfrew was a man of inherited wealth who got into the gold network on a lark. He transmitted, as agent over the smart phone’s well-encrypted network, the message that an unknown client wanted to buy Albert's old home in Freham for one thousand ounces of gold. Physical gold.
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