Read Last Call For Caviar Online
Authors: Melissa Roen
Last Call For Caviar (3 page)
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Leah wasn’t a witch or a seer, though like other women in my family, she seemed to have the uncanny ability to be able to read the signs ahead and act accordingly.
I remember when Leah had first mentioned her misgivings about the direction the economy and society in general were heading, and her plan to retreat to the redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest. Leah’s fourth husband, Jack, was originally from Oregon, though they had met, married and lived in Las Vegas these past nine years.
It was in December of 2011 when she told me of the scenario that they were anticipating, eighteen months before society, the financial system and the planet started to meltdown simultaneously.
America was way past the honeymoon phase of Barack Obama’s presidency, even though the markets had roared back from the near-collapse of the previous years. It wasn’t quite “Morning in America,” but there was a sense of optimism that maybe the worst of the financial crash of 2008 was behind the world.
The financial crisis of 2008 was triggered when one little Wall Street player went bust. Yet no matter how the world’s banks or governments tried to spin it, the whole system was rotten and unsustainable. In 2013, it was sovereign nations that defaulted throughout the Eurozone like a column of dominoes toppling on their neighbor, one by one, and knocking everyone down. The subsequent destruction of the financial markets and banking system spread like wildfire across the globe.
Now everyone around the world knew the Emperor was wearing no clothes. That the world’s banking and financial system was a Ponzi scheme. A scam created to benefit solely the dictatorship of banks and corporations that ran our planet. No amount of sleight of hand, propaganda or military adventures could misdirect people’s attention away from this bald fact. It was time to prepare for the worst that was yet to come.
When you think of Americans turning their backs on society and retreating to the woods or mountains of places like Oregon, Idaho, or other western states, you think of members of the Militia Movement, or right-wing Christian patriot groups like The Covenant, Sword and Arm: groups who believe the federal government is trampling on one or another of their constitutional rights.
You wouldn’t think a software engineer from the laid-back Northwest of Microsoft and Nike, or a director of marketing for one of the racier Las Vegas casinos would be thinking of such a radical lifestyle change. Much easier to imagine them relocating to Macau for a new job now that Vegas casino heavyweights like Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson were invading those shores, or whiling away their golden retirement years, lounging on a terrace overlooking the sea in Cabo.
Recently, the topic of what to do when the shit hits—once a subject of banter and speculation at cocktail parties—had become a subject to be considered with the utmost seriousness. Leah and Jack’s network of friends had casually become part of a grassroots movement.
Their faith in government authority to preserve and protect them evaporated. They looked at what was coming, and each in their own quiet way put his or her house in order. Now, they were preparing to the best of their ability to ride out this shitstorm of financial pandemonium and the breakdown of society that would follow.
First rule of business had been to make like Jews fleeing pogroms and to convert wealth into gold. Long before the markets crashed, Leah and Jack sold their portfolios of stocks and bonds, cashed in their life insurance policies and money market accounts, and converted their assets into semi-numismatic coins that were easily transportable. Their hoard kept increasing in value as the paper money tied to the world’s currencies decreased in purchasing power.
But the problem for Leah and Jack, and, indeed, anyone who had the foresight to have acted similarly, was that once you had all these nice, pretty gold coins, so light you could carry half a million dollars’ equivalent on your person, where did you hide the gold? Not in a fake cabbage in the fridge. And, if you planned to hide it, you better bury it damn deep—at least four feet—or else, one fine Saturday morning you’d encounter a nosy relative, or your next-door neighbor, moseying around your backyard with a metal detector and uprooting your freshly planted petunias.
It probably wouldn’t do you any good to stash it away in a safety deposit box, because when panic from the meltdown caused a run on the banks, you couldn’t expect to be able to get within blocks of your local branch, due to the crush of freaked-out hordes fighting to get access to their own accounts and safety deposit boxes.
Even if you were able to get at the stash in your safety deposit box, there would still be those gangs hanging around the bank, watching and waiting for some lucky bastard—just like you—to emerge laden with all that portable wealth. They just might follow you home and show up later for a bit of trick or treat, like something out of
A Clockwork Orange
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I’ll admit, I made a mental note when I first heard about all their gold: “Must pack metal detector on my next visit to stay with Leah,” until I heard about the guns.
Just like horse and carriage, cowboys and Indians, strip clubs and an ex-boyfriend, gold and guns just logically seemed to go together.
During one of our weekly sisterly chats, Leah confided to me casually—as if she were mentioning a new designer handbag she’d acquired—“Jack and I have gotten permits to carry concealed weapons.”
“What are you talking about? You guys are packing heat? Don’t you still have police? Has Las Vegas become that dangerous?”
“Of course we still have a police force, though with more and more people losing jobs every week, crime is soaring. Tourism is way down, and many of the casinos on the Strip have closed up shop. We need the permits to carry concealed weapons now that we’ve bought all this gold.”
I wasn’t sure if guns and Leah were a good fit, but even I could connect the dots; once you got the gold, the next step was you hadda get the guns.
Leah had always been a meticulous and organized person, always ahead of the game, whether it was doing her homework in advance or going to summer school in order to graduate early from high school. When she had a family of her own, she arose at 5 a.m. to get all the household chores done before anyone even stirred, much less sat down to freshly squeezed orange juice and homemade blueberry muffins.
I never saw her sit down or eat one of those muffins herself, because while her family ate, she would be making beds, cleaning rooms, proofreading homework, or walking the dogs, before roaring off in her red Corvette to her casino gig.
Since Jack came into her life and her daughter Sloan was packed off to college, she changed. Gone was the Stepford Wife and workaholic overachiever. Cruises to the Caribbean, holidays in Hawaii and Mexico, weekends in the wine country. She and Jack, both of them tanned and sinewy, a glass of chardonnay in hand, were each other’s co-conspirators and support system. She was finally lapping up life and living for the moment.
Initially, they thought of staying in Las Vegas and riding out the coming hell storm in their upscale, gated and security-patrolled private community. Contractors were called in to reinforce windows and doors. Specialists were consulted about upgrades to their existing security system. They stocked supplies: bottled water, dried and canned foods, batteries, candles and first aid kits. And they amassed an arsenal of weapons and cases of wine from Ménage a Trois, their favorite vineyard.
But the social fabric of Las Vegas and the country as a whole kept unraveling. Leah decided enough was enough; it was time to get out of Dodge and retreat to the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest Coast Range.
Jack had been raised in the Northwest and was at home in the outdoors culture of guns and fishing and hunting, skills that would help them survive in the event of a complete breakdown of society and if they were forced to live off the land.
Their first place of shelter would be a two-story beach house in southern Oregon that Jack had built before he moved to Las Vegas and met Leah. It was strategically placed on a headland fifteen miles north of Coos Bay. There were few neighbors around, and you could see trouble coming a long way off. All the winter of 2012 and into 2013, they’d adapted and reinforced the property. The best feature was a basement that opened onto an old tunnel, providing them with an escape route into the forest in the event they had to abandon the compound.
Their back-up plan was a house and land further north, near the Washington border, that had been in Jack’s family for generations, which they were now in the process of fortifying. It lay deep in the rainforest, with the mountains of the Coast Range at its back. They would stay at the beach house while putting the finishing touches on their woodland compound. They knew at some point they might have to retreat into the wilds and make their last stand.
Leah wanted me to come home to my family and face this frightening and uncertain future united, but a world spinning further and further out of control separated us now, and I didn’t know how I could find my way back to their side.
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The words from Leah’s email had lodged like unwelcome houseguests in my gray matter. I could feel their relentless beat: tick tock, tick tock.
Even though at some point, joining up with my family in the rainforest of the Pacific Northwest Coast Range had its allure, the reality that everyone in America was locked and loaded, shooting first and asking questions later, made me hesitate. Still, it gave me comfort to know my tribe might just survive, though they were an ocean and a continent away. If I could somehow make my way there, haven existed among the seven-hundred-year-old redwood trees.
I knew there might be a greater chance of survival hunkered down with her band, but the idea of Leah bossing me around like she had been doing all our lives made me want to dig in my heels and not find sanctuary under her wing.
But she was right about Julian, at least; I couldn’t keep waiting on a ghost.
Not that I was ready to admit to myself, or anyone else, that Julian was the anchor keeping me rooted here. I knew if I left, we would be lost to each other for all time.
I turned off my computer. I was fed up with thoughts of Julian and his whereabouts, big sisters who knew how to live my life better than me, and unreliable psychics chaining me to the improbable hope of happy endings. I experienced a desperate need to get outside. I needed to run along a hillside trail or swim in the sunlit sea.
I threw open the shutters of the French doors and windows and let the intense light of the south of France flood my home and chase away the dark thoughts and shadows. I stepped out on the stone-flagged terrace suspended over la Mala and breathed in the tang of sea air.
The villas along the Basse Corniche clung at impossibly steep angles to the granite cliff on the opposite side of the cove. Spreading out from the beach of small polished stones, the shallow waters were dappled with deep turquoise melding into jade, so clear I could almost see the silvered scales of the schools of fish darting and gliding amongst the sea grass that bent and swayed rhythmically with the currents.
My small home sat behind whitewashed walls, topped with spikes of ornate wrought-iron grillwork, and was built of stone with two levels of terraces and a small garden. Cantilevered out, it floated above the cove of la Mala. The villa was built on the highest point on the cape side of the cove, and the headlands sheltered it from the open sea. From the uppermost story, I could see the Med on the other side of the narrow peninsula, through the canopy of parasol pines that marched down to the shore to the south.
The Villa Chant de la Mer had been my home for the last twelve years, since I had bought and restored it from its forlorn state. Once, I had been able to make money renovating and selling properties here on the Cote d’Azur. But that was before the Russian oligarchs went on a buying spree, vying between each other to buy the most prestigious properties from Monaco and Saint Jean Cap Ferrat to St. Tropez, pushing up prices to the stratosphere, and subsequently destabilized the real estate market here on the French Riviera.
After the oligarchs came the merely wealthy of the former Soviet republics, who had bought the lesser properties not fit for the billionaires, in places like my neighborhood. That all ended in the world financial crash of 2013. The real estate market was dead, here on the Cote d’Azur, and probably everywhere else on the planet, too. I hadn’t had a new client or renovation project in more than a year.
Each week, more and more of the villas and apartments, summer homes to the world’s formerly wealthy, stood silent and abandoned along the cape, their owners having disappeared in the night, retreating back to their former countries for safety.
At night, through the treetops, from my upstairs window, I could see the flicker of lights and smell smoke rising from the chimneys of abandoned properties. These were signs of squatters in the guise of new neighbors; so far, they hadn’t made their presence felt in any menacing way.
This part of France, from Villefranche to the west, to Monaco, twenty kilometers to the east, and continuing on towards the frontier of Italy at Bordigera, was where the mountainous chain of the Alps abruptly ended their southerly march through Europe and plunged into the Mediterranean Sea.
For some odd reason, parts of France were relatively stable in comparison to most of the rest of the world. The nuclear reactors kept humming, and power was still supplied. If you overlooked those parts of the country that had reverted to the law of the jungle, you could almost fool yourself into thinking everything was status quo.
The outlaw zones, where thug life ruled, first sprang up in cities in the south, like Marseille and Montpellier. North, the banlieus surrounding Paris and the Val de Marne, the “quartiers chauds,” as the French media and elites termed them, were hot spots whose inhabitants were predominantly descendants of immigrants from France’s former colonial lands in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. But now, every city in France was losing ground to the “quartiers chauds,” where law enforcement had withdrawn and the bourgeoisie feared to go.
The French government protected areas it considered strategically important and divided the country into Security Zones. Reactors, airports, fuel depots, major ports, and agricultural land to produce food were top priority. Also, the bourgeois neighborhoods in cities and the enclaves of the rich and powerful were under official protection. But as the weeks and months passed and lawlessness spread, more and more areas seemed to be falling under the shadow of the lawless zones.
The western limits of the Security Zone of the Cote d’Azur ended thirty kilometers past the presqu’ile of St. Tropez, at the Cap Negre in Le Lavandou, little more than an hour’s drive from Marseille. The nighttime raids of the gangs out of the southwest against the security forces of the Security Zone had been increasing lately: calculated feints to find holes in the regional defenses and test the military patrols’ resolve. But for now, the western security perimeter held.
Gasoline had become almost impossible to find, but I had had the foresight to stockpile gas while it was still available, and there were jerry cans of gasoline stacked along the wall of my garage. My car, an orange Smart, had been vandalized—tires slashed and windows smashed—two months before, so I was on foot these days.
As much as possible, I tried to conceal that I, too, had a stash of gold. The Euro was still in use for small transactions, despite rampant inflation. The exchange rate from gold to Euros on the black market gave me a fat wad to burn, but even so, now a baguette was extremely chere.
Next to the front door hung Blue’s collar and leash. Each time I passed through, I felt the ache in my throat, as one more drop of grief was wrung from my heart. My old boy, the last of my golden retrievers, passed away three months before. Though I knew in my heart it was the kindest thing I could have done—that I couldn’t let him suffer anymore—nothing could change the fact that my dearest friend was dead by my hand.
Seated on the floor, with the sunlight highlighting the silky golden hair feathering along his ears and the noble head that I cradled in my arms, I felt him lick my hand one last time just before the sedation took hold and his bright eyes dimmed forever.
Still, I couldn’t stop being haunted by the feeling that I had let my boy down; there must have been something more that I could have done to save him.
Since it was daylight and I lived within the Security Zone of the Cote d’Azur and only four kilometers from the frontier of the Principality of Monaco, I probably wouldn’t need to go armed. I preferred to err on the side of caution, so I slipped a Smith and Wesson Bodyguard .380 into my gun purse. A slouch bag of heavy leather, it featured a separate compartment designed to allow firing—if need be—without being removed from the purse. Six rounds plus one in the chamber was enough fire-power for any daytime stroll by the sea.
I also had a Glock 9 millimeter, but it was the Judge that made me sleep easy at night. It could be used with either hollow point .45s, or as I preferred, .410 triple aught shotgun shells. Any uninvited late-night visitors would be greeted with, “Let me introduce you to my little friend.” With the Judge, I could take down a man or, if necessary, a bear.
The Gendarmes, or Police Municipal, didn’t respond anymore to late-night emergency calls. They were too overwhelmed and confined themselves to manning checkpoints and patrolling the perimeters of their sector in the Security Zone.
Though I had been uneasy, at first, with the thought of using a gun to defend myself, I joined the Monte Carlo Gun Club and learned how to shoot; soon, I could hit the sweet spot standing up, kneeling or lying down.
The Smith and Wesson and a Colt .45 were registered, but the Glock and the Judge were my throw-away guns, bought on the black market through my contacts at the gun club.
The now-familiar weight in my gun bag gave me a sense of security anywhere I went. Though I had motion sensors placed strategically about the property to pin anything that moved in a crosshair of blinding spotlights, and an alarm that went off with a sound to wake the dead, now that both Blue and Julian were gone, at some point I’d become a target in my villa by the sea. I wouldn’t be able to hold off any really determined intruders by myself forever. One night, they would get through.
Today was Tuesday, market day in Cap d’Ail. I needed to restock my fresh supplies, even though following Leah’s lead, I had stores of dried and non-perishable foods and bottled water that would last me six months.
I prayed the square would be filled with the local purveyors of fruit and vegetables. But recently, the stands were fewer, and fresh food and produce were becoming harder to find.
I saw it was still early, not even 9 a.m. I decided to take the footpath that wound along the southern shore of the peninsula and savor the day, before shopping.