The Hidden Family (12 page)

“Surely.” Brill passed her a water bottle. It crackled slightly, but most of the contents were still liquid. “I didn’t realize a world could be so large,” Brill added quietly.

“I know how you feel,” Miriam said with feeling, running fingers through her hair—it needed a good wash and, now she thought about it, at least a trim—she’s spent the past four weeks so preoccupied in other things that it was growing wild and uncontrolled. “The far side is pretty strange to me, too. I
think
I’ve got it under control, but—” she shrugged uncomfortably.
Private ownership of gold is illegal so there’s a black market in it, but opium and cocaine are sold openly in apothecary shops. Setting up a company takes an act of Parliament, but they can impeach the king.
“Let’s just say, it isn’t quite what I was expecting. Let’s go home.”

“Alright.”

Miriam and Brill pulled their boots and coats on. Brill turned off the heater and folded the sleeping bags neatly, then went outside to empty the chamber pot. Miriam picked up her shoulder bag, and then went outside to join Brill on the spot she’d marked on her last trip. She took a deep breath, pulled out the locket with her left hand, took all of Brill’s weight on her right hip for a wobbly, staggering moment that threatened to pull her over, and focused—

On a splitting headache and a concrete wall as her grip slipped and Brill skidded on the icy yard floor. “Ow!” Brill stood up, rubbing her backside. “That was most indelicately done.”

“Could be worse.” Miriam winced at the pain in her temples, glanced around, and shook her head to clear the black patches from the edge of her vision. There was no sign of any intrusion, but judging by the boxes stacked under the metal fire escape—covered with polythene sheeting against the weamer—Paulette had been busy. “Come on inside, let’s fix some coffee and catch up on the news.”

The office door opened to Miriam’s key and she hastily punched in the code to disable the burglar alarm. Then she felt the heat, a stifling warmth that wrapped itself around her like a hot bath towel. “Wow,” she said, “come get a load of this.”

“I’m coming! I’m coming!” Brill shut and locked the door behind her and looked around. “Ooh, I haven’t been this warm in
days.
’ She hastily opened her jacket and untied her boots, the better to let the amazing warmth from the under-floor heating get closer to her skin.

“You’ll want to use the shower next,” Miriam said, amused. “I could do with it too, so don’t be too long.” The shower in the office bathroom was cramped and cheap, but better than the antique plumbing arrangements on the far side. “I’ll make coffee.”

Miriam found her mobile phone in the front room. Its battery had run down while she’d been gone, so she plugged it in to recharge. She also found a bunch of useful items—

Paulette had installed a brand new desk telephone and modem line while she’d been away—and a bunch of paperwork from the city government.

She was drinking her coffee in the kitchen when the front door opened. Miriam ducked out into the corridor, hand going to her empty jacket pocket before she realized what the reaction meant. “Paulie!” she called.

“Miriam! Good to see you!” Paulette had nearly jumped right out of her skin when she saw Miriam, but now she smiled broadly. “Oh wow. You look like you’ve spent a week on the wild side!”

“That’s exactly what I’ve done. Coffee?”

“I’d love some, thanks.” There was someone behind her. “In the front office, Mike, it needs to come through under the window,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re putting a DSL line in here,” she told Miriam. “Hope you don’t mind?”

“No, no, that’s great.” She retreated back into the small kitchenette, mind blanking on what to do next. She’d been thinking about a debriefing session with Paulie and Brill, then a provisioning trip to the universe next door, then a good filling lunch—but not with a phone company installer drilling holes in the wall.

Paulette obviously had tilings well in hand here, and there was no way Miriam was going to get into the shower for a while. She stared at the coffee machine blackly for a while.
Maybe I should go and see Iris,
she decided.
Or… hmm. Is it time to call Roland again?

“Miriam. You’ve going to have to tell me how it’s going.” Paulette waited in the kitchen doorway.

“In due course.” Miriam managed a smile. “Success, but not so total.” Miriam sobered up fast. “At your end?”

“Running low on money—the burn rate on this operation is like a goddamn start-up,” Paulette complained. “I’ll need another hundred thousand to secure all the stuff you left on the shopping list.”

“And don’t forget the paycheck.” Miriam nodded. “Listen, I found one good thing out about the far side. Gold is about as legal there as heroin is here, and vice versa. I’m getting about two hundred pounds on the black market for a brick weighing sixteen Troy ounces, worth about three thousand, three five, dollars here. A pound goes a
lot
further than a dollar, it’s like, about two hundred bucks. So three and a half thousand here buys me the equivalent of forty thousand over there. Real estate prices are low, too. The place I need to buy on the far side is huge, but it should go for about a thousand pounds, call it equivalent to two hundred grand here. In our own Boston it’d be going for upwards of a million, easily. But gold is worth so much that I can pay for it with five bars of the stuff—about eighteen thousand dollars on this side. I’ve found an, uh, black-market outlet who seems reasonably trustworthy at handling the gold—he’s got his angles, but I know what they are. And it is
amazingly
easy to set up a new identity! Anyway, if I play this right I can build a front as a rich widow returning home from the empire with a fortune and then get the far side money pump running.”

“What are you going to carry the other way?” Paulette asked, sharply.

“Not sure yet.” Miriam rubbed her temples. “It’s weird. They sell cocaine and morphine in drugstores, over the counter, and they fly Zeppelins, and New Britain is at war with the French Empire, and their version of Karl Marx was executed for Ranting—preaching democracy and equal rights. With no industrial revolution he turned into a leveler ideologue instead of a socialist economist. I’m just surprised he was born in the first place—most of the names in the history books are unfamiliar after about eighteen hundred. It’s like a different branch in the same infinite tree of history; I wonder where Niejwein fits in it… let’s not go there now. I need to think of something we can import.” She brooded. “I’ll have to think fast. If the Clan realizes their drug-money pump could run this efficiently they’ll flood the place with cheap gold and drop the price of crack in half as soon as they learn about it. There’s got to be some
other
commodity that’s valuable over here that we can use to repatriate our profits.”

“Old masters,” Paulette said promptly.

“Huh?”

“Old masters.” She put her mug down. “Listen, they haven’t had a world war, have they?”

“Nope, I’m afraid they have,” Miriam said, checking her watch to see if she could take another pain killer yet. “In fact, they’ve had two. One in the eighteen-nineties that cost them India. The second in the nineteen-fifties that, well, basically New Britain got kicked out of Africa. Africa is a mess of French and Spanish colonies. But they got a strong alliance with Japan and the Netherlands, which also rule most of northwest Germany. And they rule South America and Australia and most of East Asia.”

“No tanks? No H-bombs? No strategic bombers?”

“No.” Miriam paused. “Are you saying—”

“Museum catalogues!” Paulie said excitedly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot while you’ve been gone. What we do is, we look for works of art dating to before things went, uh, differently. In the other place. Works that were in museums in Europe that got bombed during World War Two, works that disappeared and have never been seen since. You get the picture? Just
one
lost sketch by Leonardo .. .”

“Won’t they be able to tell the difference?” Miriam frowned. “I’d have thought the experts would—” she trailed off.

“They’ll be exactly the same age!” Paulette said excitedly. “They’d be the real thing, right? Not a hoax. What you do is, you go over with some art catalogues from here and when you’ve got the money you find a specialist buyer and you buy the paintings or marbles or whatever for your personal collection. Then bring them over here. It’s about the only thing that weighs so little you can carry it, but is worth millions and is legal to own.”

“It’ll be harder to sell,” Miriam pointed out. “A
lot
harder to sell.”

“Yeah, but it’s legal,” said Paulie. She hesitated momentarily: “unless you want to go into the Bolivian marching powder business like your long-lost relatives?”

“Um.” Miriam refilled her coffee mug. “Okay, I’ll look at it.”
Miriam Beckstein, dealer in fine arts,
she thought. It had a peculiar ring to it, but it was better than
Miriam Beckstein, drug smuggler.
“Hmm. How’s this for a cover story? I fly over to Europe next year, spend weeks trolling around out there in France and Germany and wherever the paintings went missing. Right? I act secretive and just tell people I’m investigating something. That covers my absence. What I’ll really be doing is crossing to the far side then flying right back to New Britain by airship. Maybe I’ll come home in the meantime, maybe I can work over there, whatever. Whichever I do, it builds up a record of me being out of the country, investigating lost art, and I use the travel time to read up on art history. When I go public over here, it’s a career change. I’ve gone into unearthing lost works of art and auctioning them. Sort of a capitalist version of Indiana Jones, right?”

“Love it.” Paulie winked at her. “Wait till I patent the business practice, ‘a method of making money by smuggling gold to another world and exchanging it for lost masterpieces’!”

“You
dare
—” Miriam chuckled. “Although I’m not sure we’ll be able to extract anything like the full value of our profits that way. I’m not even sure we want to—having a world to live in where we’re affluent and haven’t spent the past few decades developing a reputation as organized criminals would be no bad thing. Anyway, back to business. How’s the patent search going?”

“I’ve got about a dozen candidates for you,” Paulie said briskly. “A couple of different types of electric motor that they may or may not have come up with. Flash boilers for steam cars, assuming they don’t already have them. They didn’t sound too sophisticated but you never know. The desk stapler—did you see any? Good. I looked into the proportional font stuff you asked for, but the Varityper mechanism is just amazingly complicated, it wouldn’t just hatch out of nowhere. And the alkaline battery will take a big factory and supplies of unusual metals to start making. The most promising option is still the disk brake and the asbestos/resin brake shoe. But I came up with another for you: the parachute.”

“Parachute—” Miriam’s eyes widened. “I’ll need to go check if they’ve invented them. I know Leonardo drew one, but it wouldn’t have been stable. Okay!” She emptied the coffeepot into her and Paulette’s mugs, stirred in some sugar. “That’s great. How long until the cable guy is done?”

“Oh, he’s already gone,” Paulette said. “I get to plug the box in myself, don’t you know?”

“Excellent.” Miriam picked up her mug. “Then I can check my voice mail in peace.”

She wandered into the front office as Brill was leaving the shower, wrapped in towels and steaming slightly. A new socket clung rawly to the wall just under the window. Miriam dropped heavily into the chair behind the desk, noticing the aches of sleeping on a hard surface for the first time. She picked up her phone and punched in her code. Paulette intercepted Brill, asking her something as she led her into the large back office they’d begun converting into a living room.

“You have two messages,”
said the phone.

“Yeah, yeah.” Miriam punched a couple more buttons.

“First message, received yesterday at eleven-forty two:
Miriam? Oh, Sky Father! Listen, are you alright? Phone me,
please
.” It was Roland, and he didn’t sound happy. Anguish rose in her chest.
Roland
—she didn’t let the thought reach her tongue. “It’s urgent,” he added, before the click of the call ending.

“Second message, received yesterday at nine-twelve:
Miriam, dear? It’s me.”
Iris,
she realized. There was a pause. “I know I haven’t been entirely candid with you, and I want you to know that I bitterly regret it.” Another, much longer pause and the sound of labored breathing. Miriam clutched the phone to her ear like a drowning woman. “I’ve … something unexpected has come up. I’ve got to go on a long journey. Miriam, I want you to understand that I
am
going to be alright. I know exactly what I’m doing, and it’s something I should have done years ago. But it’s not fair to burden you with it. I’ll try to call you or leave messages, but you are
not
to come around or try to follow me. I love you.”
Click.

“Shit!”
Miriam threw the mobile phone across the room in a combination of blind rage and panic. She burst out of her chair and ran for the back room, grabbed her jacket and was halfway into her shoes by the time Paulette stuck a curious head out of the day room door. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s happened to Iris. I’m going to check on her.”

“You can’t!” Paulette stood up, alarmed.

“Watch me,” Miriam warned.

“But it’s under—”

“Fuck the surveillance!” She fumbled in her bag for the revolver. “If the Clan has decided to go after my mother I am going to kill someone.”

“Miriam—” it was Brill—“Paulie and I can’t get away the way you can.”

“So you’d better be discreet about the murder business,” said Paulette. She fixed Miriam with a worried stare. “Can you wait two minutes? I’ll drive.”

“I—yes.” Miriam forced herself to unclench her fists and take deep, steady breaths.