The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (53 page)

‘I’m sure your word would be sufficient,’ he said graciously. ‘Up to what level may I offer?’

‘If it goes over a thousand pounds I’ll have to make special arrangements to transfer the funds.’

‘Very well.’ He stood up. ‘By your leave?’

Miriam’s last port of call was the central library. She spent two hours there, quizzing a helpful librarian about books on patent law. In the end, she took three away with her, giving her
room at the hotel as an address. Carefully putting them in her shoulder bag she walked to the nearest main road and waved down a cab. ‘Roundgate Interchange,’ she said.
I’m
going home,
she thought.
At last!
A steam car puttered past them, overtaking on the right-hand side.
Back to clean air, fast cars, and electricity everywhere.

She gazed out of the cab’s window as the open field came into view through the haze of acrid fog that seemed to be everywhere today.
I wonder how Brill and Paulie have been?
she
wondered.

*

It was dusk, and nobody seemed to have noticed the way that Miriam had damaged the side door of the estate. She slunk into the garden, paced past the hedge and the dilapidated
greenhouse, then located the spot where she’d blazed a mark on the wall. A fine snow was falling as she pulled out the second locket and, with the aid of a pocket flashlight, fell headfirst
into it.

She staggered slightly as the familiar headache returned with a vengeance, but a quick glance told her that nobody had come anywhere near this spot for days. A fresh snowfall had turned her hide
into an anonymous hump in the gloom a couple of trees away. She waded toward it – then a dark shadow detached itself from a tree and pointed a pistol at her.

‘Brill?’ she asked, uncertainly.

‘Miriam!’ The barrel dropped as Brill lurched forward and embraced her. ‘I’ve been so worried! How have you been?’

‘Not so bad!’ Miriam laughed, breathlessly. ‘Let’s get under cover and I’ll tell you about it.’

Brill had been busy; the snow bank concealed not only the hunting hide, but a fully assembled hut, six feet by eight, somewhat insecurely pegged to the iron-hard ground beneath the snow.
‘Come in, come in,’ she said. Miriam stepped inside and she shut the door and bolted it. Two bunks occupied one wall, and a paraffin heater threw off enough warmth to keep the hut from
freezing. ‘It’s been terribly cold by night, and I fear I’ve used up all the oil,’ Brill told her. ‘You really
must
buy a wood stove!’

‘I believe I will,’ Miriam said thoughtfully, thinking about the coal smoke and yellow sulfurous smog that had made the air feel as if she was breathing broken glass.
‘It’s been, hmm, three days. Have you had any trouble?’

‘Boredom,’ Brilliana said instantly. ‘But sometimes boredom is a good thing. I have not been so alone in many years!’ She looked slightly wistful. ‘Would you like
some cocoa? I’d love to hear what adventures you’ve been having!’

That night Miriam slept fitfully, awakening once to a distant howling noise that raised the hair on her neck.
Wolves?
she wondered, before rolling over and dozing off again. Although
the paraffin heater kept the worst of the chill at bay, there was frost inside the walls by morning.

Miriam woke first, sat up and turned the heat up as high as it would go, then – still cocooned in the sleeping bag – hung her jeans and hiking jacket from a hook in the roof right
over the heater. Then she dozed off again. When she awakened, she saw Brill sitting beside the heater reading a book. ‘What is it?’ she asked sleepily.

‘Something Paulie lent me.’ Brill looked slightly guilty. Miriam peered at the spine:
The Female Eunuch
. Sitting on a shelf next to the door she spotted a popular history
book. Brill had been busy expanding her horizons.

‘Hmm.’ Miriam sat up and unzipped her bag, used the chamber pot, then hastily pulled on the now-defrosted jeans and a hiking sweater. Her boots were freezing cold so she moved them
closer to the heater. ‘You’ve been thinking a lot.’

‘Yes.’ Brilliana put the book down. ‘I grew up with books; my father’s library had five in Hoh’sprashe, and almost thirty in English. But this – the style is
so strange! And what it says!’

Miriam shook her head. ‘We’ll have to go across soon,’ she said, shelving the questions that sat at the tip of her tongue – poisonous questions, questions about trust and
belief. Brill seemed to be going through a phase of questioning everything, and that was fine by her. It meant she was less likely to obey if Angbard or whoever was behind her told her to point a
gun at Miriam. Searching her bag Miriam came up with her tablets, dry-swallowed them, then glanced around. ‘Anything to drink?’

‘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 and so
empty,’ 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’d
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.
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.’

‘All right.’

They 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 weather – 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 underfloor 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.’

She found her cell 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. She 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. 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 things 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.
Maybe I should go and see
Iris,
she wondered.
Or . . . hmm. Is it time to call Roland again?

‘Miriam, you’re going to have to tell me how it’s going.’ Paulette waited in the kitchen doorway.

‘In due course.’ She managed a smile. ‘Success, but not so total. How about 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 a couple of 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 an angle, but I know what it is. 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?’

‘I don’t think so. 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? I’d have thought the experts would – ’ she trailed off.

‘They’ll be exactly the same age! 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 has a peculiar ring to it, but
it’s 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?’