The Family Trade (7 page)

“Wer find thee?” Someone piped at her.

Miriam jolted around and stared: The someone stared right back, frozen, eyes wide. He looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old, dressed in rags and barefoot: He was shorter than she was. Pipecleaner arms, legs like wire, big brown eyes, and a mess of badly trimmed hair in a pudding-bowl cut. Time slowed to a crawl.
That’s a skin infection,
she realized, her guts turning to ice as she focused on a red weal on the side of his neck. He was skinny, not as thin as a famine victim but by no means well-fed. He had a stick, clenched nervously in his hands, which he was bringing up—

Miriam glared at him and straightened up. Her right hand went to her hip pocket, and she fumbled for the treacherous opening. “You’ll be sorry,” she snapped, surprised at herself. It was the first thing that entered her head. Her hand closed on the butt of the pistol, but she couldn’t quite draw it—it was snagged on something.

Oh shit.
She yanked at her pocket desperately, keeping her eyes on his face, despite knees that felt like jelly and a churning cold in her gut. She had a strong flashback to the one time she was mugged, a desperate sense of helplessness as she tried to disentangle the gun from her pocket lining and bring it out before the villager hit her with his stick.

But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes widened. He opened his mouth and shouted, “An solda’des Koen!” He turned, dropping the stick, and darted away before Miriam could react. A moment later she heard him wailing, “An solda!”

“Shit.”
The gun was in her hand, all but forgotten. Terror lent her feet wings. She clutched her camera and ran like hell, back toward the forest, heedless of any noise she might make.
He nearly had me! He’ll be back with help! I’ve got to get out of here!
Breathless fear drove her until branches scratched at her face and she was panting. Then the low apple trees gave way to taller, older trees and a different quality of light. She staggered along, drunkenly, as behind her a weird hooting noise unlike any horn she’d heard before split the quiet.

Ten minutes later she stopped and listened, wheezing for breath as she tried to get her heart under control. She had run parallel to the path, off to one side. Every instinct was screaming at her to
run
but she was nearly winded, so she listened instead. Apart from the horn blasts, there were no sounds of pursuit.
Why aren’t they following me?
she wondered, feeling ill with uncertainty.
What’s wrong?
After a moment she remembered her camera: She’d lost the lens cap in her mad rush. “Damn, I could have broken my ankle,” she muttered. “They’d have caught me for—” she stopped.

“That look in his eye.” Very carefully, she unslung the camera and slid it into a big outer hip pocket. She glanced around the clearing sharply, then spent a moment untangling the revolver from her other pocket. Now that she had all the time in the world, it was easy. “He was
scared,
” she told herself, wondering. “He was
terrified
of me! What was that he was shouting? Was he warning the others off?”

She began to walk again, wrapped in a thoughtful silence. There were no sounds of pursuit. Behind her the village hid in the gloom, like a terrified rabbit whose path had just crossed a fox on the prowl. “Who are you hiding from?” she asked her memory of the boy with the stick. “And who did you mistake me for?”

* * *

It was raining again, and the first thing she noticed once she crossed over—through the blinding headache—was that Paulette was bouncing up and down like an angry squirrel, chattering with indignation behind the camcorder’s view-finder. “Idiot! What the
hell
do you think you were doing?” she demanded as Miriam opened the passenger door and dumped her pack on the backseat. “I almost had a heart attack! That’s the second time you’ve nearly given me one this week!”

“I said it would be a surprise, right?” Miriam collapsed into the passenger seat. “God, I reek. Get me home and once I’ve had a shower I’ll explain everything. I promise.”

Paulette drove in tight-lipped silence. Finally, during a moment when they were stationary at a traffic light, she said: “Why me?”

Miriam considered for a moment. “You don’t know my mother.”

“That’s—oh. I see, I think. Anything else?”

“Yeah. I trusted you to keep your mouth shut and not to panic.”

“Uh-huh. So what have you gotten yourself into this time?”

“I’m not sure. Could be the story of the century—the second one this week. Or it could be a very good reason indeed for burying something and walking away fast. I’ve got some ideas—more, since I spent a whole day and a half over there—but I’m still not sure.”

“Where’s
over there?
I mean, where did you go?” The car moved forward.

“Good question. The straight answer is: I’m not sure—the geography is the same, the constellations are the same, but the landscape’s different in places and there’s an honest-to-god medieval village in a forest. And they don’t speak English. Listen, after I’ve had my shower, how about I buy supper? I figure I owe you for dropping this on your lap.”

“You sure do,” Paulette said vehemently. “After you vanished, I went home and watched the tape six times before I believed what I’d seen with my own two eyes.” Her hands were white on the steering wheel. “Only
you
could fall into something this weird!”

“Remember Hunter S. Thompson’s First Law of Gonzo Journalism: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get weird’?” Miriam chuckled, but there was an edge to it. Everywhere she looked there were buildings and neon lights and traffic. “God, I feel like I spent the weekend in the Third World. Kabul.” The car smelled of plastic and deodorant, and it was heavenly—the stink of civilization. “Listen, I haven’t had anything decent to eat for days. When we get home I’m ordering take out. How does Chinese sound?”

“I can cope with that.” Paulette made a lazy right turn and slid into the slow-moving stream of traffic. “Don’t feel like cooking?”

“I’ve got to have a shower,” said Miriam. “Then I’ve got a weekend of stuff to put in the washing machine, several hundred pictures to download and index, memos to load into the computer, and an explanation. If you figure I can do all that and a pot roast too, then you don’t know me as well as I think you do.”

“That,” Paulette remarked as she pulled over into the parking space next to Miriam’s house, “was a very mixed metaphor.”

“Don’t listen to what I say; listen to what I mean, okay?”

“I get the picture. Dinner’s on you.”

After half an hour in the bathroom, Miriam felt human, if not entirely dry. She stopped in her bedroom for long enough to find some clean clothes, then headed downstairs in her bare feet.

Paulette had parked herself in the living room with a couple of mugs of coffee and an elegant-looking handbag. She raised an eyebrow at Miriam: “You look like you’ve been dry-cleaned. Was it that bad?”

“Yeah.” Miriam settled down on the sofa, then curled her legs up beneath her. She picked up one of the mugs and inhaled deeply. “Ah, that’s better.”

“Ready to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“In a moment.” Miriam closed her eyes, then gathered up the strands of still-damp hair sticking to her neck and wound them up, outside her collar. “That’s better. It happened right after they screwed us over, Paulie. I figured you’d think I’d gone off the deep end if I just told you about it, which is why I didn’t call you back the same day. Why I asked you to drive. Sorry about the surprise.”

“You should be: I spent an hour in the woods looking for you. I nearly called the police twice, but you’d said precisely when you’d be back and I thought they’d think I was the one who was nuts. ‘Sides, you’ve got a habit of dredging up weird shit and leaving me to pick up the pieces. Promise me there are no gangsters in this one?”

“I promise.” Miriam nodded. “Well, what do
you
think?”

“I think I’d like some lemon chicken. Sorry.” Paulette grinned impishly at Miriam’s frown. “Okay, I believe you’ve discovered something very weird indeed. I actually videoed you vanishing into thin air in front of the camera! And when you appeared again—no, I didn’t get it on tape, but I saw you out of the corner of my eye. Either we’re both crazy or this is for real.”

“Madness doesn’t come in this shape and size,” Miriam said soberly. She winced. “I need a painkiller.” She rubbed her feet, which were cold. “You know I’m adopted, right? My mother didn’t quite tell me everything until Monday. I went to see her after we were fired …”

For the next hour Miriam filled Paulette in on the events of the past week, leaving out nothing except her phone call to Andy. Paulette listened closely and asked the right questions. Miriam was satisfied that her friend didn’t think she was mad, wasn’t humouring her. “Anyway, I’ve now got tape of my vanishing, a shitload of photographs of this village, and dictated notes. See? It’s beginning to mount up.”

“Evidence,” said Paulette. “That would be useful if you want to go public.” Suddenly she looked thoughtful. “Big
if
there.”

“Hmm?” Miriam drank down what was left of her coffee.

“Well, this place you go to—it’s either in the past or the future, or somewhere else, right? I think we can probably rule out the past or future options. If it was the past, you wouldn’t have run across a village the way you described it; and as for the future, there’d still be some sign of Boston, wouldn’t there?”

“Depends how far in the future you go.” Miriam frowned. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s funny; when I was a little girl I always figured the land of make-believe would be
bright
and
colourful.
Princesses in castles and princes to go around kissing them so they turned into frogs—and dragons to keep the royalty population under control. But in the middle ages there were about a thousand peasants living in sordid poverty for every lord of the manor, who actually had a sword, a horse, and a house with a separate bedroom to sleep in. A hundred peasants for every member of the nobility—the lords and their families—and the same for every member of the merchant or professional classes.”

“Sounds grimly real to me, babe. Forget Hollywood. Your map
was
accurate, wasn’t it?”

“What are you getting at? You’re thinking about… What was that show called:
Sliders?
Right?”

“Alternate earths. Like on TV.” Paulette nodded. “I only watched a couple of episodes, but… well. Suppose you
are
going sideways, to some other earth where there’s nobody but some medieval peasants. What if you, like, crossed over next door to a bank, walked into
exactly
where the vault would be in our world, waited for the headache to go away, then crossed back again?”

“I’d be inside the bank vault, wouldn’t I?
Oh.
”

“That, as they say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Paulette commented dryly. “Listen, this is going to be a long session. I figure you haven’t thought all the angles through. What were you planning on doing with it?”

“I—I’m.” Miriam stopped. “I told you about the phone call.”

Paulette looked at her bleakly. “Yeah. Did I tell you—”

“You too?”

She nodded. ‘The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don’t know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”

“Bastards.”

“Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys … it wasn’t a rich neighbourhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them—or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when
they
talk to
you
—I think I need a drink. What do you say?”

“I say there’re a couple of bottles in the cabinet,” said Miriam, massaging her forehead. “Don’t mind if I join you.”

Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. “It’s a mess,” said Paulette. “You, uh—we didn’t talk about Monday. Did we?”

“No,” Miriam admitted. “If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I’m not going to twist your arm.” She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she’d carved out for herself was under retreat. Like the months when she’d subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until…

“ ‘Drop it?’” Paulette’s eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. “Are you crazy? These hard men, they’re really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It’s simple as that.
That’s
something I learned when I was a kid.”

“What happened—” Miriam stopped.

Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. “My parents weren’t rich,” she said quietly. “Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn’t easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that’s numero uno. And for seconds, I’d be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off.”

Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.

“My brother Joe didn’t listen to what Momma told us,” Paulette said slowly. “He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn’t the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps.”

“Uh.” Miriam felt a little sick. “What happened?”

“I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an accident—it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. “That’s why I figure you don’t want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don’t ever back off.”