The Hidden Family: Book Two of Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “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.

  “Good. Because if it is the Clan, rushing in is exactly what they’ll expect you to do. And if it isn’t, if it’s the other guys, that’s what they’ll want you to do, too.” She swallowed. “Bombs and all. Which is why I’m going with you. Got it?”

  “I—” Miriam forced herself to think. “Okay.” She stood up. “Let’s go.”

  They went.

  Paulette cruised down Iris’s residential street twice, leaving a good five-minute interval before turning the rental car into the parking space at the side of her house. “Nothing obvious,” she murmured. “You see anything, kid?”

  “Nothing,” said Miriam.

  Brill shook her head. “Autos all look alike to me,” she admitted.

  “Great…Miriam, if you want to take the front door, I’m going to sit here with the engine running until you give the all-clear. Brill—”

  “I’ll be good.” She clutched a borrowed handbag to her chest, right hand buried in it, looking like a furtive sorority girl about to drop an unexpected present on a friend.

  Miriam bailed out of the car and walked swiftly to Iris’s front door, noticing nothing wrong. There was no damage around the lock, no broken windows, nothing at all out of the usual for the area. No lurking Dodge vans, either, when she glanced over her shoulder as she slipped the key into the front door and turned it left-handed, her other hand full.

  The door bounced open and Miriam ducked inside rapidly, with Brill right behind her. The house was empty and cold—not freezing with the
chill of a dead furnace, but as if the thermostat had been turned down. Miriam’s feet scuffed on the carpet as she rapidly scanned each ground floor room through their open doors, finishing in Iris’s living room—

  No wheelchair. The side table neatly folded and put away. Dead flowers on the mantlepiece.

  Back in the hall Miriam held up a finger, then dashed up the stairs, kicking open door after door—the master bedroom, spare bedroom, box room, and bathroom.

  “Nothing,” she snarled, panting. In the spare bedroom she pulled down the hatch into the attic, yanked the ladder down—but there was no way Iris could have gotten up there under her own power. She scrambled up the ladder all the same, casting about desperately in the dusty twilight. “She’s not here.”

  Down in the ground floor hallway she caught up with Paulette, looking grave. “Brill said Iris is gone?”

  Miriam nodded, unable to speak. It felt like an act of desecration, too monstrous to talk about. She leaned against the side of the staircase, taking shallow breaths. “I’ve lost her.” She shut her eyes.

  “Over here!” It was Brill, in the kitchen.

  “What is it—”

  They found Brill inspecting a patch of floor, just inside the back door.

  “Look,” she said, pointing.

  The floor was wooden, varnished and worn smooth in places. The stains, however, were new. Something dark had spilled across the back doorstep. Someone had mopped it up but they hadn’t done a very good job, and the stain had worked into the grain of the wood.

  “Outside. Check the garbage.” Miriam fumbled with the lock then got the door open. “Come on!” She threw herself at the Dumpsters in the backyard, terrified of what she might find in them. The bins were huge, shared with the houses to either side, and probably not emptied since the last snowfall. The snow was almost a foot deep on top of the nearest Dumpster. It took her half a minute to clear enough away to lift the lid and look inside.

  A dead man stared back at her, his face blue and his eyes frozen in an expression of surprise. She dropped the lid.

  “What is it?” asked Paulette.

  “Not Iris.” Miriam leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths, her head spinning. Who can he be? “Check. The other bins.”

  “Other bins, okay.” Paulette gingerly lifted the lids, one by one—but none of them contained anything worse than a pile of full garbage bags which, when torn, proved to contain kitchen refuse. “She’s not here, Miriam.”

  “Oh thank god.”

  “What now?” asked Paulie, head cocked as if listening for the sound of sirens.

  “I take another look while you and Brill keep an eye open for strangers.” Steeling herself, Miriam lifted the lid on the bin’s gruesome contents. “Hmm.” She reached out and touched her hand to an icy cold cheek. “He’s been dead for at least twelve hours, more likely over twenty-four.” A mass of icy black stuff in front of the body proved to be Iris’s dish towels, bulked up by more frozen blood than Miriam could have imagined. She gingerly shoved them aside, until she saw where the blood had come from. “There’s massive trauma to the upper thorax, about six inches below the neck. Jesus, it looks like a shotgun wound. Saw a couple in the ER, way back when. Um…sawed-off, by the size of the entry wound, either that or he was shot from more than twenty yards away, which would have had to happen outdoors, meaning witnesses. His chest is really torn up, he’d have died instantly.” She dropped the wadding back in front of the body. He was, she noted distantly, wearing black overalls and a black ski mask pulled up over his scalp like a cap. Clean-shaven, about twenty years old, of military appearance. Like a cop or a soldier—or a Clan enforcer.

  She turned around and looked at the back door. Something was wrong with it; it took almost a minute of staring before she realized—

  “They replaced the door,” she said. “They replaced the fucking door!”

  “Let’s go,” Paulette said nervously. “Like right now? Anywhere, as long as it’s away? This is giving me the creeps.”

  “Just a minute.” Miriam dropped the Dumpster lid shut and went back inside the house. Iris phoned me when the shit hit the fan, she realized distantly. She was still alive and free, but she had to leave. To go underground, like in the sixties. When the FBI bugged her phone. Miriam leaned over Iris’s favorite chair, in the morning room. She swept her hand around the crack behind the cushion; nothing. “No messages?” She looked up, scanning the room. The mantlepiece: dead flowers, some cards…birthday cards. One of them said 32 TODAY. She walked toward it slowly, then picked it up, unbelieving. Her eyes clouded with tears as she opened it. The inscription inside it was written in Iris’s jagged, half-illiterate scrawl. Thanks for the memories of treasure hunts, and the green party shoes, it said. “Green party shoes?”

  Miriam dashed upstairs, into Iris’s bedroom. Opening her mother’s wardrobe she smelled mothballs, saw row upon row of clothes hanging over a vast mound of shoes—a pair of green high-heeled pumps near the front, pushed together. She picked them up, probed inside, and felt a wad of paper filling the toes of the right shoe.

  She pulled it out, feeling it crackle—elderly paper, damaged by the passage of time. A tabloid newspaper page, folded tight. She ran downstairs to where Brill was waiting impatiently in the hall. “I got it,” she called.

  “Got what?” Brill asked, her voice incurious.

  “I don’t know.” Miriam frowned as she locked the door, then they were in the back of the car and Paulie was pulling away hastily, fishtailing slightly on the icy road.

  “When your mother phoned you,” Paulie said edgily, “what did she say? Daughter, I’ve killed someone? Or, your wicked family has come to kidnap me, oh la! What is to become of me?”

  “She said.” Miriam shut her eyes. “She hadn’t been entirely honest with me. Something had come up, and she had to go on a journey.”

  “Someone died,” said Brill. “Someone standing either just outside the back door or just inside it, in the doorway. Someone shot them with a blunderbuss.” She was making a sing-song out of it, in a way that really got on Miriam’s nerves. Stress, she thought. Brill had never seen a murder before last week. Now she’s seen a couple in one go, hasn’t she? “So someone stuffed the victim in a barrel for Iris, went out and ordered a new door. Angbard’s men will have been watching her departure. Probably followed her. Why don’t you call him and ask about it?”

  “I will. Once we’ve returned this car and rented a replacement from another hire shop.” She glanced at Brill. “Keep a lookout and tell me if you see any cars that seem to be following us.”

  Miriam unfolded the paper carefully. It was, she saw, about the same fateful day as the first Xeroxed news report in the green and pink shoebox. But this was genuine newsprint, not a copy, a snapshot from the time itself. Most of it was inconsequential, but there was a story buried halfway down page two that made her stare, about a young mother and baby found in a city park, the mother suffering a stab wound in the lower back. She’d been wearing hippy-style clothes and was unable to explain her condition, apparently confused or intoxicated. The police escorted her to a hospital with the child, and the subeditor proceeded to editorialize on the evils of unconventional lifestyles and the effects of domestic violence in a positively Hogarthian manner. No, Miriam thought, they must have gotten it wrong. She was murdered, Ma told me! Not taken into hospital with a stab wound! She shook her head, bewildered and hurting. “I’ll do that. But first I need some stuff from my house,” she said, “but I’m not sure I dare go there.”

  “What stuff?” asked Paulie. Miriam could see her fingers white against the rim of the steering wheel.

  “Papers.” She paused, weighing up the relative merits of peace of mind and a shotgun wound to the chest. “Fuck it,” she said shortly. “I need to go home. I need five minutes there. Paulie, take me home.”

  “Whoa! Is that really smart?” asked Paulette, knuckles tightening on the steering wheel.

  “No.” Miriam gri
maced. “It’s really not smart. But I need to grab some stuff, the goddamn disk with all your research on it. I’ll be about thirty seconds. We can ditch the car immediately afterwards. You willing to wait?”

  “Didn’t you say they’d staked you out?”

  “What does that mean?” Brill asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”

  Miriam sighed. “My house,” she said. “I haven’t been back to it since my fun-loving uncle had me kidnapped. Roland said it was under surveillance so I figured it would be risky. Now—”

  “It’s even more risky,” Paulette said vehemently. “In fact I think it’s stupid.”

  “Yes.” Miriam bared her teeth, worry and growing anger eating at her:

  “But I need that disk, Paulie, it may be the best leverage I’ve got. We don’t have time for me to make millions in world three.”

  “Oh shit. You think it may come to that?”

  “Yeah, ’oh shit’ indeed.”

  “What kind of disk?” Brill asked plaintively.

  “Don’t worry. Just wait with the car.” Miriam focused on Paulette’s driving. The answer will be somewhere in the shoebox, she thought, desperately. And if Angbard had my ma snatched, I’ll make him pay!

  Familiar scenery rolled past, and a couple of minutes later they turned into a residential street that Miriam knew well enough to navigate blindfolded. A miserable wave of homesickness managed to penetrate her anger and worry: This was where she belonged, and she should never have left. It was her home, dammit! And it slid past to the left as Paulette kept on driving.

  “Paulie?” Miriam asked anxiously.

  “Looking for suspicious-acting vehicles,” Paulie said tersely.

  “Oh.” Miriam glanced around. “Ma said there was a truck full of guys watching her.”

  “Uh-huh. Your mother spotted the truck. What did she miss?”

  “Right.” Miriam spared a sideways glance: Brill’s head was swiveling like a ceiling fan, but her expression was more vacant than anything else. Almost as if she was bored. “Want to drive round the block once more? When you get back to the house stop just long enough for me to get out, then carry on. Come back and pick me up in three minutes. Don’t park.”