“No, it can’t,” Olga said dismissively. “I’ve seen America, and I’ve seen this other place, and the differences are glaringly obvious. They both sprang from the same roots, but clearly they have diverged—in America, the monarchy is not hereditary, is it?” She frowned for a moment. “Did I say something wrong?”
Uproar. “What’s all this nonsense about?” demanded Earl Hjorth, red-faced. “It’s clear as day that this can’t be true! If it was, there might be a whole new world out there!”
“I believe there is,” Olga replied calmly.
The gavel rose and fell on the resulting babble. “Silence! I now call Helge Thorold-Hjorth, alias Miriam Beckstein. Please approach the table.”
Miriam swallowed as she stood up and walked over.
“Please describe for the Clan how you come to be here. From the day you first learned of your heritage.”
“We’ll be here all day—”
“Nevertheless, if you please.”
“Certainly.” Miriam took a deep breath. “It started the day I lost my job with a business magazine in Cambridge. I went to visit my mother—” a nod to Iris “—who asked me to fetch down a box from her attic. The box was full of old papers…”
She kept going until she reached her patent filing in New Britain, the enterprise she was setting up, and Olga’s shooting. Her throat was dry and the room was silent. She shook her head. “Can I have a glass of water, please?” she asked. A tumbler appeared next to her.
“Thank you. By this time I had some ideas. The people who kept trying to murder Iris—sorry, Patricia—and who kept going after me, or getting at Olga by mistake—they had to be relatives. But apart from one attempt, there was never any sign of them on the other side, in America that is. I remembered being told about a long-lost brother who headed west in the earliest days of the Clan. You know—we learned—that they, too, use a pattern to let them world-walk, however they can travel only from here to New Britain, to the place I’ve just been telling you about.
“What I’ve pieced together is something like this. A very long time ago one of the brothers headed west. He fell on hard times and lost his amulet. In fact, he ended up as an indentured slave and took nearly ten years to save the cash to buy his freedom. Once free, he had to reconstruct the knot design from memory. Either that, or his was deliberately sabotaged by a sibling. Whichever, the knot he painted was different. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough; where you go when you world-walk depends on the design you use as a key. We now know of two keys, but there’s another fact—the other one, this lost brother’s knot, doesn’t work in America. Our America. The one we go to.
“Anyway. he crossed over repeatedly, because it had been arranged that at regular intervals he should check for his brothers. They evidently intended to send a trade caravan to meet him, somewhere in Northern California perhaps. But he never found his business partners waiting for him, because they were elsewhere, traveling to another world where, presumably, they interpreted his absence as a sign that he’d died. He was cut off completely, and put it down to betrayal.”
“Preposterous!” Someone in the front row snorted, prompting Angbard to bring down the gavel again. Miriam took the opportunity to help herself to a glass of water.
“This brother, Lee, had a family. His family was less numerous, less able to provide for themselves, than the Clan. Just as the ability was lost to your ancestors for a generation or two, so it was with his descendants—and it took longer before some first cousins or cousins married and had an infant with renewed ability. They prospered much as you have, but more slowly. The New British don’t have a lot of time for Chinese merchants, and as a smaller family they had far fewer active world-walkers to rely on.
“Now, the Lees only found the Clan again when the family Wu moved west, less than a century ago. The Lees reacted—well, I think it was out of fear, but they basically conducted the campaign of assassinations that kicked off the feud. Everyone in the Clan knew that the murders could only have been carried out by world-walkers, so the attacks on the western families were blamed—understandably—on their cousins back east.”
She paused. The level of conversation breaking out in the benches made continuing futile. Angbard raised his gavel but she held up a hand. “Any questions?” she asked.
“Yes! What’s this business—”
“—How did you travel—”
“—We going to put up with these lies?”
Bang. Miriam jumped as Angbard brought down the gavel. “One at a time,” he snapped. “Helge, if you please. You have the floor.”
“The new world, where the other family—the Lees—go, is like the one I grew up in, but less well developed. There are a number of reasons for this, but essentially it boils down to the apparent fact that it diverged historically from my own about two hundred and fifty years ago. If you want evidence of its existence I have witnesses, Lady Olga and Brilliana d’Ost, and video recordings. I can even take you over there, if you are willing to accept my directions—remember, it is a very different country from the United States, and if you don’t bear that in mind you can get into trouble very easily. But let me emphasize this. I believe anyone who is sitting in this room now can go there quite easily, by simply using a Lee family talisman instead of a Clan one. You can verify this for yourselves. I repeat: It appears that if you have the ability to world-walk, you can go to different worlds simply by using a different kind of talisman.
“New Britain only had an industrial revolution a century ago. I’ve established a toehold over there, by setting up an identity and filing some basic engineering patents on the automobile. They’ll be big in about five to ten years. My business plan was to leverage inventions from the U.S.A. that haven’t been developed over there, rather than trading in physical commodities or providing transportation. But by doing this, I attracted the Lee family’s attention. They worked out soon enough that I’d acquired one of their lockets and was setting up on their territory. As Olga told you, they attempted to black-bag my house and we were waiting for them.” She glanced at Angbard for approval. He nodded to her, so she went on. “We took a prisoner, alive. He was in possession of an amulet and he’s indisputably a world-walker, but he’s not of the Clan. I asked for some medical tests. Ah, my lord?”
The duke cleared his throat. “Blood tests confirm that the prisoner is a very distant relative. And a world-walker. It appears that there are six families, after all.”
Now he resorted to his hammer again, in earnest—but to no avail. After five minutes, when things began to quieten down, Angbard signaled for the sergeant at arms to bring order to the hall. “Order!” he shouted. “We will recess for one hour, to take refreshments. Then the meeting will resume.” He rose, scowling ominously at the assembled Clan shareholders. “What you’ve heard so far is the background. There is more to come.”
Morning on the day shift in Boston. The office phones were already ringing as Mike Fleming swiped his badge and walked in past security.
“Hi, Mike!” Pete Garfinkle, his officemate, waved on his way back from the coffee machine.
“’Lo.” Mike was never at his best, early in the morning. Winter blues, one of his ex-girlfriends had called it in a forgiving moment. (Blues so deep they were ultraviolet, the same girlfriend had said as she was moving out—blues so deep she’d gotten radiation burns.) “Anything in?”
“What? On the—” Pete waved a finger.
“Office. Okay, give me five minutes.”
Mike wandered along to the vending machine, passing a couple of suits from the public liaison office, and collected a mug of coffee. Traffic was bad this morning, really bad. And he hadn’t shaved properly either. It was only nine but he already had a five o’clock shadow, adding to his bearish appearance. Don’t mess with me.
Pete was already nose-deep in paperwork that had come in the morning mail when Mike finally made it to his desk. Pete was a morning guy, always frazzled by six o’clock—when Mike was j
ust hitting his stride. “Tell me the news,” Mike grunted. “Anything happening?”
“On the Hernandez case? Judge Judy has it on her docket.” Pete grinned humorlessly.
“Judge Judy couldn’t find his ass with a submarine’s periscope and a map.” Mike pulled a face, put his mug of coffee down, and rubbed his eyes. The urge to yawn was nearly irresistible. “Judge Judy is about the least likely to sign a no-knock—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about your pissing match with hizonner Stephen Jude. Can it, Mike, he works for Justice, it’s his job to gum up the works. No point taking it personal.”
“Huh. That fucker Julio needs to go down, though. I mean, the goddamn Pope knows what he’s at! What the hell else do we need to convince the DA he’s got a case?”
“Fifty keys of crack and a blow job from the voters.” Pete leaned his chair perilously far back—the office was so cramped that a sideswipe would risk demolishing piles of banker’s boxes—and snorted. “Relax, dude. We’ll get him.”
“Huh. Give me that.” Mike held out a huge hand and Pete dumped a pile of mail into it. “Ack.” Mike carefully put it down on his desk, then picked up his coffee and took a sip. “Bilge water.”
“One of these days you’d better try and kick the habit,” Pete said mildly. “It can’t be doing your kidneys any good.”
“Listen, I run on coffee,” Mike insisted. “Lessee—”
He thumbed rapidly through the internal mail, sorting administrative memos from formal letters—some branches still ran on paper, their intranets unconnected to the outside world—and a couple of real, honest, postal envelopes. He stacked them in three neat piles and switched on his PC. While he waited for it to boot he opened the two letters from outside. One of them was junk, random spam sent to him by name and offering cheap loans. The other—
“Holy shit!”
Pete started, nearly going over backwards in his chair. “Hey! You want to keep a lid—”
“Holy shit!”
Pete turned around. Mike was on his feet, a letter clutched in both hands and an expression of awe on his face. “What?” Pete asked mildly.
“Got to get this to forensics,” Mike muttered, carefully putting the letter down on his desk, then carefully peering inside the envelope. A little plastic baggie with something brown in it—
“Evidence?” asked Pete, interestedly: “Hey, I thought that was external?”
“You’re not kidding!” Mike put it down as delicately as if it was made of fine glass. “Anonymous tip-offs ‘R’ us!”
“Explain.”
“This letter.” Mike pointed. “It’s fingering the Phantom.”
“You’re sure about that?” Pete looked disbelieving. Mike nodded.
“Jesus, Mike, you need to learn some new swear words, holy shit doesn’t cut it! Show me that thing—”
“Whoa!” Mike carefully lifted the envelope. “Witness. You and me, we’re going down to the lab to see what’s in this baggie. If it’s what the letter says, and it checks out, it’s a sample from that batch of H that hit New York four months ago. You know? The really big one that coincided with that OD spike, pushed the price down so low they were buying it by the ounce? From the Phantom network?”
“So?” Pete looked interested. “Somebody held onto a sample.”
“Somebody just sent us a fucking tip-off that there’s an address in Belmont that’s the local end of the distribution chain. Wholesale, Pete. Name, rank, and serial number. Dates—we need to check the goddamn dates. Pete, this is an inside job. Someone on the inside of the Phantom wants to come in from the cold and they’re establishing their bona fides.”
“We’ve had falsies before. Anonymous bastards.”
“Yeah, but this one’s got a sample, and a bunch of supplementaries. From memory, I think it checks out—at least, there’s not anything obviously wrong with it at first glance. I want it dusted for fingerprints and DNA samples before we go any further. What do you think?”
Pete whistled. “If it checks out, and the dates match, I figure we can get the boss to come along with us and go lean on Judge Judy. A break on the Phantom would be just too cool.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Mike grinned ferociously. “How well do you think we can resource this one?”
“If it’s the Phantom? Blank check time. Jesus, Mike, if this is the Phantom, I think we’ve just had the biggest break in this office in about the last twenty years. It’s going to be all over Time Magazine if this goes down!”
In the hallway outside the boardroom, the palace staff had busied themselves setting up a huge buffet. Cold cuts from a dozen game animals formed intricate sculptures of meat depicting their animate origins. Jellied larks vied with sugar-pickled fruit from the far reaches of the West Coast, and exotic delicacies imported at vast expense formed pyramids atop a row of silver platters the size of small dining tables. Hand-made Belgian truffles competed for the attention of the aristocracy with caviar-topped crackers and brightly colored packets of M&Ms.
Despite the huge expanse of food, most of the Clan shareholders had other things in mind. Though waiters with trays laden with wine glasses circulated freely—and with jugs of imported coffee and tea—the main appetite they exhibited seemed to be for speech. And speech with one or two people in particular.
“Just keep them away from me, please,” Miriam said plaintively, leaning close to Olga. “They’ll be all over me.”
“You can’t avoid them!” Olga insisted, taking her arm and steering her toward the open doors onto the reception area. “Do you want them to think you’re afraid?” she hissed in Miriam’s ear. “They’re like rats that eat their own young if they smell weakness in the litter.”
“It’s not that—I’ve got to go.” Miriam pulled back and steered Olga in turn, toward the door at the back of the boardroom where she’d seen Angbard pushing her mother’s wheelchair, ahead of the crush. Kara, her eyes wide, stuck close behind Miriam.
“Where are you going?” asked Olga.
“Follow.” Miriam pushed on.
“Eh, I say! Young woman!”
A man Miriam didn’t recognize, bulky and gray-haired, was blocking her way. Evidently he wanted to buttonhole her. She smiled blandly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’ll be time to talk later. But I urgently need to have words with—” She gestured as she slid past him, leaving Kara to soothe ruffled feathers, and shoved the door open.
“Ma!”
It was a small side room, sparsely furnished by Clan standards. Iris looked around as she heard Miriam. Angbard looked round, too, as did a cadaverous-looking fellow with long white hair who had been hunched slightly, on the receiving end of some admonition.
“Helge,” Angbard began, in a warning tone of voice.
“Mother!” Miriam glared at Iris, momentarily oblivious.
“Hiya, kid.” Iris grinned tiredly. “Allow me to introduce you to another of your relatives. Henryk? I’d like to present my daughter.” Iris winked at Angbard: “Cut her a little slack, alright?”
The man who’d been listening to Angbard tilted his head on one shoulder. “Charmed,” he said politely.
The duke coughed into a handkerchief and cast Miriam a grim look. “You should be circulating,” he grumbled.
“Henryk was always my favorite uncle,” Iris said, glancing at the duke.
“I mean, there had to be one of them, didn’t there?”
Miriam paused uncomfortably, unwilling to meet Angbard’s gaze. Meanwhile, Henryk looked her up and down. “I see,” she said after a moment. “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”
“Helge.” Angbard refused to be ignored. “You should be out front. Mixing with the guests.” He frowned at her. “You know how much stock they put in appearances.” Harrumph. “This is their first sight of you. Do you want them to think you’re a puppet? Conspiring with the bench?”
“I am conspiring with you,” she pointed out. “And anyway, they’d eat me alive. You obviously haven�
��t done enough press conferences. You don’t throw the bait in the water if you want to pull it out intact later, do you? You’ve got to keep these things under control.”
Angbard’s frown intensified. “This isn’t a press conference; this is a beauty show,” he said. “If you do not go out there and make the right moves they will assume that you cannot. And if you can’t, what are you good for? I arranged this session at your request. The least you can do is not make a mess of it.”
“There’s going to be a vote later on,” Iris commented. “Miriam, if they think you’re avoiding them it’ll give the reactionary bastards a chance to convince the others that you’re a fraud, and that won’t go in your favor, will it?”
Miriam sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Ma, family solidarity.”
“She’s right, you know,” Henryk spoke up. “Motions will go forward. They may accept your claim of title, but not your business proposals. Not if names they know and understand oppose it, and you are not seen to confront them.”
“But they’ll—” Miriam began.
“I have a better idea!” Olga announced brightly. “Why don’t you both go forth to charm the turbulent beast?” She beamed at them both. “That way they won’t know who to confront! Like the ass that starved between two overflowing mangers.”
Iris glanced sidelong at Miriam. Was it worry? Miriam couldn’t decide. “That would never do,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t—”
“Oh yes you can, Patricia,” Angbard said with a cold gleam in his eye.
“But if I go out there Mother will make a scene! And then—”
Miriam caught herself staring at Iris in exasperation, sensing an echo of a deeper family history she’d grown up shielded from. “The dowager will make a scene, will she?” Miriam asked, a dangerous note in her voice: “Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t seen you for decades. Thought you were dead, probably. You didn’t get along with her when you were young, but so what? Maybe you’ll both find the anger doesn’t matter anymore. Why not try it?” She caught Angbard’s eye. Her uncle, normally stony-faced, looked positively anesthetized, as if to stifle an image-destroying outburst of laughter.
The Hidden Family: Book Two of Merchant Princes Page 27
