“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 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 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 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 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.