Miriam glanced towards the end of the long, curving platform, through the thin haze of steam. “Really?” The long ant column of carriages approaching the platform seemed to vanish into the infinite distance. It was certainly long enough to be a transcontinental express train.
“Carriage eleven, upper deck.” He squinted towards it. “We’ve got a bit of a walk…”
The Northern Continental was a city on wheels—wheels six French feet apart, the track gauge nearly half as wide again as the ordinary trains. The huge double-deck carriages loomed overhead, brass handrails gleaming around the doors at either end. Burgeson’s expensive passes did more than open doors: uniformed porters took their suitcases and carried them upstairs, holding the second and third class passengers at bay while they boarded. Miriam looked around in astonishment. “This is ridiculous!”
Erasmus smiled lopsidedly. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s not that—” Miriam walked across to the sofa facing the wall of windows and sat down, bemused. The walls of the compartment were paneled in polished oak as good as anything Duke Angbard had in his aerie at Fort Lofstrom, and if the floor wasn’t carpeted in hand-woven Persian rugs, she was no judge of carpet. It reminded her of the expensive hotels she’d stayed at in Boston, when she’d been trying to set up a successful technology transfer business and impress the local captains of industry. “Does this convert into a bed, or…?”
“The bedrooms are through there.” Erasmus pointed at the other end of the lounge. “The bathroom is just past the servants’ quarters—”
“Servants’ quarters?”
Erasmus looked at her oddly. “Yes, I keep forgetting. Labor is expensive where you come from, isn’t it?”
Miriam looked around again. “Wow. We’re here for the next three or four days?”
A distant whistle cut through the window glass, and with a nearly undetectable jerk the carriage began to move.
“Yes.” He nodded. “Plenty of time to take your shoes off.”
“Okay.” She bent down automatically, then blinked stupidly. “This doesn’t come cheap, does it?”
“No.” She heard a scrape of chair legs across carpet and looked up, catching Erasmus in the process of sitting down in a spindly Queen Anne reproduction. He watched her with his wide, dark, eyes, his bearing curiously bird like. Behind him, Empire Station slid past in ranks of cast-iron pillars. “But one tends to be interfered with less if one is seen to be able to support expensive tastes.”
“Right…so you’re doing this, spending however much, just to go and see a man about a book?”
A brief pause. “Yes.” Erasmus smiled faintly.
Miriam stared at him. And you gave me a gun to carry? Either you’re mad, or you trust me, or… she couldn’t complete the sentence: it was too preposterous. “That must be some book.”
“Yes, it is.” He nodded. “It has already shaken empires and slain princes.” His cheek twitched at some unspoken unpleasantness. “I have a copy of it in my luggage, if you’d like to read it.”
“Huh?” She blinked, stupidly. “I thought you said you were going to see a man about a book? As in, you were going to buy or sell one?”
“Not exactly: perhaps I should have said, I’m going to see a man about his book. And if all goes well, he’s going to come back east with us.” He glanced down at his feet. “Does Sir Adam Burroughs mean anything to you?”
Miriam shook her head.
“Probably just as well,” Erasmus muttered to himself. “I think you ought to at least look at the book, after dinner. Just so you understand what you’re getting into.”
“Alright.” She stood up. “Is there an electrical light in the bedroom? I need to plug my machine in to charge…”
The fridge was half empty, the half-and-half was half past yogurt, and Oscar thought he was a burglar. That was the downside of coming home. On the upside: Mike could finally look forward to sleeping in his own bed without fear of disturbances, he had a crate of antibiotics to munch on, and Oscar hadn’t thrown up on the carpet again. Home. Funny place, where are the coworkers and security guards? Out on the street, obviously. Mike watched Herz drive off from the porch, then closed the door and went inside.
The crutches got in the way, and the light bulb in the hallway had blown, but at least Oscar wasn’t trying to wrap his furry body around the fiberglass cast in a friendly feline attempt to trip up the food ape. Yet. Mike shuffled through into the living room and lowered himself into the sofa, struggled inconclusively with the one shoe he was wearing, and flicked on the TV. The comforting babble of CNN washed over him. I need some time out, he decided. This being hospitalized shit is hard work. Spending half an hour as a couch potato was a seductive prospect: a few minutes later, his eyelids were drooping shut.
Perhaps it was the lack of hospital-supplied Valium, but Mike—who didn’t normally remember his dreams—found himself in a memorable but chaotic confabulatory realm. One moment he was running a three-legged race through a minefield, the sense of dread almost choking him as Sergeant Hastert’s corpse flopped drunkenly against him, one limp arm around his shoulders; the next, he was lying on a leather bench seat, unable to move, opposite Dr. James, the spook from head office. “It’s important that you find the bomb,” James was saying, but the cranky old lady on the limousine’s parcel shelf was pointing a pistol at the back of his head. “Matthias is a traitor; I want to know who he was working for.”
He tried to open his mouth to warn the colonel about the old madwoman with the gun, but it was Miriam crouching on the shelf now, holding a dictaphone and making notes. “It’s all about manipulating the currency exchange rates,” she explained: then she launched into an enthusiastic description of an esoteric trading scam she was investigating, one that involved taking greenbacks into a parallel universe, swapping them for pieces of eight, and melting them down into Swiss watches. Mike tried to sit up and pull Pete out of the line of fire, but someone was holding him down. Then he woke up, and Oscar, who’d been sitting on his chest, head-butted him on the underside of his chin.
“Thanks, buddy.” Oscar head-butted him again, then made a noise like a dying electric shaver. Mike figured his bowl was empty. He took stock: his head ached, he had pins and needles in one arm, the exposed toes of his left foot were cold to the point of numbness, and the daylight outside his window was in short supply. “Come here, you.” He reached up to stroke the tomcat, who was clearly intent on exercising his feline right to bear a grudge against his human whenever it suited him, and not a moment longer. For a moment he felt a bleak wave of depression. The TV was still on, quietly babbling inanities from the corner of the room. How long is this going to take? Mrs. Beckstein had said it could be weeks, and with Colonel Smith tasking him with being her contact, that could leave him stuck indoors here for the duration.
He pushed himself upright and hobbled dizzily over to the kitchen phone—the cordless handset had succumbed to a flat battery—and dialed the local pizza delivery shop from memory. Working out what the hell to do with this surfeit of time (which he couldn’t even use for a fishing trip or a visit to his cousins) could wait ’til tomorrow.