The Merchants’ War

sure. It is no blind ambition that desires my impression of your son: I have a nation to rid of witchcraft and nightmares, to make fit for men such as your son to live in. He will eventually play a privileged role at court; I would like to meet him sooner rather than later. But now—” He gestured at the orange grove around them. “—I have arrangements to make. There is a war to conduct, and once I have seen to my defense I must look to my arms.” He took another deep breath. “If success smells half so sweet as this, I shall count myself a lucky man.”

The bench seat stank of leather, old sweat, gunpowder, and a cloying reek of fear. It rattled and bounced beneath Mike, to the accompaniment of a metallic squeaking like damaged car shock absorbers. His leg ached abominably below the knee, and whenever he tried to move it into a less painful position it felt as if a pack of rabid weasels was chewing on it. His face pressed up against the rear cushion of the seat as the contraption swayed from side to side, bouncing over the deep ruts in the cobblestone surface of the road.

Despite the discomfort, he was calm: everything was distant, walled off from him by a barrier of placid equanimity, as if he was wrapped in cotton wool. They’ll kill me when they find out, he told himself, but the thought held no fear. Wow, whatever Hastert stuck me with is really smooth.

Not that life was entirely a bed of roses. He winced at a particularly loud burst of gunfire rattling past the carriage window. One of the women on the other bench seat rattled off something in hochsprache: he couldn’t follow it but she sounded scared. The old one tut-tutted. “Sit down, you’ll only get your head blown off if you give them a target,” she said in English.

More hochsprache: something about duty, Mike thought vaguely.

“No, you shouldn’t…”

The distinctive sound of a charging handle being worked, followed by a gust of cold air.

Crack. The sound of a rifle firing less than a meter from his ear penetrated Mike’s haze. He pushed back against the seat back, rolling onto his back just as a particularly violent pot-hole tried to swallow one of the carriage’s rear wheels, and the shooter fired again: a hot brass cartridge case pinged off the back of the seat and landed on his hand. Curiously, it hurt.

“Ow—” He twitched, shaking the thing off, wincing repeatedly as the woman in the fur coat leaning out of the carriage window methodically squeezed off another three shots. What’s the word for…? “My leg, it hurts,” he tried.

“Speak English, your accent’s atrocious,” said the old woman. “It won’t fool anyone.”

Mike stared at her. In the semi-darkness of the carriage her face seemed to hover in the darkness, disembodied. Outside the window, men shouted at each other. The carriage lurched sideways, then bounced forward, accelerating. The shooter withdrew her head and shoulders from the window. “That is all of them for now, I believe,” she announced, with an accent of her own that could have passed for German. She glanced at Mike, mistrustfully, and adjusted her grip on the gun. The real moon, outside, scattered platinum highlights off her hair: for a moment he saw her face side-lit, young and striking, like a Russian princess in a story, pursued by wolves.

“Close the window, you don’t want to make a target of yourself,” said the old biddy from beneath the pile of rugs. “And I don’t want to catch my death of cold.” A cane appeared from somewhere under the heap, ascending until it battered against the carriage roof. “Shtoppan nicht, gehen’su halt!” She was old, but her lungs were good. She glanced at Mike. “So you’re awake, are you?”

Answering seemed like too much of an effort, so Mike ignored her: it was much easier to simply close his eyes and try to keep his leg still. That way the weasels didn’t seem to bite as hard.

A moment later, the cane poked him rudely in the ribs. “Answer when you’re spoken to!” snapped the Russian princess. He opened his eyes again. The thing prodding his side wasn’t a cane, and she might be pretty, but she was also clearly angry. Is it something I did? he wondered hazily. “Where am I?”

“In a carriage,” said the old woman. “I’d have thought that was obvious.” She snorted. “The question you meant to ask is, how did I end up in this carriage in particular?”

“Jah: and, how am I, it, to leave, alive?” The Russian princess gave his ribs a final warning poke, then withdrew into the opposite corner of the cramped cabin, next to the old woman. Mike tried to focus: as his eyes adjusted he saw that under her fur coat she was wearing a camouflage jacket. The rifle—he focused some more— was exotic, some sort of foreign bullpup design with a huge night vision scope bolted above its barrel. Blonde bombshell with fur coat and assault rifle. His gaze slid sideways to take in the older one, searching for reassurance: she smiled crookedly, one eyebrow raised, and he shuddered, deja vu spiking through his guts as sharply as the pain from his damaged leg.

“That’s enough, Olga,” the old lady said sharply, never taking her eyes off Mike. “We’ve met, in case you’d forgotten.”

Oh shit. The penny dropped: that’s the entire mission blown! He stared at her in mortified disbelief, at a complete loss for words. His mind flashed back to events earlier in the evening, to a hurried snatch of conversation with Miriam, the way she’d stared at him in perplexity as if she couldn’t quite fathom the meaning of his reappearance in her life: now he felt the same scene repeating, horribly skewed. “You were—” he paused. “Mrs. Beckstein. Well…” His lips were as dry as the day when Miriam had casually suggested they stop off on their way to the restaurant to say hello, just for ten minutes, so you’ve met my mother—“I’m surprised. I thought you’d adopted Miriam? What are you doing here?”

Olga, the Russian princess as he’d started thinking of her, glared at him malevolently: her rifle pointed at the floor, but he had no doubt she could bring it to bear on his head in an eyeblink. But Mrs. Beckstein surprised him. She began to smile, and then her smile widened, and she began to chuckle, louder and louder until she began to wheeze and subsided into a fit of coughing. “You really believed that? And you saw us together? What kind of cop are you?” Something else must have tweaked her funny bone because a moment later she was off again, lost in a paroxysm of thigh-slappingly disproportionate mirth. Or maybe it was just relief at being out of the fire-fight.

“I do not see the thing that is so funny,” Olga said, almost plaintively.

“Ah, well, but he was such a nice young—” Mrs. Beckstein began coughing again. Olga looked concerned, but given a choice between keeping Mike under observation and trying to help the older woman—“Sorry, dear,” she told Olga, when she got her voice back. “That’s how Miriam described you.” She nodded at Mike. “Before she changed her mind.”

Mike closed his eyes again. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is this a fuckup! He winced: obviously demons were feeding his leg-weasels crystal meth. “He’s called Mike,” Mrs. Beckstein continued remorselessly, “Mike something-beginning-with-F, I’ve got it in my diary. And he works for the Drug Enforcement Agency. Or he used to work for the DEA. Do you still work for the DEA, Mike?”

He opened his eyes, unsure what to do: the painkillers were subsiding but he still felt unfocused, blurry about the edges. “I’m not supposed to talk—”

“You will talk, boy.” Mrs. Beckstein glared at him, and he recoiled at the anger in her expression. “You can take your chances with me, or you can make your excuses to my half-brother’s men, but you are going to talk sooner or later.” She glanced at Olga. “Sometimes I can’t believe my luck,” she said dryly. She turned back to Mike, her expression harsh: “What have you done with my daughter?”

“I—” Mike stopped. Time seemed to slow. My brother’s men. Jesus, she’s been one of them all along! How deep does this go? He shuddered, his guts churning. Until now he’d known, understood in the abstract, that Miriam was involved with these alien gangsters, narcoterrorists from Middle Earth: even meeting Miriam, dressed up for a medieval wedding in the middle of an exploding castle, hadn’t really shaken what he’d thought he knew. But Miriam’s mother was a different matter entirely, a disabled middle-aged woman living quietly in a small house in New England suburbia—they’re everywhere! He swallowed, choking back hysterical laughter. “I don’t know where she went. She said she had a, one of the lockets, got it from a friend. Said she’d be in touch later. There was a perp in black, tried to stab her so I shot him—”

“Why?”

“Orders.” He cleared his throat. “They told me, talk to her. Offer her whatever she…well, anything.”

Mrs. Beckstein glanced at the Russian princess: evidently her expression meant something because a moment later she turned back to him. “You’re colluding with Egon.”

“Who?” His bewilderment must have been obvious, because a moment later she nodded.