“I-I’m.” Miriam stopped. “I told you about the phone call.”
Paulette looked at her bleakly. “Yeah. Did I tell you-”
“You too?”
She nodded. ‘The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don’t know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”
“Bastards.”
“Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys… it wasn’t a rich neighbourhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them-or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when they talk to you-I think I need a drink. What do you say?”
“I say there’re a couple of bottles in the cabinet,” said Miriam, massaging her forehead. “Don’t mind if I join you.”
Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. “It’s a mess,” said Paulette. “You, uh-we didn’t talk about Monday. Did we?”
“No,” Miriam admitted. “If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I’m not going to twist your arm.” She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she’d carved out for herself was under retreat. Like the months when she’d subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until…
“ ‘Drop it?’” Paulette’s eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. “Are you crazy? These hard men, they’re really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It’s simple as that. That’s something I learned when I was a kid.”
“What happened-” Miriam stopped.
Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. “My parents weren’t rich,” she said quietly. “Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn’t easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that’s numero uno. And for seconds, I’d be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off.”
Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.
“My brother Joe didn’t listen to what Momma told us,” Paulette said slowly. “He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn’t the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps.”
“Uh.” Miriam felt a little sick. “What happened?”
“I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an accident-it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. “That’s why I figure you don’t want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don’t ever back off.”
“That’s-I’m really sorry. I had no idea.”
“Don’t blame yourself.” Paulette managed an ironic smile. “I, uh, took a liberty with the files before I printed them.” She reached inside her handbag and flipped a CD-ROM at Miriam.
“Hey, what’s this?” Miriam peered at the greenish silver surface.
“It’s the investigation.” Paulie grinned at her. “I got everything before you decided to jump Sandy ’s desk and get Joe to take an unhealthy interest in us.”
“But that’s stealing!” Miriam ended on a squeak.
“And what do you call what they did to your job?” Paulette asked dryly. “I call this insurance.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh. I don’t think they know about it-otherwise we’d be in way deeper shit already. Still, you should find somewhere to hide it until we need it.”
Miriam looked at the disk as if it had turned into a snake. “Yeah, I can do that.” She drained her glass, then picked up the disk and carried it over to the stereo. “Gotcha.” She pulled a multidisk CD case from the shelf, opened it, and slid the extra disk inside. “The Beggar’s Opera. Think you can remember that?”
“Oh! Why didn’t I think of doing that?”
“Because.” Miriam grinned at her. “Why didn’t I think of burning that disk in the first place?”
“We each need a spare brain.” Paulette stared at her. “Listen, that’s problem number one. What about problem number two? This crazy shit from another world. What were you messing around with it for?”
Miriam shrugged. “I had some idea that I could hide from the money laundry over there,” she said slowly. “Also, to tell the truth, I wanted someone else to tell me I wasn’t going crazy. But going totally medieval isn’t going to answer my problem, is it?”
“I wouldn’t say so.” Paulette put her glass down, half-empty. “Where were we? Oh yeah. You cross over to the other side, wherever that is, and you wander over to where your bank’s basement is, then you cross back again. What do you think happens?”
“I come out in a bank vault.” Miriam pondered. “They’re wired inside, aren’t they? After my first trip I was a total casualty, babe. I mean, projectile vomiting-” she paused, embarrassed. “A fine bank robber I’d make!”
“There is that,” said Paulette. “But you’re not thinking it through. What happens when the alarm goes off?”
“Well. Either I go back out again too fast and risk an aneurism or…” Miriam trailed off. “The cops show and arrest me.”
“And what happens after they arrest you?”
“Well, assuming they don’t shoot first and ask questions later, they cuff me, read me my rights, and haul me off to the station. Then book me in and stick me in a cell.”
“And then?” Paulette rolled her eyes at Miriam’s slow uptake.
“Why, I call my lawyer-” Miriam stopped, eyes unfocused. “No, they’d take my locket,” she said slowly.
“Sure. Now, tell me. Is it your locket or is it the pattern in your locket? Have you tested it? If it’s the design, what if you’ve had it tattooed on the back of your arm in the meantime?” Paulette asked.
“That’s-” Miriam shook her head. “Tell me there’s a flaw in the logic.”
“I’m not going to do that.” Paulette picked up the bottle and waved it over Miriam’s glass in alcoholic benediction. “I think you’re going to have to test it tomorrow to find out. And I’m going to have to test it, to see if it works for me-if that’s okay by you,” she added hastily. “If it’s the design, you just got your very own ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Doesn’t matter if you can’t use it to rob bank vaults, there’s any number of other scams you can run if you can get out of the fix instantaneously. Say, uh, you walk into a bank and pull a holdup. No need for a gun, just pass over a note saying you’ve got a bomb and they should give you all the money. Then, instead of running away, you head for the staff rest room and just vanish into thin air.”
“You have got a larcenous mind, Paulie.” Miriam shook her head in awe. “You’re wasted in publishing.”
“No, I’m not.” Paulette frowned seriously. “Y’see, you haven’t thought this through. S’pose you’ve got this super power. Suppose nobody else can use it-we can try me out tomorrow, huh? Do the experiment with the photocopy of the locket on you, then try me. See if I can do it. I figure it’s going to be you, and not me, because if just anybody could do it it would be common knowledge, huh? Or your mother would have done it. For some reason somebody stabbed your mother and she didn’t do it. So these must be some kind of gotcha. But anyway. What do you think the cops would make of it if instead of robbing banks or photographing peasant villagers you, uh, donated your powers to the forces of law and order?”
“Law and order consists of bureaucracies,” Miriam said with a brisk shake of her head. “You’ve seen all those tedious FBI press conferences I sat in on when they were lobbying for carnivore and crypto export controls, huh?” A vision unfolded behind her eyes, the poisonous fire blossom of an airliner striking an undefended skyscraper. “Jesus, Paulie, imagine if Al Qaida could do this!”
“They don’t need it: They’ve got suicide volunteers. But yeah, there are other bad guys who… if you can see it, so can the feds. Remember that feature about nuclear terrorism that Zeb ran last year? How the NIRT units and FEMA were able to track bombs as they come in across the frontier if there’s an alert on?”
“I don’t want to go there.” The thought made Miriam feel physically ill. “There is no way in hell I’d smuggle a nuclear weapon across a frontier.”
