The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Well –’ Miriam hesitated for a moment, then pressed on. What the hell can he do? It’s my way or the highway! ‘I suggest you listen to me and run things my way. No need to tell Angbard, not yet. When he sends you instructions you just say “yes sir,” then forward them to me, and I’ll tell you how to implement them, what else needs doing, and so on. If Angbard doesn’t want me expanding fast, fine: I can work around that. In the short term, though, we’ve got to position the company so that it’s less vulnerable – and so that when we’re ready to expand we can just pump money in and do it. In the long term, I’ll work on Angbard. I haven’t been able to get in to see him for months, but the crisis won’t last forever – you leave him to me. I can’t be around as much as I want – I’ve got this week to myself, but they keep dragging me back to the capital and sooner or later I’m liable to be stuck there for a while – so you’re going to have to be my general manager here. If you want the job, and if you follow orders until you’ve learned enough about the way things work not to sack our most important employee because you’ve mistaken him for the janitor.’

  He looked sour. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  Miriam shrugged. ‘You’ve got five points. Do you want that to be five points of nothing if it goes bust, or five points on an outfit that’s going to be turning over the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year?’

  ‘Ah. Okay.’ Morgan nodded, slowly this time. Miriam put on her best poker face. She wasn’t happy; Morgan was barely up to the job and was a long way from her first choice for a general manager, but on the other hand he was here. And available to be bribed, which made everything possible. If there was one thing the Clan had taught Miriam, it was the importance of being able to hammer out a quick compromise when one was needed, to build coalitions on the fly – and to recognize when a palm crossed with gold would trump weeks of negotiations. Normally she was bad at it, as events in Niejwein had demonstrated, but here was an opportunity to do it right. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, with barely concealed ill grace. ‘You didn’t leave me a choice, did you?’

  ‘Oh, you had a choice. You could have decided to wreck the company I created, screw yourself out of a fortune, and look like an idiot all at the same time. Not much of a choice, is it?’

  ‘Okay, my lady capitalist. So what do you suggest I do? Now that I’m running this business under your advice?’ He crossed his arms.

  Miriam walked around the desk. ‘You start by giving me back my chair,’ she said. ‘And then we go look round the shop and come up with an action plan. But I can tell you this much, the first item on it will be to track down Roger and offer him his old job back. Along with all the back pay he lost when you sacked him. Now’ – she gestured at the door – ‘shall we go and assess the damage?’

  *

  Five days of hard work, stressful and unpleasant, passed her by like a bad dream. At the end of the first day, Miriam went home to her house on the outskirts of Cambridgetown, to find it shuttered, dark, and cold, the servants nowhere to be found. On the second day, she met with her company lawyer, Bates; on the third day, Morgan reported finding the misplaced Roger; and on the fourth day, she actually began to feel as if she was getting somewhere. The agency Bates recommended had sent her a cook, a gardener, and a maid, and the house was actually inhabitable again. (In the meantime, she’d spent two nights in the Brighton Hotel, rather than repeat the first night’s fitful shivering on a dust-sheeted sofa.) A visit to Roger, cap in hand, had begun to convince him that it was all an unfortunate mistake, but she was getting very tired of telling everybody that she’d been hospitalized with a fever during a business trip to Derry City and had taken a month to convalesce afterward. Whether they believed the story . . . well, why hadn’t she written? Never mind. Her earlier reputation for mystery and eccentricity, formerly a social handicap of the worst kind, suddenly came in handy.

  On the fifth day, while Morgan was away performing his corvée duty for the Clan, a parcel arrived.

  Miriam was in the office that morning, going over the accounts carefully – Morgan had left that side of things almost completely to Bates’s clerk, and Miriam wanted to double-check him – when the bell outside the window rang. She stood up and slid the window back. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘Delivery.’ An eyebrow rose. ‘Hah! Fancy seeing you here. Sign, please.’ It was Sharp Suit Number Two from the verminous hole of a post office near Chicago, wearing a fetching magenta tailcoat over the oddly flared breeches that seemed to be the coming fashion for gentlemen this year.

  ‘Thanks.’ Miriam signed off on his pad. ‘Want to come in? Or . . . ?’

  ‘No, no, must be going,’ he said hastily. ‘Just didn’t realize this was a Clan operation.’

  ‘It is.’ Miriam nodded. Isn’t it? she asked herself. ‘Good day to you.’

  ‘Adieu.’ He tipped his bicorn hat at her, then turned away. She slid the window closed and carried the parcel over to the desk. Inside it were two large plastic bottles of RIFINAH-300 tablets and a handwritten note from Paulette: Here’s your first item, the other will be ready by tomorrow. ‘Good old Paulie,’ Miriam muttered to herself. She tucked the bottles into her shoulder bag, went back to the accounts. They’d wait until after lunch. Then she had to go and visit a friend.

  Lunch. Standing up stiffly, Miriam put the heavy ledger back in its place on the shelf, then walked through into the laboratory. John Probity was bent over a test apparatus, tightening something with a spanner. ‘I shall be calling on a business contact after lunch,’ Miriam announced to his back, ‘so I may not be back this afternoon. If you could shut up shop in the evening I would be obliged. Either I, or Mr. Morgan, will be in the office tomorrow if anyone calls.’

  ‘Aye, mam,’ Probity grunted. A fellow of grim determination and few words, the only time she’d ever seen him look happy was when she’d announced that Roger would be rejoining the company on Monday next. So rather than waiting for any further response, Miriam turned on her heel and headed out to catch a cab back home. Not only was she hungry, she needed a change of clothes: it would hardly do for her to be seen in the vicinity of Burgeson the pawnbroker while dressed for the office – that is, as a respectable moneyed widow of some independent means. Lips might flap, and flapping lips had an alarming tendency to draw the attention of the Royal Constabulary.

  The electric streetcar rattled its way across the trestle bridge over the river, swaying slightly as it went. The air was slightly hazy, a warm, damp summer afternoon that smelled slightly of smoke. Traffic was heavy, horse-drawn carts and steam trucks rumbling and rattling past the streetcar, drivers shouting at one another – Miriam peered out of the window, watching for her stop. She’d traded her dove-gray shal-war suit and cape for the pinafore of a domestic, worn with a slightly threadbare straw hat. With the ‘Gillian’ identity papers tucked in her shabby shoulder bag, there was nothing to mark her out as anything other than a scullery maid on a scarce day off, except the two jars of pills in her bag – and she’d decanted them into glass bottles rather than leaving them in their original plastic wrappers. Nothing to it, she thought dreamily, staring out at the paddlewheel steamers on the Charles River, letting a beam of sunlight warm her face. I could be anyone I want. Once you took the first step and got used to the idea of living under a false identity, it was easy . . .

  It was a seductive fantasy, but it was hardly practical. Not with so many strange relatives wanting to get their claws into her skin, to graft a piece of her onto the family tree. A year ago she’d been an only child, adopted at that, with no relatives but an elderly mother and a daughter she hadn’t seen in years. Now, she found she craved nothing quite as much as placid anonymity. I want my freedom back, she realized. No amount of money or power can make up for losing it. It was something that the Clan, with their sprawling extended families and their low-tech background, didn’t seem to understand about her. A flash of anger: I’m just going to have to take it back, aren’t I?

  She’d grown
up in a world where she’d been led to expect that she could create her own identity, her own success story, rather than vicariously acquiring her identity from her role in a hierarchy, the way the Clan seemed to expect her to. And it was at times like this – when independence seemed a streetcar ride away – that their expectations were at their most tiresome and her natural instinct to rebel came to the fore, an instinct bolstered by the self-confidence she’d acquired from starting up her own business in this strange, subtly alien city.

  Highgate High Street, tall brick-fronted houses huddling against one another as if for comfort against the winter gales. Holmes Alley, piles of uncleared refuse lining the gutters. She stepped around the worst of the filth carefully. The shop front was shuttered and dark, and her heart gave a small downward lurch. I thought they had let him go. Or have they arrested him again? Miriam glanced over her shoulder, then walked past the shop to the battered door with the bellpull: E. BURGESON, ESQ. When she tugged, it took almost a second for the rattle of the doorbell upstairs to reach her. She waited for the chimes to die away, waited and waited, pulled the doorbell again, waited some more. Damn, he’s not home, she thought. She began to turn away, just as there was a click from the latch.

  ‘Please, no deliveries –’ A hideous fit of coughing doubled the man in the doorway over, racking him painfully.

  Miriam stared. Burgeson the pawnbroker, her first contact in New Britain, possibly the nearest thing to a friend she had here, was coughing his lungs bloody.

  ‘Erasmus?’ she asked. ‘You’re ill, aren’t you?’ He looks awful, she realized, abruptly worried. In the dusty sunlight filtering down between the houses he looked half dead already.

  ‘Euh, euw –’ He tried to straighten up, succeeded after another bout of rattling coughing. ‘Miriam? How – hah – good to see you.’ Cough. ‘But not in. This state.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ she suggested firmly. ‘I want to take a look at you.’

  Miriam followed Burgeson’s halting progress up the steeply pitched spiral staircase, up to the front door of his apartment. She’d been here before, seen the cavernous twelve-foot ceiling walled on both sides by dusty, tottering shelves of books, the perfectly circular living room with its overstuffed sofa and scratched grand piano. The genteel bachelor-pad disarray of a cultured life going slowly downhill in the grip of chronic illness. Much of his life was a mystery to her, but she’d picked up some tantalizing hints. He’d once had a family, before he’d spent seven years in one of his majesty’s prison camps out in the northwestern wilderness. And he wasn’t as old as he looked. But his usual gauntness had now given way to the stooped, cadaverous, sunken-cheeked look of the terminally ill. ‘Make yourself at home. Can I’ – he paused for the coughing fit – ‘make you a pot of tea?’ He finished on a croak.

  Miriam perched tensely on the edge of the sofa. ‘Yes, please,’ she said. Remembering the pain of a childhood vaccination, she added, ‘It’s the consumption, isn’t it?’ Consumption. The white death, tuberculosis. He’d picked it up in the camps, been in remission for a long time. But this is as bad as I’ve ever seen him –

  ‘Yes.’ He shuffled toward the kitchen. ‘I’ve not so many months left in me.’

  He’s whistling past the graveyard, she realized, appalled. ‘How old are you, Erasmus?’ she called through the doorway.

  ‘Thirty-nine.’ The closing kitchen door cut the rest off. Miriam stared after him, horrified. She’d taken him for at least a decade older, well into middle age. This was a roomy apartment, top of the line for the working classes in this time and place. It had luxuries like indoor plumbing, piped town gas, batteries for electricity. But it was no place to live alone, with tuberculosis eating your lungs. She stood up and followed the sounds through to the kitchen.

  ‘Erasmus –’ She paused in the doorway. He had his back turned to her, washing his hands thoroughly under a stream of water piped from the coal-fired stove.

  ‘Yes?’ He half-turned, his face in shadow.

  ‘Have you eaten in the past hour or two?’ she asked.

  Evidently she’d surprised him, for he shut the tap off and turned round, drying his hands on a towel. ‘What kind of question is that to be asking?’ He cocked his head on one side, and something of the old Erasmus flickered into light.

  ‘I’m asking if you’ve eaten,’ she said impatiently, tapping her toe.

  ‘Not recently, no.’ He put the towel down and reached back into his pocket for his handkerchief.

  ‘Okay.’ She dug around in her bag. ‘I’ve got something for you. You’re certain what you’ve got is consumption?’

  ‘Ahem –’ He coughed, hacking repeatedly, into the handkerchief. ‘Yes, Miriam, it’s the white death.’ He looked grim. ‘I’ve seen it take enough of my friends to know my number’s come up.’

  ‘Okay.’ She tipped two tablets out into the palm of her hand, held them out toward him: ‘I want you to take these right now. Wash them down with tea, and make sure you don’t eat anything for half an hour afterwards.’

  He looked at her in confusion, not taking the tablets. After a moment he smiled. ‘More of your utopian nonsense and magic, Miriam? Think this’ll cure me and make me whole again?’

  Miriam rolled her eyes. ‘Humor me. Please?’

  ‘Ah, well. I suppose so.’ He took the two tablets and swallowed them one at a time, looking slightly disgusted. ‘What are they meant to do? I’ve got no time for quack nostrums as a rule . . .’ The kettle began to whistle, and he turned back to the stove to pour water into a tarnished metal teapot.

  ‘Remember the DVD player I showed you? The movie?’ Miriam asked his turned back.

  He froze.

  ‘It’s not magical,’ she added. ‘You need to take two of these tablets at the same hour, on an empty stomach, every day without fail, for six months. That should – I hope – stop the disease from progressing. It won’t make your lungs heal from the damage already done, and there’s a chance, about one in ten, that it won’t work, or that it’ll make you feel even more sick, in which case I’ll have to find some different medicine for you. But you should lose the coughing in a couple of weeks and begin to feel better in a month. Don’t stop taking them, though, until six months are up, or it will come back.’ She paused. ‘It’s not a utopia I come from, and the drugs don’t always work. But they’re better than anything I’ve seen here.’

  ‘Not a utopia.’ He turned to face her, holding the teapot. ‘You’ve got some very strange notions, young lady.’

  ‘I’m thirty-three, old man. You want to put that teapot down before you spill it? And no, it’s not a utopia. Thing is, the bac – germs – that cause consumption, they evolve over time to resist the drugs. If you stop taking the medicine before you’re completely cured, there’s a chance that you’ll develop a resistant strain of infection and these drugs will stop working. Too many homeless people where I come from stopped taking them when they felt better – the result is, there are still people dying of tuberculosis in New York City.’ He was halfway back to the living room as she followed him, lecturing his receding back. ‘That stuff is the cheap first-line treatment. And you’ll by god finish the bloody course, because I need you alive!’

  He put the teapot down. When he turned round he was grinning. ‘Hah! Now that’s a surprise, ma’am.’

  ‘What?’ Miriam, stopped in midstream, was perplexed.

  He exhaled through a gap between his teeth. ‘You’ve shown no sign of needing anyone ever before, if I may be blunt. You’re a veritable force of nature.’

  Miriam sat down heavily. ‘A force of nature with family problems. And a dilemma.’

  ‘Ah. I see. And you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘Well –’ She paused. ‘Later. What brought the tuberculosis back? How long did they hold you for?’ How have you been? she wanted to ask, but that might imply an intimacy in their relationship that had never been explicit in the past.

  ‘Oh, questions, questions.’ He pou
red tea into two china cups, neither of them chipped. ‘Always the questions.’ He chuckled painfully. ‘The kind of questions that turn worlds upside down. One lump or two?’

  ‘None, thank you.’ Miriam accepted a cup. ‘Did they charge you?’

  ‘No.’ Burgeson looked unaccountably irritated, as if the Political Police’s failure to charge him reflected negatively on his revolutionary credentials. ‘They just banged me up and squatted in my shop.’ He brightened: ‘Some party or parties unknown – and not related to my friends – did them an extreme mischief on the premises.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘And I was in custody! Clearly innocent! The best alibi!’ He managed not to laugh. ‘They still charged me with possession – went through the bookshelves, seems I’d missed a tract or two – but the beak only gave me a month in the cells. Unfortunately that’s when the cough came back, so they kicked me out to die on the street.’

  ‘Bastards,’ Miriam said absently. Burgeson winced slightly at the unladylike language but held his tongue. ‘I’ve been seeing a lot of that.’ She told him about the train journey, about Marissa and her mother who was afraid Miriam was an informer or police agent. ‘Is something happening?’

  ‘Oh, you should know better than to ask me that.’ He glanced at her speculatively. When she nodded slightly, he went on: ‘The economy.’ He raised a finger. ‘It’s in the midden. Spinning its wheels fit to blow a boiler. We have plenty out of work, queues for broth around the street corners – bodies sleeping in the streets, dying in the gutter of starvation. Go walk around Whitechapel or Ontario if you don’t believe it. There’s a shortage of money, debtors are unable to pay their rack, and I am having to be very careful who I choose to give the ticket to. Nobody likes a pawnbroker, you know. And that’s just the top of it: I’ve heard rumors that in the camps they’re going through convicts’ teeth in search of gold, can you believe it? Claiming it as Crown property. Secundus.’ He raised another finger. ‘The harvest is piss-poor. It’s been getting worse for a few years, this unseasonable strange weather and peculiar storms, but this year it hit the corn. And with a potato blight rotting the spuds in the field –’ He shrugged. A third finger: ‘Finally, there is the game of thrones. Which heats up apace, as the dauphin casts a greedy eye at our beloved royal father’s dominions in the Persian Gulf. He’s an ambitious little swine, the dauphin, looking to shore up his claim to the iron throne of Caesar in St. Petersburg, and a short victorious war that would leave French boots a-cooling in the Indian ocean would line his broadcloth handsomely. Would you like me to elaborate?’