The Merchant’s War полностью

"It arrives a few minutes later." He sighed. "Can't be late for work, can I?" He put a slight edge on his voice, a grating whine, and caught her eye with a sidelong glance. The fat man rattled his newspaper again. He seemed to be concentrating on a word puzzle distantly related to a crossword, making notes in the margin with a pencil.

"Never late for work, you." She tried to sound disapproving, to provide the shrewish counterpart to his henpecked act. What's going on? She sniffed, and glanced out of the window at the passing countryside. Where did Erasmus go last night? Why were those guys tailing us? Was it him or me they were after? The urge to ask him about the incident was a near-irresistible itch, but one glance at the fellow travelers told her that any words they exchanged would be eavesdropped on and analyzed with vindictive, exhaustive curiosity.

Luckily, things improved after an hour. The train stopped at Bridgeport for ten minutes-a necessity, for only the first-class carriages had toilets-and as she stretched her legs on the platform, Erasmus murmured: "The next compartment along is unoccupied. Shall we move?"

As the train moved off, Miriam kicked back at last, leaning against the wooden paneling beside the window. "What was that about? At the station." She prodded idly at an abandoned newspaper on the bench seat opposite.

Erasmus looked at her from across the compartment. "I had to see a man last night. It seems somebody wanted to know who he was talking to, badly enough to set up a watch on the hotel and tail all his contacts. They got slack: I spotted a watcher when I opened the curtains."

"Why didn't they just move in and arrest you?"

"You ask excellent questions." Erasmus looked worried. "It might be that if they were Polis, they didn't want to risk a poison pill. You can interrogate people, but they won't always tell you what you want to know, and if they do, it may come too late. If you take six hours out to break a man, by the time you get him to spill his guts his own people will have worked out that he's been taken, and they won't be home when you go looking for them."

"Oh." Her voice was very small. Shouldn't you have been expecting this? She asked herself. Then she looked back at his eyes. "There's more, isn't there?"

He nodded, reluctantly. "They didn't smell like Polis." His expression was troubled. "There was something wrong about them. They looked like street thugs, backstairs men, the kind your, ah, business rivals employed." The Wu family's street fixers, in other words. "The Polis aren't afraid to raise a hue and cry when their quarry breaks cover. And the way they covered us was odd."

She glanced down at the floor. "It's possible it's not you they're looking for," she murmured. I should have thought of this earlier: they know Erasmus is my friend, why wouldn't they he watching him? They're probably watching Paillette, too -her business agent in Boston, back home in the world of airliners and antibiotics- I'm a trouble magnet. "Hair dye and a cover identity may not be enough."

"Explain." He leaned forward.

"Suppose someone in Boston spotted you leaving in a hurry, a day or two after I'd disappeared. They handed off to associates in New London. Either they followed you to your hotel, or they figured you'd pay for a room under your own name. They missed a trick; they probably thought you were visiting a brothel for the usual reason-" Were his ears turning red? "-but when you reappeared with a woman they knew they'd found the trail. We threw them with the streetcar, and then I turned up at the hotel separately and in disguise, but they picked us up again on the way into the station and if we hadn't done the track side scramble they'd be-" Her eyes widened.

"What is it?"

"We'll have to be really careful if we go back to Boston."

"You think they're looking for you, yes?"

"Well- " Miriam paused. "I'm not sure. It could be the Polis tailing you. But if they were doing that, why wouldn't they turn over Lady Bishop's operation? I think it's more likely someone who decided you might lead them to me. In which case it could be nearly anyone. The cousins in this world, maybe. Or it could be the Polis looking for me, although I figure that's unlikely. Or it could be the Clan, in which case the question is, which faction is it? It's not as if-"

"The Clan factions would be a problem?"