Charles Stross: The Family Trade

Still, she was badly shaken. Journalists didn’t get fired for exposing money-laundering scams; that was in the rules somewhere. Wasn’t it? In fact, it was completely crazy. She blinked away the remaining angry tears. I need to go see Iris, she decided. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start looking for a new job. Or to figure out a way to break the story herself, if she was going to try and do it freelance. Today she needed a shoulder to cry on-and a sanity check. And if there was one person who could provide both, it was her adoptive mother.

Iris Beckstein lived alone in her old house near Lowell Park. Miriam felt obscurely guilty about visiting her during daytime working hours. Iris never tried to mother her, being content to wander around and see to her own quiet hobbies most of the time since Morris had died. But Miriam also felt guilty about not visiting Iris more often. Iris was convalescent, and the possibility of losing her mother so soon after her father had died filled her with dread. Another anchor was threatening to break free, leaving her adrift in the world.

She parked the car in the road, then made a dash for the front door-the rain was descending in a cold spray, threatening to turn to penetrating sheets-and rang the doorbell, then unlocked the door and went in as the two-tone chime echoed inside.

“Ma?”

“Through here,” Iris called. Miriam entered, closing the front door. The hallway smelled faintly floral, she noticed as she shed her raincoat and hung it up: The visiting home help must be responsible. “I’m in the back room.”

Doors and memories lay ajar before Miriam as she hurried toward the living room. She’d grown up in this house, the one Morris and Iris had bought back when she was a baby. The way the third step on the staircase creaked when you put your weight on it, the eccentricities of the downstairs toilet, the way the living room felt cramped from all the bookshelves-the way it felt too big, without Dad. “Ma?” She pushed open the living room door hesitantly.

Iris smiled at her from her wheelchair. “So nice of you to visit! Come in! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The room was furnished with big armchairs and a threadbare sofa deep enough to drown in. There was no television-neither Iris nor Morris had time for it-but there were bookcases on each wall and a tottering tower of paper next to Iris’s chair. Miriam crossed the room, leaned over, and kissed Iris on top of her head, then stood back. “You’re looking well,” she said anxiously, hoping it was true. She wanted to hug her mother, but she looked increasingly frail-only in her fifties, but her hair was increasingly gray, and the skin on the backs of her hands seemed to be more wrinkled every time Miriam visited.

“I won’t break-at least, I don’t think so. Not if you only hug me.” Iris grimaced. “It’s been bad for the past week, but I think I’m on the mend again.” The chair she sat in was newer than the rest of the furniture, surrounded by the impedimenta of invalidity: a little side trolley with her crochet and an insulated flask full of herbal tea, her medicines, and a floor-standing lamp with a switch high up its stem. “Marge just left. She’ll be back later, before supper.”

“That’s good. I hope she’s been taking care of you well.”

“She does her best.” Iris nodded, slightly dismissively. “I’ve got physiotherapy tomorrow. Then another session with my new neurologist, Dr. Burke-he’s working with a clinical trial on a new drug that’s looking promising and we’re going to discuss that. It’s supposed to stop the progressive demyelination process, but I don’t understand half the jargon in the report. Could you translate it for me?”

“Mother! You know I don’t do that stuff any more-I’m not current; I might miss something. Anyway, if you go telling your osteopath about me, he’ll panic. I’m not a bone doctor.”

“Well, if you say so.” Iris looked irritated. “All that time in medical school wasn’t wasted, was it?”

“No, Mom, I use it every day. I couldn’t do my job without it. I just don’t know enough about modern multiple sclerosis drug treatments to risk second-guessing your specialist, all right? I might get it wrong, and then who’d you sue?”

“If you say so.” Iris snorted. “You didn’t come here just to talk about that, did you?”

Damn, thought Miriam. It had always been very difficult to pull one over on her mother. “I lost my job,” she confessed.

“I wondered.” Iris nodded thoughtfully. “All those dotcoms of yours, it was bound to be infectious. Is that what happened?”

“No.” Miriam shook her head. “I stumbled across something and mishandled it badly. They fired me. And Paulie… Remember I told you about her?”

Iris closed her eyes. “Bastards. The bosses are bastards.”

“Mother!” Miriam wasn’t shocked at the language-Iris’s odd background jumped out to bite her at the strangest moments-but it was the risk of misunderstanding. “It’s not that simple; I screwed up.”

“So you screwed up. Are you going to tell me you deserved to be fired?” asked Iris.

“No. But I should have dug deeper before I tried to run the story,” Miriam said carefully. “I was too eager, got sloppy. There were connections. It’s deep and it’s big and it’s messy; the people who own The Weatherman didn’t want to be involved in exposing it.”

“So that excuses them, does it?” asked Iris, her eyes narrowing.

“No, it-” Miriam stopped.

“Stop making excuses for them and I’ll stop chasing you.” Iris sounded almost amused. “They took your job to protect their own involvement in some dirty double-dealing. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Well.” Iris’s eyes flashed. “When are you going to hang them? And how high? I want a ringside seat!”

“Ma.” Miriam looked at her mother with mingled affection and exasperation. “It’s not that easy. I think The Weatherman’s owners are deeply involved in something illegal. Money laundering. Dirty money. Insider trading too, probably. I’d like to nail them, but they’re going to play dirty if I try. It took them about five minutes to come up with cause for dismissal, and they said they wouldn’t press charges if I kept my mouth shut.”

“What kind of charges?” Iris demanded.

“They say they’ve got logfiles to prove I was net-surfing pornography at work. They… they-” Miriam found she was unable to go on speaking.

“So were you?” Iris asked quietly.

“No!” Miriam startled herself with her vehemence. She caught Iris’s sly glance and felt sheepish. “Sorry. No, I wasn’t. It’s a setup. But it’s so easy to claim-and virtually impossible to disprove.”

“Are you going to be able to get another job?” Iris prodded.

“Yes.” Miriam fell silent.

“Then it’s all right. I really couldn’t do with my daughter expecting me to wash her underwear after all these years.”

“Mother!” Then Miriam spotted the sardonic grin.

“Tell me about it. I mean, everything. Warm a mother’s heart, spill the beans on the assholes who took her daughter’s job away.”

Miriam flopped down on the big overstuffed sofa. “It’s either a very long story or a very short one,” she confessed. “I got interested in a couple of biotech companies that looked just a little bit odd. Did some digging, got Paulette involved-she digs like a drilling platform-and we came up with some dirt. A couple of big companies are being used as targets for money laundering.

“Turns out that The Weatherman’s parent company is into them, deep. They decided it would be easier to fire us and threaten us than to run the story and take their losses. I’m probably going to get home and find a SLAPP lawsuit sitting in my mailbox.”