Book of Miracles VI

Isabella Bonfontaine was waiting for me on the corner opposite Haney's bookshop.  She was wearing black jeans, hiking boots, a crimson blouse and a blue jacket.  I had James pull up next to her, and leaned across the back seat to open the door for her.  She got in, closed the door, and looked at me.
"You took your time," she said.
"What?"  I checked my watch; it was actually a minute before eight, when she'd asked me to pick her up.
"You parked the car up at the top of the road," she said, annoyingly accurately, "and spent a good five minutes watching me.  What were you hoping I was going to do?  Turn into a bat and start looking for you?"
"Well, no," I said, hedging.  In fact, it had taken me that long to get James to see her and to confirm that this was the woman he'd watched buying a broadsword from a one-room antique weapons shop in one of those little mazes of streets that cities and towns boast of as historic and quaint.  Only when I'd essentially described everything that she was wearing did he finally understand that I was talking about the only person standing on the street.  If she were only as oblivious to other people as James was I'd have had no qualms at all about using him as a chauffeur, but I suspected she was a lot more alert.  So I'd taken the chance, figuring that if she appeared to recognise him I could tell him to stand down, and if she didn't then I had at least got him to the airport with us and didn't have to worry about logistics for him as well.
"Well, no," I said again.  "I was actually trying to see if was you or if someone else was waiting on the corner.  You suggested that this book might be valuable–"
"It's a book of miracles," she interrupted, her voice slurring very slightly on miracles.  "Even your driver here would think that it was valuable.  Look, it doesn't really matter, the point I'm making is that I saw you."
I held my breath without thinking about it; was she about to reveal that she'd spotted James traipsing after her while she was on her weaponly shopping trip?
"And that you've picked me up without bothering to ask me where my luggage is."
James hit the brakes sharply and I was thrown forward, catching myself with a hand before my face hit the seat in front.  The screech behind us suggested that the rest of the traffic was now stopping just as abruptly.
"Luckily I had it all taken to the airport separately," she said, "so we can carry on.  I trust you have more luggage with you than I can see?"
James started driving again, and I shrugged.  "You didn't really tell me what I might need," I said.  "I've got a case in the boot, there's some changes of clothes, money in Euros; basically enough for an emergency."
"To create one, or get out of one?"
"Hah.  Funny."
"Clothes will be fine, the money might be useful, but I'm not sure.  I hope you know how to defend yourself if you've decided you're stealing the book.  Turn left here."
As James bore left on what looked to me like an access road, I tried not to look smug.
"I train with an MMA artist, actually," I said.  "I'm considered to be adequate."
"It's a start," she said.  "I suppose we'll find out how good that training is if it comes to that.  Turn right when the signs turn green."
I stared out of the window, and sure enough, after another eight hundred metres or so the information signs changed from having a blue background to a green one.
"Where are we going?"
"An airfield; we need a plane.  It's a small charter, the pilot's flown me to a lot of places before now."
"What's the food like?"
"Home-made."
As we bumped along a rough track that the car's suspension was struggling with, I laughed a little.  "You mean the catering company hide the packaging before serving it?"
"No, I mean that my sister will be our stewardess and she'll be cooking our food from scratch."
I suddenly realised that not only did I not know where I'd be going, but this arrangement meant that James would have no way of following us either.
"Your sister?"  A thought occurred to me.  "I'm not so happy about that."
"Why?  She's a trained cook, she's worked as a private chef to some rather fussy people before now."
"Because she's your sister and I thought there was just you and me on this.  I want my chauffeur along too."
James stopped the car outside a hut where a man with an unkempt beard and eyebrows that looked like they had hay growing in them was sitting in a deckchair reading the paper.
"Fine," said Isabella after a pause.  "You pay for him, and when he does something stupid, you fix things."
"Done," I said, offering her my hand and wondering if I'd just been tricked into revealing that James was my bodyguard or not.  "I'll get him a change of clothes at Duty Free."
Isabella's laugh was melodic and charming, and underlined that we were on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, heading to a so-far secret destination, and Duty Free was just an idea, not a place.

English Breakfast

"There's been a rumour," said my editor, perching herself on the corner of my desk, "that the phone hacking scandal has spread a little."
"Like margarine?" I asked, pronouncing the hard g.  I loathe the substance, and I loathe the word, which when pronounced properly (it derives from margaric acid, you see, so the g has always been hard) sounds nothing like anyone would be willing to eat.
"Like margarine?" she parroted, her face study for an artist confronted with the loss of his arms: blank.
"Spreading like margarine, straight from the fridge.  I thought the phone hacking scandal was old news now, and we were all about people not being convicted for the murder of other people, possibly because they own a cat?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Whoa Nellie!  Are you telling me you don't keep up with the news at all?"
"We're the weekend supplement," she said, shaking her head in mystery.  "We're not concerned with the news at all, in fact, if you try to be too contemporary our copy-editors will wield their red pens.  At you, and possibly your prose."
Our copy-editors appear to consist of a somewhat feral tribe and have hereditary positions, sharpened teeth, and views on comma-placement that you violate at your peril, so I retreated a little and helped her get the conversation back on track.
"What's with the phone hacking then?  Who's been hacking whom this time?"
"Do you recall Rosemary?"
"I still have nightmares where she arrives at the office with a truck-load of lentils that have been sitting in a Georgian warehouse for ten weeks and attempts to make us all eat them all, shouting at us that they're health foods and that a little bit of ergot never did anyone any harm.  There's usually a european peasant dancing around with a pitchfork as well, in front of a bonfire."
"Do you have to be so literal?  Can't you just say 'yes' or 'no' once in a while?"
"No."  I smiled.
"She's alleging that we hacked into her phone."
"Why?"
"To further bolster her case that we set out to destroy her livelihood by representing her as a mad harridan with personal vendettas against much of the country."
"No, I meant why would we want to hack her phone.  But before you answer that, that sounds like a very accurate representation of her."
"Notwithstanding," said my editor with a smile like a twist of barbed wire.  "I need you to meet her and assure her that we're not interested in her phone."
"Oh no!  I met her once already, it's someone else's turn.  Send the intern, he's leaving next week anyway.  Or send Joe, his balls belong to his wife so he'll be safe!"
"I said you'd do it.  You're meeting her here, tomorrow morning at 6am."
"What kind of place opens at 6am?  Oh.  A greasy spoon.  I'm reviewing breakfast?"
"Yes.  And meeting Rosemary.  Our lawyers think she spends much of the night posting flamebait to various internet forums so she should be tired and easier to talk to."
"The plural of forum is fora," I said.
"Only in Latin," replied my editor calmly.  "English pluralises everything with an s if it feels like it."





*
The greasy spoon was called the English Breakfast and served me a strip of rubber that I tried to send back as not being bacon.  The proprietress, a buxom woman with strawberry blonde hair who I'm sure counted every baked bean that fell on my plate, told me it wasn't, it was a fried egg.  I pointed helplessly as the hockey puck and said that the black pudding appeared overcooked, and she told me it was a mushroom.
I was wondering if I could stomach eating it when Rosemary marched in, slamming the door open so that the plate glass windows at the front shook, and tried to pull the seat opposite me out.  It was, however, screwed to the floor in the Great British Tradition of greasy spoons.  When it didn't move Rosemary pulled harder, until she snapped the back of the chair off.  The proprietress was upon us immediately like some overweight avenging angel, determined to sit on the culprit until they admitted culpability with the last of their breath.

"It was like that when I got here!" is how Rosemary started, and moved on to blaming me, blaming British manufacturing standards, the shopfitters and imported Chinese plastics.  None of which swayed the proprietress in the slightest.  "I'll blog about it!" Rosemary finally shouted, looking triumphant.
"With broken fingers?" asked the proprietress, and Rosemary caved.




*
"You hacked my phone," she spat, sitting on a different chair and putting her credit card back away.
"No," I replied as calmly as I could.  I tried to spear a french fry on my fork, but it bounced off.
"Oh yes you did.  You're well aware that I'm the organiser of PAVINGSTONES, and you were trying to find out what our next offensive would be!  I hear the clicks on the line, I timed the delays when I try to connect my calls.  I know exactly what you're up to!"
"PAVINGSTONES?"
"People Against Vegetables INdustrially Grown Subject TO North European Standards."
"There's a problem with that?"  I shouldn't have asked, but my blood sugar was low thanks to the inedible breakfast in front of me. Rosemary ranted for fifteen minutes while I tried to find something on my plate that wasn't congealed, too hard to chew, or remind me of things I've found in the Blonde's makeup bag.  When she finally ran out of breath, I said,
"We're not hacking your phone.  We don't even know your number."
"Well who is then?" she demanded.
"We don't know that either," I said.  "Look, would you like some breakfast?"
"I'd rather drink the water from the mop-bucket than eat that rubbish!"
"That can be arranged," said the proprietress, who had chosen that moment to come back with the receipt for the payment for the broken seat.
I excused myself, leaving a generous tip behind, as Rosemary had her head forcibly pushed into the mop bucket and was exhorted to 'drink deep.'

Leslie daFox

The outside of the Camberwick Commuity Centre was Stalinist: it towered for seventeen stories above the surrounding houses and businesses, emphatically stating that it was watching them.  Windows were recessed by fluted columns of stone, carefully cast into shadow so that people looking out couldn't be seen by people trying to look in, and all the windows on the lower floor were smoked glass or one-way mirrors.  The entrance was reached by climbing seventy stairs, a wide granite staircase that begged for three minis to come roaring down them and zoom off towards central London, laden with stolen gold.  At the top of the stairs, unseeable from the bottom, the entrance doors were two entire stories high and fronted by doormen dressed as early-Soviet KGB men, whose salary apparently came from a singular bequest from an oligarch with a strange sense of humour.  As Leslie daFox, onetime author and sitcom-writer, approached the doors they moved en masse to greet him.  He paused, a fatal error as it allowed the eight of them to surround him and start demanding proof of who he was and what he was doing there.
"I'm delivering a class," he said, unable to get the bad taste out of his mouth caused by knowing that he was resorting to paid employment.  "A twelve week creative writing course, for the Litter Ate."
There was a snigger from his left, and he turned that way, swivelling on the heel of one smartly polished boot, astonished that his condescending little sneer had been recognised.  The sniggerer, a man with a moustache that would have made Stalin proud, was still chuckling under his breath.
"Oh you shouldn't look at us like that, Sir," he said.  "I've got three degrees in various branches of English Literature, and one in Finnish Theological Studies.  This job pays very well and provides you with a lot of time for study: most people give up before they get half-way up the stairs.  If you don't mind, I might sit at the back of your class and audit it for a while."
"Er."  Leslie was nonplussed, and furiously running through his own qualifications trying to find one suitable for a put-down.
"Well, I think we've got you on the guest-list now," said another, a young man with runny eyes and whose breath smelled of oranges.  "There shouldn't be any issues from now on, but just in case –"  He handed Leslie a laminated card with a sickle-and-crescent logo on one side and "ADMIT one" on the other in large letters.
"Er." Leslie was aware that other people would say thank-you at this point, but was still struggling with the idea that a doorman might be better educated than himself.
"That way, Sir," said a third doorman whose face was overshadowed by the outsize peak of his Crimean-issue hat.  "You're in the Kantorovich Chamber.  Seats three-hundred on a good day."
"It does?"  Leslie's jaw dropped, but gentle and firm hands were already pushing him in the direction of the doors – well, the portals – to the Camberwick Community Centre.



*
Twenty minutes later he was joined in a room on the eighth floor that he rather thought should have been an amphitheatre.  His class trooped in, mostly middle-aged though there was one man who was on two crutches and looked to be dying and another girl who might not yet have been eighteen but was dramatically pregnant.  Leslie was sitting on a hard wooden stool at the front of the room looking over the class-list which had been on the stool before him.  Despite the size of the room it appeared that only nineteen people had signed up for the course, which he was still bitter about having to offer.  If it hadn't been for his wife deciding to interrupt their retirement by offering flower-arranging classes he would still be sat at home right now, probably shouting at things in the paper, or at the maid for dusting wrong, or at the gardener for either wearing or not wearing a shirt.  Leslie was secretly very amused that the gardener kept trying to get it right, and had not realised that Leslie was going to shout at him no matter what he wore.
"Sit down, sit down," he said, a little testily.  They all sat at least four rows back from the front, and he was about to motion them all to come forward when he realised that this allowed him to shout.  That thought made him feel a little better.
"Creative writing," he said, not bothering with a formal introduction, "is not something everyone can do.  I expect that over the course of the next twelve weeks we shall discover that none of you are capable of creativity, and that most of you are equally incapable of writing.  However, I shall do my best to leave you with at least an understanding of why you are so utterly worthless.  Are there any questions before I begin?"
A woman in the closest seated row raised he hand timidly.  Leslie stared at her, having expected no-one to be brave enough to respond.  She mistook his astonishment as an invitation to proceed.
"Will we be learning how to write slash?" she said.  "Only I'd like to be able to do that.  No-one really seems to see how naughty that Harry Potter is, and I'd like to set the record straight."
"Slash?  The guitarist with Guns'n'Roses?"
The class giggled, and Leslie glowered; he'd been quite pleased that his knowledge of modern culture extended to musicians and their bands.  He decided to ignore the question.
"Right!  First exercise.  Look around you at this... vast... classroom.  It should be obvious to all of you that this room has been used for more than just teaching over the years, so close your eyes and relax, let yourself soak in the atmosphere of the room.  There will be many overlapping threads here, activities that have happened again and again will resonate strongly, seeking to repeat themselves once more, while things that happened just the once might be faint, dying echoes or loud, desperate clouds of unhappiness.  Find one.  Make it yours.  Share the misery of the room, and then bring it back with you, write it down, in pencil, pen, or blood if that's what it takes.  Show us all the story that you've found, and when you've all written something, no matter how incoherent and shaming, we shall read them out and have a good laugh, and someone, perhaps me, will offer some criticism."
Silence prevailed as the students closed their eyes and sat back, and Leslie promptly sneaked his smartphone from his pocket and started to google slash.  And regretted it.

Book of Miracles V

I spent the next day talking to my lawyer.  At first, he was happy enough to set up an escrow account for me, explaining how much interest he'd be charging on the capital to keep the money safe, and producing enough paperwork to fill an entire in-tray that apparently was needed so that no-one would think I was attempting to launder money.  When he asked me what the account was for, I dodged his questions neatly, and he stopped asking shortly afterwards.  Then I explained that Isabella Bonfontaine was to be the recipient of the keys to the account and his face closed up like a mousetrap on the mouse.
"There must be.  Some mistake." he said, flapping a pale, pudgy hand near his face in lieu of a fan.
"No, I know who she is," I said.  "She's an old friend of my mother's, fallen a little on hard times."
"You had your mother go on a coach trip to Hastings," said my lawyer, who had an inconveniently long memory sometimes, "where she inexplicably took magic mushrooms and was last seen floating out to sea, mostly unconscious, on an inflatable dinosaur."
"The police did say that they thought they'd had a sighting of her in Portugal," I said, but my lawyer flapped his pudgy hand in my face now, waving away my excuses.
"If they did," he said, "I'm sure you know much more about it that you're telling anyone.  But that's a distraction to try and get me off the subject of Mx Bonfontaine.  She is most certainly not 'fallen on hard times' as you phrased it."
I stiffened when he said Mx, figuring that if he knew enough to call her that he knew enough to call my bluff, but I decided to brazen it out anyway.  "Look, Joel," I said, tempted to reach out and put my hand on shoulder but deterred from knowing how sweaty he got indoors, "She told me she was having a hard time making ends meet.  She's very thin you know, and she's got a droopy eye.  You can't help but feel sorry for her."
"So the shark has a toothache and you think you can pat it on the head and make it all better?"
"It's not like tha–"
"Oh good, because it sounds.  Like.  You're.  Paying her."  His face was a mottled grey by the end of the sentence, and he was wheezing like mouse-eaten organ bellows.  He patted his pockets, hunting for his asthma pump.
"I'm setting up a little account for her, an emergency fund, in case she needs it."
Joel's coughing fit had Mandy out of her chair and striding determinedly towards my office cracking her knuckles, all ready to go Heimlich on him.  I was tempted, but I wasn't sure he'd finished all the paperwork yet, so I waved her off and found his pump for him.  He squeezed it a few times into his mouth, heaved a huge breath that set him off coughing again, but gradually it died away without taking him with it.
"These forms," he said, indicating them with a hand gesture that delicately sprayed them with sweat, "why are we bothering?  Letting Mx Bonfontaine access the funds is as good as declaring ourselves best pals with the Mafia."
"Why one?"
"Does it matter?"
I had to concede that it probably didn't, and that similarly I needed the fund set up anyway.  Joel produced even more paperwork now, most of it indemnifying him for everything, up to and including acts of God and the declaration of open hostilities resulting in war.
As I was finishing up my signatures, my hand aching, Skype chimed with a message from James.
"Read it out?" I asked Joel shaking some blood back into my fingers.
"Boss: the broad just bought a broadsword." Joel looked at me and I smiled.  "Is that code?  Or should I be worrying about you dating people with antique weaponry fetishes?  Your life insurance won't cover that, you know."
"Neither.  Though now you mention it, let's check over the life insurance papers, I might be doing something fun this weekend."

Book of Miracles IV

I wanted to spy on Isabella Bonfontaine myself, but it was far too risky; she'd met me and was going to take me to find a Book of Miracles, and I didn't want to jeopardise that.  So I contented myself with telling James where to find her and to report back in every couple of hours, and tried to lose myself in work.
There were invoices to check, to file, and occasionally to pay; there were packages to open, packages to seal and send, and one rather odd-looking package that I sent back down to building security to have it scanned in case it was a bomb.  It turned out to be a rather overripe cheese that my office manager had ordered two weeks ago; it had apparently been held up in transit until it had reached the point where it could get out and make its own way to us.  When she opened it, albeit in the office's little kitchenette, the smell was so strong that I found myself wishing that security had exploded it instead.
"It's so evocative, isn't it!" exclaimed Mandy (the office manager), inhaling deeply and oblivious to the people turning green and running for the toilets behind her.
"Shouldn't you take that home and open it there?" I said, my voice a little muffled by the handkerchief covering my face.
"Oh no, I bought it for the office.  I thought we could have a cultural food evening, you know, after work on Friday maybe, we can all bring in food from different cultures and share them, and talk about them... that kind of thing!"
The office isn't particularly diverse; Mandy says that her mother is French, and Darren in the sales team is dating a Bolivian girl, but that's about it.  I thought about making a comment about the cheese providing all the culture we need, but Mandy's surprisingly sensitive to off-the-cuff remarks like that and I thought better of it.  Thankfully Skype chimed at that moment, allowing me to flee back to the office and talk to James.
"Awright, boss?"  James's face appeared on the tablet screen, far too close to the camera, so I could see every blackhead on his nose.
"James!" I said, genuinely pleased to see him for once.  "How's the tail?"
"She's grand, isn't she?  I've been following her around all morning, at least until she winked at me."
"She saw you?  You idiot, James!  You're supposed to be following us on Saturday as well, and now she knows what you look like!"
"Nah, it's alright, you can chill right out again, boss.  I'm in disguise, aren't I?"
"Are you?  You didn't mention a disguise."
"Yeah, course.  You can't follow someone around unless you're in disguise.  They'd get all suss otherwise, wouldn't they?"
"You'd think so, yes," I said.  "What disguise?"
"Right, so she started off at the fish market, and she bought some ice there, and then we went across town to New Covent Garden market and she spent a couple of hours with the flowers there.  Then she left there and went to the Vauxhall Bridge and stood staring at the river for a while.  Then she winked at me, and we went in a little to get a coffee–"
"James!"  Interrupting him in mid-flow can be tricky.  "James, what are you talking about?  Why are you telling me about fish and flowers and rivers?"
"That fancy woman you wanted me to follow, boss.  She's been doing all those things."
"I don't think so," I said.  "Isabella Bonfontaine is an antiquarian."
"Who?"
After a rather painful conversation, it transpired that James had been following a recent immigrée by the name of Isabelle Bloemfontain who was suffering the pangs of home-sickness, and that his disguise for the occasion had been a Hell's Angel.
"Right," I said, realising that when I got off Skype with him I would have to go back to the cheese, whose odour was starting to breach my office walls.  "Let's try again.  Isabella Bonfontaine, antiquarian tomorrow.  And no disguise, just stay well out of sight and watch what she does."
"Got you boss!"
I hung up and wondered what on earth I'd done in a previous life to end up with all this in this one.

Book of Miracles III

I returned to my office before I went home.  I'd escorted Isabella out of the bar, and she'd hailed a taxi before I could even ask her if she wanted one.  As she opened the rear door to get in, she'd paused for a moment and laid a hand on my chest.
"Saturday," she said.  "You know where to find me, so you may pick me up at ten-thirty.  Wear something appropriate."
I went to lay my hand on top of hers, but she'd already taken it back.  I went to close the taxi door for her, but she beat me to that as well.  Then as I leant in to the window to ask what she meant by appropriate, the taxi pulled away, and I was left with the distinct feeling that I looked like the guy whose date just dumped him for a quiet evening with her toys and magazines.
"Taxi for you, Sir?" asked the bouncer at the door, and I could almost hear the snigger in his voice.


*
The office was quiet; I rent out a floor of a skyscraper, but it's near the bottom – low enough to be able to be rescued in the event of a fire – and all the desk-jockeys go home at five, pretty much on the dot.  There were lights on in two of the offices, but they'd been left on, probably by the cleaners.  I turned them off and swiped my card to let myself into my own office.  Then I swiped my card again inside the office to reveal a coded panel, tapped my entry-code, and let myself into the library hidden behind my office.  As I came in, Judith looked up.
"Well?"
"Is that any way to speak to the guy who pays you?"  I was joking, Judith and I have been working on this thing for seven years now, and we've grown close.  Not as close as I'd hoped, but there was still time.
"Depends on how much he's paying me."  She smiled, her lips turning upwards and crow's-feet running suddenly from the corners of her eyes, animating her face.  She's been talking more and more about getting Botox, but I'm trying to dissuade her; some lines and wrinkles are just there to make us look human.
"I spoke to Mx Bonfontaine," I said, hoping I'd got the salutation right.  "She identified it as a Book of Miracles straight away."
"A book of miracles?"  Judith laid down the magnifying glass she'd been using to study a document on the table in front her and looked directly at me now.  Her auburn hair framed her face, and the soft light from the green-shaded banker's lamp on the desk made me think of portraits I'd studied in the Muzeul National.
"Yes.  It turns out there's a few of them, and she's being cagey about where they are, too.  She's going to take me to see one of them on Saturday, and, get this: her price goes up if she thinks I'm going to try and steal it!"
"That's it?  She just puts the price up?"
"Yeah.  What do you make of that?"
"She sounds like an honest woman.  What's she doing with a thief like you then?"
I snorted, and crossed the room to sit in a chair at a second desk.  There was probably room for a third desk, but it would have made the room feel crowded, and I wanted to keep some space to exhibit special works, works not yet... acquired.
"She said that we're probably going to Europe," I said, now watching Judith carefully, gaugeing her reaction.
"We?  You told her about me?"
"No, we as in me and her.  I haven't said anything that says I'm not doing this alone."
"This isn't just a Saturday jaunt, then, is it?"
I shrugged, my hands held out expressively.  "I haven't a clue.  If the flight's three hours say, then possibly, depends where the book's stashed.  But if it were that easy to find...."
"So let's say it's a weekend jaunt.  Either way... I think James had better tag along, don't you?"
James was Judith's nephew by her elder sister, and I'd been expecting this.  I wasn't averse to the idea, for all I was sure that Judith was really just protecting her investment in our little project by having me watched, because James's fascination with Mixed Martial Arts makes him an excellent bodyguard.  His other obsession is comic books, so he's also not that hard to get away from for fifteen minutes here and there.
"Sounds like a good idea to me," I said.  Judith relaxed, her shoulders sitting back just fractionally, an almost imperceptible tension in her arms fading away like shadows at dawn.  "As I say, I don't know where we're going yet–" there, the tension came back, "–so he'll have to follow me and stay close.  I'll try and text him the destination when I know it, but if he can overhear it then there's less of a trail."  The tension eased away again.
"Ok," she said.  "Well and good.  So that's your weekend sorted, what are we doing for the rest of the week?"
"Well," I said.  "If James isn't too busy, I'd quite like him to follow Isabella for a little bit, see if we can't find out something more about her."

Book of miracles II

"As soon as you're ready," she said, her eyes twinkling.  "Although it would make things a little easier if I knew what kind of miracle you're hoping to perform."
"Why?"  I didn't mean to snap, but I'd thought she'd be more professional than to ask me that.  Well, I'd expected her not to ask why I wanted the book, but it was much the same thing.  I thought.  She didn't look perturbed though, or even particularly bothered by my rudeness.  It could have been the stroke, helping her hide her reaction, but there was no hesitation when she spoke again, no hint of rancour in her voice.
"Because, as I said, each book records miracles that have happened.  If I show you a book that doesn't contain the miracle you're after then that book is worthless to you."  She stopped there, and looked down at the table.  As I opened my mouth to speak, my thoughts racing to be the first one said, she looked up at me, and said,
"Unless you're only interested in buying, or otherways... acquiring... that book.  In which case my fee for taking you will be higher, to reflect the significantly increased danger, both to myself and my line of business, but the book may be easier to get to."
"Otherways?"  It was stupid, it was the last thing I was interested in, but asking it bought me time to think.  Did I tell her what I was wanted?  Or did I pretend that I just wanted to steal the book and pay the higher price?  Hang on, I didn't know what the lower price was yet, if I could even afford that!
"A portmanteau."  She said the word as though she were savouring it.  "A collapse of 'otherwise, in other ways," into a simpler word.  Like 'anywhen," or 'everywhen,': words that people need but don't think to create."
"Who needs anywhen and everywhen?"
"I do."  There is was again, that half-smile that was making me wonder if it was always a half-smile, if the stroke wasn't so much as hiding her feelings from me, but hiding the fact that she was hiding her feelings from me.  I started to feel a little dizzy with all the meta-analysis I was doing.
"Your price?" I finally said, deciding that I needed answers to my questions no matter how poorly I negotiated for them.  I waved a hand, and the waitress I pulled here last week came over.  She smiled at Isabella and poked her tongue playfully out at me.  I caught her hand, kissed it, and said,
"I'll take a liquid cocaine, sweetheart.  And don't skimp on the Red Bull, either.  Isabella–"
"Mx Bonfontaine," she said, pronouncing the first word mix.  "At least until we've set a price for business."  She looked at the waitress, who was looking more impressed than I was comfortable with.  "I'll take one of those top-shelf artisanal vodkas you have, a Sipsmith I should think.  Neat.  Two doubles, in two glasses."
The waitress disappeared and I looked at Isabella, wishing that I felt more in control of this conversation.  "Mix?" I said, feeling hopeless.
"A very modern appellation," she said, laughing throatily and sending a shiver down my spine.  "I believe it's used by people who don't wish to talk about their gender so that everyone is aware that there's something to talk about.  It's supposed to tell you not to ask, particularly if they seem a little more masculine than you'd expect for a woman, or if you're just plain having trouble telling."
"Does it matter what gender someone is?" I said.  I'd never met anyone I couldn't classify as male or female at a glance, and I was quite happy with that.
"To them.  Anyway, you asked for a price, and I still don't know what we're doing exactly so: for ten thousand I will take you to the nearest book of miracles on the assumption that you want to view it, and potentially conduct business with it's owner.  If you'd like to be a little more explicit about the miracle you want, I'll take you to the book that has the best chance of helping you; the fee will be more than ten thousand in that case, but should be under twenty thousand with a single exception, where the fee would be twenty-five thousand, five thousand up front for the purchase of the equipment we would need.  If you think you may need to take the book away with you, then my fee goes up by thirty-thousand over the original; and that fee can be applied at any time if I believe you are intending to steal, repossess, or otherwise acquire the book I'm taking you to."
Our drinks arrived; mine was fizzing happily, while Isabella's had the serious air of a woman who was considering signing your death-warrant after she'd finished writing out your birthday card.
"Ok," I said.  Isabella sniffed her vodka, cocked her head slightly on one side and nodded.  Our waitress smiled with relief, laid the bill in front of me, and disappeared, just enough of a jaunt in her hips to let me know I had a date tonight if I wanted it.
"Ok to what?"
"Ok, I'll pay all you ask for.  I'll have fifty thousand in an escrow account by the end of the week, with you having immediate access to ten thousand of it.  I'd like us to leave on Saturday."
"And where will we be going?"
"Very loosely speaking," I said, only now knowing that I was going to tell her more than I'd originally intended to, "I'd like the kind of miracle that doesn't seem very miraculous to the people who get caught up in it."
Isabella nodded.  "Just because something terrible happens doesn't mean it's not a miracle," she said.  "If this has to happen just so, and that has to unexpectedly to the other, and all manner of coincidences have to go wrong in just the right way, then it's still a miracle.  Those are rarely recorded, but there are some.  I shall consult my notes, but I think we shall be going to Europe."
I nodded, and knocked my drink back in one.  Then I started coughing.
Part 3