“Old masters,” Paulette said promptly.

“Huh?”

“Old masters.” She put her mug down. “Listen, they haven’t had a world war, have they?”

“Nope, I’m afraid they have,” Miriam said, checking her watch to see if she could take another pain killer yet. “In fact, they’ve had two. One in the eighteen-nineties that cost them India. The second in the nineteen-fifties that, well, basically New Britain got kicked out of Africa. Africa is a mess of French and Spanish colonies. But they got a strong alliance with Japan and the Netherlands, which also rule most of northwest Germany. And they rule South America and Australia and most of East Asia.”

“No tanks? No H-bombs? No strategic bombers?”

“No.” Miriam paused. “Are you saying—”

“Museum catalogues!” Paulie said excitedly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot while you’ve been gone. What we do is, we look for works of art dating to before things went, uh, differently. In the other place. Works that were in museums in Europe that got bombed during World War Two, works that disappeared and have never been seen since. You get the picture? Just one lost sketch by Leonardo…”

“Won’t they be able to tell the difference?” Miriam frowned. “I’d have thought the experts would—” she trailed off.

“They’ll be exactly the same age!” Paulette said excitedly. “They’d be the real thing, right? Not a hoax. What you do is, you go over with some art catalogues from here and when you’ve got the money you find a specialist buyer and you buy the paintings or marbles or whatever for your personal collection. Then bring them over here. It’s about the only thing that weighs so little you can carry it, but is worth millions and is legal to own.”

“It’ll be harder to sell,” Miriam pointed out. “A lot harder to sell.”

“Yeah, but it’s legal,” said Paulie. She hesitated momentarily: “unless you want to go into the Bolivian marching powder business like your long-lost relatives?”

“Um.” Miriam refilled her coffee mug. “Okay, I’ll look at it.” Miriam Beckstein, dealer in fine arts, she thought. It had a peculiar ring to it, but it was better than Miriam Beckstein, drug smuggler. “Hmm. How’s this for a cover story? I fly over to Europe next year, spend weeks trolling around out there in France and Germany and wherever the paintings went missing. Right? I act secretive and just tell people I’m investigating something. That covers my absence. What I’ll really be doing is crossing to the far side then flying right back to New Britain by airship. Maybe I’ll come home in the meantime, maybe I can work over there, whatever. Whichever I do, it builds up a record of me being out of the country, investigating lost art, and I use the travel time to read up on art history. When I go public over here, it’s a career change. I’ve gone into unearthing lost works of art and auctioning them. Sort of a capitalist version of Indiana Jones, right?”