1636: The Devil's Opera

by Eric Flint

  “Well, lad, Ahithophel was a king’s councilor, and they don’t think like other men. There might be several reasons why. But I think—just thinking about the kind of man that Ahithophel proved to be—I think he waited until he could do something that would really hurt the king, as much as he himself had been hurt. And supporting Absalom’s revolt would have hurt King David very badly.”

  Simon thought about that. He could see that.

  “Okay.”

  Pastor Gruber held up a hand.

  “What lesson would you receive from this, Simon?”

  Simon thought about that for a moment.

  “Be careful who you trust?”

  The old man gave a rheumy chuckle.

  “Yes, that is certainly one lesson that could come from this story. But the more important lesson is this: everything you do has consequences. King David never realized that slaking his lust with Bathsheba would result a few years later in one of his sons driving him from his throne and coming within but a few minutes of killing him. But it did.”

  “I’ll never do anything like that,” Simon avowed.

  Pastor Gruber chuckled again. “Like as not, lad, like as not. But you or your friends should always be thinking about what could happen from the choices you make. Sometimes people make choices that could make other people die later on.”

  The pastor gave a beatific smile in the middle of his white beard.

  “But enough of that, lad.” He looked out the window. “That gaggle of noisy townsmen is gone, and there’s still daylight left. You’d best get about your business. But come by and see this old pastor some time, eh?”

  “I will,” Simon promised.

  He headed out the door and down the street, off to his next stop on his rounds. But in the back of his mind, now, the word consequences was rolling around.

  * * *

  Ciclope entered his room, to find Pietro waiting for him. “Now what?” he asked.

  “I’ve got the last of the tools I need,” the thief said, holding up a drill and large bit. “But I need you to hold the wood while the bit turns.”

  Ciclope reached over to the shelf on the wall, tore a piece of bread off the end of the loaf that sat there, and crammed it in his mouth. “What you want me to do?” he mumbled around the stale crust.

  “Sit here,” Pietro pointed to a scrap of blanket on the floor. Once he did that, Ciclope was handed a piece of tree limb about as wide as the palm of his hand and as long as his forearm. “Hold that up, and keep it from moving.”

  Ciclope rested the butt end of the log on the floor. “What is the blanket for?” He wrapped his hands around the log.

  “To catch the shavings, so we don’t have to try to sweep them up.”

  Pietro set the bit point in the center of the other end of the log, leaned on the top of the drill, and began turning the handle. The bit turned twice, then the cutting edge sliced into the wood, and the log tried to turn with it.

  “Wait!” Ciclope snapped as the bark tore into his hands. Pietro stopped, and Ciclope pointed at the table. “Hand me my gloves.”

  Once he had the leather cushioning his hands, Ciclope wrapped them around the log again. “Okay, now try it.”

  He had to squeeze hard at first to hold the log still, but after a few turns the bit was well seated and cutting smoothly, and he was able to relax his grip a bit.

  Ciclope waited a few more turns. The bit was not making great progress into the wood. “Going to take a while at this rate.”

  “Si.”

  “How many do you think we need?”

  “At least three,” Pietro grunted out.

  “Three!”

  “Si. Maybe four.”

  “Will the drill last that long?”

  Pietro sniffed. “Stole a file, too, so I can keep it sharp.”

  Ciclope looked at the little pile of curled shavings that was beginning to form on the blanket at the bottom of the log. The bit was making progress into the log, now that it was through the driest part of the exterior. “It’s still going to take a long time. You’ll only be able to do so much before you give out.”

  “Si.” Pietro stopped “Fifty passes. Your turn.”

  “My turn? Who says it’s my turn?”

  “The money we’ll get when it’s done,” Pietro said.

  Ciclope couldn’t deny that. He let go of the log, clambered to his feet, and took the drill from Pietro. The thief pulled on his own gloves, squatted on the blanket and grabbed the log.

  “Go.”

  Ciclope started turning the drill. It was harder than it looked. He leaned into it.

  “One,” Pietro counted.

  Chapter 45

  Byron Chieske looked up from the report he was reading.

  “Hey, Karl. What’s up?”

  Detective Sergeant Honister ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve reached the end of my rope, Lieutenant, or my ladder, or whatever that up-time figure of speech is. I’ve been trying to find some trace of the money that was stolen in that robbery where Schiffer’s accountant was killed.”

  “Had any luck?” Byron pushed back in his chair and steepled his fingers.

  “No.”

  Byron looked over to see his partner Gotthilf watching and listening from his desk.

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  Honister looked frustrated. “I have spoken to every merchant, every money changer, every burgher in the city who handles money. Everyone denies seeing any trace of large amounts of USE bills.”

  “Hmm.” Byron glanced at Gotthilf out of the corner of his eye, and saw his partner making writing motions in the air. He nodded.

  “You’re talking to the wrong folks, Karl.”

  “What?” Honister looked surprised. “Wouldn’t these be the very people who would most likely know about this?”

  Byron’s snort covered Gotthilf’s muffled chuckle.

  “They would—if someone bothered to tell them.”

  Honister was now confused, but spread his hands in a please explain gesture. Byron beckoned to Gotthilf, who stood and stepped over to stand beside his fellow sergeant.

  “The people you want to talk to are the clerks,” Gotthilf began, “not the merchants themselves. The clerks see everything, hear almost everything, and talk to each other in the course of business. They will bring something to their masters’ attention if they think it warrants it, but they will see and hear things that the masters may never learn about.”

  Honister looked thoughtful, and gave a slow nod.

  “So I need to go back and question the people who work for the masters, rather than the masters themselves.”

  “Yep,” Byron said. “Let me give you another tip: don’t question them in the offices.”

  “Ah, right,” Honister replied after a moment’s thought. “Catch them at their favorite taverns and buy them ale. Or watch for them at the end of the day and walk with them on the way home.”

  “You got it,” Byron said. “Make it informal, make it casual and out from under the boss’s eye, and they’re much more likely to tell you things you want to hear.”

  “You might start with Johann Dauth at the Bünemann corn factor’s office,” Gotthilf added. “Tell him we sent you and ask him to help.”

  Trust Gotthilf to remember someone from a previous case who might be useful, Byron thought to himself.

  Honister pulled his notepad out of its jacket pocket and made a note of the name. “Johann Dauth. Got it.” He closed the notepad, tucked it away, and nodded first to Byron, then to Gotthilf. “Thanks for the help. Maybe I can pick up some information now.”

  Byron watched the sergeant leave the room, exchanged a grin with Gotthilf, and turned back to the report he was reading. He was going to recommend to Captain Reilly that he order mandatory spelling lessons for everyone who wrote reports. The “I’ll spell it however I think it sounds” mindset of the down-timers was driving him nuts.

  A few minutes later, another detective wal
ked into the office and headed for his desk.

  Byron looked up. “So, Kaspar, you still working on that murdered streetwalker case?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  Although Magdeburg had a small red-light district—partly a holdover from the days of Catholic rule when such establishments were recognized by the city government of the time, and partly a result of someone just trying to make a few dollars—there were always a few women who drifted around the edges of Magdeburg’s societies trying to just survive by practicing the world’s second-oldest profession. The war and the rampaging armies had shattered so many families that the wonder was that there weren’t more of them. They would hover around the edges of the various markets on market days and outside the taverns at night. Byron and Gotthilf had dealt with several of them off and on over the past year, including one case that still gave Gotthilf occasional nightmares.

  “Making any headway on it?”

  The detective pulled out his notebook. “Not sure where she came from. Called herself Annalise. Probably in her middle twenties, although like most of these women she’s had a hard life so it’s hard to tell. Long dark hair, brown eyes. According to some of the other girls she mostly kept to herself, but one of them said that she didn’t talk like a Magdeburger. From what I can tell, that meant that she came from somewhere else recently, and that she may have had more education than these women usually get.”

  Gotthilf understood what Kaspar meant when he said the woman didn’t talk like a Magdeburger. Given the scope of the massacre in 1631, there weren’t all that many people left whom you could really call Magdeburg natives. But even in the short time since the city had been rebuilt and started expanding rapidly, a distinctive patois had emerged in the capital which made its residents easy to recognize. For one thing, almost all Magdeburgers spoke Amideutsch now rather than one of the older German dialects. For another, they spoke Amideutsch with a clipped, almost brusque, manner. Byron said it reminded him of the way people named “New Yorkers” had spoken in the up-time world he’d come from.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  Kaspar glanced at his notes. “Only that she had a customer recently that had hired her several times. Well-to-do, from the sound of it, although that could have been just bragging.”

  “Anybody see this man?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that doesn’t help much,” Byron said.

  “Except that he sometimes paid her to sing.”

  “Sing?”

  “Sing.”

  “Okay, Sergeant Peltzer,” Byron said, “that’s just weird enough that it might be a clue. Keep digging, and tell the girls that if their john asks for a song, they need to run the other way.”

  “Right, Lieutenant.” The sergeant flipped his notebook closed.

  Byron turned back to his reports.

  * * *

  Hermann crashed the last chord of the last aria of the last act, held it for a moment, then released the keys and let the piano action damp the sound. For a long moment no one breathed, then a collective sigh rose from the cast. Amber’s mouth quirked for a moment. She waited for Frau Ballauf to take off her headset and lay it on the stage manager’s desk, then they headed for center stage together.

  “All right, gather round, everyone.”

  She waited for the cast and chorus to assemble.

  “Okay, for the first complete run-through, blocking and all, that wasn’t bad.” She let everyone absorb the compliment for a moment, then continued with, “But it needs to get a whole lot better in the next couple of weeks.” She pointed to Frau Ballauf standing nearby with a clipboard. The stage manager stepped forward, and started talking.

  “Right. From the top. Make notes, people.” She barely waited for everyone to pull paper and pencils out of pockets, then referred to her list and started rattling off observations. “Act One Scene One: Dieter, you’ve missed your mark every time in your first entrance. You have to hit your mark, or the lights won’t pick you up and you’ll be singing in the dark, which is not the effect Amber wants.” The baritone ducked his head sheepishly, but dutifully wrote it down.

  She turned to her next target. “Katherine, same scene, you need to be moving a couple of seconds earlier. Dieter is having to wait on you to present his line, and it’s making the music and the scene drag.”

  * * *

  Schardius leaned back in his seat, listening to Frau Ballauf run down her list of observations and corrections. Even though she wasn’t facing him, he was able to hear every word. The acoustics in the opera hall were really very good.

  Although he didn’t have much use for Frau Higham as a person—he never cared much for people who contradicted him—he had to admit she seemed to know what she was doing in producing the opera. What had been an amorphous assemblage of singers and words only a few weeks ago had been shaped by this woman into something to behold. The fact that it would continue to improve was also amazing.

  * * *

  Byron signed off on the last report and laid it in his Out box. He stood up, grabbed his jacket off its hook, and looked over at Gotthilf.

  “Let’s get out of here, before someone else brings something in for me to read.”

  Gotthilf grabbed his own jacket and was on his heels as he headed out the office door and down the hall to the closest outside door. Once out of the building, they stopped and took a deep breath.

  “Now what?” Gotthilf asked.

  “I think…Demetrious.”

  The two of them turned and plunged into the flow of people in the street.

  * * *

  “Thank you, Frau Frontilia. And lastly,” Amber said, turning back to the cast, “I need more energy from everyone in the last half of the second act and the first part of the third act, through the battle scene. Marla and Andrea, you two especially. Don’t give me more volume; give me more intensity. More edge, if you get what I mean.”

  * * *

  Frau Higham was wrapping things up, Schardius decided. Time to go position himself.

  He stepped out of the box and hurried down the hall into the foyer to exit the building. There was a bit of shadow cast by the late afternoon sun to the right of the door there on the colonnaded porch of the opera hall, and he settled himself to wait.

  Schardius knew from observation the last few days that Frau Linder was usually one of the last people to leave the rehearsal hall. He expected that same pattern today.

  * * *

  Gotthilf heard Byron grunt in annoyance. They’d just finished checking the last of their favorite informer’s favorite haunts, and no luck. Wherever Demetrious was, he obviously didn’t want to be found—at least, not by them.

  Someone walking ahead of them caught his eye. He nudged Byron.

  “Isn’t that Metzger’s young friend Simon up there?”

  Byron’s gaze followed the tilt of his head. “Believe so.”

  “Is that other group of boys with him or following him?”

  “Looks to me like they’re following,” Byron said after a moment.

  Gotthilf picked up the pace a little, watching the boys as they drew closer.

  “Yah, they’re following, all right. And it doesn’t look to me like Simon is very happy about it.”

  Byron nodded. “Yep.”

  “Shall we go talk to him?”

  “Might’s well. We don’t seem to be finding anyone else to talk to today.”

  They sped up their pace until they were only a couple of steps behind the group of boys. One of them looked around. Gotthilf recognized him; Martin, one of the trio he had encountered the last time he had seen Ursula Metzgerinin. That thought brought a frown to his face. He pointed a finger at the boy, and Martin’s face paled at the sight. The big apprentice grabbed his friends by the arms and veered off in a different direction. Gotthilf snorted. Whatever the boy had been up to, he appeared to have had a sudden change of plans.

  The two detectives dropped into step with Simon, one on each side of him. />
  “Hello, Simon,” Gotthilf said.

  The boy glanced at him. “Hello, Sergeant Hoch.”

  “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  Simon looked back over his shoulder, and relaxed a bit when he saw the other boys were gone.

  “It is now.”

  “Not friends of yours?” Byron asked.

  “No,” Simon said in a low tone. “Not friends of mine. None of them wants to be friends with a cripple.”

  “Ah,” Gotthilf said. “Bullying you, were they?”

  “Nah,” Simon shook his head. “Not yet. They just said some things, is all. But…”

  “But they might have done something if we hadn’t come along.”

  Simon shrugged.

  They walked a few more steps in silence, then Simon looked up at Gotthilf again.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask,” Gotthilf replied.

  “Why are you and Lieutenant Chi…Chieske bullying Hans?”

  Gotthilf’s eyes widened, and he heard Byron snort. Of all the questions that the boy could have asked, that had to rank as one of the most unexpected. He gathered his wits quickly.

  “We are not bullying Herr Metzger,” he said.

  “Looks like it to me,” Simon insisted. “You keep showing up where he is, or following him or me, and you keep asking questions and pushing.”

  Byron looked at Gotthilf over the boy’s head with a sardonic expression and a shrug, as if admitting the boy had nailed them. Which, of course, he had.

  “Well, yes, we do keep coming around,” Gotthilf said. “But that’s because we’re pretty certain Herr Metzger knows some things about how some people got hurt.” He carefully avoided the word killed. “Those are things that we really need to know so that we can bring the people responsible before a judge.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you care who did it? They were all just poor folks like me, weren’t they? Who cares about us?”

  Several more steps passed in silence. “All I can tell you,” Gotthilf finally said, “is why I do. A wise man I respect very much once told me something like this: ‘They are victims, and no victim is ever going to be dismissed as just anything. Not on my watch.”