1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "The meeting will now come to order." Willie Ray Hudson, as local party chairman, banged the gavel.

  He looked around. The auditorium at the middle school was packed. There must be fifty copies of Robert's Rules of Order in the room. At least three-quarters of them in German.

  "The floor is now open for nominations."

  About a hundred hands went up.

  One of them belonging to Orval McIntire. The rest of them belonging to a caucus of women all sitting together over on the left side.

  Well, the majority rules. Especially under these circumstances.

  He motioned. "Inez."

  She didn't stand up. She couldn't. She was still in a wheel chair.

  "We're together," she said. "All of us. Ronnie's going to speak."

  Veronica got up.

  "Not everybody's going off to Bamberg," she said. "Somebody's got to take care of this town. We've got a candidate. She was the executive assistant to the Emergency Committee, right after the Ring of Fire. She was executive assistant to Mike Stearns when he was president of the NUS. When he went off to Magdeburg and Ed Piazza took over, she stayed here in town and she's been working for Ed ever since. She knows how things work."

  "Not to mention," Veleda Riddle muttered, loudly enough to be heard by almost everyone, "where all the bodies are buried."

  Ronnie was still reading her prepared speech. "She is civic-minded. She has been an active member of the League of Women Voters ever since it was founded. Her husband's business is here, so she's going to have to quit her state job. So, we…" She stopped and waved at the group. "All of us. We nominate Liz Carstairs to run for mayor of West Virginia County on the Fourth of July Party ticket."

  "Well, I'll be damned," Ed said. "If that didn't come at us right out of left field."

  Chad Jenkins nodded in agreement.

  Annabelle and Debbie looked at each other, wondering once more at the innocence of the male of the species about so many things.

  "Not," Annabelle said, "if you really sit down and think about it."

  "Can Liz win?" Joe Stull asked. "Against Frisch?"

  "Yes," every woman in the room said at once.

  Veda Mae Haggerty was sitting in the Willard Hotel dining room again-for lunch, this time-when she said what she said about Veronica Dreeson. Again.

  It was pretty much what she had read in the pamphlet. About how all Krauts were anti-Jewish and Ronnie hadn't been there with Henry when he was shot, so she had probably been a supporter of that mob of Krauts who were attacking the synagogue.

  She said it very loudly. A lot of other people were listening.

  The popular disapproval was general. Except, of course, among those people who thought there might be something in it.

  She gave her lunch partner a copy of the pamphlet and assured her that Jacques-Pierre Dumais could explain what it all meant.

  Pam Hardesty had not realized, in advance, how many incredibly boring, unpleasant people an apprentice spook had to be nice to. She went home, wrote up her longest report so far, even longer than the one about the garage, and sent it to Cory Joe.

  Don Francisco was pleased. It was so nice to know more or less what one was looking for. It enabled one to concentrate on the needles and ignore most of the haystack.

  "That's the best description that I can give," Minnie said.

  "It is admirable," Don Francisco said. "You should not criticize yourself."

  It was admirable. The girl had recalled many nuances that an experienced observer might have missed. But how to record them, make them permanent, distribute them?

  "I sure wish," Preston Richards said, "that Grantville had an Identikit setup. But we didn't."

  Explanations followed.

  "Lenore can do it," Wes Jenkins said.

  "Do what?" Richards asked.

  "Make sketches from Minnie's description. You should have seen the sketches she gave Clara for Christmas, that she did from Mom's old family photos."

  "Lenore?" Don Francisco asked.

  "My older daughter."

  "Can you bring her here?"

  "She is here. Well, not right here, but downstairs and in the other wing. She's a records transcriber for Chuck Riddle's setup. We can take Minnie down there."

  "Someone take her, then. Not you. I have more questions about the Fulda end of things." Don Francisco looked around the room for a surplus participant in the meeting. "You do it, Stone."

  Lenore understood almost right away. She listened to Minnie go through her descriptions, again and again. She produced a set of sketches. Not just a "mug shot" but also full length views of the sniper from various angles, showing what he was wearing and how he held his body. It was amazing what her idea of placing the railings and balustrades of the bridge behind him contributed. Height, set of shoulders, angle of the head.

  It took quite a while. As Minnie and Lenore worked, Ron wandered around the office.

  As they were getting ready to leave, he pointed at the prints up over Lenore's desk. "What are those?" he asked.

  "A classical Greek temple. It's called the Erechtheum."

  "I mean, the women who are standing there where you'd expect a column to be."

  "They're called caryatids."

  "Cool."

  Ron looked at them again, more closely. "I've never seen anything of the kind, before. I'm impressed."

  He was impressed. They were absolutely magnificent.

  The reminded him of Missy. Hairdos. Faces. Shapes. Posture.

  Maybe that was why she got to him so. What kind of a guy would make do with "cute" or merely "pretty" when, with a little luck, he could have stupendous?

  Lenore was her cousin, but didn't look a thing like her.

  "You know," he said. "I don't think I've ever seen Missy in a dress. She says she doesn't look good in dresses. But she would look wonderful in a dress like that."

  Don Francisco was delighted with the sketches of the assassin. The etcher whom he employed to make the plates did an excellent job. The pictures appeared in every newspaper in the USE with facilities to duplicate them. Often as cruder woodcuts, to be sure, but still showing the essence of the man's appearance.

  He hoped that Locquifier and Ducos would be profoundly annoyed.

  He was quite impressed with the competence of the girl Minnie. Plus, he had that letter from Denise Beasley. The Grantvillers told him that the two were close friends.

  Chapter 55

  Haarlem, the Netherlands

  Don Francisco sent Cory Joe Lang off to the Netherlands to try to deal with the various threads that led to Laurent Mauger.

  In the course of gathering information, Cory Joe looked up his mother, even if reluctantly, and then went up to Leiden to talk to Jean-Louis LaChapelle again. He also met Mauger's half-niece, LaChapelle's half-cousin, Alida Pieterz.

  Alida reacted to the tow-blond hair on top of Cory Joe's head much the way Jean-Louis LaChapelle had reacted to his half-sister Pam. A reaction which he fully reciprocated. Cory Joe wondered with some amusement whether there was actually a chemical reaction between members of the Mauger and Hardesty family lines-one that could be measured by someone like Bill Hudson if he had the chance and the proper set of calipers.

  Jean-Louis had been delighted to receive the letter and lava lamp report from Pam.

  Laurent Mauger was amazed and totally bewildered when the two young men announced that they wished to initiate marriage negotiations with the stated purpose of strengthening the business and personal ties in the new family alliance between Grantville and Mauger's enterprises.

  He certainly had no objections, since this might ameliorate the objections that the children of one of his half-sisters and one of his sisters might raise in the future in regard to the inheritance status of the child that his adored Velma was carrying.

  There were no guarantees of that, but it might help. Additionally, Lang was prepared to be most accommodating in the matter of Alida's nonexistent dowry. In fact, Lang said t
hat he didn't give a damn whether she had one or not, if she was prepared to live on what he earned.

  Alida, who had been a "poor cousin" for nearly fifteen years, since her father and mother died, declared that she was perfectly prepared.

  Cory Joe warned her that this wasn't going to be a Cinderella story. That she would be exchanging a life of sharing an attic room with her sister Madeleine, wearing hand-me-downs, running errands for her employer, and eating at the second table, for sharing an efficiency apartment in the Magdeburg officers' quarters with him, buying at thrift shops, finding a job, and eating a lot of bean and barley soup, which she would have to stir herself unless he could get his sister Pam in Grantville to find a crock pot at a yard sale. He even went so far as to warn her that there was a good chance he'd have to move to Prague in the not-so-distant future.

  Job-related reasons, he explained. He drew the line-right now, anyway-at explaining to Alida the complexities of his professional relationship with Francisco Nasi. Cory Joe figured he'd been honest enough, for the time being. He saw no point in piling on the fact that his real job was assistant and bodyguard to a Sephardic spymaster soon to be in private enterprise in what had to be one of the shadiest and riskiest businesses in the world.

  Alida took into account that Version One of a fairly Spartan continuing lifestyle did not include Cory Joe, whereas Version Two did. She repeated that she was perfectly prepared, while thinking that she would deal with figuring out what a crock pot was later.

  Consequently, the lawyers went to work.

  In the case of LaChapelle, unfortunately, without notifying Pam in advance. Jean-Louis assumed that since her older brother and stepfather were both present and agreeing to the provisions of the marriage contract, all would be well with Pam when he returned to Grantville with the happy news that they were betrothed.

  Jean-Louis was a young man with an immense amount of self-confidence.

  Laurent Mauger saw no reason to bother his darling Velma about the negotiations for her two oldest children's marriages until all the provisions of the marriage contracts had been satisfactorily resolved. Worry and concern might mark the unborn child. Better for her to remain quietly at the villa, without a concern in the world, sheltered and protected by his sisters.

  Grantville

  Before Grantville's law enforcement staff was ready to move, all paperwork and authorizations in hand, Jacques-Pierre Dumais left town.

  The Garbage Guys, Duck and Big Dog Carpenter and Gary Haggerty, told the powers that be that he quit his job and was going to the Netherlands on the grounds that his good friends Laurent Mauger and his wife Velma had invited him to come be godfather to their baby and take over the day-to-day management of a new startup company, which would be manufacturing lava lamps.

  As Veda Mae said to Willard Carson and Pam Hardesty, all of them at Garbage Guys were quite proud of his success. It went to show how much an immigrant could accomplish after he had been exposed to that good old American spirit of get-up-and-go for a little while.

  She was sure that he would be spreading that spirit up there among the Dutch. After all, he had taken out his citizenship papers here in Grantville. She had sponsored him herself.

  Frankfurt am Main

  Soubise read the latest letter from his brother for the third time. His valet was already packing.

  Henri was quite right, of course. This had been Ducos again. The man was simply creating too many problems for the remainder of the Huguenot diaspora. Locquifier and Ouvrard had gotten out of town, before the authorities could apprehend them. Before even de Ron knew that they were gone. Leaving him stuck with the last three weeks of their bill, which had made him rather snappish to deal with recently.

  Deneau was in a morgue in Grantville, unless someone had paid for his burial.

  Ancelin was in Grantville's jail. Thus far, taking full advantage of the prohibition on judicial torture that the congress of the State of Thuringia-Franconia had enacted at the insistence of the up-timers-a thoroughly wrong-headed law, in Soubise's opinion-he had said nothing. But Francisco Nasi was no slouch; and neither, from what Soubise could tell, was Grantville's police chief Preston Richards. Between the two of them, if they didn't know already, they would figure out that Ancelin was a central figure in the plot. It was safe to assume that the officials of West Virginia County would keep him as their unwilling guest for a long, long, time.

  Brillard? Nobody had seen Brillard for a couple of months. They would probably find him with Ducos. When they found Ducos.

  Which was the critical thing. Soubise was leaving for England. From there, he would go to Scotland. Noblesse oblige. He looked at Joachim Sandrart, who would be traveling with him. "We will take care of our own."

  Sandrart laughed. "If, as Ron Stone would say, somebody hasn't beaten us to it."

  Magdeburg

  Francisco Nasi reviewed the several reports that Cory Joe Lang had sent from Haarlem, along with copies of the draft marriage contracts for himself and Alida Pieterz and for Jean-Louis LaChapelle and Pam Hardesty. The young man had remarked blithely in the accompanying letter that this way, he should be in an even better position to keep an eye on what his stepfather was up to with Dumais. Not to mention, of course, that Alida was one really scrumptious girl, and he couldn't imagine why someone hadn't married her long before now. That accomplished, he and Jean-Louis would be leaving for Grantville.

  ***

  "Sometimes," Don Francisco said to Mike Stearns, "perspective is everything."

  "Just what does that comment pertain to?"

  "I have contemplated the latest reports from Grantville with some disbelief. Particularly the one about Dumais' citizenship papers. Which, however, checked out in the records at the administration building."

  "It does seem a trifle farfetched."

  "Of course, if one studies the Christian scriptures, it becomes quite plain that the Saul of Tarsus who became Paul made a very good thing of being a Roman citizen. Under the circumstances. It certainly improved the circumstances under which he was imprisoned here and there."

  Mike nodded.

  "Indeed," Don Francisco continued, "if one looks at the Christian scriptures from the right perspective, one might classify them as being among the ancient classics."

  "Different viewpoints, though."

  "Certainly. But there are common elements with the thought of Seneca." He paused. "I need to make a trip to Grantville, I think, if you can spare me for a few days."

  Mike wondered what on earth Francisco was up to now.

  Grantville

  "If you would be willing, of course," Don Francisco said. "There is insufficient evidence to indict Frau Haggerty for treason or anything else of a serious nature. Perhaps unfortunately, being a loathsome and vile human being is not, by itself, a criminal offense. The prosecuting attorney is profoundly frustrated."

  Pam looked at him.

  Talking to Veda Mae, as a short term thing with a specific purpose, had been bearable. But…

  "Frau Haggerty appears to be quite loquacious whenever she has a sympathetic listener. She so rarely has one, given her personality. The way she saw him, Monsieur Dumais was a thoughtful, concerned man. Now that he has left town, she is not going to have her 'sounding board.' And you have been talking to her already. She will not cooperate with the police, but who knows how much incidental information she picked up over the past few months? If you could keep listening to her and collecting the things she lets drop… You are better suited to do it than Missy Jenkins. She has difficulty in disguising her feelings about people."

  "Growing up with Velma," Pam said, "I got a lot of practice disguising my feelings about people. I was home the night that Gina Goodman shot at Will Wiley. I was sixteen. In the next room, doing homework. The newspapers said that they were in bed together, but actually, by the time she let the gun off, he had jumped out and was standing up, trying to talk to her. The slug came through the wall and went about three inches above my head. W
alls in mobile homes aren't very thick. I didn't have time to have hysterics. Tina and Susan were asleep in the room beyond mine. I walked out into the hall, looked into Mom's bedroom and saw the three of them, suggested to Gina that I thought it would be a really wonderful idea if she put that gun down, walked on into the living room, and called the police. If I hadn't disguised my feelings, I would have reverted to monkeydom and been hanging from the ceiling by my tail, gibbering."

  Don Francisco wondered what monkeys had to do with it. "We will pay you an hourly rate."

  "I don't believe this," Pam said. "I'm a spook. An actual on-the-payroll spook. Just like Cory Joe."

  "Your brother," Nasi said piously, "is in military intelligence. That's something quite different."

  Pam reacted to the news of her betrothal with even greater disbelief than she had reacted to the discovery that she was a salaried spy. And did not bother to disguise her feelings.

  "The least you could have done was ask me!" she shrieked, to the general interest and entertainment of everyone in the state library's main reading room. "Cory Joe, what in hell were you thinking?"

  "Err… I assumed that he had. It didn't seem likely that we would be drawing up a marriage contract if he hadn't."

  "But…" Jean-Louis protested. He had come with Cory Joe. It was their first stop upon getting back to Grantville. They had come to break the happy news. "Don't you want to?"

  She stared at him. Of course she wanted to. She knew it. He knew it. They knew it.

  "You could have asked me first, you creep. You really could have."

  She sent him back to Leiden without a "yes."

  For one thing, it was obvious that Jean-Louis was having real trouble getting his mind around the concept of marrying a bastard after Pam brought it up.

  Jean-Louis couldn't seem to help feeling like that. Down-timers' minds worked that way, most of them.

  Sometimes you had to wonder if their heads were screwed on straight. What could a kid do about what his parents got up to before he was born? Or she was born?