1636- the Flight of the Nightingale

by David Carrico

  Heinrich’s eyes pulled back to Christoph and grew larger. “He what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Scheisse,” Heinrich muttered.

  “Indeed,” Christoph said.

  “What was he thinking?”

  “I am not at all certain that he was,” Christoph replied. “He always was one who would…what is that up-timer phrase…go off the deep end if something really caught him unawares or off-guard.”

  “Hoo, yes,” Heinrich said with a grin. “Remember that time when—”

  “Shush,” Christoph murmured. “He is coming this way.” And so he was, but then one of the Georgs called him back. “So, what do we do about this?”

  “What can we do?” Heinrich asked. “It is a problem of his own making, is it not? And even if it were not, I somehow doubt that our esteemed eldest brother would appreciate either of us intervening in the matter.”

  “I fear you are right, Heinz,” Christoph said quietly. “He would view it as interference, and probably rightly so. And,” he turned away from the view of the four men at the console, “I do not particularly want to be the person he gets angry with right now. He is bad enough to deal with as it is; let us not make the situation worse.”

  “Agreed,” Heinrich said feverishly. “My lips are sealed, my teeth are locked, my voice still…about this, at any rate.”

  “I was about to declare a miracle,” Christoph said with a sardonic grin, “until you qualified that last statement.”

  “Do not ask for too much, brother mine,” Heinrich said with a matching expression. “Leopards and spots, you know.”

  “Indeed.”

  * * *

  “What did you say?” Johann looked up with a frown. His brother Heinrich was standing next to the spinet clavier with the soberest expression on his face.

  “I said,” Heinrich repeated with no trace of his usual sardonic attitude, by which Johann knew that the matter was serious indeed, “that they need you at the opera house construction site right now.”

  “What about?”

  Heinrich took a deep breath. “Someone stole some of the organ pipes.”

  “What?” Johann spun around on the bench and sprang to his feet. Heinrich took a step back. “Are you sure about that?”

  “I did not see it with my own eyes. That’s just what Herr Carl and Christoph said.”

  “Come on.”

  Johann grabbed all his music and notes and stuffed them into his portfolio every which way, then stuffed that all under his arm, grabbed his hat, and headed out the door, almost running over two students in the hallway.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Heinrich said as he eased by the angry students. “He just got some bad news. Sorry.” He looked back over his shoulder as he turned the corner in the hallway. The two girls were kind of cute, in a partly down-time partly up-time way that a lot of the younger women in Magdeburg were starting to develop. He certainly would not have minded getting to know them, but approaching them right after Johann had almost left boot marks on their backs was probably not a good idea. Heinrich shook his head. He hoped that Johann’s bad luck and current bad behavior did not poison the well for him and Christoph. He really didn’t want to have to move back to Erfurt or Wechmar to find a bride.

  By the time that Heinrich got outside the music academy, Johann was already across the plaza and going up the steps to the opera house. Heinrich broke into a trot and went up the steps two at a time, catching up with his older brother just as he burst through the main doors into the auditorium.

  “Christoph!” Johann bellowed, which caused Heinrich to wince. “Christoph!”

  The middle Bach brother appeared from the side of the stage, waving his hands in a downward motion. Johann ceased yelling, but headed toward the stage. “What is this about some of the pipes being stolen?” he demanded as soon as he got within normal conversational range of the leading edge. He continued moving to the side where there were some temporary steps in place, and a moment later was on the stage facing Christoph. Heinrich joined them.

  By now Carl Schockley had come out to stand by Christoph, and he responded. “Your pipes aren’t the only things that were taken last night. Whoever it was managed to make off with some tools and some other supplies, as well, so there were probably several of them in on it. They didn’t get into the ranks installed in the pipe lofts,” the project manager said. “But they did manage to find the storage space where we were staging the next round of pipes to be installed, and they took several of them.”

  “Scheisse!” Johann cursed. “That bastard Compenius has to be behind this.” He started to turn away, but Christoph grabbed him by the arm. “Let go of me!” Johann said, trying to pull his arm free.

  “No, Johann,” Christoph said. “Herr Schockley has already sent for the Polizei. They will handle this matter.”

  “And here they are now,” Carl said, looking toward the back of the auditorium.

  Johann and Heinrich turned to see a stocky man in close-fitting clothes coming down the aisle they had entered through. Carl pointed to where the temporary steps were fitted, and in a moment they were joined on stage.

  The newcomer reached inside his jacket and pulled a small leather wallet out of an interior pocket. He flipped it open to show a bronze badge with a snarling lion’s face. “Kaspar Peltzer, detective sergeant, Magdeburg Polizei,” he announced in German pronounced with a strong Polish accent. “I understand there has been a theft.” He folded the wallet closed and placed it back inside his jacket, then pulled a small notebook and pencil out. He pointed the pencil at Carl. “You are?”

  “Carl Schockley, project manager for Kelly Construction. We’re building this opera house.”

  The pencil made notes, then pointed at Christoph. “You are?”

  “Christoph Bach. I am assisting my brother,” he pointed at Johann, “in building the organ for the opera house.”

  More notes, then the pencil pointed at Johann. No words this time, just lifted eyebrows.

  “Johann Bach, musician, contracted to build the organ for the opera house, and apparently part of what was stolen were pipes for the organ. Compenius had to have something to do with that!”

  Peltzer didn’t look up from the notes he was making. “We will talk about that in a moment, Herr Bach. In the meantime, please be patient.” This time he didn’t point with the pencil, but he turned his head to look at Heinrich.

  “Heinrich Bach, also his brother,” he nodded at Johann, “also assisting in building the organ.”

  The pencil jotted a few more notes, then Peltzer looked up. “So, what has occurred?”

  Carl Schockley began. “There are a number of items missing that we believe have probably been stolen.”

  “Items…” Peltzer said. “Such as?”

  “Several hand tools, a keg of nails, and apparently some tin pipes that had been fabricated for the organ that is being built.”

  Peltzer made notes. “Show me the scene of the crime, please.”

  “This way,” Carl said. He went toward the back corner of the stage area, where he opened a door and led the way down some stairs. Heinrich followed at the tail end of the procession. He could tell from the set of Johann’s shoulders that he was probably angry. Which was not a surprise.

  There were several lanterns lit in the lower level, so they could see where they were going pretty well. Heinrich continued to follow the group until they arrived at a couple of storage rooms near where the main wind-chest for the organ was located.

  “Here,” Carl said, pointing at two doors sagging in splintered door frames. “We discovered this this morning. This one,” he pulled open one of the doors, “was a tool closet. As best we can tell we are missing a couple of hammers, a couple of heavy pry bars, and at least one shovel.”

  “Any identifying marks on the tools?” the investigator said.

  Carl nodded, and picked up another shovel to display a mark on the handle. “These were all owned by Kelly Construction, and the
y were all marked like this.”

  Peltzer quickly drew that mark in his notebook. Carl returned the shovel to the tool closet, and turned to the other door. “This one,” he said as he opened it, “we have been using to stage the organ pipes as they get completed, because the builders,” he nodded to the Bach collective, “build and set and connect a rank of pipes at once, so they wait until all the pipes are available. According to Christoph, it appears that perhaps as many as a half dozen of the pipes that were here yesterday are now gone.”

  “Herr Schockley insisted that I wait to examine the remainder until after you arrived,” Christoph said to the detective.

  Heinrich craned over Johann’s shoulder to take a look at the closet. It was certainly disarrayed and not in the neat order he had seen it in yesterday. He backed away from Johann after his brother growled something that wasn’t intelligible.

  Peltzer made a quick sketch of the appearance of the pipe closet in his book, then looked up. “How quickly can you determine what is missing?”

  “Less than a quarter of an hour, I think,” Christoph said, “especially if Heinrich helps.”

  The look that Heinrich caught from Johann over the older brother’s shoulder made it very clear that he would be helping. He started forward, only to stop when Carl said, “Aren’t you going to check for fingerprints, or run any kind of tests?”

  The sergeant sighed. “Herr Schockley, we do not yet have any trained fingerprint technicians,” he was careful in pronouncing the American word, “and it will be some time before we get some trained. Plus we do not have any of the supplies. So, no, I will not be checking for fingerprints. Besides, how many men do you have on your work crews? And how often do they come by these closets? How many men could have touched these doors since they were hung?”

  Carl’s mouth twisted, but he nodded. “Gotcha,” he said. “Trying to figure out who all the prints belonged to would take forever.”

  “Exactly,” Peltzer said. “So let us focus on what we can do and on the practical. Now, a pipe count, please?”

  With that, Heinrich slipped by Johann and joined Christoph in the closet.

  “We had the pipes for two ranks in here,” Christoph said, pulling a notebook of his own out of his jacket. “And since Master Luder started stamping numbers into the pipes, I think we can identify what is missing pretty quickly. You start on the back side and read the numbers and arrange them as you go. I will verify against my list, and whatever you do not read will be the missing pipes.”

  “Right.” Heinrich made his way to the back of the stacks with some care. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Number six forty-nine.”

  “Yes.

  “Number six fifty…”

  * * *

  Sergeant Peltzer stood and watched the count occurring. Johann stood and fumed, waiting for the detective to talk to him.

  “Bach…”

  Johann looked around to see Carl beckoning to him from several feet away. Johann moved over to face the up-timer.

  “Look, it’s really none of my business,” Carl began, “but I’m not too sure you realize just how badly you’ve stepped in it.”

  “Stepped in what?” Johann asked with a bit of confusion.

  “How badly you’ve screwed up with this thing with Staci.”

  “Oh.” Johann looked down for a moment, then back up to meet Carl’s eyes. “Tell me, then.”

  “First of all, Staci is a dancer. That’s her passion in life, just as much as music appears to be the passion in your life. She takes it very seriously, and she works at it very hard. And right now, she’s the best we’ve got. Casey’s close, and maybe I shouldn’t say it because Casey is my wife, but Staci is just a bit better.”

  “Was she one of the best in the up-time?”

  “Honestly, no. But then, I wasn’t exactly a primo dancer myself. We were both very good for where we were at the time, but the people who had been dancing for twice our lifetimes were just better. But she could have made the prima ballerina ranks in time. She has the size and the build and the carriage and, perhaps most importantly, the passion. She was starting to attract attention in the state, and we were close enough to the capital, Washington D.C., that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she could have joined one of the big dance companies there. But the Ring of Fire took that away.”

  That thought took Johann back a bit. He had always considered the Ring of Fire from the standpoint of what it had brought to his time. It had never really occurred to him to think about what the up-timers had lost in the event.

  “Think about it,” Carl continued. “If you had been chosen to be the Kappellmeister for Gustav Adolf, and then suddenly something happened, and not only were you not going to become that, you were now in a place where no one recognized your music as good or your art as worthy…how would you feel?”

  That punched Johann in the gut. That got through to him in a way that none of his previous considerations had ever reached him.

  “That,” Johann said slowly, “that would be hard.”

  “Too right it would,” Carl said. “And it was hard for all of us, but for a very few of us it was killer hard.”

  “Staci…” Johann said.

  “Was devastated,” Carl said. “About the only person out of our group that took it harder was Marla. Oh, some of the older folks in town had some real mental problems adjusting. In fact, there are a handful that can’t be left alone even now, five years later. But the younger folks, those just out of high school or younger, for the most part adjusted…not well, but okay. Except that Staci and Marla both had futures planned out that would have taken them to the heights, and then they didn’t. Staci had a really hard time dealing with that.”

  “And Frau Marla?”

  “She had an even harder time, and some of us were afraid that she was going to become one of the mental cases, until she met Franz Sylwester. He drew her out, and she finally found her balance again. Staci never had a Franz, but even though it took her a while, she did come out of her funk.”

  Carl gave Johann a hard look.

  “Staci had started thinking about how to bring dance about again. She was trying to work up ideas with her mom for staging some of the great dances. She is the prima ballerina, now—the best in the world—and if she wants a dancing career, she’s going to have to create it from scratch, much like Marla is doing with music. And frankly, we were all a little surprised when she took up with you—not because you’re a down-timer, but because you have no connection with the dance. But she saw something in you that caused her to connect with you, to open up with you, in a way that she never had with anyone before, either up-timer or down-timer. She was as happy as I have seen her in a long time. And you destroyed that.”

  Carl’s voice had turned very cold, and Johann flinched. Carl closed in to loom over the shorter Johann, and he jabbed a very hard finger into Johann’s breastbone. “Understand me, Bach,” he said in a low tone that the others wouldn’t overhear, “I’m working with you because I have to as the project manager. But it wouldn’t bother me at all if you disappeared. It wouldn’t bother me at all if you died. You really hurt Staci, and she’s very important to me and my wife, and if I were a different kind of man I’d have already hauled you off and left you bleeding and broken somewhere, or maybe left you floating facedown in The Big Ditch.” Jab. “I am actually somewhat surprised that someone else hasn’t done that, like Brendan Murphy. He was sweet on Staci at one time.” Johann winced, not at the following jab, but at the thought of the oversized Murphy putting his outsized hands on him with mayhem in mind. “Yeah, you get it. And there are still people around who might do that. But that’s really the least of your problems. That’s just your body. Where you really stepped in it is professionally.”

  Johann looked up sharply.

  “Ah, that got your attention, did it? Then wrap your head around this. Mary Simpson is a huge supporter of the arts in Magdeburg, right?”
>
  Johann nodded at that.

  “But do you know what her favorite art form is?”

  That Johann had to shake his head at. “I assume music, but I do not know for certain.”

  “Her favorite art form is ballet,” Carl said with an evil grin. “Dance. She’s a ballet aficionado to the ultimate degree. She’s been trying to get Bitty to stage major ballet productions for the last three years, and she finally got Swan Lake done this year. She’s also responsible for the fundraising for this building and for the construction of it. She signs your checks. Now, you have made her prima ballerina very unhappy. This is going to make her unhappy. And let me tell you from painful personal experience, when Mary gets unhappy, she tends to share that unhappiness…in a very polite, polished, and oh-so-refined way, of course. You could lose the contract for the organ. You could also find yourself blackballed.”

  “Blackballed?” Johann asked. Carl spent a minute or so explaining the term. As it turned out, Johann was familiar with the concept. “Blackballed,” he said at the end.

  “Yep. If Mary really gets a mad on, you may have to move to France, Spain, or Russia to find work, and maybe not even then.”

  Johann sighed. “I confess that I do not handle surprise well. My brothers will delight in telling you that I do not, and will happily recount times when I have reacted badly. But even for me, this time I acted very badly. I was very surprised, and jumped to a conclusion without thinking everything through. I was surprised, then I was angry, and before I could wrestle the anger into submission, Staci approached me, and I…said some very bad things.”

  “Yeah, you did, from what I’ve heard.” There was no give in Carl’s voice, no sympathy. That was okay with Johann. He didn’t deserve any.

  “I want to apologize. I need to apologize. Even if Fräulein Staci will never accept me again, I need to do that, because I treated her very badly. But she told me, ah, ‘not to call.’ I’ve sent letters, they were sent back to me unopened with the word ‘Rejected’ written boldly across the address. I’ve tried to go to the school and meet her, and Frau Haygood herself met me at the door, told me I was unwelcome, and that if I did not leave immediately she would call for the police and have me arrested.”