1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 40

Halle

"Pull those hoses straight! I mean straight! No kinks!" Bryant Holloway was shouting at the top of his lungs.

"You do realize," the warden of the Halle fire watch said, "that these men are mostly casual day laborers, Tagelohner who at this season of the year find available jobs very thin on the ground. They may learn to handle the hoses today, but that does not signify that they will be available to handle the hoses the next time we have a fire. If I were in charge of this project, I would train only citizens of Halle. People who can be relied upon to turn out because it is in their own interest. Men who have wives, children, houses, shops. Whose idea was it to use so many extra hands?"

"Someone in the USE Fire Marshall's office in Magdeburg. I started with your citizens and shopkeepers, but it became pretty obvious, pretty fast, that they prefer to be in their warm shops doing their own work rather than out here slogging through a lot of cold, slippery, muck. It's one thing to join a bucket brigade when a fire's actually burning and your livelihood's in danger…"

He made a sudden dash for the pump. "No, no! Not like that!"

The head of the fire watch followed him.

"Pay attention, damn it! You have to work as a team."

The warden sighed. "These are fairly tough characters, mostly. Boatmen, dock workers. Strong of body and weak of mind. Not the kind who find it easy to work together smoothly."

"Hell, maybe bribery will help."

"I doubt it. I know that man, though-the second one you have on the pump lever. He used to be a fairly good rope-maker, before his family died and he lost his business through neglect." The warden waved. "Klick, Friedrich Klick. Hier! "

A half hour later, Klick seemed to have grasped the purpose of the training drill. He went to explain it to the others. This involved standing in the cold, wearing boots that were far from waterproof, for another half hour. Bryant shivered.

Klick waved. "We are ready to begin."

"Fine, take your places."

They men moved. Began the drill. Bryant looked at the hose crew with horror. "No, no, not that way!" He ran over to the wagon to which the crew was trying to attach the hose end. "Don't force, it, for God's sake. You'll strip the screw threads. They're just wood-the wagon and the fasteners on end of the hose, both. Do it like this."

He looked around.

Klick was leaning on the pump.

The fire watch captain had disappeared. Back to his own warm shop somewhere in town, presumably.

He put his hands on his hips. Christ, but he hated Archie Stannard.

Bribery time.

"After you've gotten it right twice in a row, I'll buy every man here a beer."

That helped a little, but not much.

"Anyone who gets it right, I'll tell him about a job out of this cesspit of a town-give him the name of a man who's hiring for work a lot easier than this."

Sometimes it just took the right incentive.

By the end of the day, sixteen men knew how to work the wagon, pump, and hoses.

Seven of them left the next morning, heading south up the Saale to find Jacques-Pierre Dumais in Grantville.

Including Klick.

At least Dumais was paying a commission for every recruit he sent.

Bryant's feet were back in the wet and muck. "Pull those hoses straight. I mean straight. No kinks."

What did that guy say? Yogi Berra, maybe? " Deja vu all over again."

Naumburg

"What does it take to get an idea across to you?"

Fortunat Deneau was not having a good day.

"Listen, Weitz. Yes, I know that you hate the Jews. That is why you are here. But you are going to have to do your hating someplace other than Grantville until March fourth. That is the crux date. On the fourth of March, you may go hate the Jews of Grantville. Until then, you may speak, rant, perorate, whatever you want to call it, in other towns in Thuringia, but not there."

Weitz protested that the Jews of Grantville were the ones they had all come to attack. The excitement that enabled him to gather a couple of hundred volunteers was because they would be attacking the synagogue in the up-time town. Where they would all get to be in the newspapers after their triumph.

Deneau took a deep breath. "Until March fourth, I do not want a large demonstration. I want a few people, scattered in several towns around Thuringia. Badenburg, Saalfeld, Rudolstadt, here in Jena, over in Weimar-you can read a map, can't you? Preaching in the street. Calling out in the marketplaces. Making noise, but not doing anything. But they are to avoid Grantville. Avoid. Do you understand the word? Not go there."

"Why?"

Deneau wondered if it would be helpful to tear his hair. He had heard that it was a custom in some exotic locales. "I am trying to lull the people of Grantville into a false sense of security. I want them, their police, their mounted constabulary, their military forces to come to the point of thinking, 'Those rabble-rousers at least have enough sense not to come here.' I want them to send their constabulary and soldiers away, to Stadtilm, to Arnstadt, to Ilmenau, to Zella and Mehlis, for all I care. But far enough that it will take them some hours to get back."

Gui Ancelin shook his head. "I don't like that part of the plan. Counting on someone else's complacency to do part of one's work is always a dangerous assumption."

Weitz ignored him, concentrating on Deneau. "And what are we to do, then?"

"Rabble-rouse. Agitate. Do what agitators do. But in small groups. And close enough to Grantville that your men can walk there in a day or two-quickly enough that the authorities won't have time to notice that the ranters have suddenly disappeared from everywhere else and wonder where they have gone.

"If there are any among you who have enough prudence to remain quiet for a couple of weeks, you can send them ahead. They can infiltrate into Grantville now, pretending to be day laborers, migrant laborers, temporary workers. But only those who have enough self-control to wait. Silently."

Eventually, Weitz agreed, although he was far from pleased.

That left Deneau with just one other important problem.

He had been trying to get Boucher and Turpin to do something useful ever since the group left Frankfurt. Without any notable success. He called them in and sent them to Grantville. They were to look up Dumais and be his errand boys.

Let Dumais deal with the hapless, hopeless, and helplessly inept.

Then, another thought crossing his mind, he called them back.

"Don't tell him that I sent you. Tell him that Laurent Mauger sent you."

A couple of minutes later, he called them back again.

"Don't mention Weitz. Don't mention Ancelin. Above all, do not mention Frankfurt. Or anyone in Frankfurt-not Guillaume or Robert or Mathurin. Or me. Or Jews. Or synagogues. Or… Don't tell him anything, understand?"

"If we don't say anything, he'll think that we are mute," Turpin protested.

Deneau cast his eyes up to the ceiling. "Very funny, Georges. Tell, him precisely, these words. 'We come from La Rochelle, like you. Laurent Mauger sent us to help you.' Do you think you can remember that much, my dear compatriots? Perhaps one of you can take the first of the sentences and the second of you the other one?"

After they were gone, Deneau sat, brooding over his wine. "If Boucher and Turpin are an example of what La Rochelle's defense forces were like in 1628, my dear Gui, no wonder our great citadel fell to Richelieu's siege."

"There is a proverb, Fortunat. There is always a proverb. 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves strive in vain.' "

Grantville

"The man will pay me to do it," Friedrich Klick told his brother-in-law Jacob. "For just one day. Of course, I'll have to practice with him and the others. He insists that it is to be a 'controlled, orderly demonstration.' We will arrive together. We will carry placards made of stiffened paper attached to sticks, which we will wave in the air. We will shout slogans. He is very insistent, though, that we must not act like plebians. No looting. No…"

"Where's this happening?"

"In Grantville."

"That's a big city now-must be twenty thousand people there. How many of you are there, making this 'demonstration'?"

"He would like to have between seventy-five and a hundred men."

"Not enough to make much of an impression."

"We will all be concentrated in one place only. On a plaza they call a 'parking lot' in front of the hospital. The Leahy Medical Center. It is right on their famous tarred highway, Route 250, so we won't get lost in some maze of crooked streets, trying to find it."

Jacob Menzer raised his head. "Why is he demonstrating against the hospital?"

"Vaccinations." Klick pulled a handful of pamphlets out of his doublet. "See. Even many of the up-timers thought they were dangerous, but they are trying to force them on us and our children."

"Vaccinations?" Andres Scherf scoffed a couple of days later. "Why are they worrying about these 'vaccinations,' Jacob? Don't you know that they perform autopsies there? They desecrate the bodies of the dead, just as Dean Rolfinck does at the medical school in Jena. But Rolfinck, at least, limits himself to corpses of executed criminals that have been turned over to him by order of the city council." He laughed harshly. "Which, they say, does wonders for keeping down the crime rate in Jena. In Grantville, though-and I have heard this myself from a man who talked to the sister of the employer of the man who died-the doctors use the bodies of respectable citizens who die at that Leahy Medical Center for autopsies. Or want to. True, in that case they asked permission and gave the body to the family, undamaged, when the wife refused. Or so the man said. But who can tell how many times they have desecrated the bodies of people who came to them hoping for a cure?"

Jacob Menzer, grave and solemn, worried now, nodded his head.

"They call them 'anatomy lessons.' Yes, I know this. It is not a rumor. Hans Hessburger told me himself. He learned it from his cousin, who knows a man from Kamsdorf whose cousin Franz is studying to be a 'nurse' there. They expect Franz to stand around a table and watch while a surgeon cuts an arm or a leg into layers and pulls out the veins and muscles. 'Dissection' is what they call it. And then…"

Gabriel Kratsch paused for effect.

"Yes?" Thomas Klau leaned forward, anxiously.

"Then they will expect Franz to do it, himself. He went to work at that hospital as a respectable baker, providing food for their 'cafeteria' that feeds the staff and patients. But then one of the up-timers tempted him into becoming one of them. A respectable Lutheran boy from Thuringia, cutting up the dead. Sending them into the resurrection with mutilated bodies."

"Who did you say this is?"

"The boy? Franz Brohm, from Rottenbach. The man in Kamsdorf is named Heinz Bickel. You can talk to him yourself. He will tell you the truth."

"We will have to do something about it," Kratsch said. "Can you talk to Friedrich again, Jacob? Find out from him what day this 'demonstration' is going to happen. What time of day. All that information. Orderly protest-bah! We will let them know what we truly think of their blasphemy."

Trent Dorrman, at Grantville-Saalfeld Foundries and Metalworks, bundled up the last batch of material they had found in the files that seemed like it might have anything, no matter how tenuous, to do with Jay Barlow, Caryn Barlow, Billie Jean Mase, and the other defectors to Austria. It had taken a while and involved a lot of overtime.

He put on a cover note to Preston Richards.

At the end, he added a postscript saying that the company had picked up several new temporary laborers lately. That was normal enough in this season, when a lot of casual laborers were having trouble finding work in their home towns, but he'd overheard several of them talking. It seemed like they'd been working heavy labor on the hoses and pump wagons in several towns nearby, and that Bryant Holloway had sent them down to Grantville to find work.

He couldn't help but think that it was sort of peculiar that Holloway, who was paid by the fire department, would send men away from the towns where they lived after he'd gone to all the trouble of training them for the fire watches there.

Since the Reverend Green always said that a Christian was supposed to put the best construction on everything, he'd called the fire chief Steve Matheny to check, because maybe Holloway had sent his best prospects to Grantville because the department was short of men, and they were just picking up work in Kamsdorf because they hadn't found jobs in Grantville yet.

Matheny said that none of these guys had showed up at the Grantville fire department as volunteers.

Preston Richards read the note and put it on his "sort of peculiar" stack. Which was a large one.

Jacques-Pierre Dumais, after trying several other options, set Boucher and Turpin to lettering signs. Even this had required quite a bit of explanation-especially the need for waterproof paint on placards that men would be carrying outdoors in a town where it often snowed, sleeted, or rained. Particularly in late February and early March.

He reminded them that the demonstration would take place on March fouth.

"Why not just wait for a sunny day, if the weather's bad?" Boucher asked.

"We have a set schedule to follow."

"It would be cheaper to wait for a sunny day. The paint mixed with lac costs more than twice as much as the plain tempera."

It occurred to Boucher that if they just brushed a little raw egg white over letters painted with tempera, it would look shiny, like lac paint. Dumais would never know the difference. What's more, they could scramble the yolks and eat them. And buy a couple of bottles of the local wine from Winzerla, up by Jena, to drink with the eggs, with the money they saved at the paint store.

Their living conditions improved.

"I don't know," Jacques-Pierre Dumais said to Friedrich Klick. "Holloway has sent me a number of people, just as he promised, but your group from Halle is the single largest. Even if everyone we've given a retainer so far shows up, there won't be many more than fifty men taking part in the demonstration."

"They are reliable, though," Klick said. "We have practiced with the placards and the shouts. They will do as you tell them."

Dumais nodded. "I just wish that we had a few more, though."

Totally forgetting the maxim that a man should be careful what he wishes for.

Scotland

"This is damnable-this latest report from Guillaume."

"It goes into considerable detail in regard to the desired assassinations of which we reminded him last time."

Delerue spat on the floor. "What has he done, really? The whole tenor of this report is that we should not be overly disappointed if the effort to destroy Richelieu by assassinating those major figures and attributing the actions to France should fail. He devotes five times as many lines to describing the strong security in place as he does to explaining how he intends to circumvent it."

"A thorough understanding of the obstacles in one's path is a virtue in itself."

Delerue snorted. "He's losing his edge, Michel."

"Let's not be hasty. I will read the report again."

"What do you think?"

"Antoine is just being irritable. The security analysis that Guillaume sent is realistic. Therefore, it is useful."

"One thing caught my eye." Mademann picked up the report.

"Yes?"

"Here, Michel, on the seventh page. The mention of how insignificantly Gustavus Adolphus' queen features in all these security arrangements. She is living in Stockholm; going about her daily routine. No significant variations to throw off observers. No significant effort to avoid surveillance. Only the ordinary palace guards."

Ducos nodded. "Gustavus even allows her, it is believed, an uncensored correspondence with her brother Georg Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg. With whom he will soon be at war. That, in itself, shows how far she has been relegated to the margins of important political developments."

"It shows it to those of us who care. But, how many ordinary people really care? In Sweden or in the USE? They read the newspapers. The queen went here; the queen wore this; the queen held a reception. Or speculation. Will the queen visit Denmark? Will the queen soon join her daughter Kristina in Magdeburg? For public consumption, certainly, Gustavus Adolphus treats her with the greatest respect. How is this unlearned 'popular opinion' to conclude that she is supernumerary?"

"So you are suggesting? A trip to Stockholm, perhaps?"

"I would not be averse to the idea. Scotland is beginning to pall on me."

Ducos considered the matter for a moment. "At the very worst, if Locquifier should fail in the matter of Gustavus Adolphus and he survives, there is another possibility. It is irrational for a monarch who has only one heir, and female at that, to refuse to divorce a wife who can never bear another child. There may be some level of sentiment involved in his attitude toward Maria Eleonora. If Guillaume fails with him, but succeeds with one or more of the other targets, the death of his queen in Sweden would at a minimum demand his attention. Perhaps cause him actual grief."

"From a marksman's perspective, 'fuzz up' his focus on pursuing the culprits in the USE."

"There is always the possibility that you might be caught. What cover do you intend to use?"

Mademann smiled. "Why, none. In the case of such a misfortune, the capture of an Alsatian Lutheran subject of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar should provide the Swedes with a nice red herring directing their intelligence forces away from the activities of French Calvinists." He raised an eyebrow. " Non?"

"True," said Ducos. "But be careful. Take no unnecessary risks, even if that means postponing any action. There is no need for this to be co-ordinated with anything else."