1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 44

Haarlem, Netherlands

Velma stared out the window of the villa, down the driveway, into endless vistas of flat, flat, flat.

Her four resident sisters-in-law sat in a semi-circle behind her, chattering.

Laurent was away on business again, which meant that he would be eating things that were bad for him.

The baby was starting to become more real. The kind of real that required her to visit the necessary what seemed like every fifteen minutes.

The thought that if Laurent popped an artery one of these days, there was no guarantee at all that his family would provide support for the baby was becoming more real, too.

Much less that they would continue to provide support for her.

Aeltje was sympathetic, though. Aeltje understood about horoscopes.

Aeltje had also married into the faculty at the University of Leiden. And Aeltje's sons were studying science.

Everybody at Laurent's party had loved the lava lamps.

The high-ups in Dutch society might actually pay to have lava lamps of their own.

With hers as a model, the letter that she'd gotten from Pam to help them, and the ability of Aeltje's sons to do things in laboratories, and someone to do the work, could she start manufacturing lava lamps?

A girl had to take care of herself, after all.

Frankfurt am Main

Isaac de Ron concluded that Locquifier and Ouvrard were gone. Which meant that all of Ducos' Huguenot fanatics were gone. Out of the inn Zum Weissen Schwan, definitely. Out of Frankfurt, probably. Out of the USE? Perhaps.

First he called upon Soubise. Who called in Sandrart.

Then, since Laurent Mauger was in town, they called in Mauger.

He was thoroughly shocked to discover who his real employer had been. Pleased also, of course. Mauger was a man who respected status and nobody in the Huguenot diaspora had more status than Duke Henri de Rohan.

He didn't know much to tell them, however, beyond the instructions he had conveyed to Dumais in Grantville, which Soubise already knew about in any case.

Mauger agreed to continue to channel communications to Ducos in Scotland. If any more should arrive in Haarlem, he stipulated. All of the ones he transmitted had come from or been addressed to Locquifier, after all.

And he did not know where Michel Ducos was. The sailor who carried the letters back and forth from Haarlem just picked them up and left them at a drop point.

That provided Soubise with the name of a tavern in a Scottish port. Nothing more.

Grantville

Matthias Bruller, a guest at the Willard Hotel, presented himself as a pleasant and unobtrusive man. He was mildly disappointed that the room to which the desk clerk assigned him did not provide a view of the bridges, but it wasn't worth complaining about. He made only a couple of casual remarks about being a tourist-a man involved in the mutton trade from Strassburg to Silesia. Not that he ever had been, but he had learned enough from Ouvrard during the years of their association that he could fake it, easily enough. In times of peace, when the economy was going about its business, the city of Strassburg, population about twenty thousand, approximately the size of Grantville now, figured on consuming about four thousand oxen per year. Grantville, given its up-time citizens' fondness for beef, slaughtered many more. By contrast, Strassburg slaughtered and consumed about a thousand sheep per day. Grantville, although the down-timers ate mutton, of course, slaughtered less than half that many. It was not a place of intense interest to sheep merchants.

He was a merchant, detouring from Erfurt, come to see the sights for a couple of days. He had no reason to go near the local slaughterhouses.

Jacques-Pierre Dumais was feeling reasonably satisfied. Grantville had become a medium-sized city for Germany. About twenty thousand residents. Many of whom, for all practical purposes, were transients. Not refugees, any longer, as they had been during the first months after the Ring of Fire. Those had either settled down permanently or, with removal of the armies from central Germany, gone home to save what could be saved of their former homes, farms, shops, or jobs.

Now there were transients, who came to use the libraries or take a course or two in the schools. Plus tourists, whose stays were even shorter. It was not conspicuous that a couple of hundred people were here today who had not been here two or three weeks ago. They merely walked in, one at a time, like any other persons looking for work, looking to buy materials, carrying out an errand for an employer.

Bryant Holloway had not only found many of them for him, but had also provided the unexpected service of reserving a block of spaces at the workmen's hostel, making the deposit under the pretense that there would be a batch of guys in town for training the last few days of February and first few days of March. Since the fire department had made similar reservations before, it did not attract any particular attention.

With that, Jacques-Pierre had been able to find places for the remainder to stay with reasonable ease.

Not, of course, with the people who frequented the 250 Club. The people he needed to house were Germans. "Krauts." People whom they would not invite to stay in their homes.

Rather, he placed his recruits with people whom he had come to know on his regular garbage collection route. People who might have a spare room temporarily and be happy to earn a little extra money. That was better, in fact. The police watched those persons who regularly came to the 250 Club. They did not watch ordinary people, many of them down-timers themselves.

Sometimes it was rather difficult to make the most of all the different preferences and prejudices in this town. He could only do his best.

Jacques-Pierre reached into his pocket. He was not entirely certain why he had taken the course and obtained his citizenship papers, but he had.

Madame Haggerty was very proud of him. She had served as his witness when he signed the oath of allegiance.

That pride was why she had given him permission to store some materials of his own in her garage, along with the extra supplies for Garbage Guys that her son Gary, his boss, kept there. This was a great boon. Placards, especially when mounted on sticks and stiffened against the wind, were very bulky. He didn't have room in his own trailer to keep all the materials that would be needed to put on the demonstration at the hospital.

Veda Mae introduced Jacques-Pierre to the two young women sitting with her, Mademoiselle Hardesty and Mademoiselle Jenkins. He recognized both names and faces, of course, but appreciated the introduction.

To Mademoiselle Hardesty, he extended his most sincere felicitations upon the anticipated birth of a new sister or brother in the Netherlands.

Pam gaped at him. "Mom's pregnant? Again? At her age?"

He was mildly surprised that her mother had not already informed her. He had not thought that Madame Hardesty was a women who felt that her daughter needed to be spared in regard to matters of such delicacy. The inheritance complications alone would, in the absence of a proper marriage contract, affect not only Mauger's children but also those of his wife.

For the rest, her reaction was so parallel to what his own had been that it was almost amusing.

"You're sure?" Pam asked.

"The arrival of the child is expected in August. Your stepfather is blissfully happy."

"I… Well, thank you very much. I'll have to let Cory Joe and Susan know."

"It makes sense, Missy," Pam said. Where else would he be likely to hide his records that no one else would look.

"In garbage cans?" Missy was very doubtful.

"He's a garbage man. And if you watch the Garbage Guys doing their collections, people mostly put their things out on the curb, they way they did up-time. But for some of the old people, who have trouble getting the cans out when there's snow and ice, the guy running along beside the wagon goes behind the house, wrestles the can out, dumps it, and takes it back. That guy is Jacques-Pierre. All he would have to do, if he wanted to hide something, is put a couple of extra cans with tight fitting lids behind one or two of those houses. Cans that he doesn't bring out and dump into the wagon. Who's going to go around town counting people's garbage cans?"

Missy looked at her friend dubiously, suspecting where this might be leading. "We are?"

"Not if we don't have to," was Pam's answer. "I was in class all the way through school with Marcie Haggerty. Her brother Blake's a couple of years younger, and he's a policeman now."

"Yeah. He graduated with Ron and me in the accelerated program."

"Let's tell Ron and Cory Joe what we think and see if Don Francisco can talk Preston Richards into letting Blake look in his grandmother's garbage cans. If that doesn't work, though…" Pam frowned. "If they won't assign someone else to do it, if they think we're nuts for suggesting it, or if there's nothing in those particular cans-then, yeah, I guess we are."

Blake Haggerty reported that there was nothing in the garbage can behind his grandmother's house except garbage. He had avoided all things associated with such formalities as search warrants simply by dropping by and offering to take out the garbage while he was there, which gave him a perfectly good reason to take the lid off her garbage can.

Then he said, "But."

"But what?"

"Dad has a whole batch of stuff belonging to the Garbage Guys stored in her garage. It's locked. I looked through the window. There are three more garbage cans in there."

"We can do it Sunday morning," Pam said. "That makes sense. Veda Mae does go to church every Sunday. She leaves in time to catch the nine o'clock brunch and say a few cutting sentences about people who aren't there. Then she sits in on the Bible class for adults to make sure that if Simon Jones says anything liberal that she doesn't agree with, she'll be there to correct him. Then she goes to the eleven o'clock service to check to see if the organist is playing any modern hymns. Then she goes out for lunch to make sure she has a chance to spread a little vicious gossip before she goes to work."

"Do I detect some sarcasm in your description?" Missy asked.

"Maybe a trifle. Veda Mae palls on closer acquaintance." Pam made a face at her younger friend. Missy could come up with an amazing number of excuses not to accompany her to the Willard and talk to Veda Mae. A little of Veda Mae had gone a really long way with Missy.

"But it's accurate. That's what she does. She'll be out of the way. Neither of us goes to church, so we won't be missed if we don't show up. It's a perfectly ordinary old garage. No foundation. Just posts stuck into the ground, and the weatherboarding starting to rot where it gets damp at the bottom. We sneak along the alley where the snowbanks are still piled up where people shoveled and make like Peter Rabbit. Wriggle, wriggle, under the boards. We could probably even pull one loose, if it's too tight a fit. She'll blame it on raccoons. People blame everything peculiar that happens in sheds and outbuildings on raccoons. It's one thing that the Ring of Fire hasn't changed."