1635: The Eastern Front (5 page)

Annalise spoke up, her tone a mix of defensiveness and belligerence. "It's the only really good college for women yet. In the USE, anyway. I wouldn't mind going to Prague but Gramma'd pitch a fit."

Jeff put his glasses back on. "That'd leave us with about two hundred and twenty-five thousand. Gretchen wants to move to Magdeburg as soon as possible, now that Ronnie's leaving town, and we'd need to get a house big enough for all the kids. We'd figured on renting, but . . ." He started doing the needed calculations.

Not surprisingly, David did the figuring faster than he did. "You could buy the kind of house you need for . . . I figure about seventy-five thousand dollars. But then you'd own it free and clear and still have a hundred and fifty thousand to live on. Even with all your kids, that's way more than enough."

Gretchen frowned. "Seventy-five thousand? That seems much too high. We're not going to be looking for a home in the rich districts, you know."

"Yeah, sure. You pretty much have to stay in one of the working class areas where the CoCs are strong and can provide you with some protection. You've got a lot of enemies. But for the same reason, you'll need a really solid place. My own advice would be to buy a whole apartment building. Plenty of room for the kids—Ronnie, too, if she wants to move in with you—"

Jeff chuckled. "Not likely. She says she's had enough of babysitting our kids and we can damn well do it on our own from now on. I think she's planning to move in with the Simpsons. She and Mary get along real well, and with the admiral likely to be gone most of the time, Mary'd probably like the company."

Gretchen looked like she was on the verge of choking. "An apartment building? We don't have
that
many kids. Baldy will be staying here and so will Martha, who wants to finish school. That leaves us with only half a dozen who'll be coming to Magdeburg. And I can assure you that I have no intention of becoming a landlady!"

David made a face. Again, the youngster's nature made it hard for him to state the truth bluntly.

Jeff, on the other hand, had no such compunctions left. Being married to Gretchen for four years had pretty well rubbed off whatever delicate sensibilities he'd ever possessed. "Hon, we've got a
lot
of enemies. Well, you do, anyway. Most of them don't have much against me except they've got to get past me to put you in the ground."

Gretchen looked at him, a bit crossly. "So?"

"So figure it out for yourself. If we buy an apartment building—depending on the size, of course, but let's figure twelve units, which is pretty standard in the quarters we'd be looking in—then we can set aside half the space for CoC people."

"What do you mean, ‘CoC' people—oh."

He grinned. "Yeah. As in ‘CoC people handpicked by Gunther Achterhof.' Good luck, anyone's got it in for you getting through that crowd."

David nodded. "That's what I was figuring."

Gretchen looked back down at the sheet. "I still don't really understand how it happened. And without us even knowing about it!"

Bartley looked a bit defensive. "Hey, we
told
your grandmother what was happening."

Jeff barked a jeering laugh. "Oh, right! And I'm sure you used simple and straightforward language that made lots of sense to Ronnie."

"Well . . ."

Gretchen shook her head. "Explain it to us again. In simple and straightforward language, this time."

"Well . . . Okay. This is simplifying a lot, you understand?"

"I can live with that," said Gretchen. "Whereas you may not, if you do otherwise."

Now, Bartley looked alarmed as well as defensive. "Hey, Gretchen! There's no call for that."

"Relax, David. She's joking." Jeff glanced at his wife. "I . . . think. Do your best."

The young financier cleared his throat. "The gist of it is that, way back when, my grandmother gave you guys some stock in the sewing machine company by way of a belated wedding gift. On account of Jeff's father and my mother were first cousins, which makes me and Jeff second cousins." He rattled off the precise family relationships with the ease of any person raised in a small town. "You remember?"

Jeff and Gretchen nodded simultaneously.

"Well, after that I guess you forgot about it."

"We were . . . ah, busy," said Gretchen.

"Holed up in Amsterdam under Spanish siege, to be precise," added Jeff. "So, yeah. Sewing machine company stocks were not something we thought about much. At all."

"Sure. But as you may have heard, Higgins Sewing Machine Company did really well. And when it went public, you wound up owning five thousand shares—which was two and half percent of the stock."

"The sewing machine company did
that
well?"

David tugged at his ear. "It did really well, yeah. But it wasn't just the sewing machine company. Since you weren't around we talked to Ronnie, and your grandmother told us to handle it however we wanted to." He looked defensive again. "She didn't seem interested when we tried to explain the ins and outs of it."

Jeff wasn't surprised. Depending on who did the explaining—Bartley was actually better at this than most of his partners—Gretchen's grandmother would have probably had as much luck with a short lecture on quantum mechanics. It wasn't that she was dim-witted. She wasn't at all; in fact, in her own way she had a very shrewd grasp of practical finance. But Veronica's idea of practical finance focused on tangibles like property and hard cash. The sort of stock speculations and currency manipulations that David specialized in wouldn't have meant much to her.

David went on. "So Sarah and I diversified your holdings. You've still got the five thousand shares in HSMC, but we invested all the earnings in other stuff. By now, you own sizeable amounts of stock in OPM—"

That was Bartley's own finance company:
Other People's Money.
He was not given to euphemisms, which Jeff found refreshing in a financier.

"—as well as several of the Stone chemical and pharmaceutical companies, Casein Buttons, Kelly Aviation, a little chunk of the Roth jewelry operations, a pretty hefty chunk of the new petroleum operations near Hamburg and an even bigger chunk of the port expansion projects—Hamburg's going to turn into a real boom town—and some railroad stocks. There are some other odds and ends, but that's the heart. Sarah and I didn't want to take too many risks with your money, so we invested most of it in stuff that was safe but reasonably profitable."

It was Jeff's turn to shake his head. "If these are the kinds of returns you get on ‘safe' investments, I'd hate to see what you get on something risky that pays off."

Bartley shrugged. "You've got to remember that ‘safe' is a relative term. The Ring of Fire triggered off one of the great economic booms in history. At least, that's what Melissa Mailey says. Almost any intelligent investment will pay off well, if you know what you're doing."

Jeff didn't think it was really that straightforward. David Bartley was like most people with a genius streak at something. Doing that something seemed a lot easier to him than it did to most anyone else.

Be that as it may, the end result seemed clear enough. Much to his surprise—and Gretchen's even more so—they'd wound up very well off. So, what had seemed like the sure prospect of several years of hard near-poverty while they finished raising Gretchen's little horde of adopted children had vanished.

He could live with that. Quite easily.

An hour later, when David got up to leave, Jeff escorted him to the front door. "When will we see you again?" he asked.

"I don't know about Gretchen. But you'll be seeing me tomorrow, since your leave's up. We'll be on the same train."

"Huh?"

Bartley got a hurt look on his face. "Didn't you notice that I was wearing my uniform?"

Jeff had noticed, in fact, but hadn't thought much of it. David was a member of the State of Thuringia-Franconia's National Guard. In Jeff's experience—although he'd allow this might just be the sneer of a
real
soldier—weekend warriors wore their uniforms every chance they got. He himself was lounging around in jeans and a sweatshirt. He had no intention of donning his own uniform until he was ready to leave the next morning.

"Yeah. So what?"

"So I'm reporting to the army base in Magdeburg along with you. Mike Stearns asked me to come. He sent me a personal letter, even. Well, I doubt if he actually wrote it. But he signed it, sure enough."

"Leave it to Mike," Jeff said. "He wants you to run his quartermaster operations, doesn't he?"

"Not exactly. He says he wants me as a ‘logistics consultant.' "

Jeff grinned. "You may be a financial wizard, but you're a babe in the woods when it comes to the army. Mike's just saying that 'cause he doesn't want to piss off a lot of old-timers. But he'll have you running the show soon enough, in fact if not in name. You watch."

He said it all quite cheerfully. And why not? Logistics was always an officer's biggest headache. But with David Bartley running the supply operations . . . Jeff figured anybody who could parlay not much of anything into stocks worth over two million dollars could probably also manage to keep food and spare socks and ammunition coming.

Chapter 3

Magdeburg

Caroline Platzer rolled her eyes. "She's still insisting that I have to come with her. I swear, that kid is more stubborn than any mule who ever lived."

Her boss, Maureen Grady, didn't seem noticeably sympathetic. "What do you expect? Not too many mules are in line to inherit a throne—and Kristina's in line to inherit three. Queen of Sweden, empress of the United States of Europe, and—hum. I wonder what the female equivalent would be for high king of the Union of Kalmar? High queen? Sounds silly."

"It's not funny, Maureen! She's been pestering Thorsten too, and now
he's
starting to make noises that I should go."

"Then why don't you? For Pete's sake, Caroline, it's just a trip across the Baltic to Stockholm. Even in this day and age, that's not considered an adventure. At least, not when you've got royal resources to draw on."

Caroline felt stubborn herself. She had an uneasy feeling she probably looked stubborn, too—in that child-mulish sort of way that drove her crazy when Kristina did it to her. "Because."

Now, Maureen rolled her eyes. "Oh, how adult! Caroline, you just don't want to go because you're afraid Thorsten'll get killed when the war starts and you think you ought to be here in case that happens for reasons that defy comprehension, since it's not as if you could do anything about it. Hell, you couldn't even gloom around in widow's weeds since you wouldn't legally be a widow. Unless you marry him just before he ships off, which would be pointless romanticism, seeing as how there isn't any Social Security for spouses in this day and age on account of there's no Social Security for anybody."

Even more astringently, she added, "I suppose you might qualify for a regimental pension, but probably not. Since we administer those funds—that means me, kiddo—and I'm damned if I see why a healthy young woman like you would need to be supported when there are plenty of Deserving Widows around."

Somehow, she verbalized the capital letters. Caroline had never been able to figure out how Maureen managed that.

Still not knowing what to say—beyond another "because," which would just subject her to more ridicule—she satisfied herself with glaring at Maureen. Which brought down more ridicule anyway.

"Oh, stop trying to glare at me. You look like another eight-year-old—except Kristina's one hell of a lot better at it. Which you'd expect, given that she's a genu-ine princess."

There really wasn't much point in trying to out-glare or out-ridicule or out-anything Maureen Grady. Caroline's boss was a very experienced and successful middle-aged psychiatric social worker, which meant she had the hide of a rhinoceros. It didn't help that she was married to a cop.

"He might get killed!" she half-wailed.

"Yeah, he might," Maureen responded. "He's an officer in command of a flying artillery unit. Maybe in another life Thorsten will choose to do something safer, like being a skydiver or a demolitions expert or a NASCAR driver. But in the here and now—damn fool got himself promoted again, too—he chose to do this instead. My husband chose to be a cop. Did I tell you he turned down an offer to become the manager of the auto parts store he was working in, before he enrolled in the police academy? So there's another damn fool."

Caroline got up and went to the window in Maureen's office. Then, she pushed the curtain aside so she could have the pleasure of gazing out onto Magdeburg from the vantage point of the third floor window.

As visual pleasures went, this was akin to sight-seeing Pittsburgh—not the modern and attractive city that Caroline had known in the late twentieth century, but Pittsburgh as it had been a century earlier in its industrial heyday. There were a lot of good things about living in a city which was the center of booming industry as well as the new capital of a new nation. Jobs were plentiful, and they generally paid well. But "looks pretty" was not one of them, and "smells nice" even less so.

Still, staring at Magdeburg's factories was better than dwelling morosely on what might happen to her fiancé, once the war started. Or resumed, depending on how you looked at it. Thorsten's friend Eric Krenz had told her that the historians at the new college he'd been taking classes at were already arguing about it. Should Emperor Gustav Adolf's soon-to-be-launched campaign against Brandenburg and Saxony be considered a new war? And if so, what to call it? The "Eastern War" was advocated by some, but most seem to feel that was excessively expansive. The "East" was a large place, after all, and nobody thought this would be the last war thereabouts.

Still others, Eric said, argued that the looming hostilities should simply be considered another campaign in the Ostend League War—as some called it; other historians preferred "the Baltic War" and there was one fellow who was holding out for "the Richelieu War"—seeing as how the cause of it was the emperor's fury that Brandenburg and Saxony had betrayed him after the League of Ostend launched its attack.