1635 The Dreeson Incident: Chapter Seventeen

Frankfurt am Main

    “Angry people are, mostly, just angry people,” said Henry Dreeson. “It’s their nature. Solve one of their problems and they’ll find something else to be angry about. Maybe because you solved it and took away their gripe.”

    Henry figured that this ceremonial banquet with the Frankfurt bigwigs was going fine. Shop talk was shop talk, wherever you found it. Names kept floating past his ears. Günderrode. Zum Jungen. Both of them named Hector, which was sort of peculiar. He hadn’t met any Germans in Grantville named Hector. Maybe they were relatives.. Stalburger. A couple of men with a “von” in front of their names, though he didn’t understand why nobles would be city councillors. But “Baur von Somewhere” didn’t actually sound very much like he descended from some medieval knight in shining armor, and neither did “Weiß von Somewhere Else.” Recent promotions, maybe—guys who had bought the farm, or at least the estate, in the most literal sense of the word.

    Down the table, past the Bürgermeister, one of the councilmen was starting to rant about the dangers of popular revolution. Sounded like Tino Nobili going full tilt. He turned his head a little to direct his good ear toward the man. “Popular election to choose the council is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard it before. If you let these CoC rabble into the city government… Why, the last time, twenty years ago, it took us two years to get the movement under control.”

    As usual. The municipal equivalent of generals fighting the last war.

    “The gates of the ghetto are barricaded. The main difference from twenty years ago is that this time the defenders are armed, as well.” The printer Crispin Neumann finished his report. He was known to have connections in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto, although most people were too polite to specify what they were—namely, that his grandfather had been a convert to Lutheranism; he still had relatives who lived there.

    The members of the Frankfurt city council looked at one another.

    “Isn’t there any way you can head it off?” Henry figured that maybe he wasn’t expected to talk, him not being a citizen of Frankfurt; but, what the hell, the Bürgermeister had invited him to come to the meeting. He looked at the militia captain. “I mean, this town can’t be that different from Grantville. Our police know to keep an eye on the 250 Club when certain sorts of things come up. Don’t your watchmen do the same thing? Have a sort of list of trouble spots, that is? Even if it’s in their own heads and not written down anywhere?

    The captain nodded; started to say something.

    In the back of the room, someone stood up. Henry peered through his glasses. Sergeant Hartke’s wife? The Danish woman, Dagmar?

    “It is work righteousness to attack the Jews!”

    Everyone in the room blinked.

    “These men in the taverns are not good Lutherans! Think, only think!”

    Her German was beginning to fray a little at the edges, but she clearly had something to say. Cunz Kastenmayer slid, as inconspicuously as possible, away from his post. He had been standing behind Mayor Dreeson’s left shoulder, translating whenever a conversation between the Grantvillers and the leading lights of Frankfurt politics became too complex for either the councilmen’s limited English or Dreeson’s less limited, but still far from fluent, German.

    “Think of the words of Paul Speratus!”

    Every Lutheran in the room, obediently, thought of the words of Paul Speratus. They could do that effortlessly, of course. The hymn “Salvation Unto Us Has Come” had been a staple of the Lutheran liturgy for a century. They all knew it by heart.

    “Think!” Dagmar boomed again. She started reciting in Danish, but Cunz repeated the German after her.

    “See!” Dagmar proclaimed. “These men who attack the poor Jews. Like little Riffa’s parents, who are the sutlers at Barracktown now. Or her husband, David Kronberg, at the post office. Who has an aunt and uncle who have adopted him…” She paused for effect. “…and who live right here in Frankfurt!” Her voice, deep and stentorian at most times, rose to a shrill dramatic screech. “They are trying to earn heaven by their works, these anti-Semites, as you call them. But, remember—

    “It is Christ’s atonement that saves us. Not actions such as killing usurers. Which means,” she concluded triumphantly, “that these men, these mutterers against the Jews, are doctrinally unsound!”

    Cunz would have been struck dumb with admiration if it hadn’t been his duty to keep translating. No one could possibly have come up with a condemnation of attacking the ghetto that would have a deeper resonance in a Lutheran city. Anti-Semitism as “doctrinally unsound” work righteousness. How…

    Inspired.

    Dagmar sat down. He returned to his assigned place at Mayor Dreeson’s shoulder.

    “What are you planning to do then?” the militia captain asked. “Create what Nathan Prickett would call a ‘thin blue line’ around the ghetto?”

    He hadn’t been in the planning meeting. He had been off getting his lieutenants to agree to go along with the program. Whatever the program might prove to be.

    “Ach, nein.” The Bürgermeister gestured expansively. “There are not enough of us in the city government to surround it if there is a coordinated attack. Besides, since the ghetto is armed this time, not to mention reinforced…”

    The militia captain nodded. A fair number of Frankfurt’s CoC members had somehow managed to be inside the ghetto when the elders of the Jewish community barricaded the gates.

    “… we might be caught in crossfire. Which would be stupid of us. Dreeson, the Grantviller, mentioned that his daughter had many favorite words. One of them was proactive. This means that we do not wait for the mutterers to finish getting organized. We will not wait for an attack on the ghetto.”

    The captain was pretty sure that he would not like what came next. “So, then…”

    “We shall be proactive. We march on the taverns where the mutterers gather. Tonight.”

    “Your cane will slip on a cobblestone wet with this mist. You will break your hip.”

    Henry Dreeson shook his head. “Nonsense, Ronnie. Anyway, if the hip has to go one of these days, at least it’ll be going in a good cause. And ‘march’ doesn’t mean ‘be carried along in a litter.’ Anyway, there’d be just as much chance that one of the litter bearers would slip on a wet cobblestone, fall, and throw me out. That would be a longer way down and a harder landing than if I trip myself.”

    Veronica glared at him. “Then,” she said, “I am marching with you. Only to hold your other arm, mind you. Only to steady you if your cane should not be enough. Not for some stupid heroic cause such as the one that led Hans to his death.”

    Frankfurt’s militia officers were, by order of the council, in full ceremonial uniform. The type of uniform that they normally wore only to awards banquets. With sashes, satin trousers, lace collars, and polished boots. Items that were both difficult and expensive to clean.

    The militia captain gave his instructions. He had a loud and booming voice that carried well, too. Not in the Ableidinger league, but plenty loud enough. “One company surrounds each of the target taverns right after the bells toll. Ensure that no one leaves. Those who resist will be shot. Those who surrender will be arrested.”

    As usual, Nathan Prickett noted a bit cynically, seventeenth century notions of legitimate police work diverged sharply from twentieth. Granted that they were a bunch of loudmouthed anti-Semites, the men in the taverns who were about to be set upon by the city militia hadn’t actually done anything illegal. They weren’t even drunk and disorderly yet.

    Fat lot of good it would do them.

    The militia lieutenants nodded firmly at their captain’s instructions.

    “Ensure it. You have the best of the guns from Blumroder. Your men know how to use them. No one leaves.”

    The captain looked around. On the average, the militiamen looked more enthusiastic about the evening’s proposed project than the lieutenants did. That was Nathan’s assessment, anyway, and it seemed the captain shared it.

    “If anyone tries to leave a tavern,” he bellowed, “the man who shoots him will succeed to the lieutenancy of the company. If more than one man tries to leave at the same time, every man in the company who shoots will receive a substantial reward.”

    That ought to stiffen everyone’s back a bit. Not to mention encouraging the lieutenants to do a little shooting themselves. It wasn’t an empty threat. Judging from their own vigorous nodding, the council had already agreed to the provision.

    “In the front row with the Bürgermeister.” The city council secretary had a list, by which he was lining up the order of march.

    “I have never entered some of these neighborhoods in my life,” one of the councilmen muttered.

    “Maybe it will do you some good. You can learn how the other half lives.”

    He started to sputter; then decided that sputtering at the grandmother of the “hero of Wismar,” right at this moment, was not the best idea.

    The Grantville mayor was on the left hand of the Bürgermeister. On his right hand—the unhappy councilman grimaced—was the Danish woman who had disrupted the council hearing. And, behind the civic officials, the orange uniforms of the Fulda Barracks Regiment.

    Henry looked around and yelled, “Jeffie?”

    Jeffrey Garand looked rather anxiously at Derek Utt. “Derek? Uh? I mean, Major Utt?”

    “Go on.”

    Jeffie ran to the front line.

    “Is that your flute, you’ve got there in your hand?”

    “Ah, yeah, Mr. Dreeson. It’s not standard, I know, for one of the sergeants to double as a piper, but, well, I’ve got it, and we’re not quite fully staffed, so…”

    “You were in the marching band, weren’t you? In high school?”

    ‘Um-hmmn.”

    “Can you still play ‘Hey, Look Me Over’?”

    Jeffie sighed. “In my sleep.”

    “Then get on up here with the drums. We’re stepping out.”

    The Frankfurt municipal drum corps was good. They caught on to Jeffie’s rhythm in no time.

    Soubise and Sandrart, watching the preparations, made particular note of the three companies of orange uniforms at the rear of the procession.

    “Pour encourager les autres, I presume,” the brother of the duke of Rohan remarked.

    Nathan Prickett felt obliged to march with one of the militia companies, seeing as how he’d provided the arms for most of them. On the other hand, since he wasn’t actually a member of the militia, he didn’t feel obliged to march in the front rank. So he more or less hung around in the third rank. Close enough to “show the flag,” not close enough to get hurt—well, not likely—in case the would-be pogromists in the taverns decided to fight back.

    Some of them did fight, in fact, including the ones in the tavern that Nathan’s company marched against. But it was a pretty lame sort of thing. You might almost call it desultory, except there was nothing desultory about the man dying in the doorway of the tavern. He’d been the first one shot, as he came rushing out with an old musket, and it took a while before he stopped howling in agony. He’d been shot three times, all the wounds coming low down in his hips and abdomen. One of the militiamen might have shot him again just to put him out of his misery, but the other anti-Semites in the tavern had chosen to pour out of a side door and that had distracted the company.

    The first three of them got shot dead, too, but they were killed almost instantly.

    The rest surrendered. One of them, it seemed, had piled up a few too many grudges over the years. The militia company just plain refused to accept his surrender and shot him about half a dozen times. The others got off with nothing worse than a fair-to-middling beating with gun butts before they were marched down to the city’s jail. Well, what passed for a jail. Back up-time, the SPCA would have screamed bloody murder if you’d stuffed rats in that hole.

    After checking around later—Henry Dreeson had a really good eye for these things and so did Sandrart, oddly enough—Nathan concluded that the experience of his militia company was about standard. Middle of the road experience, anyway. Some company had a tougher fight, but some didn’t run into any opposition at all. Their targets just ran off.

    “Maybe we ought to hold off on the popular revolution for a little while,” the chief theorist of the Frankfurt CoC said the next day. “Pay a little more attention to some of the stuff that Spartacus is publishing. Maybe we can work out a modus vivendi with the council. After all, if Gretchen Richter’s own grandmother marched with members of the city council… not against them.”

    The others nodded, including the chairman.

    There was no way for them know why Veronica had marched. Or that Gretchen hadn’t known anything about the plan, much less approved her grandmother’s participation in the activity.

    It was impressive, Soubise wrote to his brother. I have been, to some extent, surprised by the effectiveness of the Grantville mayor during this political tour. It was, after all, no more than a provincial town before the Ring of Fire. Not even a provincial capital. Nonetheless, he, in cooperation with Constantin Ableidinger, has proven to be effective in encouraging the successful integration of the former Franconian territories into the SoTF.

    His wife, of course…

    After that paragraph, he stopped to think again.

    De Ron has not managed to gather any additional information in regard to what Locquifier may be planning. I still have hopes that continued observation of the men staying at the inn Zum Weissen Schwan will provide us with information as to where Ducos has gone to ground.

    Dear Ruben, Nathan Prickett wrote to Blumroder in Suhl.

    I expect you’ll already have heard about all the excitement last night before this letter gets to you, so I’ll stick to what’s important. The new guns that the firm provided to the militia performed really well. I was real pleased with the results. Even though it was damp and toward the end of the evening it started to drizzle, there were hardly any misfires.

    Two of the militia lieutenants lost their jobs over it, but since we’ve been working through the city council and the captain, that shouldn’t affect sales.

    He figured that it wasn’t worth wasting postage on a letter to Don Francisco. He was bound to hear all about it from a lot of other people. But someone else was sure going to expect a personal report from Johnny-on-the spot. He picked up another piece of paper.

    Dear Chandra.

Erfurt

    Simon Jones spread the various newspapers out on the table, sorting them by date. “I’ve got to say,” he commented, “that it seems to have played really well in Copenhagen.”

    It certainly had.

    Any reporter worth his wages could see the drama of a Danish woman, a Danish commoner, showing the way to the patricians of an imperial city; more, showing the way to the up-timers; to the officials of the United States of Europe, even. Jason Waters was worth his wages, and more.

    Headlines, and then more headlines.

    It didn’t quite salve the pride of Denmark for having been forced into a second Union of Kalmar. But it sure helped.

    Christian IV would present a medal to Dagmar Nilsdotter, wife of Sergeant Helmuth Hartke of the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s own Fulda Barracks Regiment.

    More headlines.

    The same regiment that had, a short while before, heroically rescued Wesley Jenkins, the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s civilian administrator of Buchenland, and his wife, his down-timer wife, from durance vile. (No need to mention that the jailers had already fled, leaving them nothing to do but unlock the door. Picayune details remained picayune details).

    Even more headlines.

    Christian IV would award the medal as soon as Dagmar could travel to Copenhagen, that was. She was expecting a baby in November.

    The heroine was not a virago, not a masculinized Amazon, but an honest Lutheran wife and mother.

    Gustavus Adolphus, not to be outdone or upstaged, would award a medal as soon as Dagmar Nilsdotter could travel to Magdeburg.

    Christian IV announced that he would travel to Barracktown bei Fulda and present the medal in person as soon as the mother-to-be had recovered from the travails of childbirth.

    Gustavus Adolphus, very busy but always alert to a good PR opportunity, announced that Princess Kristina would travel to Barracktown bei Fulda and present the medal in person.

    Christian IV announced that he and his future daughter-in-law would fly to Fulda together and present the medals simultaneously.

    Derek Utt and Wes Jenkins, after contemplating the topography of the immediate region, sent off a brief radio message that said, in essence, “not unless they intend to parachute out of the damned plane, they won’t.” To the distress of the politicians, the pilots agreed with their assessment.

    Erfurt, then. Christian IV and Kristina would fly to Erfurt and proceed the rest of the way in a motorized vehicle.

    That was where things stood at the moment the latest of the papers had gone to press. The reporter’s breathless prose ended with: “Stand by for further announcements.”

    Ron Stone nodded his head. “Ain’t radio communication grand?”